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UNHOLY ALLIANCE: A HISTORY OF NAZI INVOLVEMENT WITH THE OCCULT |
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3. The Occult Messiah
That Hitler was fascinated by the occult is proven: the Berchtesgaden library, discovered in a mine after the war, contained many volumes on occultism. [2] His small collection of books as a student contained works on mythology and a collection of von Liebenfels's racist-occult magazine, Ostara, [3] and he even visited with the Templar Master (as seen in Chapter Two). Friends of his from the early days recall long conversations on occult themes -- everything from reincarnation to yoga to paganism and magic [4] -- and his later biographers, such as Sir Allan Bullock, record Hitler's familiarity with occult topics in the days prior to the Second World War. [5] That Hitler ever actually belonged to an occult lodge has never been proven and, in fact, probably never will be. While Hitler appreciated the "scholarship" he discovered in the occult magazines and books he devoured, he never took a particular liking to the type of people who composed occult lodges. The occultists who were members of his inner circle -- such as Hess, Rosenberg, Gutberlet, and Eckart -- lived on the periphery of the Thule and Germanenorden lodges; while Eckart and Rosenberg may have been members of the Thule, it is clear to the author that they would have been exploiting that membership for their own, hidden, agenda. The leadership and influence of men like Sebottendorff was strong, and it is doubtful whether Hitler would have willingly accepted a role subservient to an occult (or political) master. History has shown that no occult order can survive two masters. Hitler was an activist. Almost any action was better than sitting around a room in a robe and meditating on Thor. Hitler was a pacer. He couldn't sit still for long. And he was a demagogue, almost from the beginning. He had to lead; and if he couldn't lead, he would absent himself from the action and the conversation altogether. Hitler was a paranoid, and the occult holds special attractions for the paranoid. But Hitler as cultist? As a black-robed, ritual-performing, invocation-chanting priest of Satan? Probably not. But Hitler as tool of other cultists? Probably so. [6] The basic details of Hitler's life story are so well known, and so well documented in other sources, that to repeat them here would cheat the reader who is, after all, looking for the occult angle to the mystery of the Third Reich. Let us concentrate then on those aspects of Hitler's life that reveal occult interests and involvements, all the while remembering what has been said here before: that there is no evidence that Hitler ever actually joined an occult society per se, but that the evidence for his fascination with occult themes and subjects is extensive and that a great portion of the program of the Third Reich concerning race, Jews, Freemasons, genetic engineering, etc., was the veritable platform of the volkisch and Pan-German occult lodges carried out in actual practice, a platform Hitler inherited from Liebenfels, Rosenberg, and Eckart during his early days in Vienna and Munich. Indeed, his major argument with the occult lodges was only that they had been unable to carry out their programs in the real world. Hitler, in a sense, had mastered himself and the "real world" to an extent that men like Mathers and even Crowley had not, but wished to. That is -- not satisfied with phony titles and the accumulation of pedigrees and initiations that typified the fin de siecle occultist -- he was able to take his occult beliefs and enact them on the world stage to a degree undreamed of by mainstream occult philosophers. In that sense, then, he was a tool of the occultists. More, he was their Creature. Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, to an Austrian civil servant in the town of Braunau-am-Inn, a locale said to be famous at the time for its large proportion of native mediums. [7] It is even claimed that Hitler shared the same wet nurse as two famous "channelers" of the day: Rudi and Willy Schneider. [8] That Hitler himself might have been a medium was a contention made by a great many of his personal friends and other observers, who described the Fuhrer in terms ranging from "hypnotic" to "demoniacally possessed" to the "Prince of Darkness" himself. [9] As this is a rather subjective judgment, for which no proof is available, let us pass over it in silence as there will be ample opportunity to examine the occult influences on Hitler's life from a variety of other sources. Instead, we will begin with Hitler's childhood schooling at Lambach Monastery, from 1897 to 1899, under the guidance of Catholic monks. It is so indicative of the atmosphere in which the Nazi Party would later take root in Germany and Austria that, as mentioned earlier, the coat of arms of this monastery is a swastika before which Hitler would pass every school day and which even now adorns the chapel where Hitler would attend choir practice, and in several other places, and which was even visible from his apartment window. Hitler (like Heinrich Himmler, Dr. Mengele, Joseph Goebbels, Klaus Barbie, and so many other prominent Nazis) was born and reared a Roman Catholic, a fact that is often forgotten. [10] His mother was devout, his father rather less so; and it is important to recognize that Hitler never got along well with his father but idolized his mother. Like all good Catholic children of a certain age, Hitler was confirmed in the Church. The Roman Catholic Confirmation ceremony is one in which young Catholics reaffirm the sacrament of Baptism: that is, with their own voice they confirm their acceptance of the vows made for them by their godparents when they were infants. They officially reject "Satan, and all his pomps, and all his works," in a ceremony which evidently left the young Hitler either totally unimpressed or strangely tense, for he was distracted and restless that whole afternoon until some neighborhood children came by and invited him to a game of cowboys and Indians, which he joined with unbridled enthusiasm. We may wonder at what point Hitler lost his interest in the Church or, indeed, if he ever had any interest to lose. Many Christian organizations enthusiastically supported Hitler in the early years of his dictatorship, choosing not to believe that the virulently anti-Christian stance of his neo-pagan Nazi Party was sincere. They were accompanied in their folly by many Jewish people and organizations which could not accept that the anti-Semitism of the Party was anything more than a cheap political ploy. Germany, of course, was the birthplace of the Lutheran Reformation, the last stronghold of the Holy Roman Empire and a country of Christians of whatever persuasion. Germany was also the country of Walpurgisnacht, that famous pagan festival celebrated on April 30 every year, traditionally at the top of Mount Brocken in the Harz Mountains, where the Witches' Sabbath supposedly takes place. Germany was also the scene of what we might call "Christian revisionism," an attempt to describe the resurrection of Christ as a myth perpetrated by his disciples: a thesis promulgated by Professor Reimarus of Hamburg in the eighteenth century, who insisted that Jesus was nothing more than a Jewish rebel, and that his body had been stolen from his tomb by his followers. Eventually, German scholarship would prove that the Gospels were written much later than anyone had previously realized, a position represented by no less than the esteemed Biblical commentator and professor of the University of Marburg, Rudolf Bultmann who, in his Jesus and the Word -- published before Hitler came to power -- came to the conclusion that the life of Jesus was virtually unknowable. [11] Thus we have a land where scientific research and religious fervor meet; a country that will occasionally engage in an almost masochistic turning-inward upon itself and its cherished ideals, devouring its own children in the process. We have a nation where fierce religious beliefs live cheek by jowl with fierce religious dissent; a land where Lutherans and Catholics, Christians and pagans, each lay claim to the country's psyche. The Holy Inquisition was founded there in 1231 in response to the Cathar threat to the Holy See; yet Germany was also the birthplace of Rosicrucianism, the core documents of that movement -- the Fama Fraternitatis and the Confessio -- having been published there in 1614 and 1615. The infamous bugaboo of right-wing conspiracy buffs -- the Illuminaten Orden, the dread Illuminati of Adam Weishaupt -- began in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, in 1776 (the birthplace of Ernst Rohm and once the home of Heinrich Himmler and now of BMW, Ingolstadt is also well known as the city where the fictional Dr. Frankenstein created his Monster). And Germany became the country where the Anthroposophical Society of Rudolf Steiner was founded less than 150 years later, an organization that was banned and persecuted by the Nazis resulting in Steiner's own untimely death in 1925. So it was perhaps inevitable that the type of occultism which would develop on such fertile soil would be the syncretist type represented by List and Liebenfels: an anti-Papist neo-Templarism mixed with Teutonic mythology and anti-Semitism, blended in a mind-boggling metaphysical stew and spiced with a fanatic desire to prove the undiluted "purity" of the blood. It also comes as no surprise that the ultimate British secret society of that era -- the Golden Dawn -- was traditionally said to have originated, not on that "blessed isle," but in Germany itself with the forged "cypher manuscript" of a nonexistent Fraulein A. Sprengel in Stuttgart. It was somehow important to the Chiefs of the Golden Dawn -- Dr. William Wynn Westcott, MacGregor Mathers, and Dr. William R. Woodman -- to demonstrate a German origin for their Society, even though later scholarship has shown that the forged documents [?] were in a grammatically poor, error-ridden German. So why not a British or a Celtic origin? Or French or Italian, for that matter? Or Middle Eastern? Mathers's command of Latin was good enough to enable him to perform the first ever English translation of the Sefer ha-Zohar, the central text of Jewish Qabalism, from the Latin version by Knorr von Rosenroth, a translation still in use today. [12] Indeed, Qabalism is a major element of the Golden Dawn system of initiation. So why strain for a German origin for the Golden Dawn when Mathers could have forged an ancient Latin pedigree from anywhere else in Europe or the Middle East much more easily? Because the late nineteenth century occult revival was taking place -- not in England or France or anywhere else on the Continent -- but in Germany itself: the land of the first Rosicrucians, the Teutonic Knights, Paracelsus, Johannes Trithemius, the notorious Vehmgericht (the secret tribunal to exact vigilante justice that was revived in Nazi Germany), [13] and other famous figures of medieval mysticism, both real and mythical. And it was from Germany, after all, that Aleister Crowley's most famous import originated, one still in existence today: the Ordo Ternpli Orientis, or OTO.
We have noted how Hitler was
influenced by the writings of volkisch occultists like
Liebenfels. This had happened at a
time in his life when everything around him was falling apart. In 1907,
his beloved mother died in an excruciating manner: diagnosed with breast
cancer, she submitted to the painful application of iodoform to her
chest. This was a method by which -- it was believed -- the acidlike
characteristics of iodoform would literally burn out the cancerous
cells. She succumbed, however, on December 21, dying in the light of a
Christmas tree near her bed. (Four days later,
Lanz von Liebenfels would raise his
swastika flag over Burg Werfenstein, not far from the Hitler home in
Upper Austria.)
That this experience would have figuratively burned itself into her son and thereby affect his psyche in profound and disturbing ways -- particularly in relation to women and, possibly, to Jews (his mother's doctor was Jewish) -- has already been discussed at length by other authors; [14] we may take a little license here ourselves, though, and call to mind another man whose early experience of the barbaric medical treatment of his mother would also affect him profoundly: Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, the Russian composer, who at the age of fourteen watched his mother die at the hands of doctors who were trying to cure her from cholera by submerging her body in boiling water. In Tchaikovsky's case, he managed to channel a great deal of this traumatic episode into his music (while suffering from an ambiguous sexual identity in the process). In Hitler's case, there is similar evidence that his mother's gruesome death may have affected his sex life but, being rejected as an artist -- his first career choice -- no less than three times, he abandoned the humanities for politics and thereby came to vent his anger and frustration on the whole world. It has been said that Hitler's problem in terms of art was his inability to draw the human body; perhaps, then, his inability to purge himself of the trauma of watching his mother die in such a horrible fashion on the eve of the winter solstice. Thus orphaned, estranged from most of his family, impoverished, continually rejected in his quest for acceptance at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, sleeping in men's dorms and living on the dole, this lover of grand opera -- reduced to prostituting what he believed was his great artistic talent by painting picture postcards for tourists -- was prime material for the paranoid screeds of the German and Austrian occultists. In another age, or another country, Hitler might have blamed his gross misfortunes on a plague of evil spirits and sought the assistance of an exorcist or witch doctor. Instead, the perfectly scientific-sounding jargon he found in Ostara provided him with another -- equally occult and nefarious -- enemy: an evil race whose very blood, and cells, and genes were slowly possessing and dispossessing the entire German people. Hitler would not have to burn sacrifices at the altars of pagan gods to obtain release from his demonic possession; he would only have to build the crematoria. Authors like Liebenfels took the racial theories of Blavatsky -- with her innumerable root-races and her pyramiding evolutionary scheme -- and mixed them with the programs of Social Darwinists and crank eugenicists, and took the resulting mixture to a logical conclusion: exterminate the subhumans and so avoid polluting the gene pool with their recessive traits. Hitler was not completely credulous: that is, he did not surrender his entire life to a blind acceptance of occult beliefs; otherwise, he would have spent his remaining years sitting around seance tables and invoking spirit guides like many of his contemporaries, in Europe and America. Instead, Hitler was nothing if not pragmatic, and not easily fooled by fake mediums and other occult charlatans. He sought real-world solutions to the problems posed by mystics such as Liebenfels. That is, he agreed with occult theory and seemed to take much of it as accepted fact; it was occult practice -- particularly the occult practices taking place in his own environment of self-deluded albeit self-proclaimed magi and bishops and seers -- that he couldn't stomach, although he loved to read about occultism and to discuss it with those of his friends who had done some of the same reading. In this, he was not so different from millions of other people who enjoy being entertained by tabloid tales of true occult rituals and occult crimes but who would never actually perform an occult ritual. To Hitler, the occult was possibly a further refinement of the Roman Catholicism he was brought up with. According to Schellenberg and other Nazis around the Fuhrer, Hitler did not believe in an afterlife or a personal god. [15] The author, however, submits that it lay there in the back of his mind like the faint buzz of a mosquito. He couldn't ignore it completely; as it was for Himmler, the concept of an afterlife was probably simultaneously real and threatening to him, but not something around which he would arrange his life. He paid attention to omens and prognostications from a variety of sources, and was not averse to having others work magic for him (as we shall see); but, like a Mafia don, he kept his hands clean of the actual bloodletting itself. In the years before World War I and after the death of his mother, Hitler lived in poverty in Vienna. (This would make him a typical occultist, even today. As the congenial author of many respected histories of secret societies and occult personalities -- Francis King -- once remarked in the author's presence, "It seems to be a requirement of great and powerful magicians that they live on public assistance.") He eventually had his own space at a men's dormitory where -- after having been deloused -- he was given a small, clean room of his own and managed to buy some watercolors. He would paint scenes of churches and local landmarks, and a friend would hawk them on the streets for a cut of the proceeds. It was in Vienna and during these tough times that Hitler made the personal acquaintance of Lanz von Liebenfels at the latter's office, sometime in 1909. Liebenfels remembered that Hitler appeared so distraught and so impoverished that the New Templar himself gave Hitler free copies of Ostara and bus fare back home. [16] It would be von Liebenfels who would greet the ascension of Hitler to Germany's throne with tremendous enthusiasm as a sign of the great occult power that was sweeping through the world under the sign of the swastika (before he was silenced by that same regime after Anschluss in 1938). Hitler was also fascinated by the opera, particularly Wagner (1813-1883). The four operas that compose the famous Ring Cycle were a favorite, of course, and Parsifal Lohengrin ... virtually all of Wagner's mythological and mystical work. One Wagnerian opera that stands out as an early favorite of Hitler's is a lesser-known and infrequently performed work called Rienzi. Hitler was captivated by this opera and took a childhood friend to see it several times. They had to stand during the performance since they could not afford seat tickets. It is an intriguing footnote to the story of the occult Reich that Rienzi's libretto was based on an historical novel of medieval Rome by the celebrated English occultist and best-selling author Lord Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). Rienzi was a patriot who attempted to reform the Roman government, but who eventually failed and went to his death. Rienzi -- whose real name was Niccolo Gabrini -- was often called "the last of the Romans." As for Bulwer-Lytton, who is probably best known for his The Last Days of Pompei, he was the author of the popular occult novels Zanoni and Vril: The Coming Race, the latter having inspired the creation of a German secret society by the same name. (Bulwer-Lytton's name would also be lumped together with those of Byron, Moore, Shelley, Rousseau, George Sand, and Victor Hugo as a member of the "Satanic School" of literature: a trend of certain Romantic poets towards the anti-Christian, unconventional, and occasionally obscene in literature.) It would be Wagner's peculiar vision of cosmology and world history -- that finds its most perfect expression in Parsifal, with its moving, if peculiar, pagan spin on the Christ mythos -- that would influence Hitler and an entire generation of Germans who were cutting their milk teeth on Teutonic mythology as German prehistory and on the writings of erstwhile Wagner devotee Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the philosopher who popularized the concept of the "superman." The heady combination of Nietzsche and Wagner provided an atmosphere in which strange pagan societies could develop among the otherwise fastidious members of polite society. Groups such as the Thule Society, the Edda Society, the List Society, the Germanenorden, and the Order of New Templars would include nobles, military officers, college professors, and wealthy industrialists among their ranks. It was also the influence of Wagner to which we can attribute that fascination for orders of knighthood, the quest for the pagan Grail, Teutonic gods, and blond-haired heroes that would eventually dominate the Weltanschauung of Hitler's most ardent supporter, Heinrich Himmler. About the year 1911 Hitler made the acquaintance of one Josef Greiner -- another resident of the men's hostel, an unemployed lamplighter -- and they would spend hours discussing such arcane lore as astrology, religion, and the occult sciences. [17] According to Greiner in his published memoirs, [18] Hitler was fascinated by stories of yoga and the magical accomplishments of the Hindu fakirs. He read with enthusiasm the travel books of Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, who blazed trails through the Himalayas in search of Tibetan Shangri-las. [19] But in 1913, defeated in his dream of becoming an artist and thereby redesigning the great public buildings of Vienna, Linz, and other Austrian cities, Hitler finally left his homeland for Germany, crossing over the border from Austria-Hungary on May 24 and arriving in Munich the next day. A year and a month later, Archduke Ferdinand would be assassinated at Sarajevo by a member of a Serbian secret society called the Black Hand. In July 1914, Austria will declare war on Serbia. Three days later, on August 1, Germany will mobilize against Czarist Russia; on August 3, she will declare war against France; on August 16, Hitler will enlist with the 1st Bavarian Infantry Regiment. The young artist -- broke, his artistic efforts constantly rejected, and living a humiliating life on charity -- embraces war with glee. If there is still any doubt about Hitler's enthusiasm for occult and volkisch themes, the following should put all objections to rest.
Obsessed by some of his occult
ideas, Hitler wrote a poem in the autumn of 1915, while in the
trenches. Reproduced in part in Toland's biography of Hitler, [20] it
sings the praises of Wotan, the Teutonic Father God, and of runic
letters, magic spells, and magic formulas. Had it been printed today
in any of a dozen occult and New Age journals of the author's
acquaintance, it would have raised few eyebrows so consistent is its
theme of magic, mystery, and esoteric paganism.
Adolf Hitler is twenty-six years old; by the time the war ends in 1918, he will have been awarded the Iron Cross, First and Second Classes, and will have proven himself an exceptionally brave combat soldier. But in October of 1918, he is blinded by a mustard gas attack in Belgium. He temporarily loses his sight, and is sent to the sanitorium at Pasewalk. The doctors, not familiar with this type of condition, believe it to be psychosomatic. While they may be wrong, he does eventually regain his sight, only to lose it again as word of Germany's surrender reaches his ears on Martin Luther's birthday: November 9, 1918. (On that same day, in Munich, Baron Sebottendorff would call the Saturday meeting of the Thule Gesellschaft to order and his cultists would begin to forge identity papers, spy on the Reds, and stockpile weapons.) Yet it is during Hitler's blindness that he receives a kind of mystical enlightenment, like that experienced by Guido von List many years before during his own temporary blindness (or like that of Saul, blinded on the way to Damascus) for, from that point on, Adolf Hitler has changed. He has been illumined, perhaps. Spoken -- as the Golden Dawn would have said -- to his Holy Guardian Angel, his higher Self. He has been blinded fighting the Allies in defense of his adopted country, Germany, only to regain his sight to witness Germany's capitulation and the abdication of the Kaiser -- whom the Allies had already characterized as the Antichrist -- and the resulting collapse of the Reich. After the successful overthrow of the Soviet Government by the Free Corps under Thule Society leadership, the Thulists recognize that they need to organize the workers into a coherent political party, else the Communists will return with a vengeance. Sebottendorff has already formed the Political Workers' Circle out of his base at the rather expensive and exclusive Four Seasons Hotel. From this Circle will be spawned the German Workers' Party with rail worker and locksmith Anton Drexler at its head. It is this Party that Hitler will infiltrate -- on the orders of a Captain Mayr, who reports to a clique of wealthy industrialists and officers operating coincidentally (?) out of the Four Seasons Hotel -- in September of 1919. [21] Drexler will give him a small pamphlet that he has authored containing explosive phrases like "National Socialism" and the rather sinister "New World Order." Hitler is captivated by these concepts, and decides that his spying days are over. Drexler is equally captivated by the brash and outspoken young Austrian corporal, and urges him to join the Party. Adolf Hitler becomes German Workers' Party member 555. Later, perhaps for superstitious reasons, Hitler will annoy the Old Guard by claiming that he was member number 7; this will be proven wrong when it is revealed that the Party began its numbering system at 500 in order to appear larger than it really was. (Hitler was actually member number 7 of the executive committee of the Party, formed later.) In a bizarre coincidence, the number 555 will come up again a little later as the numerological value of the word Necronomicon, a book of black magick that was first introduced to the Western world in a short story by H.P. Lovecraft entitled "The Hound" (1922). Lovecraft was also an anti-Semite and an ethnophobe, as many of his writings and letters attest. During the years that Nazism rose to total power in Germany, Lovecraft was writing stories about an unnamable evil that could be conjured using the formulas of the Necronomicon and along the way introduced yet another "black book," the Unaussprechlichen Kulten ("Unspeakable Cults" or, alternatively, "Unpronounceable Cults"!) of the mythical German anthropologist von Junst. He wrote about the mysterious and abhorred practices of Asians and Arabs in his short story "The Horror of Red Hook" among other tales and -- save for the rather high literary quality of his stories when compared to the articles of a von Liebenfels -- their racist nature could have easily promised him publication in select copies of Ostara. While the actual nature and extent of Lovecraft's anti-Semitism and ethnophobia have become the subject of much debate, it is safe to say that many of his stories do not meet the criteria set down by our faithful watchdogs of the Politically Correct. (To followers of Aleister Crowley, the number 555 is the qabalistic equivalent of an ancient Hebrew term meaning "Darkness," an appropriate connotation from a Jewish perspective of what Hitler represented. But then, of course, 555 is also the number used by Hollywood for nonexistent telephone exchanges in movie and television scripts; one may also dial 555-1212, preceded by an area code, to get the information operator for that area code. I leave it to qabalists more advanced or more creative than I to interpret these "synchronicities.") Gradually, Hitler -- carrying out his own, mysterious agenda spawned at the sanitorium in Pasewalk -- begins to assume total control of the German Workers' Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or DAP). He changes its name to National Socialist German Workers' Party or Nazionalsocialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP. He will also design its emblem with the help of a Thule Society member, the dentist Dr. Friedrich Krohn, and the swastika will become the official symbol of the new Nazi Party. Still broke, Hitler lives in a tiny rented room in Munich. His bookcase has a few, well-thumbed volumes, including the memoirs of a famous Swedish explorer, Sven Hedin, (already mentioned) whose principal destination has always been Asia with an emphasis on Tibet. Sven Hedin will later become deeply involved with the infamous Ahnenerbe: a research organization within Himmler's SS which was responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the Reich. Dietrich Eckart Although hungry, poorly (some say, ridiculously) dressed, and uncomfortable in high society, Hitler comes to the attention of one of Germany's most famous poets, the eccentric genius Dietrich Eckart (1868-1923). Eckart, encouraged by his friends in the Thule, went to hear him speak at DAP meetings and, like so many people after him, became entranced by the hypnotic, wild-eyed Austrian fanatic. He takes Hitler under his wing and introduces him to the elite of Munich society. Dietrich Eckart was a drug addict who owned his own newspaper. Famous for his translation into German of Peer Gynt, Eckart was one of Munich's coffeehouse darlings, as well known for his biting wit and sarcasm as for his felicitous use of the German language in poetry and plays. He was also a former mental patient and a rabid anti-Semite. With a circulation of some thirty thousand, his newspaper -- Auf Gut Deutsch ("In Good German") -- ranks with the Volkischer Beobachter and Ostara as a racist sheet with intellectual pretensions. His protege was none other than Alfred Rosenberg, the Baltic- born anti-Semite who is later to become one of the architects of official Nazi pagan policies. Eckart, Rosenberg, and, later, Rudolf Hess become Hitler's closest companions and coconspirators in the first years of the 1920s in Munich. It was Eckart who, on his deathbed after the failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 8-9, 1923, was widely quoted as saying "Hitler will dance, but it is I who plays the tune.... Do not mourn for me, for I will have influenced history more than any other German." [22] Eckart -- it will be no shock to learn -- was an occultist. An intimate of the Thule Society, he was as well versed in its beliefs (and, hence, of those of the Germanenorden) as any other member. He was also an early admirer of the weird cosmological theories of Hans Horbiger, and introduced them to his Austrian corporal. His cozy relationship with both Rosenberg and Hess would have provided fertile ground for any number of wide-reaching discussions on mystical subjects. It has even been claimed that Eckart and Hitler attended seances in which ghostly ectoplasmic forms were seen; but, alas, there is no evidence for this. [23] There is evidence, however, that Eckart was approached by none other than the eminent occultist Rudolf Steiner himself. Steiner was interested in forming an alliance with Eckart as the latter was known to be a mystic and as Steiner had his own politico-mystical agenda. During the "troubles" of the spring of 1919, Steiner sought out Eckart in an attempt to get coverage for his "Threefold Commonwealth" idea in the pages of Eckart's Auf gut Deutsch, an attempt that was doomed to failure. Eckart considered himself a "Christian mystic" and spurned Steiner's advances as a result of the latter's membership in the OTO, attacking Steiner in articles published in his newspaper in July and December, 1919. According to Eckart, Steiner was a crazed sex magician and a member of the Jewish-Masonic conspiracy. [24] An article, written by Alfred Rosenberg and published almost a year after Eckart's death, asserts that Eckart was steeped in the lore of ancient India and was as well versed in the mystical concepts of Maya and Atman as he was in the poetry of Goethe and the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Angelus Silesius. This is extremely relevant, for it shows that Eckart believed in the idea of Cosmic Consciousness (Atman) and in the concept that the visible, tangible world is illusion (Maya). The term "atman" has also been used, and abused, by a variety of occultists to mean a higher Self and to refer to the next stage in human evolution, which was, of course, virtually a strategic goal of the Nazis and a tenet of their basic beliefs. The eulogy also describes another crucial element of Nazi ideology, and that is the alleged usurpation by the Jews of Christianity; for Rosenberg mentions that the Jewish Jehovah is corrupting the "so-called Christian churches." [25] This is an essential part of the Nazi mythos that we will return to in a later chapter. As for Eckart himself, most histories give him very little print space. His influence over Hitler is downplayed, perhaps owing to the fact that there is insufficient documentation of the type needed to expand upon their relationship. Yet, for the last three years of his life, Eckart was Hitler's constant companion and the man who helped propel him into the public spotlight. It was Eckart who first introduced Hitler to all the right people, to the wealthy and powerful movers and shakers of Bavaria. Eckart clearly groomed Hitler for the role he was later to play and spent those three years orchestrating his rise to power. It was Eckart who helped arrange financing for the nascent Nazi Party from European and American industrialists, including Henry Ford. And it was Eckart who, along with Rosenberg, accompanied Hitler to Upper Bavaria with fifteen hundred Storm Troopers to "liberate" the town of Coburg from the Reds in what was arguably Hitler's first real military victory. Hitler's popularity and influence in Germany was growing at a speed that must have amazed Hitler himself, considering that only a few years earlier he had been cold and hungry, living on charity. But his anti-Communist, anti-Capitalist platform was winning him converts from all over Germany's political spectrum. The old guard -- those members of Germany's defeated army that came home to find their nation unrecognizable, in shreds from the hundreds of wars taking place between dozens of private armies and political parties, and in absolute economic chaos -- drank in Hitler's speeches like cool steins of draft in the very beer cellars where the Nazi Party met. And on February 24, 1920 -- at the meeting during which his Twenty-Five Point program for saving Germany was proclaimed, introduced by Marc Sesselmann (a Thulist and member of the DAP) -- he told them what they wanted to hear: that the war was lost because of Capitalists, Communists, Freemasons, and the ever-present bugaboo, international Jewry, which was behind them all. That the Germans were enslaved by punitive interest payments. That swift and violent action was needed if Germany was to be snatched from the jaws of a satanic conspiracy. The speech was welcomed by thunderous applause from the approximately two thousand listeners, and the die of the Nazi Party was cast. At this time the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was being widely disseminated, and raising alarms about a grand conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons bent on destroying Germany as they were at that moment destroying Russia. If Hitler were in power, his listeners believed, he would throw out all these undesirable elements -- by force of arms, if necessary -- and the country would be right again. Of course, subtract all the Capitalists, Communists, Freemasons, and Jews from the population (and eventually all the Christians) and one wonders who would remain. Eine Arte Menschenopfer (A Kind of Human Sacrifice) As Hitler was tramping around Germany, raising consciousness and gathering recruits, a secret organization within the Ehrhardt Freikorps Brigade was itching for revolution. They eventually carried out (on June 24, 1922) the most famous assassination of the era, one that is still remembered today by those who lived through it, as Americans remember where they were when Kennedy was killed. [26] The society was called Organization Consul and its members included Erwin Kern, Hermann Fischer, Ernst von Salomon, and Ernst-Werner Techow. Organization Consul was a terrorist cell within the Ehrhardt Brigade, dedicated to carrying out bombings and assassinations against leftist targets and "Versailles" politicians, i.e., the "November criminals" who were believed to have sold Germany down the river at the Armistice and later at the Versailles Peace Conference. While the Freikorps marched openly and provocatively through the streets, their brothers in Organization Consul stuck to the alleys. Their target for June 1922 was none other than Walther Rathenau, foreign minister of the Weimar Republic. Rathenau's father had founded what later became AEG, Germany's version of General Electric, by purchasing Edison's patents on the electric light bulb. Rathenau himself, a sensitive, artistic soul who became enmeshed in high finance, industry, and politics almost against his will (he was a lover of poetry and music who had written volumes of aphorisms under a pseudonym) was Jewish. But that was not his only crime. He was also wealthy, admired, powerful, and a man with far-ranging vision. He had virtually single-handedly ensured that Germany would be able to wage a continuous war under the Kaiser by arranging to bring all of Germany's raw materials under centralized control in 1914. He had successfully negotiated the famous Treaty of Rapallo with the Soviet Union when France was frantically trying to isolate Germany from the European community after the war. He had written books describing the political and cultural situation in Germany with insight and wit. In short, he was a man of many accomplishments and, what is more, a sympathetic and elegant figure whom even the conspirators admitted "unites in himself everything in this age that is of value in thought, in honor, and in spirituality." [27] So naturally these Freikorps thugs were committed to his destruction. We might not be discussing Rathenau at this point were it not for a peculiar phenomenon surrounding his death that is referred to by historian Norman Cohn. Of course, the Freikorps (and particularly the Ehrhardt Brigade, as we have seen) was heavily influenced by volkisch and other Pan-German occultism. And it was the Ehrhardt Brigade, remember, that marched into Munich that May Day in 1919 wearing the swastika as their symbol and singing the hakenkreuz hymn. But Rathenau was identified with the most legendary conspiracy of all time, and was numbered among its members in the crazed imaginations of desperate men. Walther Rathenau, they believed, was one of the actual Elders of Zion. His assassination would be a blow against the international Jewish/Masonic/Communist/Capitalist cabal to dominate the world. He did unite in himself all those qualities and values recognized by the Organization Consul itself, and thereby symbolized the success of the Zionist conspiracy. Therefore, according to Cohn:
In later years, Ernst Rohm would deliver a eulogy at the graves of two of the assassins, saying that their spirit "is the spirit of the SS, Himmler's black soldiers." [29] The human sacrifice of Walther Rathenau -- timed to occur on a pagan holiday or "sabbath" that was observed by Nazi cultists throughout Germany -- was the signal that the new Aryan faith was increasing in strength. It certainly must have seemed that way to Hitler. The Liberation of Coburg With Eckart and now Rosenberg at his side, Hitler strode all over Germany like an avenging angel on a budget, seeking out targets of opportunity. With him could be counted upon a contingent of six hundred oddly dressed former Free Korps men who had sworn an oath of loyalty to the cause, a kind of bodyguard that was now known as the dreaded SA, the Sturmabteilung, the brown-shirted Storm Troopers. The SA at this time was dressed in a motley of uniforms, many with patched and mismatched clothing, but their unifying symbol, of course, was the swastika, which they wore as armbands and which they flew as black-red-white flags after a design approved by Hitler. They were also accompanied by a brass band that played rousing marches at every public meeting of the Nazi Party and, at the event scheduled for Coburg, even had a van full of beefy Bavarians in lederhosen and alpenstocks for a little local color ... and brute force. Hitler himself had presided over very little actual armed conflict up to this time, but was ready for battle when they reached the town of Coburg in Upper Bavaria on October 14, 1922, for a "German Day" celebration. This time, they were met with opposition in the form of a crowd of anti-Nazis of various persuasions who began by jeering and shouting epithets, calling the Nazis murderers and criminals, and who proceeded very shortly to throw rocks at the marching Storm Troopers. Hitler gave a signal with his whip, and the Troopers fell upon the crowd with merry and reckless abandon. (Hitler had often pictured himself as Christ throwing the money-changers out of the Temple, and the whip was his favorite weapon at this time. Even Eckart was growing tired of it, and began to think that maybe his protege was a trifle insane.) The hostile crowd was forced back, and the march continued, but the talk on the street was that the Communists had only fallen back to regroup and that a major confrontation would take place in twenty-four hours. The following day, in spite of a call to all leftists to throw out the Nazis, Hitler -- who anticipated a full-scale battle with an opposition numbering close to ten thousand, and whose own SA contingent (swollen with newly arriving members and converts) now numbered only fifteen hundred -- found himself greeted instead with wild approval by the people of Coburg and surprisingly the rest of the day passed without conflict. Hitler -- his friends the poet-mystic Eckart and the architect-mystic Rosenberg in tow -- had actually liberated the town of Coburg. And now they were ready for the rest of Germany. The Combination of Stellar Influences In a letter written to Hitler by a female admirer in Munich a little over a month before the famous Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, the future leader of Germany was advised of certain astrological predictions made by Frau Elsbeth Ebertin, the dowager empress of an impressive line of German astrologers whose innovative techniques are still employed today in Europe and America. The author believes that this is the first time that the entire letter has been published in English translation:
This author felt it worthwhile to quote the entire text as it illustrates both the self-professed "fanatical" devotion of the letter writer as well as the political sentiments of Frau Ebertin at this time. Frau Heiden quoted the comments from Ebertin's own book of predictions, Ein Blick in die Zukunft (A Glimpse into the Future) for the year 1924, which was published in July of 1923. It was brought to Hitler's attention by a number of other admirers as well, and Frau Ebertin herself sent a copy of her book to the Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter ... but according to Ebertin her predictions only served to irritate the Fuhrer. [31] Hider was not one who was willing to believe that his fate was out of his hands and written in the indelible ink of the stars, at least not when he felt he had the future -- and Germany's -- in his grasp, as he did that September of 1923. But it all came to an end with the failed Munich Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923. An ill-planned and poorly executed attempt to take over the Bavarian government by force resulted in a major setback for the Party. Hitler was arrested; Hess -- who had escaped to Austria -- was being sought by the authorities and would eventually surrender himself; and Dietrich Eckart -- Hitler's mentor and protector and the man who midwifed the Nazi Party into prominence -- died at Hitler's mountain retreat, Berchtesgaden, on December 26 of that year, his protege in prison but his optimism unbounded. Eckart knew where Hitler was headed, because it was he who had pushed him in the right direction. To rebut those who claim that Eckart's influence and effect on Hitler was not relevant, one merely has to indicate the memorial services that were held every year in his honor by the Nazi Party, including the lavish ceremony on December 26, 1933 (the year Hitler came to power); the monument put up over his grave in Berchtesgaden; the eulogies written for him by such important contemporaries as Rosenberg (who would later become enormously influential in the Third Reich) and the speeches made on the anniversary of his death by such men as Baldur von Schirach (the head of Hitler Youth). Hitler owed a great deal to Eckart, and the evidence left behind shows that he knew and understood that; after all, the final words of Mein Kampf show that Hitler's infamous memoir was dedicated to him. A Mark, a Yen, a Buck, or a Pound ... Another contribution of Eckart, and one that is frequently missed even by occult historians, is his connection with Henry Ford. Eckart was approached by agents of the American automobile manufacturer as early as 1920-1921. Ford was a notorious anti-Semite, and had actually written a book -- The International Jew -- which was enormously popular in Germany where a German-language version with the title The Eternal Jew was a best-seller. Hitler had read it before writing Mein Kampf, and some authors insist that whole sections of Hitler's memoir were lifted, practically verbatim, from Ford's book. [32] Hitler even had a picture of Ford hanging in his office at Party headquarters (the Brown House) and stacks of The Eternal Jew piled up on a desk outside along with other Nazi literature. (Consider the surreal nature of that image. Imagine ousted Ugandan dictator Idi Amin with a framed portrait of Lee Iacocca ...) It is worthwhile to note that the German publisher of The Eternal Jew (as well as of an early German edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion) was none other than Theodor Fritsch, the man who founded the Germanenorden in 1912 for which the Thule Society served as a front. (See Chapter Two.) The support of Henry Ford was vital to the survival of the Nazi Party in the early days, and one of Hitler's proudest achievements. He would award that quintessential American with the highest Nazi honor it was possible to bestow to a non-German, the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle, in 1938. He was the first American and only the fourth person to be given the award. And why not? Even Baldur von Schirach would credit Henry Ford's writings for having converted him to anti-Semitism. An earlier recipient of the award was Benito Mussolini that same year. Thus it was Eckart who handled some of these early cash contributions from Henry Ford, and Eckart who, among others, dealt directly with the Ford representatives in Germany. As we continue along in our catalogue of this century's most unspeakable evil we must pause now and again to fully appreciate the depths to which some honored American heroes -- industrialists, after all, like Ford; scientists, engineers, and technicians -- have sunk, and to resurrect these memories (no matter how painful or simply distasteful) for they are crucial to a full understanding of who we are and of how we came to this impasse. Eckart, the drug-addicted occultist, racist, anti-Semite, and borderline psychopath as Henry Ford's bag man and Hitler's Bebe Rebozo, is one of those traffic accidents of history that merit a few moments of silent contemplation. Money, connections, ideology. Perhaps no single other human would come to exert that type of influence over Hitler until Hanussen, the psychic and astrologer who honed Hitler's public-speaking skills ... and who performed occult rituals on Hitler's behalf. As Eckart's ghost piped an infernal melody from beyond the grave, Hitler would indeed dance; and in that danse macabre Hanussen would lead. Hanussen In the last days of 1932, Hitler was contemplating suicide. Released from prison in 1924 after the Beer Hall Putsch got him a light sentence for what was, after all, high treason, his Mein Kampf a best-seller, and his Nazi Party back and stronger than ever, he nonetheless was losing ground in the Reichstag. Hindenberg -- the much-respected and very popular president of the Republic -- was not pleased with the rough-and-tumble crowd that seemed to compose Hitler's voting bloc, and various ministers were conspiring against Hitler to keep him out of government altogether. In 1932, they were succeeding. Hitler was facing a crucial election. Members of the Nazi Party were in danger of defecting to other political organizations. His own trusted disciples were dividing the Party into warring factions that could not be controlled. And on Halloween night -- the pagan Sabbath of Samhain -- his mistress Eva Braun shot herself. Although Eva survived what the doctors would later characterize as a serious suicide attempt, Hitler himself knew he was politically dead. It appeared as if he had lost the will to fight, and he began to speak more and more of his own death. He entered the political campaign a distracted, depressed leader who seemed unable to hold his fractious Party together. They lost heavily in the Reichstag five days later -- losing seats to the hated Communists -- and the press began publishing the Party's obituary. At this nadir of his career, he turned to an old friend whom he had met years earlier, in 1926, in Berlin. This was Erik Jan Hanussen, a famous astrologer and master of several occult disciplines who had -- it was said -- taught Hitler everything from the body language and gestures to use in public speaking to what friends and associates he should cultivate. The Viennese Hanussen -- whose real name was Herschel Steinschneider, the son of a Jewish vaudeville performer -- began his career as what Americans call a "carny," doing odd jobs in a traveling circus, until he began his own newspaper and threatened to publish vile things in it about people he knew unless they paid up! This small-time blackmailer soon became interested in hypnosis and mediumship and published several books on the subject, eventually becoming the darling of the international socialite set, a man who never failed to entertain at parties but who also provided more serious assistance to those of his hosts who needed a horoscope drawn up or a spell cast. He dyed his hair blond to fit his new persona as a Danish aristocrat, and dived into the frantic, heady atmosphere of early 1930s Berlin competing with astrologers, clairvoyants, and mediums of every description. Although he had never cast Hitler's astrological chart before, now in the late days of 1932 with Hitler morose and on the verge of doing himself damage, Hanussen erected his natal and probably a transit or progressed chart and appeared before Hitler with an eerie prognosis. Hanussen told his host that there were good times ahead, but that a few "obstacles" remained that had to be eliminated. The implication was oddly surreal. The "obstacles" were not actual people or circumstances. Instead, Hanussen claimed, Hitler was the victim of some sort of hex or magical spell. [33] History has not recorded who might have been responsible for this, and it is possible that all Hanussen knew -- or claimed -- was that "evil occult influences" were around Hitler, causing him to lose his edge. We may fantasize about a lodge of German magicians, summoning angelic forces to thwart the attempts of Hitler and his Nazi Party to gain power in Germany. We may wonder if a witch or sorcerer -- operating alone in some mountain fastness in the Obersalzberg, perhaps -- was casting a spell against Hitler for something as relatively trivial as a broken promise or unrequited love, and thereby altering the course of European history forever. We will certainly never know the actual dimensions of this baneful influence around the Fuhrer, but the outcome of Hanussen's meditations was nothing short of spectacular. In order to rid himself of this evil spell, he said, one would have to go to Hitler's hometown. At the time of the full moon. At midnight. In a butcher's backyard. And remove a mandrake from the ground. Now a mandrake is the man-shaped root famous throughout European folklore for its occult and medicinal properties. According to some traditions, one had to stop one's ears with cloth or cotton before pulling the root from the earth, as it would emit a piercing scream that would shatter the eardrums. A dog was sometimes used to pull the root from the earth as the magician kept his hands clasped around his own ears. The resulting shriek -- it is said -- normally killed the dog. The mandrake is also known for its powers as an aphrodisiac, and as an amulet of protection. We must assume that Hanussen was thinking of this last property in connection with Hitler. Also, the significance of the butcher's yard should not be ignored: such a place would have given the surrounding earth the peculiar quality of a veritable Teutonic orgy of blood, dismemberment, death, and pain, which would have been mystically absorbed by the root itself. Hanussen decided to perform the necessary rituals himself and set off for Hitler's birthplace in Austria, returning on New Year's Day 1933 with the amuletic root and with a prediction: that Hitler's return to power would begin on January 30, a date roughly equivalent to the pagan Sabbath of Oimelc: one of the four "cross-quarter" days of the witches' calendar. It seemed an outrageous prediction but -- after a series of bizarre coincidences and half-baked conspiratorial machinations on the part of his opponents -- Hitler went from washed-up political has-been to chancellor of Germany with dizzying speed in thirty days and, on January 30, 1933, he assumed power. Hanussen s impossibly optimistic prediction came true to the day. That was not the end of Hanussen's ability to predict the future, however, for on February 26 of that same year -- during a seance held that evening at his own lavishly furnished "Palace of Occultism" on Lietzenburger Strasse and attended by Berlin's movers and shakers -- he predicted that the Communists in Germany would attempt a revolution, signaled by the destruction (by fire) of an important government building. [34] The next day, the Reichstag was in flames and Hitler had all the excuse he needed to go from chancellor of Germany to Fuhrer of the Third Reich. European history had been changed forever, and once more the Society Seer was right on target. But, six weeks later in April of 1933, Hanussen would be dead; murdered in a forest outside Berlin by agent or agents unknown. There was speculation that Hitler ordered the execution since Hanussen "knew too much" or perhaps might even have had connections to the Communist Party (hence his accurate prediction of the Reichstag fire; some mediums and psychics -- and Hanussen was no exception -- are known to "enhance" their abilities by gathering intelligence on their clients ahead of time or by bugging the rooms in which seances are held, etc. In fairness, however, no amount of dirty tricks could have explained Hanussen's accurate prediction of Hitler's enormous success in January [???!!!]). Another version had it that Hanussen's murder enraged the Fuhrer, and that he ordered the death sentence for its perpetrator, Karl Ernst, who was executed during the Rohm purge with a bewildered "Heil Hitler" on his lips. [35] Another story, that SA leader Count Wolf Heinrich von Helldorf had Ernst arrest and murder Hanussen because the count owed him money, is also current. [36] Hanussen was said to have thrown orgies at the count's Wannsee villa, where attractive young ladies -- usually "actresses" -- were thrown into hypnotic trances and made to mime orgasms. The count was a rather degenerate sort who went through money like schnapps, and wound up owing a great deal to Hanussen, who carried the count's markers with him wherever he went. Needless to say, the markers were never found (which either proves that the count killed Hanussen and removed the IOUs from the body, or that the story is completely fictitious and never happened; take your pick). And then, of course, Hanussen's father was Jewish, which would have been reason enough to execute the inordinately influential seer. Unfortunately, we will never know what happened, for Hanussen died as he had lived: the Count St. Germain of Weimar and early Nazi Germany, a complete and compelling mystery. The Master of the Sidereal Pendulum Another occultist in Hitler's inner circle was the Thulist, astrologer, and pendulum expert Wilhelm Gutberlet (born 1870). Gutberlet first comes to the historian's attention as a shareholder in the Volkischer Beobachter, Sebottendorff's former newspaper. Franz Eher Verlag was a publishing company that Sebottendorff purchased in 1918 for about five thousand Reichsmarks (RM). It consisted of a newspaper, the Munchener Beobachter, that had ceased publication with the death of its founder in June. Sebottendorff picked it up and moved its offices to the Thule meeting rooms at the Four Seasons Hotel, turning it into an anti-Semitic organ that was eventually taken over -- after a series of intervening ownerships by other parties -- by the German Workers' Party after Sebottendorff left Munich. In 1920, Wilhelm Gutberlet owned shares worth 10,000 RM, or about 8.5 percent of the total value of the paper. It was renamed the Volkischer Beobachter, and as such became infamous as the propaganda machine of the Nazi Party. As mentioned, Gutberlet was a Thulist. He was also one of Hitler's earliest followers. A medical doctor, he was present at the first meeting of the German Workers' Party that Hitler attended and had remained a close friend and confidant since then. In other words, since 1919. Gutberlet virtually disappears from most official accounts of the Nazi Party until he reappears in Schellenberg's memoirs. Walter Schellenberg was chief of the Foreign Intelligence section of the SD (Sicherheitsdienst or Security Service), and survived the war to write about his experiences as spymaster in Europe. According to Schellenberg:
Thus, in Gutberlet, we have an occultist, a Thulist, an astrologer, a racist, a pendulum expert, and a confidant of Hitler, all wrapped into one. The matter of the "sidereal pendulum" itself will come up in a later chapter, but for now we can agree that Gutberlet's influence over Hitler's thinking must have been profound, for the Fuhrer himself constantly ridiculed the volkisch occult groups in his official speeches ... while secretly soliciting their advice and counsel away from the prying eyes of both the press and the superstitious Christian public. And it is revealing to know that Gutberlet, the astrologer and mystic, was consulted by Hitler on racial matters as well as on mystical subjects, thus providing additional evidence -- albeit circumstantial -- that Hitler's racism was fueled by his occultism. List, Liebenfels, Eckart, Hanussen, Gutberlet. These are only five of the many occultists whose influence surrounded the Fuhrer from his early days as an art student to his last days as leader of a ruined nation. To complete the story, we have to investigate Haushofer, Hess, Himmler and many others for -- as the Reich consolidated and became more powerful -- other occult lodges in Germany were active and were seen to pose a threat to the new regime. While drawing upon some of the same traditions as the Order of New Templars, the Germanenorden, and the Thule Society -- Eastern religions, weird rituals associated with astrology and mythology, sexual formulas for becoming powerful and casting spells -- they had other associations which made them suspect.
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