Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich

[Music] [Applause] [Music] good evening welcome to the international spy museum i'm amanda olke adult education director here i'm very excited to have a program on hitler's monsters that sounds bad but it's true because we have a terrific speaker eric kerlander he's a professor of history at stetson university in florida and he teaches modern german european and world history hitler's monsters is his latest book it's his fifth book he's also the author of living with hitler which sounds like a nightmare lots of good halloween jokes with this one i was intrigued looking around at eric online there are lots of interesting i don't know if you know how much you're tweeted about no people are constantly referencing your articles so it's pretty pretty fascinating in a very positive like this is the guy who knows what's going on so now we're gonna know all about nazism and the occult thank you eric thank you very much amanda for inviting me to uh shauna as well and alden farrow the publicist at yale who set this up it's a great pleasure to be here it's my first time in the spy museum which i i just saw today for the first time and it's fantastic i don't know how many of you have seen the exhibits but there's even a link to what i'm going to be presenting that i didn't know was going to to be there um in the james bond exhibit so i'll mention that later oh you took mine did you yeah it was a brush pass that shouldn't have happened oh look you're very good with intelligence and uh so yeah and i also i'm very happy to see a few of my former students in the audience who have obviously done very well and and are now living in dc doing various things so thanks for coming to my uh former stetson colleagues as you see this is a title and i'd like to start and i'm going to proceed this way tonight with a little bit from the book and then talk talk through some of the context and then read some other passages rather than give a formal talk so i'm going to start with the first paragraph of the book so early in the blockbuster movie captain america the first avenger which many of you have probably seen a nazi officer enters a small norwegian town in search of an ancient relic the tesser act and you can see the tesseract in a couple iterations up there the tesseract promises its owner infinite power it's a cosmic artifact of sorts we soon find out that the officer johannes schmidt has imbibed the prototype of a super soldier serum developed by a fringe or border scientist we'll get to that later named abraham erskine and you see erskine there in the original 1940 comic book intended to give schmidt superhuman strength and agility the serum instead because it's in a prototype form and he shouldn't have taken it causes a monstrous transformation driving the nazi officer mad and turning his head into a ghastly red skull hence the super villain one of the first in marvel comic book history this the red skull erskine escapes to america where he perfects his serum and that happens to the best of us don't worry uh transfiguring the prototypical 98 pound weakling there you see him um steve rogers into our hero now captain america has little time to hone his combat skills before confronting the red skull and the insidious occult society known as hydra which it turns out pulls the strings behind hitler in the third reich kind of an analogy to spectre downstairs in the james bond exhibit now if you notice i just wanted to point this out baron phone struck strucker who's the head of hydra um and he's in the the second avengers movie i believe he's at the beginning of that um that's what it looks like in the marvel movie it's very similar to the wavelessberg which is himmler's order castle where he has grail ceremonies and a black sun just to show you the fiction and the history coming together and that's really the point of of starting with captain america captain america contains all the elements of nazi supernaturalism in popular culture the connection to occult forces mad scientists fantastical weapons a superhuman master race a preoccupation with pagan religions and magical relics supposed to grant the nazis unlimited power and of course the pagan religion stuff comes back with thor and loki fighting over the tesseract and thor the nordic god has to take it from his evil brother loki and bring it to asgard for protection can you all hear me all right excellent so from comic books produced during the second world war so while the nazis are still in power through 21st century video games like castle wolfenstein from classic science fiction and adventure films like raiders the lost ark the boys from brazil to contemporary horror movies like dead snow or hellboy or superhero franchises like the avengers in captain america our popular culture is awash with these images of the nazi supernatural right now we don't have time today and that's why i decided to kind of focus to talk about the entire history of hitler and the occult right this book has nine chapters um they all deal with different aspects of what i just kind of laid out there so what i thought we'd do and then leave the rest for question and answer is i'd give you some background and historical relationship between nazism occultism and what i'm calling border science or what they call border science then using some context from the book itself look at three case studies from one chapter chapter seven of the third reich utilizing border science and occultism for the purposes of military intelligence and propaganda that did it they did actually use it for purposes that this museum would find very interesting and so i chose those case studies and then if we have time i'll bring up a couple couple other examples and then we can in the question and answer talk about more expansive things so for example um traditional occultism kind of these these doctrines like theosophy how many of you have heard of theosophy or anthroposophy right or areosophy though those kind of broader occult doctrines i won't talk about much uh initially um nor will i talk about pagan or focused religion though that's a major part of the book i will focus more on what they called grenz vissenshaft or or border science and so that's what i'd like to do so let's start with the historical relationship between nazism and the supernatural now depending on what your background is you may recognize some of these individuals or writers and i just want to riff off of this quote from alfred rosenberg alfred rosenberg was the ideological czar of the nazi party he was the one who wrote long um essays and and tomes about what nazi ideology was what was wrong with the conventional bourgeois world the church and until very recently people would have characterized rosenberg and many nazi leaders and we'll get to that as being i'm talking about mainstream historians it's very disinterested in the occult right and one of the ways i got a contract for the book is after one of the early proposals got a peer review he said well this is all fascinating but this nothing there's no no history there i forwarded this quote from rosenberg himself and you can see the quote the success of national socialism the unique appearance of the fuhrer has no precedent in german history the consequences that many germans do to their proclivity for the romantic and the mystical indeed the occult came to understand the success of national socialism in this fashion and he goes on from there so what is rosenberg arguing the reason we were successful is germans are fascinated by the occult and they associate us with that now we'll go on to say that's not necessarily a good thing but that's a that's a pretty if you're looking for an archival source saying there's a story to tell this is a good one and he was not alone so rosenberg gleaned this um lota eisner who you see up there teto ardorno both associated with the frankfurt school of kind of social scientific and cultural criticism in the 1920s they both argued very uh openly that nazism drew on occult thinking supernatural thinking esoteric thinking i have a lot of that in the book she was a film critic who looked at like her colleagues siegfried krakauer another frankfurt school film critic if you heard of the book from um caligari to hitler it's a study of expressionism um anyone kind of film scholars often cite that book he and eisner both argue that the expressionist trend in german culture the kind of fascination with horror and the macabre and authoritarian personalities paved the way for hitler adorno said occultism like anti-semitism which is based on what seems like a science that's really faith-based religious mystical thinking is exactly what facilitated nazism so there's a lot of contemporary intellectuals who made that argument and then rudolph phone zobotendorf who we don't have time into time to go into today he argued 1933 the nazis came from his movement his occult movement and the thule society which he co-founded some of you might have heard of the thule society the tula gazelle shaft we've got rosenberg and we've got rauschenin a guy who wrote a book about his about interviews he had with hitler so there was a very powerful contemporary belief that the nazis were wrapped up with occult border science and pagan religion and then you get this first generation of what we call historiography which is the kind of the interpretations that historians make about the the past and some of these are very good scholarly works like mosa stern and goodrich clark's the cult roots of nazism which focuses on that one secret area called really the arieosofis which i'll talk about briefly today others like um the morning of the magicians is kind of crypto history like trevor ravencroft spear of destiny i don't know if you've heard of that as well but all of a sudden you get this efflorescence in the 60s and 70s of a belief that nazism is based in the occult right some of it's good history some of it's not but all of a sudden this contemporary idea after maybe 15 or 20 years of kind of incubation becomes a very popular trope all right and then including a colleague of mine from graduate school some people start researching the occult per se cultism esotericism in the 90s and 2000s and their arguments are much more skeptical i would say the general trend in a lot of this work is first of all everyone was interested in the occult in the 1890s through 1930s that's one of the arguments they make but just as everyone was interested in it it was also very modern um you know everyone is trying new age spirituality and thinks that maybe they have esp and they're going to you know parapsychologists to test them and see if they really have it right there's still people doing that today we don't have to get to those analogies yet but we could uh later on and so their argument is why this obsession with nazism they call it when everyone in central europe and even if you read and hearington and others in france and britain and america were going to their spiritual gurus and trying out new religions if anything that just says that there's nothing really uniquely interesting about the relationship between nazism occultism border science what have you the problem with this argument as you'll see in my own book um is it you don't have to it doesn't have to be a direct connection that is not everyone who practices some version of occultism just like not every christian supports the same religious doctrine or political party has to support it for it to be influential right for that way of thinking or those doctrines to be influential so my my work what i'm going to talk about today accepts their premise that everyone was interested in these border sciences and occult ideas that they're not quintessentially backwards but that more than any political party of that era in germany or elsewhere the nazis drew on it while other parties were skeptical or so what does that have to do with social and political you know issues right um so this that kind of gives you a sense of the context in which we'll be we'll be arguing today all right any questions so far i want to give you a chance to ask questions about because i just went through a lot of stuff pretty quickly okay we'll save them for the end now a quick case study here before we get to my or a quick um example of nazi anti-occultism which is in the fifth chapter of my book before we get to the military intelligence and espionage so one thing that people often bring up is when the nazis came to power they attacked occultism they attacked border scientists okay and i want to talk about what that means with the differences between border science and occultism you all understand occult as being into witchcraft and secret forces and clairvoyance dousing divining right with a divining rod what they called what scientifica cult is called radisthesia so i make it i differentiate in the book between occult doctrines like theosophy eriosophy anthroposophy right which are holistic views of the world that incorporate astrology and parapsychology but also have kind of origin myths right like there were root races seven root races at some point madame blavatsky's uh started this with the theosophists and different races had different powers or skills or histories and then there was some kind of miscegenation or a flood or an ice age and the the the the greatest race kind of started to die out except maybe some of their high priest made it to tibet um this is more the religious aspect of the book um but my argument is that that is quintessentially occultism in this area there's occultism is kind of an overarching doctrine border science are practices by people who sometimes are occultists but sometimes they're just nazis right or your local doctor who's got a homeopathic background right and the idea is these are scientific practices that mainstream science and medicine don't accept which is why the term border science comes around in the twenties and thirties grins this and shaft it has multiple meanings and it's not the same thing as a cult the gren's vicious vicinchafton are practices that are on the borders of what's accepted by mainstream science so that's number one in terms of border they investigate border phenomena right so esp um talking to the dead things that are on the border of what can actually be known in that sense they're border sciences right clairvoyance astrology and they use the term because they mean interdisciplinarity as well you cross the borders from one scientific practice to another so border scientists like to claim that they're not tied to one materialist view or you know a very rigid view of what physics is or chemistry is they're willing to use all doctrines or all practices to come to the truth in some organic way why is that important because very often the nazis you'll see here will pursue occultists as individuals who claim to be the head of a sect like anthroposophy or freemasons but they don't attack the scientific occultism or the border scientists sciences they practice does that make sense and i think that's a really important distinction that no historians have yet made because what bothers nazis is sectarianism that you're not following the third reich the ideology that hitler isn't your end-all and be-all but when it comes to the pista the epistemology the sources of knowledge the approaches to knowledge they don't mind stuff that we would consider a cult provided it's framed as a border science so to give you an example of that which is a big deal in the field maybe you haven't heard of this rudolf hess who was a deputy fuhrer right he was technically in the party the second ranking guy he really wasn't um even before 33 himmler and gurion and others had displaced him but in theory he said he's the guy would replace hitler if hitler got killed and everyone was trying to kill him right he got assassin there were like what ten assassination plots that they uncovered or something um paths like himmler like many of the people will talk about today was very interested in border science and occultism and had been practicing it pretty openly he started a new age hospital for homeopathic and border scientific practices in 34. um he would have conferences where he would promote that kind of stuff even hitler sent a letter of congratulations in 35 to one of the big astrological congresses so a lot of nazi leaders dabbled or were immersed in this but hess was one of the more prominent ones and in 41 may of 41 as many of you might know he got frustrated i mean his comp it's complex what his motivations were but he was clearly frustrated with being marginalized and he was frustrated that um hitler was about to open a second front in the soviet union which he saw as disastrous for he was he was right and so he thought he would go fly because he was a decent pilot he would go fly to britain on his own and negotiate peace on behalf of hitler and third reich um so i think on may 8th 1941 he takes off now there is some evidence he did consult with his astrologer as he and himmler would do for everything right before he left and then he crash-landed got captured the british said come on this guy's nuts um and just want to do a psychological evaluation they didn't want to negotiate with him um this was a scandal obviously in the middle of the war hitler was livid he said what's wrong with this guy how could he do it and then bormon and heydrich come in and rosenberg and say well it's because of his occultism right he was obsessed with occult gurus and that's why he did it so hitler says okay finally it's been eight years we've used kid gloves until now but it's time to go after these people okay which is typical of hitler like he gets focused on something briefly and then loses focus and for about a month there was something called the hess action you see the wreckage of the plane you see the order from heydrich saying that we've got to pursue this all these occultists he lists all of them but it only lasts a few weeks and i think that's really important the only reason it only lasts a few weeks and i'll get to that here is because what has often been castigated as pseudoscience in the third reich might be characterized as a genuine openness to the very boundaries of the knowable to border science and so-called scientific occultism that's one of the premises i want to make before we look at our case studies that the nazis may have gone after sectarians but they liked the practices that those sectarians saw as important the border science now there were limits of course anyone professing a direct connection to the divine or supernatural might raise the state's hackles particularly if such individuals appeared likely to contravene the state's political or ideological goals okay so hess embarrasses the third reich they blame astrologers they go arrest some astrologers so or anthroposophists who want to have their own institutes they might they might go after them at the same time however the occult could help justify dubious scientific practices even as it acted as a wellspring of new thinking and experimentation and the second world war saw an efflorescence of such thinking okay so that's the context before we get to military intelligence now in march 1940 hans bender who had become germany's leading parapsychologist and there you see a picture of him with uri geller from the 70s he's an older gentleman at on the top but in his 30s he had become the leading parapsychologist scientific parapsychologist in germany he wrote a pessimistic letter in march of 1940 to carl croft carl croft is down there he was a famous swiss astrologer some of you may have heard of him we'll get to him later since 1937 they had both witnessed growing restrictions against occultism this escalating repression hans bender feared would be exacerbated by the outbreak of the war because they could see that now the war had broken out they were in the euthanasia program they were going after um gypsies uh the jew the policies against the jews were getting worse so he's worried that since they're anti-sectarian they're going to confuse occultism with real scientific border scientific occultism that he practices and it's going to get worse for us okay and croft wrote them back immediately and said about the prospects of border sciences in our generation i put the quote up there can you read these quotes from that far away excellent he said i'm not as pessimistic as you especially in government circles he insisted they are seeking people who have something to say in terms of border scientific research and he used the term grins vissenshaft now croft knew what he was talking about by march 1940 croft was working closely with goebbels in the propaganda ministry and the reich intelligence services to produce propaganda and wage psychological warfare against the allies many of croft's fellow experts in astrology and divining dowsing radiesthesia that i mentioned earlier would be recruited as well you see wilhelm wolfe you see um wilhelm wolfe ludwig strontiac garrett of walter these are some of the figures who would get recruited bender's own border scientific research began to receive official sponsorship only during the war so before the war he was kind of tolerated during the war himmler and indirectly hitler start giving money to his university institute this parapsychologist for just as a conflict released bottled up economic energies it also led to a greater nazi willingness to experiment and exploit border science in the interests of foreign policy propaganda and military science okay and that's where our case studies come in for example nostradamus and astrology now before september 1939 as i suggested the third reich had been ambivalent about sponsoring astrology in any official capacity so himmler and has to intervene to make sure that astrology per se the practice of scientific astrology was not banned but astrologers and people who belonged to astrological societies had been reigned in okay as had the catholic church the protestants jehovah's witnesses even radical pan-german nationalists who hadn't joined the nazi party were reigned in basically anyone who wasn't in the nazi party that's important to point out but with the outbreak of the war any lingering reservations about enlisting border science for the benefit of the regime dissipated only four days into the war rosenberg remember rosenberg the one critical of occultism rosenberg's attack dog in occult matters a guy named coord kisauer produced a policy paper okay this is a high-ranking official with a policy paper entitled quote astrology as a means to influence public opinion unquote the report indicated that the british had used fake horoscopes to good effect in germany okay and the and the ss noted the same thing independently of rosenberg's office that germans really did seem susceptible to this kind of propaganda if germans were susceptible to occult thinking why not employ similar astrological propaganda against the allies that was the point of kiss hours policy paper well while he's thinking about this and while himmler's collecting all this astrological stuff goebbels of all people on october 30th 1939 so eight weeks into the war reported on a ministerial conference during which he announced in his reich propaganda ministry that he was examining astrological writing to quote determine himself whether there were any inherent inherent dangers unquote two weeks later he brought a letter from carl croft himself okay to hitler he got a letter or the the intelligence service had gotten a letter from kraft on to november and he brought this letter to a lunch meeting with with with hitler the letter had predicted that johann georg elser would attempt to assassinate hitler shortly thereafter and there was a guy who tried to kill him when he returned to the burger boy keller in munich to give a speech there was a bomb under there and he barely escaped so here croft this astrologer just sent a letter predicting an assassination attempt so gerbils brings us to lunch with hitler he says isn't this fascinating and hitler said um he was fascinated as well and asked goebbels to explain the details when how did you get this who's this croft guy himmler who is also at lunch and was soliciting astrological materials for his own occult library okay took great interest in the conversation and agreed that the letter and its prediction we're genuine so you've got hitler hitler hitler himmler and goebbels at lunch saying you know what astrology may just work if we had followed his advice we would have you know you never would have been in there goebbels was clearly encouraged by hitler and himmler's response as he reported in his diary two days later quote i broached the idea of nostradamus to my colleagues in the propaganda ministry for the first time the whole world is full of mystical superstition why shouldn't we exploit that in order to undermine the enemy front so the question here is does goebbels really believe it or does he see it as a way of manipulating the public that's a question that i deal with in the book and i could kind of by case study show you where i think different nazis stand but what's fascinating is the war breaks out and all of a sudden you've got these high-ranking nazis saying hey maybe we should um work with this astrological stuff now um in my chapter i go through in detail month by month how hit how gerbils first has his diplomats in the propaganda ministry try to work with nostradamus's quatrains they don't know anything about astrology so their propaganda's kind of crappy right so then uh gerbil says well why don't i just hire this croft guy which isn't hard to do because the the ss and and and the sd the intelligence have been monitoring him for a while not only because he's an occultist but because he's been trying to convince diplomats to listen to him because he knows what's going to happen in the war and in the future like a there's a romanian diplomat virgil to leia the whole affair basically he tries to tell him what to tell the british and the ss is getting frustrated but they don't arrest him point is he's on the regime's radar already before he sends a letter so girls like why don't you come work for me that's why croft's so excited a few weeks later in wright's bender i'm getting paid to read nostradamus quatrains and tell them what's going to happen this is fantastic but it's not just croft gerbils had gone to this guy named kritzinger hans kritzinger who was a ballistics ballistics expert but also a dowsing expert because he was a dowsing expert he was an astrology expert because these aren't real scientists you can be an expert on everything right um and kritzinger's the guy who said croft's really good you should get him he's a really good scientific astrologer well um uh goebbels goes back to him and says do you want to work for me he's like well i'm really busy doing dowsing stuff but maybe you can hire this guy named georg who's also a great astrologer so by february he's got croft luke and all his kind of leading propaganda guys looking over nostradamus finding reasons why belgium and the netherlands should capitulate predictably right because and norway why because they invade norway and april and belgium the netherlands in may they're literally you can piece together how goebbels the lead propagandist is using nostradamus to come up with propaganda for why allied countries should capitulate and why german soldiers should be confident that they're going to win okay i'm not going to recount all of that here it's fascinating other than to say that this really happened um i want to move on to our second case study which is um i'll give you the context here my or the second the two case studies which are related so waging war with border science on 12 september 1943 the ss captain otto scorseni who's downstairs in the james bond exhibit the historian for the spy museum has argued that scorcene is the model possibly for blofeld or for one of the other um bond villains with a scar you'll see him in a minute so this special forces captain the ss otto scorseni conducted a daring raid on the campo imperatore hotel in italy's grand zasso mountains his mission was to liberate il ducey benito mussolini whom the italian people had deposed and arrested in the wake of the allied landis in sicily a couple couple weeks earlier now for weeks the italians had been moving mussolini from one obscure site to another the goal was to prevent just this kind of rescue operation it would have been a real propaganda coup if if the axis had gotten mussolini back and could set up a puppet state right in northern italy but somehow scorceni found the dictator's location and in a matter of hours his airborne troops swooped in in their dfs 230 gliders and defeated mussolini's captors without firing a shot and i'll show you the picture of what we're going to get to that in a minute here's the operation i'm talking about okay you'll see how they're linked both of these whisked off to vienna mussolini was named leader of the new italian social republic a german-dominated rump state desperate to hold off the allied advance but in the midst of germany's last offensive in the east operation citadel the disaster at kursk all the other things going wrong obviously the sicily invasion this might have been the greatest and last major military operation that you could deem successful and a great kind of propaganda coup at the same time we found mussolini rescued him there's hope right for the access access right so operation 0 constituted one of the third reich's last great public relation victories nevertheless the most remarkable aspect of the raid was not operation oak which is a technical term for rescuing mussolini it was operation mars the intelligence operation that ostensibly located mussolini in the first place evidence suggests that in the information on mussolini's whereabouts was pieced together by conventional intelligence operations we'll get to that in a minute and and breaking of allied radi radio codes but himmler and schellenberg who had replaced heidrick as head of the sd insisted they garnered this information from an expert team of occultists assembled in a villa under ss administration now operation mars wasn't the only time that astrologers clairvoyants or diviners would be recruited to help the regime as you can see here for four years after the hess action the ss employed border scientists in military technology and research seeking ways to improve morale extract intelligence and exert mind control even the german navy joined in assembling a group of diviners and astrologers to locate allied battleships so i want to talk about that first and then we'll get to operation mars now after something called world ice theory which i don't have time to get into today we can talk about it in the question and answer the area of border science is probably most valuable in the third reich or most popular wasn't astrology it was radiation it was divining or dousing whether with a stick or a piece of of iron on a string right that was seen as the most reliable border science many nazi leaders notably himmler and hess believed in the existence of cosmic forces or so-called earth rays aired strolling radiation that could be detected and harnessed with the proper training even hitler had ordered one of germany's most famous diviners to check the right chancellory for malignant malignant forms of death rays that were under the earth and we're gonna somehow give him cancer uh hass famously used to sleep with magnets below and above his bed to fend off these these these terrible death rays goebbels also hired dousers like kritzinger i mentioned him a few minutes ago to assist with nostradamus propaganda but the strangest and most telling experiment in radiesthesia was probably the one initiated not by the nazi party which shows you how how widespread it is but the navy itself so one of the big myths that's been punctured the last 30 years in all sorts of ways is that the military was somehow insulated like the church from all this crazy stuff well we now know that leaders of the church especially protestants and leaders of the military were were almost as immersed in whether it's race science or border science in this stuff as the nazis were right and this is an example of that there's not a a clear line between the sober technologically um adept and conservative military and the crazy nazis there's really a spectrum there that they're all that they're all on so by the summer of 1942 the british had begun to turn the tide in the battle of the atlantic as many of you know the battle between the u-boats we're trying to sink as many um convoys as possible to prevent supplies getting to europe and north africa and then using radar sonar destroyers and other things to to find the u-boats right now the success of the british and the americans by late 42 had nothing to do with dowsing okay to locate enemy submarines the british employed quite natural scientific methods namely radar and sonar they were aided in these efforts by sophisticated code breaking and the extensive use of american convoys but german navy officials were confused they weren't sure how they were eluding them or finding submarines and one of the most confused about the shift in the battle of the atlantic was a u-boat captain named hans roeder and there you see him captain hans roder he's not some guy writing comic books in his spare time you know captain america and whatnot and sending weird screeds the government he is a navy captain right a science expert in the navy patent office and an amateur pendulum dowser right because who isn't in in germany at this time so roeder was convinced the british were employing dowsing divining as a means to locate german ships as a counter-measure rotor suggested that the navy began employing border scientific methods so they're we're really behind you know we haven't yet weaponized this stuff we're rotor operating in the royal navy his suggestion to set up an officially sponsored pendulum institute would likely have been dismissed as outrageous and we know the british and americans had these very some fringe things going on but they never got any money and it was kind of a joke and you know all the efforts were focused on conventional things and massive undertakings like the search for an atomic bomb right and yet rotor was operating in the third reich where many ranking party officials and military men were open to border scientific doctrines um and i could go through a lot of examples of things the navy and army and air force have been experimenting in i have other examples in the book but let's just say that given this context it comes as no surprise that in september 1942 rotor received approval from the navy intelligence service so this is official for his pendulum institute its purpose was quote to pinpoint the position of enemy convoys at sea by means of pendulums and other supernatural devices so that the german submarine flotillas could be certain of sinking them unquote as rear admiral gerhard wagner chief of the navy's operational department admitted roeder the quote pendulum user was well known to well known to all of us from the point of view of those days his work was not that unusual after all what was costly thinking about new techniques and if someone came and claimed to be able to achieve something by way of a certain method no matter how crazy he doesn't say that it was a matter of course that it was given the opportunity that's very official way of saying yeah we had no problem with it back then we we understand it sounds nuts today now that he had gained official approval and financing reuters set out convening and this is a quote from a witness a strange band of psychics pendulum doubt users tatva researchers astrologers astronomers ballisticians and mathematicians these individuals included the luffa astronomer slash astrologer wilhelm hartmann wilhelm woof who would be who was freed from a concentration camp to become himmler's personal astrologer and strontiac ludwig strontiac i showed him he's up there he was the most famous scientific douser in germany he wrote all these books about secret powers that you could find with these dowsing rods he was the first douser to claim he could teach laypeople how to employ a pendulum to locate large metal objects hundreds of miles away hmm sounds a lot like enemy ships right i wonder why he said he could do that during world war ii rotor also tapped the prominent astrologers kritzinger and croft they're still around the latter recruited directly from prison i'm not going to get in why croft went to prison but it had nothing to do with occultism basically he was totally rejecting the nostradamus orders he was being given and he went rogue and said you know all these things were going to happen that that goebbels didn't like but anyway they take him out of prison throw him in this institute um garrett of alter a parapsychologist who had weaved in and out of heydrich's crosshairs for years um garrett of walter used to claim that she would talk to ernst rome the dead head of the essay at night he would come to her and they would have these nice conversations about why hitler killed him they recruit her to help out okay the leaders of the german society for scientific occultism that have been banned they decide to bring the two guys in uh fritz fara and conrad schupa um so they're brought in despite the hess action i mentioned this is a year after they supposedly going to wipe out occultism now i'm not going to get into all the details again of this institute except to say that it lasted for a period of months did absolutely nothing productive and no one paid any kind of cost for that because it would see oh well maybe we were faulty in some measurements but it was a worthwhile operation in fact all the occultists and this is a last case study that were operating in that realm end up working for the ss a year later to find mussolini and that's what i want to close with so according to a number of navy officers the institute produced no meaningful results nevertheless the institute indicates the third reich fueled by wartime necessity had moved into a new more open phase of border scientific experimentation the search for benito mussolini is emblematic of these continuing efforts um the inspiration for operation mars likely grew out of the pendulum institute so very few historians even recognize these things were going on much less see how they're linked but it's clear that the pendulum institute brought the ss into closer contact with a number of prominent border scientists including will wilhelm wolfe himmler's masseur and confidant felix kirsten claims to have facilitated wolf's rise by soliciting a horoscope of hitler which was forwarded to artur nega who was head of the criminal police under the ss and he thought well this is a really good horoscope so he forwarded that on potentially to himmler it's equally likely that wolf's yeoman work for the pendulum institute wolfe claims that he was able to find these ships you know unlike other people brought him to the attention of naba shellenberg and eventually himmler whatever the reason on 28 july 1943 almost a year to the date after the pendulum institute opened himmler ordered the gestapo to bring wolf to berlin there he met naba who instructed him as to the particulars of his mission mussolini had been kidnapped and himmler wanted wolf to locate yol ducey by astrological means now wolf was only the first of many occultists contacted a few days after vols interview with neba so they're giving them interviews to see if they're serious right the seer the clairvoyant kurt munk was taken out of saxonhousen concentration camp where he ended up after the hess action to berlin where he was asked to locate mussolini so he corroborates this he's like they just took me out of the camp and put me in berlin this is great um over the next few days nearly 40 more representatives of the occult sciences were assembled in a comfortable villa in vonsay probably neba's international criminal police headquarters they didn't know anything about the way that the ss worked but it seems to be where they were assembled upon arrival many of them demanded and were given copious amounts of food alcohol and cigarettes shellenberg would in fact complain that quote these seances cost us much money as these scientists need good food drink and tobacco to be effective schellenberg's ss colleague a guy named wilhelm hotel was more sympathetic to their seemingly epicurean requests no wonder that the poor devils having lived on starvation rations of the concentration camps for years exploited the opportunity to enjoy honey pots cigarettes and alcohol like come on you know it's tough in those concentration camps why don't we give them uh some good the good life for a while all this food and drink did nothing to dull their pretty natural senses wolf argued that his own calculations which took most of august and early september because he was serious right were instrumental in locating mussolini so too did monk who claimed that the ss produced an arzot's pendulum in a map of italy on which monk identified a dead spot in the abruzzo mountain so they're all claiming they found him right after the war most documentation indicates that it was the conventional intelligence of the sd and the ss assisted by the captain of a german seaplane squadron that pieced together mussolini's location years later so after this has all been deemed crazy this is very important historically by the 50s and 60s a lot of the nazis and germans and and navy leaders saying oh yeah we didn't really believe that right so years later hotel himself would admit that it was probably conventional intelligence that located el duce the whole operation he suggested in a memoir had been organized to placate himmler who of course had committed suicide right whose belief in the occult sciences were well known however contemporary accounts by hotel and others tell a different story so it's interesting to note that hotel's earliest memoir of the experience written before the negative post-war connotation associated with the nazi occult claim that the astrologers and dousers had indeed been successful so there's a high-ranking ss guy saying no they worked it's clearly the fact that they had occult powers equally significant is shellenberg's account now this is really fascinating because schellenberg the guy over there who replaced heidrick he famously would have wolf come down for a drink to his office and say so what's himmler asking you to to research now in the stars what have you been telling him as a way to kind of figure out what himmler's next plans were because you know himmler would listen to his astrologer which suggests he was a little bit skeptical but schellenberg in his own account says that the astrologers and diviners somehow located mussolini despite having quote no contact to the outside world unquote scorceni himself right the model for all these bond billions supposedly reported after the war that the ss had relied on quote sears and astrologers to glean mussolini's whereabouts so at least at the time they seemed to have thought this stuff worked such accounts indicate that many nazis and not only himmler took operation mars seriously so does the fact that him learn neba and shellenberg extracted more than 40 occultists from all over germany including the concentration camps you have to understand during the war it was very hard to get out of a concentration camp usually when you went in you stayed into the end of the war you got killed the fact that he's they're taking them out is remarkable but get this move them to a luxurious villa in bonsai himmler even followed through on his promise to grant occultists quote their freedom as well as one hundred thousand reichsmarks if they were successful when monk remember that guy who was taken out of saxonhausen submitted his petition for release the camp commander no doubt nonplussed by the request like you want to get out of the concentration camp again countered with the option of a cushier position as camp elder so you can be a capo i'm not letting you out of the concentration camp the astrologer insisted on his full release citing his work on behalf of quote the liberation of mussolini after the commander contacted the ss leadership monk was freed so either himmler or schullenberg said yeah he really did help us you got to let him out wolf wolf the guy was also in a concentration camp and was charging thousands of marks so it was illegal to exploit people with occult means that was one of the things the nazis did pursue that was already in the weimar republic if you were basically telling people whatever they wanted to hear to make money off of them claiming you had magic powers you could be arrested or fined wolf was doing this all the time that's why he was initially arrested but after the pendulum institute and the mussolini thing wolfe received amnesty and followed up with a request this is this is fantastic that the ss returned all his books and other occult materials that the gestapo had confiscated in the hess action more than two years earlier in late 1943 neba ordered the return of all of wilson library and a few months later wolfe became himmler's personal astrologer okay so um i don't want to go much further other than to say there's a lot of other examples beyond military intelligence that we just talked about the use of border science and racial resettlement and eastern colonization is something we could talk about in the question and answer biodynamic agriculture which comes out of anthroposophy and settlement in the east that's another theme i thought i'd throw out there human experiments in the holocaust i argue in the book are directly linked to this kind of thinking and these doctrines and then finally miracle weapons supernatural partisans and the collapse of the third reich you literally and i will end with this have a point in night late 44 and 45 when the when hitler himmler and goebbels are creating a werewolf partisan unit okay they call them werewolves because werewolves on the focus right have always been a positive monster that's germanic lives in the woods is masculine goes back to odin and thor to fight vampires the slavic and jewish interlopers from the east and even ethnic germans fleeing serbia reported on being attacked by slavic vampires who were really communist partisans okay i'm not making this up so even the end of the war can be seen as a fight between that's why i use the term twilight nazi vampires and slavic or jewish or nazi werewolves and slavic or jewish vampires so i'll leave it at that um some basic conclusions um to get back to a more academic frame of mind number one magic occultism and border science were generally taken quite seriously by the leaders of the third reich but especially after 39 which is remarkable instead of letting occultist language in concentration camps after the 1937 ban on astrology the 1941 hess action many nazi leaders hired the reich's most accurate astrologers diviners pendulum dousers anthroposophists and world ice theorists to produce propaganda provide military intelligence locate enemy battleships enhance agricultural production techniques and instruct german soldiers how to fight without regard for their own safety indeed many nazi leaders took the opportunity of the more restrictive legal environment after 37 and especially the hess action to enlist out-of-work occultists for their own purposes so think about this they make it impossible to practice occultism in the private sector and say hey you've got nothing to do come work for us right confiscated materials were not destroyed but made it to himmler and other leading ss men's personal libraries or amazingly were loaned out to germany's most famous parapsychologist hans bender remember him who was encouraged to open his own institute for the study of border science at the new reich university of strasbourg finally the selective tolerance of the supernatural might have waxed and waned due to changing circumstances and the omnipresent fear that occultism and border science could like christianity be manipulated to the detriment of the regime it is sectarian after all right but nazi paranoia regarding alternative ideological loyalties did not preclude utilizing occultism and border science to gain power shape propaganda and policy and pursue their dreams of racial utopia and empire thank you 50 minutes so that was amazing and scary and i think we'll have to open a pendulum institute here at some point anybody have any questions i was wondering what the connection was with the holocaust with this right so that's it's a it's a great it's a great question there's a lot there um i would say there's all three of the strands of my research the idea the occultism the pagan religion and the border science come together in the holocaust so on the one hand you have a eugenical eugenical theories that have left the boundaries of mainstream science the eugenics in the west it's horrible and ultimately most of it's pseudoscience right it doesn't really work it's not it's not practicable but the reason it didn't expand is because mainstream biologists and anthropologists like what are you doing with that syphilis experiment you haven't proved anything and most of the scientists and this this is you need this background to understand the difference right um who were practicing eugenics said you're right you know we can't there's double-blind tests you know it's too bad we killed all those poor african-americans but uh it isn't really working right eugenics doesn't make sense there were no massive programs of eugenics that lasted in the third reich they didn't really care whether it was accepted by international peer review so they would talk in darwinian eugenical ways but they're really getting the ideas from ariosaphy and anthroposophy of root races in atlantis and and world ice theory the idea that there are superior races and inferior races that some have monstrous qualities and abilities those are superhuman so when you think in those terms and the jews are the worst of all races and you're in a period of dearth and you're fighting against the jewish bolshevist menace all of a sudden eliminating jews is not a complex eugenical issue of well which jews do we eliminate and are they partially german becomes they're monsters that have to be gotten rid of now where do we see that reinforced we see that reinforced in the views of jews as vampires coming out of folklore so hitler himmler rosenberg they're all these analogies or just literal like equations of jews to parasitic monsters or literally vampires who like sleep under the earth and come out at night to attack aryan women and and suck out their life force and corrupt them um this is not just a nazi thing i mean there's examples even the mainstream film nosferatu is seen as a caricature of an east european jewish interloper with superhuman powers over an aryan i mean there's all sorts of cultural studies interpretations but i'm arguing that these things reinforce each other so the folklore and pagan religion and kind of mysticism that informs their anti-semitism is linked to eugenics and then the third thing is this border scientific idea of living space that also has a tradition on the focus right the idea that we need blood and soil that's pure where we can have german peasants warrior peasants who can fight against the slavic and jewish hordes and you combine all three in war and you can start to see why they say well we need to eliminate the jews and secondarily the slavs to have a pure german empire does that make sense i give a lot more detail in the book but all three of those things reinforce each other eric do you mind doing a quick touch on world ice if you can do such a thing yeah so world ice theory was invented by a an amateur scientist or kind of popular writer in the 1890s a guy named hans horbiger an austrian and later on that's a big deal he like hitler he's this brilliant non trained specialist who understands things better than mainstream scientists right it came to him in a dream he had a dream that there are giant blocks of ice smashing into each other um you know in the out in the cosmos and that that must explain everything and because he didn't know science he got an amateur astronomer named philip thought to write with him a book called glacial cosmogeny which i think came out in 1912 and immediately already you know mainstream scientists geologists geographers this is like one of them famously said if you just replaced ice with olive oil in the book it would be no less convincing right i mean it just was meaningless it was like a religion he had created that giant blocks of ice smashed into each other and there were moons of ice and when they hit the earth they created a flood and all the frost giants did well for a while but then they died out and the aryans you know lost their civilization atlantis collapsed fit in perfectly by the way with the focus occult ideas of the time and so in the 20s and 30s right-wing thinkers said well this is a great science this isn't jewish you know there's no einstein that we've got to worry about our freud with world ice theory and then hitler and himmler sponsored it in the third reich and i could get a whole part of a chapter that goes into the sponsorship of of world ice ciry there's a belief that the reason they didn't equip properly for stalingrad is because they thought that aryans are more immune to winter because of world ice theory and therefore you know the russians would suffer like they did in world war one because they're inferior and don't have these superpowers but the the germans will do okay there's some evidence of that anybody else oh david i'm curious what insight you have into german public opinion on some of these issues you've talked a lot about certain leaders captains and others but what about the people what sources do we have about what the german people bought into yes that's a great question and and and what's wonderful about the i showed you the some of those works more revisionist works from the 90s and 2000s they lay that groundwork for me so they show the proliferation of border scientific and astrological and occult thinking from the 1890s on so their argument is that if you were a a bourgeois german or austrian who hung out in a vienna or munich you know vienna cafe munich beer hall you believed in something that i talked about so their only difference from my argument is that well that didn't make you more susceptible to fascism than anyone else that there's bless you that liberalism and socialism and all these other movements are just as as attractive to you as someone who believes in world ice theory as fascism would be i'm arguing that's not the case like the empirical research shows that the people who are most invested in this tend to support the fascist parties but the fact is everyone according to them is interested in it now i show in the book that even nazis recognize or nazi affiliated scientists who don't like occultism that the socialists seem immune to it and the liberals and they acknowledge that while while liberals and socialists called into question all our traditional values which helped you know breed fascism which is good it's not their fault that we have these crazy ideas like world isiri that's the fault of the fascists who seem to kind of support that so even within the party there's a recognition that if you're a materialist marxist or a secular liberal or a very traditional christian you didn't find this stuff interesting now my my colleagues religious colleagues would argue oh no they they were interested too i i don't see as much evidence if you were an educated liberal or a socialist you were much less likely to visit an astrologer or like ludendorff you know think that there's weird conspiracies of people who can manipulate gold and you know and force your train to crash with mind waves and all these other things that right-wing thinkers seem to believe that you can smell a jew hundreds of meters away because they're from a different race yeah good question though uh there's in in the book uh the rise involved the third reich it's a really fascinating account of this man william houston chamberlain or maybe i got the name stewart chamberlain yeah right um that he was he was like the spiritual father of nazism and then he was traveling up from italy and he had a vision and he got off the train and just sat and wrote a book completely possessed completely channeled the book the foundation is the 19th century right and that book actually was the spiritual uh guide of hitler and all the people but you haven't mentioned him does he yeah i mentioned him in the book so first of all chamberlain is emblematic of a whole kind of and this is this gets us to some of the pagan religion stuff so germans in the post-romantic era decided for all sorts of reasons many germans and austrians that traditional judeo-christian identity greco-roman identity classical all this heritage that in the enlightenment many germans still embraced as a common western heritage were really the french and british view of of the european world and that germans were slightly different and part of that was the search for a new heritage which they found in a kind of common indo-aryan culture coming out of northwest india and persia and lots of thinkers who weren't racist also were fascinated by what germans called indology the field of studying india and indo-aryan science and religion and culture um chamberlain was one of these focused thinkers he's actually british but he hung out all the time in germany learned german married wagner's daughter hitler loved him as you pointed out who lent a kind of scientific sheen to this idea that there are these these superior races you can see how close this is to the occult doctrines at the same time they came out of an indo-aryan civilization there may have been a flood so the racist germans who embraced this idea said it was originally a proto-nordic people who after the flood and the collapse of atlantis or the thule society they went east and those who were left mated with native asians which is why asian culture is superior to african culture and why hinduism and buddhism are awesome religions and shinto the the the hindu and indian theorists on this say no it all originated here and then we moved west doesn't matter that much none of it's based in really rigorous science but it does all link together in this idea of an indo-aryan superior race which is why they all all these right-wing groups choose a swastika people see that as a superficial thing that's important why are they picking an indo-aryan fertility symbol and not just the nazis like all the german order all these occult groups because it's such a common belief that that's where the indo-aryan race comes from and religion and culture and certain occult powers that you of course you're gonna put a swastika on your book on your flag right it's the substitute for the cross and chamberlain believes in that stuff so that's why there's all sorts of interesting stuff in the third reich coming out of that but chamberlain's just one of many paul de la gard julius longbend tedor fritsch lonzon liebenfels we could talk about all these thinkers who make similar arguments all right well i know eric will answer questions while he's signing books if anybody wants to dive deep on any of these endless topics thank you so much really incredibly fascinating welcome thank you [Music] [Laughter] [Music] you

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Published: Tue Oct 31 2017