Nazi Secrets: An Occult Breach in the Fabric of History (7 page)

The most esoteric part of the castle was its North Tower, which was not destroyed even by the explosion at the end of the war, and is therefore supposed to store "powerful magical energies." It was to be the very spiritual center of the Aryan world, extending then to the adjacent cities around the castle, which were to be drastically modified according to the grandiose blueprints that were found after the war. The North Tower had a stone-lined room called the Obergruppenführersaal (SS Generals' Room) where the floor was inlaid with a Sun-Wheel symbol made of interlaced swastikas and sig runes, later to be called the Black Sun (see chapter on "The Black Sun"). On the walls were hanging the generals’ coat of arms, and in the center of the room stood an oak Arthurian round table for the twelve senior SS generals. In the underlying crypt, or "Land of the Dead," were also twelve matching urns that were intended to receive the ashes of the generals when they died. The Obergruppenführersaal was used only once in 1941 before Operation Barbarossa, which was the invasion of Russia.

Himmler had asked in 1938 to have a safe that only the castle commandant and he would know about. In the same mysterious confidential way, all Death's Head rings (Totenkopfring) of dead SS men had to be returned to a shrine in the castle.

Due to the Allied advance, namely of the US Army, an SS commando was sent on March 31, 1945, to destroy the castle and hide all the Death's Head rings in a secret location in the neighboring mountains. These were never found, despite the zeal of generations of treasure hunters.

Hexen Files

In 1935, Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler decided to build up a secret team of researchers, in charge of gathering information about the persecution of the witches and their trials throughout the ages. His SS gathered information not only in Germany but from other countries as well. They worked mostly undercover in German libraries and archives, pretending to look for their own genealogies. The 38,846 files were stocked in a Hexenkartothek (a witch file library). Each file stored information as to why a given witch was imprisoned, the details of her trials, and the types of torture that she was submitted to.

Chronicle of Schilling of Lucerne (1513), illustrating

the burning of a woman in Willisau (Switzerland) in 1447

The aim of these files was to prove the wicked involvement of the Catholic Church and beyond, of a Jewish conspiracy that was meant to destroy ancient Germanic creeds. The Christian faith had allegedly fought old pagan rituals in their most sacred places, like the famous Extern Steine close to the Wewelsburg castle, where ancient rites were performed from the oldest times man can remember. Pagan priests and priestesses were therefore burned as sorcerers and witches. The cellars of Himmler's beloved Wewelsburg were used until the 17th century to imprison persons suspected of being "witches and werewolves."

Germany was indeed one of the European countries that murdered the greatest number of so-called witches, counting them by the tens of thousands. It is worth mentioning that Himmler was told by SS genealogists that among his ancestors there was a witch who had been burned at the stake. The Brothers Grimm would contribute to have the legend about the persecution of the witches live on in their nationalist tales.

Researches in the field of witch persecutions were carried on until 1944, despite the ongoing war and the closing in of Allied forces from the West as well from the East. The last order related to this occult quest, given by Himmler in 1944 to his staff, was to try to prove that Von Stauffenberg, the main perpetrator of the bomb plot against Hitler, had among his ancestors witch persecutors.

None of the planned publications and books on the subject went through. What is left over from this incredible occultist search in the middle of the 20th century are the files of the Hexenkartothek: the originals are nowadays in Poznań (Poland), and a copy of them can be found on microfilms at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. They are not of much interest to modern scholars, since they were not collected according to the best scientific methods.

This case is real and has deep roots in the occult, but one must not deduce that Himmler wanted to cast spells on the Allies. His goal was only to prove a Christian-Jewish conspiracy against the ancient Aryans.

Hitler and Magic

Much has been written in the field of pseudo-esotericism and a makeshift evil genealogy of Hitler was made up in the later part of the 20th century, namely: he was Satan's medium, he sold his soul to the devil, he negotiated with Unknown Superiors from Shamballah, with extra-terrestrials from Aldebaran,
etc.
Most of these claims were Allied propaganda aiming at discrediting him. Some even said that he was involved in abnormal sexual practices, BDSM and the like. The truth is always stranger than fiction, though. This is the case with a book from Hitler's private library.

In the spring of 1945, the 101-St. Airborne Division found Hitler's library packed in crates and hidden in a salt mine near Berchtesgaden, where he had his Berghof Alpine chalet. In fact, there were only 3,000 books out of the estimated more than 16,000 that he was supposed to own in different locations. These books were later sent in the early ‘50s to the United States Library of Congress.

The most serious authors, like Nicholas Goodrick-Clark, now dismiss the idea that Hitler was seriously interested or involved in occultism. There are nonetheless occult and esoteric books in Hitler's library from such authors as Adamant Rohm, a "magnetopathic doctor"; Carl Ludwig Schleich, a Berlin physician using local anesthesia; and Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, aka Bô Yin Râ, who wrote books on reincarnation. The strangest and most marked book, though, is without doubt the one called Magic: History, Theory and Practice (1923) by Ernst Schertel.

Ernst Schertel, an early advocate in the ‘20s of the German nudist movement, tackled themes linked with magic, demons, eroticism, sadomasochism, and flagellation.

He dedicated a copy of his book to Adolf Hitler and sent it to him in 1923. This fact was made known to the public only in 2003, in an article published in The Atlantic Monthly by Timothy Ryback, the author of Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life.

Among the passages Hitler marked, one can find the following: "False images are necessary for the recognition of truth"; "He who does not have the demonic seed within himself will never give birth to a magical world"; and “Satan is the beginning…."

As a "reward," Dr. Ernst Schertel was sent into a concentration camp, and stripped of his PhD during the time that the war lasted. Isn’t all of this obviously hard proof of Hitler's involvement, or at least his interest in the occult? Hitler read a lot of books during his life, and if he were once interested in occultism it was rather during his early years while in Vienna, where he was supposed to be a regular reader of the racist occult magazine Ostara. Later in his life and even in Mein Kampf, he made fun of astrologers, mediums, seers and all "the occult rubbish" Himmler was so much involved in.

Wotan and the Aryan Archetype

Finally, let's mention the famous Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung's esoteric interest in archetypical explanations of Nazism, since they are closely related to a semi-religious paradigm. It is therefore no wonder that Jung maintained a dense correspondence for some time with Miguel Serrano, the Chilean Nazi diplomat, about psychology and more esoteric topics about Jung's archetype theory.

Wotan aka Odin, the Norse God

In his essay, first published in 1936 in Zurich as Wotan in the Neue Schweizer Rundschau, when writing about Nazism in Germany, Jung suggests, "Perhaps we may sum up this general phenomenon as Ergriffenheit – a state of being seized or possessed. The term postulates not only an Ergriffener (one who is seized) but also, an Ergreifer (one who seizes). Wotan is an Ergreifer of men, and unless one wishes to deify Hitler – which did indeed actually happen – he is really the only explanation."

Furthermore, in the book Black Sun, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke writes how Carl Jung showed "Hitler as possessed by the archetype of the collective Aryan unconscious, and could not help obeying the commands of an inner voice." Hitler referred often indeed to his "inner voice" and to the Providence that helped him during many difficult moments of his life.

Carl Jung thought of Hitler as an archetype, often manifesting itself to the complete exclusion of his own personality. "Hitler is a spiritual vessel, a semi-divinity; even better yet: a myth. Benito Mussolini is a man ... the messiah of Germany who teaches the virtue of the sword. The voice he hears is that of the collective unconsciousness of his race". This brings us to all the underground theories about Hitler as a medium of Higher Powers, as it was brought up by less-serious authors.

POST-WAR MYTHS

There are just a few serious books on Nazi occultism. The reliable references on this subject are mainly and almost exclusively those of Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's in The Occult Roots of Nazism and of Joscelyn Godwin's in Arktos, The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival. They address the question from an erudite and academic point of view, but they nonetheless have the merit of drawing the line between the historical facts and the fantasies, or shall we say the pure lies, made up by hoaxer charlatans.

Our position is that people interested in Nazi esotericism deserve the truth, and that they prefer to see a myth they hung on to be rightly debunked, rather than waste time on useless quests. Like Sagan once said: "It is not whether we like the conclusion that emerges out of a train of reasoning, but whether the conclusion follows from the premise or starting point, and whether that premise is true." As Colin Summerhayes from the Scott Polar Institute summarizes perfectly in his article Hitler’s Antarctic Base: The Myth and the Reality: "The burden of proof should fall on the shoulders of those making the claims. It is not sufficient to propose an idea and then claim that the hypothesis is untestable, because the evidence for it has been covered up."

The Allies discovered the horror of the concentration camps, and faced something they were not prepared to see in the 20th century, especially in a very civilized country like Germany was thought to be. Why all these murders? Why this barbarian ruthless will to exterminate? Why did the Nazi regime give priority to their train convoys of Jews, even as the war was coming to an end, when the German army was in such need of transportation to stop the Allied forces from advancing? What hidden agenda did they have behind this?

These almost twelve years of the Third Reich followed rules that were completely different from the rest of the civilized world; and the same is true of their philosophies, their goals, and their very concepts about how they viewed human life and history. Pauwels and Bergier, though they also narrated many unsubstantiated stories about that era, invented a very relevant wording for what happened: they called it "The Absolute Elsewhere."

The Morning of the Magicians

The Morning of the Magicians is a book written in France by Pauwels and Bergier in 1960. It was a best-seller, and it was subsequently translated in many languages. The content of the book was mainly thrilling stories, and as such they were mostly unsubstantiated on a historical and scientific level.

They tackled many subjects like ancient astronauts, spiritism, and out-of-place artifacts, and they dedicated a whole section to Nazi esotericism. In the way they presented this "breach in the fabric of history," they happened to have forerunners from ever since the early ‘30s, when there were mostly French books that associated Hitler with evil dark forces, or even the devil incarnate himself.

Pauwels and Bergier mixed quite unknown but true facts about the Nazi era with some pure fantasies made up of their own imagination. They mentioned the now well-known Hörbiger's theories about the Ice World, its falling moons and the subsequent sinking of Atlantis; the Hollow Earth Theory; the Thule Society and the inevitable Vril Society.

We took the trouble to quote some pertinent experts' opinions, but Pauwels and Bergier invented a completely different life for Professor Haushofer, who was allegedly a member of the secret society of the Green Dragon in Japan, and who committed the Japanese harakiri ritual to end his life just after the war was over, exactly as he would have promised to his Asian initiators.