The reality of Nazi involvement with the occult

This investigation intends to go beyond the sensationalist publications of the alleged Nazi’s and the occult that entered popular discourse after Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier came out with The Morning of the Magicians published  French in 1960. (1)

One reason for the persistence of beliefs about ‘Nazi occultism’ may be that it is tempting to see Nazism as an otherwise inexplicable eruption of evil whose origins must somehow be traced to shadowy and malevolent forces.(2)

Thus as Goodricke-Clarke confirmed, by the early 1960s, "one could now clearly detect a mystique of Nazism." A sensationalistic and fanciful presentation of its figures and symbols, shorn of all political and historical contexts" gained ground with thrillers, non-fiction books and films and permeated "the milieu of popular culture."(3)

To give some examples I start by mentioning three misrepresentations in Morning of the Magicians that in various forms found repetition in other books, Thule, Vril Lodge and Hitlers as an alleged medium.

Looming high in Morning of the Magicians is the Thule Society, yet in reality no one of the former Thule members or guests of the secret society besides Hess had any close contact with it after 1919. And even if they have had any contact, their own position inside the NSDAP party would have been too low to impose influence upon the way of the Nazi movement.

Hitler himself never attended any meeting and he always expressed himself as very critical and against anything related to the esoteric/occult.

The Thule Society was originally a German study group, whereby 'von' Sebottendorff used the Thule Society to promote his Munich lodge of the Germanenorden. The followers of the Thule Society were, by Sebottendorff's own admission, little interested in occultist theories, instead they were interested in racism and combating Jews and Communists. 

Himself a member of Thule Johannes Hering, in an unpublished "Beiträge zur Geschichte der Thule-Gesellschaft", typescript dated 21 June 1939, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, NS26/865, writes that the only occult element in Thule was Sebottendorff himself, and that this was contrary to what Thule intended to stand for. Sebottendorff  later was thrown out of Thule due to mismanagement.

One could also argue that 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.

The DAP line was predominantly one of extreme political and social nationalism, and not predominantly based on what in the Thule Society as such.

To back up their mythic creation of a Nazi - Vril Society Pauwels and  Bergier use as a reference a known scientist who wrote an article for a science fiction magazine.

Willy Ley was a German rocket engineer who had emigrated to the United States in 1937. In 1947, he published an article entitled "Pseudoscience in Naziland" in the science fiction magazine Astounding Science Fiction. He wrote that the high popularity of irrational convictions in Germany at that time explained how National Socialism could have fallen on such fertile ground. Among other pseudo-scientific groups he mentions one that looked for the Vril:"The next group was literally founded upon a novel. That group which I think called itself Wahrheitsgesellschaft—Society for Truth—and which was more or less localized in Berlin, devoted its spare time looking for Vril."

One of the first to discover (or at least publish) what Willi Ley was referring to is Peter Bahn who writes about it in his 1996 essay, "Das Geheimnis der Vril-Energie" ("The Secret of Vril Energy"). As Bahn is able to document,  the "Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft"  mentioned by Willi Ley,  revealed itself in a rare 1930 publication Vril. Die Kosmische Urkraft (Vril, the cosmic elementary power) written under the pseudonym "Johannes Täufer" and published by the  astrological publisher, Wilhelm Becker (in fat “Täufer” on obvious pseudonym might have been Becker himself). (4)

Others who investigated this came to the conclusion that the group if it ever existed did so only briefly and was of marginal importance in the German occult scene. It was neither registered (none detectable in official records) nor do the archives of Otto Wilhelm Barth Verlag make any mention of it.

There is no connection to Thule or/and to Nazi’s, this is pure invention on the part of Pauwels and Bergier, repeated in variations by other authors.

For a demonic influence on Hitler, Hermann Rauschning's Hitler Speaks is brought forward as a source, although most modern scholars do not consider Rauschning reliable.(5) Or as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke stated, "recent scholarship has almost certainly proved that Rauschning's conversations were mostly invented".(6)

Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945  published in April 2003, argues against the consensus that Nazism as a whole was either unrelated to Christianity or actively opposed to it.

He demonstrates that many participants in the Nazi movement believed that the contours of their ideology were based on a Christian understanding of Germany's ills and their cure. A program usually regarded as secular in inspiration - the creation of a racialist "peoples' community" embracing antisemitism, antiliberalism, and anti-Marxism - was, for these Nazis, conceived in explicitly Christian terms. His examination centers on the concept of "positive Christianity," a religion espoused by many members of the party leadership. He also explores the struggle the "positive Christians" waged with the party's paganists - those who rejected Christianity in toto as foreign and corrupting - and demonstrates that this was a conflict not just over religion, but over the very meaning of Nazi ideology itself.

Most recently, in a book that was released a week ago (June 20, 2003) Ambrus Miskolczy, Hitler’s Library (Central European University Press, 2003) addressed the question of Hitler's interest in ariosophical writings, particularly those of Guido von List and Lanz von Liebenfels (see e.g. xvii-xviii, 19-20, 83-84), but is generally skeptical of the notion that he was significantly influenced by them. In fact Historians have noted Hitler’s diatribes against occult sects and his contempt for aspiring esoteric prophets.(7)

In fact as we shall see below in spite of the popularity of the occult during the Nazi there are exceptionally few Nazi’s that showed an interest. In fact of the leading Nazi’s there was primarily only Rudolf Hess, and secondary Rosenberg and Himmler, who were at the same time also opposed to the occult. Among the mid-level administrators there  was  Walther Darré  who at times showed an interest in Biodynamic gardening. Thus when Biodynamic farmers and their supporters were arrested, Darré protested to Himmler and Heydrich, "despite a letter from Bormann, warning Darré that Hitler was behind the arrests." (8)

Not surprising there were also some occultists served the Nazi, until his disposition for example Karl Maria Wiligut worked for Heinrich Himmler, but he was a certified nut. Already institutionalized once in the 1920s he went mad again and was relieved of his duties although not before he was charged with investigating the proposals of another occultist, Edgar Julius Lang, one of Franz von Pappen’s speechwriters, who though that the SS should found a secret order to work toward a new Teutonic Holy Roman Empire.(9)

Other instances that are often quoted are the ‘cosmic ice theory’ of Hans Hörbiger and  Hermann Wirth’s tales of Atlantis and Aryans.(10)

There primarily was a great deal of friction and distrust between the Nazis and various branches of the occult: individual self-development was not a big National Socialist priority, Rudolph Hess’s traitorous flight to England was attributed by some to the lunacy of his astrologer, and plenty of important people were overtly hostile. Goebbels thought it was a superstitious throwback to the Middle Ages and Mathilde Ludendorff, a psychiatrist and the wife of the far-right general, played a big part in getting occultists—along with Jews, freemasons, and, if she had had her way, the Roman Catholic Church—labeled enemies of the Nazi state. (She argued that Helmuth von Moltke, whose wife was a follower of Steiner, had lost the Battle of the Marne because he had listened to his medium.) Prison, fines, and even death—three SS men executed Erik Jan Hanussen, a successful Viennese occult entrepreneur, after he “predicted” the Reichstag fire—faced occultists who stuck their heads out too far.

In fact, the suppression of esoteric organizations began very soon after the Nazis acquired governmental power. This also affected almost all volkisch and ariosophic organizations including: "One of the most important early Germanic racialists, Lanz von Liebenfels, had his writings banned in 1938 while other occultist racialists were banned as early as 1934."(11)

Since how important  and rooted the occult really was more generally so far remained an open question to date, this is something we take a closer look at next.

The current tendency of academics ist o look at a possible historical intersection between occultism and fascism as facilitated by and complicated by an intricate series of links and overlaps with two other social-cultural sectors, the Lebensreform milieu and the völkisch milieu.

Lebensreform or ‘lifestyle reform’ refers to an assortment of alternative movements which came to prominence in the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, including back to the land efforts and communal experiments, nutritional reform proposals, natural healing methods, vegetarian and animal protection societies, and related projects. The plethora of völkisch groups cultivated a mixture of Romantic nationalism, ethnic revivalism, anti-socialism and anti-capitalism, and generally promoted antisemitic and racist convictions as part of a hoped-for Germanic renewal. Historians Historians for some time have recognized the crossover among Lebensreform, völkisch, and occult circles, both in terms of ideology 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.and in terms of personnel, but there is little consensus on how to interpret or explain this factor.(12)

 

Lebensreform and the Völkisch-Occult

A first thing to note here is that presses (publ.) focusing exclusively on völkisch -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 völkisch. 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 völkisch -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.”

 

The supposedly occult roots of National Socialism

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 Kämpfer für 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 had already been struggled with during the Wielmine period.

See case study: The German Occult Scene at the Beginning of the Nazi Era.

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. 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.

 

Hitler, Hess and Himmler

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 interrest 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 Britain 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 VoeIkischer 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.

 

1) For a representative  sample of sensationalist publications that came in the wake of the English translation of Morning of the Magicians,  see Jean-Michel Angebert, The Occult and the Third Reich (New York 1974); Louis Pauwels  and Jacques Bergier, The Morning  of the Magicians  (New York 1964); E.R. Carmin,  Das schwarze Reich (Munich 2002); Michael Baigent and Richard  Leigh, Secret Germany (London 1994); Trevor Ravenscroft, The Spear of Destiny (New York 1973); J. H. Brennan, Occult Reich (London 1974); Gerald Suster, Hitler, Occult Messiah (New York 1981); Nigel Pennick, Hitler’s Secret Sciences (Sudbury 1981); Marco Dolcetta, Nazionalsocialismo esoterico (Rome 2003). Even accomplished scholars have produced decidedly inadequate works on the topic; see e.g. Giorgio Galli, Hitler e il Nazismo magico (Milan 2005). There are also thoughtful  popular works that are less credulous though still derivative and excessively sensationalistic: Ken Anderson, Hitler and the Occult (Amherst 1995); Alan Baker, Invisible Eagle: The History of Nazi Occultism (London 2000); Peter Levenda, Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult (New York 2002).

2) For a good appraisal of popular enthusiasm for the ‘Nazi occultism’ thesis see Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, “The Nazi Mysteries” in Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 107-27.

3) Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, he Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology: The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany, 1890-1935, 1985, p. 217.

4) Dr. Peter Bahn, 'Das Geheimnis der Vril-Energie: Berichte und Erfahrungen zu einer mächtigen Naturkraft', in Adolf und Inge Schneider (Eds.), Vorträge des Kongresses 1995 im Gwatt-Zentrum am Thunersee (Bern: Jupiter-Verlag A.I. Schneider, 1996).

5) Theodor Schieder (1972), Hermann Rauschnings "Gespräche mit Hitler" als Geschichtsquelle (Oppladen, Germany: Westdeutscher Verlag) and Wolfgang Hänel (1984), Hermann Rauschnings "Gespräche mit Hitler": Eine Geschichtsfälschung (Ingolstadt, Germany: Zeitgeschichtliche Forschungsstelle).

6) Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. 2002. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity. New York University Press, 2003: 110.

7) See Michael Rißmann, Hitlers Gott: Vorsehungsglaube und Sendungsbewusstsein des deutschen Diktators (Zurich: Pendo, 2001), 113-72, Sydney Jones, Hitler in Vienna, 1907-1913  (New York: Stein and Day, 1983), 116-26, 296-302.

8) Anna Bramwell. 1985. Blood and Soil: Richard Walther Darré and Hitler's 'Green Party', Abbotsbrook, England: The Kensal Press, p.178.

9) As with so many other aspects of occultism in Nazi contexts, Wiligut’s stature is often overstated. For salutary perspective see Junginger, “From Buddha to Adolf Hitler,” 154-55; Junginger argues that occultist influence within the Ahnenerbe was marginal. Further background is in Goodrick-Clarke’s fine analysis of Wiligut in The Occult Roots of Nazism, 177-91.

10) For an overview of the more serious literature about related subjects see  Brigitte Nagel, “Die Welteislehre: Ihre Geschichte u nd ihre Bedeutung im ‘Dritten Reich’” in Christoph Meinel and Peter Voswinckel, eds., Medizin, Naturwissenschaft, Technik und Nationalsozialismus: Kontinuitäten und Diskontinuitäten (Stuttgart: Verlag für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik, 1994), 166-72; Webb, The Occult Establishment, 321-33; Doering-Manteuffel, Das Okkulte, 209-11; Junginger, ed., The Study o f Religion under the Impact of Fascism, 114-22, 163-70; Luitgard Löw, “Völkische Deutungen prähistorischer Sinnbilder: Herman Wirth und sein Umfeld” in Puschner and Großmann, eds., Völkisch und national, 214-32.

11) Bramwell, 1985: 42.

12) See: George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich(New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964); Ekkehard Hieronimus, “Dualismus und Gnosis in der völkischen Bewegung” in Jacob Taubes, ed., Gnosis und Politik (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1984), 82-89; Helmut Möller and Ellic Howe, Merlin Peregrinus: Vom Untergrund des Abendlandes (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1986); Martin Green, Mountain of Truth: The Counterculture Begins, Ascona, 1900-1920  (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986); Jost Hermand, Der alte Traum vom neuen Reich: Völkische Utopien  und Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1988; English translation: Hermand, Old Dreams of a New Reich: Volkish Utopias and National Socialism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Corona Hepp, Avantgarde: Moderne Kunst, Kulturkritik und Reformbewegungen nach der Jahrhundertwende (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1992);Gangolf Hübinger, “Der Verlag Eugen Diederichs in Jena: Wissenschaftskritik, Lebensreform und völkische Bewegung” Geschichte und Gesellscha ft 22 (1996), 31-45; Bernd Wedemeyer, “‘Zum Licht’: Die Freikörperkultur in der Wilhelminischen Ära und der Weimarer Republik zwischen völkischer Bewegung, Okkultismus und Neuheidentum” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 81 (1999), 173-97.

 

 

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