Page 31 - All About History - Issue 56-17

Hitler and the Occult

itler

theOccult

and

The runes, rituals and star signs behind the rise and fall of the Third Reich

Written by James Hoare

“ he Nazis were desperate,” intones as a former middle-ranking Nazi to greatly that into an endless parade of Nazi zombie
embellish his contact and conversations
John Hurt’s Professor Bruttenholm
movies and credulous cable shows exploring the
in Guillermo del Toro’s 2004 dark with Hitler. Spence was a Scottish folklorist Third Reich’s myriad magical mysteries.
fantasy film, Hellboy. “Combining and writer who projected his own occult Why these stories endured then and why
Tscience and black magic, they knowledge onto the mystical manifestos of they endure now is largely the same. In 1939-
intended to upset the balance of the war.” Hitler’s fellow travellers. Saby was even further 40, the seemingly unstoppable advance of Nazi
From box office to bookshelves, the image gone, seeing evidence of occult hand gestures Germany as it rolled over its neighbours was
of Nazi Germany being in league with black in the Führer’s photographs and equating difficult to understand without recourse to dark
magic and old gods is ubiquitous. Though vegetarianism with Satanism. powers. In the aftermath of World War II, the
best characterised by the retro pulp of the Facts that thin soon gave way to fiction and horrific scale of the Holocaust, the devastation
Indiana Jones series where the adventurous Dennis Wheatley wrote the supernatural thriller of aerial bombardment and the savagery of
archaeologist races to keep relics from the Strange Conflict in 1941, which told of Nazi occupation defied easy understanding. Again,
pursuing jackboots, it’s a far more long-lived witch doctors menacing the Atlantic convoys many took comfort in the belief that this wasn’t
trope than you might think. from South America. The Stephen King of his the work of people like themselves, but of
A handful of early texts advanced the theory day, Wheatley rubbed velvet shoulders with monsters whose dark appetites drove them to
during the early days of World War II. Hitler English occultists such as Aleister Crowley and seek out forbidden lore.
Speaks (1939) by Hermann Rauschning, Occult Montague Summers, and spent the war working At its heart, though, is a kernel of truth
Causes of the Present War (1940) by Lewis for the London Controlling Section, a part of and interest in the esoteric was surprisingly
Spence and Hitler et les Forces Occultes (Hitler the byzantine British intelligence apparatus widespread in Nazi Germany. While the idea of a
at the Occult Forces, 1939) by Edouard Saby all concerned with elaborate deception campaigns. gimlet-eyed Führer driven by occult obsessions
portrayed the Führer as a man driven by the After the war, Wheatley’s novels They Used is absolute rubbish, the occult was indelibly
demonic forces he could barely contain to one Dark Forces (1964) and Gateway to Hell (1970) bound up with Nazi Germany. It was a low hum
degree or another. helped to keep the concept in the public of astrology, superstition, runes and mythology
None of these writers had any insider imagination, leading to the first Indiana Jones that underpinned 12 years in which the swastika
knowledge. Rauschning leveraged his credibility movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and from fluttered above Berlin.

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