By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
Listed as voelkish (and elsewhere called a
“traditionalist” in the sense of anti-modernist but also, as believing in a
special tradition as in “lineage”) former Thule leader ‘von’ Sebottendorf bears no responsibility
for the Nazi Party. Had the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
that von Sebottendorf initially controlled not
existed, Hitler would have taken over a different party, and had the Munchner Beobachter and Sportblatt
not existed, Hitler would have found another paper.
(See also the upcoming 2e edition of Detlev
Rose, Die Thule-Gesellschaft: Legende Mythos Wirklichkeit, Rose here debunks the alleged occult
background, or/and that the Thule society would have had an influence on
Hitler. The 1e hardback edition was published in 1994.)
On the surface, the Thule Society was an ariosophical
education society. Ariosophy (meaning wisdom of the
Aryans) was a form of occultism based on the thought of two Viennese
pseudo-scholars, Guido von List and Lanz von Liebenfels.”
One problem of course is, that not even once, be it in his speeches,
writings or/and private letters did Hitler mention either List or/and Lanz (von)Liebenfels. In fact the
only source that Hitler might in fact have read Lanz's
Ariosophical periodical, Ostara, comes from Lanz himself who during the same conversation claimed also
Lenin just like Hitler read Ostara (Quoted in, and as the basis of the book by
Wilfried Daim, The Man Who Gave Hitler His Ideas.),
comes from Lanz himself who during the same
conversation claimed also Lenin just like Hitler, read Ostara and that both
were his indirect disciples. But Lanz's story about
Hitler as relied privately to Daim may have been
self-serving, inflating his real importance.
Also in The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939 (published in the UK, 2005)
Richard Evans rejects any suggestions that Hitler was fascinated with occult
knowledge mediumism or/and paganism. He quotes from a
1936 speech where Hitler in fact clearly rejects occult mysticism, “In the
National Socialist movement subversion by occult searchers for the Beyond must
not be tolerated.” (Evans, 2005, p.257)
This doesn't mean there were no sympathisers
for the Nazis in occult circles. For example Peter Bierl
documented how German Waldorf schools went to great lengths to accommodate
themselves to the Nazi regime from 1933 onward, and a number of important
Waldorf figures were enthusiastically supportive of Nazism. Most Waldorf
leaders at the time had an ambivalent relationship to Nazism, sympathizing
openly with some of its goals while striving to protect Waldorf's autonomy. The
failure of these efforts is a striking case study in anthroposophy's complex
(and so far largely repressed) interaction with Nazism. (Bierl, Wurzelrassen,
Erzengel und Volksgeister. Die Anthroposophie Rudolf Steiners und die
Waldorfpädagogik.)
That as we shall see, occult and volkisch
texts emanated in some cases from the same presses however makede
it tempting to overplay the importance of the earlier, occult-volkisch publishing enterprise a subject that has been
milked by a number of authors making occult claims about National Socialism.
It is important to realize however, that presses focused exclusively on
volkisch-occult texts belonged to a small and highly
specialized sector of the overall market. Of a total of sixty-one presses, only
twelve could be considered primarily volkisch.. And
the significance of this group shrinks further when we realize that, even
combined, their publication lists were very small compared with those for a
single mainstream press like Oswald Mutze or Wilhelm
Friedrich. It should be clear by now, in any case, that the world of occult
publishing had a structure whose complexity cannot be encompassed adequately in
the volkisch-occult construct.
A useful comparison here might be made to the press of Eugen Diederichs, which published on the new racial thinking,
German mysticism, and the occult. Regularly tarred with the all
encompassing term volkisch, this press
actually published books with neither a racialist nor a nationalist tinge, even
in the 1930’s. Similarly, the Theosophical press of Paul Zillmann
did more than just publish Ariosophical tracts. Neue Metaphysische Rundschau, for
instance, published the racist essays of Guido von List alongside racially
neutral pieces by such mainstream occult leaders as Annie Besant, H. P.
Blavatsky, and Carl du Prel.
We should not, in any case, be surprised that the publishing history of
the occult in Europe consisted of a jumble of different political shadings, cultural
styles, and social programs. This very variety reflected the ferment that
accompanied modernist innovation as in the current lecture, Germans struggled
to accommodate themselves to the exigencies of the new age.
Within this larger context, publishing houses acted as one of the
crucibles in which new and experimental cultural forms were generated and
fused. As previous historians have suggested, presses during this period were
important not just because of their publication lists but also because they
acted both as cultural patrons and as cultural entrepreneurs, nurturing
carefully selected cultural currents while also selling and profiting from
them.
The Nirwana-Verlag fur Lebensreform,
founded before World War I, was a case in point. Plugging itself as not just a
publishing house but as the biggest specialized business in Germany devoted to
occult texts and items, the press claimed to offer customers a variety of
valuable services: ease of access (located on the posh Wilhelmstrasse,
in the very heart of metropolitan Berlin), a regularly updated catalog that
included hundreds of items, prompt and helpful service, and the advantage of
buying from experts who had devoted years of study to the occult. Its catalog
in 1922 consisted of 937 texts covering a wide variety of topics, including
healthy living, human sexuality, nudism, occultism, spiritualism, magnetism,
religion, Theosophy, occult novels, and astrology. Phrenological heads, scriptoscopes, and other occult props and instruments were
also available for immediate sale.
As this impressive catalog of goods suggests, the German occult
belonged to the larger culture of consumption. "Buy this and you will be
wiser, healthier, and happier" was a standard message that appeared in
innovative ways. A text printed in the 1922 catalog of the Nirwana-Verlag
fur Lebensreform exhorted consumers thus:
“There are many books, cheap and large, in this press for Lebensreform:
To go to the source of wisdom Study the catalog diligently, And quickly choose
Many books, rare, ideal Solid works full of power, For every scientific branch,
Especially for the occultist.”
While institutions like the Nirwana-Verlag
fur Lebensreform were undoubtedly commercial
businesses, finally, they were also more than this. The press ran a lending
library well stocked with books on naturopathy, nudism, Theosophy, and
occultism, sponsored lectures and demonstrations, and carried informational
brochures about schools and services that customers might be interested in
exploring. As should by now be clear, presses like the Nirwana-Verlag
fur Lebensreform saw themselves as active agents in
the vast movement for the reform of European, in this case German life. They
existed not only to make money but to promote a certain lifestyle whose modern
character was striking. Hans Fischer's fictional experiences had a solid basis
in fact.
Already in the 1920s, astrologers certified and employed by such
"professional" institutes were charging substantial fees for their
services. Rudolf Sagittarius, an astrologer at the Institut
fur wissenschaftliche Astrologie
and Graphologie (Institute for scientific astrology
and graphology) in Kiel in 1929, for instance, offered paying customers a menu
of options and included the construction of a birth horoscope with an oral consultation,
the construction of a birth horoscope with exact mathematical calculations, a
graphological character analysis, or a graphological test for professional
advice. Many of the more populist astrologers dabbled in other forms of
occultism as well. They gave demonstrations of hypnosis and telepathy, occult
character analysis, and occult techniques of healing.
That the "new worldview" movements, including the occult,
proved remarkably adaptable to the modern marketplace did not escape
contemporary notice. In a passage that might as well have applied to the occult
movement, one critic lampooned Anthroposophy thus:
“What is Anthroposophy? It is the department store of all ... disguised
religions, for all social positions and professions, all sexes, all ages. You
are a doctor? We carry four bodies and a few intermediate stages. You are a
philosopher? Please, please, an infinitely rich stock, 253 world views.... You
are a historical researcher? Please, go to the third floor: past and future
times.
You are an optimist? Please, check in with the woman dressed in white in our
basement department for reincarnation. A pessimist? It's not so bad. Please,
check in with the woman dressed in black in our unrivalled department for
reincarnation, located in the basement....
A poor writer? Yes, yes, hard times for the press. Well, we always have
quite a few newspapers and a book press; perhaps there is something to be done.
But, of course, my lady. We have an especially carefully run department for
new, inconsolable widows. You are a carpenter? ... A noble profession ...
Christ's father ... let's see what we can do for you.... Ah, honorable privy councillor, you are a politician and businessman? One
moment please. Take a club chair and a Waldorf. You know, of course, about the
director and the English minister of education ... yes, really excellent
international connections ... there comes our department head for the
tripartite division of the social organism.”
This satire captured an important facet of German high modernity: the
new worldview movements whose proliferation was integral to the genesis of this
modern age owed their success not least to their adherents' adaptability to the
mass marketplace, symbolized here by the department store. In this, the occult
was no exception. If the many clubs and rural retreats added up to an occult
public, the many presses, mail-order businesses, department stores, schools,
and individual providers catering to this public added up to a vibrant occult
marketplace. Indeed, occultists' emphasis on achieving satisfaction in this
world rather than the next was well suited to the offerings of the modern
marketplace and its ability to cater to the ethic of "personal
satisfaction."
Discussion of the German occult movement however, has focused almost
exclusively on the supposedly occult roots of National Socialism. In their
effort to locate these roots other scholars have been particularly assiduous in
investigating Ariosophy, a Theosophical offshoot.
Although these studies have turned up a wealth of interesting information about
Ariosophy, they have tended to obscure the history of
mainstream German/European Theosophy-a much larger, at least equally
influential, and certainly more sociopolitically
diverse movement.
To put it bluntly, Theosophy complicates our view of the occult reform
culture in fruitful ways. Too often, historians have seen this reformist milieu
in terms of what came later, trawling it continuously for signs of liberalism
and proto-Fascism. Valuable as this scholarship has been for our understanding
of Nazism, it has often misread signs of a thriving reformist culture with
political leanings that defy easy categorization. Theosophy is a case in point,
for although it did produce Ariosophy, it was also an
important site for reframing traditional liberal ideas around modern occult
ones.
Understood as a political tradition not easily reducible to social or
economic factors, liberalism in its classical form rested on a belief in the
inevitability of progress, an emphasis on the sanctity and central importance
of the individual, a hostility to any church claiming possession of an absolute
truth, and a socially integrative vision of a coming classless society in which
citizens would enjoy equal rights before the law. In late-nineteenth-century
Germany, as rights, pacifism, clothing reform, prison reform,
antivivisectionism, vegetarianism, and the Free India movement.
In Britain, where the Theosophical movement was particularly strong,
Theosophists found a variety of political homes, from left-wing feminism and
socialism in the late nineteenth century to right-wing fascism in the 1920’s
and 193o’s as we will see in the following lectures focusing on the occult
revival in the UK.
Early Theosophists understood themselves to belong to a spiritual vanguard
dedicated to the cultural renewal of modern life on an occult basis. Critical
of their era's rampant materialism and spiritual poverty, Theosophists sought
to create a so-called "sixth root race," or universal brotherhood,
that would live in full cognizance of humanity's spiritual nature and
incorporate people from around the world.
Drawing on the popularity of Social Darwinian thought, Theosophical
doctrine mixed biological and spiritual notions of race in an often incoherent
manner. Theosophists could insist that the race to which one belonged had
primarily to do with one's degree of spiritual maturity, yet at the same time
claim that such biologically understood "races" as the North Indian
Aryans had achieved a particularly high degree of spiritual maturity.
Considerations of race, moreover, could enter the Theosophical milieu in other
guises. Rudolf Steiner, for instance, often claimed that white Europeans had
achieved a higher level of spiritual perfection than the African, Asian, or
Jewish races. Sometimes, he even went so far as to claim that in the grand
cycle of spiritual evolution, the Germanic race had advanced the furthest. At
other times and with comparable frequency, however, Steiner reiterated the core
spiritual unity of all the world's peoples.
Ariosophists, however, the most
important exemplars of Theosophical occultism in the voelkisch
mode, rested on the thinking and writing of the Austrian Guido von List, who
had made a name for himself in the 1870’s as a writer of fantasy novels about a
glorious Teutonic past, and read key Theosophical works.
Relying in part on a series of clairvoyant visions received at the
supposed ruins of ancient Teutonic battles, he began to imagine an ancient
religion called Wotanism. By 1908, his fantasies
extended backwards to a Teutonic past in which an Aryan priesthood presided
over a racially homogeneous society, and forwards to an ideal future in which
Germans would live once more in a state of total race purity. Through
publications and the founding of the Guido von List Society in 1908, he drew a
following among voelkisch groups all over
German-speaking Europe. The writings of his followers may have introduced Adolf
Hitler to new varieties of political racism.
Links between the Ariosophical milieu and
early National Socialism bring up the question of just what Ariosophy
and Theosophy did and did not share, beginning at the most superficial level
with the movements' names. Coined in 1915 by Joerg Lanz
von Liebenfels, one of List's most important
followers, Ariosophy played on the term Theosophy.
In the preface to the Handbuch der Ariosophy (Handbook of Ariosophy,
1931-32), for instance, the publisher Herbert Reichstein noted Ariosophists' support for such occult practices as mind
reading, clairvoyant vision, and prophecy. These "Kabbalograms,"
he claimed, would help customers answer such weighty questions as whom to marry
or whether and when to have a child. Ariosophy and
Theosophy were also united in invoking the occult knowledge of spiritual
masters. According to Ariosophical lore, occult
knowledge belonged exclusively to an elite priesthood, a clear echo of the
Theosophical concept of a Great White Brotherhood. But behind these
similarities lay an important difference based in Ariosophists'
rejection of the Theosophical interpretation of occult knowledge.
Whereas mainstream Theosophists believed that the main purpose of the Great
White Brotherhood was to share its occult knowledge with humanity in spite of
giving each ‘race its place; without limits to race, religion, or sex, for Ariosophists, occult knowledge was a tool for erecting a
racially pure social order.
Theosophists and Ariosophists however, on
occasion sought out the same spiritual gurus. Ariosophist
Seiling (calling himself a Kathar),
patronized the mystic Alois Mailander, whose other
disciples included Franz Hartmann and Wilhelm HubbeSchleiden,
neither of whom belonged to the Ariosophical milieu.
So Theosophists and Ariosophists moved indeed in the
same social circles without bothering too much about their movements'
ideological differences. Or when List's Die Bilderschrift
der Ario-Germanen (The picture-writing of the
Ario-Germans) appeared in 1910, Franz Hartmann praised it in his Theosophical
periodical.
Yet significant is the fact that voelkisch groups
that did make use of Theosophical concepts did not absorb the Theosophical cult
of the self or or a practical sense for universal
brotherhood to any great degree. Rather, they appropriated Theosophy's
invocation of an idealized past and cosmic scheme of racial evolution in order
to underpin their developing interest in imagining a new social order based on
nationalist grounds.
Cultural affinities between occultism and members of the Nazi
party under Hitler were less than the average percentage of the population that
were interested in related subjects in 1930’s Germany. And any affinities that
were there with some in Hitlers National Socialist Party, these affinities
never translated into a sociopolitical alliance of occultists with the state.
Just the opposite in fact, the Nazi regime and the occult movement is one of
escalating hostility. Like so many before them, state officials after 1933
tended to see the occult movement as a dangerous force of antiquated
superstition whose charismatic proponents threatened to lead the public astray.
Plus more so, saw the occult movement as a menace that promoted a corrosive
individualism and antithetical to the Nazi worldview. Hess's predilection for Waldorfschools (founded by Rudolf Steiner) and Astrology,
in fact, became a tool for casting him as mentally ill in May 1941, when he
took it upon himself to parachute into Britain and attempt to end the war on
the western front. A public relations disaster for Germany, his
"treason" was blamed on the pernicious influence of his astrologers
and rapidly became an excuse for a brutal crackdown on the German occult
movement more generally. Hans Frank, who was the leading jurist of the Nazi
party and attended the meeting with Hitler following Hess's flight, reported
how Hitler castigated the astrologers who had manipulated him into action. It
was high time, Hitler insisted, to rid Germany of such superstitious
riffraff."
In fact the Nazi’s hostility to the occult movement achieved its
institutional form first in the Sicherheitsdienst
(SD-the security service) and later under the umbrella of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA-the Reich security main
office).
An SS officer named Kolrop assumed charge of
a special desk dedicated to monitoring sects, including occult ones. Germans
with ties to the occult movement were institutionally defined as sectarians, a
distinction they shared with Mormons, Christian Scientists, Methodists,
Baptists, Quakers, Seventh Day Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Whereas the
Christian sects were officially classified as religious ones, however,
occultists who adhered to Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Rosicrucianism, Ariosophy, astrology, the teachings of Bo Yin Ra, Mazdaznan, New Thought, and piritualism
were considered-along with Freemasons-to be members of “worldview sects.
In the eyes of Nazi officials, this was a stubbornness that turned
sects into a distinct barrier to the creation of a united Volksgemeinschaft.
The projects pursued by the SD and RSHA were varied. An RSHA program
description drawn up circa 1939 listed a representative spectrum of goals for a
statistical study of sects on which Kolrop’s team was
to embark. The team would monitor meetings for any communist and pacifist
elements that might be at work and gather information to aid the eventual
dissolution of sects altogether. This information, in fact, was to result in
the publication of a special reference work to help police outposts coordinate
their response to local sectarian activity. Accompanying this reference work
would be a series of special reports on individual sects like the Seventh Day
Adventists and two spiritualist groups known as the Gottesbund
Tanatra (Tanatra
association of God) and the Bund der Kdmpfer ffir Glaube und Wahrheit (Association of fighters for faith and truth).
Kolrop codified these efforts
into a list of the top ten dangers that occult and other religious sects like
Theosophy and Anthroposphy as sects posed to the Nazi
state, Kolrop finally came out with a simple
declaration: sectarian activity threatened the Volksgemeinschaft merely by
promoting an alternative worldview; it thus encouraged disunity in the Third
Reich. In other words, it was not so much that members of sects were seen as
political opponents of Nazism, but that their adherence to an independent
worldview-one distinct from National Socialism-necessarily defined them as
resisting the will of the state. This resistance, both to giving up their own
worldview and accepting the National Socialist one, was at the most basic level
what cast them as ideological foes of the Third Reich.
Although the SD and the RSHA lumped all sects together as ideologically
suspect, they did not thereby assume that all sects menaced the Volksgememschaft in the same way. As it turned out, police
observers detected many different ways in which sectarians refused allegiance
to the new order. jehovah’s Witnesses, for instance,
were persecuted particularly for their refusal to give the German salute, swear
the German oath, or perform army service. Members of occult groups may
have participated in this type of refusal, but it was probably not these
failings that landed them on the Nazi blacklist; the documents suggest that
instead it was two specific transgressions that earned occult groups the
epithet staatsfeindlich. A transgression concerned
occultists’ alleged ability to mesmerize and manipulate the masses. As one
report put it, occultists “hypnotized” the masses with spiritualist mischief (Unfug) and poisoned their minds with medieval
superstitions.
This latter transgression put occultists in the same class as
Freemasons. Sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who attracted older women and
simple people from the lowest classes, in contrast, seemed more benign.
Occultists thus rated the same danger level as Freemasons because they
were perceived as offering a worldview whose popularity among intellectuals
gave it a dangerous cultural authority with the masses.
Such inconsistent views on the dangers posed by occult sects revealed tensions
in the Nazi state’s attitudes toward the occult, tensions with which officials
in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany had already struggled (I pointed this out in a
link I posted before).
Nazi observers could not grasp what was so compelling about occult
leaders like the voelkisch spiritualist Joseph
Weissenberg. Able to see occultists only as unruly dissidents from the dominant
ideology, Nazi observers thus were forced to attribute mysterious powers to the
very occultists they sought to expose as charlatans. Informed by numerical
proof such as this, those looking out from the SD and RSHA at the spiritual
landscape of Nazi Germany in the late 1930s were alarmed at the rapid sectarian
spread following the seizure of power in 1933. Searching for the underlying
causes of this growth, the officials of the SD and RSHA were inclined to accuse
organized Protestantism for failing to attract believers and thus forcing those
with strong religious urges to turn elsewhere for spiritual fulfillment.
An anonymous report dated January 1937, for instance, lamented the
dismal legal tools available to wage the war against occultism. Occult
activities, the report’s author claimed, escaped state action because of legal
loopholes that no one had yet bothered to close. Although such activities
stupefied and confused the public and promoted non-Nazi and non-Germanic
thinking, the author pointed out, they were neither Marxist nor Jewish and thus
remained without penalty. To rectify this dangerous situation, the author
recommended that at the very least legal measures be enacted against literature
written from an astrological, characterological, or occult perspective.
Eventually, the regime not only censored occult publications but also
embarked on a much more sweeping series of operations against occult activities
in general. These actions came in two great waves, the first in 1937, the
second in 1941. An official decree in July 1937 dissolved Freemasonic lodges,
Theosophical and Anthroposophical circles, and related groups throughout
Germany. But it was in 1941, in the wake of Hess’s flight to Britain, that this
was enforched.
Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the SD, revealed the extent of a police
response in a June 1941 report on the secret actions pending against the occult
movement. The justification for this crackdown, he explained, was simple: “In
the current fateful struggle of the German people, it is necessary to maintain
the spiritual as well as physical health of both the individual and the entire
Volk: “Occult teachings were once again declared illegal, as they had been in
1937, and all occultists were declared “parasites” on the Volksgemeinschaft.
But this time, the ban was accompanied by a host of police measures.
Police were ordered to shut down any presses printing occult materials,
to confiscate any publications they found there, and to arrest all astrologers,
occultists, spiritualists, prophets, faith healers, Christian Scientists, Anthroposophists, Theosophists, Ariosophists,
and adherents of any similar creeds. Detainees were either to be sent to concentration
camps or put to work on useful projects. The crackdown, which was to go into
effect on 9 June 1941, also required local police stations to submit detailed
reports on their actions and the state of occult activities in their districts
within a week.
An irony embedded in this development was that it occurred under the
aegis of police chief Himmler, who in his more private moments, as I pointed
out below, was inclined to maintain a somewhat more open attitude toward
specific occult practices. Like many figures before him, figures of an utterly
different political persuasion, Himmler dearly could not resolve the issue
consistently.
When Hitler rose to power in 1933, occult life was indeed flourishing
in Germany. As Wolfgang von Weisl observed acerbically
in a 1933 essay: “Today, occultism-Anthroposophy, Theosophy, spiritualism,
parapsychology, astrology, and their accompaniments-has taken the place of
monism and become the science of the half educated as well as the Ersatz-church
of the uneducated.” Weisl saw this not only as a
German phenomenon, but more broadly as a European one. The thousands of men and
women who followed the spiritualist leader Weissenberg near Berlin were of the
same ilk as those others who made the pilgrimage to the Austrian town of Graz,
the “Mecca of Spirits,” to consult the mediums Frieda Weissl
and Maria Silbert, or those who took the train to
visit yet other occult virtuosos like a certain Mr. Vlcek
in Prague or Rudi Schneider in Paris. These were the men and women who, who read
the dozens of occult periodicals that appeared in the German press, who
attended the hundreds of lectures and demonstrations sponsored by Theosophical,
Anthroposophical, spiritualist, and parapsychological circles throughout
Europe.
If Weisl’s picture of a broad European stage
upon which all manner of occultists performed for cosmopolitan audiences
reflected the situation in 1933, it was a portrayal he would have been forced
to alter just a few months later since almost immediately following the Nazi seizure
of power, a gathering wave of official hostility engulfed the fifty-year-old
occult movement.
Although initially some groups that had been active before the seizure
of power continued their programs and a few new groups sprang up, decrees
issued from 1935 onward and the police actions that accompanied them eventually
forced most occultists underground.
Berlin’s Zentralbibliothek der okkulte
Weltliteratur (Central library for occult world
literature) was a typical example of an older group that remained viable in the
early years of the Third Reich. Continuing its pre-1933 tradition, the library
sponsored a biweekly lecture series under the direction of Joseph Stoll. The
roster for the fall Of 1937 included the medical doctor Walter Kraesner speaking on “Magic in Today’s World”, and the
philosopher Johannes Maria Verweyen giving a talk on
Christian mystical phenomena in light of parapsychology.
While groups like the Zentralbibliothek der okkulte Welditeratur carried on
with such activities after 1933, new groups emerged to join them. Hanns-Maria Clobes, for instance,
managed to establish the Archiv fuer
Reinkarnation (Archive for reincarnation) in Leipzig
in the mid-1930’s. This project demonstrated the wide extent of occult activity
throughout Germany through 1937. Representatives from Theosophical,
Anthroposophical, spiritualist, astrological, parapsychological, and other
occult circles eagerly contributed material for Clobes’s
archive.
But while groups like the Zentralbibliothek
and individuals like Clobes and Schurig continued to
sound pre-1933 themes, other parts of the occult movement began to display
signs of nazification. The Esoterische
Studiengesellschaft (Esoteric study group) in
Leipzig, for example, which continued to meet much as it had before the Nazi
seizure of power, sponsoring frequent public lectures on characterology,
chirology, graphology, and occultism, showed signs that it had made adjustments
to the new realities of Nazi Germany. A promotional pamphlet published in 1936
closed by declaring the group’s solidarity with Hitler’s antimaterialism,
on the one hand, and aggressive nationalism, on the other.
Antimaterialism, of course, had and still
is a standard feature of Theosophical groups for decades, but the mention of
nationalism was decidedly new. Theosophical groups, both within Germany and
out, had generally espoused a robust internationalism and commitment to
universal brotherhood. Perhaps, however, this closing declaration of solidarity
was little more than window dressing, an opportunistic accommodation to the new
regime.
Although such attempts to nazify were not always cosmetic, even
occultists genuinely enthusiastic about the new regime found it difficult to
earn official sanction. In 1935, for example, the Ariosophist
Ernst Issberner-HaIdane published his book Arisches Weistum (Aryan wisdom).
It included chapters on spiritualism, astrology, clairvoyance, telepathy, and
chiromancy, all of which he pitched as forms of ancient Germanic practice.
Consistent with his title, Issberner-Haldane took
care to voice not only his wish that the occult sciences serve the cause of
National Socialism, but also the opinion that Jews belonged to a lower race and
that the witch burnings of the Middle Ages had been a crime against the German
people.52 Despite its enthusiastic anti-Semitism and narrow German nationalism,
however, Arisches Weistum
did not fare well among official observers. When the book ended up in police
hands in 1935, its reader expressed skepticism about the Nazi merits of the text,
which he judged to be much closer to Anthroposophy-well on its way to being
labeled officially staatsfeindlich-than National
Socialism. The text’s primary threat, the policeman concluded, was that
it might be spreading false information about the racial history of Germany. In
other words, the Nazi regime of the mid-1930s remained officially suspicious of
occultists’ motives and skeptical of their Nazi credentials.
Nor was it only bureaucrats who regarded such nazification
efforts by occultists with a suspicious eye. In 1935, Ernst Pistor,
editor of the anti-Semitic periodical Judenkenner
(Jew-connoisseur), published a short piece detailing the recent crackdown in
Saxony on the Leipzig branch of the Mazdaznan sect. Pistor noted with satisfaction that despite members’
attempts to “nazify” themselves after 1933 by draping their temple with
swastikas and filling it with “Heil Hitlers!” the Saxon police had not been
fooled; instead, the police had rightly discerned that Mazdaznan
was nothing more than a mask for international Jewry. Using anti-Semitic slurs
like this, Pistor concluded that the state had been
perfectly justified in banning Mazdaznan.
In 1935, the Horpena joined Mazdaznan on a national blacklist, followed a year later by
the Gottesbund Tanatra and
Gnosis. Occult publishing enterprises were shut down as well. In May 1937
several astrological journals, including Astrale Warte, were banned in Berlin. Soon, most occult journals
had suffered a similar fate.
Restrictive policies like these, of course, did not necessarily
translate into the immediate cessation of occult activities, as the official
police files show. A telegram to the main office of the Gestapo in Berlin in
1935 noted that despite the ban the Weissenberg sect was still active around Frankfurt/Oder
and even surreptitiously publishing its periodical Johannes Botschaft.
The persistence shown by Weissenberg’s followers was mirrored in case after
case as occultists simply moved their meetings, trade, and beliefs underground.
And police files continued to record their transgressions. A 1939 report to the
Gestapo office in Dresden, for instance, noted that a member of the banned
spiritualist group Horpena had been arrested.
Similarly, the Gottesbund Tanatra,
a spiritualist circle, appeared regularly in the files of the SD as a group
whose members refused to cease their activities.
A police raid in 1940 on a villa in Kirschlag
Linz revealed a covert Anthroposophical school with daily lectures,
discussions, and exercises.
And despite the ban on astrological publications, a report prepared by the
German propaganda ministry in 1939 noted that three astrological newspapers
published out of Leipzig, Dresden, and Erfurt were still in circulation, each
with a print run of a few hundred to a few thousand copies.
The propaganda ministry’s files also contained a report on a Professor
W. A. Christiansen, who was still giving lectures with titles like “A Review of
Mysterious Forces” in the summer after Hess’s flight to Britain. Christiansen
claimed that he had even performed his “anti-occult” show several times for
such Nazi groups as Kraft durch Freude
(Strength through joy), an association for German workers. Indeed,
Christiansen’s desperate attempt to save his occult livelihood by proffering
whatever Nazi credentials he could muster epitomized the situation in which all
German occultists found themselves after 1933. Categorized as ideological
enemies of the Reich, for reasons as varied as their internationalism or
mystical obscurantism, occultists were forced into a criminal underworld.
An example is an the above mentioned exponent of the liberal wing of Lebensphilosophie, Verweyen born
to a Catholic family in 1883, he finished doctoral work in philosophy in 1905
and then, like so many of his contemporaries, embarked on a period of intense
personal exploration. He visited Theosophical circles, immersed himself in the
works of Nietzsche and Wagner (like Steiner, at least Nietze),
dabbled in monism, embraced Lebensreform and
vegetarianism, and became a poet, composer, and a pacifist. In the midst of all
this, he also found time to finish his habilitation in philosophy in 1908.
Active in the Theosophical Liberal-Katholische
Kirche (Liberal-Catholic Church), he extolled Krishnamurti, calling his teaching “a message for all, to
the entire world-and yet, oddly enough, a message for none, that is, not a
message to be accepted ... mechanically, slavishly by each person, without
thereby hindering [Krishnamurti’s] true intention...
Whatever the byways he had traversed, Verweyen’s
interests and activities clearly tended to the ecumenical, pacifistic, and even
anarchical, interests and activities from which his occult predilections were
inextricable. This was also what landed him on a Nazi blacklist in 1934, when
the regime forced him to give up his chair in philosophy at the University of
Bonn and earned him constant surveillance and harassment from the regime over
the next several years. By 1939, Verweyen had joined
an anti-Fascist circle in Wiesbaden; by 1941, he was under arrest; and by 1945,
he had died in the extermination camp of Bergen-Belsen.
Verweyen and also the stage clairvoyant Hanussen paid for their transgressions with their lives a
price for their crimes that most astrologers, clairvoyants, hypnotists, and
other occult seers in Germany did not have to pay.
That occult and voelkisch texts emanated in
some cases from the same presses makes it tempting to overplay the importance
of the occult-voelkisch publishing enterprise a
subject that has been milked by a number of authors making occult claims about
National Socialism. In fact the only affinity that complicated the Nazi’s
hostility of the occult, from Ariosophy to Theosophy,
to Anthroposophy and so on, showed up with health practices and programs, some
of which tapped the same currents of Lebensreform as
the occult movement. In the 1920s, a deep antagonism toward conventional
medicine and the strong conviction that modern life had damaged their souls and
bodies led many Germans of all political persuasions, including fascism, to
embrace nature cures, folk remedies, vegetarianism, fresh-air exercise, Anthroposophic medicine, and other, similar practices. Germans
committed to both National Socialism and Lebensreform,
indeed, dedicated themselves to recreating a life in harmony with the laws of
nature and biology.
Such naturalism was part and parcel of the Nazi quest for a “sanitary
utopia” in which pioneering work in public health-an antismoking campaign, a
concern with food additives, and a “war on cancer”-was joined to genocide.
To appease the Nazi’s the Anthroposophical society (before it was forbidden in
Germany after Hess failed to make a peace deal with England) even went so far
as to pressure its Jewish members to leave, which most of them did but not
without bitter feelings. Although Hitler, despised occultists or the
belief in a ‘spiritual world’, two members of the wider Nazi leadership did cultivate
some connections to the occult milieu, Rudolf Hess interested in Anthroposphy and naturopathy , plus Heinrich Himmler with
an interest in Astrology and known to have read the Baghavat
Gita as I will next describe in detail. But then again this would come to the
same average population percentage that also later (including today) has an
interest in the ‘esoteric’. Take for example President Reagan who had his
schedule based on horoscopes provided by his wife and so on.
Hess, follower of homeopathy and proponent of organic food, followed a
strict diet. And besides being a protector of Waldorf education, also
Astrological horoscopes and magnetic therapies were regular features of his
life. Hess’s predilection for such pursuits, in fact, became a tool for casting
him as mentally ill in May 1941, although send by Hitler, parachuted into Britian in an attempt to end the war on the western front.
A public relations disaster for Germany, it was blamed on the pernicious
influence of Hess’s occult inclinations and rapidly became an excuse for a
brutal crackdown on the German occult movement.
It was high time, Hitler had reportedly insisted, to rid Germany of
such superstitious riffraff. Whatever the truth of this private account, it is
a matter of public record that the regime’s chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels
mounted a public campaign to save face for Germany by painting Hess as a
lunatic occultist. Immediately after the failure of Hess’s flight became known.
In fact like Hitler, Goebbels revealed his utter contempt for all things
occult. To him, they were nothing more than a superstitious throwback to
the Middle Ages and a plague on the Nazi social body. But like Hess,
Himmler developed an interest in natural healing and was very critical of
modern hospitals and university-trained physicians.
Intestinal spasms had plagued Himmler and refused to improve under the
care of regular doctors. In desperation, Himmler had finally consulted a
naturopathic practitioner named Felix Kersten at some point in the 1920’s. When
Kersten’s treatment afforded him some relief, Himmler became a convert to
alternative medicine. Once war broke out in 1940, Kersten was trapped in
Germany and, despite his Finnish citizenship, soon found himself pressed
unwillingly into service as Himmler’s full-time doctor. Himmler’s
interests in herbalism, homeopathy, mesmerism, and Biochemie
(holistic medicine), in fact, led him to establish a special garden in the
concentration camp of Dachau, and allow experiments with naturopathic medicines
on his slave laborers, for example arnica for burns (this can be found in the Nuerenberg trials).
Kersten’s memoirs revealed, that Himmler also consulted one or two
astrologers during the war, although apparently without much faith in their
predictive powers. Moreover, although Himmler had also expressed a deep
antipathy toward Catholicism, the religion of his Bavarian youth, this by no
means meant that he had no religious inclinations. Kersten’s memoirs showed
that Himmler in fact believed in some form of reincarnation and was
sufficiently enthused about Oriental religions to read the Bhagavad Gita. The
most dramatic link between the occult and any top Nazi official was with
certainty Wiligut, who had served as an Austrian
officer during the Great War before discovering around 192o his special talent
for clairvoyantly recovering knowledge about ancient Germanic history, a
knowledge he claimed by virtue of his blood relation to a long chain of
sages. By the early 1920’s, Wiligut had become
convinced that Jews, Freemasons, and the Catholic Church-whom he (and also
Theosophists and Anthroposophists ) blamed for
Austria and Germany’s defeat in 1918-were persecuting him. Yet in spite of this
rather alarming symptom, September of 1933, Himmler (or did he initially not know
of this because Willigut presented himself under an
invented name) appointed Wiligut, under the pseudonym
Karl Maria Weisthor, to head the “Department for Pre-
and Early History,” one of the many subsidiary’s of
the SS Rasse-und Siedlungshauptamt
(Race and settlement main office). Two years later then, Himmler consulted ‘Weisthor’ even for symbolic and aspects. For example ‘Weisthor’, contributed to the design of the infamous Totenkopfring, or deat’s head
ring, worn by the SS, and also persuaded Himmler in 1935 to make the Wewelsburg castle the ceremonial home of the SS, imbuing it
with an aura of ancient Germanic authenticity. But by 1939, Wiligut’s
star had waned and he was forcibly retired by Himmler from the SS.
Himmler’s astrological dablings were reported
in detail in 1968 by Wilhelm Wulff and I reported about this last year on my
website. What the cases of Hess and Himmler reveal that particularly
fringe medical practices, and in the case of Himmler’s dependence on an
alternative healer accompanied his willingness to sample the services of the
astrologer Wulff and read the Bhagavad Gita, a text central to the Theosophical
portion of the occult movement. On the other hand an assessment that
other top Nazis echoed, Martin Bormann, chief of the party chancellery, made
his antipathy to occultism perfectly dear in a secret report issued in May
1941. The report linked superstition, faith in miracles, and astrology together
as channels for the distribution of propaganda hostile to the state. Occultists,
in his opinion, were using medieval methods to sow discontent among the masses.
Borman, Goebels, and also Rosenberg expanded this to
mean Ariosophy and other groups attempting to
“Germanize” Christianity and others who rejected Christianity as unsalvageable
and instead quested after a Germanic neo-paganism. Activists in the voelkisch milieu by the end of the first WW agreed on the
need for German renewal but disagreed, often intensely, on the appropriate
means by which to effect it. Guido von List saw the occult as a tool for
Germanic salvation, other voelkisch leaders did not.
The criticisms with which this latter group assailed occultists, in fact,
eventually found their way into the rationale behind the Nazi regime’s
persecution of the entire German occult movement.
During the 1920s and early 1930s, the voelkisch
movement included several theorists who lumped occultists with Freemasons and
maligned both groups as participants in an international conspiracy against
German culture. For these theorists, one of the worst crimes of the Freemasons
had been to promote a dangerous cosmopolitanism that led to Jewish emancipation
in the nineteenth century. Such views became part of official ideology in 1933,
when Hitler came to power. Although at this point Freemasonic circles in
Germany counted only seventy-six thousand members, the regime nevertheless
moved against the Freemasons as important ideological enemies of the Third
Reich. The strong international ties and the hierarchical, hermetic nature of
the lodge structure, official ideology held, made Freemasonry inimical to the
ideals of the 11 national community (Volksgemeinschaft) ). In order to
understand the official Nazi response to occultism, thus, it is also necessary
to understand the voelkisch response to Freemasonry,
with which occultism was persistently linked in the Nazi worldview.
For example Alfred Rosenberg, who later became head of the party’s
Foreign Affairs Department during the Third Reich, in publications like Die
Spur des Juden im Wandel der Zeiten (The tracks of
the Jew through the ages) and Das Verbrechen der Freimaurerei (The crime of Freemasonry) 1921, Rosenberg
early on had developed the notion that Germany had been undermined by an
international conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons.
He argued repeatedly that Freemasons were natural conspirators and the
born enemies of the German people. Not content to limit his views to books and
longer essays, Rosenberg also took his message to the popular press shortly
after the first World War. In a piece published in 1921 in Voelkischer
Beobachter, for instance, Rosenberg accused Freemasons of viewing Orientals,
Negroes, and mulattos as their “brothers.” Such attitudes, he believed, made
Freemasons and Jews allies against Germandom.
He reiterated this message in 1930 when he published his famous tome
The Myth of the Twentieth Century, which claimed that it was thanks to
Freemasons’ “preaching of ‘humanitarianism’ and the doctrine of human equality
[that] every Jew, Negro or Mulatto can become a citizen of equal rights in a
European State.” This humanitarianism, he continued, had also spawned the
“pornographic journalist,” the new practice of racial intermarriage, and the
stock exchange.
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