again. Indeed, such was Hitler’s lack of interest in these matters that he never deigned even to visit Wewelsburg. What of Himmler, then? Did he not practise dark rites with his SS Gruppenfuhrers in their Order Castle, attempting to contact the souls of long-departed Teutons? The answer to this question is, of course, yes. However, occult- orientated writers have, over the years, continually made the same mistake in claiming that, because Himmler attempted to contact supernatural forces, those forces exist to be contacted. I consider myself a sceptic, rather than an incredulous doubter, [1] and so I cannot say that supernatural forces do not exist, any more than I can say that they do exist. In truth, no one can. But we must not allow ourselves to make any connection whatsoever between Himmler’s ideas on the supernatural and the veracity of the supernatural itself.
Ken Anderson makes an interesting point in his Hitler and the Occult:
From early in their rise to power Hitler and his Nazis were enveloped in an aura of mysticism almost despite themselves. This aura appears closer to the experience of occultism than any other major movement in the twentieth century. Hitler came to personify the invisible structure which became the occult myth dealt with here.
With the help of contemporary occult writers, the illusion is today more pervasive. We find no such occult mystique surrounding other aberrations of civilisation …’
To this we might add that the aura of mysticism surrounding the Nazis was enhanced and disseminated throughout German society by means of photography and cinema, notably Leni Riefenstahl’s virulently propagandist films, which include Triumph of the Will and Olympia, and which glorify German-ness and emphasise the inherent superiority of the Aryan race. The Nazis were nothing if not masters of self-promotion.
Just as the early volkisch occultists took various elements of prehistoric mythology to construct a totally spurious history for the Germanic ‘master race’, so many occult-orientated writers have taken the image of the Nazi black magician and his diabolical allies and with it have attempted to create an equally spurious history of the Third Reich. The insubstantial edifice of their wild speculations is ‘supported’ by the incorporation of Eastern mysticism, with its tales of hidden cities inhabited by ascended masters who are the real controllers of humanity’s destiny on Earth. Whatever their veracity, these myths are exquisitely beautiful and elaborate, and it is something of a tragedy that they should have been hijacked by Western writers in their quest to connect Nazism with a putative source of genuine occult power in the East.
We have also seen how Nazi cosmology, with its utterly insane notions of ‘World Ice’ and the Earth as a bubble in an infinity of rock, arose from the grandiose but untenable cosmological theories of previous centuries. Moreover, after the end of the Second World War they became part of the twentieth-century fascination with alternative cosmologies, including the Hollow Earth theory, which has stubbornly persisted to this day.
Another example of how the Third Reich generated strange rumours can be seen in the concept of the Nazi flying discs, which arose partly from admittedly intriguing (but still inconclusive) evidence, and partly from the unassailable evidence that Nazi scientists were indeed experimenting with radical aircraft designs and weapons systems. Thanks to clever manipulators of public opinion such as Ray Palmer, the quite possibly genuine mystery of the UFOs was ‘explained’ in terms of the rumours that the Nazis had actually perfected high-performance disc- shaped aircraft.
As we have seen, this in turn gave rise to the idea that these disc-planes were used by high-ranking Nazis to escape from the Allies during the fall of Berlin. Once again, it is clear that the various outlandish claims of Nazi hideouts in Antarctica owe their inception to genuinely puzzling events such as Admiral Byrd’s apparently disastrous Operation Highjump, in addition to the indisputable fact that many Nazi war criminals did indeed escape from the ruins of the Third Reich to take up residence in various South American countries. All of this provides conspiracy theorists with a heady mixture of components with which to construct their nightmarish scenario of hideous clandestine forces maliciously pulling the strings on which we all dance. At the risk of offering a cliche, what we have here is a classic example of putting two and two together and getting five.
As we noted in the Introduction, with the passage of time and the deaths of important first-hand witnesses any chance of finding an adequate explanation of Nazism and the horrors it unleashed has now almost certainly been lost. We are left with the awful question that will continue to haunt us for as long as we remain human: why? The question is made more awful by the likelihood that the answer lies not in Outer Darkness, not in the ‘Absolute Elsewhere’, but much closer, in that most frightening and ill-explored of realms: the human mind.
Notes
1. Rosenbaum 1999, p. xiii.
2. Ibid, p. xvi.
3. Davies 1997, p. 40.
4. Ibid.
5. Godwin 1993, p. 63.
6. Trevor-Roper 1995, p. xxviii.
7. Rosenbaum 1999, p. xv.
8. Ibid., p. xxi.
9. Ibid., p. xxii.
10. Ibid., p. xxii.
11. Ibid., p xxiii.
12. Ibid., p. xxvii.
13. Ibid., p. xxxv.
14. Ibid., p. xliii. 15 Ibid., xliv. 16. Ibid., p. xlvi.
1. Goodrick-Clarke 1985, p. 7. Anyone attempting to examine the origins of Nazi occultism will necessarily owe a considerable debt to The Occult Roots of Nazism, a debt which the present author gratefully acknowledges. This is still by far the most level-headed, well-written and researched book covering this period; indeed, it remains the yardstick against which all writing on German occultism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries should be judged.
2. German Genealogy Habsburg Empire, from the German Genealogy Homepage at:
http://w3g.med.uni-giessen.de/gene/reg/ahel814.html
3. Sowards, Twenty-Five Lectures on Modern Balkan History.
4. Davies 1997, p. 829.
5. Goodrick-Clarke 1985, p. 3.
6. Ibid., p. 4.
7. Ibid., p. 5.
8. Davidson 1997, p 11.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., p. 13.
11. Ibid., p. 14.
12. Ibid.
13. Goodrick-Clarke 1985, p. 10.
14. Ibid.
15. Davidson 1997, p. 11.
16. Goodrick-Clarke 1985, p. 12.
17. Ibid., p. 12.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., p. 13.
20. Maser 1973, p. 170.
