Despite the seemingly eschewing of the subject by traditional historians or to what extent they care to cover it, there is no denying that Nazi and völkisch philosophy was steeped in the supernatural.
For example, Adolph Hitler likened the Jews and Slavic peoples to vampires who parasitized Germany and sucked the lifeblood out of it. The 1922 film Eiene Symphonie des Grauens (A Symphony of Horror, aka Nosferatu) directed by the brilliant F.W. Murnau, included scenes that depicted hoards of rats invading the (fictional) town of Wisborg, and has been interpreted by film scholars as a metaphor for the plague of "Jewish rats" that resided in Germany, as well as the neighboring Slavs, in the 1920's. While not known to be a Nazi, the film's production designer, Albin Grau, was a serious occultist who imbued a sense of mysticism along with the supernatural elements that might not otherwise have been included (more on Grau in a later post).
In addition, the term "werewolf" was used by the Nazis numerous times for various groups and operational plans, the most famous being the post-WWII guerrilla group that was named the Werewolves. Hitler's eastern front headquarters was dubbed Wolfsschanze, loosely translated as "Wolf's Lair" in English. Hitler also self-identified himself as a wolf, and referred to this several times in his writings.
Today is shown two articles on this bizarre, but interesting phenomenon of Nazis and the occult and supernatural. The first discusses the aforementioned post-war Werewolves, and the other is an interview with Eric Kurlander, the author of "Hitler's Monsters", an account of the Nazi involvement with the occult (this book will be discussed in more detail in a later post).
The Nazi Werewolves Who Terrorized Allied Soldiers at the End of WWII
Though the guerrilla fighters didn’t succeed in slowing the Allied occupation of Germany, they did sow fear wherever they went
By Lorraine Boissoneault | October 30, 2018 | smithsonianmag.com
American intelligence officer Frank Manuel started seeing the symbol near the end of World War II, etched across white walls in the Franconia region of Germany: a straight vertical line intersected by a horizontal line with a hook on the end. “Most members of the Counter Intelligence Corps were of the opinion that it was merely a hastily drawn swastika,” Manuel wrote in a memoir. But Manuel knew otherwise. To him, the mark referred to the Werewolves, German guerrilla fighters prepared “to strike down the isolated soldier in his jeep, the MP on patrol, the fool who goes a-courting after dark, the Yankee braggart who takes a back road.”
In the final months of World War II, as the Allied troops pushed deeper into Nazi Germany and the Soviet Red Army pinned the German military on the Eastern front, Hitler and his most senior officials looked to any last resort to keep their ideology alive. Out of desperation, they turned to the supernatural for inspiration, creating two separate lupine movements: one, an official group of paramilitary soldiers; the other, an ad hoc ensemble of partisan fighters. Though neither achieved any monumental gains, both proved the effectiveness of propaganda in sowing terror and demoralizing occupying soldiers.
From the start of the war, Hitler pulled from Germanic folklore and occult legends to supplement Nazi pageantry. High-level Nazis researched everything from the Holy Grail to witchcraft, as historian Eric Kurlander describes in his book, Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich. Among those mythological fascinations were werewolves. “According to some 19th and early 20th century German folklorists, werewolves represented flawed, but well-meaning characters who may be bestial but are tied to the woods, the blood, the soil,” Kurlander says. “They represented German strength and purity against interlopers.”
It was an image Hitler harnessed repeatedly, from the name of one of his Eastern front headquarters—the Wolf’s Lair—to the implementation of “Operation Werewolf,” an October 1944 plan for Nazi SS lieutenants Adolf Prützmann and Otto Skorzeny to infiltrate Allied camps and sabotage supply lines with a paramilitary group. Skorzeny had already proved the value of such a specialized strike in 1943, when he successfully led a small group of commandoes to rescue Benito Mussolini from a prison in Italy.
“The original strategy in 1944-5 was not to win the war by guerrilla operations, but merely to stem the tide, delaying the enemy long enough to allow for a political settlement favorable to Germany,” writes historian Perry Biddiscombe in Werwolf! The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement, 1944-46. But that plan failed, in part because of confusion over where the group’s orders came from within the chaotic Nazi bureaucracy, and also because the military’s supplies were dwindling.
The second attempt at recruiting “werewolves” came from Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels—and this time it was more successful. Beginning early in 1945, national radio broadcasts urged German civilians to join the Werewolf movement, fighting the Allies and any German collaborators who welcomed the enemy into their homes. One female broadcaster proclaimed, “I am so savage, I am filled with rage, Lily the Werewolf is my name. I bite, I eat, I am not tame. My werewolf teeth bite the enemy.”
While most German civilians were too exhausted by years of war to bother joining this fanatical crusade, holdouts remained across the country. Snipers occasionally fired on Allied soldiers, assassins killed multiple German mayors working with the Allied occupiers, and citizens kept caches of weapons in forests and near villages. Although General George Patton claimed “this threat of werewolves and murder was bunk,” the American media and the military took the threat of partisan fighters seriously. One U.S. intelligence report from May 1945 asserted, “The Werewolf organization is not a myth.” Some American authorities saw the bands of guerrilla fighters as “one of the greatest threats to security in both the American and Allied Zones of Occupation,” writes historian Stephen Fritz in Endkampf: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Death of the Third Reich.
Newspapers ran headlines like “Fury of Nazi ‘Werewolves’ to Be Unleashed on Invaders” and wrote about the army of civilians who would “frighten away the conquerors of the Third Reich before they have time to taste the sweets of victory.” An orientation film screened for GIs in 1945 warned against fraternizing with enemy civilians, while the printed “Pocket Guide for Germany” emphasized the need for caution when dealing with teenagers. Soldiers on the ground reacted strongly to even a hint of subterfuge: In June 1945 two German teenagers, Heinz Petry and Josef Schroner, were executed by an American firing squad for espionage against the U.S. military.
While the werewolf propaganda achieved Goebbels’ goal of intimidating Allied forces, it did little to help German citizens. “It stoked fears, lied about the situation and lured many to fight for a lost cause,” wrote historian Christina von Hodenberg by email. “The Werewolf campaign endangered those German citizens who welcomed the Western occupiers and were active in the local antifascist groups at the war’s end.”
Local acts of terror continued through 1947 and Biddiscombe estimates that several thousand casualties likely resulted from Werewolf activity, either directly or from reprisal killings. But as Germany slowly returned to stability, fewer and fewer partisan attacks took place. Within a few years, the Nazi werewolves were no more than a strange memory left from the much larger nightmare of the war.
“It’s fascinating to me that even when everything is coming down around them, the Nazis resort to a supernatural, mythological trope in order to define their last-ditch efforts,” says Kurlander. To him, it fits into the larger pattern of Hitler’s obsession with the occult, the hope for impossible weapons and last-minute miracles.
However little effect the werewolves may have had on the German war effort, they never disappeared entirely from the minds of the American media and politicians. According to von Hodenberg, “In American popular culture, the image of the Nazi and the werewolf often merged. This was taken up by the Bush administration during the Iraq War, when Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush himself repeatedly compared insurgents in Iraq to werewolves, and the occupation of Iraq to the occupation of Germany in 1945.” Even today, analysts have used the Nazi werewolves as a comparison for ISIS fighters.
For Kurlander, the longevity of the Nazi werewolf in the war years belongs to the same longing for myth and magical thinking that Hitler and the Nazis employed. People don’t necessarily want to turn to science and empiricism for answers—they want mysticism to explain problems away. “It’s very seductive to view the world that way.”
Lorraine Boissoneault is a contributing writer to SmithsonianMag.com covering history and archaeology. She has previously written for The Atlantic, Salon, Nautilus and others. She is also the author of The Last Voyageurs: Retracing La Salle's Journey Across America. Website: http://www.lboissoneault.com/
[SOURCE CREDIT: Smithsonianmag.com.]
| In NOSFERATU, Count Orlock has been interpreted as a metaphor for the "Jewish plague" in Germany. |
'Hitler’s Monsters' is a new book that examines the surprisingly deep connection between Nazis and the supernatural.
By J. W. McCormack | June 29, 2017 | vice.com
In Hitler's Monsters, a forthcoming book about Nazis and the supernatural, scholar Eric Kurlander examines how Hitler's rise exploited a public fixation with the occult and paganism. More than a record of how, say, a few Third Reichers followed their astrology charts into disaster, the book depicts a culture whose rejection of natural science in favor of faith-based "border sciences" allowed its leaders to mythologize their beliefs in racial superiority. Border science, as distinct from pseudoscience, was a term adopted by 1930s occultists to cover fields like parapsychology, astrology, or clairvoyance that suddenly found favor with Hitler's fact-averse government.
Kurlander quotes pro-Nazi writer Gottfried Benn, who observed, "There tended to be a regression in intellectual advances while those grasping for power… reached backwards in search of mythical continuity." In Nazi Germany, this meant werewolves, a preference for magic over science, and the influential Thule Society, which traced the Aryan race back to a lost continent, or what Kurlander collectively refers to as "the supernatural imaginary."
Hitler's Monsters, which will be published on July 18 by Yale University Press, is the story of a romantic movement—the populist völkisch movement—gone terribly awry, as paramilitary groups coopted magic and religion and effectively banished reality, instead embracing "fantasies of racial faith" like Hanns Hörbiger's World Ice Theory, which postulated that huge blocks of celestial ice were at the root of all natural science and explained human history. Kurlander also records the attempts of leaders like Reinhard Heinrich to expel occultists from the Party, which proved impossible given that the science-averse Nazi religion depended on superstition to justify itself.
Far from the Hollywood depiction of Nazi sorcerers (Indiana Jones, Wolfenstein 3D, Marvel's Hydra) or Britain's harmless-by-comparison Golden Dawn, Nazi magic and mysticism was something far more insidious: an ideology immune to logical contradiction and capable of shaping a faith-based populism rooted in the idea of a common myth and a shared destiny. When I recently spoke to Kurlander over the phone, it became clear that his project was not an idle arcane history of the kind that fills occult bookstores, but a prescient document of how a nation in crisis could come to prefer its own myth over reality, and reap the consequences.
VICE: So, how much did Hitler and the Nazis actually believe in werewolves and vampires?
Eric Kurlander: There's evidence that many Germans and certainly some leading Nazis believed in supernatural beings and forces, especially in the distant past. Not that everyone in the party really believed in vampires and werewolves, I'm not going so far as to say that, only that there's a reason that they chose these tropes and the British and Americans, at least at that time, did not. Can you imagine Roosevelt or Churchill calling a major military operation Project Werewolf?
Right.
For us, monsters are almost purely a pulp phenomenon. People going around in gothic makeup don't really think that vampires represented the "degenerate" Slavic or Jewish races who flooded in from the East to suck Germany dry of resources and contaminate Aryan blood. For the Nazis, however, there were good monsters like the werewolves—folkloric monsters of blood and soil who protected the nation at times of stress—and there were bad monsters, like vampires, who were never merely metaphorical.
Do you have a sense of why these occult practices flourished in Germany in particular?
There's a general trend toward a post-traditional spiritualism or transcendentalism in France and Britain (and there are many good books that look at those movements in parallel to Germany). The difference I think is that it was more privatized and apolitical. The kind of theosophy popular in America around this time would normally go on in your drawing room, in the woods, or an artist's community. The [spiritual philosophy of] anthroposophy of occultist Rudolf Steiner, for example––which did find some inroads in Great Britain and America––didn't become so politicized or racialized as it did in Germany and Austria.
Could you talk about how frost giants and World Ice Theory tie into all this?
The fascinating thing in the Central European supernatural imaginary is that all that worldwide interest in things like Atlantis or the search for the Holy Grail get racialized and hierarchized into ideas like the existence of the lost continent of Ultima Thule, or Hyperborea, which plays into grand historical narratives of Aryan racial purity. Norse traditions like frost giants found their way into World Ice Theory, which Hitler and Himmler wanted to adopt as the official cosmology of Germany, and some contemporaries suggest led to Hitler not properly equipping his soldiers on the eastern front, since Nordic peoples were ostensibly more immune to cold.
You write about how völkisch thinking, or traditional German myth and culture, drew from the Brothers Grimm, the idea of woods full of magicians and devils.
I don't want to suggest there's some straight line from talking about the völkisch mythology and the supernatural thinking that led to Nazism, but the two do intertwine. The question becomes, "How does the völkisch thought become appropriated by some supernatural thinkers?" Once you go down that path of resorting to border science and esotericism to resolve complicated questions of race and ethno-historical origin, there's a conscious appropriation of the principles of supernatural thinking. Because you can use them to rationalize or "prove," so to speak, their racial thinking. And so a whole mélange of racist and imperialist thought is tied together by a border scientific or esoteric epistemology.
So was this a case of the Nazi leaders simply appropriating a convenient ideology?
Yes, in many respects. The actual content of these doctrines became widely popular in Germany and Austria, and many were tolerated or even tentatively adopted by the Third Reich: parapsychological belief in telepathy, astrology, water dowsing, for example. Because you're now in the realm of esoteric thinking where "Jewish" materialism and "close-minded" rationalism doesn't matter, you're more open to ideas about a thousand-year-old Reich and a racial "science" and so on. It wasn't like Einstein or Freud or Heisenberg were arguing that the jury was still out on "border science." Mainstream scientists by that point are saying, "C'mon, there's no evidence for this," especially outside of Germany. But that just allowed Nazi leaders like Himmler to say, "You're being intolerant of alternate views."
Does this mean we should look upon astrology as more than an innocent superstition?
That's a great question. In 1941, you see a great deal of internal disagreement within the Nazi party over astrology regarding exactly this question. It's not just Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess, who flew to Scotland to negotiate peace with the United Kingdom because his astrologer told him to. The [Nazi leader Heinrich] Himmler enlisted the advice of an astrologer named William Wulf, a failed artist who only became a professional astrologist because he was reading da Vinci's journals and figured he could make some money. Even Reich minister of propaganda [Joseph] Goebbels, who was supposed to be one of the more sober Nazi leaders, saw the value in all this effort to enlist astrology for political purposes, putting together a team of astrologers to create Nostradamus-based propaganda for use in foreign policy.
What are the misconceptions in depiction of the Nazi infatuation with the occult that you want to clear up?
The problem is people who talk about the Holocaust and then fetishize it into some kind of poetic event that transcends all history, in which case you can't trace any lessons, compare it to other genocides or prevent future ones because it is outside of history. And by creating a caricature of Nazi occultism that is outside of all reality, we can't learn any lessons that might help us anticipate the same kind of problems today.
What is the lesson you would like us to take from the Nazi's use of mythology as a tool of propaganda?
I think it shows that, in times of crisis, supernatural and faith-based thinking masquerading as "scientific" solutions to real problems helps facilitate the worst kind of political and social outcomes. I'm not trying to say it is an exclusively right-wing phenomenon—fascism, after all, has elements of left-wing thinking, too—only that conservatives and liberals alike might do well to recognize how the kinds of arguments being made on the "alt-right," or among people who want to make sociopolitical decisions based on faith instead of empirical evidence, can end in terms of increasingly radical, totalizing projects toward an ethnic or religious other. There are many similarities between the arguments we're seeing on the alt-right and among religious fundamentalists today and the doctrines that helped facilitate Nazism a century ago.
Recent work by J. W. McCormack appears in Conjunctions, the Culture Trip, the New York Times, and the New Republic.
[SOURCE CREDIT: Vice.com.]