Nazism and The New Age, Hitler and the Occult

~Hannah Newman~

 


Creation is not finished. Man is clearly approaching a phase of metamorphosis. The earlier human species has already reached the stage of dying out.... All of the force of creation will be concentrated in a new species... [which] will surpass infinitely modern man.... Do you understand now the profound meaning of our National Socialist movement?

~Adolf Hitler, quoted by Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, translated in The Occult and the Third Reich
French  scholars Michel Bertrand and Jean Angelini writing under the name of Jean-Michel Angebert

You'll think I'm crazy, but listen to me: Hitler will bring us to a catastrophe. But his ideas, once they have been transformed, will acquire a new strength.

~Josef Göbbels to his aide-de-camp, Prince Schaumburg-Lippe, quoted in Angebert






It has been claimed that the world views of the top Nazi leaders was permeated by occult ideas, but that is probably somewhat exaggerated. It is known that Himmler's fooleries were an embarrassment to many of the Nazi bigwigs, and there was probably quite a bit of laughs in the corners.

There is also no evidence that the leader of the Nazis, Adolf Hitler, was particularly interested in the occult movements of the time, although he undoubtedly had known persons from these circles, whose political ideas in many ways were similar to his. Neither in Hitler's book collection or in his papers are traces of this.


Furthermore, there is nothing that indicates that fantasies of a grandiose Germanic ancient kingdom have had any major place in his world view. On the contrary, we have clear evidence that he was not interested in archeaology, and that he viewed it as a waste of time, when romantic souls travelled around the world to track down glimpses of glory of yore.

Hitler even became very annoyed by Himmler's archaeological activities. Albert Speer quotes Hitler for this statement:

Why are we trying to bring to the attention of the world the fact that we have no past? Isn't it enough that the Romans built massive buildings, while our forefathers still had to live in miserable huts? Himmler has now started digging up the remains of these miserable dwellings, and is enthralled by every pottery shard or any stone axe he finds. The only thing that comes out of that is, that it is now clear to everyone that we were still throwing stone axes and huddling around the fire at a time when the Greeks and the Romans had for a long tmel reached the highest cultural level. In reality, we should keep quiet about our past, but instead Himmler is creating a quite unnecessary fuss with his activities. The Romans of our days must be highly amused over Himmler's discoveries!

Hitler's driving force was primarily personal ambitions and a disdain for the existing society and a hatred of those parts of the population which he blamed for the miserable conditions in the 1920's in Germany. Romantic dreams were probably far from Hitler's mind.

All in all, there seems to be only one in the Nazi top who was interested in the occult, namely Heinrich Himmler.



HITLER'S POSITIVE CHRISTIANITY
...Unleashing The
Patriotic Church

A great deal has been made by many of Hitler's love affair with the occult. However, the "public persona" of one Adolf Hitler was one steeped in Christian tradition—German traditional religious practice and imagery. He somehow knew what made the German soul tick and what really made most of mankind tick. His realization of what could motivate the human soul (mind, will and emotion) to its grandiose heights was decisively religious (i.e., the Christian religious expression) in its public manifestation.

 

We demand liberty for all religious denominations in the State, so far as they are not a danger to it and do not militate against the morality and moral sense of the German race. The Party, as such, stands for positive Christianity, but does not bind itself in the matter of creed to any particular confession"

~Item #24 of the German Worker's Party "Program" cir. 1920s

 

At the earliest formation of the Nazi Party, Hitler expressed his Christian support to the German people and soldiers. In the 1920s, Hitler's German Workers' Party (pre Nazi terminology) adopted a twenty-five-point program with the clear intent to persuade the German people that "positive Christianity" was in full conformity to the "moral" convictions of the Party—i.e., the Party fully embraced the morality of Christianity and that Christianity was viewed as "singular" in the minds of that Party—Catholic and Protestants were considered as the foundation of German Christianity in its fullness and jurisdiction (the Party embraced both as one).

 

MY LORD AND SAVIOR ...IN THE BOUNDLESS LOVE AS A CHRISTIAN ...HE HAD TO SHED HIS BLOOD UPON THE CROSS. My feelings as a Christian point me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them. This is God's truth! He was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice....

 

And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.

 

When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people is plundered and exploited.

 

[Note, "Brood of vipers" appears in Matt. 3:7 & 12:34. John 2:15 depicts Jesus driving out the moneychangers (adders) from the temple.]

~Adolf Hitler, in his speech on 12 April 1922

 

We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.

~Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Berlin on 24 October 1933.

 

Indeed, Hitler's speeches and proclamations, even more clearly, reveal his faith and feelings toward a Christianized Germany. In sum: Hitler showed his disdain for atheism, and pagan cults, and revealed the strength of his Christian feelings—make no doubt about that. Likewise, his was no meaningless and superficial theology—it was clearly demarcated and set forth in all its hideous implications with righteous gusto.

 


Hitler - Nazis - And The Occult

By M. Sabeheddin

 

By 1975, the thirtieth anniversary of [Hitler’s] death, there were already 50,000 serious works about him and his Reich. In 1976 there appeared yet another 1000-page volume which was proclaimed ‘the definitive biography for generations to come.’ And so it goes.

 

- Robert G. L. Waite, The Psychopathic God

 

Over half a century after the capitulation of the German Third Reich and the end of the Second World War, Hitler and National Socialism still loom large in the public imagination. Adolf Hitler is upheld as the very personification of absolute evil. Countless books and films ensure we never forget the concentration camps, horrific images of death and destruction. To this day, Western governments introduce legislation outlawing the public display of the notorious swastika, while diligently seeking out octogenarian Nazis suspected of war crimes. Hitler and his Nazis reign supreme as the universal symbol of abomination that the modern world loves to hate.

 

Despite decades of study into the Hitler phenomenon, there is not much attention paid to Nazi connections with mystical and occult elements as perhaps there should be.

 

A respected British writer on Ancient Wisdom, Nigel Pennick, sees in Hitler and the Nazi phenomenon the perversion of occult forces.

"The whole Nazi ethos grew out of a magical view of the world,” says Pennick in Hitler’s Secret Sciences, "and the history of Nazi Germany was forged by strange fanatics whose actions can only be explained in occult terms. To orthodox historians, their crimes can only be dismissed as crazy obsessions, yet in terms of certain well-established occult beliefs, they fit a well-defined pattern. Far from being just another political doctrine, Nazism was nothing less than a deliberate magical attempt to alter the world."

 

There is certainly an undeniable occult link in the early history of the Nazi Party. Unfortunately, it is buried in an avalanche of disinformation and sensationalism, promoted in largely spurious books by authors like Trevor Ravenscroft, a former British intelligence officer. Such exaggerated and wildly inaccurate writings serve to screen and distract attention from the real power sources of the Nazi occult connection.

 

The modern mythology of Nazi occultism, concludes respected historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke in his excellent book The Occult Roots of Nazism, is “typically sensational and under-researched. A complete ignorance of the primary sources is common to most authors and inaccuracies and wild claims are repeated by each newcomer to the genre until an abundant literature exists, based on wholly spurious ‘facts’ concerning the powerful Thule Society, the Nazi links with the East and Hitler’s occult initiation. But the modern mythology of Nazi occultism, however scurrilous and absurd, exercises a fascination beyond mere entertainment.”

 

Goodrick-Clarke’s book does identify a wide circle of philosophers, occult societies and mystical groups, who saw in the chaos that beset Germany after the Treaty of Versailles the working out of ancient prophecies. At the pinnacle of this ‘mystical underground’ was the Thule Gesellschaft (Thule Society).

 

ULTIMA THULE

 

Among the secret societies burgeoning in Germany immediately after World War I...the Vril Society and the Thule Society, otherwise known as the ‘Thule Gesellschaft’ seem most clearly to have given birth to the Hitler movement.

 

~The Occult and the Third Reich

 

Formed toward the end of World War I as an offshoot of the Germanen Order, the Thule Society quickly grew into the most powerful secret organisation in Germany. One of its most influential and shadowy leaders, Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorff, portrayed the Thule Society as the custodian of an Ancient Wisdom perverted by Freemasonry.

 

“The old Freemasonry,” wrote Sebottendorff, “had been a keeper of secrets which they had learned from the Aryan wisdom and from the alchemists.” An article in the July 21, 1918 edition of the Society’s journal Runen gives Sebottendorff’s view on the antithesis between modern Freemasonry and the Thule Society: “We look at our world as a product of the people. The Freemason looks at it as a product of conditions...”

 

Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorff, the chief architect of the Thule Society, was born Rudolf Glauer in Silesia in November, 1875. After an early life at sea and exploring distant lands, Rudolf found himself in Turkey where he was adopted by an aged Austrian nobleman, becoming Rudolf Sebottendorff.

 

It was during this Turkish phase of Rudolf Sebottendorff’s life (he actually became a Turkish citizen) that he acquired his vast knowledge of the teachings and techniques of both Oriental and Occidental mysticism. Sebottendorff was initiated into the Muslim Bektashi Dervishes and studied alchemy, astrology and Rosicrucianism.

 

In 1910, while living in Istanbul, Sebottendorff founded his own secret society based on a combination of Islamic Sufi mysticism, masonry, alchemy and anti-Bolshevik ideology. He fought heroically in the Balkan War of 1912-13 and directed the Turkish Red Crescent. He was also named Master of the Order of Rose Garland (Rosenkrantz). Years later he titled his autobiographical novel Der Talisman des Rosenkreuzers (The Rosicrucian Talisman), confirming a special link with the original Rosicrucian Order.

 

Regarding Sebottendorff’s Turkish experience, Francis King says:

 

It is reported that he became acquainted with the former variety of esotericism (oriental mysticism) by means of direct personal contacts with initiates of various Dervish Orders. There is no reason to doubt this, for Sebottendorff unquestionably knew a great deal about Islamic mysticism, particularly about Sufism in all its aspects.

~Satan and Swastika

 

In 1913 Sebottendorff returned to Germany fortified with a vast knowledge and substantial funds from his inheritance. During the next few years he made extensive contacts with the leading members of the ‘mystic-political’ groups rapidly proliferating in Germany at this time. An able organiser and writer, Sebottendorff soon gained the attention of Herman Pohl of the Germanen Order. In the closing days of World War I, Sebottendorff laboured energetically to spread his occult-nationalist doctrines through the establishment of two newspapers, Runen and Münchener Beobachter (eventually purchased by the Nazi Party to become its official journal under the name Völkisher Beobachter).

 

On August 17, 1918 the Thule Society was founded in Bavaria. Close to two decades later, Baron Sebottendorff wrote of this event: “This decision was important, for Bavaria has thereby become the cradle of the National Socialist movement.” By November of that year the Thule Society had 1,500 active members.

 

On Saturday, November 9 as revolution swept Germany and the old imperial order collapsed, Sebottendorff addressed the leaders of the Thule:

 

Yesterday we experienced the collapse of everything which was familiar, dear and valuable to us...What will come out of this chaos, we do not know yet. But we can guess. A time will come of struggle, the most bitter need, a time of danger...

 

Significantly, he closed his impassioned speech by exhorting Thule members to fight “until the Swastika rises victoriously out of the icy darkness.” Thule quickly became the focal point for the anti-communist and nationalist struggle across Germany.

 

Adolf Hitler was not a member of the Thule and would not join the fledgling German Workers Party (the political wing of Thule, later to become the National Socialist German Workers Party) until late 1919. Alfred Rosenberg and Rudolf Hess were active Thulists, both going on to high positions in the Third Reich.

 

Outwardly, the Thule Society passed as a literary circle devoted to studying ancient German history and customs. Its name derived from the mythological land of the north, the ancient Ultima Thule. Pauwels and Bergier in The Morning of the Magicians inform us:

The legend of Thule is as old as the Germanic race. It was supposed to be an island that had disappeared somewhere in the extreme North. Off Greenland? or Labrador? Like Atlantis, Thule was thought to have been the magic centre of a vanished civilisation.

 

French writer Jean Robin argues that the original power sources of the National Socialist German Workers Party were Sebottendorff and the Thule Society, which derived from the Bektashi Dervishes in Turkey (see Hitler, l’elu du Dragon). Like fellow French author Rene Alleau, Robin shows that Sebottendorff’s central idea (or rather, of those who inspired him) was to give a popular movement, still embryonic and veiled by its political structure, the internal coherence of a Prophet with militant followers, forming a sect of devotees comparable with the Ismailian ‘fedayeen’ (Assassins) guided by their spiritual leader, the Old Man of the Mountain. In other words, the idea was to form a militant Order of initiates, with a military and religious structure.

 

Incidentally, many years later Adolf Hitler said that while Freemasonry had largely decayed, “there is one dangerous element which I have copied from them. They have developed an esoteric doctrine, not merely formulated it, but imparted it through the medium of symbols and mysterious rites....That is to say without bothering their brains but by working directly on the imagination through the symbols of a magic cult. All this is the dangerous element I have taken over. Don’t you see that our Party must be of this character. An Order that is what it has to be. An Order, the hierarchical Order of a Secular Priesthood.”

 

Sebottendorff claimed his mission was to reveal certain arcane secrets thereby reviving the forgotten Ancient Wisdom, while simultaneously launching a counter to what he saw as the malevolent forces engulfing Europe. The rituals of the Thule had as their aim, the same as that of all authentic esoteric groups, namely dissolving the ‘small self’ so that the ‘divine self’ could become manifest. Sebottendorff taught:

 

Once come to the end of our training, we sense our terrestrial body becoming more and more a stranger to us. We cross beyond it. We see distinctly that it has become dust and ashes. It is the lowest point that can be attained, that where the shadows of death and their terrors involve us. It is for this reason that the ancient Oriental Freemasons received into their community nothing but courageous men because the tests reserved for the neophyte were very harsh. Courage and endurance were the two principle virtues that were necessary.

 

Following the murder of seven prominent Thulists by the Communists on April 30, 1919, we know an intense struggle broke out within the Thule Society. This struggle was to have a dramatic and incredibly far reaching effect not only on Germany, but the entire world.

 

From the few records made public by the Secret Chiefs of Thule, we know that corrupt and sinister forces, only identified as the “brothers of darkness”, tried to gain control of the Society and reverse its authentic spiritual current. They sought to invert the original mission of Thule and produce a counterfeit image. This led the few true initiates to withdraw from Thule and the society declined, until in 1923 Baron Sebottendorff fled Germany for Turkey. The following year he published Praxis of old Turkish Freemasonry, a study of the practice of Islamic alchemy that influenced the novelist Gustav Meyrink.

 

A process of counter-initiation was triggered, of which, as Jean Robbin shows, Hitler was the primary, if unconscious, agent. Hitler himself confessed to being a “sleep walker on the way Providence dictates” and “living in a dream”.

 

The Nazi SS leader, Walter Schellenberg, wrote of Hitler in his memoirs:

 

This idea of himself as the German Messiah was the source of his personal power. It enabled him to become the ruler of 80 million people - and in the space of 12 short years to leave his ineradicable mark on history.

 

Recall that the French esotericist Rene Guenon warned how false Messiahs become the unconscious tools of malicious supernatural forces:

 

When you reflect that these false Messiahs have never been anything but the more or less unconscious tools of those who conjured them up, and when one thinks more particularly of the series of attempts made in succession in contemporary times, one is forced to the conclusion that these were only trials, experiments as it were, which will be renewed in various forms until success is achieved....But might there not be, behind such movements, something far more dangerous which their leaders perhaps know nothing about, being in themselves in turn the unconscious tools of a higher demonic power?

 

The post-1945 world owes much to the Nazis. Here is the great paradox. Without Hitler and the holocaust there would likely be no Zionist State of Israel. Without the Nazi invasion of Russia there may well have been no Cold War. Not to forget the numerous technological advances that derive directly from Nazi research, some of it first carried out in the Nazi death camps. Indeed it is also difficult to conceive of the Western liberal values that dominane the second half of the twentieth century without their Nazi demon. Hitler provided the West, sated on its own self-righteousness and brutal colonialist past, with the perfect other, the ideal devil. As Roger Garaudy, the French political philosopher, observed:

 

Hitlerism was a human catastrophe which, unfortunately, had a precedent in the policy applied over five centuries by the European colonialists to ‘colored people’. What Hitler did to white people, they did to the American Indians, of which they killed 75% (also through forced labor and epidemics, even more than through massacres); just as they did to the Africans, of which they deported between 10 and 20 million, which means that Africa was robbed of 100 to 200 million of its inhabitants since ten people had to be killed for one to be taken alive during capture by the slave-dealers.

 

The shocking spectre of Nazi evil suited both the capitalist West and the communist East. To speak of Hitler’s crimes was for the Western colonialists to have their own crimes forgotten, as it was a way for Stalin to mask his own ferocious repression.

 

Nevertheless in defeat and ignominy Hitler invariably shaped the modern world. Was the root of this diabolical process the reversal of a powerful spiritual current?

 

The distortion of the original impulse behind the Thule Society accelerated the cosmic forces of decay. War, misery and death were unleashed on an unprecedented scale. The labour camps, mass slaughter, global upheaval, and a decomposing world are only its more obvious bitter fruit.

 

“BEFORE HITLER CAME”

 

In the 1920’s Baron Sebottendorff was inducted into the Imperial Constantine Order, a virulently anti-Communist secret society, and acted as their secret agent when he returned to Germany from Turkey in 1933. Turkish Freemasonry had kept the Ancient Wisdom intact. “It must be shown,” wrote the Baron, “that Oriental Freemasonry still retains faithfully even today the ancient teachings of wisdom forgotten by modern Freemasonry, whose Constitution of 1717 was a departure from the true way.”

 

A few months after the establishment of the Nazi regime, Rudolf von Sebottendorff published in Munich a fascinating book titled Before Hitler Came - Documentaries From the Early Epoch of the National Socialist Movement. The author stated right at the outset: “Thule people are the ones to whom Hitler first came.” The remarkable revelations therein proved to be quite threatening to the Nazis and when a second edition of the book appeared in early 1934 the Bavarian political police stopped the publication of the book and with the aid of the Gestapo seized all traceable copies and had them destroyed.

 

With his book suppressed by the Nazis, Sebottendorff was arrested by the Gestapo in 1934, interned in a concentration camp and then expelled to Turkey, where he died under mysterious circumstances in 1945 at the end of the world war.

 

In Before Hitler Came Sebottendorff offers a detailed discussion of the importance of Islam and the Ancient Wisdom that he felt gave the Muslim faith a special dynamism. “Islam,” he wrote, “is not a static religion; quite the contrary its vitality is greater than Christianity.”

 

Sebottendorff believed that the esoteric tradition of Islam, particularly Sufism, was the purest stream of Ancient Wisdom and that it had nourished European occultism through the Rosicrucians, alchemists and authentic Freemasons of the Middle Ages. He claimed:

 

No one can accuse me of profanation, nor of sacrilege in uncovering the course of these mysteries...It is the means that the communities of dervishes traditionally use in order to acquire special strength by means of unusual techniques. They are, for the most part, men who aspire to the highest rite, that from which come those who have been prepared for their missions as spiritual leaders of Islam...This high rite is the practical basis of Freemasonry, and it inspired in times past the work of the alchemists and of the Rosicrucians...But to reply to the accusation of my being guilty of some kind of treachery: I say to you plainly that this book has been written on the instructions of the leaders of the Order.

~
Bevor Hitler Kam as cited by Jean-Michel Angebert, The Occult and the Third Reich)

 

Sebottendorff then proceeds to explain why “the leaders of the Order” directed him to write Before Hitler Came:

A vast organization of disbelief, of monstrous proportions, intends to bend to its will the civilized world. The religious institutions have been so gravely weakened that they are not even capable of pulling themselves together, let alone putting up a united front. If spiritual leaders do not come forth in the West, chaos may bring down everything into the abyss. In this kind of danger, the Moslem Brotherhood recalled that tradition had it that there was a time, in Europe, when men possessed ultimate knowledge...The imminent danger dispelled every objection to the publication (of this work).

~
Bevor Hitler Kam as cited by Angebert, op. cit.

 

Sebottendorff often spoke of the rediscovery of some lost thread of knowledge that once was “a torrent which nourished everything at the time of primitive Christianity, and which in the Middle Ages gave rise to the most marvellous civilisations”. His references to “communities of dervishes” and a “Moslem Brotherhood” point us to the custodians of this lost Wisdom.

 

Rene Alleau relates that Sebottendorff also wrote that: “...‘secret Muslim Masters’ had entrusted him with the mission of ‘illuminating’ Germany through the revelation of the secrets of advanced magic and initiation into ancient Oriental mysteries.” (Hitler et les Societes Secretes)

 

How does one evaluate or reconcile Sebottendorff’s Oriental Islamic mysticism with the Thule Society’s stated aim to revive pagan ‘Aryan’ culture, symbolism, and mythology? The two traditions are not as mutually exclusive as they may first appear. E.H. Palmer, in his widely respected 19th century text Oriental Mysticism, held that Sufism is “the development of the Primaeval religion of the Aryan race”. Both the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons of Europe find the ultimate source of their teachings in the Orient. Sufi-European links are discernible in much of the West’s hidden history.

 

A 9th century Celtic cross, now in the British Museum, incorporates the Islamic Arabic declaration Bismillah ir Rahman ir Rahim, suggesting close connections. The Sufi Master, Hakim Jami, said that Sufism predated the Prophet Mohammed, declaring that Plato, Hippocrates, Pythagoras and Hermes were part of an unbroken line of Sufic transmission. As an initiate of Islamic mysticism, Sebottendorff could rightly call himself a Rosicrucian, a Muslim Brother, and an Odinist.

 

Sebottendorff drew from Oriental Freemasonry a complete initiatory system requiring a probationary period before the admittance of a candidate to the Thule Lodge. Once admitted the member had to take a ritualistic vow of obedience and loyalty. “Symbolically,” wrote the Baron, “it was the return to Halgadom.”

 

Halgadom was central to the Baron’s mission. According to Jean Mabire, Sebottendorff had as his ultimate goal the creation of a spiritual community that he called Halgadom.

This temple of Halgadom is simultaneously spiritual and material. It belongs to earth and to heaven, to the past and the future. It is the Hyperborean equivalent of the Ark of the Covenant of the Israelites. Halgadom, in Sebottendorff’s mind, far surpasses that Second Reich which Wilhelm’s Germany had incarnated since 1871. It is the empire of all the Germans, but also many other Europeans: the Scandinavians, faithful to their Nordic origins; the Netherlanders, more German than the Germans; the British, divided between Celts and Saxons; the French, heirs of the Franks and regenerated by the Normans or the Burgundians; the Italians, in whose veins runs the blood of the Lombards; the Spaniards, who still carry many an imprint of the Visigoths. And also the Russians, whose country was founded by the Swedish Varegs, those Vikings of the rivers and steppes.

 

Clearly, Hitler’s Third Reich was a monstrous parody of this profound vision. The Pan-European spiritual outlook of Sebottendorff and Thule was distorted by Hitler and the Nazis into a bloody Germanic chauvinism.

 

The core of National Socialism was the racism of Social Darwinism, summed up in the myth of ‘Blood and Soil’. A legacy of the nineteenth century which believed blindly in the reality of matter.

 

In a direct attack on the spiritual worldview, a leading Nazi thinker declared, “We do not agree with the proposition that the spirit creates the body.” The interests of those of ‘Germanic blood’ were therefore paramount. Before this, said Hitler, “considerations of party politics, of religion, of humanity - in a word, every other consideration - can have no place whatever.”

 

Thus this myth of ‘Blood and Soil’ was one of physical ties, of heredity, of the land, of living space, of property, of possessiveness, of natural life. And as William Blake noted:

Nature teaches nothing about spiritual life, only about natural life. The devil is the mind of natural structure.

This narrow Germanism ultimately cost Hitler the war.

 

"Thus it fell out that Hitler’s Germany missed the mark, and it is very fortunate that it missed it; for it was necessary that things should have happened as they did, and not otherwise”, writes the novelist Jean Parvulesco in La Spirale Prophetique.

Why should the Europe of the End have been a German Europe? The Europe of the End must be European, and it will be so; the Europe of the End cannot be otherwise than European. For such is the sole question that is truly and totally revolutionary at the present time, the sole liberating question: when the time comes (and it is already here), will the European nations find, in their deepest selves, the burning reality of the ‘nation before all the nations,’ the transcendental legacy of the ‘Indo-European nation’ of our former origins?

 

Hitler had little time for the revolutionary pan-European vision of Thule and only used it to get him on the road to power. His dream of a Thousand-year Reich had no room for the love of individual liberty with which the Thulists romantically endowed their ancestors. Advocating ‘mysticism as politics’ and calling for a ‘spiritual revolution’, the Thulean vision was ruthlessly stamped out by the Nazi state. Addressing the 1938 Nazi Party Congress, Hitler said:

 

At the pinnacle of our program stands not mysterious premonitions, but clear knowledge and hence open avowal. But woe if the movement or the state, through the insinuation of obscure mystical elements, should give unclear orders. And it is enough if this lack of clarity is contained merely in words. There is already a danger if orders are given for the setting up of so-called cult places, because this alone will give birth to the necessity subsequently to devise so-called cult games and cult rituals. Our cult is exclusively cultivation of that which is natural and hence willed by God.

 

One of the few early members of the Thule Society not purged from the Nazi Party in the 1930s was Hitler’s close advisor Rudolf Hess (1894-1987). Hess, strongly influenced by the ideas of Sebottendorff, ate biodynamic food, studied Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, as well as mysticism, astrology and herbalism. After Hitler’s coming to power, Hess had applied for a substantial grant to establish a cult place, the Central Institute of Occultism, but this never materialised.

 

No one more than Hess knew the secrets of the early Nazi links with the Thule. Was this the reason the victorious Allies had Hess held in isolation in Spandau prison for over 40 years?

 

Jean Mabire shows that Hess’s flight to Britain in May 1941 on a desperate mission to bring an end to the war, was the last attempt of the old Thule Society - long dissolved or driven underground - to counter the actions of a Führer who had so completely deformed their vision. We read in Jean Mabire’s Thule: Le soleil retrouve des Hyperboreens:

 

Hess knew of the projected attack on Russia. He wanted to warn the English. It has been said that he dreamed of a reversal of alliances. I believe that it was even more complicated. He simply wanted peace. He hoped to defuse this bomb, more fatal than the atomic bomb. He knew the inner workings of the regime well enough to know that the Fuhrer was not only going to attack the East, but that he could only be following the most stupid of politics. Hess had understood that it was certainly not the spirit of Thule that was reigning in Germany, but the narrowest pan-Germanism. All these Gauleiters from South and West Germany understood nothing of the Slavic world. Have you already noticed how little importance the North and East Germans had in this Third Reich, which considered itself so ‘Nordic’? I think that the Baltic Germans would not have allowed such elementary and, to be honest, such criminal foolishness.

 

Only days after Hess’s arrival in Britain, the official Nazi Party newspaper the Völkischer Beobachter published an article that included the following:

 

As was well known in Party circles, Rudolf Hess was in poor health for many years and latterly increasingly had recourse to hypnotists, astrologers and so on. The extent to which these people are responsible for the mental confusion that led him to his present step has still to be clarified.”

 

Warrants were issued for the arrest of Hess’s adjutants, a number of his close friends and even his chauffeur. Hundreds of other people including astrologers, faith healers, spiritualists, Anthroposophists and mystics of every kind, were rounded up by the Gestapo to die in the concentration camps.

 

OCCULT REICH?

 

The notorious Aleister Crowley in the early years of World War II made a study of Hitler’s ideas, at the behest of the British intelligence service. While attracted to many of the German Führer’s pronouncements Crowley concluded that Hitler was probably a “Black Brother.” An interesting admission from the self-proclaimed ‘Great Beast 666’.

 

In Nazi Germany Occultists, along with the original National Socialists opposed to Hitler, where the first inmates of the concentration camps. The Nazis closed the Masonic Lodges, the lodges of the OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis), the Order of New Templars and the Theosophical Society. Occultists were purged from all areas of public service. For example, all Austrians who held government posts had to take oaths that they were not members of the Freemasons. Dennis Passero publisher of The Conspiracy Tracker, after an intensive study of available material, concluded, “Hitler’s war was a war against the occult...”

 

National Socialism could not, however, avoid its early influences. Baron Sebottendorff’s Thule Society acted as the defacto parent organisation to the Nazi Party. There is no doubt that it provided the perfect environment for the birth and meteoric growth of National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP).

 

The French writers of The Morning of the Magicians, Pauwels and Bergier, come close to the truth when they recognise of secret societies:

 

We believe that these [secret] societies, great or small, related or unrelated, with or without ramifications, are manifestations, more or less apparent and more or less important, of a world other than the one in which we live...The rise of Nazism was one of those rare moments in the history of our civilization, when a door was noisily and ostentatiously opened on to something ‘Other’. What is strange is that people pretend not to have seen or heard anything apart from the sights and sounds inseparable from war and political strife.

 

The Thulean stimulus succumbed to corruption and distortion. The original mission of Thule was to give birth to an agent of the everlasting Forces of Light and Life amidst the growing darkness of the Dark Age. A conception was arranged but the birth had to be delayed. The Nazi Party of Adolf Hitler became a monstrous travesty, intoxicated on power and force. A deadly perversion of a higher impulse. A vehicle at the disposal of the cosmic forces of disintegration, chaos and death.

 

Ernst Niekisch (1889-1967) was a truly great German thinker who saw the colossal dangers in Hitler’s National Socialism. Unlike so many others, Niekisch actively opposed Hitler and publicly denounced the Nazi agenda. In his paper Widerstand, which he founded in 1926 to advocate a policy of friendship towards the Soviet Union, Niekisch exposed Hitler’s treachery and opportunism. With the triumph of Nazism, the paper was banned in 1934 and three years later the Gestapo arrested Niekisch and interned him in a concentration camp until the end of the war.

 

Niekisch advocated an “elite of the spirit” in opposition to the banal demagogy and ruthless populism of Hitler’s Nazism. He wrote:

 

The spiritual elite derives its authority from the power of the masses and has the prospect of an exalted political position only in so far as it is able to win the trust and devotion of the masses. With the help of the masses it can unsaddle the landowning and plutocratic elite....But this elite has a dangerous rival in the form of individuals obsessed with power and glory who descend to the level of the primitive masses and are able to win a mass following not through the way they selflessly pursue their real interests, but through irresponsible predictions and promises of good times ahead. These are the demagogues who, armed with pseudo-dogmas and pseudo-ideologies, turn the heads of the masses and thwart the attempt of the spiritual elite to establish the rule of reason and morality. The Hitler-Reich was an example of the triumph of demagogy over a spiritual elite. The demagogue is the travesty of the spiritual leader: he eclipses him and makes everything play into the hands of the landed or money elite.


A metaphysical foundation is still essential for united action in the present Dark Age. The reader would do well to contemplate the words of Jean Parvulesco:

 

...the surest way of understanding nothing of the present business is to go on to confuse the Black Order, as it should be, with its political counterfeits, of which one, as one knows only too well, ended in the most abject nightmare.

 


© Copyright New Dawn Magazine. Permission granted to freely distribute this article for non-commercial purposes if unedited and copied in full, including this notice.



The Occult and Nazism Re-Examined

by Steve Mizrach

 

The Origins of Fascism

 

There have been many attempts to understand and explain fascism in purely materialistic and economic terms, and perhaps as many analyses looking beyond conventional socio-economic factors to more unusual origins. The problem is that 'fascism,' like communism, has several flavors and varieties, some of which (like Maoism and Leninism) are somewhat at odds with each other. Clearly, some of the purported influences on German Nazism, such as pan-Germanism and neo-paganism, had not played as much of a role in Spanish, Italian, or Latin American fascist movements, which emerged out of Catholic roots. Nazism has been analyzed from various perspectives, including that of Wilhelm Reich, who saw it as a massive 'armoring' of society resulting from the sexual dysfunction of the populace [1], and Norman Cohn [2], who saw parallels between the Nazis and millenarian, anti-Semitic, and eschatological movements of the Middle Ages such as the Lollards.

Historians have a problem with getting a grasp on fascism, because it is a label applied to such a wide panoply of political movements (especially by putative political opponents) - some collectivist or corporatist, others radically individualist; some rabidly puritanical, others flouting of all morality and taste; and some imperialistic, while others are isolationist.


Today, we ponder the applicability of the label to our own politicians. Is Pat Buchanan a fascist? What about Lyndon LaRouche, Jacques Le Pen, Leonard Jeffries, or David Duke, whose attacks on affirmative action closely parallel that of the 'mainstream' Republican party? Is fascism necessarily racist, anti-Semitic, or religiously biased? Was Barry Goldwater calling for fascism when he said "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice?" How about politicians who run on a "law and order" or "America First!" platform- some of whom are assumedly liberal Democrats? German Nazism as a particularly unique brand of fascism must be closely examined and understood and its historical geneaology traced. It will not do to go after "fascism" with a wide sociological lens (which is, not suprisingly, unfocused) and tar all right-wing thinkers with the same brush. And one of the important roots of German Nazism is, in fact, the existence of certain high-profile occult societies who operated in the period between the wars- the Germanorden, the Thule Gellenschaft, Ariosophy, and the Neo-Templars [3].


Blame It on Blavatsky, et al.

Sadly, most of the analyses of Nazism leave all of its various occult roots at the doorstep of one poor old Russian woman, Helena Blavatsky. The German occult societies appropriated some Theosophical ideas, to be sure, to the same extent that the Nazis eagerly distorted some of the doctrines of Nietzsche (so carefully doctored by his sister to omit the parts where he condemns German nationalism as an "abyss of stupidity!" [4] or disavows anti-Semitism.) When Nietzsche discusses the Superman, he does not say that he shall be a German or an Aryan, only that we will not recognize him. It should be pointed out that Blavatsky's doctrine of the Six Root Races [5] - Astral, Hyperborean, Lemurian, Atlantean, Aryan, and the Coming Race - did not assign much importance to the Aryan race. They would also be supplanted in turn by the Sixth Root Race, which would arise out of all the existing races and nations, sort of like a 'mutant' strain. Blavatsky does not attach much importance to racial magic, which she puts in the category of "sorcery." It should be pointed out that the Nazis closed most of the Theosophical lodges in Germany, including Rudolf Steiner's Götheaneum, and banned Freemasonry and many other occult societies.


There are others often mentioned in this occult cast of villains. Jung is blamed for reviving interest in mythology and the workings of the racial unconscious, and for originally supporting the Nazis because of their attempts to revive Teutonic ritual and mythic thinking. Yet, when Jung discusses that the dreams of many patients in the 1930s reveal the archetype of a "great blond beast," he issues it as a warning, not as a herald of good fortune [6]. Jung himself described Nazism as the type of mass psychosis that afflicts a society when its leader becomes 'possessed' by one of the archetypes of the unconscious. Gurdjieff and Crowley are also mentioned as possible Reich supporters, which is astounding based on the evidence that both may have well been working clandestinely for the Resistance movements in France and England. Many occult groups, such as the Prieure du Sion, seem to have acted as infiltrators, aping the Nazi party line while passing on important information to its enemies in their journal Vaincre. In places like Vichy France, occult groups might have had no choice but to appear firmly in the Nazi fold [7].

 

The German Occult Orders

 

While it is true that the various German mystical societies borrowed some of their ideas from Hermetic/Rosicrucian groups in England and from Theosophists on the continent, some of their principles are different. In particular, their emphasis on the mystical powers of the Aryan race and its resulting 'decline' and degeneration from miscegnation with lower races is a unique idea. Their Teutonophilism - interest in the Runes, Nordic myths, and the Swastika (along with the belief that Christianity had broken the back of Teutonic civilization) - came out of the general climate attendant with the new pan-Germanic nationalism. The idea that all the languages of Europe had one Indo-European source, and that many of the world's myths (from the Hindus to the Greeks) had a common 'Aryan' origin was gaining ground among respectable philologists and antiquarians [8]. Many Russians in 1905 were already promoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as evidence that the inferior Semitic races were trying to bring about Bolshevism and the downfall of Europe.


Guido von Liszt (founder of the Germanorden) may not have been as important in the Nazi pantheon as Oswald Spengler and Alfred Rosenberg, who both advanced the belief that the West was in decline from the onslaught of "Magianism" or the "World Cavern" philosophy of the Oriental Semites, which was in direct contrast to the Apollonian or Faustian guiding principle of 'no limits' which governed the European/Aryan races [9]. Both reacted in horror to the "primitive" African, Latino, and Polynesian elements that artists like Picasso and Gauguin were importing into Western art, a clear sign of 'degeneration.' Not unlike some anti-rock music phillistines today, they heard the "savage jungle beats of the tom-tom drum" in jazz and much of modern music, and found the soaring Wagnerian operas much more to their liking. The German mystical societies essentially saw a coming struggle between the forces of materialism and relativism and that of true, Aryan, spiritual civilization - a struggle that would be apocalyptic and where there could be no quarter whatsoever afforded for the enemy. Therein lay the roots of Nazism and the Holocaust.


New World Order?

 

There are various authors who propose that the Nazis were only the 'front' organization for a more sinister, clandestine Hidden Directorate. There are all sorts of rumours that some sort of evil-looking Oriental monk with a green hat was often seen around Nazi party functions, suggesting perhaps that a group of mystic lamas somewhere in Tibet might be the hidden puppet-masters of the Nazis. By the 1840s in Germany the legend of Agharti was already making its rounds; the legend was that there was an underground kingdom whose ruler, the Master of the World, was already controlling many of the kings of the earth and would soon launch an invasion for complete control. While Napoleon may have contemplated ruling all of Europe, the Nazis were close students of 'geopolitics' and may well have been the first would-be conquerors to consider the ramifications of world domination. (Hitler had blueprints in place for an invasion of America, and he assumed Italy would control Africa and the Japanese, Asia.) Some think that there may well have been Theosophist-like "Ascended Masters" behind their grab for power, with some ulterior design of their own.


When George Bush used the phrase "New World Order" in 1990, conspiratorialists all over the world went nuts. They know that as the code phrase for OWG (One-World Government), but others also remember that it was one of Hitler's names for his coming Thousand Year Reich. The phrase has been associated for a long time (long before Robert Anton Wilson, anyway) with the Illuminati and their supposed design for world control [10]. Certainly the Nazis themselves believed that the Jews, International Bankers, Freemasons, and Bolsheviks had their own plan for taking over the world - wasn't it all laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? This is a pattern repeated throughout history - various conspiratorial organizations are formed to combat real or fictitious 'subversive' conspiracies. A notable example is the Holy Vehm, a vigilante organization in the Middle Ages that wore hoods to conceal their anonymity, and rounded up and executed what they believed to be a conspiratorial band of witches and heretics opposed to the king. Hitler often made reference to the Vehm in some of his writings.


The Triumph of Irrationality?

 

James Webb and others have made much of the way in which irrationalistic ideas took such strong hold under the Third Reich [11]. Bizarre hollow-earth and Horbigerian world-ice cosmologies proliferated, as did extremely strange beliefs about giants and demons and cosmic battles ripped straight out of some Ragnarokian script. In the 1930s, there were whole journals dedicated to the researches of Atlantis and other lost continents and the possible Atlantean origins of the Nordic peoples. Hitler openly declared himself an enemy of "bourgeouis reason" and extolled the virtue of "thinking with the blood." The Lebensraum (Land-Reform) movements of the 1930s reacted violently against modern industrial, technological, and urban tendencies, and extolled instead the icon of the simple, pure, noble peasant living off the land. Like the hippies of the 'irrationalist'1960s, the Lebensraumers advocated abandoning the cities for communal village life, and were just as enamored of 'deep ecology,' folk music, "natural living" and nudism, reviving authentic craftsmanship, alternative (holistic) medicine, meditation, and even animal rights.

 

Yet it might be a mistake to see Nazism as merely a reaction against scientific materialism and modernity. The Nazis advocated the Promethean power of science and often promoted the Hindenburg and the V2 base at Peneemünde as signs of the triumph of German science. They pursued researches into atomic energy and radar as vigoruously as the allies. (They may have been hindered in their pursuits, one might note, by exterminating or banishing the main sector of the German intellegentsia - Jews, such as Einstein.) Eugenics, the "science" of breeding better babies and carrying out applied Social Darwinism, had gained considerable respectability by the 1930s, and there were many 'respectable' medical societies promoting eugenics programs here in America, involving such aspects as forced sterilization of the lower classes and the handicapped, banning of marriages with southern and eastern Europeans, and denial of immigration to 'lower' races [12]. The extermination program of the Nazis was carried out with industrially and scientifically efficient methodic precision - the Nazis kept genealogical records tracing back seven centuries and were able to make their trains run on time.

 

The Nazi doctors, for example, were interested in the answers to purely rational questions of medical science: what happens to German pilots who are downed and must live on salt water or are trapped in frozen climes? Can we transplant skin from one patient to another? They sought the answers by taking Jews, Gypsies, and other groups and performing inhumane experiments on them- experiments justified by the belief that such groups were 'subhuman' anyway. What they lacked was not reason but values, compassion, and humanity [13]. In many ways, their experiments epitomized one of the prime problems of 20th century science: its advances far outstrip man's moral and social evolution. From Tuskeegee to Edgewood, scientists have done horrible things to people - forget the animals who anger the anti-vivisectionists - in the name of the science which is supposedly to benefit their lives. In many ways, the Nazi state merely took many of the features of the modern 'Enlightenment' nation-state to their logical extremes; they could be said represent the apotheosis, not the interruption, of modernity.

 

The Spear of Destiny and the Holy Grail

 

Of particular interest to students of the 'hidden history' of the Third Reich is Hitler's interest in the Spear of Destiny. The so-called Spear of Longinus kept in the imperial museum of Austria was said to be the spear that pierced the side of Christ (and contained a nail from the Cross) and was the spear that the Roman emperor Maximilian and the Holy Roman emperors of Austria carried as a standard into battle [14]. Walter Stein insisted that Hitler was fascinated by the spear and felt that possession of it would mean victory for the Nazi cause of world domination and the triumph over Christianity. How important the spear really was to Hitler - who never really seemed to make a big deal out of it when it was seized from the museum, at least in public - is not clear. But we know- and not just from Indiana Jones movies- that the Nazis were fascinated with finding lost mystical relics, particularly those associated with Christianity. That is unusual, considering the anti-Christian bias of the Nazis, who felt that everything wrong with the West (pacifism, belief in equality, etc.) had been rammed down its throat by Christianity, an 'alien' religion from the Orient.

 

Nonetheless, it is clear that Hitler modelled his S.S. troops on the Templars and other Crusader orders, and the Jesuits and the Masons. There is a famous poster from 1937 showing Hitler as a Templar Knight, in holy armor, preparing to do battle with Satan. While Nieztsche felt nauseous from Wagner's Parsifal (for its caving into the 'sickening' ideals of Christian chivalry), the Nazi cadres seem to have vigorously promoted it. Otto Rahn was searching for the Holy Grail in the south of France in 1938, though he did not appear to think that what he was looking for was a wine cup from the Last Supper or the blood of Jesus. Instead he claimed it was "a power source of indescribable magnitute." [15] It is not known whether the Nazis really ever searched for the Ark of the Covenant, though there are tantalizing hints that they may well have been laying out blueprints for a search of northern Africa and Egypt for that Jewish relic. Why they thought they might enlist the gods of their enemies in their destruction is not clear.


Nazi Interest in Parapsychology and the Paranormal


There was widespread interest by the Nazis in various paranormal topics. Albert Speer was clearly very interested in geomancy and the ley lines and sacred spots of Germany, and some of his architecture betrays knowledge of principles of mystical geometry and numerology. The Vril Society in Germany promoted the idea that there might be a mystical energy within the earth that could be tapped by the German people, although Bulwer-Lytton had maintained it was the property of a race living inside the earth. It is well known that Hitler consulted astrologers for propitious dates for his military campaigns and employed dowsers on the battlefield to search for water and for minefields. There was also some interest by the Nazi cadres in parapsychology as an espionage device - research that appears to be carried along by the intelligence apparati of the two victorious Allied powers (our CIA and the Soviet KGB.) Further, the Nazis were interested in antigravity and 'free energy' devices. Viktor Schuberger a Nazi scientist, worked on a saucer design for one of his 'antigravity' ships [16]. For a long time, it was believed that the ‘foo fighters’ and ‘ghost rockets’ of the 1940s were a secret Nazi weapon, and there was a small minority that thought the Nazis may have created the 'flying saucers,' though the ETH-UFO hypothesis caught on soon after, by 1949.

 

But what captivated Hitler's interest most of all was his interest in hypnosis or the occult powers of 'fascination.' Witnesses of the Nuremberg rallies claim that people there were in a trancelike state, glassy-eyed and open mouthed with awe. Hitler claimed to have studied the mystical charismatic powers of earlier leaders, and read a great deal about the Jesuits' psychological techniques of focused concentration and devotion. It is certain that Hitler's minister Göbbels did employ carefully crafted techniques of social control - lighting, the tenor of the voice, and crowd psychology - for maximum propaganda value. But Trevor Ravenscroft and others are of the opinion that the Nazis may have been more than just master propagandists; they may have been true sorcerous mesmerists, possessing the minds of thousands of people. Some people maintain the CIA's MKUltra mind-control experiments may have been derived from Nazi researchers smuggled into this country through Project Paperclip [17].


Occultism = Nazism? NOT!

 

There are those of a so-called 'skeptical' bent that have been promoting a rather sloppy thesis of late. That thesis is based on a few deceptively simple assertions. The Nazis were devotees of the irrational, the occult, and the paranormal. The Nazis did horrible things. Ergo, if we do not stamp out belief in the occult and paranormal, another Nazi regime may come to power. This silly syllogism is employed to maximum effect by the purported rationalists of CSICOP: when irrationalism (ergo, Forteanism, et al., which they consider to be an irrational pursuit) is on the rise, democracy and freedom are threatened. The idiocy of this position should be fairly clear. There were many occultists who resisted the Nazi regime, such as the Coventry witches who placed an 'occult circle of power' around the British Isles to protect them from the Germans (well-intentioned, if ineffective against the V2s.) And there were many attempts by the Nazis to stamp out occult societies who did not agree with their party line, such as Steiner's Anthroposophists. (One of the first acts of the Nazis was to ban fortunetelling and Tarot card reading, as well as other forms of divination, since they associated them with the 'despicable' Gypsies.) Not everyone interested in the paranormal, mythical, metaphysical, or occult is a Nazi; the Nazis clearly distorted and twisted many occult philosophies and systems to fit their own purposes and goals.


The Surrealists (Andre Breton, etc.) also wanted to get 'in touch' with man's unconscious or 'nonrational' side, and most of them fled Germany early on, when the Nazi canon of naturalist realism in art took hold. Heidegger, Thomas Mann, and other metaphysical philosophers may have been initially flirtatious with Nazi ideas, but they eventually came to repudiate them as well. The relationship between occultism and 'irrationalism,' however vaguely defined, and other attempts at resistance to the unwanted tendencies within the urban-industrial nation-state, are not as clear-cut as some might have us think, and the relationship of all these ideologies to Nazism is highly complex. It is simply unfair and simplistic to see the Nazis only as a revolt against science, reason, technology, the Enlightenment, and Western Judeo-Christianity, and by extension accuse other social movements that are against the notion of 'progress' (e.g. environmentalists, postmodernists, or punk rockers) of being Nazis. For the record, it should be noted that a little-known journal of irrationality, Doubt , never carried one pro-Nazi editorial, despite all its anti-Roosevelt diatribes.

  1. See one of Reich's greatest rants, Listen, Little Man!
  2. See Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium.
  3. Michael Howard, The Occult Conspiracy.
  4. Stated quite clearly in Nietzsche's Gay Science.
  5. See closely Blavatksy's Secret Doctrine, if you can deal with its impenetrable text.
  6. Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
  7. Baigent, Lincoln, and Leigh. The Messianic Legacy.
  8. Marija Gimbutas, The Religions of Old Europe.
  9. Read Spengler's Decline of the West or Rosenberg's Myth of the 20th Century.
  10. Nesta Webster, None Dare Call it Conspiracy.
  11. Webb, The Occult Underground and The Occult Establishment.
  12. Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature.
  13. See Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors.
  14. See Trevor Rayvenscroft, The Spear of Destiny.
  15. Baigent, Lincoln, and Leigh. Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
  16. David Hatcher Childress, Anti-Gravity and the World Grid.
  17. Elizabeth Holtzmann, Secret Agenda: Project Paperclip.


US Eugenics Paralleled Nazi Germany


To understand how the Nazi regime grew to power in the 1930's, it is important to observe that which influenced the political and social thought of those in positions of power and influence. By far the most significant factors in the German rise to power included a fanatical push for population control, racial hygiene, the science of racism and the study of genetics, and a worldwide depression.


Today we hear very little of U.S. involvement on the side of the Nazi movement, though our role in the science of eugenics was drawn upon by German physicians, eugenicists, and propagandists to promote themselves and their ideas during the regime.


Hitler accredited eugenics in America as the most important factor influencing his policies on racial and hereditary science. Mainstream history continually underemphasizes the Nazi connection of American eugenicists, instead claiming that only an unimportant and marginal wing of the eugenics movement reacted positively to such measures of mass sterilization, special support for "hereditarily valuable" couples, prohibition of miscegenation (marriage or sexual relations between those of different races), and euthanasia (voluntary or otherwise). The reality, however, is that the U.S. played an important role as a model of a country in which eugenic sterilization and immigration legislation (which was founded on biological principles) were at least to some degree successfully implemented and state-authorized sterilizations were carried out longer and on a larger scale in the United States than previously believed, beginning with the first state eugenics law in Indiana in 1907. that in some ways paralleled the policies of Nazi Germany,. U.S. doctors believed that sterilization could help rid society of mental illness and crime launched a 20th century eugenics movement  aimed at improving society through selective breeding/. 

"The comparative histories of the eugenical sterilization campaigns in the United States and Nazi Germany reveal important similarities of motivation, intent and strategy,'' a Yale study's authors wrote in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a journal published by the American College of Physicians-American Society of Internal Medicine.


Eugenics sprang from the philosophy of social Darwinism, which envisioned human society in terms of natural selection and suggested that science could engineer progress by attacking supposedly hereditary problems including moral decadence, crime, venereal disease, tuberculosis and alcoholism.


The U.S. was widely acclaimed by Germans for their role in implementing such measures as the sterilization of those considered a threat to a clean hereditary line, or those who had a mental or physical disability, so as not to breed more of a "degenerate" race. with early U.S. policies drawing glowing reviews from authorities in pre-Nazi Germany.

 

Those affected included those hereditarily blind, deaf, mentally or physically handicapped, the psychiatrically ill, sexual "perverts", fathers who had more than two illegitimate children, and habitual criminals. The first law on sterilization in the United States was passed in 1907 in Indiana, which made mandatory the sterilization of the handicapped. From 1907 to early 1920, 3,233 people were sterilized. In the 1930's, the rate was about 4,000 sterilizations per year.


The U.S. practice of neutering ``mentally defective'' individuals was backed by most leading geneticists and often justified on grounds that it would relieve the public of the cost of caring for future generations of the mentally ill.

 

Sterilizations also took place mainly in public mental institutions, where the poor and ethnic or racial minorities were housed in disproportionately high numbers.

 

"It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind,'' Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in the majority opinion of a landmark eugenics case in 1926.  At one point a bill in the house, which was under serious debate, would have eradicated the "lowest" 10% of the American population. In 1927 they passed a decision which ruled in favor of the constitutionality of compulsory sterilization.

 

"Germany is perhaps the most progressive nation in restricting fecundity among the unfit,'' editors of the New England Journal of Medicine wrote in 1934, a year after Hitler became chancellor.


Aside from governmental support of such measures, many influential powers in society also offered a helping hand, either by contributing financially, conducting studies on genetics, publishing books promoting scientific racism, etc. Prominent figures in support of eugenics and the Nazi rule included Leonard Darwin, Alexander Graham Bell, Charles B. Davenport, Herbert Hoover, Charles Eliot (President of Harvard University), David Starr Jordan (President of Stanford University), the Pioneer Fund, and the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations.

Despite modern assumptions that American interest in eugenics waned during the 1920s, while its Nazi counterpart carried out 360,000 to 375,000 sterilizations during the 1930s and grew to encompass so-called ``mercy'' killings; . researchers said sterilization laws had authorized the neutering of more than 40,000 people classed as insane or ``feebleminded'' in 30 states by 1944. Another 22,000 underwent sterilization from the mid-1940s to 1963, despite weakening public support and revelations of Nazi atrocities, according to the study, funded by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Merck Co. Foundation.

 

Forced sterilization was legal in 18 U.S. states, and most states with eugenics laws allowed people to be sterilized without their consent by leaving the decision to a third party.

The U.S. practice ended in the 1960s after being overwhelmed by court challenges and the civil rights movement.

German and American eugenics advocates both believed science could solve social problems, tended to measure the worth of the individual in economic terms and felt mental illness a threat to society grave enough to warrant compulsive sterilization.

 

And while Nazi claims of Aryan superiority are well known, researchers said U.S. advocates of sterilization worried that the survival of old-stock America was being threatened by the influx of ``lower races'' from southern and eastern Europe. 

In the 1980's, there seemed to be a resurgence in the studies of racial inferiority in the U.S. Roger Pearson, an anthropologist and promoter of the theory that "the white race has been endangered by inferior stock for more than 30 years", and well known for being authoritarian and neo-fascist, succeeded in combining his right wing politics with an academic career as a college professor and head of the Institute for the Study of Man in Virginia. In 1982, Ronald Reagan wrote him a letter commending his "valuable service" and voiced appreciation for his "substantial contributions to promoting and upholding those ideals and principles that we value at home and abroad."


Looks like eugenics isn't dead today either.

 


From UFOs to Yoga

By Martin A. Lee

 

George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party until his violent death in 1967, gushed about having had a mystical experience when he first read Hitler's Mein Kampf: “I realized that National Socialism [was] actually a new religion," said Rockwell, who considered April 20th the holiest day of the calendar year.


That's when neo-Nazis around the world celebrate Hitler's birthday at secretive gatherings with Aryan shrines, devotional rituals, white power regalia, and other racialist kitsch.

 

These annual conclaves are akin to religious ceremonies where true believers worship Hitler as an infallible deity whose every utterance is gospel.


The bizarre quasi-religious and mythic elements that proliferate in sectors of the contemporary neo-Nazi milieu are explored by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke in his important, new book Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity.


Although there has always been a theocratic strain in fascist movements, several factors are contributing to a latter-day, "folkish" (or tribal) revival among white youth who are beset by an acute sense of disenfranchisement in Western societies.


In response to the challenges of globalization, multiculturalism, and large-scale Third World immigration, neo-Nazi racism in the United States, Europe and elsewhere has sometimes morphed into what the author describes as "new folkish religions of white identity."


This neo-folkish resurgence — reminiscent of some early Nazi ideas — encompasses a hodgepodge of anti-Semitic neo-Pagan sects, Christian Identity churches, skewed variants of eastern mysticism, occult influences, New Age conspiracies, and Satanists into the "black metal" music subculture.


Goodrick-Clarke, a British scholar who writes in an engaging and accessible style, has long foraged on the farther shores of right-wing extremist politics.


His first book, The Occult Roots of Nazism, is a masterful study of a much sensationalized subject — racist groups in early 20th century Austria that embraced forms of mystical nationalism and helped incubate Aryan racial ideas.


Building on his previous work, Goodrick-Clarke draws a parallel in Black Sun between folkish ferment in Hitler's Austria and the role of today's marginalized neo-Nazi sects, many of which have repackaged Aryan racism in new forms influenced by eastern religions.


A crucial difference, the author maintains, is the shift from the virulent German nationalism of the Third Reich to a broader racist ideology of global white supremacy.


"It is highly significant that the Aryan cult of white identity is now most marked in the United States," says Goodrick-Clarke, adding that American neo-Nazi groups behave like persecuted religious sects preparing for the final confrontation with a corrupt world.


Although each have their specific eccentricities — ranging from anti-Semitic Christian Identity churches to anti-Christian, racist Odinist groups — almost all of them espouse millenarian visions of a white racial utopia.


Satan Meets the Führer


Early American neo-Nazi James Madole, who rejected Christianity as a degenerate Jewish construct, became a key figure in developing bizarre forms of fascism after he founded the National Renaissance Party, the first U.S. neo-Nazi organization, in 1952.

 

Although he never attracted many followers, Madole became known as "the father of postwar occult fascism" by saturating his ideology with a mish-mash of science-fiction and other notions drawn from eastern traditions and theosophy, a mystical religious movement originating in late 19th century America.

 

During the 1960s and 1970s, Madole's party cultivated close links with a Church of Satan spin-off — an alliance that anticipated the recent emergence of a violent, international fringe network devoted to Nordic gods, black magic, occultism and devil worship.

 

David Myatt, chief representative of Nazi Satanism in Great Britain, defends human sacrifice and praises a new wave of satanic black metal Skinhead bands that spout demented lyrics and anti-social rants.

 

Myatt's "religion of National Socialism" owes much to Savitri Devi, the grand dame of postwar neo-Nazism, who had traveled from her native France to India as a young woman. An admirer of the racist caste system, Devi immersed herself in early Hindu texts.

 

Noting that the Nazi Swastika is also an ancient, mystical Indian symbol, she romanticized the Third Reich as "the Holy Land of the West." Devi was the first Western writer to acclaim Hitler as a spiritual "avatar," a supernatural figure who pointed the way toward a future Aryan paradise.

 

The Jews, whom Devi blamed for all the world's suffering and alienation, were predictably pegged as the main obstacle on the path to the Golden Age.

 

Devi's obsession with the pre-Christian origins of Indo-European culture was shared by Julius Evola, an Italian Nazi philosopher whose racial theories were adopted and codified by Mussolini in 1938.

 

Calling for a "Great Holy War" to battle national and ideological enemies, Evola exerted a significant influence on a generation of militant neofascist youth in postwar Italy.

 

Among his protégés were leaders of right-wing terrorist organizations linked to numerous bomb attacks from the 1960s to the 1980s. Evola's mystical fascist writings include books on Zen Buddhism, yoga, alchemy, Tantrism (a kind of sexual mysticism), and European paganism.

 

After he died in 1974, his esoteric musings were rediscovered by New Age publications. Today, many of Evola's books are available in English translation in trendy New Age bookstores in the United States, despite his status as an avowed fascist.

 

UFOs, Polar Bases and the Black Sun

 

Another influential figure in the occult-fascist underground is Miguel Serrano, a former Chilean diplomat and Nazi die-hard who touts yoga, meditation, and hallucinogenic drugs as ways of raising consciousness in order to make contact with higher Aryan intelligence.


Serrano blends exotic oriental religious themes with dubious lore about secret religious societies. He likens the Nazi SS — which was condemned in its entirety for war crimes — to an order of initiates seeking the Holy Grail.

 

This notion appealed to Wilhelm Landig, an Austrian SS veteran and postwar Nazi activist who coined the idea of the "Black Sun," a mystical energy source allegedly capable of regenerating the Aryan race.

 

Goodrick-Clarke credits Landig with reviving the folkish — and far out — Germanic mythology of Thule, the supposed Arctic homeland of the ancient Aryans, in order to prophesy the recovery and resurrection of Nazism as an earth-conquering force.

 

Landig and other occult-fascist propagandists have circulated wild stories about German Nazi colonies that live and work in secret installations beneath the polar icecaps, where they developed flying saucers and miracle weapons after the demise of the Third Reich.

 

The abundance of UFO sightings, which began in the early 1950s, is attributed to the amazing prowess of Nazi science and technology.

 

The fall of the Third Reich is cast merely as a temporary setback; at any moment, a battalion of Nazi extraterrestrials could zoom forth in their magical discs to deliver Aryan folk from the ills of democracy and Judeo-Christian decadence.

 

A hot item among New Age conspiracy theorists and promoters of Holocaust denial, stories about Nazi UFOs may seem ludicrous to anyone with their feet firmly planted on terra firma. And, certainly, this kind of thinking does not dominate even the contemporary world of the extreme right.

 

But these sci-fi legends underscore, in the words of Goodrick-Clarke, how "Aryan cults and esoteric Nazism posit powerful mythologies to negate the decline of white power in the world."

 

Moreover, if the past is any kind of prologue, these bizarre, new religious sects "may be early symptoms of major divisive changes in our present-day Western democracies."

 

"The risks of race religiosity are great. ... Whenever human groups are interpreted as absolute categories of good and evil, light and darkness," Goodrick-Clarke cautions, "both the human community and humanity itself are diminished."

 

A timely warning, indeed.

Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity


Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. New York: New York University Press, 2002


Black Sun by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke is about the proliferation of fascist ideology in post-war culture, especially since 1990. Goodrick-Clarke (Hitler's Priestess, The Occult Roots of Nazism) is no stranger to this unsavory topic of contemporary Hitler cults that mix revisions of Theosophy (Ariosophy), Satanism, Hinduism, and racism.

The author, one of the best historians of the roots of Nazism and its post-war tentacles, weaves in and out of occult beliefs and myths without falling prey to exaggeration or fascination. He begins his survey with the origins of American neo-Nazism and takes us through the labyrinth of extreme right-wing groups in Europe and the United Kingdom that include black-metal bands as well as active anarchist movements. He describes the most influential leaders and writers, from George Lincoln Rockwell to Julius Evola, Savriti Devi, Wilhelm Landig, and Miguel Serrano. Black Sun ends with a chapter about conspiracy beliefs and the New World Order. Here, Goodrick-Clarke describes the neo-fascist fear of a liberal, Jewish, Illuminati network that includes aliens in spaceships, with Jan van Helsing and Bill Cooper (Behold a Pale Horse) as two of the prominent although nutty theorists.

The book’s title reflects a favorite symbol among neo-fascists who often fail to find common ground in a patchwork movement of anarchists, occultists, and arch-conservatives who today avoid overt use of the tainted swastika. The cover features a black sun disk with a Sig rune slash underneath. The author tells us that some Nazi pilots toward the end of the war in 1945 painted the black sun symbol on their aircraft. The black sun had significance as the primal source of life and power, harking back to Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, which proto-Nazis mined for esoteric information. Erich Halik, a Swiss engineer and a member of the Vienna circle of Fascists surrounding Wilhelm Landig (1909-1997), was the first to link the “Black Sun” roundel insignia with the esoteric SS. “The alchemical metaphor of sol niger [black sun] was said to represent occultation, blackening, a sinking into the mystery of self-discovery,” writes Goodrick-Clarke.

Neo-fascists have blurred the lines between their agendas and those of the New Age movements that also wish to transform the self and the world with magic, self-realization, and global transformation. What distinguishes most fascist most fascist groups is their Futuristic (i.e., Filippo Marinetti’s Futurism, which had great effect on Mussolini) bent to turn to war and violence as purifying agents of change before a better world can arise from the ashes, Phoenix-like. The belief is that the “Supermen” of the white race will remain to rule. Goodrick-Clarke mentions that Charles Manson and his followers also believed in violence and a race war as a way to a more perfect world.

In the chapter, “White Noise and Black Metal,” we learn that radical, hard-core rock music bands that include Slayer, Satanel, Venom, Mayhem (and more than 60 others in Germany alone) have developed a significant following of skinhead and fringe radicals who revere variations of Nazi philosophy. The author connects the two 18-year-olds who slaughtered 12 students and one teacher in 1999 at Littleton, Colorado to neo-Nazis. The killers chose 20 April, Hitler’s birthday. Their favorite singer was Marilyn Manson, a transvestite, shock rocker who combines elements of Charles Manson, Goth  style, and idiosyncratic depravity on stage. One of Marilyn’s songs is “Anti-Christ Superstar,” which reflects neo-Nazi revulsion for weak Christians who would turn the other cheek. A new wave of white power, shock rock appeared in the final decade of the twentieth century in Norway, headed by Euronymous and its demented lyrics. “Very shortly (early 1990s) these fantasies of slaughter and apocalypse were followed by genuine mayhem with suicides, feuds, and murders,” reports the author.

More interesting are chapters about the influential theorists:

  • Savriti Devi  (1905-1982, aka Maximiana Portas), who wrote extensively about her theories of Aryan origins in an ancient Arctic culture. Devi borrowed heavily from B. G. Tilak, who wrote The Arctic Home in the Vedas (1903). Devi, a Hilter devotee who saw him as an Avatar in the Vedic model, is influential among current white-power radicals, despite her Hindu leanings. Goodrick-Clarke wrote an extensive study of Devi in his book Hitler’s Priestess: Savriti Devi, the Hindu-Aryan, Myth and Neo-Nazism.
  • Miguel Serrano, who developed an esoteric Hitlerism with more anti-Semitic mythology. Serrano borrowed heavily from Gnostic myth to create a sinister agenda throughout Jewish history. “For Serrano, the Jew is but the concrete manifestation of the antagonist in a cosmology structured by the battle of opposing archetypes.”
  • Francis Parker Yockey (1917-1960), who committed suicide while in FBI custody after a career as a neo-fascist agent throughout America. Yockey wrote Imperium (1948), a voluminous account of Western heritage that approves of anti-Zionist efforts.

From the retrospect viewpoint of a potential authoritarian future in 2020 or 2030, these Aryan cults and esoteric Nazism may be documented as early symptoms of major divisive changes in our present-day Western democracies.” 9/11 and the Islamic militant attack on New York City are another symptom of a “clash of civilizations” with a continuance of the hatred for Jews and Western, Christian cultures.

There is a persistent dark or shadow side of our humanity that, for whatever reason, chooses to destroy what it dislikes rather than attempt to resolve the differences

In the late 1800’s, early 1900’s, there were a variety of secret /occult societies in Germany, the main ones being, The Bavarian Illuminati, The Freemasons, The Rosicrucians, The Thule Society and The Vril Society. Each of these five societies, although based in secrecy and mysticism, had its role and function. Of these five, two were especially noted for their occult connections, The Vril Society and its purely German offshoot The Thule Society. The chief architect of the Thule Society was Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorff, sometimes referred to as Rudolf Glauer. Sebottendorff / Glauer possessed a wide knowledge of Islamic Mysticism in all its aspects, encompassing the Dervish sects and particularly the cult of Sufism which differs markedly from mainstream Islamic teaching.


In 1917 four people met in a cafe in Vienna. There was one woman and three men. The woman was a 'spiritual medium'. They met under a veil of mystery and secrecy. They discussed secret revelations, the coming of the new age, the sphere of destiny, the magical violet black stone, and making contact with ancient peoples and distant worlds.


Their source of power was the Black Sun, an infinite beam of light which though invisible to the human eye is real and there.

The myth of the 'Black Sun'  displays similarities with the Tibetan Rahu myth from the Kalachakra Tantra, can be traced to the inspiration of Karl Maria Wiligut (“Himmler’s Rasputin”) and his milieu among others. In a commentary on Wiligut’s runic writings, a pupil, Emil Rüdiger, mentions an invisible dark planet, Santur by name, which is supposed to influence human history and to be able to be microcosmically linked with the energy body of an adept.

Santur is interpreted as a burnt-out Sun that was still visible at the time of Homer. Rüdiger speculates that this was the center of the solar system hundreds of millennia ago, and he imagines a fight between the new and the old Suns that was decided 330,000 years ago. Santur is seen as the source of power of the Hyperboreans.


The Vril emblem was the 'Black Sun' - a secret philosophy thousand of years old provided the foundation on which the occult practitioners of the Third Reich would later build. The Black Sun symbol can be found in many Babylonian and Assyrian places of worship. They depicted the Black Sun - the godhead's inner light in the form of a cross. This was not much different from the German's Knight's Cross.

Logo of the VRIL Society which is also called
"All-German Society for Metaphysics"


With supposed channeled information from ET's, the Vril society built the Vril Machine. It was saucer shaped. It was supposedly an interdimensional or time travel machine.
 

Peter Moon tells us in his book The Black Sun:

The Vril Society began around the same time as the Thule Society when Karl Haushofer founded the "Brüder des Lichts", which means Brothers of the Light. This organization is sometimes referred to at the Luminous Lodge. This group was eventually renamed the Vril-Gesellschaft as it rose in prominence and united three major societies: the Lords of the Black Stone, having emerged from the Teutonic Order in 1917; the black Knights of the Thule Society; and the Black Sun, later identified as the elite of Heinrich Himmler's SS. Whereas the Thule Society ended up focusing primarily upon materialistic and political agendas, the Vril Society put its attention on the "Other Side."


The name, Thule, refers to the capital of the legendary polar country Hyperborea. Also referred to as ‘Ultima Thule’, it was supposedly the gateway to another world. Thule was therefore recognized as a place where humans could, by whatever means, ‘leave the earth’, it also reputedly stood at the portal of the ‘Hollow Earth’. Interestingly, the major players in the 20th century, the USA and the Russian Federation have ELF - extras low frequency - transmitters sited in this area. These transmitters are supposedly used to communicate with submerged submarines, but worryingly, they broadcast these messages at brain-wave frequencies, around 18 to 20Hz.

 

According to Peter Moon, the ultimate concept of Thule is well represented in the myth of it as the capital city or center of Hyperborea, a word which literally means 'beyond the poles'. As it is beyond the poles, Hyperborea is positioned as being outside of this dimension. Thule, being in the center, is positioned as the source of all life on Earth. In Greek mythology, Pythagoras was taught sacred geometry by Apollo, a god who was identified as a resident of Hyperborea. In Pythagorean teachings, the Earth itself geometrically unfolds from a void in the center. This void has been recognized by many ancient groups, including the Sumerians, as the Black Sun. In this sense, Thule is synonymous with this Black Sun.


The Black Sun is an even more esoteric concept than that of Thule. Represented as the void of creation itself, it is the most senior archetype imaginable. Thus, this namesake was reserved for the elite of the Thule Society. The Black Sun was actually a secret society within the Thule Society. it was senior to other societies.


The word Swastika  means 'source' amongst other definitions, and represents eternal cause or the fountain of creation. Accordingly, the Thule Society used the Swastika symbol in their log to represent this idea.

Hitler's use of the Swastika on the flag of National-socialist Germany has besmirched the Swastika, but it continues to hold a religious significance for Hindus.

The Vril Force or Vril Energy was said to be derived from the Black Sun, a big ball of "Prima Materia" which supposedly exists in the center of the Earth, giving light to the Vril-ya and putting out radiation in the form of Vril. The Vril Society believed that Aryans were the actual biological ancestors of the Black Sun.

This force was known to the ancients under many names, and it has been called Chi, Ojas, Vril, Astral Light, Odin Forces and Orgone. In a discussion of the 28th degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry—called Knight of the Sun or Prince Adept— Albert Pike said:

There is in nature one most potent force, by means whereof a single man, who could possess himself of it, and should know how to direct it, could revolutionize and change the face of the world.


This is the force that the Nazis and their inner occult circle were so desperately trying to unleash upon the world, for which the Vril Society had apparently groomed Hitler. A manifestation of the "Great Work" promulgated by the Adepts of secret societies throughout the ages. The Vril Society latched on to a very old archetype already in the minds of alchemists and magicians, which was only re-interpreted, by Lytton, in light of that age of occult revival and scientific progress.


The idea of mutation and transformation into a higher form of a "god-man" was envisioned, through the Vril-ya, in Buller-Lytton's The Coming Race. Lytton, himself, was an initiate of the Rosicrucians and was well versed in the arcane-esoteric philosophies (and of course the greatest advances in the sciences of his day). Through his romantic works of fiction he expressed the conviction that there are beings endowed with superhuman powers. These beings will supplant us and bring about a formidable mutation in the elect of the human race."


This is where the philosophy turns dangerous. The moment we speak of an elect and "illumined" class which is above the general populace, you inevitably encounter racism and classcism — with fascism in due course. "We must beware of this notion of a mutation," Bergier warns. "It crops up again with Hitler, and is not extinct today."


Today this philosophy is, sadly, once again in the forefront of popular culture. The New World Order, so vehemently opposed, is under the direct influence and guidance of the New Age Movement. A hodgepodge of occult doctrines and dangerous socialism, which hides under a cover of "spiritual enlightenment." Theosophy is considered the main foundation, and its founder, Mme. Blavatsky, was a great admirer of Lytton's.


Blavatsky's esotericism was virulently anti-Christian...The racial ideas of Madame Blavatsky, concerning root races and the emergence of a spiritually-developed type of human being in the Aquarian Age, were avidly accepted by the nineteenth-century German nationalists who mixed Theosophical occultism with anti-Semitism and the doctrine of the racial supremacy of the Aryan or Indo-European peoples.

 


After World War II and the subsequent occupation of Germany, Allied military commanders were stunned to discover the penetrating depth of the Nazi regime's state secrets. The world's best intelligence organization was not the least of these revelations. Also discovered were massive and meticulous research file on secret societies, eugenics and other scientific pursuits that boggled the imagination of the Allied command. Even more spectacular was an entire web of underground rocket and flying saucer factories with an accompanying technology that still defies ordinary beliefs.

A missing U-boat fleet possessing the most advanced submarine technology in the world left many wondering if the Nazis had escaped with yet more secrets or even with Hitler himself.

Behind all of these mysteries was an even deeper element: a secret order known to initiates as the Order of the Black Sun, an organization so feared that it is now illegal to even print their symbols and insignia in modern Germany.






The phenomenon of the eclipse has in mythology been connected with the upcoming end of the world and/or drastic change approaching. The John's Revelation claims that an eclipse of 3 days will precede the end of the world. Also the famous fortuneteller Nostradamus predicted an eclipse of 3 days introducing the end of all times. This way, the eclipse has taken the role of the herald of doom.



Revelation 6: 12:
When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, 13: and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by a gale; 14: the sky vanished like a scroll that is rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. 15 Then the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and every slave and every free man hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains. 16 They called to the mountains and the rocks, "Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! 17 For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?"

















 


 

Nazism and the New Age

While most Jews are sure that Hitler represented the Christian community, his associates knew better. In this section we see not only that Hitler rejected Christianity, but that there is also ample research showing that Hitler founded far more than a political regime - the Third Reich was an occult-based religious movement to usher in the New Age.

The Nazi President of the Danzig Senate, Hermann Rauschning, who defected to the Allies and in 1939 wrote the book quoted above, recorded statements made by Hitler which are unintelligible except from a NA orientation. The fact that Rauschning included quotes which he admitted he did not understand only adds to the credibility of his testimony, for these often turn out to be occultic references of the kind meant to be understood by fellow-initiates alone.


Rauschning's Phony 'Conversations With Hitler'


The supposed memoir of Hermann Rauschning, the National Socialist President of the Danzig Senate in 1933-1934 who was ousted from the Hitler movement a short time later and then made a new life for himself as a professional anti-Nazi,is one of the most widely quoted sources of information about Hitler's personality and secret intentions.

In the book known in German as Gespräche mit Hitler; and first published in the U.S. in 1940 as The Voice of Destruction, Rauschning presents page after page of what are purported to be Hitler's most intimate views and plans for the future, allegedly based on dozens of private conversations between 1932 and 1934. After the war the memoir was introduced as Allied prosecution exhibit USSR-378 at the main Nuremberg "war crimes" trial.

Among the damning quotations attributed to Hitler by Rauschning is this memorable statement:

We must be brutal. We must regain a clear conscience about brutality. Only then can we drive out the tenderness from our people ... Do I propose to exterminate entire nationalities? Yes, it will add up to that ... I naturally have the right to destroy millions of men of inferior races who increase like vermin ... Yes, we are barbarians. We want to be barbarians. It is an honorable title.

Hitler is also supposed to have confided to Rauschning, an almost unknown provincial official, fantastic plans for a German world empire that would include Africa, South America, Mexico and, eventually, the United States.

Many prestigious historians, inculding Leon Poliakov, Gerhard Weinberg, Alan Bullock, Joachim Fest, Nora Levin and Robert Payne, used choice quotations from Rauschning's memoir in their works of history. Poliakov, one of the most prominent Holocaust writers, specifically praised Rauschning for his "exceptional accuracy", while Levin, another widely-read Holocaust historian, called him "one of the most penetrating analysts of the Nazi period."

But not everyone has been so credulous. Swiss historian Wolfgang Haenel spent five years diligently investigating the memoir before announcing his findings in 1983 at a revisionist history conference in West Germany. The renowned Conversations with Hitler, he declared are a total fraud. The book has no value "except as a document of Allied war propaganda."

Haenel was able to conclusively establish that Rausching's claim to have met with Hitler "more than a hundred times is a lie. The two actually met only four times, and never alone. The words attributed to Hitler, he showed, were simply invented or lifted from many different sources, including writings by Juenger and Friedrich Nietzsche. An account of Hitler hearing voices, waking at night with convulsive shrieks and pointing in terror at an empty corner while shouting "There, there, in the corner!" was taken from a short story by French writer Guy de Maupassant.

The phony memoir was designed to incite public opinion in democratic countries, especially in the United States, in favor of war against Germany. The project was the brainchild of the Hungarian-born journalist Imre Revesz (Emery Reeves), who ran an influential anti-German press and propaganda agency in Paris during the 1930s published the book in 1940. It led to furious secret investigations by the top Nazis who established that Rauschning had spoken with Hitler but once, and briefly, at a diplomatic cocktail party.

Haenel has also found evidence that a prominent British journalist named Henry Wickham-Steele helped to produce the memoir. Wickham-Steele was a right-hand man of Sir Robert Vansittart, perhaps the most vehemently anti-German figure in Britain.

West Germany's most influential weekly periodicals, Die Zeit, and Der Spiegel (7 September 1985), have run lengthy articles about historical hoax. Der Spiegel concluded that Rauschning's Conversations with Hitler "are a falsification, an historical distortion from the first to the last page ... Haenel not only proves the falsification, he also shows how the impressive surrogate was quickly compiled and which ingredients were mixed together."

There are some valuable lessons to be learned from the story of this sordid hoax, which took more than 40 years to finally unmask: It shows that even the most brazen historical fraud can have a tremendous impact if it serves important interests, that it's easier to invent a great historical lie than to expose one and finally, that everyone should be extremely wary of even the "authoritative" portrayals of the emotionally-charged Hitler era.

Readers interested in an authentic record of Hitler's personality and private views should look into the fascinating and wide-ranging memoir of Otto Wagener, published in August 1985 by Yale University Press under the title  Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant. Wagener was the first Chief of Staff of the SA ("Stormtroopers") and Director of the Economic-Political Department of the National Socialist Party. He spent hundreds of hours with Hitler between 1929 and 1932, many of them alone.

One of the best sources I have seen is the Angebert book quoted above. For documentation besides Angebert see also D. Sklar, The Nazis and the Occult; Joseph Carr, The Twisted Cross; Robert G.L. Waite, The Psychopathic God - Adolf Hitler; Gerald Suster, Adolf Hitler, The Occult Messiah; Trevor Ravenscroft, The Spear of Destiny]. The strength of their work is ironically due to their positive attitude toward the occult: it appears they rather admire the "Ancient Wisdom" as expressed in Gnosticism, Catharsism and other esoteric movements, and they trace its threads through history with nostalgia as well as academic interest. Their far-ranging documentation allows them to conclusively show that Nazism was/is an initiation into the classical Gnostic "path of enlightenment", but unlike me the authors do not fault the "Ancient Wisdom" itself for the infamous results. On the contrary, "the prime lesson to be learned is that the practice of occultism and magic is fraught with danger and, therefore, not to be entrusted to just anyone."

This book is valuable for its uninhibited look at the many movements and occultists - including unlikely names like Plato, Nietzsche, Göthe and Pythagoras - who shared Hitler's dream of the Holy Gral and a new-age return of the ancient Hyperborean godmen with their "sacred sciences". 

Hitler turned against Christianity from his early teens and sought his destiny in the occult. He later joined with associates who also embraced those teachings, and together they built a state guided by the same occultic principles and goals repeated in today's NA. And no wonder, because he drew on the same esoteric sources as the NAers of today. [How have so many scholars overlooked this all-important key to understanding the Nazi mentality? In the words of Angebert's English translator, Lewis A.M. Sumberg, nearly all historians missed the "militant neo-Paganism" and "Gnostic racism" in Nazism "because they have brought conventional outlooks and methodologies to their examination of an unconventional phenomenon." (The Occult and the Third Reich) We must either re-assess the Nazi philosophy with these roots exposed, or be forced to settle for theories which fail to completely explain Nazi priorities. Its unconventional nature lay in "magic thought allied to science and know-how" (Angebert) - exactly the hybrid being encouraged today by NA leaders like Peter Russell. Sumberg's observation in 1974 about this blind spot among historians fell mostly on deaf ears, which makes it more difficult now - but more urgent than ever - to recognize that not only is Nazism not dead, we are now surrounded by a "kinder, gentler" version of the same philosophy, sprouted from the same roots and having the same priorities.]

Hitler and the Occult

According to available sources (see above), Hitler first made contact in 1909 with other occultists, the first of these being Georg Lanz von Lieberfels and Guido von List, after coming across their occultic-racist magazine Ostara  in Vienna. (Sklar). Besides his publishing activities, Lanz was known for starting a society called the "Order of New Templars" which imitated the traditions of occultic Grail lore. (Angebert) Lanz would later claim credit for influencing Nazi ideology - a claim which has some merit considering that one of his books was found in Hitler's personal library (now archived in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC). As for List, he founded the "Armanen", a Germanic pagan priestly order which apparently accepted Hitler into their brotherhood; evidence is in another occultic book from Hitler's library bearing an inscription from a comrade to Adolf, "my dear Armanen brother." (Sklar)



Books by List were found stamped with the insignia of the SS Ahmemerbe (the Nazi Ancestral Research division), indicating that his teachings were studied by SS candidates. (As an aside, Angebert note that the documents dealing with the Ahnenerbe itself, which they identify as "the Nazi Occult Bureau", are listed in the U.S. National Archives but for some reason are not available to researchers) Both Lanz and List were obsessed with blood purity, the Jewish threat, Grail legends and a "new world order". Both embraced the Swastika as a central symbol, borrowing it from Hindu mysticism. [see comments below]


By 1913, Adolf had passed the novice stage in his occult pursuits. (Carr) In 1918 (age 29) he claimed to hear voices announcing that he was "selected by God to be Germany's messiah" (Carr); later he made contact with an "ascended master" whom he identified as Lucifer or "the beast from the pit". He eventually became convinced he was the reincarnation of Woden (or, Woton). At some point, he discovered two German occultists who eloquently expressed his own understanding of Aryan religion and destiny: Richard Wagner [details later] and Friedrich Nietzsche. These influenced Nazi thought so heavily that the authors of  The Occult and the Third Reich  name them as "the two prime initiators of the Third Reich",  and devote two entire chapters to documenting this claim. To these can be added a third, who lived before Hitler and tried to weld Wagnerian and Nietzschean thought into one work: the British occultist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who wrote in his epic Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1900):

Every Mystic is, whether he will or not, a born Anti-Semite.

~
Sklar

Another occultist to influence Hitler's thinking was Dr. Karl Haushofer, who was introduced to Hitler in 1924 while the latter was in Landsberg prison. Haushofer, a Blavatsky disciple, combined a dubious "science" called "geopolitics" with Eastern mystical texts and The Secret Doctrine  principles, and claimed to have clairvoyant powers. It was Haushofer who schooled Hitler in The Secret Doctrine. (Carr) His geopolitical theories found their way into Mein Kampf. (Sklar) It was also Haushofer who forged Hitler's alliance with Japan basing his case on astrological predictions (Sklar), and who gave him the "Lebensraum" concept. As the Nazi conquest advanced, Haushofer applied his theories through prophecies which overruled the military leadership in directing troop movements. (Sklar)

 
Besides Hitler, Haushofer had other prominent disciples: Rudolf Hess, later to become Hitler's secretary; and Anton LaVey, who gained notoriety in later years for his promotion of Satanism. LaVey dedicated his work The Satanic Bible in part to "Karl Haushofer, a teacher without a classroom." (Sklar) Haushofer's fortunes fell, however, when his son Albrecht conspired in the 1944 coup against Hitler and was arrested; father Karl was sent to Dachau.


Hitler, like today's NA philosophers, firmly believed in the coming of a new species of humanity. Like modern New Agers, he expected them to be a literal "mutation" of Homo Sapiens, achieved by arriving at "higher levels of consciousness". He also believed that the new humanity would be free of "the dirty and degrading chimera called conscience and morality," as well as "the burden of free will" and "personal responsibility" which should rightly be borne only by the few with the fortitude to make the awful decisions necessary for the good of humanity. (Sklar)


Hitler's associate, Bernhard Forster (who happened to be Nietzsche's brother-in-law) related to Hermann Rauschning how Hitler had proclaimed that he "would bring the world a new religion,... the blessed consciousness of eternal life in union with the great universal life... when the time came. Hitler would be the first to achieve what Christianity was meant to have been, [without] any fear of death [or] the fear of a so-called bad conscience. Hitler would restore men to the self-confident divinity with which nature had endowed them." Forster then added his own opinion: "He drew his great power from intercourse with the eternal divine nature." (Sklar) [The reader should note the familiar "cosmic consciousness" vocabulary here, more appropriate to the founder of a religion than to a political schemer.]

The Nazi sacred symbols and concepts - the Swastika or "gamma cross", the eagle, the red/black/white color scheme, and ancient Nordic runes (one of which became the insignia of the SS) - were all adopted from occult traditions going back centuries, shared by Brahmins, Scottish Masons, Rosicrucians, Manichaeans and others. (Angebert givea detailed histories)


The Nazi motto, "One Reich, One Folk, One Führer", reflected the standard 3-fold power circles of the occult. (See a good example in Bailey's Discipleship in the New Age II, where the Great Invocation is to be explained on three distinct levels.) The Reich was the psychic adepts of the Nazi Party, which would build the bridge between the Folk (the masses which unite into a cosmic Entity greater than its parts) and the Führer (the initiates in the elite leadership which unite with Hitler, the divine incarnation). The outer fringe, the Folk, are taught what they can handle: blind obedience, group service, a new history and identity. The Party elite such as the SS are taught something different: psychic knowledge, tapping into the "Vril Force", self-denial, brotherhood mission, medieval lore, fearlessness of death. The innermost circle was privy to the hard-core Gnostic teaching on the Grail, immortality and godhood.


The term "Vril" came to the attention of the Western world through the writings of a not well known French author, Louis Jacolliot (1837-1890).

 

Jacolliot was an avid reader of occult literature, and was familiar with the work of Swedenborg, of the theosophist Jacob Böhme and of Louis Claude de Saint Martin. In the course of his professional career Jacolliot had been president of the tribunal at Chandernagor, India, and afterwards French consul in Calcutta.

 

The works of Jacolliot have inspired several writers and occultists, among them Rudyard Kipling and H. P. Blavatsky. Among Jacolliot's many books are: La Bible dans l'Inde ou la Vie de Iezeus Christna (1859); Les Fils de Dieu (1873); Christna et le Christ (1874); Les Traditions indo-européennes (1876); La Genèse de l'humanité (1879); and L'Olympe brahmanique (1881).

 

The main theme in his books is that modern civilizations were originated from a single, primordial nucleus, which was the same for India, western Asia, and Europe. The Semitic and indo-European races were not different at the beginning, but the Semitic races degenerated in the process, while the Aryans remained pure. A code of law rules civilized people, the Code of Manu, name of the divine ruler in India, while in Egypt he was called Menes, Mosses among the Hebrews, and Minos in Crete.

 

According to Jacolliot, Jesus Christ is but a recent reconstruction of an old indo-aryan tradition, that of Iezeus-Christna. Jesus of Nazareth is only a different characterization of the same personage.

 

North of Europe a magic civilization has existed for millennia and its name is Thule. The superior beings of Thule live in huge caverns in the entrails of the earth. They possess an extraordinary source of magic energy: the Vril. The theme of the Vril is exalted in most of Jacolliot's writings. Vril is an energy latent in man, but he utilizes only a fraction of it. It is the source of divinity, the source of the coming superman. He who discovers it and masters its use acquires great powers. He can become a master of men.

 

In many of his works, particularly in Les Fils de Dieu, and in Les Traditions indo-européenes, Jacolliot affirms that he discovered the existence of Vril among an Indian sect: the Jains, still active in the regions of Mysore and Gujerat, and counting millions of adepts.

 

The discovery of Vril by Jacolliot created extraordinary interest among European intellectuals, avid of knowledge about traditional oriental wisdom. Inspired by his writings a group of Rosicrucians from Berlin founded, by the end of the 19th century, the Vril Society to divulge the writings of the French master. Jacolliot's ideas were introduced in England by S. L. Matthews at the Golden Dawn Society, of which he was the Great Master.


With the passage of time, apparently the term Vril fell in disuse. Interest on Vril was renewed after it was used until
1871 saw the publication of The Coming Race by the English Rosicrucian, member of the House of Lords and minister of the state Edward Bulwer Lord Lytton, who personally knew one of the leading occultists of his epoch, Eliphas Levi. In this novel a young American somehow is led ever deeper into chasms in the earth until he reaches a subterranean realm in which live tall and highly educated people who had mastered a mysterious power they called "Vril", the vital energy of the shooting grain that anyone could concentrate through his or her so-called Vril Staff and individually apply both healingly as well as destructively. Thought transfer and telekinesis were also possible, but VRIL could also serve as a weapon.

Helena Blavatski, the foundress of the Theosophical Society, describes this force as an aether stream that in 1872 could be transformed into a physical force only by the Englishman John W. Keely, an initiate of Nature, through a mechanical device, an ability that apparently had been rescinded by the spirit side due to the threatened abuse of it on Earth.

Rudolf Steiner, the initiator of the Anthroposophical Movement, at the beginning of the 20th century describes this Vril power as aether of life and named its abuse as the cause of the destruction of Atlantis. In his mystery plays Rudolf Steiner recalls the fate of John W. Keely in the figure of Dr. Strader. In the last scene of the last play Dr. Strader becomes the fulcrum for the New Age. To whit: Only when the laboratory table becomes the altar, when from the fruits of the materialistically dominated natural science evolves a moral Science for Nature, the New Age may unfold.

It is said that in the 1920s the Austrian Karl Schapeller had conducted successful experiments with Vril that he called “fiery aether“, but had remained without success due to the danger of economical misuse. – This Vril Technology apparently was taken over and further developed in secret up to operability by the Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft ‘Das kommende Deutschland’ (The Reich’s Study Group ‘The Coming Germany’) that some think is the legendary Vril-Gesellschaft (Vril Society).

 


 

Many neo-Nazi groups continue to pursue these topics with devotion. But under it all was the invisible presence of "Unknown Superiors" (Angeberts, quoting Rudolf Olden, Hitler the Pawn, written 1936. Rauschning used the same term) who taught Hitler himself and who were assumed by his associates to endow him with his uncanny hypnotic power.

 

Concerning Hitler's relationship with these Unknowns, there is not much known besides his reference to a guiding voice of "Providence". However, we do have a vivid account related by an unnamed associate of Hitler to Rauschning (both were not sure what to make of it), in which Hitler wakes up in the middle of the night in total panic at some unseen visitation: "Hitler was standing there in his bedroom, stumbling about, looking around him with a distraught look. He was muttering: 'It's him! It's him! He's here!' His lips had turned blue. He was dripping with sweat. Suddenly he uttered some numbers which made no sense, then some words, then bits of sentences. It was frightening. He used terms which were strung together in the strangest way and which were absolutely weird. Then, he again became silent, although his lips continued to move. He was given a massage and something to drink. Then all of a sudden, he screamed: 'There! Over there! In the corner! Who is it?' He was jumping up and down, and he was howling." (Rauschning) [Whatever the reader may conclude about the Unknown Superiors, whether a figment of a sick mind or real entities, please remember that both Nazi cosmology and NA religion view(ed) them as real and independent beings - and also as extensions of one's own untapped divinity. No provision is made in either system for the possibility of ascended beings who first seduce their channels and then torment them. Yet stories similar to the above are not uncommon in NA circles. From those who leave the New Age after such an experience, the verdict is uniform: the Guides are clever deceivers with evil motives. For those who stay, the solution is to blame oneself for the "bad trip" and blindly dive in deeper; this was apparently Hitler's choice.]


Hitler's personal devotion to occult principles was proven ultimately by his self-inflicted death. His choice of April 30 for his suicide may well have been meant as a sacrifice; it was the eve of Beltane (known in Germany as Walpurgisnacht), identified on popular Wiccan websites as a Druid feast in honor of the deity Bel. In witchcraft, this "power-point" day is regarded as a "great Sabbath" equal in potency to Halloween. According to Wiccans, Bel is derived from the Canaanite Baal; but Helena Blavatsky goes farther in The Secret Doctrine (Vol.2), reconstructing an astrological trinity of Bel/Baal (sun-god, father), Christos (Mercury, son) and Lucifer (Venus, holy spirit). ore on the Lucifer connection in "Gods of the New Age"] As for Hitler's suicide itself, this was not a cowardly act from an occultist viewpoint, but rather an honourable practice known among the Druids, as well as among the Cathari "Perfects", those medieval guardians of the Grail, who called it the rite of "Endura". A curious requirement of the "Endura" was that it was always to be done by pairs of intimate friends, a detail known by the Nazis (Angebert) which makes sense of Hitler's joint suicide with his new wife Eva Braun. His a
ssociates Karl Haushofer and Göbbels also killed themselves in ceremonial fashion along with their wives. (Angebert)

 

Hitler and Christianity


Not only did Hitler regard Christianity as a defective, failed enterprise, he saw himself as replacing both its God and its Christ. At one of the huge Nuremberg rallies hung a gigantic poster of himself, with the caption stolen from the Christian gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word." German youth were indoctrinated from infancy to pray to Hitler, who they were taught was sent from heaven to protect them. (Sklar) Nazi-approved sermons in German churches proclaimed, "Adolf Hitler is the voice of Jesus Christ." And lest some readers [especially Jews] should conclude from this that Nazi Christians viewed Hitler as the mouthpiece of the New Testament Jesus, the statement is clarified to leave no doubt:

If Jehovah has lost all meaning for us Germans, the same must be said of Jesus Christ, his son.... He [Jesus] certainly lacks those characteristics which he would require to be a true German. Indeed, he is as disappointing, if we read the record carefully, as is his father [the G-d of Israel according to Christian tradition].

 

~What the Christian Does Not Know About Christianity, quoted by Sklar

 

In Hitler's words, Christianity "only added the seeds of decadence such as forgiveness, self=abnegation, weakness, false humility and the very denial of the evolutionary laws of survival of the fittest [social Darwinism]," and would obviously be a handicap to the new species which he was personally commissioned by the "masters" to see properly birthed and nurtured. But Hitler perceptively placed the ultimate blame where it is due:


Conscience is a Jewish invention. It is a blemish, like circumcision.... There is no such thing as truth, either in the moral or in the scientific sense. The new man would be the antithesis of the Jew.

 

Nietzsche likewise considered the Christian Bible nearly worthless because of its Jewish origin:

In Christianity, seen as the art of sacred lying, we're back with Judaism.... The Christian is but a Jew of more liberal persuasion.

 

~Antichrist

Compare with the NA view of how Judaism "defiled" Christianity.

 

In this context, antisemitism was not a starting point for the inner Nazi society as it was for the masses; Jew-hatred was the inevitable result of absorbing these bedrock occult teachings.


The nurture of the new humanity included the need to "encourage the growth of a violent, domineering, intrepid, cruel youth... nothing weak or tender in it." (Angebert, Rauschning quoting Hitler) This reached its climax in SS training, and it corresponded to the Nazi view of "pure" Gnostic, Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, which did not teach compassion and gentleness, but Aryan duty and honor above all (Angebert). [This would seem confirmed by the presence of Tibetan Buddhists in Hitler's Berlin, as well as Bailey's prediction that Buddhism is destined to drop its image of gentle pacifism.]


But there was an obstacle to sweeping away the Jew and raising this cruel new generation, in the person of that "Jew of more liberal persuasion", the Bible-believing Christian. Knowing that Christian Germany would not easily accept an open return to paganism, Nazism attempted to wean the masses from standard Christianity by removing the Jewish-influenced "negative" parts, that is the Old Testament and most of the New Testament, imposing gnostic meanings on key passages, adding colourful pagan legend, and repackaging it in their 1920 platform as "positive Christianity" (Angeberts). [This term is freely used today by many groups, some of them fervent NAers offering the same package to naive Christians, for the same purpose]/


Hitler's vision of returning to "pure" pagan religion was echoed, or more accurately anticipated, by psychoanalyst Carl Jung in 1923: "We [Germans] need new foundations. We must dig down to the primitive in us, for only out of the conflict between civilized man and the Germanic barbarian will there come what we need: a new experience of God." (Sklar) When esotericist Jakov Wilhelm Hauer founded the Nordic Faith movement, Jung urged participation on the part of Germans who were "intelligent enough not only to believe but to know that the god of the Germans is Wotan and not the Christian God." ("Wotan", essay by Jung - emphasis his, quoted by Sklar) The Nazis reciprocated by making Jung President of the German Medical Society for Psychotherapy in 1933, at which time he finally found a forum from which to expound a belief he had held since 1918: the need to distinguish between "German" and "Jewish" psychology. (The Society's Dec. 1933 issue) In his view, such a distinction was not anti-Semitic, it was liberating for both Aryans and Jews. (Sklar) When the Jews were fleeing Nazi Germany in ever-increasing numbers, Jung advised his followers in England to keep up their "negative feelings" about Jews and resist allowing them to participate as colleagues, as he also did. [See further details about Jung in Harvard Professor Richard Noll's books.] As for the destruction being wreaked by the Nazis, Noll notes that Jung viewed them as the necessary precursors to the great "light", those whose task was to destroy to make "rebirth" possible. [Compare with Bailey's assessment below.] It took until 1945 for Jung to finally denounce the Nazi extermination of the Jews, but he never retracted his proposal for a "Germanic, Jew-free psychotherapy". (Sklar)


To remove the "bad seeds" of Christian (that is, Jewish) thinking, Nazi preparation of children for the new humanity would be diligent from cradle to grave, centered around the notion that they were born to die for their god, embodied in their Führer. The education began with revised fairy tales teaching new-humanity principles of heroes struggling and dying to set their race free. Then group membership started at age 10, followed by continuous reinforcement in group settings for the remainder of their lives, "so that they shall in no case suffer a relapse, and they don't feel free again as long as they live," as Hitler bluntly put it. (Sklar) There was non-stop activity which required passive participation, allowing no time for reflection or discussion.


And what did Christian leaders think of Hitler? Although many Christians eventually bought into "positive Christianity", apparently there was enough opposition to necessitate an early purge of that community. Before launching his "final solution", Hitler made an effort to remove all churches and pastors who showed the least resistance to policies already in operation. For example, refusal by a church to sponsor a Hitler Youth chapter was sufficient grounds to close it down. Leaders whose integrity would not yield to political expediency, who could not be discredited by scandal, and who had the potential to influence Christians at large, were imprisoned indefinitely (Dietrich Bonnhöfer for example). Although Hitler did not close down many Catholic churches, especially where local support was strong, he vented his rage on Pope Pius XI, who had issued an encyclical condemning him as "a prophet of nothingness". ("Mit Brennender Sorge", March 14, 1937, translation posted by Paul Halsall of Fordham University) The Nazi government lodged a harsh protest with the Vatican shortly afterward (April 12, 1937 - see Georg May, Kirchenkampf oder Katholikenverfolgung). [I would suspect that the most damaging statements in "Mit Brennender Sorge" for the Nazis were those which exposed their "religious war" against the legacy of Judaism found in Christianity. Pius XI flatly equated Nazism with "aggressive paganism", condemned the removal of the Old Testament from churches and schools as an act of someone who "blasphemes the name of God", and reaffirmed the Jewish Bible as "sacred books" which "record the story of the chosen people, bearers of the Revelation and the Promise". The Catholic leader summarily rejected the anti-Jewish dogmas of "race and blood [and] the irradiations of a people's history" as "false coins [which] do not deserve Christian currency".


Hitler and the Popes


Piux XI and his successor Pius XII have long been subjects of controversy for their publicly ambivalent statements regarding the Jewish genocide taking place in their times. However, in the eyes of the Third Reich, Pius XI had already gone too far with his encyclical, and Nazi General Ludendorff was convinced that Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, then the Vatican Secretary of State and soon-to-be Pope Pius XII, was behind the wording of this document and "behind all the anti-German activities of Rome's policy". (Pinchas Lapide, Three Popes and the Jew) When Pius XII came to power in 1939, he appeared to adopt a more diplomatic tone, making his position much harder to identify. Yet the so-called "Silent Pope" came under attack in Nazi political cartoons published in Der Stürmer, which showed the pontiff kissing rabbis. (reported to me by German researcher Robert Jesolowitz, who has them on file)


[It is not my aim here to evaluate whether Pius XII did or did not do enough to oppose the Holocaust. There are many published papers which come to conflicting conclusions, but the prevailing opinion today is that Pius XII failed abysmally by remaining silent in the face of Nazi genocide. For open-minded readers, I recommend a documented rebuttal from the Catholic side, which ironically relies on the research of several Jewish scholars, especially Israeli historian Pinchas Lapide. My goal here, however, is to show the disproportionate Nazi response to what Pius XII did say, and to suggest motives for it.]


In what most historians consider a vague protest, Pius XII referred to "those hundreds of thousands who, without any fault of their own, sometimes only by reason of their nationality or race, are marked for death or progressive extinction" (Christmas Message 1942). Vague or not, his message was received loud and clear by the Nazi leadership. Himmler's deputy Reinhard Heydrich responded with: "The Pope has repudiated the National Socialist New European Order... He is virtually accusing the German people of injustice toward the Jews and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals." (quoted by Lapide) In Italy, the editor of Regime Fascista wrote:

The Church's obstruction of the practical solution of the Jewish problem constitutes a crime against the New Europe."

~Michael Schwartz, The Persistent Prejudice: Anti-Catholicism in America

[Besides the obvious Nazi assumption that Catholics were heeding a covert call from the Pope for resistance, note the familiar phrase "New European Order", its only difference being on a regional scale rather than today's global goal.]


[It can be - and usually is - argued that Pius XII did not do enough, given his vast resources and global influence. On the other hand, Lapide shows that he did substantially more than other leaders who were not caught in Hitler's hammer-lock, and certainly more than the U.S. government which turned away Jewish refugees even though immigration quotas left room for over one million between 1933 and 1943. (Documentation of American inaction bordering on the criminal is available in While Six Million Died, by Arthur D. Morse.) This sense of perspective is often lost by over-reliance on the 1963 German drama, Der Stellvertreter (performed as "The Deputy" in London that same year), which repeats Heydrich's charge of "war criminal", only this time presenting the Pope as an accomplice for the Nazi side by his "silence". Aside from the fact that the charge itself is debatable, I have yet to see anyone portray then-President Roosevelt as a similar "war criminal" for his refusal to get involved at a much lower risk.]


[Four points about The Deputy which reflect on the NA-Nazi connection: (1) This play focusing on Pius XII to the exclusion of many other silent "Deputies" was introduced by playright Rolf Hochhuth as a "fantasy", yet it has come to be regarded by many as a definitive "work" on the Holocaust Pope. In sharp contrast, many students of the Holocaust have never heard of Pinchas Lapide's assessment of Pius XII, based not on fantasy but on solid research. (2) This belated initiative to elevate Pius to "war criminal" status did not come from the Jewish community but from post-Nazi Germany, where no small number of unrepentant war criminals were able to continue their lives - and their occultic beliefs. (3) The Deputy was strongly criticized by Lapide, who said that world Jewry did not endorse this view of Holocaust history. For some reason, few Jews are aware of this disclaimer, let alone in agreement with Lapide. Point (2) conveniently serves the NA divide-and-conquer strategy toward Jewish-Christian relations, manipulating this painful history of the Church failing the Jews while covering up their own designs against both groups. Points (1) and (3) show the unapologetic history revision commonly seen in the New Age framework - not merely a retroactive application of create-your-own-reality, but disinformation with an agenda.]


[But here is a Point (4), which is perhaps the most telling: One of the earliest records of Pius XII denouncing the Nazi movement dates back to April 1935, when Pacelli was still a Cardinal: "These ideologues are in fact only miserable plagiarizers who dress up ancient error in new tinsel." (address at Lourdes to 250,000 pilgrims) By recognizing the return of the "ancient error" which the Church had repeatedly battled in the past - occultic Gnosticism - this pope declared himself a formidable enemy in the arena most important to the Nazis: the ancient cosmic-religious War of Light against Darkness. I would submit that his evident knowledge of the occult roots of Nazism disturbed Hitler and his fellow-initiates far more than anything Pius did later, for they were in the process of burying all such traces [see below]. The yet-stronger statements in "Mit Brennender Sorge" two years later probably intensified Nazi fears that their cover was about to be blown. This is the best explanation for the hysterical tirades reportedly directed personally at Pacelli by Hitler, and even a plot in 1940 to kidnap him. The threat from this pope did not end with the Third Reich, because the real "War" was - and is - still in progress. On the contrary, Pius XII was so highly esteemed that at his death (1958), Israel's Foreign Minister Golda Meir eulogized him in the name of the Jewish State, and the Israeli public called for a forest of 860,000 trees to be planted in honour of the estimated number of Jews saved by this Righteous Gentile. Surviving Nazi guardians of the Gnosis must have realized that Pacelli's continuing influence on the Jewish people could do great damage to the future of the Plan if they ever came to comprehend his analysis of Nazism. This is the only reasonable explanation for the total reversal of his reputation within five short years, after unknown parties financed and heavily promoted the reconstructed pseudo-history of Pius XII on the stages of Europe. The ploy succeeded: today, not many Jews are interested in anything this Nazi "deputy" had to say.]

 

Hitler and the Mufti


And what about Islam, the third monotheistic religion? While Hitler ranted against Christianity and Judaism, expressing "a violent feeling of anger at the idea that some Germans were able to be taken in by theological doctrines devoid of any depth," he contrasted these hated teachings with "those of Confucius, of Buddha and of Mohammed" which provided spiritual "sustenance". (Angeberts) In this context, Hitler's friendship with Haj Amin al Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem - which included asylum in 1941, the honorary rank of SS Major and an acceptable racial "genealogy" - can be understood as more a sign of respect than political expedience. There were even cases of Nazis relocating to Arab countries and converting to Islam. In this opinion, Hitler had the backing of the Thule Society, whose founder Sebottendorf praised Islam for having a "vitality greater than that of Christianity" which flowed "from a torrent which nourished everything" - that same "thread of lost knowledge" which was the goal of the Nazi quest. (Angeberts) [This raises other ideas for why Hitler's Mein Kampf is so popular among some Moslems; besides the expected political admiration for brute force, there may also be a consensus of spiritual worldviews.]



The Nazi Mentality - Group Mind


The Nazi goal was group-think, or the eradication of private conviction and dissent. As stated above, the "burden" of free choice and decision-making could be entrusted only to the few with the enlightenment and courage to implement the new age without flinching. For the masses, it was enough that they submit to the leadership, which would weld them into one entity through a common psychic experience. [Today this would be called a guided group "light experience", practiced by most NA channelers on their followers.

[Eerily, this group-think is the stated goal and the practical outcome of the UN-sponsored World Core Curriculum, as well as the American OBE (Outcome Based Education) which incorporates the WCC into US public schools. Alice Bailey disciple Robert Muller, author of the WCC, presents planetary group-think as the proper goal for all enlightened individuals. The first principle of the WCC Manual clearly states that "the group idea, group good and group understanding" are to "replace all limited, self-centred objectives, leading to group consciousness". The UN Global Governance Commission goes farther, branding "some assertions of particular identities" as nothing less than "intolerance", a cardinal sin in the New Age. (See the massive report by the Commission on Global Governance, "Our Global Neighbourhood", and search for the "Core Value" of "mutual respect".) Obviously, someone at the top will have to bear the "burden" of dictating the parameters for group-think. Yet the question of who will wield this immense power over the rest of mankind, and whether they might abuse it, is never brought up - seemingly not worth troubling ourselves about. The New Age global forum known as "Planetary Initiative for the World We Choose" is an example of those who have donned the mantle of choice for the group, as is the "State of the World Forum", but as usual the question is never answered how the "We" who "choose" were themselves chosen.]


Hitler's contention that free will is a burden to the masses was confirmed by the popular reaction. Said one young Nazi to the press in the glory days of the Reich: "We Germans are so happy - we are free of freedom." (Sklar) For many, it was a relief not to be saddled with personal convictions and responsibility for what was happening, as a perceptive professor reflected after the war: "I suppose we were grateful. Who wants to think?" (see They Thought They Were Free, Milton Mayer)


On the other hand, cultivation of personal will and initiative is a noble duty incumbent on the high-level occult initiate destined to lead the pliant, group-conscious new humanity. Hitler was obsessed with the potential of the human will. So was Helena Blavatsky: "...that mysterious and divine power latent in the will of every man, and which, if not called to life, quickened and developed by Yogi training, remains dormant in 999.999 men out of a million." (Sklar) It was likely this fascination which lay behind the title of that definitive Nazi propaganda piece in 1934, The Triumph of the Will. [The reader will remember that "Will" is not a mere human effort but is deified in NA as an attribute of Sanat Kumara.] A German youth interviewed by a French writer in 1937 explained the Nazi triumph of will not in militaristic but in gnostic terms: "I am studying the conception of the world.... We refuse to think and to be; we refuse to stand by helplessly under the determinism of the so-called laws of matter. What we want is inside, an inner structure.... We shall not let anyone stop us from building before God and before men that which must be built!" The writer then remarked on the similarity of Nazi sentiment to the (as he thought) extinct French Templar philosophy. (Alphonse de Chateaubriant, quoted in Angeberts)


New Age Leaders Commenting on the Nazi Experiment


And what is the opinion in the NA community to this infamous historical figure who so closely resembles them? Ambiguous, to say the least. When pressed to comment publicly about Nazism, most will say the politically correct thing and applaud the fact that "the monster" Hitler failed. [It takes a bit of sleuthing to find out what they say to one another.]


New Age references to Hitler are sometimes veiled in positive generalities. Examples are Alice's husband Foster Bailey, and David Spangler, a Findhorn leader (a NA community in Scotland where the goat-god Pan is worshiped). F. Bailey tactfully does not name Hitler but describes a disciple who tried to put the Plan of the New Age gods into action "on a regional scale in the Rhine River valley" (Running God's Plan). Spangler, dedicated to "anchor the Plan on earth" by establishing other NA communities like Findhorn, distances the New Age Aryans from Nazi Aryans only in that the "blond, blue-eyed Germanic race which Hitler spoke of" was unnecessarily narrow - the Aryans "are actually a more wide-ranging and ancient super-race". (quoted by Constance Cumbey, Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow) As an avowed disciple of Bailey and Blavatsky, he can be assumed to hold the same views about need to safeguard the "purity" of the Aryan race.


Then there is the schizoid response to Hitler - condemning his brutality while justifying his philosophical premises. This describes Alice Bailey (The Externalisation of the Hierarchy II), who called Nazism a "peculiarly distorted blend of Fascism and Communism", yet included it in "the great world ideologies" birthed by the "Shamballa force" (a flow of energy from the Hierarchy directed at the world). Says Alice, "The objective [of the Hierarchy] was to stimulate the free will of the masses; the result upon them has been relatively good." And what prompted the "masters" to trigger these beneficial ideologies, including Nazism? "It was the acuteness of the situation and the wide extent of the cleavage." Which cleavage is that? "The cleavage between the two groups... the forces of materialism and... the energy of light." The forces of materialism are known to Bailey as the "Dark Forces", which "work to preserve that which is ancient and material... and feed... separateness." The Jews' insistence on retaining their chosen-people identity "made it possible for the forces of separativeness and hate to use the Jewish race"; therefore, the Jews are the tools of the Dark Forces. (Externalisation II) Here it took a bit of effort to piece the picture together, but later Bailey is more outspoken: "Hitler, who lifted a distressed people upon his shoulders; Lenin, the idealist; Stalin and Franco are all expressions of the Shamballa force and of certain little-understood energies.... We call these people dictators, demagogues.... But all these leaders are... being used to engineer great and needed changes and to alter the face of civilisation." (Externalisation II) So then, according to this channeler whose teaching is energetically promoted by the UN, Hitler was empowered by the Hierarchy to continue the ancient and honorable War against Darkness, personified by the Jews -- precisely what Hitler himself claimed.

It is no wonder, then, to find New Age factions which openly applaud the Third Reich. Savitri Devi Mukherjee, a French convert to Hinduism who became an influential mystical leader in the West, firmly believed that Hitler was an "avatar" (divine manifestation), a being in natural harmony with the Hindu tradition. She considered him the embodiment of twin mystical light sources, "the sun and the lightning." [See Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth and Neo-Nazism, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke] Devi's book about her human idol (The Lightning and the Sun) bears the dedication: "To the god-like Individual of our times; the Man against Time; the greatest European of all times; both Sun and Lightning: ADOLF HITLER, as a tribute of unfailing love and loyalty, for ever and ever." [capitals in original. It is likely that the tribute, "the Man against Time", referred to Hitler's reversal of the Swastika's direction from the Hindu orientation which symbolized harmonic movement with the sun, to the opposite direction, that is, against time.] Devi, now deceased, still has a following in India, known as the "Hindutva" movement.


Naturally, Devi's book is heavily promoted by neo-Nazis such as Canadian Ernst Zündel, as are her tapes, "for serious students of the occult". Zündel himself follows the time-honoured Nazi obsession with occult and psychic phenomena, particularly UFOs. Another major neo-Nazi centre in New Zealand offers a book catalogue which contains as many titles on the occult as on politics - dealing with runes, Atlantis, Norse religion, magicians, and Hitler-as-god.


The best personal example of neo-Nazi ideology merged with NA thought is David Icke, former BBC commentator turned Green Party activist and "son of the godhead" guru, whose seminars are crowded with NAers and neo-Nazis alike. Likewise the British magazine Rainbow Ark and the Australian periodical Nexus, which Icke recommends to his followers. (For a good overview of Icke, see "From Green Messiah to New Age Nazi", Left Green Perspectives, Jan. 1996.) [Note the quotes by Icke, many of which are almost verbatim Bailey teachings.] Also worthy of mention is the "New Acropolis", ostensibly a NA philosophy club to outsiders, but a Fascist group known by insiders to be imitating the Third Reich.


Reasons for Hitler's failure to usher in the new humanity are given by various NA sources: he was premature; he did not coordinate with the "Hierarchy" but tried to build a rival power base [see below for confirmation]; his vision for mankind wasn't global enough; he was blocked by the "old order". If any of Hitler's NA critics detected any weakness in him toward the Christianity which they are working to eliminate, they have yet to mention it.

[Here it's appropriate to speculate why prominent New Agers in recent decades have refused to follow the Baileys (and by implication the spirit guide "DK") in rationalizing the Nazi war on the Jews. On the contrary, many are hard at work to perpetuate the memory of Nazi brutality in the Holocaust, even emphasizing their savage treatment of the Jews. There are two possible explanations: (1) The high-profile NAers are not necessarily high-ranking NAers, particularly in the entertainment industry - they may be uninformed about the NA doctrines of human evolution and Jewish karma, and honestly believe that New Age thought could never sanction Nazi anti-Semitism. (2) High-ranking NAers, who know the true roots of Nazism, are promoting the evil of the Nazi-brand Final Solution in order to more effectively contrast the benevolence of their own Solution - something like the "good cop / bad cop" strategy where two interrogators pretend to be on opposite sides to manipulate the suspect into trusting the "good guy" to protect him from the "bad guy". Or call it reverse camouflage: next to pitch black, grey can look fairly white.]


The "Missing" Link: The Thule Society

The same year Hitler had his New Age revelation, Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorf, an avid fan of Helena Blavatsky, founded the "Thule Society", a spiritist group which borrowed heavily from HPB's The Secret Doctrine. Thule in occultic, Greek and Viking lore was the capital of an ancient ice-island called Hyperborea (known in Hindu legend as the "White Isle"), inhabited by superhumans with psychic powers who eventually founded the Aryan race. After an unexplained disaster, survivors of Hyperborea took refuge first in the "West" [meaning west of India, perhaps Babylon?], then in the Gobi desert, and later in Tibet; their spirit mentors retreated to a hidden spiritual center called "Asgard" (variously located in space or in a subterranean city). [Fans of the TV series "Stargate" will recognize this as the name of the benevolent alien race which offers hidden knowledge to the SG-1 team in times of need.] In Scandinavian myth, Asgard was the abode of the gods, connected with earth by a rainbow bridge. (Angebert) These beings, headed by one known in Hindu/Buddhist tradition as "the Lama of lamas" or "King of the world", can only be contacted on the spiritual plane. The symbol of this "Master" is the swastika, "symbol of the central power of the gem of Heaven". (Angeberts, p.96, quoting J. Marques-Riviere, In the Shadow of the Tibetan Monastaries) [Note the similarity to the NA history of the "White Lodge" retiring to "Shamballa". I would also guess that the "gem of Heaven" is a symbolic reference to Lucifer's stone, or the Grail.] The Thule mythology was apparently embraced long before the Thulists by Nietzsche, who began his final work, Antichrist, with the words: "Let us see ourselves for what we are. We are Hyperboreans." (Angebert)


The goal of Thule members was to break the barrier of the "small self" - consisting of physical reality and (upon promotion to their inner circle) moral constraints - so as to merge with the "divine self" in the unseen spirit realm. (Sklar) That in turn allowed the initiate to reach the "universal energy fields" (Carr) which would "awaken the sleeping powers within" and access superhuman psychic abilities which had once belonged to the proud Aryan race. Attainment to this new level would lead to their thousand-year mastery over the earth. Thulist powers were embodied in pagan deities, specifically Woden/Woton; their symbols were the swastika (an ancient "rune" symbolizing the sun, the moving wheel of life and the process of transmutation) and the red eagle (which Sebottendorf defined as the symbol of the death-to-life experience - Sklar). Thule discipline required blind, unquestioning obedience to the enlightened master in whatever he may ask, which would create conditions for personal transformation. (Sklar) Sebottendorf called this the "Führerprinzip" ("the Führer principle"), and he concocted a formal response by which to salute such a god-man: "Sieg, Heil!" ("Glory, Hail!") (Sklar) Thule initiates fervently awaited someone worthy of that title to whom they could submit. When Hitler joined the Society, Thule member Dietrich Eckart prophesied that the day had come; he began introducing him in Munich occult circles as "the long-awaited saviour". To Alfred Rosenberg he said: "I believe in Hitler; above him there hovers a star." (Sklar) Eckart was following his own mission revealed to him in a séance: that when "Lord Maitreya" [none other!] would soon make his appearance as a German messiah to "lead the Aryan race to final victory over the Jews", he, Eckart, was charged with the responsibility of "nurturing" him. (Carr)


The Thule Society considered the Jew ("Juda") their cosmic enemy. As early as 1920, Sebottendorf advocated a "Final Goal" of "cleaning out the Jews once and for all", using "the most ruthless measures, including Sammellager [concentration camps] and sweeping out the Jewish vermin with an iron broom." (Sklar) [Readers will recognize the same terms made infamous by later Nazi propaganda.]


Thule did not stop with a war of words, however. Society members were implicated in the assassination of then-President of Bavaria, a Jew named Kurt Eisner. When police arrived to arrest suspects, Sebottendorf threatened to ignite an anti-Jewish pogrom. Whether due to expedience or to Thule's wealthy backers, law-enforcers backed down. (Sklar) One year later (1919), the Thule Society established a political arm, the NSDAP, an acronym for the rather cumbersome name later shortened to the "Nazi" party. Sebottendorf wanted the new party run by his "Führer principle", but he was overruled in favor of elected leaders. Shortly thereafter, Thule absorbed several beleaguered occult groups such as the Germanen Orden. Interestingly, Sebottendorf attacked certain kindred groups, specifically Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophists and the Freemasons - denouncing the former as a corrupted version of the truth, and the latter as Jew-ridden. [Since there was little actual difference in doctrine, the likely motive was either to discredit Thule's closest occult competitors, or to eliminate those considered too "weak", that is, too compassionate to carry out the necessary purge for the new humanity. Hitler later adopted the same strategy - see below.] Thule also joined forces with the "Free Corp", a paramilitary group comprised of demobilized soldiers who knew no other life. When the Thule Society finally disbanded, the NSDAP and Free Corp (by now known as the Storm Troopers) continued, marching under the Thule sign of the swastika. 

Why would Nazis attack fellow-occultists?  

According to research (see Adolf Hitler, The Occult Messiah, Gerald Suster), Hitler was devoted to Theosophy and kept a copy of Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine by his bedside. Yet from the 1920s, his thugs ruthlessly attacked and killed adherents of Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Freemasons and others who shared the same occult doctrines. He banned their groups from the Third Reich, and publicly denounced occultists Rudolf Steiner and Aleister Crowley. He ignored astrologers, séance mediums, fortune tellers and similar groups, until 1942 when they also were banned. This has led historians to assume that Hitler was simply anti-occult, a conclusion that fails to explain all the evidence to the contrary.

The Nazi relationship to the Thule Society in particular begs for an explanation. By 1933, when occultist Sebottendorf sought to revive Thule, he found himself roundly rejected by the Nazi party he had nurtured. He retaliated by writing a book, Bevor Hitler Kam (Before Hitler Came), claiming credit for Thule's role in launching Hitler into leadership. The book was apparently popular and sold well, until the Nazis confiscated all available copies and sent the author into enforced retirement. Thus Nazi origins in the occultic Thule Society, as well as Nazi plagiarism of many Theosophical and Thule terms, were buried; to this day they remain relatively unknown to many students of the Holocaust.

One explanation is camouflage. Hitler seemed determined to keep his occult roots hidden from the general public; the groups and individuals he targeted for early elimination were those who knew of those roots and who might expose him (thereby challenging his control of the "Plan"). This would explain why the Nazis burned every available copy of Sebottendorf's book which proclaimed those roots, and why Rudolf Hess's defection to the West in 1941 prompted Hitler to outlaw all remaining occultists in the Third Reich, such as astrologers, mediums and even parlour magicians. (Carr)

Such actions can be also be understood as attempts to eliminate competition. Hitler recognized occultic power in each of the banned groups which could compete with his own occult enterprise, and eliminated them from the field. He considered Steiner a particular threat, making him the first target. [According to Angebert, Steiner was an avowed practitioner of "white magic" who viewed Hitler as a tool of "black magic" . Since they both believed they manipulated the same Force, this equality would have suggested to Steiner the possibility of thwarting Hitler, a direct threat which Hitler in turn would have recognized.] This would make sense of the fact that he confiscated (rather than burned) all the books of the outlawed groups, and is the only explanation for his treatment of the Thule founder to whom he owed so much. Heinrich Himmler confirmed this when he defended the official Nazi policy banning astrology:

We cannot permit any astrologers to follow their calling except those who are working for us.

~SS astrologer William Wulff, Zodiac and Swastika, quoted by Sklar

While Himmler fell back on the traditional esoteric rationale, "It is not for the broad masses", who would misinterpret the occult secrets, the fact that recognized adepts were also disenfranchised betrays more of an attempt to clear the field.


Hitler did make one exception, however; his 1942 law banning secret societies and confiscating their assets specifically exempted the "old Prussian" Freemason lodges, otherwise known as the Bavarian Illuminati. This group followed the Nazi racial purity ideal far more closely than the "humanitarian Freemasonry" (as  Angebert distinguishes the different streams), and in fact the Bavarian sect shared Hitler's disdain for the other branches of Freemasons, not to mention for the Jews as well. [This would imply another reason why Steiner and the Freemasons, as "humanitarian" strains of occultism, were ruthlessly attacked by both Thulists and Nazis: they were considered too compassionate to do what was needed to usher in the New Age.]

Gnostic-Nazi-New Age Convergence

The one esoteric legend in particular which captivated the Nazis was the Quest for the Holy Grail. While popular mythology presents the Grail as the cup Jesus Christ used at his last supper, occult groups dismiss this materialistic interpretation as a "blind" to preserve for initiates the Grail's true meaning: the quest for the divine bloodline or racial purity (See Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh & Henry Lincoln), which would bring with it super mortal Knowledge and immortality. Alternately, the Grail was defined in Gnostic symbolic style as the "philosopher's stone", the "third eye" or the spiritual "crown" of Lucifer which fell from his forehead when he lost his place in heaven (Angebert). In real terms, that "seeing eye" is the Knowledge of self-as-god which Lucifer exhibited, and which he offered mankind in the Garden of Eden. Hitler saw in Wagner's Parsifal a detailed parable of the Nazi calling as "a religious brotherhood of Templars to guard the Holy Grail, the august vessel containing the pure blood". (Hitler to Rauschning, quoted in Angebert) The Grail defined here as the "vessel" refers to the racially pure body which holds the blood that can absorb god-knowledge. The racially inherited god-consciousness idea appears in the Gnostic teaching of a divine lineage descended from Jesus Christ (not a Jew but a Gnostic initiate) who didn't actually die on the cross, and who achieved a singular level of Aryan racial purity and corresponding god-consciousness (his Jewish identity was dismissed as an Oriental fiction). In search of this holy blood which contains the coveted god-knowledge, every member of the SS was screened for purity of Aryan lineage, and was taught his duty to father as many racially pure children as possible. Himmler believed that if conception took place in an Aryan cemetery, the resulting child would receive the spirit of "all the dead heroes" buried there; accordingly, lists of Nordic cemeteries were published in the SS periodical Das Schwarze Korps. (Sklar)

Gnosticism had another, lesser-known influence on Nazi religion, which also appears in New Age thought: the Jewish God (as they mispronounce it, "Jehovah") is not the Most High and only God, but a "demiurge" pretending to be such. Blavatsky agreed that the Gnostics "were right in regarding the Jewish God as belonging to a class of lower, material and not very holy denizens of the invisible world." (quoted in Sklar) (For more evidence on the Gnostic roots of New Age, see Stephan Hoeller's The Hermetic-Gnostic Roots of Theosophy, sold on tape by the Theological Society.) In Blavatsky's understanding, "only angels of a low hierarchy" could have created "those wretched races, in a spiritual and moral sense, which grace our globe." [Not shy about contradicting herself, Blavatsky also identified the Jewish God as Cain, son of Eve by Satan.] The "moral wretchedness" referred to is Jewish enjoyment of everyday life (everything from meals to sex) and their continual thanksgiving for every material blessing. This attitude was feared and hated by the Gnostics, who considered the body and the physical world a prison which the mind must reject and transcend through meditation and magical rites, and escape to the "real" or spiritual world. The "spiritual wretchedness" is the Jewish "Old Testament", rejected by Gnostics as evil, which teaches that the Creator of heaven and earth is the Most High God. Since materialism is evil, and "Jehovah" created the physical world, He must be evil as well: not merely a usurper of the title "God", but in fact Satan. [For more details, see the "Gods" section.] The Jews who persist in spreading their teachings (in their Bible) are the tools of Satan, and their influence in the world is deadly to human souls. Hitler reiterated this Gnostic doctrine: "The Jew is the anti-man, the creature of another god. He must have come from another root of the human race." (Sklar) [compare with Bailey's similar assessment] Hitler was also known for his severely simple lifestyle, voluntarily shunning material pleasures, physical appetites and a meat diet - all classic Gnostic elements of "purification from the world".

The NA cosmology placing the Jews in alliance with cosmic Evil neatly reinforced the Nazi pursuit of racial purity: not only was the Aryan race threatened with defilement on a genetic level, but on a spiritual level as well. Both NA and Nazism clearly borrowed from the Zoroastrian teaching (originating in Persia in the 6th c. BCE and experiencing a comeback through NA endorsement) and the Cathari, both of whom taught that Moses was an evil magician who received his law from "the god of Darkness", and that this "Devil caused the Deluge". (Angebert) The Gnostic themes of the Grail quest and the cosmic struggle between Light and Darkness were portrayed in Richard Wagner's Parsifal, a favorite opera of Hitler. Being an occult initiate, Hitler was aware of the Gnostic message behind "the absurd externals of the story [Parsifal], with its Christian embroidery... [the real message was] pure, noble blood, in [whose] protection and glorification the brotherhood of the initiated have come together." (Sklar) Gnosticism also clarifies some otherwise unintelligible proclamations, like those by Nazi apologist Alfred Rosenberg: "The earth-centred Jew lacks a soul"; and "[The continuing existence of the Jew] would lead to a void, to the destruction not only of the illusory earthly world but also of the truly existent, the spiritual." These statements, and also his insistence that "The denial of the world needs... to grow so that it will acquire a lasting predominance over affirmation of the world," (Sklar) only makes sense to a Gnostic. [The Theosophy studied by Rosenberg as a Thulist was his likely source - see similar statements.]

Other New-Age Threads Preserved in Nazism

Reichs Gnosticism had another, lesser-known influence on Nazi religion, which also appears in New Age thought: the Jewish God (as they mispronounce it, "Jehovah") is not the Most High and only God, but a "demiurge" pretending to be such. Blavatsky agreed that the Gnostics "were right in regarding the Jewish God as belonging to a class of lower, material and not very holy denizens of the invisible world." (quoted in Sklar) (For more evidence on the gnostic roots of New Age, see Stephan Hoeller's The Hermetic-Gnostic Roots of Theosophy, sold on tape by the Theological Society.) In Blavatsky's understanding, "only angels of a low hierarchy" could have created "those wretched races, in a spiritual and moral sense, which grace our globe." [Not shy about contradicting herself, Blavatsky also identified the Jewish God as Cain, son of Eve by Satan.] The "moral wretchedness" referred to is Jewish enjoyment of everyday life (everything from meals to sex) and their continual thanksgiving for every material blessing. This attitude was feared and hated by the gnostics, who considered the body and the physical world a prison which the mind must reject and transcend through meditation and magical rites, and escape to the "real" or spiritual world. The "spiritual wretchedness" is the Jewish "Old Testament", rejected by gnostics as evil, which teaches that the Creator of heaven and earth is the Most High God. Since materialism is evil, and "Jehovah" created the physical world, He must be evil as well: not merely a usurper of the title "God", but in fact Satan. The Jews who persist in spreading their teachings (in their Bible) are the tools of Satan, and their influence in the world is deadly to human souls. Hitler reiterated this gnostic doctrine: "The Jew is the anti-man, the creature of another god. He must have come from another root of the human race." (Sklar) [compare with Bailey's similar assessment] Hitler was also known for his severely simple lifestyle, voluntarily shunning material pleasures, physical appetites and a meat diet - all classic Gnostic elements of "purification from the world".

The NA cosmology placing the Jews in alliance with cosmic Evil neatly reinforced the Nazi pursuit of racial purity: not only was the Aryan race threatened with defilement on a genetic level, but on a spiritual level as well. Both NA and Nazism clearly borrowed from the Zoroastrian teaching (originating in Persia in the 6th c. BCE and experiencing a comeback through NA endorsement) and the Cathari, both of whom taught that Moses was an evil magician who received his law from "the god of Darkness", and that this "Devil caused the Deluge". (Angebert) The gnostic themes of the Grail quest and the cosmic struggle between Light and Darkness were portrayed in Richard Wagner's Parsifal, a favorite opera of Hitler. Being an occult initiate, Hitler was aware of the gnostic message behind "the absurd externals of the story [Parsifal], with its Christian embroidery... [the real message was] pure, noble blood, in [whose] protection and glorification the brotherhood of the initiated have come together." (Sklar) Gnosticism also clarifies some otherwise unintelligible proclamations, like those by Nazi apologist Alfred Rosenberg: "The earth-centered Jew lacks a soul"; and "[The continuing existence of the Jew] would lead to a void, to the destruction not only of the illusory earthly world but also of the truly existent, the spiritual." These statements, and also his insistence that "The denial of the world needs... to grow so that it will acquire a lasting predominance over affirmation of the world," (Sklar) only makes sense to a Gnostic. [The Theosophy studied by Rosenberg as a Thulist was his likely source - see similar statements.]

Other New-Age Threads Preserved in Nazism

Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler first entered the Thule Society orbit as a fighter in the Free Corp, by which time he was already a devoted occultist. He was especially fascinated with reincarnation and karma (individual and racial); he became convinced that he was the reincarnation of King Heinrich I the Fowler (10th c), who spoke to him in his sleep. (Sklar) He was similarly obsessed with legends of the medieval order of Teutonic knights (a secret brotherhood which required Germanic racial purity for eight generations), the meaning of ancient Nordic runes, the Hindu/Buddhist idea of sacrificial detachment from the consequences of daily life, and the precepts of the Kautilya Arthasastra, a cynical, amoral Hindu philosophy utilizing deceit. (Sklar) When he was given command of the SS, he moulded his Black Guards after a combination of all these. He required his officers to read the mystical research of SS Colonel and Ahnenerbe member Otto Rahn: Crusade Against the Grail (1933) and Lucifer's Court in Europe (1936). [Both are available in German and French only, far as I know.] Himmler's nickname, the "Black Jesuit", stems from his slavish imitation of the (equally secretive) brotherhood of Jesuit priests, whose literature he avidly studied (Sklar citing Nuremberg Trials witness Walter Schellenberg). He made use of the time-honoured Jesuit practice of "spiritual Exercises" - intensive visualization to create personal and group reality. (Sklar) [The explanation that visualization is not a powerful, time-honoured occult manipulation of others, but merely a new psychological self-help exercise, is promoted only to deceive the few who still have scruples against occult practices.]

Himmler, like his Thule fellows and like most NAers today, denied the existence of objective reality. Not surprisingly, he went on to advocate "freeing" science to pursue research unhampered by notions of provable truth - especially science dealing with ancient origins. [Leading evolutionists are only recently beginning to admit that their research is similarly "free" of objectivity, even proposing that Darwinism might be better classified as philosophy or myth than as science] This attitude was shared by the Nazi leadership, and led their rejection of valid astronomy and physics in favour of occult-based pseudo-theories such as the "doctrine of eternal cosmic ice" concocted by Hans Hörbiger, a mechanical engineer. It was Dietrich Eckart who introduced his protégé Hitler to Hörbiger's work, and its similarity to Thule mythology on new ages birthed from ice was immediately recognized. Hörbiger himself declared war on "objective science" as "a pernicious invention" (Angebert), advocated substituting the "uselessness" of mathematics with a mystical "knowing" of the universe, and targeted Albert Einstein as an archenemy (emphasizing the latter's Jewish origin no less than his pernicious scientific work). Hörbiger's cause was taken up by the Hitler Youth, and later by the SS Ahnenerbe, and Storm Troopers became fanatic supporters who disrupted meetings of conventional astronomers with shouts and threats. (Sklar) It was Hörbigerian weather forecasting (continuing after his death in 1931) that fixed 1941 as a mild winter, convinced the Nazis to leave behind heavy winter gear for the invasion of Russia, and sent them into a record-breaking cold front which marked a turning point in the war. Even after the disaster, no one admitted the bankruptcy of Hörbiger's theory. (Amazingly, works praising his theories continued to be published as late as 1952 - see Angebert.  On the contrary, Hitler blamed the German people for the defeat in Russia:

The nation has proved itself weak, and the future belongs solely to the stronger eastern nation. Besides, those who remain after the battle are of little value; for the good have fallen.

~
Sklar

[This follows the pattern of the "ascended masters" themselves, who invariably blame their devoted servants when things go wrong.]

True to Hitler's vow, "We shall wash off the Christian veneer and bring out a religion peculiar to our race" (Sklar), SS soldiers underwent occult initiations and ceremonies, to replace their Christian faith and names with ancient Germanic names and worship rites (Hitler being their incarnate deity), and to harness latent spiritual forces believed to reside in the Aryan psyche. (Sklar) [This was not an abrupt change, since these SS candidates had grown up in 1920s Germany, where the occult, psychic phenomena and paganism were quite trendy. Presumably their parents, school teachers, civic leaders and other role models had already contributed to the next generation's conditioning by their own immersion in Eastern mysticism and spiritism. The implications for today's youth, who are being raised on an even more potent and invasive brew of the same, are unmistakable.] Secrecy, a total dedication that erased all other loyalties, unquestioning obedience, isolation from 'common society', a sense of self-sacrifice, a place in an exalted and ancient line of "guardians" [as the black-cloaked, Force-wielding Jedi Knights were described in "Star Wars"], and a strict observance of hierarchal status were the methods of fostering unity - all of them borrowed from occult societies.

But under it all, the abject fear was instilled in SS men of being found unworthy of their exalted status, especially through the sin of independent thinking. The group-think to which they had been subjected since early childhood sank to new depths to minimize the chances of such a mishap. A required achievement for SS candidates was Kadavergehorsam, or "dead-body [unfeeling, robotic] obedience". In merciless drills, they were trained to disregard their own emotions and consciences by performing acts of brutality on self and others usually associated with satanic cult rituals. (See descriptions in Sklar) (Such practices in Satanism are meant to produce an altered state of consciousness and, as they believe, to channel the natural horror response into psychic energy which empowers spells.) In the resulting numbness, they could carry out the most horrific orders without thinking, and walk among sickening sights without flinching. Himmler firmly believed in the holiness of this ultimate devotion, in which the SS suffered and sacrificed more than their victims. For him, the unsung "glory" of the SS was "to have stuck it out... and to have remained decent fellows." As for Himmler himself:

I try to reach a compromise in my own life; I try to help people and do good, relieve the oppressed and remove injustices wherever I can. Do you think my heart is in all the things which have to be done simply from reasons of state?

The extreme sacrifices of the SS, he said, were required in part by German racial Karma; an individual "oughtn't to think of himself". (Sklar) [Undoubtedly, many NAers will view themselves in precisely the same light when they are required to take part in necessary future purges. The view is already prevalent in NA that individual human rights must give way to humanity's rights, and this includes inflicting pain as well as enduring it.] It was also German Karma, Himmler said, that they be "saved" by "a figure of the greatest brilliance" - meaning not Hitler, but the spirit "incarnate" in him and possessing him. (Sklar)

An inner circle of SS officers took on the roles of Teutonic knights, complete with coat-of-arms, and met regularly at Himmler's Wewelsburg Castle for deep meditation, week-long visualization sessions (Sklar) and contacts with disembodied spirit masters. The very insignia of the SS was loaded with occult meaning; the twin lightning bolts were an ancient Nordic power rune. [Savitri Devi also focused on the imagery of twin cosmic light sources in her adoration of Hitler.] The Ahnenerbe branch of the SS invested huge sums in trips to Tibet to search for an ancient Aryan clan, (Angebert) and exhaustive efforts were made to harness supernatural powers for the Nazi war effort: everything from pendulum divination and ESP to yoga and Zen Buddhism was investigated. (Sklar) Himmler was certain that his British adversaries were doing the same kind of research, and possibly with more success. (In reality, the British were aware of the high regard Himmler and others had for astrology, and commissioned astrologer Ludwig von Wohl to predict what kind of advice they were getting from Nazi stargazers.) Hitler's strict vegetarianism was a matter of principle because of reincarnation of souls into animal bodies. (This was not only Hindu and Buddhist belief but Cathar as well - Angebert) In fact, Nazis were seen to show great respect for animal life even while slaughtering human beings (. [This peculiar devaluation of humans below animals is a pillar of Hindu life as well, where the sacred cows and cobras of India fare far better than the luckless human born to a low caste. In the West animal rights are threatening to eclipse human rights as well, reflected in the "Earth First" mentality.]

Yet another ancient belief adopted by the Nazis was the dualist cycle of the universe - a cosmos full of energies at polar opposites carrying on a continual battle, colliding to bring temporary balance and transmuting to a higher state of being, evolving into a new polarization, renewed battle, and on endlessly. Fire and Ice, Light and Darkness, Matter and Spirit, Good and Evil, the human races all followed this spiral path. Each "new world order" could not proceed without the destruction of the "old order"; therefore destruction is as healthy as the following restructure. This cosmology was shared by many cultures: the Zoroastrians of Persia (who greatly impressed Nietzsche), the Hindu writers of the Veda, the Greek Gnostics (particularly Pythagoras, who carried the concept from Egypt), the Manachaeans (gnostic Christians), the Cathars, Nordic legends (Angebert) and Germanic lore transmitted mostly through Wagner. It is also a pillar of Theosophical teaching and of Alice Bailey, who clearly approved of Hitler's role in destroying the old order and "establishing of a new world order", as Hitler described it in Bailey's own words. (Angebert)

A tactic especially interesting to Jews which was shared by both Nazism and NA is faulting the Jews for rejecting Jesus as their Messiah. Like Hitler, no NA leaders accept Jesus’ claims as recorded in the New Testament, yet they make much of the fact that the Jews did not either. While Hitler drew on Martin Luther's vitrolic condemnation of the Jews for stubbornly rejecting Jesus, Alice Bailey simply adds this rejection to her tally of the Jews' karmic debt: "Christ came to bring an end to the Jewish dispensation which should have climaxed and passed away as a religion... In the rejection of Christ as the Messiah, the Jewish race has remained symbolically and practically in the [astrological] sign of Aries, the Scapegoat [actually Aries is a ram, as noted elsewhere in her book, but the purpose for this "mistake" is self-evident]... they will repeat their ancient sin of non-response to the evolutionary process. They rejected that which was new and spiritual in the desert [by making the golden calf at Sinai]; they did it again in Palestine 2000 years ago; will they do it again, as opportunity is offered to them?" (Alice Bailey, The Reappearance of the Christ)

[Here we have a masterful "Catch-22", for if the Jews reject Maitreya as a false messiah, they will "remain the Scapegoat" and be removed from the new humanity as they deserve. If they accept him, they will accept his assessment that past karma requires their annihilation - first spiritual erasure and then physical death. The only question is whether they will go out in submission or in rebellion, but go they will...]

Knowing that Christians are susceptible to such reasoning, today's NAers have become adept at using "Christian" arguments against the Jews. Christians coming from an environment that never mentioned Alice Bailey will recognize the eerie similarity of Bailey's quote above to the widespread Christian doctrine known as "Replacement Theology", the belief that the Jewish dispensation ended with Christ and that the failure of Jews to accept him cost them their place as G-d's chosen people. But the Christian linkage is maintained on the NA side for its PR value only; it rallies support among Christians for their own goals, while they work for the end of both the Jews and the Christians, as did Hitler. [A case can be made that the very existence of this as a "Christian" theology may be due to NA infiltration into Christian leadership. Only someone who is indifferent to the survival of Christianity could support such a belief, because if Replacement happened to the Jews, there is no guarantee that it won't happen next time to the Christians! Precisely the argument that NA uses.]

Besides all the above common ground, there is universal reverence in NA and Nazism for Tibetan Buddhism. Blavatsky and other Theosophists considered the Tibetan Himalayas the home of the Hierarchy themselves. According to some opinions, Hitler sent SS officers to the Himalayas not only to seek out the source of the Aryan race, but if possible to make contact with "Asgard" and consult directly with the "ascended masters". A colony of Tibetan Buddhists flourished in Berlin (Angebert). The translator of Angebert's work, Lewis Sumberg, notes that the Russian troops entering Berlin in May 1945 found "the corpses of a thousand men of Himalayan origin, in German uniform, but carrying no papers or identification." [One wonders what today's Dalai Lama might be conveniently forgetting in relation to his community's Nazi affiliations, each time he proclaims the Tibetan Buddhist's identification with the suffering of the Jews.]

A virtually unknown component in Nazism is the glorification of homosexuality as a path to higher consciousness and superhuman power. In accordance with widespread occult practice dating back to the Greeks, promotion in the SS brotherhood was conditional on adopting "warrior" or super-masculine homosexuality. The homosexuals who were despised and were sent to the camps were exclusively the effeminate kind. [See The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party, Scott Lively & Kevin Abrams, on line via the Web. I recommend an annotated version, an interesting blend of the original, somewhat flawed text with a reader's hostile comments; the end result is a welcome correction of minor points and an unintentional confirmation of the authors' main contentions.] It is interesting to note the rising popularity of "warrior" images in entertainment (both male and female-Amazon types) which combine occult powers with subtle homosexual or anti-heterosexual attitudes. [A good, blatant example is the cheesy "Xena" TV series newly arrived on Israeli TV - read the character histories.]

Nazi and American Eugenicists Working Together

The agreement among eugenicists from these two vastly different societies (for more details, see the eugenics section) reveals yet another thread borrowed from ancient occult-based societies both in the East (India) and West (classical Greece). While the Nazis were open about the necessity of "blood purity" to elevate the human race, Americans were more circumspect, veiling their goal of "racial thoroughbreds" in more acceptable social/humanitarian terms - undesirables in the U.S. were ostensibly targeted because they were "uneducated and poor", not because they were racially inferior. The Nazis understood the restrictions to which their U.S. colleagues were subjected and did not protest. They closely followed the writings of Madison Grant, associate of American Birth Control League director Stoddard, who advocated the ancient Spartan practice of infanticide as a natural weeding-out process. The Nazis publicly thanked both Grant and Stoddard for "awakening in Germany the movement for the preservation and increase of the Nordic race." The U.S. League likewise took a great interest in ongoing Nazi developments, and published an article in May 1933 entitled "Eugenic Sterilization, an Urgent Need", by Ernst Rudin, Director of Genetic Sterilization and founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. A group of American eugenists sat as guest judges in the German "eugenic courts" in the 1930's, and returned with highest recommendations:

The [Nazi] sterilization law is weeding out the worst strains in the Germanic stock in a scientific and truly humanitarian way.

~Lothrop Stoddard, 1940, after spending 4 months in Germany

[For excellent source material, see Professor Stefan Kuhl's The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, & German National Socialism


Never in a Vacuum...

Countless historians and sociologists have tried to analyze how Nazism became the new value system for a civilized, humanistic people seemingly overnight. The fact is that Nazi doctrine was introduced to an entire generation of Germans raised on magic, cosmic mythology, medieval lore, tales of secret guardians of the Ancient Wisdom and mystical god-men. The titles being published and devoured were reminiscent of today's blockbuster movies in the science fiction, mythology and "world disaster" genres: Ulysses' Bow, The Great Dream, The Seventh Ring (an actual end-of-the-world novel), The Star of the Alliance. (See Angebert for a list of German bestsellers between 1896 and the 1930s.) Astrology, Theosophy, experiments in "animal magnetism", clairvoyance and other ESP, combinations of "white" sorcery and science, séances, and other occult pursuits were widespread and trendy. Some were involved purely for entertainment or psychological manipulation, but others took it quite seriously as a door to enlightened knowledge and spiritual power. The reasons for this stampede away from reason and into mysticism have been attributed to a complex environment: the upheaval in German society and economy, an inner emptiness and fatalism which stifles personal initiative, an erasure of moral and spiritual boundaries which leaves youth with nothing to believe in and nowhere to belong, disintegration of traditional family authority, a social devaluation of personhood which makes one ashamed of having private values and goals at variance with the group. (Sklar, p.150) [I would propose that all these conditions are not the cause for the abandonment of rational thinking, so much as the result of a society accepting theosophical principles like Karma and Group Mind.]

What happens then is inevitable. Out of the chaos and apathy (the destruction of the old order) rises a mass movement (a new order). It feeds on the loss of individual thinking, but in return promises a secure, responsibility-free place in the Group Mind where thinking is done for you. It removes all rights to family autonomy, but guarantees a lifelong brotherhood; outlaws all religions except its own, but provides ego-friendly answers for all life's questions. It requires you to die, but offers a Supreme Opportunity to give up your life with honor and dignity, and a sense of intrinsic value as a tiny cog in the Vast Plan. It's better than being lost and lonely. And after all, there is no real death, nor is there any particular reason to hang onto this life; why not pay the karma sooner than later? At the head of the movement is an enlightened individual who apparently has a direct connection with that which the whole society has been seeking: Asgard, home of the Hierarchy across the Rainbow Bridge. And he declares that the time has come for the new humanity, for a return to our long-lost god consciousness, and he has been "overshadowed" and sent to guide us there. Only first, there is a "virus" that must be removed from the body of humanity so that it does not endanger the pure "seeds". And now you have a Cause to fight for - a personified yet dehumanized Darkness on which to vent your righteous rage as Sons of Light.

[Thus a whole generation of German youth was prepared to receive a NA messiah and obey his every command. How did it happen that a vulnerable society at its lowest point had the misfortune to cross wires with a loser, an obscure little man, and inexplicably welcomed him hysterically as an "avatar" - a divine channel? And how did he proceed to turn the "Shamballa force" loose across a continent and rip through the Jewish community, with millions to help him and no one to stop him? Was it just a ghastly conjunction of random social trends? If so, we are witnessing an eerie repeat coincidence - the same occultic atmosphere, and another mass movement based on the same foundations, calling for unity against the same "virus". This time it is on a far wider scale and has a global media-driven culture to accelerate its spread. At this point, the movement appears to be securely entrenched; only its "avatar" is lacking. And all this within two generations of the last nightmare encounter. The evidence suggests that we should not only acknowledge the familiar face of this movement, but stop viewing it as a "repeat" and recognize it as a continuation of something that never really went away.


One point missed by many people is that the Nazis were nominally Christian. Any Fascist movement gathers strength on its populism- and the Nazis had to at least go along with Christianity.

The truth is somewhat more complex. Most of the high ranking Nazi leaders despised Christianity in large part because it sprain from Judaism. Their goal once they won the war was to return Germany to its pagan roots and jettison the Christian baggage.

Nazi mysticism is a term used to describe a quasi-religious undercurrent of Nazism; it denotes the combination of Nazism with occultism, esotericism, cryptohistory, and/or the paranormal. It generally ascribes a religious significance to the person of Adolf Hitler and his doctrine.


Other theories involve Hitler having escaped to the Antarctic, where he joined with a subterranean dinosauroid master race[ 1], with whom he now travels inside UFOs underground, generally beneath the South Pole or throughout the center of the hollow earth, but sometimes to a Nazi moon base as well.

Modern organisations or related philosophies include Ariosophy, Armanism, Theozoology, Armanenorden, Artgemeinschaft, and Esoteric Hitlerism.


Nazi mysticism is a völkisch movement initiation with roots in the Thule society and theosophy, as well as the ideas of Arthur de Gobineau. Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels were important figures early on, with significant events after World War II being the Artgemeinschaft of Jürgen Rieger and the Armanenorden founded by Adolf Schleipfer in 1976.


High ranking Nazi officials such as Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hess, and R. Walther Darré are known to have been interested in mysticism and the paranormal. Hitler himself seems to have had considerably less interest in this topic.


The concentration of Esoteric Hitlerism is on the Nazis’ race-specific pre-Christian “pagan” (including Hindu) mythologies, and the inclusion of Adolf Hitler in the network of these mythologies.


The role played by mysticism in the development of Nazism and its ideals was identified by outsiders at least as early as 1940, with the publication of Lewis Spence’s Occult Causes of the Present War. Incidentally , Spence accurately identified a pagan undercurrent in Nazism (for which he largely blamed Alfred Rosenberg), though some of his other conclusions--such as connecting Nazism to the Illuminati, and automatically equating paganism with "satanism"--are perhaps less credible.


Central beliefs


The origin of the Aryan race, the Teutons generally, and the Germanic peoples specifically, the putative superiority of said Aryans over other races, and what they claimed were the unique circumstances of their origin, are all key concepts.


Various locations, such as Atlantis, Thule, Hyperborea, Shambhala and others are suggested as the precise location of this original society of Übermenschen.


Another key belief is that this Herrenrasse (master race) had been weakened through interbreeding with those they thought of as untermensch or “lesser races”.


Early influences


Theozoology


In 1905 Lanz von Liebenfels published a fundamental statement of doctrine titled Theozoologie oder die Kunde von den Sodoms-Äfflingen und dem Götter-Elektron (Theo-Zoology or the Lore of the Sodom-Apelings and the Electrons of the Gods). The author claims that “Aryan” peoples originate from interstellar deities who bred by electricity, while “lower” races were a result of inbreeding between apes and humans. Like much of Nazi mysticist propaganda, the book relies on a somewhat lurid sexual imagery, decrying the abuse of white women by ethnically inferior, but sexually active, men. Thus, von Liebenfels advocates mass castration of racially “apelike” or otherwise inferior males. This was in fact acted out during the Nazi era “purification”.


Ariosophy


The term “Ariosophy” (occult wisdom concerning the Aryans) was coined by Lanz von Liebenfels, founder of the Order of the New Templars, in 1915 and replaced “Theozoology” and “Ario-Christianity” as the label for his doctrine in the 1920s. It is generally used to describe Aryan-racist-occult theories.


Armanism


Guido von List called his doctrine “Armanism” (after the ‘Armanen’, supposedly the heirs of the sun-king, a body of priest-kings in the ancient Ario-Germanic nation). Armanism was concerned with the esoteric doctrines of the gnosis (distinct from the exoteric doctrine intended for the lower social classes, Wotanism).


According to The History Channel's "Decoding the Past" episode "The Nazi Prophecies" Guido von List was the founder of Ariosophy.


The Thule Society


In 1915, Pohl was joined by Rudolf Glauer. Glauer, also known as Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorf, came to Germany with a Turkish passport and was a practitioner of sufi meditation and astrology. Glauer is known to have been an admirer of Guido von List and the rabidly anti-semitic Lanz von Liebenfels. Glauer was a wealthy man (the source of his wealth is unknown) and quickly became a grand master of the Bavarian Order in 1918. Later that year, he founded the Thule Society with Pohl’s approval.


The Thule Society had a number of highly positioned individuals in the Nazi party, although Hitler himself never became a member. However, it was a member of the Thule Society, dentist Dr. Friedrich Krohn, who chose the swastika symbol for the Nazi party.


Perhaps the most significant Thule influence on Hitler came from Dietrich Eckart. Eckart was the wealthy publisher of the newspaper Auf gut Deutsch (In Plain German). He was a committed occultist as well as a member of the Thule Society’s inner circle. He is believed to have taught Hitler a number of persuasive techniques (some possibly mystical in nature). So profound was the influence, that Hitler’s book Mein Kampf was dedicated to Eckart.


The Vril Society


The Vril Society, or Luminous Lodge, has no documented activities until 1915, but is believed to have been founded by General Karl Haushofer, a student of Russian magician and metaphysician Gergor Ivanovich Gurdyev (also known as George Gurdjieff).


In Berlin, Haushofer had founded the Luminous Lodge or the Vril Society. The Lodge’s objective was to explore the origins of the Aryan race and to perform exercises in concentration to awaken the forces of “Vril”. Haushofer was a student of the Russian magician and metaphysician George Gurdjieff. Both Gurdjieff and Haushofer maintained that they had contacts with secret Tibetan lodges that possessed the secret of the “Superman.” The Lodge included Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, Himmler, Göring and Hitler’s subsequent personal physician Dr. Morell. It is also known that Aleister Crowley and Gurdjieff sought contact with Hitler. Hitler’s unusual powers of suggestion become more understandable if one keeps in mind that he had access to the “secret” psychological techniques of Gurdjieff which, in turn, were based on the teachings of the Sufis and the Tibetan lamas and familiarized him with the Zen teaching of the Japanese Society of the Green Dragon. —Louis Pauwels, author of the book Monsieur Gurdjief where some feel the account of Haushofer’s study with Gurdjieff originates, later recanted many things from his book, however.


Some, however, argue that no such Vril Society ever existed, or that such a society had no impact on Nazism: It is not mentioned in the extensive biography of Hitler by Ian Kershaw, nor in the one by Alan Bullock, nor the biography of Hermann Göring by Werner Maser, nor the book about the history of the Schutzstaffel (SS) by Heinz Hoehne.


General Karl Haushofer


General Karl Haushofer was a university professor and director of the Munich Institute of Geopolitics, as well as an avid student of Gurdjieff. He is believed to have studied Zen Buddhism and initiated at the hands of Tibetan llamas. Further, he worked closely with Hitler while he was imprisoned and working on Mein Kampf. Haushofer claimed to have had contact with secret Tibetan Lodges that possessed the secret of the “Superman”, an idea that would become central to the decision of the Nazi party to embrace an extreme form of the eugenics movement.


Hitler's WWI Experience


Hitler claimed that during his time served in WWI that he had a religious awakening, specifically around when he was temporarily blinded by an enemy gas attack.


Hitler's Odinist Poem


In 1915, while serving in the German Army on the Western Front, Hitler wrote the following esoteric poem mentioning the pre-Christian Germanic deity Wotan:


Ich gehe manchmal in rauhen Nächten
Zur Wotanseiche in den stillen Hain,
Mit dunklen Mächten einen Bund zu flechten -
Die Runen zaubert mir der Mondenschein.
Und alle, die am Tage sich erfrechten,
Sie werden vor der Zauberformel klein!
Sie ziehen blank - doch statt den Strauß zu flechten,
Erstarren sie zu Stalagmitgestein.
So scheiden sich die Falschen von den Echten -
Ich greife in das Fibelnest hinein
Und gebe dann den Guten und Gerechten
Mit meiner Formel Segen und Gedeihn.


Which can be translated as:


I often go on bitter nights
To Wodan's oak in the quiet glade
With dark powers to weave a union -
The moonlight showing me the runic spell
And all who are full of impudence during the day
Are made small by the magic formula!
They draw shining steel - but instead of going into combat,
They solidify into stalagmites.
Thus the wrong ones separate from the genuine ones -
I reach into a nest of words
Then give to the good and fair
With my formula blessings and prosperity.


Esoteric Hitlerism


The founder of Esoteric Hitlerism was Heinrich Himmler, who, more than any other high official in the Third Reich (including Hitler) was fascinated by Aryan (and not just Germanic) racialism and Germanic Odinism. Himmler has been claimed to have considered himself the spiritual successor or even reincarnation of Heinrich the Fowler. Having set up special SS rituals for the old King & returning his bones to the crypt at Quedlinburg Cathedral. Himmler even had his personal quarters at Wewelsburg castle decorated in commemoration of him.


Prayer to Hitler


In Nazism, Adolf Hitler was occasionally compared with Jesus, or revered as a savior sent by God.

A prayer recited by orphans at orphanages runs as follows

Führer, mein Führer, von Gott mir gegeben, beschütz und erhalte noch lange mein Leben
Du hast Deutschland errettet aus tiefster Not, Dir verdank ich mein täglich Brot
Führer, mein Führer, mein Glaube, mein Licht
Führer mein Führer, verlasse mich nicht


This translates roughly as:


Leader, my Leader, given to me by God, protect me and sustain my life for a long time
You have rescued Germany out of deepest misery, to you I owe my daily bread
Leader, my Leader, my belief, my light
Leader my Leader, do not abandon me


Julius Evola


Julius Evola, an occultist with radical right-wing political views, though he was never directly tied to either Italian Fascism or Nazism, tried to move Mussolini towards paganism (and away from concord with the Vatican). His influence on Nazi mysticism has been much greater in the postwar years than it was while the Nazis and fascists were in power, influencing various National Socialist organizations.


Savitri Devi


With the fall of the Third Reich, Esoteric Hitlerism took off as Hitler, who had died at the end of the war, was now able to be deified. Savitri Devi was the first major exponent of post-war Esoteric Hitlerism and connected Hitler’s Aryan ideology to that of the pro-independence Indians (specifically Hindus) such as Subhas Chandra Bose. For her, the Swastika was an especially important symbol, as it symbolized the Aryan unity amongst the Hindus and Germans (and was also a symbol of good fortune for the Tibetans). Devi integrated Nazism into a broader cyclical framework of Hindu history, and called Hitler an avatar of Vishnu (Kalki) and the “Man against Time,” having an ideal vision of returning his Aryan people to an earlier, more perfect time, and also having the practical wherewithal to fight the destructive forces forestalling his vision from fruition--a combination of the best traits of Akhenaton (a visionary, but ineffectual) and Genghis Khan (violent, but selfish).


Miguel Serrano


The next major figure in Esoteric Hitlerism is Miguel Serrano, a Chilean diplomat. He wrote both The Golden Ribbon--Esoteric Hitlerism and Adolf Hitler, The Last Avatar.


He believed that Hitler was in Shambhala, an underground centre in Antarctica (formerly at the North Pole and Tibet), where he was in contact with the Hyperborean gods and from whence he would someday emerge with a fleet of UFOs to lead the forces of light (the Hyperboreans, sometimes associated with Vril) over the forces of darkness (inevitably including, for Serrano, the Jews) in a last battle and inaugurating a Fourth Reich.


He also connected the Aryans and their Hyperborean gods to the Sun and the Allies and the Jews to the Moon, and also had a special place in his ideology for the SS, who, in their quest to recreate the ancient race of Aryan god-men, he thought were above morality and therefore justified in their seemingly cruel deeds.


Ahnenerbe


The Ahnenerbe Society, the ancestral heritage branch of the SS (also called by some the Nazi Occult Bureau) was dedicated primarily to the research of proving the superiority of the Aryan race but was also involved in occult practices. Founded in 1935 by Himmler, the Society became involved in searching for Atlantis and the Holy Grail (and is believed to be the basis for the Nazi archaeologists in the Indiana Jones series of movies).


Research and expeditions


A great deal of time and resources were spent on researching or creating a popularly accepted “historical”, “cultural” and “scientific” background so the ideas about a “superior” Aryan race could prosper in the German society of the time. Mystical organizations such as the Thule Society, Schwarze Sonne, Vril Society and others were created, usually connected with elite SS corps, and adopting specific rituals, initiations and beliefs.


Expeditions in Tibet, Nepal, Greece, the Arctic, and Neuschwabenland in Antarctica were organized in the search for the mythical “Aryan” nation of Hyperborea, whose capital, Ultima Thule was supposedly built by the extraterrestrial ancestors of the “Aryan races” who came from the star Aldebaran, according to some of the “Aryan” theories.


A German expedition to Tibet was organized in order to search for the origins of the Aryan race. To this end, the expedition leader, Ernst Schäfer, had his anthropologist Bruno Beger make face masks and skull and nose measurements.


Similar expeditions were organized in the pursuit of semi-mythical objects believed to bring power or granting special powers to their owner, such as the Holy Grail and the Spear of Destiny.


SS Rocket Technology


The flying saucer (Flugscheibe) and rocket craft models are said to have been produced by the SS Military Technical Branch E-IV of the Nazi military science division. The following is a synopsis of those claims:


The first of such crafts was designed by Viktor Schauberger who modelled the Repulsin A & B which were discoid crafts that functioned on a vortex motor.

Examples of Repulsin A craft and Repulsin B craft:


The Rudolf Shriever Flugkreisel (Flight Gyro), a disc-shaped aircraft (with 5 kerosene jet engines) was first produced in 1943 as an interplanetary exploration vehicle. It had a diameter of 60 metres and stood 45 metres high, as well as containing 10 levels for crew compartments.


Later the Richard Miethe Flugscheibe (Flight Disc) prototype (with the Schauberger vortex motor) was designed in April 1944 as a rocket craft built to 15 and 50 metres of diameter. It closely resembled what would be considered today as the common shape of a UFO.

 

The Nazi UFOs can by some be attributed to the increased sightings of flying saucer craft and other UFO's in the post World War II to present world. One interesting note is the first published alien abduction Barney Hill case described his abductors as Nazis.

Suppression of secret societies

 

The Nazi party actively discouraged certain mystical secret societies, in fact interning, and sometimes executing, a number of high-ranking mystics in Europe, particularly members of the Freemasons and Rosicrucians.

 

It is said that Aleister Crowley and Gurdjieff sought contact with Hitler, but actual contact is unconfirmed. Hitler would later go on to reject many German mystics, openly ridiculing them, particularly practitioners of Freemasonry, Theosophy and Anthroposophy.

 

Artur Dinter

 

In 1927 Hitler fired the Gauleiter of Thüringen, Artur Dinter, from his function because he wanted to make too much a religion of Aryan racial purity. In 1928 Dinter was expelled from the party when he publicly attacked Hitler about this decision.

 

Mysticism in modern Neo-Nazism

 

Modern Neo-Nazism has links to Ásatrú. Mystic influences often appear in modern Nazi music, particularly references to artifacts such as the Spear of Longinus. On the other hand, many northern European polytheist organisations and groups have stated clearly that Neo-Nazism and its Ásatrú connections are certainly not to be considered what is common or ‘mainstream’ with their adherents. Organisations such as the Theods, the Ásatrúarfélagid, and the Viðartrúar are particularly notable in their disavowal of any connections.

 

Nazi mysticism and modern pseudoscience

 

The writings of Miguel Serrano, Julius Evola, Savitri Devi, and other proponents of Nazi Mysticism have spawned numerous later works connecting Aryan master race beliefs and Nazi escape scenarios with enduring conspiracy theories about reptilian humanoids, hollow earth civilizations, and shadowy new world orders. In his book Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili scholar Joscelyn Godwin discusses pseudoscientific theories regarding surviving Nazi elements in Antarctica. Arktos is notable for its scholarly approach and examination of many sources currently unavailable elsewhere in English-language translation.

 

Godwin and other authors including Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke have also discussed Hitler’s purported Antarctic reptilian companions (sometimes seen to be Hyperboreans) as well as the connections between Nazi Mysticism and Vril energy, the hidden Shambhala and Agartha civilizations, and underground UFO bases.

 

The Thule Society (including some of their most known members) plays an important role in the Fullmetal Alchemist movie.

 

The Island of Thule is an important location in the Silver Age Sentinels superhero role playing game and collections of short stories based upon the game. It was raised from the Atlantic Ocean by Kreuzritter (“Crusader”), a Nazi superhuman who wears a mystical suit of armor made by a long-disappeared Aryan culture.

 

A fictional division of the Ahnenerbe, the Karotechia, has a prominet place in the mythology of the Delta Green setting for the role playing game Call of Cthulhu, and stories based upon the setting. In it, the survivors of the Karotechia, a group founded to study occult tomes and conduct magical research, live on in South America, training sorcerers and cultists to found the Fourth Reich, all under the sway of Hitler's ghost (actually Nyarlathotep in disguise).


The Manga series Hellsing features the Millennium, a Reich of the Nazis which was to have survived for a thousand years. This organization is heavily mystical, including among its number those who are Werwolf and a battalion of vampires known as the Letzte (“Last”) Battalion. The stated objective of Millennium is the pursuit of absolute war. It is led by a former SS officer.

Quotes


The Führer is deeply religious, though completely anti-Christian; he views Christianity as a symptom of decay. Rightly so. It is a branch of the Jewish race.

~Josef Göbbels, in his diary, December 28, 1939.

 

Christianity is the prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilisation by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society.


~Hitler 1941

 

The German people, especially the youth, have learned once again to value people racially-they have once again turned away from Christian theories, from Christian teaching which has ruled Germany for more than a thousand years and caused the racial decay of the German Volk, and almost its racial death.

~Heinrich Himmler May 22, 1936 at a speech in Brocken, Germany.


Flirting With Hitler

11/15/2002

 

Gothic is a way of dressing, a taste in music, a style. But in Germany - at the extreme fringes - it has also become the point at which neo-Nazism and Satanism meet

  


 

Links between Nazism and esoteric and occult movements are nothing new. Hitler, rejecting Christianity, embraced instead the paganism of the early Germanic tribes. Their beliefs, both real and imagined, offered a basis on which any number of sinister concepts could be superimposed. The process reached its apogee at Schloss Wewelsburg, near the town of Paderborn. Though the present-day castle dates from the late 16th century, records suggest that there has been a fortress on the site since the days of the Huns, more than a thousand years earlier. The surrounding landscape is wooded, often misty, and interspersed with giant, weirdly-shaped rocks. The castle and its environs were ideally suited to the purpose for which Heinrich Himmler rented them in 1934 - that of providing the officers of his elite corps, the SS, with an education in the supposed pagan mysteries underpinning National Socialism.

 

Though it does not make much of an impact at election time, the far right remains a disturbing undercurrent in German life: sufficiently disturbing for the federal government to have launched an all-out drive against the neo-Nazi fringe two years ago (including the attempt to ban the NPD). "The problem with the far right in Germany is not that its members are particularly numerous, but that they are readier than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe to resort to violence," said a senior intelligence officer who asked not to be named. That point was driven home by a string of savage attacks in early 2000, culminating in the beating to death of a Mozambique-born German citizen in Dessau.

 

The far right is especially pervasive in the formerly communist east where unemployment is high and where, after the war, there was not the same painful reckoning with the past as in the west. Despite - or perhaps because of - the fact that there are fewer immigrants in the former GDR, surveys also show that racist attitudes are more prevalent there than in the cosmopolitan west.

 

One possible reason why the degree of support for the far right does not show up in election results is that the most extreme rightwingers will have nothing to do with the democratic process and abstain. This is particularly true of those connected with the so-called Kameradschaften which form a network of mutually independent, neo-Nazi secret societies. Each may have no more than 10 or 15 members, but around them is a wider circle of associates and sympathisers. Indeed, the secretive and hierarchical world of the German far right mirrors that of many occult communities.

 

On several occasions since the fall of the Third Reich, evidence has surfaced of connections between the far right and Satanism, however, they have been limited to individuals or, at most, small groups. But in the past five years, an entirely new phenomenon has developed: a mass youth culture in which neo-Nazi ideas and symbols have merged with the Gothic scene.

 

This movement can be traced back to 1993, when Roland Bubik, widely regarded as the leading thinker of the German extreme right, wrote a seminal article for the magazine Junge Freiheit. Entitled "Culture as a question of power", it argued that "new possibilities or influencing people are arising in the area of communications networks. In particular, the entertainment industry... has an immense influence that until now has gone unremarked." Within a couple of years, Bubik's partner, Simone Satzger, was stating as fact, in a collection of essays edited by Bubik, that the far right's strategy was "to open up contemporary cultural and political phenomena to use them for our own purposes".

 

Since the mid-1990s, Germany's neo-Nazis have attempted to penetrate several youth scenes, including techno, but it is with Goths that they have had their greatest success. The Gothic movement may be on the wane in Britain and many other countries around Europe, but in Germany, where its adherents are known as Gruftis (from the German word for "crypt"), they constitute a vast group. It is particularly strong in the former GDR. East Germans are still reeling from the fall of communism, and the young in particular seem to be searching for new values to fill the gap left by a creed that was as much a religion as an ideology.

 

"The concentration of Goths in Germany is much higher than in other European countries," says Stephan Tschendal, who edits an online Gothic magazine. He estimates that between 5% and 7% of all young Germans between the ages of 12 and 25 are Goths, an overall population of at least 650,000. Many of them are doing no more than making a fashion statement, or registering a protest against the drabness and conformity of modern adult life. Devil-worshippers exist only on the extremist fringe. But in two specific areas of the Gothic scene - the areas in which the neo-Nazis have had the greatest success in infiltrating their ideas - Germany's intelligence officers believe there is genuine cause for concern. One of these is "neo-folk"; the other is black metal, the dark variant of heavy metal.

 

In a darkened hall in the centre of Leipzig, blue lights play on the smoke billowing out from under a stage where Darkwood, a three-piece neo-folk band, play placid, lilting, slightly weird music. The band's gig forms part of an annual, three-day Gothic festival, which this year attracted some 17,000 people from all over Europe to Leipzig. Churches in the city that had been asked to host concerts refused to do so, citing the risk that Satanists could assemble on consecrated ground.

 

About half the crowd at the gig are typical Goths, but the rest look as if they have wandered in from a Nuremberg rally. There are men wearing high, heavy boots and black military-style shirts and trousers. There are women, also wearing boots, with calf-length skirts and white shirts with a symbol on the right arm that resembles a badge of rank. Everywhere, there are leather cross-straps, forage caps and 1930s-style shorts.

 

As its name implies, neo-folk draws on the musical heritage of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and other protest singers of the 1960s and 1970s. Some German groups dig further back into the past, updating and reworking traditional folk tunes. The acoustic guitar is central to its music, which also features flutes, cellos and violins. Yet neo-folk is anything but folksy. Punk has had an influence on its evolution and much of the music could be described as industrial. Unusually extensive percussion sets are typical of the genre. Another characteristic is that gentle melody-making can all of a sudden give way to something much more visceral: the lead singer of Darkwood seized hold of a pair of heavy drumsticks and beat out an intimidating tattoo on a bass drum. It was like Japanese Kodo drumming, but with the rhythms of a Prussian parade ground. The drumming rose in a crescendo, then ended as abruptly as it had begun, prompting the loudest cheers of the night.

 

The Leipzig festival was launched in 1991, soon after German reunification, and has helped turn the city into the Gothic capital of Europe. Like neo-Nazis, Goths are drawn to its Völkerschlachtdenkmal, one of the strangest and most intimidating monuments to be found anywhere in Europe. A vast, stepped pyramid towering over a lake on the wooded fringes of the city, it resembles a Mayan temple. The Völkerschlachtdenkmal was inaugurated in 1913 to commemorate the defeat of Napoleon at the battle of Leipzig 100 years earlier. But since German reunification, it has become a favoured rallying point for the far right.

 
According to Dr Rudiger Sunner, author of a recent book on Nazism and its use of myth, the Black Sun is "definitely a sign of the SS". Himmler fashioned the SS emblem from one of the Black Sun's 12 jagged "rays", and a large Black Sun was set into the floor of the Obergruppenführer's Hall in Schloss Wewelsburg, immediately above the crypt.

 

How close, really, are the links between Gothic - or, specifically, neo-folk - culture and the German far right? Unquestionably, there is an element of sheer, apolitical mischief: it is not easy for the sons and daughters of the generation of 1968 to find a way of shocking their parents, but dressing up in vaguely neo-Nazi garb should do the trick.

 

The organisation charged with protecting Germany from a Nazi revival is the Verfassungsschutz, a body roughly equivalent to Britain's MI5. Reinhard Boos is its director in Saxony, the state in which Leipzig lies, and so has a special interest in gauging the threat posed by far right penetration of the Gothic scene. 

 

"I think the truth is in between," says Boos.

The Gothic scene is not to be confused with rightwing extremism. But there are some groups that use symbols which refer to rightwing extremism and they do it mainly for provocation. Very, very few of them do it to support rightwing groups. On the other hand, the rightwing extremists know that there are people who can be useful to them, so some of them try to win them over for their own aims. It is not a plan by a few [people] that is carried out in a clear, structured way. Those who think it is a good idea do so of their own accord.

 

"Things are not going well for the far right," argues Wolfgang Hund, an educational scientist and the author of several books on the occult.

They are under pressure from all sides and they are looking for allies... They are looking for foot soldiers in the ranks of disoriented youth - human raw material for any Pied Piper who comes along.

 

Boos believes that recruitment is not, in fact, the far right's primary aim. The threat posed by the infiltration of the Gothic scene is, he believes, subtler.

We take it seriously because it opens people's heads to extreme rightwing thought.

 

Solveig Prass and her colleagues in Leipzig, who talk regularly to DJs and others, have been keeping a running estimate of how much of the Goth scene is under the influence of the far right.

The link was first noticed in the mid-1990s. At that time, it was estimated that the overlap was about 5%. Two years ago, we put it at 7-8%. Now, our estimate is 9%.

Alfred Schobert, a lecturer at the Duisberg Institute of Language and Social Research, took a similar view in his 1998 academic investigation into the infiltration of the Gothic scene by the far right:

It is not about recruiting in the short term. It is about [producing] an overall reversal that picks up on and distorts the prevailing mood.

 

Through the Gothic scene, the far right can obtain access to the minds of hundreds of thousands of young people throughout Europe. If they can be taught to accept certain beliefs and symbols as normal, then the extreme right will have made significant progress towards achieving what Schobert argues is a key, medium-term goal:

The removal of the taboos that attach to Nazi symbols and racist-nationalist ideology.

 

 

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