39. Kulturstaat

Siegfried

In 1939, Hitler looked back on the performance of Rienzi in Vienna as decisive: “in that hour it began,” he confided in the presence of both Kubizek and Winifred Wagner.[1] Hitler was fond of saying, “Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner.”[2] To some Germans, the idea of a Dolchstoßlegende (“stab-in-the-back legend”) was evoked from Wagner’s 1876 opera Götterdämmerung (“Twilight of the Gods”), in which Hagen murders the hero of the story, his enemy Siegfried, with a spear in his back.[3] To Hitler, David Ian Hall explained, in “Wagner, Hitler, and Germany’s Rebirth after the First War,” Germany’s defeat in World War I and the unacceptable terms of peace at the Treaty of Versailles, agreed to by Friedrich Ebert and the SDP, known as the November Criminals, were symptoms of a cultural decline that needed to be reversed if Germany was to recover its former greatness. To “master this disease,” Hitler believed, Bolshevism in all its forms had to be resisted and destroyed. Only a true Volksgemeinschaft (“national community”), based on racial purity and inspired with an authentic German culture, led by a heroic leader, combination of Siegfried and Parsifal, could see Germany successfully through this historic struggle.[4] Of the first meeting of the Nazi party, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “Out of its flames was bound to come the sword which was to regain the freedom of the German Siegfried.”[5]

Members of the Thule Society maintained very close ties with the  Bayreuther Kreis (“Bayreuth circle”), an active and influential group of pan-German intellectuals, editors, and writers who promoted Wagner’s ideas and work. Thule leader Dietrich Eckart introduced Hitler to Thule Society members, including Dr. Gottfried Grandel, nationalist publisher Julius Lehmann, General Erich Ludendorff, as well as piano company executive Edwin Bechstein and his wife Helena, society matron Elsa Bruckmann, Richard Wagner’s son Siegfried and his English-born wife Winifred Wagner, who saw Hitler as “destined to be the savior of Germany.”[6] The Bayreuther Blätter, founded in by Wagner in 1878, and written primarily for visitors to the Bayreuth Festival, increasingly “nazified” Wagner, linking his work with the ideology of National Socialism.

Winifred Wagner and the leaders of the Bayreuther Kreis—including Eva Chamberlain, the widow of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Hans von Wolzogen, editor of Bayreuther Blätter—were involved in the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (“Militant League for German Culture,” KfdK), a nationalistic anti-Semitic political society founded in 1928 as the Nationalsozialistische Gesellschaft für deutsche Kultur (“National Socialist Society for German Culture,” NGDK) by Thule and Aufbau member Alfred Rosenberg. Ludwig Schemann (1852 – 1938), a member of both the KfdK and the Bayreuther Kreis, together with Adolf Bartels, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Henry Thode and Hermann Hendrich, Schemann was one of the founders of the völkisch Werdandi-Bundes. Schemann was involved with other race ideologists such as the anthropologist Otto Ammon and the writer Thule Society founder Theodor Fritsch in the Pan-German League.[7] Schemann, who was close to Cosima Wagner and was inspired by her to found the Gobineau Vereinigung (“Gobineau Society”), translated Gobineau’s An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races into German between 1893 and 1902, and “did a great deal to bring Gobineau’s term ‘Aryan’ into vogue amongst German racists.”[8]

The Bayreuther Blätter edited by Hans von Wolzogen until his death in 1938. Wolzogen’s mother was a daughter of the famous architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who collaborated in architectural projects with Jewish Prussian architect Salomo Sachs, who was a neighbor of Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy, who married Lea Salomon, a granddaughter of Daniel Itzig, a member of the Asiatic Brethren.[9] In its pages, writers had expressed support for Otto von Bismarck and the German Empire. After Germany’s defeat in World War I, it showed opposition to the Weimar Republic, eventually supporting Hitler and Nazi Germany. From 1887, each issue began with an epigraph from Great men of German cultural history. The majority were taken from Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Franz Liszt, Thomas Carlyle, and Martin Luther. Others, like Carl von Clausewitz, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Paul von Hindenburg, Paul de Lagarde and Hitler.

In a letter to her friend Helena Boy, Richard Wagner’s daughter-in-law Winifred (1897 – 1980), the English-born wife of Wagner’s son Siegfried Wagner (1869 – 1930), wrote, “My God, who would have thought that such a turn of events was possible! How proud we were of our German Fatherland, and how ashamed we are that a worm at the core could produce such degradation.” The “‘worm” was Ebert and the SDP.[10] In March 1936, following the successful German reoccupation of the Rhineland, while listening to a recording of the prelude to Parsifal on his special train, Hitler reaffirmed the vow he had made at Wahnfried—the name given by Richard Wagner to his villa in Bayreuth: “I have built up my religion out of Parsifal.”[11]

According to Hall, “Hitler’s Wagner was an ever-present metaphysical voice aestheticizing political life in National Socialist Germany – first to regenerate and afterwards to sustain public support for the Kampf (struggle) that lay ahead.”[12] Hitler believed Germany would be great again once it became a truly united, which was attainable only through a revered and widely shared German culture, beginning with core German artistic values, as portrayed in the great music dramas of Richard Wagner. As both believed that Germany’s rebirth depended on cultural regeneration, Hitler’s dream of creating a Kulturstaat (“culture state”) as the first step in restoring Germany’s greatness, was endorsed and legitimized by Hitler and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, both the guardians of Wagner’s life work.[13]

Wahnfried

In 1921, at her Berchtesgaden Villa, Eckart introduced Hitler to Helena Bechstein, the wife of Edwin Bechstein (1859 – 1934), who was the guardian of Winifred, and responsible for her education. Bechstein was the owner of the C. Bechstein piano company established in 1853 by Edwin’s father Carl Bechstein (1826 –1900). By 1870, with endorsements from Franz Liszt and Hans von Bülow, Bechstein pianos had become a staple in many concert halls and private mansions. Bechstein was the official piano maker for the Tsars of Russia, the royal families of Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Austria and Denmark, and other royalty and aristocracy. Helena took a liking to Hitler and when he was imprisoned after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, she visited him regularly in prison and once claimed to the prison that he was her adopted son. Upon Hitler’s release, Helena introduced him to German high society in Berlin, with whom she shared her belief that at last “Germany’s young Messiah” had been found.[14] Both Helena and Hitler grew close to each other, with Bechstein calling him Wölfchen (“little wolf”), stating she would have liked to have had him as a son. Hitler reciprocated by allegedly giving her an original manuscript of Mein Kampf. The Bechsteins both publicly funded Hitler, giving him the funds to continue publishing Völkischer Beobachter.[15]

As a child, Winifred was orphaned and adopted by Karl Klindworth (1830 – 1916), the nephew of Georg Klindworth, and Franz Liszt’s pupil and a friend of Richard Wagner. It was arranged that Winifred, aged eighteen, would marry Siegfried, aged 45, in the hope to end Siegfried’s homosexual encounters. After Siegfried’s death in 1930, Winifred took over the Bayreuth Festival. Like Hitler, Winifred believed profoundly in the cult of German nationalism, Nordic self-realization, and völkisch aspiration. When Hitler was jailed for his part in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, Winifred sent him food parcels and stationery on which Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf may have been written. In the late 1930s, she served as Hitler’s personal translator during treaty negotiations with Britain. Her relationship with Hitler grew so close that by 1933 there were rumors of impending marriage. Haus Wahnfried, the Wagner villa in Bayreuth, became Hitler’s favorite retreat. The name Wahnfried is a German compound of Wahn (delusion, madness) and Fried(e) (peace, freedom). Hitler gave the Bayreuth Festival government assistance and tax-exempt status, and treated Winifred’s children affectionately.[16]

In 1923, Edwin, Helene and Eckart took Hitler to visit Siegfried Wagner and introduced them. Winifred, along with Helena and Elsa Bruckmann (1865 – 1946), the wife of Thule Society member Hugo Bruckmann (1863 – 1941), helped to teach Hitler table manners and helped reform his public image.[17] Elsa Bruckmann, born Princess Cantacuzène of Romania was Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Munich publisher. She held the “Salon Bruckmann” and made it her mission to introduce Hitler to leading industrialists. In 1899, Chamberlain read at Elsa Bruckmann’s first salon in January 1899. Attendees at their salon included Rainer Maria Rilke, Heinrich Wölfflin, Rudolf Kassner, Hermann Keyserling, Karl Wolfskehl, Harry Graf Kessler, Georg Simmel, Hjalmar Schacht and her nephew Norbert von Hellingrath.[18] Schuler and Klages, founders of the Cosmic Circle, attended the salon.[19] Hitler was known to have attended some of Schuler’s lectures there in 1922 and 1923.[20]

Helena Bechstein also introduced Hitler to Wahnfried, Wagner’s family home and the spiritual headquarters of the Bayreuther Kreis. The intellectual leader of Wahnfried was Wagner’s son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who was already famous for his Die Grundlagen desneunzehnten Jahrhunderts (“The foundations of the nineteenth century,” 1899), an important text for the pan-German movement and völkisch anti-Semitism. In 1917, Chamberlain along with Heinrich Class and Georg von Below started a new journal, Deutschlands Erneuerung (“Germany’s renewal”), to provide a forum for German nationalists and anti-Semitic writers.[21] Hitler visited Wahnfried at the end of September 1923, and was the principal speaker at the German Day in Bayreuth, organized by nationalists and right-wing paramilitary groups to protest against the French occupation of the Ruhr and the “shameful Treaty of Versailles.”[22] After the speech, Hitler went to the Wagners at Wahnfried. There he visited Wagner’s tomb alone, spending a considerable time in contemplation at Wagner’s grave before he returned to the house. Winifred recalled that he came back in a state of great emotion, saying, “Out of Parsifal I will make a religion.”[23] Hitler read and absorbed Chamberlain’s writings and could quote both Wagner, and his biographer with ease.[24] By the end of October 1923, Hitler obtained Chamberlain’s blessing and the full support of Wahnfried and the Bayreuth Circle. A week after they met, Chamberlain wrote a letter to Hitler, telling him that he had expected to meet a fanatic but instead he had found a savior, the key figure of the German counter-revolution.[25]

Their meeting in Bayreuth was memorialized by the Nazis. As Hall explained, “Hitler and Houston Stewart Chamberlain clasped hands. The great thinker, whose writings went with the Führer on his journey and laid the intellectual foundations of the Nordic German world view, the genius, seer, and herald of the Third Reich, felt that through this simple man of the people Germany’s destiny would achieve a glad fulfilment.”[26] The Nazi journal Völkischer Beobachter dedicated five columns to praising him on his seventieth birthday, describing Chamberlain’s Foundations as the “gospel of the Nazi movement.”[27]

In 1883, Bernhard Förster, the husband of Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth, published an anti-Semitic pamphlet in Wagner’s Bayreuther Blätter in which he depicted the Jews as parasites that threatened the health of the German body.[28] Elisabeth herself would enthusiastically dub Hitler the “superman” her brother had predicted.[29] In 1932, she received a bouquet of roses from Hitler during a German premier of Benito Mussolini's 100 Days, and in 1934 Hitler personally presented her with a wreath for Nietzsche’s grave carrying the words “To A Great Fighter.” Also in 1934, Elisabeth gave to Hitler Nietzsche’s favorite walking stick, and Hitler was photographed gazing into the eyes of a white marble bust of Nietzsche. Heinrich Hoffmann’s popular biography, Hitler as Nobody Knows Him, featured the photo with the caption: “The Führer before the bust of the German philosopher whose ideas have fertilized two great popular movements: the National Socialist of Germany and the Fascist of Italy.”[30]

We Aryans

Eckart was also familiar with Jewish self-haters Otto Weininger and Arthur Trebitsch (1880 – 1927). Amos Elon attributes Jewish ant-Semitism as a cause in the overall growth of anti-Semitism when he says of the book by Otto Weininger (1880 – 1903), that it “inspired the typical Viennese adage that anti-Semitism did not really get serious until it was taken up by Jews.”[31] Although born Jewish, Weininger was deeply convinced by German völkisch ideology, venerated Wagner, and despised his own race. In 1901, Weininger tried to find a publisher for his work Eros and the Psyche: A biological-psychological study, which he submitted as his thesis in 1902. He met Freud, who did not, however, recommend the text to a publisher. His professors accepted the thesis and Weininger received his Ph.D. degree in July 1902. Shortly thereafter, he converted to Christianity. “The Jews would have to overcome Judaism before they could be ripe for Zionism,” Weininger explained. However, Weininger argues: “Every single Jew must seek to answer it for his own person.” He added, “Christ was the greatest human being because he overcame the greatest adversity,” as “the only Jew who has ever succeeded in defeating Judaism.” In Sex and Character, which he wrote in 1903 shortly before committing suicide, Weininger wrote:

The faults of the Jewish race have often been attributed to the repression of that race by Aryans, and many Christians are still disposed to blame themselves in this respect. But the self-reproach is not justified. Outward circumstances do not mould a race in one direction, unless there is in the race the innate tendency to respond to the moulding forces; the total result comes at least as much from a natural disposition as from the modifying circumstances.[32]

James Webb, in The Occult Establishment, suggests that Weininger must have been acquainted with occult and Theosophical groups.[33] His book Sex and Character combined anti-Semitism and a distaste for women with a prophecy in this “Jewish century” of a great founder of a new religion. Weininger went on to elaborate a symbolic theory of the universe, which borrowed from Plato, incorporated the analogy of microcosm and macrocosm, and declared that character could be discovered from astrology. There are even indications, explained Webb, that he saw himself as the great prophet he had predicted.[34]

Trebitsch was an Austrian writer and racial theorist, and fellow student of Weininger, also known for being an antisemite of Jewish origin. As a young man he came under the influence of Weininger and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose Viennese circles he frequented. Trebitsch established a vanity press which he named Antaios Verlag, after the mythological giant Antaeus in reference to a passage in Wagner’s 1850 essay The Art Work of the Future. Trebitsch became convinced of an international “Jewish world conspiracy against the German people,” which was behind the outbreak of World War I. He apparently came to believe that Providence had set him the task of becoming the savior of the Nordic race. According to Trebitsch, whose theories were first articulated in his 1919 book Geist und Judentum, the Jews were an Ungeist that was fundamentally destructive to the geist (“spirit”) of the Aryan peoples. However, he believed as an antitoxin works best when it is derived from the toxin itself, people of Jewish ancestry who reject Judaism, such as himself, will be the spiritual force to destroy the corrupting influence of the Jewish presence in Europe.[35] Jesus Christ was the archetype of a Judaised Aryan who had overcome and rejected the Jewishness within himself. As detailed in his 1923 book Die Geschichte meines “Verfolgungswahns” (“The Story of my ‘Paranoia’”), he believed Jews were trying to kill him with “poisoned electric rays.”

In his private conversations, Hitler recalled a remark his mentor Dietrich Eckart made about Otto Weininger: “I only knew one decent Jew and he committed suicide on the day when he realized that the Jew lives upon the decay of peoples…”[36] In the early 1920s, Trebitsch helped to set up and fund the Austrian branch of the Nazi party, allegedly being considered its leader for a brief period.[37] Trebitsch knew both Hitler and Eckart personally. Eckart refers to Trebitsch in his book Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin: Zwiegespräch zwischen Hitler und mir (“Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin: Dialogues Between Hitler and Me”), which records a conversation he is supposed to have had about Trebitsch, in which he refers to him as “a Jewish writer against Jews—at least he thinks he does. His every other word is ‘We Aryans’”.[38] Hitler would later recommend an acquaintance, “Read every sentence he has written. He has unmasked the Jews as no one else did.”[39] Hitler apparently considered giving Trebitsch Alfred Rosenberg’s role as head of ideological education, given that Rosenberg was one of the “smart-alecky Zionist snakes” that Trebitsch had warned him against in the party who would undermine it from within.[40]

Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant

According to Bronder, Eckart coached Hitler on his public speaking skills, along with Erik Jan Hanussen (1889 – 1933). Mel Gordon in Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant discusses the career of Hanussen as an occult figure in late Weimar Berlin, in the service of the Nazis. Hanussen became famous for giving performances of his psychic abilities at La Scala in Berlin, attracting the attention of people from Sigmund Freud and Thomas Mann to Marlene Dietrich and Peter Lorre. At the Zionist congress in Basel, Hanussen declared his descent in direct line from Judah Leib of Prossnitz, one of the successors of Shabbetai Zevi, according to a list of ordination in the Schiff Collection.[41] According to Dr. Walter C. Langer’s World War II report for the OSS: “…during the early 1920’s Hitler took regular lessons in speaking and in mass psychology from a man named Hanussen who was also a practicing astrologer and fortune-teller. He was an extremely clever individual who taught Hitler a great deal concerning the importance of staging meetings to obtain the greatest dramatic effect.”[42]

As pointed out by Richard B. Spence, one of Hanussen’s closest collaborators was Dr. Leopold Thoma, a psychoanalyst, paranormal researcher, and chief of the Psychologische Abteilung (“Psychology Department”) of the Viennese police. In 1921 he formed his own Institut fur Kriminal Telepatische Forschung (“Criminal Telepathic Research”). Thoma was well-acquainted with fellow Austrian psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, a first cousin of Victor Adler of the Pernerstorfer Circle. Aleister Crowley claimed to “know [Adler] personally” and to have “handled” some of the Adler’s Berlin patients and to have “put a lot of my own theory and practice into it.”[43] As well, Thoma was friends with Dr. Alexander Cannon, another psychiatrist, paranormal researcher and friend of Aleister Crowley who crossed paths with Hanussen.[44] Cannon, who was sometimes referred to as the “Yorkshire Yogi” or the “leader of black magic in England,” would later face accusations of being a Nazi sympathiser and German spy.[45] Cannon was renowned for prescribing exotic remedies for stress, alcoholism, sex and self-esteem problems, with treatments including electrotherapies and Tibetan hypnosis, learned while he was a prison doctor in China. John Gastor, a socialite of the day, said the King Edward VIII had been “entrapped and ensnared” by Cannon. Cannon was the subject of an MI5 investigation and then an establishment cover-up before settling in virtual exile in the Isle of Man, where he put on magic shows and psychic performances.[46]

Hanussen was also a confidant of horror fiction writer Hanns Heinz Ewers, who was a friend of Hanfstaengl, and also connected with Crowley and Viereck in the Propaganda Kabinett.[47] During the last years of the Weimar Republic, Ewers became involved with the Nazi Party, attracted by its nationalism, its Nietzschean moral philosophy, and its cult of Teutonic culture, and joined the NSDAP in 1931. Despite his involvement with the Nazi, Ewers’ main character in his horror novels, Frank Braun, is depicted as having a Jewish mistress, Lotte Levi, who is also a patriotic German. This was one of the factors which ended Ewers’ popularity with the Nazi leadership. With the addition to his homosexual tendencies, he soon lost favor with party leaders. In 1934, most of his works were banned in Germany, and his assets and were property seized. Alfred Rosenberg was his main adversary in the party, but after submitting many petitions, Ewers eventually secured the rescission of the ban.

Like Ewers’s Alraune, Hanussen was also associated with the magical mandrake root. In 1932, Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun attempted suicide. Additionally, Hitler's own political prospects were fading, and became suicidal himself. But his old friend Hanussen produced for him an astrological chart, which predicted that an auspicious future lay ahead, but that Hitler was impeded by a hex. In order to rid himself of the spell, explained Hanussen, Hitler would have to return to his hometown, on a full moon at midnight in a butcher’s backyard and remove from the earth a mandrake, a man-shaped root known in European folklore for its magical and medicinal properties. Hanussen performed a ritual, and set off to collect the mandrake himself, returning on New Year's Day 1933 with the root and a prediction: that Hitler's return to power would take place on January 30, a date approximately equivalent to the pagan Sabbath of Oimelc, one of the four “cross-quarter” days of the witches’ calendar. As unlikely as it seemed at the time, Hitler was Chancellor of Germany on precisely the date Hanussen had predicted.[48] Hanussen also made a further prediction, during a séance held at his “Palace of Occultism” in Berlin, that the communists in Germany would attempt a revolution, marked by the destruction (by fire) of an important government building. That was the day before the infamous Reichstag fire, which is widely considered to have been a false-flag operation that provided Hitler the opportunity to seize power and declare himself “Führer.” But Hanussen was eventually killed six weeks later in the purge of the Night of Long Knives, as some claim, because he “knew too much.”[49]

In 1931, just before Hitler’s rise to power, Crowley played chess with Ernst Schertel, German author, probably best known for his Magic: History, Theory and Practice (1923), of which he sent a dedicated copy to Hitler, who read the book and marked several passages, including, “He who does not have the demonic seed within himself will never give birth to a magical world,” and “Satan is the beginning…”[50] Around 1925, Crowley and Ludendorff met and they discussed “Nordic Theology,” including the occult significance of the swastika.[51] According to Crowley’s notes, Ludendorff “almost certainly got the [Swastika] from us. I personally had suggested it to Ludendorff in ‘25 or ‘26.”[52] Crowley also famously wrote in a 1933 article for the Sunday Dispatch, “before Hitler was, I am.” Crowley also believed Hitler’s Mein Kampf was inspired by his own The Book of the Law. Crowley marked the pages of his copy Hermann Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks—available at the Warburg Institute—which showed that he believed that Hitler’s “table talk” was Thelemically-inspired.[53] One member of Hitler’s inner circle claimed that several meetings took place between Crowley and Hitler, a claim repeated by Réne Guénon in a letter to Julius Evola in 1949.[54] Crowley regarded himself the “proper man” that Hitler envisioned, as he wrote to Viereck in 1936: “Hitler himself says emphatically in Mein Kampf that the world needs a new religion, that he himself is not a religious teacher, but that when the proper man appears he will be welcome.”[55]

Mitford Sisters

Hanfstaengl was a friend of Unity Valkyrie Freeman-Mitford (1914 – 1948), who was one of the six infamous Mitford sisters, who achieved contemporary notoriety for their controversial and stylish lifestyles and politics. They were caricatured by The Times journalist Ben Macintyre as “Diana the Fascist, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Hitler-lover; Nancy the Novelist; Deborah the Duchess and Pamela the unobtrusive poultry connoisseur.”[56] Jessica renounced her privileged background at an early age and became an adherent of communism. Jessica became a well-known writer, the author of The American Way of Death in 1963. She later married Robert Treuhaft, a Jewish-American civil rights lawyer, and became a friend and mentor to J.K. Rowling, author of the blockbuster Harry Potter series.

While Jessica turned to the left, Unity and her sister Diana turned to fascism. The Churchill’s eldest daughter Diana was a flower girl at Diana Mitford’s wedding to Bryan Guinness, heir to the barony of Moyne, and she was often invited for extended visits or parties at Clementine and Winston Churchill’s country house. Diana however divorced Guinness for Sir Oswald Mosley (1896 –1980), with whom she was having an affair. Mosley, was a devotee of Aleister Crowley and the founder of the British Union of Fascists.[57] Mosley’s closest ally was a disciple of Crowley, Major-General J.F.C Fuller (1878 –1966). While serving in the First Oxfordshire Light Infantry, Fuller had entered and won a contest to write the best review of Crowley’s poetic works, after which it turned out that he was the only entrant. This essay was later published in book form in 1907 as The Star in the West. After this he became an enthusiastic supporter of Crowley, joining his magical order, the A∴A∴., within which he became a leading member, editing order documents and its journal, The Equinox.

In 1920, Mosley married Lady Cynthia Curzon, daughter of Round Tabler, Lord Curzon. When Cynthia died in 1933, Oswald married his mistress Diana Mitford in secret in Germany in 1936, in the Berlin home of Joseph Goebbels, where Hitler was one of the guests. Mosley spent large amounts of his private fortune on the British Union of Fascists, negotiating with Hitler, through Diana, for permission to broadcast commercial radio to Britain from Germany.

Diana became well acquainted with Winifred (1897 – 1980), the English-born wife of Wagner’s son Siegfried Wagner (1869 – 1930), and with Goebbels’ wife Magda. Randolph Churchill, the father of Winston Churchill, relentlessly criticized his cousin Unity Mitford for her crush on Hitler. Unity, who was conceived in the town of Swastika, Ontario, Canada, where her family owned gold mines, was famous for her adulation of and friendship with Hitler. Her middle name was Valkyrie, after the war maidens in the opera of Wagner, and a friend Unity’s grandfather, Algernon Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale (1837 – 1916). Redesdale had also translated books by Houston Stewart Chamberlain. After meeting Unity and Diana, Hitler described them as the perfect examples of Aryan women.[58] Pryce Jones reports that “She [Mitford] saw him, it seemed, more than a hundred times, no other English person could have anything like that access to Hitler.”[59] Hitler’s inner circle, however, suspected she was a British spy. Nevertheless, when Hitler announced the Anschluss in 1938, Unity appeared with him on the balcony in Vienna.

When she lived in Munich before the war, Unity had befriended Ernst Hanfstaengl and lived in his sister Erna’s house. Some authorities suggest that Hitler was romantically involved with Erna, or had romantic affections for her.[60] Some authorities suggest that Hitler was romantically involved with Erna, or had romantic affections for her.[61] Unity shot herself in the head days after Britain declared war on Germany, but failed to kill herself and eventually died of pneumococcal meningitis at West Highland Cottage Hospital, Oban. However, investigative journalist Martin Bright, as revealed in an article in The New Statesman, has discovered evidence suggesting that Unity may have faked her injuries to hide the fact that she was carrying Hitler’s child.[62]


[1] August Kubizek. The Young Hitler I Knew, trans. E. V. Anderson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955), 99–100; cited in Landes. Heaven on Earth,  p. 358.

[2] Viereck. Metapolitics.

[3] J. M. Roberts. Twentieth Century: The History of the World, 1901 to the Present (London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1999), p. 289 n. 12.

[4] Winifred Wagner to Helena Boy, 17 November 1918, in Hamann, Winifred Wagner, p. 35; Cited in Hall. “Wagner, Hitler, and Germany's Rebirth after the First War,”  p. 170.

[5] Hitler. Mein Kampf (Reynal & Hitchcock ed.), pp. 513–14; cited in Viereck. Metapolitics.

[6] Friedeland Wagner. The Royal Family of Bayreuth (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1948), pp. 8–9. Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich, p. 122.

[7] Richard J. Evans. The Coming of the Third Reich (London 2003), p. 33.

[8] Ibid.

[9] L. Violinist. History of the Jews in Berlin, Volume 2, pp. 194–197.

[10] Winifred Wagner to Helena Boy, 17 November 1918, in Hamann, Winifred Wagner, p. 35; Cited in Hall. “Wagner, Hitler, and Germany's Rebirth after the First War,” p. 161.

[11] Fest. Hitler, p. 499; cited in Hall. “Wagner, Hitler, and Germany's Rebirth after the First Warm,” p. 173.

[12] Hall. “Wagner, Hitler, and Germany's Rebirth after the First War,” p. 175.

[13] Ibid. p. 173.

[14] Ibid., p. 171.

[15] “Carl Bechstein History.” Marks on Pianos. Retrieved from https://www.marksonpianos.com/bechstein-pianos/CarlBechstein_History.pdf

[16] Robert S. Wistrich. Who’s Who in Nazi Germany (Routledge, 2013), p. 279.

[17] Von Schmid. “Wohlklang aus Seifhennersdorf.”  Zeit Online (December 27, 2001). Retrieved from http://www.zeit.de/2002/01/200201_24_bechstein_hau_xml

[18] Oliver Rathkolb and John Heath (trans.) “Baldur von Schirach: Nazi Leader and Head of the Hitler Youth.” (2022). Chapter 4.

[19] Von Schmid. “Wohlklang aus Seifhennersdorf.”  Zeit Online (December 27, 2001). Retrieved from http://www.zeit.de/2002/01/200201_24_bechstein_hau_xml

[20] Jackson Spielvogel & David Redles. “Hitler’s Racial Ideology: Content and Occult Sources.” In Michael Robert Marrus (ed.). The Nazi Holocaust, Part 2: The Origins of the Holocaust (De Gruyter Saur, 1989). Retrieved from https://atlantipedia.ie/samples/archive-2795/

[21] Hall. “Wagner, Hitler, and Germany's Rebirth after the First War,” p. 167.

[22] Ibid. p. 172.

[23] Flood. Hitler, pp. 432–3; Cited in Hall. “Wagner, Hitler, and Germany's Rebirth after the First War,” p. 172.

[24] Hall. “Wagner, Hitler, and Germany’s Rebirth after the First War,” p. 172.

[25] Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth (NRWB). Chamberlain, Briefe 3, ii.124–5, letter from Houston Stewart Chamberlain to Adolf Hitler, 7 October 1923; Cited in Hall. “Wagner, Hitler, and Germany's Rebirth after the First War,” p. 173.

[26] Bayerische Ostmark, 25/26 July 1936; Cited in Hall. “Wagner, Hitler, and Germany’s Rebirth after the First War,”  p. 173.

[27] William L. Shirer. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Bookclub Associates Edition, 1959), p. 109.

[28] Daniel Devreese. “‘A new animal in the vineyards of the German spirit’: ‘Rhinoxera’ as an anti-antisemite neologism in Nietzsche’s ‘The Case of Wagner.’” Revue belge d’histoire contemporaine. Belgisch tijdschrift voor nieuwste geschiedenis, 39:3 (January 2009), abstract.

[29] Ben Macintyre. Forgotten Fatherland: The Search For Elisabeth Nietzsche (New York: Broadway, 1993) p. 220.

[30] Hans D. Sluga. Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 179.

[31] Amos Elon. The Pity of It All : a History of Jews in Germany, 1743-1933 (Metropolitan Books 2002), pp. 231-237.

[32] Otto Weininger. Sex and Character (New York & Chicago: A. L. Burt, 1906).

[33] James Webb. The Occult Establishment (A Library Press Book, Open Court Pub. Co, LaSalle, Ill: 1976), p. 362.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Steven E. Aschheim. Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), p. 226-7.

[36] Sarah Honig,. “Another Tack: The Otto Weininger Syndrome.” The Jerusalem Post (June 4, 2010). Retrieved from http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Another-Tack-The-Otto-Weininger-syndrome

[37] Aschheim. Brothers and Strangers, p. 226-7.

[38]  Hamann. Hitler’s Vienna, pp. 230-33.

[39]  Ibid.

[40]  Ibid.

[41] Gershom Scholem. Le Nom et les symboles de Dieu dans la mystique juive (Èd. Cerf. 1988), p. 201; cited in Novak. Jacob Frank, p. 187.

[42] A Psychologial Profile of Adolph Hitler; see also Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler, p. 40. Langer originally mistyped his name as “Hamissen,” but in the same sentence subsequently spelled the name correctly two times as Hanussen. In the 1972 reprint of the document by New American Library, the name “Hanussen” is spelled correctly.

[43] Spence. Secret Agent 666, pp. 214-215.

[44] Richard Spence. “Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler’s Jewish Psychic.” New Dawn Special Issue. 8: 3 (June 2014). Retrieved from https://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/secret-history/erik-jan-hanussen-hitlers-jewish-psychic

[45] “Edward VIII’s Links to a Mystic,” BBC News (6 Dec. 2008). Retrived from news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7767919.stm; cited in Spence. “Erik Jan Hanussen.”

[46] Ibid.

[47] Spence. Secret Agent 666.

[48] John Toland. Adolf Hitler (Garden City: Doubleday & Co. 1976); Peter Lavenda, Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult, (New York: Continuum, 2006) p. 104-106.

[49] Lavenda. Unholy Alliance, p. 106.

[50] Tobias Churton. Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin: Art, Sex, and Magick in the Weimar Republic (Simon and Schuster, 2014); J.H. Kelley. “New Translation of German Book Links Hitler to Satanism.” PRLog (May 17, 2009). Retrieved from https://www.prlog.org/10238075-new-translation-of-german-book-links-hitler-to-satanism.html

[51] Spence. Secret Agent 666, p. 194.

[52] Peter-Robert Koenig. “The Templar’s Reich Milieu: The Slaves Shall Serve.” www.parareligion.ch (2006).

[53] Lachman. Aleister Crowley.

[54] Luhrssen. Hammer of the Gods, p. 215 n. 17.

[55] Lawren Sutin. Do What Thou Wilt, from the O.T.O. archives; cited in Alan Richardson. Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune: The Logos of the Aeon and the Shakti of the Age (Llewellyn Worldwide, 2009), p. 81.

[56] Ben Macintyre. “Those utterly maddening Mitford girls,” The Times (October 12, 2007

[57] Levenda. Unholy Alliance, p. 116.

[58] “Hitler’s British Girl.” Channel 4 Documentary (2007).

[59] David Pryce-Jones. Unity Mitford: A Quest (W&N, 1995).

[60] Shirer. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. p. 131.

[61] Ibid.

[62] Martin Bright. “Unity Mitford and ‘Hitler’s baby’.” The New Statesman (May 13, 2002).

Zionism