CHAPTER I: Hidden Roots

Real power begins where secrecy begins ... the only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state may be sure.
-- Hannah Arendt

Many books have been written about Hitler and the Holocaust, many reasons suggested to account for them. It is said that Germany in the 1930's was economically and spiritually bankrupt, that Hitler and his henchmen were madmen or simple opportunists or petty bureaucrats -- or some combination of the three. Perhaps. But one explanation tends to contradict another, and when all are combined, they merge into a solution so general that nothing is explained. Understandably, then, many people are still not satisfied that the grotesque events of the Third Reich have been adequately dealt with by the historians.

In all this complicated story, there is one question which cries out for an answer: How is it that the theorists have missed a vital element, even when they themselves provide important clues? That element is the occult.

Many historians have alluded to the Nazi party's origins in an occult sect, to the occult leanings of leading Nazi officials, to the mystical rites of the SS and the Hitler Youth, to the establishment of a bureau devoted exclusively to the occult during World War II. It now seems puzzling that they should not also have given as much consideration to the underlying basis for these odd phenomena as they gave to economic and social factors. That they did not is, of course, evidence of their own dismissal -- quite reasonably -- of a crankish pseudoscience. But this has led, inevitably, to selective blindness. In order not to be accused of giving credence to irrational beliefs, they have failed to see those beliefs in their proper historical perspective. Since early studies always influence later ones, the interpretation of Nazi origins has tended to remain pretty much the same for the past two decades.

All the same, people do seem to have a subliminal awareness that the Nazis were involved in occultism. One often comes across references such as these: "The Nazi horror ... reveals how Satanic the human soul can become." "If there is anything fundamentally diabolic about [Anton] LaVey, it stems ... from the echo of nazism in his theories.... " "It was predictable that [Charles] Manson would identify with Hitler, for they [both] have been motivated by a kindred demonic spirit and they are comparable personalities."

The current occult revival has placed us in a better position to examine the Nazi horror from a different perspective, and gives ample ground for believing that occult beliefs and practices, however weird, played a major part in the irrational history of the Third Reich.

Some scholars may have been thrown off the scent because Hitler went to great pains to eradicate occultism from Germany almost as soon as he came to power, and on that account, is mistakenly identified as an enemy of irrational faith.

On the contrary. As will be borne out in later chapters, the occult was purged, not because it was abhorrent, but because the Nazis took it seriously -- so seriously, indeed, that it posed a potential threat. The astrologer William Wulff, who was put to work by the SS casting horoscopes of nations, groups, and movements, describes, in Zodiac and Swastika, Heinrich Himmler's confession of his own interest in and practice of occultism and his explanation of the purge:

For us politics means ... the elimination of all forces except those serving the one constructive idea....

In the Third Reich we have to forbid astrology. . . . We cannot permit any astrologers to follow their calling except those who are working for us. In the National Socialist state astrology must remain a privilegium singulorum. It is not for the broad masses.

The Holocaust appeared in a new light when I began, some time ago, to investigate certain modern esoteric cults making claims to paranormal knowledge. These cults, from those connected with George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and Rudolf Steiner to their present reincarnations, shared certain features: an authoritarian obedience to a charismatic and Messianic leader; secrecy; loyalty to the group above all other ties; a belief in supernatural possibilities open to the members only; a belief in reincarnation; initiation into superhuman sources of power; literal acceptance of the myth of ancient" giants" or supermen who handed down an oral tradition to a chosen people and who were guiding us now; and, in uncommon cases, Satanic practices.

Glaring parallels to Nazi history. Turning back to that history and its antecedents, I saw unmistakable evidence of a direct relationship between the Nazis and occultism. In fact, it was hard not to see it. Here was the missing link in our understanding of the beasts who proclaimed themselves gods.

If it seems too fantastic to believe that one of the most civilized countries in the world should have fallen to occultism, here is a highly respected German historian, an exiled former staff member of the liberal newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung, Konrad Heiden, observing, in his introduction to The Memoirs of Dr. Felix Kersten, Heinrich Himmler's masseur, that among the Germans

the best of them found refuge from the despair of their daily life in a perverse fanaticism ... called "the mysticism of a political movement."

Germany was the perfect place for this development. In almost no other country were so many "miracles" performed, so many ghosts conjured, so many illnesses cured by magnetism, so many horoscopes read, between the two World Wars. A veritable mania of superstition had seized the country, and all those who made a living by exploiting human stupidity thought the millennium had come. General [Erich] Ludendorff, who had commanded the German armies in World War I, tried to make gold with the assistance of a swindler boasting the appropriate name of Tausend (meaning "thousand"). There was scarcely a folly in natural or world history to which the great general did not lend credence; when the German Republic, which he hated so intensely, had the barriers of the railway crossings painted red and white for better visibility, Ludendorff declared that the Jews in the government were doing this because Moses had led the Jews through the desert under these colors.

Another high-ranking general was convinced that he possessed the secret of the death ray and that he could halt airplanes in their flight and stop tanks in their tracks. A steamship company dismissed its managing director because his handwriting had displeased a graphologist. Motorists avoided a certain road between Hamburg and Bremen because, it was rumored, from milestone number 113 there emanated certain mysterious "terrestrial rays," which provoked one accident after another. A miracle worker, who had the faculty of making the dead Bismarck appear during his mass meetings and who healed the sick by application of white cheese, had enough followers to establish a city; another crackpot was almost elected to the Reichstag; and still a third, who also barely missed election, promised to perform the greatest miracle of all by undoing the German inflation that had depreciated the mark to the value of one trillion paper marks for one gold mark.

Among Hitler's intimates was a man on whose visiting card appeared the word "magician" to indicate his profession -- and he meant it in all seriousness. Many were convinced that the course of world history was the sinister result of the ministrations of ancient secret societies -- as such they considered not only the Free Masons, but also Jews and the Jesuits....

Other historians have corroborated that Germany between the two world wars was particularly ripe for these states of mind. It was a time of alienation and impotence. World War I had turned everything inside out. Apart from the physical devastations, the three bugbears of taxation, inflation, and confiscation sapped the strength of the middle class. The war itself was but a symptom of growing inner turbulence in Europe. The trouble had, of course, begun much earlier. In Germany particularly, the gap between an advancing technology and an outmoded social order was great.

In the years preceding World War I, the German Jews were in an especially vulnerable position. The full emancipation of the German Jews, which had come in 1871, brought large numbers of Eastern European Jews to Germany. They settled in the cities, taking a prominent part in commercial, cultural, and political life. Likewise, the period from 1857 to 1910 saw a rise in the Jewish population of Vienna of more than 400 percent. Because of the high value the Jews placed on learning, a disproportionately large number went into the medical and legal professions, trying in that way to gain a modicum of social acceptance. Some Germans, of course, mistook these professionals for the average Jew. Slowly, a new religion evolved for those Germans who felt somehow cheated -- a cult of race, based on the supremacy of the Aryans and the vilification of the Jews. It was called the volkisch -- or Pan-German --  movement, and it enjoyed great popular appeal. It began a virulent campaign against the "foreign element." A racial theory of history was developed, and it heralded the coming of a new Messiah. The mystical concepts of Reich and Volk went along with an awakening interest in occultism. Secret cults sprang up, anti-Semitic and nationalistic, running like a sewer beneath Vienna and other cultural centers.

Two Austrian occultists, Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels and Guido von List, presented an irrational, pseudo-anthropological package which attracted a number of wealthy backers, despite its foolishness. Lanz's Order of New Templars and List's Armanen boasted several influential members.

In 1909, young Adolf Hitler, down and out in Vienna, came across Lanz's magazine, Ostara, and made contact with the occultist. The erotic language and racist rantings of this magazine were remarkably similar to Hitler's later utterances.

Membership in occult groups was often interlocking. When, in 1912, a new secret cult, the Germanen Orden, was born, disciples of both Lanz and List joined. The Germanen Orden was like the other occult-racist-nationalist groups, but with a difference. It called for "courageous men" to "accomplish the work" of combating the Social Democrats, who had gained ground in the elections of 1912. Courageous men did not leap forth to join the Germanen Orden, but after World War I prospects were brighter.

People were in a state of shock over the German defeat, which had brought with it the collapse of Kaiser Wilhelm II's regime. Power was suddenly thrust into the hands of a provisional democratic government whose unenviable task it was to accept the consequences of a lost war, reluctantly surrender, and sign a peace treaty. Extremists of the left and right blamed everything on this government: Germany's humiliation, as well as the reparations which bore heavily, financially and psychologically, on the people. It was the end of an era. The Germans had gone into the war with such high hopes. The war was to have been a release from care, a cleansing of mounting economic and social problems, a purging and purification. When the war began, said one German, "it was as if a nightmare had vanished, as if a door had opened, and an old yearning had been satisfied." The idea of war itself had become beautiful. It was to give people back their lives. "Peace," as someone pointed out, "had become insupportable." Hitler embodied the alienated man with no family or occupation, to whom the outbreak of World War I was a godsend. He later confessed: "For me, as for every German, there now began the greatest and most unforgettable time of my earthly existence."

When the Germans signed the peace treaty, the army released almost a quarter of a million men to add their numbers to the growing ranks of the unemployed. Many soldiers were dazed to come home to a fatherland on the edge of anarchy, hungry, and undisciplined. The new Russian Revolution threatened to spill over into Germany. In Munich, particularly, Communists stalked the streets, threatening civil war. Conservatives and liberals alike were anxious to do anything to stave off communism.

The Germanen Orden was happy to merge its destiny with a Munich group called the Thule Society, which was meeting regularly to study the supposed occult meaning of the ancient Germanic alphabet and its symbolism. It was led by an astrologer who called himself Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorff. The Thule Society soon became the political arm of the Germanen Orden and quietly set about preparing for a counterrevolution against the government. It formed an umbrella for many of the racist-nationalist groups and enlisted frightened or unscrupulous men against the government, which, it said, had betrayed the German people. In addition to rabid anti-semitism, it preached the coming of a Fuhrer who would do away with hated democracy, the handmaiden of the weak. It began to collect weapons, bought a newspaper, instigated terrorist activity and stirred up race hatred against the Jews, all the while keeping up the front of being a study group for Germanic antiquity. Thule members who were to play key roles in the formation of the Nazi party were Alfred Rosenberg, Rudolf Hess, Gottfried Feder, Karl Harrer, and Dietrich Eckart. Not until they found their Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, were they able to carry out the irrational programs of Lanz, List, and Sebottendorff. But all the essential ingredients -- the ideology, the rituals, the symbols, the attitudes -- of the coming Nazi Revolution were already present in the Germanen Orden and the Thule Society, as well as the Order of the New Templars and the Armanen.

Go to Next Page