Page 33 - All About History - Issue 56-17

Hitler’s Occult War

The sword in Hitler’s hand on this Many high-ranking members of the
cover of German newspaper Die Woche Nazi Party believed in the idea of
links to Wagner’s operas Blut und Boden: ‘Blood and Soil’

A pagan shrine in Germany for
those following the Norse gods

Blut und Boden called for rural
values and the preserving of
farming communities

völkisch movement, and myriad other occult drawn away members, support and even the rhetoric of good and evil, destiny and the völk —
fascinations that bloomed in this hothouse of official newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter (People’s describing Jews in the terminology of the vampire
unreason — from numerology and astrology to Observer), from their one-time sponsors. and Hitler in the language of the saviour — but
dowsing rods and homeopathy — were the engine Minister of Food Richard Walther Darré, these were subordinate to political realities.
that drove a significant chunk of the German right. Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, Hitlerjungend Hitler himself had very little contact with the
Crucially, these strands of thought electrified many (Hitler Youth) leader Baldur von Schirach and occult fringes of the German far right and, indeed,
who would go on to take their place by Hitler’s side Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler all met in the esoteric sects began to be shut down from 1933
following his seizure of power in 1933. extreme völkisch Artaman League, which formed and the more outspoken activists — “völkisch
Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess and the notorious in 1923. The Artaman preached a retreat from wandering scholars”, in Hitler’s own words —
governor general of occupied Poland, Hans Frank, cities and Christianity, and into farmsteads and were silenced.
were both members of the Thule Society, which solstice festivals. They looked to Eastern Europe for For the Führer, the supernatural was a prop, a
grew out of the obscure völkisch Germanenorden “German soil” to “reclaim” and violently opposed way of encapsulating and manipulating that desire
(German Order) and Reichshammerbund (Reich the Slavic presence in Germany’s ethnically mixed for something better, stronger, more self-assured
Hammer Association). Frustrated by their lack of eastern borderlands. Like the Thule Society, the that many ordinary Germans felt at the time. He
electoral success, the Thule Society entrusted right- League was soon swallowed up by the rise of embraced the imagery of Wagner, seeing himself
wing journalist Karl Harrer with the task of shearing NSDAP and by 1927, an estimated 80 per cent of as his heroic protagonist Siegfried, and identified
their hateful creed of its occult tics and taking it their membership had joined Hitler. with the archetype of the ‘magician’ or the
to the working class. The eventual result was the While in the grand scheme of Weimar Germany’s ‘prophet’ — but these were costumes to be worn
Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Worker’s Party), tempestuous political scene the likes of the Thule on the political stage.
co-founded in 1919 by Harrer and Dietrich Eckart. Society and the Artaman League were little more Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung best encapsulated
As the DAP transitioned to the NSDAP than racist social clubs for middle-class dilettantes, the supernatural aura of Hitler’s presentation,
(Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or the NSDAP was a mass movement that spoke to saying in 1942: “He is the loudspeaker which
the National Socialist German Worker’s Party) in the fears of the German working class. It promised magnifies the inaudible whispers of the German
1920 under charismatic new frontman and Eckart jobs, stability, economic good times, victory over soul until they can be heard by the German’s
protégé Adolf Hitler, they broke their links with enemies within and without and a new world on conscious ear […] Hitler’s power is not political;
the Thule Society and booted out Harrer, having their own terms. It may have been coached in the it is magic.”
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