Karl Haushofer 

        And the Occult Third Reich

             THE CONTROVERSY OF THE OCCULT REICH

        British Intelligence Reports on Capture of Rudolf Hess

        Haushofer and Hess meet before Hess' Flight to England

         Swiss Historian Exposes Anti-Hitler Rauschning Memoir as Fraudulent

            Article on the Thule Society

          Short excerpt from the Nazi Book of Virtues/Glauben und Handeln

         The Men Behind Hitler

         Origins of the Swastika

           Adolf und die Uebermen von der Golden Dawn

            Karl Haushofer

Professor Karl Haushofer was a highly regarded geo - political scientist of international renown, who had many connections to American as well as British and French researchers, politicians and scientists. Although an early supporter of National Socialism in Germany, he fell in disfavor with the nazi movement and especially SS racial and geo - political theorists, just prior to Germany's planned attack on the Soviet Union of which he strongly disapproved.  Much has been said, in holding him responsible for Nazi Germany's fatal eastern expansionist plans and policies of German "Lebensraum" in Russia etc. But, this is completely untrue.

 If anything, Professor Haushofer was, what we call today, a "Eurasianist" who advocated a policy of German - Russian hegemony and alliance to offset the Anglo - American power structure's dominating influence in Europe.

 He never advocated for Germany to take over Russia and use her for German territorial needs as "Lebensraum." And it is this point, more than anything else, which got him into trouble with the ruling elite of National Socialism. When Hitler sided with the aristocracy and the right wing of the Wehrmacht, against the left wing of the nazi party which was headed by Gregor Strasser, which culminated in the "Night of the Long Knives," and the murder of many of his former comrades in the SA, including Gregor Strasser.  Haushofer also came under suspicion because of his contacts with left wing figures within the nazi movement and his advocacy of, what would amount to, a German - Russian alliance.

               Gregor Strasser

 The left wing of the nazi party was more socialist than nationalist . In fact, they had many connections to the German Communist Party and some of its leaders, especially those who were influenced by the National Bolshevist philosophy of a German - Russian revolutionary alliance, as advocated by Niekisch, Evola, Juenger, Hielscher and many other important figures of the "conservative - revolution" and the National Bolshevist movement. 

                  Otto Strasser

Otto Strasser, the brother of Gregor Strasser, broke away from the nazi movement in 1930 and founded the "Black Front" organization which was very close to the National Bolshevist movement. His brother Gregor remained in the NSDAP in his high ranking position as head of the party for the north German region which included Berlin. Joseph Goebbels was his secretary and also strongly in favor of social revolution and an alliance with Russia. But, also in 1930, Gregor Strasser came under heavy attack from Hitler and the Southern German party leadership. Gregor Strasser and Goebbels were in favor of a break away from the Southern party organization because of their conservative and reactionary policies. Already in 1926 Strasser worked towards this goal and continued to fight for a social revolution against the reactionary elements of the Southern party leadership in Munich. Eventually, Goebbels betrayed him and sided with the Hitler faction of Bavaria. Gregor resigned from all party offices in 1933 after Hitler came to power in Germany and was murdered by the SS under Hitler's and Goering's orders during the "Nacht der langen Messer" on June 30, 1934.

                  Ernst Roehm

 Gregor Strasser and Ernst Roehm as well as the SA of Berlin and Hamburg and the other industrial cities, where the revolutionary left wing predominated, strongly advocated that the German Wehrmacht (Army) should be completely restructured and reconstructed from the revolutionary ranks of the SA (Sturm Abteilung). This was meant to remove the Wehrmacht from the influence and power of the reactionary elements within its ranks, especially within the officers corps.

 This reactionary element was extremely hostile to the revolutionary socialist ideas of the nazi movement and bargained with Hitler to destroy the left wing within the party. Hitler, himself not very socially conscious and quite bourgeois, sold out to their demands for the promise of financial support and international "acceptance" of National Socialism and his leadership position as "Fuehrer." 

 Of course, these "backers" were the major industrial corporations and their international financial connections which had already invested large amounts of money in the National Socialist movement. These international "financial interests," wanted the nazi party to be a more or less Fascist Party, which would carry out their interests in Germany. One of their main "interests" was the creation of a strong Wehrmacht to fight their planned war of aggression against  Communism and the Soviet Union  and with that, another World War which would bring about the dissolution of European power, influence and culture and the establishment of Anglo - American corporate fascism on a Global scale.

 Thus, Hitler betrayed the movement and murdered his former comrades of the socialist wing of the nazi movement and eventually lead the German people into a catastrophic war that could not be won. A war that  brought about exactly what these Anglo-American  schemers had planned and plotted all along.

 Whether Hitler and his inner circle were aware of these plans and willing players in it, one can probably never find out.

 What strikes us as significant though, is, that at the end of the second World War, Himmler and Goering were trying to negotiate peace with the allies and were deluded enough to think that the allies would grant them a leading position in a new German government.

            Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuehrer of the SS

 Now, we think, had they not received some kind of secret information and guidance during the war, and perhaps even certain "promises," they would have, like Hitler, committed suicide, or at least tried to escape.

 But, instead, they believed sincerely that they could surrender Germany to the allies and become "Heads of State." Does that make sense?

               Hermann Goering

 With the Concentration Camps and the murder and displacement of Jews, and Slavic peoples, and with such terrible accusations of committed atrocities, of which they must have been very well aware, if not through their role in the nazi administration, then, at least through the international press. How could they have had such illusions?

 We believe strongly, that they must have been in contact with those to whom they sold out in 1934, and probably even long before that. And they must have received promises and encouragement from those "contacts," right up to the final days of World War II.

 In the early days of the movement, up to the elections in 1933, the left wing of the nazi party was quite useful to get Communist votes and support for the national elections and thus tolerated and even encouraged by lip service and un-kept promises. But, after the nazi party had come to power, they had to be eliminated.

Watching Leni Riefenstahl's documentary movie, "Triumph of the Will," one can detect, in the speeches of the nazi leadership, constant references to the point that the "revolution" was finished and needed to be replaced by constructive work once and for all  so that the "German People" could go on with their lives in the "new state." One also becomes aware of a strong emphasis on "duty" and the "traditions" of the Wehrmacht in its role as "educator" of the German youth.

          Adolf Hitler, Leni Riefenstahl and Josef Goebbels

 Thus, we can clearly see who was really "in charge" of this new German regime. Hitler might have been the "Fuehrer," but the Wehrmacht and the reactionary elements behind the Wehrmacht, the aristocrats and corporate leaders, were calling the shots.

At this Parteitag in September of 1934 in Nuremberg, as shown and heard in the movie, an emphatic appeal is made to convince the people of Germany, and especially the cadres of the movement, that all was well within the rank and file and leadership. The "plotters" of the "Roehm Putsch," as they wrongfully called it, had paid for their "treason" with their lives as "renegades" and "traitors" to the cause.

Hitler then, led them on a reactionary, racist course united with the aristocracy, the corporate leaders and international finance which would eventually lead to preoccupation with racist theories, which would further lead into an abyss of evil manifested in beastly racist actions and atrocities which would condemn Germany, in the eyes of the world, forever, and which would unleash the second world war upon the German people and the world.

 Our point here is to say: had Professor Haushofer's knowledge and influence been followed by the Nazi leadership, and especially by Hitler, the second world war and the scheming manipulations of the "Atlanticists" (See our articles by Alexander Dugin) could, perhaps, have been averted and exposed, and the war avoided completely.

                Gurdjieff

Professor Haushofer was indeed quite involved with the Occult but not with magick or Occult organizations of that nature. His interests and studies were with Gurdjieff and with Tibetan Buddhism as well as the Occult aspects of the Thule Society and perhaps also the Vril Society. He was well traveled, and had visited many points of his eastern interests. That there were strong connections to Tibet and the then Dalai Lama is of no doubt. There definitely was a Tibetan "colony" in Berlin. And there were Tibetans fighting in the European SS detachments.

               Agwan Dordjieff, a Tsanit Khanpo who sat at
              the right hand of the Dalai Lama.

The SS branch of "Occult" studies and research was called "Ahnenerbe" and its extensive files, reports, studies and research papers etc. are now locked away in the United States. Apparently there must be implicative information and material which the Government doesn't want the public to become aware of, because NO ONE is allowed access to them and there is no time or date of release promised.

               Hitler greets Sven Hedin who was a Tibet explorer and nazi sympathizer.

We doubt very much that they will ever be released to public or even scholastic scrutiny.

 Professor Karl Haushofer's son, Albrecht, was a Professor of Geography at the University of Berlin, and a consultant to the nazi foreign office and worked in the wartime resistance against Hitler. He was arrested after the failed bomb plot which took place on July 20, 1944, and imprisoned in the Moabit Prison in Berlin. Waiting for his trial and most likely execution, he wrote sonnets and hid them very carefully. On April 23, 1945, as Soviet troops closed in on the center of Berlin, the prison authorities released Albrecht and a group of fellow inmates. But immediately outside the gates a group of SS or SD men took charge of the prisoners, marched them to a vacant lot nearby, shot them, and left their bodies where they fell. Some weeks later, Albrecht's body was found by his younger brother. The dead man's right hand was hidden under his coat, still pressing to his heart the five folded sheets of paper bearing the sonnets.

The Moabit Sonnets were first published by a group of American Army officers in the occupation forces in Berlin. Since then they have been reprinted in Germany and many European countries and languages.

                  Karl Haushofer and his son Albrecht Haushofer

                 The English edition was published by Norton & Company, New York, 1978

To see the nazi phenomenon and especially the movement in itself as a unified and strongly united front with the "Fuehrer" as the final decision maker and authority, is not only wrong but dangerously misleading. 

There was a lot of internal strife and struggle for power. Not only on an individual basis but also coming from factions and groups within the various organizations and groupings of academia, philosophy, religion and party formations such as the SA, SS, N.S.D.A.P., Hitler Youth, Labor Service (Reichs Arbeitsdienst), SD, Wehrmacht and so on.

Even some dissent was tolerated, especially before the war started in 1939. Most occult groups and organizations were eventually outlawed. So were astrologers and all other diviners as well as the Theosophical Society, Freemasonry, Rose- Crucians, Spiritists and mediums and the many religious sects, cults and churches which had flourished so abundantly during the Weimar Republic.

 The masses and especially the youth were encouraged in the study and simple practice of Nordic Paganism with its Germanic Gods, Goddesses and spirits.  

There were Gnostics, Tibetan Buddhists, German Christians and still, the Catholic Church and the Lutheran Church, Germanic Pagans and, last but not least, the philosophical semi-Gnostic writings of Alfred Rosenberg, especially his work:  Myth of the Twentieth Century, (Mythos des zwanzigsten Jahrhunders). 

And then, of course, there was the SS with their own semi-pagan rituals and runic studies. Hitler himself seems not to have known too much, and cared even less, for these philosophies especially in their more esoteric conceptions. He is known to have laughed at Rosenberg's theories and to have made fun of them behind Rosenberg's back. Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, also didn't fare to well with his obsession for medieval pomp and ancestor worship. Hitler laughed and ridiculed his follies also. His whispered nickname amongst the "Volk" was "Reichs- Heini." (Heini is a derogatory term for Heinrich. Thus, it means like Heini or fool of the Reich).

The only thing Hitler seemed to really approve of in matters of Religion, was the use of simple semi-pagan teachings and rituals as a form of bonding "material." This is not to say that Hitler was completely devoid of any spirituality. He was entranced and immensely stimulated by Wagner's Operas which dealt mostly with the Grail Myths and ancient Germanic sagas. And, as we have shown on another page of our web site, he seems to have read and somewhat admired some of Aleister Crowley's writings. Especially his  Book of the Law. What other spiritual philosophies he pursued, are strictly speculation. He should, through Rudolf Hess's and Dietrich Eckart's tutelage, have become aware of Theosophical and Anthroposophical concepts and teachings especially about the root races and their evolution. But, there is no evidence in his speeches or conversations of any involvement with their philosophies. The only words he used that indicate spiritual convictions is Gott, and "Vorsehung" which means "Destiny." Of course, he must have used other words in common language which have a religious meaning, but, they probably were just part of normal German language expressions.

The philosophy which became dominant during the third Reich was the worship of race, blood, soil and ancestors to the point of total lunacy. This especially was carried out and lived by Heinrich Himmler's SS. There, the cult of blood and race, inter-mixed with the concepts promulgated by Crowley's  Book of the Law, which teaches: "Do as thou wilt is the whole of the Law," and the brutal "worldview" conjured by ancient myths and sagas, became the spark which eventually burst forth into flames during the war and became  the pyre of death to millions of peoples of so many races and nationalities and paved the way for Europe's downfall and Anglo-American dominance.

Thus, let it be said, that the whole nazi movement as manifested in the Third Reich, had knowingly or not knowingly, fallen upon the Left Handed Path of satanic brutality and bestial slaughter in sacrifice to the ancient gods which they had so carelessly evoked.

 Do as thou wilt is the whole of the Law!  And, indeed, this is what they did!  Not as a unified willful action, but through the sub-conscious release of forces and principalities they could not contain.

As an endnote, I would like to mention, that Professor Haushofer spent the final year of the war in a nazi concentration camp. He was than interned by the allies as a war criminal but eventually released. Shortly after, he committed suicide together with his Jewish wife.

British Intelligence Reports
on Capture of Rudolf Hess

Look for Karl Haushofer's name on it !

David Irving writes: I have derived the following narrative from the RSHA interrogations (Saturday, June 12, 1999):-

Kriminalrat Franz Lutz, Hess's 48 year old security officer, questioned on May 18, described in detail Hess's many different doctors, therapists, and masseurs with evident distaste; Hess had required the doctors to test their skills on him first.

Hess's staff had accompanied him on many trips to Messerschmitt's Augsburg factory airfield. He had flown to Augsburg on November 8 and inspected the Me110; by the end of 1940 he was flying the Me110 solo. His driver told the Gestapo that in October or November he had been sent to Munich's Riem airport to fetch a map of England; then Hess sent his valet to buy two maps of north-western Europe, at Lana's bookstore. Entering Hess's study once, normally a forbidden sanctum, the valet had found it strewn with charts. Soon Hess had had auxiliary fuel tanks added to "his" Me110. Once Messerschmitt's instructor inquired why he was asking whether it could still carry a bomb or torpedo with the tank, and was he planning to fly to England with the plane then? "No, no," Hess had responded with a smile, but then he hinted to his staff that he intended to try out for himself a new method of mining British ports.

In January, recalled Sorof, Hess had once casually asked him to find out whether the British "General Hamilton" was still alive. On January 10, 1941 he had made his first serious attempt to fly to Britain, taking off at Messerschmitt's airfield at about three p.m. in the Me110 fitted with auxiliary fuel tanks. Before leaving the administration building, Hess asked for paper to write something. As the plane took off, the valet handed to adjutant Pintsch a bulky envelope. Pintsch went bright purple as he read the contents, and announced that their chief had flown to England. But at that moment the control tower announced that the Me110 was back and circling overhead; Hess then had to use up ninety minutes' fuel before he could safely land. He explained that the rudder was faulty. Pintsch swore the others to secrecy.

Disturbed by all of this, his detective Lutz asked Pintsch afterwards if the Führer knew what was going on, as he would have to make some kind of report to Himmler. Two or three days later Pintsch replied that Hess had assured him that him he was calling off the flights for the time being. There were no more visits to Augsburg until March. Hess's staff remained uneasy; his valet blurted out what he knew of the England plan to a startled Alfred Leitgen in mid-January, and suggested they ought to mention it to Martin Bormann - he himself was reluctant to do so, as he did not know if the Führer had ordered the mission or not. Lutz pressed Pintsch several times about whether Hitler was in the picture or not. "Pintsch then told me," stated Lutz under Gestapo interrogation on May 18, "that Comrade Hess had apparently talked with the Führer about such a plan while in Berlin. There was accordingly no need for me to report to the Reichsführer SS." Lutz for one was convinced that Hess "must have" informed the Führer of his plan.

Hess's staff, who were now all in the know, wilted under the oath of secrecy he had exacted.

After the January 10 attempt, Hess ordered from the Munich sports outfitters Schuster's a leather flying suit and fur-lined boots (he had previously borrowed some from Messerschmitt's). Early in April he visited Schwarz the Tailors in Munich's Prielmayer-strasse, and ordered a blue-grey Luftwaffe captain's uniform; it cost around 150 marks. The Luftwaffe uniform, which gained an almost mystical significance for the superstitious Hess, thus began an extraordinary journey that ended over fifty years later when it was returned by Berlin police authorities to Hess's now adult son (it had been stolen from his prison cell in Spandau by British soldiers a few days before his mysterious death in 1987).

Pintsch had told Sorof over a glass of beer on April 20 that Hess was worried about the way the war was going, because he knew the Führer was reluctant to destroy England, and because he saw war coming with the United States and the Soviet Union, and that he was planning to make personal contact with peace-loving circles in Britain and had been working on a memorandum to be handed to Hitler after his departure. Later in April, Hess obtained several books on the British Constitution. On May 3, said his adjutant Günther Sorof, Hess flew by government plane from München Riem airport to Berlin. Ten minutes before take-off Karl Haushofer came to speak with Hess. Haushofer told the adjutant a few minutes later that he was to stay in Munich and await a phone message from him that evening or next morning to forward to Hess in Berlin; Haushofer had indeed phoned that evening, and instructed Sorof to say to Berlin, "On a scale of 1 to 6, things stand at around 3 or 4 and more needs doing." His son Albrecht, he added, would report as soon as he was back on German soil. Pintsch, who had mistrusted the younger Haushofer as a "spongy half-Jew", and wondered what business he had in Party headquarters, dutifully passed the message to Hess in Berlin.

Hess arrived in Berlin at 5:20 p.m. He had ordered his staff to bring the Luftwaffe captain's uniform with them. "That evening," reported Lutz, Hess's detective, "Comrade Hess was with the Führer." Pintsch learned that Hess had received an important message from Haushofer and taken it straight over to the Führer late that evening of May 3, "I believe it was from Portugal." Whereupon Hitler had made a crucial alteration to the script of his next day's speech to the Reichstag - what that was, we do not know. When Detective Lutz again asked Pintsch next day, the fourth, whether Hess had told the Führer of his intention, Pintsch replied that Hess had told him he had spoken with the Führer about his plan. "The Führer was not averse to it," he had said.

Driver Lippert testified that "shortly after the Reichstag session" on May 4 Hess ordered them to get ready for an immediate journey to Augsburg. His staff were surprised at the suddenness of this decision. At five past ten p.m. Hess left Berlin in a special coach attached to the overnight Munich express. He had commanded Pintsch to have the Hitler speech printed in English, and several copies of the speech, freshly printed in a very small typeface were packed into his luggage. Over lunch on May 5, Hess met the younger Haushofer, Professor Albrecht Haushofer, whom he had summoned to his room in the Hotel Drei Mohren from Überlingen. They spoke privately, nobody knew about what (the Gestapo murdered the younger Haushofer at the end of the war). At four p.m. Hess left and drove with his staff to Augsburg, where his Me110 was ready. For the first time, he was wearing the new Luftwaffe uniform under his leather flying suit; he allowed Detective Lutz to take a roll of Leica snapshots of him in this unusual garb, in a room of the Messerschmitt building. When his driver asked about the uniform, Hess told him not to breath a word about it to anybody; "I'm planning a little surprise," he explained to his staff. Taking a handful of the Hitler speeches but no other hand luggage, to save weight, he climbed into the plane and took off at 5:15 p.m., heading north. A while later however the Me110 appeared back over the airfield, circling to lose fuel; this time a radio fault had forced his return. On the drive back to Munich, his valet noticed that Hess was in a sour mood.

On the morning of May 10, Pintsch had phoned a meteorologist to ask about the cloud levels over Scotland, and had phoned the answer through to Hess. Pintsch had then phoned the air ministry and asked them to switch on a certain beacon, Elektra. Hess had instructed his staff to keep their eyes open for a letter from Switzerland, presumably from his aunt in Zürich. On the morning of his departure a letter arrived from her reminding Hess that he had phoned her to keep her eyes open for a certain message from the International Red Cross, but that none had come yet; by then he had already left on his mission however. On May 10, he again drove to Augsburg. This time, Hess told Lutz to take no photos - it was a flying superstition, he said, not to be photographed before a long flight; he slung his own Leica camera around his neck. Pintsch handed him maps and an envelope with the Hitler speeches, and at 5:42 p.m. the Me110 took off, again heading north. This time all went well. At 9:45 p.m. Pintsch revealed to his colleagues: "No phone calls have come, so Comrade Hess's flight must have succeeded." He pulled out of his attaché case a package containing a route map - it ended somewhere in Scotland, where Hess intended, said Pintsch, to parachute into the estate of a local notable - and several letters, some addressed in Hess's handwriting and others in typescript, to the Führer, Himmler, a Messerschmitt director, and family members. Since it was too late to disturb the Führer with all this now, Pintsch decided, he would take the 7:35 a.m. train from Munich to Berchtesgaden; upon leaving this train at Freilassing, he told his colleagues that he hoped Hitler would not be upset by Hess's move - the first shocking intimation that Detective Lutz had that Hitler might be in the dark after all.

Rudolf Hess

In late 19th and early 20th century Germany and Austria there were many flourishing esoteric orders which sought to establish a reborn Germanic identity and to reconnect the Volk with its repressed archetypes.

One of the most significant of these Orders was founded in Germany in 1912 - the German Order. From this sprang the Thule Society whose driving force was Rudolf von Sebottendorff. He had been schooled in occultism, Islamic mysticism, alchemy, Rosicrucianism and much else, in Turkey, where he had also been initiated into Freemasonry.

Thule served as the recruiting and political action front of the German Order. Sebottendorff bought a failing Munich newspaper, the Beobachter which he renamed the Volkische Beobachter and it became the official newspaper of the NSDAP.

A movement to promote Thulian ideas among industrial workers and to offset Marxism, was formed in 1918 - the Workers' Political Circle - with Thulist Karl Harrer as chairman. From this came the German Workers' Party in 1919. A year later this became the NSDAP under the leadership of Adolf Hitler.

Serbottendorff himself stated: "Thule members were the people to whom Hitler first turned and who first allied themselves with Hitler."

The Thule society was active in efforts to overthrow the Barvarian Communist Government. Their propaganda effort was aided by a journalist, poet, and occult student Dietrich Eckart, who was the major intellectual influence on Hitler in the early years. The swastika flag adopted by the NSDAP was the brain-child of another Thulist, Dr Krohn.

Dietrich Eckard

With the victory of the Nazi Party, the occult tradition was carried on in the Third Reich mainly by the SS, who Reichsfuhrer, Himmler, was an avid student of the occult. An SS occult research department, the Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage) was established in 1935 with SS Colonel Wolfram von Sievers at its head. Occult research took SS researchers as far afield as Tibet. Sievers had the Tantrik prayer, the Bardo Thodol, read over his body after his execution at Nuremberg.

SS Ahnenerbe teaching session at the Ordensburg Sonthofen

National Socialism and the Third Reich represented a major attempt by high esoteric Adepts to re-establish a Culture based on the Laws of Nature, against the entrenched forces of anti-Life. Nothing that ambitious had been tried since the founding of the American Republic by Masonic adepts.

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 "Masters" 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.

On April 6, 1919, in Bavaria, left wing socialists and anarchists proclaimed 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 inclinations 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 Sebottendorf. 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 fighting 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 Eckardt. 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. Eckardt was also a committed occultist and a master of magic. As an initiate, Eckardt belonged to the inner circle of the Thule Society as well as other esoteric orders.

Dietrich Eckardt

There can be no doubt that Eckardt - 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 subsequent rejection of Free Masons and esoteric movements, of Theosophy, of Anthroposophy, 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.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky author of The Secret Doctrine

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 attaché 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.

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.

From "The Unknown Hitler" by Wulf Schwartzwaller, Berkeley Books, 1990

To get a better understanding of nazi teachings for the masses read this following excerpt from a nazi guide-book for Hitler Youth in the military. We have found it in the "German Propaganda Archive" of Calvin College:

Background: This is partial translation of a thin 1943 Nazi book titled "Faith and Action." It is rather a "Book of Virtues," discussing the the traits Nazi youth were to have. The author was in charge of military education for the Hitler Youth. It was published by the party's own publishing house. Even though 1943 was late in the war, it was published in a huge edition. The edition I am working from brought the number in print to 150,000.

Faith

From the nazi "book of virtue"

Knowledge is that which can be measured by reason. Knowledge alone means nothing and is dead. §A wish that you can fulfill is called hope. Hope can easily come to nothing. §But faith can never fail, for faith is strength. Faith springs from your deepest feelings. It is that knowledge for which there is no explanation through reason. In faith the soul sees a part of the world order. It has a sense of that which should be, and sees through its eyes a part of the way that it should and can go. It knows that by going this way it fulfills god's command and is working toward the great work that is immeasurable, incomprehensible. §Because faith sees this and can do it, is is more than human strength. It is a part of the enormous power that fills all life and all worlds. With faith, a person walks with the assurance of a sleepwalker. Who can resist him, for he follows the path of the highest will. He will succeed when he believes. No hand raised against him will divert him from his way. The bullet aimed at him will not hit as long has he has not finished his path, as long as he has not turned from it. §Thousands do not understand the believing person because their souls cannot see. But what do the faithful care about the opinion of others, what do those who can see care about the opinion of the blind, what do those who have become strong care about what the weak think. §The way of faith is the way of everything great. Before our eyes Adolf Hitler went the way fate led him. He was filled with it and believed what no reason of the reasonable could see. §The path of faith is before each of us. Even if it is not the path of fame and honor, it is still the path of duty and of greatest happiness. To find it means to gain a part of the eternal strength that moves the worlds. §Because faith is strength, it can do what seems impossible. It is the foundation for every deed. No one can do anything without faith. No one can even jump over a ditch if he does not believe he can do it. The highest and most important in a person is not knowledge and understanding, rather his faith. Each is worth only as much as the faith he has. §This new Reich began with faith. The first party rally after the seizure of power was called "The Victory of Faith." It grew and became great through faith. It no longer grew from the faith of one man, but from the faith of us all, and was borne by the strength of all. More than human strength was present. §Woe to those who do not believe. They are not on the side of the strength of creation, rather annihilation. They are the destroyers of the Reich. §Faith is however stronger than all other powers that can be found in this world.

Birth and Death

Birth and death are the same; they are the two sides of one door. To enter one room always means leaving another. It depends on which room or which life we are in as to whether we say "entrance" or "exit," life or death. §For he who understands it, death holds no terrors. But he who did not go his proper way in life and sinned will see his guilt in death. But there is after death no place of torture, no hell. To see one's guilt is the severest judgment and at the same time the greatest penalty. Judgment and punishment are within yourself. §Neglected work can only be made up by double effort. It will once more be your choice, either to work toward the world plan, or to be its enemy. That is the only death that there is, to become a force for destruction rather than for creation, and this death is not physical. It is your free choice to decide on which side you belong, on god's or, to use an old term, "the devil's." §What we call birth and death is only the door between two worlds. There is no birth and no death, only change, and we can go confidently through the door, for all the worlds were created by one hand.

To read more, go to "German Propaganda Archive" listed below:

From: German Propaganda Archive

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 were 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 Genealogy, 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.

National Socialist magazine "Volk and Race."

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 concentration 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.

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.

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 particularly 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 personifications 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 reversing 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.

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 huge 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 Hitler, 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, whos 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 folkloric 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 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 make 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).

 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. --

 James Daugherty, volunteer Postmaster for A-albionic Research (POB 20273, Ferndale, MI 48220), a ruling class/conspiracy research resource for the entire political-ideological spectrum. Quarterly Journal, book sales, rare/out-of-print searches, & networking since 1984. New Paradigms Gopher and FTP Site loaded with unique files and book catalogs. For introductory info on Weekly Up-date, Discussion List, free articles, & & free book catalogs e-mail to: majordomo@mail.msen.com message in body: info prj (subject doesn't matter) New Paradigms Project Gopher: gopher.a-albionic.com 9006 New Paradigms Project Ftp Site: ftp.a-albionic.com

We, from the Gnostic Liberation Front, would like to inform our readers, that, in The Spear of Destiny and other books dealing with nazi mysticism and the occult, a book by a former nazi who fled the Hitler regime named Hermann Rauschning, is often quoted. The book was published in Britain under the title, Hitler speaks, (London 1939) and in the United States under the title, The voice of destruction (New York 1940). Virtually every major biography of Adolf Hitler or history of the Third Reich quotes from the memoir of Hermann Rauschning, a former National Socialist Senate President of Danzig. Rauschning presents page after page of what are purported to be Hitler's most intimate views and plans for the future. They are allegedly based on a hundred or so private conversations between the two men.

Now, after more than forty years, a Swiss historian has thoroughly exposed this supposed document of Hitler's madness as completely fraudulent. Wolfgang Haenel presented the results of his research to the annual conference in May 1983 of the Ingolstadt Contemporary History Research Center in West Germany.

Here is the Story:

Swiss Historian Exposes
Anti-Hitler Rauschning Memoir as Fraudulent

Virtually every major biography of Adolf Hitler or history of the Third Reich quotes from the memoir of Hermann Rauschning, a former National Socialist Senate President of Danzig. In the book published in Britain as Hitler Speaks (London, 1939) and in America as The Voice of Destruction (New York, 1940) Rauschning presents page after page of what are purported to be Hitler's most intimate views and plans for the future. They are allegedly based on a hundred or so private conversations between the two men.

Now, after more than forty years, a Swiss historian has thoroughly exposed this supposed document of Hitler's madness as completely fraudulent. Wolfgang Haenel presented the results of his research to the annual conference in May 1983 of the Ingolstadt Contemporary History Research Center in West Germany.

Rauschning's Hitler is nothing more than a nihilistic revolutionary utterly lacking in ideas, goals, principles or systematic ideology who demagogically exploited words and men to accumulate power for its own sake. He was a clever but completely unscrupulous opportunist who believed nothing of what he said. His National Socialism, according to Rauschning, was just a "Revolution of Nihilism." He was allegedly preoccupied with war. His numerous disarmament proposals and peace offers were just hypocritical rhetoric designed to mislead his future victims.

Of the man who unified Germany, Hitler is supposed to have said: "Bismarck was stupid. He was just a Protestant." He allegedly rebuked Rauschning for his qualms: "Why do you babble about brutality and get upset over suffering. The masses want that. They need some cruelty." "I want a violent, masterful, fearless, cruel youth," he is quoted as saying. On another occasion, Hitler reportedly declared: "Yes, we are barbarians. We want to be barbarians. It is an honorable title."

Wolfgang Haenel spent many years in detailed research, text comparison and interviewing contemporary witnesses. He found that instead of "about a hundred conversations" with Hitler, Rauschning actually met with the German leader only four or five times. And these few meetings were neither private nor lengthy, but always in the company of high ranking officials while visiting Hitler in Berlin or Obersalzberg. Rauschning never had the opportunity to hear Hitler's intimate views or secret plans for the future, as he boasted in his spurious "memoir."

Haenel shows that some of the words attributed to Hitler by Rauschning were actually lifted from the works of Ernst Juenger and Friedrich Nietzsche. Hitler is quoted as making statements which could not possibly have been made at the times alleged. Some quotes supposedly made in private were in fact taken from speeches made by Hitler after 1935, the year Rauschning left for France. Haenel also exposes serious contradictions between events as presented by Rauschning and the way they actually occurred, as in the case of an alleged conversation following the Reichstag fire of March 1933.

Haenel shows that the spurious memoir was commissioned by some French journalists and New York publishing firms as a literary weapon in the propaganda war against National Socialist Germany. For many years the amount paid to the financially strapped Rauschning for his work remained a record in France for a political book.

The democratic mass media, which devoted endless columns of print and hours of broadcast time in denouncing the so-called Hitler diaries as phony, characteristically ignored the story of the exposure of this great historical hoax. An exception was the generally sober West German daily Die Welt (19 May) which, however, buried its report on page 21. The U.S. daily press published nothing.

To his credit, American historian John Toland made no use of the Rauschning work in his detailed study, Adolf Hitler. And German historian Werner Maser noted in his biography of Hitler that "Rauschning's statements may, at best, be considered a secondary historical source. They have no documentary value."

It is always easier to produce a forged document or phony memoir than to prove it false. But it's still remarkable that it took this long for someone to expose the Rauschning work as fraudulent. Any open-minded reader familiar with the literature on Hitler can determine rather quickly that The Voice of Destruction is an imaginative concoction. It simply lacks the "feel" of authenticity. In contrast, the genuine memoir of Otto Wagener, Hitler aus naechster Naehe, provides lengthy and detailed insights into Hitler's thinking and private views. As first chief of Staff of the SA ("Brown Shirts") and Director of the EconomicPolitical Department of the National Socialist Party, Wagener got to know Hitler intimately. They spent hundreds of hours together between 1929 and 1932, many of them alone.

The Ingolstadt Contemporary History Research Center deserves credit for its role in exposing this great fraud. Its director, Dr. Alfred Schickel, has authored numerous substantial revisionist historical essays.

Wolfgang Haenel's long overdue debunking of the Rauschning memoir" is a welcome contribution to the slow and painful process of clarification in an age of historical obfuscation.

- Mark Weber

Source: Reprinted from The Journal of Historical Review, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 378-380

***

Adolf und die Uebermen
von dem Golden Dawn

We have been concerned to describe these aspects of Hitlerism because, as M. Marcel Ray pointed out in I939, the war that Hitler imposed on the world was a "Manichaean war," or as the Bible says, "a struggle between gods." It is not, of course, a question of a struggle between Fascism and Democracy, or between a liberal and an authoritarian conception of society. That is the exoteric side of the conflict; but there is an esoteric side as well. This struggle between gods, which has been going on behind visible events, is not yet over on this planet, but the formidable progress in human knowledge made in the last few years is about to give it another form. Now that the gates of knowledge are beginning to open on to the infinite, it is important to understand what this struggle is about. If we consciously want to be men of today, that is to say, the contemporaries of tomorrow, we must have an exact and clear picture of the moment when the fantastic first invaded the realm of reality. This is what we are now going to examine.

Magick Socialism

And Rauschning in an attempt to explain the rise to power of this "high priest of a secret religion," tried to convince himself that several times in history "whole nations have fallen into a state of inexplicable agitation. They follow the flagellants' procession, or are seized by St. Vitus's Dance.... National-Socialism is the St. Vitus's Dance of the twentieth century."

But where does this strange malady come from? To this question he failed to find a satisfactory answer. "Its deepest roots are hidden in secret places."

It is these secret places that we feel we ought to explore. And it is not a historian, but a poet who will be our guide.

P.J. Toulet and Arthur Machen