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UNHOLY ALLIANCE: A HISTORY OF NAZI INVOLVEMENT WITH THE OCCULT |
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5. Cult War 1934-1939
Hitler came to power -- as Hanussen predicted -- on January 30, 1933, in the shadow of the ancient pagan feast of Oimelc. A more important, if less pagan date, is that of November 9; possibly a date selected with premeditation by the Occult Messiah -- or else, arrived at without much contemplation at all, just a weird little wrinkle in history. First, of course, comes Germany's most famous contribution to world religion: Martin Luther, for November 9 is his birthday. But November 9 was also the birthday of the founder of the Thule Gesellschaft, the man who organized Munich into a full-scale rebellion against the Communists, and who synchronized the Bamberg government and its regular and irregular troops for the final assault on the Bavarian Soviet: Baron von Sebottendorff. It was also the day that the Second Reich collapsed with the abdication of the Kaiser. It was the day that Sebottendorff called the Thule/Germanenorden brethren to arms. It was the day Adolf Hitler lost his eyesight for the second time at the Pasewalk sanatorium. And so it was the day of the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, a day that Hitler commemorated forever after with speeches and festivities, and sanctified with the creation of the Blood Order: a society of those men who marched with him on that fateful day, and symbolized by the Nazi flag that they carried and with which all other Nazi flags were "blessed" by being touched with it in impressive ceremonials presided over by Hitler himself. It was the day of a failed assassination attempt in 1939 on Hitler's life at a meeting commemorating the Putsch. (Coincidentally, November 9, 1939, was also the date the trial of American Nazi and Bund leader Fritz Kuhn began in New York City, a trial that resulted in his conviction on various charges and his sentencing to Sing Sing.) And it was also the day of Kristallnacht, when roving Nazi gangs went on a rampage in 1938, smashing shop windows and destroying Jewish homes, businesses, and temples. If anyone in Hitler's Germany believed in numerology, they would have spent considerable time in analyzing this most pregnant of dates for the Third Reich. As he bent to the task of solidifying his position as absolute dictator of Germany -- using the Reichstag fire in February 1933 as the excuse for assuming virtually total control of the government while waiting for the president to die -- Hitler also began ensuring that very little of his past would be revealed to the public by his friends from the old days in Vienna and Munich. The "November 9" days. Dietrich Eckart was already dead; Eckart's disciple Alfred Rosenberg was safely on board with the Party, as was Rudolf Hess. Hanussen will be murdered in the woods near Berlin only weeks after the Reichstag fire. And May 10, 1933, would witness a quintessentially barbaric act of the new German ruling party: the burning of hundreds of thousands of books that were considered dangerous to the regime. Significantly, these massive bonfires marked the first time the word "holocaust" was used by the Western press in association with the Nazis; [2] it would be eight years before the same word would be used to describe the mass extermination of the "non-Aryans." This first, frenzied auro-da-fe -- which took place all over Germany, in thirty cities -- symbolized all that was wrong with the Third Reich and all that is still wrong with its admirers on both sides of the Atlantic: the anti-intellectualism that is born, not of an educated disagreement with particular philosophical ideas, but from a primitive's fear of what it cannot comprehend. And there was one book in particular that really attracted everyone's attention in the newly Nazified Reichstag. The Return of the Baron Just when everything seemed set to allow Hitler to strjde onto the global political scene with a minimum of personal embarrassment and domestic opposition, who should reappear but the one man who had the most to do with setting that very stage -- Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorff! He was probably the last person Hitler wanted anyone to hear from, for Sebottendorff knew where all the bodies were buried. The self-styled Baron was proud of his participation in the early days of the Nazi Party and of his struggle to free Munich from Communist control in 1919. Although the Thule Gesellschaft had died a slow death, Sebottendorff was back to revive it. And not only that. The Baron had written and published a book. Entitled Bevor Hitler Kamm ("Before Hitler Came"), it outlined the entire early history of the Thule Society and the first days of the Nazi Party. Sebottendorff's whereabouts after the successful putsch against the Communists in Munich in 1919 are well known. He left active membership in the Thule Society because his brethren held him responsible for the deaths of the original Seven Thulists who were executed by the Reds. For several years, the Baron published a series of astrological works which were very well received, and in 1923 he made for Lugano in Switzerland. There he wrote another occult treatise, comparing subjects as diverse as alchemy, Rosicrucianism, and Sufism. This completed, in 1925 he made for his occult "alma mater": Turkey. For a while, Sebottendorff managed to convince the Mexican government to accept him as their honorary consul in Istanbul. This enabled him to travel throughout Central America and the United States for several years, but he returned to Munich after Hitler came to power in 1933. Perhaps he thought he could obtain a position with the new Nazi government based on his credentials with the Thule Society. Whatever his motivations might have been, they didn't keep him out of jail. At a time when the Fuhrer was trying desperately to win world recognition of his stature as statesman and Chancellor of the Reich, here was the old Orientalist, Pan-German, and occultist Sebottendorff virtually giving the game away in black and white. Hitler would not have been able to survive having this book on the reading list of those heads of state with whom he was most anxious to negotiate. Also, revelation of his connections to a patently occult organization like the Thule Gesellschaft might have resulted in an erosion of support from the middle class and in the renewal of opposition from other political blocs within Germany and even within his own political party. (The mid-1930s was a time of great upheaval within the country as various Nazi factions tried to gain the upper hand in the government, resulting in the famous Blood Purge of 1934 and the execution of SA leader Ernst Rohm and many others.) And then there was the attempt to blackmail the Fuhrer, which proved to be the last straw. The Blackmail Plot A typed letter dated September 15, 1933, on Thule Gesellschaft stationery shows Sebottendorff inviting one "Professor Stempfle" to a Thule Society meeting that Saturday evening. [3] It can be seen from this note that the Thule Society had returned not only to Munich but to its old headquarters at the Four Seasons Hotel, and to its old schedule of Saturday meetings, as if nothing had happened in the last fourteen years. Even more interesting, however, is the addressee. Quite possibly it is the same Bernhard Stempfle who was the Catholic priest who had edited an anti-Semitic newspaper in the old days before the Beer Hall Putsch. A friend and coconspirator of Baron Sebottendorff, he had helped design the framework for armed resistance to the Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919 by the legitimate government in Bamberg. He was a guest of Hitler's at Obersalzberg after the latter's release from Landsberg Prison, along with Hess and Hitler's indefatigable press secretary "Putzi" Hanfstaengl. This bizarre trio helped Hitler to complete the first volume of Mein Kamp/in the spring of 1925. (It would be published in Munich on July 18 of that year.) Stempfle was included for his editorial services, and it was probably this access to information on the early days of Hitler -- including Hitler's reminiscences about his youth in Austria and Munich -- that led to one of the most scandalous episodes of the early days of Hitler's rule in Germany. Stempfle was a friend not only of Sebottendorff but of a strange little gentleman by the name of J.F.M. Rehse, who owned what was probably the largest single collection of Nazi memorabilia in captivity. Rehse collected every scrap of paper he could find concerning the Nazis, Dietrich Eckart, the Thule Society, etc., and meticulously catalogued each item and stored them in boxes. He and the anti-Semitic priest Stempfle were close friends. [4] In 1929, Father Stempfle made an astonishing claim. He professed to own a letter that Hitler had written -- but never mailed -- to the one true love of his life, Geli Raubal. Ms. Raubal was Hitler's niece (a daughter of his half sister, Angela) and the Fuhrer was infatuated with her, saying on at least one occasion that she was the only woman he could ever conceive of marrying. According to Stempfle, Hitler had written an alarming, sexually explicit letter to Ms. Raubal. The nature of the sex being discussed in the letter was of a rather debased type, involving both masochistic and what the psychologists term "coprophilic" fantasies. Obviously, it would spell political and personal disaster for Hitler if this scatological letter were ever made public. It had probably been stuck in some forgotten corner of his rented room in Munich, for it fell into the hands of his landlady's son and from there into the possession -- or so it was said -- of Mr. Rehse. The existence of the letter became known to Hitler, who sent the Party's treasurer -- a discreet and trustworthy aide by the name of Franz X. Schwarz -- to obtain it from Rehse. Stempfle saw this as a means of insuring the existence of Rehse's invaluable "Archive," and convinced Rehse to extort enough money from the Nazis to enable his archival pursuits to continue. Although it was blackmail, pure and simple, Hitler agreed to assume financial responsibility for the collection, and in return Father Stempfle gave the purloined letter to the Party treasurer. Geli Raubal, to whom the famous letter had been addressed, had eventually committed suicide in Hitler's Munich apartment in 1931, during Adolf's failed run for president of Germany. The reason is unknown. (Eva Braun would attempt suicide during his next campaign in 1932. It seems Hitler shared Aleister Crowley's abysmal track record with women. Several of Crowley's mistresses, wives, and Scarlet Women committed suicide or wound up in mental asylums. Six of Hitler's mistresses attempted suicide: at least three succeeded, four if you count Eva Braun's final attempt in Berlin in 1945.) Rehse probably never had the Geli Raubal letter in his possession in the first place, for the integrity of the Rehse Collection remained intact and can be viewed today on microfilm at the Library of Congress (the originals were "returned" to the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz). Father Stempfle, however, did his penance for the sin of blackmailing Adolf Hitler, for he was murdered -- terminated with extreme unction -- in the woods outside Munich during the famous Blood Purge of June, 1934. His assassin pumped three rounds into his heart. [5] These were the types of people Sebottendorff was calling to his side in 1933. It's possible that the Baron knew of Stempfle's blackmail scheme regarding the FUhrer, but the author has been unable to find proof of this. In any case, Sebottendorff was a dangerous man with dangerous friends and an equally dangerous flair for publicity. He, like Stempfle and that other troublemaker, Rahm, had to be stopped. After his brief attempt at reviving the Thule -- possibly with even more occult trappings and arcane rituals than before -- he was sent to prison early the following year and released soon after, thus managing to avoid the Blood Purge in June, which might have resulted in his going the way of piously prurient Father Stempfle. Instead, he found himself back in Turkey, where he managed to convince the local head of German Intelligence to take him on as a secret agent ... yet another occultist-turned-spy. He did not cover himself with glory in this position. The end of the war would find the hapless Sebottendorff broke, disillusioned, and thoroughly depressed. All that he had worked for since the early days of National Socialism had come to nothing. His own party -- that is, the party he had done so much to create -- had seen fit to imprison him at the moment of its greatest triumph. And now Hitler was dead and the Reich was in smoking ruins. Sebottendorff committed suicide by jumping into the Bosporus. The date was May 9, 1945. Cult War Meanwhile, Hitler was on the rampage against dissident factions in the Party. June, 1934, saw the Blood Purge take place in which the head of the SA, Ernst Rahm, a longtime comrade in arms, was arrested and executed and the SA effectively shorn of its previous position and power in the Party. Many other enemies of the Reich -- real and imagined -- were targeted for death that summer, and the bodies piled up. Among those who escaped the Fuhrer's wrath were Himmler, Hess, Rosenberg, Haushofer, and the other cultists around the dictator. The death of Rohm was seen by many to be the key event, giving Heinrich Himmler and his SS virtually unlimited power in Germany and, eventually, in the occupied territories as well. But in order to consolidate this power a number of other steps had to be taken. The opposition had to be crushed. Himmler, the guard dog of the new Reich, was told to round up the usual suspects. As early as May 26, 1934 (and therefore a month before the Blood Purge of Rahm and other enemies), an order of the Reich War Minister (1 p 90 J (I a) Nr 2066/34) quite bluntly stated:
This was followed by more explicit instructions on behalf of the Party, instructions that were updated and expanded every few months and then every other year or so. To understand the official opprobrium in which the Freemasons were held, it is only necessary to read that section of the law which lumps Freemasons in with violators of the "race laws." [7] Also, a certain special hatred was reserved for those Masons who had the temerity to advance to the III degree of the Craft. These men were forbidden from participating in any but the lowest forms of labor and, in many cases, were subject to penalization of various types, punishment, and even a term in the camps. This obsession with Freemasonry did not begin with the Third Reich but was a by-product of the first wave of twentieth-century anti-Semitism that took place during the First World War with the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which described a Judeo- Masonic conspiracy to take over the world. The Jews -- thought to be operating through the Masonic lodges of Europe -- were believed to be planning world conquest beginning with the collapse of the monarchies. They had already "succeeded" with the American and French revolutions and were now well on their way to complete success with the destruction of the Kaiser and of the Czars of Russia. The Masonic lodges were believed to be fronts for the Jewish world government that was forming; their secret initiations, handshakes, code words merely a continuation of politics by other means: a way of operating clandestinely in their host countries. This was taken quite seriously by a large segment of the otherwise well-educated population, including university professors, lawyers, doctors, etc. The revelation of the "Judeo-Masonic" conspiracy "is presented as a turning point in the spiritual history of mankind." [8] The Germans were finally able to identify who and what had destroyed their country, brought them into war, and made them lose the war: a cabal of Jews and Freemasons bent on world domination. In fact, Adolf Eichmann's first job as an SS noncom in Berlin in 1934 (after preliminary training at Dachau) was as a clerk working with Professor Schwarz-Bostunitsch, an "expert" on Freemasonry who had once worked for the Czar of Russia and who then became the scientific director of the Information Section of the SS Security Service, the SD or Sicherheitsdienst. [9] (Schwarz-Bostunitsch had been the author of various anti- asonic polemics in his time and was quite possibly the Reich's preeminent expert on everything from regular Freemasonry to Rudolf Steiner and his Anthroposophy to the various cults that comprised the list of banned organizations used by the Gestapo.) The future head of the Bureau for Jewish Affairs of the Reich's Security Headquarters (RSHA), who would be ultimately responsible for implementing the Final Solution, Eichmann first worked in Berlin maintaining a card catalogue of information on the Freemasons. Later, he was transferred to the Freemasonry Museum proper. This museum, directly under the authority of the SS, was visited ("inspected") two to three times a week by Himmler himself. It consisted of material confiscated from Masonic lodges all over the Reich, everything from aprons and ritual implements to seals, photographs, documents, etc. There was a room decorated as a St. John's Temple and another as a St. Andrew's Temple. Eichmann's desk was in the St. John's room, where he catalogued thousands of Masonic seals and medallions, until his transfer to the "Jews" -- Judenamt -- Department of the SD. One may obtain a rather intimate glimpse of the ferocity with which the imagined threat of the Freemasons was fought by looking over the shoulders of the Reich officials responsible for keeping the souls of the German volk free from any taint of this ancient brotherhood. As an example, we have before us a letter on the stationery of the Reichsbetriebsgemeinschaft Druck (The Reich Printers Management Union) of the German Labor Front (Die Deutsche Arbeitsfront) dated May 17, 1935. It shows the head of that organization requesting confirmation from the Information Office of the German Labor Front that several employees -- Messrs. Strowigk, Buchhorn, and Kickelhahn -- were Masons and that one Max Fischer was a Christian Scientist. [10] A reply from the head (Amtsleiter) of that office -- dated May 21, 1935 -- shows that one of the gentlemen in question, the unfortunate Hans Strowigk, was indeed a Freemason, and furthermore gives the dates of his initiations into the three grades of the Golden Plough Lodge beginning in 1931 and culminating in January 1933, about four weeks before Hitler came to power. [11] The actual wording is suggestive. Strowigk is described as "a distinct enemy of National Socialism" (ausgesprochener Gegner des Nationalsozialisumus) for having advanced the three basic degrees of Freemasonry! As for Buchhorn and Kickelhahn, the Amtsleiter had no information, but requested birthplace, dates, etc. to enable him to more thoroughly research the files. This letter ends with a "Heil Hitler" and the stamp of the German Labor Front. One wonders if the young Eichmann had been responsible for maintaining the card files that ultimately branded Strowigk a "distinct enemy." More evidence regarding the Reich's anti-Masonic drive is represented by a letter addressed to the office of the Reichsfuhrer-SS in Berlin. [12] Dated February 25, 1935, it is from the Central Office of the German Labor Front and concerns a rule book of the St. John's Pyramid Lodge (possibly containing membership lists) that is being enclosed. According to the letter, it was obtained by one of their workers whose father had been a former member of the Lodge. Accompanying this letter in the file is another, dated April 1, 1935, [13] acknowledging receipt of the book and signed by an SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer- SS (the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army) at the office of the Reichsfuhrer-SS. This is the type of material that would have wound up in Eichmann's Section and, indeed, the dates in all the above cases seem to match the time of Eichmann's employment at the Freemasonry Museum, for he was not transferred to the Juden Department until the latter half of 1935. Among other evidence that has been collected and microfilmed on the same roll at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. is an inventory of confiscated Masonic temple furniture and ritual objects; [14] a clarification of SS regulations concerning the employment of former Freemasons in the Luftwaffe (in which those holding III degree are considered, of course, the worst offenders along with those holding any important office in the Lodge); [15] and much other material. Some of these communications are both to and from the Gestapo, the Secret Police organization of the Third Reich that was eventually subsumed into the SS, and are marked "Geheim!": Secret. One of the major anti-Masonic personalities in Nazi Germany -- aside from Schwarz- ostunitsch -- was Rosenberg himself. Convinced that the notorious forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was authentic and supplied with all the paranoid literature of the day linking a clandestine Jewish government with the operation of the Masonic lodges (after all, the Protocols are signed by an Elder or Elders with the obviously Masonic title of "33 degrees"), Rosenberg was certain that the Masons were a genuine enemy to be feared. On the first of May 1941, Hermann Goring confirmed that official policy by instructing all units of the Wehrmacht in the Occupied Territories to support Rosenberg's Einsatztab in the seizure of Masonic ceremonial objects, books, and temple property, these items being considered cultural objects representative of anti-Nazi ideology. These would have wound up in the Freemasonry Museum, or in Rosenberg's personal possession. The entire list of proscribed organizations can be found in the Zugehorigkeit von Beamten zu Freimaurerlogen, anderen Logen oder logenohnlichen Organizationen (Membership in the Offices of Freemason Lodges, other Lodges, or Lodgelike Organizations of the Reich's Home Office of June 6, 1939 (II SB 2212/39-6190 a*)). A swift glance down the names of Section B, "Freemasonlodge-like Organizations", will show the Theosophical Society, the Anthroposophical Society, the Golden Dawn, the OTO, and the Brotherhood of Saturn, cheek by jowl with the Odd Fellows, the Ancient Order of Druids, Christian Science, and something called -- in English -- the Independent Order of Owls! While it might seem that the Nazis were simply banning all fraternities and sects, one should remember that this was considered the "anti-Freemasonry" law and that all of the above- mentioned groups were lumped together under the rubric "Mason-like Organizations." The real enemy was Freemasonry. The others were considered -- at least on paper -- to be fellow travelers. This was cult war, pure and simple. There Is a Specter Haunting Germany. Why this persecution of the Masonic societies? The Nazis were not alone in history in their fear of Freemasonry. The Masons have always been much maligned since their creation over two hundred years ago. There was even a Masonic "scare" in the United States in the mid-1800s when they were believed to be infiltrating every level of government and conspiring to rob Americans of their democracy. And there was another Masonic scare much more recently in Italy, involving the infamous P-2 Society and members of the Italian parliament. The Masons are, of course, a secret society. That is, there is a set of ritual phrases and handshakes that identify Masons to one another and which represent initiatory steps taken behind the closed doors of the Masonic temple. There are secret rituals of an initiatory nature (though most, by now, have been published), and secret doctrines that form the rich and varied tradition of Masonic "lore." And then there are the oaths. These are blood oaths, taken with great solemnity, which guarantee that the initiate will not reveal any of the secrets of the lodge under pain of quite terrible punishment involving torture, dismemberment, and death. The existence of these oaths alone would be enough to attract the attention of the authorities, for the governments of most (if not all) nations really don't approve of their citizens having secrets. (The author is quite certain that, were he to take an oath to keep secret his late grandmother's recipe for poppy seed strudel, some government somewhere would find it necessary to beat it out of him.) In a dictatorship, the citizens can have no secrets since possessing a secret means withholding something from the Fuhrer and this is not consistent with the idea of a dictatorship. In Nazi Germany, the citizens took oaths of loyalty to the Reich and to the person of Adolf Hitler himself. How could a secret legally exist in such an atmosphere, where everything is the property of the Fuhrer? Secrets held by members of the polis imply dissent, and dissent can only legally exist within some form of democracy. The secret societies, on the other hand, relish their secret oaths because they instill in the new candidate a sense that something really important is hidden behind all the veils of the temple. This, of course, is not always true. Aleister Crowley once wryly pointed out that, after taking a similar, terrible oath upon entering the Golden Dawn, the secrets that were revealed to him were nothing more than the Hebrew alphabet! More importantly -- and more dangerously, in the eyes of the Reich -- a secret makes its keeper an individual. The Indo-European ("Aryan") root for the word "secret" gives us related words, like "self" and "secede." [16] Keeping a secret is a means of separating oneself from society at large, of seceding from the group, the government, the Reich. In Nazi Germany, there was no "self"; the slogan Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer told you that, even if the Nuremberg Rally of 1934 didn't. Also, the Masons believe themselves to be in possession of secret knowledge concerning the creation of the cosmos and thus of the truth behind the world's religions. Outsiders, therefore, came to believe that the Masons had set themselves up as higher than the Church and independent of the local laws, marching to a beat consistent with these esoteric rhythms. Certainly, if the Masonic oaths were to be enforced to the letter it would mean that the Masons would be conducting their own trials based on their own laws and executing their own judgments against transgressors -- in effect, by-passing all branches of civil (and especially religious) government and becoming a law unto themselves. For this reason, certainly, membership in the Society of Freemasons was forbidden by the Catholic Church: an organization which already had a history of superseding civil legislation. And, secret knowledge of an occult kind has its parallels in secret knowledge of a political kind. Men (and women) adept at keeping one kind of secret and living one kind of secret life might be equally adept at keeping and living the other. In fact, the membership of some early Masonic lodges reflects the attraction the cult of secret handshakes and costumed rituals had for some of the most famous freethinkers and rebels in history. Several studies have been published on Mozart's life as a Mason; Goethe and George Washington (and Franklin Roosevelt, Hitler's bugaboo) were Masons. The infamous Illuminaten Orden of Adam Weishaupt -- yet another frothy Bavarian confection of political conspiracy lightly folded into an Enlightenment attitude toward organized religion (and also on the Nazis' hit list of banned organizations) -- infiltrated Masonic societies in Germany, France, and Switzerland with political intent. Masons in the eighteenth century were largely aristocrats, intellectuals, adventurers, and artists; by and large they were the influential persons of the societies in which they lived, not unlike the Thule Society of later years, which thrived in the heady atmosphere of wealthy industrialists, idealistic nobles, and the Prussian officer class. Add to this the romantically styled history of Freemasonry, which traces its covert lineage back to King Solomon and later through the Knights Templar -- that other much-maligned and much-abused fraternity of crypto-occultists -- and one has a conspiracy theory that transcends centuries and the globe. A conspiracy theory isn't much fun unless it reaches wide and deep, and the Freemasons fit the bill. Several books that helped frame Himmler's early view of world history -- and therefore wound up influencing the entire scope of the SS -- were popular studies of Freemasonry in the style of the more rabid conspiracy theory books of today. These included World Freemasonry, World Revolution, World Republic (Weltfreimauerei, Weltrevolution, Weltrepublik) by Friedrich Wichtl and Freemasons and Anti-Masons in Struggle for World Mastery (Freimaurer und Gegenmaurer im Kampf um der Weltherschaft) by Franz Haiser. [17] These were books spawned from the great controversy over the Protocols and were based, in part, on "revelations" contained within that forgery. From these books Himmler borrowed the concept of the Kshatriya warrior caste of "Aryan" India, a concept to be found in the writings of Blavatsky and other theosophical authors and which made its way into the volkisch and conspiracy literature popular at that time, and enthusiastically adopted it as his own. He drank in the paranoid fantasies of Wichtl, who exculpated the Germans for any responsibility in having started the war, and instead blamed it on the Jewish-Masonic syndicate which included Trotsky, no less, as well as Lenin and George V! [18] Although Himmler may have needed a new Aryan Secret Society, he did not need another Thule Society around to foment discord. The Nazis knew all too well how much power a secret society could wield in Germany. The Thule was, after all, a front for the Germanenorden, and that organization had been conducting high-level assassinations for years when it wasn't organizing resistance against the Communists. The Masons had a rather vast underground network by comparison, and the benefit of two hundred years of organized activity from Germany to the rest of Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and even Asia. By comparison, the Freemasons made the Thule Society look like the kindergarten of secret societies, at least insofar as the prestige of antiquity and international membership was concerned. Besides, the rumors had it that Masons were responsible for every political upheaval from the American Revolution to the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution. (As early as 1919, Alfred Rosenberg's articles for the Volkischer Beobachter were full of references to a worldwide conspiracy of Jews, Bolsheviks, and Masons to take over the globe.) [19] To the Nazis the Masons were a well-organized, hierarchical society with members in virtually every nation on earth which had enthusiastically taken part in revolutions and armed conflicts everywhere. Worse, they were seen as staunch supporters of democracy, and the word "democracy" to the Nazis carried a distaste almost as bad as "Jew." In fact, democracy was believed to be the weapon of Jewish interests, created to keep the common man living in a fool's paradise of equality and brotherhood while the cynical, conniving Jew reached into the worker's pocket and took all his money. Democracy. Freemasonry. Judaism. Secret societies. The Nazis were bent on removing all trace of any philosophical opposition to their cause, for they knew the power of ideas and -- the quotation of Chairman Mao notwithstanding -- it was far stronger than the power of a gun. The Nazis were not simply a political party. As has been mentioned before, they were a cult, and as such had every trapping of the typical cult, from a spiritual Master to a brotherhood of identically clad disciples, secret rituals performed in remote castles, and a sign -- a totem -- that summed up their ideology as effectively as the Cross and the Star. The swastika is the single, most obvious, even glaring piece of evidence to support this view, and yet calling the Nazi Party nothing more than a cult on steroids has yet to become an accepted and legitimate point of view. Yet, as with any typical cult, its chief enemies were other cults. Karl Germer Speaks to an Angel One of the cults on the list of banned "Freemason-like" organizations is the Ordo Templi Orientis, which appears under the German translation of its name: Orientalischer Templer-Orden (OTO), number 14 on the list. The author has so far been unable to discover what happened to specific members of the anti-Crowley faction of the OTO that remained loyal to Tranker, but the Eugene Grosche branch (the Brotherhood of Saturn) is number 15 on the list. It's interesting to note, however, that something calling itself Thelema Verlag was still publishing Crowley material in Leipzig as late as 1937. Karl Germer was Crowley's chief disciple in Germany at the time Hider came to power. He and Marthe Kuntzel were holding down the fort while Crowley -- who had visited Germany again briefly in the spring of 1930 -- was busy drumming up support abroad for Thelema. Ms. Kuntzel had grown so infatuated with Hitler as early as 1925 that she had sent him a copy of The Book of the Law in German translation. Crowley had told her that the first country to accept the Law would become master of the world and Ms. Kuntzel was determined that it would be Germany. Some years previous, Crowley had attracted the attention of Scotland Yard. There is a record of a meeting taking place between Crowley and one Colonel Carter of the Yard concerning Crowley's activities on the Continent. He had just been deported from France - a move that was recorded in the world press -- for the authorities felt that Crowley was in fact a spy for Germany, and that the OTO was nothing more than either a front for a German spy ring or a blind with which to confuse the intelligence services. As it happens, the meeting with Colonel Carter went well and Crowley was not subject to any prosecution by the British government. That same year (I929) Crowley had married a Nicaraguan citizen -- Maria Theresa di Miramar -- in Leipzig in a marriage of convenience so that his new Scarlet Woman could obtain a visa for England, but he soon tired of her there and returned to Berlin, taking up with a series of German women. One of these, the thirty-six-year-old Gertrude "Billy" Busch, was the woman the Brownshirts rescued in 1931 when Crowley was slapping her around on a street corner. [20] He had met her while standing bemused in front of a travel agency on Unter Den Linden and soon thereafter consecrated her as one of his Scarlet Women, much to the consternation of Frater Uranus. The storm troopers found Crowley beating her on the street, and -- according to John Symonds -- "trod Crowley's face into the gutter." [21] Whether this was simply wishful thinking on Mr. Symonds's part, we shall never know. One thing is for certain, however; at the same time as Crowley was engaged in this peculiar form of worship of his Scarlet Woman, Gertrude, he was spying on the German Communists for British Intelligence. Living with the notorious espionage agent and avowed Communist, Gerald Hamilton -- the onetime companion of Sir Roger Casement -- he was able to spy on him in return for fifty pounds sterling, courtesy of MI5. [22] But in 1935, the cult war began in earnest and the Nazis banned the Freemasons and similar Lodges. This included the OTO and the Golden Dawn, and Karl Germer -- who had occult connections everywhere and was a high-grade Mason himself -- was finally arrested by the Gestapo in 1935 and thrown into solitary confinement at the Alexanderplatz prison. [23] Prior to 1935, he had been largely responsible for Crowley's many debts and a letter survives to Crowley from Germer's wife complaining about the sum of fifteen thousand American dollars that Crowley evidently frittered away on red wine and Scarlet Women. [24] Fifteen thousand dollars was an enormous sum of money in pre-WWII Germany. This kind of largesse from a ranking German Freemason and leader of the German OTO to an English occultist -- if indeed the financial transactions were known to the Gestapo -- would have made Germer's punishment particularly harsh. Further, Germer was a known associate of Eugene Grosche, whose Brotherhood of Saturn was also on the list, and of the elderly Marthe Klintzel, the erstwhile Theosophist (now an enthusiastic member of the OTO and follower of the accursed Englishman, Crowley) whose personal papers and Order documents were seized. From all this, the Gestapo must have thought that Karl Germer was Satan incarnate. As it was, he spent several weeks in solitary confinement and was cruelly tortured. Once the Gestapo were through with him, he was shipped off for ten months as a reluctant guest of the SS at the Esterwegen concentration camp. [25] What happened to Germer during that year of internment, torture, and unspeakable inhumanity can only be the subject of conjecture. He wrote a memoir of his time in the camps which has so far remained unpublished, but it is to the spiritual transformation of Germer that the author refers; for Karl Germer -- Frater Uranus, to give his Order name -- claimed that it was while at Esterwegen that he attained Knowledge and Conversation of his Holy Guardian Angel. This is a technical term in the lexicon of twentieth-century ceremonial magic, and was used to denote a particular state of enlightenment in the Golden Dawn and in Crowley's expanded version of the Golden Dawn, the A.·.A.·.. In a way, it denotes conscious "contact" with one's higher Self except that the Self as understood by modern psychoanalysis is woefully short of what the occultists mean by it. Imagine that there is an aspect of one's personality which has already attained the ultimate spiritual apotheosis it is possible to attain, that the eternal element of one's self -- that element beyond space and time -- already sits at the right hand of God. Between one's self and one's Self there exists a chasm so wide that most people never even know a Self exists; yet, after much concentrated effort in that direction suddenly, and perhaps all too briefly, there is a moment when the self becomes conscious of the Self: the two meet in a lightning flash of absolute awareness in which it is safer to say that there is a "before" and an "after" rather than a "self" and a "Self." If all this sounds like so much hyperbole, that is perhaps more due to the lack of a proper vocabulary in the English language to describe an event that lies beyond the scope of normal experience. The Golden Dawn -- borrowing the term from a medieval grimoire (book of magician's rituals) called the Sacred Book of Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage -- used the rather cumbersome title "Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel" to represent that moment of awareness that comes only after much meditation and psychological preparedness through ritual. The Holy Guardian Angel is, of course, what a Jungian might -- for lack of a better term -- call the Higher Self. While this event is spiritually momentous, it is not the ultimate goal of the magician. Once Knowledge and Conversation has occurred, it requires more work and concentration to achieve a gradual union of self and Self and there are more obstacles to be overcome and trials to be survived before this can take place. Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel is no guarantee of immortality or enlightenment, but this phase -- no matter what one calls it -- must take place before higher states are reached. The Masons and the OTO are similar societies in that they offer a series of grades of initiation in which certain "secrets" are imparted or revealed to the initiate. The basic number of grades in Freemasonry is three, although there exist as many as thirty-three degrees in American Freemasonry and there are certain illegitimate and distaff branches that add degrees with reckless abandon. The Masonic society that Germer belonged to -- that of Memphis and Mizraim (also banned by the Nazis) -- boasted as many as ninety- even degrees. However, these organizations are not "teaching" Orders in the sense of the Golden Dawn curriculum, which was quite complex and which was designed gradually to bring a person to spiritual enlightenment through a series of initiatory rituals that were complemented by private ritual and academic study. The A.'.A.·., however, was just such a "teaching" Order, as it followed the Golden Dawn grades with the addition of three degrees on top of the eight created by Mathers, et al. Germer's experience in the concentration camp at Estetwegen can be understood in that context, then, as he was also a member of Crowley's A.·.A.·.. A word about Estetwegen: this camp was built in 1933, shortly after Dachau and in tandem with Sachsenhausen. [26] Its purpose was clearly the internment and punishment of the ideological opposition, from Communists to Church leaders, from Freemasons to Jews. The prisoners were beaten and tortured daily in the relatively spacious camps (relative to their condition by 1943), and within a rather liberal time schedule. These first years of the camps were the worst in many cases, for individuals were easily singled out for brutal and bestial behavior. Once the camps became crowded far beyond capacity, the ability of SS guards to inflict specific torture on each individual became reduced. (Instead, the great masses of prisoners were subjected to inhuman and nightmarish living conditions in which corpses were left to decay in the barracks for lack of space -- or time -- to bury them. Those who were selected for medical experimentation, however, experienced the worst the human mind could conceive. More often than not, these experiments were carried out under the auspices of the Ahnenerbe-SS, an organization we shall study in the following chapters.) In order to preserve his sanity during his incarceration and torture, Germer recited to himself those of Crowley's writings he had memorized; a set of scripturelike texts entitled the Holy Books that Crowley had collated back in 1907 (the year Liebenfels raised the swastika flag over Burg Werfenstein, and the year the A.'.A.·. was founded) and published about 1909. Naturally, these texts are to be understood in light of The Book of the Law and reflect Crowley's communication with his own Holy Guardian Angel, Aiwaz: the Being of whom Crowley was made aware those three April afternoons in Cairo in 1904. One of the texts included in that collection -- Liber Liberi vel Lapis Lazuli -- is subtitled "These are the birth words of a master of the Temple," a fairly obvious reference to the spiritual transformation undergone by Germer, as a Master of the Temple is the degree attained by those who have just "crossed the Abyss," i.e., undergone what psychologists and poets alike refer to as the "dark night of the soul." That Germer should have attained spiritual illumination in a concentration camp sounds at first blush to be entirely inappropriate. Yet, a study of the literature of spiritual processes would demonstrate that the terrible anxiety and stress of the camp -- when accompanied by constant meditation and spiritual exercises -- could very well have resulted in just such a satori-like episode. Masonic initiation in the first degrees is concerned with simulating physical trials. A blindfolded candidate for initiation is bound and brought before a group of men at the point of a sword. These days, this can be understood by most people as a lot of mumbo jumbo and few candidates would take the ritual seriously. In the early days of Freemasonry, however, being bound and blindfolded and dragged before a mysterious council and made to swear an oath at the point of a sword would have been seen as serious business, indeed. For Germer, being thrown into a concentration camp, tortured, and threatened with extinction provided him with a natural initiatic scenario. He is said to have recited Crowley's Holy Books to preserve his sanity; what actually took place, however, was a Zen-like self-initiation in which the unnatural stress of the situation was further complicated by constant meditation on a spiritual path, resulting in a psychic explosion; similar to what the Zen teachers call a "satori." Ironically, this took place under the eyes of the SS, a rival cult dedicated to the eradication of just such independent initiatory experiences as Germer's. Shortly thereafter, Germer was surprisingly released from the camp and made his way to Belgium, from where he managed to keep an eye on what remained of the OTO in Germany and particularly on Thelema Verlag in Leipzig. He was arrested once again in Belgium and deported to France, spending another ten months in an internment camp, before finally emigrating to America in 1941, thus escaping certain extinction in the last years of the war. So perhaps he had a Holy Guardian Angel, after all. To Defy the Stars Others were not so lucky. In the insanity that followed the flight of Rudolf Hess to England in May of 1941, regulations were drawn up to forbid the practice of astrology. As it was known that Hess had consulted frequently with astrologers, the casting of horoscopes suddenly became a matter of national security and it was considered best if all astrologers were thrown into the camps. The role of astrology in the history of the Third Reich is fascinating in its own regard, and several books have been published that describe it in some detail. One of the most fascinating of these-because told from a first person perspective -- is that of Himmler's astrologer, Wilhelm Wulff, entitled Zodiac and Swastika. [27] In it, Wulff discusses the early days of post-World War I Germany and the gradual growth of the Nazi Party, leading up to the eventual ban of astrology by the government. This ban took place over a period of years, beginning with a formal law against the practice of astrology in the Greater Berlin area and gradually extending to the entire Reich. People who consulted astrologers could expect -- it was believed -- a visit by the Gestapo. Wulff himself wound up in Fuhlsbtittel concentration camp for four months of interrogation and hard labor in June, 1941 (one month after Hess's flight to England). His books, files, and card indexes were seized and later returned only after he met with the Reichsfuhrer-SS, Himmler himself. (An indication of how sophisticated the Gestapo had become on the occult is evidenced by the type of questions they asked Wulff, including whether or not he had ever cast mundane horoscopes. The term "mundane" horoscope refers to those cast not of individual persons, but of countries, political parties, and other groups of people.) After the flight of Hess, of course, a scapegoat was necessary and the astrologers were the unlucky victims. Prior to May, 1941, however, the reason for the initial ban remains murky, even today. Certainly, many astrologers predicted a doomed future for Hitler and the Reich and this was bad propaganda that had to be stopped. Also, the practice of astrology implied access to a source of information that the Nazis could not control: the stars themselves. It was as if the old stories about God keeping a big book in which everyone's sins were recorded was literally true; a good astrologer could perhaps consult the stars and reveal the secret machinations of the Nazi leadership. But another problem the Nazis had with astrology was perfectly consistent with their primary obsession: race. How could a horoscope not take into consideration the race of an individual, but only the time and place of birth? Was the horoscope of a Jew, therefore, the same as that of an Aryan? If so, this was a good (if somewhat bizarre) argument against the "inferior race" and "subhuman race" dogma of the Reich. Also, astrology's origins were suspect. The first Western astrologers might have been Semites, at least according to the state of archaeological knowledge at the time. In any event, astrology was seen to be inextricably linked with various Asian sources that seemed racially impure. Did the ancient Teutons practice astrology? Most probably these hunter-gatherer-warriors held only the most tenuous notion of the movements of the sun and moon. (This would later prove erroneous, as recourse to Professor de Santillana's Hamlet's Mill will verify.) But as far as dividing the ecliptic into twelve zodiacal signs and assigning values for signs, houses, angles, etc., this was considered just too non-Aryan for words. If nothing else, it was egalitarian -- virtually democratic -- and seemed to argue against the Cult of the Will that was so necessary to the self-image of the Reich. Wulff's approach, however, gave the interested parties among the Nazi elite a way out. Wulff had studied Sanskrit in order to read the ancient astrological texts of India. The system of astrology he used was based on a rather different method of computing planetary positions and rulerships than is generally practiced in the West. This "Hindu" form is known as Sidereal astrology, and is based on the actual positions of the planets and luminaries as seen against the backdrop of the ecliptic rather than on the traditional positions used by the more common (in the West) Tropical astrology. Thus, Wulff's system was both more scientific (the actual positions of the planets) and "politically correct": it was based on an Aryan system of astrology as translated from that ultimate Aryan tongue, Sanskrit. Wulff's arguments in favor of the practice of astrology within the Reich are interesting in themselves. Wulff claims the reason he wrote the book was to answer a description of him by historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in The Last Days of Hitler, in which he says that "Schellenberg found that in politics Wulff was sound." [28] (Schellenberg was Himmler's counterespionage chief, the head of AMT (section) VI of the SD.) Wulff, angered that he was being perceived as a good Nazi, answered by writing his version of the period (a version, by the way, in which Himmler's famed masseur, Felix Kersten, comes out looking like the perfect cad). Wulff's response to Himmler's objection that astrology did not figure race into the equation is interesting. Himmler complained that any system which applied in equal measure to members of every race was ideologically opposed to Nazi racial doctrine. (This was actually the Party line; during the Aktion Hess, in which astrologers were arrested all over Germany, they were asked a specific question from a printed form concerning this very issue.) Wulff answered, "But in the astrological manuals of the Aryan Indians ... constellations have been described which reflect the diversity of racial characteristics and which have found practical expression in the caste systems of ancient Indian cultural life." [29] Excuse me? Based on the above explanation alone, we can conclude that Wulff's politics were -- if not sound, then -- at least presented in such a way that no reasonable objection from one of the most despised racists in world history would have been possible. What Wulff described above and in his own words was essentially the blueprint for a Nazi astrology. What Wulff does not discuss in his autobiography is his membership in something called the "Swastika Circle" in Berlin circa 1920, a group which included Ernst Issberner-Haldane, the famous palmist. Wulff contributed to a magazine issued by the ardent New Templarist Herbert Reichstein (von Liebenfels's publisher) in company with such noted -- and pro-Nazi -- astrologers as Reinhold Ebertin. [30] (We may also find reasons to object to the manner in which Wulff fought with Kersten. While Kersten seems, from Wulff's account, to have been an obnoxious and thoroughly objectionable human being who was interested in feathering his own nest more than in actually saving Jews -- despite his seal of approval from the World Jewish Congress after the war -- Wulff might have swallowed his disgust and worked with Kersten to save a few more prisoners from the gas chambers. Instead, Wulff saw through Kersten's program of self-promotion and self-enrichment at the expense of these same prisoners and decided to work instead "for the end of the war." This, from a man who attacked both Kersten and Himmler for living in a dreamworld and being too confident of their own capabilities!) To be fair, Wulff was walking on thin ice. He had been released from a camp and could go easily once again into that dark night. His very life was at the mercy of the men he found himself working for. Whatever his personal ideology, Wulff eventually wound up calculating charts for the exclusive use of the Reichsfuhrer-SS, Heinrich Himmler himself, right up to the very end of the war. He had a ringside seat at the Byzantine machinations of various SS leaders and their confidants (including Schellenberg and Kersten) to save themselves, save prisoners, and/or save as much of Germany as they could. Those who don't believe that Himmler would be calling on Wulff the astrologer at every hour of the day and night -- through bombing runs by Allied planes, strafed convoys, the arrest of Goring, the negotiations with Bernadotte and the World Jewish Congress, the onward Russian advance-hysterical for advice on what to do on virtually every decision he had to make, have never known otherwise normal people in desperate straits. The account is quite believable in most parts, and bears a foreword to the English edition by Walter Lacqueur, not a man known for his gullibility. Further, Schellenberg did give Wulff the credit he was due and, in Trevor-Roper's account, verifies that "Himmler seldom took any steps without first consulting his horoscope." [31] Wulff survived the war to befriend respected occult historian Ellic Howe, and to write Zodiac and Swastika, his memoir of the war years. We will come back to Wulff in Chapter Eight. His colleagues, however, were not so lucky. Dr. Karl-Gunther Heimsoth was a well-known and popular astrologer in Berlin, and a close friend and confidant of the old Nazi hand Gregor Strasser. Heimsoth had written several letters to Ernst Rohm, while the latter was in Bolivia training troops, dealing with issues such as astrology and homosexuality; [32] these letters were used as evidence of the vile nature of astrology (guilt by association) in a 1932 attempt to discredit Rahm's SA. In a rehearsal for what would happen seven years later, after the Hess flight, selected astrologers and "fortune-tellers" were rounded up during the Rohm Purge using the official ban on the practice of astrology in the Greater Berlin area as a pretext. Dr. Heimsoth -- the gay astrologer -- was one of those arrested, and executed that year.
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