August Haußleiter

August Haußleiter (5 January 1905 – 8 July 1989) was a German politician and journalist. After his exclusion from the Bavarian Christian Social Union in 1949 he spent three decades as a right-wing political activist, on many occasions positioned beyond the frontiers of West Germany's consensual political mainstream. During the 1980s he remained politically active, but now as a somewhat unconventional member of the German Green party. He is also the mentor of the Finnish Greens.

He is sometimes identified by the pseudonym under which he occasionally wrote, as Karl Konstantin.

Life Before 1945 Relatively little is known for certain about Haußleiter's life before 1945. Much of what is known comes from what Haußleiter himself wrote, or from party publications emanating from the German Community, the right-wing political movement with which he was associated in the 1950s, and not all of this can be agreed to more neutral sources. Haußleiter himself also managed to disseminate differing versions of his past.

August Haußleiter was the son of a Lutheran minister. He became politically aware early on, and while still at secondary school joined "national defence organisations". At the age of 15 he was arrested by police for the first time, while participating in a major political confrontation. The commentators Martin A. Lee and Richard Stöss appear both to assume that Haußleiter was a participant in the (failed) Hitler-Ludendorff Putsch. Others, including Silke Mende, are content to infer from sources including Haußleiter's own autobiographical writings of 1957, that in 1923 Haußleiter was still "looking for nationalistic groups to join" (...er schon früh "Anschluss an nationalistische Gruppen suchte").

After passing his school final exams (Abitur) he studied theology and philosophy locally at Erlangen University, while undertaking paid work to fund his studies. Various sources indicate that before 1933 Haußleiter was a member of the German People's Party.

From 1928 Haußleiter worked as an economics and politics editor with the Fränkische Kurier (newspaper). Haußleiter remained with the Kurier for another seven years following the savage regime change of 1933, a period during which Nazi criticism of the publication became infrequent, although as the Nazi government struggled to tame opposition from the churches they continued to criticise the Kurier's pro-church stance ("kirchenfreundliche Haltung"). Richard Stöss asserts that during his time with the Kurier, Haußleiter wrote a succession of articles justifying Nazi policies including those involving anti-Semitism.

War had broken out the previous year, and later in 1940 Haußleiter was conscripted into the army. He spent the rest of the war employed in the 13th Army Corps. In 1942 he was badly wounded on the Russian Front. Later he was switched to the Western front, ending up in 1945 as a US prisoner of war. a small town between Nuremberg and Erfurt. In 1946, at nearby Kulmbach, he was one of the co-founders of the Bavarian Christian Social Union party. The Christian Social Union was a regional political party for Bavaria, an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic state within Germany. The district around Nuremberg was a protestant enclave within Bavaria, however, and Haußleiter's own protestant provenance was an important part of broadening the party's coverage beyond Bavaria's catholic majority, although his protestantism would also help to make Haußleiter in some respects an outsider. He nevertheless represented a long standing liberal conservative and federalist tradition as well as Bavaria's protestant minority within the Christian Social Union. A few weeks later, on 29 February 1948, Haußleiter was elected a deputy chairman of the Christian Social Union.

Following major internal differences whose objectives included the preparation of a democratic revolution (""). With Ferdinand Zimmermann, another fellow journalist, whose backing for the Nazi regime before 1945 appears to have been less nuanced than his own, Haußleiter produced the German Union's weekly political journal, "Die deutsche Wirklichkeit" ("The German Reality"). At the end of 1949 the German Union evolved/merged into the German Community (DG), with Haußleiter a leading spokesman of what had in effect become another German political party. whom he would later marry. The two of them continued to sit in the Bavarian Landtag, now without any party affiliation, for more than another two years, from April 1952 till December 1954.

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"). Their purpose was to discuss how they might, along with Werner Boll of the Deutsche Reichspartei (German National Party) work together to pick up SRP activists after their own party had been banned (as indeed it was in 1952, followed by the West German Communist Party in 1956). Haußleiter further burnished his credentials as a right-wing extremist during this period with his contributions to the right-wing newspaper, Nation Europa, frequently identified as a pro-Nazi publication.

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). The grouping's message failed to resonate with voters, however, and it won just 0.3% of the popular vote.

In 1965 Haußleiter was persuaded by to become a founding member of the Action Group of Independent Germans (AUD), 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. After 1967 he also produced the AUD's party newspaper, "" ("The Independents").

The German Green Party was formally inaugurated at a congress in Karlsruhe in January 1980, and two months later, at a follow-up party congress held at Saarbrücken, he was elected as one of the spokespersons for the new party, and a member of its collective leadership team. At the age of 75 August Haußleiter was by now a forgotten albeit colourful figure from West Germany's political past. 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. Press attention included a hitherto unfamiliar level of interest in Haußleiter's erratic political career to date, on his wartime writings, and on some of his more controversial political fellow travelers since 1945. Nevertheless, following consultation with other members of the party leadership, at the next party conference, held at Dortmund in June 1980 to prepare for the October general election, he resigned from his high-profile position. His successor was , a less flamboyant performer, who also came from the formerly AUD wing of the party, but was too young to have published anything during the war.

1980 did not mark the end of August Haußleiter's political career in The Green Party. He continued to produce the party's weekly newspaper. In 1986 he was back as a member of the Bavarian state parliament (Landtag), but he resigned in 1987 on health grounds.

Personal life August Haußleiter married the doctor turned politician Renate Malluche at a Munich registry office in 1963. He was the father of four recorded children.