It has been claimed that the world views of the top Nazi leaders was permeated by occult ideas, but that is probably somewhat exaggerated. It is known that Himmler's fooleries were an embarrassment to many of the Nazi bigwigs, and there was probably quite a bit of laughs in the corners.

There is also no evidence that the leader of the Nazis, Adolf Hitler, was particularly interested in the occult movements of the time, although he undoubtedly had known persons from these circles, whose political ideas in many ways were similar to his. Neither in Hitler's book collection or in his papers are traces of this.

Furthermore, there is nothing that indicates that fantasies of a grandiose Germanic ancient kingdom have had any major place in his world view. On the contrary, we have clear evidence that he was not interested in archeaology, and that he viewed it as a waste of time, when romantic souls travelled around the world to track down glimpses of glory of yore.

Hitler even became very annoyed by Himmler's archaeological activities. Albert Speer quotes Hitler for this statement:

Why are we trying to bring to the attention of the world the fact that we have no past? Isn't it enough that the Romans built massive buildings, while our forefathers still had to live in miserable huts? Himmler has now started digging up the remains of these miserable dwellings, and is enthralled by every pottery shard or any stone axe he finds. The only thing that comes out of that is, that it is now clear to everyone that we were still throwing stone axes and huddling around the fire at a time when the Greeks and the Romans had for a long tmel reached the highest cultural level. In reality, we should keep quiet about our past, but instead Himmler is creating a quite unnecessary fuss with his activities. The Romans of our days must be highly amused over Himmler's discoveries!

Hitler's driving force was primarily personal ambitions and a disdain for the existing society and a hatred of those parts of the population which he blamed for the miserable conditions in the 1920's in Germany. Romantic dreams were probably far from Hitler's mind.

All in all, there seems to be only one in the Nazi top who was interested in the occult, namely Heinrich Himmler.


Nazism and The New Age, Hitler and the Occult

Hannah Newman


Creation is not finished. Man is clearly approaching a phase of metamorphosis. The earlier human species has already reached the stage of dying out.... All of the force of creation will be concentrated in a new species... [which] will surpass infinitely modern man.... Do you understand now the profound meaning of our National Socialist movement?

~Adolf Hitler, quoted by Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, translated in The Occult and the Third Reich, French scholars Michel Bertrand and Jean Angelini writing under the name of Jean-Michel Angebert

You'll think I'm crazy, but listen to me: Hitler will bring us to a catastrophe. But his ideas, once they have been transformed, will acquire a new strength.

~Josef Göbbels to his aide-de-camp, Prince Schaumburg-Lippe, quoted in Angebert

Nazism and the New Age

While most Jews are sure that Hitler represented the Christian community, his associates knew better. In this section we see not only that Hitler rejected Christianity, but that there is also ample research showing that Hitler founded far more than a political regime - the Third Reich was an occult-based religious movement to usher in the New Age.

The Nazi President of the Danzig Senate, Hermann Rauschning, who defected to the Allies and in 1939 wrote the book quoted above, recorded statements made by Hitler which are unintelligible except from a NA orientation. The fact that Rauschning included quotes which he admitted he did not understand only adds to the credibility of his testimony, for these often turn out to be occultic references of the kind meant to be understood by fellow-initiates alone.


Rauschning's Phony 'Conversations With Hitler'

The supposed memoir of Hermann Rauschning, the National Socialist President of the Danzig Senate in 1933-1934 who was ousted from the Hitler movement a short time later and then made a new life for himself as a professional anti-Nazi,is one of the most widely quoted sources of information about Hitler's personality and secret intentions.

In the book known in German as Gespräche mit Hitler; and first published in the U.S. in 1940 as The Voice of Destruction, Rauschning presents page after page of what are purported to be Hitler's most intimate views and plans for the future, allegedly based on dozens of private conversations between 1932 and 1934. After the war the memoir was introduced as Allied prosecution exhibit USSR-378 at the main Nuremberg "war crimes" trial.

Among the damning quotations attributed to Hitler by Rauschning is this memorable statement:

We must be brutal. We must regain a clear conscience about brutality. Only then can we drive out the tenderness from our people ... Do I propose to exterminate entire nationalities? Yes, it will add up to that ... I naturally have the right to destroy millions of men of inferior races who increase like vermin ... Yes, we are barbarians. We want to be barbarians. It is an honorable title.

Hitler is also supposed to have confided to Rauschning, an almost unknown provincial official, fantastic plans for a German world empire that would include Africa, South America, Mexico and, eventually, the United States.

Many prestigious historians, inculding Leon Poliakov, Gerhard Weinberg, Alan Bullock, Joachim Fest, Nora Levin and Robert Payne, used choice quotations from Rauschning's memoir in their works of history. Poliakov, one of the most prominent Holocaust writers, specifically praised Rauschning for his "exceptional accuracy", while Levin, another widely-read Holocaust historian, called him "one of the most penetrating analysts of the Nazi period."

But not everyone has been so credulous. Swiss historian Wolfgang Haenel spent five years diligently investigating the memoir before announcing his findings in 1983 at a revisionist history conference in West Germany. The renowned Conversations with Hitler, he declared are a total fraud. The book has no value "except as a document of Allied war propaganda."

Haenel was able to conclusively establish that Rausching's claim to have met with Hitler "more than a hundred times is a lie. The two actually met only four times, and never alone. The words attributed to Hitler, he showed, were simply invented or lifted from many different sources, including writings by Juenger and Friedrich Nietzsche. An account of Hitler hearing voices, waking at night with convulsive shrieks and pointing in terror at an empty corner while shouting "There, there, in the corner!" was taken from a short story by French writer Guy de Maupassant.

The phony memoir was designed to incite public opinion in democratic countries, especially in the United States, in favor of war against Germany. The project was the brainchild of the Hungarian-born journalist Imre Revesz (Emery Reeves), who ran an influential anti-German press and propaganda agency in Paris during the 1930s published the book in 1940. It led to furious secret investigations by the top Nazis who established that Rauschning had spoken with Hitler but once, and briefly, at a diplomatic cocktail party.

Haenel has also found evidence that a prominent British journalist named Henry Wickham-Steele helped to produce the memoir. Wickham-Steele was a right-hand man of Sir Robert Vansittart, perhaps the most vehemently anti-German figure in Britain.

West Germany's most influential weekly periodicals, Die Zeit, and Der Spiegel (7 September 1985), have run lengthy articles about historical hoax. Der Spiegel concluded that Rauschning's Conversations with Hitler "are a falsification, an historical distortion from the first to the last page ... Haenel not only proves the falsification, he also shows how the impressive surrogate was quickly compiled and which ingredients were mixed together."

There are some valuable lessons to be learned from the story of this sordid hoax, which took more than 40 years to finally unmask: It shows that even the most brazen historical fraud can have a tremendous impact if it serves important interests, that it's easier to invent a great historical lie than to expose one and finally, that everyone should be extremely wary of even the "authoritative" portrayals of the emotionally-charged Hitler era.

Readers interested in an authentic record of Hitler's personality and private views should look into the fascinating and wide-ranging memoir of Otto Wagener, published in August 1985 by Yale University Press under the title Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant. Wagener was the first Chief of Staff of the SA ("Stormtroopers") and Director of the Economic-Political Department of the National Socialist Party. He spent hundreds of hours with Hitler between 1929 and 1932, many of them alone.

One of the best sources I have seen is the Angebert book quoted above. For documentation besides Angebert see also D. Sklar, The Nazis and the Occult; Joseph Carr, The Twisted Cross; Robert G.L. Waite, The Psychopathic God - Adolf Hitler; Gerald Suster, Adolf Hitler, The Occult Messiah; Trevor Ravenscroft, The Spear of Destiny]. The strength of their work is ironically due to their positive attitude toward the occult: it appears they rather admire the "Ancient Wisdom" as expressed in Gnosticism, Catharsism and other esoteric movements, and they trace its threads through history with nostalgia as well as academic interest. Their far-ranging documentation allows them to conclusively show that Nazism was/is an initiation into the classical Gnostic "path of enlightenment", but unlike me the authors do not fault the "Ancient Wisdom" itself for the infamous results. On the contrary, "the prime lesson to be learned is that the practice of occultism and magic is fraught with danger and, therefore, not to be entrusted to just anyone."

This book is valuable for its uninhibited look at the many movements and occultists - including unlikely names like Plato, Nietzsche, Göthe and Pythagoras - who shared Hitler's dream of the Holy Gral and a new-age return of the ancient Hyperborean godmen with their "sacred sciences".

Hitler turned against Christianity from his early teens and sought his destiny in the occult. He later joined with associates who also embraced those teachings, and together they built a state guided by the same occultic principles and goals repeated in today's NA. And no wonder, because he drew on the same esoteric sources as the NAers of today. [How have so many scholars overlooked this all-important key to understanding the Nazi mentality? In the words of Angebert's English translator, Lewis A.M. Sumberg, nearly all historians missed the "militant neo-Paganism" and "Gnostic racism" in Nazism "because they have brought conventional outlooks and methodologies to their examination of an unconventional phenomenon." (The Occult and the Third Reich) We must either re-assess the Nazi philosophy with these roots exposed, or be forced to settle for theories which fail to completely explain Nazi priorities. Its unconventional nature lay in "magic thought allied to science and know-how" (Angebert) - exactly the hybrid being encouraged today by NA leaders like Peter Russell. Sumberg's observation in 1974 about this blind spot among historians fell mostly on deaf ears, which makes it more difficult now - but more urgent than ever - to recognize that not only is Nazism not dead, we are now surrounded by a "kinder, gentler" version of the same philosophy, sprouted from the same roots and having the same priorities.]

Hitler and the Occult

According to available sources (see above), Hitler first made contact in 1909 with other occultists, the first of these being Georg Lanz von Lieberfels and Guido von List, after coming across their occultic-racist magazine Ostara in Vienna. (Sklar). Besides his publishing activities, Lanz was known for starting a society called the "Order of New Templars" which imitated the traditions of occultic Grail lore. (Angebert) Lanz would later claim credit for influencing Nazi ideology - a claim which has some merit considering that one of his books was found in Hitler's personal library (now archived in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC). As for List, he founded the "Armanen", a Germanic pagan priestly order which apparently accepted Hitler into their brotherhood; evidence is in another occultic book from Hitler's library bearing an inscription from a comrade to Adolf, "my dear Armanen brother." (Sklar)

 

Books by List were found stamped with the insignia of the SS Ahnenerbe (the Nazi Ancestral Research division), indicating that his teachings were studied by SS candidates. (As an aside, Angebert note that the documents dealing with the Ahnenerbe itself, which they identify as "the Nazi Occult Bureau", are listed in the U.S. National Archives but for some reason are not available to researchers) Both Lanz and List were obsessed with blood purity, the Jewish threat, Grail legends and a "new world order". Both embraced the Swastika as a central symbol, borrowing it from Hindu mysticism.

By 1913, Adolf had passed the novice stage in his occult pursuits. (Carr) In 1918 (age 29) he claimed to hear voices announcing that he was "selected by God to be Germany's messiah" (Carr); later he made contact with an "ascended master" whom he identified as Lucifer or "the beast from the pit".

He eventually became convinced he was the reincarnation of Woden (or, Woton). At some point, he discovered two German occultists who eloquently expressed his own understanding of Aryan religion and destiny: Richard Wagner [details later] and Friedrich Nietzsche. These influenced Nazi thought so heavily that the authors of The Occult and the Third Reich name them as "the two prime initiators of the Third Reich", and devote two entire chapters to documenting this claim. To these can be added a third, who lived before Hitler and tried to weld Wagnerian and Nietzschean thought into one work: the British occultist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who wrote in his epic Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1900):

Every Mystic is, whether he will or not, a born Anti-Semite.

~Sklar

Another occultist to influence Hitler's thinking was Dr. Karl Haushofer, who was introduced to Hitler in 1924 while the latter was in Landsberg prison. Haushofer, a Blavatsky disciple, combined a dubious "science" called "geopolitics" with Eastern mystical texts and The Secret Doctrine principles, and claimed to have clairvoyant powers. It was Haushofer who schooled Hitler in The Secret Doctrine. (Carr) His geopolitical theories found their way into Mein Kampf. (Sklar) It was also Haushofer who forged Hitler's alliance with Japan basing his case on astrological predictions (Sklar), and who gave him the "Lebensraum" concept. As the Nazi conquest advanced, Haushofer applied his theories through prophecies which overruled the military leadership in directing troop movements. (Sklar)

 

Besides Hitler, Haushofer had other prominent disciples: Rudolf Hess, later to become Hitler's secretary; and Anton LaVey, who gained notoriety in later years for his promotion of Satanism. LaVey dedicated his work The Satanic Bible in part to "Karl Haushofer, a teacher without a classroom." (Sklar) Haushofer's fortunes fell, however, when his son Albrecht conspired in the 1944 coup against Hitler and was arrested; father Karl was sent to Dachau.

Hitler, like today's NA philosophers, firmly believed in the coming of a new species of humanity. Like modern New Agers, he expected them to be a literal "mutation" of Homo Sapiens, achieved by arriving at "higher levels of consciousness". He also believed that the new humanity would be free of "the dirty and degrading chimera called conscience and morality," as well as "the burden of free will" and "personal responsibility" which should rightly be borne only by the few with the fortitude to make the awful decisions necessary for the good of humanity. (Sklar)

Hitler's associate, Bernhard Forster (who happened to be Nietzsche's brother-in-law) related to Hermann Rauschning how Hitler had proclaimed that he "would bring the world a new religion,... the blessed consciousness of eternal life in union with the great universal life... when the time came. Hitler would be the first to achieve what Christianity was meant to have been, [without] any fear of death [or] the fear of a so-called bad conscience. Hitler would restore men to the self-confident divinity with which nature had endowed them." Forster then added his own opinion: "He drew his great power from intercourse with the eternal divine nature." (Sklar) [The reader should note the familiar "cosmic consciousness" vocabulary here, more appropriate to the founder of a religion than to a political schemer.]

 

The Nazi sacred symbols and concepts - the Swastika or "gamma cross", the eagle, the red/black/white color scheme, and ancient Nordic runes (one of which became the insignia of the SS) - were all adopted from occult traditions going back centuries, shared by Brahmins, Scottish Masons, Rosicrucians, Manichaeans and others. (Angebert givea detailed histories)

 

The Nazi motto, "One Reich, One Folk, One Führer", reflected the standard 3-fold power circles of the occult. (See a good example in Bailey's Discipleship in the New Age II, where the Great Invocation is to be explained on three distinct levels.) The Reich was the psychic adepts of the Nazi Party, which would build the bridge between the Folk (the masses which unite into a cosmic Entity greater than its parts) and the Führer (the initiates in the elite leadership which unite with Hitler, the divine incarnation). The outer fringe, the Folk, are taught what they can handle: blind obedience, group service, a new history and identity. The Party elite such as the SS are taught something different: psychic knowledge, tapping into the "Vril Force", self-denial, brotherhood mission, medieval lore, fearlessness of death. The innermost circle was privy to the hard-core Gnostic teaching on the Grail, immortality and godhood. 


The term "Vril" came to the attention of the Western world through the writings of a not well known French author, Louis Jacolliot (1837-1890).


Jacolliot was an avid reader of occult literature, and was familiar with the work of Swedenborg, of the theosophist Jacob Böhme and of Louis Claude de Saint Martin. In the course of his professional career Jacolliot had been president of the tribunal at Chandernagor, India, and afterwards French consul in Calcutta.


The works of Jacolliot have inspired several writers and occultists, among them Rudyard Kipling and H. P. Blavatsky. Among Jacolliot's many books are: La Bible dans l'Inde ou la Vie de Iezeus Christna (1859); Les Fils de Dieu (1873); Christna et le Christ (1874); Les Traditions indo-européennes (1876); La Genèse de l'humanité (1879); and L'Olympe brahmanique (1881).


The main theme in his books is that modern civilizations were originated from a single, primordial nucleus, which was the same for India, western Asia, and Europe. The Semitic and indo-European races were not different at the beginning, but the Semitic races degenerated in the process, while the Aryans remained pure. A code of law rules civilized people, the Code of Manu, name of the divine ruler in India, while in Egypt he was called Menes, Mosses among the Hebrews, and Minos in Crete.


According to Jacolliot, Jesus Christ is but a recent reconstruction of an old indo-aryan tradition, that of Iezeus-Christna. Jesus of Nazareth is only a different characterization of the same personage.


North of Europe a magic civilization has existed for millennia and its name is Thule. The superior beings of Thule live in huge caverns in the entrails of the earth. They possess an extraordinary source of magic energy: the Vril. The theme of the Vril is exalted in most of Jacolliot's writings. Vril is an energy latent in man, but he utilizes only a fraction of it. It is the source of divinity, the source of the coming superman. He who discovers it and masters its use acquires great powers. He can become a master of men.


In many of his works, particularly in Les Fils de Dieu, and in Les Traditions indo-européenes, Jacolliot affirms that he discovered the existence of Vril among an Indian sect: the Jains, still active in the regions of Mysore and Gujerat, and counting millions of adepts.


The discovery of Vril by Jacolliot created extraordinary interest among European intellectuals, avid of knowledge about traditional oriental wisdom. Inspired by his writings a group of Rosicrucians from Berlin founded, by the end of the 19th century, the Vril Society to divulge the writings of the French master. Jacolliot's ideas were introduced in England by S. L. Matthews at the Golden Dawn Society, of which he was the Great Master.


With the passage of time, apparently the term Vril fell in disuse. Interest in Vril was renewed after it was  not used until 1871 saw the publication of The Coming Race by the English Rosicrucian, member of the House of Lords and minister of the state Edward Bulwer Lord Lytton, who personally knew one of the leading occultists of his epoch, Eliphas Levi. In this novel a young American somehow is led ever deeper into chasms in the earth until he reaches a subterranean realm in which live tall and highly educated people who had mastered a mysterious power they called "Vril", the vital energy of the shooting grain that anyone could concentrate through his or her so-called Vril Staff and individually apply both healingly as well as destructively. Thought transfer and telekinesis were also possible, but VRIL could also serve as a weapon.

Helena Blavatski, the foundress of the Theosophical Society, describes this force as an aether stream that in 1872 could be transformed into a physical force only by the Englishman John W. Keely, an ‘initiate of Nature’, through a mechanical device, an ability that apparently had been rescinded by the spirit side due to the threatened abuse of it on Earth.

Rudolf Steiner, the initiator of the Anthroposophical Movement, at the beginning of the 20th century describes this Vril power as ‘aether of life’ and named its abuse as the cause of the destruction of Atlantis. In his mystery plays Rudolf Steiner recalls the fate of John W. Keely in the figure of Dr. Strader. In the last scene of the last play Dr. Strader becomes the fulcrum for the New Age. To whit: Only when the laboratory table becomes the altar, when from the fruits of the materialistically dominated ‘natural science’ evolves a moral ‘Science for Nature’, the New Age may unfold.

It is said that in the 1920s the Austrian Karl Schapeller had conducted successful experiments with Vril that he called “fiery aether“, but had remained without success due to the danger of economical misuse. – This Vril Technology apparently was taken over and further developed in secret up to operability by the Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft ‘Das kommende Deutschland’ (The Reich’s Study Group ‘The Coming Germany’) that some think is the legendary Vril-Gesellschaft (Vril Society).

Many neo-Nazi groups continue to pursue these topics with devotion. But under it all was the invisible presence of "Unknown Superiors" (Angeberts, quoting Rudolf Olden, Hitler the Pawn, written 1936. Rauschning used the same term) who taught Hitler himself and who were assumed by his associates to endow him with his uncanny hypnotic power.

Concerning Hitler's relationship with these Unknowns, there is not much known besides his reference to a guiding voice of "Providence". However, we do have a vivid account related by an unnamed associate of Hitler to Rauschning (both were not sure what to make of it), in which Hitler wakes up in the middle of the night in total panic at some unseen visitation: "Hitler was standing there in his bedroom, stumbling about, looking around him with a distraught look. He was muttering: 'It's him! It's him! He's here!' His lips had turned blue. He was dripping with sweat. Suddenly he uttered some numbers which made no sense, then some words, then bits of sentences. It was frightening. He used terms which were strung together in the strangest way and which were absolutely weird. Then, he again became silent, although his lips continued to move. He was given a massage and something to drink. Then all of a sudden, he screamed: 'There! Over there! In the corner! Who is it?' He was jumping up and down, and he was howling." (Rauschning) [Whatever the reader may conclude about the Unknown Superiors, whether a figment of a sick mind or real entities, please remember that both Nazi cosmology and NA religion view(ed) them as real and independent beings - and also as extensions of one's own untapped divinity. No provision is made in either system for the possibility of ascended beings who first seduce their channels and then torment them. Yet stories similar to the above are not uncommon in NA circles. From those who leave the New Age after such an experience, the verdict is uniform: the Guides are clever deceivers with evil motives. For those who stay, the solution is to blame oneself for the "bad trip" and blindly dive in deeper; this was apparently Hitler's choice.]

Hitler's personal devotion to occult principles was proven ultimately by his self-inflicted death. His choice of April 30 for his suicide may well have been meant as a sacrifice; it was the eve of Beltane (known in Germany as Walpurgisnacht), identified on popular Wiccan websites as a Druid feast in honor of the deity Bel. In witchcraft, this "power-point" day is regarded as a "great Sabbath" equal in potency to Halloween. According to Wiccans, Bel is derived from the Canaanite Baal; but Helena Blavatsky goes farther in The Secret Doctrine (Vol.2), reconstructing an astrological trinity of Bel/Baal (sun-god, father), Christos (Mercury, son) and Lucifer (Venus, holy spirit). ore on the Lucifer connection in "Gods of the New Age"] As for Hitler's suicide itself, this was not a cowardly act from an occultist viewpoint, but rather an honourable practice known among the Druids, as well as among the Cathari "Perfects", those medieval guardians of the Grail, who called it the rite of "Endura". A curious requirement of the "Endura" was that it was always to be done by pairs of intimate friends, a detail known by the Nazis (Angebert) which makes sense of Hitler's joint suicide with his new wife Eva Braun. His associates Karl Haushofer and Göbbels also killed themselves in ceremonial fashion along with their wives. (Angebert)

Hitler and Christianity

Not only did Hitler regard Christianity as a defective, failed enterprise, he saw himself as replacing both its God and its Christ. At one of the huge Nuremberg rallies hung a gigantic poster of himself, with the caption stolen from the Christian gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word." German youth were indoctrinated from infancy to pray to Hitler, who they were taught was sent from heaven to protect them. (Sklar) Nazi-approved sermons in German churches proclaimed, "Adolf Hitler is the voice of Jesus Christ." And lest some readers [especially Jews] should conclude from this that Nazi Christians viewed Hitler as the mouthpiece of the New Testament Jesus, the statement is clarified to leave no doubt:

If Jehovah has lost all meaning for us Germans, the same must be said of Jesus Christ, his son.... He [Jesus] certainly lacks those characteristics which he would require to be a true German. Indeed, he is as disappointing, if we read the record carefully, as is his father [the G-d of Israel according to Christian tradition].

~What the Christian Does Not Know About Christianity, quoted by Sklar

In Hitler's words, Christianity "only added the seeds of decadence such as forgiveness, self=abnegation, weakness, false humility and the very denial of the evolutionary laws of survival of the fittest [social Darwinism]," and would obviously be a handicap to the new species which he was personally commissioned by the "masters" to see properly birthed and nurtured. But Hitler perceptively placed the ultimate blame where it is due:

Conscience is a Jewish invention. It is a blemish, like circumcision.... There is no such thing as truth, either in the moral or in the scientific sense. The new man would be the antithesis of the Jew.

Nietzsche likewise considered the Christian Bible nearly worthless because of its Jewish origin:

In Christianity, seen as the art of sacred lying, we're back with Judaism.... The Christian is but a Jew of more liberal persuasion.

~Antichrist

Compare with the NA view of how Judaism "defiled" Christianity.

In this context, antisemitism was not a starting point for the inner Nazi society as it was for the masses; Jew-hatred was the inevitable result of absorbing these bedrock occult teachings.

The nurture of the new humanity included the need to "encourage the growth of a violent, domineering, intrepid, cruel youth... nothing weak or tender in it." (Angebert, Rauschning quoting Hitler) This reached its climax in SS training, and it corresponded to the Nazi view of "pure" Gnostic, Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, which did not teach compassion and gentleness, but Aryan duty and honor above all (Angebert). [This would seem confirmed by the presence of Tibetan Buddhists in Hitler's Berlin, as well as Bailey's prediction that Buddhism is destined to drop its image of gentle pacifism.]

But there was an obstacle to sweeping away the Jew and raising this cruel new generation, in the person of that "Jew of more liberal persuasion", the Bible-believing Christian. Knowing that Christian Germany would not easily accept an open return to paganism, Nazism attempted to wean the masses from standard Christianity by removing the Jewish-influenced "negative" parts, that is the Old Testament and most of the New Testament, imposing gnostic meanings on key passages, adding colourful pagan legend, and repackaging it in their 1920 platform as "positive Christianity" (Angeberts). [This term is freely used today by many groups, some of them fervent NAers offering the same package to naive Christians, for the same purpose]/

Hitler's vision of returning to "pure" pagan religion was echoed, or more accurately anticipated, by psychoanalyst Carl Jung in 1923: "We [Germans] need new foundations. We must dig down to the primitive in us, for only out of the conflict between civilized man and the Germanic barbarian will there come what we need: a new experience of God." (Sklar) When esotericist Jakov Wilhelm Hauer founded the Nordic Faith movement, Jung urged participation on the part of Germans who were "intelligent enough not only to believe but to know that the god of the Germans is Wotan and not the Christian God." ("Wotan", essay by Jung - emphasis his, quoted by Sklar) The Nazis reciprocated by making Jung President of the German Medical Society for Psychotherapy in 1933, at which time he finally found a forum from which to expound a belief he had held since 1918: the need to distinguish between "German" and "Jewish" psychology. (The Society's Dec. 1933 issue) In his view, such a distinction was not anti-Semitic, it was liberating for both Aryans and Jews. (Sklar) When the Jews were fleeing Nazi Germany in ever-increasing numbers, Jung advised his followers in England to keep up their "negative feelings" about Jews and resist allowing them to participate as colleagues, as he also did. [See further details about Jung in Harvard Professor Richard Noll's books.] As for the destruction being wreaked by the Nazis, Noll notes that Jung viewed them as the necessary precursors to the great "light", those whose task was to destroy to make "rebirth" possible. [Compare with Bailey's assessment below.] It took until 1945 for Jung to finally denounce the Nazi extermination of the Jews, but he never retracted his proposal for a "Germanic, Jew-free psychotherapy". (Sklar)

To remove the "bad seeds" of Christian (that is, Jewish) thinking, Nazi preparation of children for the new humanity would be diligent from cradle to grave, centered around the notion that they were born to die for their god, embodied in their Führer. The education began with revised fairy tales teaching new-humanity principles of heroes struggling and dying to set their race free. Then group membership started at age 10, followed by continuous reinforcement in group settings for the remainder of their lives, "so that they shall in no case suffer a relapse, and they don't feel free again as long as they live," as Hitler bluntly put it. (Sklar) There was non-stop activity which required passive participation, allowing no time for reflection or discussion.

And what did Christian leaders think of Hitler? Although many Christians eventually bought into "positive Christianity", apparently there was enough opposition to necessitate an early purge of that community. Before launching his "final solution", Hitler made an effort to remove all churches and pastors who showed the least resistance to policies already in operation. For example, refusal by a church to sponsor a Hitler Youth chapter was sufficient grounds to close it down. Leaders whose integrity would not yield to political expediency, who could not be discredited by scandal, and who had the potential to influence Christians at large, were imprisoned indefinitely (Dietrich Bonnhöfer for example). Although Hitler did not close down many Catholic churches, especially where local support was strong, he vented his rage on Pope Pius XI, who had issued an encyclical condemning him as "a prophet of nothingness". ("Mit Brennender Sorge", March 14, 1937, translation posted by Paul Halsall of Fordham University) The Nazi government lodged a harsh protest with the Vatican shortly afterward (April 12, 1937 - see Georg May, Kirchenkampf oder Katholikenverfolgung). [I would suspect that the most damaging statements in "Mit Brennender Sorge" for the Nazis were those which exposed their "religious war" against the legacy of Judaism found in Christianity. Pius XI flatly equated Nazism with "aggressive paganism", condemned the removal of the Old Testament from churches and schools as an act of someone who "blasphemes the name of God", and reaffirmed the Jewish Bible as "sacred books" which "record the story of the chosen people, bearers of the Revelation and the Promise". The Catholic leader summarily rejected the anti-Jewish dogmas of "race and blood [and] the irradiations of a people's history" as "false coins [which] do not deserve Christian currency".

HITLER'S POSITIVE CHRISTIANITY
...Unleashing The Patriotic Church

A great deal has been made by many of Hitler's love affair with the occult. However, the "public persona" of one Adolf Hitler was one steeped in Christian tradition—German traditional religious practice and imagery. He somehow knew what made the German soul tick and what really made most of mankind tick. His realization of what could motivate the human soul (mind, will and emotion) to its grandiose heights was decisively religious (i.e., the Christian religious expression) in its public manifestation.

We demand liberty for all religious denominations in the State, so far as they are not a danger to it and do not militate against the morality and moral sense of the German race. The Party, as such, stands for positive Christianity, but does not bind itself in the matter of creed to any particular confession"

~Item #24 of the German Worker's Party "Program" cir. 1920s

At the earliest formation of the Nazi Party, Hitler expressed his Christian support to the German people and soldiers. In the 1920s, Hitler's German Workers' Party (pre Nazi terminology) adopted a twenty-five-point program with the clear intent to persuade the German people that "positive Christianity" was in full conformity to the "moral" convictions of the Party—i.e., the Party fully embraced the morality of Christianity and that Christianity was viewed as "singular" in the minds of that Party—Catholic and Protestants were considered as the foundation of German Christianity in its fullness and jurisdiction (the Party embraced both as one).

MY LORD AND SAVIOR ...IN THE BOUNDLESS LOVE AS A CHRISTIAN ...HE HAD TO SHED HIS BLOOD UPON THE CROSS. My feelings as a Christian point me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them. This is God's truth! He was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice....

And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.

When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people is plundered and exploited.

[Note, "Brood of vipers" appears in Matt. 3:7 & 12:34. John 2:15 depicts Jesus driving out the moneychangers (adders) from the temple.]

~Adolf Hitler, in his speech on 12 April 1922

We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.

~Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Berlin on 24 October 1933.

Indeed, Hitler's speeches and proclamations, even more clearly, reveal his faith and feelings toward a Christianized Germany. In sum: Hitler showed his disdain for atheism, and pagan cults, and revealed the strength of his Christian feelings—make no doubt about that. Likewise, his was no meaningless and superficial theology—it was clearly demarcated and set forth in all its hideous implications with righteous gusto.