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History This Week, June 4, 1941.
I'm Sally Helm. One of Adolf Hitler's top officials sends out a message today—a call to action to all the regional governors of the Third Reich. They should prepare for action against occult teachings.
Soon enough, that action begins.
Occultists, magicians, spiritualists, faith healers — all over Germany, they're arrested.
One astrologer is lying awake at three or four in the morning when his doorbell rings.
It's the police. They ransack his drawers, tear his books from the shelves.
He's ordered to dress and marched out the door, taken to prison.
This becomes known as the HESS action, because it all goes back to an ill -fated diplomatic mission a month earlier, by Hitler's deputy fuhrer, Rudolf HESS.
The Nazis are planning to invade the Soviet Union, and Hess is panicking.
He's supposed to be Hitler's right -hand man, though he's actually seen his influence dwindle in recent years.
And he thinks that this Soviet invasion is a terrible idea.
So he comes up with a wild scheme.
He'll fly to Great Britain on a secret mission and try to convince the British nobles to make peace with the Nazis.
That way, when the Germans invade Russia, Hitler won't be fighting a two -front war.
And Hess will regain his boss' favor.
Hess is known to dabble in the occult, and in choosing the date for this mission, he does consult an astrologer who helps him pick an auspicious moment May 10.
There are 6 planets in the peaceful Earth sign Taurus, and it's also a full moon.
So Hess, who is a skilled pilot, gets into a plane and takes off.
It's foggy. Dark. The full moon isn't helping much. And a little more than four hours into his flight, Hess runs out of fuel.
The plane is gonna crash.
He bails out and parachutes onto a field in Scotland.
The Scottish farmer who owns that field invites him into his cottage for a cup of tea.
Hess does meet the next day with a British noble, but his peace plan goes nowhere.
Instead, he's taken prisoner.
He'll be locked up for the next 46 years.
Meanwhile, one of Hess's associates delivers a letter to Hitler explaining this whole plan.
Hitler is holed up in the Bavarian Alps planning his Soviet invasion.
He rips open the envelope, reads the letter, and lets out what's later described as an almost animal -like scream.
Hitler seeks out his top lieutenants and asks, What was Hess thinking?
Has he lost his mind?
They answer, basically, he's nuts.
He's obsessed with this occult stuff.
Only a lunatic would do something like this.
So, that is the immediate impetus for the crackdown on astrologers.
But, the situation is much more complicated than it looks.
That astrologer who was ripped from his bed at four in the morning, he says that, when he's later imprisoned, the SS Guards will pull him aside sometimes and ask him to give them readings on their futures.
In fact, he's later released and becomes the personal astrologer of Heinrich Himmler, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust. Erik Kerlander has written a book about how Nazis related to the occult.
And he says they weren't actually against it.
In fact, it fascinated them.
When they arrest all of these astrologers and telepaths, they end up confiscating their books to learn their secrets and use them for themselves.
And the crackdown is short -lived, just a couple of weeks.
You see their ambivalence.
They don't want people resorting to astrology as an alternative to being loyal to Hitler.
But they're so obsessed with it both ideologically, a lot of them believe in it, and as a way to manipulate their voters and German people.
They can't really go fully against it either.
Today, a conversation with Eric Kerlander, author of Hitler's Monsters, a supernatural history of the Third Reich. How does Nazi Germany embrace the metaphysical, mysticism, and mythology?
And how do they use these ideas to strengthen their fascist regime?
Eric Kerlander, welcome to the show!
Thank you Sally, it's a pleasure to be here.
So Eric, your book is called Hitler's Monsters and it is this really fascinating history of how Hitler and the Nazis basically embraced the supernatural in all these various forms as they were consolidating their power, even at some points using divination to help direct the course of World War Two.
So we're going to get into some of the details, but I'm really curious.
How did you get interested in this topic?
So I got interested in the topic for Hitler's monsters, because of a combination of two which I think most historians rely on in picking their research questions.
One was intrinsic interest. In the supernatural, in the Nazi party?
Well as a scholar of the Third Reich, I'd come across many of these books, many of which were not scholarly.
And certainly the kind of popular zeitgeists suggesting this connection between the occult, folklore, mythology and the Third Reich. and when our culture is suffused with that.
And then in the mid -2000s, when I saw the resurgence of alt -right thinking in Europe and in the United States, I thought, you know, this might be an interesting time to go back and look at the Third Reich's exploitation, invocation of romantic, supernatural, irrational thinking in both achieving power and pursuing policy.
So it was it's a combination of this intrinsic interest, curiosity, and the timing of what was going on all around us that caused me to kind of start researching this.
You've mentioned the kind of pop -culture elements of this.
Why have people been so interested in that connection over time?
Why do you think it shows up in pop culture?
I think people are generally fascinated in what I call the supernatural imaginary, kind of a romantic view of the world, and evil, heroes, villains, secret forces, conspiracies, aliens, mythology, what have you, right?
With science and industrialization and the decline of traditional religion, human beings need something to fill that vacuum.
And so, I would argue, one way to deploy those yearnings, that search for re -enchantment of the world is to read Harry Potter books or Tolkien or go to Marvel movies or get very invested in the Star Wars kind of cosmology and that kind of fills that gap.
But then you have people who don't know how to draw that line between the material, the liberal institutional, the real, and the maybe more faith -based or romantic cognitive approach to the world.
And for them a lot of this mythology, these border scientific ideas, the science fiction become part of their cosmology.
And so since the world became highly modern and scientific and industrialized, you've had this emergence in popular culture of an interest in the occult, superheroes, fantasy, a re -enchantment in terms of our belief in, or experimentation with, esotericism, parapsychology, spiritualism.
So you're saying that there's kind of this impulse that we have inside us where we yearn for some kind of enchantment in the world.
We're drawn to myth.
We're just drawn to these things as people.
And that modernity creates this sort of difficult situation for us because the world becomes increasingly materialistic, full of machines.
It's like where do we put those impulses right and then we all find places to put them.
Let's talk about Germany specifically.
history. In the sort of lead up to Hitler's rise, what's going on in Germany with that very human impulse?
What sort of context do we need to have?
Peter T. Leeson By the end of the 19th century, Germany and America are arguably the two fastest growing economies with the most diverse populations of anyone, right?
It's no longer France or Britain.
And that means a lot of people are experience modernity in a kind of traumatic or shocking or maybe exciting way.
When modernity is so tied to technology and science and industrialization and mass politics people often resort to these more romantic frameworks to make sense of the world that are simpler, that help you make sense of your own subjectivity, and individual feelings where you don't feel like you're just part of the masses and there's no sense to your life.
Right. You're not a cog in the machine, classically.
The way that people now are seizing on theories they find on the internet and say, me and a few people really understand what's going on.
Those scientists at Harvard don't.
It's just propaganda.
Well, that's what's happening at the end of the 19th century.
People are doubling down on spiritualism and homeopathy and folkish conceptions of race in space.
And this is where the occult doctrines come in and that's helping them feel like they control.
So you draw this line in the book of these sort of three different areas that we're talking about when we say the supernatural.
So yeah, tell me about them.
What are they? Yeah, let me clarify them.
The first is what we call the occult or esotericism doctrines that combine a belief in the in the supernatural and the occult with darwinism and racism and science.
These people were looking for alternatives that combine spirituality and science in a way that wasn't as clinical and materialist, but also not as traditional as Catholicism or Lutheranism.
Right, and then you have what I call border science using it's just a translation of the German term that was used at the time Grens -Wissenschaft. So science that's on the frontiers or borders of what we currently understand that mainstream scientists who were too materialist and too caught up in, maybe, the traditional scientific method and what they could see and feel empirically were missing out on this because these forces are on the borders of what you can actually measure.
So another version of sort of we see something that no one else sees.
Exactly. We might also say fringe, right, like it's kind of you're talking about ideas that are sort of on the edge of the fringes.
Yeah, things of, you know, I don't know, like, can we read people's minds or like what kinds of examples of are you talking about?
Parapsychology, telepathy, radioesthesia, cosmology, so that's border science.
The third pillar is the folklore, mythology, pagan religion, and interest in eastern religions, Indo -Aryan religions.
Everyone is getting interested in Thor, Odin, Buddhism, Hinduism, Tibet, the mystical powers of Tibetan priests, New Age and homeopathic religion and medicine, witchcraft, werewolves, and vampires as sympathetic figures, or figures that help us understand the world.
There's a resurgence in all of this.
So the folklore and mythology and fascination with Eastern religions and spiritualities could be totally innocuous—hippies in the woods—or it can get woven into political, social, religious, and scientific doctrines, and then operationalize in very problematic ways.
I definitely want to talk about how it gets operationalized—that's sort of where we're but help me see how these ideas end up getting interwoven with Nazi ideology.
Yeah, so eriosophy is a great case study for this.
Eriosophy is very clearly an outgrowth of theosophy which does provide certain problematic aspects like the idea of seven route races with distinct characteristics of which one of those races was superior and probably founded Atlantis.
Atlantis, the lost city.
The lost city of Atlantis or lost civilization that the Greeks thought was in kind of the North Atlantic potentially right, so that gets transmogrified via Rudolf Steiner and Austrian's anthroposophy, which is a little more Pro -Western, a little more racial, a little more political.
And then his colleagues Guido von List, and Jörg Land from Liebbesfels, who really doubled down on the concept of the root races and that this superior race was the Aryan race.
But if you went to a bunch of Arians or people who had mostly Aryan blood, and you helped them perfect their physical and mental capacity, you could recreate, maybe, the superior civilization that was lost when Atlantis collapsed.
I'm definitely hearing, of course, threads that will be picked up by the Nazis and, you know, in terrible and scary ways.
What's the evidence that Hitler himself knew about these ideas, was into them, was exposed to them?
So, Lance von Liebenfeld's claims...
who is one of the founders of Ariosophy in hanging out in Vienna right before World War I claims that Hitler came by and asked for a bunch of back issues of his quasi -portographic quasi -occult magazine Ostara which you know like you go to a comic store now and ask for you know I want to get some back issues of you know Captain America when he was fighting the Red Skull he claims Hitler came in in his late teens, early 20s, and Hitler certainly uses.
Kind of off the cuff phrases at times.
I mean, not just Aryan, but stuff about the swastika is the sun wheel and, you know, the ancient areas, mixed with non -Aryans and then there are elements of areosophy that you see in Hitler's speeches in Mein Kampf, but I don't see any direct link between him personally and Lanz und Leibniz.
But even if Hitler didn't visit himself, you can find lots of people people who Hitler and other Nazis quoted, or who became Nazis, who were either in an areas of society or were familiar with the ideas inside of them.
You don't have to go.
It's not six degrees of Kevin Bacon, right?
It's two degrees. When we return, the German parliament building goes up in flames.
Nazis blame the communists and seize on the Reichstag fire to start consolidating power and building their dictatorship.
How is it that one telepath seemed to see this fire coming?
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Visit GMC .com to learn more." So we've been talking about this sort of mix of belief and ideology and the imaginary.
You also mentioned, though, that these ideas get operationalized — that they help the Nazis rise to power.
So I want to drill down there and talk about a few examples now.
And I actually want to start with Erik Hannesen.
Can you tell me about him and how he enters into this story?
Hannessen is actually Jewish, but he changed his name to Hannesen so he sounds Danish, because obviously being Jewish was not even in the Liberal Weimar Republic, not the best way to appeal to a certain demographic that he wanted to think that he had magical and telepathic powers.
And he starts publishing Horoscopes in his various magazines, some of which look like early comic books.
They have comic books about how to improve your romantic life by using certain methods and and how you can, you know, use astrology to predict the future.
And he starts predicting that Hitler and the Nazis are going to take power.
And he has major seances where he invites some of his Nazi friends and what he calls the Palace of Occultism in the middle of Berlin.
So Hannesen becomes a kind of propagandist as well for the Nazi Party.
—Yeah, you were just mentioning these seances in the Palace of the Occult, and there's this really important one in late February 1933.
—Yeah, so I think it was February 26th.
He's having his seance and he announces — and more than one witness corroborates this — that he sees a giant building, maybe an official building, on fire.
A day or two later, the Reichstag — the parliament building — is set on fire.
The Nazis immediately show up, Güring, I think, sends the Gestapo.
The problem for Hannesen is, why would he know this?
Either he really had magical powers or the fact that he's friends with all the stormtroopers in Berlin, who may have been planning this action, led him to overstep and mention it, which does not look good.
So within the next couple weeks, between him having done that, being quite arrogant about his role in bringing the Nazis and Hitler to power, being very prominent, a bunch of Nazis owe him money, and the rumor that he's Jewish gets corroborated.
If it wasn't already he's found dead a few weeks later in a woods near Berlin, and some historians say, well, that shows that they were anti -occultists.
My argument is, it's clearly way more complicated than that.
They relied on this famous occultist to get power.
He probably was a liability once they were in power, especially after announcing or predicting the Reichstag fire, which they claimed was communist, not them.
and of course he's Jewish, so with all of that they decided to get rid of him as a liability.
It doesn't show that the Nazis were somehow distancing themselves from these supernatural ideas.
They clearly saw their constituency as very much invested in them.
Why are the Nazis both clearly embracing the occult influenced by these various supernatural ideas and, like, ostensibly really cracking down?
Why are they doing that, do you think?
if it's not sort of purely that they really are anti -occult?
Well, the easiest answer, but I'll get to the more interesting one in a minute, is it's a fascist regime.
So anyone who isn't directly loyal to Hitler and a member of the party is going to experience some surveillance and repression in some way.
People who believe in the occult, or conspiracy theorists who lead a kind of a conspiracist approach to the world.
Those people have power they have followers.
Now on the Internet it would be look how many likes or YouTube views they have. Those people then have influence, so the general fear of sectarian groups dividing the folk and undermining the folks to mindset the racial and people's community which should be directly loyal to Hitler, there is a connection between occult belief and kind of fascist, authoritarian, anti -scientific idea, you know, kind of approaches to the world.
Some of them embrace it.
So they have this ambivalent attitude.
Yeah I mean one thing that we got into at the beginning of this episode is the Hess action which is which is touching on all these same things.
It's like he consults his astrologer before he goes on this ill -fated flight, so tell me, tell me about the Hess action.
Hess is famously interested in the occult, realizing the stakes are getting higher and that Hitler's about to invade the Soviet Union, which he's not sure will work out.
Hess decides in May, right before the invasion, to fly to Britain and try to convince the English to join the Third Reich against communism and not keep fighting against Germany.
The plan was actually quite rational, since that he didn't think they'd win a massive struggle against the Soviet Union, while fighting the British Empire and possibly the Americans.
That was somewhat rational.
Hess was a bright guy.
The fact that he consulted his astrologer.
But it's super embarrassing that the deputy fuhrer, the guy who would have replaced Hitler if he's assassinated, and everyone was trying to assassinate him as we know, flees to Britain gets captured and treated as a kind of nut job, it looks terrible.
So Hitler is immediately like what the hell happened?
Bormann, Heidrich, Goebbels, tell me what's going on here.
Rosenberg. I can't believe he was that stupid.
And they all say, it's because he's into the occult.
We told you, we told you is crazy.
Now, what's funny about that is with the exception of Heidrich, the other three in their own way are all invested in the occult or the supernatural imaginary themselves.
Goebbels is using it for propaganda and calling Nostradamus brilliant even though Nostradamus was likely Jewish.
Mormont at the end of the war is asking where are the miracle weapons and having his wife read Goterdamerung to the kids to get them prepared for the whole Aryan right collapsing in flames.
Rosenberg is obsessed with mystical spears and the Indo -Aryan race and their magical powers, and yet they're telling Hitler, oh the problem is the occult, right?
So Hitler says, well do something about it, go after the occult.
So they all start attacking the occult, astrology, parapsychology, but what's so interesting about it, within a few weeks, it's over and it's over for two reasons.
It's over, number one, because Himmler and other Nazis are more interested in appropriating the libraries of these people.
They want their books and see what they were studying.
Then actually throwing them all in camps and killing them.
A few hundred do get arrested or thrown in camps.
The other problem is Hitler himself is getting letters from the right magicians association saying, what's going on here.
They're, they're attacking our livelihood.
They're attacking clairvoyance and magicians and telepaths and astrologers.
I thought you liked what we did.
Hitler actually would invite the head of the Reich Magicians Association, a guy named Helmut Schreiber, to his - his Reich Chancellery, right?
So they - they hung out together.
And Hitler's like, wait a second here, we - I think this is maybe going too far.
People need magic, and it's fun to go to magicians.
Can you stop arresting everybody?
I call it Hitler's magicians controversy.
And in 42 and 43, they free a bunch of them, So, Himmler and Schellenberg and the Navy can exploit their special skills to find Mussolini.
To find Mussolini, up next, the Nazis enlist the same occultists that they just imprisoned to help them with one of the highest profile rescue missions of World War II.
Their ally, Italian Dictator Benito Mussolini, has been arrested and taken to a secret location.
The Nazis decide they need supernatural help to get him back.
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So tell me what happens with this mission to rescue Italian dictator Benito Mussolini?
How do all these ideas that we're talking about Weave in with that and how does it go?
So as a prelude, real quick.
In 42 already, to show you this isn't just a Nazi party pathology, an officer in the German Navy actually asked if he can employ some of these astrologers and pendulum dowsers.
Tell me what pendulum dowsing is.
Can you explain that?
Divining, we might call it, is that the traditional thing is where you either take a stick and you walk around and wait for it to vibrate.
or you hold a string with some kind of iron on it and the iron will supposedly interact with forces under the ground or elements or water and you'll be able to know where something is.
So they think that if these people sit long enough over their maps they can find the British destroyers that have suddenly started doing much better in the Battle of the Atlantic.
now the actual reason and the Germans should have figured this out is the British had developed both radar and sonar right but instead of assuming that's why they're doing better science this guy gets the Navy to fund a pendulum Institute where a bunch of these people are let out of the camps and asked to find British ships by using the dowsing method I'm not making this up this really happened now it ultimately doesn't work and they close it!
But the guy doesn't get arrested or anything.
He's like, oh, shucks, that didn't work.
We've got to figure something else out.
Year later, Mussolini gets captured because there's a revolt against him once the Americans invade Italy, and he's brought to this island in the Mediterranean to hide him away, because everyone recognizes if the Nazis find him they'll restore him to power, blah blah blah.
So the Nazis are trying to find him.
Himmler, by this point, has immense power.
He's that of the SS, Waffen SS, Gestapo, criminal police, all this stuff, the intelligence service, asked his subordinates to hire a whole bunch of these people from the concentration camps like 40 of them or 50 of them.
Put them in a beautiful villa in Vonsay and says give them whatever they want, we need to find Mussolini.
Did they rescue him?
Well they do rescue him, I mean, we don't know it's because of the the occultists, they did eventually find him, and Himmler as a reward basically tells most of them they're now free they don't have to go back to the camps and he even hires one of them as his personal astrologer.
So this is not some obscure thing.
All these people were involved at the highest levels.
It's another symptom of this larger pathology, right, that maybe the occult, the esoteric, the border scientific can give us insights that conventional material science, Jewish physics, liberal institutional approaches cannot.
I mean, of course, all the way along in the background here, there's this sort of horrible drumbeat of knowing things like areosophy are also going to help influence the Holocaust. How are these ideas that we're talking about, how do they intertwine and influence what happens in the Holocaust?
Great question. So the reason I call the book Hitler's Monsters — it's a twofold conceit.
On the one hand, the Third Reich is composed of people who do monstrous things and often use the occult and folklore and Indo -Aryan political theories to justify the horrible things like the Holocaust. On the other hand, they use these things to construct enemies, literal monsters that must be eliminated, because they're so horrific in a way that's clearly supernatural.
You couldn't possibly ascribe to the Jews or the Slavs or the Roman cinti all the powerful genetic and spiritual and political influence that they do, right?
By creating these monsters, they have an internal external victim that helps mobilize fascism then and now.
Yes, the Holocaust is in one sense a product of modern eugenics and a horribly violent war where there's just lots of mass death, and an ethnic group that had already been marginalized in lots of societies, but why was it so aggressive?
As I argue, the supernatural imaginary squares every circle.
Jews are parasitic vampires, they're monstrous, even a little bit of Jewish blood could poison an Aryan.
They've been saying this for so long, that comparing them to vampires and parasites and bloodsuckers, as Hitler does repeatedly in Mein Kampf, movies and books portray them as vampiric.
If you look at the original Nosferatu, it's an Eastern interloper with exaggerated, you could call, Jewish features propagandistically, who's poisoning an entire town and basically molesting a blonde Aryan woman.
This fits every anti -Semitic stereotype from the late 19th century on.
You have a pamphlet that comes out in 43, right when the Holocaust is ramping up, called The Jewish Vampire Brings Chaos to the World.
So this image of Jews as this kind of parasitic, dirty, corrupt, with vampiric qualities, is so suffused throughout the culture that when it comes to making decisions about life or death in 41 or 42 you can see how they've already created a situation where, you know, why would you keep these monsters alive?
So I argue that this propaganda motivates soldiers, the SS, ordinary German police alike to treat them as inhuman.
So I'm not blaming the entire Holocaust on the supernatural thinking, per se.
I'm saying that it acted as a catalyst for this monstrous view of the Jews.
The argument is that this history, going back to the 19th century, of constructing Jews and Slavic people as monsters, literally and figuratively, facilitates the policies once you have an extreme situation in the war.
I guess to step back or broaden a bit — I mean you've been saying it seems like some of these patterns of supernatural thinking, this supernatural imaginary — it's kind of tied to this far -right fascist politics.
Again we've gotten into it but just to summarize or say at a high level, like, why?
Why are these things intertwined then and sort of throughout history?
So I would reverse the thesis and say this kind of thinking and I've since with some colleagues we've done a survey of Americans to test this.
This kind of thinking increases the chance of someone abandoning a moderate, liberal or conservative or social Democratic party and choosing more authoritarian solutions to problems. And that's exactly what our we call it, a romanticism scale showed. People who are high on the believing in the Loch Ness Monster Area 51 and spiritualism were far more likely to be far right, meaning high on the authoritarianism scale and social dominance orientation scale, than people who were low, meaning they were skeptical of those things.
It's not one -to -one, and it's also important to point out that a small subset of people were both high on the romanticism scale and identified as Democrat, so there are left -wing authoritarians.
but that's much smaller than the group we found on the right, and the one thing that all those authoritarians, or most of them had in common, was not being a Democrat or Republican per se, it was being high on romanticism, believing in these odd ideas.
That for me validates what I'm doing in the book, which is showing how people who invest in this way of viewing the world, while they might be a harmless hippy, that harmless hippy can turn into Charles Manson.
It's a path to saying I don't accept material liberal institutional boring establishment ways of understanding things.
And then if the particular romantic supernatural ideologies you embrace happen to talk about races and purity and the right medicine and the wrong medicine, all of a sudden, why would you support far -right authoritarians?
They're the ones who have these absolutist answers to problems, because what we saw is there's a lot of people who would claim to be modern educated people who embrace science who actually are not operating under those terms. That's why fascism can happen anywhere.
Erik Kurlander, thank you for coming on History This Week.
Thank you Sally very much for having me.
Erik Kurlander is the William R. Keenan Jr. Professor of History at Stetson University and author of Hitler's Monsters, a supernatural history of the Third Reich. History This Week is a Back Pocket Studios production in partnership with the History Channel.
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