The Chronological Revision Chronicles, Part Two: The Velikovsky Catastrophe

In this installment of what I’ve been calling the Chronological Revision Chronicles, I truly make of that title a misnomer by continuing to tell the story of those who challenge accepted timelines out of all sensible order. In this edition, I skip back in the timeline, after Nicolai Morosov but before Anatoly Fomenko, to another figure who challenged traditional chronology with a theory that reordered the known past. And he too happened to be a Russian intellectual, although it seems clear that, unlike those I profiled in Part One, he was not motivated by nationalism or any desire to rehabilitate the historical significance of Mother Russia, and he certainly was not motivated by anti-Semitism, for he was himself a Jew with a strong sense of his cultural heritage. Like other chronological revisionists, however, he inevitably ended up engaging in conspiracy theory, but the conspiracies he discerned were not among ancient scribes and establishment historians in the past but rather among his contemporaries. Unlike Morosov before him, his books became a sensation, and unlike Fomenko after him, he found success in America, where he would find himself the center of a controversy over the legitimacy of his ideas. Indeed, it cannot be denied that he ruffled more than a few feathers among not only traditionalist historians but, even more so, among respected scientists, setting himself against all establishment astronomers and physicists. Little wonder, then, that he believed all of academia was dead set against him, denouncing him and his ideas without even giving them their due consideration. But did his ideas deserve any serious consideration?

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Before I introduce the principal character of this installment, I feel it may be worthwhile to look even further back, to the beginnings of historical chronology as a science, so that I do not give the wrong impression. Listeners to Part One of these “Chronicles” may have taken from the episode the notion that it was absolutely ridiculous and foolhardy for someone who was not a trained historian to presume to emend chronology based on astronomical and mathematical grounds. Upon further reflection, I don’t want to give that impression. In truth, the two Frenchmen traditionally credited with establishing the modern science of chronology were not historians, per se, and were themselves essentially challenging the accepted chronology established by men who were historians, in an ancient sense of the word. Before the 16th century, few works had attempted to place historical events on a cohesive timeline. The handful of historians who had essayed to forge a chronology, such as Theophilus of Antioch and Sextus Julius Africanus, were mostly concerned with the order of biblical events, and during the Council of Nicaea, Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea, became the most influential of ancient chronologists, establishing a method of measuring time according to the lifespans recorded in the Bible. Now, right away, anyone who’s not a biblical literalist sees the issue here, for the Bible gives us some life spans that are hard to believe, such as Adam, Noah, and Methuselah, who are all said to have lived for almost a thousand years, along with many others whose longevity far surpasses even the oldest living people in today’s modern age of miracle medicine. Through the Middle Ages, the art of chronology became little more than a tool for guessing when Christ would make His triumphal return, a date that kept getting pushed further and further into the future. It was not until the 16th century that Gerardus Mercator, not a historian but a geographer and cartographer, applied astronomical observations and the records of eclipses to the establishment of a chronology, and like Nicolai Morosov after him, his massive work on the subject would be banned by the sociopolitical powers that be—in Mercator’s case the Inquisition, which declared it heretical for its references to other forbidden works.

Joseph Justus Scaliger, via Wikimedia Commons

At around the same time as Mercator’s work was suppressed, a French philologist named Joseph Scaliger came to take an interest in chronology through his work on the linguistic analysis of calendars. Like Morosov and Fomenko so many years later, he was not a historian as such, although one might argue that a philologist, as a linguist focusing on historical texts, is far closer to a historian than is a geometer. As a philologist, he found that many of the answers he sought about what literary works had influenced others relied on a better understanding of when each author had lived, of who had preceded whom. At first, he set about arranging the chronologies he required by relying on genealogies, but soon, like Morosov and Fomenko after him, he looked instead to astronomy and mathematics, studying the work of Paulus Crusius who had assigned dates to time periods that Claudius Ptolemy had recorded in his astronomical work, the Almagest. But Scaliger revised Crusius’s findings and proposed a comprehensive chronology of known history in a massive seven-volume work whose title indicates that he was himself a chronological revisionist. It was called in Latin De Emendatione Temporum, or On the Amendment of Time. And also like Morosov and Fomenko, his work was not well-received. Throughout the rest of his career, he revised his theories and published further volumes to correct his mistakes and answer his critics, one of whom, the French theologian Dionysius Petavius, would go on to popularize the use of B.C. for dates before Christ, and A.D. or anno domini, the year of our Lord, for those after Christ’s birth, terminology that became standard until recently, with the use of BCE for Before Common Era, and CE for Common Era, the boundary between which remains the same as that between B.C. and A.D. It is useful, I think, when considering figures like Morosov and Fomenko and our figure of central interest in this installment, Immanuel Velikovsky, to remember that these two French researchers, who today are universally remembered as the fathers of scientific historical chronology, were in their own time scoffed at as out of their depth or doubted because of their use of astronomical and mathematical evidence. But it should also be remembered that Scaliger was caught making some clear errors. For example, because it disagreed with his calculations, he claimed there was no such thing as axial precession, the phenomenon of the slow wobbling of Earth’s axis of rotation, a phenomenon that all astronomers since Copernicus had agreed was a fact.  And rather than producing concrete and reliable astronomical observations and calculations as proof of his assertion, he pointed to some Egyptian texts that seemed to indicate certain constellations, such as Sirius and Arcturus, had remained constant in their movements for more than a thousand years. As we have already discussed in Fomenko’s case, making claims based on astronomical observations found in ancient records that are fundamentally fallible makes one’s own conclusions unreliable. And here we see a striking similarity to the assertions of our principal character, Immanuel Velikovsky, who hundreds of years later would also reject established astronomical science based on some clues he found in ancient literature.

Velikovsky and his ideas first came to the attention of the scientific community in January of 1950, when an article appeared in Harper’s ahead of the publication of his book, Worlds in Collision. Advance reviews from literary critics all seemed to indicate that this was a serious work from a learned man, to be published by the academic press Macmillan, and all signs seemed to point to it being a bestseller. However, after the Harper’s article, which offered some insight into Velikovsky’s actual assertions, the backlash began. Scientists and academics of every stripe took to their typewriters, excoriating Harper’s for praising such nonsense and detailing the many ways in which Velikovsky showed himself to be ignorant or his ideas to be ridiculous. Many of these critics had not even read his book, but that did not stop them from tearing it apart. And when it released and became a sensation, the publishing house Macmillan soon found that professors were boycotting them, refusing to adopt their textbooks. In an effort to save their business, they were forced to give the rights to Velikovsky’s work to Doubleday, who happily took over the publication of his books. It was a controversy unlike any in modern science before or since, and certainly it only helped make Velikovsky’s work world famous, and the takeaway today, among many critics, is that the scholarly community was unfair in attacking and suppressing Velikovsky’s ideas rather than addressing them as part of a larger, ongoing academic conversation. However, while it is true that scientists and historians should not suppress ideas simply because they run counter to consensus views… is that what really happened here? I’ve argued before that even outrageous ideas and claims must be given earnest, critical evaluations, but I argue that this is necessary specifically in order to stem the spread of lies and dubious ideas. Were Velikovsky’s ideas worthy of further consideration? Or was the response of scholars an appropriate countermeasure to slow what appeared to be a swiftly spreading lie, to unmask as pseudoscience ideas that they saw being hailed in a huge promotional campaign as revolutionary science that rewrites history?

Imannuel Velikovsky, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Immanuel Velikovsky, like others I’ve discussed in these chronicles, kind of fell backward into the study of the past. He was a witness to much upheaval and catastrophe in his lifetime, including one extraterrestrial impact very much like those about which he would eventually write: the Tunguska Event, the sky-darkening effects of which he surely saw as a boy of 13 living in Moscow in 1908, and he likely took great interest two decades later when it was confirmed to be an impact.  But many of the disasters he was witness to in his youth were decidedly man-made, such as Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, and the Revolution of 1905. Nevertheless, Velikovsky flourished, with the benefit of the finest private education, receiving a gold medal in high school for earning the highest possible grade in every subject. He entered medical school in Moscow, even though he was more interested in architecture and literature, because his mother insisted on it, and while studying there, he watched as the Russian Empire was dealt a grievous blow in World War I and thereafter collapsed into revolution and civil war. As the fighting spread, many found themselves and their families in danger, and Velikovsky’s family found themselves especially endangered, for they were “Zionists” who worked as activists promoting the creation of a homeland for the Jews in the Middle East, a quest that would eventually come to fruition with the establishment of Israel but was always met with opposition and scorn. When the Communist secret police arrested a member of the Velikovskys’ group and named Immanuel’s father as its ringleader, the family left everything behind and fled their home in Russia, eventually settling in Berlin. It was here that Velikovsky would first rub shoulders with the greatest mind of his time, for his family published a series of academic texts from Jewish scientists translated into Hebrew, and Immanuel, as its editor, worked directly with the authors, one of whom was the recent Nobel laureate Albert Einstein. And before the end of his career, they would meet again.

Immanuel Velikovsky married a violinist in 1923, and together with the rest of the family, they immigrated yet again, although this time it was more of a homecoming, for they made themselves a home in Israel, the Jewish nation his parents had long dreamed would be founded. In Israel, Immanuel practiced medicine, but like Alfred Russel Wallace, another scientist enamored of pseudoscience that I spoke about in a recent patron exclusive, he felt more drawn to metaphysical fields such as Spiritualism and parapsychology, taking an especial interest in mind-reading, and it was perhaps this interest that led directly to his study of psychiatry and Freudian psychoanalysis. With the means and connections at his disposal, he actually reached out to and picked the brains of the giants in this very contemporary field, like Carl Jung and even Sigmund Freud himself, before transitioning from practicing medicine to providing psychotherapy. And Freud can also be blamed for the bizarre swerve his career took years later. In his 1939 book Moses and Monotheism, Freud argued that Moses, a central figure in Jewish belief, was actually Egyptian rather than Jewish, a contention with which Velikovsky, as well as many other Jews, took umbrage, for it seemed to rewrite their history by changing the identity of a great leader they had always claimed as their own. Ironically, Velikovsky would go on to rewrite history to a far greater degree in his efforts to refute Freud’s assertion. The same year, Velikovsky moved his wife and his daughters to New York City so that he could make use of its libraries’ research materials in his work, and he set about investigating ancient Egyptian history, reasoning that he should be able to find some Egyptian records describing some of the catastrophic events detailed in Exodus—plagues, fiery pillars, disturbed seas, and a huge population of displaced Hebrew refugees—and if he did find it, perhaps he might find proof of Moses’s heritage and thus refute Freud. Scouring not only the Old Testament and the Talmud, but also translations of ancient Egyptian papyri and ancient Greek mythology, Velikovsky attempted to argue against Freud’s identification of the monotheist pharaoh Akhenaten with Moses by instead arguing that Akhenaten could be identified with Oedipus, another figure important in Freud’s psychoanalytical theories. However, for this to work, the accepted timeline of history had to be revised, so Velikovsky shelved his treatise on Akhenaten and Oedipus to concentrate on chronological revision, an undertaking encouraged when he became aware of an ancient Egyptian papyrus that he believed did indeed describe the events of Exodus.

Velikovsky’s 1947 passport, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

It was called the Ipuwer Papyrus, a document dated to between 1991 and 1803 BCE that recorded a sage’s complaints over the reigning chaos of his era, including mention of servants escaping and a river running red with blood, which of course Velikovsky identified with the departure of the Hebrew slaves and the first plague of Exodus 7: 14. The dating of this document to the Middle Kingdom disagrees with the traditional date given to the events of Exodus by religious scholars as well as by Egyptologists. The former contend the Hebrews left Egypt around 1440 BCE based mostly on scripture, while the latter argue that Exodus is largely myth, but based on mention of “Asiatics” enslaved in Egypt and on the first recorded mention of Israelites in Canaan, they would place such an event around 1290 BCE. Either of these dates is hundreds of years removed from the date attributed to the Ipuwer Papyrus. Many have challenged the validity of the hypothesis that Ipuwer was referring to those biblical events, for the papyrus itself mentions the “Asiatics” usually identified with the Hebrews as arriving, not leaving, and the river of blood business may be explained by the reddish hue the Nile takes on during flooding. But Velikovsky chose instead to question the validity of all ancient chronology because, of course, it helped his Oedipus/Akhenaten hypothesis. So he went to work, like Morosov before him and Fomenko after him, searching through ancient records for dynasties he would claim were duplicates of each other and pointing to the so-called Greek Dark Ages, the entire notion of which has been rejected by some scholars in the same way as the idea of the Western European Dark Ages has been. This “Revised Chronology” of Velikovsky’s, although written first, would not be published in its entirety until 1952, in his follow-up to Worlds in Collision, Ages in Chaos, and would not see a robust response from historians for another decade or more, when respected Assyriologists and Egyptologists would accuse Velikovsky of misleading and sloppy work, misconstruing cuneiform, over-relying on translations rather than original languages, and generally taking material out of context to support his claims, as we see he was already doing with the Ipuwer Papyrus. But the controversy of Velikovsky’s Revised Chronology was to be forever overshadowed by the subject to which he afterward turned his attention, for the resulting volume, which Macmillan decided should be published before his work on chronology, would catapult him into infamy.

As World War II erupted overseas and Velikovsky became a permanent resident of New York, his mind turned to catastrophism. Standing in contrast to uniformitarianism, which contends that changes to the earth occurred over vast stretches of time through slow processes like erosion, catastrophism suggests that changes may happen suddenly, disastrously, through natural upheavals. This view was championed by theologians who saw God’s agency in it and believed it corresponded well with biblical accounts of the flood, but in more recent years, with the Alvarez Hypothesis and the discovery of the Chicxulub Crater, it has been accepted as a cofactor along with slower geological processes in producing planetary change. Velikovsky’s ideas, however, were somewhere in-between biblical literalism and rational science. He claims that the idea struck him one crisp autumn afternoon, as he sat by his kitchen window reading Joshua chapter 10. In that passage, two miracles won the day for the armies of Israel: “great stones,” also referred to as hailstones, fell from heaven on their enemies, and then Moses’s successor, Joshua, “commanded the Sun and Moon to stand still in the sky,” thereby lengthening the day until the Israelites had routed their foes. With a bolt of inspiration, Velikovsky concluded that those stones were in fact meteorites, and the sun had stood still because the rotation of the Earth was somehow halted. This caused Velikovsky to go back to the drawing-board, as it were, and reimagine all of history, every miracle in Exodus and strange celestial account in mythology from every culture, as descriptions of terrible cosmic cataclysms. His eventual theory to encompass every odd description of catastrophe or celestial wonder he could scrounge from ancient records was that Jupiter had expelled a massive comet, which thereafter traveled around the sun on an extended elliptical orbit, passing extraordinarily close to Earth twice within about 52 years around 1500 BCE, such that their atmospheres and magnetic fields interfered with each other, causing Earth to temporarily stop rotating each time. After further interfering with the orbit of Mars, this comet eventually fell into a stable orbit, becoming what we now recognize as Venus. The theory was certainly cinematic, if nothing else, for he painted an astonishing picture of these close encounters, with gargantuan bolts of electricity arcing between the planetary bodies, and tempestuous disturbances of weather and the sea. But where was his proof?

"Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still" by Gustave Dore, via Wikimedia Commons

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as I’ve said before. So what evidence did Velikovsky present for his bold assertions? Well, he claimed that no historical documents mention Venus before the 7th century BCE, and he points to numerous mythological and religious texts whose descriptions of catastrophes and specifically of the Sun stopping its movement seem to support his hypothesis, but as we’ve seen before, relying on literary texts to support scientific hypotheses simply doesn’t work, and just as he had to ignore some aspects of the Ipuwer Papyrus to develop his chronology, he also ignores any portions of his evidence that contradict his catastrophist doctrine. For example, he points out that Herodotus, when visiting Egypt in the 5th century BCE, heard a story of the Sun twice moving in reverse—rising in the west and setting in the east—but this is hearsay of folklore, and Herodotus in the same breath says he was told that the strange motions of the Sun neither affected their crops nor was accompanied by any of the widespread devastation Velikovsky described, all of which Velikovsky omits from his analysis. As for the notion that Venus had never been seen before the 7th century BCE, that has been proven false. We have Babylonian cuneiform tablets detailing astronomical observations of Venus going back a thousand years before that, and we see Venus associated with the Sumerian goddess Inanna even further back in history. And these are just historical rebuttals; scientists provided manifold refutations of Velikovsky’s work, not the least of which was the simple fact that he did not go about his theorizing in a scientific manner. He never performed experiments or collected observational data; he did not maintain scientific objectivity. Rather, an idea occurred to him almost like a vision, and he made up his mind that it was fact, then set about searching for any evidence that might support it.

As for the scientific specifics, in 1974, the American Association for the Advancement of Science hosted a symposium on Velikovsky’s ideas, partly to save some face after the criticism the scientific community had received for their reception, or some would say repression, of Velikovsky’s work, but also to create an opportunity to once and for all refute his pseudoscience publicly. It was a well-attended affair, and Velikovsky himself appeared and engaged in debate with Carl Sagan and others. Sagan delivered what every scientist present believed to be a devastating debunking of Velikovsky’s principal claims, pointing out that the energy required to expel Venus from Jupiter’s gravitational pull would have been so great as to destroy Venus, that everything we know about planetary orbits suggests the proposed orbit of Venus after its expulsion that would have allowed for the collisions Velikovsky hypothesized would be absurdly unlikely and that its changing from an elongated to a circular orbit would have been impossible, and that the stopping and restarting of Earth’s rotation simply could not have happened. His further objections related to Earth’s geological record standing contrary to Velikovsky’s claims and the chemical composition of Venus being different than that of Jupiter. In reply, Velikovsky cited outdated and long refuted sources and quibbled over Sagan’s representation of his claims and back-of-the-envelope calculations to disprove them. The result was that, while scientists came away satisfied that Velikovsky had been exposed as a fraud, Velikovsky’s followers believed he had won the debate.

Sagan and Velikovsky, via everythingselectric.com

Velikovsky liked to portray himself as, and may have genuinely believed himself to be, a lone genius martyr standing against a tidal wave of reactionary ignorance with truth that he alone had surmised through great erudition and sheer perspicacity. In truth, though, just as Fomenko today owes much to the ideas of Morosov, Velikovsky owes a great deal to the ideas of one of the great writers of pseudohistory, Ignatius Donnelly. You may recognize Donnelly’s name if you’ve ever read or listened to a podcast about Atlantis, because he wrote the quintessential fringe text on the lost continent, Atlantis: the Antediluvian World. A year later, he published Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, which proposed that 12,000 years in the past, an advanced civilization was destroyed by a massive comet strike that had many of the same effects that Velikovsky claims occurred during Venus’s close passing. Unlike Fomenko with Morosov, though, Velikovsky doesn’t credit Donnelly, perhaps because he wanted to be taken more seriously than modern scholars took Donnelly. If that is the case, though, it is strange that Velikovsky made such hard to believe assertions in his work. For example, he asserts that the flood of Noah was caused by a cosmic cloud of water released when Saturn experienced a collision, and that when all this water reached Earth, it also brought with it alien plant life. And that is not the only alien visitor that probably arrived here in the wake of a collision, for he claims insects were introduced to Earth when their larvae rained down from the tail of the Venus comet. The story of manna, that miraculous food, falling from heaven when the Israelites most needed it he explains as an alien carbohydrate that just happened to rain down and be edible. Likewise, oil and diamonds fell from the sky during these planetary close calls, and the electromagnetic disturbances these passages caused once scrambled humanity’s brains, which is what really caused the confusion of languages described in the biblical Tower of Babel story. Not content to take on astronomers and historians only, he challenged the tenets of biology and geology and paleontology as well, claiming that rather than changing and evolving over extremely long periods of time, the Earth was changed suddenly. Dinosaurs went extinct only thousands of years ago in these catastrophes, which preserved their remains. There were no Ice Ages; mammoths had been flash frozen because of a tilting in the Earth’s axis. Worldwide fires created our coal deposits. Species evolved not slowly but abruptly because of radiation from these interplanetary calamities. Before his work’s publication in 1950, he encountered Albert Einstein once again, as the two both lived in Princeton, New Jersey, and he asked Einstein to read his work and give an opinion. Einstein suggested that Velikovsky might have a hard time finding a publisher, specifically because “every sensible physicist” would realize that the catastrophes Velikovsky described would have completely destroyed the Earth’s crust. Nevertheless, Einstein was kind about his criticism, and Velikovsky was undeterred. But years later, in Einstein’s very last interview, his opinion was less delicate: “[I]t really isn’t a bad book,” he said, laughing. “The only trouble with it is, it is crazy.”

He didn’t seem so crazy in the 1960s, though, when he and his followers began to claim that certain “predictions” of Velikovsky’s had borne out and thus proven him right. In his work, Velikovsky mentioned that some kind of radio emissions might be expected to emanate from Jupiter because of the electricity and heat that still remained after spitting out Venus. And lo and behold, radio astronomers had since detected radio emissions from Jupiter. Similarly, he had said that Venus must be hot because of its relatively recent ejection from Jupiter and collisions with other planets, and in 1962, the Mariner 2 had confirmed a surface temperature of more than 400 degrees Celsius. Finally, since Venus had supposedly been forged as part of Jupiter, Velikovsky predicted that it would have an atmosphere rich in hydrogen, and in 1963, NASA confirmed that the Mariner 2 had collected evidence of hydrocarbon clouds. So, indeed, science seemed to be turning Velikovsky’s way. The only problem was, a publicist at NASA had made the statement about hydrocarbon clouds in error, prompting NASA to retract. The clouds, it turns out, are mostly sulphuric acid. But Velikovsky refused to believe this retraction, claiming instead that NASA was out to make him look bad. So, it appears that claiming NASA is conspiring to hide the truth has long been a recourse of the pseudoscientist and conspiracist. As for the temperature of Venus and the radio emissions of Jupiter, he was right… but for the wrong reasons. Jupiter’s radio emissions are non-thermal, caused by ions trapped in its magnetosphere, not by its heat. And the high temperature of Venus appears to be caused by its proximity to the Sun and the fact that its clouds trap the heat—in other words, the greenhouse effect. But again, Velikovsky seems to have been in denial, ironic for a Freudian psychotherapist, for he refused to believe that the greenhouse effect could be responsible, claiming it violated thermodynamic laws and again resorting to conspiracy theory, suggesting this finding had been invented just to spite him.

Mariner 2, the world’s first successful interplanetary spacecraft, via Wikimedia Commons

So, our question was whether the scientific community was out of line in opposing the publication and popularity of Velikovsky’s work. By my own argument on this topic, which I spoke about at Harvard last year, it should be considered the duty of experts and journalists and educators to confront and examine dubious ideas, and not to ignore them for being too fringe to take seriously. So in that sense, given that Velikovsky’s claims were clearly disprovable and pseudoscientific and yet seemed poised to be taken as genuine science by a great many readers, I would argue that scientists and scholars acted according to their convictions in keeping with the principles of their calling when they exposed the problems in Velikovsky’s theories. But I also think that Velikovsky composed his work in earnest, even if he was often myopic and driven by confirmation bias. Notwithstanding his eventual cosmic craziness, how crazy were his ideas about history at the beginning of his research? How unbelievable was his Revised Chronology after all? Must all attempts to revise chronology be dismissed out of hand as ridiculous? Our discussion of the genuine questions raised by Fomenko in Part One—questions posed because of solid work in the hard sciences of astronomy and celestial mechanics, show us chronologies might be justifiably questioned in some cases. And Velikovsky himself raised some seemingly valid points about Egyptian chronology having been settled before the Rosetta Stone made the translation of hieroglyphs possible, and using the Sothic dating system, which relied on observations of the star Sirius and had been the object of criticism for a long time, being already seen in Velikovsky’s day unreliable. Our discussion of Scaliger demonstrates that revising chronology is what led to our current understanding of history. While today, Scaliger is remembered as the founder of scientific chronology, he was doubted and criticized at the time, just like Velikovsky and Fomenko, a fact that may encourage us to view Velikovsky’s intentions in drafting a Revised Chronology with a bit more respect. Indeed, Scaliger and Petavius did not have the final word in chronology until the rise of these 20th century revisionists. Rather, there has been a long line of chronological revisionists, some of whom were untrustworthy while others are still recognized today as the greatest intellectuals in history. Find out who else challenged the timeline and why next time, in the final installment of my Chronological Revision Chronicles.

Further Reading

Bauer, Henry. “Velikovsky and Social Studies of Science.” 4S Review, vol. 2, no. 4, 1984, pp. 2–8. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/690283.

Diacu, Florin. The Lost Millennium: History’s Timetables Under Siege. Knopf, 2005.

Gillette, Robert. “Velikovsky: AAAS Forum for a Mild Collision.” Science, vol. 183, no. 4129, 1974, pp. 1059–1062. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1737973.

Grafton, Anthony T. “Joseph Scaliger and Historical Chronology: The Rise and Fall of a Discipline.” History and Theory, vol. 14, no. 2, 1975, pp. 156–185. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2504611.

Morrison, David. “Velikovsky at Fifty.” Skeptic, vol. 9, no. 1, Mar. 2001, p. 62. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=5430835&site=ehost-live.

“The Ping-Pong Planets of Dr. Velikovsky.” Skeptic, vol. 18, no. 4, Dec. 2013, pp. 64–73. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=93259551&site=ehost-live.

The Chronological Revision Chronicles, Part One: The Fomenko Timeline

In this edition, we will transition from discussing the nationalist myths of Nazis and the conspiracy theories attempting to negate their history, and we will look at… nationalist myths of Russians and conspiracy theories attempting to rewrite history in their favor. But this subject is more than just a comparison of strains in contemporary Russian culture with the German culture preceding the rise of Nazism, and it will comprise more than one installment, for the topic branches to other theorists who have made challenges to accepted history and science, and not all of them with clear nationalist agendas. In the post-truth era, when facts can be disproven in the eyes of many simply by shouting that they are lies, when journalism can be discredited merely by calling it fake, and when history may be negated through hard-headed denial, perhaps it should come as no surprise that there are some who theorize that the entire timeline of history as it is accepted by academics everywhere is completely wrong. And perhaps it is even easier to believe that there are many who take them seriously. To be clear, I am not talking about alternate interpretations of certain historical events or even theories suggesting that those events have been exaggerated or misrepresented. I am speaking of fundamental doubts about entire swathes of history, raising objections about the number of years between historical events, about whether some separate episodes in history were actually the same events, and even about whether entire eras and epochs ever occurred! More than the claims of Holocaust deniers, who purport to practice the techniques of historians and whose false assertions still indicate a respect for the notion of legitimate historiography, the theories I’ll be discussing in this series represent a direct and serious challenge to all historians and to the very idea of historiology. Like other denialist ideas, these rely implicitly on conspiracy theory, giving the impression or even directly making the accusation that the academic community, in consistently promulgating the consensus view of history, is involved in what would have to be considered the most massive cover-up of all time.

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As we are exploring ideas that scramble time and throw our understanding of the sequence of historical events into disarray, I will be following suit by not discussing chronological revisionist theories in a chronological order. Instead, I’ll start with the most recent influential writer on the topic, Anatoly Fomenko, but before I delve into his New Chronology, I feel it necessary to examine the genre of alternate history in Russian culture from which Fomenko’s work seems to have evolved. This will serve as something of a transition from my series on the occult origins of Nazism, as well, for many of the same veins that throbbed in German society in the early 20th century seem to throb also in modern Russia. For example, many of the New Age occult ideas and societies swirling among the literati in Austria and Germany that I spoke about, such as theosophy, anthroposophy, astrology, etc., have found a strong foothold in Russian culture as well, and since the collapse of the Soviet Union, this has led to some prominent theories in alternate history. For example, as it did in Germany, this New Age movement has led to some curious historical mythmaking tying Russian prehistory to lost civilizations, such as Atlantis. Inspired by great Russian poets who had long used Atlantis as metaphor, some have made the serious assertion that the mythical continent was located in Russia. Also like Germany, there has been a resurgence of neo-paganism. Some more nationalist Russians, recoiling from transnational Christianity, have looked to their ancient, pre-Christian roots for inspiration. From their view, the beginning of the Russian people’s downfall came when Prince Vladimir Christianized them in 988. Indeed, just as the Germans looked to that hoax the Oera-Linda Book to confirm the superiority of ancient Germanic peoples, so Russians have their own forgery, the Book of Vles, a hoax that presented itself as an authentic manuscript written on wood planks describing the greatness of a pre-Christian Slavic civilization. The neopagans who hold this book sacred may not be so great in number as the neopagans of interbellum Germany, and may be no great worry to the dominant Orthodox Church, but they do exist, and they push to normalize their alternate view of history, as can be seen by the fact that the Book of Vles can be found in the history section of many Russian bookstores.

Contour copy of the only known photograph of a plank from the Book of Vles, via Wikimedia Commons

Likewise, just as German neopagans tied their notions of a pre-Christian golden age to notions of racial superiority, so in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union we have seen an apparent rise in belief in the myth of the Aryans and with it, unsurprisingly, renewed anti-Semitism, which as I’ve discussed in the past, has a long history in Russia. There has always been something of a controversy over whether the original Russians were Scandinavians or Slavs. Unlike the Germans, however, Aryanists in Russia have chosen to argue that Slavic peoples, rather than Nordic peoples, were the superior root race of humanity, crafting various alternate narratives of history in which the Slavs introduced all the great advancements of humanity to different cultures, teaching Greeks how to philosophize, Indians how to farm, and Europeans how to write. As Ariosophist Germans believed every great ancient civilizations must have been founded by Aryans, so these Russians will claim that Sumerians, Hittites, Egyptians, and Etruscans were all really Slavic. And just as Ariosophy was racist and specifically anti-Semitic to its core, so these Russian Aryanists recast history as a struggle between the superior and noble Slavic Russians and a villainous conspiracy of “world Jewry” bent on weakening and subjugating Russia. Much of the alternate Russian history pushed by anti-Semites focuses on Khazaria, a polyethnic kingdom on the Caspian Sea that flourished as a kind of buffer state and crossroads during the second half the Common Era’s first millennium. The anti-Semitism surrounding it stems from medieval sources indicating some of the state’s elite converted to Judaism. This has led to theories of Khazaria being a predominately Jewish homeland whose Jews survived its destruction as the Ashkenazi Jews, a diasporic population that made a home in the Holy Roman Empire. Anti-Semites see in this version of Khazarian history a cautionary tale against the supposed danger of Jewish immigrants who scheme to undermine Christian nations, as many Russians believed they did in the form of Bolshevism. More brazen purveyors of anti-Semitic alternate Russian history will even go so far as to suggest, without a shred of proof or even valid reasons to suspect it, that the entire historical record has been falsified by Jews, that rather than being subjected to the rule of Mongol invaders from the 13th to the 15th centuries, Russia was actually conquered by Khazar Jews, but, as the conspiracy theory goes, “world Jewry” would rather the Russians forget who their true enemy has always been and thus altered the historical record somehow.

It has been suggested, for example in one of my principal sources, “Conspiracy and Alternate History in Russia,” written by Marlène Laruelle for The Russian Review, that the modern Russian phenomenon of radical historical revisionism or even the reimagining of history, especially through the lens of conspiracism, can only be understood as an effect of the Soviet Union’s collapse, and in a broader sense as a reaction to its politics. Firstly, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, artists, academics, and lay researchers suddenly enjoyed a greater freedom of speech, and along with it the possibility of publishing work that previously would have been squelched by the state, or by publishers beholden to the state, for failing to conform to official discourse. Add to this a newly privatized publishing market searching for material that will sell well, and you have the makings of a possible renaissance in new Russian historiography. The fact that this “genre” of alternate history has proven to be so popular among those now writing and buying books on history can be contextualized by considering the fact that in Communist Russia, the people knew no such thing as established, unassailable consensus history. They regularly saw their history rewritten by those in power. From the nationalist revision of history prevalent in Stalinist propaganda to the disingenuous rehabilitation of Stalin by his more modern apologists, they have seen history as not a scientific pursuit but as a malleable tool of politics. And rather than declining in the new era since the Soviet Union’s collapse, they have seen former Communist states engaging in “memory wars,” protesting the historical representation of the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, the Soviet victory in World War II, and the incorporation of Baltic states, culminating in 2009 when Russian President Dmitri Medvedev established a “Commission for Countering Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests.”  

Dmitry Medvedev takes part in memorial ceremony at Russian Orthodox Chapel for Russian soldiers who died in WWI, via The Government of the Russian Federation

When I speak about alternate history as a genre of literature in Russia, I don’t mean alternate history as we tend to think of it in America, as a style of speculative fiction that imagines a world in which history took a different path. Certainly works such as those are popular in Russia as well, but I refer more specifically to a strain of academic and pseudo-academic historiography that does something quite similar but for scholarly purposes. The first such works came in the mid-1980s from a mathematician named Ivan Koval’chenko, who suggested that math and history were more closely related than is often thought, and that historians should study their subject like scientists—a suggestion with which many of the theorists and researchers we will review would heartily agree. Koval’chenko originated a brand of historiography that explores hypotheticals in detail, academic historiological studies of “what if” scenarios: what if Prince Vladimir had not Christianized, what if Ivan the Terrible had instituted democracy, what if the Bolshevik Revolution had been avoided, what if Lenin had lived longer? And these books are common and popular. It seems that the longtime distortion and corruption of history in Russia and the yearning to take history back from establishment authorities who use it as a tool of repression has created such an appetite among Russians for non-traditional and non-conformist historical narratives, especially when they favor Russia’s importance in world history, that it has created a bastardized field of history, one that peddles fiction as history with no qualms about making sweeping changes to prove a point. Now the alternate history of Koval’chenko and those who came after him may admit to being hypothetical, but there are others who make revisions just as sweeping and assert that their changes are accurate.

 In the early 1970s, a young and promising mathematician and geometer named Anatoly Timofeevich Fomenko had taken an interest in astronomy, or more specifically, in celestial mechanics, the study of the motion of objects in space. What had captured his interest was a problem with the orbit of the moon having to do with its elongation, the angle separating it from the sun, whose acceleration should be relatively constant when charted through history according to records we have of eclipses. The issue with this is that, when taking into account data on eclipses from the Early Middle Ages, about 500 to 900 C.E., it isn’t constant at all, with its acceleration showing a massive, unexplained drop in graphs. One of the foremost authorities on this problem in the late 1970s was Robert R. Newton, who dealt with such problems  first by accusing Claudius Ptolemy, author of the most important record of ancient astronomy, the Almagest, of falsifying observations to make his data agree with his theories, and then by suggesting that any remaining variations in the acceleration of the Moon’s elongation must be attributable to unknown forces. Anatoly Fomenko, however, had a different idea. He had attended a lecture on a little known Russian autodidact named Nicolai Aleksandrovich Morosov who between 1907 and 1932 had published numerous works challenging the chronology accepted by historians. Over the course of his interesting lifetime, Morosov had gone from being an imprisoned revolutionary to a respected polymath and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, but his works on chronology were not well-received. They asserted that much of ancient history had been expanded, or made longer than it actually was, because the same events were mistakenly repeated and attributed to different eras, errors that were thereafter cemented as historical fact and never challenged. For proof, Morosov relied on linguistic evidence, data about constellation positions taken from ancient horoscopes, and statistical analysis of records that he argued proved an overlap existed between the reigns of certain sovereigns who had previously been thought to rule successively. Perhaps it was this application of mathematics to history that so inspired Anatoly Fomenko in the 1970s, or perhaps it was the fact that challenging accepted chronology made for a simple solution to the problem of the Moon’s motion, since it suggested the eclipses of the Early Middle Ages may not have actually happened in those years. By shifting the problematic period of time, Fomenko was actually able to get the graph depicting the acceleration of the Moon’s elongation to flatten out into something resembling a constant variation. For the mathematician Fomenko, this constituted absolute, unimpeachable proof that history was wrong, and ever since, he has followed in Morosov’s footsteps and relied on many of his methods, but has taken his conclusions even further, suggesting that world history may be as much as a thousand years shorter than we have always been taught.

Nicolai Alexandrovich Morosov in 1910, via Wikimedia Commons

Certainly Fomenko brought a greater and more modern understanding of mathematics to bear in his arguments than had Morosov before him. Moreover, modern astronomy can determine with a far greater degree of accuracy when certain planetary configurations such as lunar and solar eclipses did or did not occur. Because of that, Fomenko could be far more certain in his conclusions regarding whether a historical record of a celestial event could or could not have occurred in the year historians accept that it occurred. He looked first to the Peloponnesian War, during which, according to the contemporary Greek historian Thucydides who chronicled it, there occurred three eclipses, two solar and one lunar, within about 18 years. Based on Thucydides’ descriptions of the eclipses, the first of which seems to have been a total eclipse because of the fact that, during it, Thucydides says, “stars became visible,” Fomenko identified a series of eclipses visible in Greece starting in 1039 C.E. that better match the description, thereby shifting the beginning of the Peloponnesian War forward in time some 600 years. Likewise, he and his associates found alternative eclipses for those described by Livy and Plutarch, as well as one recorded in the New Testament Gospels as having occurred during Christ’s crucifixion. There was indeed an eclipse that occurred in 33 C.E. and was visible in Jerusalem, but it would have been of short duration, while both Mark 15 and Luke 23 tell us the event lasted three hours. So, looking for a better alternative, Fomenko argues this event was one and the same as an eclipse that occurred in 1075 C.E., more than a millennium after historians agree Christ was crucified. Likewise, his team challenged the date of the Council of Nicaea based on lunar cycles and the rules set out by the council for establishing the dates on which Easter would be celebrated, rules which, if the council had been held in 345 as tradition tells us, were not all followed until almost 500 years later.

Fomenko’s efforts to use astronomy to establish an alternate chronology represent his most scientific and most irreproachable work… but there are nevertheless big problems with the conclusions he reaches. Not the least of these is the fact that he treats throwaway lines in ancient manuscripts as though they are unimpeachable and exact astronomical observations. He accepts Ptolemy’s work in the Almagest as reliable when it has been found dubious time and time again, and not just because it doesn’t line up with traditional chronology. As for Thucydides, Fomenko insists that the eclipse traditionally identified as that which took place at the start of the Peloponnesian War could not be the one described because of the detail of stars being visible, when it’s perfectly plausible that Thucydides exaggerated the totality of the eclipse or mentioned the twinkling of stars during the eclipse for purely aesthetic reasons. While his calculations may be sound, they are based on the questionable premise that historical reports of eclipses were rendered with pinpoint accuracy. But even if we accept this, there is the muddled mess that he makes of history in reordering it. For example, by his team’s best calculations, the Council of Nicaea, at which was debated the nature of Christ and his importance in relation to God the Father, took place in 876 or 877 C.E., while Christ himself was crucified, at 33 years old, in 1075 C.E. So in his garbled chronology, the council debated the nature of Christ more than 150 years before Christ would even be born.

Likewise his other approaches to analyzing and proposing changes to settled chronology rely on sound mathematics but rest on unstable foundational assumptions. For example, like Morosov before them, Fomenko and his assistant researchers looked at a number of Egyptian artifacts with horoscope representations carved on them, such as the Denderah stones and other bas-reliefs and paintings in a variety of tombs. After analyzing the sky configuration represented by these zodiacs, Morosov had determined that they depicted the night sky as it appeared not in the 1st century B.C.E. but rather the 6th century C.E.. As usual, Fomenko and his team go further, asserting that actually, a more accurate placement would be the 12th century, making of the Egyptians a medieval culture.  But as before, their exact and scientific calculations stand on infirm ground. These zodiacs were illustrations with figures like people and animals representing planetary bodies, and as such, each figure and the significance of its placement was open to interpretation. To illustrate the uncertainty involved, one point of debate was whether a man holding a stick was or was not meant to represent a planet, a dispute that came to depend on whether his stick had or did not have a handle, because if it were a walking stick, then he was being depicted as a traveler and could thus be interpreted as a planet. Clearly this is not an exact science, and issues of interpretation like this abound and are not always treated consistently by Fomenko and his team. For example, in interpreting the Denderah zodiac, he asserts that a star over the head of a planetary figure means that it was visible, but in interpreting bas-reliefs at Esna, he says just the opposite, claiming the standard artistic representation had changed. And sometimes, when they had no interpretations for certain figures, they came up with novel solutions, such as that smaller figures represented partial horoscopes, depicting some of the same planets already on the zodiac but in different context. But the suggestion made by many Egyptologists that these weren’t necessarily accurate astronomical diagrams but rather works of art, they dismiss out of hand.

The Denderah Zodiac, via Wikimedia Commons

Taking another cue from Morosov, Fomenko deals in the same way with the principal objection to his New Chronology, that it simply doesn’t gel with the known sequence of events, usually counted according to the reigns of different rulers, such as pharaohs in Egypt and sovereign dynasties elsewhere, or even popes in Rome. There is a wealth of records for nearly every era and in nearly every region showing us who took power, how long they held it , and who succeeded them. As did Morosov before him, Fomenko argues that some of these reigns must have overlapped, that some of these rulers must have been the same person called by different names, thus collapsing the timeline to suit his shortened version of history. Unlike Morosov, however, Fomenko takes pains to support his assertions with math, or more specifically, statistics. He takes the intervals of how long a king reigned, in conjunction with those who reigned afterward, and attempts to match them with the lengths of other reigns. To explain further, he doesn’t say, These two kings both reigned ten years, so they must be the same. Rather, he argues, Here we have a reign of ten years, followed by a reign of five years, another of 20 years, and then one of 7 years, and these match well with the lengths of another series of four consecutive reigns thought to be different. His argument is that such similarities, which he claims to have found numerous examples of, are mathematically improbable, suggesting the rulers may have been the same, recorded under different names by different scribes and thereafter assumed to be different people. He even goes so far as to create painstaking statistical analyses of ancient records, recording the number of words used to describe events in a period or the frequency of names mentioned over a period, and in comparing these finds corresponding patterns that he also argues prove the records are talking about the same time and the same people. This latter method is hard to comprehend as useful unless one is a statistician, and so Fomenko cows many critics with a proof by intimidation, a sort of logical fallacy that, like proof by verbosity, relies on the assumption that all this mathematical jargon that’s so difficult to follow must represent a valid and ironclad argument. However, we can look closely at Fomenko’s method in determining supposedly identical monarchs to see how much water it really holds. It appears Fomenko omits certain kings from his sequencing when they reigned for a statistically insignificant length of time, suggesting that any issues this omission creates fall well within an acceptable margin of error. But this shows that the sequences he is comparing don’t actually match, that one era or dynasty he’s saying is the same as another actually records a different number of rulers than its supposed doppelganger. Also, he takes it for granted that these figures are simply numbers on a page, when in fact, in many cases, each has extensive biographical information that doesn’t line up with the other, fighting different wars with different enemies for different lengths of time, marrying different numbers of spouses and fathering different numbers of children, and finally, being laid to rest in different burial places, some of which can still be visited today.

Perhaps out of an inflated self-assurance, which my principal source, The Lost Millennium by mathematician Florin Diacu, suggests may have been cultivated by the prominence and prestige accorded to mathematicians in Russia, Fomenko focuses not only on mathematical proofs of his theories, venturing also into fields of which he is no expert. In 1996, Fomenko and his associates published a book on the ancient history of Rome, England, and Russia, and in it, they rely mostly on linguistic arguments to assert that English history is far shorter than tradition claims, and that much of its history actually occurred in the Byzantine Empire. As we have seen in, for example, our examination of The Two Babylons, etymology is a shaky ground on which to build a vast conspiracy theory or alternate history, especially when one is only an amateur etymologist. In fact, true etymologists have taken some joy in absolutely destroying Fomenko’s work here, such as A. A. Zalyzniak, who belittled it as “mountains of amateurish nonsense and phantasmagoric fabrications” which he suggested “bears the same relation to a scientific investigation as a report on the authors’ dreams” (qtd. in Diacu 206-208). What specific errors were made? Well, he reduced most words to consonants only, which while valid in the analysis of some ancient languages is not suitable for English, Russian, and Latin—the pertinent languages in this case. So we see Fomenko making false assertions, such as that “Turk” reduces to the root TRK, and Trojan to TRN, so because of a superficial similarity of consonants, the Trojans must have been the Turks. And the Russian city of Samara, read backwards in some languages could be “Aramas,” and as it shares the R and M of Rome, then Rome was in Russia. It is absolutely flabbergasting that an otherwise brilliant man would make such patently false claims with such weak proof. Unless he had some ulterior motive…

Anatoly Timofeevich Fomenko at the chalkboard, via Black Bag

Fomenko has been roundly criticized by much of academia, but based on his scientific credentials and approaches, he is also defended and often given the benefit of the doubt. Indeed, even when scholars disagree with his conclusions, they will suggest that he has raised valid points about certain weaknesses in our chronology that should be further explored. In dealing with those who seek to refute or debunk his theories, Fomenko retains a position of logical advantage, for almost anything a historian might bring up to counter his claims, Fomenko can cast doubt on as being itself part of a flawed chronology. So, for example, there are records linking Christ to the time of Tiberius, a Roman emperor from 14 to 37 C.E., but Fomenko can easily point out that Tiberius’s reign may have also been misplaced on the timeline, or that he may have never existed at all, for as with many challengers of tradition, Fomenko also relies on conspiracy theory, suggesting that many records have been falsified to support traditional chronology. But as much as Fomenko may argue that traditionalists have a bias toward accepted chronology and cherry pick evidence that supports their view, he is guilty of the same. For example, the eclipse he settled on as taking place when Christ was crucified actually had as short of a duration as that which took place in 33 C.E., making it just as problematic as the one the traditionalists cite, but Fomenko likes it better because it fits his timeline. And when his techniques return impossible dates, such as when his analysis of one Egyptian zodiac indicated it represented a 19th century sky configuration, he simply discards it. As for his agenda, as with the less influential and less notorious writers of Russian alternate history, it has been argued that he seeks to rewrite history in order to place Russia in a more prominent position, or in order to reclaim the historical significance that has been supposedly taken from her by her enemies who falsify the past to minimize Russia’s contributions. While Fomenko never breaks from his scientist character to indicate this agenda, it does seem apparent in the 1996 work I mentioned. His argument that English history is really Byzantine history equates to an argument that Russia should be given credit for England’s historical accomplishments, for because of its shared Orthodox faith, Russia has long been seen by Russians as a successor to the Byzantine Empire, its tsars a continuation of the empire’s Caesars. This agenda is hard to discern in much of Fomenko’s other chronological work, but it does provide some clear motivation for why he would take his career in such a strange and controversial direction, and why his books sell so well in Russia, where his devotees have dedicated internet forums to disseminating and furthering his theories. But Fomenko was not the only Russian figure to set off a movement to revise chronology and challenge traditional scholarship, as we shall see in our next installment.

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Further Reading

Diacu, Florin. The Lost Millennium: History’s Timetables Under Siege. Knopf, 2005.

Laruelle, Marlène. “Conspiracy and Alternate History in Russia: A Nationalist Equation for Success?” Russian Review, vol. 71, no. 4, 2012, pp. 565–580., www.jstor.org/stable/23263930.

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.