Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich

Good evening, welcome to the International Spy Museum, I'm Amanda Olke, Director of Adult Education. I'm so excited to have a show about Hitler's

monsters

. It sounds bad, but it's true, because we have an excellent speaker, Eric Kerlander, he's a

history

professor at Stetson. university in florida and teaches modern german european and world

history

hitler

's

monsters

is his latest book it is his fifth book he is also the author of living with

hitler

which sounds like a nightmare many good halloween jokes with this one i was intrigued to watch eric online there's a lot of interesting stuff, I don't know if you know how much people tweet about you, no people are constantly referencing your articles, so it's quite fascinating in a very positive way, since this is the guy who knows what's going on, so that now we.

I will know everything about Nazism and the occult. Thanks Eric. Thank you so much, Amanda, for inviting me, Shauna, too, and Alden Farrow, the Yale publicist who organized this. It is a great pleasure to be here. It's my first time in the world. spy museum which I just saw today for the first time and it's fantastic. I don't know how many of you have seen the exhibits, but there's even a link to what I'm about to present that I didn't know was coming. being there, um, at the James Bond exhibit, so I'll mention that later, oh, you took mine, right?

Yes, it was a brush pass that shouldn't have happened. Oh, look, you're very good with intelligence and, yes, and so am I. I'm very happy to see some of my former students in the audience who have obviously done very well and now live in DC doing various things, so thank you for coming to my former Stetson colleagues, as you see, this is a title and I'd like to start and I'm going to proceed this way tonight with a little bit of the book and then I'm going to talk about some of the context and then I'm going to read some other passages instead of giving a formal talk, so I'm going to Start with the first paragraph of the book so early in the hit movie Captain America The First Avenger, which many of you have probably seen.

A Nazi officer enters a small Norwegian town in search of an ancient relic. The tesser act and you can see the tesseract in a couple of iterations up there, the tesseract promises its owner infinite power, it is some kind of cosmic artifact, we soon discover that officer johannes schmidt has absorbed the prototype of a super soldier serum developed by a fringe or frontier scientist, we'll get to that later. named abraham erskine and you see erskine there in the original 1940 comic intended to give schmidt superhuman strength and agility, the serum because it's in prototype form and he shouldn't have taken it causes a monstrous transformation that drives the nazi officer crazy and he goes crazy. his head into a hideous red skull, hence the super villain, one of the first in the history of Marvel comics, this red skull Erskine escapes to America where he perfects his serum and that happens to the best of us, don't worry , transfiguring the prototypical 98 pound weakling there you see him um steve rogers in our hero now Captain America has little time to hone his combat skills before facing the red skull and the insidious occult society known as hydra, which turns out to move the threads behind Hitler in the

third

reich

. from an analogy to the specter downstairs in the James Bond exhibit now, if you notice, I just wanted to point this out, the phone-beat Baron, who is the head of Hydra um and is in the second Avengers movie, I think which is at the beginning of that, um, that's it. what it looks like in the Marvel movie is very similar to the Wavelessberg, which is the castle of Himmler's order, where it has grail ceremonies and a black sun just to show you fiction and history coming together and that's really the point of starting with Captain America.

Captain America contains all the elements of Nazi

supernatural

ism in popular culture the connection to occult forces mad scientists fantastic weapons a superhuman master race a preoccupation with pagan religions and magical relics that are supposed to give the Nazis unlimited power and, therefore, Of course, the pagan religion stuff returns with Thor and Loki fighting over the Tesseract and Thor, the Norse god, has to take it from his evil brother Loki and take it to Asgard for protection. Can you hear me? Excellent, from comics produced during World War II while the Nazis are still in power through 21st century video games like Castle Wolfenstein, from classic sci-fi and adventure films like Raiders, The Lost Ark, The Boys from Brazil to contemporary horror films like Dead Snow or Hellboy or superhero franchises like the Avengers in Captain America, our popular culture is.

Inundated with these images of the Nazi

supernatural

right now, we don't have time today and that's why I decided to focus on talking about the whole history of Hitler and the occult. This book has nine chapters and they all deal with different aspects. of what I just laid out there, so what I thought we would do and then leave the rest for questions and answers is I would give you some background and the historical relationship between Nazi occultism and what I call frontier science or what they call science border science and then, using some context from the book itself, they look at three case studies from a chapter, chapter seven, of the

third

reich

using border science and occultism for military intelligence and propaganda purposes that did, actually used it for purposes that This museum would be very interesting, so I chose those case studies and then, if we have time, I will mention a couple more examples and then we can, in the Q&A, talk about broader things, for example, the traditional type of occultism .

Of these doctrines like theosophy, how many of you have heard of theosophy or anthroposophy, or areosophy? Although those kinds of broader occult doctrines I won't talk much about, initially, nor will I talk about pagan or focused religion, although that is an important part. In the book I will focus more on what they called grenz vissenshaft or frontier science and that is what I would like to do. Let's start with the historical relationship between Nazism and the supernatural. Now, depending on your background, you may recognize some. of these individuals or writers and I just want to extract this quote from Alfred Rosenberg Alfred Rosenberg was the ideological czar of the Nazi party, he was the one who wrote long essays and tomes about what Nazi ideology was, what was wrong with the conventional bourgeois world, the church and until very recently people would have characterized Rosenberg and many Nazi leaders and we'll get to that as if I were talking about mainstream historians, they are very uninterested in occult law and one of the ways I got a contract. because the book is after one of the first proposals received a peer review, he said well, all this is fascinating, but nothing, there is no story, I sent him this quote from Rosenberg himself and you can see the quote, the success of the national socialism, the unique appearance. of the führer is unprecedented in German history the consequences that many Germans have in their propensity for the romantic and the mystical, in fact, occultism came to understand the success of national socialism in this way and continues from there, so what is arguing Rosenberg about the The reason we were successful is that the Germans are fascinated by the occult and associate us with that.

Now we'll go on to say that that's not necessarily a good thing, but it's nice if you're looking for an archival source that says there's a story. to say this is good and he wasn't alone so Rosenberg picked up this um lota eisner who you see up there teto ardorno both associated with the frankfurt school of type of social, scientific and cultural criticism in the 1920s, both they argued very openly that nazism was based on occult thought supernatural thought esoteric thought i have a lot of that in the book she was a film critic who looked like her colleagues siegfried krakauer another frankfurt school film critic if you've heard of of the book from um caligari to hitler is a study of expressionism, any type of film scholars often cite that book.

Both he and Eisner maintain that the expressionist tendency in German culture, the type of fascination with horror and macabre and authoritarian personalities paved the way for Hitler. Adorno, said that occultism like anti-Semitism, which is based on what seems like a science that is actually religious mystical thought based on faith is exactly what Nazism facilitated, which is why there are many contemporary intellectuals who made that argument and then Rudolph called out Zobotendorf, who we don't have time to discuss today. He argued in 1933 that the Nazis emerged from his movement, his occult movement and the Thule society, which he co-founded.

Some of you may have heard of the Thule society, the Tula gazelle axis, we have Rosenberg and Rauschenin, a guy who wrote a book about his interviews he had with Hitler, so there was a very powerful contemporary belief that the Nazis were involved in occult frontier science and pagan religion and then there is this first generation of what we call historiography, which is the type of interpretations that historians make about the past and some of these are very good academic works like Mosa Stern and Goodrich Clark, The Roots of the Cult of Nazism, which focuses on that secret area actually called Arieosophis, which I'll talk about briefly today, others like Um The Morning. of the Magi is a kind of cryptographic story like Trevor Ravencroft's Spear of Destiny.

I don't know if you've heard of that too, but suddenly there's this flowering in the '60s and '70s of the belief that Nazism is based on occult law, some of it's good history, some of it isn't, but suddenly This contemporary idea, after maybe 15 or 20 years of incubation, becomes a very popular trope, and then, including a graduate school colleague of mine, some people start investigating occultism per se, cultism, the esotericism in the 90s and 2000s and their arguments are much more skeptical. I would say that the general trend in much of this work is, first of all, that everyone was interested in the occult between the years 1890 and 1930, that is one of the arguments they give, but just as everyone was interested In that, it was also very modern, you know, everyone is trying new age spirituality and thinking that maybe they have esp and they are going to meet parapsychologists to test them and see if they really have It's true, there are still people who do that today in day.

We don't have to get to those analogies yet, but we could later, so his argument is why this obsession with Nazism is called when everyone in Central Europe and even if you read and listen. and others in France, Britain and the United States were going to their spiritual gurus and trying new religions, if anything, that would simply say that there is nothing really interesting in the relationship between Nazism, occultism, frontier science. What is the problem with this argument? look in my own book, um, it's not necessary, it doesn't have to be a direct connection, not everyone who practices some version of occultism, just like not all Christians support the same religious doctrine or the same political party has to support . is for it to be influential, it is correct that that way of thinking or those doctrines are influential, so my work that I am going to talk about today accepts its premise that everyone was interested in these frontier sciences and occult ideas that are not. essentially backwards, but that more than any political party of that time in Germany or elsewhere, the Nazis relied on it, while other parties were skeptical or what does that have to do with social and political issues, you know, TRUE? a sense of the context that we will be in, we will be discussing today okay any questions so far I want to give you a chance to ask questions because I just went through a lot of things pretty quickly okay we'll save For last now a quick case study here before we get to my or a quick example of Nazi anti-occultism found in the fifth chapter of my book before we get to military intelligence and espionage, a thing that people often bring up.

It was when the Nazis came to power, they attacked the occult, they attacked the frontier scientists, okay, and I want to talk about what that means with the differences between frontier science and the occult. Everyone understands the occult as something related to witchcraft, secret forces and clairvoyance, soaking divination with a divination rod, which they called what a scientific cult calls dowsing, so I do it. Differentiate in the book between occult doctrines like theosophy, eriosophy, anthroposophy, which are holistic world views that incorporate astrology and parapsychology, but also have sort of origin myths, like There were root races seven root races somewhere moment Madame Blavatsky started this with the Theosophists and different races had different powers or abilities or histories and then there was some kind of interbreeding or a flood or an ice age and the largest race kind of started to go extinct, exceptperhaps some of their high priests came to Tibet.

This is more of the religious aspect of the book. But my argument is that this is essentially occultism. In this area, occultism is a kind of general doctrine that limits science. they are practices of people who are sometimes occultists but sometimes they are just Nazis, or your local doctor who has proper homeopathic training and the idea is that these are scientific practices that conventional science and medicine do not accept, hence the term science border. appears in the twenties and thirties smile this and axis has multiple meanings and is not the same as a sect the gren is vicious Vicinchafton are practices that are at the limits of what is accepted by conventional science, which is why it is number one in terms of limits.

They investigate frontier phenomena, so especially talking to dead things that are on the edge of what can really be known in that sense. They are the frontier sciences, astrology, clairvoyance, and they use the term because they also mean interdisciplinarity, you cross the borders from one scientific practice to another, so frontier scientists like to claim that they are not tied to a materialist vision or, you know, to a very rigid vision. From the point of view of what physics or chemistry is, they are willing to use all the doctrines or all the practices to get to the truth in some organic way.

Why is that important? Because very often the Nazis that you will see here will persecute occultists as individuals who claim to be the head of a sect like Anthroposophy or the Freemasons but do not attack scientific occultism or the frontier scientific sciences that they practice makes sense and I think it is a distinction really important that no historian has done yet because what bothers the Nazis is sectarianism. that you are not following the third reich, the ideology that hitler is not your end and all, but when it comes to the track, the epistemology, the sources of knowledge, the approaches to knowledge, they don't care about the things that we mind to.

Consider a cult as long as it is framed as a frontier science, so to give you an example of what is important in the field, maybe you haven't heard of Rudolf Hess, who was the Führer's deputy, right? Technically the second was in the game. high ranking guy he really wasn't um even before 33 Himmler and Gurion and others had displaced him, but in theory he said that he was the guy who would replace hitler if hitler was killed and everyone was trying to kill him, right, he got a murderer, there were like ten. murder plots that they discovered or something like that, um ways like Himmler, as a lot of people will talk about today, was very interested in frontier science and the occult and had been practicing it quite openly.

He started a new age hospital for homeopathic and frontier scientific practices in '34. um, he would have conferences where he would promote that kind of thing, even Hitler sent a congratulatory letter in '35 to one of the big astrological congresses, so Many Nazi leaders dabbled or were immersed in this, but Hess was one of the most prominent. and in May 41 of 41, as many of you will know, he became frustrated, I mean his composition, it's complex what his motivations were, but he was clearly frustrated at having been marginalized and he was frustrated that Hitler was about to open a second front in the Soviet Union.

Union which he saw as disastrous because he was right and so he thought he would go flying because he was a decent pilot. He would fly to Britain at his expense and negotiate peace on behalf of Hitler and the Third Reich. So I think on May 8, 1941 he took off now there is some evidence that he consulted with his astrologer as he and Himmler would do everything right before they left and then he crashed he was captured the British said come on this guy is crazy um and he just I want they did a psychological evaluation they didn't want to negotiate with him um this was a scandal obviously in the middle of the war hitler was furious he said what's wrong with this guy how could he do it and then bormon and heydrich and rosenberg came in and Well, I mean, it's because of his occultism, right, he was obsessed with the occult gurus and that's why he did it, so Hitler says, okay, it's finally been eight years, we've used kid gloves so far, but it's time to go after these people, okay, which is typical of Hitler concentrating briefly on something and then losing focus and for about a month there was something called Hess action.

You see the wreckage of the plane. You see Heydrich's order that says we have to pursue this. All these occultists. he lists them all, but it only lasts a few weeks and I think that's really important. The only reason it only lasts a few weeks, and I'll get to that here, is because what has often been punished as pseudoscience in the Third Reich could be characterized as a genuine openness to the very limits of the knowable for frontier science and the called scientific occultism, that's one of the premises I want to make before we look at our case studies that the Nazis may have persecuted sectarians but they liked the practices that those sectarians saw as important frontier science now there were limits of course , anyone who professed a direct connection to the divine or supernatural could irritate the state, particularly if those individuals seemed likely to contravene the state's political or ideological goals, okay, so hess embarrasses the third reich.

They blame the astrologers, they are going to arrest some astrologers or anthroposophists who want to have their own institutes. They may chase them at the same time. However, the occult could help justify dubious scientific practices even as it acted as a source of new ideas and experimentation. and the second world war saw a flowering of that thinking, well, that's the context before we got to military intelligence, now in march 1940, hans bender, who had become germany's leading parapsychologist and there you see a photo of him with uri geller from the 70s, he is an An older gentleman who was at the top, but he was about 30 years old and had become Germany's leading scientific parapsychologist.

He wrote a pessimistic letter in March 1940 to Carl Croft. Carl Croft is down there. He was a famous Swiss astrologer that some of you may have heard of. him, we will come to him later since 1937, both had witnessed increasing restrictions against occultism, this escalation of repression which Hans Bender feared would be exacerbated with the outbreak of war because they could see that now that the war had broken out they were in the euthanasia program. They were persecuting the gypsies, the Jews, the anti-Jewish policies were getting worse, so he's worried that because they're anti-sectarian, they're confusing the occult with the real scientific occultism that he practices and that it's going to get worse.

For us, it's fine and Croft responded to them immediately and told them about the prospects of frontier sciences in our generation. I put the quote up there. Can you read these quotes from so far away? Excellent. He said I'm not as pessimistic as you, especially in government circles. he insisted that they are looking for people who have something to say in terms of frontier scientific research and used the term grins vissenshaft now croft knew what he was talking about in march 1940 croft was working closely with goebbels in the propaganda ministry and the propaganda services Reich Intelligence To produce propaganda and wage psychological warfare against the Allies, many of Croft's companions, experts in astrology and divination, dowsing and dowsing that I mentioned earlier, would also be recruited. who would be recruited Bender's own frontier scientific research began to receive official sponsorship only during the war, so before the war it was tolerated during the war, Himmler and indirectly Hitler began to give money to his university institute, this parapsychologist was released during a conflict.

Increasing economic energies also led to greater Nazi willingness to experiment and exploit frontier science in the interests of foreign policy propaganda and military science, okay, and that's where our case studies come in, for example, Nostradamus and the astrology now before September 1939, as I suggested in the third The Reich had been ambivalent about sponsoring astrology in any official capacity, so Himmler has to intervene to ensure that astrology per se, the practice of astrology scientific, is not prohibited, but that astrologers and people who belong to astrological societies are fine, as are Catholics. Church Protestant Jehovah's Witnesses Even radical Pan-German nationalists who had not joined the Nazi party reigned in basically anyone who was not in the Nazi party That's important to note, but with the outbreak of war any lingering reservations about frontier enlistment the science for the benefit of the regime dissipated only four days after the war began rosenberg remember rosenberg the one who criticizes occultism rosenberg's attack dog on occult matters a guy named coord kisauer produced a political document okay, this is a high official rank with a political document titled citing astrology as a means of influencing public opinion without citing the report indicated that the british had used fake horoscopes to good effect in germany and the ss observed the same thing independently of rosenberg's office that the germans actually They seemed susceptible to this type of propaganda if the Germans were susceptible to occult thinking, why not employ similar astrological propaganda against the Allies?

That was the point of the Kiss Hours political document, while he's thinking about this and while Himmler is collecting all this astrological stuff, Goebbels of all people on October 30, 1939, so eight weeks. In the war he reported on a ministerial conference during which he announced to his Reich propaganda ministry that he was examining astrological writings to, quote, determine if there was any inherent danger, quote. Two weeks later, he brought a letter from Carl Croft himself. received a letter or the intelligence service had received a letter from kraft in november and he took this letter to a lunch with hitler the letter had predicted that johann georg elser would try to assassinate hitler shortly after and there was a guy who tried to kill him when he returned to the Burger Boy Keller in Munich to give a speech.

There was a bomb under there and he barely escaped. Croft here, this astrologer just sent a letter predicting an assassination attempt. Then Jerbos brings us to lunch with Hitler. He says that he is not that fascinating and Hitler said that he was also fascinated and asked Goebbels to explain the details to him. When how did you get this? Who is this Croft Himmler guy who is also having lunch and was requesting astrological materials for his own occult library? He became very interested in the conversation and agreed that the card and its prediction are genuine, so you have Hitler Hitler, Hitler Himmler and Goebbels at lunch saying that you know what astrology could work if we had followed his advice.

You would never have been there Goebbels was clearly encouraged by Hitler and Himmler's response, as he reported in his diary two days later. quote, I mentioned the idea of ​​nostradamus to my colleagues in the propaganda ministry for the first time, the whole world is full of mystical superstition, why shouldn't we exploit that to undermine the enemy front? So the question here is: Does Goebbels really believe it or does he see it as a way to manipulate the public? That's a question that I address in the book and that could kind of show you where I think the different Nazis are, but the fascinating thing is that war breaks out and all of a sudden you have these high-ranking Nazis saying Hey, maybe we should work on this astrological stuff now, in my chapter that I analyze in detail month by month, the surprising thing is that the gerbils first have their diplomats in the propaganda ministry try to work with the nostradamus quatrains, They don't know anything about astrology, so their propaganda is kind of bad, so, eh, the gerbil says, well, why not?

I won't hire this guy, which is not difficult to do because SS and SD intelligence have been monitoring him for a while not only because he is an occultist but because he has been trying to convince diplomats to listen ? him because he knows what is going to happen in the war and in the future, as if there was a Romanian diplomat, Virgil, to tell him the whole thing. Basically, he tries to tell her what to tell the British and the SS are getting frustrated, but they don't arrest him. The point is, he's already on the regime's radar before he sends a letter, so the girls are like: Why don't you come work for me?

That's why Croft is so excited a few weeks later at Wright's Bender. They pay me to read Nostradamus quatrains and tell you. what's going to happen this is fantastic, but it's not just that the croft gerbils had gone to this guy called kritzinger hans kritzinger who was an expert in ballistics but also an expert in dowsing becausehe was an expert in dowsing he was an expert in astrology because these aren't real scientists, you can be an expert in everything, right, um, and kritzinger is the guy who said Croft is really good, you should hire him, he's a really good scientific astrologer , well, um, Goebbels comes back to him and says: do you want to work for me?

He says, well, me. I'm really busy doing dowsing stuff, but maybe you can hire this guy named Georg, who's also a great astrologer, so in February he'll have Croft Luke and all his leading propaganda guys researching Nostradamus and finding reasons why. Belgium and the Netherlands should capitulate, as expected. because and norway why because they invade norway and april and belgium the netherlands in may you can literally reconstruct how goebbels, the main propagandist, is using nostradamus to create propaganda for why the allied countries should capitulate and why german soldiers should have confidence that they are going to win, okay, I'm not going to tell all that here, it's fascinating, other than to say that this really happened, I want to move on to our second case study, which is, I'll give you the context. here my or the second the two case studies that are related to the war with frontier science on september 12, 1943 ss captain otto scorseni who is below in the james bond exhibit the spy museum historian has argued that scorcene is possibly the model for blofeld or for one of the other scarred Bond villains, you'll see in a minute, so this special SS forces captain Otto Scorseni carried out a daring raid on the Campo Imperatore hotel in the Grand Zasso mountains of Italy.

His mission was to free the ducey Benito Mussolini, whom the Italian people had deposed and arrested after the Allied lands in Sicily a couple of weeks ago. Weeks ago, the Italians had been moving Mussolini from one dark place to another. The objective was to avoid this type of rescue operation. It would have been a real propaganda coup if the Axis had regained Mussolini and been able to establish a puppet state. Right in the north of Italy, but somehow Scorceni found the dictator's location and within hours his airborne troops launched in their DFS 230 gliders and defeated Mussolini's captors without firing a single shot.

I'll show you a picture of what we're going to do. get to that in a minute here's the operation i'm talking about ok you'll see how they're linked both were taken to vienna mussolini was named leader of the new italian social republic, a remaining german dominated state desperate to hold off against the allied advance, but in the middle of germany's last offensive in the east, operation citadel, the disaster at kursk, all the other things went wrong, obviously, the invasion of sicily, this could have been the biggest and last major military operation which could be considered successful and a great kind of propaganda coup at the same time we discovered that mussolini rescued him there is hope for the right of access, so operation 0 constituted one of the last great public relations victories of the third reich, without However, the most notable aspect of the raid was not Operation Oak, which is a technical term for rescuing Mussolini; it was Operation Mars, the intelligence operation that apparently located Mussolini in the first place.

Evidence suggests that information about the whereabouts of mussolini was collected by conventional intelligence operations, we'll get to that in a minute and break with the allies. radio codes, but Himmler and Schellenberg, who had replaced Heidrick as head of the SD, insisted that they obtained this information from an expert team of occultists gathered in a villa under SS administration. Now Operation Mars was not the only time that astrologers, clairvoyants or fortune tellers would be recruited to help the regime, as can be seen here, for four years after the Hess action, the SS employed frontier scientists in military technology and research seeking ways to improve morale, extract intelligence and exert mind control, even the German navy joined in to gather a group of fortune tellers and astrologers to locate allied battleships, so I want to talk about that first and then we will get to operation Mars, now after something called world ice theory that I don't have time to get into today, we can talk about it in the Q&A.

The area of ​​frontier science was probably most valuable in the third reich or the most popular was not astrology, it was radiation, it was divination or sprinkling, whether with a stick or a piece of iron tied to a rope, which which was considered the most reliable border. science many Nazi leaders, particularly Himmler and Hess, believed in the existence of cosmic forces or so-called earth rays, they emitted errant radiation that could be detected and harnessed with proper training, even Hitler had ordered one of Germany's most famous fortune tellers to check the appropriate chancery for malignant forms of death rays that were underground and somehow we are going to give you cancer. uh, hass used to sleep with magnets under and on top of his bed to defend himself from these terrible death rays.

Goebbels also hired soakers like kritzinger that I mentioned. I ordered it a few minutes ago to help with Nostradamus propaganda, but the strangest and most revealing experiment in dowsing was probably not the one started by the Nazi party, which shows how widespread it is, but by the navy itself, so one of the great myths that have been destroyed. the last 30 years in all sorts of ways is that the military was somewhat isolated like the church from all this crazy stuff, well now we know that the church leaders, especially the Protestants and the military leaders, were almost as immersed In itself it was racial science. or frontier science on these things, since the Nazis were right and this is an example of there being no clear line between the sober, technologically savvy, conservative military and the crazy Nazis, there really is a spectrum there that they are all that they are.

All in all, by the summer of 1942, the British had begun to turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic, as many of you know, the battle between the submarines we are trying to sink as many convoys as possible to prevent supplies from arriving. to Europe and North Africa and then use radar sonar destroyers and other things to find the submarines at this time, the success of the British and Americans in late '42 had nothing to do with dowsing, it's okay to locating enemy submarines which the British employed quite naturally. Scientific methods, namely radar and sonar, were aided in these efforts by sophisticated code-breaking and extensive use of American convoys, but German naval officers were confused, unsure how submarines evaded or found them, and One of the most confused about the Battle of the Atlantic was a submarine captain named Hans Roeder and there you see, Captain Hans Roder, he's not a guy who writes comics in his spare time, you know, Captain America and all that, and sends strange messages to the government.

He is a navy captain, a science expert at the navy patent office, and an amateur pendulum diviner, because who isn't in Germany right now, Roeder was convinced that the British were employing divination as a means to locate German ships as a countermeasure. rotor suggested that the navy started employing frontier scientific methods, so we're really behind, you know, we haven't weaponized these things yet, we're operating rotor in the royal navy, his suggestion of establishing an officially sponsored pendulum institute would probably be they have been dismissed as scandalous and we know that the British and Americans had some marginal things but they never got any money and it was kind of a joke and all the efforts were focused on mainstream things and massive enterprises like search. for an atomic bomb, and yet the rotor was running in the third reich, where many high-ranking party and military officials were open to frontier scientific doctrines, and I could name many examples of things that the navy, army, and air force have been experimenting.

I have other examples in the book, but let's say that, given this context, it is not surprising that in September 1942 Rotor received approval from naval intelligence, so this is official for his pendulum institute, its purpose was to quote to point out the position of enemy convoys at sea using pendulums and other supernatural devices so that German submarine flotillas could be sure to sink them, as Rear Admiral Gerhard Wagner, head of the navy's operations department, Roeder admitted. The pendulum user was well known to everyone. For us from the point of view of those days his work was not so unusual after all that it was expensive to think of new techniques and if someone came and claimed to be able to achieve something through a certain method no matter how crazy he did it .

I'm not saying it was a natural thing to be given the opportunity, it's a very official way of saying yes, we didn't have any problems with it back then, we understand that it sounds crazy today, now that it had gotten official approval and funding. Reuters set out to summon and this is a quote from a witness a strange group of psychics pendulum doubt users tatva researchers astrologers ballistic astronomers and mathematicians these individuals included the astronomer luffa astrologer wilhelm hartmann wilhelm wow who would it be who was released from a field of concentration to become Himmler and Strontiac's personal astrologer Ludwig Strontiac I showed him what's up there He was the most famous scientific dowser in Germany He wrote all these books about secret powers that could be found with these dowsing rods He was the first dowser who claimed that he could teach laymen how to use a pendulum to locate large metal objects hundreds of miles away hmm sounds a lot like enemy ships right, I wonder why he said he could do that during WWII.

The rotor also turned to prominent astrologers Kritzinger and Croft, they are still around, the latter was recruited directly from Prison, I am not going to explain why Croft went to prison, but he had nothing to do with the occult. Basically, he was totally rejecting the Nostradamus orders that were being given to him and he went rogue and said, "You know all these things were going to happen." Goebbels didn't like that but anyway they took him out of prison they threw him in this institute um garrett de alter a parapsychologist who had been in and out of Heydrich's sights for years um garrett de walter used to claim that he would talk to ernst rome the boss dead from rehearsal at night he would come to her and they would have these nice conversations about why hitler killed him, they recruit her to help, okay, the leaders of the german society for scientific occultism who have been banned, they decide to bring the two guys in uh fritz fara and conrad schupa um so they brought them in despite the Hess action that I mentioned, this is a year after they were supposed to put an end to the occult, now I'm not going to go into all the details again of this Institute. except to say that it lasted a period of months, did absolutely nothing productive and no one paid any kind of cost for it because it would look like, well, maybe we had errors in some measurements, but it was a worthwhile operation, in fact, everyone the occultists and This is one last case study who were operating in that area and ended up working for the SS a year later to find Mussolini and that's what I want to close with, so according to several naval officers, the institute It did not produce significant results, however, the institute indicates. the third reich driven by the necessity of war had entered a new, more open phase of frontier scientific experimentation the search for benito mussolini is emblematic of these continuing efforts um the inspiration for operation mars probably came from the pendulum institute so very Few historians even recognize these things were happening much less see how they are related, but it is clear that the Pendulum Institute brought the SS into closer contact with several prominent frontier scientists, including Will Wilhelm Wolfe Himmler, the masseuse and confidant of Felix Kirsten, who claims to have facilitated Wolf's rise by requesting a Hitler horoscope which was sent to Artur Nega, who was head of the criminal police under the SS and thought well, this is a really good horoscope, so he sent it to him. potentially to himmler, it's equally likely that wolf's yeoman works for the pendulum institute wolfe claims that he was able to find these ships, you know, unlike other people, it caught the attention of naba shellenberg and eventually himmler, anyone who Whatever the reason, on July 28, 1943, almost a year to the day the pendulum institute opened, Himmler ordered the Gestapo to bring in Wolf. to berlin there he metnaba, who instructed him on the details of his mission.

Mussolini had been kidnapped and Himmler wanted Lobo to locate Yol Ducey through astrological means. now lobo was just the first of many occultists contacted a few days after vol's interview with neba, so they are giving them interviews to see if they are serious right the clairvoyant the clairvoyant kurt munk was taken from the saxonhousen concentration camp where he ended up after Hess's action in Berlin where he was asked to locate Mussolini so corroborates this is like They simply took me out of the field and put me in Berlin. This is great. In the following days, almost 40 more representatives of the occult sciences gathered in a comfortable villa in vonsay, probably at the headquarters of the international criminal police in Neba.

They didn't know anything. about the way the SS worked, but it appears to be the place where they gathered upon arrival, many of them demanding and receiving large quantities of food, alcohol and cigarettes. Shellenberg would actually complain that, quote, these sessions cost us a lot of money, since these scientists need something good. food, drink and tobacco to be effective Schellenberg's SS colleague, a guy named Wilhelm Hotel, was more sympathetic to his apparently epicurean requests, no wonder the poor devils who had lived for years on starvation rations in concentration camps will take the opportunity to enjoy jars of honey, cigarettes and alcohol.

Come on, you know it's hard in those concentration camps, why don't we give them some good life for a while? All this food and drink did nothing to dull his pretty natural senses. Lobo argued that his own calculations took up most of August and early September, because he was serious and right, they were instrumental in locating Mussolini, as was a monk who claimed that the SS produced an arzot pendulum in a map of italy in which the monk identified a dead spot in the mountain of abruzzo, so everyone claims that they found it right after the war, most documentation indicates that it was conventional intelligence of the SD and SS , assisted by the captain of a German seaplane squadron, the one who reconstructed Mussolini's location years later, so after all this has been considered crazy, this is very important historically.

In the 50's and 60's a lot of the Nazis, Germans and Navy leaders were saying "oh yeah, we didn't really believe that", so years later the hotel itself would admit that it was probably conventional intelligence that located the entire duce the operation he suggested in A memorial had been organized to placate Himmler, who had of course committed suicide, whose beliefs in the occult sciences were well known; However, contemporary accounts by Hotel and others tell a different story, so it is interesting to note that Hotel's first memoir of the experience, written before the negative postwar connotation associated with the Nazi occult claim that astrologers and sprinklers had actually been successful, so there's a high ranking SS guy who says no, they worked, it's clearly the fact that they had equally significant occult powers, it's Shellenberg's account, now this is really fascinating because Schellenberg, the guy who replaced Heidrick, had Wolf come to his office for a drink and tell him what Himmler is asking you to look into the stars now, what you've been telling him as a way of understanding him.

Find out what Himmler's next plans were because you know that Himmler would listen to his astrologer, which suggests that he was a bit skeptical, but Schellenberg in his own account says that the astrologers and fortune tellers somehow located Mussolini despite having no contact with the outside world. Scorceni himself. Correct the model for all these bonuses, Billions supposedly reported after the war that the SS had relied on subpoenaing Sears and astrologers to find out Mussolini's whereabouts, so at least at the time they seemed to have thought this worked. Such accounts indicate that many Nazis and not just Himmler took Operation Mars seriously, as does the fact that he instructed Neba and Shellenberg to extract more than 40 occultists from all over Germany, including concentration camps.

You have to understand that during the war, it was usually very difficult to get out of a concentration camp when you went. You stayed until the end of the war, they killed you, the fact that he is eliminating them is notable, but make this move them to a luxurious villa in Bonsai. Himmler even kept his promise to grant occultists his freedom as well. like a hundred thousand reichs marks if they were successful when monk remembers that the guy who was taken from saxonhausen presented his request for release the camp commandant no doubt bewildered by the request as if you wanted to leave the concentration camp again countered with the option of a more comfortable position as a camp elder so you can be a capo I will not let you leave the concentration camp the astrologer insisted on his complete release citing his work in the name of citing Mussolini's release after the commander contacted him leadership of the ss the monk was released, so Himmler or Schullenberg said yes, he really helped us, you had to let him out, wolf, wolf, the guy was also in a concentration camp and was collecting thousands of marks, so that it was illegal to exploit people with hidden means, that was one of the things that the Nazis were after and that was already in the Weimar republic, if you basically told people what they wanted to hear to make money off of them, claiming that you had magical powers, you could be arrested or fined.

Wolf was doing this all the time, which is why he was initially arrested, but after the pendulum institute and the Mussolini thing, Wolfe received amnesty and followed up with an application. This is fantastic, that the SS returned all of his books and other occult materials that the Gestapo had confiscated in the Hess action for more than two years. In early to late 1943, Neba ordered the return of the entire Wilson library and a few months later, Wolfe became Himmler's personal astrologer. Well, I don't want to go much further than to say that there are many other examples beyond the military intelligence that we have.

I just talked about the use of frontier science and racial resettlement and eastern colonization is something we could talk about in the question and answer about biodynamic agriculture arising from anthroposophy and settlement in the east. That's another issue I thought about ruling out human experiments. in the holocaust that I argue in the book are directly related to this type of thinking and these doctrines and then finally miracle weapons, supernatural partisans and the collapse of the third reich, you and I will literally end this, have a point late of night 44 and 45 when hitler himmler and goebbels are creating a partisan unit of werewolves, okay, they call them werewolves because werewolves in the right approach have always been a positive monster that is germanic, lives in the forest, It is masculine, goes back to Odin and Thor to fight vampires, Slavs and Jewish intruders from the East and even ethnic Germans who fled Serbia reported being attacked by Slavic vampires who were actually communist partisans.

Okay, I'm not making this up, so even the end of the war can be seen as a fight between them. That's why I use the term twilight Nazi vampires and Slavic or Jewish or Nazi werewolves and Slavic or Jewish vampires so I'll leave it at that. um some basic conclusions um to get back to a more academic mood. Number one magical occultism and frontier science were generally taken quite a bit. seriously by the leaders of the third reich, but especially after '39, which is notable instead of allowing occult language in the concentration camps after the ban on astrology in 1937, the Hess action of 1941, many leaders Nazis hired the Reich's most accurate astrologers, fortune tellers, pendulum sprinklers, anthroposophists and world ice theorists. to produce propaganda provide military intelligence locate enemy battleships improve agricultural production techniques and instruct German soldiers how to fight without regard for their own safety.

Indeed, many Nazi leaders took the opportunity of the more restrictive legal environment after '37 and especially Hess's action to enlist foreign soldiers. occultists out of work for their own purposes, so think about this: they make it impossible to practice occultism in the private sector and say: "hey, you have nothing to do, come work for us." The confiscated materials were not destroyed, but found their way to Himmler and others. The personal libraries of leading SS men or, surprisingly, were loaned to Germany's most famous parapsychologist, Hans Bender. Remember him, who was encouraged to open his own institute for the study of frontier sciences at the University of the New Reich in Strasbourg.

Finally, selective tolerance toward the supernatural might have increased. and diminished due to changing circumstances and the ever-present fear that occultism and frontier science could manipulate Christianity to the detriment of the regime; It is sectarian after all, but Nazi paranoia regarding alternative ideological loyalties did not prevent them from using occultism and frontier science to gain power. shape propaganda and policy and pursue their dreams of racial utopia and empire. Thanks, 50 minutes, so it was awesome and scary, and I think we'll have to open a pendulum institute here at some point. If anyone has any questions, I was wondering what the connection was. with the holocaust with this right so it's great it's a great question there's a lot there um I would say there are the three lines of my research the idea of ​​occultism pagan religion and frontier science come together in the holocaust So, on the one hand, you have eugenic theories that have gone beyond the limits of conventional science.

Eugenics in the West is horrible and ultimately most of its pseudoscience is true. It doesn't really work. It's not that it's not practicable, but the reason why he did it. I'm not going to expand on it because conventional biologists and anthropologists like what are you doing with that syphilis experiment, you haven't tried anything and most scientists and this is you need this background to understand the difference, right? um, those who practiced eugenics said you're right, you know we can't, there's double blind testing, you know it's a shame we killed all those poor African Americans, but it's not really working, right, eugenics doesn't make sense, There were no massive eugenics programs that lasted.

The Third Reich didn't really care if it was accepted by international peer review, so they talked in Darwinian eugenic ways, but they are actually getting the ideas from Ariosaphy and Anthroposophy of races. Rooted in Atlantis and the world ice theory, the idea that there are superior races and inferior races, some have monstrous qualities and abilities, those are superhuman, so when you think in those terms, Jews are the worst of all races and you are in a period of scarcity and you are fighting against the Jews. The Bolshevik threat, suddenly, eliminating the Jews is not a complex eugenic question of well, what Jews do we eliminate and if they are partially German, they become monsters that must be gotten rid of now, where do we see that reinforced, do we see that reinforced in the views of Jews as vampires that arise from folklore, so hitler himmler rosenberg are all these analogies or just literal equations of Jews with parasitic monsters or literally vampires who like to sleep underground and come out at night to attack the Aryan women and sucking their life force and corrupting them um, this isn't just a Nazi thing, I mean there are examples, even the mainstream movie Nosferatu is seen as a caricature of an Eastern European Jewish interloper with superhuman powers over an Aryan, I mean, there are all kinds of cultural studies. interpretations, but I'm arguing that these things reinforce each other, so folklore and pagan religion and the kind of mysticism that informs their anti-Semitism are linked to eugenics and then the third thing is this frontier scientific idea of ​​living space which also has a tradition.

In the right approach, the idea that we need blood and soil that is pure, where we can have German peasants, warrior peasants who can fight the Slavic and Jewish hordes, and combine all three in war, and you can begin to see why They say, well, we need. eliminate the Jews and secondly the Slavs have a pure German empire, does it make sense? I go into a lot more detail in the book, but all three things reinforce each other eric, would you mind doing a quick splash on world ice if you can? do such a thing, yes, the world ice theory was invented by an amateur scientist or a kind of popular writer in the 1890s, a guy called Hans Horbiger, an Austrian and later that's a big deal, he likes Hitler,He is a brilliant untrained specialist who understands things. better than conventional scientists, right, he came up with it in a dream.

He had a dream that there are giant blocks of ice breaking apart, you know, in the cosmos and that must explain everything and why he didn't know the science. He got an amateur astronomer named Philip to write a book with him called Glacial Cosmogenia which I think came out in 1912 and immediately you know the leading scientists, geologists and geographers. This is like one of them said if you just replaced the ice with olive oil in the book it wouldn't be any less convincing right I mean it just didn't make sense it was like a religion he had created that giant blocks of ice crashed into each other and there were moons of ice and when they hit the earth they created a flood and everything.

The ice giants did well for a while, but then they died out and the Aryans you know lost their civilization. The collapse of Atlantis, by the way, fit perfectly with the approach to occult ideas of the time, which is why in the 20s and 30s right-wing thinkers said well. This is great science, this is not Jewish, you know, there is no Einstein, we have to worry about our Freud with the ice world theory and then Hitler and Himmler sponsored it in the Third Reich and I could get a whole part of a chapter . In regards to the patronage of the ice world city, there is a belief that the reason they did not properly equip themselves for Stalingrad is because they thought that the Aryans are more immune to winter due to the ice world theory and therefore So you know the Russians would suffer like them. they did it in WWI because they are inferior and don't have these superpowers, but the Germans will do fine, there is some evidence of that, anyone else oh David, I'm curious what view you have of the German public opinion on some of these topics.

You've talked a lot about certain leaders, captains and others, but what about the people? What sources do we have about what the German people bought? Yes, that's a great question and the wonderful thing about it. I showed you some more of those works. The revisionist works of the 90s and 2000s lay the groundwork for me, so they show the proliferation of frontier scientific, astrological and occult thought from the 1890s onwards, so their argument is that if you were a German or Austrian bourgeois who was hanging around Vienna or Munich, you know, Vienna, Café, Munich, beer hall, you believed in something I talked about, so the only difference with my argument is that, well, that didn't make you more susceptible to fascism than anyone else person, there is, bless you, liberalism and socialism and all of these. other movements are as attractive to you as someone who believes in the world ice theory would be as fascism would be.

I'm arguing that's not the case, since empirical research shows that people who are most involved in this tend to support fascist parties, but the fact is that, according to them, everyone is interested in it. Now I show in the book that even Nazis recognize or Nazi-affiliated scientists who don't like the occult, that socialists seem immune to it and liberals, and recognize it, while liberals and socialists questioned all of our values. traditions that helped him know how to engender fascism, which is good, it is not his fault that we have these crazy ideas like the Isiri world, that is the fault of the fascists who seem to support that, so even within the party there is a recognition . that if you are a materialist Marxist or a secular liberal or a very traditional Christian you don't find these things interesting now my colleagues, my religious colleagues would say oh no, they were interested too.

I don't see as much evidence if If you were an educated liberal or a socialist, you were much less likely to visit an astrologer or like Ludendorff, you know, you think that there are strange conspiracies of people who can manipulate gold and you know and you force your train to crashing with mental waves and all those other things that Right-wing thinkers seem to believe that you can smell a Jew from hundreds of meters away because they are a different race, yes, good question, although it is in the book, the climb involved the third Reich. It's a really fascinating account of this man, William Houston Chamberlain, or maybe my name was Stewart Chamberlain, yeah right, that was him. he was like the spiritual father of Nazism and then he was traveling from Italy and he had a vision and he got off the train and he just sat down and wrote a book completely possessed, completely channeled the book, the basis is from the 19th century, and that book actually he was the spiritual guide to hitler and all the people, but you haven't mentioned him, yes, I mentioned him in the book, so, first of all, Chamberlain is emblematic of a whole kind of and this brings us to some of the pagans. things of religion, so the Germans in the post-Romantic era decided, for all kinds of reasons, many Germans and Austrians that the traditional Judeo-Christian identity, the classical Greco-Roman identity, this whole heritage that in the Enlightenment many Germans still embraced as a heritage common Western, were really the French and British view of the European world and that the Germans were slightly different and part of that was the search for a new heritage that they found in a kind of common Indo-Aryan culture coming from northwest India and Persia and many thinkers who were not racists and were also fascinated by what the Germans called Indology, the field of study of India and Indo-Aryan science, religion and culture. um Chamberlain was one of those focused thinkers.

He's actually British, but he spent all his time in Germany. He learned German. He married Wagner. He was loved by Hitler's daughter, as you pointed out, who gave a kind of scientific gloss to this idea that there are these superior races. You can see how close this is to occult doctrines at the same time that emerged from an Indo-Aryan civilization. It may have been a flood, so the racist Germans who embraced this idea said that it was originally a proto-Nordic people who after the flood and the collapse of Atlantis or the Thule society went east and those who remained mated with Asians natives, why Asian culture is superior to African culture and why Hinduism and Buddhism are amazing religions and Shintoism, Hindu and Indian theorists say no, everything originated here and then we moved west, no It matters a lot, none of this is based on truly rigorous principles. science, but it all ties into this idea of ​​an Indo-Aryan master race, which is why all these right-wing groups choose a swastika.

People see that as superficial and that's important. Why do they choose an Indo-Aryan fertility symbol? and not just the Nazis like the whole German order, all these occult groups because it's such a common belief that that's where the Indo-Aryan race comes from and the religion and the culture and certain occult powers that of course you'll put a swastika on it. your book about your flag, right, is the substitute for the cross and Chamberlain believes in those things, so there are all kinds of interesting things in the Third Reich that come from that, but Chamberlain is just one of many paul de la gard julius longbend tedor fritsch lonzon liebenfels, we could talk about all these thinkers making similar arguments, well I know Eric will answer questions while signing books, if anyone wants to delve into any of these endless topics, thank you very much, really, incredibly fascinating, welcome, thank you .