The Occult and Nazism Re-Examined

by Steve Mizrach

The Origins of Fascism

There have been many attempts to understand and explain fascism in purely materialistic and economic terms, and perhaps as many analyses looking beyond conventional socio-economic factors to more unusual origins. The problem is that 'fascism,' like communism, has several flavors and varieties, some of which (like Maoism and Leninism) are somewhat at odds with each other. Clearly, some of the purported influences on German Nazism, such as pan-Germanism and neo-paganism, had not played as much of a role in Spanish, Italian, or Latin American fascist movements, which emerged out of Catholic roots. Nazism has been analyzed from various perspectives, including that of Wilhelm Reich, who saw it as a massive 'armoring' of society resulting from the sexual dysfunction of the populace1, and Norman Cohn2, who saw parallels between the Nazis and millenarian, anti-Semitic, and eschatological movements of the Middle Ages such as the Lollards. Historians have a problem with getting a grasp on fascism, because it is a label applied to such a wide panoply of political movements (especially by putative political opponents) - some collectivist or corporatist, others radically individualist; some rabidly puritanical, others flouting of all morality and taste; and some imperialistic, while others are isolationist.

Today, we ponder the applicability of the label to our own politicians. Is Pat Buchanan a fascist? What about Lyndon LaRouche, Jacques Le Pen, Leonard Jeffries, or David Duke, whose attacks on affirmative action closely parallel that of the 'mainstream' Republican party? Is fascism necessarily racist, anti-Semitic, or religiously biased? Was Barry Goldwater calling for fascism when he said "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice?" How about politicians who run on a "law and order" or "America First!" plaform- some of whom are assumedly liberal Democrats? German Nazism as a particularly unique brand of fascism must be closely examined and understood and its historical geneaology traced. It will not do to go after "fascism" with a wide sociological lens (which is, not suprisingly, unfocused) and tar all right-wing thinkers with the same brush. And one of the important roots of German Nazism is, in fact, the existence of certain high-profile occult societies who operated in the period between the wars- the Germanorden, the Thule Gellenschaft, Ariosophy, and the Neo-Templars3.

Blame It on Blavatsky, et al.

Sadly, most of the analyses of Nazism leave all of its various occult roots at the doorstep of one poor old Russian woman, Helena Blavatsky. The German occult societies appropriated some Theosophical ideas, to be sure, to the same extent that the Nazis eagerly distorted some of the doctrines of Nietzsche (so carefully doctored by his sister to omit the parts where he condemns German nationalism as an "abyss of stupidity!"4 or disavows anti-Semitism.) When Nietzsche discusses the Superman, he does not say that he shall be a German or an Aryan, only that we will not recognize him. It should be pointed out that Blavatsky's doctrine of the Six Root Races5 - Astral, Hyperborean, Lemurian, Atlantean, Aryan, and the Coming Race - did not assign much importance to the Aryan race. They would also be supplanted in turn by the Sixth Root Race, which would arise out of all the existing races and nations, sort of like a 'mutant' strain. Blavatsky does not attach much importance to racial magic, which she puts in the category of "sorcery." It should be pointed out that the Nazis closed most of the Theosophical lodges in Germany, including Rudolf Steiner's Goetheaneum, and banned Freemasonry and many other occult societies.

There are others often mentioned in this occult cast of villains. Jung is blamed for reviving interest in mythology and the workings of the racial unconscious, and for originally supporting the Nazis because of their attempts to revive Teutonic ritual and mythic thinking. Yet, when Jung discusses that the dreams of many patients in the 1930s reveal the archetype of a "great blond beast," he issues it as a warning, not as a herald of good fortune6. Jung himself described Nazism as the type of mass psychosis that afflicts a society when its leader becomes 'possessed' by one of the archetypes of the unconscious. Gurdjieff and Crowley are also mentioned as possible Reich supporters, which is astounding based on the evidence that both may have well been working clandestinely for the Resistance movements in France and England. Many occult groups, such as the Prieure du Sion, seem to have acted as infiltrators, aping the Nazi party line while passing on important information to its enemies in their journal Vaincre. In places like Vichy France, occult groups might have had no choice but to appear firmly in the Nazi fold7.

The German Occult Orders

While it is true that the various German mystical societies borrowed some of their ideas from Hermetic/Rosicrucian groups in England and from Theosophists on the continent, some of their principles are different. In particular, their emphasis on the mystical powers of the Aryan race and its resulting 'decline' and degeneration from miscegnation with lower races is a unique idea. Their Teutonophilism - interest in the Runes, Nordic myths, and the Swastika (along with the belief that Christianity had broken the back of Teutonic civilization) - came out of the general climate attendant with the new pan-Germanic nationalism. The idea that all the languages of Europe had one Indo-European source, and that many of the world's myths (from the Hindus to the Greeks) had a common 'Aryan' origin was gaining ground among respectable philologists and antiquarians8. Many Russians in 1905 were already promoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as evidence that the inferior Semitic races were trying to bring about Bolshevism and the downfall of Europe.

Guido von Liszt (founder of the Germanorden) may not have been as important in the Nazi pantheon as Oswald Spengler and Alfred Rosenberg, who both advanced the belief that the West was in decline from the onslaught of "Magianism" or the "World Cavern" philosophy of the Oriental Semites, which was in direct contrast to the Apollonian or Faustian guiding principle of 'no limits' which governed the European/Aryan races9. Both reacted in horror to the "primitive" African, Latino, and Polynesian elements that artists like Picasso and Gauguin were importing into Western art, a clear sign of 'degeneration.' Not unlike some anti-rock music phillistines today, they heard the "savage jungle beats of the tom-tom drum" in jazz and much of modern music, and found the soaring Wagnerian operas much more to their liking. The German mystical societies essentially saw a coming struggle between the forces of materialism and relativism and that of true, Aryan, spiritual civilization - a struggle that would be apocalyptic and where there could be no quarter whatsoever afforded for the enemy. Therein lay the roots of Nazism and the Holocaust.

New World Order?

There are various authors who propose that the Nazis were only the 'front' organization for a more sinister, clandestine Hidden Directorate. There are all sorts of rumours that some sort of evil-looking Oriental monk with a green hat was often seen around Nazi party functions, suggesting perhaps that a group of mystic lamas somewhere in Tibet might be the hidden puppet-masters of the Nazis. By the 1840s in Germany the legend of Agharti was already making its rounds; the legend was that there was an underground kingdom whose ruler, the Master of the World, was already controlling many of the kings of the earth and would soon launch an invasion for complete control. While Napoleon may have contemplated ruling all of Europe, the Nazis were close students of 'geopolitics' and may well have been the first would-be conquerors to consider the ramifications of world domination. (Hitler had blueprints in place for an invasion of America, and he assumed Italy would control Africa and the Japanese, Asia.) Some think that there may well have been Theosophist-like "Ascended Masters" behind their grab for power, with some ulterior design of their own.

When George Bush used the phrase "New World Order" in 1990, conspiratorialists all over the world went nuts. They know that as the code phrase for OWG (One-World Government), but others also remember that it was one of Hitler's names for his coming Thousand Year Reich. The phrase has been associated for a long time (long before Robert Anton Wilson, anyway) with the Illuminati and their supposed design for world control10. Certainly the Nazis themselves believed that the Jews, International Bankers, Freemasons, and Bolsheviks had their own plan for taking over the world - wasn't it all laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? This is a pattern repeated throughout history - various conspiratorial organizations are formed to combat real or fictitious 'subversive' conspiracies. A notable example is the Holy Vehm, a vigilante organization in the Middle Ages that wore hoods to conceal their anonymity, and rounded up and executed what they believed to be a conspiratorial band of witches and heretics opposed to the king. Hitler often made reference to the Vehm in some of his writings.

The Triumph of Irrationality?

James Webb and others have made much of the way in which irrationalistic ideas took such strong hold under the Third Reich11. Bizarre hollow-earth and Horbigerian world-ice cosmologies proliferated, as did extremely strange beliefs about giants and demons and cosmic battles ripped straight out of some Ragnarokian script. In the 1930s, there were whole journals dedicated to the researches of Atlantis and other lost continents and the possible Atlantean origins of the Nordic peoples. Hitler openly declared himself an enemy of "bourgeouis reason" and extolled the virtue of "thinking with the blood." The Lebensraum (Land-Reform) movements of the 1930s reacted violently against modern industrial, technological, and urban tendencies, and extolled instead the icon of the simple, pure, noble peasant living off the land. Like the hippies of the 'irrationalist'1960s, the Lebensraumers advocated abandoning the cities for communal village life, and were just as enamored of 'deep ecology,' folk music, "natural living" and nudism, reviving authentic craftsmanship, alternative (holistic) medicine, meditation, and even animal rights.

Yet it might be a mistake to see Nazism as merely a reaction against scientific materialism and modernity. The Nazis advocated the Promethean power of science and often promoted the Hindenburg and the V2 base at Peneemunde as signs of the triumph of German science. They pursued researches into atomic energy and radar as vigoruously as the allies. (They may have been hindered in their pursuits, one might note, by exterminating or banishing the main sector of the German intellegentsia - Jews, such as Einstein.) Eugenics, the "science" of breeding better babies and carrying out applied Social Darwinism, had gained considerable respectability by the 1930s, and there were many 'respectable' medical societies promoting eugenics programs here in America, involving such aspects as forced sterilization of the lower classes and the handicapped, banning of marriages with southern and eastern Europeans, and denial of immigration to 'lower' races12. The extermination program of the Nazis was carried out with industrially and scientifically efficient methodic precision - the Nazis kept genealogical records tracing back seven centuries and were able to make their trains run on time.

The Nazi doctors, for example, were interested in the answers to purely rational questions of medical science: what happens to German pilots who are downed and must live on salt water or are trapped in frozen climes? Can we transplant skin from one patient to another? They sought the answers by taking Jews, Gypsies, and other groups and performing inhumane experiments on them- experiments justified by the belief that such groups were 'subhuman' anyway. What they lacked was not reason but values, compassion, and humanity13. In many ways, their experiments epitomized one of the prime problems of 20th century science: its advances far outstrip man's moral and social evolution. From Tuskeegee to Edgewood, scientists have done horrible things to people - forget the animals who anger the anti-vivisectionists - in the name of the science which is supposedly to benefit their lives. In many ways, the Nazi state merely took many of the features of the modern 'Enlightenment' nation-state to their logical extremes; they could be said represent the apotheosis, not the interruption, of modernity.

The Spear of Destiny and the Holy Grail

Of particular interest to students of the 'hidden history' of the Third Reich is Hitler's interest in the Spear of Destiny. The so-called Spear of Longinus kept in the imperial museum of Austria was said to be the spear that pierced the side of Christ (and contained a nail from the Cross) and was the spear that the Roman emperor Maximilian and the Holy Roman emperors of Austria carried as a standard into battle14. Walter Stein insisted that Hitler was fascinated by the spear and felt that possession of it would mean victory for the Nazi cause of world domination and the triumph over Christianity. How important the spear really was to Hitler - who never really seemed to make a big deal out of it when it was seized from the museum, at least in public - is not clear. But we know- and not just from Indiana Jones movies- that the Nazis were fascinated with finding lost mystical relics, particularly those associated with Christianity. That is unusual, considering the anti-Christian bias of the Nazis, who felt that everything wrong with the West (pacifism, belief in equality, etc.) had been rammed down its throat by Christianity, an 'alien' religion from the Orient.

Nonetheless, it is clear that Hitler modelled his S.S. troops on the Templars and other Crusader orders, and the Jesuits and the Masons. There is a famous poster from 1937 showing Hitler as a Templar Knight, in holy armor, preparing to do battle with Satan. While Nieztsche felt nauseous from Wagner's Parsifal (for its caving into the 'sickening' ideals of Christian chivalry), the Nazi cadres seem to have vigorously promoted it. Otto Rahn was searching for the Holy Grail in the south of France in 1938, though he did not appear to think that what he was looking for was a wine cup from the Last Supper or the blood of Jesus. Instead he claimed it was "a power source of indescribable magnitute."15 It is not known whether the Nazis really ever searched for the Ark of the Covenant, though there are tantalizing hints that they may well have been laying out blueprints for a search of northern Africa and Egypt for that Jewish relic. Why they thought they might enlist the gods of their enemies in their destruction is not clear.

Nazi Interest in Parapsychology and the Paranormal

There was widespread interest by the Nazis in various paranormal topics. Albert Speer was clearly very interested in geomancy and the ley lines and sacred spots of Germany, and some of his architecture betrays knowledge of principles of mystical geometry and numerology. The Vril Society in Germany promoted the idea that there might be a mystical energy within the earth that could be tapped by the German people, although Bulwer-Lytton had maintained it was the property of a race living inside the earth. It is well known that Hitler consulted astrologers for propitious dates for his military campaigns and employed dowsers on the battlefield to search for water and for minefields. There was also some interest by the Nazi cadres in parapsychology as an espionage device - research that appears to be carried along by the intelligence apparati of the two victorious Allied powers (our CIA and the Soviet KGB.) Further, the Nazis were interested in antigravity and 'free energy' devices. Viktor Shauberger, a Nazi scientist, worked on a saucer design for one of his 'antigravity' ships16. For a long time, it was believed that the 'foo fighters' and 'ghost rockets' of the 1940s were a secret Nazi weapon, and there was a small minority that thought the Nazis may have created the 'flying saucers,' though the ETH-UFO hypothesis caught on soon after, by 1949.

But what captivated Hitler's interest most of all was his interest in hypnosis or the occult powers of 'fascination.' Witnesses of the Nuremberg rallies claim that people there were in a trancelike state, glassy-eyed and open mouthed with awe. Hitler claimed to have studied the mystical charismatic powers of earlier leaders, and read a great deal about the Jesuits' psychological techniques of focused concentration and devotion. It is certain that Hitler's minister Goebbels did employ carefully crafted techniques of social control - lighting, the tenor of the voice, and crowd psychology - for maximum propaganda value. But Trevor Rayvenscroft and others are of the opinion that the Nazis may have been more than just master propagandists; they may have been true sorcerous mesmerists, possessing the minds of thousands of people. Some people maintain the CIA's MKUltra mind-control experiments may have been derived from Nazi researchers smuggled into this country through Project Paperclip17.

Occultism = Nazism? NOT!

There are those of a so-called 'skeptical' bent that have been promoting a rather sloppy thesis of late. That thesis is based on a few deceptively simple assertions. The Nazis were devotees of the irrational, the occult, and the paranormal. The Nazis did horrible things. Ergo, if we do not stamp out belief in the occult and paranormal, another Nazi regime may come to power. This silly syllogism is employed to maximum effect by the purported rationalists of CSICOP: when irrationalism (ergo, Forteanism, et al., which they consider to be an irrational pursuit) is on the rise, democracy and freedom are threatened. The idiocy of this position should be fairly clear. There were many occultists who resisted the Nazi regime, such as the Coventry witches who placed an 'occult circle of power' around the British Isles to protect them from the Germans (well-intentioned, if ineffective against the V2s.) And there were many attempts by the Nazis to stamp out occult societies who did not agree with their party line, such as Steiner's Anthroposophists. (One of the first acts of the Nazis was to ban fortunetelling and Tarot card reading, as well as other forms of divination, since they associated them with the 'despicable' Gypsies.) Not everyone interested in the paranormal, mythical, metaphysical, or occult is a Nazi; the Nazis clearly distorted and twisted many occult philosophies and systems to fit their own purposes and goals.

The Surrealists (Andre Breton, etc.) also wanted to get 'in touch' with man's unconscious or 'nonrational' side, and most of them fled Germany early on, when the Nazi canon of naturalist realism in art took hold. Heidegger, Thomas Mann, and other metaphysical philosophers may have been initially flirtatious with Nazi ideas, but they eventually came to repudiate them as well. The relationship between occultism and 'irrationalism,' however vaguely defined, and other attempts at resistance to the unwanted tendencies within the urban-industrial nation-state, are not as clearcut as some might have us think, and the relationship of all these ideologies to Nazism is highly complex. It is simply unfair and simplistic to see the Nazis only as a revolt against science, reason, technology, the Enlightenment, and Western Judeo-Christianity, and by extension accuse other social movements that are against the notion of 'progress' (e.g. environmentalists, postmodernists, or punk rockers) of being Nazis. For the record, it should be noted that a little-known journal of irrationality, Doubt , never carried one pro-Nazi editorial, despite all its anti-Roosevelt diatribes.

  1. See one of Reich's greatest rants, Listen, Little Man!
  2. See Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium.
  3. Michael Howard, The Occult Conspiracy.
  4. Stated quite clearly in Nietzsche's Gay Science.
  5. See closely Blavatksy's Secret Doctrine, if you can deal with its impenetrable text.
  6. Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
  7. Baigent, Lincoln, and Leigh. The Messianic Legacy.
  8. Marija Gimbutas, The Religions of Old Europe.
  9. Read Spengler's Decline of the West or Rosenberg's Myth of the 20th Century.
  10. Nesta Webster, None Dare Call it Conspiracy.
  11. Webb, The Occult Underground and The Occult Establishment.
  12. Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature.
  13. See Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors.
  14. See Trevor Rayvenscroft, The Spear of Destiny.
  15. Baigent, Lincoln, and Leigh. Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
  16. David Hatcher Childress, Anti-Gravity and the World Grid.
  17. Elizabeth Holtzmann, Secret Agenda: Project Paperclip.
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