August Haußleiter
August Haußleiter (5 January 1905 – 8 July 1989) was a German politician and journalist. After leaving the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) in 1949, he spent three decades as a right‑wing political activist and, in the 1980s, became a member of the Greens and a mentor to the Finnish Greens. He sometimes wrote under the pen name Karl Konstantin.
Haußleiter was born in Nuremberg, the son of a Lutheran minister. He grew up as an orphan and became politically engaged early. He studied theology and philosophy at Erlangen University and worked as an editor for the Fränkische Kurier from 1928. During the Nazi era he wrote articles that supported Nazi policies and had a notable clash with Julius Streicher in 1940, after which he was removed from the Kurier. He served in the army during World War II, fought on the Eastern Front where he was wounded in 1942, and later published a book about his experiences. He became a US prisoner of war and was released in 1945.
In 1946 Haußleiter helped found the Bavarian CSU and served in the Bavarian state parliament. He worked on drafting the new Bavarian constitution. In 1947 he briefly lost his party backing because of his militaristic writings, but he regained the CSU mandate in 1948. He was elected deputy chairman of the CSU in early 1948 but resigned in 1949 amid internal party conflicts and suspicions about his links to prewar nationalist circles.
After leaving the CSU, Haußleiter helped start the German Union in 1949, which soon became the German Community (DG). He pushed for cooperation with the refugees’ bloc (BHE) in Bavaria and helped lead the DG group in the Bavarian Landtag from 1950 to 1952. The DG later declined, and Haußleiter and Renate Malluche, whom he would marry, remained in the Landtag as independents until 1954. He also worked to unite right‑wing groups and supported contacts with other nationalist groups after the Nazi era.
Haußleiter continued his political involvement in various fringe groups, including the Deutsche Reichspartei and Nation Europa, and helped organize the DNS, a short‑lived right‑wing electoral alliance, for the 1953 federal election. In 1965 he joined the Action Group of Independent Germans (AUD), which gradually shifted toward environmental concerns and eventually merged with the Greens.
From the late 1960s he produced the AUD’s newspaper and, in 1979, joined the Greens as they were formed. In 1980 he became one of the Greens’ spokespersons, helping to shape the new party. A Monitor television segment in 1980 questioned his wartime writings, leading him to step down as a spokesperson later that year, though he continued to publish the Greens’ weekly newspaper. He returned to the Bavarian state parliament in 1986 but resigned for health reasons in 1987.
August Haußleiter married Renate Malluche, a doctor turned politician, in 1963, and they had four children.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 15:42 (CET).