In the eighty years since the Second World War, few topics have been as carefully and as closely studied by popular historians as the rise of the Nazi Party.
Adolf Hitler preyed on prejudices and exploited the fears of ordinary people to assume power and force through his fascistic vision for Europe.
Fascism and the crude origins of ‘race science’ have been broken down to better understand, and avoid, their conditions.
But less well understood is how the party traces its beginnings to esoteric, cultish traditions – and how they, in turn, would come to guide the Nazis towards expensive digs around the world in search of evidence of a lost Aryan race of superhumans, once supposedly imbued with the gift of psychic powers.
While Nazi engagement with the occult has largely been a footnote of history, reserved for quick allusions in the Indiana Jones films and cartoonish video games, research shows the Nazis did, in fact, lean into ‘magic’ and sponsor huge efforts to reclaim a fabled ancient folk history.
The Nazis harnessed distrust in science and ‘truth’ to rally voters and undermine traditional authorities.
But their willingness to hinge vital war operations on blind faith in tarot readers, death rays and astrology, collecting thousands of mystical tomes and financing excavations in pursuit of a lost ‘divine’ civilisation, suggests they may have also let superstition play a key role in the forming of the Third Reich.
Holocaust architect Heinrich Himmler (L, next to Adolf Hitler) collected works on the occult and collected thousands of works over his lifetime
Interest in the Nazi relationship to the supernatural has found its way into popular culture (Pictured: Harrison Ford and Karen Allen star in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981))
Expedition members pose for a photo during the 1938-39 German expedition to Tibet under SS-officer Ernst Schafer. Himmler ostensibly wanted Schafer to research Hanns Horbiger’s theory of World Ice Theory
Nazi fascination with the supernatural has made it into the mainstream in the last few decades – but remains largely underexplored in academia.
The 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark pits archaeologist Indiana Jones against Nazi forces in Egypt in a struggle to recover the Ark of the Covenant – an ancient relic mentioned in the Old Testament that, in the film, is believed to hold the power to make armies invincible.
The plot seems far-fetched, but the trope has stuck. In the Marvel cinematic universe, the Nazis steal a mysterious relic called the Tesseract in Norway to gain special powers.
The popular Call of Duty game series draws on Nazi interest in revival of the dead, ‘wonder weapons’, teleportation and space exploration for one of its most popular features.
But until recently, links between the Nazi Party and the supernatural, the occult and the so-called ‘border sciences’ have been downplayed in research, judged a little facetious. Eric Kurlander, an American historian at Stetson University, argues the issue deserves more attention.
Kurlander’s ‘Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich’ suggests the Nazis were part of a generation that grew up distrustful of the scientific method and willing to engage with fantastical theories that reflected Germany’s proud image of itself in nationalistic folk – or Völkisch – stories.
In the early 20th century, astrology, dowsing and tarot reading all attracted large circles of genuine believers looking to fill the void as Christianity waned.
At the same time, German nationalists – inspired by the country’s unification in 1871 – began forging folk stories of their proud, Aryan origins and the dangers of foreign invaders, often painted as vampires and other mythical beings.
The German stories were ‘more violent, fantastical and arguably racist’ than their equivalents in Britain and France, filled with references to ‘malevolent Jews’ and ‘manipulative demons’, Kurlander says.
Vampires were painted as sinister creatures from eastern Europe in Germany, representing a ‘kind of Polish and later Jewish danger’, while werewolves were tasked with protecting German lands from foreign invaders. Nazi units later took their name.
Popular writers embedded their work with hateful prejudices, claiming ‘pure-blooded’ Aryans had once held psychic powers and special abilities (supposedly lost from race-mixing), while Jewish people were painted as being ‘materialistic’ with no capacity for transcendence.
But it was the Nazis who would try to legitimise these fears by finding evidence of these far-fetched theories with excavations around the world.
The Nazi Party brought together strange ideas about the workings of the world with a paranoid and nationalistic history, taking their shape from secret underground groups like the Thule Society.
The Thule Society, formed from the Germanic Order before it, brought together a number of study circles interested in criticism of international capitalism, Jewish financing, racial genealogy, Nordic culture and mythology, David Luhrssen notes in ‘Hammer of the Gods: The Thule Society and the birth of Nazism’.
It was this group that would ultimately sponsor the German Worker’s Party that Hitler would reorganise into the National Socialist German Workers’ Party — the Nazi party.
As Thule members had gathered to speak about the ‘World Ice Theory’ – a discredited theory holding that the universe was born from a clash of icy spheres – so the Nazis financed expeditions around the world to back up their revised history.
The Ahnenerbe group, affiliated with the SS, dig for evidence of German ancestry in 1935
The Oera Linda manuscript was said to contain mythological secrets of antiquity, now considered a hoax. The public became aware in the 1860s and came back into focus in the 1930s under the Nazis
The Thule society adopted the swastika, meaning ‘well being’ in Sanskrit, before the Nazis eventually coopted it for their movement
World Ice Theory held that much of the world was created when a water-filled star collided with a much larger star, causing an explosion.
An ice comet then crashed into the earth containing ‘divine sperma’, and scattered humans and animals across the planet, before ancient Aryans had their civilisation destroyed by another crashing ice moon.
The Ahnenerbe was tasked with researching and promoting pseudo-scientific racial theories
This was, of course, all revealed to founding theorist Hanns Hörbiger in a dream. With no scientific background, he claimed he awoke with intuitive knowledge of the physics of the solar system, and published a book with amateur astronomer Philip Fauth in 1921.
One day, archaeologists would be able to uncover evidence of the lost society of the ancient race, followers believed. These ideas remained on the periphery as a kind of ‘fringe science’ until the Nazi rise.
When the Nazis came to power, they commissioned digs around the world in the hope of recovering some of these ancient, forgotten artefacts.
Before the outbreak of war, an official expedition was sent to Tibet to scout for evidence that Aryans lived in the Himalayas before their civilisation was destroyed by an ice moon.
Then, between 1935 and 1945, the SS oversaw the ‘Ahnenerbe’, an organisation tasked with promoting racial doctrines and scouring the world for evidence of historical Aryan civilisation, financing digs at old Viking trading posts for mythical ‘Nordic’ relics.
The Ahnenerbe grew out of the Herman Wirth Society, founded by a Dutch-German scholar fascinated by Thule, the legend of Atlantis and recovering the supposed prehistoric Arctic ice-continent where the Aryans were meant to have been born.
Wirth’s searches took him to Friesland in the 1920s, where he uncovered bizarre decorations he assumed must be ancient Germanic hieroglyphs. They turned out to be random ornaments. Wirth nonetheless relayed his findings to Heinrich Himmler.
Himmler, who leant into mysticism and the racist ‘philosophy’ of ancient Aryan history from a young age, amassed a collection of 13,000 books on the occult – and his SS based its logo on Armanen runes invented by occultist and eugenicist Guido von List.
But ‘there was no border science in the Third Reich that was more widely or uncritically embraced than World Ice Theory,’ Kurlander writes in a 2017 adaptation of the book.
An authentically ‘German’ science, it was the ‘perfect exemplar of Nazi border science’. Nazi intellectual Edgar Dacqué said it represented a combined ‘racial spirit of the times and science’, and a move away from ‘foreign’ science.
Kurlander writes that Hitler had even spoken about building a huge observatory in Linz, Austria, his hometown, to represent ‘the three great cosmological conceptions of history—those of Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Hörbiger’.
He was even said to have suggested that one day, World Ice Theory could replace Christianity.
Hitler’s membership card for the German Worker’s Party (DAP)
Pictured: Child survivors of Auschwitz. The Nazis used pseudoscientific and anti-Semitic theories to justify their policy towards Jews, Roma, Sinti, the disabled, Black people and Slavic people. Six million Jewish people and millions of others were killed during the Holocaust
Needless to say, digs around the world did not uncover an ancient race of Aryan superhumans.
But Nazi faith in the esoteric remained strong until the end of the war.
The Thule society drew on pseudoscientific ideas about history and German mythology. Members would go on to found the DAP, which was later reformed into the Nazi Party
There are records of Hitler using ‘dowsers’ – using rods to find water, precious metals – to scan his Reich Chancellery for harmful ‘death rays’, and he also read a book on ‘magic’ penned by a fringe parapsychologist, Kurlander claims.
The Nazis also hired astrologers to acquire military intelligence during the war.
The Gestapo banned debunkers from shedding light on the secrets of magic, worried about offending Hitler and the public, Kurlander writes.
When Mussolini was toppled, the Nazi leadership released ‘experienced’ dowsers and magicians to find him with no expense spared.
When commandos eventually tracked him down, the magicians took credit. Rather than being laughed out of the room, however, Himmler appointed lead magician Wilhelm Wulf his personal astrologer.
Kurlander paints Himmler as a skeptic of modern medicine, studying the fields of homeopathy, herbalism and mesmerism – an invisible life force that could encourage healing.
‘He also followed the advice of ariosophic thinkers … [who] believed that practising yoga could release cosmic energies tied to astral bodies,’ he writes.
Nazi interest in the occult had much deeper ideological roots than the mere utility of undermining empirical science that may have contradicted their racial theories.
The Nazis did try to measure heads to determine race – an idea borrowed from pseudoscientific doctrines, later dropped when it failed to yield results.
And anti-Semitic views certainly did undercut trust in sciences dominated by Jewish intellectuals, with the ‘border sciences’ offering an alternative world view that promised to resolve waning faith in mainstream religion.
Some of these new sciences – resentful of the ‘souless natural sciences’ – called for a reappropriation of ‘German land’ and a ‘purification’ of ancient bloodlines.
But the unbridled faith in astrology and tarot to help win the war suggests a more genuine belief that the pseudosciences really could change their fortunes.
The main entrance to the Auschwitz II death camp, pictured in 2019
A Hitler Youth rally on National Socialist Party Day in 1933
There is also a sense of opportunism to Hitler’s willingness to adopt popular ideas during his rise to power. Alfred Rosenberg remarked that ‘many Germans’ took up Nazism ‘due to their proclivity for the romantic and the mystical, indeed the occult’.
The Black Sun wheel originated in Nazi Germany and has been co-opted by neo-Nazis since. Its use and significance under the Nazis is unknown
Hermann Rauschning, a conservative politician who renounced Nazism in 1934, credited the Nazi success with the fact that ‘every German has one foot in Atlantis, where he seeks a better fatherland’.
Hitler himself described his followers in 1931 as fighters for a ‘unique spiritual – I would almost say divine – creation’ and spoke of how the ‘spiritual energy’ of a people could ‘recapture what it has lost in a thousand years of warfare’.
He had praised how the new German folklore helped shaped the culture. He saw the value in common beliefs and scientific frameworks that undermined traditional institutions.
‘By binding Jews, communists and freemasons to images of vampires, zombies, demons, devils, spectres, alien parasites and other supernatural monsters, the Third Reich helped to justify otherwise exaggerated responses to an enemy who did not seem to adhere to the same cultural code,’ Kurlander concludes in his 2017 work.
Still, the idea is debated. The late British historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke argued that much of the post-war research into Nazi occultism was ‘sensational and under-researched’.
But understanding some of the prevalent ideas during this period goes some way towards putting the rise of the Nazi party into context, which helps us today recognise the hallmarks of fascism – the erosion of truth, the marketing of fear and the loss of faith in traditional institutions.
Himmler adopted the Wewelsburg Castle as an SS base, ‘cult site and spiritual centre’ on advice of occultist and SS officer Karl Maria Wiligut
Adolf Hitler (pictured in Berlin, 1936) adopted pseudo-scientific theories to justify deplorable policies – and appealed to folk stories to rally the German public
After the Second World War, the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt attempted to understand the conditions that allowed the Nazi party to rise in Germany in the early 1930s.
She focused on the emergence of new material conditions and a reshaping of ideas that prepared the world for totalitarian politics. The Origins of Totalitarianism was controversial but set out to understand the mentality that allowed huge swathes of the population to be drawn into the populist movement.
The Nazi fascination with the occult does not paint a full picture, but goes some way towards framing the people of Weimar Republic – for the similarities and differences they share with societies today.
Eight years ago, a leader of the far-right AfD party in Germany – which made significant gains in elections this year – sought to destigmatise the term ‘Völkisch’, raising concern about the resurgence of dangerous ideas in Europe.
Neo-Nazi hate groups in the US continue to make reference to runic symbols in their messaging today, and rioters in Britain this summer appeared marked with Nazi swastikas.
The story of German folklore, Völkisch nationalism, the Thule Society and the German Workers Party reflect a human history, with lessons that carry a stark warning into the present.