ABSTRACT
The author of the following passage, Hermann Rauschning (1887-1982), joined the Nazi Party in 1932 but resigned in 1934, put off in part by antiJewish agitation. He became a refugee in 1937, settling in Great Britain in 1938 before moving to the United States in 1941. His writings after leaving Germany became staples of anti-Nazi propaganda in the West. They helped to popularize the image of Hitler as a man devoid of ideas, interested solely in power for its own sake. That image received its most famous incarnation in Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 fi lm, The Great Dictator, but subsequent scholarship has shown that Hitler had a far more developed and original world view than Rauschning understood.
