After informing us of the complexities attached to the interpretation of left-and right-handed swastikas, Godwin continues:
Whatever the validity of these theories, the ancient decorative swastikas show no preference whatsoever for one type over the other. The place where the left-right distinction is supposed to be most significant is Tibet, where both Nicholas Roerich and Anagarika Govinda observed that the swastika of the ancient Bon-Po religion points to the left, the Buddhist one to the right. Now it is true that the Bon-Pos perform ritual circumabulations counter- clockwise, the Buddhists clockwise, but almost all the Buddhist iconography collected by Thomas Wilson shows left-handed swastikas, just like the ones on the Bon-Pos’ ritual scepter, their equivalent of the Buddhist vajra. One can only say that the swastika should perhaps be left-handed if (as in Bon-Po) it denotes polar revolution, and right-handed if (as in Buddhism) it symbolizes the course of the sun. But the root of the problem is probably the inherent ambiguity of the symbol itself, which makes the left-handed swastika appear to be rotating to the right, and vice versa. (45)
As we saw in the first chapter, the swastika gained popularity among German anti-Semitic groups through the writings of Guido von List and Lanz von Liebenfels, who took the symbol of good fortune and universal harmony and used it to denote the unconquerable Germanic hero. As might be expected, the counter-clockwise orientation of the swastika used as a banner by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) has also aroused considerable controversy in occult and esoteric circles.
According to the occult historian Francis King, when Hitler called for suggestions for a banner, all of the submissions included a swastika. The one Hitler finally chose had been designed by Dr Friedrich Krohn, a dentist from Sternberg. However, the design incorporated a clockwise-turning swastika, symbolising good fortune, harmony and spirituality.
Hitler decided to reverse the design, making the swastika counter-clockwise, symbolising evil and black magic. (46) Here again, we encounter the problem of defining what is a right-and left-handed swastika. Was the Nazi symbol right-handed (traditionally denoting good) or left-handed (denoting evil)? In one sense, the Nazi swastika could be said to be right-handed because the hooked arms extend to the right; conversely, it could be said to be left-handed, since the apparent rotation is counter-clockwise. As the journalist Ken Anderson notes: ‘What we are dealing with is subjective definition … We can speculate that Hitler had chosen to reverse the cross because of the connotations of black magic and evil in Krohn’s cross and for the purpose of evoking the positive images of good luck, spiritual evolution, etc., for his fledgling party!’ (47) (Original emphasis.) Anderson gives the impression of having his tongue slightly in his cheek, but his interpretation is almost certainly correct, for two reasons.
Firstly, we must remember that Hitler himself had very little time for occult mumbo-jumbo, and was certainly not the practising black magician many occultists claim him to have been (more on this in Chapter Five); and secondly, the idea that Hitler considered himself ‘evil’ (as he would have had to have done in order to take the step of reversing a positive symbol to a negative one), or that evil was an attractive concept for him is ridiculous. As we noted in the Introduction, one of the most terrifying and baffling aspects of Adolf Hitler is that he did not consider himself ‘evil’: as Trevor-Roper states, Hitler was convinced of his own rectitude, that he was acting correctly in exterminating the Jews and the other groups targeted for destruction by the Nazis.
In addition, Hitler himself makes no mention of such an alteration in his repulsive Mein Kampf. In view of the fact that he took most of the credit for the design himself, neglecting even to mention Krohn’s name, he would surely have explained the reasons for his making such a fundamental alteration to the design of the NSDAP banner:
… I was obliged to reject without exception the numerous designs which poured in from the circles of the young movement … I myself — as Leader — did not want to come out publicly at once with my own design, since after all it was possible that another should produce one just as good or perhaps even better. Actually, a dentist from Starnberg [sic] did deliver a design that was not bad at all, and, incidentally, was quite close to my own, having only the one fault that a swastika with curved legs was composed into a white disk
I myself, meanwhile, after innumerable attempts, had laid down a final form; a flag with a red background, a white disk, and a black swastika in the middle. After long trials I also found a definite proportion between the size of the flag and the size of the white disk, as well as the shape and thickness of the swastika. (48)
The reader will notice that Hitler says the submission he received that was quite close to his own had only one fault: the swastika had curved legs. Anderson is undoubtedly correct when he states that ‘the major importance of the decision [was] — for a man who prided himself on being a thwarted artist of great merit — not some unidentified occultic myth, but rather balance and aesthetic value’. (49)
3 — A hideous strength
The Vril Society
We have now reached the point in our survey of Nazi involvement with the occult where we must depart from what is historically verifiable and enter an altogether more obscure and murky realm, a place that Pauwels and Bergier call the ‘Absolute Elsewhere’. (1) Serious historians (at least, those who deign to comment on the subject at all) regard the material we shall be examining for the rest of this book with contempt — and, it must be said, not without good reason. Much of what follows may well strike the reader as bizarre and absurd in equal measure; and yet, as we shall see, amongst the notions we are about to address (products, apparently, of fevered imaginations) will be found unsettling hints of a thread running through the collective mind of humanity in the late twentieth century — ominous, dangerous and, by the majority, unseen.
As we shall see, the ‘twilight zone between fact and fiction’ can produce significant shifts in our collective awareness of the world, our place in it and the unstated intentions of those who rule us. The world view of those who subscribe to the idea of genuine Nazi occult power includes a number of outrageous conspiracy theories that revolve around the claim that many leading Nazis (including, according to some, Hitler himself) escaped from the ruins of Berlin and continue with their plans for world domination from some hidden headquarters. At first sight, these theories can surely have little to do with known reality. And yet, the idea that the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) could have smuggled many personnel from Nazi intelligence and the German secret weapons programme into the United States in the postwar years might likewise seem outlandish — until we remember that this, too, is a documented historical fact. Project PAPERCLIP proves that some senior elements of the Third Reich did indeed survive in this way, their lives bought with scientific and military knowledge that the American government desperately wanted.
So, for the rest of this book, we shall concentrate on the elements of Nazi occultism that find no home in orthodox history but that nevertheless stretch their pernicious tentacles through modern popular and fringe culture and refuse to vanish in the glare of the light of reason. The Vril Society, our departure point into the Absolute Elsewhere, might seem to have been better placed in the first chapter, were it not that there is so little evidence for its influence over the activities of the Third Reich. In spite of this, it has come to occupy a central position in the dubious study of Nazi occult power and so demands a chapter of its own. But what was the strangely named Vril Society?
The first hint of the Vril Society’s existence was discovered in a scene that would not have been out of place in one of Dennis Wheatley’s occult thrillers. On 25 April 1945, so the story goes, a group of battle-weary Russian soldiers were making their cautious way through the shattered remnants of Berlin, mopping up the isolated pockets of German resistance that remained in the heart of the Third Reich. The soldiers moved carefully from one wrecked building to another, in a state of constant readiness against the threat of ambush.
In a ground-floor room of one blasted building, the soldiers made a surprising discovery. Lying in a circle on the floor were the bodies of six men, with a seventh corpse in the centre. All were dressed in German military uniforms, and the dead man in the centre of the group was wearing a pair of bright green gloves. The Russians’
