High Nazi leaders believe the traditional “white man’s burden” has become too heavy for “senile” Great Britain and that it is now up to the “young” Third Reich to shoulder it, according to Dr. Hermann Rauschning, former Nazi president of the Danzig Senate and now a bitter foe of Chancellor Adolf Hitler.
Dr. Rauschning, one of the first of the high Nazi officials to turn against Nazism, has written a book about the ideology of Germany which will shortly be published here.
The Havas correspondent has just been permitted to examine the manuscript of this book. In it Rauschning, perhaps the only National Socialist who has held high office to pass into opposition ranks, says Nazism is “a permanent revolution without doctrine and without defined ends. It is, for traditional European civilization, a menace more dangerous and more universal than Russian Bolshevism.”
The book, which is to be called “the Revolution of Nihilism,” asserts that the German Army originally hoped to use the Nazi movement for putting itself on top so as to carry out its military policies. But the Hitler “blood purge” definitely placed Nazism on top. Recent army shakeups have revealed, the author says, that all is not yet smooth between the Nazis and the military. But this part of the book reveals that Dr. Rauschning does not wish, or fears, to say all he knows about inner army politics.
Nazism is working for world domination, the ex-Nazi asserts. France is no longer regarded as Germany’s most dangerous enemy. In Nazi eyes it is a “dying nation.” Great Britain is seen by the Nazis as having lost the “imperial spirit” and, by its disarmed state, has been “abandoning means of domination.”
When the time comes, Germany will muster many elements for carrying on anti-British propaganda. It will argue that British puritanism comes from the Old Testament and that therefore Great Britain incarnates the Jewish spirit and is a “modern Judaea.”
Rauschning concludes that in Germany and beyond its frontiers Nazism must be fought bitterly if permanent values of the European tradition are to prevail over Nazi Nihilism.
Rauschning, descended from Prussian officers and himself a military man, played a leading role in the Nazi Party in 1933, and was elected head of the Government in the free City of Danzig. In 1934 he was ousted when he took a firm stand against the radical Nazi elements. In 1935 he campaigned against the Nazis in the Danzig elections.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
