Resources on the Nazis and the Occult

The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and their Influence on Nazi Ideology — Book by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke

The Occult Roots of Nazism: The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany, 1890-1935 is a book by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke about Nazi occultism and Ariosophy, tracing some of its roots back to Esotericism in Germany and Austria between 1880 and 1945. The foreword is by Rohan Butler, who had written The Roots of National Socialism in the 1930s. The book is based on Goodrick-Clarke’s 1982 Ph.D. thesis The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany 1890-1935: Reactionary political fantasy in relation to social anxiety.

This book has been continually in print since its first publication in 1985, and has been translated into twelve languages, including French, Polish, Italian, Russian, Czech, German and Greek.

“The Supernatural Pseudoscience of Nazi Germany” — Michael Schulson article

“The Abusive Exploitation of the Human Religious Sentiment”: Michael Burleigh as Historian of “Political Religion” — Daniel J. Mahoney article

The Third Reich: A New History — Book by Michael Burleigh

Until recently there has been no up-to-date, one-volume, international history of Nazi Germany, despite its being among the most studied phenomena of our time. The Third Reich restores a broad perspective and intellectual unity to issues that have become academic subspecialties and offers a brilliant new interpretation of Hitler’s evil rule.

Filled with human and moral considerations that are missing from theoretical accounts, Michael Burleigh’s book gives full weight to the experience of ordinary people who were swept up in, or repelled by, Hitler’s movement and emphasizes international themes-for Nazi Germany appealed to many European nations, and its wartime conduct included efforts to dominate the Continental economy and involved gigantic population transfers and exterminations, recruitment of foreign labor, and multinational armies.

Nazis: The Occult Conspiracy — Documentary

Nazis: The Occult Conspiracy is a documentary on how Adolph Hitler and the Nazi regime made use of ancient mysticism and occultism to win the war. The Nazi’s also used occult mind control techniques to brainwash Germans to perceive themselves as the master-race. Astrology, Reincarnation, a new blood religion. In this chilling yet fascinating glimpse at recent historical events, discover how Nazi beliefs were based on a perversion of ancient myths, pagan lore and the occult.

In their quest to create an Aryan super race, the Nazis left no myth or religion unexploited, using astrological forecasts to plan battles; pendulums to locate allied battleships; the prophesies of Nostradamus to frighten the Allies, and sacred symbols, such as Nordic runes, to inspire their warriors to battle. Nazis: The Occult Conspiracy explores the disturbing ways the Third Reich linked occult practices with political aims and created a reign of terror unparalleled in history.

The Occult History of the Third Reich – Part 1: The Enigma of the Swastika — Documentary

From the occult origins of the Nazi party to the death of Hitler in the flaming ruins of Berlin, the emergence of the doctrine of National Socialism took place in a dark and sinister world of rituals and beliefs.

The Occult History of the Third Reich – Part 2: SS Blood and Soil — Documentary

In the early 20th century, the young Adolf Hitler was just one of many German-speaking people attracted by a new Germanic mythology that combined ancient legends and esoteric cosmologies with cutting-edge theories of genetic science. In the hands of the Nazis, the result was a new ideology that saw racial purity as the key to human destiny.

This was a belief-system of arcane rituals and potent symbols, with the ancient swastika appropriated for the Nazi cause. By the time of the Third Reich, Hitler and the Nazis had evolved an entirely new faith, complete with holy book, venerated relics and a priestly elite in the form of Himmler’s SS. It was a religion based on obedience, power, and the cult of the leader, with Hitler himself conceived in Messianic terms.

The Occult History Of The Third Reich – Part 3: Adolf Hitler — Documentary 

Describe how this film investigates Hitler’s own occult beliefs, in particular the German mysticism of Guido von List and Jorg Lanz, as well as the tremendous impact on him of the anti-Semitic German composer Richard Wagner and how they informed his upbringing and his racist political beliefs.

The Occult History Of The Third Reich – Part 4: Himmler The Mystic — Documentary

The Nazi Gospels — Documentary

The Foundations of the 19th Century  (Volumes 1 and Volume 2— Books by Houston Stewart Chamberlain

Chamberlain was extensively influenced by the anti-Semitic German composer Richard Wagner (he later married Wagner’s daughter Eva and in 1909 he moved to Bayreuth where he lived at the family’s famous home until his death in 1927).

It was in 1899 he published his greatest work, ‘Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts‘ (The foundations of the Nineteenth Century), a volume of over twelve hundred pages, in German.

Despite its length and difficulty it eventually sold over a quarter of a million copies, and, in the event, made its author a rich man.

The work was stupendous, both in its breadth of scholarship and its complexity of thought. It profoundly impacted and shaped both Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler, both of whom he knew well.

The Myth of the 20th Century: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age — Book by Alfred Rosenberg

Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the 20th Century was the second most important book in Germany’s National Socialist Third Reich next to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle). The title is a homage to Chamberlain’s The Foundation of the 19th Century.

Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity — Book by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke

The Spear of Destiny — Book by Trevor Ravenscroft

Trevor Ravenscroft’s 1973 book, The Spear of Destiny (as well as a later book, The Mark of the Beast), claims that Adolf Hitler started World War II in order to capture the spear (which legend claimed had pierced the side of Christ at Calvary)  with which he was obsessed. At the end of the war the spear came into the hands of US General George S. Patton. According to legend, losing the spear would result in death, and that was fulfilled when Hitler committed suicide and Patton died in a car accident in an army camp.

Ravenscroft repeatedly attempted to define the mysterious “powers” that the legend says the spear serves. He found it to be a hostile and evil spirit, which he sometimes referred to as the Antichrist, though that is open to interpretation. He never actually referred to the spear as spiritually controlled, but rather as intertwined with all of mankind’s ambitions. Several scholars have disputed Ravenscroft’s account as spurious.

The Occult and the Third Reich: The Mystical Origins of Nazism and the Search for the Holy Grail — Book by Jean-Michel Angebert

Crusade Against the Grail — Book by Otto Rahn

Otto Rahn was the real “Indiana Jones.”

Crusade Against the Grail is the daring book that popularized the legend of the Cathars and the Holy Grail. The first edition appeared in Germany in 1933 and drew upon Rahn’s account of his explorations of the Pyrenean caves where the heretical Cathar sect sought refuge during the thirteenth century. Over the years the book has been translated into many languages and exerted a large influence on such authors as Trevor Ravenscroft and Jean-Michel Angebert, but it has never appeared in English until now. Much as German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann used Homer’s Iliad to locate ancient Troy, Rahn believed that Wolfram von Eschenbach’s medieval epic Parzival held the keys to the mysteries of the Cathars and the secret location of the Holy Grail. Rahn saw Parzival not as a work of fiction, but as a historical account of the Cathars and the Knights Templar and their guardianship of the Grail, a “stone from the stars.” The Crusade that the Vatican led against the Cathars became a war pitting Roma (Rome) against Amor (love), in which the Church triumphed with flame and sword over the pure faith of the Cathars.

Otto Rahn was born in Michelstadt, Germany, in 1904. After earning his degree in philology in 1924, he traveled extensively to the caves and castles of southern France, researching his belief that the Cathars were the last custodians of the Grail. Induced by Himmler to become a member of the SS as a civilian archaeologist and historian, Rahn quickly grew disillusioned with the direction his country was taking and resigned in 1939. He died, an alleged suicide, on March 13, 1939, in the snows of the Tyrolean Mountains.

See also Otto Rahn And The Quest For The Grail, by Nigel Graddon

Lucifer’s Court: A Heretic’s Journey in Search of the Light Bringers — Book by Otto Rahn

First English translation of the author’s journeys in search of a Nordic equivalent to Mt. Sinai

Explains why Lucifer the Light Bringer, god of the heretics, is a positive figure.

Otto Rahn’s lifelong search for the Grail brought him to the attention of the SS leader Himmler, who shared his esoteric interests. Induced by Himmler to become the chief investigator of the occult for the Nazis, Rahn traveled throughout Europe–from Spain to Iceland–in the mid 1930s pursuing leads to the Grail and other mysteries. Lucifer’s Court is the travel diary he kept while searching for “the ghosts of the pagans and heretics who were [his] ancestors.” It was during this time that Rahn grasped the positive role Lucifer plays in these forbidden religions as the bearer of true illumination, similar to Apollo and other sun gods in pagan worship.

This journey was also one of self-discovery for Rahn. He found such a faithful echo of his own innermost beliefs in the lives of the heretics of the past that he eventually called himself a Cathar and nurtured ambitions of restoring that faith, which had been cruelly destroyed in the fires of the Inquisition. His journeys on assignment for the Reich–including researching an alleged entrance to Hollow Earth in Iceland and searching for the true mission of Lucifer in the caves of southern France that served as refuge for the Cathars during the Inquisition–also led to his disenchantment with his employers and his mysterious death in the mountains after his break with the Nazis.

Religious aspects of Nazism — Wikipedia entry

Germanic Paganism — Wikipedia entry

Occultism in Nazism — Wikipedia entry

THE NAZI’S PERSECUTION OF RELIGION AS A WAR CRIME: THE OSS’S RESPONSE WITHIN THE NUREMBERG TRIALS PROCESS

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6:45 pm on January 17, 2021