By Alexander Berzin on May 2003, from BerzinArchives Website / Spanish version
Introduction
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler (German: [ˈhaɪnʁɪç ˈluːɪtpɔlt ˈhɪmlɐ] ⓘ; 7 October 1900 – 23 May 1945) was a German politician who was the 4th Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (Protection Squadron; SS), a leading member of the German Nazi Party, and one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany. He is primarily known for being a principal architect of the Holocaust. After serving in a reserve battalion during the First World War without seeing combat, Himmler went on to join the Nazi Party in 1923. In 1925, he joined the SS, a small paramilitary arm of the Nazi Party that served as a bodyguard unit for Adolf Hitler. Subsequently, Himmler rose steadily through the SS’s ranks to become Reichsführer-SS by 1929. Under Himmler’s leadership, the SS grew from a 290-man battalion into one of the most powerful institutions within Nazi Germany. Over the course of his career, Himmler acquired a reputation for good organizational skills as well as for selecting highly competent subordinates, such as Reinhard Heydrich. From 1943 onwards, he was both Chief of the Kriminalpolizei (Criminal Police) and Minister of the Interior, which gave him oversight of all internal and external police and security forces (including the Gestapo). He also controlled the Waffen-SS, a branch of the SS that served in combat alongside the Wehrmacht in World War II. As the principal enforcer of the Nazis’ racial policies, Himmler was responsible for operating concentration and extermination camps as well as forming the Einsatzgruppen death squads in German-occupied Europe. In this capacity, he played a central role in the genocide of an estimated 5.5–6 million Jews and the deaths of millions of other victims during the Holocaust. A day before the launch of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, Himmler commissioned the drafting of Generalplan Ost, which was approved by Hitler in May 1942 and implemented by the Nazi regime, resulting in the deaths of approximately 14 million people in Eastern Europe. In the last years of the Second World War, Hitler appointed Himmler as Commander of the Replacement Army and General Plenipotentiary for the administration of the Third Reich (Generalbevollmächtigter für die Verwaltung). He was later given command of the Army Group Upper Rhine and the Army Group Vistula. However, after he failed to achieve his assigned objectives, Hitler replaced him in these posts. Realizing the war was lost, Himmler attempted, without Hitler’s knowledge, to open peace talks with the western Allies in March 1945. When Hitler learned of this on 28 April, he dismissed Himmler from all his posts and ordered his arrest. Thereafter, Himmler attempted to go into hiding but was captured by British forces. He committed suicide in British custody on 23 May 1945.
Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)
Many high-ranking members of the Nazi regime, including Hitler, but especially Himmler and Hess, held convoluted occult beliefs.
Rudolf Walter Richard Hess (Heß in German; 26 April 1894 – 17 August 1987) was a German politician and a leading member of the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany. Appointed Deputy Führer to Adolf Hitler in 1933, Hess held that position until 1941, when he flew solo to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate the United Kingdom’s exit from the Second World War. He was taken prisoner and eventually convicted of crimes against peace. He was still serving his life sentence at the time of his suicide in 1987. Hess enlisted as an infantryman in the Imperial German Army at the outbreak of World War I. He was wounded several times during the war and was awarded the Iron Cross, 2nd Class, in 1915. Shortly before the war ended, Hess enrolled to train as an aviator, but he saw no action in that role. He left the armed forces in December 1918 with the rank of Leutnant der Reserve. In 1919, Hess enrolled in the University of Munich, where he studied geopolitics under Karl Haushofer, a proponent of the concept of Lebensraum (‘living space’), which became one of the pillars of Nazi ideology. Hess joined the Nazi Party on 1 July 1920 and was at Hitler’s side on 8 November 1923 for the Beer Hall Putsch, a failed Nazi attempt to seize control of the government of Bavaria. While serving a prison sentence for this attempted coup, he assisted Hitler with Mein Kampf, which became a foundation of the political platform of the Nazi Party. After Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933, Hess was appointed Deputy Führer of the Nazi Party in April. He was elected to the Reichstag in the March elections, was made a Reichsleiter of the Nazi Party in June and in December 1933 he became Minister without Portfolio in Hitler’s cabinet. He was also appointed in 1938 to the Cabinet Council and in August 1939 to the Council of Ministers for Defence of the Reich. Hitler decreed on the outbreak of war on 1 September 1939 that Hermann Göring was his official successor and named Hess as next in line. In addition to appearing on Hitler’s behalf at speaking engagements and rallies, Hess signed into law much of the government’s legislation, including the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which stripped the Jews of Germany of their rights in the lead-up to the Holocaust. By the start of the war, Hess was sidelined from most important decisions, and many in Hitler’s inner circle thought him to be mad. On 10 May 1941, Hess made a solo flight to Scotland, where he hoped to arrange peace talks with the Duke of Hamilton, whom he believed to be a prominent opponent of the British government’s war policy. The British authorities arrested Hess immediately on his arrival and held him in custody until the end of the war, when he was returned to Germany to stand trial at the 1946 Nuremberg trials of major war criminals. During much of his trial, Hess claimed to be suffering from amnesia, but he later admitted to the court that this had been a ruse. The court convicted him of crimes against peace and of conspiracy with other German leaders to commit crimes. He served a life sentence in Spandau Prison; the Soviet Union blocked repeated attempts by family members and prominent politicians to procure his early release. While still in custody as the only prisoner in Spandau, he hanged himself in 1987 at the age of 93. After his death, the prison was demolished to prevent it from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine. His grave, bearing the inscription “Ich hab’s gewagt” (I dared it), became a site of regular pilgrimage and demonstrations by Neo-Nazis. In 2011, authorities refused to renew the lease on the gravesite, and his remains were exhumed and cremated and the gravestone destroyed.
Prompted by those beliefs, the Germans sent an official expedition to Tibet between 1938 and 1939 at the invitation of the Tibetan Government to attend the Losar (New Year) celebrations.
Tibet had suffered a long history of Chinese attempts to annex it and British failure to prevent the aggression or to protect Tibet.
Under Stalin, the Soviet Union was severely persecuting Buddhism, specifically the Tibetan form as practiced among the Mongols within its borders and in its satellite, the People’s Republic of Mongolia (Outer Mongolia).
In contrast, Japan was upholding Tibetan Buddhism in Inner Mongolia, which it had annexed as part of Manchukuo, its puppet state in Manchuria.
Claiming that Japan was Shambhala, the Imperial Government was trying to win the support of the Mongols under its rule for an invasion of Outer Mongolia and Siberia to create a pan-Mongol confederation under Japanese protection.
The Tibetan Government was exploring the possibility of also gaining protection from Japan in the face of the unstable situation.
Japan and Germany had signed an Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936, declaring their mutual hostility toward the spread of international Communism.
The invitation for the visit of an official delegation from Nazi Germany was extended in this context.
In August 1939, shortly after the German expedition to Tibet, Hitler broke his pact with Japan and signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
In September, the Soviets defeated the Japanese who had invaded Outer Mongolia in May.
Subsequently, nothing ever materialized from the Japanese and German contacts with the Tibetan Government.
Several postwar writers on the Occult have asserted that Buddhism and the legend of Shambhala played a role in the German-Tibetan official contact.
Let us examine the issue.
The Myths of Thule and Vril
The first element of Nazi occult beliefs was in the mythic land of Hyperborea-Thule.
Just as Plato had cited the Egyptian legend of the sunken island of Atlantis, Herodotus mentioned the Egyptian legend of the continent of Hyperborea in the far north.
When ice destroyed this ancient land, its people migrated south.
Writing in 1679, the Swedish author Olaf Rudbeck identified the Atlanteans with the Hyperboreans and located the latter at the North Pole.
According to several accounts, Hyperborea split into the islands of Thule and Ultima Thule, which some people identified with Iceland and Greenland.
Proposals for the United States to purchase Greenland – Wikipedia
The second ingredient was the idea of a hollow earth.
At the end of the seventeenth century, the British astronomer Sir Edmund Halley first suggested that the earth was hollow, consisting of four concentric spheres.
Edmond (or Edmund) Halley FRS (/ˈhæli/; 8 November [O.S. 29 October] 1656 – 25 January 1742 [O.S. 14 January 1741]) was an English astronomer, mathematician and physicist. He was the second Astronomer Royal in Britain, succeeding John Flamsteed in 1720. From an observatory he constructed on Saint Helena in 1676–77, Halley catalogued the southern celestial hemisphere and recorded a transit of Mercury across the Sun. He realized that a similar transit of Venus could be used to determine the distances between Earth, Venus, and the Sun. Upon his return to England, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society, and with the help of King Charles II, was granted a master’s degree from Oxford. Halley encouraged and helped fund the publication of Isaac Newton’s influential Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687). From observations Halley made in September 1682, he used Newton’s law of universal gravitation to compute the periodicity of Halley’s Comet in his 1705 Synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets. It was named after him upon its predicted return in 1758, which he did not live to see. Beginning in 1698, Halley made sailing expeditions and made observations on the conditions of terrestrial magnetism. In 1718, he discovered the proper motion of the “fixed” stars.
Jules Gabriel Verne (/vɜːrn/; French: [ʒyl ɡabʁijɛl vɛʁn]; 8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). His novels, always well-researched according to the scientific knowledge then available, are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account the technological advances of the time. In addition to his novels, he wrote numerous plays, short stories, autobiographical accounts, poetry, songs, and scientific, artistic, and literary studies. His work has been adapted for film and television since the beginning of cinema, as well as for comic books, theater, opera, music and video games. Verne is considered to be an important author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation was markedly different in the Anglosphere where he had often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children’s books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels have often been printed. Since the 1980s, his literary reputation has improved. Jules Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking below Agatha Christie and above William Shakespeare. He has sometimes been called the “father of science fiction”, a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback. In the 2010s, he was the most translated French author in the world. In France, 2005 was declared “Jules Verne Year” on the occasion of the centenary of the writer’s death.
The hollow earth theory fired many people’s imaginations, especially with the publication in 1864 of French novelist Jules Verne’s Voyage to the Center of the Earth.
Journey to the Center of the Earth – Anna’s Archive
Soon, the concept of vril appeared.
Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, PC (25 May 1803 – 18 January 1873), was an English writer and politician. He served as a Whig member of Parliament from 1831 to 1841 and a Conservative from 1851 to 1866. He was Secretary of State for the Colonies from June 1858 to June 1859, choosing Richard Clement Moody as founder of British Columbia. He was created Baron Lytton of Knebworth in 1866. Bulwer-Lytton’s works were well known in his time. He coined famous phrases like “pursuit of the almighty dollar”, “the pen is mightier than the sword”, “dweller on the threshold”, “the great unwashed”, and the opening phrase “It was a dark and stormy night.” The sardonic Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, held annually since 1982, claims to seek the “opening sentence of the worst of all possible novels”.
In 1871, British novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, in The Coming Race, described a superior race, the Vril-ya, who lived beneath the earth and planned to conquer the world with vril, a psychokinetic energy.
Vril: THe Power of the Coming Race – Anna’s Archive
The French author Louis Jacolliot furthered the myth in Les Fils de Dieu (The Sons of God – 1873) and Les Traditions indo-européeenes (The Indo-European Traditions – 1876).
Louis Jacolliot (31 October 1837 – 30 October 1890) was a French barrister, colonial judge, author and lecturer.
In these books, he linked vril with the subterranean people of Thule.
The Thuleans will harness the power of vril to become supermen and rule the world.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland in 1869, at the age of 24, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897, and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900, after experiencing pneumonia and multiple strokes. Nietzsche’s work spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony. Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favour of perspectivism; a genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and a related theory of master–slave morality; the aesthetic affirmation of life in response to both the “death of God” and the profound crisis of nihilism; the notion of Apollonian and Dionysian forces; and a characterisation of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power. He also developed influential concepts such as the Übermensch and his doctrine of eternal return. In his later work, he became increasingly preoccupied with the creative powers of the individual to overcome cultural and moral mores in pursuit of new values and aesthetic health. His body of work touched a wide range of topics, including art, philology, history, music, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew inspiration from Greek tragedy as well as figures such as Zoroaster, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Wagner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. After his death, Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth became the curator and editor of his manuscripts. She edited his unpublished writings to fit her German ultranationalist ideology, often contradicting or obfuscating Nietzsche’s stated opinions, which were explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. Through her published editions, Nietzsche’s work became associated with fascism and Nazism. 20th-century scholars such as Walter Kaufmann, R. J. Hollingdale, and Georges Bataille defended Nietzsche against this interpretation, and corrected editions of his writings were soon made available. Nietzsche’s thought enjoyed renewed popularity in the 1960s and his ideas have since had a profound impact on 20th- and early 21st-century thinkers across philosophy—especially in schools of continental philosophy such as existentialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism—as well as art, literature, music, poetry, politics, and popular culture.
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) also emphasized the concept of the Übermensch (superman) and began his work, Der Antichrist (The Antichrist – 1888) with the line,
“Let us see ourselves for what we are.
We are Hyperboreans.
We know well enough how we are living off that track.”
Although Nietzsche never mentioned vril, yet in his posthumously published collection of aphorisms, Der Wille zur Macht (The Will to Power), he emphasized the role of an internal force for superhuman development.
Delphi Complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche – Anna’s Archive
Friedrich Nietzsche – Search – Anna’s Archive
He wrote that “the herd,” meaning common persons, strives for security within itself through creating morality and rules, whereas the supermen have an internal vital force that drives them to go beyond the herd.
That force necessitates and drives them to lie to the herd in order to remain independent and free from the “herd mentality.”
In The Arctic Home of the Vedas (1903), the early advocate of Indian freedom, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, added a further touch by identifying the southern migration of the Thuleans with the origin of the Aryan race.
Bal Gangadhar Tilak (pronunciationⓘ; born Keshav Gangadhar Tilak (pronunciation: [keʃəʋ ɡəŋɡaːd̪ʱəɾ ʈiɭək]); 23 July 1856 – 1 August 1920), endeared as Lokmanya (IAST: Lokamānya), was an Indian nationalist, teacher, and an independence activist. He was one third of the Lal Bal Pal triumvirate. The British colonial authorities called him “The father of the Indian unrest”. He was also conferred with the title of “Lokmanya”, which means “accepted by the people as their leader”. Mahatma Gandhi called him “The Maker of Modern India”. Tilak was one of the first and strongest advocates of Swaraj (‘self-rule’) and a strong radical in Indian consciousness. He is known for his quote in Marathi: “Swaraj is my birthright and I shall have it!”. He formed a close alliance with many Indian National Congress leaders including Bipin Chandra Pal, Lala Lajpat Rai, Aurobindo Ghose, V. O. Chidambaram Pillai and Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
Thus, many Germans in the early twentieth century believed that they were the descendants of the Aryans who had migrated south from Hyperborea-Thule and who were destined to become the master race of supermen through the power of vril.
Hitler was among them.
Hitler’s Genealogy – Library of Rickandria
The Thule Society and the Founding of the Nazi Party
Felix Niedner, the German translator of the Old Norse Eddas, founded the Thule Society in 1910.
In 1918, Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorf established its Munich branch.
Adam Alfred Rudolf Glauer also known as Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorff (or Sebottendorf; 9 November 1875 – 8 May 1945) was a German occultist, writer, intelligence agent and political activist. He was the founder of the Thule Society, a post-World War I German occultist organization where he played a key role, and that influenced many members of the Nazi Party. He was a Freemason, a Sufi of the Bektashi order – after his conversion to Islam – and a practitioner of meditation, astrology, numerology, and alchemy. He also used the alias, Erwin Torre.
Sebottendorff had previously lived for several years in Istanbul where, in 1910, he had formed a secret society that combined esoteric Sufism and Freemasonry.
It believed in the creed of the assassins, deriving from the Nazari sect of Ismaili Islam, which had flourished during the Crusades.
While in Istanbul, Sebottendorff was also undoubtedly familiar with the pan-Turanian movement of the Young Turks, started in 1908, which was largely behind the Armenian genocide of 1915-1916.
Genocide IS & Always Has Been a Jewish Ideal – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)
Turkey and Germany were allies during the First World War.
Back in Germany, Sebottendorff had also been a member of the Germanenorden (Order of Teutons), founded in 1912 as a right-wing society with a secret anti-Semitic Lodge.
Through these channels:
- assassination
- genocide
- anti-Semitism
became parts of the Thule Society’s creed.
Anti-Communism was added after the Bavarian Communist Revolution later in 1918, when the Munich Thule Society became the center of the counterrevolutionary movement.
Antony C. Sutton – The Capitalist Communist Conspiracy (Part 1 of 2).mp4 806 MB
Reading the Signs – Today’s Lesson: Karl Marx – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)
In 1919, the Society spawned the German Worker’s Party.
Engels & Owen – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)
Starting later that year, Dietrich Eckart, a member of the inner circle of the Thule Society, initiated Hitler into the Society and began to train him in its methods for harnessing vril to create a race of Aryan supermen.
Dietrich Eckart (German: [ˈɛkaʁt]; 23 March 1868 – 26 December 1923) was a German völkisch poet, playwright, journalist, publicist, and political activist who was one of the founders of the German Workers’ Party, the precursor of the Nazi Party. Eckart was a key influence on Adolf Hitler in the early years of the Party, the original publisher of the party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter (“Folkist Observer”), and the lyricist of the first party anthem, “Sturmlied” (“Storming Song”). He was a participant in the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 and died on 26 December of that year, shortly after his release from Landsberg Prison, of a heart attack. Eckart was elevated to the status of a major thinker upon the establishment of Nazi Germany in 1933. He was acknowledged by Hitler to be the spiritual co-founder of Nazism and “a guiding light of the early National Socialist movement.”
Marx’s Wife & other things – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)
Hitler had been mystic minded from his youth, when he had studied the Occult and Theosophy in Vienna.
Later, Hitler dedicated Mein Kampf to Eckart.
In 1920, Hitler became the head of the German Workers Party, now renamed the National Socialist German Worker (Nazi) Party.
Haushofer, the Vril Society, and Geopolitics
Another major influence on Hitler’s thinking was Karl Haushofer (1869-1946), a German military advisor to the Japanese after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905.
Karl Ernst Haushofer (27 August 1869 – 10 March 1946) was a German general, professor, geographer, and diplomat. Haushofer’s concept of Geopolitik influenced the ideological development of Adolf Hitler. Rudolf Hess was also a student of Haushofer, and during Hess and Hitler’s incarceration by the Weimar Republic after the Beer Hall Putsch, Haushofer visited Landsberg Prison to teach and mentor both Hess and Hitler. Haushofer also coined the political use of the term Lebensraum, which Hitler also used to justify both crimes against peace and genocide. At the same time, however, Gen. Haushofer’s half-Jewish wife and their children were categorized as Mischlinge under the Nuremberg Laws. Their son, Albrecht Haushofer, was issued a German Blood Certificate through the influence of Rudolf Hess, but was arrested in 1944 over his involvement with the July 20th plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler and overthrow the Nazi Party. During the last days of the war, Albrecht Haushofer was summarily executed by the SS for his role in the German Resistance. After being interrogated by Fr. Edmund A. Walsh, who recommended to Robert H. Jackson that Haushofer be prosecuted at the Nuremberg Trials for complicity in Nazi war crimes, Karl and Martha Haushofer died together in a suicide pact outside of their home in the American Zone of Occupied Germany.
Because he was extremely impressed with Japanese culture, many believe that he was responsible for the later German-Japanese alliance.
He was also highly interested in Indian and Tibetan culture, learned Sanskrit, and claimed that he had visited Tibet.
The Matrix & the Sanskrit Texts – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)
After serving as a general in the First World War, Haushofer founded the Vril Society in Berlin in 1918.
It shared the same basic beliefs as the Thule Society, and some say that it was its inner circle.
The Society sought contact with supernatural beings beneath the earth to gain from them the powers of vril.
It also asserted a Central Asian origin of the Aryan race.
Haushofer developed the doctrine of Geopolitics and, in the early 1920s, became the director of the Institute for Geopolitics at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich.
Geopolitics advocated conquering territory to gain more living space (Germ. Lebensraum) as a means of acquiring power.
Rudolf Hess was one of Haushofer’s closest students and introduced him to Hitler in 1923, while Hitler was in prison for his failed Putsch.
The BEER HALL PUTSCH was Faked! – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)
Subsequently, Haushofer often visited the future Führer, teaching him Geopolitics in association with the ideas of the Thule and Vril Societies.
Thule Gesellschaft & the Vril Society – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)
Thus, when Hitler became chancellor in 1933, he adopted Geopolitics as his policy for the Aryan race to conquer:
The key to success would be finding the forefathers of the Aryan race in Central Asia, the guardians of the secrets of vril.
The Swastika
The swastika is an ancient Indian symbol of immutable good luck.
“Swastika” is an Anglicization of the Sanskrit word svastika, which means well-being or good luck.
Used by:
- Hindus
- Buddhists
- Jains
for thousands of years, it became widespread in Tibet as well.
The swastika has also appeared in most other ancient cultures of the world.
For example, the counterclockwise variant of it, adopted by the Nazis, is also the letter “G” in the medieval Northern European Runic Script.
The Freemasons took the letter as an important symbol, since “G” could stand for God, the Great Architect of the Universe, or Geometry.
The swastika is also a traditional symbol of the Old Norse God of Thunder and Might:
- Scandinavian Thor
- German Donner
- Baltic Perkunas
Because of this association with the God of Thunder, the Latvians and Finnish both took the swastika as the insignia for their air forces when they gained independence after the First World War.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)
In the late nineteenth century, Guido von List adopted the swastika as an emblem for the Neo-Pagan movement in Germany.
Guido Karl Anton List (5 October 1848 – 17 May 1919), better known as Guido von List, was an Austrian occultist, journalist, playwright, and novelist. He expounded a modern Pagan new religious movement known as Wotanism, which he claimed was the revival of the religion of the ancient German race, and which included an inner set of Ariosophical teachings that he termed Armanism. Born to a wealthy middle-class family in Vienna, List claimed that he abandoned his family’s Roman Catholic faith in childhood, instead devoting himself to the pre-Christian god Wotan. Spending much time in the Austrian countryside, he engaged in rowing, hiking, and sketching the landscape. From 1877 he began a career as a journalist, primarily authoring articles on the Austrian countryside for nationalist newspapers and magazines. In these he placed a völkisch emphasis on the folk culture and customs of rural people, believing that many of them were survivals of pre-Christian, pagan religion. He published three novels, Carnuntum (1888), Jung Diethers Heimkehr (1894), and Pipara (1895), each set among the German tribes of the Iron Age, as well as authoring several plays. During the 1890s he continued writing völkisch articles, now largely for the nationalist Ostdeutsche Rundschau newspaper, with his works taking on an anti-semitic dimension halfway through that decade. In 1893, he co-founded the Literarische Donaugesellschaft literary society, and involved himself in Austria’s Pan-German nationalist movement, a milieu which sought the integration of Austria into the German Empire. During an 11-month period of blindness in 1902, List became increasingly interested in occultism, in particular coming under the influence of the Theosophical Society, resulting in an expansion of his Wotanic beliefs to incorporate Runology and the Armanen Futharkh. The popularity of his work among the völkisch and nationalist communities resulted in the establishment of a List Society in 1908; attracting significant middle and upper-class support, the Society published List’s writings and included an Ariosophist inner group, the High Armanen Order, over whom List presided as Grand Master. Through these ventures he promoted the millenarian view that modern society was degenerate, but that it would be cleansed through an apocalyptic event resulting in the establishment of a new Pan-German Empire that would embrace Wotanism. After having erroneously prophesied that this empire would be established by victory for the Central Powers in World War I, List died on a visit to Berlin in 1919. During his lifetime, List became a well-known figure among the nationalist and völkisch subcultures of Austria and Germany, influencing the work of many others operating in this milieu. His work, propagated through the List Society, influenced later völkisch groups such as the Reichshammerbund and Germanenorden, and through those exerted an influence on both the burgeoning Nazi Party, the SS and the German Faith Movement. After World War II his work continued to influence an array of Ariosophic and Heathen practitioners in Europe, Australia, and North America.
The Germans did not use the Sanskrit word swastika, however, but called it instead “Hakenkreutz,” meaning “hooked cross.”
It would defeat and replace the cross, just as Neo-Paganism would defeat and replace Christianity.
Christian Program & Purpose – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)
Sharing the anti-Christian sentiment of the Neo-Pagan movement, the Thule Society also adopted the Hakenkreuz as part of its emblem, placing it in a circle with a vertical German dagger superimposed on it.
The Christian Confusion – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)
In 1920, at the suggestion of Dr. Friedrich Krohn of the Thule Society, Hitler adopted the Hakenkreuz in a white circle for the central design of the Nazi Party flag.
Hitler chose red for the background color to compete against the red flag of the rival Communist Party.
The French researchers Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, in Le Matin des Magiciens (The Morning of the Magicians – 1962), wrote that Haushofer convinced Hitler to use the Hakenkreuz as the symbol for the Nazi Party.
They postulate that this was due to Haushofer’s interest in Indian and Tibetan culture.
This conclusion is highly unlikely, since Haushofer did not meet Hitler until 1923, whereas the Nazi flag first appeared in 1920.
It is more likely that Haushofer used the widespread presence of the swastika in India and Tibet as evidence to convince Hitler of this region as the location of the forefathers of the Aryan race.
Nazi Suppression of Rival Occult Groups
Brotherhoods & Secret Societies – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)
During the first half of the 1920s, a violent rivalry took place among the Occult Societies and Secret Lodges in Germany.
In 1925, for example, Rudolf Steiner, the founder of the Anthroposophical movement, was found murdered.
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner (27 or 25 February 1861[1] – 30 March 1925) was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century, he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory. In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed “spiritual science”, sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions,: differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approac hes to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture,culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural center to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine. Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s world view in which “thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas.” A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.
- Rudolf Steiner & Anthroposophy – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)
- Rudolf Steiner: The Invention of God & Religion – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)
- Rudolf Steiner Describes the Archons & Parasitic Entities that Feed off Your Fear & Anxiety – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)
- Rudolf Steiner, Secret Societies & ‘The Ahrimanic Deception’ – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)
Many suspected that the Thule Society had ordered his assassination.
In later years, Hitler continued the persecution of:
- Anthroposophists
- Theosophists
- Freemasons
- Rosicrucians
Various scholars ascribe this policy to Hitler’s wish to eliminate any occult rivals to his rule.
Influenced by Nietszche’s writings and Thule Society creeds, Hitler believed that Christianity was a defective religion, infected by its roots in Jewish thinking.
He viewed its teachings of forgiveness, the triumph of the weak, and self-abnegation as anti-evolutionary and saw himself as a messiah replacing God and Christ.
Hitler’s Religious Beliefs – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)
Steiner had used the image of the Antichrist and Lucifer as future spiritual leaders who would regenerate Christianity in a new pure form.
Exposing Christianity – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)
Hitler went much further.
He saw himself as ridding the world of a degenerate system and bringing about a new step in evolution with the Aryan master race.
He could tolerate no rival Antichrists, either now or in the future.
He was tolerant, however, of Buddhism.
Buddhism & the Kalachakra System – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)
Buddhism in Nazi Germany
In 1924, Paul Dahlke founded the Buddhistisches Haus (House for Buddhists) in Frohnau, Berlin.
Paul Dahlke (25 January 1865, Osterode – 29 February 1928) was a German physician and one of the founders of Buddhism in Germany. He wrote extensively about Buddhist teaching and living and translated Buddhist literature into German. In 1924 he established “Das Buddhistische Haus” considered to be the first Buddhist temple in Europe.
Dr. Paul Dahlke – History – Das Buddhistische Haus – Berlin Frohnau
It was open to members of all Buddhist traditions, but primarily catered to the Theravada and Japanese forms, since they were the most widely known in the West at that time.
In 1933, it hosted the First European Buddhist Congress.
Buddhism in Europe – Wikipedia
The Nazis allowed the House for Buddhists to remain open throughout the war, but tightly controlled it.
As some members knew Chinese and Japanese, they acted as translators for the government in return for tolerance of Buddhism.
BUDDHISM: The Stronger Poison – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)
Although the Nazi regime closed the Buddhistische Gemeinde (Buddhist Society) in Berlin, which had been active from 1936, and briefly arrested its founder Martin Steinke in 1941, they generally did not persecute Buddhists.
After his release, Steinke and several others continued to lecture on Buddhism in Berlin.
More on the Buddha – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)
There is no evidence, however, that teachers of Tibetan Buddhism were ever present in the Third Reich.
The Nazi policy of tolerance for Buddhism does not prove any influence of Buddhist teachings on Hitler or Nazi ideology.
A more probable explanation is Germany’s wish not to damage relations with its Buddhist ally, Japan.
The Ahnenerbe
Friedrich Hielscher (31 May 1902 – 6 March 1990) was a German intellectual involved in the Conservative Revolutionary movement during the Weimar Republic and in the German resistance during the Nazi era. He was the founder of an esoteric or Neopagan movement, the Unabhängige Freikirche (UFK, “Independent Free Church”), which he headed from 1933 until his death.
Under the influence of Haushofer, Hitler authorized Friedrich Hielscher, in 1935, to establish the Ahnenerbe (Bureau for the Study of Ancestral Heritage), with Colonel Wolfram von Sievers as its head.
Wolfram Sievers (10 July 1905 – 2 June 1948) was a Nazi and convicted war criminal for medical atrocities carried out while he was managing director (Reichsgeschäftsführer) of the Ahnenerbe from 1935–1945. He was convicted of war crimes in the Doctors’ Trial in 1947 and executed by hanging in 1948.
Among other functions, Hitler charged it with researching Germanic runes and the origins of the swastika and locating the source of the Aryan race.
Tibet was the most promising candidate.
Alexander Csoma de Körös (Sandor Körösi Csoma – 1784-1842) was a Hungarian scholar obsessed with the quest to find the origins of the Hungarian people.
Sándor Csoma de Kőrös (Hungarian: [ˈʃaːndor ˈkøːrøʃi ˈt͡ʃomɒ]; born Sándor Csoma; 27 March 1784/8 – 11 April 1842) was a Hungarian philologist and Orientalist, author of the first Tibetan–English dictionary and grammar book. He was called Phyi-glin-gi-grwa-pa in Tibetan, meaning “the foreign pupil”, and was declared a bosatsu or bodhisattva by the Japanese in 1933. He was born in Kőrös, Grand Principality of Transylvania (today part of Covasna, Romania). His birth date is often given as 4 April, although this is actually his baptism day and the year of his birth is debated by some authors who put it at 1787 or 1788 rather than 1784. The Magyar ethnic group, the Székelys, to which he belonged believed that they were derived from a branch of Attila’s Huns who had settled in Transylvania in the fifth century. Hoping to study the claim and to find the place of origin of the Székelys and the Magyars by studying language kinship, he set off to Asia in 1820 and spent his lifetime studying the Tibetan language and Buddhist philosophy. Csoma de Kőrös is considered as the founder of Tibetology. He was said to have been able to read in seventeen languages. He died in Darjeeling while attempting to make a trip to Lhasa in 1842 and a memorial was erected in his honour by the Asiatic Society of Bengal.
Based on the linguistic affinities between Hungarian and the Turkic languages, he felt that the origins of the Hungarian people were in “the land of the Yugurs (Uighurs)” in East Turkistan (Xinjiang, Sinkiang).
He believed that if he could reach Lhasa, he would find there the keys for locating his homeland.
Hungarian, Finnish, the Turkic languages, Mongolian, and Manchu belong to the Ural-Altaic family of languages, also known as the Turanian family, after the Persian word Turan for Turkistan.
From 1909, the Turks had a pan-Turanian movement spearheaded by a society known as the Young Turks.
The Hungarian Turanian Society soon followed in 1910 and the Turanian Alliance of Hungary in 1920.
Some scholars believe that the Japanese and Korean languages also belong to the Turanian family.
Thus, the Turanian National Alliance was founded in Japan in 1921 and the Japanese Turanian Society in the early 1930s.
Haushofer was undoubtedly aware of these movements, which sought the origins of the Turanian race in Central Asia.
It fit in well with the Thule Society’s search for the origins of the Aryan race there as well.
His interest in Tibetan culture added weight to the candidacy of Tibet as the key to finding a common origin for the Aryan and Turanian races and for gaining the power of vril that its spiritual leaders possessed.
Haushofer was not the only influence on the Ahnenerbe’s interest in Tibet.
Hielscher was a friend of Sven Hedin, the Swedish explorer who had led expeditions to Tibet in 1893, 1899-1902, and 1905-1908, and an expedition to Mongolia in 1927-1930.
Sven Anders Hedin, KNO1kl RVO, (19 February 1865 – 26 November 1952) was a Swedish geographer, topographer, explorer, photographer, travel writer and illustrator of his own works. During four expeditions to Central Asia, he made the Transhimalaya known in the West and located sources of the Brahmaputra, Indus and Sutlej Rivers. He also mapped lake Lop Nur, and the remains of cities, grave sites and the Great Wall of China in the deserts of the Tarim Basin. In his book Från pol till pol (From Pole to Pole), Hedin describes a journey through Asia and Europe between the late 1880s and the early 1900s. While traveling, Hedin visited Turkey, the Caucasus, Tehran, Iraq, lands of the Kyrgyz people and the Russian Far East, India, China and Japan. The posthumous publication of his Central Asia Atlas marked the conclusion of his life’s work.
A favorite of the Nazis, Hitler invited him to give the opening address at the Berlin Olympics in 1936.
Hedin engaged in pro-Nazi publishing activities in Sweden and made numerous diplomatic missions to Germany between 1939 and 1943.
In 1937, Himmler made the Ahnenerbe an official organization attached to the SS (Germ. Schutzstaffel, Protection Squad) and appointed Professor Walther Wüst, chairman of the Sanskrit Department at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, as its new director.
Walther Wüst (7 May 1901 – 21 March 1993) was a German Indologist who served as Rector of the University of Munich from 1941 to 1945. He was an Oberführer in the SS and served as the President of the Ahnenerbe during Nazi Germany.
The Ahnenerbe had a Tibet Institut (Tibet Institute), which was renamed the Sven Hedin Institut für Innerasien und Expeditionen (Sven Hedin Institute for Inner Asia and Expeditions) in 1943.
The Nazi Expedition to Tibet
Ernst Schäfer, a German hunter and biologist, participated in two expeditions to Tibet, in 1931-1932 and 1934-1936, for sport and zoological research.
Ernst Schäfer (14 March 1910 – 21 July 1992) was a German explorer, hunter and zoologist in the 1930s, specializing in ornithology. He was also a scientific member in the Ahnenerbe and held the rank of an SS-Sturmbannführer.
The Ahnenerbe sponsored him to lead a third expedition (1938-1939) at the official invitation of the Tibetan Government.
The visit coincided with renewed Tibetan contacts with Japan.
A possible explanation for the invitation is that the Tibetan Government wished to maintain cordial relations with the Japanese and their German allies as a balance against the British and Chinese.
Thus, the Tibetan Government welcomed the German expedition at the 1939 New Year (Losar) celebration in Lhasa.
In Fest der weissen Schleier: Eine Forscherfahrt durch Tibet nach Lhasa, der heiligen Stadt des Gottkönigtums (Festival of the White Gauze Scarves: A Research Expedition through Tibet to Lhasa, the Holy City of the God Realm – 1950), Ernst Schäfer described his experiences during the expedition.
Germany’s leader is like a dragon.
During the festivities, he reported, the Nechung Oracle warned that although the Germans brought sweet presents and words, Tibet must be careful:
Nechung – The State Oracle of Tibet
Tsarong, the pro-Japanese former head of the Tibetan military, tried to soften the prediction.
He said that the Regent had heard much more from the Oracle, but he himself was unauthorized to divulge the details.
The Regent prays daily for no war between the British and the Germans, since this would have terrible consequences for Tibet as well.
Both countries must understand that all good people must pray the same.
During the rest of his stay in Lhasa, Schäfer met often with the Regent and had a good rapport.
The Germans were highly interested in establishing friendly relations with Tibet.
Their agenda, however, was slightly different from that of the Tibetans.
One of the members of the Schäfer expedition was the anthropologist Bruno Beger, who was responsible for racial research.
Bruno Beger (27 April 1911 – 12 October 2009) was a German racial anthropologist, ethnologist, and explorer who worked for the Ahnenerbe. In that role he participated in Ernst Schäfer’s 1938–1939 expedition to Tibet, helped the SS Race and Settlement Main Office (Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS, RuSHA) identify Jews, and later helped select human subjects to be killed to create an anatomical study collection of Jewish skulls.
Having worked with H. F. K. Günther on Die nordische Rasse bei den Indogermanen Asiens (The Northern Race among the Indo-Germans of Asia), Beger subscribed to Günther’s theory of a “northern race” in Central Asia and Tibet.
In 1937, he had proposed a research project for Eastern Tibet and, with the Schäfer expedition, planned to investigate scientifically the racial characteristics of the Tibetan people.
While in Tibet and Sikkim on the way, Beger measured the skulls of three hundred Tibetans and Sikkimese and examined some of their other physical features and bodily marks.
He concluded that the Tibetans occupied an intermediary position between the Mongol and European races, with the European racial element showing itself most pronouncedly among the aristocracy.
Liberty, Liberation & Aristocracy in Satanism – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)
According to Richard Greve, “Tibetforschung in SS-Ahnenerbe (Tibetan Research in the SS- Ahnenerbe)” published in T. Hauschild (ed.) “Lebenslust und Fremdenfurcht” – Ethnologie im Dritten Reich (“Passion for Life and Xenophobia” – Ethnology in the Third Reich – 1995), Beger recommended that the Tibetans could play an important role after the final victory of the Third Reich.
They could serve as an allied race in a pan-Mongol confederation under the aegis of Germany and Japan.
Although Beger also recommended further studies to measure all the Tibetans, no further expeditions to Tibet were undertaken.
Purported Occult Expeditions to Tibet
Several postwar studies on Nazism and the Occult, such as Trevor Ravenscroft in The Spear of Destiny (1973), have asserted that under the influence of Haushofer and the Thule Society, Germany sent annual expeditions to Tibet from 1926 to 1943.
- Indiana Jones and the Spear of Destiny – Anna’s Archive
- Indiana Jones and the Spear of Destiny – Anna’s Archive
- Indiana Jones and the Spear of Destiny – Anna’s Archive
- Indiana Jones and the Spear of Destiny – Anna’s Archive
Indiana Jones and the Spear of Destiny (Volume 3) – Anna’s Archive
Their mission was first to find and then to maintain contact with the Aryan forefathers in Shambhala and Agharti, hidden subterranean cities beneath the Himalayas.
Adepts there were the guardians of secret occult powers, especially vril, and the missions sought their aid in harnessing those powers for creating an Aryan master race.
According to these accounts, Shambhala refused any assistance, but Agharti agreed.
Subsequently, from 1929, groups of Tibetans purportedly came to Germany and started lodges known as the Society of Green Men.
Order of The Green Dragon – Tibetan Buddhist Encyclopedia
In connection with the Green Dragon Society in Japan, through the intermediary of Haushofer, they supposedly helped the Nazi cause with their occult powers.
Green Dragon (order) – Wikipedia
Himmler was attracted to these groups of Tibetan-Agharti adepts and, purportedly from their influence, established the Ahnenerbe in 1935.
Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)
Aside from the fact that Himmler did not establish the Ahnenerbe, but rather incorporated it into the SS in 1937, Ravenscroft’s account contains other dubious assertions.
The main one is the purported Agharti support of the Nazi cause.
Ferdynand Antoni Ossendowski (Polish pronunciation: [fɛrˈdɨnant anˈtɔɲi ɔssɛnˈdɔfskʲi]; 27 May 1876 – 3 January 1945) was a Polish writer, explorer, university professor, and anticommunist political activist. He is known for his books about Lenin and the Russian Civil War in which he participated.
In 1922, the Polish scientist Ferdinand Ossendowski published Beasts, Men and Gods describing his travels through Mongolia.
Beasts, men and gods. – Anna’s Archive
In it, he related hearing of the subterranean land of Agharti beneath the Gobi Desert.
In the future, its powerful inhabitants would come to the surface to save the world from disaster.
The German translation of Ossendowski’s book, Tiere, Menschen und Götter, appeared in 1923 and became quite popular.
Sven Hedin, however, published in 1925 Ossendowski und die Wahrheit (Ossendowski and the Truth), in which he debunked the Polish scientist’s claims.
He pointed out that Ossendowski had lifted the idea of Agharti from Saint-Yves d’Alveidre’s 1886 novel Mission de l’Inde en Europe (Mission of India in Europe) to make his story more appealing to the German public.
Since Hedin had a strong influence on the Ahnenerbe, it is unlikely that this bureau would have sent an expedition specifically to find Shambhala and Agharti and, subsequently, would have received assistance from the latter.