Millennial Reich

The millenarian influences of the Sabbateans on the Nazi movement are expressed in their ambition to create a “Third Reich.” The phrase “Third Reich” was originally coined by the German thinker Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, who in 1923 published a book titled Das Dritte Reich. Van den Bruck, like Martin Heidegger, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, Julius Evola and Carl Schmitt, was a leading figure of the Conservative Revolutionary movement, prominent in the years following the First World War. Rooted in the Counter-Enlightenment of the Romantic Era, the movement rejected liberalism and parliamentary democracy as the failed legacies of the Enlightenment. Inspired by the notion of the Volk, the movement advocated a new conservatism and nationalism that was specifically German, or Prussian in particular.[1] Ultimately, explained Kurt Sontheimer, Conservative Revolutionary anti-democratic thought in the Weimar Republic “succeeded in alienating Germans from the democracy of the Weimar constitution and making large groups receptive to National Socialism.”[2]

An important scholar on the German Conservative Revolution, Armin Mohler (1920 – 2003) was responsible for popularizing that term, in Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1932: Ein Handbuch, this PhD dissertation published in 1949 under the supervision of Karl Jaspers. “Conservative Revolutionaries,” explains historian Roger Wood, “frequently declare their ‘indebtedness’ to Friedrich Nietzsche and proclaim him their chief philosophical mentor.”[3] Ernst Jünger wrote of “the lonely Nietzsche, whom we have to thank for practically everything that moves us most profoundly.”[4] Oswald Spengler, who praised Nietzsche’s account of the will, declared: “In this matter we are all his pupils, whether we want to be or not, whether we know him or not. Without anyone realising it, his perspective has already conquered the world. Nobody writes history any more without seeing things this way.”[5] Woods writes that Conservative Revolutionaries “constructed,” in response to the war and the unstable Weimar period, a Nietzsche “who advocated a self-justifying activism, unbridled self-assertion, war over peace, and the elevation of instinct over reason.”[6] In addition to Nietzsche’s rejection of Christian ethics, democracy and egalitarianism, theorists of the Conservative Revolution also drew inspiration from various elements of the nineteenth century, including the anti-modernism and anti-rationalism of German romanticism, Völkisch nationalism,  Prussian militarism, accompanied by their own experience on the front lines during World War I.

Rejecting reactionary conservatism, van den Bruck proposed a “Third Reich” which would unite all classes under authoritarian rule, based on a combination of the nationalism of the right and the socialism of the left. [8] Looking back at German history, van den Bruck distinguished two separate periods, and identified them with the ages of the crypto-Jewish mystic Joachim of Fiore: the Holy Roman Empire as the Age of the Father and the German Empire, beginning with unification under Otto von Bismarck to the defeat of Germany in World War II, as the “Second Reich” or the Age of the Son. After the interval of the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), during which constitutionalism, parliamentarianism and even pacifism ruled, these were then to be followed by the “Third Reich” or The Age of the Holy Ghost.

The weak Weimar Republic, van den Bruck argued, would have to be replaced by a new revolution, a revolution from the right. He looked also for a new political movement that would embrace both socialism and nationalism, a unique form of German Fascism. He took all of his philosophical cues from the work of Nietzsche “who stands at the opposite pole of thought from Marx.” Although van den Bruck was unimpressed by Hitler when he met him in 1922 and did not join the Nazi Party, his conception of a Third Reich was nevertheless adopted by the Nazis. Van den Buck believed Germany needed an Übermensch (Superman) in the fashion described by Nietzsche. He is the man who recognizes that “God is dead,” and can go “beyond good and evil” and write his own rules.

Third Rome

An important influence on van den Bruck’s conceptualization of the Third Reich were the works of Russian writers Fyodor Dostoevsky and Dmitri Merezhkovsky (1866 – 1941) on Russian millennial tradition of the Third Rome.[9] Joachim of Fiore and Savonarola and others were major sources for the prophecies Nostradamus, which shaped expectation for the coming of the Grand Monarch and the Third Rome,[10] the hypothetical successor to the legacy of ancient Rome, the “first Rome,” followed by the “Second Rome,” usually referring to Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, original seat of the Eastern Orthodox Church, unofficially called “New Rome.” Shortly after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, as only Catholicism and Muslim domination remained, it was left to Russia, as the Third Rome, to preserve true Orthodoxy and to stave off the Antichrist. In 1523, a Russian Orthodox monk named Filofei of Pskov declared, “two Romes have fallen, and the Third stands, and a fourth shall never be, for Thy Christian Empire shall never devolve upon others.”[11]

The notion of the Third Rome is related to the eschatological Christian concept of the katechon, a Greek word meaning “one that restrains,” interpreted to mean the one who restrains the coming of the Antichrist. The end of the world is inevitable. Although man gained the truth of Christ, because of his sinful nature, he fell into apostasy, resulting in the coming of the Antichrist. Based on Paul’s Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, the Book of Revelation and the Book of Daniel, St. Augustine and St. Jerome developed the concept of the Christian Rome as a “metaphysical world whose mission is to guard the Truth of Christ.” This “metaphysical world” could be passed on. Hence, when Rome fell to the Visigoths, Christians understood that the Apocalypse had not yet arrived.[12]

Although the verse in 2 Thessalonian was traditionally interpreted to refer to the Roman Empire, some understand the katechon as the Grand Monarch or a new Orthodox Emperor, and some as the rebirth of the Holy Roman Empire.[13] Last Roman Emperor, Last World Emperor or Emperor of the Last Days is a figure of medieval European legend, which developed as an aspect of eschatology in the Catholic Church. The legend predicts that in the end times, a last emperor would appear on Earth to reestablish the Holy Roman Empire and assume his function as biblical katechon who stalls the coming of the Antichrist.

Joachim of Fiore and Savonarola and others were major sources for the prophecies Nostradamus, which shaped expectation for the coming of the Grand Monarch and the Third Rome.[14] The biblical foundations for the concept of the Great Monarch can be found in the Old Testament in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel and Zechariah, and in the New Testament. The concept of the Great King has been commonly associated with in mystical revelations. In the sixteenth century, Nostradamus was known to have prophesied that “a great and terrifying leader would come out of the sky” on the seventh months of 1999 “to resuscitate the great King from Angoumois.”

Nostradamus foresaw a massive Muslim invasion of Europe, that would be repelled by a universal Christian monarch.[15] Nostradamus’ major sources further included the prophecies of Pseudo-Methodius, the Tiburtine Sibyl.[16] Written in Syriac in the late seventh century, the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius was falsely attributed to Methodius of Olympus, a fourth century Church Father. The work was extremely popular and shared the stage over the centuries, and after the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation, the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius was the most widespread apocalypse in Europe.[17] In Pseudo-Methodius, the Last Emperor will save the Christian lands from the Muslims, and travel to Jerusalem and relinquish his power on the Mount of Olives. The Apocalypse incorporated numerous aspects of Christian eschatology, such as the invasion of Gog and Magog, the rise of the Antichrist, and the tribulations that precede the end of the world.

The Last Emperor is repeated in Tiburtine Sibyl, which was purportedly written in the fourth century, but in the form that it survives today it was written in the early eleventh century, and influenced by the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius.[18] The sibyls were women that the ancient Greeks believed were oracles. The Tiburtine Sibyl was a Roman sibyl, whose seat was the ancient Etruscan town of Tibur. It prophesies the advent a final Emperor in the world's ninth age, characterized by great wealth, victory over the foes of Christianity, an end of paganism, Gog and Magog, and the conversion of the Jews. In doing so, he will give way to the Antichrist. The prophecy relates that the Antichrist would be opposed by the Two Witnesses from the Book of Revelation, identified with Elijah and Enoch, after having killed the witnesses and started a final persecution of the Christians.

In 1589, the concept of the Third Rome resurfaced in the founding document of the Russian patriarchate, where it claimed that the rulers of Russia guaranteed the faith of not only their country, but that of the entire world. The Old Believers, Eastern Orthodox Christians who maintain the liturgical and ritual practices of the Eastern Orthodox Church as they existed prior to the reforms of Patriarch Nikon of Moscow between 1652 and 1666, continued to employ the doctrine of the Third Rome in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The concept gained ascendency in the early twentieth century with the rise of communism in Russia.

Many identified communism with characterization of Nikolai Berdyaev (1874 – 1948) of the Third Rome with what he believed was “Russian messianism,” which differentiated Russians from all other peoples and defined their historical mission.[18] Christian apocalypticism, according to Yaacov Yadgar, author of Mysticism in 20th Century Hebrew Literature, “is one of the prominent characteristics of theological and political Russian literature and thought during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Unlike Russian Orthodox Christianity, Russian apocalyptic literature emphasized the collective-national aspect, the hero of the narrative being the Russian people.”[19] The roots of Apocalypticism, explains Yadgar, run deeper and richer in religious Russian literature than in Western European literature. A possible explanation for this is the high value of suffering in Russian culture. Apocalyptic thought is found in nineteenth-century Russian literature by writers who wished to revive the non-European tradition of Russia, such as Nikolay Gogol, Fiodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Solovyov and Konstantin Leontiev. For example, redemption was dependent upon the East overcoming the West, which endangered the original Eastern spirit of Russia.

This fact enabled central thinkers like Berdyaev to view communism as a Messianic redemption, and the Bolshevik Revolution as an apocalyptic Gog and Magog war between Good and Evil.[20] As noted by Konstantin Burmistrov and Maria Endel—referring to the tradition dating back to Nikolay Novikov, who brought the Gold and Rosy Cross to Russia—the religious and political views of the Russian Rosicrucians exerted a great influence on the development of Russian Romantic philosophy and social utopianism in the first half of the nineteenth century, as well as of the Slavophile movement, which in turn influenced Russian religious philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov and Berdyaev. Thus, the authors conclude, “as a component of masonic outlook, Kabbalah has become an important factor in Russian history and culture.”[21] According to E.D. Kuskova, a prominent Russian journalist, she and her husband, along with Berdyaev, were founding members of the political Masonic organization that originated just after the turn of the century, and which subsequently founded the Union of Liberation, the organization that Russian liberals and radicals used to bring about the Revolution of 1905, known as the First Russian Revolution.[22]

The Third Rome became Lenin’s Third International.[23] Stalin used the Third Rome as a symbol of Russian greatness and independence from hostile imperialist powers. Following a series of decrees in the 1930s, historians were expected to recognize the “progressive” role that Russia had played in bringing non-Russian peoples under the yoke of what would become the world’s first communist state. During the Cold War, Western observers interpreted the adoption of the Third Rome doctrine as proof of the continental ambitions of “Soviet Expansionism.”[24]

Eurasianism

Oswald Spengler and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, explained Kevin Coogan, echoed themes found in Eurasianism, a Russian political movement formerly within the primarily Russian émigré community, that posits that Russian civilization is not “European” or “Asian” but instead belongs to its own geopolitical concept of Eurasia. The Eurasianist idea of seeking a separate path from Europe was not new, but the Eurasianists employed new means to justify their ideology. Many Eurasianists believed that their predecessors were such Slavophiles as Leontiev and Berdyaev as well as Russian writers like Nikolai Gogol and Dostoevsky.[25] Dostoyevsky made a separation of Russia from “European Europe” a central theme. According to Joseph Frank on Dostoyevsky’s Winter Notes on Summer Impressions: “Dostoevsky’s purpose in Winter Notes is to convey the idea that European civilization is based on a soulless, heart-less materialism, and to imply by contrast-in virtue of his own reaction as a Russian-that such a civilization is inimical and anti-pathetic to the Russian spirit.”[26]

Like Dostoevsky, many in the far right in Imperial Russian around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries believed that the Kingdom of God could only succeed following the destruction of Western civilization.[27] Dostoevsky described himself as a member of the particularly ardent brand of Slavophilism that believed: “Our great Russia, at the head of the united Slavs, will speak its own new, wholesome, and as yet unheard of word… to the entire world.”[28] In Diary of a Writer, Dostoevsky argued that the Russians possessed “two awful strengths,” namely their “spiritual indivisibility” and their “closest unity with the monarch.” He connected the “idea of the Russian people” within Orthodox Christianity.[29] Dostoevsky heralded the approach of a final confrontation between the “Catholic idea,” its opponent Protestantism, and “the third world idea, the Slavic idea, an idea coming into being.” He noted that the resolution of these great world traditions could not be submitted to “petty, Judaizing, third-rate considerations.”[30]

David Riasanovsky, a leading expert on Eurasianism, argues that it “can be considered a product of… [the] application of European, especially German, geopolitical theories to Russia.”[31] According to former KGB officer Konstantin Preobrazhensky, Eurasianism was developed by Soviet intelligence in the 1920s, and later popularized by Alexander Dugin after the Soviet collapse.[32] The key leaders of the Eurasianists were exiled White Russian intellectuals, headed by Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, and including P.N. Savitsky, P.P. Suvchinskiy, D. S. Mirsky, K. Ccheidze, P. Arapov, and S. Efron. Prince Trubetzkoy (1890 – 1938), a prominent linguist, ethnologist and a founder of phonology as scientific discipline, together with other Russian émigrés, founded the Prague School of linguistics. The Trubetzkoy were a princely house of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, who later became prominent in Russian history, and played a central role in the development of Freemasonry in Russia, dating back to a Prince Trubetzkoy who was involved in the Rosicrucian circle around Novikov, and they were also involved in the Masonic plot of the Decembrists. Trubetzkoy, whose father was Nikolai Petrovitch Trubetskoy 1828 – 1900), co-founder of the Moscow Conservatory, was close friend of Vladimir Solovyov, whose work he continued.

Trubetzkoy insisted that Russia was a unique combination of Europe and Asia. Bolshevism was the last foreign attempt to impose a Western universalist ideology on the Russian people. In one respect, though the Russian Revolution represented the disastrous culmination of Western intervention, it nevertheless presented the possibility for a messianic transformation of Russian society the Bolshevik momentum would have exhausted itself, since it had destroyed the old Europhile elite. For that reason, the Eurasians, unlike the majority of White Russian émigrés, did not entirely reject the Revolution, but instead adopted a “constructive” approach towards the new Soviet state. The Eurasianists believed that the Soviet regime was capable of evolving into a new national, non-European Orthodox Christian government, shedding the initial mask of proletarian internationalism and militant atheism.[33]

One fundamental variant of Eurasianism was advanced by Spengler.[34] In Decline of the West, Spengler argues that Russia was an example of a historically “young” culture overwhelmed by an older, alien culture—the West. Fyodor Dostoevsky, according to Spengler, was the true spirit of Russia. The notion that the soul of Russia was Dovstoyeskian was first introduced to European intellectuals by van den Bruck. According to Dovtoevsky’s adaptation of the myth, Russia was imparted with a divine mission to counter the corrupting influence of Western modernization and inaugurate the millennial New Age, the Third Rome. Merezhkovsky, along with Moeller, co-edited the first complete German edition of Dostoevsky’s works. Merezhkovsky built on Dostoevsky by further incorporating the influence of Joachim of Fiore. Merezhkovsky argued that Dostoevsky’s promotion of Russian autocracy and the Orthodox Church as a means to world salvation was intended to refer to the Second Coming. “Dostoevsky believed or wanted to believe his religion was Orthodoxy. But his true religion was… that which will come after Christianity, after the New Testament. It was apocalypse, the coming Third Testament, the revelation of God’s Trinity, the religion of the Holy Spirit.”[35] According to Merezhkovsky, Dostoevsky longed for the End Time, believing that the apocalypse would cause the cleansing necessary to bring the millennial New Age of peace, prosperity and power, under the reign of The Liberator.

Dasein

Mohler was also press secretary for Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976), who would become one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and a major influence on the rise of Postmodernism.[36] Heidegger’s thought was influenced by Edmund Husserl (1859 – 1938), who established the school of phenomenology. Husserl was born into a Jewish family in 1859 in Proßnitz, a town in Moravia, where the Sabbatean Rabbi Eybeschütz had studied under Rabbi Meir Eisenstadt. Husserl was later baptized into the Lutheran Church in 1886. According to Athol Bloomer, “Phenomenology itself has roots in the teachings of Jacob Leib Frank who wished to encourage a spirituality that looked at truth from the perspective of man and his life.”[37] Heidegger wrote that Being and Time was made possible by his study of Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, and it is dedicated to Husserl “in friendship and admiration.” Being and Time, in which he developed the concept of Dasein (“Being There”), has been described as the most influential version of existential philosophy, and Heidegger’s achievements in the work have been compared to those of Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason and Hegel in The Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic.

Husserl’s assistant was Edith Stein (1891 – 1942), a German Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. She was born into an observant Jewish family, but had become an atheist by her teenage years. From reading the works of the Marrano of the Carmelite Order, Teresa of Ávila, she was drawn to the Catholic faith. She was baptized on 1 January 1922 into the Catholic Church. She was eventually canonized as a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church, and she is one of six co-patron saints of Europe. She met Heidegger in 1929. She tried to bridge Husserl’s phenomenology to Thomism. She was executed at Auschwitz and eventually canonized as a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church. She was beatified in 1987 by Pope John Paul II as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

Stein became friends with Gerda Walther, secretary to the Munich doctor and parapsychologist Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, the German medical doctor and a pioneer of psychotherapy and parapsychology, who was an associate of Freud and had participated in Max Theon’s Cosmic Movement.[38] Schrenck-Notzing was also a founding member of the formation of the German Gesellschaft für psychologische Forschung (“Society for Psychological Research”), with Max Dessoir and Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden, an associate of Henry Steel Olcott and Annie Besant, who founded the German Theosophical Society, to which belonged Franz Hartmann and Rudolf Steiner. In her childhood, Walther came into contact with her parents’ social democratic friends, including August Bebel, Klara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, Wilhelm Liebknecht and Adolf Geck. Walther, who is considered an exponent of phenomenology, later became a student of Husserl. After Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland, Walther was arrested by the Gestapo and interrogated about her correspondence with Dr. Schulte Strathaus.

Victor Farias in Heidegger and Nazism has revealed comments from Heidegger in 1933 such as, “the glory and the greatness of the Hitler revolution,” and a speech in that same year where Heidegger proclaimed: “Doctrine and ‘ideas’ shall no longer govern your existence. The Führer himself, and only he, is the current and future reality of Germany, and his word is your law.”[39] In a 1948 letter to his former student—another leading Frankfurt Schooler, Herbert Marcuse—Heidegger explained his attraction to Nazism in these words: “I expected from National Socialism a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety, a reconciliation of social antagonisms and a deliverance of Western Dasein from the dangers of communism.”[40]

During a 1935 lecture, which was published in 1953 as part of his Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger refers to the “inner truth and greatness” of the Nazi movement.[41] Karl Löwith, a former student who met Heidegger in Rome in 1936, recalled that Heidegger wore a swastika pin to their meeting, though Heidegger knew that Löwith was Jewish. Löwith also recalled that Heidegger “left no doubt about his faith in Hitler,” and stated that his support for Nazism was in agreement with the essence of his philosophy.[42]

Heidegger’s friend Karl Jaspers recalled that in 1933, when he criticized The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Heidegger responded: “But there is a dangerous international alliance of Jews.”[43] Jaspers, a friend of Max Weber’s family, was a German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher often viewed as a major exponent of existentialism in Germany. Jaspers worked at a psychiatric hospital in Heidelberg under Franz Nissl, successor of Emil Kraepelin, who would later go on to conduct Rockefeller-funded research in eugenics. In 1931, two years before the rise of Hitler, Jaspers wrote Man in the Modern Age, which concludes with a call for an authoritarian solution to liberal political “chaos.” After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Jaspers was considered to have a “Jewish taint” due to his Jewish wife, and was forced to retire from teaching in 1937. In 1938, he fell under a publication ban as well.

State of Exception

Mohler also maintained extensive correspondence with Carl Schmitt (1888 – 1985), another leading exponent of the Conservative Revolution, known as the “Crown Jurist of the Third Reich,” in formulating his theory of the Absolute State and the forces that work against it.[44] Schmitt joined the Nazi party at the urging of Martin Heidegger.[45] From June 1933, he was in the leadership council of Academy for German Law, an organization financed by business contributions. The Academy was founded on the initiative of Hans Frank, a former member of the Thule Society, and the head of the Reich Legal Department (Reichsrechtabteilung) in the Nazi Party’s national leadership (Reichsleitung) and, at the time, also the Bavarian Minister of Justice. Other former members of the Thule Society involved in the academy included Rudolf Hess and Alfred Rosenberg. Among prominent industrialists were Carl Bosch, Friedrich Flick and Fritz Thyssen. Among the high-ranking members of the Nazi Party were Walter Buch, Wilhelm Frick, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring and Julius Streicher. Schmitt was among a group of noted academics which included Martin Heidegger, Hans Carl Nipperdey and Jakob Johann von Uexküll.[46] In 1933, Schmitt was appointed State Councilor by Göring, Hitler’s Reichsmarschall, and became the president of the Union of National-Socialist Jurists. As professor at the University of Berlin, he presented his theories as an ideological foundation of the Nazi dictatorship, and a justification of the “Führer” state with regard to legal philosophy.

It was Schmitt who provided the legal justification for Hitler’s seizure of power. Schmitt developed the doctrine of a necessary enemy. Schmitt’s pessimism draws from the political “realism” of Hobbes’ Bellum omnium contra omnes or “The war of all against all.” Schmitt proposed that there is a domain of life distinct from all the others, which he called the “political.” According to Schmitt, each area of human existence has its own particular form of dualism: in morality there is good and evil, in economics profits and liabilities, in aesthetics beauty and ugliness and so on. The “political,” for Schmitt, was based on the distinction between “friend” and “enemy.” The political exists wherever there exists an enemy, a group which is different and holds different interests, and with whom there is a possibility of conflict. A population can be unified and mobilized through the political act, in which an enemy is identified and confronted.[47] Schmitt declared, “I think, therefore I have an enemy; I have an enemy, therefore I am.”[48]

According to Calvin Dieter Ullrich, “The symbolization of the katechon in Schmitt’s thought is used not only to legitimize his concept of sovereignty, but also becomes the basic structural principle around which the totality of history is to be conceived.”[49] Schmitt employs the katechon in a defence of the concept of the political which would justify the prerogative of the total state to confront the chaos prevalent during the Weimar Republic, as well as the persistent threat of communism. As explained by Jacob Taubes:

Schmitt’s interest was in only one thing: that the party, that the chaos not rise to the top, that the state remain. No matter what the price. This is difficult for theologians and philosophers to follow, but as far as the jurist is concerned, as long as it is possible to find even one juridical form, by whatever hairsplitting ingenuity, this must absolutely be done, for otherwise chaos reigns. This is what he [Schmitt] later calls the katechon: The retainer [der Aufhalter] that holds down the chaos that pushes up from below.[50]

Based on Joseph de Maistre’s notion of the authority of the “executioner,” Schmitt developed the concept of the seizure of power by a powerful determined leader through the pretext of a state of emergency. Schmitt called such a crisis a “state of exception.” The person or institution which decides when the state of exception arrives is the true possessor of sovereignty, regardless of whether this is formally recognized or not. Effectively, a state of emergency presupposes the threat of a specific public enemy against whom a legitimate charismatic leader must exercise a sovereign decision.

Schmitt’s legal analysis of commissarial and sovereign dictatorship, based on Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, first formulated in 1922, provided the legal basis for Hitler’s assumption of power, through the declaration of emergency and suspension of rights of February 28, 1933. Schmitt then authored the necessary article justifying the enabling laws of March 24, 1933, which transformed Germany legally from a commissarial to a sovereign dictatorship. On February 27, 1933, the Nazis, under Göring’s sponsorship, staged the Reichstag fire, and on February 28, Hitler suspended basic constitutional rights, and accused the Communists of sabotage, and imprisoned at least 4,000 alleged Communists, banning them from Parliament. On March 23, the Reichstag passed enabling legislation by a vote of 444 to 94, which stated that henceforth, the Executive as well as the Reichstag could pass laws. The “Act to Relieve the Distress of the People and the Reich,” effectively legislated Schmitt’s 1930 legal opinion authorizing Presidential rule, and installed Hitler’s sovereign dictatorship.

Land and Sea

The Kabbalah also provided the basis for Carl Schmitt’s geopolitical interpretation of history. Schmitt’s speculations strongly influenced those of Ernst Jünger, who according to Steven M. Wasserstrom, elaborated what he calls a “cabala of enmity,” based on Kabbalistic traditions he associated with the myth of Leviathan myth, in an “anti-Jewish politico-theosophical program.” Jewish enmity, explains Wasserstrom, was as central for Jünger as it was for Schmitt. And according to Jünger, who adopted Schmitt’s concept: “The great goal of the political will is Leviathan.”[51] As Schmitt explained in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (1938), in the course of the Middle Ages two major categories of interpretations of the symbolism of the Biblical creature emerged: the one Christian and the other Kabbalistic. He notes that in Luther’s translation of the Bible that leviathan is called the “dragon in the sea.” He notes that this interpretation approaches the apocalyptic beasts of the Book of Revelation as the “beast rising from the sea,” and that the myths of the battles against the dragons such as Siegfried, Saint Michael, and Saint George can also be traced to the Leviathan. He also refers to the teachings of the Mandaeans, according to whom the Leviathan, at the end of the world, swallows the universe and all those who have failed to separate themselves from the world. Schmitt also mentions Isaac La Peyrère, Menasseh ben Israel’s co-conspirator, in his “for many reasons, important” book, about a reference to the “pre-Adamites”  in the Book of Job, which deals with the Chaldean magicians who cite the Leviathan qui Daemon est (“who is the devil”), and that he adds that it has been affirmed that there exists a land and a sea leviathan or, in other words, a land and a sea demon.[52]

In Land and Sea, Schmitt elaborated an occult-inspired interpretation of the geopolitical theories of Mahan and Mackinder, which pitted sea power against land power. Julien Freund, a sociologist and political theorist, who expanded on Schmitt’s work, coined the term thalassopolitics, “to call into question certain conceptions of geopolitics that privilege telluric phenomena over maritime phenomena.”[53] In Land and Sea, Schmitt cites a prophecy by Roman poet Seneca, in his tragedy Medea, and makes reference to mythical land of Thule, and which he believed foreshadowed the current geopolitical conflicts:

The Indian drinks of the icy Araxes.
The Persians quaff the Elbe and the Rhine.
An age will come in the far-off centuries,
When Ocean will loosen the bonds of things,
And the whole broad Earth will be revealed,
When Thetis will disclose new worlds.
And Thule will no longer be the bound. [54]

Schmitt ultimately traces the land and sea dichotomy of the Medieval Kabbalah and its discussions of an apocalyptic war between Leviathan and Behemoth—beasts described in the Book of Job. In Jewish Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Behemoth is the primal unconquerable monster of the land, while Leviathan is the primal monster of the waters of the sea. A Jewish rabbinic legend describes a great battle which will take place between them at the end of time. The two beasts were also the theme of one of William Blake’s twenty-two engraved prints from his series, Illustrations of the Book of Job. According to Schmitt:

According to the medieval interpretations put forth by the cabbalists, world history is a combat between the strong whale, leviathan, and the no less strong behemoth, a terrestrial animal, which was represented imaginatively as a bull or an ele­phant. The names leviathan and behemoth had been borrowed from the Book of Job (40 and 41). According to the cab­balists, behemoth tries to tear leviathan to pieces with its horns and teeth, while in turn, leviathan tries hard to stop the land animal’s mouth and nostrils with its flaps and fins in order to deprive it of food and air. This is a graphic illustration, which only the mythological imagery can convey, of the blockade to which a sea power subjects a land power by cutting its supplies in order to starve it to death. In the end, the two opponents kill each other.[55]

 According to Schmitt, the dichotomy is based on the notion of the four elements— earth, water, air, fire—a concept pivotal to astrology, alchemy and magic. It would appear that humans are dominated by the first, earth, but Schmitt points out that there are also legends of deities and also men born of the sea. And some nations, like the Vikings and the English, became “children of the sea.” The birth of England as a sea power Schmitt traces to the reign of Elizabeth I and her sponsorship of the pirates Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh and Henry Morgan. They presented, Schmitt believed, the fulfillment of a prophecy attributed to Merlin the magician: “The lion’s cubs will turn into the fishes of the sea.”[56]

World history, therefore, according to Schmitt, “is the history of the wars waged by maritime powers against land or continental powers and by land powers against sea or maritime powers.”[57] Everywhere we look in history we see this struggle between Land and Sea. Land and Sea, he explains, become “two distinct worlds, and two antithetical, juridical convictions.”[58] For instance, Persia against Greece, Sparta against Athens, and Rome against Carthage. In the nineteenth century, the great example of the struggle between Land and Sea Powers was England and Russia. Key to the opposition to Britain as a sea power was the consolidation of German power under a single dictatorial leader.

National Bolshevism

Ernst Jünger (1895 – 1998)—a close friend of Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, and a contributor to Alfred R. Orage’s The New Age—was an exponent of National Bolshevism. At the time, Jünger was the most famous soldier in Germany, the most highly decorated veteran of World War I. Jünger enjoyed a long-term friendship with Friedrich Hielscher (1902 – 1990), who is said to have “mentored” the Executive Secretary of the Ahnenerbe, Wolfram Sievers. Following Ernst von Salomon, who named Hielscher “Bogumil,” Jünger nicknamed Hielscher “Bodo” or “Bogo” in reference to Hielscher’s interest in Gnosticism.[59] Hielscher was the founder of an esoteric or Neopagan movement, the Independent Free Church (UFK), which combined panentheism with paganism and nationalism. In Hielscher’s theology, God is external to the universe, or the universe is contained within God, and within the universe are the “Twelve Divine Messengers,” six male and six female, identified with the gods of Germanic paganism.

 As noted by Ascher and Lewy, it is well-known that the nationalist right and the Communist left both contributed to the downfall of the Weimar democracy. However, they point out, that the equally common view that these forces acted independently in their agitation against the Republic needs to be revisited. Because, while the two flanks seemingly represented the two opposite poles of the political spectrum, in actuality there was considerable attraction between them. As the authors indicate:

At certain crucial moments during the 1920s this attraction culminated in serious attempts to achieve a working alliance and an ideological synthesis. This startling rapprochement between right and left, known in Germany as National Bolshevism, was facilitated by the friendly relations between democratic Germany and Communist Russia after World War I… The common ground was their conviction that each stood to benefit from an alliance between the two ‘proletarian nations,’ Russia and Germany, against the capitalist West.[60]

As described by Alexander Reid Ross in Against the Fascist Creep, as White Russian émigrés moved to Germany and forged an ultranationalist sense of anticommunist unity between their countries, some sought to unite with the Nazis to “liberate” their former homeland.[61] Some adopted a semblance of socialism in the belief that state communism would eventually evolve toward nationalism. For example, Nikolai Ustryalov (1890 – 1937) recognized the positive national contributions of the Bolsheviks and hoped that they would abandon internationalism in favor of a strong nationalist political economy—a kind of “national-bolshevism.”[62]

The movement had its origins when Moeller van den Bruck counterposed the tactic of opening the East to Spengler’s well-known “theory of pessimism, arguing that Germany and Russia were both vigorous “young” peoples, and that the outcome of World War I “had separated them with finality from the decaying West.”[63] When Spengler and Moeller debated their respective positions at the June Club in 1920, Otto Strasser (1897 – 1974) was in the audience. Initially, Otto Strasser founded the Fighting Community of Revolutionary National Socialists (KGRNS), whose theses about the German revolution were loosely based on the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner.[64] With his brother Gregor, Otto later created the left or Strasserist wing of the Nazi Party. In his autobiography, History in My Time, Strasser described how he would never forget that fruitful discussion,” when “the Pessimist and the Optimist of the West expounded their versions of the coming decades.” Although “the two conceptions were opposed to each other,” Spengler and Moeller were “yet attuned to each other and complimentary to each other, so that all of us, moved by this moment, solemnly swore to devote our lives to the realization of their visions.”[65]

The vision became known as National Bolshevism. National Bolshevism arose during the 1920s, when a number of German intellectuals began a dialogue which created a synthesis between radical nationalism (typically referencing Prussianism) and Bolshevism as it existed in the Soviet Union. The main figure in this movement was Ernst Niekisch (1889 – 1967) of the Old Social Democratic Party of Germany. Niekisch and his followers adopted the name of “National Bolsheviks” and looked to the Soviet Union as a continuation of both Russian nationalism and the old state of Prussia. Jünger and Niekisch were members of the Association for the Study of Russian Planned Economy (ARPLAN), along with Georg Lukacs, the Marxist philosopher who was among the primary influences on the Frankfurt School.[66] All of them envisioned a Eurasian cooperation spanning from Russia to Portugal.

Although members of the Nazi party under Hitler did not take part in Niekisch’s National Bolshevik project, characterizing Bolshevism as a “Jewish conspiracy,” in the early 1930s there was a parallel tendency within the party which advocated similar views. Also known as Strasserism, for its leader, Gregor Strasser, the Nazi left-wing was the strand of Nazism that called for a worker-based and anti-capitalist form of Nazism. They included Aufbau member Karl Haushofer, who eventually came under suspicion because of his contacts with left-wing socialist figures within the Nazi movement, and his advocacy of essentially a German–Russian alliance. The Strasser brothers’ movement advocated neither capitalism nor Marxism, but instead a society organized “without masters,” in a natural hierarchy based on merit and an organic integration of syndicates and corporations bringing the nations of Europe into a new United States of Europe.[67] However, their movement was crushed during the Night of the Long Knives.

Jünger’s 1932 work Der Arbeiter (“The Worker”) is considered a seminal National Bolshevik text. Along with Karl Haushofer, Jünger, Niekisch and other figures of the Conservative Revolution, the Strassers advocated National Bolshevism, a German-Russian revolutionary alliance which influenced the German Communists with connections to the Nazi left-wing.[68] Jünger was the most prominent of the German Conservative Revolutionaries and considered one of the greatest German writers of the twentieth century, and although he was sympathetic of National Socialism he never joined the Nazi party. He was a highly-decorated German soldier in World War I, after which he became active in German politics, experimented in psychedelic drugs, and travelled the world.

Jünger’s accounts of the war, The Storms of Steel and The Adventurous Heart, celebrated the heroism of the battlefield, the real arena of the “world spirit.” Jünger identified the decline of civilization and the portent of an oblivion, joined with the feminization of Weimar, that had to be overcome. This Zivilisationskritik (critique of civilization) became his trademark, along with a rejection of the Enlightenment in favor of a more natural “deeper Enlightenment.” Jünger envisioned a “total mobilization” that would capture the imagination of the workers of the nation in a united industrial effort to bring catastrophe to the modern world and overthrow liberal democracy.[69] Jünger never joined the Nazi Party, and eventually turned against them by the late 1930s. His objections to the Nazis, which were influential on the members of the Stauffenberg plot to assassinate Hitler in July 1944, led to his dismissal from the Wehrmacht.[70]

Otto Strasser fled first to Austria, then to Prague, Switzerland and France, and in 1941 he emigrated to Canada, where he was the famed “Prisoner of Ottawa.” During this time, Goebbels denounced Strasser as the Nazis’ “Public Enemy Number One” and put a price of $500,000 on his head. As an influential and uncondemned former Nazi Party member still faithful to many doctrines of National Socialism, he was initially prevented from returning to West Germany after the war, first by the Allied powers and then by the West German government. During his exile, he wrote articles on Nazi Germany and its leadership for a number of British, American and Canadian newspapers, including the New Statesman, and a series for the Montreal Gazette, which was ghostwritten by then Gazette reporter and later politician Donald C. MacDonald. A long time Canadian politician and political party leader and had been referred to as the “Best premier Ontario never had.”[71]

[1] Armin Mohler. The Conservative Revolution in Germany, 1918-1932 (ARES Verlag, Gmbh, 2018).

[2] Kurt Sontheimer. Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlag, 1968), pp. 13-14; cited in Roger Wood. The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic (University of Nottingham, 1996), p. 29.

[3] Wood. The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic, p. 29.

[4] Ernst Jiinger. Das Waldchen, 125, p. 154; cited in Wood. The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic, p. 29.

[5] Oswald Spengler. “Nietzsche und sein Jahrhundert” (speech of October 1924), in Oswald Spengler. Reden und Aufsdtze, third edn (Munich: Beck, 1951), pp. 110-24 (pp. 12-13); cited in Wood. The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic, p. 29.

[6] Ibid., pp. 57–58.

[7] David Redles. “Nazi End Times: The Third Reich as a Millennial Reich,” in Kinane, Karolyn & Ryan, Michael A (eds). End of days: essays on the apocalypse from antiquity to modernity, (McFarland and Co, 2009), p. 176.

[8] David Redles. “Nazi End Times: The Third Reich as Millennial Reich.” in End of Days: Essays on the Apocalypse from Antiquity to Modernity, ed. Karolyn Kinane & Michael A. Ryan (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2009), p. 176.

[9] Peter Lemesurier. Nostradamus: The Illustrated Prophecies (O Books, 2003).

[10] P. Duncan. Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution, Communism and After (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) (note 9) pp. 10–12

[11] Jardar Østbø. The New Third Rome: Readings of a Russian Nationalist Myth (Columbia University Press, May 3, 2016), p. 161.

[12] Dennis Eugene Engleman. Ultimate Things: An Orthodox Christian Perspective on the End Times (Conciliar Press, 1995)

[13] Lemesurier. Nostradamus.

[14] Richard Smoley. The Essential Nostradamus: Literal Translation, Historical Commentary, and Biography (Penguin, 2006), p. 258.

[15] Lemesurier. Nostradamus.

[16] Anne A. Lotowsky. Emperor of the World: Charlemagne and the Construction of Imperial Authority, 800-1229 (Cornell University, 2013), p. 71.

[17] Christopher Bonura (2016) “When Did the Legend of the Last Emperor Originate? A New Look at the Textual Relationship between the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius and the Tiburtine Sibyl.” Viator, 47(3), pp. 47-100.

[18] Marshall Poe. “Moscow, the Third Rome: The Origins and Transformations of a ‘Pivotal Moment’” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Neue Folge, Bd. 49, H. 3 (2001), pp. 424-425.

[19] Yaacov Yadgar. Mysticism in 20th Century Hebrew Literature (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010), p. 359.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Konstantin Burmistrov & Maria Endel. “The Place of Kabbalah in the Doctrine of Russian Freemasons.” Aries (2004), 4, 1, p. 57.

[22] Barbara T. Norton. “Russian Political Masonry and the February Revolution of 1917.” International Review of Social History, Vol. 28, No. 2 (1983), p. 244.

[23] Dmitrii Sidorov. “Post-Imperial Third Romes: Resurrections of a Russian Orthodox Geopolitical Metaphor.” Geopolitics 11(2), p. 323.

[24] Poe. “Moscow, the Third Rome,” pp. 425-426.

[25] Kofner Y. “Russian Philosophy: Sketch of the Classical Eurasianism.” Gumilev Center. 01.03.2011. Retrieved from

http://www.gumilev-center.ru/russkaya-filosofiya-ocherk-klassicheskogo-evrazijjstva/ (12.04.13)

[26] Joseph Frank. “Dostoevsky: The Encounter with Europe.” Russian Review 22 (3) 1963, p. 240.

[27] Otto-Ernst Sch¨uddekopf. Linke Leute von rechts: Die nationalrevolution¨aren Minderheiten und der Kommunismus in der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1960), p. 33.

[28] Dostoevskii. Dnevnik pisatelia, vol. X, 225, 226; vol. XI, 5, 6, 8, 240, 241.

[29] Ibid.; vol. XI, 8; cited in Kellogg. The Russian Roots of Nazism, p. 32.

[30] Dostoevskii. Dnevnik pisatelia, vol. X, vol. XI; cited in Kellogg. The Russian Roots of Nazism, p. 32.

[31] Riasanovsky. The Emergence of Eurasianism; cited in Kevin Coogan. The Dreamer of the Day (Autonomedia, 1999), p. 185.

[32] Dunlop, “Aleksandr Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics.”

[33] Coogan. The Dreamer of the Day, p. 185.

[34] Ibid.

[35] David Redles. “Nazi End Times: The Third Reich as Millennial Reich.” in End of Days: Essays on the Apocalypse from Antiquity to Modernity, ed. Karolyn Kinane & Michael A. Ryan (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2009), p. 177.

[36] Tamir Bar-On. Where Have All The Fascists Gone? (Routledge, 2016).

[37] Athol Bloomer. “Jacob Frank and the Zoharist Catholic Khasidim: A Hebrew Catholic Perspective.” A Catholic Jew Pontifications. aronbengilad.blogspot.ca (September 13, 2006).

[38] Pascal Themanlys. “Le Mouvement Cosmique.” Retrieved from http://www.abpw.net/cosmique/theon/mouvem.htm

[39] Victor Farias. Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), p. 118.

[40] “Heidegger to Marcuse” (Freiburg, January 20, 1948); Douglas Kellner and Peter Marcuse, ed. Technology, War and Fascism, Volume I (Routledge, 1998), p. 264-267.

[41] Jurgen Habermas. “Work and Weltanschauung: the Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective,” Critical Inquiry 15 (1989), pp. 452–54.

[42] Karl Löwith. “My last meeting with Heidegger in Rome,” in R. Wolin. The Heidegger Controversy (MIT Press, 1993).

[43] Thomas Sheehan. “Heidegger and the Nazis,” a review of Victor Farias’ Heidegger et le nazisme, in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXV, n°10, (June 16, 1988), pp. 38-47.

[44] Jacob Taubes. To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections (Columbia University Press, 2013).

[45] Bryan S. Turner. “Sovereignty and Emergency Political Theology, Islam and American Conservatism.” Theory, Culture & Society 2002 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 19(4): 103–119.

[46] Ernst Klee. Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945 (Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 2007), pp. ff.

[47] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, expanded edition, trans. G. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)

[48]  “Ich denke, also habe ich Feinde; ich habe Feinde, also bin ich,” in Schmitt. Die andere Hegel-Linie, 2; cited in Steven M. Wasserstrom. “‘The Great Goal of the Political Will Is Leviathan’: Ernst Jünger and the Cabala of Enmity.” in Kabbalah and Modernity, (eds) Boaz Huss, Marco Pasi and Kocku von Stuckrad (Leiden: Brill, 2010, p. 330.

[49] Calvin Dieter Ullrich. “Carl Schmitt: Katechon.” Critical Thinking (July 3, 2018). Retrieved from https://criticallegalthinking.com/2018/07/03/carl-schmitt-katechon/

[50] Jacob Taubes, Dana Hollander (trans.) The Political Theology of Paul (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 103; cited in Ullrich. “Carl Schmitt: Katechon.”

[51] Jünger, Eumeswil, 378; cited in Steven M. Wasserstrom. “The Great Goal of the Political Will Is Leviathan,” p. 330.

[52] Carl Schmitt. The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol (Wesport: Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 24.

[53] Edouard Rix. “Geopolitics of Leviathan, Part 1.” Counter-Current Publishing.

[54] Carl Schmitt. Land and Sea. Simona Draghici, trans (Plutarch Press, 1997). Original publication: 1954.

[55] Ibid.

[56] Ibid.; Geoffrey of Monmouth. Historia regum Britanniae.

[57] Carl Schmitt. Land and Sea.

[58] Ibid.

[59] Alain de Benoist. “Ernst Jünger: The Figure of The Worker Between the Gods & the Titans, Part 3.” Counter-Currents. Retrieved from https://counter-currents.com/2011/07/ernst-junger-the-figure-of-the-worker-between-the-gods-the-titans-part-3/

[60] Abraham Ascher & Guenter Lewy. “National Bolshevism in Weimar Germany: Alliance of Political Extremes Against Democracy.” Social Research, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Winter, 1956), p. 450.

[61] Alexander Reid Ross. Against the Fascist Creep (AK Press, 2017).

[62] Ibid.

[63] Fritz Stern. The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1961); as cited in Coogan. The Dreamer of the Day, p. 187.

[64] Karla Poewe. New Religions and the Nazis (Routledge, 2006), p. 53.

[65] Klemens von Lemperer. Germany’s New Conservatism: Its History and Dilemma in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 174; Fritz Stern. The Politics of Cultural Despair, p. 239; cited in Coogan. The Dreamer of the Day, p. 187.

[66] Philip Rees. Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890 (1990), p. 279.

[67] Alexander Reid Ross. Against the Fascist Creep (AK Press, 2017).

[68] Martin A. Lee. The Beast Reawakens (London: Warner Books, 1998), p. 314; Tamir Bar-On. Where Have All The Fascists Gone? (Routledge, 2016).

[69] Alexander Reid Ross. Against the Fascist Creep (AK Press, 2017).

[70] Elliot Y. Neaman. A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger and the Politics of Literature After Nazism (University of California, Berkeley, 1999 ) p. 122-23.

[71] Sandra Martin. “DONALD C. MACDONALD: 1913-2008: ‘Best premier Ontario never had,’ Donald C. MacDonald dies at 94.” The Globe and Mail. (April 10, 2008).

Volume Three

1. Synarchy

2. Ariosophy

3. Zionism

4. Eugenics & Sexology

5. The Round Table

6. The League of Nations

7. avant-Garde

8. Black Gold

9. Secrets of Fatima

10. Polaires Brotherhood

11. Operation Trust

12. Aryan Christ

13. Aufbau

14. Brotherhood of Death

15. The Cliveden Set

16. Conservative Revolution

17. Eranos Conferences

18. Frankfurt School

19. Vichy Regime

20. Shangri-La

21. The Final Solution

22. Cold War

23. European Union