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UNHOLY ALLIANCE: A HISTORY OF NAZI INVOLVEMENT WITH THE OCCULT |
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9. Cult Counterstrike It might be assumed from the preceding chapters that the cultic elements of the Second World War were all on the side of the Nazis. This was not the case, as we will attempt to show in this chapter. Several rather famous officers of the British intelligence services were involved in a campaign to anticipate or even counteract the activities of the German cults and their grim reincarnations in the Ahnenerbe-SS, Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry Department AMO (Astrology, Metapsychology, Occultism), the Naval Research Institute, and AMT VII of the SD. This does not imply that the Allies were taking occultism seriously. They did recognize, however, that the Nazis were taking it seriously and for a while it was incumbent upon British Intelligence to discover as much as they could about the various occult sciences adopted by the Nazis in general and the SS in particular. Once they realized that Himmler was listening to his astrologers, they knew that a few good astrologers working for the British could tell them what Himmler's astrologers were telling him. That there is a certain level of internal consistency in astrology was taken for granted; that is, a Sun-Mars square affecting the first and fourth houses of someone's natal chart -- an event that could be identified by simply referring to an ephemeris and a table of houses, astrological tools which are pretty much identical no matter what country one is working in -- could be interpreted similarly by both the British astrologers and the Germans; or, at the very least, a British astrologer familiar with the methods employed by his German counterpart would be able to predict with reasonable success what the German astrologer was telling Hitler, Hess, or Himmler. The fact that such planets were in alignment at all was something of which every astrologer anywhere would be aware, and could thus be used in such a way by a capable propagandist to insinuate the success or failure of a military enterprise. And when the Nazis banned the German occult lodges, they provided the Allies with a useful tool to use against them. The occult lodges had an underground network throughout Europe -- replete with coded phrases, secret hand signals, and the like -- that could be exploited by the intelligence agencies and it was to this end that secret agents like future novelists Dennis Wheatley and Ian Fleming toyed with the idea of using Aleister Crowley's connections in Germany (and among the secret societies of Europe and America) against the Third Reich. Crowley Redux The British War Office had a long memory. During the Great War it was well known that Aleister Crowley had written pro-German propaganda from a safe berth in New York City. Crowley's protestations that he was really working on behalf of Allied Intelligence interests -- from the British Secret Service to the American Justice Department -- seemed to have fallen on deaf ears back in Great Britain, where Crowley was officially characterized as a "small time traitor" by the former British naval attache in Washington, Sir Guy Gaunt. However, Crowley's services to MI5 during the period between the wars proved reliable enough, and there is some evidence that he might actually have been telling the truth about his World War I experience in New York. According to at least one researcher, [1] the Americans admitted that Crowley actually was working as their intelligence agent while editing The Fatherland and The International, just as Crowley himself had always insisted. Whatever one cared to believe about Crowley's loyalty and motives, however, by 1941 the situation had changed dramatically. Hess had been seduced into flying to Great Britain in what was probably one of the greatest intelligence coups of the war thus far (a coup that was badly bungled by the British when it actually occurred, for they did not make the political hay out of it that they could have). But who actually did the seducing? Nazi astrologers who advised Hess in all sincerity to undertake his doomed "peace mission"? A German resistance movement, of which Karl and Albrecht Haushofer were members, feeding Hess false information concerning their connections with sympathetic British nobility? Or was it another cabal entirely? While the whole story of the Hess flight may never be known, there is enough evidence to suggest that the occult circle around Hess might have been infiltrated by astrologers working for MI5. And that's where Aleister Crowley comes in, as one of MI5's oddest -- but potentially most useful -- secret agents. In the first place, most of Crowley's cronies on the Continent were being rounded up and sent to the camps. All the occult lodges were banned, from the Golden Dawn to the Masonic Societies to the OTO, and this was especially true after the Hess affair. Ceremonial magicians with outrageous titles of astral eminence were being shoved unceremoniously into Esterwegen and Dachau. Crowley's many German mistresses had probably wound up in similar circumstances (those who had not committed suicide or found themselves in mental asylums beforehand), either as social misfits, "useless eaters" (a term that covered every variety of the physically and mentally handicapped), or simply as guilty by association with Baphomet himself. But the leadership of the Third Reich was replete with deranged mystics, even after the lodges had been shut and the camps swollen with the presence of Freemasons, Thelemites, Theosophists, Odd Fellows, and Swedenborgians. Some occultists were actually being freed to work for the Nazi cause (as described in the previous chapter). And, interestingly enough, Crowley's old partner-in-propaganda, George Viereck, was still operating his pro- German apparatus in New York City, this time with a decidedly Nazi agenda. Viereck had actually grown somewhat well-to-do on the constant flow of funds coming his way from Party sources in Germany, funds that were paying for his adroit hand at propaganda and disinformation. Was there a chance that Crowley's connections and knowledge of the occult scene -- particularly in Germany, but also in the United States -- could be used in a constructive way to aid the Allied cause? The Devil Rides Out Dennis Wheatley is the well-known author of dozens of novels as well as a few nonfiction books. It is said that even Hermann Goring was a Wheatley fan, and a Nazi spy in London once communicated to Berlin that Wheatley would make an excellent Gauleiter for northwest London after a Nazi invasion! [2] In the United States he is perhaps best known for his occult novels of which three -- The Devil Rides Out, To the Devil a Daughter, and The Satanist -- stand out as more "hardcore" than the others. These books introduced modern ceremonial magic to Wheatley's audience and combined elements of Thelema -- Crowley's cult -- with those of some Eastern religious practices and the more staid Golden Dawn rituals and Theosophical beliefs in a hodgepodge of cultures that proved nonetheless exciting to that portion of the market that thrills to tales of Satan worship and secret, worldwide societies that mix sexual initiations with military adventurism (an "Allied" version of the Nazi Bolshevik-Jew-Freemason conspiracy theory). Needless to say, the Thelemites and Satanists both come out looking pretty much the same: lewd black magicians with terrible body odor who live in fear of arousing the displeasure of Lucifuge Rofocale, the British Foreign Office, or some other Demon. Oddly enough, Wheatley is one of the very few occult novelists who actually met the Beast himself. According to his own account -- published in The Devil and All His Works - - he found Crowley a wonderful conversationalist and had him to dinner several times. [3] In another place in the same book -- a nonfiction summary of occult practices and beliefs with an emphasis on the seamier side -- he mentions casually that he worked with Churchill's own Joint Planning Staff during the war in a basement under Whitehall. [4] What he neglects to mention (for fear of arousing the wrath of Lucifuge Rofocale? or of being prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act?) is that, laboring in an intelligence capacity along with that "other" spook novelist, Ian Fleming, he actually once considered using the services of Aleister Crowley around the time of the Hess flight. This was not so strange as it might seem. In the first place, of course, it was well known that Hess was mystically inclined and deeply involved with astrology. The German resistance movement knew that the Haushofers had secretly turned against the Fuhrer, and that the Haushofers were also -- if only peripherally -- involved in occult practices; indeed, it was an open secret that Albrecht Haushofer was something of an astrologer himself, or at any rate an educated layman. [5] Who better to debrief Hess the Egyptian-born mystic than another mystic, one with strong ties to the German occult movement: Aleister Crowley himself? Further, it was probably no secret at all to American and British intelligence officials that deep within the United States' own rocket program -- and thus engaged in a highly classified race against the Nazi scientists at Peenemunde -- lurked another Thelemite and member of Crowley's OTO, the brilliant engineer Jack Parsons. Parsons was involved in rocket fuel research, principally of the "solid-fuel" variety, and therefore his work was vital to the war effort and to the subsequent space program. A charter member of Cal-Tech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Parsons is probably the only known occultist -- and certainly the only Thelemite -- who has a crater on the Moon (dark side) named after him. Although this is not the space to go into the Parsons story in detail, some information is necessary to show the extent to which Crowley's organization was involved in magick and the war effort on the side of the Allies and on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1939, Jack Parsons became involved with Crowley's OTO through the Agape Lodge of California, then being run by one W. T. Smith, who had been a Thelemite since 1915 via the Vancouver Lodge under Charles Stansfeld Jones ("Frater Parzival"), an accountant and a very early member of the OTO from the first days of Crowley's rulership of the Order's English-speaking world community. In 1942 -- a significant year as we shall see -- Crowley removed Smith from leadership of the Agape Lodge and installed Parsons as its chief. The Agape Lodge was run from Parsons's home in Pasadena, where rituals were held daily and from where Parsons would collect membership dues, etc. and forward them to Karl Germer on the East Coast, who would send them on to Crowley in London. In other words, this OTO Lodge was being run more or less openly during the war by a man -- magickal name "Frater 210" -- simultaneously involved in critical work for the war effort, under the spiritual guidance of a former concentration camp inmate who corresponded regularly with a man accused of being a former German spy, now living in London! Parsons joined the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, California Institute of Technology (GALCIT) in 1936, working for FrankJ. Malina and Theodore von Karman at Pasadena on various problems related to rocket propellants. [6] Once America entered World War II, the need for discovering a reliable solid propellant became crucial, particularly if the Navy was to develop JATO (Jet Assisted Take-Off) aircraft. Try as they might, the GALCIT people could not come up with a workable formula. The fuels they developed had a tendency to deteriorate after only a few days, making them impossible to transport and store aboard ship. All the different types of black powder fuels were tested and scrapped. Finally, it was Jack Parsons who came up with the solution that enabled America to enter the rocket-propelled aircraft race. In 1942 -- the year he became head of the Agape Lodge and moved its headquarters into his home -- he decided to abandon the black powder concept altogether and came up with a solution that could only have come from someone with a working knowledge of the arcane lore of alchemy and magic: Greek fire. [7] To this day, no one really knows how he intuited the switch from black powder to asphalt and potassium perchlorate. But it worked, and was GALCIT's first breakthrough of the war. The solid propellant designed and formulated by Jack Parsons became widely used by the US Navy in 1944 and 1945 with great success. [8] Parsons himself, however, became the subject of what might have been a Federal investigation into his occult activities during the war. In April 1945 -- the month the war ended in Europe -- he became involved with one "Frater H," who proved a disastrous companion for Frater 210. Claiming he was working either for Naval Intelligence or the FBI or even, oddly, LAPD -- depending on the source you believe, if any -- Frater H succeeded in virtually destroying Parsons's life and his grip on reality. Performing various rituals of sex-magick and angelic invocations with Frater H, Parsons believed he had contacted some of the same higher powers with which Crowley had conversed in Cairo in 1904; he even went so far as to communicate these beliefs to the Great Beast himself, without going into details, pledged as he was to a pact of secrecy with these alien beings. Crowley rightly assumed that Parsons was being made a victim of some sort of confidence trick just as the mysterious Frater H was absconding with money from a joint account he held with Parsons and wound up actually marrying Parsons's girlfriend. By 1948, Parsons had declared himself the Antichrist. By 1952, Parsons -- now known as "Belarion Armiluss Al Dajjal Antichrist" -- would drop a vial of fulminate of mercury at his home laboratory and with the resulting explosion one of the more brilliant [?] -- if terribly sad -- figures in contemporary occultism would be dead at the age of thirty-eight. Upon hearing of her son's death, his mother committed suicide the same day. "Frater H" -- the man who was most responsible for leading Parsons into madness by (among other things) stealing his money and his girlfriend -- was none other than science fiction author and Scientology creator L. Ron Hubbard. In addition to people like Parsons in America, Crowley's contacts throughout Europe were numerous and they involved a wide range of people from society-type spiritualists who dabbled in ritual magic to coffeehouse intellectuals and artists of various persuasions to the lowest rungs of civilization. His utility to MI5 during his Berlin days, when he spied on German Communists, was not forgotten. Further, he had been cultivated by Dennis Wheatley, who found the occult fascinating and who eventually -- according to Anthony Masters -- became a low-level initiate in what must have been one of Crowley's own magickal lodges, the A...A... or the OTO. [9] The ostensible reason for this was to study magic under the Master, so that he could lend an air of verisimilitude to his occult novels. Anyone interested in seeing how much Wheatley absorbed merely has to pick up any of the three abovementioned books and study them carefully. The reader will find Crowley's A...A... degree structure used and many of the incantations and rituals (in appropriately abridged forms) shamelessly exploited for dramatic effect. Crowley was introduced to Wheatley by the journalist Tom Driberg, who would later become a Labour MP and who for years served as an MI5 spy inside the Communist Party of Great Britain. [10] (Driberg, referred to as "Z" in Wheatley's book, joined the Communists and dutifully reported back to MI5 until being discovered by British spymaster and Soviet mole Anthony Blunt, who had him kicked out of the Party.) While Wheatley admits he found Crowley fascinating, he did not feel the Great Beast merited the degree of awe and fear that his followers and detractors, respectively, accorded him. It was Driberg who was quick to point out that Crowley did, indeed, possess marvelous occult powers but, alas, that the ritual in Paris had all but killed him. This story -- which became one of Wheatley's favorite tales and which is repeated in several of his books -- has Crowley invoking the Great God Pan in the upstairs room of a hotel on the Left Bank along with the assistance of his "son," the pseudonymous MacAleister. Evidently the ritual (like the proverbial surgical operation) was a success, but the assistant died. Crowley himself -- according to this tale -- spent four months in a mental asylum after being found completely naked and curled up in fetal position in a corner, gibbering. Needless to say, this story does not appear in any of the official biographies of Crowley but it's a great story, nevertheless. (It should be pointed out that John Symonds -- whose biography of Crowley, The Great Beast, was published in 1951 -- refers to Mr. Driberg's loan of Crowley's diaries on his acknowledgments page without giving us a clue as to how Mr. Driberg -- Wheatley's "Z," Member of Parliament, and British secret agent-managed to be in possession of them in the first place, so soon after Crowley's death in 1947. [11] Was the story about the Paris evocation of Pan contained within those very pages?) Wheatley -- who was friendly with many of the twentieth century's most famous occultists, including the reincarnationist Joan Grant and the author Rollo Ahmed (whom he may have once tried to recruit into MI5) [12] -- also had an abiding interest in crime and detection. It was in this connection that he happened to meet one of the most famous names in the history of British intelligence, Maxwell Knight. Knight was the prototype for Ian Fleming's character, "M": the Intelligence chief whom we always see in the movies giving Sean Connery or Roger Moore his dangerous, "license to kill" assignment. What is not generally known is that "M" was also introduced to Aleister Crowley -- by Dennis Wheatley -- and was actually quite friendly with the Magus. Wheatley had met Knight at a party and the two hit it off right away. Knight wanted to get a book published, and Wheatley helped him to publicize it. What they eventually realized is that they also shared an interest in the occult. Wheatley invited Knight to dinner at his home when he knew Crowley would be there, and the three of them became quite friendly. Wheatley and Knight approached Crowley on the subject of magick (Crowley's version, spelled with a "k" to distinguish it from both legerdemain and from other, lesser, forms of magic), and Crowley agreed to take them on as students. This has got to be one of the most startling, if amusing, situations imaginable; for here is Maxwell Knight -- "M" after all -- accepting a kind of occult initiation from Aleister Crowley and becoming his pupil! [13] Himmler was obsessed by the idea that British Intelligence was being run by the Rosicrucian Order and that occult adepts were in charge of MI5 (a view still held today by such political eccentrics as Lyndon LaRouche). How would he have reacted had he known that the formidable Maxwell Knight, head of Department B5(b), the countersubversion section of MI5, was a disciple of Aleister Crowley himself? And that Dennis Wheatley -- he of the occult novels favored by Goring -- was also a student of Crowley's and simultaneously working for Churchill's Joint Planning Staff? Oh, how the black candles would have burned that night! Particularly if Himmler had also been told that yet another British secret agent -- this time James Bond novelist Ian Fleming of the Department of Naval Intelligence -- was plotting to bring Reichsleiter Rudolf Hess to England on an occult pretext involving ... Aleister Crowley. As this story is told in several places by respected historians of the British Secret Service, [14] and thus has the seal of authenticity, it is worth repeating here for the benefit of those not normally involved in such research. It is generally agreed among the various sources that the outlandish idea of capturing Rudolf Hess -- a man largely viewed as Hitler's second-in-command at the time -- began with Ian Fleming. Fleming, who had been a banker before the war, wound up at the Department of Naval Intelligence in what was essentially a desk job. Hungering for more dramatic employment and realizing he would not get it at DNI, he turned instead to Knight, who had a reputation for being something of a maverick (and who had, more importantly, a direct line to Churchill through yet another mutual friend of Wheatley and Knight, Desmond Morton). Basically, the idea was this: There had been a rather subversive organization in Great Britain known as The Link. The Link was ostensibly an Anglo-German "cultural society" once under the auspices of a Sir Barry Domville, who had also once been Director of Naval Intelligence from 1927 to 1930, but who had since been interned because of his pro-Nazi sentiments and connections. The Link had been under Knight's surveillance in the 1930s and then dissolved when enough evidence was found implicating it in espionage activities and the like. Fleming -- whiling away his time behind a desk at DNI -- had been reading the files on Domville and an idea occurred to him. He thought that if the Nazis could be made to believe that The Link was still in existence, they could use it as bait for the Nazi leadership. The point was to convince the Nazis that The Link had influence sufficient to overthrow the Churchill government and thereby to install a more pliable British government, one which would gladly negotiate a separate peace with Hitler. But whom among the Nazi leadership was naive enough to fall for the story? Rudolf Hess had always been something of an Anglophile and it was known through intelligence sources -- probably by way of the Haushofers and their Resistance circle -- that he was anxious for peace with England so that Germany could concentrate on defeating Russia, the "real enemy." Hess also had a reputation for being something of a gullible sort who surrounded himself with mystics and stargazers. It was but a short leap from there to realizing that Knight's friend and occult mentor, Aleister Crowley, would be quite useful in such a context. Also, it is possible that Fleming -- poring through the DNI files as he was -- had come across Sir Guy Gaunt's World War I records on Crowley. Gaunt, it will be remembered, was Britain's naval attache in Washington during that war, and therefore DNI's man in America. He also ran an effective espionage campaign in the States that kept an eye on pro-German activities, and was even running agents inside the Austrian Embassy. Gaunt had succeeded in arranging the capture of an important German saboteur -- Captain Franz Rintelen von Kleist, who was responsible for several explosions at US arms factories -- and eventually retired to Tangier with the rank of admiral. When Crowley's hostile biographer, John Symonds, wrote to Gaunt concerning Crowley, it was Gaunt who agreed with Symonds that Crowley was just a "small time traitor." [15] Gaunt had kept Crowley and The Fatherland on his list of usual suspects, and had discussed him with A. J. Balfour (the Foreign Secretary) and Basil Thomson (the Secret Service's liaison at Special Branch, Scotland Yard) advising them both not to worry about the Great Beast, that Gaunt had everything under control. [16] Unfortunately, owing to the Official Secrets Act and the strange, twilight landscape of the secret services, we shall probably never know Gaunt's real take on Crowley. Fleming and Knight pondered the problem for a while. Crowley's personality was such that the two spies were unsure how far they could control him in the field. Even more importantly, Crowley's intelligence contacts were probably well known to the Germans since his early Berlin days spying on Communists for the British; thus, Crowley's cover was probably already "blown" in spook parlance, although the well-publicized raid on OTO headquarters in London in reprisal for Crowley's ostensibly pro-German activities during World War I might have been used to convince the Nazis that Crowley was really their man. However, they turned to astrology. Via a Swiss astrologer known to Fleming, astrological advice was passed on to Hess (again, via the Haushofers and by Dr. Ernst Schulte- Strathaus, an astrological adviser and occultist on Hess's staff since 1935) advocating a peace mission to England; further, the Duke of Hamilton was persuaded to let it be known that he would entertain a visit from Hess for just that purpose. May 10, 1941, was selected as the appropriate date since an unusual conjunction of six planets in Taurus (that had the soothsayers humming for months previous) would take place at that time. [17] The aspect would signal important and long-lasting developments in the mundane world. It was a most auspicious time for an undertaking of global ramifications, and this was precisely the day Hess chose to fly, solo, to Great Britain to meet with the Duke of Hamilton to discuss a peace treaty between England and Germany that would allow the Nazis free rein on the Continent and particularly against the Soviet Union. (It is for this reason that the Soviets steadfastly refused to allow Hess to leave Spandau Prison after the Nuremberg Tribunals; Hess's mission -- had it been successful -- would have permitted the destruction of the Soviet Union and the probable massacre of most of its population by the SS.) Indeed, to Hitler both the astrologers and the Haushofers were guilty of some kind of conspiracy. In what was eventually known as the Aktion Hess, the astrologers were rounded up and sent to the camps while Albrecht Haushofer was picked up for questioning by the Gestapo. The rest, as they say, is history. On that day, coincidentally the date of the last major air raid on Great Britain, Hess made the flight, landed in Scotland, and was promptly arrested. Oddly, however, the British government did not make the use they could have of this outstanding intelligence coup and Hess languished in prison. Fleming tried to obtain permission for Crowley to debrief Hess in order to develop intelligence on the occult scene in the Third Reich and particularly among the Nazi leadership, but suddenly the "secret chiefs" turned cold toward the idea. [18] For reasons which were never made clear -- and which probably had more to do with internal British politics and the danger of exposing a genuine pro-German cabal of traitors high up in the British government -- Hess was treated as a pariah almost from the moment he landed and a chance to learn once and for all about the genuine extent of an Occult Reich was lost forever. The idea that Hess had been lured to Scotland by British Intelligence -- and possibly with the help of the American OSS -- was suspected by many in Germany. When Hess's Messerschmidt was inspected by aeronautical engineers, for example, they found numerous examples of American-made parts, including the tires and the gas tank, which gave rise to rumors that the Allies had been more than cooperative in the effort to ensure the Reichsleiter made it safely to Scotland. [19] What is more mysterious is why, once Hess had arrived safe and sound on British soil, he was then totally ignored and the incident shrugged off as the act of a madman, much to Hitler's relief as it was identical to the way he was handling it in Germany. What could have been a major propaganda coup against the Nazis went utterly wasted, as if by tacit agreement on both sides. Crowley's efforts to help the British war effort did not end with Hess, however, for he plied MI5 with all sorts of plans for occult propaganda. According to published sources, these were not implemented. Yet, there was one cult countermeasure that smacks of Crowley's fine Thelemic hand. In a way, it had been recommended by Crowley, but its execution was left to another section of British intelligence led by Sefton Delmer of the Political Warfare Executive. Astrological Warfare Crowley felt that profit could be gained by dropping occult pamphlets from planes onto the German countryside. [20] While the exact nature of these proposed pamphlets has never been revealed, it seems safe to say that they would have at least contained predictions about the outcome of the war and descriptions of the Nazi leadership as "satanic," etc., and perhaps even details of the occult practices -- both real and invented -- of the Nazi elite. While that idea was rejected, a similar one was eventually developed on both sides of the Channel. While the Swiss astrologer Krafft was working up his faked Nostradamus predictions (as described in Chapter Eight), there was yet another astrologer working for the spooks, this time for the Department of Psychological Warfare in London. Holding the rank of captain in the British Army, Hungarian-born Louis de Wohl made much of his connections with Nazi astrologers and managed to convince the Secret Service that he could be of inestimable value to the war effort. [21] This was to be exploited in two ways. In the first place, de Wohl could inform British Intelligence of what the Nazi astrologers were telling Hitler, Himmler, and the rest of the leadership. In other words -- since he was familiar with the methods employed by those astrologers closest to the halls of power in Berlin -- he would know when Hitler was being advised to attack or retreat, negotiate or fight, declare war or sue for peace. In the second place, he could be counted on to provide falsified astrological information that would be disseminated among the German astrological community, causing them to counsel peaceful negotiations and to advise the Nazis of the impossibility of winning the war. To this end, a forged version of the popular German astrological magazine, Zenit, was produced by de Wohl and his collaborators -- among them the noted occult historian and wartime spook Ellic Howe -- and dropped behind enemy lines. Virtually identical to the original Zenit (down to the classified ads), it nonetheless contained subtle Allied propaganda in the form of astrological advice. It would be the annoyingly helpful Wilhelm Wulff who would be handed a copy of the magazine and who would identify it as a clever British forgery to Schellenberg, all the while marveling at its authentic appearance. Crates of it had been intercepted on the way into Germany from Sweden, and the publisher's name had been given as the famous Dr. Korsch, an astrologer who had died in the camps years earlier. Thus, while it would not have fooled the Nazis themselves, it might have succeeded in alarming the general population, which was starved for astrological advice anyway. As it is, we shall never know the extent to which the forged Zenit could have been useful for, as mentioned, crates of it were seized by the Gestapo before they could be distributed. But another occult operation of the British intelligence services did work admirably well. An OBE for an OBE? The intelligence operative known by her code-name, Anne, probably never received the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for her amazing work for the Secret Service during World War II, but she certainly deserved it for she performed one of the most amazing feats of intelligence gathering of that or any war. She penetrated to the heart of the Reichswehr in Berlin, copied classified documents, and reported on secret conversations between military leaders ... and all without leaving her armchair in London. She did it by utilizing her special gift of astral travel, what New Agers today refer to as "Out of Body Experience" or ... OBE. This charming and intriguing story is given in only one place the author is aware of, a book entitled Women in Espionage by a former Czechoslovak government official whose book on Rudolf Hess -- Hess: The Man and His Mission -- appears in many World War II bibliographies. The official's name is J. Bernard Hutton, and he claims to have tracked down and met the mysterious "Anne" ... who unfortunately remained loyal to the Service (and to the Official Secrets Act) and would not divulge any details of her exploits on behalf of MI5. However, he was able to determine that "Anne" had one day appeared at the office of an "Intelligence chief" with a sealed letter of recommendation from one of his friends. I like to think this "chief" was Maxwell Knight, whose tolerance for the occult was no secret, but that is pure speculation on my part. No matter. "Anne" -- a former ambulance driver whose poor health had forced her to retire -- professed to be able to obtain information on Nazi military intentions by "mind- traveling": that is, she would lean back in a chair, close her eyes, and "travel" to the place desired and eavesdrop on what was being said. She could even read documents and -- with her photographic memory and command of the German language (the result of some student years spent in Berlin and Zurich) -- relay their contents completely and accurately upon her "return." Anne was tested several times by the Service, and found to be quite reliable. She was then "sent" on various intelligence assignments to Germany and parts unrecorded, successfully bringing back the war-critical data as required. Mr. Hutton reports that Anne's information was treated with respect and that "British political and military strategy was influenced and helped by Anne's reports." [22] Compared to the trance medium employed by Himmler to uncover the conspiracy behind the Beer Hall explosion, Anne wins by a landslide. One wonders if any Nazi psychics were ever aware of Anne's spiritual form wafting through the halls of the Reichswehr, the Reichstag, or perhaps even the bedrooms at Hitler's Berchtesgaden retreat, recording everything she saw with her ethereal -- yet lethally photographic -- second sight? The Yonkers Connection Lest the reader come away with the suspicion that the cult counterstrike was strictly a British affair, the author hastens to point out one particularly interesting American contribution, in the person of Samuel Untermyer. Sam Untermyer was reportedly a member of the Golden Dawn in New York City, [23] and was well known in local legal and political circles as something of a philanthropist as well as a formidable attorney. According to investigative journalist Maury Terry, a British newspaper called Untermyer a "satanist." [24] To the British press, of course, this could have meant anything from Theosophist to cannibal. Considering Untermyer's accomplishments and sentiments, however, the author tends to agree that, if anything, he truly was a member of the Golden Dawn. In 1903, he purchased the former estate of Samuel Tilden in Yonkers. Tilden was famous for his unsuccessful bid for the presidency against Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876. This property -- known as "Greystone" -- became a public park after Untermyer's death in 1940, and it would be here at Untermyer Park (within walking distance of David Berkowitz's Yonkers apartment) that the Son of Sam cult would have its earliest meetings -- and where it sacrificed dogs to Satan -- thirty-seven years later. But Untermyer was also well-known for his persistent anti-Nazi crusade in New York, a crusade which began in 1933 with Hitler's accession to power in Germany and which did not end until Untermyer's death in March 1940. [25] Untermyer was tireless in promoting a boycott of German products under the aegis of his "Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to Champion Human Rights" and the "World Anti-Nazi Council." The World Anti-Nazi Council was a truly global organization, with representation in Asia, Africa, and South America as well as in Europe. Untermyer even financed a touring exhibit of Nazism across the United States in the mid-1930s. More than that, however, he also threw his considerable resources behind the hunt for Nazi agents who were pouring into the country from freighters and steamship lines at New York's west-side piers. As evidence in various Congressional investigations at the time had shown, Untermyer's was a name the Third Reich had learned to fear. In May 1935 Sam Untermyer enlisted the aid of a volunteer investigator, Richard Rollins, in a campaign of counterespionage against the various Nazi and Fascist gangs who were openly and aggressively recruiting in the United States at that time, primarily under the leadership of Fritz Kuhn, the notorious head of the German- American Bund, who was on the payroll of the Third Reich and who had marched in Berlin at the head of a Bund column during the Olympics. Rollins was named chief investigator for a secret society, referred to only as "the Board" and under the leadership of Untermyer, composed of individuals and organizations whose identities have never been revealed. Rollins went on to great success against the Bund, the Silver Shirts, the Black Legion, and the Klan, among others, always with the discreet but powerful force of Samuel Untermyer and "the Board" behind him. How this old Golden Dawn initiate and tireless anti-Nazi crusader would have felt about his beloved Greystone estate being used for Satan worship is left up to the reader's imagination. In Rollins's published memoir of his anti-Nazi escapades -- I Find Treason -- we discover a bizarre account of the fascist Black Legion initiation ritual, whose oath is revealing, indeed:
The oath goes on to include a Masonic-type injunction that, should the initiate break his oath, he will be torn to pieces, scattered over the earth, and so forth, and ends with "In the name of God and the Devil, Amen." What interests us here, however, is the invocation of both God and the Devil: a peculiarity that will crop up again in the neo-Nazi Process Church of the Final Judgment, a group that (as we shall see in Chapter Thirteen) has been implicated in several of the twentieth century's most ghastly crimes. Thus, as we have been at pains to prove, the cult war was not entirely one-sided. The stories about Louis de Wohl, Aleister Crowley, Jack Parsons, Dennis Wheatley, Ian Fleming, Rudolf Hess, Ellic Howe, Maxwell Knight, and the mysterious Anne all demonstrate that British Intelligence took the occult aspects of the conflict very seriously and -- like their Nazi counterparts -- exploited whatever it could, no matter how bizarre or "unscientific," to ensure final victory and the survival of its people. Everyone reading this book already knows who won that conflict; but perhaps they are not aware of the occult ramifications of the final Gotterdammerung and of its legacy to a new generation of cultists and Nazis.
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