Nazi occultism has been a popular topic in pop culture since at least Indiana Jones. Movies like The Boys from Brazil, Hellboy and Captain America, as well as PC games like Castle Wolfenstein and Call of duty, have all the usual ingredients: Nazi assassins in league with demonic forces, mad scientists, fantastic weapons, pagan religions and magical relics.
None of this suffers from a lack of real reason. There was very little political literature in Adolf Hitler's library, but all the more there were books on parapsychology, hypnosis and black magic. Hitler read the prophecies of Nostradamus and a book on magic by Ernst Schertel, in which he emphasized lines like, "Satan is a fertilizing destructive-creative warrior" and "He who does not have a demonic seed inside will never give birth to a new world ".
Heinrich Himmler organized research expeditions to Tibet, Iceland and Europe in search of the Holy Grail, medieval witchcraft formulas and sunken Atlantis. Rudolf Hess supported transcendental physics, astroarcheology, cosmobiology and other "frontier sciences". During the war, Joseph Goebbels' Propaganda Department, Himmler's SS and the German navy turned to astrologers, clairvoyants and fortunetellers to obtain intelligence information and wage psychological warfare.
The Nazis organized seances, tried to neutralize gravity and resurrect the dead, and developed death rays and paranormal weapons, drawing inspiration from Old Norse mythology. They changed the theory of evolution to the strange "Doctrine of Eternal Ice" and wanted to destroy Christianity in favor of "Luciferianism."
Examples taken from the new book by American history professor Eric Kurlander: Hitler's monsters: A supernatural history of the Third Reich, Yale University Press, an in-depth and fascinating exploration of what he calls The "world of supernatural representations" of Nazism - a broad concept that, in addition to various esoteric teachings, also encompasses pseudosciences and goblins from the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.
The topic is not indisputable. In an article for the online newspaper Aeon, historian Peter Staudenmaier recently called all talk of Nazis as warlocks of sorts as conspiracy nonsense - "it's a good story but not history."). In his own study of the Nazi connection with the anthroposophical movement, Between occultism and nazism (2014), he instead focuses on Nazi interest in Waldorf pedagogy and ecological agriculture.
Eric Curlander disagrees. No mass political movement, he writes, as consistently and consciously as the Nazis, has benefited from supernatural fantasies - occultism and frontier science, pagan, non-spiritual and Eastern religions, folklore, mythology, and a variety of esoteric teachings - to attract a generation of Germans who were striving for new forms of spirituality and looking for a new explanation of the world on the border between faith and science. To fully understand the history of the Third Reich, he believes, one must first understand its close connections with the supernatural.
The occult roots of Nazism attracted attention back in the 1920s, when prominent esotericists pointed out that the ideology of the new Nazi party, its iconography and party apparatus grew out of the Austrian-German occult milieu. Many German writers have said the same thing after the war: Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Gottfried Benn and Ernst Jünger are just a few of them. …
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The 60s and 70s saw a wave of speculative books on the topic, of which The occult roots of Nazism by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke is perhaps the most elaborate. And all the same - or maybe that's why - few serious historians have dealt with this issue. In contrast, the occult history of Nazism is often pushed aside by scholars, who, like Staudenmeier, believe that it distracts attention from more important explanations of the origins of Nazism. Körlander's book, the result of an eight-year study of German archives, is the first academic study to date to take a holistic approach to this issue.
Körlender writes about the renaissance of the occult in the interwar period in Europe and especially in Germany, where people flocked to seances, astrologers, fortune tellers, parapsychological experiments, occult shops, esoteric schools and even university courses on these topics. Renewed interest in ancient relics, runic inscriptions and dead languages was combined with admiration for Indian religions, yoga, concern for animal rights, vegetarianism and sexual emancipation. At the same time, there was a large-scale racist and nationalist movement, the so-called Völkisch movement, a popular movement that stemmed in part from the German romanticism's interest in Germanic tales and myths.
All this was absorbed and used by Nazism in the split, restless and in a state of economic crisis, the Weimar Republic. The monsters in the title of the book refer to how the Nazis systematically demonized Jews and Communists, who, with the help of Heinz Ewers, who wrote in the horror genre, were associated with images of vampires, zombies, demons, devils, phantoms and other creatures from the German fairytale heritage. … The Nazis in propaganda presented themselves as ruthless werewolves who, with their sharp teeth, defended a mystical blood community based on race and territory.
Curlander discusses the major esoteric teachings of the time: Madame Blavatsky's theosophy, Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy, and the lesser-known racist Ariosophy, which prophesied the revival of a lost Aryan civilization inhabited by northern "godmen." The doctrine, founded by the Austrian Guido von Lanz, was based on a grandiose nationalist cosmology: a world divided into light and dark, where the blonde-haired blue-eyed northern heroes were doomed to an eternal struggle with the race of "inferior people".
Similar ideas circulated in the Thule Society, the Hammer group and other occult political groups with which Hitler contacted in the cafes of Vienna and the pubs in Munich. Curlander shows that much of the Nazi party program was already foreshadowed in the Ariosophical magazine Ostara, which Hitler was supposed to read in the 1910s: the importance of racial hygiene and the danger of race mixing, the meanness of the Jews, the harmful effects of socialism, liberalism and feminism, and the mystical the power of the Indo-European swastika. Ostar also had even more ominous demands for forced sterilizations, a program of euthanasia and the extermination of Jews.
It is believed by many that the Nazi Party has been cleaning up anything called occult thinking since 1937. Curlander shows that the campaign against the occult was directed only against what the Nazis called "popular occultism", while throughout the war they continued to fund the so-called "scientific occult": astrology, telepathy, magnetotherapy, the art of divination, and so on. He pays special attention to the vague "Doctrine of Eternal Ice" (Welteislehre or WEL) - "glacial cosmogony" according to which the universe arose as a result of an interstellar struggle between two antagonistic primordial elements, ice and fire. The collision between the water-filled star and the fire star caused an explosion that scattered ice crystals throughout outer space. Crystals formed the solar systemstars and planets; and an ice age on Earth. Then a meteorite, filled with "divine sperm," fell to Earth and gave birth to the northern ancient people.
The German scientific community dismissed all of this as utter nonsense. Some have pointedly venomously pointed out that the universe might as well have arisen from olive oil. And yet WEL was officially declared a science in the Third Reich. Hitler, Himmler and the entire Nazi leadership wholeheartedly believed in this theory and created a cult around its creator, the Austrian engineer Hanns Hörbiger, who once had it all in a vision.
With its torrent of cataclysms, apocalyptic battles and Aryan demigods, the WEL represented an attractive Germanic alternative to "Jewish" physics and "soulless" natural science. She satisfied the spiritual needs of the Germans in order to "restore the charm of science" and at the same time ideally fit into the ever-expanding fairy-tale world of the Völkisch movement.
Curlander also brings up a series of testimonies that call all the big Nazi ideologies openly enemies of the church. Himmler announced that the priests would go to the gas chambers after the Jews. According to Hitler's secretary Christa Schroeder, the Fuhrer planned to start fighting the church after the war. Curlander also writes interestingly about the eclectic mixture of Gnosticism, Satanism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism, Edda and the Nibelungen Saga, from which the Nazis wanted to make their new state religion. But at the same time also about Hitler's interest in Islam, which he called "the highest religion."
"Hitler's Monsters" is a clear and sober book, free from speculation and passion for sensations. Only in one place did I get a little thoughtful when Körlender seemed to be hinting at the fact that Hitler could have performed mass hypnosis and hypnotized the German people. Despite the fact that Hitler's rhetoric was useless, and he did not leave behind a single catch phrase, there is countless evidence of his "supernatural", "magical", "simply mystical" ability to bewitch his audience. Körlender says that Hitler did read books on mass psychology and hypnosis. But there is no evidence that he practiced it, and it is even less likely that it would have worked. Curlander does not focus on this especially, and of course, it is interesting to reflect on a lot of this evidence in itself.
Reading Eric Körlander's story about how quickly the Nazis managed to dehumanize and figuratively transform various ethical minorities into “monsters” to be destroyed, it is especially alarming now, when the flag-waving Friends of Sweden unashamedly shout in the faces of Afghan refugees that they - parasites ", which" will be raped like animals."
Fabian Kastner
