Letters to the Editor
Correcting a Citation
The June 4, 2018 issue of The New American contains an excellent article entitled “Propaganda: Fight for the Minds of Children,” by Dennis Behreandt.
However there is an errant claim. A citation on page 34 refers to comments that Hitler made while in conversation with “Herman Rauschnigg.” But the conversation probably never happened. The person Behreandt refers to is actually Hermann Rauschning, the former National Socialist president of the Danzig Senate, who fell out with the party shortly before WWII, went west, and wrote up his supposed private conversations with Hitler in a book. The book was variously entitled Conversations With Hitler or The Voice of Destruction.
An article in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, published in 1985, contained the research of a German-Swiss teacher named Wolfgang Hanel, who uncovered the fact that these reminiscences are invented. Dr. Rauschning had two — not hundreds of — meetings with Hitler, neither of them private. The themes and quotations written by Rauschning are invented, or sometimes lifted from fiction (e.g., Nietzsche’s works or Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla.”)
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