The Führer and his fantasies
T he relationship between the Nazi party and the occult has been much debated across popular culture both in fiction and in innumerable schlocky works of pseudoscience. As it turns out, though, an academic treatment of the topic reveals stranger-than-fiction truths on every page.
Hitler’s Monsters by Eric Kurlander tells how, in the 1930s, Hitler made extensive notes on a book called Magic: Theory, History,
Practice and underlined passages such as “He who does not carry demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world”.
In 1934, the year after he was appointed chancellor of Germany, Hitler hired a dowser to go over the Reich Chancellery in search of “death rays” that might damage staff in the building. He and Heinrich Himmler held frequent conversations about “the World Empire of Atlantis, which fell victim to the catastrophe of the moons falling to Earth” and about a discredited pseudoscience called Welteislehre, or World Ice Theory. It taught that the cosmos was made of ice, and the two Nazi leaders saw it as a “Germanic” counterbalance to the “Jewish” theory of relativity.
All across the Nazi high command esoteric belief was rife. Goebbels read Nostradamus in bed. Rudolf Hess was into homoeopathy and herbalism, and employed a personal dowser and astrologer. Julius Streicher, governor of Nuremberg and editor of the Nazi paper Der Stürmer, was an advocate of “radiesthesia” — the supernatural capacity to locate objects with rods and pendulums. Many high-ranking Nazis were also enthusiasts for Eastern mysticism — Indian myths, Tibetan spirituality, Japanese warrior codes — which they saw as the lost teaching of an ancient Aryan race.
Himmler, the head of the SS, went farthest, setting up the Ahnenerbe — the Institute for Ancestral Research — which combed Germany and occupied Europe for records and folklore to support his ideas of Aryan heredity.
The SS had a witch division, responsible for bringing home evidence of witch trials and wizardry. Witches, Himmler argued, represented an old Germanic religion that had been cruelly wiped out by Judeo-Christian religion (with the emphasis on the Judeo).
In his castle at Wewelsburg, which was fitted out like the occult lair of a knightly order, he employed an elderly sage called Wiligut, who claimed to be descended from gods. In return for copious rations of drugs and booze, Wiligut, who went by the name Weisthor (Wise-Thor), would provide stories about telepathic deities, ancestral white supermen and a time when “giants, dwarves and mythical beasts moved about beneath a sky filled with three suns”.
There are traces of the occult in Nazi films, mass media, and, most chillingly, in the preparations for the Holocaust. The book has a sting in the tail. A concluding chapter takes note of the current “renaissance in supernatural reasoning, shadowy conspiracy theories and extraterrestrial powers” combined with “fantasies of a racially pure, immigrant (Islam)-free Europe” . Hitler’s monsters, it seems, aren’t just Hitler’s. —