The Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner’s concept of anthroposophy-which today underpins the pedagogy of Waldorf schools-had its followers. Kurlander’s measured history, though, depicts a situation that was more Elks Lodge than Da Vinci Code-a network of clubs and fraternal orders aiming to revive esoteric German folk practices, discover mystical Eastern traditions, and stretch the borders of scientific thinking. The topic is easy to dramatize (and the sensationalism has, at times, earned some well-deserved backlash). Best known is the British historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s book on the subject, published in 1985 under the sensationalist title The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology, which has been translated into at least eight languages. Kurlander is far from the first scholar to note that Germany in the early twentieth century was a hotbed of unorthodox spiritual exploration. But the point stands: Somewhere in the borderlands of folklore, biology, science fiction, parapsychology, and occultism, a handful of fringe thinkers were cooking up a potent, and lethal, political brew. Even back in 1909, Kurlander writes, the little magazine was preoccupied with some now-infamous themes: “the importance of ‘Nordic’ blood purity and the dangers of racial miscegenation the monstrous perfidy of the ‘Jew’ the deleterious effects of socialism, liberalism, and feminism and the mystical power of the Indo-European swastika.”ĭecades later, the publisher of Ostara, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, would claim that a young Adolf Hitler had shown up at his office and ordered back issues of the magazine.
Kurlander, a historian at Stetson University in Florida, starts this story in Vienna, in 1909, in the offices of a self-published occult magazine, Ostara.
And it’s the story of what can happen when a fragile democracy, under the strain of economic collapse and rapid cultural upheaval, sees its leadership abandon civic traditions, indulge in vivid fantasies, and lose any stable sense of reality.
But it’s also a reminder of the deep connections that sometimes appear between illiberal politics and certain kinds of occult or supernatural beliefs. His book is a grim museum of Nazi exotica. Kurlander is documenting something zanier, more particular, and somehow more frightening. We’re used to understanding Nazis as cruel automatons, and their regime as the horrific triumph of secular rationality and bureaucratic efficiency. This isn’t what Americans are accustomed to hearing about the Third Reich. There were biodynamic farms at Dachau and Auschwitz. The second most powerful Nazi leader, Heinrich Himmler, was an avid reader of the Bhagavad Gita and had a personal astrologer. SS officers studied runes, compared themselves to a Hindu warrior caste, and traveled to Tibet in the middle of the war, looking for a lost Aryan tribe. Kurlander writes about Nazi scientists hunting for death rays, and about a government team that tried to suss out submarines using a map of the Atlantic and a metal cube on a string.
#HOLOCAUST PROJECT TITLE IDEAS MOVIE#
Some of the details in historian Eric Kurlander’s new study of Nazism and the occult, Hitler’s Monsters, sound more like plot points from a Captain America movie than facts from the historical record. Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich
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