NAZIS & THE OCCULT- more than a men's club

the unknown hitler: nazi roots in the occult

on april 6, 1919, in bavaria, left wing socialists and anarchists pro- 
claimed the bavarian soviet republic.  the brains of the revolution were a 
group of writers who had little idea of administration.  life in munich grew 
chaotic.  the counter- revolutionary forces, the whites, composed of various
groups of decommissioned soldiers known as "frei corps", equipped and
financed by the mysterious thule society, defeated the bavarian soviet within
a matter of weeks.

many other decommissioned soldiers waited out the turbulence in barracks, pfc
adolph hitler among them.  after the bavarian republic had been defeated by
the whites, in may, hitler's superiors put him to work in the post revolution
investigating commission.  his indictments injected ruthless efficiency into
the kangaroo courts as he fingered hundreds of noncommissioned officers and
enlisted men who had sympathized with the communist and anarchists.  he was
subsequently sent to attend special anticommunist training courses and
seminars at the university which were financed by the reichswehr
administration and by private donors from the thule society.  this led to an
assignment in the intelligence division of the postwar german army, to
infiltrate groups that could organize the working classes while the 
communists were weak.  on a september evening, 1919, hitler turned up in the 
sternecker beer hall where members and friends of the budding german workers 
party had gathered.  he quietly listened to the presentation by engineer 
gottfried feder, a thule society member, who talked about jewish control over 
lending capital.  when one of the other group members called for bavaria to 
break away from the rest of germany, hitler sprang into action.  the 
astonished audience stood by while his highly aggressive remarks and 
compelling oratory swept through the room.  after hitler had finished his 
harangue, party chairman and founder, anton drexler, immediately asked him to 
a meeting of the party's steering committee held a few days later.  he was 
asked to join the committee as its seventh member, responsible for 
advertising and propaganda.

back in 1912, several german occultists with radical anti-semitic inclina- 
tions decided to form a "magic" lodge, which they named the order of teutons.  
the main founders were theodor fritsch, a publisher of an anti-semitic
journal; philipp stauff, pupil of the racist guido von list, and hermann
pohl, the order's chancellor. (pohl would drop out three years later to found
his own bizarre lodge, the walvater teutonic order of the holy grail.)  the
order of teutons was organized along the lines of the free masons or the
rosicrucians, having differing degrees of initiation, only persons who could
fully document that they were of pure "aryan" ancestry were allowed to join.

in 1915, pohl was joined by rudolf blauer, who held a turkish passport and
practiced sufi meditation.  he also dabbled in astrology and was an admirer
of lanz von liebenfels and guido von list, both pathologically anti- semitic.
blauer went by the name of rudolf freiherr von seboottendorf.  he was very
wealthy, although the origin of his fortune is unknown.  he became the grand
master of the bavarian order and he founded the thule society, with pohl's
approval, in 1918.

after the bavarian communist revolution of 1918, the thule society became a
center of the counterrevolutionary subculture.  an espionage network and arms
caches were organized.  the thule club rooms became a nest of resistance to
the revolution and the munich soviet republic.

journalist karl harrer was given the job of founding  a political "worker
circle".  he realized that the workers would reject any program that was
presented to them by a member of the conservative "privileged" class.  harrer
knew that the mechanic anton drexler, who was working for the railroads, was
a well-known anti-semite, chauvinist and proletarian.  with drexler as
nominal chairman, harrer founded the german workers party in january 1919

the german workers party was only one of many associations founded and
controlled by the thule society.  the thule was the "mother" to the german
socialist party, led by julius streicher, and the right-wing radical oberland
free corps.  it published the munich observer, which later became the
national observer.  hitler became the most prominent personality in the
party.  he caused harrer to drop out, and he pushed drexler, the nominal
chairman, to the sidelines.  he filled key positions with his own friends
from the thule society and the army.  during the summer of 1920, upon his
suggestion, the party was renamed the national socialist german worker party
(nasdap).  the new name was intended to equally attract nationalists and 
proletarians.

to go along with the new name his mass movement also required a flag with a 
powerful symbol.  among many designs under consideration, hitler picked the 
one suggested by thule member dr. krohn: a red cloth with a white circle in 
the middle containing a black swastika.

hitler wanted to turn the german workers party into a mass-conscious fight-
ing party, but harrer and drexler were hesitant, due in part to their woeful
financial situation.  the thule society was not yet supplying very much money
and no one seemed to know how to build up a mass party.  hitler arranged two
public meetings in obscure beer halls, and he drafted leaflets and posters,
but there was no real breakthrough.

all of this changed dramatically at the end of the 1919 when hitler met
dietrich eckart.  most biographers have underestimated the influence that
eckart exerted on hitler.  he was the wealthy publisher and editor-in-chief
of an anti-semitic journal which he called- in plain german.  eckart was
also a committed occultist and a master of magic.  as an initiate, eckart
belonged to the inner circle of the thule society as well as other esoteric
orders.  

briefly, the creed of the thule society inner circle is as follows: thule was 
a legendary island in the far north, similar to atlantis,  supposedly the 
center of a lost, high-level civilization.  but not all secrets of that 
civilization had been completely wiped out.  those that remained were being 
guarded by ancient, highly intelligent beings (similar to the "masters" of
theosophy or the white brotherhood).  the truly initiated could establish
contact with these beings by means of magic-mystical rituals.  the "mas-
ters" or "ancients" allegedly would be able to endow the initiated with
supernatural strength and energy.  with the help of these energies the goal
of the initiated was to create a race of supermen of "aryan" stock who would
exterminate all "inferior" races.

there can be no doubt that eckart- who had been alerted to hitler by other 
thulists- trained hitler in techniques of self confidence, self projection, 
persuasive oratory, body language and discursive sophistry.  with these 
tools, in a short period of time he was able to move the obscure workers 
party from the club and beer hall atmosphere to a mass movement.  the emotion 
charged lay speaker became an expert orator, capable of mesmerizing a vast 
audience.

one should not underestimate occultism's influence on hitler.  his subse- 
quent rejection of free masons and esoteric movements, of theosophy, of 
anthrosophy, does not necessarily mean otherwise.  occult circles have long 
been known  as covers for espionage and influence peddling.  hitler's spy 
apparatus under canaris and heydrich were well aware of these conduits, 
particularly from the direction of britain which had within its mi5 
intelligence agency a department known as the occult bureau.  that these 
potential sources of trouble were purged from nazi life should not be taken 
to mean that hitler and the nazi secret societies were not influenced by 
mystical and occult writers such as madame blavatsky, houston stewart 
chamberlain, guido von list, lanz von liebenfels, rudolf steiner, george 
gurdjieff, karl haushofer and theodor fritsch.  although hitler later 
denounced and ridiculed many of them, he did dedicate his book mein kampf to 
his teacher dietrich eckart.

a frequent visitor to landsberg prison where hitler was writing mein kampf 
with the help of rudolf hess, was general karl haushofer, a university 
professor and director of the munich institute of geopolitics.  haushofer, 
hitler, and hess had long conversations together.  hess also kept records of 
these conversations.  hitler's demands for german "living space" in the east 
at the expense of the slavic nations were based on the geopolitical theories 
of the learned professor.  haushofer was also inclined toward the esoteric.  
as military attache in japan, he had studied zen-buddhism.  he had also gone 
through initiations at the hands of tibetan lamas.  he became hitler's second
"esoteric mentor", replacing dietrich eckart.  in berlin, haushofer had
founded the luminous lodge or the vril society.  the lodge's objective was to
explore the origins of the aryan race and to perform exercises in
concentration to awaken the forces of "vril".  haushofer was a student of the
russian magician and metaphysician gregor ivanovich gurdyev (george
gurdjieff).   both gurdjeiff and haushofer maintained that they had contacts
with secret tibetan lodges that possessed the secret of the "superman".  the
lodge included hitler, alfred rosenberg, himmler, goring, and hitler's
subsequent personal physician dr. morell.  it is also known that aleister
crowley and gurdjieff sought contact with hitler.  hitler's unusual powers of
suggestion become more understandable if one keeps in mind that he had access
to the "secret" psychological techniques of the esoteric lodges.  haushofer
taught him the techniques of gurdjieff which, in turn, were based on the
teachings of the sufis and the tibetan lamas- and familiarized him with the
zen teaching of the japanese society of the green dragon.

from "the unknown hitler" by wulf schwartzwaller, berkeley books, 1990
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the men behind hitler-  excerpts from the book by bernard schreiber

thomas robert malthus (1766-1834) was an english political economist and
historian who in 1796 published a book called "an essay on the principle of
population" in which he said that poverty, and thereby vice and misery, are
unavoidable because population growth always exceeds food production.  checks
on population growth were wars, famine, and diseases.

malthus's ideas had great impact, only a few asked on what his claims were
actually based.  yet neither malthus nor his later disciples ever managed to
put forward any scientific proof for his theory.  many scientists have
disproved malthus' theory and the ideology resulting from it.

however, with the book, malthus created an atmosphere which moved his 
adherents in 1834 to pass a new law providing for the institution of work- 
houses for the poor, in which the sexes were strictly separated to curb the 
otherwise inevitable overbreeding.  this kind of philosophy urged the calling 
forth of drastic measures.  the full title of charles darwin's famous book is 
not so famous: "the origin of species by means of natural selection or the 
preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life".  in it he explains 
the development of life-forms as a struggle for existence.  the result of
this struggle would be a natural selection of those species and races who
were to triumph over those weaker ones who would perish.

francis galton (1822-1911) was an english psychologist and a half-cousin of 
darwin.  galton extended darwin's theory into a concept of deliberate social 
intervention, which he said was a logical application of evolution to the 
human race.  he called his theory "eugenics", the principle of which was that 
by encouraging better human stock to breed and discouraging the reproduction
of less desirable stock, the whole race could be improved.

modern racism really began with arthur count de gabon (1816-1882) who 
published his  "essay on the inequality of human races".  he wrote in of a
fair-haired aryan race that was superior to all the others whose remnants
constituted a tiny racial aristocracy decaying under the overwhelming weight
of inferior races. a revival of his work in germany began ten years after his
death by the pan-germans, an extremely nationalistic and anti-jewish group.

in 1899, gabon's disciple, houston stewart chaimberlain (1844-1927), an 
englishman, published "the foundations of the nineteenth century", in
germany.  he upheld the german race to be the purest and damned the inferior
races, the jews and negroes, as degenerate.  from this point on, eugenics,
social darwinism and racial hygiene fused into a single concept.

in 1904 the first chairs in eugenics wewe instituted at university college, 
london, followed by the establishment of the galton laboratory for national 
eugenics in 1907.  in 1910 the eugenic record office was founded in the 
united states, both institutes used the research results of the galton 
laboratory of national eugenics to propose practical applications.  eugenics 
was used an the "scientific" basis upon which racism was fused to politics.

eugenicists believed that the child of a mentally-ill person and a mentally 
heathy person would be a mentally-ill offspring.  this led to a series of 
escalating regimens: separation from society, restraint, separation of the 
sexes in defective's colonies, and sterilizations.  in great britain one of 
the leaders of the mental hygiene movement was miss evelyn fox.  she had been
an active member of the eugenics society before the foundation of the
national council for mental hygiene, of which she was an officer and founder.
among the board members was sir cyril burt, who later founded mensa, a high
i.q.  group which espoused eugenic principles.  the mental hygiene movement
drew strongly from the eugenic movements of whatever country they were in.

shortly after the turn of the century eugenic organizations were set up 
throughout the world.  while the whole world was being prepared by propaganda 
for the sterilization of the insane, the adherents of mental hygiene and 
eugenics were preparing their next step, euthanasia.  in the u.s.a., dr. 
alexis carrel, a nobel prize winner who had been on the staff of the
rockefeller institute since its inception, published his book "man the
unknown" in 1935.  in it he suggests the removal of the mentally ill and the
criminal by small euthanasia institutions equipped with suitable gases.

in 1933 the nazi party rapidly consolidated its power.  in june of that year, 
minister of the interior wilhelm frick put in motion the passage of the "law 
for the prevention of hereditary diseases in posterity"- the sterilization 
law.  architect of the law was ernst rudin, professor of psychiatry at the 
munich university, director of the kaiser-wilhelm institute for genealog, and 
of the research institute for psychiatry.  a separate legal system was set up 
consisting of "hereditary health courts", which could decree sterilization 
against a person's will.  by 1935 the "nuremburg laws" intended to insure the 
racial purity of the nation and was aimed specifically at the jews.

in 1934 the institute for heredity, biology and racial research was founded
at frankfurt university by professor ernst rudin's colleague at the kaiser
wilhelm institute, dr. otmar freiherr von verscheur.  von verscheur's
assistant there was dr. joseph mengele.

in england, dr. charles killick millard, president of the society of medical 
officers of health, brought up in 1931 the question of voluntary euthanasia 
and proposed a suitable law.  later he became fellow founder of the voluntary 
euthanasia legislation society.  in 1935 lord moynihan, president of the
royal college of surgeons, founded the euthanasia society .

sterilization and euthanasia were not the ideas of the nazis and never had 
been.  they were ideas which were supported and promoted throughout the world 
by groups with an interest in the development of mental hygiene.  germany,
however, was the only country in which the political climate allowed
materialization of the final goal of sterilization and euthanasia.

there is not a great deal known about "t4" compared to other aspects of nazi 
germany.  t4 was the fuhrer chancellery and the initials came from the full 
address which was tiergartenstrasse 4, berlin.  "project t4" was fully 
integrated into the organizational structure of the reich and fell under 
section 11b. ("mercy-death") of the chancellery of the fuhrer.  four cover 
organizations safeguarded the project t4: the realms work committee in charge 
of collecting information on candidates for euthanasia from questionnaires 
sent to hospitals, the realms committee for scientific approach to severe 
illness due to heredity set up exclusively to apply euthanasia to children, 
the charitable company for the transport of the sick which transported 
patients to the killing centers, and the charitable foundation for 
institutional care, in charge of final disposition of the victims' remains.

at the time the questionnaires went out a number of mental hospitals were 
being converted for use as killing centers and schools for murder.  death 
chambers were built disguised as shower-baths and crematoriums, which were 
identical to those later to be established in the death camps in poland.

schooling of the personnel at hadamar mental institution produced perfect 
murderers who were used to the smell of burnt flesh, had been taught to trick 
people being led to their death and to steel themselves against the crying 
and pleading of the victims.  on arrival, the victims were stripped, dressed 
in paper shirts and forthwith taken to a gas chamber where they were murdered 
with hydrocyanic acid gas, and the bodies moved to crematoriums by conveyer
belts, six bodies to a furnace.  the psychiatrist in charge at hadamar was
dr. adolf wahlmann, an active member of the german mental hygiene movement.

after the state had been relieved of the burden of these undesireables, the 
operation, still under the direction of eminent mental health psychiatrists 
in t4, was expanded under the code of 14f13.  from being limited to mental 
hospitals and institutions, it now embraced german and austrian inmates and 
jews in concentration camps who were sick or invalid.  at dachau at the end 
of 1941 a commission composed of 4 psychiatrists under professor dr. werner 
heyde, ss standartenfuhrer and lecturer in neurology and psychiatry at 
wurzburg university, arrived at the camp and selected hundred of patients
incapable of work who were transported to the gas chambers and disposed of.

the extermination camps had followed a separate evolution from the concen- 
tration camps that were opened a few months after the nazi rise to power.  
these death camps had their headquarters, not in himmler's ss organization, 
but in the fuhrer's chancellory (t4).  franz stangl (austrian gestapo) said 
at the nuremberg trials that his progression to builder and commander of the
sobibor extermination camp went through the hartheim and bernberg euthanasia
centers.  the original staff at sobibor was taken from hartheim.

during the war eugenics became associated with the nazis and afterwards a
global whitewashing began.  the first step was the reconstitution of the many
national councils of mental hygiene.  the first was the british association
for mental health.  lady prescilla norman, wife of montagu norman, governor
of the bank of england, had been working in the mental hygiene movement since
the 20's.  in 1944 they sponsored a congress held at the ministry of health
in london where they established the world federation of mental health- wfmh.

the first elected president of the wfmh was dr. john rawlings rees, a british
psychiatrist associated with the tavistock institute.  in 1948 the wfmh was
formally inaugurated at the third international congress of mental health.  a
vice-president of the congress was dr. carl g. jung who was described by
fellow vice-president dr. conti as  "representing german psychiatry under the
nazis".  dr. jung had been co-editor of the journal for psychotherapy with
dr. m. h. goering, the cousin of marshal hermann goering.
george ivonovitch gurdjieff: proto nazi

it may be that the real key to the third reich lies buried in the history of
tibet, for it was here that karl haushofer, the initiate who taught the
youthful hitler, first met in literal fact the superman of nazi legend.

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origins of the swastika

by 1945 the thousand year reich had become a smoking ruin.  russian soldiers
pressed through the rubble, fighting from house to house, from street to
street in order to link up with their british and american allies who also
pressed in inexorably on the heart of the dying capital.  before they overran
the eastern sector of berlin, these russian troops came across something very
strange: vast numbers of tibetan corpses.  the fact is mentioned by maurice
bessy and again by pauwels and bergier, who set the actual number of bodies
at a thousand.  they wore german uniform, but without the usual insignia of
rank.

the religion of tibet is buddhism, but like the zen of japan, it is a brand
of buddhism far divorced from the indian original.  many scholars prefer the
term "lamaism" to distinguish between tibetan buddhism and its parent root.
the religious life of the country is concentrated in a multitude of
monasteries, many of them built in almost inaccessible mountain regions.
side by side with the state religion of lamaism, and flourishing particu-
larly in the rural districts, is tibet's aboriginal religion of bon.  the 
bon-pas follow a primitive, animistic creed, full of dark rituals and spells.  
if the holy lamas of the buddhist sects were looked on as personi- fications 
of spiritual wisdom, the priests of bon had a potent reputation with the 
common people as magicians.

the nazi leaders were attracted to tibet by those of its secret doctrines
which filtered through to the west.  they believed, those members of the
thule group, the luminous lodge, and the various other occult organizations
which helped shape the third reich, in an esoteric history of mankind.  and
it was in the archives of tibetan monasteries that this history was
preserved in its purest form.

already, in the latter half of the previous century, intriguing hints about 
tibetan secret teachings had been carried to the west by helena blavatsky, 
who claimed initiation at the hands of the holy lamas themselves.  blavatsky 
taught that her "hidden masters" and "secret chiefs" had their earthly
residence in the himalayan region.  as soon as the nazi movement had
sufficient funds, it began to organize a number of expeditions to tibet and
these succeeded one another practically without interruption until 1943.  one
of the most tangible expressions of nazi interest in tibet was the party`s
adoption of its deepest and most mystical of symbols- the swastika.

the swastika is one of mankind's oldest symbols, and apart from the cross and
the circle, probably the most widely distributed.  it is shown on pottery
fragments from greece dating back to the eighth century b.c.  it was used in
ancient egypt, india and china.  the navaho indians of north america have a
traditional swastika pattern.  arab-islamic sorcerers used it.  in more
recent times, it was incorporated in the flags of certain baltic states.

the idea for the use of the swastika by the nazis came from a dentist named
dr. friedrich krohn who was a member of the secret germanen order.  krohn
produced the design for the actual form in which the nazis came to use the
symbol, that is reversed, spinning in an anti-clockwise direction.  as a
solar symbol, the swastika is properly thought of as spinning, and the
buddhists have always believed the symbol attracted luck.  the sanskrit
word "svastika" means good fortune and well being.  according to
cabbalistic lore and occult theory, chaotic force can be evoked by revers-
ing the symbol.  and so the symbol appeared as the flag of nazi germany and
the insignia of the nazi party, an indication for those who had eyes to
see, as to the occult nature of the third reich.



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              THE CONTROVERSY OF THE OCCULT REICH
              By John Roemer

  This article is transcribed from an issue of Gnosis Magazine.
  One hundred years after Adolf Hitler's birth near Linz in Austria
on April 20 1889, and decades after his malign empire metastasized
in Bavaria in Bavaria, the Hitler phenomenon remains to mainstream
historians largely inexplicable, or at least unexplained. The man
and his awful work seem to stand outside history looking in.
Perhaps our human fear of the irrational is so great that we
instinctively hold Hitler at a great remove in order that we need
not admit him to our company.
  In light of this it isn't very surprising that an extensive
literature exists seeking an occult rationale for the otherwise
baffling catastrophe Hitler represents. As Louis Pauwels and
Jacques Bergier point out in the MORNING OF THE MAGICIANS (1960),
the Nazi era simply defies conventional analysis:

       A self taught madman, surrounded by a handful of          
    megalomaniacs,rejects Descartes, spurns the whole humanist   
    culture, tramples on reason, invokes Lucifer, conquers Europe, 
    and nearly conquers the world... The historian begins to feel 
    anxious and to wonder whether his art is viable.1
  
  Pauwels and Bergier were among the first postwar proponents of
a black magical explanation for the Third Reich.1a About a quarter
of their book is devoted to a region they call "The Absolute
Elsewhere," a neverland where Nazi pseudosciences and occult
methodology held official sway. They quote a Hitlerian
pronouncement to demonstrate that the Fuhrer's intellectual
development was on a level wholly different from that understood
by the Western tradition: "there is a Nordic and National Socialist
science which is opposed to Jewish-Liberal science".2 Reality was
defined by politics. 
  Nazi "science" has brought hoots of derision from those who hold
to the Cartesian model. In place of psychology there was an occult
frappe composed of the mysticism of Gurdijeff, the theosophy of
Madame Blavatsky and the archetypes of Nordic mythology.3 In place
of Newtonian physics stood the cosmic force called vril, the
bizarre geology known as the hollow earth theory, and the frigid
cosmology of Hans Horbiger's Welteislehre, the doctrine of eternal
ice.
  Nazi thought excluded psychoanalysis, which has in fact been not
very helpful in explaining the etiology of great evil, although
Robert G.L. Waite's effort, quoted above and published in 1977 by
Basic Books, is good on several provocative subjects: Hitler's
sadomasochistic sex life; the possibility he had a Jewish
grandfather; and his Viennese mentors, who are described at greater
length by the authors about to be mentioned.
   Nazism officially rejected the theory of relativity as "Jewish
science". Not only Freud but EInstein too was forced to flee
Hitler's Europe. He and other physicists eventually were able to
ensure that atomic secrets remained in the hands of the allies
until they could be used spectacularly to climax the Pacific war.

  Horbiger's physics derived from an intuitive flash he experienced
late in the nineteenth century. "... As a young engineer," he
wrote, "I was watching one day some molten steel poured on wet
ground covered with snow: the ground exploded after some delay and
with great violence."4
  This conflict of opposites, of fire and ice, is a theme that
inspired Horbiger and resonated for German nationalists because it
recurs in the Icelandic Eddas, the sourcebooks of Teutonic
mythology. It all makes good sense in Iceland, since that island's
peculiar geology feature numerous volcanic rifts in the permafrost;
fire and ice are commonly juxtaposed all over the landscape. As
grounds for a cosmology- the word implies universality- it is at
best dubious. It would be a hard sell in Hawaii.
  Nevertheless, Nazi science was influential out of all proportion
to its objective validity. Hoerbiger was immensely influential in
the Third Reich. His followers numbered in the tens of thousands.
There were scores of Horbigerian books, hundreds of Welteislehre
pamphlets, and a monthly magazine called THE KEY TO WORLD EVENTS.
As one tract put it,

      Our Nordic ancestors grew strong amidst the ice and snow, and
   this is why a belief in a world of ice is the natural heritage
   of Nordic men. It was Austrian, Hitler, who drove out the Jewish
   politicians, and another Austrian, Horbiger, (who) will drive
   out the Jewish scientists. By his own example Hitler has shown
   that an amateur to give us a thorough understanding of the
   Universe.5

  Hitler's fatal confidence in the success of his troops on the
Russian front during the 1941 - 2 winter is generally believed to
have been a result of his misplaced faith in Horbiger's weather
forecasts. Despite such setbacks, the Welteislehre managed to
thrive even after the war. The popular speculations of Immanuel
Velikovsky derive in part from Horbiger. In 1953 a survey conducted
by Martin Gardner showed that more than a million people in
Germany, England, and the U.S. believed that Horbiger was right6.
  The Horbigerian cosmology posited an early epoch, some fifteen
million years ago, during which a hugh moon moved across the sky
very near the earth. Its gravitational attraction gave rise to a
race of our ancestors, the giants. These giants, which appear in
the ancient Norse and Icelandic sagas, sleep, yet they are alive.
To the Nazis, they were Supermen. In one set of myths, contained
in the Nibelungenlied, they lived beneath Teutonic mountains. In
another they were prototype Aryans from the East, inhabiting vast
Tibetan caverns.
  Three other books that investigate hidden influences on Gerald
Suster's HITLER: THE OCCULT MESSIAH; Jean-Michel Angebert's THE
OCCULT AND THE THIRD REICH; and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's THE
OCCULT ROOTS OF NAZISM7.
  Suster's book largely rehashes Pauwels and Bergier. Angebert
(actually a pen name for two French writers) interestingly links
Hitler to an ancient dualist tradition he traces from Manichaenism
in Persia through the Essenes, Jesus's Palestinian forebears, to
the Cathars in the south of France in the Middle Ages. It's
philosophy in which, in its Nazi incarnation, solar forces of light
represented by blond, fair-skinned Aryans strive against the evil
forces of darkness, who are of course dark skinned Semites.
  Both books, but especially Suster's are written in prose that
stops just this side of tabloid journalese. This is too bad for two
reasons. One, the authors diminish some important material by this
kind of presentation. Two, the lessons we have to learn about mass
psychopathology and about the history of fascism are too important
to be trivalized in this way.
  Goodrick-Clark's is a serious and compelling historical look at
ariosophy, a dangerous amalgam of Aryan racism, pan-German
nationalism, and occultism that flourished in Austria and Germany
from around 1890 well into the era when Himmler's Death's Head SS
was organized. Himmler is said by Pauwels and Bergier to have taken
the Jesuits for his model, and to have installed a regular
hierarchy ranging from lay brothers to father superior, and to have
used this Black Order in horrific rites.8
  THE OCCULT ROOTS OF NAZISM identifies wide circle of proto-Nazi
philosophers, previously almost unknown, who saw in the chaos that
beset Germany after the Treaty of Versailles the working out of
ancient Aryan prophecies. Among them was Rudolf John Gorsleben, who
interesting career Goodrick-Clarke sums up in a sentence: "on the
basis of the runes, occultism, and the Edda, Gorsleben created an
original racist mystery-religion which illuminated the priceless
magical heritage of the Aryans and justified their spiritual and
political world-supremacy."9
  Gorsleben was active in right-wing politics in Bavaria in the
years Hitler was forming his political convictions there, and he
lectured to the Thule Society, a Munich club thought to have
greatly influenced Nazism in its infancy (see below). He also
edited a weekly newspaper called German Freedom; in 1927 he changed
the name to Aryan Freedom. 
      He derived the word 'race' from rata, an Old Norse term
meaning 'root', in order to conclude that God and race were
identical.... He maintained that racial mixing was always
detrimental for the racially superior partner, since his purity was
debased in the progeny, and he repeated the common volkisch
[folkish] conviction that woman could be 'impregnated' by
intercourse, even when no conception occurred, so that her
subsequent offspring bore the characteristics of her first lover.
Given these overwhelming pressures towards the increasing
bastardization of the German descendants of the Aryan race, only
the strict practice of segregation and eugenics could guarantee the
reversal of racial contamination in the world.10

  Another book which hold that Hitler learned many of his occult
lesson from avatars in Vienna and Munich may well be the best known
black magical explanation of Nazism to have been put forth so far.
Trevor Ravenscroft's THE SPEAR OF DESTINY was published by that
famous British house of occultism, the aptly named Neville Spearman
Ltd,.in 1972, and has since gone through many edition.11
  Ravenscroft is intriguing because instead of reporting historical
influences on Hitler, he presents secret history in a narrative
form that purports to be factual and that-if true maybe even if
only poetically "true"-goes a long way toward finding a convincing
occult explanation for the Nazi phenomenon.
  Two challenges to Ravenscroft's facts, discussed below, have led
some readers to conclude his book is more nearly a novel than
strict history. Nonetheless, its provocative premise and fluent
synthesis of black magical thematics will keep it on occult
booklists until a better effort at explaining Hitler comes along.
  Ravenscroft, a British journalist, historian, and World War II
commando officer, spent four years in Nazi prison camps after he
was captured attempting to assassinate General Erwin Rommel in
North Africa in 1941. His personal perspective on the Hitler era
is based on material he says he got in a state of transcendent
consciousness while imprisoned. He introduces his methodology by
speaking of 
          my own experience of higher levels of consciousness    
       whilst in a Nazi Concentration Camp during the war, and   
       how the nature of this transcendent experience had guided 
       me to a study of the Spear of Longinus and the legend of  
       world destiny which had grown up around it.12

   Later, in London, his intuitive suspicions about certain grail
relics and their importance in occult Hitlerian history were
confirmed by a Viennese exile called Dr. Walter Johannes Stein who
died in 1957.
   Dr. Stein spent much of the war as a British secret agent, but
before that time he was a scholar who employed white magical means
to clairvoyantly investigate historical events. It was his book on
the grail mythos published in Stuttgart in 1928 and titled THE
NINTH CENTURY: WORLD HISTORY IN THE LIGHT OF THE HOLY GRAIL13 that
attracted Ravenscroft to him.
   THE SPEAR OF DESTINY focuses first on Hitler's lost years in
Vienna from 1909 to 1913. During that time, Ravenscroft writes, Dr.
Stein was pursuing his occult researches as a student at the
University of Vienna and getting to know Hitler, then a dropout
living in a flophouse.
   Vienna was during Hitler's years there a vortex of modern
thinking. Freud was in practice at Berggasse 19; Ludwig
Wittgenstein was in residence pondering avant garde philosophy and
metaphysics; Gustav Mahler had returned home to die and to name his
protege, Arnold Schonberg. In contrast there persisted the deep
anti-Semitic currents that had caused Mahler to convert to
Catholicism, that forced Freud eventually to flee to London and
that informed the ancient pan-German folkoric nostalgia espoused
by Guido von List.
 
   This old black magician, whose occult lodge Ravenscroft says
substituted the swastika for the cross in perversion and the
practice of medieval thaumaturgy, looked like a wizard in floppy
cap and long white beard. His link to Hitler was allegedly through
an occult bookseller, Ernst Pretzche, in whose shop the future
Fuhrer found a second home.
  In the shop Dr. Stein found a copy of Wolfram von Eschenbach's
PARZIVAL, the medieval grail romance that Dr. Stein was himself
researching for his work on the ninth century. In the book's
margins were handwritten annotations; looking them over Dr.Stein
was fascinated and repelled:

             This was no ordinary commentary but the work of     
             somebody who had achieved more than a working       
             knowledge of the black arts! The unknown commentator 
             had found the key to unveiling many of the deepest  
             secrets of the Grail, yet obviously spurned the     
             Christian ideals of the Knights and delighted in the 
             devious machinations of the Anti-Christ.   
             It suddenly dawned on him that he was reading the   
             footnotes of Satan!14

   The footnotes, of course, proved to have been Hitler's.
   Soon afterward, Dr.Stein and Hitler saw the Reich's lance
together in the Imperial Museum at the Hofburg. Dr. Stein had been
there before and had never failed to be moved by the sight of the
old relic, supposed to have been moved by the original spear with
which the Roman centurion, Longinus, pierced the side of Christ
during the crucifixation. Longinus was a German, and his "spear of
destiny" was fated to play a magical role in the careers of German
leaders like Charlemagne, Otto the Great, and Frederick Barbarossa.
Dr. Stein said the spear inspired in him the emotion expressed in
the motto of the knights of the holy grail: Durch Mitleid wissen,
"through compassion to self knowledge."
   Then he glanced at Hitler:
   Walter Stein found he was not the only one moved by the sight
of this historic spearhead. Adolf Hitler stood beside him, like a
man in a trance, a man over whom some dreadful magic spell had been
cast... The very space around him seemed enlivened with some subtle
irradiation, a kind of ghostly ectoplasmic light. His whole
physiognomy and stance appeared transformed as if some might Spirit
now inhabited his very soul, creating within and around him a kind
of evil transfiguration of its own nature and power.15
   Latter Hitler took Dr. Stein up the Danube to visit his mystic
teacher, a rustic woodcutter and herbalist named Hans Lodz "who
retained in his peasant's blood the last traces of the atavistic
clairvoyance of the ancient Germanic tribes" and who "resembled a
mischievous yet malevolent dwarf from the pages of Grimm's Fairy
Tales or an illustration from a book on ancient Germanic
folklore".16 The men took a swim in the river at which Dr. Stein
noticed that Hitler had only one testicle.

  It was Lodz, Dr.Stein learned, who had prepared for Hitler a
peyote concoction that afforded him psychedelic insight into his
past lives. The peyote itself had come from Pretzche, who had lived
for a time in the German colony in Mexico. Hitler had hoped that
his former existences, viewed in his drug trance, would include an
early incarnation as a powerful Teutonic ruler, but it was not to
be.
   Instead his psychedelic perception revealed non Eschenbach's
Parzival to have been prophetic of events that would take place a
thousand years after it was written, i.e. in the present. And it
showed Hitler to have been the historical personage behind the evil
sorcerer Klingsor, the very spirit of the anti-Christ and the
villain of Parzival.
   According to Dr. Stein's work Klingsor was in fact Landulf II
of Capua, the traitorous confidant of the Holy Roman Emperor who
betrayed Christianity to the Moslem invaders of Italy and Spain.
   Armed with the knowledge of his black spiritual ancestry,
Ravenscroft writes, Hitler moved to Germany, joined the Bavarian
Army, survived the hellish trench warfare on the western front, won
the Iron Cross, second class, and got discharged in Munich where
he encountered the men who were to invent National Socialism.
   Virtually every study of Hitler's time in Munich mentions the
Thule Society as superficially a kind of Elk's Club of German
mythology which met often and openly at a fancy metropolitan hotel
and for a time counted Hitler as a member. Behind the scenes,
however the society seems to have been considerably more sinister.
   Robert Payne whose excellent Hitler biography contains no occult
explanations, describes the Thule Society as the center of the
right wing opposition to the brief Bavarian postwar socialist coup
under the Jewish intellectual Kurt Eisner.
         The reaction set in swiftly, as the extreme right gathered
       its forces. The headquarters of the reaction was the Hotel
       Vierjahreszeiten, where several floors were given over to
       the Thule Society, ostensibly a literary club devoted to the
       study of Nordic culture but in fact a secret political    
       organization devoted to violent anti-Semitism and rule by
       an aristocratic elite. The name of the organization derived 
       from ultima Thule, the unknown northern land believed to  
       be the original home of the German race... The symbol of the 
       Thule Society was a swastika with a dagger enclosed in   
       laurel leaves.17

   Most of the occult historians of the era believe the Thule
Society operated on a deeper level still, a level headed by a
mysterious figure called Dietrich Eckart. Goodrick-Clarke calls
Eckart Hitler's mentor in the early days of the Nazi Party, along
with Rudolf Hess and Alfred Rosenberg.18
   According to Ravenscroft, Eckart, like Hitler, first achieved
transcendence through psychedelic drugs. Research on peyote by the
German pharmacologist Ludwig Lewin had been published in 1886,
leading to widespread popular experimentation. Later a heroin

addict, in earlier days Eckart used peyote in the practice on neo-
pagan magic in Berlin. He came to believe that he, too was the
reincarnation of ninth century character. In his case it was
Bernard of Barcelona, a notorious betrayer of Christianity to the
Arabs and a black magician who used thaumaturgy to hold off
Carolingian armies in Spain.
  Eckart assertedly organized Kurt EIsner's assassination and
personally chose Hitler-by then a battle-scarred veteran of the
horrors of trench warfare and a fervent critic of the armistice-to
lead the Aryan race back to supremacy.
  Ravenscroft writes that Hitler had been prepared for satanic
initiation by his experiences in Vienna with peyote and with the
spear and by his mustard gassing in 1918, which left him blind and
in a state of enforced trance for several days.
  He also says that the techniques Dietrich Eckart used were in
part derived from the sexual magic of Aleister Crowley. In 1912
this famed British magician was named IX British head of a secret
Berlin lodge called Ordo Templi Orientis which practiced various
forms of sexual magic.19
   Ravenscroft writes "there can be little doubt" that both Crowley
and Eckart conducted deep studies of the Arabian astrological magic
performed by Klingsor's real life counterpart, Landulf II. It was
to Sicily-then a Moslem stronghold-that Landulf fled after his
traitorous links to Islam were disclosed. And it was in a dark
tower in the mountains of the southwest corner of that island that
his evil soul festered with additional bitterness over his
castration by the relatives of a noblewoman he had raped. There he
practiced sadistic satanism of a nature that foreshadowed the
horrors of Nazi concentration camps.
       
       If the legends that have come down from these dark centuries
       of European history are true, these rituals carried out at
       Kalot Enbolot included terrible tortures such as the      
       slitting open of the stomach of sacrificial victims and the 
       slow drawing open of the stomach of sacrificial victims and 
       the slow drawing of their entrails, the driving of stakes 
       through the orifices of their bodies before disembowelling 
       them, and the invoking of Spirits of Darkness (incubi) to 
       rape young virgins kidnapped from their families.20

   It was from his studies of the power available to practitioners
of such perversities that Eckart devised the rituals he used when
he "opened the centers of Adolf Hitler to give him a vision of and
a means of communication with the Powers." Ravenscroft concludes,
though he declines to furnish the full details: "Suffice it to say
that they were indescribably sadistic and ghastly." 21
    Having done his worst, Eckart soon died, proudly advising those
around him:

         Follow  Hitler! he will dance, but it is I who have called
         the tune!

         I have initiated him into the "Secret Doctrine", opened
         his centers of vision and given him the means to        
         communicate with the Powers.
         Do not mourn for me: I shall have influenced history more
         than any other German.22

   Not unnaturally the question rises whether any of THE SPEAR OF
DESTINY is true. It's certainly a great story, one which
Ravenscroft elaborates with a lengthy investigation of Hitler's sex
life, in which he makes a case for associating the reports of the
Fuehrer's missing testis to the perversities resulting from
Landulf's castration.
   The problem lies with Ravenscroft's primary source, Dr. Walter
Johannes Stein. And the problem with Dr.Stein is really two
problems: one his method of historical research: and two, the fact
that he is dead and unable to speak for himself.
   Given his method, of course, this second problem should not be
insurmountable. Had we the technique, Dr. Stein could presumably
verify each of Ravenscroft's assertion for us from beyond the
grave. For Dr. Stein is alleged to have studied history not in the
libraries and archives that are the usual haunt of the historian
but in an arena called the Cosmic Chronicle where, according to
Ravenscroft, past present and future were united in a higher
dimension of time.
   What's more Ravenscroft reveals in his introduction, Dr.Stein
taught the same techniques to him.
   It is, however, undeniably difficult, if not unprecedented, to
footnote clairvoyance. We have to take on faith that the SPEAR OF
DESTINY is what Dr.Stein told Ravenscroft. This is not to say that
all of his information came from the Cosmic Chronicle; Dr. Stein
as we have seen is purported to have been present in Vienna during 
Hitler's lost years there. Nor did their close association end in
Austria. Ravenscroft says Dr. Stein "watched at close quarters" the
founding of the Nazi party and Hitler's association with Eckart and
other sinister mentors.
          When Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler ordered Dr.Stein's
       arrest in Stuttgart in 1933 in order to press him into    
       service with the SS Occult Bureau, he escaped from Germany 
       and brought with him to Britain the most authoritative    
       knowledge of the occultism of the Nazi Party.23 

   Nowhere does Ravenscroft made it clear whether he's talking
about eyewitness knowledge on Dr.Stein's part or about the sort of
information to be gleaned from the Cosmic Chronicle. But two
critics of the SPEAR OF DESTINY do cast doubt on several of the
factual assertions upon the factual assertions upon which
Ravenscroft's argument is built.
   One is Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, whose book on the occult roots
of Nazism is quoted above. In an appendix called "THE MODERN
MYTHOLOGY OF NAZI OCCULTISM", Goodrick-Clarke takes Ravenscroft to
task for the story about Hitler's relations with the occult

bookseller in Vienna and for his claim that Guido Von List was
forced to flee from outraged Viennese Catholics in 1909 after the
sexual rites of his blood brotherhood were exposed. he writes
flatly,

           There is not a shred of evidence for such rituals.
        List was never obliged to leave Vienna and he enjoyed the 
        patronage of prominent Vienna figures...The fictional    
        nature of the whole episode surrounding the annotated copy 
        of copy of Parzival is suggested by the similarity of    
        Pretzsche's obscure bookshop to the one described by Sir
        Edward Bulwer-Lytton in ZANONI (1842), which probably    
        served Ravenscroft as a literary model.24

  Goodrick-Clarke also criticizes Jean Michael Angebert's book, THE
OCCULT AND THE THIRD REICH, cited above. He brands as imaginary
Angebert's account of the young Hitler's association with Lanz von
Lebenfels.
  As noted earlier, Goodrick-Clarke's book is an important and
serious piece of research on Guido von List and Lanz von
Lievenfels. But the author seems a little over-sensitive toward
other writers who invoke his two subjects. Nevertheless, his
critique of Angebert and Ravenscroft, though brief, does offer a
glimpse of the misgivings that professional historians feel
regarding such material.
  More extensive criticisms have been offered by Christoph
Lindenberg in his review of THE SPEAR OF DESTINY in the German
journal Die Drie. Lindenberg has done some effective digging at the
Vienna Records office. Ravenscroft has Hitler sitting high up in
the cheap seats of the Vienna Opera House in the winter of 1910 -
 1 watching Wagner's Parzifal and sympathizing with Klingsor. This
proves to have been impossible, because Lindenberg learned that the
first performance of Wagner's opera took place three years later,
on January 14,1914.
   Ravenscroft's second mistake was to name the Viennese bookseller
who introduced Hitler to drugs. "No better name occurred to him
than Pretsche, popular among English writers of fiction for German
malefactors," Lindenberg writes scornfully  before revealing that
extensive checks of Vienna city and business directories and police
records for the years 1892 through 1920 were negative for the name
in question.25
   Next, Lindenberg takes issue with Ravenscroft's description of
the Danube trip Hitler and Dr. Stein took in May 1913, to visit the
mystic woodcutter, Hands Lodz:
        We can overlook Ravenscroft's mistake of speaking of    
"Wachau" as a place and not of the region which really it is.    
But the details do not fit: the snow melting in May, the
steamer running in spite of the floods, bathing in the river-
it makes no sense. Certainly wrong is the statement that Hitler
  had only one testicle... all this has been completely refuted
  by [Werner] Maser.26

   Ravenscroft's account of Hitler's circumstances in Vienna also
come in for some heavy criticism. Dr. Stein reportedly sat in a
window seat in Demel's Cafe, reading the anonymous marginalia in
the copy of Parzival he'd found and concluding they were "the
footnotes of Satan" when he looked through the  glass and beheld
"the most arrogant face and demonical eyes he had ever seen". This
was of course the future Fuehrer in his legendary guise as an
impoverished pavement artist, selling homemade postcards, dressed
in a big black "sleazy" coat, his toes visible through the cracks
in his shoes. When in August, 1912, he sought Hitler out at the
"flophouse" he lived in , in Meldemannstrasse, he was told Hitler
was away at Spittal-an-der-Drau collecting a legacy left him by an
aunt. Thereafter, Hitler dressed well.27
   Hitler did receive a legacy from his aunt, Johanna Poelzl,
Lindenberg reports. But this happens in March, 1911, and the aunt
lived in Spital-with-one-t, not on the Drau but in southern
Austria. Furthermore,

          At no time of life did Hitler live in impoverished     
       conditions, rather he had always sufficient money. In the 
       Meldenmannstrasse, a kind of large hotel, Hitler paid a  
       rent of 15 Kronen a month. So he could afford a fairly    
       expensive room and had no need to sell his pictures, which 
       in any case were no postcards. So this scene too, that    
       impoverished Hitler dressed in an oversized black coat    
       selling water colors in front of the Cafe Dehmel does not 
       agree with the facts either (cf. the two works by Werner  
       Maser who with incredible care collected all ascertained  
       facts of Hitler's youth).28

   In his discussion of the holy lance's power to evoke
transcendent experience, Ravenscroft has a scene in which the chief
of the German general staff, Helmut von Moltke, visited the relic
in the company of Conrad von Hoetzendorf, an Austrian general,
shortly before the outbreak of World War I. The spear's presence
led von Moltke to have a trance vision of himself incarnated as
Pope Nicolas I, a ninth century pontiff concerned, like von Moltke,
with the balance of geopolitical power between east and west.29
  Untrue protests Lindenberg. "For Moltke visited Vienna neither
in 1913 nor in 1914. Conrad and Moltke met on May 12, 1914 at
Karlsbad, from September 7 - 10, 1913, in Silesia, and at Leipzig
on October 18 at the Centenary of the Battle of Leipzig. They had
no other meeting."30
  Lindenberg has several other criticisms to make, such as the
assertion that "A number of people who intimately knew Walter
Johannes Stein in the last years of his life state that Stein never
met Hitler." Unfortunately Ravenscroft's aversion to footnotes has
also afflicted his critic, and Lindenberg nowhere names these
people nor does he document his other assertions.
   Lindenberg doesn't like Ravenscroft's book; he calls it " a
pollution of our spiritual environment." And it is manifestly
difficult for him or anyone to rebut research done on the cosmic
level.
  What, in the end, was Hitler all about? Perhaps no better
explanation can be found than W.H. Auden's suggestions, made in his
poem "September 1,1939" and printed as an epigram to Robert G.L.
Waite's book. The date is the beginning of Hitler's Blitzkrieg
against Poland:

              Accurate scholarship can
              Unearth the whole offence
              From Luther until now
              That has driven a culture mad,
              Find what occurred at Linz,
              What huge imago made
              A psychopathic god:
              I and the public know
              What all schoolchildren learn,
              Those to whom evil is done
              Do evil in return.

--
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