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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photographic portrait of Madame Blavatsky, via Wikimedia Commons

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

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

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

Photographic portrait of Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, via Wikimedia Commons

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

Nazi Occultism, Part One: The Myth of the Aryans

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