Religious aspects of Nazism
Final solution Pre-Machtergreifung Post-Machtergreifung Parties Historians, political scientists and philosophers have studied Nazism with a specific focus on its religious and pseudo-religious aspects.
Before 1980, the writers who alluded to the religious aspects of Nazism included Aurel Kolnai, Raymond Aron, Albert Camus,[2] Romano Guardini, Denis de Rougemont, Eric Voegelin, George Mosse, Klaus Vondung and Friedrich Heer.
"[5] However, Richard Steigmann-Gall in The Holy Reich holds that, on closer examination, "Point 24 readily provides us with three key ideas in which the Nazis claimed that their movement was Christian":[4] the movement's antisemitism, its social ethic under the phrase Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz (literally, "public benefit before private benefit") and its attempt to bridge the confessional divide between Catholicism and Protestantism in Germany.
The Ariosophic writings described a glorious ancient Germanic past, in which an elitist priesthood "expounded occult-racist doctrines and ruled over a superior and racially pure society.
However, historians such as Richard Weikart and Alan Bullock doubt the assessment that he was a true atheist, suggesting that despite his dislike of Christianity he still clung to a form of spiritual belief.
[43] Privately, Hitler repeatedly deprecated Christianity, and told confidants that his reluctance to make public attacks on the Church was not a matter of principle, but a pragmatic political move.
[44] In April 1941, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels privately wrote in his diaries that although Hitler was "a fierce opponent" of the Vatican and Christianity, "he forbids me to leave the church.
[47] From the mid-1930s, his government was increasingly dominated by militant anti-church proponents like Goebbels, Bormann, Heinrich Himmler, Alfred Rosenberg and Reinhard Heydrich, whom Hitler appointed to key posts.
[51] Smaller religious minorities faced harsher repression, with the Jews of Germany expelled for extermination on the grounds of Nazi racial ideology.
[28] Although he was prepared to delay conflicts for political reasons, historians conclude that he ultimately intended the destruction of Christianity in Germany, or at least its distortion or subjugation to a Nazi outlook.
[56] Thule Gesellschaft had initially been the name of the Munich branch of the Germanenorden Walvater of the Holy Grail, a lodge-based organisation which was built up by Rudolf von Sebottendorff in 1917.
[58] Five rooms, capable of accommodating 300 people, were leased from the fashionable Hotel Vierjahreszeiten ('Four Seasons') in Munich and decorated with the Thule emblem showing a dagger superimposed on a swastika.
[62] In The Myth of the Twentieth Century, the most important Nazi book after Mein Kampf, Alfred Rosenberg referred to Atlantis as a lost land and an Aryan cultural center.
[68] Goodrick-Clarke concludes that the origins of the Nazi symbol can be traced back through the emblems of the Thule Society and the Germanenorden and ultimately to Guido von List,[68] but it is not evident that the Thulean ideology filtered through the DAP into the NSDAP.
Goodrick-Clarke implies that ariosophical ideas were of no consequence: "the DAP line was predominantly one of extreme political and social nationalism, and not based on the Aryan-racist-occult pattern of the Germanenorden [and Thule Society]".
Bramwell, however, comments that Himmler "is supposed to have sent a party of SS men to Tibet in order to search for Shangri-La, an expedition which is more likely to have had straightforward espionage as its purpose".
In its first issue, the newspaper published an article on the origins of the Nordic race, hypothesizing a location near the North Pole similar to the theory of Hermann Wirth (but not mentioning Atlantis).
As a result, a book containing these articles and entitled Germanisches Leben was published by Koehler & Amelung of Leipzig with the approval of the SS and Reich Government in 1937.
Himmler has been claimed to have considered himself the spiritual successor or even reincarnation of Heinrich the Fowler,[86] having established special SS rituals for the old king and having returned his bones to the crypt at Quedlinburg Cathedral.
In his book El Cuarto Lado del Triangulo (Sudamericana 1995), Professor Ronald Newton describes a number of occasions when a Sonnenwendfeier occurred in Argentina.
When SS-Sturmbannführer Baron von Thermann (Edmund Freiherr von Thermann, German WP), the new head of the German Legation, arrived in December 1933, one of his first public engagements was to attend the NSDAP Sonnenwendfeier at the house of Vicente Lopez in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, "a neo-pagan festival with torches in which the Argentine Nazis greeted the winter and summer solstices".
"They lit great pillars of wood, and in the light of the flickering flames diverse NSDAP orators lectured the children on the origins of the ceremony and sang the praises of the (Nazis) Fallen for Liberty.
In March 1939 the pupils at the German School in Rosario were the celebrants on an island in the Paraná River opposite the city: Hitler Youth flags, trumpets, a rustic altar straight from Germanic mythology, young leaders enthroned with solemnity to the accompaniment of choral singing...the Creole witnesses shook their heads in incredulity..." In the Chaco in the north of Argentina the first great event promoted by the Nazis was the Sonnenwendfeier at Charata on 21 December 1935.
Uki Goñi in his book The Real Odessa (Granta, 2003) describes how Jacques de Mahieu, a wanted SS war criminal, was "a regular speaker at the pagan solar solstice celebrations held by fugitive Nazis in postwar Argentina."
[90] He was appointed head of the Department for Pre- and Early history within the Race and Settlement Main Office (Rasse- and Siedlungshauptamt, RuSHA) of the SS.
[90] His bureau could (much more than the Ahnenerbe) be described as the occult department of the SS: Wiligut's main duty appears "to have consisted in committing examples of his ancestral memory to paper.
[94] "In September 1935 Rahn wrote excitedly to Weisthor [Karl Maria Wiligut] about the places he was visiting in his hunt for grail traditions in Germany, asking complete confidence in the matter with the exception of Himmler.
"[95] In 1936 Rahn undertook a journey for the SS to Iceland, and in 1937 he published his travel journal of his quest for the Gnostic-Cathar tradition across Europe in a book titled Luzifers Hofgesinde "Lucifer's Servants".
[99] An active agitator against the Bolshevik Revolution, he fled his native Russia in 1920 and travelled widely in eastern Europe, making contact with Bulgarian Theosophists and probably with G.I.
[101] Meanwhile, he had begun to give lectures for the Ariosophical Society[102] and was a contributor to Georg Lomer's originally Theosophical (and later, neopagan) periodical entitled Asgard: A Fighting Sheet for the Gods of the Homeland.
