This article is about the Nazis andtheir involvement in a range of occult and esoteric ideas and practices wth a brief look at the Allied response.
·
Nazi Germany was not an “occult Reich”
but occult ideas influenced its thinking to a greater extent than is often
realized. Himmler spent more on his occult dreams than America spent on the
atomic bomb. Goering believed that we lived inside a hollow earth and in 1942
wasted huge resources in order to prove the theory. Hess believed in every
speculative idea imaginable. Hitler, though for tactical reasons choosing to
distance himself publicly from the excesses of his lieutenants, was a firm
adherent to numerous “alternative” theories. He and Goebbels were sufficiently
good astrologers to be able to examine the horoscope of the German nation in
the dying months of the war.
·
I will examine both the scope and
limitations of the influence of occult ideas on Hitler and their impact upon
the Third Reich in detail.
- Let’s begin
with Hitler. Hitler’s world view didn’t spring out of his own head. Both
as a youth and as an adult he was influenced by ideas from other people.
I’ll now talk about the men and ideas that influenced Hitler’s thinking
and actions.
- When he
arrived in Vienna as a teenager Hitler was introduced to various occult
ideas and practices by Joseph Greiner.
-
- Greiner
taught Hitler hypnotism, astrology, meditation, yoga, graphology,
numerology, astral projection, dowsing and mediumship. Hitler spent hours
dowsing in the woods around Vienna while he lived there. Perhaps the most
important single thing Greiner taught Hitler was to develop his will as a
means of controlling people and events, including psychokinesis.
- Hitler also
discovered the occult racism of Guido von List.
-
- From von
List he derived the belief that Aryans in general and Germans in
particular were a superior race. He also adopted von List’s symbol of the
swastika. He was much less interested in von List’s neo-paganism but his
idiosyncratic interpretations of the runes were later to have profound
influence on Himmler.
- Von List
believed that the runes were “the secret sacred language” of Aryan
priests. They also, so he claimed, contained the secrets of alchemy. He
believed that they were “words of power” that could connect the material
world with the world of thought. Each letter of the runic alphabet, he
claimed, rotated in a vibrating harmony with a particular star or planet.
He even claimed that humans – by which of course he meant ‘Aryans’ - had
originated on the Moon before settling on Earth. He saw the swastika as both a symbol of
the sun and of life, claiming that it possessed electromagnetic
properties. It could also, he believed, develop powers of clairvoyance and
“strengthen German blood.”
-
- Von List’s
advocacy of the pseudo-science of phrenology – a belief that character
could be read from the bumps on a person’s head – also influenced both
Hitler and Himmler, and in particular his belief that ‘Aryan’ skulls had
innately superior ‘bumps’ reflecting their innate ‘superiority.’
- An even
more powerful influence on Hitler during his time in Vienna was the racial
mythology of Adolf Lanz, a megalomaniac who liked to style himself Baron
Lancz von Liebenfels.
-
- From Lanz
Hitler adopted the idea that Jews were subhuman, the product of mating
between humans and apes. He also discovered the idea of the Final
Solution, one that Lanz advocated strongly. Lanz added anti-Slavism to
anti-Semitism, an idea that Hitler later adopted. Not only blonde hair and
blue eyes but even small hands and feet and large heads were, in Lanz’s
view, proofs of superior Aryan racial stock. Angels, in Lanz’s mythology,
were coded references to “Aryan heroes.” In his distorted version of evolution,
only Aryans were fully human. Jews, Slavs, blacks and other inferior races
were the product of interbreeding between humans and apes. Lanz was also a misogynist, declaring
that “through woman, sin came into the world, and it is so over and over again
because woman is especially susceptible to the love artifices of her
animal-like inferiors.” His slogan was “race war until the castration
knife.” Lanz also advocated nudism and believed that there once existed on
Earth a lost paradise where nude Aryan men and women enjoyed racially pure
sex. The Fall, in Lanz’s view, was the result of human women interbreeding
with what Lanz called “the dark races.”
He called for “the extirpation of the animal man and the propagation
of the higher New Man,” an idea that Hitler later embraced
enthusiastically and attempted to carry out. Lanz met Hitler on several
occasions when the future Nazi leader was living in Vienna. He also
purchased copies of Lanz’s magazine Ostara
in which he expounded his racial and occult fantasies.
-
- Hitler left
Vienna in 1913 and moved to Munich. He lived in Schwabing, the “artist’s
quarter” of the city. There he discovered the ideas of Alfred Schuler
-
- and Ludwig
Derleth.
-
- Both men
belonged to a group known as the “Cosmic Circle” and their goal was to
make Munich the centre of “cosmic consciousness.” They believed that all
existing religions were false and sought to replace them with what they
called the Urheimat – original
home – of the soul. They despised reason and advocated following the
instincts and the desires of the unconscious mind. This attitude to life
later found its way into Nazi thought under the slogan of “thinking with
the blood.” Schuler admired the Roman Empire and blamed the Jews and
Christians for its collapse. He engaged in séances, healing and astral
travel. His personal symbol was the swastika and he stressed what he
called the “sacredness” of “pure blood.” Ironically, Schuler believed that
the original state of society was one of a matriarchal society where unbridled
promiscuity reigned and he wanted to revive the religious worship of the
Mother Goddess. This aspect of his ideas had no appeal for Hitler but it
certainly influenced Himmler and Hess. Hitler heard Schuler lecture in
Vienna and developed an admiration for Rome as a result. He also became
fascinated by the symbol of the swastika. Hitler later met Schuler in
Munich.
- Derleth may
have been as fervently racist as Schuler and a fellow-member of the
“Cosmic Circle” but the two men became bitter enemies. He denounced
Schuler’s séances as “black magic rituals.” Derleth issued his notorious Proclamations in which he announced
the imminent coming of “Christus Imperator Maximus.” This new world leader
required “death-hardened troops for the conquest of the globe,” an idea
that later appealed greatly to both Hitler and Himmler. Derleth wanted to
establish an ideal city which he called the Rosenburg – rose town. Lanz admired Derleth and Himmler was
greatly attracted by this fantasy city. Himmler also followed Derleth in
his advocacy of organic farming, vegetarianism, alchemy, “spiritual
development” and an “order” that fashioned and governed a “golden
society.” Derleth was a greater influence on Himmler than Hitler but
Hitler certainly knew his work and admired many of his ideas.
- In 1919
Hitler joined what became the Nazi Party where he met Dietrich Eckart,
-
- Alfred
Rosenberg,
-
- Gottfried
Feder
-
- and Rudolf
Hess.
-
- Eckart, Rosenberg and Feder had a
decisive influence on his thinking and his future development..
- Eckart had
been looking for a German Messiah ever since the defeat of Germany in
1918. Even before he met Hitler he was conducting séances with two
anti-Semitic Russian former generals.
- Like Lanz,
Eckart hated women and Jews. His mythological fantasies differed slightly
from those of Lanz and von List because Eckart was essentially a Gnostic.
Like the Gnostics, he regarded the material world as evil and saw death as
preferable to life. He believed that it was the destiny of human beings to
“transcend” the physical plane and become purely “spiritual beings.”
- Rosenberg,
like his friend Eckart, was a racist and misogynist. He was not just
anti-Semitic and anti-Communist but anti-capitalist, anti-Christian and
anti-Freemasonry. He also harboured a fierce hatred for feminism and
lesbianism. Rosenberg, like Eckart, saw the material world as evil and
believed that humans should strive to evolve to a higher level where they
could live on a “non-material plane of existence.” Before Rosenberg many
people had accused the Masons of being politically subversive but he
appears to have been the first one to accuse Masonry of being a
specifically “Jewish conspiracy.” This idea was rapidly taken up by Hitler
and others in his circle and quickly became the orthodox view in far right
movements.
- As with
Eckart, the extent of Rosenberg’s influence on Hitler was downplayed once
Hitler became Chancellor but because Rosenberg was a Minister in the Third
Reich his influence continued to be felt and his work was not suppressed.
There were two ways in which Rosenberg particularly helped to shape
Hitler’s thinking. One was when he brought the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion to Germany in 1919.
-
- This became
a kind of Bible to the far right and remains so among neo-Nazis to this
day. It was a forgery carried out in the late nineteenth century by an
anti-Semitic Russian woman and which was seized on by the Tsarist secret
police as a pretext for pogroms. Rosenberg showed the book to Eckart and
it was translated into German where it quickly became a best-seller.
Hitler was convinced that it represented the “truth” about a sinister
Jewish conspiracy and even when he was challenged by Rauschning who told
him bluntly that it was a forgery, Hitler’s reply was to say that it did
not matter. What mattered to him was its “intrinsic truth.”
- The other
way in which Rosenberg influenced Hitler’s thinking was in his firm belief
in a new stage in human evolution. The “higher man” would be as far above
the Aryans as they were above the “subhuman lesser races.” Like many völkisch occultists, Rosenberg believed that
civilization derived from a northern source, generally referred to as
Thule, a land in the region of the North Pole and said to be a fragment of
the lost continent of Atlantis.
-
- (I’ll have more to say on Atlantis shortly.) It was Rosenberg who convinced Hitler of
the importance of the “higher man” as the next step in human evolution and
it was he was convinced Himmler of the importance of a völkisch approach to history and of the
relevance of a lost northern civilization and Atlantis to the Nazi
project.
- Karl Haushofer
-
- created a whole new pseudo-science which he called geopolitics.
This idea was not even invented by him but was stolen wholesale from the
British imperialist Sir Halford Mackinder.
-
- Mackinder believed that the territory stretching from the Rhine to
Central Asia and in particular the areas of Tibet and Mongolia represented
the “heartland” and claimed that whoever controlled the heartland could
control the world. Haushofer adopted this idea and used it as a
justification for his advocacy of lebensraum
– living space – which he regarded as an ideological basis for German
imperialism. Hitler, of course, swallowed Haushofer’s ideas whole and made
them the basis of his foreign policy. In addition to his ‘geopolitical’
ideas, Haushofer was also deeply versed in Eastern occult and mystical
traditions. He joined the Society of the Green Dragon in Japan and
imported new strains of Eastern occultism to the West. Haushofer travelled
extensively in the Far East and made contact with occultists from Japan,
China, Tibet and Siberia. All these contacts influenced his own thinking
and so, indirectly, the foundation of the Nazi Party.
- At this
point it’s worth taking a closer look at the Thule Group and the Vril
Society. Thule took its name from a mythical country in Greek legend
located in the far north. Many of the group’s members believed that Thule
had been the last surviving remnant of the lost continent of Atlantis. It
was founded in 1910 but until it moved to Munich in 1918 it was small and
ineffective. In 1918 Rudolf von Sebottendorf
-
- took
control of Thule and transformed it into a force that changed the course
of history.
- Its members
believed that Thule was the seat of a lost Hyperborean civilisation and
that the Aryan races represented its surviving descendants. Johannes
Hering was not an important member but because he recorded details of the
meeting is the principal source of information on Thule.
·
Sebottendorf believed that mediaeval cathedral
builders had been members of a secret society of craftsmen who also knew the
secret of alchemy
·
He taught the members to repeat certain
syllables during particular phases of the moon. They also learned to make signs
which were supposed to capture ‘original force’ and to turn matter into energy.
·
There was an inner and outer circle but
both attempted to raise their consciousness and to develop contacts with
supernatural beings. The inner circle looked on themselves as lords of the
earth, destined to usher in a new era in evolution when supermen would
eventually supersede the Aryan race.
·
Thule’s non-political activities were
primarily centred on meditation, concentration, developing the will and seeking
to contact ancestors.
·
Sebottendorf was obsessed with astrology
and the idea that – in his own words – ‘the Germans especially must give to the
world a new species.’
·
Sebottendorf purchased the Münchener Beobachter – the ‘Munich
Observer – in 1918 and turned it into a vehicle for racist and occult
propaganda. He also acquired the Franz Eher publishing house. He renamed it the Volkische Beobachter - the People's Observer - and it became the main newspaper of the emerign Nazi Party.
·
·
Thule became highly active in politics
as Bavaria was on the brink of going Communist and the Thulists actively worked
to suppress ‘Soviet Bavaria.’
·
Its membership list contained most of
the early leaders of the Nazi Party – Hess, Rosenberg, Frank, Feder, Eckart and
other leading lights in the early years of the party.
·
Its members subscribed to a range of
occult beliefs and some engaged in a variety of occult practices but its
primary purpose soon became to establish an alternative political movement to
Communism.
·
The Thule Group held a séance in 1919
with a Russian medium who allegedly produced ghostly apparitions from her
vagina. At this séance she is said to have evoked the spirits of two murdered
Thulists and to have prophesised the imminent arrival of Germany’s saviour.
·
The Thule Group became largely
ineffective after the suppression of the Communist threat to Germany. Hitler’s
political career continued to rise and as he began to contemplate the
possibility of achieving political power he slowly pushed the occult groups
like Thule into the background. On his appointment as Chancellor in 1933 he
suppressed the group completely.
·
The result of this was an angry book by
Sebottendorf, Bevor Hitler Kam
(Before Hitler Came), in which Sebottendorf took too much credit for Hitler’s
rise to power and exaggerated the influence of the Thule Group and of his own
role within the organisation.
·
The Vril Society
·
The Vril Society was founded in 1919 by
Karl Haushofer. It grew out of the Order of the Green Dragon, an Asian order to
which Haushofer belonged. Green Dragon members tried to control the vital
forces in the human body and to gain power over time. They also performed a ritual
to control the vital energy in plants.
·
·
The original name of the organization
was the Brothers of the Light. It was then renamed the Luminous Lodge but soon
became known as the Vril Society.
·
The name Vril was taken from an 1871
novel by Bulwer-Lytton
·
·
· who wrote a novel called
, The
Coming Race,
wwhich described a race of superior beings dwelling under the
ground and who enjoyed the mastery of a mysterious force which Lytton called
‘Vril power.’
·
The Vril Society believed in the real
existence of ‘Vril power.’ They were convinced that anyone who could master
this force could dominate the world.
·
The Vril Society’s interest included
research into Atlantis, the origins of the Aryan race and the awakening of the
magical powers they believe lay dormant in those with Aryan blood.
·
In December 1919 the society met at a
house near Berchtesgaden. It is alleged that two female mediums, one a Croatian
called Maria Orsitsch and another known simply as Sigrun, received various
messages from supernatural beings.
·
·
·
These claimed that the forthcoming
saviour of Germany was ‘hard by the door’ and that he would be the next owner
of the ‘Spear of Destiny’ – the lance held in the Hofburg Museum at Vienna
which was claimed to be the spear that pierced the side of Christ on the cross.
·
·
Vril members performed rituals to
‘summon’ and ‘control’ Vril power as well as the usual meditation and
visualization exercises.
·
Vril power has been identified with many
different ‘forces.’ Lytton compared it to electricity while others have
compared it to prana or kundalini. Some Vril Society members believed it to be
‘telluric energy’ from the Earth.
·
All the society’s members believed that
control of Vril led to domination of the world and to advancing to the next
stage in evolution. They saw it as the only proper and worthwhile goal in life.
If it could be achieved they believed that when the subterranean dwellers from
the Earth’s core emerge on to its surface they would greet humans had mastered
Vril as their equals.
·
Haushofer was the founder and the
dominant force in the Vril Society. He also allegedly possessed the gift of
prophecy.
·
Haushofer emphasised not only the
‘racial purity’ of the subterranean ‘Aryans’ from Atlantis but also regarded
them as masters of magic. He believed that Atlanteans were not purely human but
partly spiritual beings with superhuman powers. They were so close to nature
that they could, through certain words of power, heal the sick and aid the
growth of plants. What they lacked,
Haushofer claimed, was reason. It was the latest branch of the Atlanteans, the
Aryan race, who developed the power of thought. This gave them enormous new
possibilities but meant that they lost their magical power and had to learn to
adapt and improvise. These Aryans left Atlantis and went to Europe and Asia.
Their leaders settled in Tibet and established ‘an oracle of the sun’ whose
symbol was the swastika. Their main centre was known as Shamballah.
·
·
Haushofer introduced not only the legend of
Shamballah but also that of Agarthi (also known as Agarti and Agharta) to the
society. The name Shamballah means ‘quietness’ and the name Agarthi means
‘inaccessible.’ Shamballah was described, like the Norse ‘world tree
Yggdrassil, as having its foundations beneath the earth as well as a visible
section above ground. Haushofer believed
that Agarthi was the original ‘centre’ from which the Aryan race had started
out.
·
·
Haushofer transferred the traditional
location of Shamballah from Mongolia to Tibet.
·
The importance attached by the Vril
Society to Tibet led to a number of expeditions to the country between 1926 and
1938. It is alleged that one final expedition took place between 1942-1943 bur
this seems implausible.
·
·
·
Unlike the Thule Group, which became
moribund after 1925, the Vril Society continued to exist and exert influence
for some years. As with Thule, there is no evidence that Hitler became a member
but he certainly knew and was influenced by key players within the society and
undoubtedly shared most of their beliefs.
·
Hess had been a member of the Vril
Society and an ardent disciple of Haushofer.
·
Following the failure of the Munich putsch in 1923, both Hitler and Hess
were imprisoned in Landsberg prison. Hess introduced Hitler to Haushofer and
Hitler became convinced of the truth of his teachings.
·
The first semi-public appearance of the
Vril Society was in 1930 when it produced a book entitled Vril: Die kosmische Urkraft which claimed that the Atlanteans had
possessed a ‘spiritual dynamic technology.’
·
·
Their second brochure, Weltdynamismus, appeared in 1931 and spoke of the possibilities of
‘free energy.’ After these two publications, both of which appeared during the
final years of the Weimar Republic, open knowledge of the Vril Society ceased.
·
·
From 1933 onwards the picture is less
clear. One of the first things the Nazis did on coming to power was to suppress
or incorporate every occult or mystical group within Germany. A few managed to
survive, mainly through becoming incorporated in the SS, but the story of the
Vril Society’s fate is complex and contradictory.
·
On the one hand Vril Society members
like Himmler, Hess, Rosenberg, Feder and others held high office and continued
to be influential. On the other hand there is little or no evidence of any kind
of occult activity by them except for Himmler’s rituals within Wewelsburg
castle and his public neo-pagan ceremonies.
·
The first open mention of the Vril
Society was in an article by the German rocket scientist Willy Ley in 1947. He
gives few concrete details though the reality of the society has been confirmed
by independent researchers.
·
·
Ley’s account of the Vril Society states
that among its members were Tibetan lamas with knowledge of Agarthi. The leader of the Tibetan monks was
known simply as the Man with Green Gloves. He and his fellow lamas lived and
died in the Third Reich, many of them through suicide as the Russians
approached Berlin. The Man with the Green Gloves was alleged to ‘know the
secrets of the entrance to Agarthi.
·
·
In spite of their small size and
secretive nature, and the probability that Hitler never directly joined either
organization, there is no doubt that both groups had a profound and decisive
influence upon his thinking and his courses of action.
·
It has been alleged that either the Vril
Society or the Thule Group designed, constructed and flew flying saucers during
the 1930s and 1940s. I’ll discuss that
idea shortly when I take a look at the possible connections between UFOs and
the Nazis.
·
There was considerable research into
what would now be called ‘alternative energy’ under the Third Reich. Karl
Schappeller, Hans Coler and Nikola Tesla are names often mentioned in this
regard. Schappeller worked on a device that he believed exemplified ‘cold
ether,’ what is nowadays referred to as ‘zero point energy.’ This idea was
picked up by the Nazis and associated with Vril power.
·
·
Tesla claimed to have developed a
‘teleforce weapon’ which he refused to sell to the Nazis but which he at least
discussed with Soviet scientists.
·
·
Coler began developing a ‘free energy’
device as early as 1923 but the Third Reich gave him funds and research
facilities to turn his project into a reality. Successive German scientists
and, after the war, British scientists examined his machine and discovered that
it worked but neither Coler nor any of the scientists who examined it could
find an explanation as to how and why it functioned. Coler suggested a new form
of energy but no one has ever satisfactorily explained the mystery of this
device.
·
·
Viktor Schauberger
·
·
believed that water was ‘the blood of
Mother Earth’ and that it was alive and needed to be handled carefully to
protect this precious resource. He
classified water into different categories – ‘juvenile’ water which is the name
he gave to sterile or distilled water; ‘ripe’ water which he identified with
spring water that had grown and developed in the forest and had the properties
of being self-cooling, bubbling and full of energy. In his opinion
deforestation caused a severe deterioration in the quality of water. He also
believed that too great heat harmed water and that its optimum temperature was
below 9 degrees Celsius (39.2 degrees Fahrenheit.) His worked attracted the
interest of the Agriculture Minister Richard Darré and his ideas
that water could be a source of energy also found some support. Ultimately the
advent of war pushed Schauberger’s views into the background though curiously
in 1952 an experiment in West Germany seemed to confirm his ideas.
·
The idea of ley lines was first
consciously formulated by Alfred Watkins but built on the earlier work of R
Hippisley Cox. It was taken up enthusiastically by the German ley line writer
and researcher Joseph Heinsch. Heinsch enlarged and developed the ideas of
Watkins to postulate not simply an extensive network of prehistoric roads (as
Cox and Watkins had believed) but seeing them as generators of ‘telluric
energy’ – the power believed to lie latent within the earth. Heinsch also believed that churches and in
particular cathedrals had been built on ley lines and were consequently
themselves reservoirs of ‘telluric energy.’
·
- The Welteislehre – World
Ice Theory – was put forward by Hanns Hörbiger, an Austrian engineer. It
claimed that there had been successive moons and each in turn had crashed
down on Earth and destroyed former civilisations. Hitler was a firm
believer in the theory and it played a part in his failure to equip his
troops for the invasion of Russia because the Hörbigerian weather
forecasters had predicted a mild winter.
-
-
- Goering believed in an even more bizarre theory put forward by
Peter Bender. This former Luftwaffe
pilot had read a magazine advocating the hollow earth theory while a
prisoner of war and became converted to it. . While the concept of habitable layers beneath the Earth’s crust
had been popular for centuries amongst occultists, Bender’s Hohlwelt-theorie argued that the
Earth was a vault within an endless field of matter. The sun was somewhere
in the middle of this vault, and the stars in the sky were the lights of
cities from the other side.
-
- “An infinite universe is a Jewish abstraction,”
wrote Bender. “A finite, rounded universe is a thoroughly Aryan
conception.”
- Bender
persuaded Hermann Goering of its truth and many officers in the
German navy.
- Other German advocates of the idea were
Johannes Lang and Karl Neupert.
- Bender further developed Teed’s theory by
claiming that the universe was extremely small and was entirely contained
within the hollow earth. Humans lived within a hollow globe with the sun at
its centre. However, points of light revolved around the sun, creating
what Bender called ‘the phantom universe.’ Day and night were only
illusions caused by the movement of the sun to the other side of the
phantom universe. The hollow earth was the fixed centre of the cosmos and
the sun, stars and planets revolve around it. All astronomical
observations were simply our relative location to the sun and planets
within the hollow earth.
- Shortly after the National Socialist party came
to power Bender convinced several Nazi leaders to fund an experiment to
send a rocket from Magdeburg to New Zealand. Bender believed that if the
rocket was fired directly into the sky it would be able to reach the other
side of the world. A series of
tests was carried out but the project was abandoned fairly swiftly without
a successful launch.
-
- Bender declared that the Copernican theory was
false. We did not live on the outside of a globe rotating around the sun
but we lived inside the earth which was the true centre of the universe
and the sun was inside our globe. What humans believed to be the surface
of the earth was actually the inner section of the world we know.
- Goering and the German navy were intensely
interested in Bender’s theory. The navy hoped that it might help them to
detect British ships. Bender and his fellow advocates suggested that
aiming radar detection equipment at the sky would lead to light waves
bouncing back from the exterior layer surrounding the centre which would
pinpoint the positions of vessels.
- For five years Bender and his supporters gained
increasing support. Then in 1938 one of them, Johannes Lang, asked for
permission to give a talk on the subject. Rosenberg not only refused
permission but discovered that Lang had once published a horoscope of
Hitler. This was illegal in Nazi Germany and led to the hollow earth
advocates coming under suspicion.
- As late as 1942 Goering wasted vast sums of money and scientific
resources attempting to prove the truth of the idea. After the failure of
the expedition Bender was thrown into a concentration camp and the hollow
earth theory banned in Germany.
- Atlantis
was another myth that was hugely popular among the Nazi inner circle.
There were various theories about its location, the most favoured ones
being those that placed it in the north.
-
- The
swastika was claimed to be a symbol of the ‘northern sun’ and was said to
be one of the sacred symbols of Atlantis. Several attempts to find relics
of Atlantis were undertaken, one of them in collaboration with Franco’s
Spain.
-
- For a heady period of four years Hitler lived among these ideas and
began to see himself as a new Messiah and National Socialism as a new
religion for Germany. The failure of his attempted putsch in 1923 led him to adopt a more moderate public face
but his Table Talk and various
other accounts by associates shows clearly that he did not abandon these
views but simply hid them from open view in the interests of his political
career. At times he pretended to be an orthodox Catholic but his real
views on the subject of religion were utterly contemptuous of all forms of
Christianity. He did not take Himmler’s neo-paganism seriously but
approved of his attempts to turn Nazi events into substitute
quasi-religious ceremonies and his attempts to portray Hitler as a
semi-divine being.
- In 1923 the astrologer Elsbeth Ebertin
-
- was asked by a Nazi Party woman member to cast a horoscope of an
unknown man. It was of course Hitler and though she did not have the time
of his birth she drew up a chart and it was published later that year.
Among other things it described him as ‘a man of action’ who could ‘expose
himself to danger for the future of Germany.’ When in November the Munich
putsch occurred it made Ebertin famous and Hitler often referred to her
prediction and how much it had helped his career. On the other hand, once
he became Chancellor he suppressed all
astrological activity that was not sponsored and controlled by the Nazis
and after Hess’ flight to Britain in 1941 even most of the Nazi
astrologers had to fall silent. Only the handful who enjoyed Himmler’s
protection were able to continue working.
- As well as
astrology outright prophecy was popular among many Nazi leaders. Jan Erik
Hanussen, a bizarre character who was actually a Jew named Herschel
Steinschneider, took an interest in Hitler in the late 1920s and not only
taught him the importance of gestures and body language but also successfully
predicted several events, the most important of his prophecies being of
the Reichstag fire.
-
- In 1939 the
Communist Georg Elser
-
- attempted
to assassinate Hitler by planting a bomb at the November meeting for ‘old
fighters.’ It failed to kill Hitler by fifteen minutes and a number of
other Nazis died. What is interesting is that before the event the Swiss
astrologer Karl Krafft
-
- sent a
message to Hess warning that Hitler’s life would be in danger ‘from an
explosion.’ Not surprisingly Krafft was arrested by the Gestapo after the
bomb went off but was able to persuade them that his knowledge of the bomb
plot had been arrived at purely through astrological deduction!
- After Hitler became Chancellor he tolerated the occult excesses of
his lieutenants like Hess, Goering and especially Himmler. Himmler was
allowed to spend vast amounts of public money on his occult projects which
failed to produce any results.
- During the course of the Third Reich money was spent on all kinds
of ‘alternative’ projects ranging from alternative sources of energy to
unorthodox types of aircraft. A claim has been made in recent years that
an extraterrestrial spacecraft crashed in the Black Forest in 1936 and was
‘back engineered’ by German scientists to produce a working flying saucer.
This claim is wholly fictitious and was originated by neo-Nazi Holocaust
deniers.
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- On the other hand, genuine research on flying discs was undertaken
by Nazi scientists and aeronautical engineers. The best-known claims
(apart from fantasy and fictitious ones like the Haunebu device
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- and the Vril ‘tachyonator’ machine)
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- are made for the Belluzo,
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- Schriever-Habermohl
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- Miethe
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- and Fleissner machines.
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- Of all these various claims
it is worth noting that none of them were made until the 1950s and that no
trace of Habermohl has been discovered. Belluzo, Schriever and Miethe
existed but none of them claimed their craft were successfully developed,
still less that they flew. Fleissner is different; not only is there
photographic evidence of a test flight in 1945 but he took out a patent
for a flying saucer in the 1950s. Of all the claims for Nazi involvement
with UFO projects his is by far the most plausible.
- By 1945
when all rational people could see that Germany was defeated Hitler and
Goebbels pored over the horoscope of the German nation. When they heard
the news of the death of Roosevelt they foolishly imagined that the US
would pull out of the war and they would be able to regroup. Both men were
sufficiently skilled in astrology to be able to read and interpret the
horoscopes themselves.
- The Nazis
may have been the nation most willing to use occult methods in an attempt
to achieve victory but the Allies also used it to a lesser extent. Both
the British and Germans forged Nostradamus prophecies as propaganda
weapons.
- Various
individuals and groups in the West also attempted to use occult methods to
fight against the Nazis. One such group was the Druids and I was
privileged to hear from Ross Nicholls, one of the Druids involved in their
campaign against the Nazis, about two rituals the Druids carried out in
1940 to try and prevent a German invasion.
- Another one
was the witches and Gerald Gardner has recorded details of how they too
carried out rituals in an attempt to stop the Germans from landing. The
Druid Lewis Spence was also involved in secret contacts with anti-Nazi
disciples of Hörbiger which may have been partly responsible for the poor
state of equipment of the German Army when they attacked Russia. Dion
Fortune was heavily involved in what she called ‘the magical Battle of
Britain’ and sent out a series of projections designed to affect the
course of the war, to lower German morale and to assist the Allies.
- The
Americans attempted to use hypnotism to reduce the effect of German
U-boats and, according to various accounts, tried to dematerialise either
one of their own ships or one of their own submarines.
- Even Stalin
employed his own psychic, Wolf Messing, who predicted both the date of the
invasion of the Soviet Union and the end of the war. The Russians also
attempted to use remote viewing and telepathy to gain intelligence about
German plans.
- Probably
never before or since has so much money been spent by governments on
occult experiments and research. How effective all this effort was is open
to question but it is a fascinating sidelight on one of the most decisive
periods in human historyBottom of Form
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