|
GODS AND BEASTS -- THE NAZIS AND THE OCCULT |
||
|
CHAPTER 10: The Black Knights
Though we have not yet learned all of the secrets of the SS and may never learn them, we do know some of them. We know that it was an occult society. This may enlighten us as to how more than a million SS men could change, in the space of a few years, from ordinary citizens to mass murderers. Some of them must have participated in the Final Solution just to get on, in a period when it was surely not easy just to get on. But we cannot fail to comment on the zealousness -- the overzealousness -- with which most men approached their tasks. Fear of punishment does not quite account for it. There were many options, not picked up, to quietly sabotage the SS machine without detection. One could seem perfectly willing to perform an unpleasant task and yet raise questions as to its efficacy. So, for example, the deputy head of the Nazi Health Bureau, Dr. Kurt Blome, wrote to his superior, Arthur Greiser, on November 18, 1942, about the order to exterminate all the Polish population who were tubercular:
By this means, Blome caused Himmler to reconsider, and the lives of thousands of Poles were saved. In order to make sense of the brutal activities of the SS, it must be seen that its members were motivated, for the most part, not by sadism, but by sacrifice in a fanatical utopian cause which suspended normal judgment. Present-day occult groups have improved our understanding of the human capacity for personality change and for expanding the boundaries of endurance. They show us how malleable people are. They give us new insights into how an appeal to idealism and a training for self-sacrifice can prepare people for deeds which transcend individual conscience. Membership in the SS seemed to present an opportunity to become part of a utopian society -- its most vital part. The Nazi revolution, like the Communist revolution, aimed to turn things around, but instead of a class struggle, it was concerned with a racial struggle. A new class would be brought to power, not the old aristocracy, but a new aristocracy, based on the inherent nobility of the Aryan blood. The master race was to be the culmination of a biological evolution. If "inferior" races prevented these goals, the master race would be justified, by the "natural law" of Darwinism, in doing whatever it needed to survive the harsh struggle for existence. This had an immediate appeal to the masses. Sons of middle-class men, like Himmler, who could not even hope, in that gray time of the twenties and thirties, to approach the comfortable standard of living of their fathers, now saw an escape route. It was not necessarily outcasts or scoundrels who joined the SS, but ordinary people, members of the lower and middle classes, who saw in it a chance to participate in a movement with which they could identify. They were to be the warriors against the enemy. They recognized the enemy. Many of these men had fathers who had read the books of List, Lanz, Fritsch, and Chamberlain and believed in the mystical racist package. The churches, too, had shown sympathy with the volkisch ideas. In school, the future Nazis had been taught by people who had been conditioned by the same Zeitgeist. On joining the SS, then, a man had little to unlearn. As a bulwark against the horror of the future, in which all the avenues of growth seemed to be closed, the organization promised new options. The renunciation of personality which it required of the individual he gladly assented to. For the sake of being part of a utopian society which would usher in a golden age, he was willing to give up personal liberty. He had been told for some time, anyway, that individual liberty was a fiction. Often, it was only the liberty to go down the drain. If, in the process of the SS training, an individual was transformed into a machine, he could justify it with the propaganda that he was on the way to becoming "the new man." As Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, put it: "We were told all the time we were the elect, we were to be the Fuhrer's and Himmler's special instrument for creating a new Reich. They became our conscience, we lost our personal moral self-determination." There was a feeling that "the Last Days were at hand," that the "subhuman" Jew, Satan in disguise, had to be prevented, by any means, from taking over the world. A crusade of the elect, in absolute obedience to the will of the charismatic Fuhrer, was a "divine mission." As Himmler told the SS:
If Germany after World War I was a man-made jungle, the new man was the natural man, very much at home in the economic and psychic swamp. Encouraged to "think with his blood" and to renounce the bourgeois shackles of humanism, he turned, as Himmler had, from the tender romanticism of knightly deeds and pure fellow-feeling to the savage romanticism of barbaric slaughter. In this, he was the archetypal twentieth-century man, daring to destroy the old forms so that the new could be born. He was a modern warrior, accomplished in technology, who reverted to savagery, so that, in a curious way, he came to embody both rationalism and irrationalism. These were not the only ambiguities. Though SS men were trained to be the first stage in a superhuman mutation, and already behaved as if they were supermen, they also exhibited a robotlike quality. Fearless and cruel, they were also capable of a cringing subservience to superiors. What was the nature of the order which could contain such paradoxes? It was an elite society, with strict conditions for acceptance. Himmler himself scrutinized applicants' photographs for an intuition into their breeding. They had to prove that only pure Aryan blood had flowed into their veins for three generations. They had to meet certain requirements of racial appearance, physical condition, and general bearing. Intellectual attainments were not considered. They had to go through innumerable political and physical tests, demonstrate that there were no hereditary imperfections in their families, and be examined for racial purity by a board of doctors, racial specialists, and SS officers. The ratio of height to physique was important:
Even underarm perspiration was made a distinguishing characteristic. If the applicant met the specifications, he was then made a candidate. He had to swear an oath of loyalty, bravery, and obedience unto death to his superiors and to Hitler. An SS lieutenant general had to swear further that he would not favor his own offspring or those of other SS men. In the prolongation of examination and testing, Himmler copied the Jesuits, with their two-year-long period of rigorous tests and exercises for novices before they allowed them to take the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Before a candidate was allowed to consider himself an SS man, he had to pass through a year-long course to win his sports badge, a period in the Labor Service, and two years in the army. Then, after an intensive course of indoctrination, he had to wait until the following November 9 to become a full member. At 10:00 P.M. in the Nazi shrine in Munich, the acolyte attended a special mystical ceremony binding him to his Fuhrer, who was present. The scene before the Feldherrnhalle was described thus by a Nazi, Emil Helfferich: "Tears came to my eyes when, by the light of the torches, thousands of voices repeated the oath in chorus. It was like a prayer." Himmler had replaced the Catholic catechism with his own series of questions and answers, which he dinned into each SS man's head, as for example:
Himmler was known as "the Black Jesuit," and created a hierarchical structure with a graded series of privileges, separating the higher orders from the lower orders, with himself as "General of the Order." He understood well the elitist leanings of his men, and their fear of losing their status. Everyone was constantly spying on everyone else, and even the top officers were not exempt from being visited by emissaries who arrived unannounced to see whether things were being done according to regulations. Naturally, then, despite the conditioning these men were daily receiving that they were the hope of civilization, they lived in constant dread of being discovered to be in some way unworthy of such a high calling. As Robert Ley pointed out:
Yet there was a fierce pride in having been chosen for a superhuman task, and the romanticism persisted:
Kadavergehorsam -- cadaver obedience -- was achieved not just through fear but through the creation of a religious fanaticism which separated SS members from everyone else. The SS order was a state within a state, not subject to national law, with its own laws, courts, and judges. A curtain separated Himmler's empire from the outside world; other Germans, no matter how lofty their position, could not penetrate it. SS men were discouraged from contact with others. Concentration-camp guards could not be stationed near home, were shifted to new locations every three months, and could never be transferred to street duty. The SS was a secret society, as the journalist Heinz Hohne observed:
Even as early as 1927, the SS's slogan was: "The aristocracy keeps its mouth shut." Members were not allowed to take part in discussions at Party meetings. They were to remain silent, and refrain from smoking or leaving the room. One of the early orders was:
As an early memorandum suggested, the SS was organized to be "a secret Order within the Party to hold the movement together in an iron grip." An inner circle of twelve SS officers of top rank met in secret for conference and meditation in a monastery in Wevelsburg, Westphalia, which Himmler had turned into a castle, refurbishing it at tremendous expense. The town was built on the foundations of a burgh that went back to Charlemagne, and Himmler supposedly searched the province for this castle because he had heard that in the next confrontation with the East, a Westphalian castle would be the only stronghold to survive. In the 100-by-145-foot dining room, circling a round oak table, each officer-knight sat on a high-backed pigskin chair, a silver plate engraved with his name hanging from the back. Each wore his own coat-of-arms and slept in a room done in period style suitable to a particular German hero -- Himmler, of course, choosing King Heinrich I, whose spirit apparently gave him invaluable counsel. Himmler would say, on occasion: "In this case King Heinrich would have acted as follows." Heinrich I was not the only great spirit of the past with whom Himmler was able to communicate. He believed he had the power to call up others and hold conferences with them, but only if they had been dead for hundreds of years. In the bowels of the castle was a funereal room containing a sunken well and a hollowed-out stone pillar. When one of the twelve top-ranking officers died, his ashes were placed in a cremation urn by the well. His escutcheon was burned on top of the pillar and the smoke would rise above the well, because of a cleverly arranged ventilating scheme. For a week once a year, Himmler and his twelve Knights of the Round Table, in an atmosphere of secret confinement, gave themselves over completely to mental and spiritual exercises of visualization. A professor of anthropology at Occidental College in California, C. Scott Littleton, provided me with astonishing details of another SS ceremony which has not been corroborated by anyone else, but which may well be true. A professor friend of his, he claims, saw original Nazi depositions taken for the Nuremberg Trials, but never included in the record, which told of a periodic sacrifice wherein a fine Aryan specimen of an SS man was beheaded and the severed head made a vehicle for communion with Secret Masters in the Caucasus. These beings, presumably, were not believed to be earthly, and were looked to for guidance.
Whether this is true or not, we do know that in schools of instruction at Wevelsburg and other, less completed castles at Sonthofen in Bavaria, Vogelsang in Rhenanie, and Krossinsee in Pomerania, candidates were systematically prepared to participate in atrocities. Each school had its dormitories, refectories, chapel room, meditation cloister, and private cemetery. In Wevelsburg, a library of twelve thousand volumes comprising all of the known literature relating to the cult of race was made available. Rene Alleau relates that in each of these schools, men, stripped to the waist and without any defensive weapons, were taught to become hard by such ordeals as fighting off for twelve minutes attack dogs that were unleashed and incited to kill. If the candidates took flight, they were shot. Another gruesome preparation for pitilessness, according to Alleau, consisted of tearing out the eyes of three cats with one's bare hands. Throughout these barbarities, one had to show utter indifference to sorrow.
Officer candidates were often told to pull a pin out of a grenade, balance it on their helmets, and stand at attention until it exploded. Such training gave men the ability to walk unmoved among corpses. And such ferocities were coupled, in the classroom, with racist educational courses designed to separate the SS man further from the outside world, because they were deliberately anti-Christian and quickly created a climate of neo-paganism. Christian names were replaced with Teutonic names. Christmas was brought forward to the winter solstice and celebrated as Yuletide, which, an SS manual assured, was the
The cult of ancestors, which Himmler fostered to give his men a feeling of being part of a great continuum, also took in the Germanic forebears of the Middle Ages. Like Lanz's New Templars, SS members delved into the occult mysteries of the Grail legends. All their mystical rituals, says Joachim Fest,
Since the members of this new community were heirs to the old German nobility, it mattered with whom they mated and begot children. The future of the German people depended on it. Himmler laid down elaborate rules for marriage. How he must have enjoyed prying into the most intimate details of his men's lives. Future wives had to pass the same rigorous test for Aryanism as SS men. At christenings, as at deaths, the priest was supplanted by the local SS leader. Every fourth child born to an SS man received a present of a candlestick with the inscription "You are only a link in the clan's endless chain." The breeding catalogs of the order's Race and Settlement Bureau read like one of Lanz von Liebenfels' tracts. Men were urged to have children out of wedlock with racially pure women, and there were special facilities set up for these purposes. At the height of the war, Himmler had so many of his men and so much money involved in esoteric research projects that it began to seem as if he hoped to turn the tide in Germany's favor by fathoming the secrets of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, the occult meaning of Gothic spires and the top hats worn by the boys at Eton, and the symbolism involved in the suppression of the Ulster harp. These projects were all undertaken by the Foreign Intelligence Service. The most ambitious researches were done by the Ahnenerbe, which had a group of financiers called the Circle of Friends, led by Wilhelm Keppler, pay enormous sums for a flight to Tibet to look for traces of a pure Germanic race which might have been able to keep intact the ancient Nordic mysteries. The Ahnenerbe also had archeologists digging up all of Europe for remains of Germanic culture. More than fifty departments in this branch succeeded in spending over a million marks ($400,000) on such "vital" matters. But the most incredible research of all was set up in 1939 in Berlin. An astrologer, Wilhelm Wulff, who was made prisoner of the SS and coerced into working for it, described the Berlin Institute's scientific research center as being used "to harness, not only natural, but also supernatural, forces. All intellectual, natural, and supernatural sources of power -- from modern technology to medieval black magic, and from the teachings of Pythagoras to the Faustian pentagram incantation -- were to be exploited in the interests of final victory." In March 1942, the astrologer joined this "very strange company, which included spiritualist mediums and sensitives, pendulum practitioners (dowsers who used a pendulum instead of a dowsing rod), students of Tattwa (an Indian pendulum theory), astrologers and astronomers, ballistics experts, and mathematicians." Under the direction of a navy captain who believed that British Intelligence was able to find the whereabouts of German U-boats simply by sitting in the Admiralty office in London and swinging a pendulum over a map, noticing when the pendulum would begin to rotate, and radioing a message to British destroyers telling them the exact location of the U-boats, Himmler decided to have his people do the same. (Actually, the British had simply succeeded in breaking the secret German code.) One member of the German team, Ludwig Straniak, a Salzburg writer and architect, claimed that he could hold a pendulum over a picture of a boat and then "search" the map with the same pendulum. The German Admiralty was impressed, and let him swing. He and others sat for hours on end, day after day, arms outstretched over maps, but, says Wilhelm Wulff, who was also adept in occultism, "the results were, of course, pitiful. Whatever one may think about occult phenomena, it was simply ridiculous to expect that an unknown world could be forcibly opened up in this dilettante fashion and exploited for military purposes." When the experimenters "began to suffer from nervous exhaustion," the project was moved out of Berlin and into "quieter and more salubrious surroundings on the island of Sylt, perhaps on the basis that a little ozone would help the 'vibrations.'" Wulff, as a student of Vedanta and Buddhist yoga, went on to work with German soldiers, instilling in them "the Zen-Buddhist beliefs which inspired the Japanese." The pendulum swingers surfaced again in 1943, after Mussolini was arrested by the government of Pietro Badoglio. Although Hitler was most anxious to rescue him, German Intelligence could not find out where he was held captive. The same occultists who had been arrested after Hess's flight were now released and taken to a villa in Wannsee, where Himmler ordered them to use pendulums, clairvoyance, astrology, or any other means to locate the missing dictator. As Schellenberg recounts:
Though this experiment is innocuous enough, it is a further demonstration that an occult climate existed in the SS. Its members could not have accepted the crazy ideology which goaded them into ridding the world of supposed evil by wiping out millions of people if they had not first been turned into robots, methodically and successfully, so that one of their leaders, Robert Ley, could announce to them: "When I look at you my men, I know that the principles on which we mustered you are right. Externally you already look alike and in a short time you will be alike inside as well." We are learning now, from contemporary cults in America, that the process of turning human beings into robots can actually begin quite innocently. Among SS men, it was so effective that even at the end of the war, they were still able to call their unscrupulous acts sacred deeds.
|
||