Hitler’s Monsters: The Occult Roots of Nazism and the Emergence of the Nazi‘Supernatural Imaginary’*

Eric Kurlander

German History 

Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 528–549, 2012. 

Published by Oxord University Press on behalf of the German History Society.

All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghs073

The success of National Socialism, the unique appearance of the Führer, has no precedent in German History ... The consequence of these historic and unprecedented political occurrences is that many Germans, due to their proclivity for the romantic and the mystical, indeed the occult, came to understand the success of National Socialism in this fashion. 

Alfred Rosenberg, 1941

Near the end of the First World War a twenty-six year old veteran and art student, discharged from the German army due to wounds received on the Western Front, proceeded to Munich to seek his fortune. Neither born nor raised in the Reich proper, the ambitious young artist had developed a passion for Pan-Germanic ideology, spending most of his time consuming any literature he could find on the history of the Teutonic people. Shortly after arriving in Bavaria’s capital city, he joined a working group of like-minded nationalists dedicated to forging a Greater Germany devoid of Jews and Communists. 

Profoundly influenced by the right-wing, occult milieu of prewar Vienna, the working group adopted an elaborate array of folkish (völkisch) ideas, including pseudo-scientific racism and esoteric symbols such as the swastika.

Within two years, the young artist had helped transorm this discussion circle of a few dozen radical racists into the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP).

These biographical details describe almost perfectly the political and ideological trajectory of the future Führer of the Nazi movement, Adolf Hitler. Except that the young artist in question was not Hitler, but Walter Nauhaus, leader of the Germanic Order of the Holy Grail, and co-founder, with Rudolf von Sebottendorf, of the proto-Nazi Thule Society.

Nauhaus was a follower of the Wilhelmine-era esoteric philosophy known as ‘Ariosophy’, developed somewhat independently by two Austrian occultists, Guido von List and Lanz von Liebenfels. Ariosophy prophesied the resurgence of the ancient Indo-European Aryan race, now embodied by the Germanic people, through adherence to a series of arcane pagan religious practices and strict racial purity. 

In Liebenfels case, these ideas were supplemented by his own occult doctrine of theozoology, which suggested the extraterrestrial origins of the original Aryan ‘God Men’ and recommended the forced sterilization of the biologically inferior.

We now knowt hat Hitler himself, like Nauhaus, read Lanz von Liebenfels’ semi-pornographic, occult magazine Ostara 

.https://www.academia.edu/3998398/Hitlers_Monsters_The_Occult_Roots_of_Nazism