Osprey - DARK 001 - The Nazi Occult.pdf

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THE NAZI OCCULT

KENNETH HITE

CONTENTS

Introduction

The Secret of the Runes

The Thule Gesellschaft

Hidden Energies

The Ahnenerbe

Tibet and the Secret Kingdom

Unholy Quests

Aktion Hess

Werwolf

Black Sun and Fourth Reich

Further Reading, Watching, and Gaming

Glossary

Index

Introduction

The Nazi occult legend predates the war, coming into its own alongside

the Nazis themselves. Various “Aryan mystics” claimed the Nazi Party was

predestined, even mythic, but the theory of occult, conspiratorial forces

intertwined with the rise of the Third Reich ﬁrst explicitly appeared in a novel

entitled

Les Sept Têtes du Dragon Vert

(The Seven Heads of the Green Dragon;

1933) by a French journalist (and possible French spy) named Pierre Mariel.

A number of other French publications elaborated on this theme during the

1930s, culminating in Edouard Saby’s

Hitler et les Forces Occultes

(Hitler and

the Occult Forces; 1939). That same year, the disenchanted German politician

Hermann Rauschning published

Gespräche mit Hitler

(Conversations with

Hitler; UK title

Hitler Speaks)

a book describing Hitler’s encounters with “the

new man” of quasi-Theosophist lore, and his “bondage to … evil spirits.”

With the outbreak of war in September 1939, the “occult Reich” theory

reached the English press in Lewis Spence’s

The Occult Causes of the Present

War

(1941). The actual business of ﬁghting slowed down such speculations,

but the concept re-emerged in Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier’s

Le Matin

des Magiciens

(The Morning of the Magicians; 1960) and Trevor Ravenscroft’s

The Spear of Destiny

(1972), both of which sold millions of copies and

spawned hundreds of imitators, all of which reconstruct and emphasize each

others’ larger claims while contradicting each others’ details. This pattern will

be familiar to historians in other ﬁelds.

This book attempts to synthesize and systematize a history of the Nazi

occult. It draws, as far as possible, on the work of serious historians both of the

occult and of German intellectual and political history. Where documentation

or ﬁrm evidence exists, this text does not depart from it. But as the great

historian Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper (himself an authority on both Nazism

and the occult) observed, writing history is inevitably an act of imaginative

reconstruction. In this ﬁeld, where so little has been uncovered by academic

research, imagination – mine or other authors’ – is a necessity. Just as the

history of some ancient land, where only one or two archaeologists have dug,

must rely on myth, legend, and folktales, for now so too the history of the

Nazi occult must incorporate those elements of its mythology most likely

to reﬂect actual events. In some places I have resorted to extrapolation and

interpolation; in almost all places I have been required to choose between

divergent narratives.

(opposite)

The front page of

Hanussens

Berliner Wochenschau

(July 8,

1932) depicts the horoscope of

the Reichstag, showing dangers

and mishaps after the end of

July, and correctly predicting the

Nazi percentage of the upcoming

vote. Hanussen also predicted

(correctly) that Hitler would

not join the government, that

the socialists and communists

would fail to unite, and that Hitler

would not marry the composer’s

daughter-in-law Winifred Wagner.

His final successful prediction in

this issue: “The National Socialists

will remain at the helm in the

foreseeable future. Supported by

a robust militia, which is blindly

devoted to their leader and highly

disciplined, they will continue to

field a force of great power. Their

commitment and toughness is

something the uninitiated cannot

imagine.” (Mel Gordon Archive)

One narrative I can reject. Hitler was not an occultist. He had little

patience for Himmler’s Ariosophist obsessions, repeatedly condemning them

in private conversation and public speech. He despised astrology, although he

was willing to use it as propaganda, and was suspicious of all secret societies.

His conceptions of race and history were operatic, even mystical at times, but

he was no mystic. He was willing to accept Hörbiger’s World Ice Theory as

legitimate astrophysics, mostly on poetic grounds, but he mocked notions

of Atlantis or giants. His beliefs were pragmatic, as beﬁt a street-brawling

politician. The Holocaust was not

a sorcerous ritual. It was a political

mass murder, driven by National

Socialist ideology. That ideology

was shaped by Ariosophy, but

also by the trauma of World

War I and by the theories of

leading scientists like Haeckel and

philosophers such as Nietzsche

and Schopenhauer. The occultists

who surrounded Hitler, and who

took advantage of the suspension

of both morality and skepticism

in his regime, used those killings

for their own ends, but they did

not engineer them. They did not

have to.

ERIK JAN HANUSSEN

According to a 1943 US Oﬃce of Strategic Services

(OSS) report, Hitler took “regular lessons in speaking

and in mass psychology from a man named Hanussen,

who was also a practicing astrologer and fortune-

teller.” Erik Jan Hanussen combined stage magic,

mesmerism, séances, and the occult in varying degrees

during his long career. By 1930, he was holding orgies

and magical rituals in his “Palace of the Occult” with

high-ranking members of the Sturmabteilung (Storm

Detachment; SA). In 1932, he clairvoyantly predicted

Hitler’s rise to power, earning him at least one meeting

with the then-sidelined politician. Various sources say

that he trained Hitler in mesmerism, broke a curse

put on Hitler by an unknown magical enemy, and

volunteered his own services as Director of the Occult

in a Nazi government. When Hitler baﬄed onlookers

by becoming chancellor in January 1933, Hanussen

seemed on the verge of triumph.

Then, the night before the Reichstag Fire, Hanussen

clairvoyantly predicted “a Great House consumed by

ﬂames.” Suddenly, The Man Who Was Never Wrong

became The Man Who Knew Too Much. Hanussen’s

real name came out: Hermann Steinschneider. The

Danish magus was a Jewish fraud! He vanished on the

way to a performance; his bullet-ridden body turned up

in a shallow grave. On trial, the Reichstag ﬁre arsonist,

a simple-minded communist named Martin van der

Lubbe, showed every sign of mesmeric control.

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