HISTORY
from issue no. 10 - 2004
Germany the great,an esoteric dream
An interview with Giorgio Galli on the occult roots of Nazism, from which also arose the idea that the “living space” of the Third Reich should stretch to the Urals. An aspect little studied by historians, but which has re-emerged since the fall of the Berlin Wall
by Paolo Mattei
Above, a poster of the SS (Schutz-Staffeln, “Security-squads”) with the runic stylization of the initials. Runic symbols were the object of study of Guido von List, an esoterist known to Adolf Hitler (below) during the years when his mind was forming
It has been from that viewpoint that he has also studied the history of the Third Reich, publishing the result of his work in 1989 in a widely known book: Hitler and magical Nazism. The esoteric components of the millennial Reich (Rizzoli, Milan). The year 1989 is one for which Galli points out significant coincidences: the centenary of the birth of Hitler and the bicentenary of the French Revolution. «The year 1989», he explains in the preface to the second edition of his book, «was to enter history because of the revolution in the East: exactly a century after the birth of the Führer the wall of Berlin fell, premise of a Germany united again, the hegemonic power in Europe».
Fifteen years on from that year, after so many happenings, after the tragedy of 11 September 2001 that gave rise to the on-going wars, the history of violence and death in which Hitler and Nazism figured so largely continues to stir troubling questions and to stand as measure for the violence and death that rain down each day in the places round the world martyred by conflicts. And the possible occult, magical, esoteric substratum of that phenomenon stirs the interest of many. The television has often dealt with it and in the last year at least two books have had a certain success in Italy (Marco Dolcetta, Esoteric Nazionalsocialism, Cooper Castelvecchi, Rome 2003; Mel Gordon, Hitler’s magus. Eric Jan Hanussen: a Jew at the Führer’s court, Mondadori, Milan 2004).
We put some questions to Giorgio Galli (author of many essays some of which deal with the esoteric and politics such as Politics and the magicians, Rizzoli, Milan 1995; Politics and the esoteric on the threshold of 2000, Rizzoli, Milan 1992; Notes on the New Age, Milan 2003, in which he analyses that cultural movement, making use also of papal documents).
In your essay Magical Nazism you point to an “esoteric bridge” between England and Germany, between theories and esoteric and occult societies present in the two countries in the 19th and the 20th centuries. A bridge that stretched to the founders of Nazism also. What was that so exactly?
GIORGIO GALLI: Between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth the esoteric tradition in both Germany and England gained new strength. An “esoteric bridge” between the two countries, the Rosicrucian one, goes back in fact to the 17th century, in the framework of an occult culture not extraneous to the Thirty Years War that devastated Germany. In the last decades of the 19th century relations between English and Germans esoteric groups took on new force, and close links were forged among influential people – on the basis of a “magical” conception of reality - that were passed on for a couple of generations following. There were also troubling elements in the reconstitution. One of these consisted of so-called “sexual magic”, that is to say the attainment of “special” powers deriving from sexual practices: in 1888, the year after the foundation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, London was shaken by a series of sexual crimes, those of Jack the Ripper. The mystery has never been solved. Some figures and some relations significantly mark this resurfacing of the esoteric culture in Europe, such as the meeting in London between the French occultist Eliphas Levi, biblical pseudonym of Alphonse-Louis Constant, a former seminarian who became a revolutionary in Paris in 1848, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who was to have a crucial role in the evolution of the Rosicrucian society into the hermetic Golden Dawn. After various excursions into political and occult activities, Levi was to write a book, The coming race : in it he speaks of a form of energy, the “Vril” that is to give its name to a society, which, along with the work of the founder of the Institute of Geopolitics of Berlin, Karl Haushofer, was to furnish a fundamental contribution to the elaboration of Nazi ideology in relation to the idea of the Aryan race and of “living space”, Lebensraum.
What was the cultural background and theories common to these groups?
GALLI: First of all a conception according to which the history we know is only one part of the history of mankind. Only some elites of initiates know “all” history. The ancient history of pure and incorrupt civilizations. This lore and knowledge, which one can gain through occult practices and rites, transmit particular power to the initiates who must also perform a political role so as to administer the future of a decadent mankind to which the gifts and the characteristics lost over time must be restored. The members of these societies believed, in short, that they were the depositories of an ancient primordial learning that often manifested itself in particular rites. An interesting fact is that some followers of esoteric groups performed roles in the secret services of their own countries. A key figure in this sense is the German Theodor Reuss, of the occult Ordo templi orientis society, teacher of the Englishman Aleister Crowley. Crowley, also a master of the occult and agent of the British services at the same time, at the end of the nineteenth century joined the celebrated Golden Dawn – a derivation, as has been said, of the Rosicrucian Society – and then founded an English offshoot of the Ordo templi orientis. The Golden Dawn was in its turn linked with German associations connected to the secret doctrine of the Russian Madame Elena Blavatsky – founder in New York, in 1875, of the Theosophical Society –and to the anthroposophy of Rudolph Steiner.
But the business of Hitler and Nazism occurred after those episodes...
GALLI: My hypothesis is that the “bridge”, which, as I’ve explained, united English and German esoteric cultures, hermetic orders and secret services between the 19th and 20th centuries, continued to exist in the period immediately following, so that the intellectual baggage of Hitler and of part of the Nazi executive group came from this type of occult culture. I have gathered data that enables me even to say that this group, having reached power in the Third Reich, debated within that ambit on how to implement a strategy deriving from that culture, that is to say the resurgence of “Aryan wisdom”. As I can also affirm that Hitler’s decision to enter war in the conviction that England would not intervene can be understood in the light of the esoteric culture, of which leading circles in English politic life were also aware. The whole history of Nazism should, in my view, be read keeping this factor in mind as well.
Above, Hitler reconstituting the Nazionalsocialist Party (outlawed after the putsch of 1923), Munich 1925; first from the left is Alfred Rosenberg; first from the right is Heinrich Himmler, from 1929 head of the SS, conceiver and organizer of the extermination camps; below, the occultist Aleister Crowley, British secret service agent and member of the Golden Dawn
GALLI: The starting point can be found in the magazine Ostara, of which Hitler in his Vienna years was an avid reader. The publication - which takes its name from an ancient Germanic goddess of the spring and that hence denotes a connection with the Nordic tradition and with the old pagan deities antecedent to the spread of Christianity in Germany – was founded in 1905 by a former monk, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels who, among other things, founded a place in Werfenstein, the “Castle of Order”, where, probably, with financial support from business, began to advocate an organization founded on the theory of the superiority of the Aryan race. Another point of reference for the esoteric interests of the future Führer is Rudolf von Sebottendorff, a student of the Cabal, of alchemical and Rosicrucian works, of the occult practices of the dervishes, and promoter, in 1918 in Munich, of the Thule Gesellschaft, an offshoot association of the Germanorden, a society set up early in the second decade that was strongly marked by elements of anti-semitism and racism. Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Karl Haushofer and Hans Frank, the future governor general of Poland all gravitated round the Thule. It was an association dominated by occult culture and the secret doctrines worked out in the preceding decades. Thule – the mythical Atlantis, country of the Hyperboreans – was thus the mould of the group of intellectuals at the origin of Nazism. Among other things, in 1933 Von Sebottendorff published a book, Before Hitler came, in which, meaning to rekindle the debate about the esoteric origins of Nazism, he speaks of having been the Führer’s teacher in the occult. But that group of intellectuals, by then in power, had for some time decided that it was better to keep hidden the esoteric and occult elements they believed in so as to give emphasis to political organization. And for that matter, in the year von Sebottendorff’s book was published, Hitler was already Chancellor of the Reich. The book was thus withdrawn from the shops.
What are the basic features of the esoteric group Hitler centered on?
GALLI: I have to say beforehand that one of the difficulties working in this field is the fact that official, academic historiography doesn’t much engage with these things. Work in the area of esoteric culture is sometimes left to minority scholars or even to very eccentric characters, who in any case often work on marginal affairs. The fact that official historiography doesn’t do much in this direction makes it more difficult to find certified documentation. I’m convicted that if there were more interest, something would be found. But let me answer your question. I’ve mentioned very ancient civilization and legacies of knowledge – Atlantis is the most important reference – in short to a cultural element based on fantasy history, on fantasy geography, on fantasy cosmogony and on the hidden laws that are alleged to guide it. Hitler believed that the founding reasons of his political action lay in that distant past, in a magical wisdom to be retrieved and in which lay the tool for forging the luminous future. The group of Thule intellectuals who in the ’twenties decided the transformation of an occult sect into a mass political party, were convinced believers in these things. There were thus two dynamics at work: the profound conviction of the initiates who operated in these groups and, at the same time, a certain influence that they, for reasons amply gone into by the scholars, exerted in some historic moments on political movements. Hitler, Himmler, Hess, Rosenberg, Frank: they believed themselves the heirs to an ancient lore that would enable them to build a new civilization. It should be said that a renowned and “traditional” historian has identified and assessed some of these esoteric threads: I speak of George Mosse who in the Cultural origins of the Third Reich explicitly points to the esoterist Guido von List and his runic symbology as one of Hitler’s points of reference. The initials of the SS, the militias that Himmler was to use to implement projects worked out in the occult milieu, come from the runes studied by von List.
Above, Adolf Hitler with Rudolf Hess in a photo of Lebensraum, the “living space”" src="upload/articoli_immagini_interne/1101294393293.jpg" />
Karl Haushofer, founder of the Institute of Geopolitics of Berlin and principal conceiver of the Nazi theory of Lebensraum, the “living space”
GALLI: In esoteric culture there is a fundamental difference between “initiation” and “contra-initiation”. Initiation – that of the Masons, to make myself clear – is held to be positive. Contra-initiation instead is thought to have something diabolic about it: Churchill had found out that Hitler was a “contra-initiate”. Churchill, then, knowing of the “esoteric-diabolic” background to Hitler’s contra-initiation, was afraid that behind the negotiable objectives – a free hand in Europe and in the East for Germany and guarantee of the continuity of the British Empire – that were probably acceptable to him, there were non-negotiable objectives: the empire of evil. Hitler didn’t want only an empire of a geopolitical sort. He wanted an empire over minds, based on a series of values that even the conservative anti-communist Churchill saw as negative and unwarrantable. It’s a fact, however, that Hitler’s prophecy of the end of the British Empire has in substance come true. Hitler prophesied that Churchill would destroy the English Empire and hand over the imperial sceptre to the United States.
One last question, Professor. René Girard said in a recent interview that «the Nazi contempt for Christian tenderness toward the victims has not gone out of history». The French professor also said he was afraid that «in future somebody will try to reformulate the principle in more politically correct fashion, maybe by draping it in Christianity». What do you say?
GALLI: Girard is a great scholar, thoroughly documented and rich in insights. I think that it is possible to conceive of a Nazism “draped in Christianity”, not least because Nazism with its specific characteristics is unrepeatable. And I don’t believe that the representative democracy can be put into crisis by authoritarian movements like those of the ’twenties and ’thirties. There is however the danger that in the western democracies the forms of democracy are kept up without the substance. Political parties won’t be banned any longer, civil liberties will be guaranteed to a certain extent but, at the same time, there could be the danger that only the formulas of democracy remain and the substance disappears. There could be a non-democracy disguised as democracy. Likewise, Girard’s insight is plausible: just as it’s possible that an anti-democracy presents itself with apparently democratic features, so it’s possible that an anti-Christianity that despises victims as did Nazism, can actually operate by draping itself in Christian forms. I wouldn’t want to hazard myself in a field I don’t know, but I know that there are - and are ever more widespread - publications that express tendencies that I think can be described as “apocalyptic fundamentalist”. These tendencies might in some way prefigure a danger like the one Girard mentions. Some isolate features that came together in the spread of Nazism could reappear in that context.
