In the decades since the end of the war, some historians have seen Nazi occultism as evidence of the essential irrationality underlying the Third Reich, and as a salutary lesson regarding the power that myth can exercise over the human mind. This point of view is, of course, based on the fact that occultism (however important it may be in the history of the human quest for understanding) is not an accurate way of describing the nature of the Universe. The concepts, beliefs, attitudes and actions we shall encounter in this book, however, are based on the opposite notion, that occultism is a genuine and useful system with which to apprehend and influence the workings of Nature.
If we take Fackenheim’s belief that Hitler represents an ‘eruption of demonism into history’, which can only truly be understood by God, and apply it to the subject of Nazi occultism, it becomes clear that the various claims for the reality of genuine Nazi occult power were inevitable. One can easily imagine the thought processes of the writers who have made these claims: the Third Reich was an atrocious aberration in the history of humanity, an utter catastrophe even by our usual bloody standards. How could it have come about? If Hitler was uniquely evil, why was he so? What was it in his mind, his nature, his essential attributes and the actions to which they gave rise that took him beyond the continuum of human behaviour and placed him at the level of the absolute, comprehensible only to the creator of the Universe? If his evil extended beyond the human, is it possible that its origin lay beyond the human?
In view of the extreme nature of Nazi crimes, the idea that an evil external to humanity (a cosmic evil) exists and that leading Nazis actually attempted to make contact with transhuman entities in their pursuit of world domination and the creation of an Aryan super-race maybe seen by many as distasteful in the extreme, and demeaning to the memory of those who suffered and died under Hitler’s tyranny. It is an uncomfortable notion, to be sure, and one that, as the British writer Joscelyn Godwin notes, occupies ‘that twilight zone between fact and fiction: the most fertile territory for the nurturing of mythological images and their installation in the collective imagination’. (5) However, it is for this very reason that the idea of genuine Nazi occult power demands our attention: it has become an important (if unwelcome) aspect of the history of the Second World War and the second half of the twentieth century.
At this point, I should clarify my reasons for and intentions in writing this book. The prevalence of the Nazi-occultism idea is such that I considered it worthwhile to attempt an evaluation of it — especially in view of the fact that humanity stands on the threshold of a new millennium more or less intact. With the arrival of the year 2000, human culture finds itself in an intriguing position, the nature of which might best be captured by the British writer Thomas De Quincey’s statement that the present is the confluence of two eternities, the past and the future. As we look with curiosity, hope and some trepidation to the new century and the new millennium before us, we will also, of necessity, look back at the thousand years we have just left behind, and in particular at the century that has just ended — without doubt the bloodiest and most violent, but also the century that saw more and greater scientific advances than any other in the history of our species. And yet, despite the myriad scientific and technological advances that have carried us to this point in our history, it cannot be said with any confidence that science itself has triumphed over mythology. In some ways, this is by no means a bad thing: human beings are not machines, and a worldwide culture based exclusively on hard scientific principles would be intolerable to human nature, which is fascinated by spirituality, mythology and mystery.
However, this inherent need in human beings to mythologise can seriously hinder the quest for truth, particularly historical truth. As the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper put it, ‘reason is powerless against the obstinate love of fiction’. When he wrote this, Trevor-Roper was referring to the so-called ‘Hitler survival myth’, the idea that the Fuhrer did not die in the Berlin bunker in 1945, but somehow managed to escape — according to various versions, to South America, to Antarctica, and even to a monastery in Tibet. As a historian and British intelligence officer, Trevor-Roper was given the task of establishing Hitler’s fate by the then-head of Counter-intelligence in the British Zone of Germany, Sir Dick White. He made his report to the Four-Power Intelligence Committee in Berlin on 1 November 1945, and the report inspired one of the finest history books ever published, The Last Days of Hitler (1947). In this book, Trevor-Roper calmly establishes beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler did not survive the end of the Second World War. Nevertheless, the Hitler survival myth continued to circulate, particularly in far-right and neo-Nazi circles, and can still be encountered occasionally to this day.
This mythopoeic capacity is brought to bear in the absence of verifiable data. In the case of the Hitler survival myth, in September 1945 no one knew for certain what had happened to the Fuhrer: he had simply disappeared. This gave rise to numerous speculations, particularly from journalists, that he had somehow managed to escape from the ruins of Berlin as his Thousand-Year Reich imploded to the dimensions of his bunker. When Trevor-Roper’s final report was delivered, stating that Hitler had died by his own hand and that all other theories were ‘contrary to the only positive evidence and supported by no evidence at all’, it drew criticism from some quarters. ‘The critics did not indeed deny the evidence that was produced, but they maintained that there was still a possibility of escaping so final a conclusion; they maintained that the body that had been burnt was that not of Hitler but of a “double” introduced at the last minute …’ (6)
Trevor-Roper’s use of the phrase ‘a possibility of escaping’ is interesting and very significant with regard to the present book, since the idea of escaping from a final conclusion to the horror of Hitler resonates powerfully with the fact that Hitler himself managed to escape human justice through suicide. Indeed, as more than one commentator has suggested, Hitler managed a twofold escape: not only did he elude punishment for his crimes but he has also eluded explanation, as noted earlier. This inability on our part to arrive at a satisfactory explanation for Hitler has been called ‘evidentiary despair’ by Ron Rosenbaum, who illustrates the concept with comments from historians such as Trevor-Roper, Alan Bullock and the Jewish-studies scholar Alvin Rosenfeld. Trevor-Roper still considers Hitler a ‘frightening mystery’, while Bullock states that the more he learns about Hitler, the harder he finds him to explain. Rosenfeld sums up the problem best: ‘No representation of Adolf Hitler has seemed able to present the man or satisfactorily explain him.’ (7)
Of course, there have been many attempts to explain the mind of Hitler, to chart the process that took him from unprepossessing Viennese down-and-out to the assassin of European Jewry. Surprisingly (indeed, shockingly), the debate that has continued for more than half a century concentrates partly on the question of whether or not Hitler can accurately be described as ‘evil’. Our first reaction to this might be that it is the easiest question to answer that has ever been posed, to echo Alan Bullock’s ‘If he isn’t evil, who is?’ Nevertheless, the ease with which we seem to be able to answer this question is illusory and, in addressing ourselves to it, we find ourselves grappling with one of the oldest problems of humanity: the problem of the nature of evil itself. As Rosenbaum reminds us, ‘it doesn’t matter what word we choose to apply to Hitler’, it does not alter the number of people who suffered and died. ‘How we think about Hitler and evil and the nature of Hitler’s choice is a reflection of important cultural assumptions and divisive schisms about individual consciousness and historical causation, the never-ending conflict over free will, determinism, and personal responsibility.‘8 It is important to emphasise that to question the use of the word ‘evil’ as applied to Hitler is not to minimise in any way the enormity of his crimes (which were inarguably horrific). However, our intuitive sense of the existence of evil and the certainty with which we perceive its presence in Hitler is little help in our search for a definition of it. Rosenbaum informs us that during the course of interviews with many historians, conducted as part of the research for his remarkable book Explaining Hitler: The Search For the Origins of His Evil, he discovered to his surprise that many were reluctant to call Adolf Hitler evil.