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Mysticism and occultism

Bullock found "no evidence to support the once popular belief that Hitler resorted to astrology" and wrote that Hitler ridiculed those like Himmler in his own party who wanted to re-establish pagan mythology, and Hess who believed in Astrology. Albert Speer wrote that Hitler had a negative view toward Himmler and Rosenberg's mystical notions. Speer quotes Hitler as having said of Himmler's attempt to mythologize the SS:

What nonsense! Here we have at last reached an age that has left all mysticism behind it, and now wants to start that all over again. We might just as well have stayed with the church. At least it had tradition. To think that I may, some day, be turned into an SS saint! Can you imagine it? I would turn over in my grave...

— Adolf Hitler quoted in Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich

In a 1939 speech in Nuremberg, Hitler stated: "We will not allow mystically-minded occult folk with a passion for exploring the secrets of the world beyond to steal into our Movement. Such folk are not National Socialists, but something else—in any case something which has nothing to do with us."

According to Ron Rosenbaum, some scholars believe the young Hitler was strongly influenced, particularly in his racial views, by an abundance of occult works on the mystical superiority of the Germans, like the occult and anti-Semitic magazine Ostara, and give credence to the claim of its publisher Lanz von Liebenfels that Hitler visited him in 1909 and praised his work. John Toland wrote that evidence indicates Hitler was a regular reader of Ostara. Toland also included a poem that Hitler allegedly wrote while serving in the German Army on the Western Front in 1915. This poem includes references to magical runes and the pre-Christian Germanic deity Wotan (Odin), but it is mentioned neither by Goodrick-Clarke nor by Fest.

Hitler's contact to Lanz von Liebenfels makes it necessary to examine how far his religious views were influenced by Ariosophy, an esoteric movement in Germany and Austria that flourished from the 1890s to the 1920s. (Whether Ariosophy is to be classified as Germanic paganism or Occultism is a different question.) The seminal work on Ariosophy, The Occult Roots of Nazism by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, devotes its last chapter the topic of Ariosophy and Adolf Hitler. Not at least due to the difficulty of sources, historians disagree about the importance of Ariosophy for Hitler's religious views. As noted in the foreword of The Occult Roots of Nazism by Rohan Butler, Goodrick-Clarke is more cautious in assessing the influence of Lanz von Liebenfels on Hitler than Joachim Fest in his biography of Hitler.

While he was in power, Hitler was definitely less interested in the occult or the esoteric than other Nazi leaders. Unlike Heinrich Himmler and Rudolf Hess, nevertheless Hitler had interest in astrology. Nevertheless, Hitler is the most important figure in the Modern Mythology of Nazi occultism. There are teledocumentaries about this topic, with the titles Hitler and the Occult and Hitler's Search for the Holy Grail.

Comparing him to Erich Ludendorff, Fest writes: "Hitler had detached himself from such affections, in which he encountered the obscurantism of his early years, Lanz v. Liebenfels and the Thule Society, again, long ago and had, in Mein Kampf, formulated his scathing contempt for that völkish romanticism, which however his own cosmos of imagination preserved rudimentarily." Fest refers to the following passage from Mein Kampf:

"The characteristic thing about these people is that they rave about the old Germanic heroism, about dim prehistory, stone axes, spear and shield, but in reality are the greatest cowards that can be imagined. For the same people who brandish scholarly imitations of old German tin swords, and wear a dressed bearskin with bull's horns over their heads, preach for the present nothing but struggle with spiritual weapons, and run away as fast as they can from every Communist blackjack.

It is not clear if this statement is an attack at anyone specific. It could have been aimed at Karl Harrer or at the Strasser group. According to Goodrick-Clarke, "In any case, the outburst clearly implies Hitler's contempt for conspiratorial circles and occult-racist studies and his preference for direct activism." Hitler also said something similar in public speeches. Although, the quote is really just criticizing German romanticists for lack of action, not necessarily their spiritual or cultural beliefs. Hitler, himself, was very much into the culture he refers to here, especially in the case of Wagner operas.

Older literature states that Hitler had no intention of instituting worship of the ancient Germanic gods in contrast to the beliefs of some other Nazi officials. In Hitler's Table Talk one can find this quote:

"It seems to me that nothing would be more foolish than to re-establish the worship of Wotan. Our old mythology ceased to be viable when Christianity implanted itself. Nothing dies unless it is moribund.

Jackson Spielvogel and David Redles in an article published by the Simon Wiesenthal Center assert alleged influences of various portions of the teachings of H.P. Blavatsky, the founder of The Theosophical Society with doctrines as expounded by her book "The Secret Doctrine", and the adaptations of her ideas by her followers, through Ariosophy, the Germanenorden and the Thule Society, constituted a popularly unacknowledged but decisive influence over the developing mind of Hitler. The scholars state that Hitler himself may be responsible for turning historians from investigating his occult influences. While he publicly condemned and even persecuted occultists, Freemasons, and astrologers, his nightly private talks disclosed his belief in the ideas of these competing occult groups - demonstrated by his discussion of reincarnation, Atlantis, world ice theory, and his belief that esoteric myths and legends of cataclysm and battles between gods and titans were a vague collective memory of monumental early events.

Religion, social Darwinism and Hitler's racism

Scholarly interest continues on the extent to which inherited, long-standing, cultural-religious notions of anti-Judaism in Christian Europe contributed to Hitler's personal racial anti-Semitism, and what influence a pseudo-scientific "primitive version of social-Darwinism", mixed with 19th century imperialist notions, brought to bear on his psychology. Laurence Rees noted that "emphasis on Christianity" was absent from the vision expressed by Hitler in Mein Kampf and his "bleak and violent vision" and visceral hatred of the Jews had been influenced by quite different sources: the notion of life as struggle he drew from Social Darwinism, the notion of the superiority of the "Aryan race" he drew from Arthur de Gobineau's The Inequality of the Human Races; from events following Russia's surrender in World War One when Germany seized agricultural lands in the East he formed the idea of colonising the Soviet Union; and from Alfred Rosenberg he took the idea of a link between Judaism and Bolshevism. Hitler espoused a ruthless policy of "negative eugenic selection", believing that world history consisted of a struggle for survival between races, in which the Jews plotted to undermine the Germans, and inferior groups like Slavs and defective individuals in the German gene pool, threatened the Aryan "master race". Richard J. Evans wrote that his views on these subjects have often been called "social Darwinist", but that there is little agreement among historians as to what the term may mean, or how it transformed from its 19th century scientific origins, to become a central component of a genocidal political ideology in the 20th century.

Derek Hastings writes that, according to Hitler's personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, the strongly anti-Semitic Hieronymite Catholic priest Bernhard Stempfle was a member of Hitler's inner circle in the early 1920s and frequently advised him on religious issues. He helped Hitler in the writing of Mein Kampf. He was killed by the SS in the 1934 purge. Hitler viewed the Jews as enemies of all civilization and as materialistic, unspiritual beings, writing in Mein Kampf: "His life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine." Hitler described his supposedly divine mandate for his anti-Semitism: "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." In his rhetoric, Hitler also fed on the old accusation of Jewish deicide. Because of this it has been speculated that Christian anti-Semitism influenced Hitler's ideas, especially such works as Martin Luther's essay On the Jews and Their Lies and the writings of Paul de Lagarde. Others disagree with this view. In support of this view, Hitler biographer John Toland offers the opinion that Hitler "carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the killer of God. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of God...". Nevertheless, in Mein Kampf Hitler writes of an upbringing in which no particular anti-Semitic prejudice prevailed.

According to historian Lucy Dawidowicz, anti-Semitism has a long history within Christianity, and that the line of "anti-Semitic descent" from Luther to Hitler is "easy to draw." In her The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945, she writes that Luther and Hitler were obsessed by the "demonologized universe" inhabited by Jews. Dawidowicz states that the similarities between Luther's anti-Jewish writings and modern anti-Semitism are no coincidence, because they derived from a common history of Judenhass which can be traced to Haman's advice to Ahasuerus, although modern German anti-Semitism also has its roots in German nationalism. Catholic historian José M. Sánchez argues that Hitler's anti-Semitism was explicitly rooted in Christianity.

Richard J. Evans Evans noted that Hitler saw Christianity as "indelibly Jewish in origin and character" and a "prototype of Bolshevism", which "violated the law of natural selection". In the decades between Charles Darwin and the mid-twentieth century, various historians have noted that the concept of "Social Darwinism" had been vaunted by both "proponents of altruistic ethics", and by "spokesmen of a brutally elitist morality", but in many of its exponents, it took a rightward shift at the close of the 19th Century, when racist and imperialist notions joined the mix. According to Evans, Hitler "used his own version of the language of social Darwinism as a central element in the discursive practice of extermination...", and the language of Social Darwinism, in its Nazi variant, helped to remove all restraint from the directors of the "terroristic and exterminatory" policies of the regime, by "persuading them that what they were doing was justified by history, science and nature".

According to Fest, the Nazi dictator simplified Arthur de Gobineau's elaborate ideas of struggle for survival among the different races, from which the Aryan race, guided by providence, was supposed to be the torchbearers of civilization. In Hitler's conception, Jews were enemies of all civilization, especially the Volk. Sherree Owens Zalampas wrote that, although Hitler has been called a "Social Darwinist, he was not such in the usual sense of the word, for, whereas Social Darwinism stressed struggle, change, the survival of the strongest, and a ceaseless battle of competition, Hitler, through the use of modern industrial technology and impersonal bureaucratic methods ended all competition by the ruthless suppression of all opponents." Henri Ellenberger considered his understanding of Darwinism incomplete, and based loosely on the theory of "survival of the fittest" in a social context, as popularly misunderstood at the time. Similarly the historian Karl Dietrich Bracher has argued that it would be wrong to believe that Hitler's views were formed through the discipline of close study and that rather Hitler had drawn on, 'a chance reading of books, occasional pamphlets, and generalisations based on subjective impressions to form the distorted political picture which became the Weltanschauung ' that dominated his future life and work. An example from Hitler's formative Vienna years was the influence of Lanz von Liebenfels, whose programme spread 'the crass exaggerations of the social Darwinist theory of survival, the superman and super-race theory, the dogma of race conflict, and the breeding and extermination theories of the future SS state', and whose Ostara publication was widely available in the tobacco kiosks of Vienna. In Mein Kampf, p. 59, Hitler recounts the genesis of his anti-Semitism and says his 'books' are polemical pamphlets bought 'for a few pennies'.

Hitler biographer Alan Bullock wrote that Hitler did not believe in God, and that one of his central objections to Christianity, was that its teaching was "a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest". Steigmann Gall concludes that, to the extent he believed in a divinity, Hitler did not believe in a "remote, rationalist divinity" but in an "active deity," which he frequently referred to as "Creator" or "Providence". In Hitler's belief God created a world in which different races fought each other for survival as depicted by Arthur de Gobineau. The "Aryan race," supposedly the bearer of civilization, is allocated a special place:

"What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and the reproduction of our race ... so that our people may mature for the fulfilment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe. ... Peoples that bastardize themselves, or let themselves be bastardized, sin against the will of eternal Providence."

See also

• Benito Mussolini's religious beliefs
• German Christians
• Guilt by association
• Kirchenkampf
• Nazi occultism
• Race of Jesus
• Religion in Nazi Germany
• Religious aspects of Nazism
• The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century

References

1. Cite error: The named reference Stalin pp.412 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
2. Alan Bullock; Hitler: a Study in Tyranny; HarperPerennial Edition 1991; p219
3. Cite error: The named reference p. 94 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
4. Speech in Nuremberg on 6 September 1938. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, Volume 1 Edited by Norman Hepburn Baynes. University of Michigan Press, p. 396.
5. Rosenbaum, Ron p. xxxvii, p. 282 (citing Yehuda Bauer's belief that Hitler's racism is rooted in occult groups like Ostara), p 333, 1998 Random House
6. Toland, John p. 45, 1976 Anchor Books.
7. Toland 1992
8. Goodrick-Clarke 1985, p. x
9. Telegram from Hitler to Dr. Korsch, President of the International Astrological Congress. Source: Life
10. Entry for "Hitler's Search for the Holy Grail" at the Internet Movie Database
11. Fest 1973, p. 320
12. Hitler 1926, ch. 12
13. Goodrick-Clarke 1985, p. 202
14. "We will not allow mystically-minded occult folk with a passion for exploring the secrets of the world beyond to steal into our Movement. Such folk are not National Socialists, but something else—in any case something which has nothing to do with us." (Speech in Nuremberg on 6 September 1938)
15. Gunther 1938, p. 10
16. ^ Jackson Spielvogel and David Redles: Hitler's Racial Ideology: Content and Occult Sources, The Simon Wiesenthal Center, 1997
17. Laurence Rees; The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler; Ebury Press 2012; pp. 61–62
18. ^ Richard J. Evans; In Search of German Social Darwinism: The History and Historiography of a Concept; a chapter from Medicine & Modernity: Public Health & Medical Care in 19th and 20th Century Germany; Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge; 1997; pp. 55–57
19. Derek Hastings, Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism, p. 67
20. Hastings, Derek (2010). Catholicism and the roots of Nazism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 119.
21. Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship, p.111
22. http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/triumph/tr-roehm.htm
23. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Ralph Mannheim, ed., New York: Mariner Books, 1999, p. 65.
24. Shirer 1960, pp. 91–236 argues that Luther's essay was influential. This view was expounded by Lucy Dawidowicz. (Dawidowicz 1986, p. 23) Uwe Siemon-Netto disputes this conclusion (Siemon-Netto 1995, pp. 17–20).
25. John Toland. (1976). Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography. New York: Anchor Books, p. 703.
26. The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945. First published 1975; this Bantam edition 1986, p.23. ISBN 978-0-553-34532-2
27. José M. Sánchez, Pius XII and the Holocaust; Understanding the Controversy (Washington, D.C: Catholic University of American Press, 2002), p. 70.
28. Cite error: The named reference Richard J 2009, p. 547 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
29. Richard J. Evans; In Search of German Social Darwinism: The History and Historiography of a Concept, 1997 - (quoted by Richard Weikart in From Darwin to Hitler; Palgrave MacMillan; USA 2004; ISBN 1-4039-7201-X; p.233)
30. Fest, Joachim (1974). Hitler. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, pp. 56, 210.
31. Zalampas, Sherree Owens. (1990). Adolf Hitler: A psychological interpretation of his views on architecture, art, and music. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, p. 139..
32. Ellenberger, Henri (1970). The Discovery of the Unconscious: The history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry. New York: Basic Books. p. 235.
33. Sklair, Leslie (2003). The Sociology of Progress. New York: Routledge, p. 71. ISBN 978-0-415-17545-6
34. Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship, pp. 86–87
35. Cite error: The named reference Hitler p.216 & 219 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
36. ^ Steigmann-Gall 2003, p. 26

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External links

• Mein Kampf - by Adolf Hitler
• Mein Kampf - by Adolf Hitler (published by Hurst and Blackett, 1939)
• Introduction to The Holy Reich - by Richard Steigmann-Gall
• Review of Richard Steigmann-Gall's Holy Reich - by John S. Conway
• Full Text of Hitler's Table Talk.
• Was Hitler a Christian?; by Dinesh D'Souza.
• Was Hitler a Catholic?; by John Muscat; Quadrant Online

• Adolf Hitler
• Catholicism-related controversies
• Religious views by individual
• Religion in Nazi Germany