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The Unknown Hitler: Nazi Roots in the Occult
The Unknown Hitler:
Nazi Roots in the Occult
Author Unknown
On April 6, 1919, in Bavaria, left wing socialists and anarchists
proclaimed the Bavarian Soviet Republic. The brains of the
revolution were a group of writers who had little idea of
administration. Life in munich grew chaotic. The counter-
revolutionary forces, the whites, composed of various groups of
decommissioned soldiers known as "Frei Corps", equipped and
financed by the mysterious Thule Society, defeated the Bavarian
Soviet within a matter of weeks.
Many other decommissioned soldiers waited out the turbulence in
barracks, pfc Adolph Hitler among them. After the Bavarian
Republic had been defeated by the Whites, in May, Hitler's
superiors put him to work in the post revolution investigating
commission. His indictments injected ruthless efficiency into the
kangaroo courts as he fingered hundreds of noncommissioned
officers and enlisted men who had sympathized with the communist
and anarchists. He was subsequently sent to attend special
anticommunist training courses and seminars at the University
which were financed by the Reichswehr administration and by
private donors from the Thule Society. This led to an assignment in
the intelligence division of the postwar German army, to infiltrate
groups that could organize the working classes while the
communists were weak. On a September evening, 1919, Hitler
turned up in the Sternecker Beer Hall where members and friends
of the budding German Workers Party had gathered. He quietly
listened to the presentation by engineer Gottfried Feder, a Thule
Society member, who talked about jewish control over lending
capital. When one of the other group members called for Bavaria to
break away from the rest of Germany, Hitler sprang into action. The
astonished audience stood by while his highly aggressive remarks
and compelling oratory swept through the room. After Hitler had
finished his harangue, party chairman and founder, Anton Drexler,
immediately asked him to a meeting of the party's steering
committee held a few days later. He was asked to join the
committee as its seventh member, responsible for advertising and
propaganda.
Back in 1912, several German occultists with radical anti-semitic
inclinations decided to form a "magic" lodge, which they named the
Order of Teutons. the main founders were Theodor Fritsch, a
publisher of an anti-semitic journal; Philipp Stauff, pupil of the
racist Guido Von List, and Hermann Pohl, the order's chancellor.
(Pohl would drop out three years later to found his own bizarre
lodge, the Walvater Teutonic Order of the Holy Grail.) The Order
of Teutons was organized along the lines of the Free Masons or the
Rosicrucians, having differing degrees of initiation, only persons
who could fully document that they were of pure "aryan" ancestry
were allowed to join.
In 1915, Pohl was joined by Rudolf Blauer, who held a Turkish
passport and practiced sufi meditation. He also dabbled in
astrology and was an admirer of Lanz Von Liebenfels and Guido
Von List, both pathologically anti-semitic. Blauer went by the
name of Rudolf Freiherr Von Seboottendorf. He was very wealthy,
although the origin of his fortune is unknown. He became the
Grand Master of the Bavarian Order and he founded the Thule
Society, with Pohl's approval, in 1918.
After the Bavarian communist revolution of 1918, the Thule
Society became a center of the counterrevolutionary subculture. An
espionage network and arms caches were organized. The Thule
Club rooms became a nest of resistance to the revolution and the
Munich Soviet Republic.
Journalist Karl Harrer was given the job of founding a political
"worker circle". He realized that the workers would reject any
program that was presented to them by a member of the
conservative "privileged" class. Harrer knew that the mechanic
Anton Drexler, who was working for the railroads, was a well-
known anti-semite, chauvinist and proletarian. With drexler as
nominal chairman, Harrer founded the German Workers Party in
January 1919
The German Workers Party was only one of many associations
founded and controlled by the Thule Society. The Thule was the
"mother" to the German Socialist Party, led by Julius Streicher, and
the right-wing radical Oberland Free Corps. It published the
Munich observer, which later became the National Observer. Hitler
became the most prominent personality in the party. He caused
Harrer to drop out, and he pushed Drexler, the nominal chairman,
to the sidelines. He filled key positions with his own friends from
the Thule Society and the Army. During the summer of 1920, upon
his suggestion, the party was renamed the National Socialist
German Worker Party (NASDAP). The new name was intended to
equally attract nationalists and proletarians.
To go along with the new name his mass movement also required a
flag with a powerful symbol. Among many designs under
consideration, Hitler picked the one suggested by Thule member
Dr. Krohn: a red cloth with a white circle in the middle containing
a black swastika.
Hitler wanted to turn the German Workers Party into a mass-
conscious fighting party, but Harrer and Drexler were hesitant, due
in part to their woeful financial situation. The Thule Society was
not yet supplying very much money and no one seemed to know
how to build up a mass party. Hitler arranged two public meetings
in obscure beer halls, and he drafted leaflets and posters, but there
was no real breakthrough.
All of this changed dramatically at the end of the 1919 when Hitler
met Dietrich Eckart. Most biographers have underestimated the
influence that Eckart exerted on Hitler. He was the wealthy
publisher and editor-in-chief of an anti-semitic journal which he
called In Plain German. Eckart was also a committed occultist and a
master of magic. As an initiate, Eckart belonged to the inner circle
of the Thule Society as well as other esoteric orders.
Briefly, the creed of the Thule Society inner circle is as follows:
Thule was a legendary island in the far north, similar to Atlantis,
supposedly the center of a lost, high-level civilization. But not all
secrets of that civilization had been completely wiped out. Those
that remained were being guarded by ancient, highly intelligent
beings (similar to the "Masters" of Theosophy or the White
Brotherhood). The truly initiated could establish contact with these
beings by means of magic-mystical rituals. The "Masters" or
"Ancients" allegedly would be able to endow the initiated with
supernatural strength and energy. With the help of these energies
the goal of the initiated was to create a race of Supermen of
"Aryan" stock who would exterminate all "inferior" races.
There can be no doubt that Eckart - who had been alerted to Hitler
by other Thulists - trained Hitler in techniques of self confidence,
self projection, persuasive oratory, body language and discursive
sophistry. With these tools, in a short period of time he was able to
move the obscure workers party from the club and beer hall
atmosphere to a mass movement. The emotion charged lay speaker
became an expert orator, capable of mesmerizing a vast audience.
One should not underestimate occultism's influence on Hitler. His
subsequent rejection of Free Masons and esoteric movements, of
Theosophy, of Anthrosophy, does not necessarily mean otherwise.
Occult circles have long been known as covers for espionage and
influence peddling. Hitler's spy apparatus under Canaris and
Heydrich were well aware of these conduits, particularly from the
direction of Britain which had within its MI5 intelligence agency a
department known as the Occult Bureau. That these potential
sources of trouble were purged from Nazi life should not be taken
to mean that Hitler and the Nazi secret societies were not
influenced by mystical and occult writers such as Madame
Blavatsky, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Guido Von List, Lanz
Von Liebenfels, Rudolf Steiner, George Gurdjieff, Karl Haushofer
and Theodor Fritsch. Although Hitler later denounced and ridiculed
many of them, he did dedicate his book Mein Kampf to his teacher
Dietrich Eckart.
A frequent visitor to Landsberg Prison where Hitler was writing
Mein Kampf with the help of Rudolf Hess, was General Karl
Haushofer, a university professor and director of the Munich
Institute of Geopolitics. Haushofer, Hitler, and Hess had long
conversations together. Hess also kept records of these
conversations. Hitler's demands for German "Living Space" in the
east at the expense of the Slavic nations were based on the
geopolitical theories of the learned professor. Haushofer was also
inclined toward the esoteric. as military attache in Japan, he had
studied Zen-Buddhism. He had also gone through initiations at the
hands of Tibetan Lamas. He became Hitler's second "esoteric
mentor", replacing Dietrich Eckart. 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 Gregor Ivanovich Gurdyev (George Gurdjieff). Both
Gurdjeiff 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, Goring, 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 the esoteric lodges. Haushofer taught
him the 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.
From "The Unknown Hitler" by Wulf Schwartzwaller, Berkeley
Books, 1990
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Men Behind Hitler - excerpts from the book by Bernard
Schreiber
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) was an English political
economist and historian who in 1796 published a book called "An
Essay on the Principle of Population" in which he said that poverty,
and thereby vice and misery, are unavoidable because population
growth always exceeds food production. Checks on population
growth were wars, famine, and diseases.
Malthus's ideas had great impact, only a few asked on what his
claims were actually based. Yet neither Malthus nor his later
disciples ever managed to put forward any scientific proof for his
theory. Many scientists have disproved Malthus' theory and the
ideology resulting from it.
However, with the book, Malthus created an atmosphere which
moved his adherents in 1834 to pass a new law providing for the
institution of work- houses for the poor, in which the sexes were
strictly separated to curb the otherwise inevitable overbreeding.
This kind of philosophy urged the calling forth of drastic measures.
The full title of Charles Darwin's famous book is not so famous:
"The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection or the
Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life". In it he
explains the development of life-forms as a struggle for existence.
The result of this struggle would be a natural selection of those
species and races who were to triumph over those weaker ones who
would perish.
Francis Galton (1822-1911) was an english psychologist and a
half-cousin of Darwin. Galton extended Darwin's theory into a
concept of deliberate social intervention, which he said was a
logical application of evolution to the human race. He called his
theory "Eugenics", the principle of which was that by encouraging
better human stock to breed and discouraging the reproduction of
less desirable stock, the whole race could be improved.
Modern racism really began with Arthur Count de Gabon (1816-
1882) who published his "Essay on the Inequality of Human
Races". He wrote in of a fair-haired Aryan race that was superior to
all the others whose remnants constituted a tiny racial aristocracy
decaying under the overwhelming weight of inferior races. A revival
of his work in Germany began ten years after his death by the Pan-
Germans, an extremely nationalistic and anti-jewish group.
In 1899, Gabon's disciple, Houston Stewart Chaimberlain (1844-
1927), an Englishman, published "The Foundations of the
Nineteenth Century", in Germany. He upheld the German race to be
the purest and damned the inferior races, the jews and negroes, as
degenerate. From this point on, Eugenics, Social Darwinism and
racial hygiene fused into a single concept.
In 1904 the first chairs in Eugenics were instituted at University
College, London, followed by the establishment of the Galton
Laboratory for National Eugenics in 1907. In 1910 the Eugenic
Record Office was founded in the United States, both institutes
used the research results of the Galton Laboratory of National
Eugenics to propose practical applications. Eugenics was used an
the "scientific" basis upon which racism was fused to politics.
Eugenicists believed that the child of a mentally-ill person and a
mentally heathy person would be a mentally-ill offspring. This led
to a series of escalating regimens: separation from society, restraint,
separation of the sexes in defective's colonies, and sterilizations. In
Great Britain one of the leaders of the mental hygiene movement
was Miss Evelyn Fox. She had been an active member of the
Eugenics Society before the foundation of the National Council for
Mental Hygiene, of which she was an officer and founder. among
the board members was Sir Cyril Burt, who later founded Mensa, a
high i.q. group which espoused eugenic principles. The mental
hygiene movement drew strongly from the eugenic movements of
whatever country they were in.
Shortly after the turn of the century eugenic organizations were set
up throughout the world. While the whole world was being
prepared by propaganda for the sterilization of the insane, the
adherents of mental hygiene and eugenics were preparing their next
step, euthanasia. In the U.S.A.., Dr. Alexis Carrel, a nobel prize
winner who had been on the staff of the Rockefeller Institute since
its inception, published his book "Man the Unknown" in 1935. In it
he suggests the removal of the mentally ill and the criminal by
small euthanasia institutions equipped with suitable gases.
In 1933 the Nazi party rapidly consolidated its power. In June of
that year, Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick put in motion the
passage of the "Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases in
Posterity"- the sterilization law. Architect of the law was Ernst
Rudin, professor of psychiatry at the Munich University, director of
the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute for Genealog, and of the Research
Institute for Psychiatry. A separate legal system was set up
consisting of "Hereditary Health Courts", which could decree
sterilization against a person's will. By 1935 the "Nuremburg Laws"
intended to insure the racial purity of the nation and was aimed
specifically at the Jews.
In 1934 the Institute for Heredity, Biology and Racial Research was
founded at Frankfurt University by professor Ernst Rudin's
colleague at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Dr. Otmar Freiherr Von
Verscheur. Von Verscheur's assistant there was Dr. Joseph
Mengele.
In England, Dr. Charles Killick Millard, president of the Society of
Medical Officers of Health, brought up in 1931 the question of
voluntary euthanasia and proposed a suitable law. Later he became
fellow founder of the Voluntary Euthanasia Legislation Society. In
1935 Lord Moynihan, president of the Royal College of Surgeons,
founded the Euthanasia Society .
Sterilization and euthanasia were not the ideas of the Nazis and
never had been. They were ideas which were supported and
promoted throughout the world by groups with an interest in the
development of mental hygiene. Germany, however, was the only
country in which the political climate allowed materialization of
the final goal of sterilization and euthanasia.
There is not a great deal known about "T4" compared to other
aspects of Nazi Germany. T4 was the Fuhrer Chancellery and the
initials came from the full address which was Tiergartenstrasse 4,
Berlin. "Project T4" was fully integrated into the organizational
structure of the Reich and fell under section 11b. ("mercy-death")
of the Chancellery of the Fuhrer. Four cover organizations
safeguarded the project T4: the Realms Work Committee in charge
of collecting information on candidates for euthanasia from
questionnaires sent to hospitals, the Realms Committee for
Scientific Approach to Severe Illness Due to Heredity set up
exclusively to apply euthanasia to children, the charitable company
for the transport of the sick which transported patients to the
killing centers, and the Charitable Foundation for Institutional
Care, in charge of final disposition of the victims' remains.
At the time the questionnaires went out a number of mental
hospitals were being converted for use as killing centers and
schools for murder. Death chambers were built disguised as
shower-baths and crematoriums, which were identical to those later
to be established in the death camps in Poland.
Schooling of the personnel at Hadamar Mental Institution produced
perfect murderers who were used to the smell of burnt flesh, had
been taught to trick people being led to their death and to steel
themselves against the crying and pleading of the victims. On
arrival, the victims were stripped, dressed in paper shirts and
forthwith taken to a gas chamber where they were murdered with
hydrocyanic acid gas, and the bodies moved to crematoriums by
conveyer belts, six bodies to a furnace. The psychiatrist in charge at
Hadamar was Dr. Adolf Wahlmann, an active member of the
German Mental Hygiene Movement.
After the state had been relieved of the burden of these
undesireables, the operation, still under the direction of eminent
mental health psychiatrists in T4, was expanded under the code of
14F13. From being limited to mental hospitals and institutions, it
now embraced German and Austrian inmates and Jews in
concentration camps who were sick or invalid. At Dachau at the
end of 1941 a commission composed of 4 psychiatrists under
professor Dr. Werner Heyde, SS Standartenfuhrer and lecturer in
neurology and psychiatry at Wurzburg University, arrived at the
camp and selected hundred of patients incapable of work who were
transported to the gas chambers and disposed of.
The extermination camps had followed a separate evolution from
the concentration camps that were opened a few months after the
Nazi rise to power. These death camps had their headquarters, not
in Himmler's SS organization, but in the Fuhrer's Chancellory (T4).
Franz Stangl (Austrian Gestapo) said at the Nuremberg trials that
his progression to builder and commander of the Sobibor
Extermination Camp went through the Hartheim and Bernberg
euthanasia centers. The original staff at Sobibor was taken from
Hartheim.
During the war eugenics became associated with the Nazis and
afterwards a global whitewashing began. The first step was the
reconstitution of the many National Councils of Mental Hygiene.
The first was the British Association for Mental Health. Lady
Prescilla Norman, wife of Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank
of England, had been working in the mental hygiene movement
since the 20's. In 1944 they sponsored a congress held at the
Ministry of Health in London where they established the World
Federation of Mental Health-WFMH.
The first elected president of the WFMH was Dr. John Rawlings
Rees, a British psychiatrist associated with the Tavistock Institute.
In 1948 the WFMH was formally inaugurated at the Third
International Congress of Mental Health. A vice-president of the
Congress was Dr. Carl G. Jung who was described by fellow vice-
president Dr. Conti as "representing German psychiatry under the
Nazis". Dr. Jung had been co-editor of the Journal for
Psychotherapy with Dr. M. H. Goering, the cousin of Marshal
Hermann Goering.
It may be that the real key to the Third Reich lies buried in the
history of Tibet, for it was here that Karl Haushofer, the initiate
who taught the youthful Hitler, first met in literal fact the Superman
of Nazi legend.
Origins of the swastika
By 1945 the Thousand Year Reich had become a smoking ruin.
Russian soldiers pressed through the rubble, fighting from house to
house, from street to street in order to link up with their British and
American allies who also pressed in inexorably on the heart of the
dying capital. Before they overran the eastern sector of Berlin,
these Russian troops came across something very strange: vast
numbers of Tibetan corpses. The fact is mentioned by Maurice
Bessy and again by Pauwels and Bergier, who set the actual
number of bodies at a thousand. They wore German uniform, but
without the usual insignia of rank.
The religion of Tibet is Buddhism, but like the Zen of Japan, it is a
brand of Buddhism far divorced from the Indian original. Many
scholars prefer the term "Lamaism" to distinguish between Tibetan
Buddhism and its parent root. The religious life of the country is
concentrated in a multitude of monasteries, many of them built in
almost inaccessible mountain regions. Side by side with the state
religion of Lamaism, and flourishing particularly in the rural
districts, is Tibet's aboriginal religion of Bon. The Bon-Pas follow
a primitive, animistic creed, full of dark rituals and spells. If the
holy Lamas of the Buddhist sects were looked on as
personifications of spiritual wisdom, the priests of Bon had a
potent reputation with the common people as magicians.
The Nazi leaders were attracted to Tibet by those of its secret
doctrines which filtered through to the west. They believed, those
members of the Thule group, the Luminous Lodge, and the various
other occult organizations which helped shape the Third Reich, in
an esoteric history of mankind. And it was in the archives of
Tibetan monasteries that this history was preserved in its purest
form.
Already, in the latter half of the previous century, intriguing hints
about Tibetan secret teachings had been carried to the west by
Helena Blavatsky, who claimed initiation at the hands of the Holy
Lamas themselves. Blavatsky taught that her "Hidden Masters" and
"Secret Chiefs" had their earthly residence in the Himalayan region.
As soon as the Nazi movement had sufficient funds, it began to
organize a number of expeditions to Tibet and these succeeded one
another practically without interruption until 1943. One of the most
tangible expressions of Nazi interest in Tibet was the party`s
adoption of its deepest and most mystical of symbols-the swastika.
The swastika is one of mankind's oldest symbols, and apart from
the cross and the circle, probably the most widely distributed. It is
shown on pottery fragments from Greece dating back to the eighth
century b.c. It was used in ancient Egypt, India and China. The
Navaho indians of North America have a traditional swastika
pattern. Arab-Islamic sorcerers used it. In more recent times, it was
incorporated in the flags of certain baltic states.
The idea for the use of the swastika by the Nazis came from a
dentist named Dr. Friedrich Krohn who was a member of the secret
Germanen order. Krohn produced the design for the actual form in
which the Nazis came to use the symbol, that is reversed, spinning
in an anti-clockwise direction. As a solar symbol, the swastika is
properly thought of as spinning, and the Buddhists have always
believed the symbol attracted luck. The Sanskrit word "svastika"
means good fortune and well being. According to Cabbalistic lore
and occult theory, chaotic force can be evoked by revers- ing the
symbol. And so the symbol appeared as the flag of Nazi Germany
and the insignia of the Nazi party, an indication for those who had
eyes to see, as to the occult nature of the Third Reich.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE CONTROVERSY OF THE OCCULT REICH By John
Roemer
This article is transcribed from an issue of Gnosis Magazine.
One hundred years after Adolf Hitler's birth near Linz in Austria on
April 20 1889, and decades after his malign empire metastasized in
Bavaria in Bavaria, the Hitler phenomenon remains to mainstream
historians largely inexplicable, or at least unexplained. The man
and his awful work seem to stand outside history looking in.
Perhaps our human fear of the irrational is so great that we
instinctively hold Hitler at a great remove in order that we need not
admit him to our company.
In light of this it isn't very surprising that an extensive literature
exists seeking an occult rationale for the otherwise baffling
catastrophe Hitler represents. As Louis Pauwels and Jacques
Bergier point out in the MORNING OF THE MAGICIANS (1960),
the Nazi era simply defies conventional analysis:
A self taught madman, surrounded by a handful of
megalomaniacs,rejects Descartes, spurns the whole humanist
culture, tramples on reason, invokes Lucifer, conquers Europe, and
nearly conquers the world... The historian begins to feel anxious
and to wonder whether his art is viable.1
Pauwels and Bergier were among the first postwar proponents of a
black magical explanation for the Third Reich.1a About a quarter
of their book is devoted to a region they call "The Absolute
Elsewhere," a neverland where Nazi pseudosciences and occult
methodology held official sway. They quote a Hitlerian
pronouncement to demonstrate that the Fuhrer's intellectual
development was on a level wholly different from that understood
by the Western tradition: "there is a Nordic and National Socialist
science which is opposed to Jewish-Liberal science".2 Reality was
defined by politics.
Nazi "science" has brought hoots of derision from those who hold
to the Cartesian model. In place of psychology there was an occult
frappe composed of the mysticism of Gurdijeff, the theosophy of
Madame Blavatsky and the archetypes of Nordic mythology.3 In
place of Newtonian physics stood the cosmic force called vril, the
bizarre geology known as the hollow earth theory, and the frigid
cosmology of Hans Horbiger's Welteislehre, the doctrine of eternal
ice.
Nazi thought excluded psychoanalysis, which has in fact been not
very helpful in explaining the etiology of great evil, although
Robert G.L. Waite's effort, quoted above and published in 1977 by
Basic Books, is good on several provocative subjects: Hitler's
sadomasochistic sex life; the possibility he had a Jewish
grandfather; and his Viennese mentors, who are described at greater
length by the authors about to be mentioned.
Nazism officially rejected the theory of relativity as "Jewish
science". Not only Freud but EInstein too was forced to flee Hitler's
Europe. He and other physicists eventually were able to ensure that
atomic secrets remained in the hands of the allies until they could
be used spectacularly to climax the Pacific war.
Horbiger's physics derived from an intuitive flash he experienced
late in the nineteenth century. "... As a young engineer," he wrote, "I
was watching one day some molten steel poured on wet ground
covered with snow: the ground exploded after some delay and with
great violence."4
This conflict of opposites, of fire and ice, is a theme that inspired
Horbiger and resonated for German nationalists because it recurs in
the Icelandic Eddas, the sourcebooks of Teutonic mythology. It all
makes good sense in Iceland, since that island's peculiar geology
feature numerous volcanic rifts in the permafrost; fire and ice are
commonly juxtaposed all over the landscape. As grounds for a
cosmology- the word implies universality- it is at best dubious. It
would be a hard sell in Hawaii.
Nevertheless, Nazi science was influential out of all proportion to
its objective validity. Hoerbiger was immensely influential in the
Third Reich. His followers numbered in the tens of thousands.
There were scores of Horbigerian books, hundreds of Welteislehre
pamphlets, and a monthly magazine called THE KEY TO WORLD
EVENTS. As one tract put it,
Our Nordic ancestors grew strong amidst the ice and snow, and this
is why a belief in a world of ice is the natural heritage of Nordic
men. It was Austrian, Hitler, who drove out the Jewish politicians,
and another Austrian, Horbiger, (who) will drive out the Jewish
scientists. By his own example Hitler has shown that an amateur to
give us a thorough understanding of the Universe.
Hitler's fatal confidence in the success of his troops on the Russian
front during the 1941 - 2 winter is generally believed to have been a
result of his misplaced faith in Horbiger's weather forecasts.
Despite such setbacks, the Welteislehre managed to thrive even
after the war. The popular speculations of Immanuel Velikovsky
derive in part from Horbiger. In 1953 a survey conducted by Martin
Gardner showed that more than a million people in Germany,
England, and the U.S. believed that Horbiger was right6.
The Horbigerian cosmology posited an early epoch, some fifteen
million years ago, during which a hugh moon moved across the sky
very near the earth. Its gravitational attraction gave rise to a race of
our ancestors, the giants. These giants, which appear in the ancient
Norse and Icelandic sagas, sleep, yet they are alive. To the Nazis,
they were Supermen. In one set of myths, contained in the
Nibelungenlied, they lived beneath Teutonic mountains. In another
they were prototype Aryans from the East, inhabiting vast Tibetan
caverns.
Three other books that investigate hidden influences on Gerald
Suster's HITLER: THE OCCULT MESSIAH; Jean-Michel
Angebert's THE OCCULT AND THE THIRD REICH; and
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's THE OCCULT ROOTS OF NAZISM.
Suster's book largely rehashes Pauwels and Bergier. Angebert
(actually a pen name for two French writers) interestingly links
Hitler to an ancient dualist tradition he traces from Manichaenism
in Persia through the Essenes, Jesus's Palestinian forebears, to the
Cathars in the south of France in the Middle Ages. It's philosophy
in which, in its Nazi incarnation, solar forces of light represented
by blond, fair-skinned Aryans strive against the evil forces of
darkness, who are of course dark skinned Semites.
Both books, but especially Suster's are written in prose that stops
just this side of tabloid journalese. This is too bad for two reasons.
One, the authors diminish some important material by this kind of
presentation. Two, the lessons we have to learn about mass
psychopathology and about the history of fascism are too important
to be trivalized in this way.
Goodrick-Clark's is a serious and compelling historical look at
ariosophy, a dangerous amalgam of Aryan racism, pan-German
nationalism, and occultism that flourished in Austria and Germany
from around 1890 well into the era when Himmler's Death's Head
SS was organized. Himmler is said by Pauwels and Bergier to have
taken the Jesuits for his model, and to have installed a regular
hierarchy ranging from lay brothers to father superior, and to have
used this Black Order in horrific rites.8
THE OCCULT ROOTS OF NAZISM identifies wide circle of
proto-Nazi philosophers, previously almost unknown, who saw in
the chaos that beset Germany after the Treaty of Versailles the
working out of ancient Aryan prophecies. Among them was Rudolf
John Gorsleben, who interesting career Goodrick-Clarke sums up
in a sentence: "on the basis of the runes, occultism, and the Edda,
Gorsleben created an original racist mystery-religion which
illuminated the priceless magical heritage of the Aryans and
justified their spiritual and political world-supremacy."9
Gorsleben was active in right-wing politics in Bavaria in the years
Hitler was forming his political convictions there, and he lectured
to the Thule Society, a Munich club thought to have greatly
influenced Nazism in its infancy (see below). He also edited a
weekly newspaper called German Freedom; in 1927 he changed the
name to Aryan Freedom.
He derived the word 'race' from rata, an Old Norse term meaning
'root', in order to conclude that God and race were identical.... He
maintained that racial mixing was always detrimental for the
racially superior partner, since his purity was debased in the
progeny, and he repeated the common volkisch [folkish] conviction
that woman could be 'impregnated' by intercourse, even when no
conception occurred, so that her subsequent offspring bore the
characteristics of her first lover. Given these overwhelming
pressures towards the increasing bastardization of the German
descendants of the Aryan race, only the strict practice of
segregation and eugenics could guarantee the reversal of racial
contamination in the world.10
Another book which hold that Hitler learned many of his occult
lesson from avatars in Vienna and Munich may well be the best
known black magical explanation of Nazism to have been put forth
so far. Trevor Ravenscroft's THE SPEAR OF DESTINY was
published by that famous British house of occultism, the aptly
named Neville Spearman Ltd,.in 1972, and has since gone through
many edition.11
Ravenscroft is intriguing because instead of reporting historical
influences on Hitler, he presents secret history in a narrative form
that purports to be factual and that-if true maybe even if only
poetically "true"-goes a long way toward finding a convincing
occult explanation for the Nazi phenomenon.
Two challenges to Ravenscroft's facts, discussed below, have led
some readers to conclude his book is more nearly a novel than strict
history. Nonetheless, its provocative premise and fluent synthesis
of black magical thematics will keep it on occult booklists until a
better effort at explaining Hitler comes along.
Ravenscroft, a British journalist, historian, and World War II
commando officer, spent four years in Nazi prison camps after he
was captured attempting to assassinate General Erwin Rommel in
North Africa in 1941. His personal perspective on the Hitler era is
based on material he says he got in a state of transcendent
consciousness while imprisoned. He introduces his methodology by
speaking of:
my own experience of higher levels of consciousness whilst in a
Nazi Concentration Camp during the war, and how the nature of
this transcendent experience had guided me to a study of the Spear
of Longinus and the legend of world destiny which had grown up
around it.12
Later, in London, his intuitive suspicions about certain grail relics
and their importance in occult Hitlerian history were confirmed by
a Viennese exile called Dr. Walter Johannes Stein who died in
1957.
Dr. Stein spent much of the war as a British secret agent, but before
that time he was a scholar who employed white magical means to
clairvoyantly investigate historical events. It was his book on the
grail mythos published in Stuttgart in 1928 and titled THE NINTH
CENTURY: WORLD HISTORY IN THE LIGHT OF THE HOLY
GRAIL13 that attracted Ravenscroft to him.
THE SPEAR OF DESTINY focuses first on Hitler's lost years in
Vienna from 1909 to 1913. During that time, Ravenscroft writes,
Dr. Stein was pursuing his occult researches as a student at the
University of Vienna and getting to know Hitler, then a dropout
living in a flophouse.
Vienna was during Hitler's years there a vortex of modern thinking.
Freud was in practice at Berggasse 19; Ludwig Wittgenstein was in
residence pondering avant garde philosophy and metaphysics;
Gustav Mahler had returned home to die and to name his protege,
Arnold Schonberg. In contrast there persisted the deep anti-Semitic
currents that had caused Mahler to convert to Catholicism, that
forced Freud eventually to flee to London and that informed the
ancient pan-German folkoric nostalgia espoused by Guido von List.
This old black magician, whose occult lodge Ravenscroft says
substituted the swastika for the cross in perversion and the practice
of medieval thaumaturgy, looked like a wizard in floppy cap and
long white beard. His link to Hitler was allegedly through an occult
bookseller, Ernst Pretzche, in whose shop the future Fuhrer found a
second home.
In the shop Dr. Stein found a copy of Wolfram von Eschenbach's
PARZIVAL, the medieval grail romance that Dr. Stein was himself
researching for his work on the ninth century. In the book's margins
were handwritten annotations; looking them over Dr.Stein was
fascinated and repelled:
This was no ordinary commentary but the work of somebody who
had achieved more than a working knowledge of the black arts! The
unknown commentator had found the key to unveiling many of the
deepest secrets of the Grail, yet obviously spurned the Christian
ideals of the Knights and delighted in the devious machinations of
the Anti-Christ. It suddenly dawned on him that he was reading the
footnotes of Satan!14
The footnotes, of course, proved to have been Hitler's. Soon
afterward, Dr.Stein and Hitler saw the Reich's lance together in the
Imperial Museum at the Hofburg. Dr. Stein had been there before
and had never failed to be moved by the sight of the old relic,
supposed to have been moved by the original spear with which the
Roman centurion, Longinus, pierced the side of Christ during the
crucifixation. Longinus was a German, and his "spear of destiny"
was fated to play a magical role in the careers of German leaders
like Charlemagne, Otto the Great, and Frederick Barbarossa. Dr.
Stein said the spear inspired in him the emotion expressed in the
motto of the knights of the holy grail: Durch Mitleid wissen,
"through compassion to self knowledge."
Then he glanced at Hitler:
Walter Stein found he was not the only one moved by the sight of
this historic spearhead. Adolf Hitler stood beside him, like a man in
a trance, a man over whom some dreadful magic spell had been
cast... The very space around him seemed enlivened with some
subtle irradiation, a kind of ghostly ectoplasmic light. His whole
physiognomy and stance appeared transformed as if some might
Spirit now inhabited his very soul, creating within and around him
a kind of evil transfiguration of its own nature and power.15
Latter Hitler took Dr. Stein up the Danube to visit his mystic
teacher, a rustic woodcutter and herbalist named Hans Lodz "who
retained in his peasant's blood the last traces of the atavistic
clairvoyance of the ancient Germanic tribes" and who "resembled a
mischievous yet malevolent dwarf from the pages of Grimm's Fairy
Tales or an illustration from a book on ancient Germanic
folklore".16 The men took a swim in the river at which Dr. Stein
noticed that Hitler had only one testicle.
It was Lodz, Dr.Stein learned, who had prepared for Hitler a peyote
concoction that afforded him psychedelic insight into his past lives.
The peyote itself had come from Pretzche, who had lived for a time
in the German colony in Mexico. Hitler had hoped that his former
existences, viewed in his drug trance, would include an early
incarnation as a powerful Teutonic ruler, but it was not to be.
Instead his psychedelic perception revealed non Eschenbach's
Parzival to have been prophetic of events that would take place a
thousand years after it was written, i.e. in the present. And it
showed Hitler to have been the historical personage behind the evil
sorcerer Klingsor, the very spirit of the anti-Christ and the villain of
Parzival.
According to Dr. Stein's work Klingsor was in fact Landulf II of
Capua, the traitorous confidant of the Holy Roman Emperor who
betrayed Christianity to the Moslem invaders of Italy and Spain.
Armed with the knowledge of his black spiritual ancestry,
Ravenscroft writes, Hitler moved to Germany, joined the Bavarian
Army, survived the hellish trench warfare on the western front, won
the Iron Cross, second class, and got discharged in Munich where
he encountered the men who were to invent National Socialism.
Virtually every study of Hitler's time in Munich mentions the Thule
Society as superficially a kind of Elk's Club of German mythology
which met often and openly at a fancy metropolitan hotel and for a
time counted Hitler as a member. Behind the scenes, however the
society seems to have been considerably more sinister.
Robert Payne whose excellent Hitler biography contains no occult
explanations, describes the Thule Society as the center of the right
wing opposition to the brief Bavarian postwar socialist coup under
the Jewish intellectual Kurt Eisner.
The reaction set in swiftly, as the extreme right gathered its forces.
The headquarters of the reaction was the Hotel Vierjahreszeiten,
where several floors were given over to the Thule Society,
ostensibly a literary club devoted to the study of Nordic culture but
in fact a secret political organization devoted to violent anti-
Semitism and rule by an aristocratic elite. The name of the
organization derived from ultima Thule, the unknown northern land
believed to be the original home of the German race... The symbol
of the Thule Society was a swastika with a dagger enclosed in
laurel leaves.17
Most of the occult historians of the era believe the Thule Society
operated on a deeper level still, a level headed by a mysterious
figure called Dietrich Eckart. Goodrick-Clarke calls Eckart Hitler's
mentor in the early days of the Nazi Party, along with Rudolf Hess
and Alfred Rosenberg.18
According to Ravenscroft, Eckart, like Hitler, first achieved
transcendence through psychedelic drugs. Research on peyote by
the German pharmacologist Ludwig Lewin had been published in
1886, leading to widespread popular experimentation. Later a
heroin
addict, in earlier days Eckart used peyote in the practice on neo-
pagan magic in Berlin. He came to believe that he, too was the
reincarnation of ninth century character. In his case it was Bernard
of Barcelona, a notorious betrayer of Christianity to the Arabs and
a black magician who used thaumaturgy to hold off Carolingian
armies in Spain.
Eckart assertedly organized Kurt EIsner's assassination and
personally chose Hitler-by then a battle-scarred veteran of the
horrors of trench warfare and a fervent critic of the armistice-to lead
the Aryan race back to supremacy.
Ravenscroft writes that Hitler had been prepared for satanic
initiation by his experiences in Vienna with peyote and with the
spear and by his mustard gassing in 1918, which left him blind and
in a state of enforced trance for several days.
He also says that the techniques Dietrich Eckart used were in part
derived from the sexual magic of Aleister Crowley. In 1912 this
famed British magician was named IX British head of a secret
Berlin lodge called Ordo Templi Orientis which practiced various
forms of sexual magic.19
Ravenscroft writes "there can be little doubt" that both Crowley and
Eckart conducted deep studies of the Arabian astrological magic
performed by Klingsor's real life counterpart, Landulf II. It was to
Sicily-then a Moslem stronghold-that Landulf fled after his
traitorous links to Islam were disclosed. And it was in a dark tower
in the mountains of the southwest corner of that island that his evil
soul festered with additional bitterness over his castration by the
relatives of a noblewoman he had raped. There he practiced sadistic
satanism of a nature that foreshadowed the horrors of Nazi
concentration camps.
If the legends that have come down from these dark centuries of
European history are true, these rituals carried out at Kalot Enbolot
included terrible tortures such as the slitting open of the stomach of
sacrificial victims and the slow drawing open of the stomach of
sacrificial victims and the slow drawing of their entrails, the driving
of stakes through the orifices of their bodies before disembowelling
them, and the invoking of Spirits of Darkness (incubi) to rape
young virgins kidnapped from their families.20
It was from his studies of the power available to practitioners of
such perversities that Eckart devised the rituals he used when he
"opened the centers of Adolf Hitler to give him a vision of and a
means of communication with the Powers." Ravenscroft concludes,
though he declines to furnish the full details: "Suffice it to say that
they were indescribably sadistic and ghastly." 21
Having done his worst, Eckart soon died, proudly advising those
around him:
Follow Hitler! he will dance, but it is I who have called the tune!
I have initiated him into the "Secret Doctrine", opened his centers
of vision and given him the means to communicate with the Powers.
Do not mourn for me: I shall have influenced history more than any
other German.22
Not unnaturally the question rises whether any of THE SPEAR OF
DESTINY is true. It's certainly a great story, one which Ravenscroft
elaborates with a lengthy investigation of Hitler's sex life, in which
he makes a case for associating the reports of the Fuehrer's missing
testis to the perversities resulting from Landulf's castration.
The problem lies with Ravenscroft's primary source, Dr. Walter
Johannes Stein. And the problem with Dr.Stein is really two
problems: one his method of historical research: and two, the fact
that he is dead and unable to speak for himself.
Given his method, of course, this second problem should not be
insurmountable. Had we the technique, Dr. Stein could presumably
verify each of Ravenscroft's assertion for us from beyond the grave.
For Dr. Stein is alleged to have studied history not in the libraries
and archives that are the usual haunt of the historian but in an arena
called the Cosmic Chronicle where, according to Ravenscroft, past
present and future were united in a higher dimension of time.
What's more Ravenscroft reveals in his introduction, Dr.Stein
taught the same techniques to him.
It is, however, undeniably difficult, if not unprecedented, to
footnote clairvoyance. We have to take on faith that the SPEAR OF
DESTINY is what Dr.Stein told Ravenscroft. This is not to say that
all of his information came from the Cosmic Chronicle; Dr. Stein
as we have seen is purported to have been present in Vienna during
Hitler's lost years there. Nor did their close association end in
Austria. Ravenscroft says Dr. Stein "watched at close quarters" the
founding of the Nazi party and Hitler's association with Eckart and
other sinister mentors.
When Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler ordered Dr.Stein's arrest
in Stuttgart in 1933 in order to press him into service with the SS
Occult Bureau, he escaped from Germany and brought with him to
Britain the most authoritative knowledge of the occultism of the
Nazi Party.23
Nowhere does Ravenscroft made it clear whether he's talking about
eyewitness knowledge on Dr.Stein's part or about the sort of
information to be gleaned from the Cosmic Chronicle. But two
critics of the SPEAR OF DESTINY do cast doubt on several of the
factual assertions upon the factual assertions upon which
Ravenscroft's argument is built.
One is Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, whose book on the occult roots
of Nazism is quoted above. In an appendix called "THE MODERN
MYTHOLOGY OF NAZI OCCULTISM", Goodrick-Clarke takes
Ravenscroft to task for the story about Hitler's relations with the
occult
bookseller in Vienna and for his claim that Guido Von List was
forced to flee from outraged Viennese Catholics in 1909 after the
sexual rites of his blood brotherhood were exposed. he writes
flatly,
There is not a shred of evidence for such rituals. List was never
obliged to leave Vienna and he enjoyed the patronage of prominent
Vienna figures...The fictional nature of the whole episode
surrounding the annotated copy of copy of Parzival is suggested by
the similarity of Pretzsche's obscure bookshop to the one described
by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton in ZANONI (1842), which probably
served Ravenscroft as a literary model.24
Goodrick-Clarke also criticizes Jean Michael Angebert's book,
THE OCCULT AND THE THIRD REICH, cited above. He brands
as imaginary Angebert's account of the young Hitler's association
with Lanz von Lebenfels.
As noted earlier, Goodrick-Clarke's book is an important and
serious piece of research on Guido von List and Lanz von
Lievenfels. But the author seems a little over-sensitive toward other
writers who invoke his two subjects. Nevertheless, his critique of
Angebert and Ravenscroft, though brief, does offer a glimpse of the
misgivings that professional historians feel regarding such material.
More extensive criticisms have been offered by Christoph
Lindenberg in his review of THE SPEAR OF DESTINY in the
German journal Die Drie. Lindenberg has done some effective
digging at the Vienna Records office. Ravenscroft has Hitler sitting
high up in the cheap seats of the Vienna Opera House in the winter
of 1910 - 1 watching Wagner's Parzifal and sympathizing with
Klingsor. This proves to have been impossible, because Lindenberg
learned that the first performance of Wagner's opera took place
three years later, on January 14,1914.
Ravenscroft's second mistake was to name the Viennese bookseller
who introduced Hitler to drugs. "No better name occurred to him
than Pretsche, popular among English writers of fiction for German
malefactors," Lindenberg writes scornfully before revealing that
extensive checks of Vienna city and business directories and police
records for the years 1892 through 1920 were negative for the name
in question.25
Next, Lindenberg takes issue with Ravenscroft's description of the
Danube trip Hitler and Dr. Stein took in May 1913, to visit the
mystic woodcutter, Hands Lodz:
We can overlook Ravenscroft's mistake of speaking of "Wachau" as
a place and not of the region which really it is. But the details do
not fit: the snow melting in May, the steamer running in spite of the
floods, bathing in the river- it makes no sense. Certainly wrong is
the statement that Hitler had only one testicle... all this has been
completely refuted by [Werner] Maser.26
Ravenscroft's account of Hitler's circumstances in Vienna also
come in for some heavy criticism. Dr. Stein reportedly sat in a
window seat in Demel's Cafe, reading the anonymous marginalia in
the copy of Parzival he'd found and concluding they were "the
footnotes of Satan" when he looked through the glass and beheld
"the most arrogant face and demonical eyes he had ever seen". This
was of course the future Fuehrer in his legendary guise as an
impoverished pavement artist, selling homemade postcards, dressed
in a big black "sleazy" coat, his toes visible through the cracks in
his shoes. When in August, 1912, he sought Hitler out at the
"flophouse" he lived in , in Meldemannstrasse, he was told Hitler
was away at Spittal-an-der-Drau collecting a legacy left him by an
aunt. Thereafter, Hitler dressed well.27
Hitler did receive a legacy from his aunt, Johanna Poelzl,
Lindenberg reports. But this happens in March, 1911, and the aunt
lived in Spital-with-one-t, not on the Drau but in southern Austria.
Furthermore,
At no time of life did Hitler live in impoverished conditions, rather
he had always sufficient money. In the Meldenmannstrasse, a kind
of large hotel, Hitler paid a rent of 15 Kronen a month. So he could
afford a fairly expensive room and had no need to sell his pictures,
which in any case were no postcards. So this scene too, that
impoverished Hitler dressed in an oversized black coat selling water
colors in front of the Cafe Dehmel does not agree with the facts
either (cf. the two works by Werner Maser who with incredible care
collected all ascertained facts of Hitler's youth).28
In his discussion of the holy lance's power to evoke transcendent
experience, Ravenscroft has a scene in which the chief of the
German general staff, Helmut von Moltke, visited the relic in the
company of Conrad von Hoetzendorf, an Austrian general, shortly
before the outbreak of World War I. The spear's presence led von
Moltke to have a trance vision of himself incarnated as Pope
Nicolas I, a ninth century pontiff concerned, like von Moltke, with
the balance of geopolitical power between east and west.29
Untrue protests Lindenberg. "For Moltke visited Vienna neither in
1913 nor in 1914. Conrad and Moltke met on May 12, 1914 at
Karlsbad, from September 7 - 10, 1913, in Silesia, and at Leipzig
on October 18 at the Centenary of the Battle of Leipzig. They had
no other meeting."30
Lindenberg has several other criticisms to make, such as the
assertion that "A number of people who intimately knew Walter
Johannes Stein in the last years of his life state that Stein never met
Hitler." Unfortunately Ravenscroft's aversion to footnotes has also
afflicted his critic, and Lindenberg nowhere names these people nor
does he document his other assertions.
Lindenberg doesn't like Ravenscroft's book; he calls it " a pollution
of our spiritual environment." And it is manifestly difficult for him
or anyone to rebut research done on the cosmic level.
What, in the end, was Hitler all about? Perhaps no better
explanation can be found than W.H. Auden's suggestions, made in
his poem "September 1,1939" and printed as an epigram to Robert
G.L. Waite's book. The date is the beginning of Hitler's Blitzkrieg
against Poland:
Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther
until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at
Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public
know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
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