Voice of Destruction, The [Paperback]

Hermann Rauschning (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 31, 2003

Hermann Rauschning was president of the Danzig senate from 1933 to 1934 and had been Hitler's frequent guest, often for long periods of time.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

A frequent guest of Hitler for long periods of time, Hermann Rauschning resigned from his post as president of the Danzig senate in 1934 and severed his ties with the Nazi Party. He then meticulously transcribed conversations with Hitler from 1932 to 1934 and published them with the hope of sounding a warning throughout the world of the dark days that lay ahead. Unfortunately, it was not published until 1940. This book is unique in its perspective from inside Hitler's intimate circle. The conversations recorded here took place in the last year before Hitler's seizure of power and the first two years of the National Socialist regime. Important not only for the intimate outlining of Hitler's aims and how he would seek to achieve them, The Voice of Destruction helps add detail to the portrait of this man who would settle for nothing short of global German supremacy, even if it meant annihilation for some.

About the Author

Hermann Rauschning resigned his post in the Danzig senate in 1936 and fled to Switzerland, where he began writing this book from the copious notes, wherein he recorded verbatim what Hitler had said. He left Switzerland for the United States in 1948 and continued to write about German politics. He died in 1982.

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Pelican Publishing; 2 edition (July 31, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1589801369
• ISBN-13: 978-1589801363
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #802,550 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars HITLER SPEAKS WITH A NEW TITLE, May 7, 2010

By 

John M. Lane "statesman and philosopher" (Hardin, Montana, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Voice Of Destruction (Hardcover)

This is a review of VOICE OF DESTRUCTION by Hermann Rauschning. Mine is the hard back copy published in 1940 by G.P. Putnam's Sons in New York. This the same book published originally by Thornton, Butterworth, Ltd., of London in 1939.

The only differences I can see are that VOICE OF DESTRUCTION has slightly larger print and runs 295 pages compared to 287 pages for HITLER SPEAKS. VOICE OF DESTRUCTION also omits the last sentence of HITLER SPEAKS which didn't alter the meaning or content at all. Otherwise the two books are identical. Neither has an index, bibliography or annotations.

Rauschning was a wealthy agriculturalist from Danzig who achieved a degree of political prominence after WW I by criticizing the Poles for the expulsions of ethnic Germans from territories ceded to the new Polish government by the Versailles Treaty. Rauschning described their treatment as brutal and complained about Polish internment of ethnic Germans in such places as Szczypiorno where he said 8,000 men, women and children, including 24 Lutheran clergymen, were kept for months under harsh conditions without any access to medical care. Gustav Stresemann complained bitterly to the League of Nations in Lugano about this, and other, incidents in his speech of December 15, 1928.

Rauschning became President of the Farmers' Association and came to believe that the National Socialists (Nazis) were Germany's only real hope. He began to advocate the incorporation of the Free City (of Danzig) into Germany and became president of the Danzig Teachers' Association in 1932, the year before the Nazis won control of the government in Germany and of Danzig's city government. This put Rauschning in charge of the Free City as he became President of Danzig's Senate.

It was in that capacity that he began to associate with Hitler himself. How many meetings he had with the Fuhrer and how well he knew him are at the root of the controversy surrounding Rauschning's book. Critics like Holocaust denier Mark Weber of the Institute for Historical Review, claim that Rauschning had only met Hitler a few times and wasn't in a position to have much firsthand knowledge about his views. Weber refers to research presented by a Swiss contributor, Wolfgang Haenel, at an IHR conference. Haenel claimed that Rauschning only met Hitler four times and that these meetings were all brief and that he was never alone with the Fuhrer. He also accused Rauschning of plagiarizing some of his dialogues from Hitler from other sources.

It should be noted that Mark Weber and the IHR have no academic standing and are ignored by professional historians because of their ongoing denial of what is now called "the Holocaust." Weber and the IHR claim that it never happened contrary to what every historian who's ever studied it has concluded. That may account for the mystery surrounding Wolfgang Haenel's scholarly credentials and why he chose the IHR as the forum for his critique of Rauschning's book which is highly critical of Hitler and his Nazis.

Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper notes that Rauschning's prewar concerns about Hitler were validated by Hitler's conduct of the war and his role in the Holocaust. Hitler's own conduct, in other words, confirmed the general accuracy and validity of Rauschning's book. The Fuhrer did what he told Rauschning he was going to do.

Historian Eberhard Jaeckel reached a similar conclusion that Rauschning's book is a reliable guide to Hitler's view of the world even if it might not be a perfect verbatim record. Historian David Redles was critical of Haenel's method which consisted of looking for similarities in wording from other books and then concluding that Rauschning had copied them thereby committing "plagiarism." It's also significant that such prominent historians as Alan Bullock, Joachim Fest and Robert Payne found Rauschning's book reliable enough to consult.

Rauschning's book is highly critical of Hitler to the point where it had to be published in exile. When the Nazis began arresting Catholic priests and depriving German Jews in the Free City of their rights as citizens, Rauschning turned away from Nazism to constitutionalism and became a critic of the Fuhrer's. By 1936, he was forced to flee for his life. After passing through Switzerland, France and the United Kingdom, he got to the United States where purchased a farm near Portland, Oregon. He remained there until his death in 1982.

The tone of VOICE OF DESTRUCTION is extremely critical of Hitler and his Third Reich. Rauschning writes, for example, that "Hitler and his movement are the apocalyptic riders of world annihilation." This was strong stuff for the late 1930s, but spot on from a post-war perspective formed by devastation of WW II and the Holocaust.

Rauschning writes that Hitler was a coward and a borderline hysteric who saw "race" as the basis for everything even nations and religions. This might account for a lot of the vitriol shown by his critics among whom are a number of Holocaust deniers, Hitler apologists, and neo-Nazis.

Despite the controversy about Hermann Rauschning, he wrote well and he left no doubt in the reader's mind what kind of leader Hitler had become by the late 1930s. I liked THE VOICE OF DESTRUCTION and gave it five stars. If you're interested in this period of history, the Holocaust, WW II, National Socialism, Germany, the Weimar Republic or Adolf Hitler himself, you'll like this book. Don't be deterred by the IHR's attempted hatchet job which makes up much of the Wikipedia article on Rauschning either. If you can find a copy of VOICE OF DESTRUCTION, or HITLER SPEAKS, in good condition at a reasonable price it, buy it. Just remember that the same book appears under two different titles.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hitler's Overt Genocidal Plans against Jews and Slavs: Early Manifestations, June 18, 2007

By 

Jan Peczkis "Scholar and Thinker" (Chicago IL, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Voice of Destruction, The (Paperback)

This book has also been published in the English language under the title: HITLER SPEAKS.

Covering events mostly from the early to the middle 1930's, this book fills an important gap in the development of Hitler's thinking. It comes after MEIN KAMPF (1923-1925) and the then-unpublished HITLER'S SECOND BOOK (1928), but before HITLER'S TABLE TALK.

Rauschning elaborates on Hitler's attitudes towards Poland. It becomes obvious that the Fuhrer never saw the 1934 Polish-German Nonaggression Pact as anything more than a temporary expedient, and that he never seriously considered accepting Poland as an ally against the Soviet Union (p. 119). This adds refutation against the claim that WWII had been triggered, in part, by "Polish intransigence".

A common Nazi anti-Semitic theme is the one about Jews being vermin (presumably fit for nothing other than extermination). Interestingly, Nazis also thought that way of Poles. Albert Forster, the Gauleiter of Danzig (Gdansk), referred to Poles as lice (p. 110). (So did Joseph Goebbels, in his diaries).

Rauschning elaborates on Hitler's obsession with Jews. He believed that it was driven in part by Hitler's fear of his partial Jewish ancestry (p. 235).

In his MEIN KAMPF and SECOND BOOK, Hitler had vilified the Jews, and presented Slavic lands as ones to be conquered for lebensraum purposes and filled with German settlers. But what exactly was to be done with the Jews and the Slavs was left to the imagination of the listener. Not so here! Hitler makes direct threats against both Jews and Slavs as biological entities. He speaks of using both Jewish property and Jewish lives as hostages in response to the anti-German actions of other nations (pp. 88-89). (This foreshadows his infamous January 1939 statement, in which he said that, if "international Jewry" caused another war, he would destroy Europe's Jews in response.) He first speaks of resettling Czechs in Siberia (p. 38) and then, repeatedly complaining about the great fecundity of the Slavic peoples (p. 33, 137), proposes to solve this problem through such measures as keeping men and women separated for years (p. 137). He quips: "There are many ways, systematical and comparatively painless, or at any rate bloodless, of causing undesirable races to die out." (p. 138). (In time, the Nazis did implement both active and passive genocidal techniques against the conquered Slavs, as discussed by Raphael Lemkin. The Nazis also worked to develop mass-sterilization methods, preferably ones that could be used covertly against the intended victims).

In this book, Hitler develops his anti-Christian themes, but not as strongly as in the later HITLER'S TABLE TALK. In this work, Hitler refers to Christianity as an effeminate, Jewish invention (p. 49, 235). He trusts that the dogma of the Vicarious Suffering of Christ will give way to acceptance of the new Leader-legislator, who will liberate the faithful from the burden of free will (p. 225). Hitler also clearly exhibits the views of a moral relativist: "There is no such thing as truth, either in the moral or in the scientific sense." (p. 223).

Nazism is often misrepresented as a form of extreme nationalism. In fact, Hitler believed that the concept of the nation was a political expedient of democracy and Liberalism (p. 232), and was just as outdated as the concept of the dynastic feudal state that it had replaced. He wanted the concept of the nation replaced by "purely biological values". (p. 233).

Nazism is also commonly misrepresented as a form of capitalism. In actuality, Hitler scorned both Communism and capitalism, just as he had done earlier in MEIN KAMPF and the SECOND BOOK. In the present work, he commented: "The classless society of the Marxists, he [Hitler] contended, was madness. Order always meant class order. But the democratic notion of a class order based on the moneybag was equally mad. A genuine aristocracy was not born out of the accidentally successful speculations of bright businessmen." (p. 39).

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Lies, lies, lies, November 20, 2011

By 

Hosehead - See all my reviews

This review is from: Voice of Destruction, The (Paperback)

The following four quotes are all ascribed to Hitler by Rauschning. Hitler did not utter one of them, not one. How this book managed to get such high ratings only goes to show the extent to which people believe what they want to believe.

Truth is truth even if no one believes it and a lie is a lie even if everyone believes it.

"They refer to me as an uneducated barbarian. Yes, we are barbarians. We want to be barbarians, it is an honored title to us. We shall rejuvenate the world. This world is near its end."

"A violently active, dominating, intrepid, brutal youth -- that is what I am after ... I want to see in its eyes the gleam of pride and independence, of prey. I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is the ruin of my young men."

"Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death."

"I am liberating man from the degrading chimera known as conscience,"

"Destroy by all and any means. National Socialism will reshape the world."