by J H Brennan
Chamberlain was aware of demons for most of his life. They drove him relentlessly to study and write. Their promptings explained the butterfly approach to his student career as he hopped from music to philosophy to botany to history. In 1896, a demon assailed him while he was traveling on a train, so that he was forced to cut his journey short, shut himself up for eight days in a hotel room in Gardone, and produce a thesis on biology. Most of his major works were written in this way. He would fall into trance and work feverishly, with little attention to his own comfort or surroundings. Afterward he would read the material with a sensation of surprise, unable to recognize it as his own. Foundations was written like this, the result of a demonic possession that lasted nineteen months.
If this was a work of fiction and our natural disbelief in demons had been suspended, we might by now be waiting with some impatience for the hero of our story, who would surely be a mystic representative of the Powers of Light. In reality, such a figure did indeed appear in the form of the quartermaster general, Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the Imperial General Staff of the German Army.
Von Moltke was a student of medieval mysticism, with particular reference to the history of the Holy Grail. He was also a close personal friend of Rudolph Steiner, an occultist of genius, who taught that individual evolution could be hastened by means of esoteric exercises and techniques. Whether von Moltke actually practiced these mystic disciplines we do not know, for like most occultists he was more reticent about the application of his studies than about the studies themselves. But it is likely that he did; and it is known that his insights were deep enough to leave him profoundly disturbed by the influence of Chamberlain on his kaiser.
As Europe moved inexorably into war, von Moltke, in his capacity of chief of staff, supervised the complex mobilization of the German forces. He was at his desk in the Konigsplatz Headquarters when he was swept away by one of the most dramatic esoteric experiences of his career. He plunged into a spontaneous nine-minute trance, which army doctors afterward dismissed as the result of strain and exhaustion. Von Moltke interpreted the experience differently and bequeathed to future generations the description of an intriguing and impressive vision.
It seemed as if his mind was swept back through time to the ninth century, where he found himself observing incidents in the life of the medieval pontiff, Pope Nicholas I. Interwoven with this scene was a curious understanding of the historical process and a recognition that the world of centuries past had not obeyed the same hard rules of physics as governed our planet in 1914. In the days of Pope Nicholas, it was apparent that mankind was blessed with an expanded awareness, an extended conscious experience of spiritual realms and transcendental realities.6 But it was also apparent that such a state of consciousness would not last. In order that men should develop an analytical intellect and the scientific method take its proper place in the evolution of our species, a narrowing of attention became necessary. Pope Nicholas himself foresaw this development and privately predicted a time when the people of Europe would have only an awareness of three-dimensional reality. Direct experience of the spirit worlds would become the prerogative of a very few. For the masses, the only sustenance would be revealed religion; but even here, the activities of the Infernal Hierarchies would go a long way toward convincing men that the physical world was the only reality. Although the time scale of this grim development was measured in centuries, it was seen ultimately as a temporary necessity. The day would come when evolution reopened the psychic centers of mankind and once again allowed direct perception of spirit worlds.
In the course of his vision, von Moltke perceived something even more intriguing. He became aware of the effect of reincarnation on the historical process. It seemed to him that certain personalities reappeared on Earth at certain times, often grouped together to act out parallel dramas at different historical periods. In Pope Nicholas he recognized an early incarnation of himself, while his cardinals and bishops included members of the German General Staff. Later, in waking consciousness, all this struck him as unlikely, but the concept proved too disturbing to dismiss. Years of careful analysis showed him there were indeed parallels between the two situations. For example, both the medieval popes and the German General Staff were withdrawn from the mundane world, and, more important, both were vitally concerned with the future of Europe.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the vision was the graphic prediction of mankind’s impending plunge into materialism. It was as if humanity were gradually falling asleep. Spiritual origins were forgotten. The once-empirical reality of higher planes and dimensions became nebulous and was eventually denied altogether. Blind chance was evoked to explain both the historical and evolutionary processes. In the forthcoming First World War, whole nations of sleepwalkers prepared to slaughter one another. This development was, perhaps, a spiritual necessity, designed to reawaken mankind through the medium of suffering, but it was an unpalatable necessity just the same. Von Moltke emerged from his vision a very troubled man.
The experience must have had a profound effect on von Moltke’s outlook. Yet despite the revelation that a long, hard war was necessary, history shows he did his utmost to shorten the duration of the conflict. But his efforts were fruitless in the face of circumstance. The German master plan failed miserably and swiftly, and the war settled into the horrific stalemate typified by Flanders Fields. The failure led to the dismissal of von Moltke and his replacement as chief of staff by General Eric von Falkenhayne. By 1916, von Moltke was dead.
His story did not, however, end with his death. His widow, Eliza, was convinced she could still communicate with him and brought through a lengthy series of messages that, some occultists maintain, still circulate in photocopies through several of Germany’s many modern secret societies. The messages were in the nature of prophecies: a defeat for Germany in the 1914–18 war, the fall of the Romanovs and the establishment of a Communist regime in Russia, the rise of fascism as an international creed, and the establishment of Adolf Hitler (whom he named) as the führer of Germany. There was, too, a reference to a familiar figure in these communications. Von Moltke predicted that his occult archenemy, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, would be among the first influential figures in Germany to welcome Hitler as the new messiah. In this, as in his other predictions, the spirit of von Moltke was all too accurate. None of these predictions was made in a vacuum. They were presented as essential outcomes of an unorthodox view of history, the long-term results of processes that began centuries earlier, hastened by the multiple reincarnations of personalities who had been intimately involved in the earlier dramas. They resulted from the communications of a disembodied spirit.
Within two decades, the disembodied spirits were at their war work again.
18. THE SPIRITS AND THE FÜHRER
THE FIRST WORLD WAR, WHICH BEGAN IN 1914, ENDED FOUR YEARS later with the signing of an armistice in a disused railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne. Months later, in 1919, the position was formalized in the Treaty of Versailles which demanded from Germany its old colonial possessions, massive financial reparations, and an admission of guilt for the whole sorry affair. That same year, a thirty-year-old war veteran named Adolf Hitler joined the tiny, obscure German Workers Party. Two years later, he became its leader. By then, the party had been reorganized, expanded, and renamed. It was now the National Socialist German Workers Party or, more concisely, the Nazis. In 1923, the party welcomed a new recruit named Heinrich Himmler.
Himmler’s appearance on Germany’s political stage—he was already head of an embryo SS when elected to the Reichstag in 1930—shows that spirit influence was still evident in European politics during the Nazi period and throughout the Second World War. There is evidence it may not have been confined to Himmler.
By the early 1930s, clubs devoted to all manner of esoteric matters had sprung up across the whole of Germany—there were fifty-two of them in Berlin alone.1 They attracted a wide range of influential people from various
walks of life, including the military, medicine, business, finance, and the arts. Among their activities were séances that attempted to contact spirit beings. An indication of their potential influence may be drawn from the fact that the host of one such series of séances was a wealthy aristocrat who sat on the board of I. G. Farben, the massive chemical conglomerate.
There is no doubt at all about the popularity of spirit communication and other occult practices in Germany before the First World War. In the devastation of the immediate postwar period and throughout the long, inflation-ridden economic crisis that followed, interest in such matters actually increased as people sought to escape from their everyday problems and find a deeper meaning to their lives. The country swarmed with psychics and mediums—one estimate puts their number at more than twenty thousand—keen to meet the demand. An example of the breed was Hermann Steinschneider, who achieved fame in Berlin as a stage mentalist under the name of Erik Jan Hanussen.
In the early stages of his career, Hanussen made no assertions beyond an ability to fool audiences using clever stagecraft, but by the late 1920s all that had changed. Hanussen now claimed a genuine psychism that led to communication with spirit forces and a consequent ability to prophesy. On one occasion, shortly after he moved to Berlin from his native Vienna, he fell into a trance in a museum and established contact with the spirit of a drowned woman whose glove was one of the objects on display. On another occasion, he was visited by the shade of his mistress, Betty Schostak, who had just died in a hospital. Whether Hanussen’s mediumship was genuine or simply a ruse to enhance his stage reputation has proven a matter of considerable controversy. His most recent biographer, Arthur J. Magida, appears convinced his psychism was nothing more than a mix of cold reading and trickery. But trickery has always been a part of traditional shamanic techniques and the scientific investigation of mediums2 has on several occasions led to the conclusion that genuine psychics will sometimes resort to fraud when their powers fail them. Certainly Hanussen’s second wife, Therese, was convinced by four intimate years of marriage that her husband really did have paranormal abilities. She witnessed his healing the sick, claimed he used clairvoyance to help the police solve crimes, and believed he saved her life by insisting she move to a different seat in a café. Just moments later, another patron attempted suicide by shooting himself. The bullet went astray and struck the place where Therese had been sitting.3
Despite the fact that he was Jewish, Hanussen became a firm supporter of the Nazis, both before and after their bid to take control of Germany in the early 1930s. A report prepared by the American Office of Strategic Services in 1943 claimed he not only met regularly with Hitler, but actually tutored him in the art of effective public speaking.4 There is no evidence to suggest Hanussen attempted to influence the führer directly with spirit messages, but he certainly attempted to influence other high-ranking Nazis, notably Count Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf, the head of Berlin’s storm troopers. On February 26, 1933, he packed his home with Nazi notables for a midnight séance during which an entranced medium—the actress Maria Paudler—predicted the Reichstag fire that occurred the following day. It proved an ominous portent. Since the Reichstag fire was almost certainly a “false flag operation” set by the Nazis themselves, historians speculate that Hanussen was suspected of betraying their secret. In any case, a month after the séance, three men, almost certainly members of Helldorf’s SA, took him to a woods some twenty miles outside Berlin, shot him a total of twelve times, and buried his body in a shallow grave.5
Hitler’s own brushes with spirits were attested to by a former Nazi president of the Danzig Senate, Hermann Rauschning. In 1939, Rauschning, now no longer a Nazi, published Gespräche mit Hitler (“Conversations with Hitler”), which subsequently appeared in English translation as Voice of Destruction (US) and Hitler Speaks (UK). In it, he claimed numerous conversations with Hitler and had this to say about the führer:
Hitler was abandoning himself to forces which were carrying him away—forces of dark and destructive violence. He imagined that he still had freedom of choice, but he had long been in bondage to a magic which might well have been described, not only in metaphor but in literal fact, as that of evil spirits.6
Rauschning went on to chronicle Hitler’s expressed interest in magic and the occult, even going so far as to suggest that the führer had a degree of personal mediumship: one story had it that Hitler awoke in the night screaming, having been awakened by an apparition in the corner of his room.
Certainly Rauschning’s picture of Hitler as a mediumistic personality with profound occult interests is borne out by other sources. At age eighteen in October 1907, Hitler applied to enter the Viennese Academy of the Arts and was turned down on the basis that his test drawings were unsatisfactory. But instead of returning home, he stayed in Vienna and, as his money dwindled, gradually sank to the level of a tramp. During this period he shared a room with a student named August Kubizek, who later had this to say about the youthful Adolf:
I was struck by something strange which I had never noticed before, even when he talked to me in moments of great excitement. It was as if another being spoke out of his body and moved him as much as it did me.7
This is a classic description of a mediumistic personality. Hitler’s occult interests were confirmed by Otto Wagener, a prominent Nazi official who became a close confidant of Hitler’s from 1929 to 1933. Wagener introduced the führer to the theory of Odic force developed by Baron Karl von Reichenbach in the mid-nineteenth century. Von Reichenbach taught that everyone had a source of power (usually quite unsuspected by themselves) that radiated outward in the form of invisible rays to create a sort of auric force field around the body. Hitler became infatuated with the idea and quickly adopted it for his own:
Wagener, it’s as though scales fall from one’s eyes when one hears this theory for the first time. I must read the writings of this Reichenbach.8
The British author Trevor Ravenscroft claimed as his source Dr. Walter Johannes Stein, a Viennese scientist and follower of Rudolf Steiner. According to Stein, as reported by Ravenscroft, Hitler attained higher states of consciousness through the use of drugs and studied medieval occultism and ritual magic.9 If this was true, it is worth noting that any working of medieval magic would almost certainly have involved the evocation of spirits, since the grimoires of the time dealt with little else. Stein was also alleged to have said that Hitler was initiated into a secret form of Western occultism based on Arthurian legends.
Ravenscroft claimed that Dr. Stein knew Hitler intimately in Vienna and often discussed esoteric matters with him, but critics like the investigative journalist Eric Wynants have since cast doubts on the source, suggesting that Ravenscroft never met Stein in the flesh but only communicated with him through a medium after his death—tantamount to dismissing any information obtained as fantasy.10 But wherever the material originated, the fact remains that this pointer toward Hitler’s early magical training is consistent with the reality of esoteric practice. Whole generations of Western occultists, up to the present day, have trained using secret techniques hidden in the Grail Cycle.11
For Hitler to have discovered these techniques without help would have been remarkable indeed. But he may have been guided by an occultist of greater experience. According to Ravenscroft, his esoteric mentor at the time was an unsavory, hunchbacked bookseller named Ernst Pretzsche, who claimed to have assisted various students along the troubled road to occult knowledge. At one point on Hitler’s personal journey, Pretzsche seems to have suggested a dangerous shortcut—the peyote cactus. Peyote is an hallucinogenic plant containing some twenty-eight alkaloids, the principal of which is mescaline. Today, peyote and mescaline tend to be seen as part of modern society’s drug problem. This view, while largely accurate, is nevertheless unfortunate. An ancient tradition suggests some psychedelics can, if properly used, open valid windows onto other dimensions of reality. Proper use involves physical and psychological preparation, plu
s the ingestion of the drug in controlled—usually ritualistic—circumstances. The tradition was well known to the Indians of Mexico, where Ernst Pretzsche spent a good deal of his life. Peyote was venerated as the manifestation of a god and used as a practical aspect of religion.
When Hitler came to take peyote, Ravenscroft claimed, his mind had been prepared by graded meditations and imaginal exercises directed by Pretzsche. As a result, it might be a mistake to dismiss his experience as a recreational drug trip. It is likely that he believed the cactus rendered him able to sense something beneath the surface of reality and divine his personal relationship with the universe. Details of Hitler’s peyote experience are not known except for a few hints made to Dr. Stein. From them Ravenscroft pieced together a dramatic reconstruction and concluded that Hitler discovered himself to be “the chalice for the Spirit of the Anti-Christ.”
Such overblown phraseology positively commands disbelief, yet more recent developments have finally brought absolute confirmation of Adolf Hitler’s interest in the occult.
In the spring of 2001, France’s deputy-secretary general of the Académie Diplomatique International, Timothy W. Ryback, had his first sight of the remnants of Hitler’s personal library. Some twelve hundred volumes had been seized by American troops from the führer’s private residences in Munich, Berlin, and Obersalzberg immediately after the war and transported across the Atlantic to the safekeeping of the Rare Book Division of the Library of Congress … where they languished unnoticed and largely unexamined for more than half a century. Ryback discovered that less than half the works stored in Washington’s Thomas Jefferson Building had even been cataloged and of those only two hundred were searchable online. Further investigation unearthed another eighty Hitler books stored in Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, which had received them as a donation toward the end of the 1970s. Among these were a number of occult works acquired by Hitler in Munich during the 1920s.12
