Night of 27th-28th July, 1941.
The National Socialist theory is to make use of all forces, wherever they may come from.
~ ~ Adolf Hitler (H.R. Trevor-Roper (ed.): 17)

Part I: The Dark Side of History

By Alex Burns

The esoteric origin of the Nazi movement, as an explanation of Adolf Hitler's meteoric rise-to-power, and the genocidal "Final Solution" that resulted in the horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka, has long haunted our collective imagination.

Nowhere is the post-war fascination with the Nazis more felt than in the conspiracy and neo-Nazi communities. Since the publication of Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwel's landmark book The Morning of the Magicians (New York: Avon Books, 1968), this fascination has transmuted into a fringe subculture, which constructs a crypt-history involving the secretive Thule Society, Antarctic bases and Nazi flying saucers.

This fringe subculture fueled a 1970s publishing genre, featuring speculative books on the post-war survival of key Nazis (confirmed by "Project Paperclip"), the hunt for Martin Bormann, and rumors of a future Fourth Reich, financed by the shadowy ODESSA clique. This genre is best represented by Trevor Ravenscroft's The Spear of Destiny (G. P. Putman's Sons, 1973). Holocaust revisionist David Irving and conspiracy theorist David Icke have both exploited the genre's Dionysian fascination, which also infiltrated Hollywood's pop culture via Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones films, and the Lucasfilm franchise.

Yet despite Spielberg's mythopoeic vision, the genre is considered by historians and scholars as sensationalist, under-researched regarding "primary sources", and prone to repeating wild claims. Bergier and Pauwels, alongside Colin Wilson, speculated that Aleister Crowley and George Gurdjieff covertly assisted Nazism's rise-to-globalism. This scenario, relying on marginal evidence, overlooks Nazism's real fascination with magical, occult and philosophical systems. This would include Heinrich Himmler's Deutsches Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage Organization), Hanns Horbiger's glacial cosmology (commonly known as the 1882 "Cosmic Ice" theory), and the search for the "Atlantis of the North" conducted by racialist philosopher Alfred Rosenberg and professor Hermann Wirth (Michael Edwardes: 226).

We may laugh today at the Nazi belief in a Hollow Earth (Michael Edwardes: 228), safe in the universe where the Allies won. Post-humanism has eclipsed the specter of Ariosophy: a world ruled by gnostic initiates and Wotanist priesthoods, where an Aryan elite rules over non-Aryan slaves. But in a parallel universe . . .

Bibliography:

Michael Edwardes. The Dark Side of History: Magic in the Making of Man. London: Hart-Davis MacGibbon, 1978.

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.

Michael Howard. The Occult Conspiracy. London: Rider, 1989.

Gudio von List. Secret of the Runes. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1988.

Guido von List Der Unbesiegbare (The Invincible). Runa-Raven Books, 1996.

Hermann Rauschning. The Return of Nihilism: Warning to the West. New York: Alliance Book Corporation, 1939.

Trevor Ravenscroft. The Spear of Destiny. New York: G. P. Putman's Sons, 1973.

Frederick C. Redlick. Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.