Saint Amour’ (‘God Lives, Saint Love’), and their motto was ‘Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed Nomini Tuo da gloriam’ (‘Not for us, Lord, not for us, but to Thy Name give glory’). (52)
Over the next century and a half, the Templars amassed a truly staggering amount of wealth, property (with over seven thousand estates in Europe) and power, and had branches throughout Europe and the Middle East, all run from their headquarters in Paris. This led to jealous rivalries, and during the Crusades rumours began to circulate that the Templars were not the pious Christian knights many believed them to be. Attention was focused on their secret rituals, which their enemies claimed were centred upon their worship of Allah; others suspected them of actually worshipping the demon Baphomet, practising horrendous black magic rites involving sodomy, bestiality and human sacrifice, of despising the Pope and the Catholic Church, and various other crimes.
In 1307, King Philip IV of France, heavily in debt to the Templars, decided to use these rumours in an attempt to engineer their downfall. On 13 October, he seized their Temple in Paris and arrested the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, and 140 Templars, whom he subjected to horrible tortures in order to secure confessions. Philip persuaded Pope Clement V to authorise the seizure of all Templar properties. Pope Clement abolished the Order in 1312 at the Council of Vienne, and transferred its properties to the Hospitallers, in return for the money Philip claimed was owed by the Templars. (53)
Jacques de Molay was promised life in prison if he made a public confession of the Order’s crimes. Instead, he made a public proclamation of the Order’s innocence of all crimes with which it had been charged, and for this he was burned at the stake. However, this was apparently not the end of the Knights Templar: there have been persistent rumours that those Templars who managed to evade capture fled to Scotland disguised as stonemasons and created the society of Freemasons. It has also been suggested that a Templar named Geoffroy de Gonneville received a message from de Molay shortly before his death and took it to a group of Templars meeting in Dalmatia. The message stated that the Order would be revived in 600 years’ time. Before disbanding, the Templars at this meeting allegedly created the Order of the Rose-Croix, or Rosicrucians. (54)
To Lanz von Liebenfels, the brutal suppression of the Knights Templar and the appropriation of their wealth and property represented the victory of racial inferiors over a society of heroic men. The result was racial chaos, the corruption of ‘ario-Christian’ civilisation and the disorder of the modern world. (55) For this reason, Liebenfels decided to resurrect the Order in the form of his Ordo Novi Templi (ONT). He described the Order as an ‘Aryan mutual-aid association founded to foster racial consciousness through genealogical and heraldic research, beauty- contests, and the foundation of racist Utopias in the underdeveloped parts of the world’. (56)
The early activities of the ONT revolved around festivals and concerts, with hundreds of guests being shipped in by steamer from Vienna. They were routinely reported in the press, thus ensuring a wider audience for Liebenfels and the racist ideas presented in Ostara. Membership of the ONT was naturally restricted to those who could prove that they were of pure Aryan blood and who would vow to protect the interests of their (racial) brothers.
Two years before he founded the ONT, Liebenfels had published a book with the incredibly odd title Theozoologie oder die Kunder von den Sodoms-Afflingen und dem Gotter-Elektron (Theo-zoology or the Lore of the Sodom-Apelings and the Electron of the Gods). The word ‘theo-zoology’ was arrived at through the amalgamation of Judaeo-Christian doctrine and the principles of the then-burgeoning field of life-sciences. Using the Old and New Testaments as departure points, Liebenfels divided his book into two sections, the first dealing with the origin of humanity in a race of beast-men (Anthropozoa) spawned by Adam. In his warped and bizarre view of antiquity, Liebenfels utilised new scientific discoveries such as radiation and radio communication, which at that time had a powerful hold on the public imagination.
Liebenfels applied these discoveries in his description of the gods, which held that they were not really gods at all, but higher forms of life (Theozoa) who possessed fantastic mental faculties including telepathy (which was actually the transmission of electrical signals between the brains of the Theozoa). Through the millennia, these god-men gradually lost these faculties through miscegenation with the beast-men of Adam, until their telepathic sense organs became atrophied as the pineal and pituitary glands of modern humanity. As Goodrick-Clarke notes, (57) Liebenfels based this declaration in part on the work of the zoologist Wilhelm Bolsche (1861–1939), who in turn seems to have been inspired by Theosophy. At any rate, Liebenfels believed that the only way for Germans to reclaim their ancient godhood was through the enforced sterilisation and castration of ‘inferior races’, to prevent the pollution of pure Aryan blood. (58)
The second section of Liebenfels’s book concerned the life of Christ (whose powers were once again electrical in nature) and the redemption of the Aryan people, who had been corrupted by the promiscuous activities of the other races of Earth. This idea of the Aryan struggle against the pernicious vices of other races in effect replaced the traditional Judaeo-Christian concept of the struggle between good and evil. Liebenfels argued for the most extreme measures in the pursuit of Aryan re-deification: since the poor and underprivileged in society were identified with the progeny of the inferior races, they would have to be either exterminated (by incineration as a sacrifice to God), deported or used as slave labour. This constituted the inversion of traditional Judaeo-Christian compassion for the poor, weak and handicapped in the new form of Social Darwinism, with its central tenet of survival of the fittest at the expense of the weakest. These horrific methods of ensuring the survival of pure-blooded Aryans proposed by Liebenfels would, of course, become hideous reality in the Third Reich.
Although List’s and Liebenfels’s ideas were inherently hateful and violent, they remained just that: ideas. Many of their followers became more and more restless and dissatisfied with their lack of action against the perceived threat to the Aryan race from the various inferior beings with whom they were forced to share their nation, in particular the Jews, who were blamed for the perceived evils of urbanisation, industrialisation and the threat to the traditional rural way of life of the Aryan peasant-hero. Many came to believe that the time for scholarly theorising was past, that the time for direct action had come.
In May 1912, a meeting was held at the Leipzig home of Theodor Fritsch. At this meeting were approximately twenty prominent Pan-Germans and anti-Semites. Their purpose was to found two groups to alert Germans to the dangers to small businesses they perceived as arising from the influence of Jewish business and finance. These groups were known as the Reichshammerbund and the Germanenorden (Order of Germans). Born on 28 October 1852, Fritsch, the son of Saxon peasants, had trained as a milling engineer, and had edited the Kleine Muhlen- Journal (Small-Mills Journal). In common with other activists of the time, his anti-Semitism arose principally from a fear of rapid industrialisation, technology and mass production, driven by international Jewish influence, and the threat it posed to small tradesmen and craftsmen.
In spite of his political leanings, Fritsch decided against becoming a candidate for either of the two German anti-Semitic parties, the Deutsch-Soziale Partei and the Antisemitische Volkspartei, which had been established at Bochum in 1889, since he did not believe that anti-Semitism would prove successful in parliament. As Goodrick- Clarke notes, Fritsch’s ‘conviction in the ineffectiveness of parliamentary anti-Semitism proved to be correct. When more than one party existed after the Bochum conference, their competition led to a reduction in the number of successful anti-Semitic candidates at the Reichstag elections.’ (59) In addition, the merging of the two parties in 1894 as the Deutsch-Soziale Reformpartei resulted in a significant reduction in anti-Semitism in favour of ‘an appeal to more conservative and middle-class economic interests’. (60)
At this time, in the mid-1860s, racist writers such as the French aristocrat Comte Vacher de Lapouge and the Germanised Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain were influenced by biology and zoology, and were concentrating more on ‘scientific’ studies of race (although they were, of course, nothing of the kind). It was these writers who identified the Jews as the greatest threat to the supremacy of the Aryan race, and attempted to back up their ideas with reference to physical characteristics such as hair and eye colouring, and the shape of the skull. (61) For de Lapouge, Jews were more pernicious than any other race because they had insinuated themselves so completely into European society, (62) while Chamberlain in particular did much to popularise mystical racism in Germany. According to Stanley G. Payne:
Beyond the Aryan racial stereotype (tall, blond, blue-eyed) [Chamberlain] affirmed the existence of a special ‘race soul’ that created a more imaginative and profound spirit in Aryans and produced a ‘German religion’, though the latter was still (in part) vaguely related to Christianity. The ultimate anti-Aryan and most bitter racial foe was the Jew. Chamberlain combined Social Darwinism with racism and thus emphasized an endless racial struggle on behalf of the purity of Aryanism and against Jews and lesser peoples [including Slavs and Latins], virtually creating a scenario for race war. (63)
