Hitler's Master of the Dark Arts

by Bill Yenne

  Coincidentally, or perhaps intentionally, Lanz named his publication Ostara, for the same goddess that was the namesake of Guido von List’s Wotanist theme parks. The magazine was subtitled Briefbücherei der Blonden und Mannesrechtler (or Newsletter of the Blonde and Masculist), “Mannesrechtler” being a term for an antifeminist philosophy that was current in early twentieth-century Europe. Essentially, it was a magazine for blonde men who were proud to be blonde and manly. It was also aimed at an audience who were anxious about the age-old struggle between good and evil—or, in Lanz’s view, between Aryans and everyone else.

  Another significance of the name was that List and Lanz imagined the creation of “Ostara,” the long-discussed Völkische utopia. They not only advocated, but also predicted a purely Aryan nation-state within Austria and Germany.

  Among the thousands of subscribers to Ostara was a struggling Viennese art student and German army corporal named Adolf Hitler.

  CHAPTER 3

  Almost Hocus-Pocus

  GUIDO VON LIST died in Germany in that terrible, turbulent spring of 1919, as Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels continued crafting his strange beliefs into dogma, and as Heinrich Himmler was heading down a Völkisch country lane to the farm.

  World War I was a wake-up call for List and Lanz. As Himmler had thrilled to the sight of flags and to the sound of marching boots in the heady days of 1914–1915, the old Wotanist and his understudy had confidently spun the war—in those thrilling early years—as a great struggle in which Germanic legions would naturally triumph.

  Neither List nor Lanz was touched directly by the conflict. When the war started, List was sixty-six, and Lanz had just turned forty, so neither served in uniform. However, by the dark days of 1917–1918, civilians were feeling the pinch indirectly. Wartime restrictions on paper availability probably played a role in Lanz’s ceasing publication of Ostara in 1917. Severe food scarcity devolved into food riots and affected everyone. The shortages certainly played a role in List’s failing health.

  Shortly after the war ended, one of List’s financial backers, Eberhard von Brockhusen, invited the old man to come visit him at his home near Berlin. Brockhusen also headed the orthodox wing of the Germanenorden, which had split during the war. List made the trip, but only as far as the German capital. The fatigued old guru could not go on. Hacking and wheezing, his lungs failing, he checked into a gasthäus near the station, and a doctor was called. After a bad night, List coughed himself to death. The cause may have been pneumonia or perhaps the residual effects of the global influenza pandemic that had killed millions around the world in 1918.

  Lanz spent the war years in denial of his mentor’s death, editing Ostara, partying at Burg Werfenstein, and designing quasireligious rituals and vestments for his New Templar acolytes. Even as the Austro-German empires were collapsing violently around them, the New Templars in both countries carried on glibly. It was during the war that Lanz had repackaged his Theozoology doctrine, renaming it Ariosophy and defining it more simply as Aryan mysticism, rather than as the decidedly hard-to-digest fusion of theology and zoology. “Ariosophy” came to be used as a general term describing a dogmatic belief in Aryan superiority.

  In the months after the war, as List prepared to leave Austria for Germany, Jörg Lanz found his way to Budapest. Hungary, free from centuries of rule by various monarchies, including that of the Austrians, was redefining itself as an independent republic. Here, Lanz expanded the reach of the New Templars and fell in with anti-Bolshevik and anti-semitic activists fighting to keep Hungary from going communist. Whereas the prewar coffee houses in Vienna had buzzed with abstract philosophical debate, revolution was in the air now, and talk was now backed by the threat of armed confrontation. Such was also the case in Munich, where the various freikorps and other assorted armed groups surged in the political fringes and scuffled in the streets. Against this backdrop, Heinrich Himmler was negotiating his course through the university.

  Though he voted for nationalists in student elections, Himmler’s political persona was still in its formative stage. He had but a passing awareness of Guido von List at this point, and his fascination with Völkisch themes was still that of a romantic environmentalist. His views about Jews were still ambivalent. Indeed, he associated with Jewish fellow students at the university, and in his diary, he confessed a fondness for Jewish cabaret singer named Inge Barco, whom he had met in a bar.

  Adolf Hitler is here surrounded by an enraptured crowd of adoring fans. They liked his message, but they loved the way he delivered it. As Dr. Karl Alexander von Müller, a history professor at the Universität München, wrote, “Hitler had turned them inside out, as one turns a glove inside out, with a few sentences. It had almost something of hocus-pocus, or magic about it.” Author’s collection

  This unconsummated fascination was par for the course. Himmler was far from being a lady’s man. While in school, he admitted to have fallen in love with Maria Loritz, the daughter of a family friend and distant relative. However, Maja, as she was known, did not return his affections—even when Himmler offered her a ride on his newly acquired motorcycle. While the Wotanists were engaging in frequent orgiastic rituals in the countryside, Himmler’s diary suggests that he may not have had his first sexual encounter until his mid-twenties.

  Himmler graduated from the Universität München on August 5, 1922. The young credentialed agriculturist took a job as an agricultural assistant at a fertilizer company called Stickstoff-Land GmbH, located in the town of Schleissheim. It was a short commute from Munich, but Himmler may have lived in the town for a while. Though he had toyed with the idea of traveling abroad and had even confided in his diary that he might like to live in Russia or Peru, he stayed put in Bavaria.

  During his school years and immediately after, Himmler was exposed to the various Völkisch New Age factions that frequented the coffee houses and beer halls around Munich. One such group that piqued his interest in archeology and the ancient origins of the Aryan race was the Thule Gesellschaft (Thule Society). It had originated in Berlin as the Studiengruppe fur Germanisches Altertum (Study Group for German Antiquity), and a leading figure in the group was a crippled World War I veteran named Walther Nauhaus, who was also an important member of the Germanenorden. Around the time that Nauhaus moved to Munich, in 1917, the cumbersome and academic-sounding name was changed to the more manageable Thule Gesellschaft.

  It has been suggested that Nauhaus’s Thule group may have been used as a front for the nationalistic Germanenorden to help avoid its members being bothered by Bolsheviks, but the group did have a unique doctrine. The essential premise of the Thule Society was that the original source of the secret wisdom of the Aryan race was a remote Nordic never-never land called Thule. It was located somewhere in the far north, making it sort of an arctic Atlantis. For the Thule Gesellschaft, the Thule of the distant past was home to a primeval group of superbeings who were similar to—or arguably identical to—Guido von List’s Wotanist/Armanen priests. This concept made sense to the Ariosophists because, after all, the Eddas described Wotan and the other founding figures of Nordic mythology as living in such a place.

  Stories of this mythical place called Thule were not new. They had been around for more than two millennia, and the legend had been embellished, re-embellished, and over-embellished many times. Any study of the mythology of the Eddas is indebted to twelfth-century Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson, who wrote the Prose Edda, or Younger Edda. It was Sturluson’s theory that the gods of Nordic mythology were actually human warriors or monarchs, around whose burial sites cults developed. In turn, these cults evolved the legends of the great heros to the point that, in the telling and retelling of the sagas, the heroes became deified. Hence, Guido von List and the Thuleans were right, their heroes were gods—and vice versa.

  Adolf Hitler and his entourage of tough young Aryan followers pose for the camera in Munich in the early 1920s. By this time, the silver-tongued orator had established himself as the Führer
of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party), best known as the Nazi Party. Author’s collection

  As for the origins of the place called Thule, the Greek explorer Pytheas is said to have written about such a place toward the end of the fourth century BC. There are many mentions in medieval literature of Thule or “Ultima Thule” being located in the distant north, beyond the edges of the known world. The Austro-German New Age was also aware that the Greeks had written of a place called Hyperborea, located in the distant north and inhabited by a powerful race of people. The name “Hyperborea” means “above the northern lights,” or aurora borealis, and the legend states that the sun never set in this place. This description suggests that someone may have actually ventured north of the Arctic Circle and based the Hyperborea legend on fact.

  Thule had been mentioned by numerous writers, from Pliny the Elder to Edgar Allan Poe. Like the mythical lands of Atlantis, Lemuria, or Hyperborea, Thule was mentioned so often in literature that it often seemed like a real place. The exact location has never been determined, although it has been suggested that the stories may be based on reports by mariners who visited Iceland, Greenland, or the islands off the windswept north coast of Scotland. The name was so entrenched in popular lore that it was borrowed by the Danish explorers Knud Rasmussen and Peter Freuchen as a name for a trading-post settlement they established on the northwest coast of Greenland in 1910—a town that still exists.

  Heinrich Himmler, seen here in the center, wearing glasses, was literally the standard-bearer for the Nazis during the November 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. He and his companions are behind barricades at the offices of the Military District for Bavaria, the former Bavarian war ministry. The flag itself was the old Imperial German battle flag. Author’s collection

  When Heinrich Himmler first became aware of the Thule Gesellschaft, he would have come in contact with Walther Nauhaus’s energetic new partner, a globetrotting merchant seaman turned astrologer and mystic hobbyist named Adam Alfred Rudolf Glauer. A Freemason and Germanenorden member, Glauer also dabbled in Theosophy, as had so many members of the German counterculture. Having traveled widely in the Middle East, he had also experimented with spiritualist doctrines, from Jewish Kabbalah to Islamic Sufism, from Egyptian mysticism to Rosacrucianism. His own fictionalized life story, entitled Der Talisman des Rosenkreuzers (The Rosicrucian Talisman), was published in 1925.

  Like both List and Lanz, Glauer had abandoned his birth name for a pseudonym with the aristocratic “von.” As Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorff, he was a ubiquitous New Age man-about-town in Munich in the early postwar years. Sebottendorff was an avid follower of Lanz von Liebenfels and student of runes, especially those of Guido von List’s Armanen Futharkh.

  Another Thule Society member of note was the Bavarian playwright Dietrich Eckart, the enthusiastic Ariosophist who was also an early member of the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP). In addition to his politics, Eckart studied Hindu and western metaphysics, and thought of himself as a philosopher in the mold of Arthur Schopenhauer. He had gone so far as to develop a doctrine of a higher human—Aryan, of course—genius that was based on the theories of Lanz von Liebenfels.

  As corded-ware had made ancient Aryans real for Gustaf Kossinna, the thought that Thule was a real place must have greatly stirred the amateur archeologist in Heinrich Himmler. Indeed, the idea of the Aryan race having originated in a far away icy land became a vividly real part of Himmler’s beliefs.

  Like Eckart, Dr. Alfred Rosenberg was a DAP member who also joined the Thule Society. An Estonian engineer and an enthusiastic Ariosophist, he had lived in Russia during the 1917 Revolution and had developed a strong dislike for Bolsheviks, as well as for Jews. Rosenberg was a follower of Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s more extreme Aryan superiority ideas and of Gustaf Kossinna’s thesis that the Aryan race had originated in northern Europe. He was also a member of the Lübeck-based Nordische Gesellschaft (Nordic Society), a Völkisch organization with members throughout Scandinavia and the Baltic rim.

  Rosenberg believed not only that the Aryan race was the master race of all Indo-European races, but also that the Wotanist religion of the Aryan race was the master religion of the Indo-European races. As such, he believed that Wotanism not only predated, but also influenced Zoroastrianism, the ancient religion of the Persians, and Hinduism, two creeds that are generally ranked as the two oldest of the world’s major religions.

  Rosenberg was also one of the first of the future Nazi racial theorists to use the term untermensch (“under man,” or “subhuman”) to describe both Slavs and Jews. In this, he was borrowing a concept widely discussed in Völkisch circles around the turn of the century and expounded upon at length by Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels in his bizarre Theozoology. The word “untermensch” may have originated with Lothrop Stoddard, the American author of The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man, published in 1922. Or it may have been coined as the flip side of the term übermensch (“over-man” or “superman”), which features in the 1883 work Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zoroaster) by the gloomy German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the prophet of nihilism. Like Nietzsche, Rosenberg had an interest in Zoroaster (Zarathustra), the Persian prophet who lived sometime before the tenth century BC and who had founded Zoroastrianism.

  Rosenberg’s belief that Aryan paganism was the mother creed of both Hinduism and Zoroastrianism was an idea that was very much a part of the academic premise of Hans Friedrich Karl Günther, a cultural anthropologist and self-styled racial theorist who bounced around to the faculties of universities in Jena, Berlin, and his native Freiburg during the 1920s and 1930s. Like Chamberlain and Kossinna, Günther gave academic credence to the Völkisch believers in Aryan superiority. His writings included The Knight, Death and the Devil: The Heroic Idea (1919)—based on the famous apocalyptic woodcut of the same name by Albrecht Dürer—and The Racial Elements of European History (1927). These books interwove Völkisch paganism with a form of biological nationalism. Among the neopagans and Ariosophists who seized upon Günther’s works with great enthusiasm was Heinrich Himmler.

  A heroic illustration of Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) “brown shirts” attacking communist agitators, thus defending the Nazi Party and the nation from what they perceived as the sickness of Bolshevism. Author’s collection

  Like participants in the American counterculture of the 1920s and 1960s, Himmler also developed a keen interest in Hindu scriptures. Even in later years, like Timothy Leary, he carried a copy of the Bhagavad Gita with him as he traveled. Perhaps he enjoyed the war stories as much as the philosophical content. The central character, Krishna, is a deified warrior-hero who would have been right at home with Thor or Siegfried, the fighting heroes the Eddas.

  While Günther had bought into the Kossinna’s “confirmation” that the superior Aryan race had originated in northern Europe, he also believed the race was part of the greater Indo-European family. As part of this idea, he wrote that the Aryans had migrated across Asia, through Persia, and into India, where they were responsible for the great theological literature of Hinduism, specifically the Vedas. Like Kossinna, he pointed to archeological evidence, citing similarities in Hindu and Nordic runes, burial mounds, and so on.

  The first post–World War I issue of Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels’s Ariosophist magazine, Ostara, published in 1922 and reissued in 1930. Author’s collection Far right: There is no mistaking the degenerate “apeling” on the cover of this 1923 issue of Ostara. Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels filled the pages of his magazines with diatribes against subhuman creatures, whom he feared were everywhere. Author’s collection

  During the early 1920s, as Himmler wound up his college career and entered the work force, he found an opportunity for the military experience that had eluded him during World War I. At the suggestion of his friend Ernst Röhm, he joined the freikorps militia originally known as Reichsflagge, but recently renamed as Reichskreigsflagge (Nation
-War-Flag).

  Röhm was a veteran who had served as an officer in a Bavarian infantry unit during World War I. Discharged as a captain, Röhm was active in brokering weapons for various underground nationalist groups in Munich. Himmler had met Röhm early in 1922 at a beer hall political meeting in Munich, and the two became friends.

  Röhm and Himmler were an odd pair. Thirteen years older than Himmler, Röhm was a large, beefy former officer, while Himmler was a small, slender man who had only yearned for military life. Himmler looked up to Röhm, treating him with the deference of an enlisted man for an officer. Though Röhm was openly gay, there is no indication that their relationship was ever physical.

  It was Röhm who introduced Himmler to Adolf Hitler.

  When World War I had ended, Hitler was in a hospital recovering from injuries suffered in a poison gas attack he endured just a few weeks before the armistice. Psychologists who have analyzed Hitler ad nauseam through the years have deduced that the depression borne of this experience was the origin of the anger Hitler manifested in later years. Others have suggested that he had always had a few screws loose. In any case, Hitler had returned to Munich—his adopted home—rather than returning to his native Austria. He had remained in military service, though he had exchanged his Imperial German Army uniform for that of the newly formed Reichswehr.