Hitler and his God

Things Visible and Invisible

It is a symptom of the confusion in the Western “consensus mentality”, supposedly materialistic and scientific, that occultism remains a subject of suspicion while millions accept the occult ceremonies of their Churches without questioning them, and while thousands of the social elite are practising Freemasons. The same suspicious attitude prevails among academic historians. “I have studied history and psychology at the University of Munich and became years later a doctor in philosophy”, writes Peter Orzechowski. “In the course of these studies it has become clear to me that history, as a simple presentation of the facts, cannot explain the historical events. This is especially true as far as the history of the Third Reich is concerned … There is a wealth of quotations which show that Hitler conceived National Socialism as a religion. Until now no historian has drawn serious conclusions from this fact. The National Socialist religion appeared too abstruse to the analytical, scientific intelligence for it to be worthy of an examination. This religion seemed to be rooted too deeply in the occult for a historian to be able to study it without becoming himself suspect of occultism to his colleagues.” 651

“Irrationalism in its multifarious manifestations belongs to the fundamental facts of all societies, also the most ‘advanced’”, writes Detlev Rose. “The liberal-enlightened idea of human thought and action solely guided by the intellect is nothing more than wishful thinking. Who does not want to accept that thought conceptions, world views and impulses to act are also determined by irrational forces, fails to recognise an elementary part of the realities of life.” 652 Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, in his unanimously appreciated The Occult Roots of Nazism, formulates the same opinion more prudently as follows: “For historians trained exclusively in the evaluation of concrete events, causes, and rational purposes, this netherworld of fantasy may seem delusive. They would argue that politics and historical change are driven only by real material interests. However, fantasies can achieve a causal status once they have been institutionalized in beliefs, values, and social groups. Fantasies are also an important symptom of impending cultural changes and political action.” 653

All depends on what one considers the “fantasies” which can achieve a causal status to be. One might legitimately ask if, excepting the physical activities of Nature, there has been and is anything else but “fantasies” determining the acts of humans. What, in the present times, is not recognised as “scientific fact” may be classified as “fantasy”. If so, the whole of humanity in the whole of its known history before the last two centuries, roughly speaking, lived in a world of fantasy, and one wonders how it managed to finally reach the era of scientific realism, which is the era in which we are living. Amazingly, this is also the era in which Father Christmas has become an international figure; Olympic flames are lit again; people continue taking part in magical Church ceremonies; millions mourn a jet-setting British princess; film stars are venerated as saints after their death; and libraries are written by scientifically qualified materialistic scholars on Jung and Freud – while the killing for reasons of fantasy continues unabated. A striking example of the selectiveness of historic writing, in this case by the person at the centre of the event, is what now is commonly called the “near-death experience” of Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, “favourite minister and one of his possible successors”.

In January 1944 Speer was hospitalized for a serious knee and lung infection. The time was not opportune for him because Göring, always covetous of more power, had been intriguing against him, using the sinister Martin Bormann to bring Speer in disfavour with Hitler. The medical institution where Speer’s condition had grown critical was a state-of-the-art Party hospital at Hochenlychen, near Berlin, run by Dr Karl Gebhardt. This was an SS-Gruppenführer and the personal physician of Himmler, who, according to Speer, had directed Gebhardt to eliminate him. In Inside the Third Reich Speer writes: “The doctors prepared my wife for the worst. But in contrast to this pessimism, I myself was feeling a remarkable euphoria. The little room expanded into a magnificent hall. A plain wardrobe I had been staring at for three weeks turned into a richly carved display piece, inlaid with rare woods. Hovering between living and dying, I had a sense of well-being such as I had only rarely experienced.” 654

In Speer’s conversations with Gitta Sereny, however, we read what really happened: he, the very ambitious, very materialistic and very matter-of-fact architect, powerful minister and top Nazi, had had a near-death experience! As Sereny reports that conversation: “‘I have never been so happy in my life’, [Speer] said. He was ‘above’ he said, looking down at himself in bed. ‘I saw everything very clearly. The doctors and nurses hovering, and [his wife] Margret, looking sort of soft and slim, her face small and pale … What Professor Koch and the nurses were doing’, Speer continued, ‘looked like a silent dance to me. The room was so beautiful’ … He smiled at the memory. ‘I was not alone; there were many figures, all in white and light grey and there was music … And then somebody said, “Not yet”’. And I realized they meant I had to go back and I said I didn’t want to. But I was told I had to – it was not yet my time. What I felt then was not something I know how to describe. It wasn’t just sadness, or disappointment – it was a long feeling of loss … To this day I think that I felt things in those hours which the man I know myself to be cannot feel, or see, or say. I tell you one thing: I’ve never been afraid of death since. I’m certain it will be wonderful.”

Then why hadn’t he written all this in his memoirs? Speer’s answer: “Well, I was supposed to be that super-rational man, you know, writing a definitive book on this terrible history of our time. What do you think readers would have said if in the middle of that book I had suddenly written that I am sure, sure to this day, that I died that night and came back to life? Can you imagine the fun the critics would have had with that?” 655 This is how and why crucial experiences are omitted from “official” history, which is like a layer of hardened ashes on the red-hot magma of reality.

As we have seen, the human being, in the non-materialistic view, is per definition occult because it is mostly constituted of occult, to the ordinary senses imperceptible parts, and because therefore most of its activities and experiences – thoughts, feelings, impulses, dreams – are “occult”. That occultism has so often been abused by frauds and mountebanks does not invalidate this viewpoint. Not only is the individual life for the most part an occult occurrence, the foundations of the scientific-materialistic world too are steeped in occultism. The magic component of the Renaissance has been mentioned. The inspiration of Descartes’ philosophical re-evaluation of the bases of Western knowledge was revealed to him in three dreams. August Comte, the theorist of positivism, launched a new religion of humanity. Nietzsche’s thinking, however this-worldly in its intention, started from and returned to a-material suppositions. And theoretical physics in the last one hundred years has been leading up to “the matter myth”.

In the preceding paragraph we have skipped Isaac Newton. As the result of a 1936 auction at Sotheby’s in London “scholars were enabled, for the first time, to assess the magnitude and scale of Newton’s Hermetic interests”, write Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. “It came as a startling revelation. The first commentator to publish the hitherto suppressed work was John Maynard Keynes, who concluded that Newton’s ‘deepest instincts were occult, esoteric, semantic …’ According to Keynes: ‘Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians’ … In the words of a subsequent commentator: ‘It may safely be said that Newton’s alchemical thoughts were so securely established on their basic foundations that he never came to deny their general validity, and in a sense the whole of his career after 1675 may be seen as one long attempt to integrate alchemy and the mechanical philosophy’.” 656

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke entitles the second chapter of The Roots of Nazism: “The modern German occult revival 1880-1910”. There he writes about that period: “Occult science tended to stress man’s intimate and meaningful relationship with the cosmos in terms of ‘revealed’ correspondences between the microcosm and macrocosm, and strove to counter materialist science, with its emphasis upon tangible and measurable phenomena and its neglect of invisible qualities respecting the spirit and the emotions. These new ‘metaphysical’ sciences gave individuals a holistic view of themselves and the world in which they lived. This view conferred both a sense of participation in a total meaningful order and, through divination, a means of planning one’s affairs in accordance with this order.” 657

Goodrick-Clarke sketches the rapid spreading of Theosophy in Germany and mentions the publication in Leipzig of a twelve-volume book series, Library of Esoteric Writings, in 1898-1900, and in 1894-96 of a thirty-volume book series, Theosophical Writings, in Weimar. In 1906 a Theosophical Publishing House was established in Leipzig, under the imprint of which “a wave of occult magazines” appeared. From his survey Goodrick-Clarke is able to deduce that the German occult publishing activity reached another peak between the years 1906 and 1912. It was the flourishing of the German occult movement which would influence the German speaking (and dominant) population in Austria. “The impetus came largely form Germany, and both List and Lanz drew their knowledge of theosophy from German sources … Theosophy in Vienna after 1900 appears to be a quasi-intellectual sectarian religious doctrine of German importation, current among persons wavering in their religious orthodoxy but who were inclined to a religious perspective.” 658 We know that the Austrians List and Lanz would pay back their debt to Germany a thousandfold and directly inspire the Germanenorden and Nazism.

The tragic events of the First World War, like all great crises, produced a new wave of occult interest. The post-war period was a time in which, as Ulrich Linse formulates it, “many nervously disposed people occupied themselves with occult and mystical things, and showed themselves exceptionally receptive to suggestive influences. It is well known that just after the war a great number of hypnotists, magnetizers, telepaths, and whatever else they might call themselves, performed in public and presented their ‘mystical’ and healing powers in well-organized shows.” 659 The crisis atmosphere in Germany in that period of defeat and humiliation, right and left wing revolutions and surreal hyperinflation, lasted for years. It was the time of the stigmatized Therese Neumann, the spiritist Joseph Weissenberg’s Church and the famous magician and show man Erik Hanussen. In 1925, German Freemasonry reached its absolute maximum with 82 194 Brothers in 632 loges. 660 Nazism too was part of this search for new, different and potent, not to say miraculous, values.

“Saviours appeared everywhere”, remembers Sebastian Haffner, “people with long hair and hair shirts, declaring that they had been sent by God to save the world. The most successful in Berlin was a certain [Louis] Häusser, who used posters and mass meetings and had many followers. His Munich counterpart, according to the press, was a certain Hitler who, however, differed from his Berlin rival by the exciting coarseness of his speeches, which reached new levels of vulgarity in the extravagance of their threats and their unconcealed sadism. While Hitler wanted to bring about the millennium by a massacre of all the Jews, there was a certain [Friedrich] Lamberty in Thuringia who wanted to do it by folk dancing, singing and frolicking. Each saviour had a style of his own. No one and nothing was surprising; surprise had become a long-forgotten sensation.” 661

“The German mind contains a strong ‘irrational’ component”, writes Jochen Kirchhoff, “which feels itself superior to the West-European rationalism … From the viewpoint of this mind the Cartesian clarté appears to be flat, superficial … The German spirit has this brooding inclination towards the ‘far-off’ and abysmal realm of being. This corresponds with the German fascination for things spiritual, esoteric, supra-sensual, occult, and for magic and secret societies of any kind … In the German philosophy there is always a part of mysticism, an element of Meister Eckhart and Jakob Böhme … West-Europeans feel inclined to situate ‘German irrationalism’ next to demonism, to relatedness with death, and to sense behind all that a relapse into the Middle Ages, into ‘diutisc’ barbarism … This relates to the layer of ‘the day before yesterday’ in the German mentality, the ‘age-old neurotic base’, the ‘secret relation of the German nature with the demonical’, as Thomas Mann puts it, who sees in this one of the roots of National Socialism …” 662