Life Magazine
Article - November 20, 1939
Germany’s
Brain Truster Produces Nazi War Aims
Excerpt
The root of
Haushofer’s advice is to be ready for anything, to suit the demand to the
supply in international politics, to seek the weak point and to be bound by no
principles. This advice is what the Nazi leaders have always believed in
internal politics. Haushofer tells them, out of an immense scholarship, how to
apply it to international politics. Strangely, the first complete report on
Haushofer to reach the democratic world was contained in several chapters of
the book by the renegade Nazi Hermann Rauschning, “The Revolution of
Nihilism.”
Karl Haushofer’s
ideas, according to Rauschning, are responsible not only for Germany’s alliance
with Soviet Russia but for the development of a totally unscrupulous
revolution. The Nazi elite, according to Rauschning, have come to know that the
whole Nazi program is just balderdash to feed the people. They look on the
hard-working, patriotic, march-loving Germans as the most marvelous suckers ever
handed to a small, tight group hungry for power. Their true program, says
Rauschning, is to pulverize and “Atomize” the German people into one classless
mass, suited to any purposes the High Command may decide. This is to be the
instrument for the great external aims improvised by Haushofer.
Knowing that
the elite of any revolution’s first phase are overthrown by later elites,
Hitler trains the young Nazi elite in special leader schools. In the
competitions for admission, lower-middle-class candidates are more and more
often beaten out by merciless young men from the aristocracy and upper-middle
class. The same type of young man is making his appearance in the ranks of Army
officers. Rauschning says that they listen to Hitler today with embarrassed disgust,
that they believe the revolution cannot stand still and the old Nazis must go.
Either the Army will take over Germany, according to Rauschning, or this new
elite will launch a further “pulverization” of the German people and the “eternal
war” of German dominion.
For all
these “sons of chaos” infected by Haushofer’s ideas, Rauschning has such
epithets as primitive, vulgar, ungrammatical, amoral, immoral, anti-social, déclassé,
hooligan. Like their Fuhrer, they await the turn of events to take over whatever slogans will excite and
delude the people. These slogans are continually changing. Behind the screaming
voice of Adolf Hitler, the actual words are so vague and ambiguous that they
can be used in any way he chooses. Rauschning describes a total breakdown in
Germany of everything once meant by German character, a triumph of cynicism, the death of all hope and
principle, the glorification of rapid action and crafty opportunism. The Revolution,
he says, will whirl on, either forward or backward.
other excerpts
Haushofer
picked Adolph Hitler and his Deputy Chief, Rudolf Hess, as pupils of his in 1920,
saying that Hess should have been a priest and Hitler an architect. He has
never let go of them and calls them by their first names.
He won his
first hold on Hitler when he and his Jewish wife brought to Hitler’s jail in
Munich in 1923 books and flowers to keep the future Fuhrer happy, while he
wrote Mein Kampf.
Personal notes:
I typed this
up after reading it because the methods Haushofer suggested to Hitler for
taking power seem very similar to what GOP Republicans grabbed hold of in Donald
Trump in 2016. “primitive, vulgar, ungrammatical, amoral, immoral,
anti-social, déclassé, hooligan”
Haushofer’s son, Albrecht, would later be executed by the Nazi’s for his work with the German Resistance. Albrecht was implicated in the July 20, 1944, attempted plot to assassinate the Fuhrer. (see Wikipedia)
Karl Haushofer and his wife on the night of March 10-11, 1946, committed suicide. Both drank arsenic, then his wife hanged herself from a tree branch.
Haushofer developed Geopolitik from widely varied sources.
World War II began on Sept. 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland.
Guilt
(found on his person at the time of his execution)
I am guilty,
But not in the way you think.
I should have earlier recognized my duty;
I should have more sharply called evil evil;
I reined in my judgement too long.
I did warn,
But not enough, and not clearly enough;
And today I know what I was guilty of.
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