paperback edition in a high-street bookshop.
What is the connection between Bulwer-Lytton’s strange novel and Nazi Germany? If there really was a large colony of Tibetan monks in Berlin in the 1940s, what were they doing there? It seems that the connection was none other than the Bavarian Karl Haushofer (1869–1946) whose theories of Geopolitics gave rise to the concept of Lebensraum (living space), which Hitler maintained would be necessary to the continued dominance of the superior Aryan race and which he intended to take, primarily, from the Soviet Union. Haushofer, along with Dietrich Eckart (1868–1923) — an anti-Semitic journalist and playwright who influenced Hitler’s racial attitudes and introduced him to influential social circles after the First World War — is frequently described by believers in genuine Nazi occult power as a practising black magician, and the ‘Master Magician of the Nazi Party’. (11)
Haushofer excelled at Munich University, where he began to develop his lifelong interest in the Far East. After leaving university, he entered the German army, where his great intelligence ensured a rapid rise through the ranks. His knowledge of the Far East earned him a posting as military attache in Japan. The idea that Haushofer was an occult adept, with secret knowledge of powerful transhuman entities, was first suggested by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier in their fascinating but historically unreliable book The Morning of the Magicians (which served as the model for a number of subsequent treatments of Nazi occultism in the 1960s and early 1970s).
According to Pauwels and Bergier:
[Haushofer] believed that the German people originated in Central Asia, and that it was the Indo-Germanic race which guaranteed the permanence, nobility and greatness of the world. While in Japan, Haushofer is said to have been initiated into one of the most important secret Buddhist societies and to have sworn, if he failed in his ‘mission’, to commit suicide in accordance with the time-honoured ceremonial. (12)
Haushofer was also apparently a firm believer in the legend of Thule, the lost Aryan homeland in the far north, which had once been the centre of an advanced civilisation possessed of magical powers. Connecting this legend with the Thule Society, Pauwels and Bergier have this to say:
Beings intermediate between Man and other intelligent beings from Beyond would place at the disposal of the [Thule Society] Initiates a reservoir of forces which could be drawn on to enable Germany to dominate the world again and be the cradle of the coming race of Supermen which would result from the mutations of the human species. One day her legions would set out to annihilate everything that had stood in the way of the spiritual destiny of the Earth, and their leaders would be men who knew everything, deriving their strength from the very fountain- head of energy and guided by the Great Ones of the Ancient World … It would seem that it was under the influence of Karl Haushofer that [the Thule Society] took on its true character of a society of Initiates in communion with the Invisible, and became the magic centre of the Nazi movement. (13)
Serious historians such as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke take issue with the claims of Pauwels and Bergier and the later writers who reiterated them. Goodrick-Clarke, who has perhaps conducted more research into primary German sources than any other writer in this curious field, states that the claims regarding the secret guiding power of the Thule Society are ‘entirely fallacious. The Thule Society was dissolved in 1925 when support had dwindled.’ He goes on to assure us that ‘there is no evidence at all to link Haushofer to the group1. (14) Nevertheless, Haushofer’s alleged skill in the Black Arts has become an important link in the Nazi occult chain as described by writers on such fringe subjects.
After the end of the First World War, Haushofer returned to Munich, where he gained a doctorate from the university. He divided his time between teaching and writing and founded the Geopolitical Review in which he published his ideas on Lebensraum, which could ‘both justify territorial conquest by evoking the colonizing of Slav lands by Teutonic knights in the Middle Ages and, emotively, conjure up notions of uniting in the Reich what came to be described as Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) scattered throughout eastern Europe’. (15)
While incarcerated in the fortress of Landsberg am Lech following the failure of the Munich Putsch in 1924, Adolf Hitler read and was influenced by Haushofer’s books on geopolitics (he had already been introduced to Haushofer by the professor’s student assistant, Rudolf Hess). There is no doubt that Hitler occupied his time in Landsberg judiciously, reading widely in several fields, though not for the sake of education so much as to confirm and clarify his own preconceptions. (He later said that Landsberg was his ‘university paid for by the state’). (16)
According to Pauwels and Bergier and other fringe writers, Haushofer visited Hitler every day in Landsberg, where he explained his geopolitical theories and described his travels through India in the early years of the century. While in India, he had heard stories of a powerful civilisation living beneath the Himalayas:
Thirty or forty centuries ago in the region of Gobi there was a highly developed civilization. As the result of a catastrophe, possibly of an atomic nature, Gobi was transformed into a desert, and the survivors emigrated, some going to the extreme North of Europe, and others towards the Caucasus. The Scandinavian god Thor is supposed to have been one of the heroes of this migration.
… Haushofer proclaimed the necessity of ‘a return to the sources’ of the human race — in other words, that it was necessary to conquer the whole of Eastern Europe, Turkestan, Pamir, Gobi and Thibet. These countries constituted, in his opinion, the central core, and whoever had control of them controlled the whole world. (17)
After the cataclysm that destroyed the Gobi civilisation, the survivors migrated to a vast cavern system beneath the Himalayas where they split into two groups, one of which followed the path of spirituality, enlightenment and meditation while the other followed the path of violence and materialistic power. The first of these centres was called Agartha, the other Shambhala. (These names have many different spellings: for Agartha, I use the simplest; for Shambhala, the spelling favoured by Orientalists.) We shall return for a closer look to the realms of Agartha and Shambhala in the next chapter.
According to Alec Maclellan, among the many books Hitler read while languishing in Landsberg was Bulwer- Lytton’s The Coming Race, which, Haushofer informed him, was an essentially correct description of the race of Supermen living far beneath the surface of the Earth and corroborated much of what the professor had himself learned while travelling in Asia. Bulwer-Lytton’s novel apparently galvanised Hitler’s imagination, and he ‘began to yearn for the day when he might establish for himself the actuality of the secret civilization beneath the snows of Tibet …’ (18)
In the following year, 1925, the Vril Society (also known as the Luminous Lodge) was formed by a group of Berlin Rosicrucians including Karl Haushofer. As Joscelyn Godwin informs us, there is only one primary source of information on the Vril Society: Willy Ley, a German rocket engineer who fled to the United States in 1933 and followed a successful career writing popular science books. In 1947, Ley published an article entitled ‘Pseudoscience in Naziland’. Following a description of Ariosophy, Ley writes:
The next group was literally founded upon a novel. That group which I think called itself Wahrheitsgesellschaft — Society for Truth — and which was more or less localized in Berlin, devoted its spare time looking for Vril. Yes, their convictions were founded upon Bulwer-Lytton’s ‘The Coming Race’. They knew that the book was fiction, Bulwer-Lytton had used that device in order to be able to tell the truth about this ‘power’. The subterranean humanity was nonsense, Vril was not. Possibly it had enabled the British, who kept it as a State secret, to amass their colonial empire. Surely the Romans had had it, inclosed [sic] in small metal balls, which guarded their homes and were referred to as lares. For reasons which I failed to penetrate, the secret of Vril could be found by contemplating the structure of an apple, sliced in halves. No, I am not joking, that is what I was told with great solemnity and secrecy. Such a group actually existed, they even got out the first issue of a magazine which was to proclaim their credo. (19)
Although they apparently interviewed Ley, Pauwels and Bergier could learn nothing more from him about this mysterious society; however, they later discovered that the group actually called itself the Vril Society, and that Karl Haushofer was intimately connected with it. (Joscelyn Godwin kindly reminds us of the unreliability of the splendid Pauwels and Bergier: although they cite Jack Fishman’s The Seven Men of Spandau with regard to Haushofer’s connection to the Vril Society, Fishman actually makes no such reference.) (20)
Pauwels and Bergier go on to inform us that, having failed in his mission, Haushofer committed suicide on 14 March 1946, in accordance with his pledge to his masters in the secret Japanese society into which he had been
