Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
I.B.Tauris, London, 1992, £9.95.
In his last paragraph the author concludes: ‘Books written about Nazi occultism between 1960 and 1975 were typically sensational and under-researched. A complete ignorance of the primary sources was common to most authors and inaccuracies and wild claims were repeated by each newcomer to the genre until an abundant literature existed, based on wholly spurious ‘facts’ concerning the powerful Thule Society, the Nazi links with the East, and Hitler’s occult initiation.’ The chief target of this paragraph is presumably Pauwels and Bergier’s The Dawn of Magic (a.k.a. The Morning of the Magicians), which first appeared in this country in 1966 or 7 and blew the minds of thousands.
I remember vivedly the blast I got from that book, my first introduction to the Fortean world. But what remains in my memory, fifteen years after I read it is, are fragments about crank sciences which flourished — perhaps I should say allegedly flourished — under the Nazi regime: hollow earth, solid sky, ice and fire; foreign policy conducted by horoscope, troop deployment by dowsing over maps; and hints about strange links between the Nazis and the occult. I had never come across any of that before and it rang the bell. For the big puzzle about the Holocaust was explaining how people who lived in the same world as my parents, only a few hundred miles away, apparently post-Enlightenment Europeans, decided that it was a good idea to wipe out the Jews, gypsies, gays, communists et al. Then along came Pauwels and Bergier with the message: relax, do not adjust the set. The reason you can’t understand the Nazis is they didn’t live in the same world as you; that was the surface. And finally, with this fascinating research in the original German sources, we have a reliable guided tour through some of the weird shit inside some German minds. And, boy oh boy, weird it was.
For example there is the work of Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, according to whom (p. 94) ‘the chief pursuit of antiquity appeared to have been the rearing of love-pygmies (Buhlzwerge) for deviant sexual pleasure. The prime purpose of the Old Testament had been to warn the chosen people (the Aryans!) against the consequences of this bestial idolatory….. Lanz finally intepreted the Passion as the attempted rape and perversion of Christ by pygmies urged on by the disciplines of the satanic bestial cults devoted to interbreeding.’
For example, there is Phillip Stauff (p. 132), whose ‘esoteric treatise Runenhauser [Rune Houses] (1912) extended the Listian thesis of ‘armanist’ relics with the claim that the ancient runic wisdom had been enshrined in the geometric configuration of beams in half-timbered houses throughout Germany.’
And so on through the Templars, Germanic Theosophy, Theozology, the Germanorden, the Thule Society, Ariosophy… This is a wonderful piece of research in the slimy trail left by late 19th century shysters like Madame Blavatsky and her disciples.