Rauschning was born in Thorn in the province of West Prussia (then part of the German Empire; now Toruń, Poland) to a Prussian Army officer.

He attended the Prussian Cadet Corps institute at Potsdam and studied history, German philology and musicology at the Berlin University, where he obtained a Dr. phil.

[1] After the war, he stayed in Poznań,[5] which (like Rauschning's home region of West Prussia) was ceded by Germany to Poland after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

[4] Disagreeing with the leaders of the German minority in the Poznań Voivodeship, he moved to the Free City of Gdansk (which was under League of Nations mandate) in 1926, where he bought an estate in the village of Warnau (Warnowo) in the Vistula Fens and became a farmer.

In Summer 1932, Rauschning and the local Gauleiter Albert Forster met with Adolf Hitler in Obersalzberg to discuss happenings in Danzig.

After Hitler came to power in Germany in January 1933, the Nazis in Danzig withdrew their support for the Ziehm Senate and demanded the formation of a new government under the leadership of Hermann Rauschning.

Ziehm refused to form a joint government with the Nazis, but he and his Senate resigned en bloc, triggering an early parliamentary election in May 1933.

In foreign affairs, Rauschning did not conceal his personal desire to turn neighbouring Poland into a vassal state of Germany.

Since Danzig retained an independent status under the League of Nations, Hitler apparently felt that the free port "might well offer a useful asylum.

[4] Rauschning's ideas of conservative Christian resistance to Hitler met with increasing scepticism and were of no interest to Winston Churchill and his doctrine of uncompromising total war against the Nazis.

[4] Rauschning's writings that were translated into English deal with Nazism, the conservative revolutionaries' relation to it, and their role and responsibility for Hitler gaining power.

By conservative revolution, Rauschning meant "the prewar monarchic-Christian revolt against modernity that made a devil's pact with Hitler during the Weimar period.

[27] 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.

[28] Not long after the ZFI conference in 1983, 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,"[29] which led to the Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi community campaign to deny Rauschning's writings.

[32] 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.

[33]Considered 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,"[34] who by 1988 was regarded as a proponent of Holocaust denial.

[40]Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper's initial view that the conversations recorded in Hitler Speaks were authentic[41] also wavered as a result of the Hänel research.

"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.