The German Kaiser's Confident P.1

Until the end of his life in the Netherlands, the German Kaiser daily held court, and read all major newspapers following developments elsewhere. One of his closest alleys in Germany was General Ludendorff, and the German Kaiser as did Ludendorff initially put high hope of a promised co-operation and re-establishment some of the monarchists power in Germany once he came to power. As history knows, these hopes were dashed no later than 1933, when Hitler indeed took over.

Ludendorff's historical role as a radical German nationalist after World War I is more significant than previously assumed. After World War I, German "radical nationalism" advocated national resurrection, called for a return to traditional pre-modern culture and values, exalted war, distrusted internationalism, and was racist. Until his death in 1937, Ludendorff and his movement served as a radical nationalist alternative to Hider and the NSDAP. Considerable interaction existed between his movement, Ludendorff’s (pro German Kaiser) Tannenbergbund, and Nazism.

Once securely in power the NSDAP, with some restrictions, permitted him to disseminate his propaganda for popular consumption, but because of his popularity among radical German nationalists, structural weaknesses in the Nazi state, and inconsistent implementation of policy, the Nazi regime had difficulty controlling his activities and those of his supporters. Ultimately, the regime recognized the Ludendorff movement. This dissertation argues that the NSDAP, despite several campaigns to control him and the Tannenbergbund, sought to accommodate Ludendorff, who served as a symbol of unity for the many factions within radical German nationalism.

Ludendorff like other neopagans, was an unknowing participant in a political contest between mainstream Religions and the Nazi regime. It may be coincidental interest in neopagan movements increased in 1935 when negotiations between for example the Church and the regime collapsed. In May 2003 by the way “Der Spiegel” published an interesting just released series of documents indicating that the Pope and Hitler had some sort of agreement that Catholic Church would not oppose him as long he did not attack the Church in Germany. When near the end of WWII, many years after the Pope and Rom knew about the extermination of the Jews, Hitler was about to turn now also against the Church, the Pope did a private exorcism on Hitler, as Der Spiegel revealed.

It may be coincidental interest in neopagan movements increased in 1935 when negotiations between for example the Church and the regime collapsed.

The Nazi regime took advantage of the situation, for neopaganism pressured the Catholic Church from below while the Nazi regime pressured it from above. 

activism threatened order and stability. Neopagan movements proved convenient scapegoats when anti-Catholic activism threatened social stability; they served as acceptable and harmless targets for those dissatisfied with Nazism. The neopagan groups, then, were valuable, since anti-Nazis could safely express their disapproval of Nazism by attacking neopaganism, and the Nazis could satisfy critics by restricting neopagan activity.

Historians have yet to investigate thoroughly the interesting topic of neopaganism in the Third Reich. It is clear that numerous neopagan groups existed at the time, with Ludendorff s movement and Jakob Wilhelm Hauer's German Faith Movement being the two most important examples. It also appears that Hauer's movement was the more popular of the two, and it enjoyed the patronage of high ranking Nazi officials and noteworthy radical nationalists. Historians as well as Germans at the time often confused Ludendorff’s and Hauer's movements, but there existed substantial differences between them. Hauer's movement acknowledged the authority of the Nazi regime, and the regime assimilated it more rapidly than it did Ludendorff s. There also existed a significant amount of competition between Hauer and Ludendorff. Clearly, historians must study in greater detail this unknown chapter in the history of the Third Reich, for we know little about those who followed neopagan beliefs, why they followed them, and how the Nazi regime cultivated and controlled neopaganism.

The emergence of the Ludendorffs' anti-Christian ideology paralleled the difficulties Christianity faced in Europe following World War I. The Ludendorffs' anti Christian rhetoric was reminiscent of the various anti-clerical movements that periodically arose in Europe. 'Meir neopaganism and glorification of the Volk was also grounded in the romantic movement of the nineteenth century. In these two legacies, the Ludendorffs combined the long anti-clerical tradition in European history with the modem notion of racist and chauvinist nationalism.

It is hard to predict what the Nazi regime intended for Christianity and neopaganism in Germany, but we can assume that the regime would have continued to encourage the proliferation of neopagan sects at the expense of Christianity, and we can assume that the regime wished to subordinate the Church to the state. Indeed, the conspicuous growth of neopagan activity in the first half of 1935 corresponded to a more aggressive and coercive Nazi stance in the regime's negotiations with the Catholic Church. Catholicism, or any other Christian denomination, endangered National Socialism. 

The social and political contradictions embodied by Ludendorff proved advantageous for Nazism. By 1937 the NSDAP, the Wehrmacht, and, to a lesser extent, German society accepted Ludendorffs ideology. In the regime and the Wehrmacht he had tacit allies who helped to legitimize and propagate Deutsche Gotterkenntnis. Those who sympathized with him and his ideology existed at all levels of the Nazi hierarchy. Although today he may be forgotten, and although his memorial shrine in Tutzing may be neglected, Erich Ludendorff was one of the most important Germans of the twentieth century.

 

Chasing conspiracies

Although Ludendorff's anti-Catholicism caused less damage to his movement in Protestant northern Germany than in the Catholic south, it nonetheless increased the visibility and acceptability of the NSDAP, which, compared to the Tannenbergbund, appeared to radical nationalists across Germany as a rational, pragmatic, and sane alternative to Ludendorffs movement. He became embroiled in numerous lawsuits initiated by angry victims of his diatribes and was often represented by Walter Luetgebrune, a prominent right-wing attorney who made his reputation defending in court members of the SA. (Bruce Campbell, The SA Generals and the Rise of Nazism (1998), 113.)

Nevertheless, the Nazi press continued to defend Ludendorff. It welcomed Ludendorff's revelation that Freemasons surrounded Germany with enemies even though the Masonic lodges, according to the Nazi press, were in the midst of a difficult struggle to rehabilitate themselves and regain their former popularity in Germany. The NSDAP itself occasionally attacked Freemasonry; during the Third Reich, the party sometimes accused officials of belonging to a lodge when it charged them with corruption.( Bimonthly report for June/July 1934. Deutschland-Bericht der Sopade, Erster Jahrgang 1934 (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Petra Nettelbeck, 1980), 235)

The Voelkischer Beobachter also continued to advertise Ludendorffs expose of Masonic secrets, his book “Destroying Freemasonry by Exposing its Secrets”. (Voelkischer Beobachter, October 23, 1929. BHStA, Sig Personen 2545)

The Masons quickly replied to Ludendorfrs accusations in order to prove their loyalty to the country, for German Masons took his ludicrous assault on Freemasonry seriously. The Bamburg lodge denied that it ever threatened him, arguing that it "has had nothing to do with Ludendorff in the past, has nothing to do with him now, and will have nothing to do with him in the future.” (Frankfurter Zeitung, November 1, 1928. BHStA, Sig Personen 2545)

Others demonstrated greater deference to Ludendorff, praising his leadership and heroism during World War I and blaming naive readers for believing his mistaken claims. (Carl Bonhoff, Droht der deutschen Freimaurerei Vernichtung? Eine Antwort an Erich Ludendorff , 1927, 3, 8.)

A few, however, refused to yield to Ludendorff. In November 1929, Graf Dohna, the former Grossmeister (Grand Master) of the largest Masonic lodge in Germany before World War I, sued Ludendorff for libel after Ludendorff accused the former Grand Master of deliberately starting World War I by plotting the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

In October 1928 when word leaked out that Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government in Nanjing had invited Ludendorff to reorganize the Chinese Army, he faced considerable derision in the press. One Catholic Center Party newspaper in Upper Silesia concluded, with a touch of irony, that Chiang's offer was a great opportunity for Ludendorff to become the leader of the "Yellow Horde."( Volksstimme, October 17, 1928. BHStA, Sig Personen 2545). 

In fact in spite of the Nazi’s soft stance towards S. Asia and especially Tibet (see the Tibet expedition mentioned in the SESN Editorial) Ludendorff and especially his wife, wrote many anti-Buddhist/Tibetan tracts, for example “Europa den Asiatenpriestern?” (Europe to the Asian Priests ?), indicating they did not only mean the Priests of the Catholic Church.

Another episode occurred in January 1929. Four years previously, an Austrian swindler named Tausand sought investors in Munich for his scheme to manufacture gold. He managed to defraud a number people, including, it was rumored, Ludendorff, although nobody was able to prove the allegation. It is possible that Tausand, in order to cheat wealthy industrialists, used Ludendorfrs name without the general's knowledge."' The Munich press, as reported by the National Liberal Manchener Neueste Nachrichten, a paper sympathetic to Hitler, understood that Ludendorff was interested in Tausand's discovery because the alchemist promised he would set aside a portion of his scheme's profits for nationalist purposes." Regardless of the truth of the accusation, his determination to unmask supranational conspiracies did him irreparable harm not only among the general German public but also among radical German nationalists.

In fact it was this interest of Ludendorff that Pauwels and Bergier in their “Morning of the Magicians” used as an excuse to claim the “Nazis” were interested in “Alchemie” that is in schemes of Tausand, the ancient gold-making trick promish.

For the Ludendorffs, a spider's web of fiendish conspiracy and counter-conspiracy enmeshed Germany. Shadowy figures and sinister cabals, which they called the Uberstaatliche Maechte (supranational powers), responsible for governing the world populated the Ludendorffs' universe. (In my conversations with Wilhelm Landig during the 1970’s he made frequent use of this same term “Uberstaatliche Maechte”)

Capitalists, Communists, Freemasons, and Jews freely mixed and mingled, at once competing against each other and joining for mutual benefit, always determined to crush individual nations and create an international community under their domination. The Ludendorffs had a simple Weltanschauung that blamed Germany's troubles, as well as the German Kaiser and Ludendorff's military failures and subsequent political ineffectiveness, on foreigners and a few traitorous Germans.

His emphasis on conspiracy to explain Germany's troubles after World War I pointed to a wider crisis of confidence in the country. There is great temptation for societies to blame conspiracies for the mysteries, scandals, humiliations, and difficulties they face, especially if these societies encounter extraordinarily severe political, social, and economic problems. In the 1920s and 1930s, Germany experienced such difficulties. Religious, political, economic, and scientific explanations were inadequate reassurances for Germans in the unstable years during the 1920s and 1930s. The crisis in confidence opened the door for the bizarre Weltanschauungen of the Ludendorffs and others like them, such as Streicher, Rosenberg, and Heinrich Himmler. For radical German nationalists these contrived explanations based on the notion of faceless conspiracies made sense; for them the history of Germany in the interwar years seemed inhumane, confusing, and arbitrary. Intangible economic developments had destroyed the German economy, social forces unleashed by World War I had destabilized German society.

 

Introduction: A Russian Connection

In this series of lectures I will discuss a number of early influences on the rise of Hitler and the early Nazi party.

Hitler's Secret "Protocols" P.1
The Protocols of the Wise Elders of Zion,  were not fabricated in Paris, but within Imperial Russia between April 1902 and August 1903. The earliest versions of the Protocols contain pronounced Ukrainian features, whereas later ones were given French overtones in order to lend them the appearance of credible accounts from abroad.

Hitler's Secret "Protocols" P.2
General Vladimir Biskupskil, who went on to collaborate closely with Hitler in the context of the Aufbau Vereinigung in postwar Munich, played a leading role in the Ukrainian Volunteer Army. "Conservative revolutionaries" in Imperial Germany and Russia established detailed anti-Western, anti-Semitic ideologies in the months leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution. The largely internally-orientated voelkisch model focused on alleged Germanic racial and spiritual superiority through a heightened capacity to negate the will heroically, whereas the more externally- fixated Russian version offered apocalyptic visions of concrete political struggle between Russians at the head of all Slavs and perceived Jewish world-conspirators.

Hitler’s Source P.1
The Protocols did provide anti-Semitic arguments that strongly influenced the ideology of the National Socialist movement, going through 33 editions by the time Hitler came to power and becoming the most widely-distributed work in the world after the Bible. The National Socialist regime did not reprint the Protocols after the outbreak of World War II, though, perhaps precisely due to the Protocols' parallels with both brutal National Socialist occupation policies in Eastern Europe and public pacification efforts domestically.

Hitler’s Source P.2
Anticipating Tsarist pretender Kirill's arrival in Germany, General Ludendorff worked to establish an intelligence service for Kirill in early April 1922. He asked Walther Nicolai, who had served him as the head of the German Army High Command Intelligence Service during World War one, to use his considerable experience and connections to establish a reliable pro-Kirill intelligence service for the struggle against Bolshevism.

The German Kaiser's Confident P.1
By 1937 the NSDAP, the Wehrmacht, and, to a lesser extent, German society accepted Ludendorffs ideology. In the regime and the Wehrmacht he had tacit allies who helped to legitimize and propagate Deutsche Gotterkenntnis. Those who sympathized with him and his ideology existed at all levels of the Nazi hierarchy. Although today he may be forgotten, and although his memorial shrine in Tutzing may be neglected, Erich Ludendorff was one of the most important Germans of the twentieth century.

The German Kaiser's Confident P.2
The Ludendorffs (now Hohe Warte) advocated a return to traditional rural German culture since they believed that the demands of modem capitalist society had tom the German people from the soil, causing them to forget their heritage and ensuring their submission to finance and industrial capital. The Ludendorffs' ideology paralleled similar intellectual developments among Conservative Revolutionaries.

The Ideologists and First Financiers of Hitler P.1
Before the establishment of the “Aufbau” Vereinigung in late 1920, the collaboration between Eckart and Rosenberg in the context of Eckhart’s Newspaper In Plain German.” Formed the crux of the fusion between voelkisch-redemptive German and White Russian world conspiratonial-apocalyptic anti-Semitic thought, where "positive" notions of Germanic spiritual and racial superiority fused with more negative visions of impending "Jewish Bolshevik" destruction supported by Jewish finance capitalists.

The Ideologists and First Financiers of Hitler P.2
By 1923, Hitler had thoroughly internalized Aufbau’s and the people around it, assertions, of the nature of socialism and its most aggressive variant Bolshevism as mere tools of Jewish finance capitalism to enslave European peoples…

Dietrich Eckart, Rosenberg, and the White Russian Influence on Nazi Ideology, P.1
The ensuing military conflagration, Eckart continued, had led to the destruction of Imperial Russia so that "Jewish Bolshevism" could take root there. He also warned that there would arise "from the Neva to the Rhine, on the bloody ruins of the previous national traditions, a single Jewish empire.

Dietrich Eckart, Rosenberg, and the White Russian Influence on Nazi Ideology, P.2
Hitler in his unpublished 1928 sequel to Mein Kampf, further expounded upon the Aufbau/Eckartian theme of the "Jewish Bolshevik" annihilation of the leading elements of Russian society as a precedent for further Jewish atrocities. He argued that "Jewry exterminated the previous foreign upper strata with the help of Slavic racial instincts."

The "Final" Solution Before WWII, P.1
Hitler continued to express a view of history whereby Jews pitted Germans and Russians against each other after 1923. As witnessed in his unpublished 1928 sequel to Mein Kampf. He argued of "the Jew's" drive to dominate the European peoples that he -methodically agitates for world war" with the aim of "the destruction of inwardly anti-Semitic Russia as well as the destruction of the German Reich. which in administration and the army still offered resistance to the Jew."

The "Final" Solution Before WWII, P.2
That which Jewry once planned against Germany and all peoples of Europe. this must (Jewry) itself suffer today, and responsibility before the history of European culture demands that we do not carry out this fateful separation (Schicksalstrennung) with sentimentality and weakness, but with clear, rational awareness and firm determination.” (Rosenberg 1941 press release dealing with his public assumption of the position of  State Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories.)

Early Nazis and the Mystical Connection P.1
Like the mystical inclined author Sergei Nilus, who had played a crucial role in popularizing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Vinberg viewed Jews as a satanic force.

Early Nazis and the Mystical Connection P.2
Hitler asserted that "liberalism, our press, the stock market, and Freemasonry" together represented nothing but "Instrument[s] of the Jews."

Early Nazis and the Mystical Connection P.3
By the time of Ludendorfrs death, Deutsche Gotterkenninis had become for Nazis a legitimate Weltanschauung. Ludendorff's vision of a totalitarian society unified in the face of external and internal threats was nearly identical to the Weltanschauung of Nazism.
 

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