Occultism in the Third Reich is a very popular topic. However, it is not limited to the "spear of fate", expeditions to Shambhala, secret rituals of the SS at the Wewelsburg castle and the use of occult techniques to seize world domination. To prohibit, imprison, release and arrange in military organizations - "Lenta.ru" tried to understand the vicissitudes of relations between the Nazis and the occultists.
Magic and politics
Scientists were already thinking about the closeness of Nazism and esotericism in the 1940s, but for a long time opponents of the regime set the tone for the discussion. Trying to understand how Hitler managed to "intoxicate" the German people, they chose a fairly simple explanation. The very fascination of Germany with magic and otherworldly forces (even under Wilhelm and the Weimar Republic) paved the way for the Nazis to power. Hitler only satisfied the nation's longing for an irrational world order, argued the influential Frankfurt School sociologists Siegfried Krakauer and Theodor Adorno.
"Hitler is a true mystic, a demigod who was able to manipulate the subconscious of 78 million Germans," the great psychologist Carl Jung echoed. In a more academic form, this paradigm is presented in the translated into Russian monograph by Goodrick-Clarke "The Occult Roots of Nazism."
But after the end of the Cold War and the reevaluation of the "black" interpretations of the Third Reich, historians of the occult, most notably Corinna Treitel, challenged the fact that the Nazis had a special connection with the occult. Data were raised about the numerous repressions of the Third Reich against magicians, astrologers and telepaths, whom the Nazi state also considered suspicious. In addition, Treitel and her supporters urged not to look down on esotericism as a "dope" and false knowledge: parapsychology, spiritualism, astrology and other "frontier sciences" (Grenzwissenschaft) were no less important for Europeans than ordinary science, a means of finding meaning in the Godless reality of modernity.
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Historians are now moving away from both extremes. It is impossible to say that the Nazis treated the occult good or bad: politics on any issue changed for internal and external reasons, and sometimes it turned 180 degrees. Historians emphasize that Nazi Germany was not a mythically “totalitarian”, but a polycratic state: dozens of diverse organizations and centers of power competing with each other, with overlapping functions and powers (as an example, we can recall the rivalry between the Abwehr, SD and intelligence of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), pursued their own policies, trying to prove that it was their methods and solutions that realized the ideals of National Socialism.
Pragmatic attitude
After coming to power in 1933, the Nazis took control of astrologers, clairvoyants and fortune-tellers, just like other free professions of the Weimar Republic. Do you want to make money from private practice and publish magazines? Register with the Imperial Chamber of Literature, Ministry of Health, Gestapo and SD. Nazi officials were not worried about the anti-scientific nature of occult teachings, but about luring money from the people (for example, when reading by hand).
Moreover, many leaders of the state (starting with Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels) themselves were fond of esoteric practices (from astrology to fortune telling with a pendulum). This explains why the repression against the occultists never came to the brutality with which the Reich cracked down on communists, homosexuals, the mentally ill, let alone Jews.
Dozens of adherents of esoteric teachings continued their activities, taking advantage of the legal distinction between “charlatanism” and “scientific occultism”, introduced in the republic, - studies of unusual phenomena that science cannot yet explain. Dozens of analytical notes were ordered from the SD and the Gestapo, demanding to find a clear criterion for distinguishing charlatanism from promising "frontier sciences" - which, of course, should not attract the attention of the broad masses, but work in closed "sharashki" for the benefit of power structures.
“As you know, I do not consider astrology to be a pure hoax, but I believe that there is something behind it … We need to restrict charlatans more and only allow special research groups in this area,” Himmler wrote to Heydrich in 1939.
Against prejudice and Jews
But this does not mean that esotericism felt calm in the Third Reich. Fighters against obscurantism and pseudoscience did not sleep, trying to encourage the authorities to fight the "vampire of prejudice." It is curious that the most active among them came not from the circle of independent scientists, but from the circle of Matilda Ludendorff, the second wife of the famous German general, a former ally of Hitler. For them "magicians" were on a par with Jews, Christians and Masons - forces destroying the healthy organism of the German people, and only vigilant enlightenment can save them from them.
Fighters against obscurantism, the most famous of whom were Police Commissioner Karl Peltz and professional esoteric debunker Albert Stadhagen, understood that they needed powerful patrons to succeed. And they found them in the person of Reinhard Heydrich and the head of the Ministry of Health Bernhard Hermann, who smashes the occult on the pages of his magazine, as well as in the SS newspaper. Hermann's main achievement is Peltz's show, where he exposed the tricks of magicians, parapsychologists and clairvoyants. Peltz performed 105 times in front of Wehrmacht soldiers alone in the 1937-1940s.
But she found a scythe on a stone: the sub-section of magicians of the Imperial Union of Artists in 1940 obtained from the Gestapo and personally from Hitler a ban on the activities of Pelz, as well as Stadhagen. He could not hide his indignation: for 20 years he fought against "occult swindlers, Jews and Jesuits", exposing "prejudices - a way of thinking for the intellectually disabled, unworthy of the Third Reich," and here a gang of magicians, using their influence in the highest circles, put him stick in the wheels of the fight against obscurantism.
Peltz and Stadhagen tried to get through to Hitler, sent Rosenberg, who favored them, to the Reich Chancellery, but the Fuhrer refused to lift the ban. True, soon a scrap was found suitable for use against this scrap. Back in 1937, Peltz, on his own initiative, sent a detailed denunciation to his police leadership about the occultists continuing their activities with all "appearances and passwords." The denunciation attracted the attention of Heydrich himself (who, unlike Himmler, did not favor esotericism), but lay under the cloth - in anticipation of an opportune moment.
Bormann the educator
This moment came unexpectedly for everyone, including Hitler: on May 10, 1941, one of the closest associates of the Fuhrer, Rudolf Hess, flew to England to negotiate a separate peace. Hess was declared crazy on the basis of astrology, and opponents of the occult (Martin Bormann was one of them) did not hesitate to organize a large-scale police operation on this occasion against "astrologers, spiritualists, fortune-tellers, healers, anthroposophists, theosophists, ariosophists and supporters of Christian science" - according to the denunciation "Enlightener" Peltz.
Supporters of the concept of the "occult" of the Nazi regime and clear boundaries between science and anti-science will be interested in reading the circular that Bormann sent to party workers in the same 1941.
“Occult circles are trying to sow confusion and doubt among the people, deliberately spreading stories of miracles, prophecies, astrological predictions of the future (…). Clairvoyants and fortune-tellers take advantage of a difficult situation [war] (…). The ideology of National Socialism is based on scientific knowledge of the laws of race, society and nature (…). It is your responsibility to ensure that party members, especially in rural areas, do not participate in the dissemination of political fortune-telling, belief in miracles, prejudice or occult miracles."
Enlightener Bormann emphasized that police measures alone are not enough, a "policy of enlightenment" is needed that does not allow wide circles of society to get carried away by occult teachings - which is especially important during war.
However, the unsuccessful course of hostilities for the Nazis undermined the positions of "rationalists" like Bormann and Heydrich: Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler allocated more and more funds to "their" occult sciences. The Fuhrer himself in 1942 admitted that "without magic and superstition, the people cannot explain unforeseen events that cannot be foreseen and cannot be dealt with." The books confiscated by the police were not burned, but sent to the SS libraries. "Scientific astrologer" Karl Krafft in 1942 went straight from prison, like Korolev, to the Pendulum Institute created by the Navy - to search for ships of allies using pendulums (now it is delicately called biolocation). In the search for Mussolini, arrested in 1943 after the anti-fascist coup, Himmler was helped by a large group of astrologers and so on.
How Himmler got scared of science
It is interesting to compare the fate of esotericism in the Third Reich and the USSR. Of course, under Stalin there could be no question of legalizing occultism - but there was Lysenkoism, when an openly pseudo-scientific trend, taking advantage of the leader's favor, achieved official recognition - and immediately began to "silence" and repress its opponents, normal scientists.
In science, however, Hitlerite Germany never outlived Weimar pluralism. For example, there was such a doctrine of eternal ice, proposed by the Austrian engineer Hans Gerbiger. According to his concept, the solar system was formed as a result of the interaction of the super-sun (fiery sphere) and cosmic ice. There was no ideological background here, but the Nazis saw in this doctrine a long-awaited cosmological alternative to "Jewish" physics (the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics). Gerbiger was compared to Hitler - the same self-taught people, making a revolution.
Supporters of the doctrine of eternal ice settled in the "Ahnenerbe" and tried, with the support of Hitler, to enter the official science. First, they decided to introduce a special protocol (agreeing with their "theory") so that geologists and meteorologists who refused to sign it would lose funding. Did not work out.
In 1937, thanks to the efforts of Ahnenerbe, an article about Copernicus of the 20th century was published in a popular German publication. The editors immediately received hundreds of indignant letters from scientists and engineers. German science should not be denigrated "with such tales - especially when young conscripts have extremely poor knowledge of physics and mathematics," the military engineer Peter Lautner was indignant. Some were not too lazy to scribble denunciations to the Reich ministry, demanding to call the supporters of the "eternal ice" to justice.
In 1938, the leading scientific publication Journal of the German Geological Society published an article where not only the doctrine of eternal ice was exposed, but implicitly criticized the tendency of the German bourgeoisie to irrational ideas (in this one could even see a hint of the popularity of Hitler and the NSDAP). And the author-geologist did not suffer in any way for this. Moreover, Himmler officially recommended that the theoreticians of the eternal ice "keep their head down" and not engage in polemics in scientific journals, so as not to be substituted. However, "Ahnenerbe" increased funding for the theory of world ice, inviting its supporters to predict the weather for the Luftwaffe: in other words, instead of publicly fighting scientists, the Nazis preferred to create their own pocket structures with the craziest employees, hoping that the "miracle" would prove the correctness of their occult theories …
Artem Kosmarsky
