Repression of the occult
It’s been suggested that Hitler and other high ranking Nazis were obsessed with the occult, or `black magic’, and that they were even `black magicians.’
But if this is true, why were occult writings and practices so rigorously repressed when the Nazis rose to power?
In 1934 the first move was made when the Berlin police issued a ban on all forms of fortune-telling, from fairground palmists to society astrologers. That the orders came from central headquarters is certain, for the police officers who carried out the orders were extremely confused as to the intention behind them. They both impounded ‘innocent’ books and let go books of magic spells and similar works.
Next came a general suppression of all occult groups, even to the dismay and surprise of members of the `German Order’ and the `Thule Society’. Many Nazis were members of these organizations, but even they were not exempt.
For instance, Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, whose writings inspired much of the German racial mystique, and who boasted that by introducing Hitler to occult groups he had been his ‘guru’, was told that he must not publish occult works in future.
With the sole exceptions of ‘inner party members’, such as some of Himmler’s personal SS aides, occultists of all kinds had been destroyed or driven underground in German-occupied countries by 1940.
If the Nazis really were occultists, or magicians, why would they want to repress occultism? Surely they would want to encourage it instead?
The answer to this has been pointed out by such writers as Francis King and J. H. Brennan.
They argue that in regimes that in some ways were similar to the Nazi regime — Mao’s China, for instance, and Stalin’s Russia — there was no such systematic repression of occultists. True, Stalin repressed freemasons, cabalists, and the like, but only because they were ’secret societies’ per se, not because of their ‘magical’ activities.
In China, even after the Cultural Revolution, seers and astrologers were condemned as `superstitious, but no action was taken against them. They were ridiculed rather than persecuted. So in general authoritarian regimes don’t seem to fear magical practices, or the occult.
But Nazi Germany had to repress ‘freelance’ occultists, because in effect they were its own rivals — in much the same way that the Trotskyites were repressed by Stalin because they were his rivals.
In the German Third Reich only one brand of the occult was allowed, and it was at the heart of the regime. It was controlled by Adolf Hitler and his `disciple’ Heinrich Himmler - and according to the `Nazi magic’ theory they were both powerful black magicians.
A newspaper stand during the American civil war or War Between the States
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