Invisible Eagle: The Hidden History of Nazi Occultism

Conclusion: the myth machine The Reality and Fantasy of Nazi Occultism

Occultism is a curious and fecund beast. Beliefs, and the events to which they give rise, have a frequently unfortunate habit of generating additional beliefs. If, as in the case of Nazi occultism, the initial beliefs were little more than crypto-historical idiocies, there can be little hope of improvement in their ideological progeny. This book has been as much a history of belief about Nazi occultism as about Nazi occultism itself, and there is little doubt that the principal driving force behind the development of this belief is an attempt to explain the dreadful aberration that was the Third Reich.

Given that human beings have always been fascinated with the occult and the supernatural, precisely because they promise so much in offering the prospect of a higher meaning to the vagaries of existence, and given also our quest for an answer to the problem of evil, it is only to be expected that many should seek to explain Nazism in terms that transcend the merely human. We noted in the Introduction that some serious orthodox historians place Hitler outside the spectrum of human behaviour — a spectrum that includes the most barbarous of crimes. Hitler is seen by them as uniquely evil, wicked beyond even the human capacity for wickedness. Others, who are inclined to accept the reality of a cosmic evil originating beyond humanity, in some Outer Darkness eternally forsaken by God, see Hitler and the Nazis as examples of how, given the right circumstances, this Darkness can enter humanity, an ‘eruption of demonism into history’.

Nevertheless, the demonic can easily be confused with insanity: one shudders to think of the number of unfortunates throughout history whose madness was mistaken by their fellows for possession by the forces of Darkness. We have seen that the origins of National Socialism can be traced to volkisch occultists who believed wholeheartedly not only in the existence of a prehistoric Germanic race of superhumans but also that their very superiority had been transmitted through the ages to modern Germans by means of a magically active, pure Aryan blood. The bizarre occult statements of Theosophists such as Madame Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner and others seemed to offer evidence of the existence of a fabulous Aryan race that established great civilisations on the lost continents of Atlantis, Lemuria and the mythical island of Thule in the incredibly remote past.

The idea of genuine Nazi occult power (as opposed to Nazi belief in that power) seems to have arisen out of our own continuing fascination with the legends in which the volkisch and Pan-German occultists believed so fervently. Belief in all aspects of the paranormal is extremely prevalent, whether it be belief in alien visitation, the spirits of the dead, dark and demonic forces from beyond the realm of humanity, or technologically advanced prehistoric civilisations such as those of Atlantis and Lemuria; and it seems to me that this belief lies at the core of the mythological development of Nazi occultism that has occurred in the second half of the twentieth century. For if the supernatural really exists, might not the Nazis have discovered a way to harness its power to further their dreadful ambitions?

The answer to this question must be negative: we have already seen that the evidence for Hitler’s initiation into the mysteries of the black arts is non-existent, while the evidence for his utter contempt for mysticism of any kind (particularly that practised by Himmler in Wewelsburg, his sick joke of a Grail castle) is documented time and again. Indeed, such was Hitler’s lack of interest in these matters that he never deigned even to visit Wewelsburg. What of Himmler, then? Did he not practise dark rites with his SS Gruppenfuhrers in their Order Castle, attempting to contact the souls of long-departed Teutons? The answer to this question is, of course, yes. However, occult-orientated writers have, over the years, continually made the same mistake in claiming that, because Himmler attempted to contact supernatural forces, those forces exist to be contacted. I consider myself a sceptic, rather than an incredulous doubter, [1] and so I cannot say that supernatural forces do not exist, any more than I can say that they do exist. In truth, no one can. But we must not allow ourselves to make any connection whatsoever between Himmler’s ideas on the supernatural and the veracity of the supernatural itself.

Ken Anderson makes an interesting point in his Hitler and the Occult:

To this we might add that the aura of mysticism surrounding the Nazis was enhanced and disseminated throughout German society by means of photography and cinema, notably Leni Riefenstahl’s virulently propagandist films, which include Triumph of the Will and Olympia, and which glorify German-ness and emphasise the inherent superiority of the Aryan race. The Nazis were nothing if not masters of self-promotion.

Just as the early volkisch occultists took various elements of prehistoric mythology to construct a totally spurious history for the Germanic ‘master race’, so many occult-orientated writers have taken the image of the Nazi black magician and his diabolical allies and with it have attempted to create an equally spurious history of the Third Reich. The insubstantial edifice of their wild speculations is ‘supported’ by the incorporation of Eastern mysticism, with its tales of hidden cities inhabited by ascended masters who are the real controllers of humanity’s destiny on Earth. Whatever their veracity, these myths are exquisitely beautiful and elaborate, and it is something of a tragedy that they should have been hijacked by Western writers in their quest to connect Nazism with a putative source of genuine occult power in the East.

We have also seen how Nazi cosmology, with its utterly insane notions of ‘World Ice’ and the Earth as a bubble in an infinity of rock, arose from the grandiose but untenable cosmological theories of previous centuries. Moreover, after the end of the Second World War they became part of the twentieth-century fascination with alternative cosmologies, including the Hollow Earth theory, which has stubbornly persisted to this day.

Another example of how the Third Reich generated strange rumours can be seen in the concept of the Nazi flying discs, which arose partly from admittedly intriguing (but still inconclusive) evidence, and partly from the unassailable evidence that Nazi scientists were indeed experimenting with radical aircraft designs and weapons systems. Thanks to clever manipulators of public opinion such as Ray Palmer, the quite possibly genuine mystery of the UFOs was ‘explained’ in terms of the rumours that the Nazis had actually perfected high-performance disc-shaped aircraft.

As we have seen, this in turn gave rise to the idea that these disc-planes were used by high-ranking Nazis to escape from the Allies during the fall of Berlin. Once again, it is clear that the various outlandish claims of Nazi hideouts in Antarctica owe their inception to genuinely puzzling events such as Admiral Byrd’s apparently disastrous Operation Highjump, in addition to the indisputable fact that many Nazi war criminals did indeed escape from the ruins of the Third Reich to take up residence in various South American countries. All of this provides conspiracy theorists with a heady mixture of components with which to construct their nightmarish scenario of hideous clandestine forces maliciously pulling the strings on which we all dance. At the risk of offering a cliche, what we have here is a classic example of putting two and two together and getting five.

As we noted in the Introduction, with the passage of time and the deaths of important first-hand witnesses any chance of finding an adequate explanation of Nazism and the horrors it unleashed has now almost certainly been lost. We are left with the awful question that will continue to haunt us for as long as we remain human: why? The question is made more awful by the likelihood that the answer lies not in Outer Darkness, not in the ‘Absolute Elsewhere’, but much closer, in that most frightening and ill-explored of realms: the human mind.