Richard Löwenthal (April 15, 1908 – August 9, 1991) was a German journalist and professor who wrote mostly on the problems of democracy, communism, and world politics.
Starting in 1935 Löwenthal began formulating his own definition of fascism, which was strongly influenced by the work of Otto Bauer and Franz Leopold Neumann.
In 1941, Löwenthal published a book which argued that it was necessary for the Soviet Union to be given the lion’s share of the responsibility of governing Germany after the war, as this would be the best means of ensuring the triumph of the German Left.
Löwenthal very much admired the Labour Party and in several articles after 1945, urged that West Germany adopted the British model for its economic organization.
Löwenthal was late to write that “In England the German socialist emigrants got to know an impressive model of a free democracy which proved its worth under extreme external pressure; thus they were essentially confirmed in their democratic conviction and prepared for the task that awaited them after the war.
The English, at least those who lent the emigrant an ear and cooperated with them, gathered new hope that a true democracy might be established in Germany and contributed considerably to the realization of this model during the first harsh postwar years.
In the late 1960s, Löwenthal was initially sympathetic towards student protestors, but turned against what he regarded as the destructive anarchism and “romantic relapse” into Marxism of the New Left and rejected their call for a West German pull-out from NATO as opening the door for the Soviet conquest of Western Europe.
[5] Löwenthal argued "Those countries have not gone from tyranny to freedom, but from massive terror to a rule of meanness, ensuring stability at the risk of stagnation".
[5] In a 1960 article in Commentary, Löwenthal claimed that totalitarianism was a dead force in the East Bloc, even through none of the regimes were anything close to being "liberalized".
[10] Moreover, Löwenthal asserted it was impossible for the East Bloc regimes to return to totalitarianism, arguing that "that particular secular religion is dead-at least in those countries that have tried it out".
They were shipped to far-away concentration camps and in general were not killed right away, but were forced to suffer conditions that led in the course of time to a miserable death” [17] Löwenthal argued that: “What Stalin did from 1929 both against peasants and against various other victims, including leading Communists (among them, incidentally, Bucharin, who in 1929 had already publicly taken a position against the “new system”) and returned soldiers, was in fact historically new in its systematic inhumanity, and to this extent comparable with the deeds of Hitler.
At any rate the idea of total annihilation of the Jews had already been developed in the last work of Hitler’s mentor, Dietrich Eckart, who died in 1924.