Hitler and his God

The Light of Apollo, the Frenzy of Wotan

We had a look at some of the ideas which became ever more articulated in “the new romanticism” that was the völkisch movement. We met with a new German history favouring heroes whose actions and ideals seemed worthy of imitation; there was the Motherland with its natural beauty and the places where ancestors had dwelt; and there were the ancient gods, still alive among the people nearest to the soil – the gods who were revered and whose powers vibrated once more in the ranks of a youth who opened their hearts to them. The ways to approach these supernatural beings were not logical theorems and mathematical equations, but the fascinating mysteries of occultism, “sciences” based on experience, and wisdom.

“The irrationality of these cults, as well as the anti-rationalistic romanticism then in vogue, made an astonishing number of men receptive to equally, and at times more, outlandish theories of national heritage, race and religion”, writes George Mosse. “Occultism, in fact, became essential to another aspect of völkisch thought. For some thinkers it provided a link between the present and the past; it was a bridge that spanned a thousand years of neglect. The past, which Christianity had done its best to destroy, could be recovered and applied to the present needs of the Volk through occultism. Occultism was the chalice that quenched their thirst, and at the same time made irrelevant anything that historical scholarship might do to show events in an entirely different light.” 503

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, in his Occult Roots of Nazism, interprets the flourishing of occultism at the time as follows: “The wide range and confusing variety of racist occultism during the years of the Republic and the Third Reich might tempt one to dismiss the phenomenon as a crankish outgrowth of a larger occult movement in German society during a troubled period in history. While it is undeniably true that these astrologers, rune magicians and Edda mystics were occultists, to leave the matter there is to fail to understand the basic ideological and political motive of this special kind of occultism. All these thinkers were united in a profound reaction to the contemporary world. They perceived the German Republic as vulgar, corrupt, and the symbol of defeat. As cultural pessimists they lifted their eyes from the frustrations and disappointments of the present to behold a vision of high Aryan culture in a fabulous prehistoric past. Astrology, the myth of the Edda and the runes, whether mysteriously whispered or cut as strange magical characters, all represented a marvellous link with that golden age. They were all the promissory tokens of a new era, in which magic, mystical vision and world-power would be restored to all true-born Germans.” 504

While to its practitioners occultism was a method, based on wisdom, to find out the laws of nature and to use them to certain ends, the pagan rites of power were almost exclusively put at the service of the barbarian urges of self-aggrandizement and the physical force to dominate others, gain honour in battle, a place in the heaven of the warriors, and, on the side, grab the property of others. The Catholic Church thought it had eradicated the cult of the “demons”, but now it found to its amazement that, suddenly, the demons seemed to be immortal and were reasserting their power with renewed vigour, writes Rüdiger Sünner in his chapter on the “Neo-pagan Outburst around the Turn of the Century”.

“German utopianism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries almost always meant a return to pre-Christian, pagan spirituality in some form”, declares Richard Noll. “Goethe exemplified this trend in the romantic movement by suggesting replacing the fairy tale of Christ-worship with sun worship. The romantic revival of the Greek gods in Germany also led to utopian visions of a Hellenic Germany, based on the best, most rational and most aesthetically superior Apollonian aspects of ancient Greek culture. In the 1870’s, Nietzsche and Wagner unleashed a stream of utopian fantasies that reversed these notions with their appeal to a return of an irrational, organic, Dionysian community of oneness of will and expression.” 505 Apollo and sun worship, and a Dionysian frenzy of possession: both trends were present in the völkisch movement.

Sünner summarizes an article in the völkisch periodical Die Sonne (the sun) to illustrate the hankering for light and warmth in the Germany of that period. “The metaphor of the rising sun and the onset of spring were used to express the unease with the present time and the hope for a fundamental change. In the German world something was falling apart, something was withering, and something new was coming up. The gods worshipped until recently, viz. capitalism and socialism, had become morally bankrupt.” The pure ‘pleasure principle’ had left the people cold, and there was an urge in all social classes and circles to become free of any form of intellectualism and to enter into a direct experience. The people felt civilization as something cold and dark. 506 “There has hardly been another period in history when there was so much talk of ‘light’ and ‘sun’ as in the period under consideration”, Sünner writes. “One really got drunk on these words, like hungry and freezing people who, in a gloomy dungeon, are longing for light and warmth.”

“The lightning-shaped SS-rune was interpreted as a symbol of ‘sun’ and ‘illumination’, and Himmler declared Hitler to be ‘one of the greatest Beings of Light’, destined by ‘the karma of Germanhood’ to wage ‘the battle against the [Slavonic] East’. Alfred Rosenberg, chief ideologist of the NSDAP, spoke of ‘the victory of the Nordic-Apollonian light principle’ at countless places where the fallen heroes were honoured and ‘eternal flames’ were burning. Reviews were called The Path of Light or The Sun, and an age-old ‘site of the solar cult’ was supposed to have existed at every real or hypothetical Germanic sanctuary. There was an almost obsessive thirsting for the power of the radiant celestial body, and the hope of rebirth in its rays after the alleged humiliations …

“The Nazis considered themselves the only rightful heirs of a hoary solar religion which must have originated in the North, because only the people there had experienced the return of the vernal sun as a special revelation. Proof of this were the swastikas and other spiral-shaped symbols, found on rocks and cult objects as early as the Bronze Age; they were without much ado interpreted as symbols of an ‘altaric’ solar cult … The Hitler Youth began to celebrate the solar solstices already in 1933, and similar celebrations were organized from 1935 onwards in all regional subdivisions of the Party, sometimes in big stadiums filled with 100 000 people. According to SS-Führer Reinhard Heydrich they believed, in this way, to draw from the same power source as their forefathers had done thousands of years ago. In the summer of 1935 there was even a ‘Reich solar solstice’ in which eight thousand fires were lit simultaneously along the Bay of Lübeck. In the winter of the same year chains of fires started from a big fire on the Brocken [Heath] in central Germany and ran in six rays to the borders of the nation, thus creating an imaginary solar wheel as big as the Reich …

In the darkness of the world the Aryans brought the light.

The great illumination came from the North …

Longer lasting and older than Rome, longer lasting and older is Germany.”507

The Artamanen also celebrated the solar solstices. “One wears the folkloric dresses and organizes dances and symbolic plays under old trees. Here too the solar celebrations are the most important feasts to bring the youth into contact with the soul of the forebears.” Sünner quotes a description of such a feast from The Book of the Wandervögel: “They assembled in silence around the pile of wood. The tarred torch is lit. ‘Arise, o flame!’ Not a word is heard when the last sounds of the song fade away. One man steps forward from the circle and speaks, turned towards the fire, of the true liberation, of the purifying blaze of the new ideals … Who does not know that this youth hides the intensity of their feelings under an outwardly boisterous joy does not understand why, after the harangue and the song, a circle of apparent madmen dances around the fire … When the pile of burning wood collapses all jump over the embers, as if they wanted to show that burning by the fire cannot frighten them.” 508

The fabricated myth of the German past, of a Volk whose origins and therefore its very existence were arguable, had to fill the vacuum left by the rejection of Christianity and the disillusionment of the Enlightenment. The pathetic effort at imagining to be the superior people rested fundamentally on nothing. What Noll called the German “utopianism” was often a hysterical overreaction against the angst of nihilism. This explains the German fascination with Götterdämmerung, the twilight of the gods and the catastrophic end of a world – with the Nietzschean act of self-affirmation in a world without an essential meaning.

“It was in keeping with their divorce from reality that the idea of a ‘soldierly existence’ was based not on the real experiences of the war but upon vainglorious illusions; not upon dirt, disgust and the fear of death, but upon that myth of the front-line soldier with which the older generation compensated for defeat. The first steps towards a contempt for life developed by the Wandervögel, the battlefield romanticism with ‘mounds of dead’, the transfiguration of striking and stabbing and throttling, the whole aestheticization of violent death culminating in the intoxication of grandiose disasters, now underwent unlimited extension in an ignorantly blissful shudder before the Nibelungen and the Last of the Goths, before the Lost Warrior Bands of the Middle Ages, before Langemarck, Koltschak and the samurai ideal … All this was not merely the expression of a historicizing hero-worship but also a symptom of a deep-rooted tendency of German educational tradition to prepare the young for death rather than life. Rarely did the character of the Bündische Jugend, in its mixture of commonplace metaphysics, ego-assertion and pseudo-military spirit, find for itself a more apt formula than in the ‘German trinity’ proclaimed by one of its members: ‘God, myself and my weapons’.” (Joachim Fest 509)

One of the works of art most popular with the völkisch movement was Albrecht Dürer’s engraving “The Knight, Death and the Devil”, of which an imitation in the form of a cartouche hung behind Hitler’s desk at his new Chancellery in Berlin. 510 The medieval knight, flanked by Death on one side and by the Devil on the other, is riding through a nightmare world towards his end, ready for to wage the battle without a stake. “The German people are inclined to believe in the moral superiority of dark and hard ideas over ideas that are clearer and gentler. This agrees with their deeper disposition for the tragic side of life and the necessity of evil in the world”, wrote Thomas Mann, the author of Doktor Faustus. 511

As the völkisch protest movement against the modern world turned towards nature and the old gods, it was inevitable that the darker, vitalistic forces of life would seek an outlet through this youth. The youth associations were almost exclusively close bondings of groups of men; women had no access to these Männerbünde and were disdainfully relegated to the conventions and duties of the bourgeois world. If Greece stood as an example here, it was Sparta, not Athens. Their songs were martial ones, often those of the former Landsknechte, the drifting mercenaries who, like the Free Corps, obeyed only their captain, as long as he fed and paid them, and were in spite of their religious superstitions also nihilists marching on between Death and the Devil. The ultimate ideal of the völkisch youth was sacrifice, the sacrifice of life to Death, unconditionally accepted in total obedience to the command of the leader, the Führer. The expectation of a Great Leader, “a Strong One from Above”, to lead them into a future as glorious as the imagined past, was common at that time. But if the future nevertheless would turn out to be another Götterdämmerung, so be it, they were ready to lay down their life with dignity.

These were the realities as the völkisch youth saw them; they led straight to Nazism. “National Socialism was a völkisch movement”, states Mosse in the very first pages of his thorough study of the movement. We know about Hitler’s reservations on this point and will draw our conclusions later. It was part of Hitler’s remarkable intuition, however, to use the völkisch aspects of Nazism to the utmost. The same völkisch youth who had been marching and chanting in the Wandervogel and its numerous sister organizations, was now marching and chanting at the NSDAP rallies, but integrated (gleichgeschaltet) into the Nazi moloch and proudly wearing their carefully designed uniforms.

The testimony of Denis de Rougemont, written in 1936 after having participated in a mass rally of the NSDAP, is often quoted: “I had thought to assist at a mass demonstration, at a political rally. But they celebrate their cult!” He goes on to describe how he was physically affected, not to say crushed, by the force of the religious belief of the 40 000 present there, bawling out in unison their faith in the Führer and Germany. The French ambassador, André François-Poncet, present at one of the Reichstage at Nuremberg, writes in a similar vein: “Still more astonishing and actually indescribable is the atmosphere of collective enthusiasm in which this old town is bathing, the extraordinary drunkenness which has overtaken hundreds of thousands of men and women, the romantic fever, the mystic ecstasy, the kind of sacred delirium by which they are possessed.” 512 Heine’s prediction was coming true, Thor was swinging his hammer again.

The German youth, around their camp fires, during their treks and their ceremonies of initiation and dedication at sacred sites, was listening to seductive voices which also whispered to them in their dreams and impelled them to spend their energy, blindly, for the great Cause assigned to them by the charismatic Führer, that “Being of Light”. For these young men Wotan, whom others called Odin, was present again – he, the one-eyed god with the green hat, who leads the wild hunt of dead riders seen in times of upheaval, when storms are wailing or the moon makes the nights ominous. “Wotan” is from the same root as “Wut”, which means rage or fury.

“We have to become the berserkers of our inner being and our faith”, wrote Goebbels in his diary, and: “We are the berserkers of the new German idea.” 513 Spengler, at the end of his famous book, had pointed in a similar direction: “The race pushes itself once more to the fore, pure and irresistible … From now on a destiny of heroes in the style of ancient times is possible again.” 514 And René Alleau quotes the Austrian author Otto Höfler who wrote: “The most honored god of the German tribes was the lord of demonic possession … Wotan is the savage god of possession, the divine master of the ecstatic Männerbünde, the unpredictable god of war and tempest, of the runes and the dead, of rage and sorcery, of masks and human sacrifices.” 515

The “ecstasy”, the possession by the vital forces of a god or an animal, was not a matter of escape, as nowadays sought in drugs, but of “a cultic identification” of the individual and communal existence. When a person opens himself to such powers, he leaves his normal personality behind and “accepts the obligations of the community of the dead-but-immortals”. This experience, with its relations to Germanic prehistory, can be understood only in the Third Reich, writes Klaus von See. National-Socialism was a movement, an existentially and ecstatically “moved movement”. And he shows how during the Nazi period the word “fanatic” is no longer defined as “passionately zealous” but as “filled with an idea, enthusiastic”. 516

This brings us straight back to Hitler who in Mein Kampf repeatedly pressed for a “fanatical” faith in the National-Socialist movement, and who used fanatisch as a key-word in many speeches. No true Nazi who did not have the Glaube, the faith; no true Nazi who was not fanatical. To turn Germans into fanatics was an essential part of the education and training in the Reich, as it was of the propaganda-cum-brainwashing directed by Joseph Goebbels. The effort succeeded wonderfully well, alas, thanks to the völkisch preparation briefly related above. What counted was instinct, not intellectual reasoning or “causalities”, as Spengler names them. This falling back on animal instincts may also provide a clue to the cruelty with which so many Germans, citizens of one of the foremost civilized nations, treated and killed their victims.

It is an essential point in the understanding of Hitler that, while founding the Reich of a Thousand Years, he lived constantly under the shadow of the possibility of a new Götterdämmerung, which he consciously did try to bring down upon Germany when it was evident that his Thousand Year Reich would be stillborn. Supposing he had succeeded in building his Reich, which would have been its supporting ideology, the ground, the meaning of it all? Hitler had something in mind which he never expressed directly and which remains to be discovered. It was definitely not the völkisch dream of a return to imaginary olden times. But neither did he intend to build a Reich on “scientific-methodological” foundations. His mind-set was far too unscientific, not to say irrational, and his inspiration, as shown by his actions and realizations, was religious, occult, or, as many have maintained, demonic. Hitler “claimed to serve not the emancipation but the redemption of mankind”, writes Fest. If this is true, the question is legitimate: redemption in the name of what or of which god?

About the ritualistic events of the Reichstage at Nuremberg, Speer wrote: “When I saw Hitler virtually canonizing the ritual in this manner, I realized for the first time that the phrase [a Reich of a thousand years] was intended literally. I had long thought that all these formations, processions and dedications were part of a clever propagandistic revue. Now I finally understood that for Hitler they were almost like rites of the founding of a church … It now seemed to me that he was deliberately giving up the smaller claim to the status of a celebrated popular hero in order to gain the far greater status of founder of a religion.” 517 There were mass rituals, initiations, the swearing of sacred oaths, the magical transmission of the power contained in the Blutfahne, the banner sanctified by the blood of the Nazi martyrs fallen in the November 1923 Putsch in Munich; there were torches, and fires, and long silences, and music, and songs, and the rhythmic sound of many men marching. “‘Party’ is a wrong concept. I would prefer to say ‘order’ … Don’t you see that our Party has to be something similar: an order, the hierarchic ordering of a secular priesthood … I will tell you a secret: I am founding an order …” This, Hitler confided to Hermann Rauschning, lifted a tip of the veil over his inmost thought.

What kind of religion was it which Hitler wanted to launch? “The Order of the Death’s Head”, the SS, may suggest an answer. Many of Himmler’s hobbyhorses were not to Hitler’s taste, but the fundamental ideas behind this order of “black knights” were doubtlessly approved if not prescribed or inspired by him. Their ideals were exactly the same as those of the völkisch youth organizations: loyalty, sacrifice, heroism, the pride of being the superior race, unconditional obedience unto death. They were the elite legions of Death wearing the death’s head on their caps and conditioned “to give and take death” without questioning and without giving in to one’s feelings. The effects of the furor teutonicus, the Teutonic furor or “ecstasy”, can still be seen in the documentaries filmed at mass rallies of the Nazis, bellowing their mantra’s; they can also be read from places where the SS celebrated its cult of barbarian revenge, for instance the ruins of Oradour-sur-Glane and the wasteland where once Lidice stood; but among the most unbelievable consequences of that pagan frenzy are the piles of emaciated corpses found where the Order of the Death’s Head had implemented to the letter the regulations of their faith.

“Mass demonstrations on the grand scale not only reinforce the will of the individual but they draw him still closer to the movement and help to create an esprit de corps … [The individual] is gripped by the force of mass-suggestion which comes from the excitement and enthusiasm of three or four thousand other men in whose midst he finds himself. If the manifest success and the consensus of thousands confirm the truth and justice of the new teaching and for the first time raise doubt in his mind as to the truth of the opinions held by him up to now, then he submits himself to the fascination of what we call mass-suggestion. The will, the yearning and indeed the strength of thousands of people are in each individual. A man who enters such a meeting in doubt and hesitation leaves it inwardly fortified; he has become a member of a community.” Hitler wrote this in 1926, in the second part of the book known as Mein Kampf, where one also finds: “I was now able to feel and understand how easily the man in the street succumbs to the hypnotic magic of such a grandiose piece of theatrical presentation.” 518

About the impressionability of the German “man in the street”, Pfeffer von Salomon, one-time commander of the SA, had this to say: “The sight of a large body of disciplined men, inwardly and outwardly alike, whose militancy can be plainly seen or sensed, makes the most profound impression upon every German and speaks to his heart in a more convincing and persuasive language than writing, oratory or logic ever can.” These words are quoted in Fest’s biography of Hitler, of whom we read there the following words: “We [the Germans] have another value: our fighting spirit. It is there, only buried under a pile of foreign theories and doctrines. A great and powerful party goes to a lot of trouble to prove the opposite, until suddenly an ordinary military band comes along and plays. Then the straggler awakes from his dreamy state and joins their columns. That’s the way it is today. Our people only have to be shown this better course – and you’ll see, they’ll start marching.” 519