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... Quest for World Dominion, p. 77. 449 Albert Speer: Inside the Third Reich, p. 150. 450 Klaus von See: Barbar, Germane, Arier, p. 308. 451 Adolf Hitler, op. cit., pp. 242-43. 452 Hermann Rauschning, op. cit., pp. 218-19. 453 Adolf Hitler, op. cit., pp. 303, 318, 385. 454 Albert Speer: Inside the Third Reich, p. 148. 455 John Weiss: Ideology of Death, p. 33. 456 Christian... Apokalypse und Moderne, p. 38. 470 Michael Burleigh: The Third Reich – A New History, p. 50. 471 Volker Mauersberger: Hitler in Weimar, p. 98. 472 In George Mosse, op. cit., p. 35. 473 Klaus von See: Barbar, Germane, Arier, p. 29. 474 In Michael Ley, op. cit., p. 35. 475 Albert Speer: Inside the Third Reich, p. 151. 476 Monologe im Führerhauptquartier, pp. 214, 232. ... – The Secret Diaries, p. 16. 772 Albert Speer: Inside the Third Reich, p. 222. 773 Monologen im Führerhauptquartier, pp. 135, 151, 135, 158, 149. 774 Hermann Rauschning, op. cit., p. 210. 775 Joachim Köhler, op. cit., p. 355. 776 Peter Orzechowski, op. cit., p. 179. 777 Albert Speer: Inside the Third Reich, pp. 604, 607. 778 Brigitte Hamann: Winifred Wagner, oder Hitlers ...

... William: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Shirer, William: The Nightmare Years 1930-1940 Shirer, William: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Sigmund, Anna Maria: Des Führers bester Freund Sigmund, Anna Maria: Die Frauen der Nazis I Sigmund, Anna Maria: Die Frauen der Nazis II Snyder, Louis: Encyclopedia of the Third Reich Sobieroj, Martin: Der Stern des Abgrundes... the Third Reich Speer, Albert: Spandau – The Secret Diaries [orig. Spandauer Tagebücher] Spengler, Oswald: Der Untergang des Abendlandes Spotts, Frederic: Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics Stern, J.P.: Hitler – The Führer and the People Stern, J.P.: Nietzsche Stoakes, Geoffrey: Hitler and the Quest for World Dominion Studt, Christoph: Das Dritte Reich in Daten ... l’Ordre noir Bronder, Dietrich: Bevor Hitler kam Bullock, Alan: Hitler and Stalin – Parallel Lives Burgess, Simon: Stafford Cripps – A Political Life Burleigh, Michael: The Third Reich – A New History Cannadine, David (ed.): The Speeches of Winston Churchill, p 134. Chamberlain, Lesley: Nietzsche in Turin – An Intimate Biography Châtellier, Hildegard: Entre religion ...

... till the time that the final collapse of the Reich seemed imminent. We have therefore to disagree with the authors who would have us understand that Hitler distanced himself from some of Himmler’s projects, for instance the Wewelsburg. For Rüdiger Sünner mentions that Hitler signed, on 2 July 1940, a “decree by the Führer and Chancellor of the Reich concerning building works in the region of the... education, especially lawyers, economists and physicians, was considerable. They ran the SS as drilled technocrats, which explains the cancer-like growth of the Order within the body of the Third Reich. On this aspect of the SS, Burleigh remarks: “Historians have made much of the fact that many of them were lawyers or economists, two-thirds of whom had higher education and a third doctorates; less... influenced his ambiguous attitude at the time of the Stauffenberg attempt on Hitler’s life and his decision towards the end of the war to negotiate with the Swedes. For he, Himmler, top policeman of the Reich, must surely have been aware of some of Hitler’s barbs at his expense. For instance, Speer writes that Hitler had little sympathy with Himmler in his mythologizing of the SS. “What nonsense!” exclaimed ...

... well as ordinary travellers, stepped out of the station they would be overwhelmed, or rather stunned, by the urban scene and thus by the power of the Reich.” 374 Fest quotes Hitler’s words, spoken in 1937: “Because we believe in the eternity of this Reich, its works must also be eternal ones, that is … not conceived for the year 1940 and not for the year 2000; rather they must tower like the cathedrals... world dominion, as documented in The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, and if Hitler’s Aryans had to exterminate them “to do the work of the Lord” and found the Kingdom of God as the Thousand Year’s Reich, then the stage of this eschatological event could be no other than the whole earth. To put this in doubt is to efface the perspectives of Hitler’s messianic vision, and a diminution of his vision leaves... and who must be able to win and hold their position as lords of the earth only through their own intelligence and courage.” 367 We recall that it would be “a greater honour to be a citizen of this Reich, even as a street-sweeper, than to be the king of a foreign state”. Mein Kampf was written in 1924-25, at a time when Hitler had to make a new start in order to give shape to his dreams and world ...

... superiority complex, took on inflated proportions. Thanks to the statesmanship of Bismarck they had finally succeeded, in 1871, to build a German nation, which they considered to be the Second Reich. (The First Reich, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, had ended in 1806.) But the more the Germans became convinced of their exceptional qualities as a nation, and more particularly as a race, the more... It was Fritsch who compiled, in 1887, the Catechism of the Anti-Semite; its twenty-seventh impression in 1907 was renamed Handbook of the Jewish Question and remained till the end of the Third Reich a source of reference and inspiration for all Jew-haters. Fritsch launched the “Anti-Semitic People’s Party” in 1889. In 1902 he started a periodical, the Hammer , which became such a success that... that Fritsch founded, in 1912, the Germanenorden. “The most important carriers of Listian ideas across the border [between Austria and Germany] were the members of the List Society in the German Reich who were involved in the founding of the Reichshammerbund and the Germanenorden ”, writes Goodrick-Clarke. 42 Fritsch’s multiple initiatives, which found broad resonance in Germany, leave no doubt ...

... regime and Hitler’s politics of annihilation. As long as Heydrich was alive he provided an idea of what Hitler’s regime and the National Socialist new order of Europe would have become if the Third Reich had been victorious.” 1065 The intellectual responsible for the implementation of Hitler’s anti-intellectualism was Dr Joseph Goebbels. “He gave a voice to the madness”, writes Guido Knopp, 1066... the Hitler shark.” 1069 And Sri Aurobindo stated, in a talk with his disciples, that Goebbels, as well as Hitler, was “possessed by forces of the Life plane”. 1070 Hermann Göring, Marshall of the Reich, potentate and drug addict, was the other Nazi leader whom Sri Aurobindo mentioned by name as being possessed. Sri Aurobindo’s opinion is confirmed by an unexpected source, a letter to Göring from his... is a fact, but suffering remains intangible. Still, it is one of the elementary experiences of the human condition. The phenomenon of wilful, cruelly inflicted suffering was so typical of the Third Reich that “Auschwitz” is the association it automatically evokes today. The physical and psychological suffering, administered for the most part by “ordinary men” (the title of a much discussed book by ...

... 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... 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... 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 ...

... “Now at last comes what we have been awaiting for days: the explanation of all what has happened, a confession, even a confession of guilt, or perhaps a justification. In this last document of the Reich of a Thousand Years should be written the truth, admitted by a man who had nothing to lose anymore. But my expectation remained unfulfilled. Detached, almost mechanically, the Führer utters declarations... And so I believe today that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: in standing guard against the Jew I am defending the handiwork of the Lord.” 625 As Chancellor of the Reich, Hitler knew how to talk peace and became known, in Germany and abroad, as “the Chancellor of Peace”, although he had been preparing for war from his first day in office. Likewise, he knew how to restrain... eyes, the Satanic hosts. When he spoke or wrote about his ‘holy mission’, he used words associated with chiliastic prophecy (not only in the millennial concept literally rendered as the ‘Thousand Year Reich’), like ‘consecration’, ‘salvation’, ‘redemption’, ‘resurrection’, ‘God’s will’. The murder of the Jews, in his fantasies, was commanded by divine providence, and he was the chosen instrument for that ...

... centuries’ of armed workers were formed after the example of the revolutionary guards in Petersburg. Their task was … to spread the revolution that was to expand like a wildfire from the middle of the Reich, and to bring about a ‘German October’ in imitation of the Russian October.” 209 Germany was split into Left and Right, with the looming possibility of civil war. But the Left was itself fatally... prestige with Protestant Prussia. Munich, “Athens on the Isar”, was synonymous with culture, while Prussian Berlin stood for boorishness and aberration. “Since Bismarck had founded the Second German Reich, Bavaria had been little more than a provincial vassal and here opportunity was being offered for Munich to assume the leadership of Germany and take it away from the despised Prussians in Berlin.”... central Government, and the catastrophic state of the finances and the economy with the resulting riots and unemployment, it is no wonder that Sebastian Haffner writes: “In the autumn of 1923 the German Reich was on the verge of political extinction.” 211 Joachim Fest is of the same opinion: “The harassed [central] government might well see the events in Munich as the signal for total collapse.” 212 ...

... Houston Chamberlain and Rosenberg “It is probably no exaggeration to say, as I have heard more than one follower of Hitler say, that Chamberlain was the spiritual founder of the Third Reich.” 438 With whatever proviso one quotes these words of the experienced journalist who was William Shirer, it is a fact that the influence of the Englishman Houston Chamberlain penetrated profoundly into... National Socialism, and called him “a man of whose integrity of personal intention I am absolutely convinced”. 448 He appointed Rosenberg general supervisor of National-Socialist ideology for the whole Reich and would later nominate him Governor-General of the Eastern Occupied Territories. Rosenberg’s prestige rested, besides on his supposed closeness to Hitler, mainly upon a thick book he published... the official doctrine of the Nazi state, and it would be Hitler’s intention to implement them as soon and fully as possible. He would try to cement them during his lifetime into the foundations of a Reich that would last a thousand years. ...

... Mein Kampf was to be present at the SS-ceremonies of baptism, initiation into the Order, marriage and death. We find another confirmation in the following articles of the National Reich Church: “… 14. The National Reich Church declares that to it, and therefore to the German nation, the Führer’s Mein Kampf is the greatest of all documents. It not only contains the greatest but it embodies the purest... 6. Mein Kampf Hitler and his God Hitler Bares his Mind William Shirer, the American journalist who has followed “the rise and fall of the Third Reich” from nearby, writes: “It might be argued that had more non-Nazi Germans read [ Mein Kampf ] before 1933 and had the foreign statesmen of the world perused it carefully while there was still time, both Germany... of not putting down in writing exactly the kind of Germany he intended to make if he ever came to power and the kind of world he meant to create by armed German conquest. The blueprint of the Third Reich and, what is more, of the barbaric New Order which Hitler inflicted on conquered Europe in the triumphant years between 1939 and 1945 is set down in all its appalling crudity at great length and in ...

... Wagner. The Party Rally in Nuremberg will each year open with the Rienzi overture, which Köhler calls “the quasi official Reich overture” and “a musical summary of Hitler’s ideological programme”, while Serpico calls it “the unofficial hymn of the Third Reich”. “In the Third Reich the music of Wagner occupied a dominating position, because it was so eminently tuned to the Nazi myths and served as their... in April 1945, that Kubizek was once more reminded of “the primal scene of Hitler’s career” on the Freinberg. “When in those terrible days of April 1945 I followed deeply shaken the battle for the Reich Chancellery which ended the world conflagration [the Second World War], I could not help thinking of the final scene in Rienzi , when the Tribune perishes in the flames of the burning capitol.” 917 ...

... One finds in the works of the commentators on Hitler’s intentions conflicting versions of his plans of conquest. Some maps show Hitler’s Greater German Reich occupying the middle part of Europe, from Scandinavia to Italy, but other maps extend the Reich up to the Urals. Both land masses are supposed to be the base, established by Hitler, for future German world conquest. “Any thought of world politics... the Master Race “See to it that the strength of our nation does not rest on colonial foundations”, wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf , “but on our own native territory in Europe. Never consider the Reich secure unless, for centuries to come, it is in a position to give every descendant of our race a piece of ground and soil that he can call his own. Never forget that the most sacred of all rights in... them to be “honorary Aryans” to further his plans in Asia and the Pacific Ocean, in this relying on Karl Haushofer as the chief intermediary. The plans for his lifetime, as the founder of the Third Reich which others would have to build up and complete, did not include colonies. Water was an element Hitler disliked, and Ernst Hanfstängl, who maintains he tried to convince Hitler of the capacities of ...

... achieve, that the words ‘Secret Germany’ were first employed … George, unlike Nietzsche, did not choose to be alone; it was the heart of his method to build a secret empire for the sake of the new Reich to come … It was an elitist programme pushed to the very limits of elitism; the secret Germany was a club to which new members were elected and for which they were trained, one by one.” 719 Claus... sometimes equivocal disapproval did not deter the Nazis from hailing him as a spiritual precursor and trying to co-opt him, much as they did Nietzsche.” 721 Resurgence and greatness of a new German Reich, leading to a new world and a new man; the fulfilment of the Führer expectation; the redress of alleged injustices by the morally and culturally inferior victors of 1918; ostentation of strength and ...

... 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... 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 ...

... by forces which we have seen darkening and which we still have to identify. In his book Hitler: The Führer and the People, J.P. Stern has titled one of the chapters which leads up to the Third Reich “A Society Longing for Transcendence”. There he writes: “What the Germans now seek is a religious solution – religious in the sense of being total and absolute and an object of faith rather than of... basis was always metaphysical. During the 1920’s, intellectuals continued to view the coming German revolution primarily in spiritual terms … “Möller van den Bruck, in his famous work The Third Reich (1923), which he first called The Third Way, considered Germany to be a ‘new nation’, as distinguished from the overripe ‘old nations’ of the West, a nation with a mission. It was a country of the ...

... Germany and Russia were still partners under their non-aggression pact; Mussolini had not yet taken his decisive step into Hitler’s camp, staging many shows of “everlasting” friendship with the Third Reich but also often making denigrating remarks about the Germans and their Führer, who to him was something like an epigone; and Japan seemed fully tied down in East Asia. Now is the world for his eating... will not perish”, he said during those last days, and Speer comments: “There was no doubt that he regarded himself as this one righteous man.” 1060 In October 1939, though, the dream of the Third Reich and German domination of the world was still alive – indeed it had never been more alive than then: Thus driven he must stride on conquering all, Threatening and clamouring, brutal, invincible ...

... devotion … Terror cannot be overcome with the weapons of the mind, but only by counter-terror”. 176 Here is the origin of the barbarism, terror and cruelty which will be the hallmarks of the Third Reich. “Though these were violent times, this was from its inception an exceptionally violent movement”, observes Laurence Rees. 177 Konrad Heiden heard Hitler shout: “We may be inhuman! But if we save Germany... possessed the key to the weapons arsenal.” 186 Like Captain Mayr, Röhm had connections in many organizations, overt and covert. He was himself the head of the Reichkriegsflagge , the War Banner of the Reich, and played a dominant role in the Eiserne Faust , the Iron Fist. And there was, in addition, the homosexual boys’ network, an at the time most scandalous eruption of the latent homoeroticism in the ...

... was happening in the present; it had to be won before the power could be gained and the revenge against Germany’s mortal enemy prepared. Hitler called the government “the present Jewish-Democratic Reich, which has become a veritable curse for the German people”; they were “those ruffians of Jews who came into power in 1918 and were able to rob the nation of its arms”; they were “a gang of bandits”... Royal Palace, from where he intended to announce a soviet-style republic modelled on Lenin’s Russia … There was no time to lose. Leaving his meal, he strode out on to the small balcony outside the Reich library. The vast crowd cheered his appearance, then quietened as he began an off-the-cuff speech … Needing a rousing finish, he cried: “The rotten old monarchy has collapsed. Long live the new [government] ...

... appointed cultural czar of the Third Reich and working under Hitler’s close supervision, excelled in the comparatively new techniques of propaganda. His basic concept was plain and unencumbered by moral qualms: “The propaganda which produces the desired results is good and all other propaganda is bad.” 789 According to William Shirer, who experienced the Third Reich from nearby, Goebbels “completely isolated... Hitler’s “strict education” was to be effective, in other words if the propaganda, methodically planned to reorder the contents of the German brain, was to reach every individual in every corner of the Reich. Hitler had written a whole chapter on propaganda in Mein Kampf , camouflaging it under the title “War Propaganda”, where he says: “I soon came to realize that the right use of propaganda was an asset ...

... the indigenous people. Building castles, forts and towns, they converted the remaining natives to Christianity, reduced them to serfdom and made themselves lords of the land.” 455 “Half of the German Reich was established on what originally had been Slavonic territory”, writes Christian von Krockow, “and what finally became the German nation arose from a mixture of Germanic and Slavonic tribes”. 456 In... grandfathers remains unknown. He was acidly mocked in the pre-1933 leftist press for his “emphatically non-Aryan appearance”, especially his fleshy nose. 458 The inanity of the Aryan myth in the Third Reich was glaringly demonstrated by the physical appearance of its top leaders: Göring was fat and a drug addict; Goebbels was stunted, big-headed and club-footed; Himmler had a mongoloid face; Hess had bushy... frontiers of our native country, the association with non-German foreign elements in the territories that lie along our frontiers, and especially the strong influx of the blood into the interior of the Reich itself, have prevented any complete assimilation of those various elements, because the influx has continued steadily. Out of this melting-pot a new race arose. The heterogeneous continue to exist side ...

... expectation of “the new man” in the diary of young Goebbels. “ Heil and Sieg to the new man! … We must descend into the deepest depths if we want to create the new man … I am in search of the new Reich and the new man …” 809 Ernst Jünger too had perceived a new man, for in one of his books about the First World War he wrote: “The spirit of the battle with modern war materiel and in the trenches... Girls for the ten to fourteens.” 818 By the end of 1938 the Hitler Youth numbered more than seven and a half million; in March of the next year it became the only authorized youth organization in the Reich. When a member had served his years in the Hitler Youth, he was in fact a fully trained military man. “While training in shooting and manoeuvre exercises was extended to all young men, the defence ...

... fish eyes” over “dull grey” (François-Poncet) to the colonel’s “deep blue”, “bright blue” and Goebbels’ “marvellous blue – like stars”. Even in the last days of Hitler’s existence and that of his Reich, “the fascination of the eyes, which had bewitched so many seemingly sober men – which had exhausted Speer, and baffled Rauschning, and seduced Stumpfegger, and convinced an industrialist that [Hitler]... as Party leader. Hitler won the direct confrontation thanks to his decisiveness and the support of the SS who, faithful to their oath, stood as one man behind him. (The rise of the SS in the Third Reich dates from this crisis.) Stennes and the rebellious SA commanders were replaced by loyal Hitlerites. The day would come that Stennes too had to run for his life. (He ran as far as China, where he became ...

... participated. In 1938 Hitler declared: “Several of the [ritual] acts have by now reached their definitive form.” “Up to this point”, writes Speer, “I had taken the phrase Das Tausendjährige Reich [the Reich of a Thousand Years] as purely theoretical, a mere claim to establishing something that would last more than a single lifetime. But when I saw Hitler virtually canonizing the ritual in this manner ...

... eventually be renewed by them. The colony soon succumbed to internal troubles, but some descendants still survive in the original location. In 1934 Elisabeth would receive the Chancellor of the German Reich, Adolf Hitler, at the Nietzsche Archives in Weimar with a flashy right arm salute, and create the occasion for a photo session of Hitler with the bust of Friedrich Nietzsche, symbolizing the philosophical... and Austria would be united in a theocratic pan-German realm, wherein non-German interests would play no part. Within thirty-five years this vision was instituted as the foreign policy of the Third Reich.” 698 The well-read Dietrich Eckart was familiar with List’s publications, a fact which we find confirmed in Ralph Reuth’s Hitler biography, and communicated this knowledge, along with much more ...

... mystic Johannes Tauler, Arthur Dinter, who wanted to bring the Reformation to a successful end, and Joseph Goebbels, the Catholic who projected his apocalyptic expectations on Hitler and his Third Reich. There was a pronounced tendency towards occultism in Rudolf von Sebottendorff, Master of the Thule Society, and Eckart and Rudolf Hess, both members of this Society; in Otto Rahn, the SS-man with a... our Führer, I swear that I shall dedicate all my force and all my strength to the saviour of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am willing and ready to give my life for him, so help me God. One Volk, one Reich, one Führer!” 740 The third basic principle of National Socialism was Gleichschaltung, a term best translated by “integration” – integration into the body of the nazified Volk, that is. The existing ...

... Travels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Arabian Nights , but May remained his favourite author even in adulthood. “Hitler’s cult of May weathered time unscathed. It is said that even when Chancellor of the Reich he took the time to read May’s complete works. In 1943 he had, in spite of the paper shortage, 300 000 copies of a Winnetou book printed for the soldiers, this notwithstanding the undeniable fact that... Christian faction of the German völkisch movement. He gave in March 1912, shortly before his death, a talk in Vienna which Hitler, if he knew about it, will not have missed. May’s subject was Empor ins Reich der Edelmenschen , 149 which means something like “Up towards the Reign of the Noble Human Beings”. Edelmensch was an often used synonym of the Arian-Nordic-German in his purest state – one of the ...

... 1919-20 until the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945. They were used successively to help the Party come to power, to justify its regime of terror, to justify the war, to justify the genocide, and finally to postpone the capitulation. The history of this myth, and of its utilization for various ends, reflects accurately the rise and fall of the Third Reich itself.” According to Cohn, “one may not ...

... propitious course were Premier Gustav Stresemann and the “financial wizard” Hjalmar Schacht, who created a new monetary system – and who would play a similar and equally important role in the Third Reich. The Nazi Party, now without its strong-willed Führer, went adrift and split up in several factions. Hitler had foreseen this and let it happen, for it might come useful when he would take up the reins... to him, seems to have played a part. This may have been the main reason of the intimacy between the two men, and of the fact that Hess became Hitler’s secretary and afterwards the second man in the Reich, although there was a unanimous opinion among the top Nazis that Hess was a poor politician and organizer. Behind his back fellow Nazis sometimes called him Fräulein Anna , Miss Anna, for he read poetry ...

... and imperialist policies.” (Hermann Gilbhard 427) Besides being squarely racist, the Pan-Germans stood chiefly for the integration of all Germans into one Greater German Empire or Reich, and for the hegemony by this Reich over other nations within its sphere of influence. The German “war aims” were their brainchildren, adopted by the politicians and by the Hindenburg-Ludendorff tandem. We have seen ...

... widened. He now became the missioned Leader who had to conquer a firm and durable foothold in Europe for the Aryan race, and to ready his Aryan legions for world conquest. Then, as Chancellor of the Reich, he capitalized on the political situation to secure the foundations of the Aryan world empire, and to execute what until then had been unthinkable, the genocide of the Jews. Hermann Rauschning ...

... permitted too many high-ranking Nazi Party members to plead insanity and thereby escape retribution on grounds of diminished responsibility … So flagrant an eruption of the irrational as the Third Reich represented was uncomfortable, disturbing and potentially dangerous. For the world to be made aware of the sheer potency of the irrational, on so awesome a collective level, would have been to open ...

... Germany, so much so that “in almost no other country there were so many miracles performed, so many ghosts conjured, so many illnesses cured and so many horoscopes read as in Germany up to the Third Reich”. The spiritists themselves came in different flavours: New Psychologists, plain Occultists, Animists, Spiritualists of the Anglo-Saxon school, Davisians, Allan-Kardecians, Psychists, Theosophists, ...

... “The higher one was, the less one knew”, confided Speer to Gitta Sereny. 638 Speer’s words might be illustrated with passages from Goebbels diaries, showing that even the proud propaganda-tsar of the Reich was informed about some important events only post factum. “Hitler has never revealed the secret of his mission”, writes Joachim Köhler in Hitlers Wagner, p. 21. “The core of his message was not ...

... Streicher considered Hitler the saviour of the German people sent by God. Streicher himself acted as a basely possessed figure without any humane feelings. “He was considered disgusting even in the Third Reich”, according to Speer, and Joseph Persico observed at Nuremberg that “the man had become a pariah, reviled by his captors and shunned by his fellow defendants”. 1026 But “Streicher spoke and acted aloud ...

... to smother the frail plant” – of National Socialism, that is. 232 The former Master of Thule made matters worse by trying to relaunch the Society, perhaps envisioning a place of honour in the Third Reich for himself and his former adherents. “Today is fulfilled what those seven [executed members of Thule] and the Thule as a whole looked forward to … We recognize the greatness and the merit of Adolf ...

... Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine was that the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, asleep in the Kyffhäuser mountain, would wake up, appear on a white horse and lead “a new chivalry” to establish a reign, or Reich, of a thousand years. This would happen through massacre and terror in a crusade “to smash Babylon in the name of God”. Those to be massacred would be “the rich, well-fed, loose-living clergy”, the ...

... legend, and you envision again their deepest meaning!” Sünner quotes these words from one of the völkisch periodicals, Nordland . “Such thoughts were often found in books and reviews of the Third Reich”, continues Sünner. “Their aim was to replace gradually the Christian prayers and visits to the church by a new creed and ‘Germanic places of worship’. Especially the SS re-evaluated the megalithic ...

... time experiments with animals had been carried out. But these were in contravention of the National-Socialist laws for the protection of animals and had to be stopped on the personal intervention of Reich Marshall Göring, the ‘Supreme Master of the Hunt’. This opened the way for experiments with human beings.” 534 Hitler, another animal lover, said in one of his monologues when expressing his aversion ...

... throttle its industrial life lines and the nourishment of its people. Undefeated on the battlefield, Germany would stand up again stronger than ever, and reach at last its ultimate fulfilment in a Third Reich. What was foreseen in the plan of God would be accomplished by the works of man. ...

... popular lore, is to make the “other”, whether enemy or just “not one of us”, into a stereotype. The völkisch stereotype of the Jew would afterwards be taken over by the propaganda machine of the Third Reich. “The Jew lacked a soul, all virtues, and the capacity for ethical behaviour for the reason that Judaism was a fossilized legalism. What a striking contrast this made with the German soul, steeped as ...

... of Hitler, one of the first, most famous and influential post-war Hitler books, Trevor-Roper states outright: “The power of the Führer was a magic power.” 871 Similarly, in The Face of the Third Reich Fest writes: “… The character of Hitler’s compulsive power over men’s minds can only be understood in religious terms”. 872 – How could there ever be an understanding of Hitler without an explanation ...

... illustration of Hitler’s theories about the moral value of the relations between nations. For one of the main points of the Nazi doctrine and propaganda had been throughout that it was the aim of the Third Reich to obliterate Judeo-Bolshevism; on the other hand, for the Russians and for the Communist Parties all over the world Nazism represented the acme of imperialistic capitalism and was their much maligned ...

... Adolf Hitler, who had seen to it that they grew up with Wagner’s music in their ears at every important public or political manifestation. Hitler had made Wagner into the official composer of the Third Reich; living composers, like Richard Strauss, only moved in Wagner’s shadow. The reason was that Wagner and his music had played such an important role in Hitler’s own life. From his years in Linz onwards ...

... jealous Yahweh-god” was a quote from Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century. The reader will remember that Rosenberg was the official chief-ideologist and inspector of ideology in the Nazi Reich. (Unofficially, but most effectively, it was Adolf Hitler who held this job and who supervised the inspector.) As we have seen, what Germany needed according to Rosenberg was “a religion without Jewishness ...

... he was not normal; he was a morbid man, near to being demented, a personage from Dostoyevsky, one of the ‘possessed’.” 981 And there is the following passage in Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich about the days of Hitler’s meetings with Chamberlain, when the Führer was “in a highly nervous state”: “He seemed to be, as I noted in my diary that evening, on the edge of a nervous breakdown. ‘ ...

... pleasure, of the little creatures.” 3 But, lo and behold … not that many years later there stood that selfsame Adolf Hitler, triumphantly, as the new Chancellor of Germany on the balcony of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, acclaimed by thousands of enthusiastic German citizens! And then he stood, all by himself and with the Iron Cross First Class on his chest, high above huge, neatly drawn up columns ...

... all völkisch-oriented, racist Germans in the first decennia of the twentieth century. Hitler, for one, held exactly the same opinion, as did Alfred Rosenberg, the ideological supervisor of the Third Reich, and consequently the official ideology of the Nazis. Thule had also become familiar in the imagination of the völkisch Germans by another way: the publisher Eugen Diederichs had chosen the word ...

... Eiserne Hand (Iron Hand), the Escherich Organization , the Deutschvölkische Schutz- and Trutzbund (Defense and Defiance League of the German Race), the Verband Altreichsflagge (Flag of the Old Reich Association), the Bayreuth, Würzburg and Wolf Free Corps, and a variety of other organizations” – including the Thule Society and the (NS)DAP. The ranks of the rightists in Bavaria were swelled by ...

... nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Some such anthologies, for instance Treitschke’s Handbuch des Judentums, sold in enormous numbers and were reprinted till the end of the Third Reich. What the nationalist literature did not promulgate were the visionary predictions of a Romantic like Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), who was a Jew. “Christianity – and this is its nicest merit – has ...

... century, but expressing what had become a fixed emotional component of the German character. As Germany was a patchwork of principalities for centuries, also when constituting the basis of the Holy Roman Reich, and became a nation in the true sense only in 1871, there must have been some underlying ideological foundation for the feeling of “Germanness”, of belonging to a German Volk . It was this special ...

... and he would never forgive the French for the dastardly act. (In 1937 the children of these African soldiers and German woman were among the first to be sterilized in the eugenic scheme of the Third Reich. 270) “As long as the eternal conflict between France and Germany is waged only in the form of a German defence against the French attack, that conflict can never be decided and from century to century ...

... plans have been executed is to be attributed to the qualities of each individual race.” 282 The Aryan was “the standard-bearer of human progress”. “It will be a greater honour to be a citizen of this Reich, even as a street-sweeper, than to be the king of a foreign state.” 283 For the Aryan is “the highest image of the Lord,” 284 and the Aryans are “a race destined to become master of all the other peoples ...

... philosophical structure, destined to promote a civilization completely different from ours, began to converge toward Munich … All principal members of the future high governing strata of the Third Reich happened to be on the same stage.” 201 It has struck many that not even a perceptive person would have been able, at the time of the rise of the movement, to pick them out from among the average members ...

... leading SS-ideologist and Hitler’s Minister of Agriculture, and Martin Bormann, after Hess’ flight to Great Britain as Hitler’s private secretary one of the most powerful and dangerous men in the Third Reich. Bormann’s wife Gerda, a fanatical Nazi, wrote: “He [her husband] divided all the people in three groups: peasants, rooted in the soil, nomads roaming through the steppes, and parasites living from ...

... “devolve” into a uniform miscellany of animal-like imbeciles and finally die out was, according to Gobineau, certain. What then about the German Herrenmenschen and the future glories of the Third Reich – the aspirations of a country in which a French count was honoured as a pioneer of racist thought? Honoured perhaps, but probably little studied. People’s movements thrive on slogans, and the thinking ...