Conversations with Hitler

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Conversations with Hitler is a book written by Hermann Rauschning , which was intended to document the author's conversations with Adolf Hitler in the years 1932–1934. It first appeared in France in 1939 under the title Hitler m'a dit ( something like : What Hitler told me , literally: "Hitler told me"). After some historians questioned the authenticity of the conversations, the lack of authenticity became known to a broad public since 1984. The Hitler quotes in the book are therefore viewed as not quotable or even as falsifications .

content

In the volume, Rauschning documents alleged conversations with Hitler that he claims to have had during his work as a politician in Danzig , first as chairman of the Danzig Landbund and later in his function as president of the Danzig Senate. In the preface to the text, he states that he made handwritten notes after the private conversations and that “many things can be regarded as almost literal reproduction”.

The revelations that Rauschning documents in his book concern, on the one hand, things that were already circulating as rumors, such as the participation of the National Socialists under the leadership of Hermann Göring in the Reichstag fire or a possible attack on France, which was already foreseeable in 1939. On the other hand, Rauschning was referring to acts by Hitler that had long since happened at the time of writing.

A chapter under the heading "Hitler in private" portrays Adolf Hitler as a raging, apparently insane person, whose outbursts are "an expression of an unrestrained personality up to and including total disintegration". This description can be traced back in part to statements made by former Chancellor Heinrich Brüning , who said Hitler had paranoid features and madness. Rauschning gave his descriptions as memories of a man from Hitler's "closest daily environment" and as a personal encounter.

History of origin

After Rauschning fell out of favor with Adolf Hitler in 1934 and had to resign from his post as President of the Danzig Senate after a vote of no confidence , he emigrated first to Switzerland and then to France. In Paris he met the journalist Emery Reves and told him of many conversations with Adolf Hitler. Reves urged him to publish his experiences. Rauschning himself actually only met Hitler about four times and never in a one-to-one conversation. So Rauschning invented few specific times and places and divided his few personal experiences many times over. He took further suggestions from reports from acquaintances, the brown books and the daily press, as well as some meetings in which he took part in his function as Senate President. The then penniless Rauschning received an advance of around 125,000 francs .

In December 1939 Rauschning published the book under the title Hitler m'a dit ("Hitler told me") in France. The work is written much more sharply than the later German-language edition, which is probably due to the influence of the translator. In the same month an English edition followed with the title Hitler speaks ("Hitler speaks"). In January 1940, The Voice of Destruction ("The Voice of Destruction") was printed an American edition. The first German-language edition, entitled Talks with Hitler , which initially appeared in Switzerland, followed around this time . In 1940 the work in France had a circulation of 220,000 copies. Numerous other editions and translations into other countries and languages ​​followed.

effect

Once published, the book became a bestseller . The appearance also put the leadership of the Third Reich under pressure. However, since the editions were made abroad, there was no way to prevent the book from appearing. Only a few neutral countries, such as Switzerland, Sweden or Denmark, could pressure be exerted to prevent further publication. However, in Switzerland, for example, the much sharper French version was imported. A presumably planned counteraction by the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda fizzled out due to the war. The collected materials for discrediting Rauschning were lost after the end of the war.

The public paid special attention to Hitler's plans for world conquest described by Rauschning, which Rauschning extended to the United States and the Soviet Union , presumably to arouse suspicion of Hitler there too. Hitler also spoke of a "bacterial war".

After the war, the Soviet Union used parts of the book in the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals as evidence "USSR-378". Also, the history of research , for example by Joachim C. hard and Gerhard L. Weinberg , the plant used as the standard source .

The historian Golo Mann wrote the introduction to a reprint in 1964, in which he praised Rauschning's visionary achievement, but not without criticizing his conservative and bitter attitude in the post-war years. Nevertheless, he said in the foreword, referring to a quote from the Swiss diplomat Carl Jacob Burckhardt about Rauschning, that Rauschning “could become a statesman in a more favorable light”.

Research assessment

Beginning shortly after publication, the first voices expressed doubts about the truthfulness of the book. Among other things, Friedrich Stampfer (former editor-in-chief of the SPD central organ Vorwärts ) called Rauschning a "sensational writer of the lower class [...] who mixed truth and poetry strongly". In 1977, in his work The Third Reich and Mexico, Klaus Vollhand refuted Hitler's alleged plans to conquer Mexico and identified them as fakes. Fritz Tobias confronted Rauschning with his arguments against the Reichstag fire hypothesis, but the latter broke off the correspondence. In 1969, Eberhard Jäckel spoke out against using the work as a source.

In 1972, Theodor Schieder published a lecture entitled Hermann Rauschning's “Conversations with Hitler” as a historical source, who described the work as a “document of indubitable source value”, but at the same time admitted that it was “not a source document from which one can find literal or verbal traditions from Hitler May expect sentences and sentences ”. Rauschning himself had informed him in a letter dated February 22, 1971 that the conversations attempted to give an “overall picture of Hitler” that was “woven together from notes, from memory and even from messages from others”. Schieder had already narrowed down Rauschning's meetings with Hitler to around 13, of which he could only find concrete records for two.

In 1984, the Swiss history teacher Wolfgang Hänel presented further evidence in a lecture by the contemporary history research center in Ingolstadt that the conversations were falsified. In the same year he published the results of his research in a book. A few months before his death in October 1981, Hänel was able to persuade the initiator of the talks to tell the story of how the text came about, and recorded this report on tape. With this he proves the forgery of the work. Hänel also points out that Rauschning simply copied some findings, partly from Rauschning's own book The Revolution of Nihilism , partly from Mein Kampf . He also made use of Ernst Jünger , Erich Ludendorff , Karl Haushofer and even Guy de Maupassant's story Der Horla .

Hänel's research was received with great interest in journalism. But there was also contradiction to Hänel's thesis: Martin Broszat, for example, believed in an “inner authenticity” of the conversations and pointed out that Hänel's falsification thesis was based only on the tape record, i.e. an oral statement made decades after the events described.

Bernd Lemke from the Military History Research Office called for a differentiated view of the work and referred to a new edition of Rauschning's book 2005 with a detailed introduction by the historian Marcus Pyka.Lemke names several matches between Hitler's quotations in Rauschning and in the script that is considered authentic "Hitler's table talks in the Führer Headquarters 1941–1942" , by Henry Picker , and sums up:

“The book does not deserve defamation. In parts, especially in the two final chapters, it represents a hybrid form between literature and historical sources. "

Most historians today are of the opinion that the conversations can make little or no claim to authenticity. According to Ian Kershaw , Rauschning's account is “a work that is so little authenticated today that it is better to ignore it”, while the National Socialist Encyclopedia speaks of “well-invented propaganda material against National Socialism”.

Book editions

  • Hitler m'a dit. Confidences du Führer on a plan de conquête du monde . Coopération, Paris 1939
  • Hitler Speaks. A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on his Real Aims . Thornton Butterworth, London 1939
  • Conversations with Hitler . Europa Verlag, Zurich 1940
  • Hitler. Conversations and revelations . Paris 1940 (64-page brochure with excerpts from conversations and additions)
  • Conversations with Hitler. With an introduction by Marcus Pyka. Europa Verlag, Zurich 2005, ISBN 3-85665-515-8 .

literature

  • Theodor Schieder: Hermann Rauschning's "Conversations with Hitler" as a historical source . Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1972, ISBN 3-531-07178-5 .
  • Wolfgang Hänel: Hermann Rauschning's conversations with Hitler - a falsification of history . Publication of the contemporary history research center Ingolstadt, 7th volume, 1984.
  • Fritz Tobias: Counterfeits also have long legs. The Senate President Rauschning's "Talks with Hitler" . In: Karl Corino (Ed.): Forged! Fraud in politics, literature, science, art and music . Greno, Nördlingen 1988, ISBN 3-89190-525-4 , p. 91-105 .
  • Pia Nordblom. Against the thesis of deliberate forgery. Comments on the talks with Hitler , in: Hermann Rauschning. Materials and contributions to a political biography . Edited by Jürgen Hensel and Pia Nordblom. Osnabrück 2003, pp. 151–174 (Brostiana; 6) [reprint of the edition published in 2002 by Verlag VOLUME, Warsaw] ISBN 3-929759-61-6 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Quoted from Fritz Tobias: Forgeries also have long legs . S. 96 .
  2. ↑ a b c Fritz Tobias: Counterfeits also have long legs . S. 98 .
  3. ↑ Fritz Tobias: Forgeries also have long legs . S. 97 .
  4. ↑ Fritz Tobias: Forgeries also have long legs . S. 96 .
  5. ^ Hermann Rauschning: Conversations with Hitler . Europa Verlag, Zurich 1973, ISBN 3-203-50440-5 , p. 272 .
  6. ^ Hermann Rauschning: Conversations with Hitler . Europa Verlag, Zurich 1973, ISBN 3-203-50440-5 , p. 273 .
  7. ^ Hermann Rauschning: Conversations with Hitler . Europa Verlag, Zurich 1973, ISBN 3-203-50440-5 , p. 277 .
  8. ↑ Fritz Tobias: Forgeries also have long legs . S. 92 .
  9. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Wolfgang Malanowski: Quote, quote, quote, and nothing more . In: Der Spiegel . No. 37 , 1985 ( online ).
  10. ↑ a b c d Fritz Tobias: Counterfeits also have long legs . S. 96 f .
  11. ↑ Paul Sethe: The prevented statesman - Rauschning's most important book is reissued . In: Die Zeit , No. 49/1964.
  12. ↑ Quoted from Fritz Tobias: Counterfeits also have long legs . S. 101 .
  13. ^ Theodor Schieder: Hermann Rauschnings "Talks with Hitler" as a historical source . Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1972.
  14. ↑ a b Quoted from Martin Broszat : Revelation? The Rauschning Controversy . In: FAZ , September 20, 1985; reprinted in Martin Broszat: After Hitler. The difficult handling of our history . dtv, Munich 1988, p. 263 ff.
  15. ↑ Karl-Heinz Janßen : Poor notes . In: Die Zeit , No. 30/1985.
  16. ↑ Fritz Tobias: Forgeries also have long legs. The Senate President Rauschning's "Talks with Hitler" . In: Karl Corino (Ed.): Forged! Fraud in politics, literature, science, art and music . Greno, Nördlingen 1988, pp. 91-105.
  17. ↑ Martin Broszat: Revelation? The Rauschning Controversy . In: FAZ , September 20, 1985; reprinted in Martin Broszat: After Hitler. The difficult handling of our history . dtv, Munich 1988, p. 263 ff. Cf. the similar argumentation in Pia Nordblom: Against the thesis of deliberate forgery. Comments on the "Talks with Hitler" . In: Pia Nordblom, Jürgen Hensel (Ed.): Hermann Rauschning. Materials and contributions to a political biography . Fiber, Osnabrück 2003.
  18. ↑ Bernd Lemke: Review of: Rauschning, Hermann: Conversations with Hitler. With an introduction by Marcus Pyka. Zurich 2005 . In: H-Soz-u-Kult , August 2, 2006.
  19. ↑ Wolfgang Benz , Hermann Graml , Hermann Weiß (eds.): Encyclopedia of National Socialism . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1997, p. 872.
  20. ↑ Ian Kershaw : Hitler 1889-1936 . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 2000, p. 10.
  21. ^ Henning Köhler : Germany on the way to itself. A history of the century . Hohenheim-Verlag, Stuttgart 2002, p. 338.
  22. ↑ Richard Steigmann-Gall: The Holy Empire. Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 . Cambridge University Press, p. 29.
  23. ↑ Ian Kershaw: Hitler 1889-1936. Stuttgart 2000, p. 10.
  24. ^ Encyclopedia of National Socialism , p. 872.