The Wrong Side of History: Holocaust Denial and Its Fallacies

In the preceding series, I discussed conceptions of the Nazis as occultists, suggesting that some such depictions of them may have been exaggerated while others were mostly accurate, and I further explored Nazi views on history, which gave credence to an assortment of myths and legends. Now, I am obliged to confront a modern myth that both falsifies history and attempts to revise our conception of the Nazis. I am speaking, of course, of Holocaust denial, a term that has become standard among academics discussing the phenomenon despite the purveyors of such pseudohistory preferring the more innocuous term “Holocaust revisionism,” as it presents them more as legitimate academics engaged in genuine historical revision. While the history of Holocaust denial stretches all the way back to the time of the Nuremberg trials, with the advent of mass media and especially the Internet, it seems to have gone…perhaps not viral, but bacterial, growing slowly and in secret until simple measures are useless at eradicating it. Like other denialist claims symptomatic of the so-called Post-Truth Era—like those of anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, creationists, climate change deniers, and a host of other conspiracy theorists—Holocaust denial has built up a body of supportive literature and talking points that encourage believers—or rather, deniers—to continue doubting empirical historiography and consensus history no matter how conclusive the evidence presented to them. That, however, does not mean we should give up on them, or that the topic should be anathema. As I’ve argued before, no claims, however absurd or fringe or downright disgusting, should be considered beneath critical consideration. Indeed, those are the claims that most require critical response.

One may argue that only the willfully obtuse, or those with ulterior motives, make or believe such claims about the Holocaust, our shorthand label for the systematic extermination of Jews by the Nazis in World War II. After all, this is taught in every school’s history class, is featured prominently in every textbook that covers that period, and has entered the popular imagination through well-known books and films. Therefore, why would one waste breath dignifying a view that only a misguided minority credit. The truth is that some studies indicate people are far more open to notions associated with Holocaust denial than one might think. In 1993, the Roper Organization released the results of a poll it had conducted to examine American knowledge of and views on the Holocaust. Shockingly, they concluded that about one-fifth of Americans were open to the idea that the Holocaust never happened (Smith 269-270). Now, these results have been strongly challenged due to some awkward phrasing in the survey questions that may have caused confusion. Nevertheless, the poll stands as evidence of a general openness among many to the plausibility of Holocaust denial claims, and psychological studies have tended to indicate that Holocaust denier propaganda is quite effective at persuading such undecided minds (Yelland and Stone). And so, perhaps a little reluctantly, I will address the claims, and I will detail them so that they lack any mystique or ambiguity, but in no way is my intention to dignify them.

In order to refute a claim, one must first understand it precisely, for raising up and then knocking down a straw man is itself a waste of effort. Surprising to some is the fact that these so-called revisionists do not deny the mistreatment of Jews under the Third Reich or even the fact that many died as a result of this treatment, nor for the most part do they reject, at least explicitly, that such mistreatment was wrong or even evil. Some have even conceded that it could justifiably be called a holocaust. Holocaust denial literature and rhetoric stands firmly on three cornerstones: 1) the estimate of six million Jews being murdered is an exaggeration, and a more accurate accounting would be 1 or 2 million or even as few as 300,000; 2) these deaths resulted through mere unfortunate circumstances and were never intended by Nazi leadership; and 3) the circumstances that caused these deaths in concentration camps were starvation and disease, which can be blamed on the Allied powers cutting off German supplies. Crematoria were used only to burn the dead, and Gas chambers either didn’t exist or were used only delouse blankets and clothes. I will rebut all three of these false and insidious claims in due course. But before coming to grips with the claims of Holocaust deniers, we should first understand who they are and what agendas lie obscured beneath their claims, for knowing this, their claims lose the tinge of genuine revisionism and take on the smack of racist propaganda.

The “selection” of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz either for labor or extermination, via Wikimedia Commons

Perhaps the first denier of the Holocaust was a Scottish anti-Catholic firebrand named Alexander Ratcliffe, who, while serving as a Glasgow councilor in 1945, the year the Nuremberg Trials began, wrote in his magazine Vanguard that the concentration camps had been dreamed up by Jews, who had even faked newsreel footage. It is incomprehensible that even so soon after the atrocities of the Nazis came to light, such conspiracy theories sprang up, but perhaps expected when looking at the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories he had already publicly subscribed to and promoted. He appeared to be a believer in the old Protocols of the Elders of Zion hoax, that long discredited lie of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, and indeed, one finds this to be a rotten vein running through most organizations that publish Holocaust denial literature, for the fact that all of mainstream, legitimate historiography stands opposed to your claims is much easier to explain away if all historians are under the thrall of the Jewish cabal that holds sway over everything. Beyond Ratcliffe, Holocaust denial claims did not really appear until the late ‘60s with some German books like Franz Scheidl’s History of the Ostracism of Germany and Emil Aretz’s Witches’ Multiplication of a Lie. The early 1970s saw further German works establish the cornerstone argument that gas chambers weren’t used for execution, including Thies Christophersen’s Auschwitz Lie and Wilhelm Stäglich’s Auschwitz Myth. Then throughout the 1970s appeared further books, outside of Germany, with titles that clearly indicate their contents, like Did Six Million Really Die?, Six Million Swindle, Hoax of the Twentieth Century, and Debunking the Genocide Myth. The notion of a “Holohoax,” as some called it, was beginning to take shape, and in an effort to establish their literature as credible historiography, they began dissociating themselves from the fringe and the anti-Semitic and cultivating an image of academic legitimacy. Thus, in the late 1970s, the Institute for Historical Review was born, as was its Journal for Historical Review.

The IHR is a curious organization. Obviously its members yearn for their academic credentials to be recognized and for their institute to be accepted into the ranks of other scholarly associations, but they simultaneously must appeal to a base comprised of far right extremists, neo-Nazis, and bigoted conspiracy theorists in order to keep their coffers full of fresh donations. This wasn’t always the case, though. Toward the beginning of their existence, they enjoyed generous funding from, of all places, the estate of Thomas Edison, but the $15 million that Edison’s granddaughter bequeathed them was quickly squandered and lost. Now it appears they keep themselves in money solely through the publication of their literature and through donations from like-minded individuals, which are tax-deductible because the IRS recognizes them as a 501(c)(3) group, a not-for-profit operating in the public interest. In fact, like true ghouls, their About Us page ends with the unusually forward suggestion that their supporters “[p]lease also consider a bequest in your will.” They describe themselves as a publisher and “an independent educational center,” an odd characterization considering they have kept their headquarters’ physical address a secret ever since their offices were firebombed in 1984. The IHR has become, essentially, the point of the spear for the holocaust denial movement, its undeniably clever and learned researchers, such as Mark Weber and David Irving, providing a great many talking points for deniers the world over through articles in the Institute’s journal and lectures at their annual conference.

The Institute has gone to great pains to try to divorce itself from white supremacist and anti-Semitic groups, but their beginnings make their agenda evident. It was founded by Willis Carto, a known anti-Semite and far right political booster of George Wallace’s presidential campaign who went on to found the Populist Party, which ran Ku Klux Klan members for office, like David Duke whom they nominated for president in 1988. Then there was the Institute’s co-founder and first director, William McCalden, a man with a long list of known aliases who had been a leading figure in Britain’s neo-Nazi political movements, the National Front and the National Party. While it is true the Institute has broken with Carto and McCalden, a simple perusal of the literature they peddle is sufficient to indicate that the organization’s stock-in-trade is still anti-Semitic conspiracy trash; their website’s front page is peppered with an array of articles whose titles indicate “The Danger and Challenge of Jewish-Zionist Power” and promise “Straight Talk About Zionism” and revelations on “What Christians Don’t Know About Israel” and the “Tactics of Organized Jewry,” a phrase that hearkens clearly to the old Jewish world conspiracy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Members and contributors to the IHR may use a variety of terms, from those as overt as “Zionists” and “the Jewish Cabal” to more circumspect and coded phrases like “the traditional enemy,” but it is abundantly clear, read between the lines of all their literature, that they believe, or at least choose to spread the notion, that the “Holohoax,” as they sometimes call it, was perpetrated by an international Jewish conspiracy that now actively works to destroy them for daring to question it.

But of course, their claims have been soundly disproven, their objections addressed and shown to be groundless, and not just in history books but in courts of law. Numerous times, holocaust deniers have had the three cornerstones of their ideology overturned by witnesses and experts in legal settings. One of the first was in 1981, after the IHR offered a $50,000 award to the public for evidence of Jews being gassed at Auschwitz, and after one Mel Mermelstein came forward with evidence in the form of numerous survivor testimonies, the IHR refused to pay and Mermelstein sued. A judge found the evidence convincing and forced the IHR to pay the promised sum as well as further damages. Another came in 1996, when the aforementioned David Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books for libeling him by calling him a Holocaust denier. English law placed the burden of proof on the defendants to prove the claims in Lipstadt’s book had been accurate and therefore not libelous, and so, essentially, the Holocaust was put on trial, with the defense endeavoring to show Irving’s connection to white supremacist groups, demonstrate how he had knowingly distorted and falsified the historical record, and finally present evidence on the Holocaust directly to prove that Irving was not a reasonable or fair-minded historian. This they did, with gusto, and the judge found in their favor. Some of the best evidence to refute Holocaust deniers can now be found collected in the numerous books written about this trial, some of which were composed by the expert witnesses themselves, such as Richard Evans’s Lying About Hitler and Robert Jan van Pelt’s The Case for Auschwitz.

Jews rounded up and searched in Warsaw Ghetto (photo discovered on the body of a Nazi officer), via Wikimedia Commons

So let us examine the evidence refuting Holocaust deniers’ claims, in outline and broad strokes only, for to raise each point they make in detail and offer a comprehensive rebuttal, I would have to write a lengthy volume or two, as several historians have done already. First, let us address the claim that the number of Jewish victims, six million, is inflated. Holocaust deniers will gleefully point to any revisions of the numbers of victims as evidence that this estimate is exaggerated, but they fail to take into account the fact that legitimate historians are engaged in a continuous academic debate and may revise the number of victims in one camp based on strong evidence while also taking into account further evidence of deaths elsewhere. So, for example, it has turned out that the number of those murdered in some death camps was exaggerated; the Department of Holocaust Studies at Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has revised the total number of victims at Auschwitz from 4 million all the way down to 1 million. However, the larger view of the Holocaust we now have also takes into account the vast numbers of Jews and Slavic peoples exterminated by the Einsatzgruppen during and after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. While some tallies have been lowered, others have been added, and the estimate of six million remains the same. Nor do we limit our accounting to only those who were gassed in camps or shot by the Einsatzgruppen, for any reasonable tally of the murdered includes those who died from starvation and disease in the ghettos. There are a wealth of sources corroborating these atrocities and the numbers of the dead, including census data, Nazi records, and eyewitness testimony not only from the victims but from the perpetrators themselves. Through these overlapping proofs can be discerned a stark and horrifying truth that no real historian can ignore. Regardless of how the numbers are revised one way or another, give or take some tens of thousands of murdered people, the vast contours of this atrocity cannot be reasonably denied.

The further claim of Holocaust deniers that Hitler and others in the Nazi leadership were unaware of the extermination going on, that rather than a systematic genocide it was just a result of the unfortunate conditions of war and the zealous actions of the rank and file, can also be clearly refuted with a conscientious examination of the historical record. First, it should be conceded that, as Holocaust deniers are fond of pointing out, the actual order for the Final Solution, signed by Hitler, does not exist in the historical record. But it should also be pointed out that the Nazis went to great lengths to destroy evidence of their crimes against humanity, especially when it appeared the world would soon be holding them to account. Nevertheless, in speech after speech and document after document, leading Nazi figures implicate their guilt. Holocaust deniers will claim the Final Solution was actually referring to deportation, but consider the following quotation from Heinrich Himmler to the commandant of Auschwitz, indicating that Hitler had directly ordered the Final Solution: “You have to maintain the strictest silence about this order, even to your superiors. The Jews are the eternal enemies of the German people and must be exterminated. All Jews we can reach now, during the war, are to be exterminated without exception.” This certainly doesn’t sound like a deportation order. Then consider Himmler’s speech to the SS in Poznan, 1943: “I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jews. This is something that is easily said: “The Jewish people will be exterminated”…Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when 500 lie there or when 1,000 are lined up.” Himmler directly refers to the grisly reality of the Final Solution here, praising the executioners of Jews as being hard and honorable for taking on the task. Again, it is hard to mistake this for a reference to deportation. Nor was Himmler alone in making such references. Joseph Geobbels, the Reich minister of propaganda, wrote in his diary in 1941 of the “liquidation” of Jews, and even wrote after a visit with Hitler in 1942 that “The Führer again voices his determination to remorselessly cleanse Europe of its Jews. There can be no sentimental feelings here. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that they are now experiencing. They shall experience their own annihilation together with the destruction of our enemies. We must accelerate the process with cold brutality,” a clear indication of the systematic and calculating nature of the Final Solution. Indeed, the words translated as “extermination” and “annihilation” were used multiple times by Hitler himself, in speeches at the Reichstag and elsewhere, for Hitler had always maintained, in what he called a prophecy but what should more accurately be called a threat, that if Germany became embroiled in an international world war—apparently even if he provoked it himself—it would result in the destruction of European Jewry. No sane historian can read the words of these men, in conjunction with the evidence of how many Jews were murdered, and maintain that because the paper order hasn’t been found, most likely because it was destroyed, that means they didn’t know what was happening under their auspices.

A mass grave like those referred to by Himmler in the speech quoted above, via Wikimedia Commons

Finally, Holocaust deniers’ favorite claim has to do with the specific actions taken at Auschwitz. Sometimes called the Auschwitz Lüge, or Auschwitz lie, they claim that there were no killing centers at Auschwitz, that the gas chambers there were only used for destroying the lice in blankets and clothing, and the crematorium used only for burning those who had died from disease and starvation—essentially, like all other denier claims, an attempt to exonerate Nazis. The support most often cited comes from the 1989 Leuchter Report, a supposedly scientific engineering report that concluded the chambers could not have been used for gassing prisoners. These are the most insidious pieces of “evidence” cited by deniers, since they have a convincing veneer of scientific legitimacy that is hard to refute unless one is a scientist or has done the necessary research into other scientists’ findings. In short, deniers claim that traces of Zyklon-B, the hydrocyanic acid used to gas prisoners, were stronger in delousing chambers than in chambers that historians claimed were used to kill prisoners, and their claim is that if those chambers truly were used to gas millions of Jews and other prisoners, there would have been far higher traces and the walls would be stained a dark blue. In truth, it makes perfect sense for delousing chambers to have higher traces, since lice take longer to die from Zyklon-B exposure than people, who absorb it through their lungs. Their very testing for Zyklon-B traces, and therefore their findings, are also suspect, for the gas chambers at Auschwitz were reduced to rubble long ago, and the undressing rooms and gas chambers that do stand are partially reconstructed and not reliable for testing. Then there is the fact that deniers have been caught making false or disingenuous claims, such as Fred Leuchter, author of the Leuchter Report, who asserted that Nazi officers dropping the Zyklon-B pellets down through the roof into the chambers would have been committing suicide. Later, he admitted, during yet another Holocaust denier’s trial, that this was not true at all, and that the gas would have taken several minutes to reach them on the roof, by which time they would have closed the hatch through which they’d dropped it and left the area, all while probably wearing a gas mask for protection. Then there was a further claim that the gas being used near a crematorium would have caused an explosion, when in fact crematoria were well-sealed, and the amount of Zyklon-B used to murder prisoners would have been too small to cause an explosion. These flaws and misrepresentations, as well as links between Leuchter and other Holocaust deniers that prove he was no impartial scientific authority on the matter, taken together discredit the Leuchter Report as well as other supporters of the “Auschwitz Lie” conspiracy theory.

Scientific rebuttals and logical counterarguments aside, as with the other claims of deniers, there exists a wealth of further convincing evidence to prove them wrong. One piece alone cannot be relied on to prove or disprove the Holocaust. Instead, one must see the forest for the trees. There are eyewitness accounts of Nazis marching their prisoners into the gas chambers and burning their bodies afterward, but if you doubt survivors’ testimonies, there exist photographs as well, taken secretly by a Greek Jew in Auschwitz. If these you still find dubious, there are the confessions of the camp’s guards, who corroborated all of it. Some Holocaust deniers point to aerial photographs taken by Allied reconnaissance to suggest that since no smoke is seen emerging from smokestacks, the Holocaust must be a hoax, for in order to kill so many, they would have had to be gassing and burning them 24 hours a day. First off, the underlying assumption here is false, for the total killed, as previously stated, includes millions shot and starved elsewhere, and second, we have camp records that were entered as evidence in the trials of Nazis that can verify that, on the days when aerial photos were taken, there happened to be no gassings. Of course, Holocaust deniers go on denying, finding or inventing details to quibble over and reject, all while the great mass of evidence stares them in the face. They put on blinders, focusing only on the bits they think they might be able to cast doubt on and ignoring all that they cannot.

Aerial photo taken Augus 23 1944 of the extermination camp Auschwitz II–Birkenau at Brzezinka in which the smokestacks do indicate the running of the crematorium, via Wikimedia Commons.

Further Reading

Evans, Richard J. Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial. Basic Books, 2002.

Petropoulos, Jonathan. “Confronting the ‘Holocaust as Hoax’ Phenomenon as Teachers.” The History Teacher, vol. 28, no. 4, 1995, pp. 523–539. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/494640.

Shermer, Michael, and Alex Grobman. Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened, and Why Do They Say It? University of California Press, 2000.

Smith, Tom W. “A Review: The Holocaust Denial Controversy.” The Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 2, 1995, pp. 269–295. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2749705.

Van Pelt, Robert Jan. The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial. Indiana University Press, 2002.

Yelland, Linda M., and William F. Stone. “Belief in the Holocaust: Effects of Personality and Propaganda.” Political Psychology, vol. 17, no. 3, 1996, pp. 551–562. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3791968.

Nazi Occultism, Part Three: The Hunt for a Hyperborean Heritage

As a boy in the 1980s, there were no movies I loved more than the Indiana Jones films. I had myself a fedora and whip, and I used to stand in my front yard trying to wrap it securely around a tree limb. So I grew up under the assumption that Hitler was obsessed with finding relics of power, like the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail. As I grew up and learned more about who Nazis were, I thought that, if those jackbooted boogeymen were real, then perhaps those powerful talismans were also real, a notion my Sunday school teachers were all too happy to reinforce. So, just as I tried to wrap that whip around that branch, I tried to wrap my head around the idea that Judeo-Christian artifacts imbued with God’s magical power might somehow aid in evil men’s plans of world domination and genocide. A tale like Ravenscroft’s about the Spear of Destiny would have drawn me in and convinced me entirely, as it has so many others. But returning to this topic with a more critical perspective, and finding legends like Ravenscroft’s to be entirely implausible and impossible to credit, I had been ready to accept that Nazis weren’t the archaeologists of the weird that Raiders and Last Crusade made them out to be. Imagine my surprise, then, when through my research, as the story of the neo-pagan and occult notions behind Nazism unfolded to me, I discovered that, in many ways, this legend was entirely true.

Long before the rise of the Nazi party, the development of the myth of an Aryan race that came from some mysterious northern homeland and spread southward over the world, propagating their Indo-European language, led to the identification of the imagined Aryan race with certain lost civilization myths. It was these myths that drove Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, the dark pontiff of the SS Death’s Head Cult, and his archbishop Karl Maria Wiligut, to organize and bankroll numerous pseudoscientific archaeological and anthropological expeditions. Essentially, their interest in the ancient past extended only as far as proving their occult theories about their racial heritage, and that meant seeking to prove the existence of places long held by empirical historiography to be mere myth. One of these places was Atlantis, the history of whose myth is so rich and byzantine that I could not hope to do it justice in one short passage here. Suffice to say, then, that Atlantis was a mythical mid-Atlantic lost continent and civilization that originated in an allegorical story told by Plato. I encourage you to listen to Sebastian Major’s coverage of Atlantis in Our Fake History for a better understanding of the myth. What is relevant here is that to some, the idea arose that Atlantis could have been the homeland of the Aryans, even though a Mid-Atlantic continent could not be considered as being to the north of Europe. The reason for the connection is the Oera-Linda Book, which I covered in my last patron exclusive Blindside podcast episode. That seemingly ancient Frisian text, believed to have been written in a runic script, told the tale of a Northern European, Nordic civilization descended from Atlanteans that would go on to be the progenitor of the Germans and basically all white Europeans. Despite the fact that, after the book first came to light in the late 19th century, it was conclusively proven to be a forgery and hoax, its ideas were so appealing to German believers in the Aryan myth, that in 1933, a Völkisch pseudo-scholar named Hermann Wirth published a translation of it. This version so caught the imagination of Heinrich Himmler that in 1935 he recruited Hermann Wirth to be the head of his newly formed Study Society for Primordial Intellectual History and German Ancestral Heritage, later renamed Research and Teaching Community for Ancestral Heritage, Das Ahnenerbe, for short, a word ostensibly meaning ancestral heritage, but which amusingly is translated by Google as “guessed heritage,” as in heritage about which one is only guessing. For years, until the beginning of World War II, the Ahnenerbe would devote much time and research to attempting to prove the Oera-Linda Book genuine, at which task, of course, they failed. But this was far from the sole focus of the Ahnenerbe, for to begin with, the Atlantis of the Oera-Linda was not the only mythical land believed to have been the Aryan origin place.

1665 map by Athanasius Kircher placing Atlantis in the mid-Atlantic, via Wikimedia Commons

One purveyor of myths about ancient lost civilizations who had a tremendous influence on Nazi occult pseudohistory was Madame Helena Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society, whose contributions to Ariosophy I’ve already discussed. In her 1888 book The Secret Doctrine, she outlined her cosmogony, or version of the origin of the universe, as well as her claims about anthropogenesis, the origins of mankind. By her reckoning, there had been multiple ages, during which different root races of mankind had seen their rise and fall on continents now lost to time. She claimed that mankind as we knew it, the Aryans or fifth race, were descended from the fourth race, Atlanteans, a race of giants with psychic powers. The Atlanteans, in turn, before being nearly wiped out by the sinking of their continent, had been descended from the third race, who had lived in the lost southern civilization of Lemuria. And before them, had been the second race, who lived in Hyperborea near the North Pole, as so on. Hyperborea, meaning “beyond the North Wind,” had been a mythical place since time immemorial. The earliest surviving mention of it was in Herodotus, who indicated other, now lost records of the continent, such as in a lost work of Homer’s. Poets, philosophers, and geographers of antiquity all had their own ideas about the location of Hyperborea. It was a northerly location, as the very name suggested, and the myth tells us it was beyond the Riphean Mountains, but no one was quite certain of those mountains’ location. Despite what you might find written about it online, none thought of it as an arctic or polar island. Diodorus Siculus, Pliny the Elder, and Pomponius Mela described Hyperborea as a utopian paradise, which of course doesn’t square well with the Arctic’s less than temperate climate. Actually, most scholars believe the myth of Hyperborea may represent evidence of Greek contact with Celts on Britain. French occultist Antoine Fabre d’Olivet appears to be the first to propose the Arctic north as the location of Hyperborea and the origin of the “white race,” and from there it passed through the writings of countless occultists, who like Blavatsky are an incestuous group, metaphorically, in that they seem to have little qualm about repeating claims, source unseen, and even plagiarizing lengthy passages.

The idea of Hyperborea being located at the farthest point northward, beyond the Arctic circle, seems to have come from a conflation of that lost civilization with another mythical northerly island: Ultima Thule. Like Hyperborea, the myth of Ultima Thule originated in antiquity, and its location was likewise debated by many of the same names, such as Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Pomponius Mela, and Claudius Ptolemy. However, Thule had a much stronger claim to actually be a land in the Arctic north. It was first written about during the time of Alexander the Great’s conquests by Pytheas of Massilia, a mariner exploring the Atlantic. Only a few quotations of Pytheas’s writings have survived, but enough that we know he described Thule as “the place where the sun sets. For it happened that in these parts the night becomes extremely short, sometimes two, sometimes three hours long, so that the sun rises a short while after sunset” (Cassidy 595). The myth of Ultima Thule—this ultimate, as in utmost or farthest, island—presents the greatest evidence that mankind indeed penetrated the Arctic circle in ancient times, for it is a clear description of the midnight sun phenomenon now known to occur there. However, even some geographers in antiquity doubted Pytheas, such as Strabo, who called him an “archfalsifier” (Cassidy 595). Doubt is understandable, for just as Hyperborea was said to be icebound yet to enjoy a comfortable climate, so Ultima Thule was described by some, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, to experience “an eternal spring, green throughout seasons” (Cassidy 600). Among those who gave him credence, Ultima Thule’s location was debated with just as much verve: it was variously seen as being somewhere northwest of England, then to the northeast, then far out west into the Atlantic, and once, a confusion of names had some thinking it was in the Persian Gulf! Today, most believe that if it ever existed, it was likely a Shetland Island, or Iceland, whose evergreens would go a long way toward explaining claims about its year-round greenery. (Cassidy 597-599). Of its inhabitants, however, little was claimed beyond them being barbarians, and later, that they enjoyed a perfect utopian existence. In another indication that myths about Hyperborea have become confused with myths about Ultima Thule over the years, we see Pomponius Mela state that Hyperboreans did not die but rather “laughingly” cast themselves into the sea “when sufficiency of living…has come upon them,” while in the 15th century English encyclopedia The Mirror of the World, it is claimed that the Thuleans only die “whan they ben so olde & feble that…they had [rather] dye than lyve” (Cassidy 602).

1623 map of a mysterious Arctic continent by Gerardus Mercator, via Wikimedia Commons

Just as occultists took the myth of Hyperborea and asserted its connection to their notions of racial descent, so German Ariosophists took the myth of Ultima Thule and claimed it as part and parcel of their Aryan myth. Among these, of course, were the members of the aforementioned Thule Gesellshaft, or Thule Society. The Thule Society did not necessarily hold fast to the notion that a green and verdant land that enjoyed a perpetual spring had ever existed at the North Pole. But they thought, perhaps, it could have existed beneath it, and so throughout their literature can be seen references to Hohlweltlehre, or Hollow Earth Theory. The idea that the earth might be hollow, and that conditions beneath the surface might possibly support life was not exactly new. The astronomer and explorer Edmund Halley, for example, had developed a detailed theory about it. I spoke of this briefly last year, in my discussion of the Green Children of Woolpit, and I guested on an episode of the podcast The Conspirators with host and friend of the show Nate Hale in which we spoke all about it. I encourage you to go listen to those episodes for more on the notion of the Hollow Earth. Here, what is most germane to mention is that the Thule Society, along with other proponents of the Hollow Earth theory, looked to Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth as inspiration, which featured a German scholar deciphering the ancient rune script of a Nordic saga to discover the hidden entrance to the inner realms of the earth in Iceland. One imagines the members of the Thule Society finding this fiction not only plausible but almost a revelation, perhaps theorizing that Verne had some occult knowledge that they might uncover themselves with further research. Other novels featuring a civilization inside a hollow earth that they might have taken inspiration from include the Pellucidar novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the satirical Utopian novel The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Indeed, Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, which revolved around a race of subterranean superbeings called the Vril-ya, was accepted by numerous occultists, including many of Blavatsky’s Theosophists, as revealing some hidden truth about the world. And in the 1930s Willy Ley, a German rocket scientist who defected to America and wrote about Nazi pseudoscience, offered the supposed revelation that another secret German society, called the Society for Truth, existed for the sole purpose of discovering and harnessing Vril, the mysterious force wielded by Bulwer-Lytton’s hollow earth dwellers. This has turned Bulwer-Lytton’s fiction into a touchstone for Aryan theorists and enthusiasts of occult Nazi myths ever since, resulting in legends of Vril-powered Nazi UFOs, of course. Ironically, another important literary legacy of Edward Bulwer-Lytton has to do with bad writing, for he famously coined the ultimate cliché, “It was a dark and stormy night….”

Whether or not the Hollow Earth theory was given credence by a great many Nazis or only a few, it is evident that among Nazis and occultists in Germany at the time, eccentric conceptions of how the earth was formed seem to have been prevalent. One such theory, proposed by Dr. Cyrus Reed Teed after a series of surveys he completed in 1890s Florida, suggested that the earth was concave. Some researchers have argued that both Hitler and Himmler had become convinced of this “Cellular Cosmogony,” as it was called, which had seen a resurgence in the weird atmosphere of early 20th century Germany. Essentially, this theory holds that there is a hollow earth, and we are on its concave inner surface, looking up at a gaseous blue cloud lit by a small sun, on the other side of which could possibly be seen the far side of the world. Supposedly, Hitler sent a radar expert to the Baltic Sea to aim his radar equipment into the sky at a certain angle in hopes of tracking the British fleet in the Atlantic. While this theory and projects undertaken based on it might seem ridiculous, another, no less absurd, might even make it seem sensible by comparison. It seems that Himmler and Hitler both also became enamored of Welteislehre, or World Ice Theory, the brainchild of one Hanns Horbiger, an engineer and inventor. He seems to have been a man of science, until one day, while gazing at the moon, he claimed to have had an epiphany—almost like the visions of Guido von List, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, and Karl Maria Wiligut—that all planets were composed of ice and that ice was the basic building block of all things, making the Milky Way not a galaxy of stars but a vast swathe of icebergs. In 1912, he published his theory of “Glacial Cosmogony,” and some elements of it were actually prescient. For example, he suggested that the universe had begun in an explosion like the Big Bang. Other aspects of his theory, however, definitely show it to be a product of the Austro-German revival of occultism and esotericism at the time, such as that the ancient and superior races of man had arrived on earth when moons of ice had crashed into it, and that impacts of these sorts had further resulted in the sinking of Atlantis and in Noah’s flood. Particularly appealing to Ariosophists and specifically to Heinrich Himmler was this notion of a master race originating from an icy world, for this struck his ear as very like the myth of Ultima Thule being the frozen homeland of the Aryan master race.

Depiction of our galaxy according to Horbiger’s World Ice Theory, via the Moscow Society of Astronomy Lovers

Much of the work of Himmler’s Ahnenerbe was directed toward finding evidence to support these various Ariosophist pet theories of anthropogenesis and cosmogenesis, but of course, by the time the Second World War came around, when Himmler and his Death’s Head Cult took on far more horrific tasks and put their academic undertakings on hold, they had nothing to show for their research. One should attribute this to the fact they were seeking evidence of something that only existed in their minds, though, and not to any lack of effort on their part. In search of archaeological proof of German superiority and lost Aryan civilizations, the Ahnenerbe sent teams all over the world. In order to gather more Nordic folklore to pore over, teams visited Scandinavia in 1935, recorded the traditional songs of pagan forest dwellers, and met with a legendary sorceress named Miron-Aku. Perceived similarities between prehistoric petroglyphs and runes led to numerous expeditions to Sweden, the Baltic Sea, and Italy, and the theory that Aryan paganism was the progenitor of all Middle Eastern religions led to an expedition to Iraq to study the ancient sites of Babylon. The Ahnenerbe truly were the villainous archaeologists portrayed in Raiders of the Lost Ark, exploring prehistoric Celtic settlements close to home in the Black Forest and planning expeditions as far afield Iceland, where they hoped to study the culture for any echoes of their mythological Ultima Thule and the Aryan race, and Bolivia and Peru, where they believed they saw parallels between the ancient Incans and Nordic culture. Perhaps the most far-flung operation ever taken on by the Ahnenerbe was their mission to Tibet in hopes of finding there the source of their imagined master race. There was a theory at the time that plant and animal life had all come from a common source up in the Himalayas, an idea that resonated well with Ariosophist notions of a root or master race of human beings coming from some icy realm. Tibet wasn’t exactly to the north of Europe, but there was another legend, of the so-called Mountain of Tongues, called Jabal al-Alsinah by medieval Arab geographers who claimed it was the birthplace of Indo-European languages. While this mythical mountain had long been supposed to be in the Caucasus, Himmler thought that perhaps the tales had been mistaken and it might be in the Himilayas. Moreover, the mad mystic Karl Wiligut was apparently very interested in stories he’d heard about Tibetan women keeping magical stones in their vaginas, so off they sent a team to Tibet, where after an arduous seven-month journey, they eventually reached the forbidden capital city of Lhasa… and of course found no sign of any blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryans.

True to the image of Nazi archaeologists in Raiders and The Last Crusade, though, the Ahnenerbe did more than sift around in ruins and squint at glyphs. They were on the lookout for artifacts of legend. Perhaps the earliest such artifact to interest Himmler and Wiligut was the Irminsul, a great pillar said to be sacred to the pagan Saxons, that legend says was destroyed by Charlemagne. Völkisch neo-pagans associated the Irminsul with Yggdrasil, the World Tree of Nordic mythology, and saw parallels to the object in numerous world religions, such as Christianity’s Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden, the sacred Hindu fig tree the Ashvastha, and the bodhi tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment. Völkisch pseudo-scholars like Karl Maria Wiligut believed that the Irminsul was none other than the Externsteine, a formation of natural sandstone pillars in the Rhineland that Roman historian Tacitus had written about as the Pillars of Hercules. At this site are a number of 12th century Christian carvings, the most prominent of which depicts Christ’s descent from the Cross, but Karl Maria Wiligut and other neo-pagans believed that long before these carvings were made, it had been a pagan place of worship and appreciated it as such, coaxing Himmler and other SS officers to make pilgrimages out to the site. In fact, Himmler came to be so preoccupied by it that before he established the Ahnenerbe, he established a precursor organization called the Externsteine Foundation whose focus was to study the stone outcropping he and WIligut believed was the Irminsul. In those early years, the madman Wiligut was far more influential in the archaeological undertakings of the SS, mounting expeditions of his own to places where he believed there to be intersections of “energy lines,” like planetary chakra points or ley lines, and digging up stone ruins from which he felt “vibrations.”

A depiction of Charlemagne having the Irminsul destroyed, via Wikimedia Commons

While the story of Hitler’s obsession with taking possession of the Spear of Destiny may be dubious, there are plenty of real stories involving the Ahnenerbe seeking out and sometimes snatching historical artifacts. The war put one plan on hold, to photograph the Behistun Inscription carved into a mountainside in Iran using a balloon-mounted camera, but as the Reich invaded other countries, the chance to loot relics was always seized on by the Ahnenerbe. They took possession of Gothic artifacts such as the Veit Stoss altarpiece and the Crown of Crimea, and they took great interest in the Bayeaux Tapestry upon invading France, believing it offered evidence supporting the notion of Germanic superiority. And the one probably mythical, supposedly magical artifact that actually did seem to cast a spell over Himmler and his black-clad archaeologists was the Holy Grail of legend. Spielberg and Lucas seem to have gotten this one spot on. Ever since Wagner based his opera Parzival on the 13th-century story of Percival, the Knight of King Arthur’s Round Table who quested after the Holy Grail, Germans and neo-pagan occultists had taken great interest in Grail mythology. As mentioned in the last episode, entire reading rooms at Wewelsburg had been dedicated by Himmler to the study of Arthurian Legend and the mythos of the Holy Grail, and some have said he envisioned the castle as a kind of twisted Camelot, with an almost 15,000-square-foot dining hall equivalent to Arthur’s Round Table. And within the ranks of the Ahnenerbe was a slick-haired, weaselly man named Otto Rahn who, like a quintessential Indiana Jones villain, had been obsessed with the Grail all his life, believing that the Gnostic French Cathar sect wiped out in a Catholic Crusade in 1244 had actually secreted the Grail away somewhere in the Languedoc region of western France. If you’re thinking that this sounds an awful lot like Holy Blood, Holy Grail or The DaVinci Code, you’re absolutely right. These kinds of conspiracy theories of hidden history are endlessly recycled. Like many who would come after him, he searched the castle at Montségur and various remote caves throughout the Pyrenees Mountains, finding nothing more concrete than material for a 1933 book. Himmler, it turned out, was a fan of his writings, gave Rahn a black uniform and an impressive rank, and bankrolled his Grail quest. But Otto Rahn was no Parzival and only ever produced some further writings about his search.

In the end, it may seem surprising that Himmler and the Ahnenerbe’s undertakings live in on legend, for they never turned up anything supportive of their pseudohistorical views, nor is there any evidence they ever discovered a mythical artifact and proved it to be true. The most they ever accomplished was turning up some remains or artifacts of passing historical interest, something it may have been hard not to do when sifting around through prehistoric sites. But enduring legends of Nazi survival remain to tantalize us. These unsupported and fantastical speculations suggest that perhaps the Nazis did discover objects of power or the secret places of the earth and kept their discoveries a secret, establishing what some call a breakaway civilization, an idea encouraged by the fact that some Nazis did escape Germany and take refuge across the world in South America. But these theories go further. They claim that it is all too suspect that entrances to the hollow earth were said to be located in Tibet and Antarctica, and the Germans mounted expeditions to both places. The Tibet expedition I have already discussed; as for Antarctica, the Nazis sent one Captain Alfred Ritscher to there in 1938 to claim 230,000 square miles in the name of Germany. If you dare visit the underbelly of Internet conspiracy and paranormal pseudohistory websites, you’ll find it said that, clearly, the Nazis found a path to the hollow earth, harnessed the power of Vril, and used it to found a new, underground society and power their flying saucers. The problem is there are far simpler explanations and more reasonable conclusions. The Tibet expedition was well documented, with surviving film and photographs, and it is apparent that the Nazi pseudo-anthropologists who undertook it did little more than place calipers on the heads of everyone they encountered and record their craniometric data. There is no indication that they did any sort of cave exploration or excavation. As for the Antarctic mission of Captain Ritscher, it was a territorial claim, pure and simple. Many nations had sent similar teams to the South Pole before them, including Norway, France, Britain, and the U.S., whose Admiral Richard Byrd had famously flown over it. It was only because of the Nazi’s aggression and the clear rumblings of war that Ritscher’s expedition raised eyebrows. But legend always finds a way to grow. Two years after the Reich fell, Admiral Byrd organized a task force of 13 ships, 33 aircraft, and nearly 5,000 men and went back to Antarctica in Operation Highjump, with a mission of training personnel in cold conditions, gathering information, and extending sovereignty. Conspiracy theorists, however, will tell you that it was a military operation to attack a secret Nazi UFO base. With their customary lack of supporting evidence, they won’t even try to prove their claims, looking instead to skeptics to somehow prove them wrong.

Emblem of the Nazi expedition to Antarctica, via Wikimedia Commons

Further Reading

Cassidy, Vincent H. de P. “The Voyage of an Island.” Speculum, vol. 38, no. 4, 1963, pp. 595–602. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2851657.

Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology. New York University Press, 2004.

Shnirelman, Victor. “Hyperborea: The Arctic Myth of Contemporary Russian Radical Nationalists.” Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics, vol. 8, no. 2, 2014, pp. 121-38. Directory of Open Access Journals, doaj.org/article/a20b5cfd725d4cdaa864118d815444c0.

Yenne, Bill. Hitler’s Master of the Dark Arts: Himmler’s Black Knights and the Occult Origins of the SS. Zenith Press, 2010.

Nazi Occultism, Part Two: The Death's Head Cult

In part two of this series, we will look at the dark messianic figure saluting at the head of the Nazi columns, Adolph Hitler, and beyond him to the figures in his orbit who most involved themselves in mystical and occult practices. At the end of Part One, we introduced him as an art student and army corporal who took an interest in the writings of Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels. After the conclusion of World War I, when the Treaty of Versailles forbade the reconstitution of the Imperial German Army, unemployed veterans joined up with a number of paramilitary militias called freikorps, or like Hitler, joined the national police force known as the Reichswehr. This was a time of great unrest, with communists on the far left and nationalists on the far right all displeased with the democratic compromise of the Weimar Republic, a disaffection exacerbated by a general economic collapse. Just as numerous mystical creeds had vied for ascendancy in the Austro-German New Age, in 1919, in Munich, numerous fledgling political groups struggled to capture the attention of the German people. The Reichswehr sent young Hitler to spy on one small party, the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP), or the German Workers’ Party, but Hitler, an avowed anti-Semite already, liked what the DAP had to say about Bolsheviks and the Jews being responsible for Germany’s recent defeat and ended up joining the party instead. Before the end of the year, the DAP became the NSDAP, or National Socialist German Workers’ Party, but don’t let the name fool you. They were a far right nationalist group seeking to expand their appeal to their base with watchwords; they were only “socialist” insofar as they heaped scorn on Jewish capitalists. Thus the Nazi party was born, their name a shortening of Nationalsozialistische, and by 1921, the orator Hitler was its chairman, and by 1923, its Führer, the dictator of a political party with some 20,000 members and its own freikorps of storm troopers, the SA, called brownshirts after their uniforms, who went around intimidating and brutalizing enemies of the party. It was late that year that Hitler attempted a coup in Bavaria, fomenting the overthrow of the government with a speech at a beer hall and marching on Munich’s city hall, a gambit that failed and landed him in prison, where he solidified his doctrine of racism and nationalism by writing Mein Kampf and prepared himself to resume leadership of the Nazis and continue his inexorable march to absolute power over Germany and Europe. But while it is overtly clear that Hitler was driven nationalist and racist ideals, it is not as clear whether he subscribed to the occult, mystical, and neo-pagan notions of the Austro-German New Age or how ingrained these elements were in the culture of Nazism.

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Once again, as I discuss the rise to power and beliefs of Hitler and his lieutenants, I do so with a purpose: to examine the veracity of claims that Nazis were an occult group. If I suggest that perhaps there are myths surrounding him or other Nazi figures, it is not in an attempt to exonerate him or revise history to his benefit. Hitler was a racist and a despot and a mass murderer the likes of which I don’t believe have never been seen before or since in human history, and the same can be said for all his cronies or accomplices. If you are listening to this searching for fodder to use in Nazi apologism, unsubscribe, delete your accounts, go outside and get to know the people you fear and blindly hate.

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Clearly Hitler identified with völkisch and Ariosophist ideas, but that does not mean that he was a mystic pupil of Guido von List and Jörg von Liebenfels. He was a clear nationalist, but the völkische movement did not invent German nationalism; there was plenty of that in the Imperial German Army to which Hitler had previously belonged. Certainly he appreciated völkisch notions, such as Drang Noch Osten, the eastward urge, which suggested Germans held a manifest destiny to settle in lands to the east, a notion addressed in Hitler’s doctrine of lebensraum, or the German need to spread eastward for living space. And of course, ideas of German racial superiority, specifically over Jews, appealed to Hitler’s very apparent and rabid anti-Semitism. There is, however, some justified debate over whether he subscribed to the racial theories of Aryan superiority as some others held them, for although he did seek to absorb all Germanic peoples into his Reich, he appears to have been more skeptical about accepting those of other ethnicities even when his racial pseudo-scientists insisted on their Aryan characteristics, which would suggest Hitler maintained more of an Imperial nationalism than some other true believers. Then there is the fact, strange if Lanz von Liebenfels was such an influence on him through his writings in Ostara, that Hitler never drew von Liebenfels into the Reich or awarded him any position. Some have claimed that Hitler may have visited the offices of Lanz’s magazine in 1909 to buy some issues of Ostara, and that he may have spoken with Von Liebenfels at the time, but there is no evidence of a significant influence on the Führer. Indeed, in Mein Kampf, Hitler even warns against “wandering völkisch scholars” and “so-called reformers of the ancient Germanic type,” calling them “the greatest imaginable cowards” and “comedians,” suggesting “that they are sent by dark forces who do not desire the rebirth of [the German] people. For their entire activity leads the Volk away from its fight against the common enemy, the Jew, in order that it may expend its energy in internal religious struggles.” These are certainly not the words of an initiate in pagan mysteries or a true believer in the occult or the mystical.

There exist numerous unsupported claims about Hitler being the pawn of occult agents bent on grooming him for evil purposes. One example comes from English occult writer Victor Neuburg, who claimed to have been present at a conversation in which infamous magician Aleister Crowley informed novelist and essayist Aldous Huxley that his secret society, the Ordo Templi Orientis, had fed peyote to Hitler and under its influence brainwashed him, trained him in oratory, and “gave him his daemon.” Needless to say, Neuburg offers no further evidence of this third-hand claim. Likewise, perhaps the most famous story about Hitler’s involvement in occultism comes to us as hearsay that we are expected to take as truth. In Trevor Ravenscroft’s incredible—as in hard to believe—book, The Spear of Destiny, he lays out a tale about Hitler’s obsession with a magical artifact, manipulation by esoteric secret societies, and possession by dark forces, all of which was supposedly conveyed to him by Dr. Walter Stein, the physician and advisor to Winston Churchill mentioned in Part One, who believed, or at least spread the idea, that Hitler was a Satanist. As Ravenscroft’s pseudohistory unfolds, we meet a young and indigent Hitler who is obsessed with an artifact in the Hofburg Museum in Vienna. This artifact, a lance variously believed to have belonged to Saint Maurice or to Constantine the Great, became conflated with the Holy Lance, or Lance of Longinus, said to have pierced Christ’s side during the crucifixion. This claim is also made of numerous other lance heads displayed around the world. Ravenscroft, however, tacitly asserting that the one in the Hofburg was genuine, describes how it called out to Hitler, possessing him, for he who took ownership of the Holy Lance would rule the world. While it is true that, after annexing Austria, Hitler seized the crown jewels and this artifact along with them, transporting them in an armored train and depositing them in a bunker, there was plenty of precedent for doing so as it made a clear symbolic statement about his sovereignty. Trevor Ravenscroft attributes quotes to Hitler without source; makes claims that biographers of Hitler have proven untrue, such as where he was at certain times and what his financial situation might have been; and relies on a plot containing so many coincidences that it reads like a bad novel, which it probably is. Perhaps the biggest strike against the book is that it later came out Ravenscroft never actually met Dr. Stein but rather claims to have interviewed his ghost through a séance! Regardless, even if he really had learned these things from Dr. Stein, Stein’s own credibility issues and the lack of any concrete evidence make Ravenscroft’s story of Hitler’s initiation into the occult only worth mentioning insofar as it is entertaining.

A depiction of Longinus piercing Christ’s side with the Holy Lance, via Wikimedia Commons

However, even if Hitler’s devotion to esoteric and occult beliefs cannot be clearly proven, it is evident that he surrounded himself with true believers. One example was the astrologer and hypnotist, Erich Jan Hanussen, an old friend of Hitler’s who would sometimes advise him by reading his horoscope or suggesting certain arcane rituals be undertaken for luck or to break supposed curses on Hitler. His relationship to this figure seems to suggest at least an openness or tolerance of the occult. Then there were the members of the Thule Society, such as the playwright Dietrich Eckart, racial theorist and future Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, and pseudo-aristocratic occultist Rudolf von Sebottendorff, all of whom ran the Nazi mouthpiece newspaper, the People’s Observer. These men were all neo-pagans and Ariosophists, believers in the legendary land of Ultima Thule as the long-lost origin of the mythical Aryan race, about which, as already promised, I will have more to say before the series concludes. There is no evidence that Hitler himself was a member of the Thule Society, however, and he may have only relied on them as writers and publishers because of their involvement in the DAP from the beginning, before it had even transformed into the NSDAP, or Nazi Party. One thing, however, is certain; the involvement of the Thule Society members in the Nazis did much to encourage Heinrich Himmler to devote himself to the party, and Himmler would prove to be the biggest occult influence on Nazism.

Raised a middle-class Catholic, like Hitler himself, Himmler was an imaginative youth who lost himself in daydreams about medieval Germanic folklore and Nordic mythology, much like Guido von List. His reveries about the warriors of the Nibelungenlied and of Teutonic Knights left him yearning for martial service. He enlisted in the 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment in World War I, but with poor eyesight and a weak constitution, he never saw any action and failed to complete the officer training into which his father had pulled strings to enroll him. During the days of the Weimar Republic, he lived on a farm and became enamored of völkisch ideas, including the most extreme Blood and Soil notions, and he became obsessed by the myth of the Aryan race and its history in the primeval past as well as the runology of Guido von List. After studying agriculture at the University of Munich and still trying to scratch an itch for the military service he idealized, he join a freikorps militia, and finding similar interests among members of Nazi Party, such as those espoused by the Thule Society, he joined up, and during the attempted coup known as the Beer Hall Putsch, he marched with his freikorps to seize the former war ministry offices. Upon Hitler’s release from prison and the reconstitution of the Nazi Party, Himmler took a position as a rural community organizer, recruiting völkisch idealists for the Nazi cause, but his dark star was on the rise. By 1929, he was the head of another freikorps, the SS (the Schutstaffel, or Protection Squad), conceived as a kind of elite imperial guard. Through ruthless maneuvering, Heinrich Himmler would likewise take control of the German State Police, or Gestapo, and over the course of his career and the Third Reich would become the most feared man in Germany, but his focus always remained on the SS, which he transformed from an imperial guard into a kind of cult devoted to neo-paganism and Aryan purity. More than any other Nazi, Heinrich Himmler stands as proof of occultism’s influence on Nazi policy, and it was at his desk that the most horrifyingly evil Nazi policy, that of the Final Solution, originated.

Some scholars, such as Stephen E. Flowers and Michael Moynihan in their essay, “The Myth of Nazi Occultism,” have suggested that the pagan and anti-Christian culture of Nazism has been exaggerated, pointing to the fact the original NSDAP party platform declared Christianity the official religion of Germany, and further noting that Hitler not only mocks neo-pagans in Mein Kampf but also relies on numerous biblical references (Flowers and Moynihan 30-31). A quote from Hitler’s 1938 speech to the Reich Party Congress stands as a clear example that Hitler, who himself never resigned from the Catholic Church as did many others in his party, may have thought of himself as remaining a Christian. He warned that “woe if the movement or the state, through the insinuation of obscure mystical element, should be given unclear orders.… There is already a danger if orders are given for the setting up of so-called cult-places, because this alone will give birth to the necessity subsequently to devise so-called cult games and cult rituals. Our cult is exclusively the cultivation of that which is natural and hence willed by God.” But of course, he may have simply been appealing in this speech to those who had retained their traditional Christian loyalties, and it is telling that in it he still calls Nazism a cult, even if only rhetorically. But to suggest that Nazism was not anti-Christian in the extreme would be to ignore the fact that, along with Jews, they would eventually persecute a great many Catholics and Jehovah’s Witnesses for their beliefs. And the simple fact that the neo-pagan Heinrich Himmler organized and ran the SS like a pagan cult clinches the argument, for the SS were considered the elite, the perfect example of Nazi ideals. Himmler required that any who would join his modern day Teutonic knighthood first renounce their faith in Catholic or Protestant Christianity. SS soldiers were forbidden to celebrate Christmas, replacing the observance with solstice celebrations. While it is true that many in the SS only paid lip service to this policy and continued to worship privately as they always had, the policy itself stands as the strongest evidence of Nazism’s anti-Christian, neo-pagan principles.

Photograph of Himmler by Friedrich Franz Bauer, licensed under (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE) via Wikimedia Commons

The runology of Guido von List, with which Himmler was so fascinated, provides another piece of evidence proving the occult influence on Nazism and the SS in particular. Even the prominence of the swastika itself, which had early been flown as a banner by Lanz von Liebenfels at the solstice rituals of his New Templars, appears to have been encouraged by the fascination of neo-pagans and new age mystics with ancient runes. The old mystic Guido von List had connected the hakenkreuz, or hooked cross, as it was called in German, to ancient Aryans, suggesting it represented some force by which the universe had been created, an assertion for which, typically, he offered no evidence beyond his own certainty. Certainly the symbol, called swastik in Sanskrit, has been found to be prevalent in numerous cultures connected through Indo-European languages, from Northern Europe all the way to India. It has been used in some form in Hinduism and Buddhism and Jewish Kabbalism, and in ancient Greece, where it was called the gammadion. But as noted in the previous installment, language groups and even cultural groups, are not the same as racial groups, and this was the root error that resulted in the myth of an Aryan race. Moreover, this symbol, which Carl Sagan has noted is readily apparent in nature and so could have arisen spontaneously in completely unrelated cultures, has been found in artifacts of pre-Columbian North American native tribes, such as the Navajo. Its widespread use in multiple cultures is likely what encouraged Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society to take it up as one of their principal symbols, and its association with Nordic mythology and the Teutonic Knights, a Catholic military order around whom swirled almost as many fantastical theories as those concerning the Knights Templar, led to the hakenkreuz being adopted as an important symbol of the Thule Society as well, who recommended its use in the Nazi flag. Members of the Thule Society likely saw in it more than the traditional Sanskrit meaning, which denoted good luck or well-being, for they were preoccupied with the symbols of Guido von List’s so-called Armanen Futharkh runes, a runic alphabet he appears to have invented and claimed were supernaturally conveyed to him. Therefore, to them, the hakenkreuz, or swastika, was likely viewed as two Sig or Sigel runes superimposed on each other. According to List’s runic alphabet, Sig meant victory, just like the German word sieg, which would become the traditional Nazi chant, sieg heil, or “hail victory.” Likewise, when it came time for Heinrich Himmler, the true believer, to choose the symbols of the SS and their regalia, he settled on two Sig runes, like twin lightning bolts, a runic symbol that he made so common in Nazi Germany that typewriters were manufactured with a special key to type the symbol on official documents. Along with this runic insignia, Himmler chose to retain the symbol previously adopted by the SS before he had taken command: that of the Totenkopf, or death’s head, a symbol that had been called the Jolly Roger when used by pirates. The images of the skull-and-crossbones and runic double lightning bolts on the black uniforms of this military order would strike terror into their victims and the world at large, and the very fact that this elite group openly and stringently devoted to neo-paganism and racial theories based on myth adopted its own occult iconography goes a long way toward establishing that this was more of a cult than an army.

Himmler’s devotion to the occult myth of the Aryan race is plain to see in his administration of the SS as well, for it was not only held up as an exemplar of Nazism but also of Aryan racial purity. Many were the armchair theorists and mystical declaimers of Ariosophy in those years, but Heinrich Himmler, a mild-mannered and mousy little man with hooded eyes, was determined to act on his convictions of Aryan purity and actually enact a program of controlled breeding that many early 20th century eugenicists only pondered. He started by instituting exacting standards for membership in the SS, believing that his elite corps must be unimpeachably pure of Aryan blood in order to serve as the vanguard in their struggle to assert the mastery of their race. Applicants to serve in the SS were therefore required to not only appear Nordic but to document their genealogy back more than a hundred years to prove that no Slavic or Jewish blood ran through their veins. This was true not only of new applicants, but of the existing rank and file, from which Himmler purged any whose blood he believed to be tainted. Once enlisted, SS could not marry unless their brides provided their family trees to prove their pure Aryan ancestry. Once approved, their weddings were pagan affairs, a non-Christian consecration ceremony that Himmler himself had crafted. And even their daughters were forbidden to marry any man in whose lineage could be found a drop of Jewish or Slavic blood, for Himmler saw the members of his SS as the seed from which a future, purely Aryan utopia would spring, and he felt it needed to be protected from the corruption of miscegenation. No wonder, then, that, after the SS had proven in its operations in the Soviet Union that it was capable of mass murder, the zealously anti-Semitic Hitler, who had long shouted about the annihilation of European Jews, would turn to Himmler, the ruthless enactor of racial policies, for a “Final Solution.” Thus it was Himmler, the mastermind of the concentration camp, and his death’s head cult, who would carry out the greatest atrocities of the Third Reich.

When one hears about how carefully Himmler and the SS scrutinized the women in their officers’ lives, one might be tempted to give credence to the tales that Himmler formed a secret unit of women, the SS Hexen-Sonderkommando, who were witches practicing their dark arts to further the ends of the Führer. But this appears, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be a legend. Certainly Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer, was interested in witchcraft. He created a team of researchers to gather evidence that the Catholic Church had persecuted Germans in their witch-trials, and this group, which indexed its findings in the Hexenkartothek, may actually be the inspiration for the SS Hexen group of legend, but there is no indication that this group was even comprised of women, let alone witches. Documents have turned up indicating that Himmler may have believed one of his ancestors had been persecuted as a witch, and that he was interested in claims that unusual numbers of crows were said to haunt the sites of witch executions, but I decline to hazard a guess as to the authenticity of these, and regardless, they would only prove his academic interest in the occult, which is already well-established. In truth, there were female units in the SS, such as the Helferinnenkorps, or Helpers Corp, who served as nurses and administrative assistants. Later, there were the more notorious Aufseherinnen, or Overseers, women tasked with overseeing some aspects of concentration camp operations. Technically, none of these were considered real members of the SS, and of course, there are no indications of them practicing magic, but there is the story of Die Hexe von Buchenwald,  the Witch of Buchenwald, that might have transformed into a legend of actual witches in SS uniforms. Ilse Köhler Koch, wife of Karl Otto Koch, commandant of the Buchenwald, was in her position as Oberaufseherin, known to engage in as much casual cruelty and disgusting sadism as any male counterpart. She took a voyeuristic pleasure in staging rapes, and she was disturbingly obsessed with tattoos, such that she had them cut off the corpses of prisoners, tanning the skin and making accessories out of them, like gloves and handbags.

Ilse Koch testifying in her own defense, via Wikimedia Commons

While Himmler and the SS may not have had witches in their ranks, they certainly had at least one warlock. In the same year that Hitler rose to the position of chancellor, a nearly 70-year-old man, formerly a colonel who had served in the Austrian army during the previous world war, got an audience with Himmler and explained how he was able to commune with the spirits of old Nordic heroes from the time of Germanic mythology. The two men shared many interests, in theories about the ancient roots of the Germans, their old runic language, their relation to the gods. Himmler made him head of a department focused on researching prehistory, but within a year, this old mystic guru had risen to the rank of SS Oberführer, a position something like that of a general. Karl Maria Wiligut was just another crank coming out of the Austro-German New Age, like a Guido von List or a Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, except he had never managed to find himself a following. Like List, he was interested in runes and had written a book about them, and just as List crafted a mythology around a group of ancient priests called Armanen, an extrapolation of a tidbit in Tacitus that mentioned Germanic tribes called Irminones who resisted the Romans, Wiligut crafted his own alternate mythology around a similar group he called the Irminen, although he insisted they were a wholly different ancient Germanic priesthood that worshipped a different pagan deity and actually went to war with List’s Wotan-worshippers. Just as Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels had his publication Ostara, Wiligut published his own periodical, The Iron Broom, in which he also vocally dissented from Christianity and bemoaned the fact that the supposedly superior Aryan race had been and was being deteriorated by lesser races, including the Jewish race. As Guido von List had claimed supernatural inspiration for the futharkh runes, and as Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels had claimed to receive a vision revealing the threat of the sub-human races, Wiligut claimed that he knew so much about the ancient world because he channeled ancient spirits, from whom he learned that the Aryan race was born 230,000 years earlier, in a fantastical world with three suns, peopled by dwarves, giants, and mythical creatures. His own bloodline, according to him, could be traced back to Irminen royalty, born of gods and men, just the kind of divine sodomy that Lanz von Liebenfels wrote about. In every way, he was a contemporary of those pseudo-mystics, but he never had his own secret society or cult. In fact, he could not even make a believer of his own wife, whom he abused and who ended up having him committed. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, he spent around three years institutionalized before being released into the welcoming arms of Ariosophists who appreciated his writings. And eventually, he found an acolyte in Heinrich Himmler who was finally able to give him, in the SS, the cult following that had always eluded him.

Heinrich Himmler had grown up in Landshut, in the shadow of Castle Trusnitz, which called up images of the ancient kings and hero knights with which he had been infatuated. And Himmler’s high priest, Karl Maria Wiligut, had never had an ancient temple of his own, as had his contemporaries. Guido von List and his Armanenorden had some ancient Roman ruins at Carnuntum in which they practiced their pagan rituals, and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels’s Ordo Novi Templi or Order of the New Templars used Castle Werfenstein, an impressive old pile of rocks on a hilltop, for their orgiastic rituals. So, late in 1933, Himmler and Wiligut, the two leaders of the Nazis’ Death’s Head Cult, went looking for just such a place and found it in the Castle of Wewelsburg. Believed to be near the site of an ancient battle in which Germanic tribes defied Roman rule, it was perfectly suited for their neo-pagan beliefs, and the fact that it was said to be the site of thousands of witch burnings also, perversely, seems to have been a draw for them. The strangely triangular shaped castle would officially be the temple of the Death’s Head Cult, renovated to reflect their occult mythology with countless runic symbols carved into the ornate walls and ceilings. The castle was to be the hub from which he would build outward a massive complex called the Center of the New World whose numerous towers, walls and boulevards would, from above form the shape of a spear pointing north, toward the mythical homeland of the Aryan race. This spear one may be templated to think was meant to represent the Holy Lance, but that very Christian symbol had no place in the mythology of the Death’s Head Cult, which more likely would think of it as Gungnir, Wotan’s spear, or as a simple metaphor for this new world order, if you will, that they intended to spearhead.

Plans for the Center of the New World at Wewelsburg, via Wikimedia Commons

It was here at Castle Wewelsburg that they would perform their pagan weddings and baptisms, and other rituals, which Himmler, always one for meticulous record keeping, kept curiously secret. Thus legends have sprung up around the goings on there. In Dusty Sklar’s 1977 book, The Nazis and the Occult, she reported an unsupported claim that Himmler, Wiligut, and the SS engaged in human sacrifice rituals at Castle Wewelsburg. As the story goes, they would take a good specimen of an Aryan man, behead him, and use this severed head to channel otherworldly spirits they called the “Secret Masters of the Caucasus.” When you look more closely into the provenance of this story, however, much like the claims of Trevor Ravenscroft, it begins to lose any semblance of credibility. Sklar’s source was an Occidental College anthropology professor named C. Scott Littleton, which sounds reliable enough, but it turns out Littleton had the details from a college friend whose identity he refused to reveal, and that friend had them from a professor at a German university who likewise would remain anonymous. Supposedly, this German professor’s father had been an SS general and had left behind a box of files in which were reports about these grisly séances, but the actual files have never turned up. Instead, we just have what amounts to an urban legend, in which Sklar was told that Littleton heard that so-and-so spoke to a guy whose father had proof of these occult rituals. Nevertheless, what we do know of the Castle at Wewelsburg shows us the fascination that Himmler and Wiligut maintained in the occult and in their mythologized ancient past, an interest they encouraged all the members of their Death’s Head Cult to take. Throughout the castle, they built a series of oak-paneled reading rooms, each named after a specific subject, among which were a room on runes, a room on all things Aryan, rooms on old Germanic kings, a room on the Order of Teutonic Knights, and rooms on King Arthur and the Holy Grail. And as we shall see, in the final installment of this series, under the auspices of Heinrich Himmler’s authority, the Nazis would engage in much strange research and occult archaeology straight out of an Indiana Jones film.

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Further Reading

Badger, William, and Diane Purkiss. “English Witches and SS Academics: Evaluating Sources for the English Witch Trials in Himmler's Hexenkartothek.” Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural, vol. 6, no. 1, 2017, pp. 125–153. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/preternature.6.1.0125.

Roland, Paul. The Nazis and the Occult: The Dark Forces Unleashed by the Third Reich. Chartwell Books, 2008.

Sklar, Dusty. The Nazis and the Occult. Dorset Press, 1989.

Yenne, Bill. Hitler’s Master of the Dark Arts: Himmler’s Black Knights and the Occult Origins of the SS. Zenith Press, 2010.

Nazi Occultism, Part One: The Myth of the Aryans

In this installment, I’ll be returning to a topic that I have not revisited since my exploration of the Reichstag fire a couple years ago.  The rise of Nazism and the nature and underpinnings of their racist and tyrannical ideology fits particularly well into the thematic focus Historical Blindness, for a few reasons. One, it involved numerous misleading narratives and dubious conspiracy theories spread as propaganda, some of which have passed into history as though they were fact, as we explored in the previous installments on the Reichstag fire and the Oberfohren memorandum and the Ernst confession. Two, their conception of themselves and their place in history derived from numerous myths and false alternate histories, as we shall see in this series. And three, because not only are the lies and myths of Nazis still promulgated today by some on the far right, but the far right has also seen a resurgence in numerous countries around the world, making it more relevant than ever and essential that we not turn a blind eye to the lessons of the Nazis’ rise to power. Therefore, it is important that we look at the darkest influences in German society at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries to discover what made Nazism possible, what terrible conditions and malevolent forces led to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis.

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At the outset, it must be clearly established that Nazi ideology and mythology are undeniably evil. As I move from one concept’s origin to the next, from one movement or idea to another, I may not always return to this baseline truth or explain overtly why each is dangerous, misleading, or wicked—and in fact, some may appear harmless or may actually have been harmless at first, making their eventual enfolding into Nazism that much more insidious—so at the beginning, I must clarify that every element contributing to the rise of Nazism must be looked back on with distaste and mistrust and that I am in no way exploring them as valid notions or admirable schools or thought. Any who might read this and think, “Hey, they were on to something,” close your browser. You’re missing my point and you should reexamine your biases, your thought processes, and really, your life. Nazis were and are deluded and despicable. Any doctrines of racial supremacy are pure evil, in part and overall. The question I intend to examine here, however, is the nature of Nazism’s evil. Was it a distinctly human evil, the evil of men and their avarice and greed for power and domination? Certainly it was this, but was there some other, spiritual or supernatural aspect to its evil? Nazis are remembered as devilish ghouls, and many are the religious people who will tell you they think Hitler and his lieutenants were possessed by demons. In everything from Indiana Jones to Captain America, Hollywood portrays the Nazis as seekers after ancient and supernatural power. But how accurate is this conception of Nazi occultism? It is a question that first requires a definition of its central term. The “occult” denotes the obscured or the hidden, and in this sense, Nazis were not “occult” at all. While they may have kept some of their most monstrous programs quiet, they made no attempts to hide the tenets or doctrines of their movement. But the term “occult” connotes more than hidden knowledge; it hints at intercourse with the supernatural and with pagan or satanic influences that the Western, predominately Christian world hold to be nefarious, forces in contravention to all that is good and righteous. By this definition, especially that of the pagan and anti-Christian, it is hard to argue that the Nazis were not an occult movement.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that in large part, the popular notion of Nazi occultism was a narrative spread as propaganda. And much of this propaganda focused on Hitler and the Nazis being in league with the literal devil. Even the greatest and most prominent opponent of the Nazis, Winston Churchill, who helped to convince the world of the dark and evil threat that Nazi Germany posed, may have been significantly influenced by his personal physician, an expatriate German named Walter Stein who vocally asserted that Hitler was a diabolist and that his power derived from demons, a claim for which there is no evidence, insofar as such a claim can ever be proven. But for a more concrete and influential propagandist, one must look to Lewis Spence, whose 1940 The Occult Causes of the Present War made sweeping accusations of outright Satanic worship among not only Nazis but across Germany generally, and stretching back far into its past. For a taste of Spence’s logic, consider the following: he claimed that the fact so many witches had been burned in Germany was proof that the German people engaged in witchcraft to a greater degree than other peoples. For a further example, consider the 1939 book Hitler Speaks, or Voice of Destruction, supposedly written by a former high-ranking Nazi official, Hermann Rauschning. In it are shared numerous conversations the author claimed to have had with Hitler, depicting a Fuhrer carried away by dark forces and evil spirits (132). This book was revealed by journalists in the 1980s to have been a hoax comprised of choice material cribbed from nihilist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and French horror writer Guy de Maupassant. Further works that presented Hitler and his Nazis and being steeped in the supernatural came from figures who were sympathetic to their cause and bemoaned their defeat in the war, such as Savitri Devi, whose pseudohistorical and mystical biography of Hitler, Genghis Khan, and the Pharaoh Akhnaton, called The Lightning and the Sun, represents the leaders of the Third Reich as demigods and Hitler specifically as having been deified after his suicide, or Chilean author Miguel Serrano, contemporary and acquaintance of Carl Gustav Jung and Hermann Hesse, who advocated an “Esoteric Hitlerism” that blended Nazi ideals with Hindu religious traditions and a variety of conspiracy theories and science fiction. From there, popular culture takes up the torch, depicting the Nazis as demon-possessed, devil-worshipping magic relic hoarders, UFO builders, hollow earth explorers, and moon colonizers. It’s enough to make a level-headed researcher doubt any bizarre stories about them, but such stories abound, and many cannot be denied.

Another element of Nazism that some have suggested arises from the occult influence on the movement is their notion of racial superiority, but it is clear that such notions did not originate from occult sources, and in fact did not even originate in Germany. Rather, they originated in the fledgling science of anthropology, which engaged in a lot of what we recognize today as pseudoscience. Long before this, though, some Westerners turned to the Bible for explanations of race and skin tone variation. They relied on the passage in Genesis indicating that since Noah’s son Ham refused to avert his eyes when his father was naked and drunk, Ham’s son Canaan would be cursed to serve his brethren. This biblical story was misinterpreted and twisted in the mid-sixteenth century to provide a justification for racism and slavery, the curse on Canaan becoming a curse on all Ham’s descendants and coming to include a darkness of skin as well as a fate of servitude, none of which was really supported in the original scripture. Later, in the 17th century, Western natural philosophers still tended to think about race in biblical terms. believing that all races must have originated with Adam and Eve, a foundational assumption that led Robert Boyle to view albino children as proof that humans could give birth to progeny of a different race than their own. Much of what has been called “scientific racism” or “race biology” can be traced back to Enlightenment thinkers, such as Carl Linnaeus, father of taxonomy and a devout Christian, whose taxonomic classification of human beings included judgments of their character based on the ideas of physiognomy, a pseudoscience that asserted a person’s temperament and personality could be discerned from their outward appearance. Thus Linnaeus’s Europeanus was “fair,” as in white, and also “gentle, acute, inventive,” while Asiaticus was “sooty” and “severe, haughty, covetous” and Africanus was “black” and “crafty, indolent, negligent.” A racist hierarchy is abundantly evident here, even without mentioning his further classifications of sub-humans, the Homo Monstrosus.

A diagram showing the racism inherent in craniometry, via Wikimedia Commons

The particular brand of pseudoscientific racism that would eventually be folded into the Nazi worldview may have originated among Germans, as it began to take definite form when the German philosopher Christoph Meiners, who coined the early race classifications of Caucasian and Mongolian, believed in the racial superiority of Germans based on their “whitest, most blooming and most delicate skin.” But his race classifications were taken and run with by others, like Georges Cuvier, French zoologist and naturalist, whose work in paleontology caused him to be revered by the Sea-Serpent Killer Richard Owen whom I spoke so much about in my recent installments. Cuvier would add to Meiners’s classification a third, Ethiopian, sometimes called Negroid, to encompass those of darker skins, whom Cuvier believed “always remained in the most complete state of barbarism.” In order to bolster the claims of racial character and superiority already held by early anthropologists, data collected through the pseudoscientific practice of craniometry, or skull measurement, was used to supposedly prove that races originating from the Caucasus region were better formed and more intelligent. Likewise, among the subclassifications of the Caucasoid, the Aryan, the Semitic, and the Hamitic, craniometrists declared the Aryan, or Indo-European, to be of a superior stock. But Aryan did not always mean white northern European, or Nordic as the Germans came to think of it. Originally, it applied to the speakers of most major European languages and those in northern India, Iran and Central Asia. But German linguists and philologists like Max Müller conflated linguistic relationships with racial relationships, and thus was born the myth of a people calling themselves Aryan who came from some mysterious and mythical northern homeland and migrated into India, Iran, and Europe. This myth found perhaps its most influential supporter in French count Arthur de Gobineau, whose Essay on the Inequality of the Races suggested that the most superior of races are those whose blood has been least degraded from its Aryan purity, for this was a “master race,” a term that originally meant the race from which others derived, as in the term “master key,” but which came to be taken as a term indicating the race’s natural right to dominate those inferior to it. Despite the fact that de Gobineau actually thought the English, with their insular country, to be the closest to pure Aryan blood, his ideas became very popular in Germany. This can be attributed to his friendship with the composer Richard Wagner, who publicized Gobineau’s ideas through a newsletter published specifically for visitors to the world-famous Bayreuth Festival, which celebrates Wagner’s operas.

With the entrance of Wagner into the story, we can begin to examine the ever more distinctly German contribution to the notions of racial superiority that would eventually become foundational to Nazism, and we will see that we cannot claim there were no occult or pagan influences on this most evil aspect of Nazism, for to do so, one would have to ignore the influence of the Austro-Germanic “New Age” movement on this burgeoning ideology. Compared to the New Age movement of the 1980s by Bill Yenne in one of my principal sources, this Germany and Austria in the 1920s saw a great increase in interest in alternative theologies and mysticism, including Buddhist and Rosicrucian philosophies, Egyptian mythologies, and Kabbalistic practices. Among these, perhaps the greatest interest was shown to Germanic folklore and Nordic paganism, both of which had been popularized by the operatic works of Richard Wagner, which drew from mythologies contained in the medieval Icelandic Eddas as well as the ancient Germanic epic poem, the Nibelungenlied. In Wagner’s masterpiece. The Ring of the Nibelung, German audiences became entranced by the age of the Nordic gods of Valhalla, as Wotan, whom we may today more popularly call Odin, seeks to regain a ring inscribed with magical runes that grants its bearer the power to rule the world. A fantasy world filled with giants and dwarfs, it may strike modern audiences as quite similar to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and with good reason, for certainly Wagner was a major influence on Tolkien. And just as Tolkien’s works have fired the imaginations of entire generations, so Wagner’s kindled a renewed interest in all things Nordic and pagan among many in Germany during the last half of the 19th century, such that some renounced their former Christian and Catholic beliefs to practice a new form of pagan worship they would call Wotanism, which they felt was more true to their ancient Germanic heritage.

Depiction by artist Arthur Rackham of a scene from Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung, via Wikimedia Commons

Meanwhile, another popular counterculture movement around the same time, also concerned with Germanic heritage, proves to be a complementary piece to the puzzle as we put together a picture of the roots of Nazism. Rather than an ancient fantasy world, this one had at its heart the practical beauty and charm of rustic farm life in rural Germany. Among many city dwellers there arose a back-to-the-land movement that romanticized peasant life as being closer to the pure German national identity, which was at its heart agrarian. It was a nostalgic movement, called the völkisch, or “folksy” movement, reacting to post-industrial alienation with a yearning for quaint villages and a simpler life. The movement appealed equally across the political spectrum, for all in urban areas felt the misery of wage slavery, drawing everyday workingmen and intellectuals alike. Essential to the völkisch movement was a notion of achieving a closer connection to Germanic identity, and thus, at its heart, it was a nationalist movement. But this became intrinsically tied to notions of not just nationality but race and ethnicity as well, as the ideology of Blut und Boden, or Blood and Soil, emerged. The völkisch notion of Blood and Soil argued that one’s blood, or race and lineage, is inextricable from one’s homeland, or soil, and that those who achieve a closer relationship with the land through a rural way of life forge a closer bond to their racial and ethnic identity. One can already see the separate threads begin to come together, for among the völkisch movement there emerged the most famous of German archaeologists, Gustaf Kossinna, who reached the dubious conclusion that finding materially consistent artifacts in a region, such as the pottery containing cord-like impressions that he discovered between the Rhine and Volga Rivers, meant that an ethnically homogeneous race dwelt there. Eventually, in an effort to bolster the völkisch movement and German nationalism, Kossinna made claims that the Corded Ware culture he had discovered was evidence that ancient Germans were one and the same with the mythical idea of an Aryan people as a distinct superior race.

Thus as two concurrent strains in society, the Austro-Germanic New Age was driven on one side by nationalist Blood and Soil-ers who believed their ancestral racial identity tied to the supreme and mysterious race of Aryans and on the other by those who rejected Christianity to worship at the pagan altars of the old Nordic pantheon. And it would not take much of a stretch, then, to link the two, for the ever-evolving myth of the Aryan race indicated they had migrated from some mysterious northern homeland, which some identified with the mythical Hyperborea or Ultima Thule, about which I’ll have more to say later. From there, it’s a mere skip to suggest that the Aryans were the gods of the Nordic pantheon, their homeland of Valhalla one and the same with the mysterious Aryan homeland, and therefore Germans were descended from the gods themselves. Into this roiling cauldron of mystical ideas about race and ancient wisdom came Madame Helena Blavatsky, a Russian woman who had travelled the world and gained fame with her claims to ancient knowledge and psychic abilities. For a fantastic exploration of Blavatsky and her claims, check out Sebastian Major’s series on her in his podcast Our Fake History. For our purposes here, suffice to say that she emerged from popular spiritualism, which saw mediums holding parlor room séances the world over, and rose to become the founder of her own philosophy, or religion, or many would say cult, which she called Theosophy, and which she established through her best-selling book, Isis Unveiled: A Master Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, a volume widely considered to be plagiarized and patchwritten from numerous mystical texts. In 1884, as many pseudo-religious groups and schools of philosophical thought vied for attention in the burgeoning Austro-German New Age, she established a branch of her Theosophical Society in Germany. Among the tenets of Theosophy was one idea that would prove to be particularly appealing to the völkisch movement and its Blood and Soil philosophizers: that among the primeval races of humankind, there existed a hierarchy, at the very top of which was the “root race,” which she identified as Aryan, with all others being subraces. 

Photographic portrait of Madame Blavatsky, via Wikimedia Commons

As an example of the melting pot of pagan and occult ideas that was the Austro-German New Age movement and how disparate beliefs might coalesce into the particularly virulent strain that was Nazism, we find Guido Karl Anton List, who in an effort to claim some appearance of aristocracy for himself would later in life go by Guido von List. He was not, however, from a wealthy family. Rather, he grew up middle class and preoccupied with the fantasy world of Nordic mythology. During a tour of the catacombs beneath Vienna at 14 years old, after seeing an old altar that he assumed had once been dedicated to Wotan, his obsession grew. As a young man and an outdoorsman who wrote for an alpine newspaper, he readily embraced the völkisch back-to-the-land movement, and his writing about the natural world began more and more to take on the tinge of mysticism, as he imagined a variety of spirits inhabiting the German countryside. His writings became more and more nationalistic as well and focused on German racial identity after reading a translation of The Origin and Situation of the Germans by Roman historian Gaius Cornelius Tacitus, which made mention of Germanic tribes called Irminones living outside the Roman Empire. In List’s mind, this group took on mythical significance. He called them the Armanen, and he claimed they were a pagan priesthood that held great power flowing directly from the Nordic god Wotan. With the success of his first novel, List found himself rubbing elbows with many prominent figures in the Austro-German New Age, and his further published works focused on Wotanism. After taking an interest in Blavatsky and Theosophy, he developed his own doctrine, bringing together metaphysics, Nordic paganism, völkisch nationalism, and theories of Aryan and Germanic racial supremacy. He called his movement Armanism, after the almost entirely fictional Armanen priesthood he had imagined, and the elite society he founded, the Armanenorden, worshipped Wotan and conducted pagan ceremonies every solstice. Among the many interests of Guido von List that he wrote about and lectured on to his Armanenorden were runes, those ancient alphabets that preceded the adoption of Latin in northern Europe, which List and others believed held some form of magic, a belief likely encouraged in List’s case by his love of Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung, with its rune-magic talismans. Indeed, he claimed to have had a new runic alphabet revealed to him mystically while temporarily blind. This preoccupation with ancient runes among many in Germany would eventually contribute to some of the most recognizable symbols of Nazism.

Photographic portrait of the young mystic Guido von List in 1878, via Wikipedia

As with any successful movement, Guido von List’s Armanenorden saw its imitators and offshoots. One imitation was the Germanenorden, which greatly admired Von List and his writings, so this may almost be considered a satellite group. Then there was the offshoot led by one of Von List’s closest followers, Adolf Josef Lanz, who at 19 took the name Jörg and became a monk, a career that didn’t last long because of his engagement in illicit sexual activity. Much like Guido von List claiming a runic alphabet was revealed to him supernaturally, Lanz had what he considered to be a religious revelation. He saw a 13th-century carving of a nobleman standing over a creature with a man’s head and a tail, and he believed that he had been shown some truth about the eternal struggle between humanity, which represented all that was good, and the subhuman, which represented all evil. After his ouster from the monastery, he fell in with the Armanenorden and Von List, gave himself the more noble-sounding name Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, wholeheartedly accepted the völkisch notions of Aryan superiority and the purity of Germans, and went even further by asserting that other races represented the subhuman evil of which his vision had warned. He wrote a bizarre book called Theozoology or the Account of the Sodomite Apelings and the Divine Electron, which asserted that Aryans and their descendants were theozoa, or god-men, while all others were anthropozoa, descended from sodomy between the gods and apelings. From his work, he founded his own secret society, the Order of the New Templars, which took solstice celebrations to the next level by practicing orgies at which they raised a flag with a particular runic symbol on it that Lanz von Liebenfels had chosen himself: the swastika. And he established his own school of thought, Ariosophy, which took his particularly awful racism to new extremes, suggesting that the doctrine of Social Darwinism must apply in the case of the races as well, and advocating for the selective breeding and sterilization programs that others were calling eugenics. Lanz von Liebenfels also published a magazine called Ostara, after the goddess of rebirth we know from the holiday Easter, a publication in which he spread many of these vile ideas. One subscriber to Ostara, then a corporal in the German army and an art student in Vienna, was Adolph Hitler.

Photographic portrait of Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, via Wikimedia Commons

Join me next time as I look at the rise of the Nazi party and how these pagan and occult influences helped to shape it and lead it to its darkest places.

*

 Further Reading

Dunlap, Knight. “The Great Aryan Myth.” The Scientific Monthly, vol. 59, no. 4, 1944, pp. 296–300. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/18253.

Flowers, Stephen E., and Michael Moynihan. The Secret King: The Myth and Reality of Nazi Occultism. Feral House/Dominion, 2007.

Reid, Gordon McGregor. “Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778): His Life, Philosophy and Science and Its Relationship to Modern Biology and Medicine.” Taxon, vol. 58, no. 1, 2009, pp. 18–31. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27756820.

Yenne, Bill. Hitler’s Master of the Dark Arts: Himmler’s Black Knights and the Occult Origins of the SS. Zenith Press, 2010.

The Monster of Loch Ness: Delusion or Denizen of the Deep?

As I mentioned in the last installment, sightings of sea monsters fell off rather dramatically after the Daedalus encounter and those that followed. Some have looked to this as proof that there had never been true sea serpents encountered, but rather a series of hoaxes and mistakes, while others have suggested this just reflects the fact that more and more ships at sea may have driven them into hiding, especially once those ships became motorized. The we-scared-it-off theory, after all, had seemed reasonable enough to explain the gradual falling off of sea serpent sightings in Gloucester Bay, New England, which had been crowded with tourist-laden ferries and fishing vessels all hunting for the creature. But the mid 19th century would not be last time that people believed they saw a massive, long-necked, water-dwelling creature that would be termed a monster. While the seas remained mostly calm and untroubled by serpents, in the 1930s and ever since, sightings surged in a rather unexpected place, inland, on a lake, as though the Great Sea Serpent had abandoned its saltwater habitat for the fresh waters of a lake in the Scottish Highlands, southwest of Inverness. Like the Great Sea Serpent, this creature is usually described as serpentine, owing to the fact that when it breaks the surface of the lake in which it supposedly dwells, it is seen as a series of humps. Sometimes, though, witnesses of this creature are graced with a view of its long neck and small head, and perhaps a glimpse of its bulky body, which has led to a popular conception of it as being akin to the plesiosaur, although the fact that this one supposedly lives in a fresh water lake would mean that it would more likely be of the family Leptocleididae, genus leptocleidus, or perhaps a genus and species of polycotylid that recent researchers have proposed, dubbing them “occultonectians,” or “hidden swimmers,” and suggesting they survived the extinction of similar plesiosaurs, at least for a while, by taking refuge in and adapting to bodies of fresh water, adaptation that resulted in the development of longer necks. But rather than speculating exactly what kind of surviving dinosaur this creature is, it is far more logical to first consider the reliability of evidence that there is anything at all so large or unusual dwelling in this particular lake: Loch Ness.

Popular belief in the monster affectionately known as Nessie began in 1933, in March, when a couple, the MacKays, who had been staying at a nearby hotel, were motoring along an old narrow road by the lake. Mrs. MacKay saw a huge black form rolling in the lake and told her husband John to pull over. Once he had stopped the car, John could only see the ripples, about a mile and a half away, but even from these he discerned that something very large had caused them. To Mrs. MacKay, the ripples appeared to be a wake made by something just below the surface, and she watched its progress across the otherwise placid lake. Then she saw it again: black humps, two of them, the one in front smaller than that behind it, rising and sinking as though the entire form were undulating. It turned and circled halfway around before sinking finally and disappearing. A few months later, in June, a crew of workmen spotted a large body and head emerge from the water in the wake of a passing boat, a sighting easily waved away as an optical illusion created by the waves themselves. But then in July, another motoring couple, the Spicers of London, saw a creature emerge from the bushes on the side of the roadway, or at least part of one. It looked like a thick appendage, trunklike, perhaps a long neck held horizontally, wavering over the surface of the road. Then it crossed the road in a jerking fashion, its body filling the entire roadway and then suddenly gone in the direction of the lake. Mr. Spicer estimated it was at least 25 feet long, with dark gray skin like that of an elephant. After this sighting, the lake monster had become a news item, with press reports at first suggesting in a measured way that the Spicers had just seen an enormous otter carrying its young on its back. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, with the press attention, sightings increased to about one a month. In August, more witnesses saw a disturbance trailing behind a steamboat on the lake, insisting that because there were calm waters between the boat and the disturbance, it couldn’t have been the boat’s wake. Then one Mrs. MacLennan saw a large animal sunning itself on a ledge, and when she called to her family, it lurched clumsily and rolled into the water. In October, a crew member on a boat towing a barge saw what looked like a mound of water moving toward them like a wave from the side of the lake. In November, Hugh Gray took the first known photo of the supposed creature during his walk home from church. He claimed to have seen it raising its head above the water and lashing its tail. His photo, which saw extensive reprinting in newspapers in December, shows a vaguely serpentine S-shape on the surface of the waters, obscured by a kind of hazy mist. This photo has been variously said by different photographic experts to show signs of having been retouched or damaged and to show no signs of having been tampered with, leaving us, almost a hundred years later, to merely wonder at it.

Hugh Gray’s photo, used under Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0)

In December, as papers reported on Gray’s photographic evidence, the excitement, or hysteria, heated to a fever pitch. One Mrs. Reid, while motoring by, saw an animal lying in a glade very near where Mrs. MacLennan had earlier seen a creature sunning itself, and she described it in much the same terms, huge, fleshy, and clumsy like a hippopotamus. The same month, the first movie film evidence appeared, taken with a 16mm camera by Malcolm Irvine and a film production crew that was in the area specifically hoping to film the creature that had been in the news. His film, which was said by those who viewed it, including reporters from the Times, to have shown a humped creature swimming on the surface and moving both tail and fins, has unfortunately—some might say conveniently—been lost. But it did its job, nonetheless. On the 21st of December, the London Daily Mail, a newspaper with a long and dubious history, declared “MONSTER OF LOCH NESS IS NOT LEGEND BUT A FACT” and in a publicity stunt reported that it had hired Marmaduke Wetherell, a filmmaker with a reputation as a big game hunter, to search for further proof of Nessie’s existence. Think of Wetherell as an early 20th-century precursor to the many reality-T.V. cryptid hunters that populate the backwaters of cable television today, and remember him, for we will return to him shortly. While Wetherell performed his search for Nessie tracks along the shores of the loch, sightings continued into 1934. Just after the New Year, a student named W. Arthur Grant who might have been thought a reliable and scientific witness because he was training to be a veterinarian, nearly ran into something on a benighted road while riding his motorcycle. His headlight illuminated a massive creature with a flat head like that of an eel. It bounded from the bushes and across the road on flippers, its strong round-tipped tail extended behind it, and it disappeared into the darkness, leaving behind only the sound of its splash as it entered the loch. The next month, by the light of a full moon, two girls likewise saw something huge that tapered down to a long tail cross the road in front of them on short appendages that they called legs rather than flippers and head toward the water. And finally, in April of 1934, I’ll end my recounting of the first and most prolific flap of Nessie sightings with the appearance of the most famous, or infamous, photo of the creature. It would come to be known as the “Surgeon’s photo,” having been taken by a gynecologist named Robert Kenneth Wilson while on vacation with a friend. He admitted he had brought the camera hoping to snap a pic of the monster, although later he claimed he’d brought it to photograph birds. When the creature presented itself, he ran back to his car and returned just in time to take two photos, both of which show the shadow of a slender, curved object extending from the water’s surface, the water rippling around it. For all the world, it looked like the body and arched neck and head of the Loch Ness Monster.

The Surgeon’s Photo, credited to Robert Kenneth Wilson, used under Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0)

When one considers the believability of these encounters, one might be tempted to dismiss the eyewitness testimony altogether, leaving only the harder evidence to evaluate. In fact, the simple fact that the story became a newspaper sensation within the first year tends to discredit most of the sightings as either hoaxes by attention seekers or mistakes by the overeager who had been caught up in the hysteria. But historical precedent for sightings of a creature in or around Loch Ness before 1933 might weaken this argument. In looking for pre-’33 indications of Nessie’s existence, one is invariably drawn into the realm of folklore. For example, the Scottish people originated largely in Ireland, and there is an ancient Irish tradition that sees in the reflection of bodies of water an inverted aquatic world, where it was supposed there dwelled mirror opposite creatures, like water-cows and water-horses. Tales told of these animals crossing over at times, such that farmers had been known to harness their ploughs to a water-horse. In Scottish lore, the water-horse evolved to become the kelpie, a shape-changing creature similar to the siren in its alluring behavior. And this certainly might apply to Nessie, when one considers the siren call it has had on many a monster and cryptid hunter. Further, more geographically specific folkloric evidence of the creature can be found in the 7th century writings of the Abbot of Iona, who biographized the 6th century life of Saint Columba. In his work, St. Columba has numerous encounters with animals that show God had given him mastery over the creatures of the earth, such as snakes and boars. In one particular passage, the saint commands a monk to swim across the River Ness and bring back a boat. When a “water beast” appears and makes toward the monk, St. Columba cried out from the shore, “Thou shalt go no further, nor touch the man! Go back with all speed!” and the fearsome beast retreated. To most, in context with the rest of the stories told about St. Columba, this would seem a simple tall tale, but looking back at a story of a “water beast” in Ness—even if it was the river and not the loch—a modern reader cannot help but consider that this could be evidence of an aquatic monster in the area.

And there are many accounts in far more modern times of giant eels, or horse-eels, in the same area if one widens the scope of one’s search beyond Loch Ness. Friend of the show Mike Dash has written of 19th century reports of giant eels which have at least one thing going for them as explanations of Nessie in that they are bottom-dwellers that only surface occasionally, explaining why whatever is in Loch Ness is only glimpsed infrequently. He cites the memoir of a Scottish Catholic priest, who writing about events in the middle of the 19th century described lakes on Hebridean islands teeming with gigantic eels that travel overland from lake to lake. Dash also describes secondhand recollections of a huge maned eel being caught in a canal-lock in 1899 at Corpach, only about 26 miles southwest of the shores of Loch Ness, and how everyone believed it must have come down from Loch Ness, which supposedly had a reputation for monstrous serpents even then. As for Loch Ness itself, there were reports of sightings previous to the 1933 flap, such as in 1871 or ’72 when D. Mackenzie saw what he thought was a log suddenly come to life and churn up the water as it swam with great speed, or in 1889, when Alexander Macdonald saw an unusual creature on the lake that he called “the salamander” and which Roderick Matheson, who frequently plied the waters of the loch on his schooner, called “the biggest eel I ever saw in my life…[with] a neck like a horse and a mane somewhat similar.” Then into the 20th century, when sometime during the first decade a fisherman recalled having scared off a large beast with an eel’s head and a tapering tail that lay still upon the surface of the loch when he cast his line near it. 1919, a 12-year-old boy named Jack Forbes, drives a pony cart home through a stormy night with his father when a beast emerges from the trees, crosses the road and splashes into the water. 1923, a chauffeur’s headlamps catch a huge humped creature as his car rounds a bend, and actually hears the thing grunting as it waddles away. 1926, Simon Cameron is watching some gulls on the water when suddenly they fly off screeching because something that looked like an overturned boat bursts to the surface, water washing down its sides. While some of these recollections may have been colored by or even invented to corroborate the later legend of Nessie, it does seem that Loch Ness had long been a place where people saw animals they believed were unusual.

Further supporting the idea that Loch Ness monster sightings have proven to be far more than a yearlong flap easily written off as mass hysteria fueled by sensational journalism is the fact that the sightings never really stopped. Roy Mackal, a biologist working for University of Chicago who took particular interest in Nessie, claimed there were more than 10,000 such reports and that he had personally reviewed nearly 3,000 published accounts of them. Certainly there are many hundreds of verifiable witness claims, with a more recent accounting estimating they number around 1,800, but more than these, there is a wealth of harder evidence as well. Including the aforementioned Gray photo and the Surgeon’s Photo, one tally has around 30 photos taken of Nessie or what the photographers purport to be Nessie. Most of the time, they picture little more than shadowy humps on the water’s surface that one might imagine could be breaching portions of the creature’s neck or back, such as the Lachlan Stuart photo of 1951 and the Peter McNab photo of 1955. Others like the 1977 Anthony Shiels photo and the 1982 Jennifer Bruce photo seem to show the creature’s head and long neck held elegantly straight up out of the water, like the Surgeon’s photo. Not all of these are easily available to the modern researcher, as some are in private collections and seem to have no extant copies. Such is also the case with movie films supposedly capturing the creature, which also may number as high as 30, ranging from older cine film reels to more modern video recordings. One of these, taken by a Dr. MacRae around 1935 and said to show a slant-eyed, horned creature splashing the surface with its great reptilian tail, supposedly remains locked away in a vault in London, awaiting its release at some uncertain future time when “the public takes such matters seriously!” This seems to be a common explanation for why some alleged films cannot be examined, such as the 1938 film made by London bank manager James Currie, which supposedly resides in the same vault as the MacRae film. Then there are those films that have simply been lost, which includes the very first film made by the aforementioned Malcolm Irvine. Likewise with a film made by one James Fraser the next year, which seems to have rather suddenly vanished after being screened for the Linnaean Society of London, whose members thought it pictured a seal or otter rather than a monster. In 1936, when Malcolm Irvine managed to capture Nessie on film yet again, he once more promptly lost the footage. These instances of poor custodianship of evidence do little to inspire confidence in the credibility of the evidence itself.

Photo by Anthony Shiels, used under Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0)

Beyond the suspicious disappearance of evidence to cause one to look askance, there is also a history of hoaxes about as long as the history of Nessie herself. Remember the actor, film director and “big game hunter” Marmaduke Wetherell that I said to keep in your memory? Within days of his arrival at the lake after being hired by the Daily Mail to “track” the Loch Ness Monster, Wetherell made it known that he had discovered Nessie’s huge tracks and sent plaster casts of them to the London Natural History Museum. The museum eventually revealed that they appeared to be hippopotamus prints. But Wetherell hadn’t discovered a rogue hippo living around the loch; rather, he had taken a stuffed hippo’s hoof that had been part of an umbrella stand, attached a stick to it and used it like a stamp. Years later, in 1960, a young firefighter named Peter O’Connor was caught making hoax photographs by inflating a plastic sack and weighting it down with stones. In 1972, Frank Searle, frustrated at not being able to catch a glimpse of the genuine article, faked some later discredited photos using logs and other objects and by pasting images of brontosaurs onto pictures of water. Then there were the remarkably clear photos taken by Anthony Shiels in 1977, whose reputation as a kook already put his pictures in doubt. Shiels was a self-styled psychic and wizard who claimed to have actually conjured Nessie to the surface through the use of ancient magic. Close examination of his photo showed that ripples on the water’s surface could be seen through the creature’s neck, a sure sign of double exposure. By the time the 1980s and ’90s came around, older, long respected photographic evidence also began to be discredited. The first was Lachlan Stuart’s photograph of humps on the water from 1951, which Stuart had actually admitted to a local was accomplished by wrapping haybales in tarps and floating them in a row. Finally, in 1994, a confession revealed that the most famous photo of all, the Surgeon’s Photo, had been a crude fake perpetrated in collaboration with that original hoaxer, Marmaduke Wetherell. Wetherell’s own step-son, two years before he died, had admitted that Wetherell had conspired with his sons to concoct the photo by affixing a plastic head and neck to a toy submarine and photographing it in a calm inlet of the lake. The gynecologist Robert Kenneth Wilson had been a co-conspirator in agreeing to say he had taken the photo, since Wetherell had already been discredited. Some have cast doubt on this confession as being itself a hoax, suspicious about the perceived size of the object, whether the photo could have been taken in a sheltered cove, and whether a toy submarine could have supported the weight of such a false neck, but even most Nessie believers have come to accept that the Surgeon’s photo, long the single greatest piece of evidence in favor of Nessie’s existence, was nothing but a fraud.

Photo by Lachlan Stuart, used under Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0)

Even if one took the Surgeon’s Photo as authentic, it still does not stand as unimpeachable evidence of Nessie’s existence, for ever since the beginning of the 1933 Loch Ness Monster flap, there have been plenty of convincing answers for what people really see and what is actually pictured in photographs. Most sightings of humps in the water are explainable as waves. Think about the sightings of humps in the wake of a passing boat I mentioned. And we now know that water sometimes behaves strangely, with odd, standing waves or solitons, that appear to be immobile humps with water washing over them. When sightings cannot be accounted for by the water itself, some other, more recognizable animal usually does the trick, like a bathing deer, or most commonly, an otter. Even birds, like cormorants, flying close to the water with their wings disturbing the surface, might appear at a distance to be a series of moving humps leaving a wake. As for more exotic animals, a bathing elephant extending its trunk from the surface, would certainly seem to fit the bill, especially considering some early reports that described its flesh as elephant-like,  and it just so happens that a circus was in the area in 1933. The showman who owned the circus, Bertram Mills, was known to let his performing animals bathe in the loch, and he seemed to encourage the excitement, offering a 20,000 pounds sterling reward to any who could capture the monster. This was a monstrous sum indeed, equivalent to almost 2 million dollars today, and some have suggested he only advertised such an exorbitant reward because he knew the monster didn’t exist, perhaps because he knew his elephants had been mistaken for the beast. But one does not need to look so far for so complicated an answer either. In addition to the extensive photographs and films taken above water, there have been numerous underwater photos taken, as well as many sonar contacts, and all can be very convincingly explained by fish activity and debris. In the same way, some humps on the surface can be attributed to huge bottom-feeding sturgeon visiting the surface, or to simple logs and other vegetable matter. This seems to be a clear instance in which Occam’s Razor cuts to the heart of the matter. These prosaic explanations of sightings are far simpler than the notion that a heretofore undiscovered species of lake monster exists and may represent proof of surviving dinosaurs. And more than this, there are further problems of feasibility making the lake monster hypothesis fundamentally untenable. First, there is the fact that, for such a species to have survived, there must needs be substantial breeding population, not just a solitary monster or a couple of mates, which conflicts with how infrequently they are seen, especially considering how intently people search for them. Then there is the fact that the loch is simply not big enough to contain such a population, nor does it contain enough food to sustain them. Some have suggested that there must be a hidden underwater channel from this freshwater lake to the ocean, but if this were the case, the loch being so far above sea level would mean that the lake waters would have long ago emptied into the sea. When Occam’s Razor cuts so easily and unequivocally through a popular belief like this, it must be assumed to be false, and this means that the same must hold true for all the other supposed denizens of lakes that have surfaced since Nessie. Ogopogo in Okanagan Lake, Tessie in Lake Tahoe, Champ in Lake Champlain, and Bessie in Lake Erie: all must be considered with the utmost skepticism, their very existence held in doubt.

Further Reading

Binns, Ronald. The Loch Ness Mystery Solved. Prometheus Books, 1984.

Campbell, Steuart. The Loch Ness Monster: The Evidence. Prometheus Books, 1997.