Nazi occultism

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Since 1960 (the year Le Matin des Magiciens was published), there has been an interest in Nazi occultism in popular culture. Before that, there had already been several publications on this topic in the occult milieu in France and England. The recurring motive of this literary genre is the thesis that the Nazis were directed by occult agencies of some sort: black forces, invisible hierarchies, unknown superiors, secret societies or even Satan directly. Since such an agency "has remained concealed to previous historians of National Socialism,"[1] they have dismissed the topic as modern cryptohistory. The actual religious aspects of Nazism, including the question of its potential occult and pagan aspects, are a different topic.

Contents

[edit] Nazism and occultism

"The Modern Mythology of Nazi Occultism" is the title of Appendix E of Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's seminal work The Occult Roots of Nazism. On nine pages, the Oxford historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke here surveys the most influential books that have have attempted to explain the rise of Nazism as the work of a "hidden power". That Goodrick-Clarke's book includes such an appendix is not without reason. One of the difficulties of the book's subject (the racist-occult movement of Ariosophy, a major strand of Esotericism in Germany and Austria, and its potential influences on Nazism) lies in that it can be regarded "as a topic for sensational authors in pursuit of strong sales."[2] Some of this modern mythology even touches Goodrick-Clarke's topic directly. The rumor that Adolf Hitler had encountered Lanz von Liebenfels already at the age of 8, at Heilgenkreuz abbey, goes back to Les mystiques du soleil (1971) by Michel-Jean Angbert. "This episode is wholly imaginary."[3]

Nevertheless, Michel-Jean Angbert and the other authors discussed by Goodrick-Clarke present their accounts as real, so that this modern mythology has led to several legends that resemble conspiracy theories, concerning, for example, the Vril Society or rumours about Karl Haushofer's connection to the occult. The most influential books were Trevor Ravenscroft's The Spear of Destiny and Le Matin des Magiciens by Pauwels and Bergier.

In Ravenscroft's book a specific interest of Hitler concerning the Spear of Destiny is alleged. With the annexation of Austria in 1938, the Hofburg Spear, a relic stored in Vienna, had actually come into the possession of the Third Reich and Hitler subsequently had it moved to Nuremberg in Germany. It was returned to Austria after the war.

Aside from this, there are also accounts of Nazi occultism that are clearly fictional. The best known example of them (Nazi occultism in popular culture) would be Indiana Jones. In the first Indiana Jones movie, the hero fights Nazis who have discovered the Ark of the Covenant, which would supposedly grant victory to whatever army carried it into battle. In the third film, the popular American movie character again battles Nazis over a religious artifact: the Holy Grail.[4] The motive of a Nazi search for the Holy Grail is not wholly fictitious: Otto Rahn, who worked at that time for a section of the RSHA department of the SS actually searched after "rumours" about the Holy Grail.

In 2001, video game publisher Activision released Return to Castle Wolfenstein, the plot of which focused on Himmler raising an army of zombies to take over the world.

[edit] Modern theories of Nazi occultism

By its very nature the study of occult influences on the Nazis attracts sensationalistic authors who often seem to lack the ability or the patience to conform to the scientific method of history. "There is a persistent idea, widely canvassed in a sensational genre of literature, that the Nazis were principally inspired and directed by occult agencies from 1920 to 1945".[5] Appendix E of Goodrick-Clarke's book discusses "The Modern Mythology of Nazi Occultism".[6] He refers to the writers of this genre as "crypto-historians".[7] As their possible motive he mentions a "post-war fascination with Nazism".[8] Mattias Gardell, a historian who researches a related field, points at another explanation:

"Occultists believe, Hanussen may also have imparted occult techniques of mind control and crowd domination on Hitler". —Hitler and the Occult
"Occultists believe, Hanussen may also have imparted occult techniques of mind control and crowd domination on Hitler". —Hitler and the Occult
In documentaries portraying the Third Reich, Hitler is cast as a master magician; these documentaries typically include scenes in which Hitler is speaking at huge mass meetings. [...] Cuts mix Hitler screaming with regiments marching under the sign of the swastika. Instead of providing a translation of his verbal crescendos, the sequence is overlaid with a speaker talking about something different. All this combines to demonize Hitler as an evil wizard spellbinding an unwitting German people to become his zombified servants until they are liberated from the spell by the Allied victory after which, suddenly, there were no German Nazis left among the populace. How convenient it would be if this image were correct. National socialism could be defeated with garlic. Watchdog groups could be replaced with a few vampire killers, and resources being directed into antiracist community programs could be directed at something else.[9]

Gardell obviously refers to documentaries such as History Channel's documentary Hitler and the Occult.[10][11] As evidence of Hitler's "occult power" this documentary offers, for example, the infamous statement by Joachim von Ribbentrop of his continued subservience to Hitler at the Nuremberg Trials.[12] After the author Dusty Sklar has pointed out that Hitler's suicide happened at the night of April 30/May 1, which is Walpurgis Night, the narrator continues: "With Hitler gone, it was as if a spell had been broken". A much more plausible reason for Hitler's suicide (that does not involve the paranormal) is that the Russians had already closed in on Hitler's bunker to about several hundred meters and he did not want to be captured alive.

Well-known religious figures like Pope Pius XII and Pope Benedict XVI spoke about a demonic possession of Hitler; Pope Pius XII even performed an exorcism on Hitler at a distance, but supposedly failed every time[13][14]. For a demonic influence on Hitler, Hermann Rauschning's Hitler Speaks is brought forward as source,[15] although most modern scholars do not consider Rauschning reliable.[16] (As Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke summarises, "recent scholarship has almost certainly proved that Rauschning's conversations were mostly invented".)[17] Similarly to Rauschning, August Kubizek, one of Hitler's closest friends since childhood, claims that Hitler—17 years old at the time—once spoke to him of "returning Germany to its former glory"; of this comment August said, "It was as if another being spoke out of his body, and moved him as much as it did me."[18]

In his later ambition of imposing a National Socialist regime throughout Europe, Nazi propaganda used the term Neuordnung (often poorly translated as "new order", while actually referring to "re-structurization" of state borders on the European map and the resulting post-war economic hegemony of Greater Germany),[19] so one could probably say that the Nazis pursued "a" new world order. But the claim that Hitler and the Thule Society conspired to create "the" New World Order (as put forward on some webpages)[20] is completely unfounded; the Thule Society did not have this impact on Nazism and Hitler never attended any of their meetings.[21]

Various conspiracy theory websites also claim that the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley sought to contact Hitler during World War II as well.[22][23]

Indeed, if Hitler (and also Stalin) or the Nazis in general, were the agents of Satan, or "'black forces', 'invisible hierarchies', 'unknown superiors' or any other 'discarnate entity'",[24] this would be a convenient explanation. Explaining Hitler's rise to power, the Second World War and possibly even The Holocaust by the means of the paranormal seems to serve the function of protecting the authors and readers alike from having to deal with this rationally.

"The truth, however, is that millions of ordinary German workers, farmers and businessmen supported the national socialist program. [...] They were people who probably considered themselves good citizens, which is far more frightening than had they merely been demons."[25]

[edit] Crypto-historic books on Nazi occultism

Goodrick-Clarke examines several pseudo-historic "books written about Nazi occultism between 1960 and 1975", that "were typically sensational and under-researched".[26] He terms this genre "crypto-history", as its defining element and "final point of explanatory reference is an agent which has remained concealed to previous historians of National Socialism".[27] Characteristic tendencies of this literature include: (1) "a complete ignorance of primary sources" and (2) the repetition of "inaccuracies and wild claims", without the attempt being made to confirm even "wholly spurious 'facts'".[28] Books debunked in Appendix E of The Occult Roots of Nazism are:

These books are only mentioned in the Appendix. Otherwise the whole book by Goodrick-Clarke does without any reference to this kind of literature; it uses other sources. This literature is not reliable; however, books published after the emergence of The Occult Roots of Nazism continue to repeat claims that have been proven false:

  • Wulf Schwarzwaller, 1988, The Unknown Hitler[34]
  • Alan Baker, 2000, Invisible Eagle. The History of Nazi Occultism[35]

[edit] Neopaganism

The use of runic symbology and the existence of an official Nazi government department for the study of the Germanic ancestral heritage (including paganism) have lent some credence to the idea that there was a pagan component to Nazism. As early as 1940, the occult scholar and folklorist Lewis Spence identified a neopagan undercurrent in Nazism,[36] for which he largely blamed Alfred Rosenberg, and which he equated with "satanism". He further connected Nazism to the Illuminati.[37]

Occultist or neopagan authors like Stephen McNallen, Stephen Flowers and Michael Moynihan (Flowers and Moynihan being translators of The Secret King) argue however that the Nazis' occult and runic pretensions amounted to a distortion and misrepresentation of the ancestral religion, Odinism.[38] Thus McNallen denounces "the lie that 'Hitler was a pagan' or that 'Asatruar trace their roots to Nazi Germany'".[39] In an article entitled "The Wiligut Saga" featured in The Secret King, Adolf Schleipfer points out the differences between Wiligut's beliefs and those generally accepted within Odinism. Flowers, who is also a scholar of Germanic religious history, contends that

The Ahnenerbe and the Totenkopf Orden made more practical use of Judeo-Christian and Manichean techniques and ideas in their magical traditions and organizational principles....One brief glance at a book on ancient Germanic and old Scandinavian culture and religion will show the massive degree to which the Nazis perverted the egalitarian systems of the ancients into a totalitarian scheme ... just as the Christian evangelists would employ old pagan symbols (such as the cross) to convert the heathens and then gradually infuse those venerable symbols with a contrary significance, so too did the Nazis employ old Germanic symbolism (which was very popular at that time) and infuse it with non-Germanic concepts for manipulative purposes.[40]

This is not only the opinion of occultists. Heinz Höhne, an authority on the SS, observes that in practice the organisation was modelled on Ignatius Loyola's Jesuit order and that "Himmler's neo-pagan customs remained primarily a paper exercise".[41]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 1985: 218
  2. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 2004: vi.
  3. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 1985: 224.
  4. ^ Rebecca A. Umland and Samuel J. Umland, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), The Use of Arthurian Legend in Hollywood Film: From Connecticut Yankees to Fisher Kings (Contributions to the Study of Popular Culture) (Greenwood Press, 1996.), 167-171.
  5. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 1985, 217
  6. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 1985, 217-225
  7. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 1985, 218
  8. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 1985, 217
  9. ^ Gardell 2003, 331
  10. ^ The History Channel online Store: The Unknown Hitler DVD Collection
  11. ^ Another critique of Hitler documentaries: Mark Schone - All Hitler, all the time
  12. ^ "Even with all I know, if in this cell Hitler should come to me and say 'Do this!', I would still do it." - Joachim von Ribbentrop, 1946
  13. ^ The Daily Mail newspaper. Hitler and Stalin were possessed by the Devil, says Vatican exorcist. Retrieved on August 2007
  14. ^ Vatican exorcist: Hitler Knew the Devil
  15. ^ Demonic Possession of World Leaders
  16. ^ Theodor Schieder (1972), Hermann Rauschnings "Gespräche mit Hitler" als Geschichtsquelle (Oppladen, Germany: Westdeutscher Verlag) and Wolfgang Hänel (1984), Hermann Rauschnings "Gespräche mit Hitler": Eine Geschichtsfälschung (Ingolstadt, Germany: Zeitgeschichtliche Forschungsstelle), cit. in Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (2003), Black Sun, p. 321.
  17. ^ Goodrick-Clarke (2003: 110). The best that can be said for Rauschning's claims may be Goodrick-Clarke's judgment that they "record ... the authentic voice of Hitler by inspired guesswork and imagination" (ibid.).
  18. ^ “Hitler and the Holy Roman Empire”
  19. ^ Safire, William. The New York Times. Retrieved on November,2007
  20. ^ Historic Results of Hitler's Thule Societies pursuit of the NWO
  21. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 1985: 201; Johannes Hering, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Thule-Gesellschaft, typescript dated June 21, 1939, Bundesarchiv, Koblenz, NS26/865.
  22. ^ Illiminati-News: Aleister Crowley
  23. ^ Occult Symbolism: As American as Baseball at Alex Jones' prisonplanet.com
  24. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 1985, 218
  25. ^ Gardell 2003, 331,332
  26. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 1985: 224, 225.
  27. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 1985: 218.
  28. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 1985: 225.
  29. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 1985: 219-220.
  30. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 1985: 221.
  31. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 1985: 221-223.
  32. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 1985: 224.
  33. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 1985: 221.
  34. ^ If The Unknown Hitler is quoted correctly in The Vril Society, the Luminous Lodge and the Realization of the Great Work, then this book makes false allegations about Karl Haushofer and G. I. Gurdjieff.
  35. ^ Chapter 5 of the Free online version of Invisible Eagle is mainly based on Ravenscroft.
  36. ^ Spence, Lewis, Occult Causes of the Present War, 1940: p85.
  37. ^ Spence 1940.
  38. ^ http://www.runestone.org/RS32/books/index.htm, http://www.runestone.org/lep4.html, http://www.angelfire.com/wy/wyrd/odinvsnazi.html; "The Myth and Reality of Occultism in the Third Reich" lecture by S. E. Flowers, November 12th, 2006. http://www.woodharrow.com/lectureseries.html.
  39. ^ Review of The Secret King by Stephen A. McNallen, (http://www.runestone.org/RS32/books/index.htm).
  40. ^ Flowers 1984: 16.
  41. ^ Höhne 1969: 138, 143-5, 156-57.

[edit] Works Cited

[edit] List of books about Nazi occultism

  • Wiligut, Karl Maria (2001). in Michael Moynihan (editor): The Secret King: Karl Maria Wiligut, Himmler's Lord of the Runes, translated by Stephen E. Flowers, Dominion Press and Runa-Raven Press. ISBN 1-885972-21-0. 
  • Hitler's Secret Sciences: His Quest for the Hidden Knowledge of the Ancients by Nigel Pennick
  • Runic Astrology: Starcraft and Timekeeping in the Northern Tradition by Nigel Pennick
  • The SS Family Book: Procedure for Conducting Family Celebrations, authored by Charles Barger & Ulric of England. Ulric Publishing. - SS Pagan rituals.
  • Reveal the Power of the Pendulum: Secrets of the Sidereal Pendulum, A Complete Survey of Pendulum Dowsing, by Karl Spiesberger, (1962) ISBN 0-572-01419-8 (Der erfolgreiche Pendel-Praktiker) - 1962 [1]
  • Rune Might: History and Practices of the Early 20th Century German Rune Magicians by Stephen Flowers
  • Mythos Schwarze Sonne by Gerhard von Werfenstein
  • Odinism and Christianity under the Third Reich by John Yeowell, published by the Odinic Rite in 1993.
  • Unholy Alliance: History of the Nazi Involvement With the Occult by Peter Levenda, (May 1, 2002, ISBN 0-8264-1409-5)
  • Nazis and the Occult by Dusty Sklar
  • Hitler and the Occult by Ken Anderson
  • Zodiac and Swastika: Astrologer to Himmler's Court by Wilhelm Wulff
  • The Occult Understanding of Hitler and the Nazis by Cyril Scott
  • Unknown Sources: National Socialism and the Occult by Hans Thomas Hakl & Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (Translator)
  • Hitlers Visionäre. Die okkulten Wegbereiter des Dritten Reiches Hitler's Visionaries. Nazism's Occult Roots] by Eduard Gugenberger [2]
  • Astrology and the Third Reich: A Historical Study of Astrological Beliefs in Western Europe Since 1700 and in Hitler's Germany, 1933-45 by Ellic Howe
  • Astrology: A Recent History Including the Untold Story of its Role in World War II by Ellic Howe (1968)
  • Astrology and Psychological Warfare During World War II by Ellic Howe (1972)
  • Himmler's Crusade: The Nazi Expedition to Find the Origins of the Aryan Race by Christopher Hale (Wiley 2003. ISBN 0-471-26292-7)
  • Heinrich Himmler's Camelot: Pictorial/documentary: The Wewelsburg Ideological Center of the SS, 1934-1945 by Stephen Cook (Kressmann-Backmeyer, 1999)
  • Spence, Lewis: Occult Causes of the Present War; 1940, Rider and Co, London.
  • The Occult Establishment by James Webb
  • Storm Troopers of Satan by Michael FitzGerald
  • Das Ende des Hitlermythos by Josef Greiner
  • Himmler's Black Order 1923-45 by Robin Lumsden
  • Himmler's Crusade: The True Story of the 1938 Nazi Expedition into Tibet by Christopher Hale
  • Nietzsche, Prophet of Nazism: The Cult of the Superman--Unveiling the Nazi Secret Doctrine by Abir Taha
  • Reich Of The Black Sun: Nazi Secret Weapons & The Cold War Allied Legend by Joseph P. Farrell
  • Satan and Swastika: The Occult and the Nazi Party by Francis X. King
  • Himmler's Castle by Stuart Russell, J A Bowman (Editor)
  • Hitler and his God: The Background to the Hitler Phenomenon by Georges van Vrekhem, Rupa & Co. ISBN 81-291-0953-0
  • Hitler: Black Magician by Gerald Suster, ISBN 1-871438-82-9.
  • Hanussen: Hitler's Jewish Clairvoyant by Mel Gordon
  • Hitler: The Occult Messiah by Gerald Suster (1981)
  • Schwarze Sonne (book) by Rüdiger Sünner

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Pages on the Nazis and the Occult that may not be reliable