Occultism in Nazism
The association of Nazism with occultism occurs in a wide range of theories, speculation, and research into the origins of Nazism and into Nazism's possible relationship with various occult traditions. Such ideas have flourished as a part of popular culture since at least the early 1940s, and gained renewed popularity starting in the 1960s.
British historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke analyzed the topic in his 1985 book The Occult Roots of Nazism, in which he argued there were in fact links between some ideals of Ariosophy and Nazi ideology. He also analyzed the problems of the numerous popular occult historiography books written on the topic, which he found heavily exaggerated the relationship between Nazism and the occult. Goodrick-Clarke sought to separate empiricism and sociology from the modern mythology of Nazi occultism that exists in many books which "have represented the Nazi phenomenon as the product of arcane and demonic influence". He evaluated most of the 1960 to 1975 books on Nazi occultism as "sensational and under-researched".
Ariosophy
Historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's 1985 book, The Occult Roots of Nazism, discusses the possibility of links between the ideas of the occult and those of Nazism. The book's main subject is the racist-occult movement of Ariosophy, a major strand of nationalist esotericism in Germany and Austria during the 19th and early 20th centuries. He introduces his work as "an underground history, concerned with the myths, symbols, and fantasies that bear on the development of reactionary, authoritarian, and Nazi styles of thinking," arguing that "fantasies can achieve a causal status once they have been institutionalized in beliefs, values, and social groups."In Goodrick-Clarke's view, the Ariosophist movement built on the earlier ideas of the Völkisch movement, a traditionalist, pan-German response to industrialization and urbanization, but it associated the problems of modernism specifically with the supposed misdeeds of Freemasonry, Kabbalah, and Rosicrucianism in order to "prove the modern world was based on false and evil principles". The Ariosophist "ideas and symbols filtered through to several anti-semitic and Nationalist groups in late Wilhelmian Germany, from which the early Nazi Party emerged in Munich after the First World War." He demonstrated links between two Ariosophists and Heinrich Himmler.
Contemporary claims
In the essay that is included in the German edition of The Occult Roots of Nazism, also published in a short book, Unknown Sources: National Socialism and the Occult, translated by Goodrick-Clarke, Hans Thomas Hakl, an Austrian writer, traces the origins of the speculation about Nazism and Occultism back to several works from the early 1940s. Already in 1933 a pseudonymous Kurt van Emsen described Hitler as a "demonic personality", but his work was soon forgotten.The first allusions that Hitler was directed by occult forces which were taken up by the later authors came from French Christian esotericist René Kopp. In two articles published in the monthly esoteric journal Le Chariot from June 1934 and April 1939, he seeks to trace the source of Hitler's power to supernatural forces. The second article was titled: "L'Enigme du Hitler". In other French esoteric journals of the 1930s, Hakl could not find similar hints. In 1939 another French author, Edouard Saby, published a book: Hitler et les Forces Occultes. Saby already mentions Hanussen and Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln. Hakl suggests that Edouard Saby would have the copyright on the myth of Nazi occultism.
However, another significant book from 1939 is better known: Hermann Rauschning's Hitler Speaks. There it is said, that "Hitler surrendered himself to forces that carried him away. … He turned himself over to a spell, which can, with good reason and not simply in a figurative analogy, be described as demonic magic." The chapter "Hitler in private" is even more dramatic, and was left out in the German edition from 1940.
One of the earliest claims of Nazi occultism can be found in Lewis Spence's book Occult Causes of the Present War. According to Spence, Alfred Rosenberg and his book The Myth of the Twentieth Century were responsible for promoting pagan, occult and anti-Christian ideas that motivated the Nazi party.
Modern mythology
By the early 1960s, "one could now clearly detect a mystique of Nazism." A sensationalistic and fanciful presentation of its figures and symbols, "shorn of all political and historical context", gained ground with thrillers, non-fiction books, and films and permeated "the milieu of popular culture." At the time, it was seen as a sensational topic that attracted strong sales.Goodrick-Clarke gives a highly critical view of much of the popular literature on the topic. In his words, these books describe Hitler and the Nazis as being controlled by a "hidden power characterized either as a discarnate entity or as a magical elite in a remote age or distant location". He has referred to this genre as the "Nazi Mysteries", and terms this genre "crypto-history", as its defining element and "final point of explanatory reference is an agent which has remained concealed to previous historians of National Socialism".
Goodrick-Clarke notes numerous pseudo-historic "books written about Nazi occultism between 1960 and 1975", that "were typically sensational and under-researched", noting that,
Multiple scholars attribute the origin of the modern Nazi Mysteries genre and interest in the Nazi occult to the 1960 book The Morning of the Magicians. The Morning of the Magicians is a generally conspiratorial book, covering such topics as conspiracy theories and theories similar to later ancient astronaut conspiracies; however, the entire second half of the work is dedicated to Nazi-Occult connections, in a section entitled "A Few Years in the Absolute Elsewhere". Stéphane Françoise wrote in 2023 that:
In his 2002 work Black Sun, which was originally intended to trace the survival of occult Nazi themes in the postwar period, Goodrick-Clarke considered it necessary to readdress the topic. He devotes one chapter of the book to "the Nazi mysteries", as he terms the field of Nazi occultism there. Other reliable summaries of the development of the genre have been written by German historians. The German edition of The Occult Roots of Nazism includes an essay, "Nationalsozialismus und Okkultismus", which traces the origins of the speculation about Nazi occultism back to publications from the late 1930s, and which was subsequently translated by Goodrick-Clarke into English. The German historian Michael Rißmann has also included a longer "excursus" about "Nationalsozialismus und Okkultismus" in his acclaimed book on Adolf Hitler's religious beliefs.
According to Goodrick-Clarke, the speculation of Nazi occultism originated from "post-war fascination with Nazism". The "horrid fascination" of Nazism upon the Western mind emerges from the "uncanny interlude in modern history" that it presents to an observer a few decades later. The idolization of Hitler in Nazi Germany, its short-lived dominion on the European continent and Nazism's extreme antisemitism set it apart from other periods of modern history. "Outside a purely secular frame of reference, Nazism was felt to be the embodiment of evil in a modern twentieth-century regime, a monstrous pagan relapse in the Christian community of Europe."
Books considered to be part of this literary trend include:
- Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, 1960,
Claims
Demonic possession of Hitler
For a demonic influence on Hitler, Hermann Rauschning's Conversations with Hitler is brought forward as a source. However, most modern scholars do not consider Rauschning reliable. The best that can be said for Rauschning's claims may be Goodrick-Clarke's judgment that they "record... the authentic voice of Hitler by inspired guesswork and imagination."Similarly to Rauschning, August Kubizek, one of Hitler's closest friends since childhood, claims that Hitler—17 years old at the time—once spoke to him of "returning Germany to its former glory"; of this comment August said, "It was as if another being spoke out of his body, and moved him as much as it did me."
The article "Hitler's Forgotten Library" by Timothy Ryback, published in The Atlantic, mentions a book from Hitler's private library authored by Ernst Schertel. Schertel, whose interests included flagellation, dance, occultism, nudism and BDSM, had been an activist for sexual liberation before 1933. He had been imprisoned in Nazi Germany for seven months and his doctoral degree was revoked. He is supposed to have sent a dedicated copy of his 1923 book Magic: History, Theory, Practice to Hitler some time in the mid-1920s. Hitler is said to have marked extensive passages, including one which reads "He who does not have the demonic seed within himself will never give birth to a magical world".
According to James Herbert Brennan in his book The Occult Reich, Hitler's mentor, Dietrich Eckart, wrote to a friend of his in 1923: "Follow Hitler! He will dance, but it is I who have called the tune. We have given him the 'means of communication' with Them. Do not mourn for me; I shall have influenced history more than any other German."
The Vatican's chief exorcist, Father Gabriele Amorth, held the belief that Hitler and other Nazi leaders were influenced by demons.