Karl Haushofer - Hitler's Inexhaustable Idea Man (1939)

 

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

Moabit Sonnet by Albrecht Haushofer

(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.

 

Haushofer and German "Geopolitik" utilize Harold Mackinder's Heartland Theory to forge a Greater German Empire