Gods & Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: Gods & Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

Postby admin » Sun Jun 21, 2015 12:19 am

CHAPTER 9: The Obedient Man

This combination of ideas offered a solution of sorts to the difficulty of applying traditional values to existing conditions.... he could sustain his belief in the superiority of the class from which he came simply by equating the values ... of his own group with the characteristics of the dominant and moral man.

-- Bradley F. Smith. Heinrich Himmler: A Nazi in the Making


A searching study of Heinrich Himmler's early years helps us to understand the kind of mentality which yearned for the return of the Atlantean age, and which could go on to carry out Lanz von Liebenfels' extermination policies -- all the while considering himself a decent human being.

We should look back for the ''fires of hell" nowhere else but within ourselves. All of mankind, including the Germanic lands, is today dying the Sodomite death, we are drowning in the mixing jug of the Whore of Babylon, who has sucked the marrow from our bones and the brains from our skulls. We know that the Fire of Sodom is the Devil -- the beast-man. He is in hell; he is the worm that never dies (Mk. IX.44). In the Apostles' Creed XVI it is said that in the final days mankind will be tested by fire. All offspring of Sodom, all apelings, will burn themselves up in the fire-oven of fornication. The sensual prurience, which stems from the apeling-blood, from the "swirling water," is the fire, which cannot be quenched, it is the hell in which today nearly all of mankind languishes weeping and gnashing its teeth. Friends, the day of "Final judgment" (krisis), i.e. the division of men, is drawing close! The angels, those who will reap the human harvest, cannot yet be seen -- but those who have ears can already hear how they are whetting the scythes for the mowing down of whole peoples. Krisis, the so-called "Judgment." really means a "division" or "selection." Christ, the God-man, the once more purely bred and transfigured white man of the future will divide them to the right and to the left. Jesus came in order to divide (Lk. XII.51) and he will come again when the Sodomite man will have revealed himself (II Thess. II.3). The time has come! The old Sodomite brood in the Middle East and all around the Mediterranean is degenerate and wretched, the one-time Paradisiacal fields are completely exploited and plundered like a wheat-field in which a thievish hoard of apes has taken up residence. Our bodies are infected with a mange which despite every kind of soap remains udumu-ized, pagutu-ized and baziat-ized. Never has human life been as miserable as it is today -- despite all its technical advancements. Devilish human beasts oppress us from above, slaughtering millions of people in unconscionably murderous wars conducted for the enrichment of their personal money-bags. Savage human beasts undermine the pillars of culture from below. Mankind is putrid like Lazarus and already exudes the stink of Sodomite death. What do you want with Hell in the Beyond?! Isn't the one we are living in now, and in which we are now burning, terrible enough? A time has once more come when Creation anxiously awaits the arrival of a God-man (Rom. VIII.10). These "Messianic laments" also announce the advent of the "Kingdom of Heaven" (basileia ton oyranon or toy theoy). The Sibylline Oracles (II.25) tell us when it will come: "There will be a scarcity of men throughout the whole world so that if one were to see a man's footprint on the ground, one would wonder ... then the great God who lives in the sky will be a Savior of pious men in all respects. Then also there will be deep peace and understanding, and the fruitful earth will again bear numerous fruits, being neither divided nor in servitude any longer. Every harbor, every port will be free for men as it was before." The "Kingdom of Heaven" is therefore a terrestrial concept -- an ideal, social and racially hygienic state!

Culture is impossible without slavery (Col. III.22), for this reason Jesus says in the Oxyrhynchus papyrus: "Ye ask who are those who draw you to the Kingdom ... The birds of the sky and all animals under the earth and upon the earth are, and the 'fish of the water' these are the ones which draw you onward. The Kingdom is within you, and whosoever knows himself will find it. The brain-value the noble race of man -- above all the Germanics -- gave to humanity must now be repaid as brain-interest by those of lesser value in the form of manual labor. Here I am not thinking so much of a subjugation of the colored races or Germanic people, but rather much more of a breeding of a new race of slaves with dull nerves and strong arms to this new race mental abilities will only be apportioned as necessary. These beings will have to do all the tasks for which machines can not be invented. To what extent apes, of the kind which are alive today, could be used for this purpose only time will tell. This may sound inhuman. But all the babble about Christian brotherly love is just a conjuring trick of words. As if from a thousand documents we did not know that Popes, bishops and abbots have sold and exchanged their ''bondsmen'' like merchandise? The practices of the Church form an inextricable contradiction to its doctrines! If the Church tolerated slavery, what should we be -- more papist than the Pope? Complete equality is nonsense! If all the estates of the Earth had to be divided up into 1600 million parts then each individual would get, if everything went well, a loincloth, a hole to live in and a handful of fruit every day! The social question is not a question of individual stomachs -- it is a racial question. In the view of the Socialists it is just those upper ten thousand who are in better-off circumstances who are the scoundrels. -- Who can say that expansion of equal rights should cease at the Australian Aborigines? Gorillas, chimpanzees and bats have exactly the same claim to socialistic "human rights." General equality would not advance the cause of the individual, but would hurl everyone back into the condition of a hoard of apes. How truly Paul speaks (I. Cor. XV.50): "Therefore I say, that Sodomite flesh and Sodomite blood can not inherit the Kingdom of God!" Humanitarian brotherly love is one of the most disastrous deceptions of the Sodomite apelings. Rome always preached brotherly love to the Germans only, the Germans should practice brotherly love. Rome -- the Romans and the Slavs -- never bothered themselves with brotherly love. I ask any historian: has Papal diplomacy ever been guided by brotherly love? Furthermore, I ask any cultural historian: has all this Christian brotherly love ever helped even one spiritual man? Everything the German spiritual men created, they created from within themselves. Brotherly love never did them any good, nor was it helpful to them. Swindlers have gorged themselves fat on the gifts of Christian brotherly love -- but to a Mozart, a Schubert, a Schiller and many, many other great men it denied even a dry piece of bread. If brotherly love does not serve the interests of such men, then it is not good for anything. Here we must finally intervene with force. Away with false and suicidal brotherly love which was invented by the Sodomite apelings and their pastors in order to strangle us, just like Russia convened the Peace Congress in order to subdue East Asia "in peace and quiet." We must arm ourselves against pity, our greatest weakness, with a god-like hard-heartedness, yet with one which seeks human benefit. The Socialists are indeed seduced enthusiasts, comparable to sheep who have lost their way, who need the forceful hand of a lord to lead them back to the protected herd. If they become stubborn we must not give in. We lords must check our charitable natures. If the Socialists go on strike, then we must go on strike with our charity. How come there are charitable institutions for hospitals, foundling hospitals, illegitimate children and fallen girls? How come there are no such institutions for the preservation of pure and noble blood and for legitimate children? There is much more in the way of culpable misfortune than there is in the way of innocent misfortune. With innocent misfortune aid should be given quickly and generously. Culpable misfortune must however, leave us without pity, because culpable misfortune comes from the person; whatever we give to such a person we are taking away from a fit person, who has hit a patch of misfortune through no fault of his own. I am obviously against all stipends, etc. whereby some juridical person is the administrator, and upon whom the dispensation of certain certificates is dependent. Such stipends are merely an invitation to corruption and nepotism. You should verify yourself, and then give with a generous hand. It is better to support generously an individual, where possible the best individual you can find, than to try to take care of many with a few pennies each. Those who should be supported are strictly the old, and those of good Germanic descent, and for Jews, those of true Israeli descent.

-- Theozoology, or the Science of the Sodomite Apelings and the Divine Electron, by Dr. Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels


Born on October 7, 1900, the second son of a Bavarian professor who became tutor to the son of the prince of Wittelsbach, Himmler grew up in the Catholic faith. At nineteen, he was earnest enough about his religion to have noted in his diary an internal conflict over a common fraternity practice: "During the sermon I had to endure an inner struggle more serious than any before. The dueling business constantly keeps cropping up. In the evening I prayed. I had, of course, earlier partly overcome it. God will continue to help me to overcome my doubts."

He must have decided that God was not opposed to dueling, because he regularly practiced it. Two decades later, as Reichsfuhrer SS, he expressed no such qualms over the Jewish massacre.

His diary entries recorded in meticulous detail the exact times of arrival and departure of buses and people, and the number of swims he took, banal impressions of books he read, pointing to a pedantic, assiduous character, prone to pontificating. He was a collector of stamps and secrets. He took it upon himself to spy on his elder brother's fiancee, going so far as to hire a private detective to gather incriminating evidence of her disloyalty and succeeding in ending the betrothal.

Once he left the safe haven of his snug middle-class family, his rigid character structure could not bend to the raw winds blowing through Germany. Never a careful thinker, he anguished over the impossibility of finding a respectable niche in the conventional society which gave him comfort. He had been an officer candidate during the war, but when it was over, there were rumors about attacks on officers in Bavaria by Communist revolutionaries. Himmler wrote to his parents, urging them to send civilian clothes so that he could travel unmolested. He also begged them: "Buy all of the coal you can and also all the food, even if you have to buy it by the pound. In 14 days there will be no more coal and no more electric light.... Father, you must join the Bayerisch Volkspartei, it is the only hope." A postscript, only for his father's eyes, cautioned: "Don't let mother go out alone at night. Not without protection. Be careful in your letters. You can't be sure."

In self-defense, Himmler slowly adopted more and more of the ideology of the radical right, to the distress of his moderate family. Sentimental novels extolling the traditional virtues gave way, in his reading, to vitriolic accounts of the origin of World War I. Like Sebottendorff, they blamed Germany's troubles on a Jewish-Freemasonic world conspiracy. The world-conspiracy theoreticians were themselves beginning to assume the proportions of a world conspiracy.

Some Catholics had long supported the view that Freemasons and Jews were liberal and potentially dangerous to the old order, but Himmler more and more withdrew from identification with the church which, though conservative, was not fanatical enough. He read the "hate" literature with delight, making terse comments in his diary:

A book that explains everything and tells us whom we must fight against next time. It is true and one has the impression that it is objective, not just hate-filled anti-Semitism. Because of this it has more effect. These terrible Jews. Even an initiate is shaken when he reads all this with understanding. If only some of the eternally blind could have it put before their eyes.


Writers like Fritsch, Chamberlain, and Gobineau helped him to justify his own frustrations, while the whole culture's increasing infatuation with spiritualism made it possible for him to bridge the gap between the death of the old religious faith and his personal longing for evidence of the existence of the supernatural.

The books he read signified a deep involvement with and leanings toward spiritualism and the occult. He labeled occult theories "unbelievably deep and significant" and particularly enjoyed Karl du Prel's Der Spiritismus ("Spiritualism") because it "really lets me believe in spiritualism and introduced me to it correctly for the first time."

He was impressed by the arguments for transmigration of souls in a book on life after death, and noted that it gave him "meaningful new grounds" for believing in it. This interest in and sympathy with the occult endured throughout his life. Without it, his role as Reichsfuhrer SS would have been played out quite differently.

As in the case of Lanz and Hitler, his occultism was bound up with eroticism. To all three, sexuality was decadent, and the loose morality of Western Europe after the war seemed to them to travel like a plague, spread by the "decadent" people, namely, the Jews. They believed Jews were bestial in their passions, corrupting pure German womanhood and making all women join the radical cause of feminism. They also saw the Jews as cunning, practical pimps and pornographers, able to profit materially from prostitution and from the growing interest in "filth." These were popular volkisch themes, and Himmler accepted them.

Right after World War I, Himmler was in contact with a number of Bavarian volkisch groups which were working to get rid of the republican government. In 1923 he joined the Free Corps, and he must have enjoyed the sense of participating in a grand design which was to lead Germany back to greatness. He was welcomed into the Nazi party because, as his superior, Gregor Strasser, put it, "the fellow's doubly useful -- he's got a motor-bike and he's full of frustrated ambition to be a soldier." Hinmler soon realized that he had a penchant for secret service.

When, in 1925, the SS (Schutzstaffel) was formed as a special bodyguard for Hitler in each district, Himmler was put in charge of his local unit. It brought him little glory at first. Its petty duties included soliciting for Party newspaper subscriptions. But in 1927, when the SS Order was nationalized, Himmler, because of his demonstrated administrative abilities, was made deputy leader, and in 1929, Reichsfuhrer SS. The nature of the organization changed. It became a central bureaucracy for dispensing terrorism, an elitist political police, giving Himmler powers second only to Hitler. What fitted Himmler for the job were his skill at pigeonholing people and assigning categories to them, and especially, the rigid personality defenses he had developed as a student. As Bradley Smith has pointed out in his biography, "the pose of omniscient hardness" which he developed early made it possible for him to overcome his awkwardness in social encounters and to impose himself on others, despite his lack of charisma. His "social mask" became a weapon habitually used to make others subordinate to his wishes. Thus, despite his colorlessness, he was able to compel his Black Guards to go against their own standards of morality and justify horrifying murder tactics as utopian idealism. He said proudly of his black-uniformed SS: "I know that there are many people in Germany who feel sick when they see this black tunic; we can understand that and do not expect to be beloved by overmany people."

Sometimes he saw his Black Guards as an elite cadre of Teutonic warriors, and sometimes as medieval knights protecting their lord, Adolf Hitler. Himmler's interest in the Germanic past and in the Middle Ages went back to his youth, when he used to spend summer vacations looking for ancient stones and artifacts, a hobby he learned from his father.

His belief in the transmigration of souls led him to think he was the reincarnation of the tenth-century German king Heinrich I the Fowler, with whom he communicated in his sleep. In 1937, he had the monarch's bones dug up and placed in the crypt of Quedlinburg Cathedral, after a holy procession. He chose the town of Quedlinburg, in the Harz Mountains, because it had been founded by the king. Himmler invited Germans to make a pilgrimage to the tomb to honor Heinrich the Fowler. Yearly, on July 2, the date of the king's death, Himmler held a midnight ritual in the clammy crypt. One of the great charms which the medieval monarch had for Himmler was his anti-Slav crusade. On the thousandth anniversary of Heinrich's death, Himmler stood before Wehrmacht officers and braided and medaled SS dignitaries and pledged to continue the crusade for German expansion in the east. It was not clear whether he was really talking about himself or about his namesake when he praised him.

Like List and Lanz, Himmler was obsessed with the secret medieval society called the Order of the Teutonic Knights. There, a candidate had to prove pure noble German ancestry for eight generations on both sides of the family tree. Himmler, in creating a secret order suitable for a mass society, naturally dispensed with the idea of social or economic aristocracy and made the whole Aryan race aristocratic, an idea which List and Lanz had popularized before him. He admired the rigid organization of the Teutonic Knights, and the strictness of their rules. But he must have admired their secrecy above everything else, given his personal propensity for secrets. Even in his brief stint as orderly-room clerk in the army's officer candidates' school, he had collected odd bits of personal information about his fellow cadets, as if in apprenticeship for the job of secret police chief which lay in his future. A few years later, Gregor Strasser laughed him to scorn when he heard about this, asking: "Whatever use do you suppose will derive from knowing who did fatigue duties for insubordination in the 119th Bavarian Infantry Regiment in 1919?" To which Himmler replied: "One never knows."

Himmler was so fanatical a spy that he noted about Party members: "Schwarz was playing Mendelssohn on his gramophone when I arrived. It is as well to know of Semitic sympathies." And: "I noticed in [Mucke's] bookcase a copy of Chamberlain's Foundations of the 19th Century. He is well chosen for the Fuhrer's personal troop." And about citizens in general: "In the fishmonger's there was a man who mentioned in a low voice to his wife that he suspected treachery in the ranks of the Party. I made it my business to find out his name from the shopkeeper. Such information might be useful in the future."

Himmler knew what a powerful motivation a secret order, with difficult rules and a hierarchical structure, could be; its mere existence held members together in a common bond, subject to the same vows of silence on certain questions.

In trying to create a new Order of Teutonic Knights out of his SS, Himmler was also mindful of the power of the Jesuits. According to his assistant, Walter Schellenberg, he deliberately built the SS organization on the principles of the Society of Jesus, using their statutes and spiritual exercises. In fact, Himmler was called' "the Black Jesuit" by his enemies and compared with the order's founder, Ignatius Loyola, by Hitler, who was pleased to have his fanatical devotion.

Schellenberg testified at the Nuremberg Trials that Himmler had

the best and richest library on the Jesuit Order, whose literature he perused at night for years. Thus he built up his SS organization according to Jesuit principles. Its basis was the constitution and the exercises of Ignatius de Loyola: Its supreme law was absolute, blind obedience.... Himmler himself, as SS General, was the Order's General Commander. In Westphalia, near Paderborn, he kept a medieval castle, the Wevelsburg, which served, so to say, as the SS monastery.... The roots of this attitude ... go back to his father's education and his severe Catholic conduct of life.


The essential principle which Himmler borrowed from the Jesuits was the oath of absolute blind obedience. In this, he outdid the Jesuits. Though he sought to eliminate all competition to his own esoteric order and officially abominated the Jesuits, they and the SS had a common enemy.

This enemy was the Freemason, who, in his resistance to the dogmas of Original Sin and Grace, in his tolerance and humanism, became the symbol of the Enlightenment, with its belief in the possibility of human perfectibility on earth. His was a rival universal superstate which threatened to replace the less flexible Catholic Church. It was rumored that the Jesuits had destroyed the eighteenth-century Order of the Illuminati by infiltrating the group, a mystical association started by Adam Weishaupt, a former Jesuit student, and diverting it from its original aims. The same suspicions were circulated about Jesuit intrigue in Masonic lodges. The introduction of hierarchical "higher degrees" into Freemasonry was scorned by some Masons as evidence of a Catholic spirit. There were papal bulls of condemnation against the Freemasons, but their power and political influence continued to increase throughout the Enlightenment. The new spirit, which was actually one of reason and an interest in material well-being, was viewed by the Church as a threat to the Faith.

The Jesuits used science in the service of faith, for their aim was never the dispassionate study of astronomy or biology, but the combating of "Satan," from the nineteenth century on, in the guise of materialism.

Germany was the home of the first Jesuit settlement. In Bavaria, particularly, the order stood firm against Lutheranism and held that section of the country, so much so that Munich was called "a German Rome."

The Counter Reformation in Germany was greatly helped by the erection of numerous schools. The zeal of the Jesuits filled the Lutherans with fear and trembling, and a vicious battle ensued; as Rene Fulop-Miller points out in The Power and Secret of the Jesuits, "it became more and more customary in Germany for men to express the strength of their religious convictions by filthy insults directed against their opponents."

It was in Bavaria, too, that the Jesuits introduced their unique system of "spiritual exercises," reporting to the Pope: "No small benefit has accrued from the Exercises. Some who were falling away are now strengthened, and some who had fallen away are now restored." The exercises spread widely among the Bavarians, adapted to the working classes, under the directive never to "lay too heavy a burden on a too little enlightened spirit or a too weak heart." An "exercise house" was created in Munich, where an efficient lay apostolate was produced.

The spiritual exercises of the Jesuits are designed to awaken the natural powers of the will and connect them with the divine will; the penitent is enjoined to undergo a rigorous series of pictorial imaginings lasting four weeks, during which time he comes to see, hear, smell, and feel scenes of Heaven and Hell. He strives to converse with Jesus and pictures the Incarnation. In an exercise called "composition: seeing the place," the imagination is used to clothe ideas with a visible form. There are prayers for a definite desire and an exercise called "fixing of the objects," and in the end, the penitent's life is changed. These exercises are considered the foundation of the order.

That Himmler practiced visualization is clear from Walter Schellenberg's account in his memoirs. When General Werner von Fritsch was brought to trial on the false accusation of homosexuality, Schellenberg reports:

I witnessed for the first time some of the rather strange practices resorted to by Himmler through his inclination toward mysticism. He assembled twelve of the most trusted SS leaders in a room next to the one in which von Fritsch was being questioned and ordered them all to concentrate their minds on exerting a suggestive influence over the General that would induce him to tell the truth. I happened to come into the room by accident, and to see these twelve SS leaders sitting in a circle, all sunk in deep and silent contemplation, was indeed a remarkable sight.


Himmler had derived his Round Table idea from the court of the twelfth-century Holy Roman emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Under the influence of knightly thought compulsion, the object of the Round Table's concentration had to submit his will to theirs.

The student of occultism will recognize in the projection of Himmler's picture the magical view that, through visualization, we can change reality. It is an important trick of the trade. This is how the occultist believes he exercises his power, by holding in his mind a mental picture of what he wishes to achieve.

Despite the fact that Himmler's odd ideas made him a ridiculous figure to his underlings, he ruled over them with an iron hand. In a quieter time, he would have been a harmless crank, cultivating his herb garden, studying astrology, graphology, antiquity, mesmerism. His pursuit of these interests in the midst of and even in the service of the most awful atrocities in history has made some historians suspect that he was mad. He had herb gardens planted right in the concentration camps. His order that prisoners be frozen and then, when near death, placed in bed with prostitutes (non-Aryan) to see if body heat and sexual passion could restore them to warmth was inspired by his belief in animal magnetism, the reciprocal action between all living bodies. Through his decrees to SS men on marriage and procreation, he hoped to create a mutant race of supermen. Under his direction, Jewish and Russian heads were severed and sent, in hermetically sealed containers, to a research center to be analyzed for subhuman traits. Just before the end of the war, with the Reich crumbling, Schellenberg arranged a meeting between Himmler and the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, to negotiate a surrender. Schellenberg urged his superior not "to expound his astrological and philosophical theories," but even at that tense moment Himmler could not resist putting aside the urgent talk of peace to lecture for an hour on runes. To the discerning eye, he insisted, the uninterrupted script of the Northmen of the Dark Ages resembled Japanese ideograms. This was evidence that the Japanese, too, were Aryans.

The image that Himmler apparently had of himself was that of an idealistic man of science. Yet it was a piece of role-playing, and one is never sure whether he really deceived himself as well as others with it. As fanatical and earnest as he was in the pursuit of his crazy researches, they were convenient rationales for his ideology, as they were for Hitler. The image of the dispassionate scientific researcher was often distorted. So, for instance, Hermann Rauschning reports a conversation with Himmler, incensed at the audacity of a professor who dared to criticize the Nazi dogma about the origins of the Teutons:

What ideas, he said, these gentlemen got into their heads! ... if the State or the party had declared that a certain view was regarded as the desired starting-point for scientific research, that view must be accepted simply as a scientific axiom....

"We don't care a hoot whether this or something else was the real truth about the prehistory of the German tribes [said Himmler]. Science proceeds from hypotheses that change every year or two. So there's no earthly reason why the party should not lay down a particular hypothesis as the starting-point, even if it runs counter to current scientific opinion. The one and only thing that matters to us, and the thing these people are paid for by the State, is to have ideas of history that strengthen our people in their necessary national pride.

"In all this troublesome business we are only interested in one thing -- to project into the dim and distant past the picture of our nation as we envisage it for the future. Every bit of Tacitus, in his Germania, is tendentious stuff. Our teaching of German origins has depended for centuries on falsification. We are entitled to impose one of our own.... Prehistory is the doctrine of the eminence of the Germans at the dawn of civilization."


Himmler's views and deeds were not the excesses of madness, though they were not always rational. They owe more to the dissociations of the fanatical occultist than they do to the divided personality. If he spent much of his own time and that of his men in investigating crankish researches, this did not diminish his talents for efficient organization.

If his reality was non-ordinary, it was not because he was crazy, but rather, as his masseur, Dr. Felix Kersten, tells us, because he was "extremely superstitious." He believed in "good and evil spirits" and was "always afraid of an invisible power" to which he would "one day have to give an account of himself." When Dr. Kersten asked him how, with this view, he could do the things he had to do, believing as he did that according to the doctrine of karma his deeds would determine his destiny in his next incarnation, Himmler answered:

You oughtn't to look at things from such a limited and egotistical point of view; you have to consider the Germanic world as a whole -- which also has its Karma. A man has to sacrifice himself, even though it is often very hard for him; he oughtn't to think of himself. Of course it's pleasanter to concern yourself with flower-beds rather than political dust-heaps and refuse-dumps, but flowers themselves won't thrive unless these things are seen to. I try to reach a compromise in my own life; I try to help people and do good, relieve the oppressed and remove injustices wherever I can. Do you think my heart's in all the things which have to be done simply from reasons of state? What wouldn't I give to be Minister for Religious Matters like [Bernhard] Rust and be able to dedicate myself to positive achievements only! ...


Over and over again, Himmler referred to the work of the SS men in concentration camps as sacrifice. It was as though they had to suffer a greater ordeal than their victims. One of his most interesting speeches to his officers sympathizes with this ordeal: "To have stuck it out, and at the same time ... to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written...."

Every cause has its idea of sacrifice, calling on the individual to give up his well-being for the sake of something greater. Himmler's idea of sacrifice was influenced by Eastern philosophy. He had read the Bhagavad-Gita, the Vedas, the Rig-Vedas, the sayings of Buddha, the Visudi-Magga, and the Book of Purity, and had learned to practice that detachment from his acts which, while it might seem silly or monstrous to the foolish, was purifying to the wise.

Karma required only that the individual carry on his unavoidable duties, disregarding the consequences. As it is written in the Bhagavad-gita: "One should not give up the activity to which one is born (sahajam karma: the duty incumbent on one through birth, caste, profession), even though this should be attended by evil; for all undertakings are enveloped by evil, as fire by smoke."

The disengagement from the effects of fulfilling one's duties was self-sacrifice.

Himmler was particularly fond of the Bhagavad-Gita, and told Dr. Kersten that he "never moved without it." He prized it for its "great Aryan qualities." He was also an avid student of the Arthasastra), Hinduism's anticipation of Machiavelli. This handbook of statecraft reached the West shortly before World War I. It seemed to Christian scholars to embody pagan wickedness, and though it was no more cynical than Machiavelli, it was not redeemed by his Western spirit. The Kautilya Arthasastra was especially cherished by Himmler. Here was laid out a crafty system for international espionage in the service of the tyrant state, from which a fanatical Nazi flunky could learn a good deal. Its Oriental despots and warriors were Himmler's people -- Aryans. Their amorality accorded well with his own, and could even be linked to the divine essence. The artifices and cunning advocated by the Kautilya were nowhere practiced more heartily than in the Third Reich, where hypocrisy and deception were raised to a fine art.

Himmler began more and more to propagate occult ideas among the SS. When several astronomers were courageous enough to call Hoerbiger's theory an outmoded concept, Himmler answered:

I advocate unrestricted research of whatever kind and that includes unrestricted research into glacial cosmogony. I intend to encourage that research and in so doing I find myself in the best of company ... as the Fuhrer, too, is a convinced supporter of this theory so much abominated by scientific hacks.... the Ministry ... must put these opinionated schoolmasters in their place. There are a great many things we should like to see researched, even by non-scientists.


Under his supervision in the SS, a great many things were researched. The crank succeeded eventually in having millions of men explore his fanatical notions, sending to their ruin millions more.
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Re: Gods & Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

Postby admin » Sun Jun 21, 2015 12:22 am

CHAPTER 10: The Black Knights

The selection of the new Fuhrer class is what my struggle for power means. Whoever proclaims his allegiance to me is, by this very proclamation and by the manner in which it is made, one of the chosen. This is the great significance of our long, dogged struggle for power, that in it will be born a new master class, chosen to guide the fortunes not only of the German people but of the world.

-- Hitler


Though we have not yet learned all of the secrets of the SS and may never learn them, we do know some of them. We know that it was an occult society. This may enlighten us as to how more than a million SS men could change, in the space of a few years, from ordinary citizens to mass murderers. Some of them must have participated in the Final Solution just to get on, in a period when it was surely not easy just to get on. But we cannot fail to comment on the zealousness -- the overzealousness -- with which most men approached their tasks. Fear of punishment does not quite account for it. There were many options, not picked up, to quietly sabotage the SS machine without detection. One could seem perfectly willing to perform an unpleasant task and yet raise questions as to its efficacy. So, for example, the deputy head of the Nazi Health Bureau, Dr. Kurt Blome, wrote to his superior, Arthur Greiser, on November 18, 1942, about the order to exterminate all the Polish population who were tubercular:

There is no doubt that the method proposed is the simplest and most radical. If there could be an absolute guarantee that the matter would be kept secret, one could stifle any scruples one might have. But I believe complete secrecy to be simply impossible and experience shows that we must work on that assumption. Suppose that according to plan these sick persons are despatched to Germany ostensibly for treatment or cure but in practice do not return; however strict the secrecy, their relatives will one day realize that there is "something not quite in order" here. It must also be remembered that there are large numbers of Polish workers in Germany who will be questioned about the whereabouts of their fellow countrymen; in addition, a number of Germans are related to Poles, either directly or by marriage, and they will get to know of the deportation of these people. Definite information regarding this action will soon filter through and will be seized upon by enemy propaganda. The euthanasia affair showed us the form which this propaganda will take and the methods it will use. Political repercussions may be all the greater in that we are dealing with members of a defeated nation....

I therefore believe that before action begins, these points should be put to the Fuhrer, since in my view he alone is capable of considering all the implications and making the decision....


By this means, Blome caused Himmler to reconsider, and the lives of thousands of Poles were saved.

In order to make sense of the brutal activities of the SS, it must be seen that its members were motivated, for the most part, not by sadism, but by sacrifice in a fanatical utopian cause which suspended normal judgment. Present-day occult groups have improved our understanding of the human capacity for personality change and for expanding the boundaries of endurance. They show us how malleable people are. They give us new insights into how an appeal to idealism and a training for self-sacrifice can prepare people for deeds which transcend individual conscience.

Membership in the SS seemed to present an opportunity to become part of a utopian society -- its most vital part. The Nazi revolution, like the Communist revolution, aimed to turn things around, but instead of a class struggle, it was concerned with a racial struggle. A new class would be brought to power, not the old aristocracy, but a new aristocracy, based on the inherent nobility of the Aryan blood. The master race was to be the culmination of a biological evolution. If "inferior" races prevented these goals, the master race would be justified, by the "natural law" of Darwinism, in doing whatever it needed to survive the harsh struggle for existence. This had an immediate appeal to the masses. Sons of middle-class men, like Himmler, who could not even hope, in that gray time of the twenties and thirties, to approach the comfortable standard of living of their fathers, now saw an escape route.

It was not necessarily outcasts or scoundrels who joined the SS, but ordinary people, members of the lower and middle classes, who saw in it a chance to participate in a movement with which they could identify. They were to be the warriors against the enemy. They recognized the enemy. Many of these men had fathers who had read the books of List, Lanz, Fritsch, and Chamberlain and believed in the mystical racist package. The churches, too, had shown sympathy with the volkisch ideas. In school, the future Nazis had been taught by people who had been conditioned by the same Zeitgeist. On joining the SS, then, a man had little to unlearn.

As a bulwark against the horror of the future, in which all the avenues of growth seemed to be closed, the organization promised new options. The renunciation of personality which it required of the individual he gladly assented to. For the sake of being part of a utopian society which would usher in a golden age, he was willing to give up personal liberty. He had been told for some time, anyway, that individual liberty was a fiction. Often, it was only the liberty to go down the drain. If, in the process of the SS training, an individual was transformed into a machine, he could justify it with the propaganda that he was on the way to becoming "the new man." As Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, put it: "We were told all the time we were the elect, we were to be the Fuhrer's and Himmler's special instrument for creating a new Reich. They became our conscience, we lost our personal moral self-determination."

There was a feeling that "the Last Days were at hand," that the "subhuman" Jew, Satan in disguise, had to be prevented, by any means, from taking over the world. A crusade of the elect, in absolute obedience to the will of the charismatic Fuhrer, was a "divine mission." As Himmler told the SS:

We shall unremittingly fulfill our task.... We shall take care that never more in Germany, the heart of Europe, can the Jewish-Bolshevik revolution of subhumans be kindled internally or by emissaries from abroad. Pitilessly we shall be a merciless executioner's sword for all these forces whose existence and doings we know ... whether it be today, or in decades, or in centuries.


If Germany after World War I was a man-made jungle, the new man was the natural man, very much at home in the economic and psychic swamp. Encouraged to "think with his blood" and to renounce the bourgeois shackles of humanism, he turned, as Himmler had, from the tender romanticism of knightly deeds and pure fellow-feeling to the savage romanticism of barbaric slaughter. In this, he was the archetypal twentieth-century man, daring to destroy the old forms so that the new could be born. He was a modern warrior, accomplished in technology, who reverted to savagery, so that, in a curious way, he came to embody both rationalism and irrationalism.

These were not the only ambiguities. Though SS men were trained to be the first stage in a superhuman mutation, and already behaved as if they were supermen, they also exhibited a robotlike quality. Fearless and cruel, they were also capable of a cringing subservience to superiors. What was the nature of the order which could contain such paradoxes?

It was an elite society, with strict conditions for acceptance. Himmler himself scrutinized applicants' photographs for an intuition into their breeding. They had to prove that only pure Aryan blood had flowed into their veins for three generations. They had to meet certain requirements of racial appearance, physical condition, and general bearing. Intellectual attainments were not considered. They had to go through innumerable political and physical tests, demonstrate that there were no hereditary imperfections in their families, and be examined for racial purity by a board of doctors, racial specialists, and SS officers. The ratio of height to physique was important:

No one could be under 1.70 meters [5' 7"], and if he were over 1.80 [5'11"] or 1.85 [6'1"], although this was in itself gratifying, the height must be balanced by the harmony of the rest of the body -- the lower thigh, for example, must be in proportion to the upper. The hands, the gait, the bearing must be those of the desirable SS man, an ideal physical and psychological type on whose specifications they had been working since 1931, said Himmler.


Even underarm perspiration was made a distinguishing characteristic.

If the applicant met the specifications, he was then made a candidate. He had to swear an oath of loyalty, bravery, and obedience unto death to his superiors and to Hitler. An SS lieutenant general had to swear further that he would not favor his own offspring or those of other SS men.

In the prolongation of examination and testing, Himmler copied the Jesuits, with their two-year-long period of rigorous tests and exercises for novices before they allowed them to take the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Before a candidate was allowed to consider himself an SS man, he had to pass through a year-long course to win his sports badge, a period in the Labor Service, and two years in the army. Then, after an intensive course of indoctrination, he had to wait until the following November 9 to become a full member. At 10:00 P.M. in the Nazi shrine in Munich, the acolyte attended a special mystical ceremony binding him to his Fuhrer, who was present. The scene before the Feldherrnhalle was described thus by a Nazi, Emil Helfferich: "Tears came to my eyes when, by the light of the torches, thousands of voices repeated the oath in chorus. It was like a prayer."

Himmler had replaced the Catholic catechism with his own series of questions and answers, which he dinned into each SS man's head, as for example:

QUESTION: Why do you obey?

ANSWER: From inner conviction, from belief in Germany, in the Fuhrer, in the Movement and in the SS, and from loyalty.


Himmler was known as "the Black Jesuit," and created a hierarchical structure with a graded series of privileges, separating the higher orders from the lower orders, with himself as "General of the Order." He understood well the elitist leanings of his men, and their fear of losing their status. Everyone was constantly spying on everyone else, and even the top officers were not exempt from being visited by emissaries who arrived unannounced to see whether things were being done according to regulations. Naturally, then, despite the conditioning these men were daily receiving that they were the hope of civilization, they lived in constant dread of being discovered to be in some way unworthy of such a high calling. As Robert Ley pointed out:

He who fails or actually betrays the party and its Fuhrer ... will not thereby merely be deprived of an office, but he personally, together with his family, his wife, and his children, will be destroyed. These are the harsh and implacable laws of an Order. On the one hand men may reach to the skies and grasp whatever a man can desire. On the other hand lies the deep abyss of annihilation.


Yet there was a fierce pride in having been chosen for a superhuman task, and the romanticism persisted:

And how they drilled us till we howled with rage -- over obstacle courses, crawling through pipes; pack drills and long route marches in the heat, with the taps all turned off so that we could not drink. Yet no one would dream of asking for a transfer, such was the comradeship. One got so that one lost all criticism; one just lived in this life; one was simply an SS man. One lost the thin thread to the parents. There was no other thought than Kadavergehorsam.


Kadavergehorsam -- cadaver obedience -- was achieved not just through fear but through the creation of a religious fanaticism which separated SS members from everyone else. The SS order was a state within a state, not subject to national law, with its own laws, courts, and judges. A curtain separated Himmler's empire from the outside world; other Germans, no matter how lofty their position, could not penetrate it. SS men were discouraged from contact with others. Concentration-camp guards could not be stationed near home, were shifted to new locations every three months, and could never be transferred to street duty.

The SS was a secret society, as the journalist Heinz Hohne observed:

... intended to be mysterious, sinister and incomprehensible to the ordinary citizen, like the Order of Jesuits which the SS officially abominated but actually imitated down to the smallest detail. The Lords of this black-uniformed secret Order deliberately cultivated the fear evoked by their mere existence.... [Reinhard] Heydrich [deputy chief of the Gestapo] ... boasted: "The Gestapo, the Kriminalpolizei (Criminal Police) and the security services are enveloped in the mysterious aura of the political detective story."


Even as early as 1927, the SS's slogan was: "The aristocracy keeps its mouth shut." Members were not allowed to take part in discussions at Party meetings. They were to remain silent, and refrain from smoking or leaving the room. One of the early orders was:
Even in the face of unjustified criticism, SS men and SS commanders are strictly forbidden to converse with SA [Sturm Abteilung -- Storm Troopers] men and commanders or with civilian members of the party other than as necessary for the performance of duty. Should criticism be voiced in a small gathering, members of the SS will immediately and silently leave the room with a curt comment that the SS carries out Adolf Hitler's orders.


As an early memorandum suggested, the SS was organized to be "a secret Order within the Party to hold the movement together in an iron grip." An inner circle of twelve SS officers of top rank met in secret for conference and meditation in a monastery in Wevelsburg, Westphalia, which Himmler had turned into a castle, refurbishing it at tremendous expense. The town was built on the foundations of a burgh that went back to Charlemagne, and Himmler supposedly searched the province for this castle because he had heard that in the next confrontation with the East, a Westphalian castle would be the only stronghold to survive.

In the 100-by-145-foot dining room, circling a round oak table, each officer-knight sat on a high-backed pigskin chair, a silver plate engraved with his name hanging from the back. Each wore his own coat-of-arms and slept in a room done in period style suitable to a particular German hero -- Himmler, of course, choosing King Heinrich I, whose spirit apparently gave him invaluable counsel. Himmler would say, on occasion: "In this case King Heinrich would have acted as follows." Heinrich I was not the only great spirit of the past with whom Himmler was able to communicate. He believed he had the power to call up others and hold conferences with them, but only if they had been dead for hundreds of years.

In the bowels of the castle was a funereal room containing a sunken well and a hollowed-out stone pillar. When one of the twelve top-ranking officers died, his ashes were placed in a cremation urn by the well. His escutcheon was burned on top of the pillar and the smoke would rise above the well, because of a cleverly arranged ventilating scheme.

For a week once a year, Himmler and his twelve Knights of the Round Table, in an atmosphere of secret confinement, gave themselves over completely to mental and spiritual exercises of visualization.

A professor of anthropology at Occidental College in California, C. Scott Littleton, provided me with astonishing details of another SS ceremony which has not been corroborated by anyone else, but which may well be true. A professor friend of his, he claims, saw original Nazi depositions taken for the Nuremberg Trials, but never included in the record, which told of a periodic sacrifice wherein a fine Aryan specimen of an SS man was beheaded and the severed head made a vehicle for communion with Secret Masters in the Caucasus. These beings, presumably, were not believed to be earthly, and were looked to for guidance.

The "Mumia" of a thing is its life-principle. "From the use of the Mumia have resulted the greatest and mysterious magnetic cures; for some persons who have learned to know and understand the action and power of their own Mumia, and that even a small dose of it attracts unto itself the powers of the whole body, like the magnet attracts iron, have in this way cured themselves of many ills "(Philosoph., tract iii.).

"The Mumia of the dead body is useless, and the Mumia that is prepared by embalming a corpse is good for nothing but to serve as food for worms. The most efficacious Mumia is that of a person who died in an unnatural manner while his body was in good health; such a one, for instance, as has been hung or decapitated, or whose body has been broken on the wheel. A person who dies a slow death in consequence of some disease loses his powers before he dies, and putrefaction begins often in such cases even while the patient is still alive. His Mumia will then be worthless. But if our physicians knew the occult powers of the Mumia of persons that have died sudden deaths, they would not permit the body of an executed criminal to hang at the gallows for over three days, but they would take it away and use it for medical purposes. Such a Mumia is very powerful, especially after it has been exposed to the influence of the air, the sun, and the moon."

"The Mumia of a being who dies a violent death in the air returns to the air; the Mumia of a body is taken up by that element in which the body is decomposed. If a person is drowned, his Mumia will go to the element of water; if he is burnt, it will go to that of the fire" (Philosoph., tract iii).

"These three kinds of Mumia have very wonderful occult powers, and many strange feats may be performed through their use by those who know how to employ them, especially by such as have taken the Mumia themselves from the persons for whose life it served as a vehicle. Such people are executioners, hangmen, and murderers, and the latter sometimes kill a man for the mere purpose of obtaining his Mumia to perform wicked things. But for such people it would have been better if a millstone had been hung about their necks and they had been thrown into the sea, because they will themselves end in a pitiful manner, and their souls will experience the evil which they themselves have created."

On account of the great occult power contained in the Mumia, it is used in witchcraft and sorcery. "Witches and sorcerers may make a bargain with evil spirits, and cause them to carry the Mumia to certain places where it will come in contact with other people, without the knowledge of the latter, and cause them harm. They take earth from the graves of people who have died of the plague, and infect other people with it. They also infect the cattle, spoil the milk, and cause a great deal of damage, and the injured people do not know the cause of the evils that afflict them. A great deal might be said in regard to this subject, but we will not write it down, because we do not desire to give instructions in sorcery, or enable the wicked to use the knowledge obtained for the purpose of injuring others" (De Pestilitate).

-- The Life of Paracelsus, by Franz Hartmann, M.D.


Whether this is true or not, we do know that in schools of instruction at Wevelsburg and other, less completed castles at Sonthofen in Bavaria, Vogelsang in Rhenanie, and Krossinsee in Pomerania, candidates were systematically prepared to participate in atrocities. Each school had its dormitories, refectories, chapel room, meditation cloister, and private cemetery. In Wevelsburg, a library of twelve thousand volumes comprising all of the known literature relating to the cult of race was made available.

Rene Alleau relates that in each of these schools, men, stripped to the waist and without any defensive weapons, were taught to become hard by such ordeals as fighting off for twelve minutes attack dogs that were unleashed and incited to kill. If the candidates took flight, they were shot. Another gruesome preparation for pitilessness, according to Alleau, consisted of tearing out the eyes of three cats with one's bare hands. Throughout these barbarities, one had to show utter indifference to sorrow.

Nietzsche argued that in any case pity is only a form of egoism; whether we do good or evil to others, it is with the object of feeling our own power, and that we may bring others under our dominion. The aristocrat tries to bend his equals to his will; the slave is contented with easy triumphs and seeks to control others -- the sick, the wretched -- by pitying them. The aristocrat hates to be pitied; the slave enjoys it.

But apart from this, pity interferes with the law of natural selection; it tends to preserve those who, if left to themselves, would not survive in the struggle for existence, and who ought not to survive. Their survival increases the sum of misery in the world; directly, by perpetuating a degenerate, useless and miserable species; indirectly, in so far as the sight of pain, deformity, ugliness or sorrow is liable to disturb the balance of the Super-man, and even, either by excess of disgust or of compassion, to drag him down from his high estate to pessimism or to asceticism.

The inundation of pity into modern life, says Nietzsche, is only another proof that we have become effeminate, and that we are afraid of pain. We not only fear pain for ourselves; we cannot even bear the idea of suffering in others. Such cowardice, he says, like every other form of fear, is contemptible. Instead of abolishing suffering, he would make life harder than it has ever been. All human progress has been brought about by suffering. There is in man a creature and a creator. The creature needs "to be moulded, broken, hammered, rent, scorched, burnt, purified." Suffering is good for the creature and pity is out of place. The creator suffers, but scorns pity and should not be insulted by the sight of it.

Nietzsche did not stop there. Believing, as we have seen, that "slavery is one of the necessary conditions of a high culture," he declared that "the misery of men who vegetate, in pain, ought to be still further increased in order to allow a small number of olympian geniuses to produce great works of art." While, to spare future generations the depressing spectacle of misery and ugliness, we ought to have the courage, not only to leave those who are ripe for death to their fate, but to push them on their way even faster than they are inclined to go of their own accord. It is necessary for the Super-man, therefore, to be able to inflict suffering of all kinds without faltering. Even feeble women and slaves can endure. "But not to succumb to inner distress and uncertainty, when one inflicts severe pain and hears the cry of that pain -- that is great, that is a condition of greatness."

Every surgeon ought to know how much truth there is in the sentence just quoted.

-- Nietzsche and Madame Blavatsky: Their Doctrines Stated and Compared, by Theosophical Quarterly Magazine 1909-1912


Officer candidates were often told to pull a pin out of a grenade, balance it on their helmets, and stand at attention until it exploded.

Such training gave men the ability to walk unmoved among corpses. And such ferocities were coupled, in the classroom, with racist educational courses designed to separate the SS man further from the outside world, because they were deliberately anti-Christian and quickly created a climate of neo-paganism. Christian names were replaced with Teutonic names. Christmas was brought forward to the winter solstice and celebrated as Yuletide, which, an SS manual assured, was the

greatest festival of our forebears. They advanced towards the Yule-night with firebrands to liberate the sun from bondage of wintry death, and thought of it as a young hero come to rouse and free them from their death-like sleep.... On Christmas eve the main ingredients of festive fare must be carp, roast goose and wild boar -- drawn respectively from the sphere of water, air and earth.... in view of the fact that [this] is the greatest clan festival -- it is becoming customary to ... exchange ideas about the success of the steadily deepening research into family genealogies.


The cult of ancestors, which Himmler fostered to give his men a feeling of being part of a great continuum, also took in the Germanic forebears of the Middle Ages. Like Lanz's New Templars, SS members delved into the occult mysteries of the Grail legends. All their mystical rituals, says Joachim Fest,

not only conferred a special distinction but also placed them under a special obligation.... had the additional purpose of overwhelming those present with a melancholic shudder at his [Himmler's] innate demonism. Over and above this, they were intended to inspire those states of rapture which are so easily transformed into brutal and merciless violence. But none of this belies the initiatory character of these solemn hours, which amounted to a repeated act of consecration and total commitment to a community opposed to all traditional ties, one that seriously demanded "unconditional liberation from the old social world of caste, class and family" and "proclaimed its own 'law' as springing unconditionally from the mere fact of belonging to the new community."


Since the members of this new community were heirs to the old German nobility, it mattered with whom they mated and begot children. The future of the German people depended on it. Himmler laid down elaborate rules for marriage. How he must have enjoyed prying into the most intimate details of his men's lives. Future wives had to pass the same rigorous test for Aryanism as SS men. At christenings, as at deaths, the priest was supplanted by the local SS leader. Every fourth child born to an SS man received a present of a candlestick with the inscription "You are only a link in the clan's endless chain." The breeding catalogs of the order's Race and Settlement Bureau read like one of Lanz von Liebenfels' tracts. Men were urged to have children out of wedlock with racially pure women, and there were special facilities set up for these purposes.

At the height of the war, Himmler had so many of his men and so much money involved in esoteric research projects that it began to seem as if he hoped to turn the tide in Germany's favor by fathoming the secrets of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, the occult meaning of Gothic spires and the top hats worn by the boys at Eton, and the symbolism involved in the suppression of the Ulster harp. These projects were all undertaken by the Foreign Intelligence Service.

The most ambitious researches were done by the Ahnenerbe, which had a group of financiers called the Circle of Friends, led by Wilhelm Keppler, pay enormous sums for a flight to Tibet to look for traces of a pure Germanic race which might have been able to keep intact the ancient Nordic mysteries. The Ahnenerbe also had archeologists digging up all of Europe for remains of Germanic culture. More than fifty departments in this branch succeeded in spending over a million marks ($400,000) on such "vital" matters.

But the most incredible research of all was set up in 1939 in Berlin. An astrologer, Wilhelm Wulff, who was made prisoner of the SS and coerced into working for it, described the Berlin Institute's scientific research center as being used "to harness, not only natural, but also supernatural, forces. All intellectual, natural, and supernatural sources of power -- from modern technology to medieval black magic, and from the teachings of Pythagoras to the Faustian pentagram incantation -- were to be exploited in the interests of final victory."

In March 1942, the astrologer joined this "very strange company, which included spiritualist mediums and sensitives, pendulum practitioners (dowsers who used a pendulum instead of a dowsing rod), students of Tattwa (an Indian pendulum theory), astrologers and astronomers, ballistics experts, and mathematicians."

Under the direction of a navy captain who believed that British Intelligence was able to find the whereabouts of German U-boats simply by sitting in the Admiralty office in London and swinging a pendulum over a map, noticing when the pendulum would begin to rotate, and radioing a message to British destroyers telling them the exact location of the U-boats, Himmler decided to have his people do the same. (Actually, the British had simply succeeded in breaking the secret German code.)

One member of the German team, Ludwig Straniak, a Salzburg writer and architect, claimed that he could hold a pendulum over a picture of a boat and then "search" the map with the same pendulum. The German Admiralty was impressed, and let him swing. He and others sat for hours on end, day after day, arms outstretched over maps, but, says Wilhelm Wulff, who was also adept in occultism, "the results were, of course, pitiful. Whatever one may think about occult phenomena, it was simply ridiculous to expect that an unknown world could be forcibly opened up in this dilettante fashion and exploited for military purposes." When the experimenters "began to suffer from nervous exhaustion," the project was moved out of Berlin and into "quieter and more salubrious surroundings on the island of Sylt, perhaps on the basis that a little ozone would help the 'vibrations.'"

Wulff, as a student of Vedanta and Buddhist yoga, went on to work with German soldiers, instilling in them "the Zen-Buddhist beliefs which inspired the Japanese."

The pendulum swingers surfaced again in 1943, after Mussolini was arrested by the government of Pietro Badoglio. Although Hitler was most anxious to rescue him, German Intelligence could not find out where he was held captive. The same occultists who had been arrested after Hess's flight were now released and taken to a villa in Wannsee, where Himmler ordered them to use pendulums, clairvoyance, astrology, or any other means to locate the missing dictator. As Schellenberg recounts:

These seances cost a mint of money because what the "scientists" needed in the way of good food, drinks and smokes was enormous.... After a while a pendulum maestro said ... island to the west of Naples. In fact the Duce had first been taken to one of the small Ponza islands that he indicated. It must be stated in all justice that the man had no contact with the outside world at the time of the experiment.


Though this experiment is innocuous enough, it is a further demonstration that an occult climate existed in the SS. Its members could not have accepted the crazy ideology which goaded them into ridding the world of supposed evil by wiping out millions of people if they had not first been turned into robots, methodically and successfully, so that one of their leaders, Robert Ley, could announce to them: "When I look at you my men, I know that the principles on which we mustered you are right. Externally you already look alike and in a short time you will be alike inside as well."

We are learning now, from contemporary cults in America, that the process of turning human beings into robots can actually begin quite innocently. Among SS men, it was so effective that even at the end of the war, they were still able to call their unscrupulous acts sacred deeds.
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Re: Gods & Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

Postby admin » Sun Jun 21, 2015 12:24 am

CHAPTER 11: The Children's Crusade

My teaching is hard. Weakness has to be knocked out of them. In my Ordensburgen a youth will grow up before which the world will shrink back. A violently active, dominating, intrepid, brutal youth -- that is what I am after. Youth must be all those things. It must be indifferent to pain. There must be no weakness or tenderness in it. I want to see once more in its eyes the gleam of pride and independence of the beast of prey.... In this way I shall eradicate the thousands of years of human domestication. Then I shall have in front of me the pure and noble natural material. With that I can create the new order.

-- Hitler


Nineteenth-century German youth was not yet hard. It was innocent. And it usually belonged to one or another youth group, whether religious, athletic, nature, cultural, or a combination of these. Some of them built medieval castles in the air. They were all an expression of restlessness and bewilderment, and well they might have been, for Germany, especially after World War I, was a place which was losing its hold on sense and purpose. Young people not only felt estranged from the government, but from adults in general. Though the same could be said of youth throughout Europe, particularly in the middle class, the difference in Germany was that it did not, for the most part, attach itself to the liberal cause, the way youth movements elsewhere did.

The German youth movement began at the end of the nineteenth century and was not at all political at first. It was a romantic protest against a society in which young people were superfluous. Middle-class youth had been educated and brought up to believe that they could claim their birthright on coming of age. Work and position would be theirs. In adolescence they experienced the culture shock of Kafkaesque alienation. Meaningful work and the status that went with it were claimed by the lucky few. To the rest, young manhood ushered in a period of drift.

The youth groups filled a vacuum. Everyone seemed to recognize that it was the end of an age, and that the futility and smallness which men now felt would not aid them in getting out of the snares of mechanized modern life. The youth groups, whatever their particular character, had certain things in common: They all promised liberation from artificiality, alienation, and sterility, and wholeheartedly opposed the bourgeoisie, which stood for everything that had failed them. They brought back the romanticism of the Middle Ages. Its simple faith, loyalty, and high-minded love contrasted with the impersonality and decadence around them. But it was not to be all feudal music and peasant crafts. The youth movement early on fell under the spell of third-rate philosophers with extremist notions, men like the occultist Theodor Fritsch; the Orientalist Paul de Lagarde; and Julius Langbehn, who believed he had sufficient magical powers to exorcise the demons from Friedrich Nietzsche, then languishing in an asylum.

Racism became violent and brutal and mixed with occultism through the influence of men like Lanz von Liebenfels and List. Lanz's comic-book heroes appealed to the young. They were larger-than-life and boosted the adolescent egos of their German readers, who could identify with their pure-blooded rage against the despoilers of civilization. List's fantasies were equally flattering. His glorification of Germanic history and deification of nature were bathed in the rosy glow of a sun which symbolized hidden psychic powers. As the historian George L. Mosse made clear in The Culture of Western Europe: "These men believed that their ideals possessed a tremendous magnetism for the hopeless, rationalistic world of the present.... Some took to the spiritualism of Madame Blavatsky or to the fad for Oriental sects which promised nirvana from the present."

The whole of Germany was swept up in this esoteric wave, and youth more than anyone. The peculiarly nineteenth-century phenomenon, spiritualism, and its more "scientific" variation, Theosophy, in Germany were welded together with a mystical concept of the Volk as a people whose collective "soul" was more than the sum of its parts. This Aryan "soul," Germans believed, united the individual German to his geographical place. Every tree and rock of German soil was holy, and spoke to the people, shaping them and causing their creativity. The intuitive wisdom of which the Aryans, rooted in their land, were capable was hidden from the Jews, those eternal wanderers, who had no organic place of their own and, therefore, tried to usurp the fatherland of others. On this account, the Jew was most comfortable in the city, alienated from nature and the Volk Spiritualism joined itself to the idea of the Volk, in that nature emitted a vital ether, a life force, with which only the Aryan was in touch. He alone could contact an extrasensory world which would yield up its secrets and give him special powers.

The new romanticism was, above all, irrational, and this seemed to guarantee its easy acceptance. It peddled itself as more substantial than the discoveries of science, because science itself did not claim to understand the dark mysteries of the force which drove nature, whereas Madame Blavatsky and others like her did. List, borrowing her Theosophy, also did. Her "ancient wisdom," transposed by him into Germanic wisdom which had been destroyed by Christianity, could be revived through intuition, and would explain the essence of things. German mystics developed an ideology, a hodgepodge of the occult, racism, and romanticism which, while ridiculous, went down surprisingly well with youth hunting for certainties. Many young people, Walter Z. Laqueur points out in Young Germany,

joined one of the many new religious and occult sects whose prophets grew like mushrooms in the volkisch camp between the First and Second World War. Of such were Mathilde Ludendorff's [the general's wife] Tannenberg Bund, Arthur Dinter's group, the Asgard Circle, or Gustav Muller's sect, which believed that the human soul was an amalgamation of three or four animal souls ("according to reliable reports from beyond"), and that the planet Mars was the place where man first appeared.


To children whose fathers had been killed in the war, the leaders of these groups became surrogates. To adolescents disturbed by a fragmented society, they offered solidity. To students who knew that nothing awaited them upon graduation from school, they offered immersion in the group. To alienated youth drifting into dreary, unfriendly cities, they offered companionship. To young people bewildered by the intricacies of sex, they offered the solution of rigorous puritanism. To children who could no longer believe in the God of their fathers, they offered a new, modern God. To those thirsting for absolute meanings, they provided absolute answers.

As one participant put it (in E. Y. Hartshorne's German Youth and the Nazi Dream of Victory):

Mysticism and everything mystical had dominion over us. It was in our ranks that the word Fuhrer originated, with its meaning of blind obedience and devotion. The word Bund arose with us, too, with its mysterious undertone of conspiracy. And I shall never forget how in those early days we pronounced the word Gemeinschaft ["community"] with a trembling throaty note of excitement, as though it hid a deep secret.


He goes on more objectively:

The tragedy of the appeal of this mysticism to the youth of the post-war period was that it offered them a dreamy haven of refuge from the pressing problems of the day.

A significant proportion of cultured idealistic youth was thus, for years on end, and at the most impressionable age, withdrawn from the tasks of their time, and estranged. Instead of learning to see things as they were, and freeing themselves from the dangerous tradition of German escape-idealism, they became victims of a deceptive mysticism which made them easy victims for the National Socialists. Furthermore, by yielding to the lure of this mysticism, toward which an attitude of rational criticism was sure to mean angry expulsion from the "group," these boys lost all capacity for criticism. At a time when the blind obedience of the soldier was regarded as unworthy of rational men, they adopted the habit of a far more sinister obedience: the servile subordination of the mind under the yoke of an ideology.


The divine essence, or elan vital, or life force, or vril, was believed to be electromagnetic -- "Theo-zoological," in Lanz's terminology. Since the sun was the repository of this energy, it became the fashion for German youth groups, as for occult groups generally, to adopt the emblem of the swastika, a symbol for the sun. The festival of the changing sun, an old pagan ritual, was given a new occult twist by the Sera Circle, in that the cosmic rays were thought to emit esoteric knowledge along with warmth. List's Armanen believed that the solar symbol held the key to an ancient "secret science" and that by communing with the ghostly spirits present in certain Germanic ruins, mysterious veils of the past would be lifted. The Cosmic Circle practiced pagan rituals intended to arouse the life force and awaken clairvoyant powers in people of Germanic blood. In their songs and dances, the groups tried to recreate that primordial kinship with nature which they supposed ancient man to have had. They abhorred science and reason as enemies of the life of the soul. Many of them became vegetarians and teetotalers, for they believed that the purification of the physical body would help the soul to see reality. They threw over orthodox medicine for spiritual and herbal healing, which were somehow felt to be closer to the primal source.

One reason why any one who desires to develop his spirituality should, if his condition otherwise permits it, adopt a vegetarian diet, is that the flesh of animals exercises a stimulating effect upon the lower and animal instincts, which ought to be overcome instead of being aroused. The scientific explanation of this action of flesh is, that each material thing is an expression of its soul, and that it contains some of the qualities of that soul or life (Kama), and communicates them to a certain extent to those in whom it is taken up.

-- The Life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim Known by the Name of Paracelsus and the Substance of his Teachings, by Franz Hartmann, M.D.


The youth movement in Germany was essentially conservative because it stressed the importance of the link with the past -- not with the traditions of one's parents and grandparents, but with the rites of one's remote ancestors. While Communist youth was being taught to believe in a classless society in which the individual was subordinated to the state, volkisch youth was being taught that the Aryan individual was bound to the state through his hereditary ties, that peasantry and rulers were one folk and each had his proper place in the hierarchy. The peasantry was rhapsodized over and imitated in dance, song, and dress as being "organic" folk. But like the Communists, volkisch youth held the bourgeoisie to be contemptible -- the source of all misery. After World War I, the German youth movements took on more and more the character of anti-Semitic societies, seeing the Jew as the exemplar of the bourgeoisie. Little by little, Jewish youth was excluded from membership in youth organizations.

At the same time that they were practicing spirituality through vegetarianism and abstinence from sex, boys and girls were being encouraged by leaders like de Lagarde, Langbehn, Chamberlain, and Fritsch to extol force, as the Crusaders had done, in a holy war against the enemies: Freemasons, liberals, and Jews.

The politicization of the youth movement came just after World War I, when the paramilitary Free Corps attracted many former members, to pass them on in turn to the Nazi party, and in some cases, the SS. Their education in obedience, discipline, selfless service to an ideal, romanticism, and the occult -- in a patriarchy where fathers had been taken away to the war -- helped to make the transition easy, and they were eager to follow the Fuhrer wherever he might lead. As one volkisch youth put it:

One often hears the question why it was that youth spontaneously rallied to Hitler. But the experiences of war, revolution, and inflation supply an explanation. We were not spared anything. We knew and felt the worries in the house. The shadow of necessity never left our table and made us silent. We were rudely pushed out of our childhood and not shown the right path. The struggle for life got to us early. Misery, shame, hatred, lies, and civil war imprinted themselves on our souls and made us mature early. So we searched, and found Adolf Hitler. What attracted us like a magnet was precisely the fact that he only made demands of us and promised us nothing. He demanded of every person a total commitment to his movement and therefore to Germany.


German youth had always been highly organized. In the Weimar Republic some 4.5 million boys and girls under twenty-one were members of organizations connected with the National Board of German Youth Associations. Under Hitler, the youth movement became a holy crusade. By the end of 1934, the Hitler Youth included 6 million members, ranging in age from ten to eighteen. Membership in other youth organizations was officially discouraged and disintegrated under pressure. Parents and church groups were in jeopardy if they failed actively to support the Hitler Youth, so that eventually all the young in Germany, according to the contemporary observer, Stephen H. Roberts, were "stamped into the same mould" and emerged "as unquestioning automata, physically fit and mentally sponges for the official Hitler hero-worship," with the slogan "Command and we follow ... the standard is more than death."

The brainwashing actually began in the cradle. Even the fairy tales read to babies instilled the propaganda that the Fuhrer had been sent from heaven to kill the wicked enemy who was eager to devour little children.

The "ideological training" Hitler decreed was "to bring up that unspoilt generation which will consciously find its way back to primitive instinct." Fairy tales were saturated with "struggle" and "race" as "a childhood means of education to a heroic view of the world and of life." One volume was titled People Fight. The Robinson Crusoe age groups were taught: "From an early age youth must be able to face a time when it may be ordered not merely to act, but also to die ... [it must] simply learn to think like our ancestors again. A man's greatest honor lies in death before the enemy of his country." Hitler Youth sang: "God is struggle and struggle is our blood, and that is why we were born." A book of tales published for them in 1935 gave them the battle cry: "No one shall live after the Leader's death."

The system of indoctrination was perfect. At ten, each boy joined the Young Folk; and each girl, the Union of German Maidens. They received uniforms and took a pledge to devote their lives to the Fuhrer. His will was to be their will. Hitler knew well how to accomplish this:

This youth learns nothing else than to think German, to act German, and if these boys enter our organization at the age of 10, ... then 4 years later they come from the Jungfolk into the Hitler Youth, and we keep them there for another 4 years, and then we certainly don't give them back into the hands of the originators of our old classes and estates, but take them straight into the party, into the Labour Front, the SA or the SS, the NSKK, and so on. And if they are there for another 2 years or a year and a half and still haven't become complete National Socialists, then they go into the Labour Service and are polished for another 6 or 7 months, all with a symbol, the German spade. And any class consciousness or pride of status that may be left here and there is taken over by the Wehrmacht for further treatment for 2 years, and when they come back after 2,3, or 4 years, we take them straight into the SA, SS, and so on again, so that they shall in no case suffer a relapse, and they don't feel free again as long as they live. And if anyone says to me, yes, but there will always be a few left over: National Socialism is not at the end of its days, but only at the beginning!


The child who was willing to assert himself as a leader in this system no longer had to worry about his future. He knew that he could rise to the top of an elitist cult. His family usually did not object, out of fear, ambition, or ignorance. Many did not realize until too late that a dreadful Pied Piper had taken their children away from them. Hitler himself remarked that it was a "quite special secret pleasure" to see "how the people around us fail to realize what is really happening to them."

Not every child throve under the training program. The more intelligent and individualistic must have found it unbearable to be watched like prisoners. Innocuous conversations were recorded by eavesdroppers. True friendship was impossible, because everyone was afraid to say what they really thought. One Labor Service inmate described what conversation inevitably was:

Camp conversations would begin somewhat in this fashion, when one was fairly sure of being able to trust the other person. "The camp's fine, isn't it?" "Yes, very"-- with emphasis on the word "very" -- "There's such a friendly spirit, don't you think, such spontaneous comradeship?" "Yes, and such excellent leadership, isn't there?" "Yes, I am thankful to be able to share such a valuable experience and to see eye to eye with my leaders."


But most young people succumbed to the brainwashing, even if their inclinations went counter to Nazi dogma. One young teacher, the daughter of a liberal professor, joined the Party under pressure:

At first I just made myself do it. The Nazi accounts were so fantastic -- plots of world-Jewry, etc. -- that I could hardly keep from laughing as I read them; but of course I had to be careful. It was somewhat of a shock to find how readily the children accepted these Nazi fabrications. But the most amazing thing of all was, that after a few years of going through the routine, I began to believe the stories myself and could no longer distinguish in my own mind between propaganda and truth.


Paragraph 2 of the Law Relating to the Hitler Youth read that "all young Germans in the Reich area are, except in the parental home and at school, to be physically, mentally and morally reared in the spirit of National Socialism for service to the nation and the national community in the Hitler Youth." For most young people, there was little resistance. The enthusiasm for the Fuhrer canceled out all other interests. Even when church groups or parents pleaded with children to keep away from the Hitler Youth, their hearts and souls had been captured by the uniforms, the fife and drums, and the example of their peers, so that not to be included in the Fuhrer's glorious movement became the worst kind of punishment.

The generation gap became a battle for the mind in some families, where parents who opposed the regime found it impossible to express their ideas to their idolatrous children. Parents rejecting Nazi dogma while their children shifted loyalty to the family to loyalty to the Party must have experienced great pain. In many households, one's offspring became one's worst enemy. It was not at all uncommon for children to denounce their parents as traitors to the state.

Children worshipped the Fuhrer as a god. To be singled out to see him and speak to him was to be elevated to demigod. The training fostered this kind of fanaticism while at the same time discarding intellectual inquiry. Philosophy was held to be morbid. Universal education was, according to Hitler, "the most corrosive and disintegrative poison ever devised by liberalism." Each stratum of society needed to learn what was necessary for its particular purposes, and nothing more. All education was to be under constant surveillance, with the "broad mass of the lowest class" receiving "the blessings of illiteracy."

Hitler was right. His pedagogy was hard, not only for German youth but for all mankind. He took the prevailing knowledge about mass propaganda techniques and applied them zealously. Almost every moment in the youth camps was regimented. The mind was led step by step through an intensive drill to accept Nazi principles. The days were long and active, and the political indoctrination was particularly effective when minds were tired. Without physical force, then, youth was brainwashed from the 5:45 A.M. reveille to the 9:30 P.M. lights-out, with lectures on the healthy family, the healthy nation, hereditarily diseased offspring, Germanic civilization, and Lebensraum theories instilled along with a love of heroism, toughness, silence, and loyalty, and above all, a contempt for weakness.

By these tactics, the Nazis created a generation of youth so brutalized that they were capable of roaring with hysterical laughter while watching civilians in occupied countries being executed and, when they ran out of civilians, hanging kittens from miniature gallows. A British soldier, writing home, remarked: "It is not even organized terrorism, but cruelty and bestiality practised for its own sake, the worst offenders being German boys between the ages of 16 and 18." Another observer, a Swiss who lived in Germany in 1943, noticed in these boys "an acquired military rigidity together with a quivering nervousness ... bright laughter side by side with a desperate seriousness, and a self-assured, grown-up manner alternating with childish and uncontrollable behavior." The boys he was describing were ten to eighteen years old.

The impact of the "hate" training is brought home dramatically when we realize that these young hoods, when captured in the war, refused blood transfusions if they could not be certain of the donor's racial purity, preferring to die instead.

When they were questioned by the Allies about the atrocities, they shrugged off their responsibility: "I saw women and children killed, but did not pay any attention to it; I have no opinion, I obey."

By Nazi standards, their education had been perfect. All morality and intelligence had been propagandized out of them. Before Hitler came, Germany had been one of the most respected countries in the world for its high standard of education. By February 11, 1941, the illiteracy that Hitler prized was an accomplished fact, according to an official press account, which reported: "Apprentices not only seem unable to spell properly, but also fall far below the old standards in arithmetic. At a recent examination for 179 apprentices, 94 spelled names without capital letters, and 81 misspelled Goethe's name [in 17 different ways]...."

After the war, the Allies were worried about how to rehabilitate these morally depraved youngsters. A German teacher provided a solution:

Why do we conquer such distant foreign lands if, in so doing, we must leave untilled the field of our own children's souls which is close at hand?

Never mind textbooks, the first job will be to teach these youngsters how to love!


Love was something Himmler actually tried to instill in youth, though not in the sense that the teacher meant it. Departing from the puritanism of the earlier youth movement, he urged that the mating of vigorous young males with healthy females was so important to the future of the Aryan race that procreation was no longer a private matter, but a duty to the state. Irresponsible youth was encouraged to produce children out of wedlock, and unwed mothers were elevated to hitherto undreamed-of heights. Although abortions for adult women almost disappeared (in 1940 there were less than a third of what there had been in 1931), abortions for fourteen- and fifteen- year-old girls rose, as did the incidence of pregnancies. Secret reports dealt with homosexuality among Hitler Youth, which officials blamed on the old youth-group past of many members and leaders, when a homoerotic ideal had been fostered.

One of Himmler's major preoccupations was the question of how to produce more male children to make up for those killed in the war. He had heard there was a custom in the Swabian Alps of a man abstaining from alcohol for a whole week, going for a twenty-kilometer walk in the early afternoon, and copulating with his wife on his return. She had done nothing but sleep and eat wholesome food for the week. This was believed to bring about the birth of a male child. Himmler asked an SS doctor to comment, but never got an answer.

Himmler dreamed up Lebensborn, a chain of maternity homes which looked after unwed mothers and provided foster homes for illegitimate babies. He believed the organization would result in several thousand more choice births annually. Every SS officer had to join it and support it with his dues, 5 to 8 percent of his salary. Other SS men were not forced to become members. Himmler believed that "Nietzsche's Superman could be attained by means of breeding" and warned his men that "without multiplying our blood we shall not be able to maintain the Great Germanic Empire that is in the process of coming into existence." He encouraged his "valuable and racially pure men" to become "conception assistants" and overcome their bourgeois qualms about fathering children out of wedlock. Lebensborn, he said, was "a unique phenomenon and can be the basis for a new advance of the Germanic race."

He tried to create the impression that he was learned in genetics. Citing "the marvelous authority of German folklore," he theorized that when conception took place in a Nordic cemetery, babies inherited the spirit of "all the dead heroes who lay therein." Lists of such cemeteries were published regularly in the SS periodical Das Schwarze Korps. One English wag, on learning of this, punned: "One might say that these lists give a new ring to the phrase 'poking about in graveyards.' "

Himmler must have been disappointed with the total output of "new beings" at Lebensborn. In 1938, two years after the program officially started, the seven Lebensborn homes accepted only 653 mothers, 40 percent of the applicants who had applied. Racial requirements were so exacting that the majority were turned away. In 1939, however, there were homes in Steinhoring, Polzin, Klosterheide (Mark), Hohehorst, and in the Vienna woods. Later, more hospitals, children's homes, and sanitoria were added from former Jewish properties. Directing offices were set up in Bromberg, as well as in Belgium and Holland. But, for all that, after nine operational years, the official figures for births at Lebensborn were recorded as 12,000, of which half were illegitimate.

Louis Hagen, in Follow My Leader, reports one Lebensborn mother as saying:

At the Tegernsee hostel, 1 waited until the tenth day after the beginning of my period and was medically examined; then I slept with an SS man who had also to perform his duty with another girl. When pregnancy was diagnosed, I had the choice of returning home or going straight into a maternity home.... The birth was not easy, but no good German woman would think of having artificial injections to deaden the pain.


Girls considered it an honor to be chosen. One maiden announced proudly to fellow passengers on a train: "I am going to the SS Ordensburg in Sonthofen to have myself impregnated." Naturally, young girls in the Hitler Youth were encouraged to try motherhood. Rewards were exemption from Labor Service and financial bonuses.

One Labor Service internee wrote to her fiance:

The first question they ask a Labor Service girl is, who's going to have a baby for the Fuhrer? Then the girls go into a camp and have to stay there for a year. First to be used by SS men, then stay for a year and have a child. If you do all right they slip you RM [reichsmarks] 1,000 and let you go....


The leaders of the camps gave their blessings to these liaisons. One wrote to the mother of a pregnant girl, to bring the glad tidings that she was soon to "present the Fuhrer with a child." If parents did not particularly care for this manner of bestowing gifts, there was nothing they could do. As one Labor Service inmate cautioned her family; "You better not beat me if I come home with a baby, or I'll denounce you!"

To get the right kind of offspring, Himmler even ordered the kidnapping of racially pure children from occupied countries.

Thus, the methodical indoctrination of a whole nation with a conglomeration of irrational ideas -- mystical, occult, racist, and anti-human -- led to the robotization of the German people, particularly the young, who were most susceptible. As J. G. Siebert, in The Remaking of German Youth, remarks;

The reason why German youth allowed itself to be tricked lies in the fact that it had itself submitted to self-escapement, irrationalism and mysticism, that it had willingly given away its rational powers and its will to independent action. It had given up mastery over itself, and when the Nazis fell upon it with their demagogery, it became an easy victim.


In a relatively short time, the good effects of civilization had been bred out of them, and they had shown themselves capable of performing the most atrocious deeds without any pangs of conscience.
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Re: Gods & Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

Postby admin » Sun Jun 21, 2015 12:26 am

CHAPTER 12: Prophets of the Third Reich

Awareness of one's national heritage and blood ties with the Aryan race are indivisibly bound up with astrological science.

-- German astrological magazine


Astrology is one aspect of the occult tradition with which the Nazis have been openly identified. It is an important part of that tradition. According to astrological theory, the harmony of nature expressed in the planetary movements is the same as that expressed in individual personalities and societies. Therefore, the past, present and future can be interpreted by certain cyclic and numerical calculations of heavenly bodies. H, the occultist argues, the human temperature is lower in the morning, why may we not observe distinct differences between different periods, people, and races, since they, too, follow certain periodicities?

Occultists are particularly fond of the law of correspondences, exemplified by the saying attributed to Hermes Trismegistus: "As above, so below." They see a reciprocal relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm, the stars providing a language by which life can be read, a symbolic master-plan of the hierarchical cosmos; and one of the purposes of the occult, as they perceive it, is to give men the wisdom to free themselves from bondage to the fortune in their stars. Through special knowledge, they believe they can develop the psychic powers to influence events. To understand astrology is to be able to use a kind of mental alchemy by which the negative aspects of life can be transmuted into good -- if one is properly initiated, of course.

From the late nineteenth century on, the Germans were eager to use astrology in their daily lives. They had been particularly impressed with Franz Anton Mesmer's attempts to place astrology on a scientific footing. An Austrian who had studied medicine in Vienna, he applied his theory of animal magnetism to heavenly bodies in his first book, De Influxu Planetarum in Corpus Humanum ("Of the Influence of the Planets on the Human Body"). The universe he described was held together by an "aetheric continuum," of which the stars and planets were a constituent part, and from which flowed "animal magnetism." Illness was simply failure to draw effectively on one's aetheric continuum reserves, and Mesmer's apparatus was designed to help people tap this source -- this intangible universal force which pervaded space and exercised a hidden influence on human affairs.

Mesmer learned of the researches of Empress Maria Theresa's court astrologer, who enjoyed amazing luck in treating the ill on the basis of Paracelsus' theory of correspondences, or sympathies. What the court astrologer did was to apply magnets to the affected part of the patient's body. Mesmer broadened this theory.

Animal magnetism was more widely practiced by doctors in Germany than anywhere else in Europe, as the eminent turn-of-the-century British clergyman, Frank Podmore, observed in his book, From Mesmer to Christian Science. There was no centralized medical academy to impose its rules on the "profession." Mesmerism was studied in German universities. Court physicians and medical professors wrote learned treatises on it. Experiments were repeated endlessly. Podmore reported: "The magnetic fluid could be seen radiating as a stream of light from the eyes and the fingers of the operator and the poles of a magnet, from the heart of a living frog or the spinal marrow of a newly killed ox."

German magnetists threw themselves enthusiastically into clairvoyance and somnambulism. Since the animal fluid could magnetize over space, many instances of extrasensory communications were noted. According to Podmore:

Clairvoyance at a distance was apparently much commoner in Germany and northern Europe generally at this time than in France. The cases quoted are rarely, however, recorded with sufficient detail to serve any purpose other than that of attesting the prevalence of the belief, and some of the instances are strongly suggestive of collusion.

The special contribution of the German nation, however, to the early history of Animal Magnetism consists of the revelations concerning the spiritual world dictated by several somnambules in the state of ecstasy.


Such interests flourish in cataclysmic times and are exploited by adventurers like Madame Blavatsky. Inspired by her challenge to Darwinism, other occult leaders copied her peculiar package, so satisfying to educated people who were not prepared to gainsay the findings of science, yet were not prepared to give up the mysteries of religion, either. Scientific theory was not so well understood by the layman that it could hold its own against Madame Blavatsky's fanciful ramblings. In her variation of the Eastern doctrine of human cycles, she read the Atlantean zodiacal record and predicted the end of certain races whose "time was up."

Men like Lanz von Liebenfels, Guido von List, and the master astrologer, Rudolf von Sebottendorff, elaborated on this, and German astrology became intimately bound up with racism. Its ideologists borrowed heavily from Madame Blavatsky to show that the ancient Germans had been keepers of a secret science which had been wiped out by Judeo-Christianity. Lanz and Sebottendorff read in the movement of the planets the coming of a divine Fuhrer who would establish a racist regime. List, in his book, Die Religion der Ario-Germanen in ihrer Esoterik und Exoterik ("The Religion of the Aryan Germans in Its Esoteric and Exoteric Aspects"), revealed the "secret" that the moon was the forefather of the human race, and the swastika "one of the holiest secret signs." List believed that the mystery of the heavens would be revealed by departed spirits, in an extrasensory way.

The effect of World War I was to intensify German interest in animal magnetism, Theosophy, and astrology. Inflation drove some to suicide and others to the "sure" knowledge contained in horoscopes. The German astrologer Wilhelm Wulff reports in his book, Zodiac and Swastika:

... by the November Revolution of 1918, inflation was making headway, well-established businesses were crashing, and suicides were a daily event. In this period of tremendous economic and political uncertainty, hypnosis, mesmerism, clairvoyance, and every form of occultism flourished. Such interests are promoted by catastrophic situations. In post-war Germany, hypnotists, clairvoyants and mind readers were suddenly able to fill huge concert halls. There was scarcely a single large music hall or cabaret that did not stage a telepathic act. Enormous placards and newspaper advertisements pompously proclaimed: "The Most Important Parapsychologist," "The Woman with a Thousand Eyes" (Madame Karoli at the Busch Circus), "The Great Enigma, an Outstanding Achievement in the Sphere of Occult Science, the Lady Who Tells You All," etc. Swindle or not, both public and press found it all fascinating. I was very soon revolted by this fairground occultism ....


Konrad Heiden adds this personal observation of the same period:

The churches raged.... But if one had accused these astrologers, quacks, necromancers, and fake radiologists of witchcraft and sorcery, most of them would have replied indignantly that they occupied themselves with science -- naturally, a science that the "experts" did not understand, for it was the science of the future, perhaps a science predicated on experiments that were still imperfect....

... there was much talk of intuition, of presentiment, of what they called "vision" and the like. But nearly always it was considered an "advance" by abnormally endowed natures into certain fields of the spirit that in the near future would be investigated by conventional methods. The stock explanation in that world of deception and self-deception was that everything was done "along strictly scientific lines," which shows to what extent the cult of science had taken the place of religion....


One magus, Erik Jan Hanussen, who received notoriety as the "Prophet of the Third Reich" and the "Magician of Berlin," was credited with having taught Hitler all that he knew about mass psychology, which was considerable. Walter Langer, a psychiatrist, wrote in his secret report to the Allies:

According to Strasser, during the early 1920's Hitler took regular lessons in speaking and in mass psychology from a man named Hanussen, who was also a practicing astrologer and fortuneteller. He was an extremely clever individual who taught Hitler a great deal concerning the importance of staging meetings to obtain the greatest dramatic effect.... It is possible that Hanussen had some contact with a group of astrologers, referred to by von Wiegand, who were very active in Munich at this time. Through Hanussen Hitler, too, may have come in contact with this group, for von Wiegand writes: "When I first knew Adolf Hitler in Munich, in '21 and '22, he was in touch with a circle that believed firmly in the portents of the stars. There was much whispering of the coming of 'another Charlemagne and a new Reich.'"


Born Herschel Steinschneider in Vienna in 1889, Hanussen pretended to descend from a long line of Danish noblemen, although his father actually was a small-time itinerant Jewish vaudevillian. The son followed in the dancing footsteps of the father and joined a traveling show at twelve, as trapeze artist, lion tamer, stable boy, and folk singer. And these roles did not begin to exhaust his versatility. In Istanbul, without resources, he created an ersatz Franz Lehar operetta. On his way back to Vienna, to freeload aboard ship, he impersonated a singer and agreed to work his way home, but a scratchy throat prevented singing. Once home, he blackmailed people to keep their names out of a paper he edited, and made money from others by giving them free publicity.

Before World War I, he discovered the world of magic illusion, and in the army he set himself up as a clairvoyant, with considerable help from someone in the army post office. Whether or not he believed he really possessed extrasensory perception, he became a masterful hypnotist. He also learned how to dowse for water, and wrote a book for other magicians who wanted to put on mind-reading acts: The Road to Telepathy: Explanation and Practice. After the war, he wrote another, Thought Reading: A Primer for Telepathy, in which he gave invaluable advice to the neophyte magician: "The illusion of the supernatural must surround him in the eyes of his audience, which will be a thousand times more manageable when it has become a group of believers. With success, self-confidence rises, and with self-confidence the power of persuasion itself."

By this time he had changed his name to Erik Jan Hanussen and had created his own reputation for clairvoyance and other supernatural powers, despite his confession: "If I were to strip away all that is mystical or supernatural, if I were to show thought reading for what it is, we would arrive at virtuosity in the knowledge of audience psychology, linked to the meticulous study of procedures concerning ideomotor motions [based on ideas rather than on reflexes]." Here, finally, was a man who employed the scientific method. Others less candid had paved the way for him. There is a natural affinity between magic tricks and fakirism which believers had no will to discover. Many "masters of wisdom" were also accomplished magicians. Madame Blavatsky had been, and when she was discovered at her tricks, her disciples protested that this was what the public had driven her to. As magicians, from Houdini in the twenties to Milbourne Christopher and Randi in our own time, have demonstrated, most, if not all, feats of clairvoyance can be duplicated by the magician, and a look at a catalog of magicians' equipment bears them out. The magicians, of course, resent the mediums, because they feel the mediums are using the same tricks they do (and, in fact, they have caught many of the most famous mediums in the act, so to speak). The stage magicians are using their skills and techniques to provide honest entertainment, and feel that the mediums, psychics, and faith healers are using those skills to gull, cheat, and sell false dreams and false hopes.

In 1931, Hanussen met Hitler, joined the Nazi party, raised the swastika flag on his car, and befriended leading Nazi officials. Hitler knew the value of using men with Hanussen's gifts to publicize his image as a man of historic destiny. Hanussen put himself at the service of the Nazi cause in astrological forecasts published by his swastika-trimmed paper. He also sought to put the Party in his debt by lending large sums to the SA leader of Berlin, Count Wolf Heinrich Helldorf, an opportunist as impressive as Hanussen himself. Prominent Nazis attended fashionable seances which Hanussen staged at his Palace of Occultism and were pleased to listen to his cheerful prognostications for the Party. One that was not so cheerful will cause him to be remembered whenever the controversial Reichstag fire comes up.

In February 1933, soon after Hitler was named chancellor, Hanussen opened the Palace of Occultism to actors, actresses, and important members of the Party. At a midnight seance, in an atmosphere of garish splendor embellished with gilded zodiac symbols and bugged with secret microphones to pry out intimate details from an unsuspecting audience (a common showman's trick which the Nazis were to use again in the fashionable brothel they instituted for important officials, German and foreign), Hanussen went into his trance:

I see a vast and distinguished room.... Portraits of prominent men of history hang on the walls. They are men who have led Germany through much agony. Are they not the chancellors of the Reich? Yes, this is the Conference Room of the Chancellery. Noise penetrates through the windows. The Storm Troopers move down the Wilhelmstrasse. There has been a magnificent victory. The people want Hitler. Victory, Victory! Hitler is victorious. Resistance is useless. But the noise comes closer. Is there a struggle? Shooting? No ... no ... it is not that.... I see flames, enormous flames.... It is a terrible conflagration that has broken out. Criminals have set the fire.

They want to hurl Germany into last-minute chaos, to nullify the victory. They are setting fire to a large public building. One must crush this vermin. They want to resist Hitler's victory. Only the mailed fist of an awakened Germany can hold back chaos and the threat of civil war....


The following evening, the Reichstag was in flames. The question as to who started the fire has not been resolved to this day. The suspicion that the Nazis themselves were implicated is strengthened by the fact that Berlin police president Helldorf went directly to bed after hearing of the fire. It was still raging when the police arrested a Dutch Communist who was found on the premises. The Nazis linked him with a Communist plot which they failed to make stick, but the Dutchman was executed. Some people claim that Hanussen had hypnotized him into starting the fire. Hanussen had pledged himself, after all,

to be the first, if necessary, to devote everything I own and am, when the time comes, to make a sacrifice at the altar of Germany. I have encountered the readiness for sacrifice among all those who stood behind the banner of the National Concept; I know that Adolf Hitler sacrificed his all for this national idea; I saw Storm Trooper veterans in torn shoes and in thin jackets standing in the icy winds for hours to perform their duty; I have observed selflessness, integrity, and true patriotism among the millions who back Hitler. . . . and so I had no choice but to demonstrate my respect and gratitude, unhesitatingly, in spite of everything, to serve the truth.


Whether or not Hanussen had advance notice of the fire, he probably assumed his prediction of it would assure his stature as a prophet. It did not. Six weeks later, he was snatched from the entrance to his theater by Helldorf's orders, and murdered in the woods near Berlin. Helldorf, perpetually bankrupt, had borrowed money from Hanussen, but whether this was the motivation for the murder, or whether it related to Hanussen' s knowledge about the fire, is still a mystery. The fire augured well for the Nazis, on the other hand. It enabled them to do away altogether with the need for free elections, under the guise of preventing an imminent Communist takeover.

The Reichstag fire was deliberately set, probably utilizing a flammable liquid, by a group of experts. This is where Putzi Hanfstaengl comes into the picture. The key question is how did this group, bent on arson, gain access to the Reichstag to do the job? After 8 p.m. only one door in the main building was unlocked and this door was guarded. Just before 9 p.m. a tour of the building by watchmen indicated all was well; no flammable liquids were noticed and nothing was out of the ordinary in the Sessions Chamber where the fire started. Apparently no one could have gained access to the Reichstag building after 9 p.m., and no one was seen to enter or leave between 9 p.m. and the start of the fire.

There was only one way a group with flammable materials could have entered the Reichstag — through a tunnel that ran between the Reichstag and the Palace of the Reichstag President. Hermann Goering was president of the Reichstag and lived in the Palace, and numerous S.A. and S.S. men were known to be in the Palace. In the words of one author:

The use of the underground passage, with all its complications, was possible only to National-Socialists, the advance and escape of the incendiary gang was feasible only with the connivance of highly-placed employees of the Reichstag. Every clue, every probability points damningly in one direction, to the conclusion that the burning of the Reichstag was the work of National-Socialists.


How does Putzi Hanfstaengl fit into this picture of arson and political intrigue? Putzi — by his own admission — was in the Palace room at the other end of the tunnel leading to the Reichstag. And according to The Reichstag Fire Trial, Putzi Hanfstaengl was actually in the Palace itself during the fire:

propaganda apparatus stood ready, and the leaders of the Storm Troopers were in their places. With the official bulletins planned in advance, the orders of arrest prepared, Karwahne, Frey and Kroyer waiting patiently in their cafe, the preparations were complete, the scheme almost perfect.


Dimitrov also asserts that:

The National-Socialist leaders, Hitler, Goering and Goebbels, together with the high National-Socialist officials, Daluege, Hanfstaengl and Albrecht, happened to be present in Berlin on the day of the fire, despite that the election campaign was at its highest pitch throughout Germany, six days before the poll. Goering and Goebbels, under oath, furnished contradictory explanations for their "fortuitous" presence in Berlin with Hitler on that day. The National-Socialist Hanfstaengl, as Goering's "guest," was present in the Palace of the Reichstag President, immediately adjacent to the Reichstag, at the time when the .fire broke out, although his "host" was not there at that time.


According to Nazi Kurt Ludecke, there once existed a document signed by S.A. Leader Karl Ernst — who supposedly set the fire and was later murdered by fellow Nazis — which implicated Goering, Goebbels, and Hanfstaengl in the conspiracy.

-- Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, by Anthony C. Sutton


Once firmly entrenched, the Nazis continued to call upon the services of soothsayers, even though official policy was to harass and banish them. The astrologer Gerda Walther, in an article in Tomorrow entitled "Hitler's Black Magicians," observed a "complete lack of unity" regarding occultism. "Not only is there an absence of 'coordination,' but often there are different and even opposing points of view."

As soon as Hitler came into the public eye, he was the target for astrological prognostications. But after 1933, an astrologer tempted fate if he cast the Fuhrer's horoscope, and none were so bold as to dare. Fearing unfavorable predictions, Hitler decreed that police regulations equate astrology with fortunetelling, and Paragraph 2 read:

For purposes of these police regulations fortune-telling is understood as a prediction of future events, the divination of the present or the past, and all other forms of revelation not based on natural processes of perception. It specifically includes the reading of cards, the casting of horoscopes, the explanation of the stars, and the interpretation of omens and dreams.


As Himmler later confessed to Wilhelm Wulff, the reason for the strictures against astrologers was that if they were not Nazis, they might see their calling as universally applicable to all humans, whether they were Negroes, Indians, Chinese, or Aryans, "in crass opposition" to the Nazi concept of the racial soul. "No one doctrine," argued Himmler, "can cover all cases." But he left no doubt in Wulff's mind that he was committed to a belief in astrology and related occult studies:

He told me about a few of his own experiences and observations at certain phases of the moon. His ancestors, he said, had been familiar with peasant lore, calculating the right time to plant crops .... He began projects at certain, but not generally known, phases of the moon....


He was fond of citing the important place of astrologers and fortunetellers in the court of Frederick the Great.

A friend of Wulff's, Ellie Howe, who was employed by the British Secret Service in World War II, discovered, by reading astrological studies in Gestapo files after the war, that Himmler was in good company. Wulff repeats his assertion that "German astrology was supreme in the 1930's" and it engaged the attention of other important Nazis, like Walter Schellenberg and Rudolf Hess. It was largely thanks to Hess that the so-called "witchcraft act" of 1934 against astrologers and occultists was circumvented. When a former planetarium director on Alfred Rosenberg's staff in the Department for the Promotion of German Writing made an official declaration that astrology should be banned, Hess disagreed, on the grounds that there might be something to it. It was this bias, some believe, which caused Hess to make the mysterious flight to Scotland. Howe reports in his book, Astrology: A Recent History Including the Untold Story of Its Role in World War II, that a confidant revealed to him:

Hess's astrological foible strengthened his own conviction that everything possible must be done and hazarded in order to end hostilities without delay, because at the end of April and beginning of May 1941 Hitler's astrological aspects were unusually malefic. Hess interpreted these aspects to mean that he, personally, must take the dangers that threatened the Fuhrer upon his shoulders in order to save Hitler and restore peace in Germany. Time and again Hess's astrological "advisor" had told him that Anglo-German relations were threatened by a deep-seated crisis of confidence.... Indeed, at this time there were very dangerous [planetary] oppositions in Hitler's horoscope.


Hitler, although he publicly ridiculed the occult tastes of his disciples, was equally superstitious; and his chief architect and later minister of armaments and war production, Albert Speer, related that he himself witnessed a number of instances of this, such as the occasion when

Hitler had solemnly laid the cornerstone for the House of German Art in Munich. He delivered the ceremonial hammer blows with a fine silver hammer Troost had designed especially for this day. But the hammer broke. [Troost died three months later and] Hitler remarked to us: "When the hammer shattered I knew at once it was an evil omen. Something is going to happen, I thought. Now we know why the hammer broke. The architect was destined to die."


Hermann Rauschning, a leader of the Danzig Senate who fled Germany in 1940, also attests to Hitler's occult leanings. In The Voice of Destruction, he writes:

One day when Hitler seemed in an approachable mood, a far-sighted woman in his circle said to him warningly:

"My Fuhrer, don't touch black magic. As yet both white and black are open to you. But once you have embarked upon black magic it will dominate your destiny. It will hold you captive. Don't choose the quick and easy successes. There lies before you the power over a realm of pure spirits. Do not allow yourself to be led away from your true path by earthbound spirits, which will rob you of creative power."

Hitler was fond at times of this sort of mystical talk. Only in such guise could any serious warning be offered to him. This woman friend expressed in her way what everyone who came in touch with Hitler was bound to feel: Hitler was abandoning himself to forces which were carrying him away -- forces of dark and destructive violence. He imagined that he still had freedom of choice, but he had long been in bondage to a magic which might well have been described, not only in metaphor but in literal fact, as that of evil spirits. And instead of a man emerging step by step from the obscurity of his youth, and freeing himself from its dross in his upward course, we witnessed the development of a man possessed, the helpless prey of the powers of darkness.

Black magic, white magic -- Hitler is the typical person with no firm foundation, with all the shortcomings of the superficial, of the man without reverence,
quick to judge and quick to condemn. He is one of those with no spiritual tradition, who, being caught by the first substitute for it that they meet, hold tenaciously to that, lest they fall back into Nothingness. He belongs also to the type of German who is starving for the unattainable. For all those who have been unsuccessful in the battle of life National Socialism is the great worker of magic. And Hitler himself is the first of these; thus he has become the master-enchanter and the high priest of the religious mysteries of Nazidom.

Hitler's henchmen make more and more play with this quality of his of supreme magician ....


After Hitler's rise, someone in Himmler's department was given an astrological forecast by a Swiss friend, Karl Ernst Krafft, an astrologer with a predilection for the same sort of theories about the "spirit of language" and "word magic" which distinguished Guido von List. Krafft was well versed in Latin, Greek, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and English. He had used his astrological talents to forecast trends on the commodities market. Around 1938, he was living in the Black Forest with two women who were interested in Rudolf Steiner. Hitler appealed to Krafft as "the conqueror of the mechanistic way of life."

Krafft predicted to his friend that Hitler's life would hang in the balance between November 7 and 10, 1939. During that time, Hitler attended an anniversary celebration of the 1923 Putsch in the Munich Hofbrauhaus. He left just before a bomb went off and tore apart the beer cellar. Krafft zealously wired Hess, thrusting his prediction under his nose, and adding that the stars still indicated that Hitler would not be safe for a few more days. Krafft was promptly arrested.

Himmler, meanwhile, was working on tracking down the failed assassin by interviewing a Viennese trance medium who had been ordered to his office.

Goebbels, as propaganda minister, had more practical concerns. He just happened, at that particular time, to have developed an interest in Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century French prophet, not for his verse quatrains, but for his propaganda possibilities. He must have been delighted to find in Krafft a man who was not only familiar with Nostradamus' obscure verses but who actually believed that Germany's triumph over the Allies -- and over future enemies, as well -- could be deciphered from them.

Krafft came to work for the propaganda ministry and began using his special knowledge of Nostradamus as a means of psychological warfare. Nostradamus had been deliberately obscure, to keep his secrets from being understood by any but the initiated. The infinite permutations of possible interpretations had made his quatrains popular propaganda devices for centuries. Thus Krafft had an embarrassment of riches from which to choose so as to interpret Germany's victory. Quatrain III-76 presumably predicted the birth of National Socialism:

In Germany will be born diverse sects,
approaching very near happy paganism.
The heart captive and receipts small;
they will return to paying the true tithe.


Krafft was in deadly earnest when he interpreted a passage like the following to mean great discomfort for Great Britain:

In the islands shall be so horrid tumults,
That nothing shall be heard but a warlike surprise,
So great shall be the insult of the robbers,
That everyone shall shelter himself under the great look.


Goebbels' diary entry for November 22, 1939, reads: "This is a thing we can exploit for a long time. I forbid all printing of these forecasts by Monsieur Nostradamus. They must be disseminated only by handbills, hand-written, or at most typed, secretly, and in the manner of snowball letters. The thing must have an air of being forbidden.... Naturally, all this silly rubbish must also go out to France...."

Pamphlets of Krafft's interpretations were sent in advance of the military through occupied France and were highly successful in getting their message across. Krafft's exegeses were translated into many different languages, and the output was enormous. They were even "surreptitiously stuck into people's pockets as they left the movies -- as far away as in Iran!" according to Gerda Walther.

Romania's minister to London, an anti-Nazi awed by Krafft's seemingly prophetic gifts, wrote him to renew an old acquaintance and to ask for his astrological predictions about the war. Krafft showed the letter to his Nazi superiors, and they drafted an answer predicting Germany's victory. When the Romanian minister received it, he assumed that Krafft must be advising Hitler, and got the idea of convincing the British to hire the best astrologer they could find and have him try to second-guess Krafft. If the British could get their astrologer to find out how Krafft was arriving at the sources for his advice, they could, first of all, know what Hitler was thinking, and secondly, influence his thought by preparing forecasts similar to Krafft's but pro-Allies, and slipping them into Hitler's hands. For the purpose, Ludwig von Wohl was hired.

A Roman-Catholic Hungarian author of religious books who left Berlin for London in 1935, he had a reputation among believers in astrology for his accurate horoscopes of Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, Chamberlain, and other prominent people. One of Hitler, in particular, cast in 1931, brought him to the attention of the international set. Just before the beginning of World War II, at a Spanish embassy dinner party, he entertained the British secretary of foreign affairs, Lord Halifax, with astrological predictions, and was assured that he would have a job if war broke out when he said it would and if Hitler's invasion of Poland was as rapid as he predicted.

The war was three days early. Ludwig von Wohl became a British citizen, changed his name to Louis de Wohl, and joined the British army. In August 1940 an employee of the War Office came to him and asked: "How would you like to work on a highly secret assignment?"

He liked it very much. Made a captain, paid in cash, and set up in a suite at Grosvenor House, he worked on his unique task. British Intelligence believed that Hitler was being advised not only by Krafft but by four other astrologers, and that he never made a military move without their advice. Churchill was agreeable to the idea of trying to intercept what Hitler was being told every day. "Why not try it?" he said. "It could be fun." In allowing the bizarre appointment, Churchill was assumed to be indulging one of his mischievous caprices. "After all," he is reported to have said, "why should Hitler have a monopoly on astrologers?" One commentator remarked that he may also have "relished the idea of subjecting some stuffy high-powered official to an astrologer's scrutiny."

Since De Wohl knew all five astrologers who were supposedly advising Hitler, had worked for some time with Krafft, and was familiar with his formula, he could guess what he presumed they were telling Hitler. In his first memo to the British War Office in the beginning of September 1940 he advised that the Germans would not invade England, because he was sure that Hitler's astrologers were counseling him against it.

One of De Wohl's tasks was to put out a bogus copy of an astrological magazine called Der Zenit, which looked exactly like the genuine article. It was intercepted by the Nazis; and Wulff relates that he told Himmler's assistant, Walter Schellenberg, "that from an astrological point of view it was a first-class production and indicated that it was the work of experts. Some very skillful bits of propaganda had been casually inserted in an otherwise apparently innocuous text. We deduced that this fake had been manufactured in England."

Wulff was consulted several times by Himmler during 1944 and 1945, particularly as defeat seemed imminent. Wilhelm Hoetl, who joined the German Secret Service in 1938, says of Himmler: "His predilection for the occult sciences also went far beyond the confines of a harmless hobby; it can with truth be said that all his major decisions hung upon the advice given to him by his clairvoyant.... " According to Hoetl, Schellenberg, anxious to end the war, had Wulff draw up a horoscope "which would give Himmler the necessary courage and convince him that he was destined by Fate to become the Fuhrer and the saviour of the German people.... "

Not only Himmler, but the German people pinned their hopes on astrology. Speer relates that they had

long since stopped believing the newspapers. There was one exception: During the closing months of the war growing bands of desperate people began pinning their hopes on the astrological sheets. Since these were dependent on the Propaganda Ministry, for a variety of reasons they were, as I learned from [Hans] Fritzsche at Nuremberg, used as a tool for influencing public opinion. Fake horoscopes spoke of valleys of darkness which had to be passed through, foretold imminent surprises, intimated happy outcomes. Only in the astrological sheets did the regime still have a future.


In 1945, the day after President Franklin D. Roosevelt died, Goebbels, who may have been a victim of his own propaganda, ordered champagne and phoned Hitler: "My Fuhrer, I congratulate you! Roosevelt is dead. It is written in the stars that the second half of April will be the turning-point for us. This is Friday 13 April. It is the turning-point."

Later, in Hitler's bunker, Goebbels sent for the horoscopes which had been cast for the Fuhrer and for Germany on his accession to the chancellery. They had been given to Himmler for safekeeping. Both predicted the entire outcome of the war: the beginning, in 1939; victory until 1941; then defeat until the second half of April 1945, when there would be a reversal of fortune. Peace would not come until August.

Goebbels, who may have been humoring Hitler, drew historical analogies between the death of Roosevelt and the death of the tsarina during the Seven Years' War with Russia, when Frederick the Great appeared to be defeated until the death turned things around.

But in the end, all the prophets failed them, and the Nazis learned that they could not be saved by the stars.
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Re: Gods & Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

Postby admin » Sun Jun 21, 2015 12:30 am

CHAPTER 13: Jung and the Aryan Unconscious

Even Jung's much-debated interpretation of what was happening in Hitler's Germany in the thirties was not without insight, though his conduct justifies the suspicion that he himself, like all too many equally intelligent contemporaries in Europe, had momentarily turned to the same demonic powers for salvation and let himself be carried away by them.

--Lewis Mumford, "The Revolt of the Demons," The New Yorker, May 23, 1964


It has always been a mystery why intelligent people outside of Germany in the twenties and thirties were attracted by the Nazi movement. Before the atrocity stories began to leak out, the Nazis were persona grata with a certain type of mystical temperament which saw in the romantic aspects of their ideology a refreshing return to "thinking with the blood," as D. H. Lawrence called it.

The psychologist Carl Jung is a case in point. His interest in the occult ran very deep, and began very early. In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, he told of his initiation, in dreams of childhood, to "the secrets of the earth" and "the realm of darkness," "overpowered by a vision of the whole cosmos," where "lived the 'Other,' who knew God as a hidden, personal, and at the same time suprapersonal secret. Here nothing separated man from God; indeed, it was as though a human mind looked down upon Creation simultaneously with God."

The young Carl soon discovered that his jolly housewife mother harbored a submerged self, "archaic and ruthless," just as sacred as God, which he later identified with the ancient Germanic realm of Wotan. Sometimes the child would find her doing chores with a strange look in her eyes, muttering incomprehensibly to herself. When he listened more attentively, it was clear that the words were designed for him, and their appropriateness reached "to the very core" of his being.

Her diary recorded experiences with precognition, ghosts, and supranormal phenomena. As a child, her services had often been called upon to protect her theologian father from spectral presences:

She had to sit behind him when he was writing his sermons, because he could not bear "spirits" passing behind his back and disturbing him. Every week, at a fixed hour, he used to hold intimate conversations with his deceased first wife, very much to the chagrin of the second! Jung's psychiatric diagnosis was that he suffered from "waking hallucinations," though at the same time he dismissed this as a "mere word." [His] second wife, ... Jung's maternal grandmother, was gifted with "second sight" and could also see "spirits." The family traced this back to an episode when, as a young girl, she lay for thirty-six hours in a state of catalepsy resembling death. Her gifts, however, could stand the test of a more rigorous judgment: she sometimes saw apparitions of persons unknown to her, but whose historical existence was later proved.


Carl was both scared and thrilled by the sense of the uncanny. As a teen-aged student at the Gymnasium in Basel, he found a philosophical basis for it in the work of Pythagoras. By this time, the private, secret world which he had learned to inhabit as an escape from his all-powerful mother was much pleasanter than the bourgeois school world from which he was excluded by poverty, provincialism, and personal unpopularity. He saved his ego by retreating into ritual, fantasy, and nature-mysticism. The greatest fantasy, which came unbidden, and which would have earned him the applause of Jonathan Swift and Rabelais, was a masterpiece of unconscious wit in such a stolid fellow: God, from on high, sent down his own personal blast of excrement, appropriately monumental, to bomb the newly decorated roof of the Basel Cathedral.

Jung was convinced that he had been chosen by God for a prophetic mission to herald the dawning Age of Aquarius. At the same time, he felt privy to ancient dark mysteries, which he was not about to reveal, wanting to avoid the fate of Nietzsche, who went mad. Jung had a sense of himself as two distinct personalities, the schoolboy and the wise old man. The schoolboy was himself as he appeared to others. The wise old man was a powerful figure of the Enlightenment, and the young boy owed to this odd presence his sense of being selected for a great work and of being perfectly at home with eighteenth-century ideas and artifacts. The psychologist, looking back at this dichotomy in his youth, insisted that it did not represent a diseased disunion. A recurring daydream, which he was later able to play out in reality, had him ensconced in a medieval castle where, as judge, he ruled over the town. What gave him the power to rule was that, hidden in the tower,

was a thick copper column whose top, branching into a network of tiny capillaries, drew from the air an ineffable spiritual substance which, condensed and transformed by its passage through the metallic column, would reappear at the bottom as finished gold coins. In his gold-making fantasy, Carl, unlike the medieval alchemists, did not use lead or other base metals for raw material, but something "spiritual" diffused in the air. With his hunger for omens, he was bound to retrospectively view this adolescent daydream as presaging his long-lasting fascination with alchemy in later years. A person of less exalted turn of mind might read the same fantasy as pointing to Jung's future adroitness in extracting money from "spirituality."


As outsider and as pagan, he felt much closer to the animal and vegetable kingdoms than to the kingdom of man. Nature was suffused with "numinousness," a term which he came to love and use a great deal. It well described his family's extrasensory experiences.

As it came time, however, to decide on a profession, he was governed by more practical concerns. He did not care to repeat his clergyman father's history of poverty, and in 1895 enrolled as a medical student at the University of Basel. There he was attracted by spiritualists like Johann Zoellner and Emanuel Swedenborg, discussing their theories by the hour. He was far from being alone in his fascination with spiritualism. A number of respectable scientists believed in the existence of occult phenomena and were investigating them. Jung arranged mediumistic seances. In his autobiography, he described how a medium, his fifteen-year-old cousin, made a sturdy antique table and a knife in a drawer break apart. (The family saved the fragmented pieces of knife.) This medium became the subject for Jung's doctoral dissertation, "The Psychology and Pathology of Supposed Occult Phenomena." In it, he talked about the relation of the unconscious to the conscious mind and referred to Sigmund Freud's new theory of hysterical identification. Jung made up his mind to become a psychiatrist and unite his interest in the soul with his interest in medicine.

He did not meet Freud in the flesh until 1907. By then, strong anti-Semitic sentiments were already skulking through Western Europe. Freud was a pariah, both as Jew and as proponent of a controversial theory of sexuality, a subject shrouded with taboo -- one Freud himself referred to as "that troublesome factor so unwelcome in good society." It took courage on Jung's part to join the Freudian camp. Then almost thirty-two, Jung had a good deal to lose by associating himself with the Austrian Jew. Also, by becoming Freud's favorite son, he incurred the enmity of older and longer-standing disciples.

Despite mutual respect and admiration, there were insurmountable differences between Jung and Freud. The older man could not share the younger's passion for occultism. When Jung came to visit Freud in Vienna, they discussed precognition and parapsychology in Freud's study. Freud dismissed the matter as "nonsensical," and there came a loud cracking sound from his bookcase. Jung predicted that there would be another in a moment, and interpreted the noise as evidence of the paranormal. Returning home, he wrote Freud that the visit, "most happily, freed me inwardly from the oppressive sense of your paternal authority." Freud replied that the "poltergeist business" left him incredulous. Since Jung's visit, he had heard the sounds from the bookcase repeatedly -- not, he hastened to add, when he was thinking of Jung -- but he warned his "dear son to keep a cool head, for it is better not to understand something than make such great sacrifices to understanding." Jung's "investigations of the spook complex" Freud took to be "a charming delusion" which he could not share.

Years later, in his autobiography, Jung confessed that, as Freud was disparaging parapsychology, he himself felt "a curious sensation" in his diaphragm, as if it "were made of iron and were becoming red-hot -- a glowing vault." Hearing the noise from the bookcase, he feared it would topple over on them. Freud's retort that this was "sheer bosh" made Jung believe that his mentor mistrusted him, and though they never talked about the incident after the exchange of letters, the schism between them grew. Nonetheless, Freud did push for Jung to be elected president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, to the horror of other disciples.

Jung devoted more and more of his professional activity to investigating what Freud had called "the black tide of mud of occultism." Although the scientific establishment scorned the notion that occult phenomena were worthy subjects for investigation, the romantics had managed to generate excitement about hypnosis, mesmerism, somnambulism, precognition, and spiritualism, so that a man with Jung's family history, personal experiences, predisposition, and natural gifts was not alone in his proclivities. After he separated from Freud, Jung immersed himself in Gnostic and Neoplatonic texts and in Eastern philosophy. Befriended by the celebrated German Orientalist Richard Wilhelm, he explored Chinese alchemy and the I Ching, the ancient Chinese method of divination. Jung took this oracle quite seriously as a revelation of unconscious knowledge. In preparing the introduction to Wilhelm's book, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Jung found the link he had been searching for, between ancient Gnosticism and modern thought, in European alchemy. He identified himself with another Swiss doctor-metaphysician, Paracelsus, who had enriched the sixteenth century with his esoteric lore. "Magick is a Great Hidden Wisdom -- Reason is a Great Open Folly," he had taught.

Paracelsus' observation that Eastern and Western alchemy were really concerned with psychic states rather than with chemical states confirmed Jung's perspective of the unconscious as a reservoir of collective as well as personal images. This collective unconscious explained the presence of archetypes -- myths and symbols that were made up off "universal dynamic forms." Though there were similar archetypes in all races and throughout all the ages, there were also perceived differences between races, because of their different evolutions. The Jew, for instance, because he was rootless, needed to "reduce everything to its material beginnings." That was why the simple reduction by Freud and Alfred Adler of all psychic phenomena to primitive drives was gratifying to the Jew, though "thoroughly unsatisfying to the Germanic mentality," which still (in 1918) had "a genuine barbarian in [it] who [was] not to be trifled with." Said Jung: "The fact is, our unconscious is not to be got at with over-ingenious and grotesque interpretations. The psychotherapist with a Jewish background awakens in the Germanic psyche not those wistful and whimsical residues from the time of David, but the barbarian of yesterday, a being for whom matters suddenly become serious in the most unpleasant way...."

By the time the Nazis came to power, this sort of distinction caused Jung some embarrassment -- not, to be sure, with the champions of National Socialism. The new study of psychoanalysis had to go through a process of gleichgeschaltung, i.e., conformity to the Party line. Jung's mysticism was far more congenial to the philosophy of Aryanism than Freud's "Jewish science." Jung understood and shared the romantic sensibility which craved for pagan purification. In 1923 he had written:

... we cannot possibly get beyond our present level of culture unless we receive a powerful impetus from our primitive roots. But we shall receive it only if we go back behind our cultural level, thus giving the suppressed primitive man in ourselves a chance to develop. How this is to be done is a problem I have been trying to solve for years.... the existing [edifice] is rotten. We need some new foundations. We must dig down to the primitive in us, for only out of the conflict between civilized man and the Germanic barbarian will there come what we need: a new experience of God....


Jung came under the influence of the German Indologist Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, an authority on Kundalini yoga and number-symbolism. Hauer was head of the Nordic Faith movement, which barred Freemasons, Jews, and colored people from membership. He lectured at Eranos, a Swiss esoteric school for Jungians, on the racial unconscious and its symbolism. When the Nazis came to power, he gave an impassioned talk on the SS hero and Hitler, the "genius of our people." Jung, in his essay, "Wotan," later mentioned that Hauer's group "aims at the religious renaissance of the nation out of the hereditary foundations of the German race" and advised the "German Christians" to join Hauer's "decent and well-meaning people ... intelligent enough not only to believe but to know that the god of the Germans is Wotan and not the Christian God."

When the president of the international German Medical Society for Psychotherapy, located in Germany, resigned because of the Nazi takeover in 1933, Jung filled the post by remote control from Switzerland and assumed the editorship of its official publication, the Zentralblatt fur Psychatherapie. Its December 1933 issue was graced with a commitment by the new Reichsfuhrer of psychoanalysts, Professor M. H. Goring, the nephew of Hermann Goring, to "Adolf Hitler's fundamental book, Mein Kampf" and "to contribute to the work of the people's chancellor to educate the German people for the spirit of heroism and sacrifice." And Goring gratefully acknowledged: "Thanks to the fact that Dr. C. G. Jung accepted the presidency on June 21st, 1933, it has been possible to continue the scientific activity of the Association and of its periodical."

For that same issue, Jung wrote an introduction which he later had many opportunities to defend:

The differences which actually do exist between Germanic and Jewish psychology and which have long been known to every intelligent person are no longer to be glossed over, and this can only be beneficial to science. In psychology more than in any other science there is a "personal equation," disregard of which falsifies the practical and theoretical findings.


Though he went on to state that he was no more depreciating "Semitic psychology" than he would if he talked of the Chinese in terms of Oriental psychology, his editorial in no way hurt him with the Nazis. The General Medical Society, although international in membership, was dominated by the Germans. Its publication was put out in Germany, and the managing editor and staff were German. Jung had given orders that the issue which caused him such embarrassment be "for exclusive circulation in Germany," but the managing editor had disobeyed him. Jung said: "The incident is naturally so incriminating as to put my editorship seriously in question."

But he defended his position in the March 28, 1934, letter to Max Guggenheim:

If you disregard the persecutions of the Jews in Germany, you must admit that there is a medical Society there which is very important for us in Switzerland. It is therefore not a matter of indifference what happens to psychotherapy in that country.... As a psychotherapist I cannot be indifferent to the future of psychotherapy. Its development in Germany will also be crucial for us. Freud once told me, very rightly: "The fate of psychotherapy will be decided in Germany." To begin with it was doomed to absolute perdition because it was considered wholly Jewish. I have broken this prejudice by my intervention and have made life possible not only for the so-called Aryan psychotherapists but for the Jewish ones as well. What with the hue and cry against me it has been completely forgotten that by far the greatest number of psychotherapists in Germany are Jews. People do not know, nor is it said in public, that I have intervened personally with the regime on behalf of certain Jewish psychotherapists. If the Jews start railing at me this is shortsightedness in the extreme and I hope you will do what you can to combat this idiotic attitude. The existence of the Society for Psychotherapy, which has very many Jewish members, is now assured, also the membership of Jewish doctors. Actually the Jews should be thankful to me for that....


Although he had already made it clear in 1918 that he believed in psychological differences between Jews and Aryans, 1933 was an inopportune moment to reiterate such a thesis. Anyone of Jewish descent had been purged from the German civil service that spring. Other professions were closing to Jews, and with 6 million unemployed, there was a scramble for their jobs. While Jung was not a Nazi [?!], he understood the Nazis' paganism. He also understood their antipathy to Freud, whom he felt to be lacking in spiritual concerns. The Nazi psychiatrist Kurt Gauger reiterated this point of view:

Freud is the scientist, only the scientist: Jung is the ethician. One could also call him a seer, in the deepest and most reverent sense of the word. Jung is the poet among psychologists. His subconscious is full of living forms with whom one speaks and consorts like human beings, who can give counsel and warn, with whom one tries to be on a good footing because otherwise they may become "angry." Jung's psychology is a demonology.... Primordial wisdom has it that one can disarm a demon, even make a servant of him, if one knows his name....

Freudian psychology incorporates all the advantages and dangers of the Jewish spirit, Jungian psychology all those of the Germanic soul.

Freud is atheistic; Jung, not in terms of doctrine but in terms of attitude, is marked by a Catholic piety....


Jung protested that he was not anti-Semitic, that he had courageously chosen to talk about that which was on everyone's mind, that Jews could not be insulted since he had made no value judgments, and that it was the failure to make distinctions which leveled everything and caused hatred between people. He was not for tarring everyone with the same brush. He fought Freud's psychology, he said,

because of his materialistic and intellectualistic and -- last but not least -- irreligious attitude and not because he is a Jew. Insofar as his theory is based in certain respects on Jewish premises, it is not valid for non-Jews. Nor do I deny my Protestant prejudice. Had Freud been more tolerant of the ideas of others I would still be standing by his side today. I consider his intolerance -- and it is this that repels me -- a personal idiosyncrasy.... Infinite nuances are needed if justice is to be done to human beings.


To "accept the conclusions of a Jewish psychology," then, "as generally valid," was a "quite unpardonable mistake. "

Jung's branding of Freud's psychoanalysis -- a technique evolved out of this "Jewish psychology" -- as a "Satanic" doctrine capable of "murdering souls" did not injure his growing reputation. Many famous artists and writers had flocked to him for soul salvation. In 1939, the Mellons were converted. Andrew Mellon's interest in the occult resulted in a huge collection of books on the subject, stretching back to antiquity, which he donated to Yale. The Mellons set up the Bollingen Foundation to publish Jung's work.

The real Fascists of America are never named in the commercial press. It will not even hint at the fact that there are many powerful elements working against a greater democracy, against an America without discrimination based on race, color and creed, an America where never again will one third of the people be without sufficient food, clothing and shelter, where never again will there be 12,000,000 unemployed and many more millions working for semi-starvation wages while the DuPont, Ford, Hearst, Mellon and Rockefeller Empires move into the billions of dollars. I call these elements Fascist. You may not like names and labels but technically as well as journalistically and morally they are correct. You may substitute Tories, or Economic Royalists, or Vested Interests, or whatever you like for the flag-waving anti-American Americans whose efforts and objectives parallel those of the Liga Industriale which bought out Mussolini in 1920, and the Thyssen-Krupp-Voegeler-Flick Rhineland industry and banking system which subsidized Hitler when Naziism was about to collapse. Their main object was to end the civil liberties of the nation, destroy the labor unions, end the free press, and make more money at the expense of a slave nation.

-- Facts and Fascism, by George Seldes


Leary and Alpert returned to the US with their small but energetic band of followers and began to look for an alternative base of operations. During this period they rubbed shoulders with some of the richest jet-setters on the Eastern seaboard, including William Mellon Hitchcock, a tall, handsome stockbroker in his twenties. Hitchcock was the grandson of William Larimer Hitchcock, founder of Gulf Oil, and a nephew of Pittsburgh financier Andrew Mellon, who served as treasury secretary during Prohibition.

Thanks to a sizable inheritance and a family trust fund that provided him with $15,000 per week in spending money, Billy Hitchcock was in a position to offer a lot more than moral support to the psychedelic movement. He first turned on to LSD after his sister, Peggy, the director of IFIF's New York branch, introduced him to Leary. They hit it off immediately, and Hitchcock made his family's four-thousand-acre estate in Dutchess County, New York, available to the psychedelic clan for a nominal five-hundred-dollar monthly rent. At the center of the estate sat a turreted sixty-four-room mansion known as Millbrook, surrounded by polo fields, stables, beautiful pine forests, tennis courts, a lake, a large gatehouse, and a picturesque fountain. Two hours from New York City by car, this idyllic spread served as the grand backdrop for the next phase of the chemical crusade.

With a new headquarters at Millbrook, IFIF was disbanded and replaced by another organization, the Castalia Foundation, named after the intellectual colony in Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. Leary, a great fan of Hesse, felt that this particular book illuminated many of the problems he and his cohorts would confront while trying to apply the psychedelic experience to social living. Specifically Leary was concerned about the relationship between the mystic community and the rest of society. He did not want Millbrook to degenerate into a haven for isolated intellectuals. His group would avoid this perennial pitfall by remaining socially relevant. They would undertake the spiritual search in a communal setting and report back to the rest of the world. They would keep records, compile statistics, and publish articles in their own journal, The Psychedelic Review. Above all they would become an active, educative, and regenerative force, an example for others to follow.

A core group of approximately thirty men and women gathered at Millbrook, including many acid veterans from the early days at Harvard. They were rejoined by Michael Hollingshead, who had left the group in early 1963 to work in New York City with an organization known as the Agora Scientific Trust. Hollingshead had quite a scene going for a while at his Fifth Avenue apartment. The entire place was laced with LSD -- the food, the furnishings, etc. -- and anyone who came through the door (even the knobs were spiked) inevitably wound up stoned. He threw some wild parties at which everybody was dosed; those in attendance included people from the United Nations whom he knew from his days at the British Cultural Exchange. But when Hollingshead learned of Hitchcock's generous offer, he knew it was time to pack his bags and head upstate. That's where the action was, and he wanted to be part of it.

The Millbrook residents were a tight-knit group. They shared a common lifestyle geared toward exploring the realities of their own nervous systems in a creative rather than a clinical setting. Their goal was to discover and cultivate the divinity within each person. The permanent members of the household regularly tripped together, rotating as shaman in "follow the leader" sessions involving high doses of LSD-25. The elusive aim of these group sessions was to break through to the other side without losing the love and radiance of the acid high during the crucial reentry period. Various methods were devised to facilitate a permanent spiritual transformation. Since many in the group had backgrounds in behavioral psychology, it came natural to them to keep a scorecard of their changing states of consciousness. On certain days a bell would ring four times an hour starting at 9:00 A.M. The bell was a signal to stop and record what they were doing then, what "game" they were playing. They thought that by paying more attention to shifting motivations and interpersonal dynamics they could learn to transcend their habitual routines. They compared scorecards and rapped endlessly about how LSD was affecting them.

In many ways the scene at Millbrook was like a fairy tale. The mansion itself was beautifully furnished with Persian carpets, crystal chandeliers, and a baronial fireplace, and all the rooms were full of elaborate psychedelic art. There were large aquariums with unusual fish, while other animals -- dogs, cats, goats -- wandered freely through the house. People stayed up all night tripping and prancing around the estate. (A stash of liquid acid had spilled in Richard Alpert's suitcase, soaking his underwear, when the psychedelic fraternity was traveling back from Zihuatanejo, so anyone could get high merely by sucking on his briefs.) Everyone was always either just coming down from a trip or planning to take one. Some dropped acid for ten days straight, increasing the dosage and mixing in other drugs. Even the children and dogs were said to have taken LSD.

Millbrook was a constant party, but one infused with a sense of purpose and optimism. The residents saw themselves as the vanguard of a psychic revolution that would transform the entire society. Victory seemed inevitable because they thought they had a means of producing guaranteed mystical insight. As Hollingshead described it, "We lived out a myth which had not yet been integrated into our personalities. Millbrook was itself the work of art .... like Kafka's Castle, it gave out messages into the aether in the form of one high resonant sound which vibrated on the ears of the world, as if it were trying to penetrate beyond the barrier separating 'us' from 'them.' We felt satisfied that our goal was Every Man's, a project of Every Man's private ambition. We sought for that unitary state of divine harmony, an existence in which only the sense of wonder remains, and all fear gone."

Billy Hitchcock, the millionaire padrone, never really entered into the close camaraderie of the Millbrook circle. He lived a half-mile from the "big house" in his own private bungalow, a four-bedroom gardener's cottage with a Japanese bath in the basement. There he carried on a social life befitting a scion of one of the country's wealthiest families. Hitchcock never totally broke with his old routines even though he had begun turning on. He still kept in close contact with his friends from New York and with various brokers and investors who visited his bungalow for private parties. Some of these people were introduced to LSD through Hitchcock, but it became a running joke at Millbrook that you should not turn on your lawyer or anyone who had to take care of business for you, lest he drop his briefcase and head for the psychedelic sunset. Hitchcock would usually be on the phone all morning talking with Swiss and Bahamian bankers, setting up business meetings and fast-money deals. By afternoon he had taken care of his monetary affairs and would occasionally join the scene at the mansion.

Why Hitchcock decided to throw his weight behind the psychedelic cause is still something of a mystery. Was he simply a millionaire acid buff, a wayward son of the ruling class who dug Leary's trip? Or did he have something else up his sleeve? "Mr. Billy," as his servants affectionately called him, claimed he got involved with LSD because kicking the establishment in the teeth was exciting. Of course, since Hitchcock was the establishment, some questioned what he was really up to. Michael Hollingshead, for one, never fully trusted him. Most residents, however, thought Hitchcock a charming fellow. As one insider commented, "It hardly registered that he owned the place. He had a happy, open way of talking, perfect manners -- a sort of Frank Merriwether type who had somehow fallen into a pool of gold and come up smelling like marijuana."

Hitchcock got along well with Leary and often joined the acid fellowship in group trips. At times he became very emotional and vulnerable on LSD. One night he had to be reassured that he did indeed own the estate. But unlike the others, Mr. Billy tended not to verbalize his feelings. He never developed any metaphysical system about the LSD experience, which was rather peculiar since everyone at Millbrook was into some kind of half or full-cocked philosophy. Hitchcock's interest in LSD did not appear to be a simple matter of spiritual enrichment. He was not one to wax poetic over the prospect of merging with the Oversoul. When asked at the outset of one group session what question he wanted answered by the acid trip, he replied, "How can I make more money on the stock market?" ....

Billy Hitchcock wasn't the only figure in the Mellon clan who rubbed shoulders with the espionage community. A number of Mellons served in the OSS, notably David Bruce, the OSS station chief in London (whose father-in-law, Andrew Mellon, was treasury secretary during the Depression). After the war certain influential members of the Mellon family maintained close ties with the CIA. Mellon family foundations have been used repeatedly as conduits for Agency funds. Furthermore, Richard Helms was a frequent weekend guest of the Mellon patriarchs in Pittsburgh during his tenure as CIA director (1966- 1973).

-- Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond, by Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain


After the atrocities of the Holocaust became public knowledge, Jung's outrage against the Nazis was genuine[?!]. Still, his assistant, H. G. Baynes, gave the Jews some unpleasant moments by theorizing, in Germany Possessed, without reasonable evidence [?!] that Hitler's natural father had been a wealthy Viennese Jew:

By far the greater portion of the wealth and power of Austria was, at that time, in the hands of the Jews, and they were also guilty of an unfeeling ostentation of wealth and luxury while half Vienna was starving. One can understand, therefore, how the mind of the boy [Hitler] saw the Jews as the worldly possessors who lay coiled about the wealth of his motherland.


HITLER THE JEW?

During his tumultuous rise to the pinnacles of power Adolf Hitler was often accused of being Jewish. Even the leaders of the National Party which he sought to lead, ridiculed Hitler as a "Jew" and for "behaving like a Jew" as did many of his enemies.

In 1933, it was reported in a London newspaper that a gravestone was found in a Jewish cemetery in Bucharest, inscribed with Hebrew characters that spelled out: Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler was a Jewish name ... but this "Adolf Hitler" had been born in 1832, fifty years before the birth of the future dictator of Germany.

Before coming to power, Adolf Hitler was also a target of widespread ridicule, and was mocked by enemies and the press who questioned his ancestry and who laughably referred to him as "Adolf Schickelgruber." "Schickelgruber" had been the name of Adolf's maternal grandmother, and for 39 years, the name of his father, Alois.

Although the "Schickelgruber" moniker rankled the rising dictator, what concerned him, and what he feared most, was the history behind the name: the discovery that he was part "Jew;" a fear he repeatedly voiced long after coming to power.

"People must not know who I am," he ranted, and then ranted again when informed that his family history was being investigated. "They must not know where I came from."

Long before and well after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, considerable effort was expended to falsify, erase or destroy the records from his past. Repeated investigations were conducted by the Gestapo who repeatedly visited his ancestral village in Austria, questioning and threatening anyone that had been associated with the Hitler family.

Hitler was so concerned that when he annexed Austria, in 1938, he ordered that his family's ancestral village, Dollersheim, and all neighboring villages be destroyed. His armies marched in and then cleared out and forcibly evacuated the villagers who were dispersed far and wide. And then Hitler in fact made it disappear, erased it from the face of the Earth. His armies bombed Dollersheim and all neighboring villages into oblivion as part of a training exercise. Even his father's and grandmother's graves were obliterated and no trace remains.

Nevertheless, what has survived the ravages of time, purposeful destruction and clever forgery, is the fact that Adolf's father, Alois Schickelgruber, was the illegitimate son of a female servant, Maria Anna Schickelgruber. Maria Anna became pregnant while living as a servant in a Jewish household -- a common servant girl fate. It was assumed by family members and villagers alike that she'd been impregnated by the head of the house, Baron Rothschild (Langer, 1973; Payne, 1973); a rumor that the Austrian Secret police claimed to have confirmed when ordered by Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss to conduct a thorough investigation. Later, when Hitler orchestrated the anschluss of Austria, and German troops marched in, he had Dollfuss murdered, and in addition to destroying Dollersheim, ordered that all documents related to that investigation be destroyed.

Yet others claimed that the man who had impregnated Adolf's grandmother was the Jewish scion of the seigneurial house of Ottenstein.

Hitler's own nephew, William Patrick Hitler, and Adolf's personal attorney, Hans Frank, claimed that his grandfather was a wealthy "Granz Jew" by the name of Frankenberger who in turn "paid a maintenance allowance from the time of the child's birth until his fourteenth year."

As Frank reported to Hitler, and as he recounted at his Nuremberg war crimes trial, based on what he learned: "the possibility cannot be dismissed that Hitler's father was half Jewish as a result of an extramarital relationship between the Schickelgruber woman and the Jew from Graz. This would mean that Hitler was one-quarter Jewish."

When Adolf Hitler was presented with the results of Frank's investigation, although denying he was Jewish, Hitler did admit to Frank that a Jewish man paid his grandmother money, because the "Jew" was tricked into believing he was the father of Alois. Of course this means, if Adolf (or rather Frank) is to be believed, that his grandmother was having sex with a Jewish man before she became pregnant.

What these stories all have in common, of course, is that Hitler's grandfather was a rich "Jew," and that after becoming pregnant his grandmother was banished from the Rothschild or Frankenberger or the Ottenstein home and sent back to her village to have her baby, Alois. It also appears that funds and even "hush money" were secretly provided for her and the baby.

When required to fill out the baptismal certificate for her son, she left the line as to the father of her boy completely blank. Why did she leave it blank? Two reasons. Having been impregnated by a Jewish man was nothing to be proud of given the hateful anti-Semitic attitudes of the ignorant peasant farmers and villagers of Lower Austria. Secondly, it is said that she was paid to keep the paternity secret.

Yet another factor suggesting that Alois was Jewish was the fact that he was nothing like the peasants of his mother's village where people intermarried and produced generation and after generation of peasant farmers. Alois in fact left the village and sought his fortune. Alois was supremely self-confident, politically astute, and ambitious, and with the help of influential aristocrats in Vienna, Alois became a government official. Alois presumably inherited these traits from his father, who was most likely a very intelligent and successful Jew.

-- The Mind & God of Adolf Hitler, by Rhawn Joseph, Ph.D.


Hitler worshipped Wagner, and expounding on the opera Parsifal, confided to Hermann Rauschning: "Behind the absurd externals of the story, with its Christian embroidery and its Good Friday mystification, something altogether different is revealed as the true content.... The king is suffering from the incurable ailment of corrupted blood."

-- Gods & Beasts -- The Nazis & the Occult, by Dusty Sklar


Hitler's "uncanny shrewdness," "political flair," and "taste in lavish interior decoration," "handsome furniture," and "rare things," as well as his "amazing political opportunism" were the result of his Jewish blood. Hitler, in a word, was "the Wandering Jew," "the man accursed" because he had spurned "the jewel of great price," Christ's teaching.

Not until 1945 did Jung publicly comment again upon events in Germany, and then to present himself as a prophet who had foreseen the "collective psychic murder." Now it was the "German psychology" [Librarian's Comment: Rather, his own psychology] which he dissected. The German, charged Jung, instead of purging himself by admitting his guilt, shifted his responsibility for the crime and refused even to acknowledge that he had ever been a Nazi. He "dolled up" his inferiority feeling with "pseudo-scientific race-theory," which "did not make the extermination of the Jews any more acceptable."

About his own collusion Jung said nothing.

Criticism for his aid to the cause of what he believed would be a "Germanic, Jew-free psychotherapy" has now died down, and in the present atmosphere of receptivity to occultism, his ideas, books, and disciples are in the vanguard, enjoying great prestige.

It is difficult, however, to accept his defense that he was simply trying to save a young science. The December 1933 Zentralblatt issue occasioned a number of alarmed letters from colleagues. His answer to Max Guggenheim, on March 28, 1934 (see above), was representative.

What is more likely, the reigning attitudes in Germany expressed mystical affinities with which Jung was very much at home. There were several areas of compatibility between Jung and the Nazis: alchemy, astrology, the Grail legend, the symbolism of the runes, medieval mysticism, anti-bolshevism, and so forth. His high degree of tolerance for the "shadow" side of human nature, a necessary complement to reason, may have caused him to cast the Nazis in a romantic light. Like them, he was not afraid to explore the hidden recesses of the unconscious for ancient secrets so great and fearful, as he said, "that the world is grateful to Freud for having proved 'scientifically' (what a bastard of a science!) that one has seen nothing behind [the door]...."

The Nazis were the new barbarians who would purge civilization of its clotted, stultifying elements. They were the antidote to the civilized man, who had advanced too rapidly, "which is why we have become lopsidedly intellectualistic and rationalistic and have quite forgotten that there are other factors which cannot be influenced by a one-track rational intellect."

If Jung was able, at least for a while, to add his prestige to the Nazis' weltanschauung, it was because of their common occult ground. His thinking rendered him susceptible to their apocalyptic visions of Hitler as a magical shaman with a spiritual mission. To the extent that he enhanced their credibility, if only in their own minds, he strengthened faith in the "hero cult."
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Re: Gods & Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

Postby admin » Sun Jun 21, 2015 12:45 am

CHAPTER 14: Jehovah as Satan

Jehovah ... was a creature of darkness, hence an Evil God....

-- Louis Israel Newman, Jewish Influence on Christian Reform Movements


The Jews have figured as scapegoats many times in history. They have been hounded and massacred. This has been laid to their obstinacy in clinging to their religion and image as God's chosen people; to their rejection of Christ; to their economic superiority; and to their presumed unique psychology. But there is one peculiar motive for the extermination policy of the Nazis which has hitherto escaped attention. It suggests itself when we view the Nazis in the light of occult thinking: The mystical teachings of Guido von List, Lanz von Liebenfels, and Rudolf von Sebottendorff were modern restatements of Gnosticism.

When the apocalyptic promise of Christ's resurrection was broken, the Gnostics sought to return men to God by another route, more Oriental than Hellenist. They devised a dualistic cosmology to set against the teachings of the early Christian Church, which, they claimed, were only common deceptions, unsuited for the wise. The truth was esoteric. Only the properly initiated could appreciate it. It belonged to a secret tradition which had come down through certain mystery schools. The truth was, God could never become man. There were two separate realms -- one spiritual, the other material. The spiritual realm, created by God, was all good; the material realm, created by the demiurge, all evil. Man needed to be saved, not from Original Sin, but from enslavement to matter. For this, he had to learn the mystical arts. Thus Gnosticism became a source for the occult tradition.

A famous medieval Gnostic sect, the Cathars, came to identify the Old Testament god, Jehovah, with the demiurge, the creator of the material world and therefore the equivalent of Satan. Within Gnosticism, then, existed the idea that the Jewish god was really the devil, responsible for all the evil in the world. He was opposed to the New Testament God. The Cathars tried to eliminate the Old Testament from Church theology and condemned Judaism as a work of Satan's, whose aim was to tempt men away from the spirit. Jehovah, they said, was the god of an earth "waste and void," with darkness "upon the face of the deep." Was he not cruel and capricious? They quoted Scripture to prove it. After promising that the Tower of Babel would be built, he dispersed the builders. He rained down a deluge; ravaged Sodom and Gomorrah; circumcised his male people; encouraged animal sacrifice; insisted on strict observance of a day of rest; made two sexes, to battle each other; issued an edict to Adam which was transgressed out of ignorance or imperfection, then cursed his sinful creation.

The New Testament God, on the other hand, was light. He declared that "there is neither male nor female," for everyone was united in Christ. He blessed his creation, which was good and perfect and without sin.

These two gods, obviously, had nothing in common.

The synagogue was regarded as profane by Christians. The Cathars -- themselves considered heretical by the Church -- castigated Catholics for refusing to purge themselves of Jewish sources; Church members often blamed the Christian heresy on Jewish mysticism, which was considered an inspiration for Gnostic sorcery.

But Gnostic cosmology, though officially branded "false," pervaded the thinking of the Church. The Jews were widely thought to be magicians. It was believed that they could cause rain, and when there was a drought, they were encouraged to do so. Despite the displeasure of the Roman Popes, Christians, when they were in straitened circumstances, practiced Jewish customs, even frequenting synagogues.

To the medieval mind, sorcery had an everyday reality, and the sorcerer was living proof of Satan's power. The Jew, with his strange customs, was suspected of practicing black magic in his most innocent rituals. Tossing a bit of earth behind oneself or rinsing the hands after a funeral; binding the head and overturning the bed during mourning; attaching a mezuzah (a scroll, inscribed with Biblical passages, placed in a small case, as a reminder of faith in God) to the doorpost -- all these were mystifying to the Christian, and filled him with dread. Jews grew so sensitive about the accusations of sorcery that they were often exempted by their rabbis from some of their customs out of fear of arousing suspicion, "for this is a matter of life and death, since they accuse us and persecute us." A Jewish group, bringing gifts to Richard I's coronation in London in 1189, touched off a conflict which lasted more than six months. It was thought that they used witchcraft on the new monarch.

Their reputation for supernatural powers -- enhanced by their Biblical reputation for interpreting dreams -- gave them a psychological edge over Christians in their practice of the healing arts. Moreover, ancient Arabic and Greek medicine was available to the Jews through their versatility in languages and their travels; and immunity from Church dogma made them look elsewhere than to miraculous relics and cures. Paradoxically, the scientific medical skill which the Jews amassed further confirmed their image as sorcerers. Thus the Christian who acknowledged the Jewish physician's superiority by seeking him out for a cure risked the consequences of a mortal sin. In this and a multitude of other ways, the Jew embodied all of the medieval ambivalence toward Satan.

Never before had Satan played the starring role than he did in that era. Under the shadow of Gothic spires, Satan skulked, waiting to pounce on unsuspecting souls. He tormented them with pestilence and portents, but also with visions of incredible beauty, because the old devil was infinitely adaptable and could appear in the guise of one's fondest dream. Terror-stricken by a Church which preached sin and sorrow, trapped in a world which wallowed in both, the Christian did not love God so much as he feared the devil. As the Italian scholar Arturo Graf puts it in The Story of the Devil:

Satan is the child of sadness ... in order that he may grow and thrive, there is need of shadows, of the mysteries of sin and of sorrow, which like a funeral shroud enfold the religion of Golgotha. Satan is the child of fear; and terror dominates the Middle Ages. Seized with an unconquerable dread, the souls of men ... fear the physical world, opposed to the world of the spirit, and its irreconcilable foe; they fear life, the perpetual incentive and tinder-box of sin; they fear death, behind which yawn the uncertainties of eternity. Dreams and visions torment men's minds. The ecstatic hermit, kneeling long hours in prayer before the doorway of his cell, sees flying through the air awe-inspiring armies and riotous hordes of apocalyptic monsters; his nights are lighted up by flaming portents; the stars are distorted and bathed in blood, sad omens of impending evil. In seasons of pestilence that mow men down like ripened stalks of grain, are seen darts, hurled by invisible hands, cleaving the air and disappearing with hissing sound; and ever and anon, across the face of terror-stricken Christendom runs, like a tremor presaging the world's end, the sinister word that Antichrist is already born and is about to open the fearful drama foretold in the Apocalypse.


If God seemed absent, Satan was present everywhere, not only in curses but in prayers, and the Church, intimately acquainted, gave him full publicity. What was the Church without the devil and hell? As Graf points out: "The Church made good use of Satan, employed him as a most effective political tool, and gave him all possible credit; since what men would not do through love of God or in a spirit of obedience, they would do through fear of the Devil." Men may have hated Satan, but they also recognized him as the real ruler of the physical world. He had all the power. One couldn't help admiring him for that and wish for some of it oneself.

Though the medieval Christian persecuted the Gnostics, it is scarcely surprising that he accepted their view of the Jew as the child of Satan. Despite outward appearances, it seemed that the Jew was not really a human creature. He did not smell human. It was said that he ate Christian children; that horns even grew out of his head. In certain periods in Vienna, he was required to wear a horned hat; in France, a horn-shaped figure on his badge. Satan, in his portraits, has decidedly Semitic features. The Jew seemed to the Christian, as well as to the Gnostic, to enjoy the kingdom of this world, whatever he might expect in the next. His failure to accept Christ was, therefore, to be expected. What better proof of his partnership with Satan than his practical involvement with worldly goods? A Gnostic axiom declared: "The world's money is the corruption of the soul." Since the material world was the devil's domain, it was necessarily perverted. All matter was vile. Christians and Gnostics believed that the Jew was attracted by matter and adept at controlling it: hence, his inordinate love of ostentatious luxury and his financial genius.

The body, too, belonged to Satan. It was the prison of the soul. Physical man was a brute -- one of Satan's nicknames was God's Ape -- and it was through the passions, particularly sex, that man's greatest demonic temptations came. Here, also, the Jew was considered the exemplary demonic being, living only for his appetites, not the least the sexual appetite. The simplest way for the devil to invade souls was through possession, and the most intimate form of possession was through sexual intercourse. It was not uncommon for the devil to unite himself with human beings this way, and all the evil in the world was proof of the number of diabolical children thus begotten. Furthermore, in the Gnostic view, procreation itself was always evil. Since matter was Satan's creation, the struggle against evil could only triumph, ultimately, with the cessation of new life. This was too much to ask of weak mortals, but it was a direction toward which to tend.

Gnosticism, going by name of Hermetism in the Renaissance and Reformation, practiced magic and meditation to try to free the spirit from the body. The Age of Enlightenment was not particularly hospitable to the occult tradition, but Gnosticism found new advocates among nineteenth-century Germans. The original "fall into matter," the creation of Jehovah, which had unloosed all the evil in the world, was now given a "scientific" explanation, in light of Darwin's theories; popularizers gave the layman to understand that the inequality of races was due to a tragic flaw carried in the blood. Madame Blavatsky held, in The Secret Doctrine, that the Gnostics "were right in regarding the Jewish God as belonging to a class of lower, material and not very holy denizens of the invisible world.

" ... For the creation of those wretched races, in a spiritual and moral sense, which grace our globe, no high divinity could be made responsible, but only angels of a low hierarchy, to which class they relegated the Jewish God, Jehovah." [italics hers.]


The Jewish God, furthermore, was identical with Cain, Son of Eve by Satan, said Madame Blavatsky.

The anti-Semites embraced this with glee, and the concept of Aryanism was wedded to the forces of light. Nature, they said, decreed that the union of Aryan and Semite resulted in a hybrid monstrosity, psychically sterile. Since "bad blood drives out good," an Aryan woman mating with a Jew was sure to bear only Jewish children. Proponents of hypnotism and suggestion accounted for "Jewish" traits by the observation that a mother's thoughts were mentally transmitted to the fetus. "Nature is and remains essentially aristocratic and punishes implacably all attempts upon the purity of the blood," said Ludwig Buchner. The Jews were originally a crossbreed, argued Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and "their existence is sin, their existence is a crime against the holy laws of life; this, at any rate, is felt by the Jew himself in the moments when destiny knocks heavily at his door. Not the individual but the whole people had to be washed clean, and not of a conscious but an unconscious crime." Anti-Semitism, then, was the instinctive "wisdom" of the Aryan race, which, as the "fittest," sought to survive. To explain the Jew's survival, his "inability to disappear," one commentator fell back on his material wealth, which he hid "under the appearance of misery."

Geographers, sociologists, political scientists, and Orientalists made common cause in attributing the differences between the German and the Jew to the contrast between desert and forest. The racial soul, developed over eons, led to the softness, parasitism, sterility, and alienation from nature which was manifest in the Jew, and the strength, courage, creativity, and love of nature displayed by the German. "Biological philosophers" such as Theodor Fritsch, Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, and Guido von List preached "racial hygiene" to inflamed Aryans worrying about the contamination of their blood. Within a few decades, men of learning and propagandists succeeded in implanting in the Germans a "scientific racism" which gave them a warrant for genocide.

The greatest obstacle in the way of extermination, religious sentiment, was swept aside by divorcing Jesus from his origin as a Jew and making him the ancestor of the Germanic tribes, a sort of Siegfried-Christ. German racists took the Gnostic view that Christianity must separate itself from the Old Testament, and they printed "a mass of 'revelations' of every kind (such as the 'unveiling of the secrets' of Holy Writ or of Runic lore or of Paradise itself)," as Leon Poliakov points out in The Aryan Myth.

Of course, a great deal of this religious questing was associated with speculations and experiments in occult phenomena or in theosophy and spiritualism.... But it was only in Germany that they took such an aggressively pagan as well as patriotic and nationalistic turn. The inevitable spongers who climbed on to the band-wagon earned a living by ... forging documents to prove the Aryanism of Jesus.


The Jew, "the devil incarnate of human decadence," as Richard Wagner called him, had made a "Judaeo-barbaric jumble of the world," and only a blood purification rite would keep civilization going.

Wagner transposed esoteric themes into music and turned on generations of Germans to the real meaning of the struggle between the Jew and the Aryan. One of his operatic themes was the quest for the Holy Grail, a mystery in the ancient Gnostic tradition that had been revealed in the songs of the Cathar troubadours and was understandable only to those who had ears to hear.

Hitler was one. He worshipped Wagner, and expounding on the opera Parsifal, confided to Hermann Rauschning:

Behind the absurd externals of the story, with its Christian embroidery and its Good Friday mystification, something altogether different is revealed as the true content.... pure, noble blood, in the protection and glorification of whose purity the brotherhood of the initiated have come together. The king is suffering from the incurable ailment of corrupted blood. The uninitiated but pure man is tempted to abandon himself in Klingsor's magic garden to the lusts and excesses of corrupt civilization, instead of joining the elite of knights who guard the secret of life, pure blood.


Only the "truly pure and noble" would partake of the "eternal life granted by the grail," Gnostic symbol for hidden knowledge of immortality.

Rauschning observed that to Hitler the Jew represented "the very principle of evil," and that in his "esoteric doctrine" the "mythical prototype of humanity," the Jew, must be "the irreconcilable enemy of the new, the German, Chosen People. One god excludes the other." There was an "actual war of the gods." Rauschning, ignorant of esoteric doctrine, assumed that Hitler meant this symbolically, but Hitler assured him:

No! It's the sheer simple undiluted truth. Two worlds face one another -- the men of God and the men of Satan! The Jew is the anti-man, the creature of another god. He must have come from another root of the human race. I stood the Aryan and the Jew over against each other, and if I call one of them a human being I must call the other something else. The two are as widely separated as man and beast. Not that I would call the Jew a beast. He is much further from the beasts than we Aryans. He is a creature outside nature and alien to nature.


We can understand more fully the Nazis' intense identification with the Middle Ages in the light of their Gnostic attachment. A reporter in Munich in 1936 observed colored pictures of Hitler in the silver garb of the knights of the Holy Grail. The pictures were withdrawn by the Nazis after a short while. SS training classes presented material on the Grail, on knighthood, on alchemy, and on Gnostic history. Nazi antipathy to the Church confused Christians, who failed to recognize in the reference to a paganized Christ the ancient Gnostic heresy. As Hitler told Goebbels in Rauschning's presence:

The peasant will be told what the Church has destroyed for him: the whole of the secret knowledge of nature, of the divine, the shapeless, the daemonic.... We shall wash off the Christian veneer and bring out a religion peculiar to our race. And this is where we must begin. Not in the great cities.... There we shall only lose ourselves in the stupid godless propaganda of the Marxists: free sex in nature and that sort of bad taste. The urban masses are empty. Where all is extinguished, nothing can be aroused. But our peasantry still lives in heathen beliefs and values....


Most important, the central doctrine of nazism, that the Jew was evil and had to be exterminated, had its origin in the Gnostic position that there were two worlds, one good and one evil, one dark and one light, one materialistic and one spiritual.

This sheds light on an otherwise incomprehensible recurring theme within Nazi literature, as, for example, "The Earth-Centered Jew Lacks a Soul," [Found in George Mosse's book "Nazi Culture"] by one of the chief architects of Nazi dogma, Alfred Rosenberg, who held that whereas other people believe in a Hereafter and in immortality, the Jew affirms the world and will not allow it to perish. The Gnostic secret is that the spirit is trapped in matter, and to free it, the world must be rejected. Thus, in his total lack of world-denial, the Jew is snuffing out the inner light, and preventing the millennium:

Where the idea of the immortal dwells, the longing for the journey or the withdrawal from temporality must always emerge again; hence, a denial of the world will always reappear. And this is the meaning of the non-Jewish peoples: they are the custodians of world-negation, of the idea of the Hereafter, even if they maintain it in the poorest way. Hence, one or another of them can quietly go under, but what really matters lives on in their descendants. If, however, the Jewish people were to perish, no nation would be left which would hold world-affirmation in high esteem-the end of all time would be here.

... the Jew, the only consistent and consequently the only viable yea-sayer to the world, must be found wherever other men bear in themselves ... a compulsion to overcome the world.... On the other hand, if the Jew were continually to stifle us, we would never be able to fulfill our mission, which is the salvation of the world, but would, to be frank, succumb to insanity, for pure world-affirmation, the unrestrained will for a vain existence, leads to no other goal. It would literally lead to a void, to the destruction not only of the illusory earthly world but also of the truly existent, the spiritual. Considered in himself the Jew represents nothing else but this blind will for destruction, the insanity of mankind. It is known that Jewish people are especially prone to mental disease. "Dominated by delusions," said Schopenhauer about the Jew.

... To strip the world of its soul, that and nothing else is what Judaism wants. This, however, would be tantamount to the world's destruction.


This remarkable statement, seemingly the rantings of a lunatic, expresses the Gnostic theme that the spirit of man, essentially divine, is imprisoned in an evil world. The way out of this world is through rejection of it. But the Jew alone stands in the way. Behind all the talk about "the earth-centered Jew" who "lacks a soul"; about the demonic Jew who will despoil the Aryan maiden; about the cabalistic work of the devil in Jewish finance; about the sinister revolutionary Jewish plot to take over the world and cause the decline of civilization, there is the shadow of ancient Gnosticism.

"Jewry as such has long since outlived its time; it has no more justification within the modern life of peoples, and the fact that it continues to exist is a mistake of world history whose consequences are unavoidable. We do not mean the forms of the Jewish religion alone, but above all the spirit of Jewry, the Jewish way of thinking."

-- Anthroposophy and its Defenders, by Peter Staudenmaier and Peter Zegers



Then, as a material phenomenon accompanying this process of the departure of the Moon-forces, something else came about. — I have already told you how Jahve is related to the Moon. What happened was that through the connection of Jahve with the Moon, the Moon too was made material, was mineralised, but with a materiality much denser than that of the Earth. Therefore what can be seen today as physical Moon and of which it can be assumed that the Moon contains a mineral element, is to be traced back to the deed of Jahve whereby certain elements were added to the Old Moon.

Thereby, however, the Old Moon forces were crippled, and now work in a quite different way. Had the Moon remained unmineralised, its forces would have worked in such a way that its rays would always have evoked the old atavistic clairvoyance in men, and the effects of the Moon upon the will would have made men somnambulists in the most marked form. This was neutralised through the mineralisation of the Moon. The old forces can now no longer develop in such a way.

This is a truth of tremendous importance, for now you will realise that it was necessary for the Moon to be mineralised in order that it might not work in the old way.

-- The Occult Movement in the Nineteenth Century and Its Relation to Modern Culture, by Rudolf Steiner


The medieval concept of the Jew as sorcerer was apparent in Hess's announcement, after his capture by the British, that the Jews were in possession of a secret power to hypnotize people and make them act against their will.

Nor is it at all clear that in the earliest times the difference between Jehovah and other gods was placed in His spiritual nature. The Old Testament word which we translate by spirit (ruah) is the common word for wind, including the "living breath" (ruah of life, Gen. vi. 17), and so used of the motions of life and the affections of the soul. Now, observation of human life taught the Hebrews to distinguish between man's flesh, or visible and tangible frame, and the subtile breath or spirit which animates this frame. It was in the fleshy body that they saw the difference between man and God. "Hast Thou eyes of flesh," says Job, "or seest Thou as man seeth" (Job x. 4). "The Egyptians are men and not God, and their horses flesh and not spirit" (Isa. xxxi. 3). These passages are the clearest expressions of the spirituality of the godhead which the Old Testament contains, and you observe that they are not directed to distinguish between the true God and false gods, but to characterise the godhead in its difference from human nature. It is, in fact, the divine working, rather than the divine nature, that the Hebrew Scriptures regard as spiritual — that is, as possessing a subtile and invisible character, comparable with the mysterious movements of the wind. The common doctrine of the Old Testament is not that God is spirit, but that the spirit of Jehovah, going forth from Him, works in the world and among men. And this is no metaphysical doctrine; it simply expresses that difference between divine and human agency which must be recognised wherever there is any belief in God, or at least any belief rising above the grossest fetichism. That the early Israelites possessed no metaphysical doctrine of the spirituality of Jehovah, conceived as an existence out of all relation to space and time, is plain from the fact that the Old Testament never quite stripped off the idea that Jehovah's contact with earth has a special relation to special places — that the operations of His sovereignty go forth from Sinai, or from Zion, or from some other earthly sanctuary, where He is nearer to man than on unconsecrated ground. It is true that this conception generally takes a poetical form, and did not to the prophets appear irreconcilable with the thought that it is impossible to escape from Jehovah's presence (Amos ix. 1 seq.; Ps. cxxxix. V), that heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him (1 Kings viii. 27); that He sits on the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are as grasshoppers (Isa. xl. 22). But the figures of early poetry express the actual thoughts of the people who use them; and there can be no question that, by the ordinary Israelite, the local relation of Jehovah to the land and sanctuaries of Israel, the idea of His march from Sinai in the thunderstorm that announces His approach, were taken with a degree of literality that would have been impossible if Moses had already given to the people a metaphysical conception of the divine being. As for the common notion that the name Jehovah expresses the idea of absolute and unconditioned existence, that is a mere fiction of the Alexandrian philosophy, absurdly inconsistent with the whole language of the Old Testament, and refuted even by the one phrase Jehovah of hosts — the Jehovah of the armies of Israel. [10] Even the principle of the second commandment, that Jehovah is not to be worshipped by images, which is often appealed to as containing the most characteristic peculiarity of Mosaism, cannot, in the light of history, be viewed as having had so fundamental a place in the religion of early Israel. The state worship of the golden calves led to no quarrel between Elisha and the dynasty of Jehu; and this one fact is sufficient to show that, even in a time of notable revival, the living power of the religion was not felt to lie in the principle that Jehovah cannot be represented by images.

It was as a living personal force, not as a metaphysical entity, that Jehovah was adored by Israel, and so a living faith was possible in spite of much vagueness and vacillation upon the very points in the conception of the Godhead which, to our habit of mind, seem most central. In truth, metaphysical speculation on the Godhead as eternal, infinite, and the like, is not peculiar to the religion of revelation, but was carried by the philosophers of the Gentiles much further than is ever attempted in the Old Testament.

The other point to which I have referred, the views of the Hebrews as to the state after death and future retribution, may be disposed of more briefly. Apart from the doctrine of the resurrection, of which nothing is heard till the later books of the Old Testament, the religion of the Hebrews has to do with this life, not with a life to come, as, indeed, was inevitable, seeing that the religious subject, the object of Jehovah's love, is, in the first instance, the nation as a whole, individual Israelites coming into relation with their God as members of the nation sharing in His dealings with Israel qua nation. After death man enters the shadowy realm of Sheol, where the weak and pithless shades dwell together, where their love, their hatred, their envy are perished, where small and great are alike, and the servant is free from his master (Eccles. ix. 4 seq.; Job. iii. 13 seq.), where there is no more remembrance of God, and none can praise His name or hope for His truth (Ps. vi. 5; Isa. xxxviii. 18). There is nothing in these conceptions which partakes of the character of revelation; they are just the same ideas as are found among the surrounding nations. The very name of shades (Rephaim) is common to the Old Testament with the Phoenicians; and, when the Sidonian king Eshmunazar engraved on his sarcophagus the prayer that those who disturbed his tomb might "find no bed among the shades," he used the same imagery and even the same words as are employed in the books of Isaiah and Ezekiel in describing the descent into Sheol of the kings of Babylon and Egypt (Isa. xiv. 9, 18 seq.; Ezek. xxxii. 25). [11] In accordance with this view of the state of the dead, the Hebrew doctrine of retribution is essentially a doctrine of retribution on earth. Death is itself a final judgment; for it removes man from the sphere where Jehovah's grace and judgment are known. Here, then, even more clearly than in the other case, it is plain that the religion of the Hebrews does not rest on a philosophy of the unseen universe. The sphere of religion is the present life, and the truths of religion are the truths of an everyday experience in which to Hebrew faith Jehovah is as living and personal an actor as men are. His agency in Israel is too real to invite to abstract speculation; all interest turns, not on what Jehovah is in Himself, or what He does beyond the sphere of the present national life, but on His present doings in the midst of His people, and the personal character and dispositions which these doings reveal.

-- The Prophets of Israel and Their Place in History to the Close of the Eighth Century, B.C., by W. Robertson Smith, LL.D.


And like the medieval inquisitors, the Nazis felt no qualms of conscience about burning the Satanic Jews. Only, they substituted crematoria for fagots and stakes.
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Re: Gods & Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

Postby admin » Sun Jun 21, 2015 12:48 am

CHAPTER 15: Making an Obedient Mass



It is too easy to say that the German soul was predisposed to totalitarianism. Even if the people were inured to submissiveness through iron discipline for generations, they were never, before Hitler, genocidal maniacs.

Since World War II, several books have appeared which, while not dealing directly with the Nazis, are of invaluable aid in explaining how ordinary people can be transformed into automata, devoid of conscience or reason. They help us to understand, not only the Nazis, but millions of disciples of movements in Western countries today who, almost overnight, are weaned from their customary behavior and attachments and indoctrinated with irrational beliefs. They are The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, The Mind Possessed by William Sargant, and The Rape of the Mind by Joost Meerloo.

What is the formula for producing pliant followers?

Take people, not wholly preoccupied with subsistence, who despair of being happy either in the present or in the future. They feel the sharp cutting edge of frustration. Either through some personal defect or because external conditions do not permit growth, they are eager to renounce themselves, since the self is insupportable.

Many German men were in this position at the end of World War I. They came home to a civilian life without purpose, in which they had no part. In the chaos and collapse, vast armies of uprooted people felt threatened by the war's economic and social aftermath. National Socialism gave them a chance for a fresh start. As Eric Hoffer points out:

People who see their lives as irremediably spoiled cannot find a worthwhile purpose in self-advancement. The prospect of an individual career cannot stir them to a mighty effort, nor can it evoke in them faith and a single-minded dedication. They look on self-interest as on something tainted and evil; something unclean and unlucky. Anything undertaken under the auspices of the self seems to them foredoomed. Nothing that has its roots and reasons in the self can be good and noble. Their innermost craving is for a new life -- a rebirth -- or, failing this, a chance to acquire new elements of pride, confidence, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by an identification with a holy cause. An active mass movement offers them opportunities for both. If they join the movement as full converts they are reborn to a new life in its close-knit collective body, or if attracted as sympathizers they find elements of pride, confidence and purpose by identifying themselves with the efforts, achievements and prospects of the movement.

To the frustrated a mass movement offers substitutes either for the whole self or for the elements which make life bearable and which they cannot evoke out of their individual resources.


The movement, in turn, encourages self-renunciation. It does not attract the individual who believes in himself, nor does it care to; on the contrary, he is precisely the individual whom it ridicules. It popularizes the idea that the private person who finds his own satisfactions is halting the progress of civilization. But to the person with the unwanted self, unable to believe in himself, the movement provides something larger to believe in. As Hitler pointed out: "Monkeys put to death any members of their community who show a desire to live apart. And what the apes do, men do too, in their own manner."

Christ's soul must needs descend into hell, before it ascended into heaven. So must also the soul of man. But mark ye in what manner this cometh to pass. When a man truly Perceiveth and considereth himself, who and what he is, and findeth himself utterly vile and wicked, and unworthy of all the comfort and kindness that he hath ever received from God, or from the creatures, he falleth into such a deep abasement and despising of himself, that he thinketh himself unworthy that the earth should bear him, and it seemeth to him reasonable that all creatures in heaven and earth should rise up against him and avenge their Creator on him, and should punish and torment him; and that he were unworthy even of that. And it seemeth to him that he shall be eternally lost and damned, and a footstool to all the devils in hell, and that this is right and just and all too little compared to his sins which he so often and in so many ways hath committed against God his Creator. And therefore also he will not and dare not desire any consolation or release, either from God or from any creature that is in heaven or on earth; but he is willing to be unconsoled and unreleased, and he doth not grieve over his condemnation and sufferings; for they are right and just, and not contrary to God, but according to the will of God. Therefore they are right in his eyes, and he hath nothing to say against them. Nothing grieveth him but his own guilt and wickedness; for that is not right and is contrary to God, and for that cause he is grieved and troubled in spirit. This is what is meant by true repentance for sin. And he who in this Present time entereth into this hell, entereth afterward into the Kingdom of Heaven, and obtaineth a foretaste thereof which excelleth all the delight and joy which he ever hath had or could have in this present time from temporal things...This hell and this heaven are two good, safe ways for a man in this present time, and happy is he who truly findeth them...Again: this hell and this heaven come about a man in such sort, that he knoweth not whence they come; and whether they come to him, or depart from him, he can of himself do nothing towards it. Of these things he can neither give nor take away from himself, bring them nor banish them, but as it is written, "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof," that is to say, at this time present, "but thou knowest not whence it cometh, nor whither it goeth."... It is possible for him to pass ofttimes from the one into the other; nay even within the space of a day and night, and all without his own doing. But when the man is in neither of these two states he holdeth converse with the creature, and wavereth hither and thither, and knoweth not what manner of man he is. Therefore he shall never forget either of them, but lay up the remembrance of them in his heart....

[A] man should so stand free, being quit of himself, that is, of his I, and Me, and Self, and Mine, and the like, that in all things, he should no more seek or regard himself, than if he did not exist, and should take as little account of himself as if he were not, and another had done all his works. Likewise he should count all the creatures for nothing...Man is created for true obedience, and is bound of right to render it to God.

-- Theologia Germanica, by Anonymous (Meister Eckhart)


The movement also provides justification. To those who find no meaning or purpose in life, it says: "The world is out of joint, not you" or "The world that most people inhabit is an illusion... No longer alone in its misery, the frustrated mind now has company, which includes even those who protest that they are happy, because it is taught to see through that so-called happiness.

As one Nazi, Karl-Heinz Schwenke, a tailor, described it:

I had ten suits of my own when I married. Twenty-five years later, when their "democracies" got through with me in 1918, I had none, not one. I had my sweater and my pants. Even my Army uniform was worn out. My medals were sold. I was nothing. Then, suddenly, I was needed. National Socialism had a place for me. I was nothing -- and then I was needed.


The movement also provides a suitable outlet for the pent-up rage which frustrated people feel, against themselves and the world. It fans that rage and honors it. The believer's rage may actually increase in proportion to what he has had to give up to become part of the movement: his former life, his friends, his family, his privacy, his judgment, sometimes even his name and worldly goods. He is willing, even eager, to make these sacrifices and more, of course, because by making them he can slough off the undesirable self. He receives, in return, an artificial sense of worth. His stature grows through involvement with the group. He is assured that he is great, one of the chosen.

SS men were held together by the idea that they were a sworn brotherhood of the elect. Their mystic rituals gave them special obligations, some too abhorrent to contemplate, but also special privileges.

The believer becomes a fanatic. As a frustrated person, incapable of acting in his own best interests, he never had a firm grip on reality. He can enter into the fantasy life of the movement and act on behalf of impossible dreams, which impose less risk on his fragile ego than he would encounter if he were to tussle with personal hurdles. He gets a sense of omnipotence, too, from tackling world-shaking tasks.

Running away from an acceptance of his own nature and the world as it is, the believer is prone to credulity. He believes because it is impossible. He can be persuaded by the irrational and led by the nose by charlatans. It is easy for him to become irresponsible, since he is not following his own will.

Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, was the perfect exemplar of will-lessness. As he confessed at Nuremberg: "I had nothing to say. I could only say Jawohl! We could only execute orders without thinking about it.... from our entire training the thought of refusing an order just didn't enter one's head, regardless of what kind of order it was."

Since life has been irremediably spoiled for the believer, he has relatively little hesitation about spoiling it for others. This gives him an advantage. He can be unscrupulous under the disguise of idealism. His self-righteousness permits him to convince himself that he is destroying people for their own good. Josef Goebbels felt it his duty "to unleash volcanic passions, outbreaks of rage, to set masses of people on the march, to organize hatred and despair with ice-cold calculation." Eric Hoffer explains such inhumanity:

It seems that when we are oppressed by the knowledge of our worthlessness we do not see ourselves as lower than some and higher than others, but as lower than the lowest of mankind. We hate then the whole world, and we would pour our wrath upon the whole of creation.

There is a deep reassurance for the frustrated in witnessing the downfall of the fortunate and the disgrace of the righteous. They see in a general downfall an approach to the brotherhood of all. Chaos, like the grave, is a haven of equality. Their burning conviction that there must be a new life and a new order is fueled by the realization that the old will have to be razed to the ground before the new can be built. Their clamor for a millennium is shot through with a hatred for all that exists, and a craving for the end of the world.


This recalls Alfred Rosenberg's argument that "the denial of the world needs a still longer time in order to grow so that it will acquire a lasting predominance over affirmation of the world," and his equation of the Jew with world affirmation.

To be bored is also to be potentially an easy mark for a movement. It provides the meaning and purpose which are gone from the life of the isolated individual, burdened with freedom. As one young Nazi put it just before World War II, "We Germans are so happy. We are free of freedom."

What sort of social milieu is it that breeds people who want to be free of freedom?

Not sufficiently content with abusing the National Assembly, a great part of his work is taken up with abusing Dr. Price (one of the best-hearted men that lives) and the two societies in England known by the name of the Revolution Society and the Society for Constitutional Information.

Dr. Price had preached a sermon on the 4th of November, 1789, being the anniversary of what is called in England the Revolution, which took place 1688. Mr. Burke, speaking of this sermon, says: "The political Divine proceeds dogmatically to assert, that by the principles of the Revolution, the people of England have acquired three fundamental rights: 1. To choose our own governors; 2. To cashier them for misconduct; 3. To frame a government for ourselves."

Dr. Price does not say that the right to do these things exists in this or in that person, or in this or in that description of persons, but that it exists in the whole; that it is a right resident in the nation. Mr. Burke, on the contrary, denies that such a right exists in the nation, either in whole or in part, or that it exists anywhere; and, what is still more strange and marvellous, he says: "that the people of England utterly disclaim such a right, and that they will resist the practical assertion of it with their lives and fortunes." That men should take up arms and spend their lives and fortunes, not to maintain their rights, but to maintain they have not rights, is an entirely new species of discovery, and suited to the paradoxical genius of Mr. Burke.

-- The Rights of Man, by Thomas Paine


Precisely that which has increasingly prevailed since the nineteenth century: a mass society in which the individual is atomized and counts for very little. He stands completely alone. His ties with the community, the family, the kinship group have been broken. Paradoxically, he needs them more than ever, because individual life becomes increasingly absurd and incoherent the more mass society advances.

Uprooted from village and ancestral loyalties and shifted to the anonymous city, the individual suffers culture shock: The old values are out of place in the hostile, competitive world. As an isolated person, no longer part of a settled group whose norms he accepted, he is uncertain and empty -- unless he is an independent thinker or a creative spirit, in which case he may feel himself well rid of the influence of the group. But with the encroachment of mass society, it is less and less likely that he will be able to think or create. A philologist, specializing in Middle High German, described the situation candidly to Milton Mayer (They Thought They Were Free):

... suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was "expected to" participate that had not been there or had not been important before.... it consumed all one's energies.... You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time.... The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway.... Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about -- we were decent people -- and kept us so busy with continuous changes and "crises" and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the "national enemies," without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?


Through mass education and mass communication, the individual is propagandized and molded into conditioned responses, like one of Pavlov's dogs. His innate ability to figure things out for himself atrophies, with predictable consequences.

To soften the pain of emptiness, he is drowned in entertainments, which offer him hero-surrogates who are able to live for him. Eternally occupied either as hustler, machine, or spectator, he seldom has a moment to notice that he cannot think, feel or live; that his life is petty, shabby, and totally without meaning; that his authorities are deceitful and manipulative, his society disintegrating, his relationships hollow, and worst of all, that nothing is being done to remedy these horrors.

The irony is that the individual in mass society has only himself. The authority of his parents has been undermined. He has moved from the soil where he was born and experienced certain local allegiances. His work is inhuman and mechanical. No meaning, responsibility, or dignity attaches to it. It requires his participation, but actually develops passivity. It regiments him, and he remains an apathetic machine. He is dependent on his job, and in periods of economic insecurity, glad to have it, but he feels diminished by it.

His relationships lack intimacy and affection. He can no longer trust anyone. He must have answers that will explain the problems of his life. Yet, because he has been trained not to think for himself, he faces a void, and his life becomes unendurable.

Human beings can't stand being unimportant. Most will readily accept the idea of further and further "massification" -- the greater leveling and equality which is evidence of greater democracy -- as a sign of progress. Mass society is symbolized by modernism and egalitarianism, two popular myths of progress. In Germany, this egalitarianism culminated in Hitler's boast that

sixty thousand men have outwardly become almost a unit, that actually these men are uniform not only in ideas, but that even the facial expression is almost the same. Look at these laughing eyes, this fanatical enthusiasm, and you will discover how a hundred thousand men in a movement become a single type.


What does the movement offer the faithful?

Nothing less than a new life. His rebirth is sometimes symbolized in a new name, exotic and foreign, to make the change of identity tangible. Now there is certainty. He knows exactly what is expected of him. Within a circumscribed set of rules, all is permitted: rage without guilt, relief from responsibility, the assertion of superiority over others.

He knows what action is required of him in the present and can look forward to a millennial future as well. There is no more ambiguity. The conflicts, tensions, self-criticisms, and doubts that assail the rest of us are washed away, and he enjoys a state of equilibrium. He is no longer a passive participant. Righteously, he looks down at those whom he formerly felt to be superior. The same society which scorned him now is forced to recognize that his beliefs are important. The mass man becomes a power in the world. Rudolf Hess, the melancholy student who became deputy leader of the Third Reich, remained grateful to the end. As he testified at Nuremberg:

It was granted to me for many years of my life to live and work under the greatest son whom my nation has produced in the thousand years of its history. Even if I could I would not expunge this period from my existence. I regret nothing. If I were standing once more at the beginning I should act once again as I did then, even if I knew that at the end I should be burnt at the stake. No matter what men do, I shall one day stand before the judgment seat of the Almighty. I shall answer to him, and I know that he will acquit me.


In exchange for this miraculous transformation, the individual willingly subjects himself to a thorough brainwashing, through which his old beliefs and personality are eradicated. He may never be aware that he is being brainwashed. It may happen instantly or gradually, but he puts absolute trust in the leaders of the movement. The group becomes the good father he may never have had, the proxy whom he depends on to solve all his problems, the authority to which he owes obedience. From the moment he is captured, he identifies with the group and begins to think as they do. Their common undertaking insures that he will never have to shoulder any personal blame for failure or shortcomings. So long as he behaves according to the rules, he will be accepted. The rules are clear and consistent, or seem to be.

The Germans were used to compulsion from early childhood. Rudolf Hoess's reminiscence is fairly typical, and makes his subsequent acquiescence in running Auschwitz more plausible:

It was constantly impressed upon me in forceful terms that I must obey promptly the wishes and commands of my parents, teachers, priests, etc., and indeed of all grown-up people, including servants, and that nothing must distract me from this duty. Whatever they said was always right.

These basic principles on which I was brought up became part of my flesh and blood. I can still clearly remember how my father, who on account of his fervent Catholicism, was a determined opponent of the Reich Government and its policy, never ceased to remind his friends that, however strong one's opposition might be, the laws and decrees of the State had to be obeyed unconditionally.

From my earliest youth I was brought up with a strong awareness of duty. In my parents' house it was insisted that every task be exactly and conscientiously carried out. Each member of the family had his own special duties to perform.


The group is beyond criticism. Its realm is sacred. Even if a man has convictions which run counter to those of the movement, he can still be led to act in a manner which contradicts his own beliefs, either because his will is weak or because he is the victim of certain techniques which cause his will to be transcended. He can say, with Hermann Goring, "I have no conscience! Adolf Hitler is my conscience!" or "It is not I who live, but the Fuhrer who lives in me."

It is important to examine these techniques if we are to understand how people can be made to follow a Fuhrer wherever he may lead.

The proselyte is isolated at first. No free exchange with unbelievers is allowed. He is cut off from ties of loyalty with the past. His family and friends are discredited. Feelings of exclusivity are encouraged.

His mind is barraged with repetitive propaganda until it is made weary. The indoctrination may go on uninterruptedly for sixteen hours or more a day, for weeks on end. Even if the proselyte rejects what he hears, argues against it, or falls into apathy, the Pavlovian conditioning ultimately seduces him, and he surrenders to the training.

Mechanical drill, rhythmical marches, dance rituals, and repetitive chanting are also effective in breaking down resistance.

The English psychiatrist William Sargant could better grasp how Hitler was able to bring even intelligent Germans into "a condition of intellectual and emotional subjection" through "mass rallies, marching and martial music, chanting and slogans and highly emotional oratory and ceremony" after witnessing the subservience of certain African tribes to their leaders and seeing their powerful initiation rites:

Whether in a "primitive" tribe or at school or in the army, the process is essentially the same. Severe stress is imposed on the new recruit, by subjecting him to arbitrary and frightening authority, by bewildering him, abusing or ill-treating him, by telling him that his old values and sentiments are childish, and so inducing in him a state of unease and suggestibility in which new values can easily be drummed into him, and he recovers his self-confidence by accepting them. The initial conditioning techniques may have to be reinforced from time to time by further conditioning procedures, and follow-up indoctrination is considered most important in all types of religious or other conversion.


Once the proselyte has been broken down and sensitized, his thinking and feelings can be manipulated, and delusions implanted. He falls under the suggestive power of the group and accepts its distortions as objective truth.

Most people are suggestible and can be hypnotized against their will, obeying commands even when they go against the grain. Dr. Sargant observes:

It is not the mentally ill but ordinary normal people who are most susceptible to "brainwashing," "conversion," "possession," "the crisis" ... and who ... fall readily under the spell of the demagogue or the revivalist, the witch-doctor or the pop group, the priest or the psychiatrist, or even in less extreme ways the propagandist or the advertiser.


In the suggestible state, the proselyte may attribute divine powers to his leader and accept dogmas which he might have rejected in a more normal state. Some of the men closest to Hitler, for example, acknowledged that they believed in his divinity. Himmler's masseur, Felix Kersten, relates that he once answered the phone and heard Hitler's voice before passing the phone on to Himmler, who exclaimed: "You have been listening to the voice of the Fuhrer, you're a very lucky man." Himmler told Kersten that Hitler's commands came "from a world transcending this one" and "possessed a divine power." It was the "Karma" of the German people that they should be "saved" by "a figure of the greatest brilliance" which had "become incarnate" in Hitler's person.

And even disbelievers and scoffers can also come to accept irrational dogmas -- through contagion, imitation or sudden conversion.

Beliefs have the power to infect. The onlookers at a mass rally, where emotions are being stirred up, often feel the same intensity of excitement that the participants feel. We can "catch" ideas that are completely foreign to us. In early Judaism, for example, there was no concept of a demonic force. God was responsible for both good and evil. But with influences from Iran, Egypt, and Greece came a tendency to explain evil as the work of demons. Soon after, people began to see manifestations of evil spirits everywhere, and "every misfortune, every illness, and particularly, under the name of possession, all disorders of the nervous system were ascribed to them," according to Charles Guignebert in The Jewish World in the Time of Jesus.

Hitler's early speeches were so mesmerizing that even people who were repelled by his ideas felt themselves being swept along. The playwright Eugene Ionesco mentions in his autobiography that he received the inspiration for Rhinoceros when he felt himself pulled into the Nazi orbit at a mass rally and had to struggle to keep from developing "rhinoceritis."

We "catch" ideas, too, because we want to be like others, particularly when we want not to be our despised selves. If we're satisfied, we don't need to conform, but if we're not, we imitate people whom we admire for having greater judgment, taste, or good fortune than we do. Obedience itself is a kind of imitation. Through conformity, the person who feels inferior is in no danger of being exposed. He's indistinguishable from the others. No one can single him out and examine his unique being. Conformity, in turn, sets him up to be further canceled out as an individual, to have no life apart from his collective purpose. This gives a movement tremendous power over the individual. Even intelligent people are not immune from the desire to conform. Heinrich Hildebrandt, a schoolteacher who was anxious to hide his liberal past, joined the Nazi party, and to his own disgust, found himself "proud to be wearing the insignia. It showed I 'belonged,' and the pleasure of 'belonging,' so soon after feeling excluded, isolated, is very great.... I belonged to the 'new nobility.'"

Hoffer observes:

Above all, he [the true believer] must never feel alone. Though stranded on a desert island, he must still feel that he is under the eyes of the group. To be cast out from the group should be equivalent to being cut off from life.

This is undoubtedly a primitive state of being, and its most perfect examples are found among primitive tribes. Mass movements strive to approximate this primitive perfection, and we are not imagining things when the anti-individualist bias of contemporary mass movements strikes us as a throwback to the primitive.


Sudden conversions, which may happen through hypnosis, emotional shock, despair, or exhaustion, can bring people into movements. William Sargant believes an apparently well-balanced person, "dominated by hypnoid and slightly suggestible brain activity," may suddenly give up his "previous intellectual training and habits of rational thought," to accept "ideas which he would normally find repellent or even patently nonsensical." Sargant is convinced that a heightened state of suggestibility accounts for many cases of demonic possession, or for sudden salvation. The history of mysticism offers instances of extreme opinions instantly reversed. The critical faculty is suspended, and what was formerly believed to be black is now white, and vice-versa.

Once the believer has been taken over by one of these means, it is difficult for him to revert to his former self. In a sense, collective totalitarian thinking can be compared with schizophrenia. In both, there is, says Joost Meerloo in The Rape of the Mind, a "loss of an independent, verifiable reality, with a consequent relapse into a more primitive state of awareness." In both, thought and action are arrested at an infantile level of development.

Since the totalitarian denies man's dynamic nature, views him simply as a submissive robot, and provides this robot with one single, simple answer to all the ambivalences, doubts, conflicts, and warring drives within him, all attempts to dislodge the official cliches clash with those same cliches. The believer's isolation in a fortress of other delusional thinkers gives him no opportunity for clear thought or contact with other influences. He is immune to reasonable propositions. He is convinced that he is reasonable, and that his enemies are not. Having burned his bridges behind him, broken with his family and old friends, he cannot go back. He is committed to his involvement in the group. To renounce it would be to repudiate himself. It would also mean giving up all the psychic benefits of omnipotence. His personality and prejudices have become crystallized around a set of actions and dogmas. They are irreversible. Any external stimulus which threatens to penetrate his armor and make him see the absurdity or injustice of his position is rationalized to further harden his rigidity. He has joined the movement at least partly because it handed him stereotypes in place of his vague notions and saved him from having to think things out for himself. Any stimulus which evokes a symbol causes a reflex action. With his weakened conscience and consciousness, he can no longer respond spontaneously, however he may appear to be doing so. He has become the movement. All thoughts and feelings that are at odds with it are snuffed out. This is what gives the believer the air of a one-dimensional man. He lacks depth. There is a limited range of possibilities open to him. If one wants, therefore, to convert him back to an autonomous human being, one finds that there is nobody at home. His mind is shut tight against new ideas. The slogans and ready-made judgments he has absorbed stretch forward into infinity. The believer is protected for all time. Within his sacred circle, all other knowledge is taboo. One might say that the most telltale sign of a believer is his refusal to examine ideas other than the divine commandments which have been implanted in him. One can't get to him because he will not and cannot engage in dialogue. What is particularly maddening about him is that, sterile and unimaginative, he masquerades as an exemplary man, an objective guide eager to spread enlightenment.

The ability to exercise his own judgment, having atrophied, is never restored. Even if he should drop out of one group, he will quickly seek and find another. Like a drug addict who needs his fix, he cannot live without his cliches.

At Nuremberg after the war, Allied examiners were shocked to see how unrepentant some of the Nazis were. Julius Streicher cried "Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!" at his execution, until the opening of the trap door muffled his voice. Arthur Seyss-Inquart declared, to the last, that Hitler remained "the man who made Greater Germany a reality in history." Rudolf Hoess, by his own admission "completely filled, indeed obsessed" with his monstrous goal, was not guilty of arrogance when he proudly declared that "Auschwitz became the greatest human extermination center of all time." He was one of the countless ordinary men who had been turned into a believer. He gave validity to Hitler's contention "that by the clever and continuous use of propaganda a people can even be made to mistake heaven for hell, and vice versa, the most miserable life for Paradise." As Hitler knew better than perhaps anyone else: "The essence of propaganda consists in winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that in the end they succumb to it utterly and can never again escape from it."

We need not, however, look as far back as Nazi Germany for examples of people undergoing personality changes and extreme shifts in ideology. We can learn from present-day American groups.
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Re: Gods & Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

Postby admin » Sun Jun 21, 2015 12:49 am

CHAPTER 16: The Dangers of Occult Thinking

If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.

-- Sarvepalli Radha Krishnan


Men who are ignorant of history may be condemned to repeat its lessons, as the American philosopher George Santayana observed. But the reverse is true too. We often need the experience of the present to shed light on the events of the past, so that we are better able to guide our lives in the future.

If we are to ask now, more than a generation later, how normal people could have committed the Nazi atrocities, we need only look at the normal people in American cults today. This may seem a harsh comparison; the parallels are certainly not universally applicable. Still, it would not be unfair to say that the same sort of normal people who obeyed the crazy commands of the Nazi hierarchy are today obeying the crazy commands of some contemporary cult leaders. To be sure, those commands, apart from certain Satanic cults, do not call for ritual murder. Not yet, at any rate. But none of us should feel too comfortable with so many of our compatriots so willing to suspend independent judgment, and so ill equipped to exercise that judgment.

"R2-45"

Despite the general exposure of many Scientology practices, policies and attacks in the media over the past several years, resulting primarily from the F.B.I's seizure of documents from Scientology headquarters, there exists in Hubbard's twisted mind and writings a little known policy called "R2-45" .VIII-7 In the book, "The creation of Human Ability -- A Handbook of Scientology" written by Hubbard and distributed by the Church of Scientology of California, the following quote appears:

"R2-45 -- an enormously effective process for exteriorization, but its use is frowned upon by this society at this time."

"Exteriorization" in Scientology policy, is death. The policy refers to shooting a person in the head. In a short internal Scientology memorandum called "Racket Exposed", Hubbard attacks a number of individuals, subjects them to the "Fair Game" doctrine, and states as follows:

"Any Sea Organization member contacting any of them is to use auditing process R2-45".

It is unknown to the authors of this Report whether the process was used on those individuals.

During a meeting of Scientologists in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1954, Hubbard demonstrated the R2-45 auditing process by firing a shot into the floor during the middle of the meeting. There is some evidence to suggest that between 1975 and 1977, during the F.B.I. investigation of Scientology, meetings of Scientology executives were held in which there were discussions relative to auditing high level F.B.I. members with auditing process R2-45.

-- Preliminary Report to the Clearwater City Commission Re: The Power of a Municipality to Regulate Organizations Claiming Tax Exempt or Non-Profit Status, by Michael Flynn Esq.


Membership in occult groups in America today has reached epidemic proportions. Some people take this as an omen that Satan is hard at work; others, that God is. The groups take many different forms: Satanism, witchcraft, pseudoscience, mind-control, mysticism, Christian, pagan. Most are not as innocent as they seem, as we are beginning to find out.

The one which has most often been compared with the Nazis is, of course, the Charles Manson cult, with its murderous violence and sadomasochistic sex. All the Satanic groups express a great admiration for Hitler. Anton LaVey, the leader of the Church of Satan, probably has the largest collection of Nazi memorabilia in America. LaVey dedicated his book, The Satanic Bible, to a number of people, including the Nazi geopolitician "Karl Haushofer, a teacher without a classroom."

In the case of other groups, there are less obvious parallels. The Reverend Sun Myung Moon came from Korea to save tens of thousands of American youth, who hail him as the Messiah. In gratitude, they have left their families to give their energies totally to his Unification Church. Growing numbers of abandoned parents are banding together, forming organizations to try to use legal means to get their children deprogrammed, protesting to the government that "destructive cults and their strategy of alienation" have "psychologically kidnapped" their offspring. The parents chose Moon's cult to begin their offensive with. Once having found grounds for prosecution, they will move on to other groups.

Despite parental pressures, there are few dropouts among the "Moonies." Moon's brainwashing techniques work amazingly well, particularly in light of the fact that he appeals to Americans in the Korean language, that he looks and behaves like a provincial businessman, that he indulges in Byzantine luxury while preaching asceticism, and that his sales pitch is markedly uninspired. His commercial enterprises, encompassing a Korean industrial conglomerate which brings in $15 million a year, real estate holdings in New York worth more than $11 million, and various operations serviced by Moonies without pay, are all tax-exempt.

The young disciples, some graduates of prestigious colleges, give their free labor gladly, doing whatever they are told by their superiors in the hierarchy, in return for which they receive a responsibility-free life. They hawk the glad tidings of the new Messiah on city street comers and college campuses. Their clothes, lodgings, and thoughts are provided by the Church. A sample of Moon's wisdom, from his writings:

"I am your brain."

"What I wish must be your wish."

"My mission is to make new hearts, new persons."

"Satan is everywhere and you are vulnerable to his attack."

" ... Satan confronted Jesus, working through the Jewish people.... "

"During the second World War, 6 million people were slaughtered to cleanse all the sins of the Jewish people from the time of Jesus."

"Of all the saints sent by God, I think I am the most successful one."

"The time will come ... when my words will almost serve as law. If I ask a certain thing it will be done."

"The whole world is in my hand, and I will conquer and subjugate the world."

"By putting things in order, we can accomplish God's will. All obstacles to this world must be annihilated."

"Our strategy is to be unified into one with ourselves, and with that as the bullet we can smash the world."


Many people drift into Moon's groups after drug experiences. The emotional "high" in meetings and meditation is likened to the drug high. The evangelist group on the corner is always on the lookout for the lonely figure in the crowd. After a brief discussion, they invite the prospect to join them at an introductory lecture, enclose him in a circle of friendship. Next comes a weekend workshop, with relentless hours of indoctrination in a syncretism of Eastern mysticism, occultism, and instant psychology. The recruit is given nonstop tender, loving care. Hints are dropped about Moon's supernatural powers. Those who go on to a week-long workshop will probably stay, donate their lives to the Church, and be stamped with identical robot-like smiles. An observer, watching a prayer session, compared it to a voodoo ceremony.

Moon was a relatively late arrival on the wave that brought in planeloads of gurus from India, Japan, China, and Tibet. In their own countries they were as familiar as a bowl of rice, whereas in America they were exotic, but for all that, they caught on here as fast as franchised fast-food chains and were advertised in a similar manner, as part of the growing "growth" movement, which has become a profitable industry.

The McDonald's of that movement, as one writer called it, is TM, whose Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, with white wraps and irrepressible giggles, looks like a bearded infant, but has turned out to be cunning enough to harness "big science" by converting quantum physicists, astronauts, psychologists, and medical researchers. He has also been clever enough not to alienate parents, but has converted them as well. TM, he declares, is not a religion. Yet the initiation ceremony is Hindu, and each individual is assigned a mantra which, he is told, has special properties suitable to him alone. He is never to repeat this mantra to anyone. The initiator who assigns the mantra has only a few vital statistics to guide his choice. Those who take up TM themselves do not know -- or will not say -- how the appropriate mantras are distributed. "Maybe," one psychiatrist-convert told me, "it's done on the basis of astrological signs." One TM scientist, Dr. Harold Bloomfield, flatly declares that using the wrong mantra might kill you.

Scientology, another variation with science-fiction neologisms, has a native-born chief, L. Ron Hubbard, former science-fiction writer. His group conditions its people to believe that if you so much as oppose Scientology it might kill you. One does not drop out of such a group lightly. Some former Scientologists have met with mysterious deaths, and some enemies of Scientology -- "suppressives" or "potential trouble sources," they are called -- have been harassed. There are all sorts of unsavory rumors. Yet Father Hubbard's cupboard is far from bare. Some years ago, a reporter figured his "take" to be $140,000 a week. It has undoubtedly grown since then.

L. Ron Hubbard's most formidable competitor at the moment is an even sharper salesman who once earned his living training people to sell encyclopedias door-to-door. He was born Jack Rosenberg, but changed his name to Werner Hans Erhard. A former student of Scientology and Mind Dynamics, he eventually packaged his own "growth" elixir, called est (for Erhard Seminars Training), which uses Storm Trooper tactics to bring people to enlightenment. Est people insist that it's incorrect to think of the process as brainwashing, since no coercion is used. But if one considers brainwashing to include the breaking down of old beliefs and the systematic indoctrination in new beliefs, then est, like so many other contemporary cults, is brainwashing, and doing it successfully. The trainee has only a vague idea of what to expect when he comes for the first and second weekend seminars, because people who have been through the training are told not to spoil it for newcomers by telling them in advance what happens.

What does happen is awesome or frightening, depending on your frame of reference. Two hundred and fifty people sit in uncomfortable chairs for sixteen hours a day over two weekends, with only two breaks a day -- determined by the trainer -- for eating, going to the bathroom, smoking, talking, moving about, or note-taking. Harangued and insulted, the participants are brought to the edge of despair. Group dynamics are so skillfully manipulated as to convert them, in the end, to estian bliss. The results are impressive. People move out of static grooves, are more open and lighthearted. Why, then, feel at all uneasy? Because, as one trainee put it:

I have seen people take est and become like robots, give up their freedom, and deny their healthy instincts. These people, fortunately, are relatively few in number -- and can, I suppose, be written off as the "fringe" of followers that seem to crop up with every new group today. But they are the extreme result of what est is all about: est "trains" us to cope and adapt and follow the rules of society; it teaches us how to live and function under totalitarianism. What makes est successful is not its basic message -- which is, after all, nothing new -- but the positive response of thousands of us to the authoritarian way in which that message is packaged, sold, and practiced day to day.


This is in no way an exhaustive survey of the existing occult groups in America today. There are thousands upon thousands of others, some better known and more powerful than the ones mentioned, others hidden and secret, with a few hundred or a few thousand followers, closed to the general public. As one writer, John C. Cooper, observed in Religion in the Age of Aquarius, it's "a seller's market for anyone who comes with a vision -- no matter how myopic -- of how the universe hangs together around the groping individual." Millions of people belong to what are called "the new religions" and more are joining daily. These are not fads. On the contrary, they represent the beginning of a mass "consciousness" movement which is helping many people to solve personal and social problems. It is certainly helping the leaders of these groups to cash in on those problems. Not all are powerful personalities or charismatic figures. Some are downright repulsive. The Guru Maharaj Ji, Perfect Master of the Divine Light Mission, is a fat, blank-faced teenager with a penchant for costly possessions. His own mother renounced him and tried to promote his elder brother as savior, instead. Two of his disciples seriously wounded a newspaperman who threw a pie in the Maharaj Ji's face because he'd always wanted to throw a pie in the face of God. Adverse publicity does not seem to have affected the devotion of disciples, who still kiss his feet.

Gross or slick, ascetic or fleshpot, every leader's claims to special favor from the gods are validated by his disciples. Moon, Hubbard, and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi offer photographs of themselves which disciples relate to in the same way that Catholics relate to photographs of paintings of Jesus Christ. The transition from teacher to Messiah can sometimes easily be charted. Hubbard's passage from one to the other is still not quite complete, but he is definitely in transit, according to George Malko, "off on a new tangent, rhetorically asking his followers 'Who is the Messiah?' only to answer with a parable involving a powerful, barrel-chested man with red hair," remarkably like himself.

Both Hubbard and Erhard are Machiavellian enough to be careful to wipe out potential competition when they see it in their more ambitious followers. The Messiah business has many advantages. You don't need academic training or degrees. No financial investment is necessary, and the financial rewards are unreal. No mortal work is more prestigious. Even an unexalted past is no deterrent. Moon, Hubbard, and Erhard have managed to rationalize theirs, just as nineteenth-century prophets did.

Though each group has its own distinctive style, people often move freely from one to another. Some observers have been surprised at the attraction of former radical revolutionary Rennie Davis to the Divine Light Mission. Jerry Rubin, the former Yippie leader, has sampled such a smorgasbord of cults that he's been labeled a "guru whore." If the true believer seeks to lose or validate himself in a movement, a spiritual movement can serve as well as a political one.

The spiritual and political often merge with one another. Esoteric leaders have been known to act as advisers to governments. Reverend Moon, who has enjoyed the protection of the South Korean government, prepares his disciples to be ready to lay down their lives for that government, the "fatherland" of the Unification Church. He came to America with more influence and hard cash than is usual at the beginning of religious careers. He organized a political arm in Washington, D.C., called the Freedom Leadership Foundation, which sponsored talks and publications dedicated to fighting communism in America and supporting the South Korean government. Church publications reproduce photographs of Moon taken with Senators Hubert Humphrey, James Buckley, Edward Kennedy, and Strom Thurmond. When Nixon met his Watergate, Moonies prayed for the government and held demonstrations in Washington. Moon, claiming to be under orders from God, took full-page ads in major newspapers throughout the country: "This nation is God's nation. The office of the President of the United States is therefore sacred.... God has chosen Richard Nixon to be President of the United States." With Moon's move to America, he seems to have given up the idea that the Koreans are the chosen people of the twentieth century and now bestows that honor on the Americans.

The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi courts the military as well as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. A few army generals and astronauts have become enthusiastic disciples. Major General Franklin M. Davis is excited over the prospect of getting the whole U.S. Army to meditate. It would help solve the drug problem, he believes.

To young people, the new religions are compatible with radical politics -- usually of the right -- because they view both as anti-establishment. John C. Cooper observes:

Perhaps the connecting link of politics and magic in our times is the unconscious awareness of many young people that while the external actions of a hippie spellcasting and the rhetoric and hoopla of a political convention are only window dressing, somewhere within the group, and perhaps in a way not responsive to the wishes of either the majority or the minority of those involved, decisions that will affect the course of human events are being made. When men feel that for all their hard work and all their good wishes they are cheated out of a share of control over the destiny of their group, then superstition grows in the area of man's spirit and rebellion arises in the area of man's actions.


It is significant that the modern occult groups grew out of the drug scene -- replaced it, in effect. Drugs were not just a way out of insupportable reality, but a religious experience, search, and preoccupation. It is noteworthy that contemporary gurus boast of providing the only successful means for getting young people off drugs. Either drugs or the meditation the gurus offer is a means of finding a way to feel at home in technological society without conflicting with its operation.

The drug scene, like the modern cults, had its own jargon, rituals, and communal sharing. With both, an inner core of deeply committed practitioners drew to itself a fringe of imitative onlookers who copied the lifestyles and formulas. The drug adventure has really been preempted by the spiritual search for meaning, creating the same ecstasies, visions, confusion of the senses, and synthetic paradise. Instead of passing around a joint, some young people are now chanting together. But they still live in a "holy" place completely alien to the uninitiated, who are repelled by their orgiastic delirium, and whom they accuse of not understanding because they "haven't been there."

It is significant, too, that the modern occult movement began simultaneously with America's involvement in the distasteful war in Vietnam, which intensified the feeling of impotence. The occult movement will help to prepare its followers for the "brave new world" that's coming. Many observers have already remarked on the similarity in manner of people within each individual group, and among groups in general, even those which purport to make people free. They have been compared with robots, automata, and zombies, for good reason. Despite the promise that their training will increase their capacity for alertness and their ability to face reality, the influence exerted by the group, whether intended or not, is the opposite. One cannot be successfully propagandized without losing some essential part of individual humanity. It is odd to talk with some of the cult members about a speculative point -- say, for instance, the astral plane -- and see how very wise and absolute they appear in discussing an irrational tenet which they have never examined. And when one asks "Why?" in a class in esoteric philosophy, one is told, "'Why?' is the devil's question."

No doubt, some cults really do help some people. They are frightening nonetheless. Occultists themselves are frightened. The hypnotic effect is powerful, whatever the quality of the particular leader or doctrine.

When we remember that the Nazi party arose out of the merger of mystical groups, there is cause for even more distress. These groups considered themselves sacred. Faith in a holy cause had taken possession of them. They were completely incapable of objectivity. What they did was not seen by many of them as evil. This pathological blindness convinced them that they were participating in the superhuman task of ridding the world of a menace.

There were those ambitious men, too, who saw an opportunity to advance in the hierarchy. Once they climbed to a certain height, they had a large stake in the Nazi movement. In maintaining the supremacy of the group, they had individual power. Obedience and devotion insured their success. Like the ancient Aryan conquerors of India, they created a society so structured that no citizen could do anything without official sanction. The Chandala, the lowest Aryan caste, became, figuratively, the Jew.

The Brahmins, using the authority of the Vedas, created, through the laws of Manu, a totalitarian organization which corrupted the wisdom of Eastern philosophy and so invaded every area of private Hindu life that it was impossible to go to the bathroom without obeying certain strictures. They squeezed the heart out of India. Twentieth-century Aryans, emulating the Brahmins, set up their own ideas of caste, but instead of favoring hereditary aristocracy, made it possible for the credulous, ambitious, and unscrupulous to rise to the top.

We have an opportunity, in watching contemporary groups evolve before our eyes, to recreate what must have happened in Germany before and after World War I, to fill in gaps in our understanding, and to recognize the German people as similar to ourselves. They were swept along by "prophets" like Lanz, List, and Sebottendorff. The well-to-do among them gave them financial backing, which must have reassured Lanz, List, and Sebottendorff in their beliefs in themselves as Messiahs and heralds.

Then, as now, people put their trust in a single man, revered him as a saint, loved him like a father. They were prepared to follow him into the bowels of Hell. Hitler was said to have had a magnetic personality, but this is hardly necessary, nor was he seen in this light by some of those who were immune to his message. There are leaders preaching to multitudes today who have no discernible power to attract, other than the will of people to believe in them. And no matter how ridiculous the edicts handed down from on high -- perhaps because they are ridiculous -- believers are eager to justify and rationalize.

***

I have been present at meetings where proselytes, presumably sane and rational, accepted without question irrational doctrines presented portentously, believing that they were receiving revealed truth.

I have also been present at a protest rally sponsored by parents who had lost their children to the Pied Piper of the Unification Church. It was a pitifully thin crowd compared with the twenty-five thousand who would appear at Yankee Stadium that same evening for Reverend Moon's rally. The parents and deprogrammed ex-Moonies spoke to the press. They repeated again and again: "You won't believe this. How could you? It's all so strange, so irrational. It sounds like science fiction. But don't kid yourself. It's really happening. You must alert people to the danger."

I didn't know if their stories had much credibility to others, but to me, after all I had learned about the Nazis, they had the ring of authenticity.

One parent told me that her daughter, a wholesome, bright, dynamic college student, had been sucked into the group by attending one of its weekends. She was idealistic. She wanted to help combat the drug problem. After one week of indoctrination, she was hooked on Moon. "I didn't recognize her when I saw her again," said her mother. "She was like a robot. She'd been thoroughly brainwashed. She'd taken on a whole set of new ideas. It was the most frightening thing you can imagine."

The brainwashing process was systematic. Trainees were taught to practice "heavenly deception" in canvassing for funds for Moon. "Heavenly deception" encompassed the use of subliminal suggestion on prospective contributors. Moonies were indoctrinated to smile in a particular way. Their parents' lives, they were told, depended on their movement. They were to save the world through their mission, and eventually they would be groomed to enter politics and take over world government.

"All we talked about was taking over," an ex-Moonie told me. "This was an army we were in. We screamed that we were heavenly bullets. We were going to take over the government and then the country without one bullet. We would take over and rule the world."

Gradually, they were made to see that their families were Satanic. Mail from home was kept from them. They were shifted about the world and kept from contact with friends and relatives. If they tried to drop out other Moonies were dispatched to bring them back. The Unification "family" was not a happy community, however it might have appeared to outsiders. Fatigued and ill-fed, they were constantly competing to meet fund-raising quotas. The rigorous program, which entailed unexpected reveilles in the middle of the night and flashlit mountain marches, sometimes led to physical accidents, which were hushed up. Moonies did not really get along with each other. Hysteria, anxiety, guilt, and terror resulted from the pressure.

The parents at the protest rally, determined to get their children back, paraded placards which read:

REMEMBER HITLER
NO MORE HITLERS ... STOP MOON
MOON IS DESTROYING AMERICA'S YOUTH


"Aren't they taking themselves too seriously?" one reporter asked. "Moon's group seems so innocuous."

"The Hitler Youth began by raising money, selling flowers and candy most aggressively. Parents in Germany must have felt this way about their kids," I answered. "And with good reason."
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Re: Gods & Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

Postby admin » Sun Jun 21, 2015 12:49 am

Sources Quoted

This list contains only sources not included in the bibliography.

Alleau, Rene, Hitler et les societes secretes, Editions Bernard Grasset (Paris, 1969).

Blavatsky, H. P., The Secret Doctrine, Vol. II. Theosophical University Press (Pasadena, Calif., 1974).

Cooper. John C.. Religion in the Age of Aquarius, The Westminster Press (Philadelphia, Pa., 1971).

Dicks, Henry V., Licensed Mass Murder, Basic Books, Inc. (New York, 1972).

Ebon, Martin, Prophecy in Our Time, New American Library (New York, 1968).

Fest, Joachim C., The Face of the Third Reich, Pantheon Books (New York, 1970).

---, Hitler, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. (New York, 1974).

Fraenkel, Heinrich, "Is Hitler Youth Curable?", New Republic, September 18, 1944.

Graf, Arturo, The Story of the Devil, Macmillan Co. (New York, 1931).

Grunberger, Richard, Hitler's SS, Delacorte Press (New York, 1970).

Hartshorne, E. Y., German Youth and the Nazi Dream of Victory, Farrar & Rinehart, Inc. (New York, 1941).

Hitler, Adolf, Hitler's Secret Conversations 1941-1944, Farrar, Straus & Young (New York, 1953).

---, Mein Kampf, Houghton Mifflin Co. (Boston, Mass., 1943).

Hahne, Heinz, The Order of the Death's Head, Coward-McCann, (New York, 1970).

Jaffe, Aniela, From the Life and Work of C. G. Jung, Harper & Row (New York, 1971).

Leasor, James, The Uninvited Envoy, McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc. (New York, 1962).

List, Guido von, Die Religion der Ario-Germanen in ihrer Esoterik und Exoterik, Guido von List-Verlag (Vienna, 1910).

Lowenthal, Marvin, The Jews of Germany, Longmans, Green &Co. (New York, 1936).

Mayer, Milton, They Thought They Were Free, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, Ill., 1955).

Merkl, Peter H., Political Violence Under. the Swastika, Princeton University Press (Princeton, N.J., 1975).

Pauwels, Louis, and Bergier, Jacques, The Dawn of Magic, Anthony Gibbs & Phillips (London, 1960).

Rauschning, Hermann, Men of Chaos, G.P. Putnam's Sons (New York, 1942).

---, The Voice of Destruction, G. P. Putnam's Sons (New York, 1940).

Ravenscroft, Trevor, The Spear of Destiny, G. P. Putnam's Sons (New York, 1973).

Schellenberg, Walter, Hitler's Secret Service, Pyramid Publications, Inc. (New York, 1974).

---, Memoirs, A, Deutsch (London, 1956).

Sebottendorff. Rudolf von, Bevor Hitler Kam, Deufula-Verlag Grassinger & Co. (Munich, 1933).

Shirer, William L.. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Simon & Schuster (New York, 1960).

Speer, Albert, Inside the Third Reich, Macmillan Co. (New York, 1970).

Stern, Paul J. t C. G. Jung: The Haunted Prophet, George Braziller, Inc. (New York, 1976).

Walsh, Edmund A., Total Power, Doubleday & Co., Inc. (New York, 1948).

Webb. James, The Occult Underground, Open Court Publishing Co. (La Salle, Ill., 1974).

Wykes, Alan, Himmler, Ballantine Books, Inc. (New York, 1972).
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Re: Gods & Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

Postby admin » Sun Jun 21, 2015 12:50 am

Selected Bibliography

Hanfstaengl, Ernst, Hitler: The Missing Years, Eyre & Spottiswoode (London, 1957).

Heckethorn, Charles W., Secret Societies of All Countries, Vol. II. New Amsterdam Book Co. (New York, 1897).

Hoffer, Eric, The True Believer, Harper & Row (New York, 1951).

Howe, Ellie, Astrology: A Recent History Including the Untold Story of Its Role in World War II, Walker & Co. (New York, 1968).

Jung, C. G., Civilization in Transition, Pantheon Books (New York, 1964).

---, Letters 1906-1950, Princeton University Press (Princeton, N.J., 1973).

---. Psychology and Religion: West and East, Pantheon Books (New York, 1958).

Kersten, Felix, The Memoirs of Dr. Felix Kersten, Doubleday & Co., (New York, 1947).

Kubizek, August, The Young Hitler I Knew, Houghton Mifflin Co. (Cambridge. Mass., 1955).

Langer, Walter, The Mind of Adolf Hitler, Basic Books, Inc. (New York, 1972).

Laqueur, Walter Z., Young Germany, Basic Books, Inc. (New York, 1962).

Ludecke, Kurt Georg, I Knew Hitler, Charles Scribner's Sons (New York, 1937).

Meerloo, Joost A. M., The Rape of the Mind, World Publishing Co. (Cleveland, Ohio, 1956).

Masse, George L., The Culture of Western Europe (Chicago, 1961).

---, ed., Nazi Culture, Grosset & Dunlap (New York, 1966).

Mumford, Lewis, "The Revolt of the Demons," The New Yorker, May 23, 1964.

Phelps, Reginald H., "'Before Hitler Came': Thule Society and Germanen Orden," The Journal of Modern History, Vol. XXXV, No.3. (September 1963).

---, "Hitler and the Deutsche Arbeirerpartei," American Historical Review, Vol. LXVIII, No. 4 (July 1963).

Podmore, Frank, From Mesmer to Christian Science, University Books, Inc. (Secaucus, N.J., 1963).

Poliakov, Leon, The Aryan Myth, Basic Books, Inc. (New York, 1974).

Reiss, Curt, Total Espionage, G. P. Putnam's Sons (New York, 1941).

Roberts, Stephen H., The House That Hitler Built, Harper & Bros. (New York, 1938).

Sargant, William, The Mind Possessed, J. B. Lippincott Co. (New York, 1974).

Smith, Bradley F., Henrich Himmler: A Nazi in the Making, 1900-1926, Hoover Institution Press (Stanford, California, 1971).

Trachtenberg, Joshua, The Devil and the Jews, Meridian Books (New York, 1970).

Waite, Robert G. L., "Adolf Hitler's Anti-Semitism: A Study in History and psychoanalysis," in Benjamin B. Wolman, ed., The Psychoanalytic Interpretation of History. Basic Books, Inc. (New York, 1971).

Walther, Gerda, "Hitler's Black Magicians," Tomorrow, Vol. IV, No.2.

Webb, James, The Occult Establishment, Open Court Publishing Co. (La Salle, Ill. , 1976).

Webster, Nesta H., Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, Boswell Printing & Publishing Co" Inc. (London, 1924).

Wulff, Wilhelm, Zodiac and Swastika, Coward, McCann & Geoghegan (New York, 1973).
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