Page 32 - All About History - Issue 56-17
P. 32
Hitler and the Occult
The spiritualists and secret societies at the birth of the Nazis
Across Europe and North America, the turn of the hyperinflation — an unnecessary head start for the one flag in 1871, while Austria remained part of
century represented the flowering of superstitious race to the bottom that was the Great Depression the ‘German world’ but not a part of the country
thought. This was the product of spiritual anxiety What granted this febrile atmosphere a uniquely itself. In short, the question of what it was to be ‘a
— people felt lost in this unstable new world and dangerous quality was the relationship between German’ hadn’t really been resolved.
nowhere was this more obvious than in Germany. nationalism, anti-Semitism and the supernatural. The soundtrack to this combative nationalism
Hot on the heels of their seemingly Still a new country with myriad dialects and was undoubtedly Richard Wagner. In 1869, the first
incomprehensible defeat in World War I came the regional identities, significant Slavic and Jewish part of what would become his epic Der Ring des
economic mismanagement and political instability minorities and a volatile confessional faultline Nibelungen (The Ring of Nibelungen) was staged in
of the Weimar Republic, bringing with it running between the Protestant north and the Catholic Munich. Conceived as a break from the Italian-style
street battles between far left and far right, and south, Germany had only become unified under operas of his earlier career, Nibelungen crafted a
new shared mythology out of pre-Christian Norse
“To be Germany you had to be descended and Germanic folktales. Although widely admired,
amid these thunderous chords was plenty that
from this pre-industrial pagan idyll that their the emerging German far right could embrace: a
heroic masculine ideal overcoming duplicitous foes,
cherry-picking of history had contrived” spiritual purity versus greedy materialism, and
sheer bloody righteousness.
Another spiritual bonding agent for this fractured
nation was the völkisch movement that emerged
NSDAP propaganda from
1932 depicts Communism as over the 19th century, emphasising the spiritual
a supernatural foe
purity of German peasant life and folklore that
had become corrupted by urbanisation and
Christianity. For völkisch thinkers, theirs was an
exclusive creed: Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil).
German soil and German blood were linked, and to
be German you had to be descended from this pre-
industrial pagan idyll that their cherry-picking of
history had contrived.
In 1903, the hoary Austrian occultist Guido von
List (and his acolyte Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels)
popularised a new theory that bound this sense
of longing and bubbling hatred into a potent
new form: Ariosophy, or Armanism. An active
contributor to völkisch journals on the subject of
ancient runes (he created the 18-letter Armanen
Futharkh later used by the SS) and his own Odin-
worshipping cult, List believed that all the great
figures in history and legend were Aryans whose
golden age had been ended by the onset of inferior
races and cultures.
List and Liebenfels identified Atlantis — an
object of particular fascination for 19th-century
occultists — with the mythical North Atlantic island
civilisation of Thule, postulating that the ancient
Aryans had been scattered from there following a
catastrophic flood, with the purest bloodlines of
this spiritual Aryan super race settling in Germany
and the Himalayas.
Now German meant Aryan, and those of
insufficient ‘Aryan blood’ — Jews and Slavs, for
example — were seen as an existential threat to the
völk. Purely by existing, völkisch fanatics believed
that these ‘lesser races’ were poisoning the sacred
union of their ancient culture and land.
This broiling stew of heroic mythology
that followed Wagner, the imagined
pagan past and virulent racism of the
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