Hitler and his God

List and Lanz

We have met Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels in the first chapters of our story. We recall that these Austrian mythic visionaries were widely read and exerted a direct influence on the Germanenorden, of which the Thule Society was a chapter. Both saw the Germanic race as a people of god-men who temporarily had forgotten their divine origin, but who would, in the near future, regain their status of world-dominators, using the other races as their slaves. “For his descriptions of the millennium [List] tended to make use of mythological materials drawn from medieval German apocalyptic, Norse legends, and modern theosophy in order to convey its fantastic nature. He related the medieval tale of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa who lay sleeping inside the Kyffhäuser mountain. Once he awakened, Barbarossa would unleash a wave of Teutonic fury across the world prior to the establishment of German hegemony. This tale owed its inspiration to a complex of medieval millenarian hopes which had originally crystallized around the Hohenstauffen emperors.” 392 (Hitler will call the invasion of Russia “Operation Barbarossa”.)

List also gave voice to a strong, profound expectation in the German people of the coming of a Saviour, a Herzog who would raise the people from their age-old misery and conduct them at last into their glorious future. This need for an all-powerful master was an important feature in the psychological make-up of the Germans long before the strong man became the paragon of Fascism in many European nations. The Führer (i.e. leader) was longed and prayed for; he was expected before he took shape in Adolf Hitler. It was not the least of Hitler’s intuitions that he knew exactly how to take on the part and act in a way to which the German masses subconsciously responded with religious fervour. “The cry for a leader”, writes Günter Scholdt, “arose from the searing wish for somebody who would provide meaning in a secularized time, which apparently burdened the individual with an excess of individual responsibility and made him feel lonely.” 393 And he quotes Bruno Brehm: “This is a dream dreamt by all peoples: when princes and lords, learned men and priests no longer know how to go on because the laws no longer obtain, the faith is troubled and the people confused, then appears, called by no one and longed for by all, from the despairing crowd a simple man to save them. The people see this man, feel that he has come at the very last moment, recognize themselves in him and suddenly know what they want.” 394

“As early as 1891, List had discovered a verse of the Voluspa which invoked an awesome and benevolent messianic figure:

A wealthy man joins the circle of counsellors,

A Strong One from Above ends the factions,

He settles everything with fair decisions,

Whatever he ordains shall endure for ever.

This “Strong One from Above” became a stock phrase in all of List’s subsequent references to the millennium. An ostensibly superhuman individual would end all human factions and confusion with the establishment of an eternal order. This divine dictator possessed particular appeal for those who lamented the uncertain nature of industrial society. List eagerly anticipated the advent of this leader, whose monolithic world of certainties would fulfil the socio-political conditions of his national millennium.” 395

“‘The Unconquerable’ was that heroic prince supposedly already prophesied by the ancient Germanic Edda. List considered it his life’s task to prepare this ‘Strong One from Above’ and the Germanic world domination”, writes Brigitte Hamann. “The longed for Germanic people’s leader, ‘the Strong One from Above’, would, according to List, rule as a god-man and be subject to no law. This heroic prince would be recognizable by the fact that he would be victorious in every battle. ‘The Strong One from Above’ would always be right. For List saw him attuned to the forces of Nature … He could make no mistakes. To him the ‘final victory’ was assured.” And Hamann reproduces a facsimile from one of List’s books in which he says: “I offer with this work the highest and holiest that has been offered for long centuries: the proclamation of the Ario-Germanic dawn of the morning of the gods – the Strong One from Above is coming again!” 396

Lanz von Liebenfels, List’s disciple and friend, was not less outspoken. “Germany could no longer allow ‘the apish louts [the subhuman, animal-like Chandalas] to fleece the world’, since the entire planet was her natural colony with a farm for every bold soldier and, in accordance with the hierarchical principle of racial purity, a country estate for every officer.

“An apocalyptic battle would be released upon the corrupt and resistant world, in order to attain this racist millennium. Lanz’s words echoed List’s own prophecy of the First World War: ‘Amid the jubilation of the liberated god-men we would conquer the whole planet … the fire should be raked until sparks fly from the barrels of German battleships and flashes start from German cannon … and order is created among the quarrelsome Udumu-band [of subhumans]’. This envisaged order was a pan-German racist and hierarchical paradise, which included gnostic hierophants, a new caste of warriors and a world revolution to establish eternal German hegemony.

“This apocalypse fused several German intellectual traditions into a millenarian vision of the new fatherland. The bards and sages of early Romanticism marched with the princes and soldiers of pre-industrial conservatism into a religious paradise, defined by such [Lanzian] neo-gnostic symbols as the Holy Grail, the electron and the Church of the Holy Spirit. Its attainment was conditional upon the total subjugation of the inferiors.” 397