Since the 1960s, numerous trendy books penned by sensationalist writers have suggested that Hitler and the National Socialist phenomenon were products of esoteric or demonic guidance. Some have concluded that the astonishing and inexplicable rise of National Socialism in traditional and religious Germany was the doing of supernatural forces. A consistent view among some conspiracy-driven authors is that the Third Reich’s leaders were actively involved in various sorts of occult practices that, according to some, even lent them otherworldly powers. We shall attempt to ascertain if there is irrefutable proof or not that occult or esoteric beliefs and activities existed among the Third Reich’s tyrants.
Hitler’s infamous statement in Mein Kampf, “By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord,”1 reminds us that he repeatedly expressed his belief in God both in public and in private. Whether he believed in a higher being or not, “Divine Providence” and “God” became regular components of Hitler’s rhetoric. As early as 1920, Hitler’s twenty-five-point program for the National Socialist Party included provisions for “Positive Christianity” as the future religion of the people.2 Ultimately, this nondenominational dogma would reveal itself to be nationalistic and antisemitic and promote the belief in a non-Jewish Jesus Christ.
Raised a Catholic and professing a faith in divine authority, Hitler referred numerous times in outbursts or speeches to a higher power: “Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time.” Or in the style of a preacher, projecting on National Socialism a divine mission:
In this hour I would ask of the Lord God only this: that, as in the past, so in the years to come He would give His blessing to our work and our action, to our judgement and our resolution, that He will safeguard us from all false pride and from all cowardly servility, that He may grant us to find the straight path which His Providence has ordained for the German people, and that He may ever give us the courage to do the right, never to falter, never to yield before any violence, before any danger. . . . I am convinced that men who are created by God should live in accordance with the will of the Almighty. . . . If Providence had not guided us I could never have found these dizzy paths. . . . Thus it is that we National Socialists, too, have in the depths of our hearts our faith. We cannot do otherwise: no man can fashion world-history or the history of peoples unless upon his purpose and his powers there rests the blessings of this Providence.3
If Hitler was secretly driven by occult or arcane philosophies, he certainly confirmed the opposite. In a speech heard by hundreds of thousands delivered at the 1939 Nuremberg party rallies, he declared,
National Socialism is not a cult-movement—a movement for worship; it is exclusively a völkisch political doctrine based upon racial principles. In its purpose there is no mystic cult, only the care and leadership of a people defined by a common blood-relationship. . . . We will not allow mystically-minded occult folk with a passion for exploring the secrets of the world beyond to steal into our Movement. Such folk are not National Socialists, but something else—in any case something which has nothing to do with us. At the head of our program there stands no secret surmising, but clear-cut perception and straightforward profession of belief. But since we set as the central point of this perception and of this profession of belief the maintenance and hence the security for the future of a being formed by God, we thus serve the maintenance of a divine work and fulfill a divine will—not in the secret twilight of a new house of worship, but openly before the face of the Lord. . . . Our worship is exclusively the cultivation of the natural, and for that reason, because natural, therefore God-willed. Our humility is the unconditional submission before the divine laws of existence so far as they are known to us men.4
Authors in the period from around 1960 to the 1990s appeared to be engaged in a competition to craft the most sensationalized tales about Hitler and his associates, ranging from beliefs in the occult to initiation into secret mystical orders and even engaging in demonic practices. These authors bought into the alleged supernatural realm in order to explain the extraordinary success and power wielded by Hitler and his top officials, resulting in the proliferation of a rapidly expanding crypto-history of the National Socialist phenomenon. The implication was that Hitler was supported and controlled by an ultimate and esoteric force—dark powers, invisible hierarchies, unknown superiors, a magical elite, or secret societies.5
In The Spear of Destiny (1982), Trevor Ravenscroft alleges that Hitler was transfixed at the sight of the spearhead of Longinus’s lance, which purportedly pierced Jesus’s side at the Crucifixion. Seeing this relic for the first time at Vienna’s Treasury Museum, Hitler supposedly discovered he was chosen for a great political mission. However, according to the notable archeologist Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews, Trevor Ravenscroft’s source of such affirmations—including Hitler supposedly being an occultist—was through Ravenscroft’s séances with a dead man named Walter Stein.6
In Gods and Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult (1977), Dusty Sklar lists a multitude of pseudosciences that circulated as an undercurrent in pre-Hitler Germany, but with regard to proving Hitler’s supposed occult interests, she refers to Ravenscroft and other questionable sources and can evidence no proven direct connections of the Führer to such beliefs.
According to J. P. Holding, in the 1974 book The Occult and the Third Reich, Jean-Michel Angebert (actually the pseudonym for two authors) makes use of imagination and storytelling more than proven facts.7 Holding also lays bare the fanciful and far-fetched surmising of Gerald Suster, a devotee of the occultist Alister Crowley, in his three books The Occult Messiah (1981), Hitler and the Age of Horus (1981), and Hitler: Black Magician (1996).8
One thing that Guido von List, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, and Rudolf von Sebottendorff had in common is that they were born “commoners,” yet later in their lives, all three styled themselves with the aristocratic “von” as part of their name pedigree. Another common link was that all three became deeply involved in the development and dissemination of esoteric, Pan-German, pagan, theosophical, völkisch, antisemitic, or anti-Catholic beliefs. Above all, many authors have suggested that one or all of these men influenced Hitler’s worldview or, in some way, National Socialism.
It should be kept in mind, however, that the occult revival of the late 1800s and early 1900s was the intellectual sideline of only a few, not a mainstream phenomenon, and was a reaction to the reign of materialism and industrialization of the time. Occultism in Germany was in fact an import from the American Theosophical Society and the work of its founder, the adventuress and occultist Helena Blavatsky.9
The Austrian occultist Guido von List (1848–1919) was the first popular writer to combine völkisch (nationalist, racist) ideas with occultism and theosophy. He claimed that the ancient Teutons (North Germans/Danish) had followed a gnostic religion that involved initiation into the mysteries of nature. He called this religion Wotanism, a type of early shamanism, and began studying and interpreting ancient runes. The religion that List interpreted from these various elements was to be implemented as the faith of a new Pan-German realm. He distinguished between the exoteric (Wotanist) and the esoteric (Armanist) types of religious systems. The Armanen, according to List, were ancient priest-kings. He also affirmed that the swastika was a holy Aryan symbol and that it had developed from the “fire-whisk” from which the creator had swirled the cosmos into being.10
There is no evidence that Hitler read the works of Guido von List, yet the similarity between the occultist’s precepts and some of those associated with National Socialism appear to be more than coincidental. List’s blueprint for the new Pan-German empire required the brutal subjugation of “non-Aryans to their Aryan masters in a highly structured hierarchical state.” To qualify for education or posts in civil service, racial purity had to be proven. The Ario-German people would rule over the slave castes of non-Aryans, follow strict racial-marital laws, and only the pure-blooded would be allowed citizenship. These guidelines, published in 1911, read like the first draft of the National Socialists’ 1935 racial purity laws, the so-called Nuremberg Laws.11
Guido von List also developed a detailed conspiracy theory that attempted to prove that Christianity had played a negative and destructive role in the history of the Ario-Germanic race.12 Such concepts were later widely disseminated by the National Socialists’ ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg, one of the key developers of the new “Positive Christianity.”13
In his youth, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874–1954) joined the Cistercian monks near Vienna until an “enlightenment” that resulted from his discovery of a Knight Templar’s tombstone. After leaving the order, he began developing racial theories and embraced the notion of a strange prehistoric world of godlike Aryan supermen whose spiritual duty it was to carry out a sacrificial extermination of the submen, the “Apelings.”14 Influenced by social Darwinism, Lanz described the blue-eyed, blond-haired race as the good principle and various dark races or “Mediterraneanoids” as the evil principle. Lanz developed a system of belief that he termed “Ariosophy,” similar in substance to his contemporary occultist Guido von List’s “Armanen” principles. He also founded a new chivalrous organization that he called the Order of the New Templars and, with the financial support of his Viennese friends, purchased a castle as its headquarters.
Lanz advocated brood mothers in eugenic convents, served by pure-blooded Aryan males. The racist occultist recommended using “racial inferiors” as beasts of burden, deporting them to Madagascar, and incinerating them as a sacrifice to God. Here again, the National Socialist regime’s employment of Jews, Slavs, and others as slave labor or incinerating them in crematoria and plans for deporting the Jews to Madagascar, as well as the psychopathy of the Holocaust, were foretold by Lanz’s xenophobic suggestions.15
Beginning in 1905, Lanz von Liebenfels, based in Vienna, began publishing a periodical titled Ostara (named after the pagan goddess of spring), a journal in which he and other like-minded occultists, Pan-Germanists, antisemitists, and followers of Guido von List could express their views. Basic themes included racial somatology, antifeminism, antiparliamentarianism, and the spiritual differences between the “light” and the “dark” races in all aspects of society. One of the 1906 issues, written by Harald Grävell van Jostenoode, crusaded for the return of the Holy Roman Empire’s Imperial Regalia from Austria to Germany, an act that was carried out by Hitler as soon as he annexed Austria to the German Reich.16
The British historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke defends in detail the sources from which he affirms that Hitler not only was an avid reader of Ostara’s sexist, racist, and occult-imbued content but also kept a collection of at least fifty of these scurrilous pamphlets. Whether the down-and-out artist read Ostara or not, many similarities exist in the respective opinions of Hitler and Liebenfels. Both men saw the world as divided between light-skinned Aryan heroes and dark-skinned “apelings,” and they both stressed the high value of marriage but viewed women ambivalently.17
The Germanenorden was founded in Berlin in 1912 by Theodor Fritsch and several leading occultists connected to the Guido von List Society and the High Armanen Order. The rituals of the order were influenced by theories about the Aryan race, Freemasonry, and the operas of Richard Wagner. The Germanenorden’s principal aims were the monitoring of the Jews and their activities, the dissemination of antisemitic materials, propagating völkisch ideology, and offering assistance to its members. The order’s roots were undeniably planted in Guido von List’s Ariosophy, and its symbol was a curved swastika superimposed on a cross.18 These elements would all be emulated during the course of Hitler’s Third Reich.
The adventurer and world traveler Rudolf von Sebottendorf (1875–1945) became so interested in the Germanenorden that, in 1917, he founded the Bavarian branch of the order. With the help of Walter Neuhaus, an occultist fascinated by astrology, chiromancy, and the mystical ideologies of secret cults, Sebottendorf attracted some 1,500 members to the new Germanenorden division within a year. Meetings of the order’s brethren took place in the posh rooms of Munich’s grand Vier Jahreszeiten Hotel, with as many as three hundred members attending on a regular basis. To avoid drawing attention from socialist or prorepublican activists, the order disguised itself as the “Thule Society,” the moniker alluding to the ancient name of Iceland, supposedly the outpost of Germanic refugees according to Guido von List. The Thule Society’s symbol was a dagger superimposed on a shining swastika sun wheel.19
In 1918, Sebottendorf purchased a newspaper, the Beobachter (Observer) and renamed it the Münchner Beobachter und Sportblatt (Munich Observer and Sports Page), with the intent of propagating the Thule Society’s antisemitic views and doctrine. Two years later, the paper belonged in part to an early supporter of Hitler’s and eventually slid into the hands of Anton Drexler, chairman of the Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (German Workers’ Party), the precursor to Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The newspaper’s shares were transferred to Adolf Hitler in 1921, and the paper was eventually renamed the Völkischer Beobachter, the party’s main propaganda newspaper.20
Neither the occultist Germanenorden nor Sebottendorf’s Thule Society could claim to have served as blueprints for National Socialist doctrine, but some of Hitler’s earliest supporters, as listed in chapter 5, were either members of or associated with the Thule Society. The “mystical” and racist organization did, however, help shape Hitler’s future ideological structures, even if only through the swastika symbol and having provided a newspaper for his party’s propaganda.
Although Hitler was given a variety of books on occultism, he did not display any interest in Germany’s pagan and Nordic cults. Instead, his concept of Aryanism was influenced by the Greek and Roman tradition. According to those who knew him well, Hitler was an avid reader, but he did not read materials on the occult—instead, he extensively read books on history, particularly military history.21
Though the various abovementioned authors and lecturers on the mishmash of occultism, runology, racial issues, astrology, the supernatural, and knightly orders may have exerted minor influence on some of the Third Reich’s leaders, there is no proof that any of them practiced any form of occultism. A sole common theme expressed by the three occultists mentioned—pro-Aryan racism—was mirrored in the dogma of the National Socialist spearheads. The use of the Sig rune to designate the SS and the adoption of the swastika symbol as the National Socialists’ logo have little to do with occultism, and there is no evidence of any of the Reich’s leaders having been members of cults or secret societies or carried out searches for ancient secrets or artifacts. Though much has been insinuated regarding Hitler’s possible connection to mystical, occult, or dark forces, it is wise to scrutinize and question such authors’ references and source material.
1. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 25.
2. Laurence Rees, The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012), 135.
3. Speech at the Reichstag, February 20, 1938, in Baynes, Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922–August 1939, 410.
4. Speech delivered at Nuremberg, September 6, 1938, in Adolf Hitler, My New Order (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941), 500.
5. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism (London: Tauris Parke, 2004), 218.
6. Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews, “‘The Spear of Destiny’: Hitler, the Hapsburgs and the Holy Grail,” Bad Archaeology, December 30 2012, https://badarchaeology.wordpress.com/2012/12/30/the-spear-of-destiny-hitler-the-hapsburgs-and-the-holy-grail/.
7. J. P. Holding, Hitler’s Christianity (n.p.: Tekton, 2013), ebook, chap. 2.
8. Ibid.
9. Goodrick-Clarke, Occult Roots of Nazism, 18.
10. Ibid., 33–52.
11. Ibid., 64.
12. Ibid., 68.
13. Cecil, Myth of the Master Race, 85–92.
14. Goodrick-Clarke, Occult Roots of Nazism, 90
15. Ibid., 97.
16. Ibid., 194–95.
17. Ibid., 196–97.
18. Ibid., 123–34.
19. Ibid., 142–44.
20. Ibid., 146–47.
21. Weber, Becoming Hitler, 246–48.