Hermann Rauschning was a German nationalist who first thought the Nazis were the only answer to Germany's many problems. Holding various high offices in northern Germany in the first couple years after Jan 1933, he found himself face to face with even greater problems. The straws that broke the camel's back for Hermann was the requirement of the Party that he enforce Gleichschaltung more seriously (including arresting Catholic and Jewish dissidents) along with the Nazi dismantling of the constitution.

          Resistance was useless for Herman by 1935-6 so he fled, leaving all behind. He became the 'seer' for the West, the Prophet that saw, warned and foretold all the Nazis were and would do. He used the word and concept 'holocaust' in his major work "The Revolution of Nihilism". In this book, published in 1938, Rauschning argued that the Nazis were so extremist that the only logical and possible end was Nihilism -- the destruction of the German culture and way of life. His definition of Nazi Nihilism was the obsessive quest for power, all power, at all and any cost.

           The book was quickly translated and promoted widely. Time Magazine reviewed it in 1939, just before the war began:

1) Nazi theories are so much window-dressing for befuddling the masses:
2) Germany's real rulers, a small Nazi inner circle or "elite," have one program—power, one plan—plunder, one tactic—terror;
3) this inner plunderbund secretly laughs at Nazi claptrap about race, blood, soil, considers Mein Kampf oldfashioned;
4) they plan to make Germany a base from which to conquer the world;
5) they expect a socialist "second revolution" which will destroy the last remnants of Christianity, individual freedom, reduce the German people to collective serfdom.

Dr. Rauschning's own wording of the Nazi horrorscope: "The new [National Socialist] social order will consist of ... blind obedience to an absolute despotism . . . a progressive economic destruction of the middle class, and the all-pervading atmosphere of barracks and prison . . . desolation, impoverishment, regimentation, and the collapse of civilized existence."

And this review-article by the same magazine that made Hitler  Time's Man of the Year in 1938, after the Munich Agreement with England's then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain (Bullock, ch 8).

       The question of nihilism is for us to track. Hitler's image had often been presented as a 'plebeian anti-bourgeois' man-of-the-people. Yet his house here to the right, with its giant picture window commanding the Berghof or Eagle's Nest, suggests nothing more than a desire to join society and succeed to the top of bourgeois society, dictator of the tea cups living in purely bourgeois rooms.

       The window displayed a fantastic outlook over the Alps, but more to the point here, was it an example of nihilism -- a desire for a commanding power over even the mountains? (This was actually a "power window", that is, electronically controlled to roll down and allow people to look or even walk directly outside.) Power move? Destruction of even the environment? Value-less? Tyranny for the sake of tyranny? The later facts are consistent with Hermann's portrayal and it is worth keeping this interpretation in mind. Look for substantiation in Bullock, and for counter-evidence as you read. How to put it all together is the question.