BUILDING A FORTEAN LIBRARY

28. A VILLAGE OF CRAZIES TO RAISE A MADMAN

The Occult Roots of Nazism THE HIEROPHANT’S APPRENTICE

“To a young observer,” wrote Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke in 1985, “National Socialism appears as an uncanny interlude in modern history.” At that time, 40 years after the collapse of the Third Reich, even not-so-youthful observers would have been equally bemused – then as now, another 30 years afterwards. Bemused not only by the sheer scale and seeming inexplicability of the monstrosities perpetrated by the Nazis, but also by the plethora of baroque claims that were made to account for the strange beliefs that they held and acted upon. The essential presumption of this latter exposition of alternative, crypto-history (‘crypto’ because it has no conventional documentation) is that Hitler and his gang of grotesques ventured so far outside any norm of modern Western humanity that they must have been in thrall to fiendish, supernatural powers – the kind of speculation that should have appealed to Dennis Wheatley (who, instead, preferred to think Communism was Satanic).

In The Occult Roots of Nazism, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke devotes an hilarious and eye-stilting appendix on the likes of Pauwels’s and Bergier’s Morning

of the Magicians, which purports to show that “the Nazi leadership was determined to establish contact with an omnipotent subterranean theocracy and gain knowledge of its power”. This was entangled with ideas filched from Helena Blavatsky (see FT302:2-37), who herself added plagiarism to her many imaginative talents, Joseph Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (a work of fiction featuring the Power ofVril; see

FT292:63 and FT303:42-46), and others. The pair also ‘exposed’ the occultist and

völkisch Thule Society as one “of initiates in communion with the Invisible, [which] became the magic centre of the Nazi movement.” Unfortunately, there’s no evidence that Hitler was ever a member, and the Society was dissolved eight years before the Nazis came to power. Then there was Trevor Ravenscroft and his unintentionally uproarious 1972 book

The Spear of Destiny (see FT175:48-52). Too convoluted to recount in full here, its intricate plot had the Thule Society carrying out ritual torture and sacrifice of Jews and Communists, while its luminaries “contrived to develop and open the centres in the astral body of Adolf Hitler” and so “awakened [him] to the real motives of the Luciferic Principality which possessed him so that he could become the conscious vehicle of its evil intent….” All this, Goodrick-Clarke observes mildly, is “fanciful”, and he cites much more like it, both from Ravenscroft and sundry other authors dealing in “wholly spurious ‘facts’”.

Goodrick-Clarke is wary of the possibility of any direct influence – for instance from the Thule Society and other ‘ariosophists’ – on the Nazis in their formative state. Rather, he excavates the soil in which sprouted what passes for Nazi philosophy, perhaps better described as a diseased Weltanschauung. There are three major strands to this: the general superiority of the Germans to everyone else; the diluted purity of the German race (notably by Jews and sundry Slavs), which in pristine form once gave them supernormal powers; and the need for a powerful leader to sort out the mess once and for all. The ‘mess’ was, in the first place, created by the 1871 unification of Germany by Bismarck (who pronounced the King of Prussia Kaiser over all), which left millions of ethnic Germans scattered and dissatisfied throughout the multi-ethnic Hapsburg empire of Austria-Hungary. It was among these ‘isolated’ people that ariosophy initially arose, although it had been preceded as early as the 1840s by various right-wing youth movements. And the mess was compounded with the unimagined and unacceptable defeat of Germany in World War I, both in and of itself and in concert with the sudden blossoming of sundry Communist revolutions in Germany immediately after. And then, thanks in part to the humiliating and unnecessary provisions of the Treaty ofVersailles, there was the crushing hyperinflation of the 1920s. These events more than anything contributed to the belief (mistaken as it turned out) that ein Führer of clear vision and unshakeable resolve was the solution to the national economic and psychological crisis.

Feeding into this was the nearly untranslatable notion of the volk. Meaning more than just ‘folk’ or ‘people’, the word embodied a sense of almost mystical uniqueness, even chosen-ness, that harked back to a largely mythological, mostly mediæval German past. The ariosophists (see FT343:28-29) proceeded to create a longer, deeper and purer prehistory for the

volk by proclaiming them – and plagiarising the dreaded Blavatsky – descendants of survivors of Atlantis, or Aryans from Tibet, people possessed of occult powers and dispossessed of them by the baneful influences of, and miscegenation with, lesser races (once again, Jews and Slavs, mostly). The long and wretched history of German antisemitism, encouraged not least by the semi-demented Martin Luther, was thus given a spurious but appealing underpinning. Wagner’s rousing pæan to

die heilige deutsche Kunst (holy German art) at the end of his otherwise most delightful opera confirms how deep the sense of German superiority went; and his vast and tedious Ring cycle underwrote the notion of German (Nordic) mythology as the only one worthy of attention. Wagner was, as the world knows, Hitler’s favourite composer.

Goodrick-Clarke takes us through the

“WHERE THEY HAVE BURNED BOOKS, THEY WILL END IN BURNING HUMAN BEINGS.” Heinrich Heine

various groupuscules, semi-secret societies and ‘wandering prophets’ who constructed the ancient history of the ‘Aryan’ Germans. These fabricators included Manichean pagans, Grail-hunters, astrologers, phrenologists, dowsers, geomancers, seers and mystics and visionaries, graphologists, interpreters of the magical ancient runes and, of course, ferocious racists. More than one pronounced Germans to be gods, or at least god-like. One of the book’s greater pleasures is in observing how, as with most other excavations of ‘lost’ ancient history, few of their fictions agree with one another. Another is the sheer fantasticality of it all. Palmist Ernst Issberner-Haldane, for instance, when in Rio de Janeiro, “noticed the brothels were full of girls with Aryan features, clear evidence of a Jewish world-conspiracy to debase the female youth of the superior race”. For Guido von List anything from megalithic stone circles to the shapes of beams in half-timbered houses was evidence of a vanished Aryan high culture. Karl Maria Wiligut’s chronology of the ancient Germans started in 228,000 BC, “when there were three suns in the sky and the earth was populated with giants, dwarves, and other… mythical beings”. And its reliability doesn’t improve after that.

There is some – not wholly reliable – evidence that of all this bizarre literature, Hitler became familiar with Lanz von Liebenfels’s ariosophist journal Ostara, while living (1908–13) inVienna (see

FT218:32-39 for more on von List and Liebenfels). Whether it influenced him, or opened him to anything new, is impossible to say. Perhaps most likely is that it articulated and entrenched his own nascent ideas about pure German blood and soul, the obliquity of the Jews and their eternal conspiracies, and the need for a messiah-figure to purge the nation and the ‘Aryan’ race of such contaminations. But what Goodrick-Clarke shows is that these ideas were both long-standing and widespread in the Austria and Germany in which Hitler grew up. So, it is altogether plausible that he was familiar with them, even if not precisely an aficionado or member of any of the associated sects and cults. As Eric Kurlander puts it, “the occult doctrine sperm eating Vienna’ s cafés and Munich’s beer halls before the First World War clearly helped to shape the Nazi supernatural imaginary.” By the time he came to power, Hitler didn’t need to be any kind of expert: he had his equally deranged, mythologically-obsessed sidekick Himmler to investigate the esoterica – and to take care of the practical details, from Tibet to Treblinka.

Eric Kurlander, in Hitler’s Monsters, looks at the question from the opposite direction – delving into the way the Nazi leadership engaged with the occult material that was swirling around in German culture. A major point is that in the years of the Weimar Republic, the society at large had become increasingly irrational: there was, for instance, massive popular support for astrology, mythical pseudo-history, and parapsychology of a sensationalising kind as well as, of course, a growth in antisemitism. Jews were blamed for the military defeat in World War I (the infamous ‘stab in the back’ myth or Dolchstoßlegenden) and, as bankers, for the post-war hyperinflation. The country was ripe for some form of extremist politics. To some extent Kurlander diverges from Goodrick-Clarke’s analysis, noting that while Hitler generally deprecated occult pursuits, he was not above hiring Germany’s foremost dowser (or ‘radiesthesiologist’ – that sounded so much more scientific) “to police the Reich Chancellery for harmful death rays”. And he placed no obstacle in the way of Himmler’s eccentric and sometimes lethal researches (see FT175:30-39, 196:32-39). A pair of his protégés justified the goal of a global German empire on the grounds that the country was the centre of a vast geomantic network of “substantial underground energies [that] once united ancient Indo-Aryan civilisations.” You couldn’t make it up: except they did.

Hitler himself entirely embraced Alfred Hörbiger’s Welteislehre – World Ice Theory (or ‘glacial cosmogony’, which also sounded scientific). Hörbiger proposed, essentially, that the Solar System consists of ice, as does the Milky Way. You can look the whole thing up for your own amusement. Among its many other quirks, the theory says our current Moon (solid ice) is the sixth the Earth has had. Hörbiger’s comprehensive responses to more informed cosmologists were: “Calculation can only lead you astray”, and “Either you believe in me and learn, or you will be treated as the enemy”.

Welteislehre appealed to Hitler precisely because it was “intuitive” – Hörbiger’s ‘theory’ had come to him in something like a vision – not coldly rational or by extension materialistic. And, even better, it cocked an almighty snook at relativity theory and other wicked excrescences of ‘Jewish science’, the teaching of which the Reich forbade. Yet, officially, the Nazis were opposed to occultism and what were politely called ‘border sciences’. They got around this difficulty by declaring ‘scientific’ astrology, parapsychology, et

cetera, acceptable, but popular versions beyond the pale. In cases where there was any doubt, the test was simply whether the practitioner was a dedicated Party member. Hence various senior Nazis’ reliance on dowsing and astrology, and support of para psychological research. Prominent in the last was Prof. Hans Bender, member of both the SA and the Party, facts not often mentioned on these shores, where he is best-known for promoting the ‘Rosenheim Poltergeist’. Critics have not been kind to his work. Those occultists of whom the Nazis disapproved were put out of business or jailed.

One of Kurlander’s more intriguing, lengthy asides concerns Hitler’s own hypnotic powers. He quotes various observers who had noticed how his speeches seemed to send his audiences into a kind of alternative state of consciousness. CG Jung thought this effect reflected “the deep beatitude of a thoroughly muddled soul”, whose power was “not political; it is magic”. At the same time, in full rhetorical flow, Hitler himself entered a kind of trance state. This is entirely plausible if one watches any film of Hitler in maximum rant mode, and – crucially – can translate what he’s saying. It doesn’t make much sense: it’s a weird

mélange of non-sequiturs, slogans, and praises for the Party, the volk, Germany, and by implication himself. It was left to Rudolph Hess to be explicit at Nuremberg in 1934, roaring: “The Party is Hitler – and Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler!” And that all ended well, didn’t it?

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan cults and their influence on Nazi ideology, (Aquarian Press 1985) Taurus Parke, 2004. Eric Kurlander, Hitler’s Monsters: A supernatural history of the Third Reich, Yale University Press, 2017.