2. The National Socialist World-View: Racial Darwinism, Gnosticism, and MysticismThe sheer quantity of scholarly -- and non-scholarly -- literature about Hitler and National Socialism has reached massive proportions. But a quick perusal of the bookstores in New York, West Berlin, or Frankfurt reveals that most of these works have little to do with historical truth.
As both the distance from the Nazi phenomenon and the amount written on the subject have increased, two basic myths about Nazism seem to have established themselves. The first myth is the sharp distinction between Hitler's National Socialism on the one hand and fascism on the other, with the result that fascism appears in an increasingly differentiated and even sympathetic light. The second myth reflects a fundamental consensus that has crystalized about Nazism, resting on the axiomatic equation Nazism = Germany +anti-Semitism +industrial capitalism. Both myths contain partial truths, were not "made up out of the clear blue sky," and hence appear plausible and easy to grasp. Nonetheless, both myths are irreconcilable with historical truth, and miss the essence of fascism and Nazism. More importantly, they obstruct insight into new fascist tendencies, in the present and the future.
In the present, second world crisis of the twentieth century, it is absolutely necessary to grasp the essentials of fascism and Nazism. We must avoid being blinded to the essential by a fixation on the form and predicates. For it may very well happen that a new Nazism and fascism will rear its head under the guise of "anti-fascism." There are already very clear tendencies in this direction in both East and West.
The following presentation is closely related to an essay by Helga Zepp-LaRouche which was published in 1982 under the title, "The Historical Roots of Green Fascism," in which the "ideological roots of Green fascism were presented, primarily as they appear in Armin Mohler's work, The Conservative Revolution. Here, we wish to sketch out, on the one hand how the Nazi elite came into being and what ideological factors determined it; and on the other, how this Nazi elite was able to build a Nazi mass movement.
According to Hitler himself, National Socialism was started as follows: "In July 1919 I joined the German Workers Party· (DAP), which then consisted of seven members, in which I finally found an organization in the political arena which reflected my ideals." This statement fits nicely into the conception that the "Fuhrer" built the Nazi mass movement out of nothing. In reality, the German Workers Party (DAP), which shortly afterwards became the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), was in no way a minuscule political splinter group. Founded by Anton Drexler, a railway worker, and run by Karl Harrer, a sports writer, the DAP set itself the task of spreading anti-Semitic racism throughout the working class. The anti-capitalist rhetoric used for this was carried over into the NSDAP, especially in Gottfried Feder's slogan of "breaking from the servitude of [Jewish] interest rates."
Harrer, Drexler, Feder, and Hitler were not only members of the DAP, they were at the same time members or at least sympathizers of the Thule Society. The German Workers Party was actually founded on orders from the Thule Society and functioned as its front organization. Alongside the DAP, the Thule Society created dozens of splinter groups, parliamentary organizations, and terrorist associations. Of all of these organizations the DAP-NSDAP proved to be the most promising, and the Thule Society decided to focus its energies on this project. This, no doubt, had a lot to do with Hitler's quickly emerging talent as a political organizer and demagogic orator:
The Thule SocietY and Haushofer
The Thule Society functioned as a secret mystic-political organization modeled on Freemasonry. The existence of this organization first became known , when members of the Thule Society were "taken hostage and murdered during the final stage of the so-called Munich Soviet Republic. On April 29, 1919, ten Thule members were killed, among them Prince Maria von Thurn und Taxis, Countess Westarp, Baron Teikert, and Baron Seydlitz. About two months earlier, another member of the Thule organization, Count Arco-Valley, had' shot the "revolutionary" Bavarian Prime Minister Kurt Eisner. The Thule organization later continued to exert substantial control over political terrorism, especially through the so-called Consul Organization. In connection with these terrorist activities, it became evident that the Thule Society, unlike the DAP-NSDAP, was no band Of muddleheaded mystics who happened to get together; to a significant extent, its members were recruited from ruling oligarchical families. The Thurn und Taxis were, after all, one of the richest and most influential noble houses in Germany, and remain so to this day.
The official head of the Thule Society was one Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorf, a.k.a. Glauer. Born in 1875 in Thuringia, he had lived in the Middle East at the beginning of the century, where he was adopted by a von Sebottendorf. He became an expert in Islamic Sufism and maintained very close ties to Sufi networks in the Ottoman Empire. Through these ties he was soon able to get his hands on political influence and substantial financial means. Already in the Balkan War of 1912-1913 he served as a leader of the "Turkish Crescent."
His career in Turkey has certain parallels with Alexander Helphand-Parvus, who also, "from nothing," rose from being a revolutionary in 1905 to enormous wealth and influence in Turkey, and worked in the First World War for the German imperial secret police (and probably others as well).
Sebottendorf, a wealthy man by 1917, returned to Germany and settled down in Munich. There he worked on reorganizing the populist-mystic groupings, especially the "Vril Society."
As has already been indicated, Sebottendorf's organizing abilities enabled him to turn the Thule Society into an organization which recruited from noble families, academics, literati, and officialdom. Major-General and Professor Karl Haushofer was a particularly important member of the Society. Along with Halford Mackinder of the London School of Economics, Haushofer is known as the founder of "geopolitics," the theory that the fate of a people and nation depends on their racial characteristics of "blood and soil." The very life and survival of nations, so the theory goes, rests on securing and expanding its Lebensraum (living space). Since the population increases, whereas the size of the earth's surface remains unchanged, a dynamic, ambitious people must continually conquer new areas at the expense of weaker peoples. Not industry, but agriculture must form the primary base of subsistence. Haushofer proclaimed that Germany's Lebensraum lay in continental expansion into the Eurasian land mass. The Anglo-Saxons had taken the sea route and conducted their colonial and imperialist expansion overseas. Since the British Empire and the United States had developed unchallengable naval power, Germany must therefore concentrate on expansion into southern Europe, Russia, the northern Orient and central Asia. As we shall see, these ideas were directly taken over by Hitler. Indeed, it has been established that the key geopolitical section of Hitler's Mein Kampf was dictated by Haushofer through Rudolf Hess during Hitler's imprisonment at the Landsberg fortress, when Mein Kampf was written. Hitler, Hess, and Hermann Goering had all attended Army indoctrination sessions just after World War I at the University of Munich; where Haushofer taught.
But geopolitics was only one side of Haushofer's activities. Haushofer was one of the most important mystic ideologues of the Thule Society. Members of this society bore little resemblance to the typical image of the xenophobic, beer-guzzling, narrow German chauvinist. Many members of the inner circle of the Thule Society lived abroad for many years or had been born there, such as Sebottendorf, Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, and Erwin Scheubner- Richter.
Haushofer spent many years as a military attache in Japan and traveled extensively in Asia; his trips to India and Tibet are important in connection with the origins of his ideology and Nazism. Haushofer made two acquaintances there which were to have important future consequences: the British Viceroy Lord Kitchener and the Russian expert on Tibetan mysticism Georg Ivanovich Gurdjieff, who lived in Tibet. Through Kitchener and Gurdjieff, Haushofer was introduced into the inner circle of racist-gnostic mysticism. This circle also included the Swedish-born Asian scholar Sven Hedin.
Through the beginning of World War II, Haushofer continued to cultivate contacts with his Anglo-Saxon mystic friends, such as the "Order of the Golden Dawn." Houston Stewart Chamberlain, nephew of the British Colonial Minister Joseph Chamberlain and Richard Wagner's son-in-law, was another of the Thule Society's important ties with Anglo-Saxon mystic ideology. Chamberlain's book, "The Foundations of the 19th Century," became one of the most important source documents for National Socialist ideology.
The Thule Myth and TibetThe special significance of India and Tibet for the ideology of the Thule Society and the Nazis centers around the term Thule. In northern European mythology, Thule signifies a prehistoric "golden age" which ended in a sudden catastrophe. With the mysticism of the Thule Society and the Nazis, but also in circles in Russia, England, Scandinavia, and in other European locations, the Thule mythos became the alpha and omega of all human history. But only in Tibet had this secret knowledge of this ancient Thule been preserved along with the way to a "new Thule," a "thousand-year Reich" of the Aryans.
Without resorting to primary sources, the Thule myth can be approximately reconstructed as follows: In prehistoric times there existed a flourishing culture in the North Sea region. This empire of blond, blue-eyed, racially pure Aryans was led by an aristocracy with "superhuman," cosmic powers and abilities. Without relying on technology, they could exert these "cosmic" powers to determine and change the course of Nature.
But then there came a natural catastrophe of cosmic proportions. The planets' orbits were altered. Continents and oceans shifted, and the flora and fauna in the North Sea region were destroyed. The Aryan Thule empire sank into the sea. Only a few of the Aryans and their supermen managed to escape, finally finding refuge in the Tibetan Himalayas. There the supermen preserved the secrets and powers of the collapsed Thule empire. Still during the prehistoric period, a few supermen wandered back northward. Scandinavia and the area around the Baltic as far as Germany became the new Aryan settlement. In the course of their wanderings they also settled in India and Persia, the Caucasus, and parts of Russia. Along the way, however, the Aryans relinquished some of their racial purity and so lost access to the higher knowledge and supernatural capacities of the old Aryan superman aristocracy. Only a very few, selected Aryans remained capable of gaining access to the inner secrets of the Aryan supermen, and these supreme secrets survived only in the secret cult centers of Tibet.
The Thule Society, and later the leading Nazi circles, thought of themselves as an exclusive secret cult which had re-established its connection to the Aryan supermen's knowledge. This knowledge and concomitant power, however, was reserved for only the select few who submitted to racist-gnostic rituals and cult practices. The mission of these chosen few of the Thule Society and the Nazi leadership, was to lead the Aryan people into a new Thule empire, with themselves as a new superman aristocracy.
This Thule-Nazi mysticism was, of course, not espoused publicly; it remained the knowledge of a select few. The writings of Haushofer, Rosenberg, and Hitler contain only vague hints. But a monologue given by Hitler in 1942 to his closest associates, and later written down by Martin Bormann's assistant Heinrich Heim (in Hitler's Table Talk), contains explicit discussions of the Thule myth. Hitler said that
It is amazing how small a period of time man is capable of grasping .... Where do we get the right to believe that man was not originally what he is today? .. We would do well to assume that what is reported by the mythology of the deities is in fact a memory of a previous reality. At the same time, within every body of legends we always find the story of the collapse of the heavens .... My only explanation for this is that: an immense natural catastrophe destroyed a race of human beings who possessed the highest level of culture. What we find on earth today must be a small remainder which, living for that memory, will gradually find its way back to culture [emphasis added].
Hitler felt that his mission was to resurrect the Thule empire of the Aryans along with its superman aristocracy and their superhuman faculties, and so to create an Aryan "thousand-year Reich." But despite his repeated attempts to portray himself as such, Hitler was not the originator of these ideas. Hitler was initiated into this mystical ideology by the Thule Society.
Haushofer played a crucial role in the Thule Society's inner circles because he was the only member to have been personally initiated into the Tibetan secret cult. A similar role was played by the poet and minor nobleman Dietrich Eckart, who served as the Thule Society's chief ideologue and who was also Hitler's own mentor.
Dietrich EckartEckart was a prominent figure in the "Schwabing Bohemians" circle before World War I. He wrote several dramas, including "Henry IV" and "Lorenzaccio," which were frequently performed at the time. His best-known work is his German version of Ibsen's Peer Gynt. Eckart loved to drink, consumed narcotics, and was a proponent of "racial mysticism." He personified the culture of Nietzsche and Wagner, which was becoming increasingly radicalized into an activist, racist-gnostic mysticism. It is not surprising that Eckart was on the best of terms with influential oligarchical families. Eckart was one of the founders of the Thule Society, and edited its literary-political journal Auf gut Deutsch (In Proper German).
Eckart was probably the first member of the Thule Society to recognize Hitler's talent as a demagogue and an organizer. He saw in Hitler someone who could translate racist-gnostic mysticism into action. It was under Eckart's guidance that Hitler was first made into a political Fuhrer, and Eckart's August, 1921 article was the first to describe Hitler as the Fuhrer of the German People. He put his library at Hitler's disposal, educated him in mysticism, and taught him to express himself more articulately. At the same time, he introduced Hitler to influential families and businessmen. On his deathbed in 1923, Eckart left the following political testament:
Follow Hitler. He will dance, but I am the one who composed the music. Do not regret my death .... My idea will not die with me. The Germans, once they have become a nation of biologically perfected human beings, will lead their people toward those great goals already known by the initiates of Aryan antiquity living in Tibet. Follow Hitler, for through him I will speak to you.
As we have already seen, in his public statements Hitler deliberately attempted to conceal his political origins in the Thule Society. After Eckart's death, Hitler made himself "independent." After years of inculcation by the Thule Society and apprenticeship under Haushofer and Eckart, the "Fuhrer" could now rely on his own dynamism. From the mid-1920s onward, Hitler began to outgrow his fellow conspirators in the Thule circle. Hitler's mystic-ideological sources of inspiration had developed to such an extent that he could henceforth publicly call upon "Providence" to guide his actions. For Hitler, rationality and logical calculation were nothing compared to the mystical "intuition" which determined his thought and actions through "Providence."
It is therefore all the more noteworthy that Dietrich Eckart was the only member of the Thule elite for whom Hitler felt respect and gratitude up to his death in 1945. Hitler not only dedicated the second volume of Mein Kampf to the deceased Eckart; in Heinrich Heim's above-cited transcript of Hitler's monologues, there is no name mentioned more frequently than his. In the warmest tones, Hitler was always ready with new stories and anecdotes about his old mentor.
In addition to promoting Hitler, Eckart was also the mentor of the future official ideologue of National Socialism, Alfred Rosenberg. Rosenberg's career likewise highlights the international connections of the Thule Society and the Nazi inner core. We have already mentioned Haushofer's close relations with the Russian mystic and Tibet expert G. I. Gurdjieff; Rosenberg's connections were even more explicit. He grew up as a "Balkan German" in Reval (Tallinn) and spoke perfect German and Russian. He studied architecture at Moscow University and graduated there in 1917. After the Bolshevik Revolution he left Russia for Germany.
Perhaps one of the least-acknowledged facts is the influence exerted by Russian racist mysticism on the formation of corresponding ideologies in Germany. The political writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky, along with the ideological content of his fictional works, played the crucial role. With the exception of a few British imperalists, before Hitler only Dostoevsky advocated world racial hegemony so radically, so brutally and with such frankness. Dostoevsky proclaims, without restraint, Russia's mission was to become the third and final Rome. In order to free the world from the yoke of Western rationalism, Russia must, in the spirit of gnostic Christianity, achieve world hegemony. Russia was the only nation with an instinctive national "divine" soul.
Dostoevsky vehemently advocated a war of conquest against decadent, rationalist Western Europe. "War refreshes people," he exclaimed. "War is indispensable in our time; without war the world could collapse, or at the very least would change into filthy slime." Dostoevsky took it for granted that this war of conquest would put all of Western Europe under Russian domination, "and perhaps not we, but our children will witness England's demise."
lt is wrong to assume that this is merely an extreme form of Russian chauvinism, having nothing to do with the Nazis. Dostoevsky envisioned Russia as the leader of the entire Aryan race, declaring that Russia "is just as concerned about the fate of the great Aryan race as it is about Russia itself." Dostoevsky was also, of course, a raving anti-Semite: "The Jews and the banks control everything: Europe and the Enlightenment, all civilization and Socialism.... And when nothing remains but anarchy, then the Jew will be sitting on top of it all."
Dostoevsky's political ideology exerted an enormous influence on German intellectual currents. Dostoevsky inspired the ideologue of the "Conservative Revolution," Moeller van den Bruck, to write his book Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich). His influence is also evident in Alfred Rosenberg's book, The Mythos of the Twentieth Century. By the time Rosenberg had joined up with Dietrich Eckart and the Thule Society, his experience in Russia had already predisposed him to adopting this racist-gnostic mysticism in Germany.
Rosenberg was not transformed into a racist and an anti-Semite by the Thule Society; he brought it with him from Russia. Moreover, in contrast with the German anti-Semites, Rosenberg had already become familiar with the so-called Protocols of Zion during his Moscow days. This forgery, concocted by the czarist secret police, the Okhrana, was first published outside Russia by Eckart and Rosenberg as part of a campaign launched by the Thule Society in 1918.
Hatred of ChristianityIn 1930, Alfred Rosenberg proceeded to make a grand attempt at an ideological synthesis of the Thule Society's mysticism, racism, and gnosticism: his book The Mythos of the Twentieth Century. The enemy of Rosenberg (and of the Nazis in general) was the Judeo-Christian tradition. By Judeo-Christian tradition, we do not primarily mean theological- dogmatic statements of belief, but rather the essence of Western European culture and its constantly self-renewing force of progress. Hatred of this conception continues to be a distinguishing characteristic of all neo-fascist tendencies.
Rosenberg and the Nazis dealt with the Jewish intellectual and spiritual tradition, which of course had strongly influenced Christianity, by simply turning it into the expression of an inferior race. The creations of an inferior race must thus axiomatically be inferior and evil, unworthy of serious intellectual discussion.
Their attack on Christianity took a different tack. After all, the overwhelming majority of the" Aryan" populations adhered to the Christian faith or were rooted in Judeo-Christian culture. It was therefore impossible to make an open frontal assault against Christianity. Hence Rosenberg's solution was to promote gnostic distortions of Christianity. Monistic Christian doctrine was transformed into a Manichean ideology of "the blood-soul." Christ became Lucifer, a prophet for the master. race. Christ himself, of course, had to belong to the "Aryan race," and his earthly parents were not Jewish, but rather Roman legionnaires, or else of Persian descent. This northern Christ-hero became the scourge of all racially inferior and rationalist elements. Christ would counter the "poisoning" of the race and "aberrations" in world-outlook-Lucifer-Christ against the Satan of racial inferiority and rationality.
According to Rosenberg, the Nordics must therefore possess a "violent Luciferian power which overcomes space and time," and must produce a harmony of blood and soul. This "blood-soul," manifested through the convergence of the Luciferian and the mystical side of the Aryans, is predetermined among Nordics: "On the level of the unconscious, in cult and in life the individual fulfills the commands of the blood, as in a dream."
Rosenberg's Nazi world-view explicitly draws upon the gnostic tradition. Starting with the Thule mysticism of Tibet, Rosenberg extols the religion and philosophy of Aryan India, which achieved "unparalleled metaphysical depths." He likewise praises the Zarathustra and Mani cults of Aryan Persia -- which are still active today. The allegedly Germanic-influenced religions of Greece and the Roman Empire drew his highest admiration.
Rosenberg, like Hitler, harbored the greatest hatred for the Catholic Church, for quite obvious reasons. According to Rosenberg, the Nordic race never completely and unreservedly embraced the Roman Catholic faith, and indeed engaged in a gigantic struggle with the Church. Rosenberg therefore glorifies all Christian heresies and schisms: Albigensians, Cathars, Waldensians, Calvinists, and Lutherans. Aside from Luther, he has great sympathy for the heroic battle of the Cathars in southwestern France.
The GrailThis attitude toward the gnostic Cathars is related to a further aspect of the Thule Society and the Nazis, namely, the myth of the Holy Grail. The Grail is an ancient heathen-gnostic symbol of wisdom and power. In England, France, and Germany, the poets of the early Middle Ages transformed it into a Christian symbol, principally in the form of a cup holding the blood of Christ. In the nineteenth century, the Grail was de-Christianized and became again a heathen-gnostic myth-object, as expressed most influentially in Richard Wagner's opera Parsifal.
The Thule Society and the Nazis took up this myth of the Grail and interpreted it so that the Grail was understood as an inscribed stone or tablet. This tablet was a crucial document of Aryan gnosticism, preserved and passed on from Aryan prehistory. According to the myth of the Grail, the tablet was finally hidden in a Grail fortress in southern France; according to Nazi lore, it originally came from Aryan Persia, then reached Jerusalem, and was brought to Rome after Jerusalem was destroyed. During the sack of Rome, the tablet fell into the hands of the Goths, and when they were forced out of Spain by the Arabs, it found its way to southern France, where it supposedly constituted the gnostic center for the Cathars. Finally, when the French monarchy bloodily routed the Cathars and ravaged the Aquitaine region, a few surviving Cathars smuggled the Grail from the fortress and hid it somewhere. The Nazis in the inner mystic circle thought they were now able to understand the contents of the tablet, which the Cathars had never deciphered, and to penetrate further secrets of Aryan gnosticism. SS experts in Aryan esoterica actually conducted a search for the Grail, with the support of Heinrich Himmler. And Hitler was not being ironical when he spoke to his intimate friends about his Berchtesgaden Berghof as "my Grail fortress."
Rosenberg's racialist-gnostic distortion of Christianity and the Nazi regime's publicly stated posture vis-a-vis the church in no way coincides with the views of Christianity and the churches actually held by the Nazi elite, let alone that of Hitler personally. Hitler's attitude toward Christianity is characterized by hate-filled, radical rejection.
As previously mentioned, Bormann's assistant Heim had kept notes of the content of Hitler's nocturnal monologues. Between 1941 and 1944, these show an almost daily repetition of tirades of hate against Judaism and Christianity, and there is virtually no difference in the number and frequency of his attacks on Judaism and those on Christianity. Here are some examples:
Christianity is the greatest setback in the history of mankind.
The most severe blow that mankind has ever endured is Christianity; Bolshevism is the bastard son of Christianity.
Christianity was an all-destroying Bolshevism. [Christ was] the son of a whore and a Roman soldier.
Nero didn't set fire to Rome; that was done by the Christian Bolsheviks.
If some little peasant woman or proletarian believes it, fine, then I have nothing to say about it. But for people who are intelligent to embrace such satanic superstition ... !
These priests! Whenever I so much as see such a black-robed inferior being coming my way.... Whoever wants to think, gets burned by one of those black bugs.
The worst cancer is our priests of both confessions. I can't deal with them now, but it's all going into my notebook. The moment will come when I will settle accounts without further ado.
It is interesting to see how, during these tirades, Hitler referred to Dietrich Eckart and to the Thule Society, which had shown him how "priests" and Christianity were to be dealt with. Nietzsche's philosophical slogan "God is dead" was the main trumpet-call of the Thule Society and the inner Nazi circles. They were determined not only to battle Christianity intellectually and spiritually, but to liquidate it physically. They clearly recognized that the destruction of Christianity was the indispensable precondition for the destruction of Western European culture. Hitler deeply regretted that he was still forced for political reasons to compromise with the Christian churches, which contradicted his deepest convictions. He ridiculed the Nazi collaborators in the churches, especially the Protestants, saying that they could not prevent him from settling accounts with Christianity.
Hitler's Gnosticism and RacismHitler's "deepest conviction," his conception of God, was based on a racialist gnosticism. For him and his inner leadership circle, God is a cold, Darwinian "law of Nature," of struggle against and elimination' of all "inferiors." The other side of this God of pitiless destruction is the cold "beauty" beyond all good and evil.
We can do nothing more than take joy in what we find beautiful. I strive for a condition in which each individual knows that he lives and dies for the preservation of his species.
Hitler was sharply critical of the metaphysics of the race theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose gnosticism was too "intellectual," a criticism which implicitly extends to Nietzsche. Hitler's gnosticism is strictly biological and Darwinian; therefore "divine" beauty for Hitler is something physical. Hitler characterized Wagner's music in this way, saying that this music with its "divine beauty" transported him into a state of physical and emotional excitement.
But when I imagine that bland Christian heaven! We have had Richard Wagner here on earth, and all you can do up there is listen to hallelujas and look at palm fronds.
In this connection, investigators usually overlook the influence of French nineteenth-century intellectual life on Hitler's racialist gnosticism. The influence of Gobineau on Hitler's racialism is usually mentioned, but not the strong influence of Joseph Ernest Renan, whom Hitler studied carefully. In Renan's Life of Jesus (1863), Renan wrote:
The broad application of the science of physiology and the principle of selection could make possible the creation of a higher race, which would have the right to rule over others, not because of its knowledge but because of the superiority of its blood, intelligence, and determination. We would then have a species of gods or "divas And we can imagine that we could set up something like a factory for cultivating aces [pure Aryans], an "Aceburg.".. .. I repeat, intellectual superiority means religious superiority. We should think of these future beings as the incarnation of the Good and the True, and all must totally subordinate themselves to them.
Hitler had already adopted this racialist gnosticism in his early Vienna days. It is therefore hardly a world-historical accident that Hitler came into contact with the Thule Society in Munich in 1919. The Thule Society became aware of Hitler because of his talent as a political demagogue and organizer; this is the actual surprise or accident, since up to that time Hitler had been a notorious loner, with no demonstrable talents in that direction, whereas his racialism, gnosticism, and mysticism were fully developed before that time. It would have been extraordinary indeed if, given Hitler's views when he arrived in Munich, he had not bumped into the Thule Society.
This is especially true of Hitler's racialism and anti-Semitism. While still in Vienna, i.e. before 1913, Hitler joined an "Anti-Semitic Union." Hitler's turn toward anti-Semitism goes even further back. There are indications that Hitler's father had anti-Semitic ideas, though this has not been definitively established.
Certain conclusions can be drawn from Hitler's school days. Between 1896 and 1898 Hitler attended the Benedictine cloister school in Lambach, which decades before Hitler's school days had been directed by an abbot named Peter Hagen, an expert in oriental mysticism who spent the years 1856-68 in the Middle East and Persia. Abbot Hagen's personal coat of arms was the swastika, a wooden carving of which stands above the abbey door. Furthermore, Hagen left behind an extensive library of mystical works. This library was intensively used by another Benedictine monk in the 1890s named Peter Adolf Josef Lanz, whom we will meet later under a different name. All this, of course, only had a general influence on Hitler's childhood, but such things must be taken into account.
The influences on Hitler during his high school days in Linz from 1900-1905 were probably more direct. Hitler's history teacher, Dr. Leopold Poetsch, played an important role. Poetsch was an active member of the Austrian All-German Party, and served as the party's town council representative. Hitler himself said in Mein Kampf that his historical and political conceptions had been. strongly influenced by Poetsch. The All-German Party of Austria had been founded by Georg Ritter von Schonerer, who rejected the royal poly-racial state of the Danube monarchy, and demanded the separation of non-German areas from Austria and the annexation of German Austria to the German Reich. Schonerer was also the inventor of the slogan "Away from Rome!" and was an active anti-Semite. His party was represented in the Vienna Reichstag. When Hitler left Linz, he became a follower of Schonerer's party and was already anti-Semitically inclined.
In Vienna, Hitler's political sympathies shifted toward Viennese Mayor Karl Lueger and Lueger's Christian Social Party. Like Schonerer, Lueger was anti-Semitic, perhaps more so. In 1895, he and his party had already won a majority on the Viennese City Council on the basis of an anti-Semitic program: and from that time until his death, the anti-Semite Lueger served as the virtually autocratic mayor of Vienna.
Though Hitler did not become a member of Schonerer's or Lueger's party, they were his political models. His viewpoint as a political anti-Semite was firmly fixed. His criticism of Schonerer and Lueger was simply that he rejected their political compromises and thought that their anti-Semitism and their stance against the Hapsburg regime and the Catholic Church was not sufficiently principled.
Hitler himself repeatedly emphasized that, in addition to general political considerations, his own experiences in the "racial Babylon" of Vienna had crystalized his attitude. He relates how emotional encounters with orthodox Eastern Jews and their hairstyle and clothing, finally fixed his anti-Semitism. We can see that in pre-World War I Vienna, anti-Semitism was by no means a fringe phenomenon, but was a broad current which had not only gripped the petite bourgeoisie but was also "fit for polite society" (salonfahig).
Lanz von LiebenfelsNow we must return to the Benedictine father already mentioned above, Peter Lanz. In 1900 Lanz left the Catholic Church, went to Vienna, and founded the "Order of the New Temple." He called himself Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels and published a journal Ostara. This journal, which appeared irregularly but was always available at the kiosks, was characterized by its publisher as follows:
Ostara is the only journal dedicated to the creation and cultivation of the heroic racialism . .and male justice that actually seeks to apply the results of race science, in order to keep the heroic noble race on its path of organized pure breeding and of male justice, and to protect it from socialistic and feminist revolutionaries.
In 1905, Liebenfels published his "major work": Theozoologie oder die Kunde von den sodoms-Afflingen und dem Gotter-Elektron (Theo-zoology or the Knowledge of Sodom's Monkeys and the Electron of the Gods). In it he relates how the Ario-heroes, or aces, lived like gods in prehistoric times. When their Aryan women fell from grace, they mixed with dark, ape-like beings, which resulted in the inferior "Chandala" race. This race reproduced rapidly, while the Ario-heroes steadily lost their racial purity and, with it, their "electro-magnetic-radiological" powers.
The New Temple Order saw itself as a human breeding society whose aim was to bring produce new Ario-heroes. This may seem incredible, until we recall the racial mysticism of the Thule Society and compare it to the Lebensborn Program of the SS, in which selected women were impregnated by SS members to help engender the "master race." Liebenfels claimed that Lord Kitchener was a member of the New Temple Order, a claim which should be taken seriously. It is also documented that the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg was a member of this organization and stayed for some time in Lower Austria at a castle which served as Liebenfels' "Fortress of the Order."
Liebenfels demanded the most extensive extermination of the darker-skinned races, referring to Thomas Malthus and the British colonial regime as examples to follow. The Jews, he maintained, were the most intelligent of the ape-races, and therefore the most dangerous.
Hitler studied the Ostara newspapers during his years in Vienna, and there is no doubt that he was deeply influenced by them. This same insanity, though in a more moderate form, was advocated by the Vienna-based "Guido von List Society," which published a book-series of "research results" which do not differ in content from Ostara.
As Hitler testified later at his trial in 1924, he "left Vienna an absolute anti-Semite, a deadly enemy of the collective Marxist world-view, and as an pan-German in my orientation." In his Vienna student days he had come to understand that "if the power to struggle ... is no longer there, then our right to life in this world of struggle has ended."
Hitler's Racial GenocideWith his deep-seated ideological fixation on a racist-Darwinist struggle for life and death, Hitler's desire to exterminate the Jews and other inferior races had existed implicitly since his Vienna days. The idea that Hitler escalated his endless, hate-filled tirades against the Jews step by step until they ended with the mass exterminations of the Second World War, is misleading. Hitler had already drawn the consequences of his racialist-ideological postulates during the Vienna and Thule Society days, and the early days of the NSDAP. His convictions only became firmer over time.
Hitler could not immediately carry out his racialist-Darwinist world-view because he lacked power; when he had it, he had to maintain restraint because of political considerations. As in the case of Christianity, mass extermination had long before been written down in the "great notebook" of his Weltanschauung. For the Thule Society, Hitler, and the inner leadership of the Nazis, gnosticism, mysticism, and racial Darwinism were not mere external appendages or crazy eccentricities; they were the ultimate driving force.
In the inner circles of the Nazi and SS leadership, Hitler spoke often and matter-of-factly about the mass extermination of the Jews and other "inferiors": "I say only that [the Jew] must go.... I see only one way: mass extermination .... "
Since the Jews had corrupted the Aryan race, extermination was a completely natural process. Animals could not be blamed if they ate other animals. He, Hitler, saw himself as a Pasteur or a Koch in questions of race. The bacillus of the Jews must simply be killed. In the world-view of the Nazi elite, mass murder of the Jews and other "inferior races" followed with virtual necessity from racial Darwinism.
The Role of the SSHitler was only being consistent when he commissioned Heinrich Himmler as Reichsfuhrer of the SS, with orders to carry out the mass murder of Jews and other "inferior races." Hitler was reluctant to issue this as a signed order; he gave it verbally to Himmler himself. Hitler designated Himmler as an "Ignatius Loyola, in a good sense," and Hitler told one-time Nazi Hermann Rauschning (who later fled Germany) that he would let him in on a big secret: he had founded an order. And indeed, the SS must be seen as the continuation of the Thule Society as a state institution. In the tradition of the gnostic knightly orders, the SS was not merely a military and police organization, but rather the principal carrier of the world-view of Hitler and his closest associates. The SS was created by a strict selection process, and was conceived as a "blood brotherhood" for breeding. Among the highest echelons of the SS hierarchy, racial Darwinism, gnosticism, and mysticism predominated, increasing with each rung. The SS elite around Heinrich Himmler can be seen as the continuation of the inner circle of the Thule Society and their racialist-gnostic mysticism. In the SS, Hitler saw the ideological and racial incarnation of this world-view; the SS was to be the cell formation of the Aryan Greater Reich toward which he was striving; the SS was to produce the racial and philosophical elite of "Ario-heroes" and supermen.
This is why Hitler ordered Himmler and the SS to carry out the mass extermination of the Jews and other inferior races. The SS, as the incarnation of racial Darwinism, was entrusted with conducting the "racial war" in Europe all the way to its "final solution." Himmler explained:
I urgently request that no regulations be made concerning the "Jew." ... The occupied Eastern areas will be Jew-free. The Fuhrer has shouldered me with the execution of this very difficult order .... It is therefore not discussable.
Hitler was completely unrestrained in his endless, raging public tirades against the Jews and other "inferior" races. At the same time, he knew that he could not put his extermination plans before the German public. His most explicit public statement came a speech on Jan. 30, 1942, in which he said that "the the war can only end when either the Aryans are exterminated or Jewry disappears from Europe." Hitler knew that he must keep the mass exterminations secret from the German people, who would find it unthinkable that Jews and other inferior races could be exterminated in "assembly-line" death camps.
Nazi Ideological PropagandaHitler had a finely developed sense of how far he could go, not only on the question of Jewish extermination but generally, with public proclamations of his actual ideas and goals. He knew that it was impossible to confront the population with the full force of his world-view.
Two things played a role here. In accordance with the Nazis' hierarchical mentality, the "need to know" principle was applied. With respect to racial Darwinism, the population was constantly barraged with anti-Semitic propaganda, while they were also subject to the Nuremberg Race Laws, under which marriages were made contingent on certification of Aryan racial purity. The anti-Semitic propaganda was comprehensive and often cleverly done, but it did not have immediate implications for the non-Jewish population. Anti-Semitic activities were carried out by Nazi organizations; the anti-Jewish boycott and the "Kristallnacht" were done by the SA or party members. For the general population, the mysticism of the Nazis was boiled down to symbols such as the swastika, mass marches or "solstice celebrations." Other mystical ceremonies were reserved for the various Nazi organizations. Similarly, the population was only exposed to Nazi anti-religious gnosticism cautiously and in measured doses. This, as we mentioned earlier, was not merely a question of "need to know," but was necessary in order not to shock the population. Even though Germany had been a perfect police state since 1933, the system still depended upon keeping the population calm and passive.
What we have outlined here for the post-1933 period is also true for Hitler in his early period. In 1919 the leaders of the Thule Society had already recognized Hitler's talents as a speaker and political organizer. But Hitler at that point was anything but a lone politician. Hitler utilized the political questions of Germany's chaotic situation immediately after World War I in order to propagandize for racialism and irrationalism. The method he used later remained unchanged.
There exists no speech or written document by Hitler in which he said he acted according to the secret Aryan teachings of Tibet, or that he wanted to destroy Christianity and exterminate the Jews in Europe. Instead he incessantly talked about the "Weimar system," Marxism, the ignominy of Versailles, ending unemployment, the rearmament of Germany, and so forth. But whatever the political theme of his statements was at the time, his racist-mystical world-view would always shine through; this "real" message was always there, sometimes only in vague, dark hints, but other times more explicitly.
Thus, Hitler applied the principle of ideological "need to know" -- the careful dosage and clever packaging of his ideological convictions. His worldview is continually evident in connection with political questions. At the same time, he knew how to give the impression that all his utterances were ultimately and solely based on his world-view, without ever explicitly saying what that world-view was.
Hitler often said that National Socialism was first and foremost a world-view -- and this was not just a passing mood of his. "I have become a politician against my will. For me, politics is merely a means to an end .... If there had been somebody else, I would have never gotten into politics.... "
Economics, technology, natural sciences, or administration did not interest Hitler in the least. His sole interest was his own of racialist mysticism, along with its corresponding "art." In keeping with this, Hitler continued his bohemian style of living and working through the beginning of the war.
Hitler quickly realized that his almost autistic fixation on his own and the Thule Society's worldview could only work to his advantage. His audiences and supporters did not expect well-considered, elaborated ideas from him. As Hitler himself said, the "mass" to which he turned was "inclined to the feminine," and was only capable of "emotional responses." He went so far as to avoid holding rallies in the morning and afternoon, since the "masses" could only be reached while in a certain state of mental exhaustion, at night.
World War I and the Weimar RepublicThis state of mental exhaustion has a more comprehensive significance for the period when Hitler and his leadership group were building the Nazi movement. The German masses whom Hitler and the Nazis were addressing were indeed deeply shaken, uncertain and mentally exhausted.
In spite of a cultural crisis 'and social tensions, the German population, including the labor movement, had experienced the period before World War I as a time when "the world was still in order." Patriotism prevailed at the outset of the war. Germans entered a war which they expected to end in swift victory. But instead the war lasted for years and degenerated into unbelievable butchery. The Allied food blockade drew the German civilian population directly into the events of the war, to an extent unseen since the Thirty Years' War of the seventeenth century.
Then, with unprecedented speed, the military collapse came in 1918, so fast that the ill-prepared population could literally "not comprehend" it. Overnight, the state monarchical institutions disappeared. In their place came political chaos which was to last for a decade. Shortly thereafter came the next blow, the dictate of Versailles with its monstrous conditions. Europe's map was crumpled up; the three empires of Germany, Austria, and Russia no longer existed, and dozens of new states suddenly sprang up. Along with hyperinflation came the economic ruin of large sectors of the population, and after a certain amount of minimal stability had been achieved during the second half of the 1920s, this too collapsed into nothing with the world economic depression.
Within a dozen years the German population had been subjected to an unbroken chain of blows and collective shocks. For the majority of the population this was "incomprehensible," and could no longer be grasped rationally.
The fact is, that under the conditions of constant stress, one can observe in both individuals and groups a reduction in rationality. In the group, a kind of "multiplier effect" also comes into play. There is no doubt that during the Weimar period at least, large numbers of Germans were in danger of losing their trust in rationality.
Now it is hardly the case that this worked quickly and directly to the Nazis' advantage. Only under the traumatic conditions of the 1932 world economic crisis were the Nazis able to gain a mass of followers and voters, and even then, at the last free election in November 1932, the Nazis received no more than 34 percent of the vote.
There was, however, a kind of basic intellectual attitude which the Nazis were able to utilize in Weimar Germany. The population's disposition towards a lowering of consciousness was systematically exploited and strengthened by Hitler and the Nazis. Precisely because it was irrational, the Nazi worldview had a chance of striking a responsive chord under the conditions of Weimar Germany. The tendency to doubt rationality enabled the Nazis to win a following not in spite of, but because of, their views. To be sure, the Nazis knew that there was no chance that the full spectrum of racial Darwinism, gnosticism, and esotericism would be accepted, except by a few fringe groups. But in the appropriate dosages and packaging, this world-view could indeed be "sold."
Ultimately, the Nazi world-view is merely a specific form of a pre-cultural mythos. A "leader" who claims to be guided by "providence" fanatically promulgates a world-view of "blood and soil." The "leader" and his "providence" derive from supernatural sources, inaccessible to reason. From out of this supernatural-supersensuous region now comes the message of "blood and soil."
It should be briefly mentioned that "blood and soil" are the predicates of the "Magna Mater" mythos, which has been around since the prehistory of human culture. More precisely, this myth always emerges when a culture undergoes a fundamental crisis. In periods when intellectual and religious values collapse, accompanied by economic slumps and depressions, the "Magna Mater" emerges with great regularity.
To be sure, the Nazis did not propound an explicit "Magna Mater" cult like the cults of Astarte, Cybele, Isis, Madonna Maria, etc. But the Nazis did have a "Magna Mater" world-view: "blood and soil." "Blood" was symbolically associated with death, birth and feminine sexuality, while "soil" symbolized "Mother Earth," the "earth goddess," and so forth.
These references should make it sufficiently clear that the Nazi world-view, as it is summed up in the slogan "blood and soil," was one causal element in the rise of the Nazi movement. In times of crisis, this ideology enabled the Nazis to exploit latent despair in rationality and to massively strengthen this emotion. The Nazi world-view was therefore no add-on, but was rather the Nazi movement's vital attracting and motivating force.
The cult of irrationality will forever remain the primary distinguishing characteristic of every fascist movement, regardless of which predicates it might otherwise employ.
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