He saw the so-called German Day mass marches of 1920–1922 in North Bavaria as a manifestation of a wider evolving nationalist mood, and he would only slowly take to heart the lessons of the 9 November 1923 confrontation, remembered in history as the Hitler-Ludendorff Putsch.
[8] The hitherto conservative newspaper had transformed itself since 1918 into an anti-republican, sometimes anti-Semitic "nationalist" publication, and thereby indirectly helped to prepare the way for National Socialism, even if before 1933 it found itself condemned by the Nazis as a mouthpiece for Chancellor von Papen (als "Papen-Blatt").
[2][15] Richard Stöss asserts that during his time with the Kurier, Haußleiter wrote a succession of articles justifying Nazi policies including those involving anti-Semitism.
[13] In 1947 Haußleiter was temporarily deprived of his party endorsement by means of a majority vote of Christian Social Union members in the Bavarian state legislature (Landtag).
[17] Haußleiter appealed to the Bavarian Constitutional Court, and after winning his case before the arbitration board, he was successful in recovering the party mandate on 16 January 1948.
[20] The suspicion was allowed to grow that the underlying cause of the problems Haußleiter faced within the Christian Social Union arose because he was a member of Bavaria's Protestant minority.
The disclosure in 1980 of hitherto confidential documents indicate that a major additional issue was the inclusion of Haußleiter's name on a list of suspected Nazi sympathizers compiled by the intelligence services supporting the US occupation authorities.
[23] Following major internal differences[16] between rival wings of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria, Haußleiter finally resigned from the party in September 1949.
[7] As a leading DG figure in Bavaria, August Haußleiter advocated a merger for Bavarian political purposes with the League of expellees and dispossessed ("Bund der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten" / BHE), a grouping representing the millions of victims of ethnic cleansing whose former homes had ended up on the wrong side of Germany's new eastern frontier, and many of whom had ended up as refugees in Bavaria.
[27] During 1952 the little DG grouping in the Landtag splintered as members drifted off to other parties, while the alliance with the BHE also came to an end as refugees made new lives and moved on politically and, sometimes, geographically.
[27] Anticipating (correctly) the subsequent outlawing of the Socialist Reich Party (SRP), on 4 October 1952 Haußleiter instigated a meeting with Karl-Heinz Priester, a right-wing extremist who had recently established his own Deutsch-Soziale Bewegung (literally "German Social Movement").
[31] For the West German General Election of 1953 Haußleiter organised an electoral alliance of extreme right wing parties into a grouping named the Dachverband der Nationalen Sammlung (DNS) in which the principal players were himself, Karl-Heinz Priester and Karl Meißner (Deutscher Block).
[32] In 1965 Haußleiter was persuaded by Hermann Schwann [de] to become a founder member of the Action Community for an independent Germany ("Aktionsgemeinschaft Unabhängiger Deutscher"), a nationalist anti-war political grouping which in the next few years became increasingly focused on environmental issues, and in the end, in 1979, merged into the embryonic forerunner of the German Green party.
[2] The AUD failed to gain traction with he German electorate, and in preparation for the European Parliament election of 1979 it joined together with various other fringe political groupings, most of them recently emerged as part of the surge in environmental awareness and concern that was a feature of the 1970s in West Germany.
His unexpected appearance as a possible candidate for the job of Chancellor, campaigning on behalf of The Greens against Franz Josef Strauss and Helmut Schmidt in the forthcoming general election, attracted a surge in public interest, however.
[33] On 24 April 1980 the political television magazine programme, Monitor transmitted a lengthy feature on Haußleiter, referring to his war diary and including footage from the 1957 party conference of the DG.