German journalist, author, diplomat and political activist, who served as German envoy since 1920, first in Georgia and from 1922 until his death in Poland.
Rauscher studied law then was a correspondent for the left-liberal Frankfurter Zeitung and worked in Strasbourg and Berlin. He was one of the first to write about the cinema as a propaganda instrument. At times he was a close employee of Siegfried Jacobsohn.
After 1914 he worked in the war press office and in the political department of the German General Government in Belgium and was a supporter of an annexation policy in relation to Belgium. He was the driving force of the so-called German National Committee, an externally independent body, but in fact a government propaganda agency. Between 1917 and 1918 he served as an army sergeant on the Western Front.
Rauscher probably joined the SPD in 1918. In November and December 1918, he was Philipp Scheidemann’s personal assistant. From early January 1919 he was press chief of the Reich government and between October 1919 and June 1920 head of the united press department of the Reich government and the Federal Foreign Office. There were initially protests from the workers’ and soldiers’ councils against Rauscher’s appointment because he had supported the German occupation policy in Belgium.
During the Kapp Putsch in 1920, Rauscher drafted a joint call for a general strike by the President of the Reich, the Social Democratic ministers and the Socialist parliamentary faction. Theodor Heuss, who referred to Rauscher as a friend and compatriot in his memoirs, and others later claimed that Rauscher had taken this step alone.
He was one of the few diplomats who came to the Federal Foreign Office from other professions after the War. In his Polish days, Rauscher was one of Gustav Stresemann’s closest confidants and was occasionally his go-between with Friedrich Ebert.
Ulrich Rauscher died on 18 December 1930 in St. Blasien at age 46.
Link to Wikipedia biography (German)