Monstrous Science

This chapter illustrates the ways in which science and the supernatural intersected in the Third Reich's approach to anti-Semitism, human experimentation, and ethnic cleansing. Certainly, the Nazi resettlement project was based on broader European colonial premises and practical military-economic necessities. The ideology that guided these policies, however, was fuelled by supernatural conceptions of race and space. Similarly, not all aspects of Nazi eugenics were motivated by border science. However, Nazi attempts to sterilize and murder millions went beyond any prevailing understanding of eugenics in natural scientific circles within the United States, Britain, or Sweden. If the process of genocide was conducted in a highly technocratic fashion, its foundations lay in a conception of the Jews as supernatural monsters. Only by associating Jews with vampiric, parasitic, almost superhuman opponents locked in a centuries-old conspiracy to destroy the Aryan race could the Nazis lay the conceptual groundwork for murdering so many innocent civilians in so monstrous a fashion.

Exploiting Hitler’s Magic

This chapter illustrates how the National Socialist Workers' Party (NSDAP) appropriated supernatural ideas in order to appeal to ordinary Germans, enlisting the help of occultists and horror writers in shaping propaganda and political campaigning. By exploiting the supernatural imaginary, Hitler tied his political mission into something out of the Book of Revelation, as one ‘divinely chosen’ to create the Third Reich. The chapter then looks at three case studies. The first assesses Hitler's approach to politics through his reading of Ernst Schertel's 1923 occult treatise, Magic: History, Theory, Practice. The second considers the NSDAP's propaganda collaboration with the horror writer, Hanns Heinz Ewers. The third delves into the relationship between the NSDAP and Weimar's most popular ‘magician’, Erik Hanussen. In coopting Schertel's magic, enlisting Ewers, and forming an alliance with Hanussen, the Nazis diverted the masses from objective reality and toward the coming Third Reich.

The Supernatural and the Second World War

This chapter evaluates the influence of the supernatural imaginary on the Third Reich's conception of foreign policy, investment in fanciful weaponry, and use of astrology, divination, clairvoyance, and telepathy in prosecuting the war. The Second World War was neither caused nor directed primarily by occult designs. However, many aspects of the war were influenced or determined by folklore, border science, and the broader Nazi supernatural imaginary. Rather than rely on a practical evaluation of risks and rewards, Hitler frequently tapped into his own intuition in making foreign-policy decisions and appealed to the German people's collective unconscious in selling his aggressive policies. Abetting Hitler's faith-based foreign policy, the Propaganda Ministry and Foreign Office employed professional astrologers and diviners to produce wartime propaganda aimed at both the Allies and the German public. Finally, the Third Reich utilized occultism and border science to gather military intelligence, search for enemy battleships, and train Nazi soldiers.

The Supernatural Roots of Nazism

This chapter discusses the occult, mythological, and ‘border scientific’ ideas that permeated Vienna's cafés and Munich's beer halls before the First World War. Although these ideas were remarkably fluid and interconnected, they fall loosely into three overlapping subcultures. The first is Ario-Germanic religion, folklore, and mythology. The second is occultism, including the esoteric doctrines of theosophy, anthroposophy, and ariosophy. Third and finally is the so called ‘border sciences’, ranging from astrology, parapsychology, and radiesthesia (‘dowsing’) to World Ice Theory. These subcultures played an important role in the rise of Nazism. First, in terms of ideological content, all three subcultures circulated and popularized ideas and doctrines that informed the Nazi supernatural imaginary and impressed a broader Nazi constituency. Second, these subcultures legitimized an esoteric and border scientific approach to understanding the world that informed Nazi thinking on race and space, science and religion.

Lucifer’s Court

This chapter explores the Nazis' interest in Germanic paganism, witchcraft, Luciferianism, and Eastern spirituality in their attempt to find a suitable Ario-Germanic alternative to Christianity. The Third Reich embraced a range of pagan, esoteric, and Indo-Aryan religious doctrines that buttressed its racial, political, and ideological goals. That is why Nazism posed a different threat to Christianity than secular liberalism or atheist Marxism. Nazi religiosity was a ‘fluid and incoherent thing which expresses itself in several different forms’. Part of a shared supernatural imaginary, these various religious strains were to some extent embraced and exploited by the Third Reich in the process of building spiritual consensus across a diverse Nazi Party and an even more eclectic German population.

The Third Reich’s War on the Occult

This chapter examines the regime's policies toward occultists in the early to middle years of the Third Reich, including ‘Hitler's Magicians' Controversy’ — a debate over whether to allow professional anti-occultists to debunk ‘magic’ and occultism. When the regime worked to repress or ‘coordinate’ esoteric groups, it had more to do with controlling than eliminating occult ideas. Indeed, like border scientists generally, many Nazis worked carefully to distinguish between commercial and popular occultism on the one hand and ‘scientific’ occultism on the other. While the Nazis indicated considerable hostility toward commercial occultism, practitioners of the scientific variety enjoyed remarkable latitude, even sponsorship, by the Third Reich. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the ‘Hess Action’ against the occult and its longer term consequences.

Epilogue

This epilogue argues that the Nazi movement had closer ties to occult, border scientific, and pagan-mythological ideas and doctrines than any mass political party. To be sure, Hitler and the Nazi Party may have broken with the Thule Society that helped inspire National Socialism. Yet the Society's border scientific doctrines persisted within the Nazi supernatural imaginary. Not all Germans who shared elements of this supernatural imaginary were fascists, racist imperialists, or anti-Semites. But that is precisely why the Nazis' exploitation of the supernatural imaginary was so effective in attracting and maintaining support from a broad cross section of the German population. The NSDAP's appeal to such ideas helped the party transcend the thorny social and political reality of Depression-era Germany. It allowed a party with no clear political or economic programme to supersede the materialist, class-based rhetoric of the left, the pragmatic republicanism of the liberal centre, and the more traditional conservatism of the Catholic and Protestant centre right.

The Stars Come Down to Frozen Earth

This chapter looks systemically at the application of the ‘border sciences’ promoted by many Nazis, including astrology, World Ice Theory, and ‘biodynamic’ agriculture, between 1933 and 1941. In terms of astrology and parapsychology, biodynamic agriculture, and World Ice Theory, the regime's approach was often highly public. High-profile support for border science is evident in the regime employing biodynamic agriculture to prepare the athletics grounds for the 1936 Olympics or in Hitler and Himmler promoting World Ice Theory as official science despite the opposition of the entire academic establishment. Similarly, when it comes to anthroposophy's border scientific approach to ‘higher knowledge’ — whether in terms of radiesthesia, natural healing, or biodynamic agriculture — a remarkable number of Nazis expressed enthusiasm and support. During the Second World War, this border scientific approach to decision-making and policy helped facilitate projects both fantastical and monstrous.

From the Thule Society to the NSDAP

This chapter examines the organizational and ideological connections between late-Wilhelmine occult organizations such as the German Order and Thule Society and the early National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). The Thule Society and early Nazi movement shared a supernatural imaginary that transcended the particulars of their internal political and organizational differences. They were all, to varying degrees, fascinated by Nordic mythology and Germanic paganism, occult doctrines such as ariosophy, and border scientific theories of race (‘blood’), space (‘soil’), and psychology (‘magic’). In contrast to the mainstream parties that dominated the first decade of the Weimar Republic, the NSDAP drew upon a broader supernatural imaginary which spoke to a diverse social milieu that had lost faith in secular liberalism, traditional Christian conservatism, and Marxist socialism. Like the Germans themselves, many Nazis, living in a society riddled by crisis, increasingly viewed popular aspects of occultism, paganism, and border science as fundamental to negotiating the complexities of modern life.

Nazi Twilight

This chapter looks at the regime's increasingly desperate, if futile, investment in ‘miracle weapons’, partisan warfare, and cataclysmic ‘twilight’ imagery during the final years of the war, providing a fitting corollary to the disintegration of the Third Reich. During the final months of the war, when defeat appeared inevitable, many Nazis and millions of ordinary Germans wanted to believe that death was not permanent, that fantasy was reality, and that a ‘magical priest’ might rescue them from annihilation. In this way, the regime's fanciful invocation of miracle weapons, of partisan werewolves and vampires, and of ritual self-immolation, functioned as a form of therapy for Germans suffering through material and psychological distress. However, if twilight imagery helped Germans reconcile themselves to everyday violence, criminality, and loss, it also augured the disintegration of the Third Reich and Germany's post-war rebirth.