It should be noted at the top of this discussion that Rauschning—after a sustained campaign prosecution and defamation by 'scholars' in the cottage industry of
Holocaust denial—has reentered the domain of sources approved by mainstream scholarship in the history of the period.
Richard J Evans, who criticized Rauschning (along with his peer
Ian Kershaw) as recently as 2018, began to cite from Rauschning again in his most recent work,
Hitler’s People in 2024
. He rejoins other mainline historians and biographers of the Third Reich, such as
Hugh Trevor-Roper and
Joachim Fest, in considering Rauschning an important source on this period and as a source-witness on the subject of the figure he is best remembered for describing,
Adolf Hitler.
Controversy The authenticity of the discussions that Rauschning claimed to have had with Hitler between 1932 and 1934, which formed the basis of his book
Hitler Speaks, was challenged shortly after Rauschning's death by an obscure Swiss researcher, Wolfgang Hänel—a holocaust-denier. Hänel investigated the memoir and announced his findings at a conference of the
negationist association
Zeitgeschichtliche Forschungsstelle Ingolstadt (ZFI) in 1983. The ZFI is a historical revisionist association that, according to one of its leaders,
Stephen E. Atkins, is a
Holocaust denial institution that is based in Germany. Its conferences and meetings have speakers attempting to trivialize Nazism and denying the guilt for Nazi Germany's part in World War II and other culpable activities by Nazis, in close collaboration with periodicals such as
Europa Vorn,
Nation und Europa, and
Deutschland in Geschichte und Gegenwart, who promoted similar viewpoints and goals. Not long after the ZFI conference in 1983 where Hänel’s critique of Rauschning was introduced,
Mark Weber, from the
Institute for Historical Review (IHR), considered the mainstay of the international Holocaust denial movement, published an article condemning the "Rauschning memoir as fraudulent," which led to the Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi community campaign to deny Rauschning's writings. As director of IHR, Mark Weber has referred to the Holocaust as a "hoax" and was the former news editor of
National Vanguard, a neo-Nazi publication of the
National Alliance. The Hänel research was reviewed in the West German newspapers
Der Spiegel and
Die Zeit in 1985. By 2012, the scholarly consensus was that the conversations were not genuine. In an effort to undercut the accuracy of Rauschning's early account of Hitler's anti-Semitic diatribes to "remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin," Weber wrote: The Holocaust hoax is a religion. Its underpinnings in the realm of historical fact are nonexistent—no Hitler order, no plan, no budget, no gas chambers, no autopsies of gassed victims, no bones, no ashes, no skulls, no nothing. As one of the first former Nazi insiders to criticize Hitler's plan for world domination and the expulsion of Jews, many of Rauschning's most sceptical adversaries have been led by "revisionist historians gathered around
David Irving," who by 1988 was regarded as a proponent of Holocaust denial. In an unsuccessful 2000 libel case, Irving was discredited after he had falsified historical facts in an effort to advance his theory that the Holocaust never happened, where Judge
Charles Gray concluded that Irving was "an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist and that he associates with right wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism."
The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich also considers that "the research of the Swiss educator Wolfgang Hänel has made it clear that the 'conversations' were mostly free inventions." In his biography of Hitler,
Ian Kershaw wrote: "I have on no single occasion cited Hermann Rauschning's
Hitler Speaks, a work now regarded to have so little authenticity that it is best to disregard it altogether." Other historians have not been convinced by Hänel′s research. David Redles criticized Hänel′s method, which he said consisted ofpoint[ing] out similarities in phrasing of quotations from other individuals in Rauschning's other books... and those attributed to Hitler in
The Voice of Destruction [i.e.
Hitler Speaks]. If the two are even remotely similar Hänel concludes that the latter must
be concoctions. However, the similarities, which are mostly slight, could be for a number of reasons.... [they] need not stem from Rauschning's attempt at forgery. According to an article by
The Spectator, Rauschning had taken immediate "notes made by him at the time" during his years with Hitler, which have been considered "not a mere transcript of the notes, but an attempt to reconstruct the conversations noted." Although Rauschning had written his book more than six years after his conversations with Hitler, German historian
Theodor Schieder remarked that it— ...is not a document in which one can expect to find... stenographic records of sentences or aphorisms spoken by Hitler, despite the fact that it might appear to meet that standard. It is a [work] in which objective and subjective components are mixed and in which alterations in the author's opinions about what he recounts become mingled with what he recounts. It is, however, a [source] of unquestioned value, since it contains views derived from immediate experience. Historian
Hugh Trevor-Roper's initial view that the conversations recorded in
Hitler Speaks were authentic also wavered as a result of the Hänel research. For example, in the introductory essay he wrote for ''
Hitler's Table Talk'' in 1953, he said: "Hitler's own table talk in the crucial years of the Machtergreifung (1932–34), as briefly recorded by Hermann Rauschning, so startled the world (which could not even in 1939 credit him with either such ruthlessness or such ambitions) that it was for long regarded as spurious. It is now, I think, accepted. If any still doubt its genuineness, they will hardly do so after reading the volume now published. For here is the official, authentic record of Hitler's Table-Talk almost exactly ten years after the conversations recorded by Rauschning." Trevor-Roper stated that Rauschning's account "has been vindicated by the evidence of Hitler's views which has been discovered since its publication and that it is an important source for any biography of Hitler." In the third edition, published in 2000, he wrote a new preface in which he revised but did not reverse his opinion of the authenticity of
Hitler Speaks: "I would not now endorse so cheerfully the authority of Hermann Rauschning which has been dented by Wolfgang Hänel, but I would not reject it altogether. Rauschning may have yielded at times to journalistic temptations, but he had opportunities to record Hitler's conversations and the general tenor of his record too exactly foretells Hitler's later utterances to be dismissed as fabrication." ==Works==