38. The Führer

Thule Society

Interviewed by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, Ernst Hanfstaengl recounted that Hitler had made it known privately that at Pasewalk he had had a “supernatural vision which commanded him to save his unhappy country. After giving his first speech at the Hofbräukeller for the DAP on October 16, 1919—a year after first having heard the “Voice,” at Pasewalk—the members the Thule Society were so impressed by the oratorical skills of Hitler—a former male prostitute, and failed artist with barely a secondary-school education—that he was received by them as the “messiah” they had been awaiting. Thule founder Dietrich Eckart (1868 – 1923) had expressed his anticipation of List’s prophecy of a “German Messiah” who would save Germany after World War I in a poem he published in 1919, months before he met Hitler for the first time. When he met Hitler, Eckart was convinced that he had encountered the prophesied redeemer. Eckart refers to Hitler as “the Great One,” “the Nameless One,” “Whom all can sense but no one saw.”[1] Ludendorff “trembled with emotion” when he first heard Hitler.[2]

In March 1920, at the behest of Captain Karl Mayr (1883 – 1945), head of the Army Intelligence Division in the Reichswehr, Hitler and Eckart flew to Berlin to meet Kapp and take part in the Kapp Putsch of March 1920, along with Ludendorff, and Aufbau members Scheubner-Richter, Biskupsky, Vinberg, Shabelsky-Bork.[3] Mayr was personally ordered by Ludendorff to have Hitler join the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP), founded by members of the Thule Society, and which would become the Nazi Party, and build it up.[4]  Mayr recruited Hitler with the task of gathering intelligence on political movements potentially hostile to the Bavarian authorities, and attending to the “political education” of the troops to counter alleged Bolshevik influences. As noted by Richard Landes, in Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience, although Hitler asserted in Mein Kampf that he had already adopted a hatred of Jews in Vienna, most of the reliable evidence suggests that it occurred quite late in his Munich career, that is, in 1919, coinciding with his first exposure to the fully articulated racist millennialism of Ariosophy and the Thule Society and to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.[5]

In June 1919, Mayr sent Hitler—who had not graduated from high school—to courses at Munich University with Gottfried Feder (1883 – 1941) and Graf von Bothmer (1852 – 1937), both of whom wrote for Dietrich Eckart’s Auf Gut Deutsch, as well as the historian Karl Alexander von Müller (1882 – 1964). Feder, together with fellow Thule Society members Eckart, Anton Drexler and Karl Harrer, had founded the DAP in January of that year. During one course, Müller identified Hitler’s “rhetorical talent.” Müller would be chosen by the Nazi Party in 1935 as the official head of the Institut zum Studium der Judenfrage (“Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question”). Mayer’s assignment for Hitler’s was to learn from these men to then teach his fellow soldiers. Also impressed with his skills as a communicator, Mayr then entrusted Hitler with responding to a request for elaboration on the so-called Jewish question by Adolf Gemlich, a German Army soldier. In the letter to Gemlich, dated September 16, 1919, Hitler stressed the need for a “rational” and “scientific” anti-Semitism, that Jews were  not a religious group, but a race “through thousands of years of the closest kind of inbreeding,” and that the aim for the government “must be the total removal of all Jews from our midst.” For these ends, concluded Hitler, “a government of national strength, not of national weakness, is necessary.”[6] Hitler then adds:

 

The Republic in Germany owes its birth not to the uniform national will of our people but the sly exploitation of a series of circumstances which found general expression in a deep, universal dissatisfaction. These circumstances however were independent of the form of the state and are still operative today. Indeed, more so now than before. Thus, a great portion of our people recognizes that a changed state­form cannot in itself change our situation. For that it will take a rebirth of the moral and spiritual powers of the nation.

And this rebirth cannot be initiated by a state leadership of irresponsible majorities, influenced by certain party dogmas, an irresponsible press, or internationalist phrases and slogans. [It requires] instead the ruthless installation of nationally minded leadership personalities with an inner sense of responsibility.[7]

 

Several months after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Sebottendorf published a book titled Bevor Hitler kam: Urkundliches aus der Friihzeit der nationalsozialistischen Bewegung (“Before Hitler Came: The early years of the Nazi movement,”), where he detailed how the Thule Society was the organ of the Nazi Party:

 

Thule members were the people to whom Hitler first turned, and who first allied themselves with Hitler. The armament of the coming Führer consisted—besides the Thule Society itself—of the Deutscher Arbeiterverein, founded in the Thule by Brother Karl Harrer at Munich, and the Deutsch-Sozialistische Partei, headed there by Hans Georg Grassinger, whose organ was the Münchener Beobachter, later the Völkischer Beobachter. From these three sources Hider created the Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei.

 

Sebottendorf instructed Karl Harrer to set up a political group aimed at ordinary workers, which became the short-lived DAP, formed by Anton Drexler, Hermann Esser, Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart, and which was the precursor of the Nazi Party, which was officially known as the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (“National Socialist German Workers’ Party” or NSDAP.[8] Hitler’s journey towards becoming their Führer began formally on September 12, 1919, at the Sterneckerbräu on the Tal in central Munich, when he attended a meeting of the DAP. The popular account is that Hitler was initially indifferent. However, after his explosive reaction to Professor Baumann, who advocated Bavarian separatism, Drexler’s allegedly remarked: Mensch, der hat a Gosch’n, den kunnt ma braucha (“Goodness, he’s got a gob. We could use him”).[9]

According to Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw, the Thule’s “membership list… reads like a Who’s Who of early Nazi sympathizers and leading figures in Munich.”[10] In a book also titled Bevor Hitler Kam (“Before Hitler Came”), Dietrich Bronder alleged that members of the Thule Society included Dietrich Eckart, Gottfried Feder, Hans Frank, Hermann Göring, Karl Haushofer, Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler, and Alfred Rosenberg. Bronder also noted that among the anti-Semites there were quite a few of Jewish origin, and concluded, from his own research, that among 4000 men of the Nazi leadership there were 120 foreigners by birth, many with one or two parents of foreign origin and one percent even of Jewish descent. Of Jewish descent or related to Jewish families he listed Thule member Rudolf Hess, Gregor Strasser, Josef Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Franz Hanfstaengl, and Aufbau and Thule members Alfred Rosenberg and Karl Haushofer. According to Bronder, Ribbentrop—a protégé of Hanfstaengl—also maintained a close friendship with Chaim Weizmann.[11]

Hanfstaengl was intimately associated with Otto Khan and Aleister Crowley’s friend and co-conspirator, Hanns Ewers, who worked the secretive Propaganda Kabinett of Max Warburg’s associate Dr. Bernhard Dernburg, with George Sylvester Viereck and Harvard professor Hugo Münsterberg.[12] Ewers was also an associate of Guido von List Lanz von Liebenfels.[13] Ewers wrote a screenplay about the Nazi martyr Horst Wessel that was produced by Hanfstaengl.

In 1932, Goebbels pamphlet published to refute certain allegations that his grandmother was Jewish.[14] Gregor Strasser, for many years second only to Hitler in the Nazi Party, had asserted that Goebbels was of Jewish ancestry, citing the club foot as proof.[15] After attending the lectures at University of Heidelberg on the German Romantics from his Jewish professor Friedrich Gundolf, a member of the George-Kreis, Goebbels became completely captivated by the works of the Schlegel brothers, of Tieck, Novalis and Schelling.[16] Goebbels sent a letter to Professor Max Freiherr von Waldberg (1858 – 1938), with whom he graduated, reiterating how much he owed to Gundolf.[17] Goebbels’s first love, Anka Helhom, often showed her friends a book with his personal inscription on it, the Buch der Lieder, by Heinrich Heine. In the summer of 1922, he began a love affair with Else Janke, a schoolteacher. After she revealed to him that she was half-Jewish, according to Goebbels the “enchantment [was] ruined.”[18] Nevertheless, he continued to see her on and off until 1927.[19]

A prominent member of the Nazi Party, Goebbels’s wife Magda was a close ally, companion and political supporter of Adolf Hitler. When she was eight-years-old, Magda’s mother married Jewish businessman and leather-goods magnate Richard Friedländer and moved with him to Brussels in 1908. Friedländer’s residency card, found in Berlin archives, stated that Magda was his biological daughter.[20] Friedländer was later killed in the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Ludendorff was also friendly with Karl Haushofer (1869 – 1946).[21] Under the Nuremberg Laws, Haushofer’s wife and children were categorized as Mischlinge, the German legal term used in Nazi Germany to denote persons deemed to have both “Aryan” and Jewish ancestry. His son, Albrecht, was issued a German Blood Certificate through his protégé Rudolf Hess’ help. Albrecht had studied alongside Hess at Munich University. Hess and Albrecht shared an interest in astrology, and Hess also was keen on clairvoyance and the occult.[22]

 

Beer Hall Putsch

Hitler met Heinrich Class in 1918, and Class provided Hitler with support for the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, in which Lehmann and Ludendorff were also a part. Aufbau leader Erwin von Scheubner-Richter (1884 – 1923), a Baltic German from the Russian Empire, had introduced Hitler to Ludendorff. An early member of the Nazi Party, Scheubner-Richter served as Hitler’s chief advisor on foreign policy matters and as one of his closest counselors. Along with Alfred Rosenberg, Scheubner-Richter devised the plan to drive the German government to revolution through the Beer Hall Putsch, the failed coup attempt by Hitler—along with Ludendorff and other Kampfbund leaders—to seize power in Munich, on November 8–9, 1923. About two thousand Nazis, led by Hitler, Ludendorff, Göring, and other Nazi leaders, marched to the center of the city, where they confronted the police, resulting in the death of sixteen Nazis and four police officers. Scheubner-Richter was shot in the lungs and died instantly, at the same time dislocating Hitler’s right shoulder. Hitler escaped immediate arrest and was spirited off to safety in the countryside. When the Beer Hall Putsch failed, Hanfstaengl fled to Austria, but when Hitler’s car broke down he decided to seek refuge with Hanfstaengl’s wife Helen, who reportedly prevented him from committing suicide. After two days, he was arrested and charged with treason.

Hanfstaengl introduced himself to Hitler after the speech and began a close friendship and political association that would last through the 1920s and early 1930s. For much of the 1920s, Hanfstaengl introduced Hitler to Munich high-society and helped polish his image. Hitler was the godfather of Hanfstaengl’s son Egon. Hanfstaengl composed both Brownshirt and Hitler Youth marches patterned after his Harvard football songs and, he later claimed, devised the salute “Sieg Heil.”[23] By December 1920, when Alfred Rosenberg’s Völkisch Observer was heavily in debt, Dietrich Eckart initiated its purchase by the Nazi Party, and funds for a printing press were provided by Hanfstaengl.[24] When Hanfstaengl returned to Munich in July 1921, the economic and political turmoil that he saw left him “looking back to the happier days of Ludwig II and Richard Wagner.”[25]

The Freikorps Oberland, founded by Rudolf von Sebottendorf and the Thule Society in 1919, played a part in the Beer Hall Putsch. Captain Ernst Röhm (1887 – 1934), who belonged to the Freikorps under General Franz Ritter von Epp, was an original member of the German Workers Party (DAP)and a known homosexual, who became a close associate of Hitler and the founder of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazi Party’s original paramilitary wing.  Although he was of mixed Jewish and ethnic German ancestry, Emil Maurice (1897 – 1972), Hitler’s personal chauffer, was an early member of the Nazi Party and a member of Freikorps Oberland. Hitler’s personal friendship with Maurice dated back to 1919 when they were both members of the DAP. Maurice led the SA stormtroopers in fights that were known to break out with other groups during those early days.[26] In 1923, Maurice also became a member of the Stoßtrupp (“Shock Troop”), a small separate bodyguard dedicated to Hitler’s service, who along with the SA and several other paramilitary units, took part in the abortive Beer Hall Putsch.

 

Mein Kampf

Hitler’s arrest was followed by a 24-day trial, which was widely publicized and gave him a platform to promote his nationalist sentiments to Germany and the world. Hitler was found guilty of treason and sentenced to five years in Landsberg Prison. To make way for his stay in in cell 70, another inmate was moved, the Jewish anti-Semite, assassin of Kurt Eisner and rejected Thule Society member Anton Arco-Valley. Hitler, and his fellow prisoner Rudolf Hess, was visited in prison by Eckart and Karl Haushofer.  Around the same time, Haushofer forged a friendship with the young Rudolf Hess, who would become his scientific assistant and later the deputy leader of the Nazi Party. In Landsberg Prison, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, dictated to Hess, and in which he combined the theories of Hess’ mentor Karl Haushofer and those of Alfred Rosenberg. Help in editing the work was also provided by Hanfstaengl.[27]

As explained by Michael Kellogg, “The Protocols’ warnings of an insidious Jewish plot to achieve world domination greatly affected völkisch Germans and White émigrés, including Hitler’s mentors Eckart and Aufbau member Alfred Rosenberg.”[28] Rosenberg, who was also a Baltic German, led the Nazi Party during Hitler’s imprisonment following the Aufbau-backed Beer Hall Putsch. Aufbau member Pyotr Shabelsky-Bork (1893 – 1952) had arrived in Berlin in early 1919 with a copy of the Protocols, which he gave for translation and publication in German to the völkisch publicist Ludwig Müller von Hausen, a member of Fritsch’s Germanenorden. Hausen sent The Protocols to the Völkisch Beobachter, who ran a large front-page article, “The Secrets of the Wise Men of Zion,” in April 1920.[29] The “fighting paper of the National Socialist movement of Greater Germany,” as it called itself, the Völkisch Beobachter, which was owned by von Sebottendorf, had its origin as the Munich Observer of the Thule Society.

Like the Völkisch Observer, Mein Kampf was published by Franz Eher Nachfolger, the central publishing house of the Nazi Party. The publishing house was registered by Franz Xaver Josef Eher (1851 – 1918) in 1901. However, the firm was actually founded with the name Münchener Beobachter in 1887. After Eher’s death, Rudolf von Sebottendorf took over the firm in 1918. By December 1920, the Völkisch Observer was heavily in debt, and the Thule Society were open to an offer to sell the paper to the Nazis. Röhm and Eckart persuaded Röhm’s commanding Freikorps Oberland officer, Major von Epp, to purchase the paper for the Nazi Party. In 1921, Hitler, who had taken full control of the NSDAP earlier that year, acquired all shares in the company, making him the sole owner of the publication.[30] Alfred Rosenberg became the editor in 1923. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf:

 

…[The Protocols] are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung moans [ ] every week… [which is] the best proof that they are authentic… the important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims.[31]

 

Hitler dedicated Mein Kampf to Maurice along with Rudolf Hess. In the aftermath of the putsch, Hitler, Hess, Maurice and other Nazi leaders were incarcerated together at Landsberg Prison. Maurice became Hitler’s permanent chauffeur in 1925, and when he informed Hitler that he was having a relationship with Hitler’s half-niece Geli Raubal, Hitler forced an end to the affair. Although Himmler considered Maurice to be a serious security risk, given his “Jewish ancestry,” in a secret letter written in 1935, Maurice and his brothers were informally declared “Honorary Aryans” and allowed to stay in the SS.[32]

In 1926, Ludendorff married his second wife Mathilde von Kemnitz, who was interested in Ariosophy and the occult. In Insanity Induced Through Occult Teachings (1933), she attacked Schrenck-Notzing’s work and argued that occult practices had been responsible for the development of mental illness in a number of her patients.[33] In the Fraud of Astrology, she was critical of astrology, arguing that it had always been a Jewish perversion of astronomy and that it was being used to enslave the Germans and dull their reasoning. In spite of her personal opposition to occultism, Mathilde was a member of the Edda Society of Rudolf John Gorsleben, whose other members included Friedrich Schaefer, a follower of Karl Maria Wiligut, and Otto Sigfried Reuter, a strong believer in astrology.[34] In 1925, Ludendorff and Mathilde founded the Tannenbergbund (“Tannenberg Union”), taking its name from the 1914 Battle of Tannenberg, one of Ludendorff’s greatest military triumphs. As its central ideas were inspired by the Thule Society, the Bund saw history as a struggle between the Nordic hero and the three-way alliance of Jews, Catholics and Freemason.[35]

 

Nuremberg Rallies

In Mein Kampf, Hitler recalled his “vision” in Pasewalk, saying of his period of blindness, “in the days that followed, my own fate became known to me.” A Frankfurter Zeitung editorial of January 1923 reported that, while blinded, Hitler was “delivered by an inner rapture that set him the task of becoming his people’s deliverer.”[36] Ludwell Denny, writing for The Nation, in 1923, reported about Hitler that, “during the war he was wounded, or through fright or shock became blind. In the hospital he was subject to ecstatic visions of Victorious Germany, and in one of these seizures his eyesight was restored.”[37] During the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler gave an impassioned speech, referring to the Pasewalk episode:

 

I am going to fulfill the vow I made to myself five years ago when I was a blind cripple in the military hospital: to know neither rest nor peace until the November criminals had been overthrown, until on the ruins of the wretched Germany of today there should have arisen once more a Germany of power and greatness, of freedom and splendor.[38]

 

One of Hitler’s professors at Munich University, Karl Alexander von Müller—whose immediate disciples included Baldur von Schirach, Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring, Walter Frank, and Ernst Hanfstaengl—heard his first speeches on January 27, 1923, and referred to the charged atmosphere as “mass hypnotism.”[39] As demonstrated by David Redles, in Hitler’s Millennial Reich: Apocalyptic Belief and the Search for Salvation, the success of the Nazi movement was rooted in millennialist fervor inspired by an “apocalypse complex.” However, as Richard Landes indicated, in Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience “Hitler’s religiosity continues to constitute a major problem for historians. Most tend to view Hitler though a secular prism.”[40] Modern historians, effectively, fail to recognize that the reason that Hitler’s apostolicism is stripped of its usual religious themes is because it is rooted in the Gnostic theology of the Thule Society.

Hitler shared his vision of a community of nations with Otto Wagener (1888 – 1971), a German major general who joined the SA and became Hitler’s economic advisor and confidant, that would be “the final goal of human politics on this earth.” He explained:

 

The peace on earth Christ wanted to bring is the very socialism of nations! It is the new great religion, and it will come because it is divine! It awaits the Messiah!

But I am not the Messiah. He will come after me. I only have the will to create for the German Volk the foundations of a true Volk community. And that is a political mission, though it encompasses the ideological as well as the economic.

It cannot be otherwise, and everything in me points to the conviction that the German Volk has a divine mission. How many great prophets have foretold this![41]

 

Paul Gierasch, writing for The Current History Magazine of the New York Times in 1923, perceptively observed:

 

Their leader, Hitler, had worked up these emotions by using the reactions to economic and spiritual distress that pervade the psychology of the German people today. Radical antipathies and religious motives are fused with dreams of a better day to come. Hitler asks that the German nation be cleansed of all non-Aryan elements and that it find renewal in a church of the people in which the belief in the nordic Wotan shall be merged with that in Christ. To the purified nation shall at the appointed time come forth a new German emperor-king who, as the national messiah, shall free German from the bondage of her foreign taskmaster.[42]

 

Hitler’s “Christian” mission was one that combined Nietzsche’s predatorial “blond beast,” with Wagner’s mythical heroes, Siegfried and Rienzi, mobilized for the preservation of an idealized German Volk.[43] Thus, the Christian ideal that Hitler reinterpreted was not the sense of unity of being bound together for the advancement of universal principles—particularly of charity and compassion. Rather, Hitler transposed religious significance and belonging to a community, the Volk, unified in collective purpose: self-preservation. Hitler cultivated fanatical patriotism by misappropriating the noblest deed, martyrdom, counterfeited as “masculine” virtues of fascism, self-discipline and self-sacrifice.

As the young Rudolf Hess wrote in 1921, “common interest goes before self-interest; first the nation, then the personal ego… this union of the national with the social is the fulcrum of our time.”[44] Hermann Rauschning, a one-time Nazi supporter, recalled  Hitler’s saying,

 

The day of individual happiness has passed. Instead, we shall feel a collective happiness. Can there be any greater happiness than a National Socialist meeting in which speakers and audience feel as one? It is the happiness of sharing. Only the early Christian communities could have felt it with equal intensity. They, too, sacrificed their personal lives for the higher happiness of the community.[45]

 

To inculcate the messianic aura around Hitler, the Nazis employed the mass-hypnotic qualities of psychodrama of occult ritual on a large scale. As explained by Peter Viereck:

 

The techniques of showmanship in Wagner’s opera settings are also imitated effectively by Hitler. These techniques, whose aim is to flabbergast the audience with awe, are the model for Hitler’s stage-managing of the Nazi party congresses. The torchlight parades, the mob choruses, the grand gestures of the nordic heroes, the reiteration of leitmotivs and ever rising climaxes—all these have been reproduced from Bayreuth in Nuremberg.[46]

 

The Nuremberg rallies, which first took place in 1923, became a national event once Hitler rose to power in 1933, and became annual occurrences. The first grand-scale rally occurred in 1929 and featured most of the elements that distinguished all future rallies: Wagnerian overtures, martial songs, banners, goose-step marches, human swastika formations, torchlight processions, bonfires, and fireworks. Hitler and other Nazi leaders delivered lengthy speeches. Buildings were decorated with enormous flags and Nazi symbols. The climax of the rallies was the solemn consecration of the colors, in which new flags were touched to the Blutfahne (“Blood Banner”), a tattered standard said to have been soaked in the blood of those killed in Hitler’s abortive Beer Hall Putsch.[47] From 1933, the size and scale of the rallies increased dramatically. The 6th Party Congress held in Nuremberg, September 5–10, 1934, was attended by about 700,000 Nazi Party supporters. Leni Riefenstahl film Triumph des Willens was made at this rally. The rally was notable due to Albert Speer’s Cathedral of light, where a 152 searchlights cast vertical beams into the sky around the Zeppelin Field.

As explained by Redles, “The religious rites and ceremonies of the Nazis, complete with chants, flags, banners, music, and torchlit processions, undoubtedly had a powerful psychological effect, as well, inducing nondirected thinking in large numbers of individuals.”[48] Klaus Vondung explained that the Nazis deliberately used ritualized settings for speeches, party rallies, and other public performances, so that “social reality” could be manipulated through what he termed “magical consciousness.”[49] As a contemporary writer, Hanns Johst, explained, the party rallies enabled the individual to experience, “in the community of equally minded, equally feeling, equally believing people the dream of salvation as displayed and envisioned truth.”[50] Alfons Heck, who experienced the mass rallies as a young boy, was impressed by the “pomp and mysticism,” which had an effect “very close in feeling to religious rituals,” a “gigantic revival meeting but without the repentance of one’s sins… it was a jubilant Teutonic renaissance.”  He added that “no one who ever attended a Nuremberg Reichsparteitag can forget the similarity to religious mass fervor it exuded. Its intensity frightened neutral observers but it inflamed the believers.”[51] The sociologist Jean-Pierre Sironneau described that at the rallies “a genuine sacred drama was preformed there, which only the resurgence in the twentieth century of religious drives that were supposed to have disappeared can explain.”[52] This drama, Sironneau added, involved the communion of leader and led, what he termed a “dialectic of possession,” for “the crowd leader, possessed by they who surround him, possesses them in his turn; because the crowds recognize themselves in him and somehow create him, he subjugates them.”[53]

 

Führerprinzip

As explained by Alfred Rosenberg, the chief ideologue of the Nazi Party, “We see the old German nationalism after its grand flaming up in the Wars of Liberation (1813), after its deepest foundation by Fichte, after its explosive rise through Stein and Arndt… the unqualified greatness of those men who in 1813 again led Germany from the abyss to the heights.”[54] In 1814, Jahn called for a “unity-creator.” He wanted a Führer to apply Hippocrates’ cure for cancer: “What medicine does not heal, steel heals, what steel does not heal, fire does.” The idea of “iron and blood” was repeated in “The Iron Cross,” by Max von Schenkendorf, who had been commissioned to compose patriotic songs together with Ernst Moritz Arndt and Theodor Körner, and later famously adopted by Bismarck. Of his “iron and fire” Führer Jahn stated: “The Volk will honour him as saviour and forgive him all his sins.”[55]

The first example of the political use of Führer was with Georg von Schönerer, the leading exponent of pan-Germanism who was associated with the Albia fraternity that included Theodor Herzl. According to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, “[von Schönerer’s] ideas, his temperament, and his talent as an agitator, shaped the character and destiny of Austrian Pan-Germanism, thereby creating a revolutionary movement that embraced populist anti-capitalism, anti-liberalism, anti-Semitism and prussophile German nationalism.”[56] Schönerer’s views and philosophy would go on to exercise a great influence on Hitler and the Nazi Party as a whole. Hannah Arendt called von Schönerer the “spiritual father” of Hitler.[57] Schönerer, who had adopted the swastika as a völkisch symbol,[58] was addressed by his supporters as the Führer and himself and his followers also used the “Heil” greeting, two things Hitler and the Nazis later adopted.[59]

Sebottendorf advanced the “Führerprinzip” and commanded that the Aryan believers greet each other with the straight-armed salute with the words “Sieg Heil!”[60] In the December 1922, the Völkischer Beobachter proclaimed Hitler a “special Führer” for the first time.[61] It was noted that “ever since Dietrich von [sic] Eckart discovered him in Munich, Adolf has never lacked people who encouraged his belief in his mission.”[62] Baldur von Schirach (1907 – 1974), leader of the Hitler Youth movement, later lamented, “this unlimited, almost religious veneration, to which I contributed, as did Goebbels, Göring, Hess, Ley and countless others, strengthened in Hitler the belief that he was in league with Providence.”[63] Goebbels, who had been searching for his personal savior for some time, wrote to Hitler in prison, stating, “What you said there is the catechism of a new political creed coming to birth in the midst of a collapsing, secularized world… To you a god has given the tongue with which to express our sufferings. You formulated our agony in words that promise salvation.”[64]

As stated in the Organization Book of the Nazi Party, “The will of the Führer is the Party’s law.” The first commandment for the Party members declares: “The Führer is always right.”[65] As explained by Rosenberg:

 

The Führer unites in himself all the sovereign authority of the Reich; all public authority in the state as well as in the movement is derived from the authority of the Führer. We must speak not of the state’s authority but of the Führer’s authority if we wish to designate the character of the political authority within the Reich correctly. The state does not hold political authority as an impersonal unit but receives it from the Führer as the executor of the national will. The authority of the Führer is complete and all embracing; it unites in itself all the means of political direction; it extends into all fields of national life; it embraces the entire people, which is bound to the Führer in loyalty and obedience. The authority of the Führer is not limited by checks and controls, by special autonomous bodies or individual rights, but it is free and independent, all-inclusive and unlimited.[66]

 

However, as David Redles noted, perhaps the most significant individual who helped bring Hitler’s messianism to the forefront was Rudolf Hess, who came to see in Hitler the ‘coming man’ he longed for, the man who would save him and Germany from misery.”[67] Hess even produced Hitler’s astrological chart to prove it.[68] According to Hess, “He himself has nothing in common with the masses, his entire personality is ever greater. This power of his personality radiates from a certain something that brings acquaintances under his spell and cultivates ever wider circles.”[69] Hess proposed that what Germany needed was a “savior from the chaos,” a “Napoleon as dictator,” a Caesar, or a Mussolini. As “chaos… calls forth a dictator,” thus “it will likewise come in Germany.” Thus, Hess concluded, “the Volk longs for a genuine Führer free from all party haggles, for a pure Führer with inner veracity.”[70]

Through the Nazis’ complete control of the press, they were able to advance the Thule Society’s veneration of Hitler as a messiah figure as the Führerprinzip (“leader principle”) at all levels of German society. The key figure leading the Franz Eher Nachfolger publishing house’s expansion was Max Amann (1891 – 1957), the first business manager of the Nazi Party. Amann’s most notable contribution was persuading Hitler to retitle his first book from Viereinhalb Jahre (des Kampfes) gegen Lüge, Dummheit und Feigheit, (“Four and a Half Years (of Struggle) Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice”) to Mein Kampf, which he also published. Eher Verlag published, among other imprints, the anti-Semitic satirical magazine Die Brennessel and the SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps (“The Black Corps”). Amann joined the SS in 1932 with the rank of SS-Gruppenführer, was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer in 1936 and was assigned to the staff of the Reichsführer-SS, the highest rank of the SS. In his official role as Reich Press Leader and president of the Reich Press Chamber, Amann had the power to seize or close down any newspapers that either ran counter to the Nazis’ wishes or did not fully support the Nazi regime. By 1942, Amann controlled 80% of all German newspapers through his publishing empire.[71] Combined with the proceeds from Mein Kampf, this made the Eher-Verlag the largest newspaper and publishing company in Germany, and one of the largest in the world.[72]

 

Enabling Act

From June 1933, Carl Schmitt (1888 – 1985), known as the “Crown Jurist of the Third Reich,” was drawn to the Nazi party by his admiration for a decisive leader, praised him in his pamphlet State, Volk and Movement, because only the ruthless will of such a leader could save Germany and its people.[73] Schmitt in the leadership council of Academy for German Law, 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.[74] Schmitt developed the doctrine of a “necessary enemy,” by defining that the sphere of the “political” is based on the distinction between “friend” and “enemy.” A population can be unified and mobilized through the political act, in which an enemy is identified and confronted.[75]

Schmitt developed a geopolitical interpretation of history ultimately based on a 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. The historian Eugene Sheppard has argued that Schmitt was inspired by Johannes Buxtorf (1564 – 1629), who had in 1603 written the book De Synagoga Judaica, which included the Kabbalistic belief in the war of Gog and Magog, which, according to Buxtorf, originated with Isaac Abarbanel as a conflict between a “Leviathan” and “Behemoth,” between a sea monster and a land monster. Hobbes, the author of Leviathan, almost certainly had access to the writings of Abarbanel, mainly through the writings of the Buxtorf family.[76]

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. 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.[77] 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. [78]

 

In Land and Sea, Schmitt elaborated an occult-inspired interpretation of the geopolitical theories of Alfred T. Mahan and Halford Mackinder (1861 – 1947), which pitted sea power against land power. 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.”[79] 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.”[80] 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.

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. After the Nazis, under Göring’s sponsorship, staged the Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933, blaming the Communists, and on February 28, when Hitler suspended basic constitutional rights, Schmitt provided the legal basis for Hitler’s assumption of power, and authored the necessary article justifying the enabling laws of March 24, 1933.

The Gleichschaltung (“Coordination”) was the process of Nazification by which Hitler and the Nazi Party which successively established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society and societies occupied by Nazi Germany “from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education.”[81] Hitler promptly used these powers to thwart constitutional governance and suspend civil liberties, which brought about the swift collapse of democracy at the federal and state level, and the creation of a one-party dictatorship under his leadership. When Hitler finally came to absolute power, after being appointed Chancellor and assuming the powers of the President when Paul von Hindenburg died on August 2, 1934, he changed his title to Führer und Reichskanzler (“Führer and Reich Chancellor”), at which time the Führerprinzip became an integral part of German society.

After the massacre known as Night of the Long Knives, which took place between June 30 and July 2, 1934, Hitler declared: “in this hour, I was responsible for the fate of the German nation and was therefore the supreme judge of the German people!”[82] On June 30, 1934, Hitler had Röhm arrested and shot on suspicions of disloyalty, being the most high-profile execution of the massacre known as the Night of the Long Knives. Röhm’s execution was also the beginning of a massive crackdown on homosexuals. According to German historian Lothar Machtan, however, Röhm and the large number of homosexual figures within the SA were killed by Hitler to silence speculation about his own homosexuality.[83] The officer corps of the SA became the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), organized by Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s second in command.

 

 


[1] Claus Hant. Young Hitler (London: Quartet Books, 2010), p. 395.

[2] Eric Kurlander. Hitler’s Monsters: a supernatural history of the Third Reich (Yale University Press, 2017), p. 73.

[3] Werner Maser. Der Sturm auf die Republik: Frühgeschichte der NSDAP (Dusseldorf: Econ Verlag, 1994), p.217.

[4] “Selected Biographis - M” Humanitas International. Retrieved from http://www.humanitas-international.org/holocaust/bios_m.htm

[5] Landes. Heaven on Earth, p. 383.

[6] “Adolf Hitler: First Anti-Semitic Writing.” Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved from https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/adolf-hitler-s-first-anti-semitic-writing

[7] Eberhard Jäckel (ed.). Hitler. Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905­1924 (Stuttgart, 1980), pp. 88­90. Translated by Richard S. Levy; cited in “Adolf Hitler: First Anti-Semitic Writing.” Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved from https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/adolf-hitler-s-first-anti-semitic-writing

[8] Sedgwick. Against the Modern World, p. 96.

[9] Hall. “Wagner, Hitler, and Germany's Rebirth after the First War,” p. 170.

[10] Ian Kershaw. Hitler, 1889-1936: hubris, (W. W. Norton & Company, 2000) p. 138-139.

[11] Dietrich Bronder. Bevor Hitler Kam (1975), p. 211.

[12] Spence. Secret Agent 666. Kindle Locations 2043-2044.

[13] Stephen E. Flowers. “Introduction.” Hanns Heinz Ewers. Strange Tales (Lodestar Books, Mar. 3, 2011).

[14] Roger Manvell & Heinrich Fraenkel. Doctor Goebbels: His Life and Death (New York: Skyhorse, 2010), p. 299.

[15] Curt Riess. Joseph Goebbels (London: Hollis and Carter, 1949), p. 9.

[16] Ibid., p. 16.

[17] Ibid., p. 16.

[18] Peter Longerich. Goebbels: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2015), p. 24.

[19] Ibid., pp. 72, 88.

[20] “Magda Goebbels’ biological father may have been Jewish.” Jewish Chronicle (August 21, 2016).

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

[22] Roger Manvell & Heinrich Fraenkel. Hess: A Biography (London: Granada, 1971), p. 94.

[23] John Sedgwick. “The Harvard Nazi.” Boston Magazine (March, 2005).

[24] Ernst Hanfstaengl. Unheard Witness (Lippincott, 1957).

[25] Ernst Hanfstaengl. Hitler: The Memoir of a Nazi Insider Who Turned against the Führer (New York, 2011; first published 1957), p. 30; cited in Hall. “Wagner, Hitler, and Germany's Rebirth after the First War,” p. 162.

[26] Peter Hoffmann. Hitler’s Personal Security: Protecting the Führer 1921–1945 (Da Capo Press, 2000), p. 50.

[27] John Sedwick. “The Harvard Nazi.” Boston Magazine (May 15, 2006).

[28] Kellogg. The Russian Roots of Nazism, p. 13.

[29] Ibid., p. 70.

[30] Wulf Schwarzwaller. The Unknown Hitler: His Private Life and Fortune (National Press Books, 1988), p. 80.

[31] Adolf Hitler. “XI: Nation and Race.” Mein Kampf, I, pp. 307–8.

[32] Ibid., pp. 50, 51.

[33] Corinna Treitel. A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Johns Hopkins, 2004), p. 219.

[34] Goodrick-Clarke. The Occult Roots of Nazism, p. 159.

[35] K.D. Bracher. The German Dictatorship (Harmondsowrth: Penguin, 1971), p. 170

[36] Rudolf Binion. Hitler among the Germans (New York: Elsevier, 1976), p. 136; cited in Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich, p. 113.

[37] Ludwell Denny. “France and the German Counter-Revolution.” The Nation 116 (February 1923), p. 295; cited in Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich, p. 113.

[38] Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 109; cited in Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich, p. 113.

[39] Müller. Im Wandel einer Welt, pp. 144–45; cited in Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich, p. 146.

[40] Landes. Heaven on Earth, pp. 365.

[41] Wagener. Memoirs of a Confidant, pp. 170, 172; cited in Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich, p. 126.

[42] Paul Gierasch, “The Bavarian Menace to German Unity.” Current History Magazine, 223 (1923), p. 226; cited in Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich, p. 124.

[43] Landes. Heaven on Earth, pp. 356.

[44] Rudolf Hess. “Wie wird der Mann beschaffen sein, der Deutschland wieder zur Höhe führt,” typescript in NSDAP Hauptarchiv, roll #35, folder #689, p. 3; cited in Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich, p. 145.

[45] Hermann Rauschning. The Voice of Destruction (New York: Putnam, 1940), p. 192; cited in Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich, p. 145.

[46] Viereck. Metapolitics.

[47] Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Nürnberg Rally.” Encyclopedia Britannica, Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/event/Nurnberg-Rally

[48] Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich, p. 145.

[49] Klaus Vondung, Magie und Manipulation: ideologischer Kult und politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1971); cited in Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich, p. 144.

[50] Hanns Johst. Ich glaube!: Bekenntnisse (Munich: Albert Langen, 1928), p. 75; cited in Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich, p. 144.

[51] Heck. A Child of Hitler, pp. 18, 23; cited in Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich, p. 144.

[52] Jean-Pierre Sironneau. Sécularisation et religions politiques (The Hague: Mouton, 1982), pp. 581–82; cited in Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich, p. 144.

[53] Jean-Pierre Sironneau. Sécularisation et religions politiques (The Hague: Mouton, 1982), pp. 582–83; cited in Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich, p. 144.

[54] Alfred Rosenberg. Mythus, 142d ed., (Munich, 1938), pp. 539–41.

[55] Cited in Viereck. Metapolitics.

[56] Goodrick-Clarke. The Occult Roots of Nazism, p. 10.

[57] Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York 1973), p. 241.

[58] Kenneth Hite. The Nazi Occult (Bloomsbury, 2013).

[59] Hamann. Hitler’s Vienna, pp. 13, 244.

[60] Tyson. Hitler’s Mentor, p. 117.

[61] Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich, p. 122.

[62] Ludwig Wagner. Hitler: Man of Strife (New York: W. W. Norton, 1942), pp. 320–21; cited in Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich, p. 126.

[63] Baldur von Schirach. Ich Glaubte an Hitler (Hamburg: Mosaik Verlag, 1967), p. 160; cited in Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich, p. 126.

[64] Fest. Hitler, p. 210; cited in Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich, p. 125.

[65] United States. Office of Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression: Office of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), p. 192.

[66] United States. Office of Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression: Office of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), p. 191.

[67] Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich, p. 127.

[68] Ibid.

[69] Rudolf Hess. “Wie wird der Mann beschaffen sein, der Deutschland wieder zur Höhe führt,” typescript in NSDAP Hauptarchiv, roll #35, folder #689; cited in Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich, p. 128.

[70] Ibid., p. 128.

[71] Christian Zentner & Friedemann Bedürftig. The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), pp. 21, 22.

[72] “Hitler aurait déposé les droits de ‘Mein Kampf’ dans une banque suisse.” Le Monde (September 7, 1996). Retrieved from https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1996/09/07/hitler-aurait-depose-les-droits-de-mein-kampf-dans-une-banque-suisse_3718617_1819218.html

[73] Koonz, Claudia (2003) The Nazi Conscience, Belknap, p. 59

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

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

[76] Avner Ben-Zaken. “The Father, the Son (Bibi) and the Spirit of Catastrophe.” Haaretz (May 24, 2015). Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20220702020956/https://www.haaretz.com/2015-05-24/ty-article/.premium/the-father-the-son-and-the-spirit-of-catastrophe/0000017f-e80e-da9b-a1ff-ec6f99e90000

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

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

[79] Ibid.

[80] Ibid.

[81] Christoph Strupp. “‘Only a Phase’: How Diplomats Misjudged Hitler’s Rise.” Der Spiegel (January 30, 2013). Retrieved from http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/marking-eighty-years-since-hitler-took-power-in-germany-a-880565.html

[82] Alexander Sager & Heinrich August Winkler. Germany: The Long Road West: 1933–1990 (Oxford University Press, 2007). p. 37.

[83] Daniel Siemens. Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 173.

Zionism