•Oct 31, 2017
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On this All Hallows' Eve, a special Halloween look at last week's program - "Hitler's Monsters". The Nazi fascination with the occult is legendary, and in reality the supernatural was an essential part of the Nazi project. The regime enlisted astrology and the paranormal, paganism, Indo-Aryan mythology, witchcraft, miracle weapons, and the lost kingdom of Atlantis in reimagining German politics and society and recasting German science and religion. Join Eric Kurlander, professor of history at Stetson University and author of Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, for an eye-opening look at the occult ideas, esoteric sciences, and pagan religions touted by Nazi Germany in the service of power.
![Hitler's Monsters by [Eric Kurlander]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51UWZ9rRdoL._SY346_.jpg)
The definitive history of the supernatural in Nazi Germany, exploring the occult ideas, esoteric sciences, and pagan religions touted by the Third Reich in the service of power
The Nazi fascination with the occult is legendary, yet today it is often dismissed as Himmler’s personal obsession or wildly overstated for its novelty. Preposterous though it was, however, supernatural thinking was inextricable from the Nazi project. The regime enlisted astrology and the paranormal, paganism, Indo-Aryan mythology, witchcraft, miracle weapons, and the lost kingdom of Atlantis in reimagining German politics and society and recasting German science and religion. In this eye-opening history, Eric Kurlander reveals how the Third Reich’s relationship to the supernatural was far from straightforward. Even as popular occultism and superstition were intermittently rooted out, suppressed, and outlawed, the Nazis drew upon a wide variety of occult practices and esoteric sciences to gain power, shape propaganda and policy, and pursue their dreams of racial utopia and empire.
Product description
Review
“Deeply researched, convincingly authenticated, this extraordinary study of the magical and supernatural at the highest levels of Nazi Germany will astonish.”—Robert Carver, Spectator
“A trustworthy [book] on an extraordinary subject.”—David Aaronovitch, The Times
“This is a dense and scholarly book about one of the pulpiest subjects of the past 70 years – the relationship between the Nazi party and the occult, which has been much debated across popular culture both in fiction (Captain America, Hellboy, Wolfenstein, the Indiana Jones series, Iron Sky, The Keep and countless others) and in innumerable schlocky works of pseudoscience with runes and swastikas on the covers. As it turns out, though, even this sober, academic treatment of the topic reveals stranger-than-fiction truths on every page.”—Tim Martin, Daily Telegraph
“[Kurlander] shows how swiftly irrational ideas can take hold, even in an age before social media.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
“This original and compellingly argued book shows a significant link between Nazism and the supernatural.”
—Lisa Pine, English Historical Quarterly
—Lisa Pine, English Historical Quarterly
“A fascinating look at a little-understood aspect of fascism.”—Kirkus Reviews
“A frightening glimpse at the pseudo-science national socialists accepted to justify their abominations abroad.”—National Post
“Kurlander provides a careful, clear-headed, and exhaustive examination of a subject so lurid that it has probably scared away some of the serious research it merits.”—National Review
“A deeply researched and lucid study of the role of supernatural beliefs in the rise of the Nazis . . . Indispensable for anyone interested in Nazism and modern pseudoscience and pseudohistory.”—Choice
"Hitler’s Monsters by Eric Kurlander advances an arresting argument. . . . Eric Kurlander deserves considerable credit for taking us along on that pursuit in such entertaining and stimulating fashion."—Derek Hastings, Journal of Modern History
"Hitler’s Monsters is a book I’ve long been wishing to read. Now that it’s been written, I couldn’t be more delighted. Eric Kurlander delivers in just about every way possible. His writing is crisp and compelling; his haunting narrative richly documented, utterly convincing, and certain to change popular understanding of National Socialist history in Germany."—Sidney D. Kirkpatrick, author of Hitler’s Holy Relics
"Eric Kurlander’s provocative new study offers compelling reasons to take a critical look at the neglected history of occultism in Nazi Germany. It should spark renewed attention to the topic and more informed debates about its significance."—Peter Staudenmaier, author of Between Occultism and Nazism
"In this thought-provoking and original book, Kurlander explores the monstrousness of Hitler’s Germany by taking seriously the demons, vampires, witches, and werewolves that populated the Nazi world and made possible the building of a Third Reich right in the middle of the twentieth century."—Peter Fritzsche, author of An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler
"Until now, no one has offered a sustained treatment of the links between Nazism and occultism. Eric Kurlander has unearthed myriad examples of these links, and in fields as diverse as agriculture, archaeology and armaments manufacture. Their cumulative effect in Hitler’s Monsters is positively jaw-dropping."—Monica Black, author of Death in Berlin
"In this stunning new book, historian Eric Kurlander shows how the Third Reich was monstrous in more ways than commonly supposed. The regime's modern planning and methods of conquest and biopolitics were shot through with the search for esoteric pagan, even supernatural knowledge. We cannot think of “racial science” in the same way again."—A. Dirk Moses, author of German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past
About the Author
Eric Kurlander is professor of history at Stetson University. He lives in DeLand, FL.
Hitler's Monsters
A Supernatural History of the Third Reich
Eric Kurlander
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, July 2017. 448 pages.
$35.00. Hardcover. ISBN 9780300189452.
Review
Eric Kurlander’s Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich investigates the role of occultism, supernatural thinking, and “border science”—practices that claimed scientific legitimacy, even while violating standards of empirical verification—in Nazi Germany. From the Nazi Party’s origins in the occultist Thule Society in 1918-19 to the “werewolf” mythologies that drove partisan actions in the waning days of the Second World War, Kurlander integrates the burgeoning literature on Nazi Germany and the occult while incorporating new archival evidence. The result is an exhaustively documented study whose core thesis will prove difficult to refute: Nazi ideology and propaganda, the regime’s genocidal war aims, and the leadership’s insistence on pursuing a bloody Endkampf in the face of inevitable defeat depended on supernatural beliefs shared widely by both the National Socialist leadership and the German population.
Hitler’s Monsters is at its most impressive in demonstrating overarching patterns amidst the seemingly chaotic nature of Nazi ideology and policymaking. Kurlander shows that a fascination with the supernatural was present at the outset of the National Socialist movement, and shaped Nazi beliefs about race, space, and national destiny through the end of the war. The occultist Thule Society that sponsored the early German Workers’ Party, the predecessor to Hitler's National Socialist Party, promoted “rabid anti-Semitism and anti-Communism, fanatical hatred of democracy, and dedication to overthrowing the [Weimar] Republic” (46). The Nazi Party’s early supporters were steeped in mythologies of a proto-Germanic civilization that emerged out of an Indo-Aryan race, and many believed Hitler to be gifted with supernatural capabilities. After coming to power, the Nazis organized an expedition to Tibet in search of Indo-Aryan ruins, invested in “biodynamic” agriculture that claimed to activate mystical forces beneath the soil, sponsored research on the pseudoscientific “World Ice Theory,” and performed deadly experiments on concentration camp inmates seeking to revive the deceased or demonstrate the racial inferiority of Jews. Kurlander convincingly argues that no decisive turn against occultism took place. Instead, the selective persecution of movements perceived as challenges to the regime’s authority, especially after 1937, formed the bases for deepening cooperation with occult practitioners during the war (106-29).
While offering a fresh synthesis, Kurlander’s study also returns to older interpretive models. Whereas recent scholarship has argued that border science enabled Europeans to adapt to a modern, post-Christian society (xiii), Kurlander follows the neo-Marxist theorists Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch, who viewed occultism as “a tool for the fascist manipulation of the population” (6) that subverted critical reflection (see Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott, Verso, 2005, 238-44). Departing from historians who have focused on the European and global contexts of colonialism, racial science, and economic crisis within which Nazi Germany took shape, Kurlander emphasizes a peculiarly Austro-German fascination with the supernatural. Readers schooled in the critique of the Sonderweg (special path) paradigm of German history might take issue with Kurlander’s suggestions that the “liberal and cosmopolitan aspects of theosophic thought” were “stronger” in Britain than in Germany (16), or that Germany’s long period of political fragmentation fueled particular skepticism toward modern science (23-24). Nevertheless, Kurlander presents compelling evidence for the depth of interest in the supernatural within both the Nazi Party and German society more broadly. In the early 20th century, “thousands of spiritualists, mediums, and astrologers” worked in Berlin and Munich (14), while during the Second World War, the Nazi leadership eschewed the “Jewish” science of atomic physics to invest in supernatural “death rays” and anti-gravity machines (270-76).
Scholars of religion will likely be most interested in Kurlander’s contribution to discussions about the relationship between the Nazi regime, neo-pagan movements, and Germany’s Protestant and Catholic churches, the focus of chapter 6. Some of Kurlander’s findings will be familiar. For instance, Nazi leaders could express vitriolic hostility toward the institutional (especially Catholic) churches while offering paeans to the authentic Germanic religion of the “Aryan” Jesus (179-83). By showing how Nazi religious views drew on a mélange of motifs from völkisch thought, border science, and Eastern religions as well as Christianity, Kurlander usefully complicates the debate about whether the Nazis were “Christians” or “pagans.” At times, however, Kurlander juxtaposes his nuanced account of occultism against a rather static portrait of “traditional Christianity” (7). His opening chapter explains the popularity of supernatural practices in late 19th-century Germany partly as a reaction to a decline in Christian belief. Yet Germany’s 19th-century churches were incubators for a range of revivalist movements that gave voice to similar anxieties about the rise of modernity—one thinks of the Protestant Great Awakening (Erweckungsbewegung) or the rise in Marian apparitions among Catholics. Even during the Nazi years, the Catholic mystic and stigmatic Therese Neumann von Konnersreuth, whom Kurlander treats only cursorily (292), attracted a wide following in rural Bavaria (Michael E. O'Sullivan, "Disruptive Potential: Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth, National Socialism, and Democracy," in Monica Black and Eric Kurlander, eds., Revisiting the "Nazi Occult": Histories, Realities, Legacies, Camden House, 2015, 181-201). Greater attention to how Christians (and not only the radically pro-Nazi “German Christians”) partook in occult, supernatural, and racialist thinking might temper the conclusion that Nazi crimes depended on a rejection of “Christian morality” (250).
Hitler’s Monsters leaves open the question of how to integrate the supernatural into the mainstream of scholarship on Nazi Germany, where it continues to play a secondary role. While demonstrating the ubiquity of supernatural thinking at the highest levels of the regime, Kurlander recognizes that occultism constitutes only one of multiple factors necessary to explain Nazi atrocities. “The Third Reich’s crimes took on monumental dimensions because the Nazis drew both on border scientific theories peculiar to the Austro-German supernatural imaginary as well asa broader European mix of eugenics, racism, and colonialism” (232). But how precisely did the “supernatural imaginary” affect the decision process leading to the Final Solution, or the operation of particular killing sites? A task for future scholarship will be to complement Kurlander's focus on the elite stratum of Nazi leaders—Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Rosenberg, and Bormann figure prominently in his narrative—with investigations of the role of the supernatural in particular religious communities, localities, or military and SS divisions. Such scholarship will surely begin from Kurlander's learned and wide-ranging study.
About the Reviewer(s):
Brandon Bloch is College Fellow in Modern European History at Harvard University.
Date of Review:
July 18, 2018
About the Author(s)/Editor(s)/Translator(s):
Eric Kurlander is Professor of History at Stetson University. His previous books include The Price of Exclusion: Ethnicity, National Identity, and the Decline of German Liberalism, 1898–1933 and Living With Hitler: Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich (Yale University Press, 2009).
Categories: politics 20th century mysticism ritual violence Europe
Keywords: occult, Nazi, paganism, witchcraft, astrology, supernatural
The Nazi's Were Obsessed With Magic
What can their fascination with the supernatural teach us about life in our own post-truth times?
By REBECCA ONION
AUG 24, 2017 SALON
https://tinyurl.com/yd2npxlc
A picture dated 1939 shows Adolf Hitler giving a speech during a meeting with high-rank Nazi officials.
FRANCE PRESSE VOIR/AFP/Getty Images
The History Channel and the virtual pages of Amazon are full of the stories of Nazis who claimed to become werewolves, channel pagan gods, or communicate with aliens. As historian Peter Staudenmaier recently wrote in Aeon, titillated conversations about the Nazis as occult masters just make it harder to talk about the realities of fascism. (If supernatural forces made the Holocaust happen, after all, we don’t have to wonder how humans could have done those things.)
But that doesn’t mean the Nazi relationship with this kind of fringey thinking is meaningless. Historian Eric Kurlander has recently written a book that takes Nazi occultism seriously: Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich. Grouping astrology, some practices in archaeology, history, and folklore, and out-there scientific theories together under the heading “the supernatural imaginary,” Kurlander writes about how the popularity of border thinking guided the Nazis in creating their own political reality in Germany.
We spoke recently about World Ice Theory, the anti-Semitism inherent in Nazi critiques of mainstream science, and lessons from Nazi unreality for our own post-truth times. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Who participated in supernatural thinking in Germany in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s? Everyone? And do you think Nazis actually believed this stuff, or did they find it politically convenient?
Educated urban liberal elites and Jewish intellectuals were the least likely to embrace any of this as authentic, or see it as anything other than a pathology of modernity that was particularly strong in Austria and Germany and needed to be dealt with. They could see people they otherwise respected finding some of it interesting, and worried about that response, but they were almost universally opposed to it.
Then you have the German and Austrian middle and lower-middle classes. Traditional religious practice was waning over the course of the 19th century. World War I was really galvanizing in that regard because it called everything into question. Many people who were—well, I don’t want to use the term that some of the intellectuals at the time used, like “half-educated,” “semi-educated”; Theodor Adorno [said] “occultism is the metaphysic of dunces.” Let’s say, clearly these were people who were educated enough to want an alternative to traditional religion, to want to be able to argue scientifically or with authority about religion, science, and politics, and they’re finding these alternative doctrines and institutes and classes on parapsychology and tarot reading as a kind of supplement to the [disenchantment of] the world that occurred through industrialization. And that was true of millions of Germans and Austrians. (It was also true in Britain and France!)
Why did so many Nazis, in particular, believe it or find it interesting or see it as potentially helpful in manipulating the population? Because they grew up during a flowering of supernatural thinking across Germany and Austria. So even the Nazis who were skeptical recognized it as a profound theme. You have both Hitler and Goebbels in the 1920s acknowledging that ‘folkish [völkisch]’ thinkers are the ones most likely to join the Nazi Party. Many of these people want to wander around “clothed in bearskins,” as Hitler put it in Mein Kampf, talking about mystical runes. Now Hitler and Goebbels said, “That’s not what our movement is about.” So some people say, “You see, Hitler wasn’t into that!” But my question is why didn’t Churchill or Roosevelt or France’s Prime Minister Leon Blum have to write things like that to their constituents repeatedly? It’s because [supernatural thinking] wasn’t so intrinsic to [their] movements.
So to come back to France for a minute: In France, you don’t see the equivalent politicization and racialization of it. You have theosophy in Britain and America. But it’s a relatively harmless movement, where people get together in a drawing room and try to connect with spirits and write novels about Atlantis. But the concept of root races, which [H.P.] Blavatsky, the Russian progenitor of theosophy, talked about, never gets brought up as an actual basis for belief in “superior breeding” or race war among the liberal or conservative parties that run the government in Britain and America. It clearly is not influencing Roosevelt or Churchill’s view of social policy or foreign policy.
But in Germany so many of the people who joined the Nazi Party or supported it are using language and ideas directly borrowed from these occult and border scientific doctrines. “Tschandals,” the lesser races, a Thule civilization.
You make a distinction between pseudoscience, which tries (and fails) to operate within mainstream science, and what you call “border science,” which works around the edges, from a faith-based epistemology. What was the relationship between the people who were still trying to work within an international mainstream of scientific activity in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, and the people who were doing these border-scientific experiments that were increasingly supported by the regime? (World Ice Theory, for example—the idea that everything in our universe was created when the collision of two stars flung icy celestial moons and planets everywhere—happened to align with ideas from Nordic mythology, so it got a lot of support from the Nazis despite its origins in a dream.)
[Border science] was easily dismissed as amateurish by mainstream scientists in the 1910s and 1920s. There were no university posts or research institutes officially sponsored by the Imperial German, Austrian, or Weimar government to promote world ice theory. But it was wildly popular among völkisch and esoterically inclined thinkers, like engineers, who didn’t quite understand modern physics but understood enough technical jargon to kind of glom onto the ideas and argue that they were valid as an alternative to “Jewish physics.”
In the 1930s Hitler and [Heinrich] Himmler gave an honorary doctoral title to the living co-progenitor of World Ice Theory, or “Glacial Cosmogony” as they called it, Philip Fauth. They put him and Hans Robert Scultetus, who was trained as a meteorologist, in charge of a World Ice Division in ’35 or ’36 within the Ahnenerbe, Himmler’s giant Institute for Ancestral Research. The sole purpose of the division was to coordinate and propagate World Ice Theory as official Nazi doctrine.
A year or so in they started to get nasty letters from the Prussian Academy of Sciences, or professional physicists and geologists, asking “Hey, what are you doing here? It’s bad enough that kids can’t do math anymore and we’re trying to rebuild our military and improve our technology. Now you’ve got these official publications claiming that World Ice Theory is just as good or better than modern geology and physics. This is really problematic.”
The really mainstream, well-known natural scientists—as far as I can tell, they were just ignored. So Himmler didn’t put them in jail or anything, he just wouldn’t give them the time of day when they wrote the letters. But if you were a person within the SS ambit, like this guy named Georg Hinzpeter, you were in trouble. All Hinzpeter said was, “You know, if we use what we’ve got in the last 30 years in terms of physics and geology, some calculations and claims that [co-progenitor of the theory Hans] Hörbiger made 40 years ago—not his fault, that was the 1890s—don’t quite hold up, and maybe we should rethink these premises.” And that was when Himmler and Scultetus and this other guy, Edmund Kiss, who wrote fantasy novels about Atlantis—not even a scientist!—they all agreed: “You know what? We’ve got a protocol [The Pyrmont Protocol] now. Anyone practicing World Ice Theory now has to subscribe to its basic tenets”—almost like a bible. “And if you don’t, you will not be allowed to publish, at least not with the imprimatur of anything in the government, and you will not get any funding.” In 1939, World Ice Theory became a very rigid kind of orthodoxy.
As in many other areas, the Third Reich was not a totalitarian regime in all ways. They weren’t going to start locking up otherwise brilliant “Aryan” scientists who paid their taxes and joined the military because they found this theory laughable. But they weren’t going to change what they thought or redistribute funding in a more rational way, either.
What other theories, beside World Ice Theory, did the regime adhere to in that way?
Well, the entire apparatus of race theory was founded at least as much on ideas drawn from Indo-Aryan religion, Nordic mythology and occult or border-scientific doctrines as it was on modern biology or eugenics. Eugenics as practiced in most of the West was limited by the fact that those people wanted to be accepted by mainstream biology. So eugenics was a pseudoscience, not a border science. It did come out of mainstream genetics and biology, it just made claims that were out of all proportion with scientific capacity or reality at the time. And when that proved as destructive as it was, both scientifically and ideologically [after World War II], it got reined back in.
In the Nazi case, it’s the opposite. While they make certain nods to the eugenics movement and say “Oh, this brilliant Swedish or British eugenicist was very inspiring,” when you look at how they argue about race, with the Jews being monstrous and the Slavs “sub-human,” while Indian, Japanese, and perhaps even Persian and Arab civilizations are deemed at least partially Indo-Aryan, it’s all this stuff that’s wrapped up with ariosophy, theosophy, anthroposophy—these major occult doctrines that were prominent in Austria and Germany. It had so little to do with actual empirical science, or even pseudoscience practiced elsewhere during the first half of the 20th century, that it opened the way for all these fantastical policies.
To what degree was anti-mainstream-science feeling within the Nazi Party also anti-Semitic?
I wouldn’t say they were “anti-science.” The Nazis simply thought that there are new sciences, new ways of doing things that traditional scientists hadn’t accepted, in part because they’d been corrupted by Jewish leftist materialists who don’t understand the mystical parts of life. Because the Jews, they insist, are these soulless, self-interested, evil people who just can’t get the organicist connection between soul and body—and all these other ideas that völkisch and esoteric thinkers, and many Nazis, embraced.
You make the argument that, near the end of the war, miraculous thinking was a strategic and military detriment to the Nazi war effort. What happened to this kind of thinking through the lead-up to the defeat and after the defeat?
My impression is that the supernatural imaginary, and the Nazi dismissal of mainstream science in favor of border science, impacted their ability, financially and logistically, to maximize military resources. I give examples, like the rocket program and death rays and other things that the SS was trying to develop, and Hitler’s own aversion to nuclear technology. I haven’t quantified it, and the effect may have only been marginal, and there’s a lot of research left to be done here. Maybe [supernatural thinking] only undermined the Nazi ability to maximize whatever it was they needed at any given time—more bombers, more fighters—by 10 or 20 percent, and they would have lost anyway. But clearly there was an impact there.
We happen to have a period in Austria and Germany, where for various reasons, the intrinsic popularity of certain occult ideas and border scientific doctrines, of alternative religions, Nordic mythology, and German folklore, punctuated by crises, like World War I and the Great Depression, made the supernatural imaginary much more widespread, public, political, and dangerous as a reservoir of policy, than it would have been otherwise or was in other countries at that time.
After the war, now that Germany was defeated [these kinds of supernatural thinking] became receded from the realm of policy, becoming a mostly privatized form of entertainment. No longer were there research institutes, supported by Himmler or Hitler, sponsoring parapsychology, dowsing, or World Ice Theory. With the collapse of Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry no major German political leaders were promoting astrology as a means of propaganda or threatening collaborators with retribution from Nazi “werewolves.” And that for me is important.
So people are still interested in the supernatural today! They’re playing video games and reading Harry Potter, but most recognize the difference between supernatural thinking and empirical science; between fantasy and policy. I think Germans since 1945 have become more allergic to these kinds of faith-based, organicist, racist, völkisch ways of thinking, precisely because of that experience from the 1890s and to the 1940s. It doesn’t go away, but it becomes privatized and held at arms’ length.
One of the things that makes liberals, lefties, centrists feel so frustrated in encountering an administration that is anti-reality, is the feeling that nothing you will say can make a difference. Is there anything that opponents of Nazis in Germany did that Americans can take a note or a lesson from, in terms of intervening against the supernatural imaginary taking hold of the national mind?
Let’s say one-quarter or one-third of [people in] all modern industrialized societies are sympathetic to fascism. They may claim they believe in democracy and elections and some kind of individual rights, but when it comes down to it, they’ll sacrifice those to have this kind of national organic folk community that fits their vision of their country. And they’ll give up all sorts of rights and kick out foreigners.
You want to be arguing against people who have that point of view, but you also want to make sure you aren’t alienating the more rational actors, who recognize that this is dangerous and would only side with the fascist group if they’re alienated from whatever the putative left might be.
It means not exaggerating or demonizing certain things that are really legitimate points of view, even if you disagree with them, and then being careful to explain your terms when you want to identify fascist, or racist, or supernaturalist thinking.
It’s not an easy process, because once [supernatural thinking] has been unleashed, and we’ve been resorting to faith-based responses to complex problems it for years, it’s very hard to turn around and suddenly say, “Global warming is happening. It’s just a question of how bad it is, and what we can do about it.” Or “the world is not 5,000 years old, the world is billions of years old. We need to accept science and evolution.” It’s hard for conservatives now to say that, much less liberals, and still get elected.
When it comes to some of these fundamental premises on which we base our political and social reality, all educated people, all citizens, regardless of politics, [should be] agreeing and pushing back. And I don’t think we’re there yet.
The Nazi's Were Obsessed With Magic
What can their fascination with the supernatural teach us about life in our own post-truth times?
By REBECCA ONION
AUG 24, 2017 SALON
https://tinyurl.com/yd2npxlc
A picture dated 1939 shows Adolf Hitler giving a speech during a meeting with high-rank Nazi officials.
FRANCE PRESSE VOIR/AFP/Getty Images
The History Channel and the virtual pages of Amazon are full of the stories of Nazis who claimed to become werewolves, channel pagan gods, or communicate with aliens. As historian Peter Staudenmaier recently wrote in Aeon, titillated conversations about the Nazis as occult masters just make it harder to talk about the realities of fascism. (If supernatural forces made the Holocaust happen, after all, we don’t have to wonder how humans could have done those things.)
But that doesn’t mean the Nazi relationship with this kind of fringey thinking is meaningless. Historian Eric Kurlander has recently written a book that takes Nazi occultism seriously: Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich. Grouping astrology, some practices in archaeology, history, and folklore, and out-there scientific theories together under the heading “the supernatural imaginary,” Kurlander writes about how the popularity of border thinking guided the Nazis in creating their own political reality in Germany.
We spoke recently about World Ice Theory, the anti-Semitism inherent in Nazi critiques of mainstream science, and lessons from Nazi unreality for our own post-truth times. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Who participated in supernatural thinking in Germany in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s? Everyone? And do you think Nazis actually believed this stuff, or did they find it politically convenient?
Educated urban liberal elites and Jewish intellectuals were the least likely to embrace any of this as authentic, or see it as anything other than a pathology of modernity that was particularly strong in Austria and Germany and needed to be dealt with. They could see people they otherwise respected finding some of it interesting, and worried about that response, but they were almost universally opposed to it.
Then you have the German and Austrian middle and lower-middle classes. Traditional religious practice was waning over the course of the 19th century. World War I was really galvanizing in that regard because it called everything into question. Many people who were—well, I don’t want to use the term that some of the intellectuals at the time used, like “half-educated,” “semi-educated”; Theodor Adorno [said] “occultism is the metaphysic of dunces.” Let’s say, clearly these were people who were educated enough to want an alternative to traditional religion, to want to be able to argue scientifically or with authority about religion, science, and politics, and they’re finding these alternative doctrines and institutes and classes on parapsychology and tarot reading as a kind of supplement to the [disenchantment of] the world that occurred through industrialization. And that was true of millions of Germans and Austrians. (It was also true in Britain and France!)
Why did so many Nazis, in particular, believe it or find it interesting or see it as potentially helpful in manipulating the population? Because they grew up during a flowering of supernatural thinking across Germany and Austria. So even the Nazis who were skeptical recognized it as a profound theme. You have both Hitler and Goebbels in the 1920s acknowledging that ‘folkish [völkisch]’ thinkers are the ones most likely to join the Nazi Party. Many of these people want to wander around “clothed in bearskins,” as Hitler put it in Mein Kampf, talking about mystical runes. Now Hitler and Goebbels said, “That’s not what our movement is about.” So some people say, “You see, Hitler wasn’t into that!” But my question is why didn’t Churchill or Roosevelt or France’s Prime Minister Leon Blum have to write things like that to their constituents repeatedly? It’s because [supernatural thinking] wasn’t so intrinsic to [their] movements.
So to come back to France for a minute: In France, you don’t see the equivalent politicization and racialization of it. You have theosophy in Britain and America. But it’s a relatively harmless movement, where people get together in a drawing room and try to connect with spirits and write novels about Atlantis. But the concept of root races, which [H.P.] Blavatsky, the Russian progenitor of theosophy, talked about, never gets brought up as an actual basis for belief in “superior breeding” or race war among the liberal or conservative parties that run the government in Britain and America. It clearly is not influencing Roosevelt or Churchill’s view of social policy or foreign policy.
But in Germany so many of the people who joined the Nazi Party or supported it are using language and ideas directly borrowed from these occult and border scientific doctrines. “Tschandals,” the lesser races, a Thule civilization.
You make a distinction between pseudoscience, which tries (and fails) to operate within mainstream science, and what you call “border science,” which works around the edges, from a faith-based epistemology. What was the relationship between the people who were still trying to work within an international mainstream of scientific activity in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, and the people who were doing these border-scientific experiments that were increasingly supported by the regime? (World Ice Theory, for example—the idea that everything in our universe was created when the collision of two stars flung icy celestial moons and planets everywhere—happened to align with ideas from Nordic mythology, so it got a lot of support from the Nazis despite its origins in a dream.)
[Border science] was easily dismissed as amateurish by mainstream scientists in the 1910s and 1920s. There were no university posts or research institutes officially sponsored by the Imperial German, Austrian, or Weimar government to promote world ice theory. But it was wildly popular among völkisch and esoterically inclined thinkers, like engineers, who didn’t quite understand modern physics but understood enough technical jargon to kind of glom onto the ideas and argue that they were valid as an alternative to “Jewish physics.”
In the 1930s Hitler and [Heinrich] Himmler gave an honorary doctoral title to the living co-progenitor of World Ice Theory, or “Glacial Cosmogony” as they called it, Philip Fauth. They put him and Hans Robert Scultetus, who was trained as a meteorologist, in charge of a World Ice Division in ’35 or ’36 within the Ahnenerbe, Himmler’s giant Institute for Ancestral Research. The sole purpose of the division was to coordinate and propagate World Ice Theory as official Nazi doctrine.
A year or so in they started to get nasty letters from the Prussian Academy of Sciences, or professional physicists and geologists, asking “Hey, what are you doing here? It’s bad enough that kids can’t do math anymore and we’re trying to rebuild our military and improve our technology. Now you’ve got these official publications claiming that World Ice Theory is just as good or better than modern geology and physics. This is really problematic.”
The really mainstream, well-known natural scientists—as far as I can tell, they were just ignored. So Himmler didn’t put them in jail or anything, he just wouldn’t give them the time of day when they wrote the letters. But if you were a person within the SS ambit, like this guy named Georg Hinzpeter, you were in trouble. All Hinzpeter said was, “You know, if we use what we’ve got in the last 30 years in terms of physics and geology, some calculations and claims that [co-progenitor of the theory Hans] Hörbiger made 40 years ago—not his fault, that was the 1890s—don’t quite hold up, and maybe we should rethink these premises.” And that was when Himmler and Scultetus and this other guy, Edmund Kiss, who wrote fantasy novels about Atlantis—not even a scientist!—they all agreed: “You know what? We’ve got a protocol [The Pyrmont Protocol] now. Anyone practicing World Ice Theory now has to subscribe to its basic tenets”—almost like a bible. “And if you don’t, you will not be allowed to publish, at least not with the imprimatur of anything in the government, and you will not get any funding.” In 1939, World Ice Theory became a very rigid kind of orthodoxy.
As in many other areas, the Third Reich was not a totalitarian regime in all ways. They weren’t going to start locking up otherwise brilliant “Aryan” scientists who paid their taxes and joined the military because they found this theory laughable. But they weren’t going to change what they thought or redistribute funding in a more rational way, either.
What other theories, beside World Ice Theory, did the regime adhere to in that way?
Well, the entire apparatus of race theory was founded at least as much on ideas drawn from Indo-Aryan religion, Nordic mythology and occult or border-scientific doctrines as it was on modern biology or eugenics. Eugenics as practiced in most of the West was limited by the fact that those people wanted to be accepted by mainstream biology. So eugenics was a pseudoscience, not a border science. It did come out of mainstream genetics and biology, it just made claims that were out of all proportion with scientific capacity or reality at the time. And when that proved as destructive as it was, both scientifically and ideologically [after World War II], it got reined back in.
In the Nazi case, it’s the opposite. While they make certain nods to the eugenics movement and say “Oh, this brilliant Swedish or British eugenicist was very inspiring,” when you look at how they argue about race, with the Jews being monstrous and the Slavs “sub-human,” while Indian, Japanese, and perhaps even Persian and Arab civilizations are deemed at least partially Indo-Aryan, it’s all this stuff that’s wrapped up with ariosophy, theosophy, anthroposophy—these major occult doctrines that were prominent in Austria and Germany. It had so little to do with actual empirical science, or even pseudoscience practiced elsewhere during the first half of the 20th century, that it opened the way for all these fantastical policies.
To what degree was anti-mainstream-science feeling within the Nazi Party also anti-Semitic?
I wouldn’t say they were “anti-science.” The Nazis simply thought that there are new sciences, new ways of doing things that traditional scientists hadn’t accepted, in part because they’d been corrupted by Jewish leftist materialists who don’t understand the mystical parts of life. Because the Jews, they insist, are these soulless, self-interested, evil people who just can’t get the organicist connection between soul and body—and all these other ideas that völkisch and esoteric thinkers, and many Nazis, embraced.
You make the argument that, near the end of the war, miraculous thinking was a strategic and military detriment to the Nazi war effort. What happened to this kind of thinking through the lead-up to the defeat and after the defeat?
My impression is that the supernatural imaginary, and the Nazi dismissal of mainstream science in favor of border science, impacted their ability, financially and logistically, to maximize military resources. I give examples, like the rocket program and death rays and other things that the SS was trying to develop, and Hitler’s own aversion to nuclear technology. I haven’t quantified it, and the effect may have only been marginal, and there’s a lot of research left to be done here. Maybe [supernatural thinking] only undermined the Nazi ability to maximize whatever it was they needed at any given time—more bombers, more fighters—by 10 or 20 percent, and they would have lost anyway. But clearly there was an impact there.
We happen to have a period in Austria and Germany, where for various reasons, the intrinsic popularity of certain occult ideas and border scientific doctrines, of alternative religions, Nordic mythology, and German folklore, punctuated by crises, like World War I and the Great Depression, made the supernatural imaginary much more widespread, public, political, and dangerous as a reservoir of policy, than it would have been otherwise or was in other countries at that time.
After the war, now that Germany was defeated [these kinds of supernatural thinking] became receded from the realm of policy, becoming a mostly privatized form of entertainment. No longer were there research institutes, supported by Himmler or Hitler, sponsoring parapsychology, dowsing, or World Ice Theory. With the collapse of Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry no major German political leaders were promoting astrology as a means of propaganda or threatening collaborators with retribution from Nazi “werewolves.” And that for me is important.
So people are still interested in the supernatural today! They’re playing video games and reading Harry Potter, but most recognize the difference between supernatural thinking and empirical science; between fantasy and policy. I think Germans since 1945 have become more allergic to these kinds of faith-based, organicist, racist, völkisch ways of thinking, precisely because of that experience from the 1890s and to the 1940s. It doesn’t go away, but it becomes privatized and held at arms’ length.
One of the things that makes liberals, lefties, centrists feel so frustrated in encountering an administration that is anti-reality, is the feeling that nothing you will say can make a difference. Is there anything that opponents of Nazis in Germany did that Americans can take a note or a lesson from, in terms of intervening against the supernatural imaginary taking hold of the national mind?
Let’s say one-quarter or one-third of [people in] all modern industrialized societies are sympathetic to fascism. They may claim they believe in democracy and elections and some kind of individual rights, but when it comes down to it, they’ll sacrifice those to have this kind of national organic folk community that fits their vision of their country. And they’ll give up all sorts of rights and kick out foreigners.
You want to be arguing against people who have that point of view, but you also want to make sure you aren’t alienating the more rational actors, who recognize that this is dangerous and would only side with the fascist group if they’re alienated from whatever the putative left might be.
It means not exaggerating or demonizing certain things that are really legitimate points of view, even if you disagree with them, and then being careful to explain your terms when you want to identify fascist, or racist, or supernaturalist thinking.
It’s not an easy process, because once [supernatural thinking] has been unleashed, and we’ve been resorting to faith-based responses to complex problems it for years, it’s very hard to turn around and suddenly say, “Global warming is happening. It’s just a question of how bad it is, and what we can do about it.” Or “the world is not 5,000 years old, the world is billions of years old. We need to accept science and evolution.” It’s hard for conservatives now to say that, much less liberals, and still get elected.
When it comes to some of these fundamental premises on which we base our political and social reality, all educated people, all citizens, regardless of politics, [should be] agreeing and pushing back. And I don’t think we’re there yet.
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