Hitler and the occult roots of Nazism - An interview with professor

Giorgio Galli

Following the interesting thread on Mafia and Freemasonry I was able to pick
up an interview with the professor Galli of which I had summarized the views
on the occult roots of NS doctrine. The interview by Paolo Mattei offer a more
complete summary of his book "Hitler e il nazismo magico" As reprinted from
the catholic oriented history website Storialibera.it Germany the great, an
esoteric dream (occult roots of Nationalsocialism)

Paolo MATTEI

Germany the great, an esoteric dream (occult roots of Nationalsocialism)

from 30 Days, October 2004.

An interview with Giorgio Galli on the occult roots of Nazism, from which also
arose the idea that the "living space" of the Third Reich should stretch to the
Urals. An aspect little studied by historians, but which has re-emerged since
the fall of the Berlin Wall

Professor Giorgio Galli does not feel competent to appraise the esoteric "from
the inside", but he is an acknowledged scholar of it. His stance «is that», as
he puts it, «of a historian and political scientist who believes that esoteric
culture is more interwoven with the disciplines he practices than has been so
far judged by historiography and political science».

It has been from that viewpoint that he has also studied the history of the
Third Reich, publishing the result of his work in 1989 in a widely known book:
"Hitler and magical Nazism. The esoteric components of the millennial Reich"
(Rizzoli, Milan). The year 1989 is one for which Galli points out significant
coincidences: the centenary of the birth of Hitler and the bicentenary of the
French Revolution. «The year 1989», he explains in the preface to the second
edition of his book, «was to enter history because of the revolution in the
East: exactly a century after the birth of the Führer the wall of Berlin fell,
premise of a Germany united again, the hegemonic power in Europe».

Fifteen years on from that year, after so many happenings, after the tragedy
of 11 September 2001 that gave rise to the on-going wars, the history of
violence and death in which Hitler and Nazism figured so largely continues to
stir troubling questions and to stand as measure for the violence and death
that rain down each day in the places round the world martyred by conflicts.
And the possible occult, magical, esoteric substratum of that phenomenon
stirs the interest of many. The television has often dealt with it and in the last
year at least two books have had a certain success in Italy (Marco Dolcetta,
"Esoteric Nazionalsocialism", Cooper Castelvecchi, Rome 2003; Mel Gordon,
"Hitler's magus. Eric Jan Hanussen: a Jew at the Führer's court", Mondadori,
Milan 2004).

We put some questions to Giorgio Galli (author of many essays some of which
deal with the esoteric and politics such as "Politics and the magicians",
Rizzoli, Milan 1995; "Politics and the esoteric on the threshold of 2000",
Rizzoli, Milan 1992; "Notes on the New Age", Milan 2003, in which he
analyses that cultural movement, making use also of papal documents).

In your essay "Magical Nazism" you point to an "esoteric bridge" between

England and Germany, between theories and esoteric and occult societies
present in the two countries in the 19th and the 20th centuries. A bridge that
stretched to the founders of Nazism also. What was that so exactly?

GIORGIO GALLI: Between the end of the nineteenth century and the
beginning of the twentieth the esoteric tradition in both Germany and
England gained new strength. An "esoteric bridge" between the two
countries, the Rosicrucian one, goes back in fact to the 17th century, in the
framework of an occult culture not extraneous to the Thirty Years War that
devastated Germany. In the last decades of the 19th century relations
between English and Germans esoteric groups took on new force, and close
links were forged among influential people - on the basis of a "magical"
conception of reality - that were passed on for a couple of generations
following. There were also troubling elements in the reconstitution. One of
these consisted of so-called "sexual magic", that is to say the attainment of
"special" powers deriving from sexual practices: in 1888, the year after the
foundation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, London was shaken by
a series of sexual crimes, those of Jack the Ripper. The mystery has never
been solved. Some figures and some relations significantly mark this
resurfacing of the esoteric culture in Europe, such as the meeting in London
between the French occultist Eliphas Levi, biblical pseudonym of Alphonse-
Louis Constant, a former seminarian who became a revolutionary in Paris in
1848, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who was to have a crucial role in the
evolution of the Rosicrucian society into the hermetic Golden Dawn. After
various excursions into political and occult activities, Levi was to write a
book, "The coming race": in it he speaks of a form of energy, the "Vril" that is
to give its name to a society, which, along with the work of the founder of the
Institute of Geopolitics of Berlin, Karl Haushofer, was to furnish a fundamental
contribution to the elaboration of Nazi ideology in relation to the idea of the
Aryan race and of "living space", Lebensraum.
What was the cultural background and theories common to these groups?

GALLI: First of all a conception according to which the history we know is only
one part of the history of mankind. Only some elites of initiates know "all"
history. The ancient history of pure and incorrupt civilizations. This lore and
knowledge, which one can gain through occult practices and rites, transmit
particular power to the initiates who must also perform a political role so as
to administer the future of a decadent mankind to which the gifts and the
characteristics lost over time must be restored. The members of these
societies believed, in short, that they were the depositories of an ancient
primordial learning that often manifested itself in particular rites. An
interesting fact is that some followers of esoteric groups performed roles in
the secret services of their own countries. A key figure in this sense is the
German Theodor Reuss, of the occult "Ordo templi orientis society", teacher
of the Englishman Aleister Crowley. Crowley, also a master of the occult and
agent of the British services at the same time, at the end of the nineteenth
century joined the celebrated "Golden Dawn" - a derivation, as has been said,
of the Rosicrucian Society - and then founded an English offshoot of the
"Ordo templi orientis". The "Golden Dawn" was in its turn linked with German
associations connected to the secret doctrine of the Russian Madame Elena
Blavatsky - founder in New York, in 1875, of the "Theosophical Society" - and
to the anthroposophy of Rudolph Steiner.

But the business of Hitler and Nazism occurred after those episodes...

GALLI: My hypothesis is that the "bridge", which, as I've explained, united

English and German esoteric cultures, hermetic orders and secret services
between the 19th and 20th centuries, continued to exist in the period
immediately following, so that the intellectual baggage of Hitler and of part of
the Nazi executive group came from this type of occult culture. I have
gathered data that enables me even to say that this group, having reached
power in the Third Reich, debated within that ambit on how to implement a
strategy deriving from that culture, that is to say the resurgence of "Aryan
wisdom". As I can also affirm that Hitler's decision to enter war in the
conviction that England would not intervene can be understood in the light of
the esoteric culture, of which leading circles in English politic life were also
aware. The whole history of Nazism should, in my view, be read keeping this
factor in mind as well.

How did Hitler come into contact with the esoteric? Who were his mentors?

GALLI: The starting point can be found in the magazine "Ostara", of which
Hitler in his Vienna years was an avid reader. The publication - which takes its
name from an ancient Germanic goddess of the spring and that hence
denotes a connection with the Nordic tradition and with the old pagan deities
antecedent to the spread of Christianity in Germany - was founded in 1905 by
a former monk, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels who, among other things, founded a
place in Werfenstein, the "Castle of Order", where, probably, with financial
support from business, began to advocate an organization founded on the
theory of the superiority of the Aryan race. Another point of reference for the
esoteric interests of the future Führer is Rudolf von Sebottendorff, a student
of the Cabal, of alchemical and Rosicrucian works, of the occult practices of
the dervishes, and promoter, in 1918 in Munich, of the "Thule Gesellschaft",
an offshoot association of the "Germanorden", a society set up early in the
second decade that was strongly marked by elements of anti-semitism and
racism. Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Karl Haushofer and Hans Frank, the future
governor general of Poland all gravitated round the "Thule". It was an
association dominated by occult culture and the secret doctrines worked out
in the preceding decades. "Thule" - the mythical Atlantis, country of the
Hyperboreans - was thus the mould of the group of intellectuals at the origin
of Nazism. Among other things, in 1933 Von Sebottendorff published a book,
"Before Hitler came", in which, meaning to rekindle the debate about the
esoteric origins of Nazism, he speaks of having been the Führer's teacher in
the occult. But that group of intellectuals, by then in power, had for some
time decided that it was better to keep hidden the esoteric and occult
elements they believed in so as to give emphasis to political organization.
And for that matter, in the year von Sebottendorff's book was published,
Hitler was already Chancellor of the Reich. The book was thus withdrawn
from the shops.

What are the basic features of the esoteric group Hitler centered on?

GALLI: I have to say beforehand that one of the difficulties working in this
field is the fact that official, academic historiography doesn't much engage
with these things. Work in the area of esoteric culture is sometimes left to
minority scholars or even to very eccentric characters, who in any case often
work on marginal affairs. The fact that official historiography doesn't do much
in this direction makes it more difficult to find certified documentation. I'm
convicted that if there were more interest, something would be found. But let
me answer your question. I've mentioned very ancient civilization and
legacies of knowledge - Atlantis is the most important reference - in short to a
cultural element based on fantasy history, on fantasy geography, on fantasy
cosmogony and on the hidden laws that are alleged to guide it. Hitler
believed that the founding reasons of his political action lay in that distant
past, in a magical wisdom to be retrieved and in which lay the tool for forging
the luminous future. The group of Thule intellectuals who in the 'twenties
decided the transformation of an occult sect into a mass political party, were
convinced believers in these things. There were thus two dynamics at work:
the profound conviction of the initiates who operated in these groups and, at
the same time, a certain influence that they, for reasons amply gone into by
the scholars, exerted in some historic moments on political movements.
Hitler, Himmler, Hess, Rosenberg, Frank: they believed themselves the heirs
to an ancient lore that would enable them to build a new civilization. It should
be said that a renowned and "traditional" historian has identified and
assessed some of these esoteric threads: I speak of George Mosse who in the
"Cultural origins of the Third Reich" explicitly points to the esoterist Guido
von List and his runic symbology as one of Hitler's points of reference. The
initials of the SS, the militias that Himmler was to use to implement projects
worked out in the occult milieu, come from the runes studied by von List.

Hitler often gets described as an ignorant man, a man without qualities. How
did he manage to impose himself on the esoteric group he belonged to?

GALLI: There's a widespread tendency to describe him as an ignorant person

and it's shared by the work of Joachim Fest, the Führer's biographer, who
acted as consultant on the recent film on Hitler that has come out in
Germany, Der Untergang (The fall). Fest has written an excellent biography of
Hitler but he tends to present him as a barn-storming leader and as a man of
skimpy reading, and that only of anti-semitic propaganda. That's not true.
Hitler had read Nietzsche and Schopenauer. He stood out in the group of
Rosenberg, Hess, Himmler, Frank because he possessed two qualities that
have nothing to do with esoteric culture. He was a most effective speaker
and a clever organizer. Maybe he learned the first quality from the magus
Hanussen, that almost hypnotic way of communicating with his listeners. We
know with certainty that Hitler took lessons in diction from Hanussen. But he
learned something else from the magus. Hanussen had the gift of hypnotism
and Mel Gordon's book reconstructs the matter fairly well. In "Mein Kampf"
Hitler proposes, apart from an esoteric ideology, precise organizational
programs as well. That give the idea they were worked out by a good
politician. Himmler, the bureaucrat of extermination, had similar
organizational talent, but was not at all a good communicator. And neither
was Hess. Rosenberg is only very effective as a writer... Of this group bound
up with esoteric culture nobody had, in short, the two specific gifts which
Hitler possessed.

"Mein Kampf" indicates the goals Hitler set himself: the creation of a Eurasia
with undefined eastern frontiers, world "co-dominion" with England...

GALLI: Yes, it's an esoteric strategy in which the occult and geopolitics are
interwoven. It was Haushofer who worked out the theories relating to "living
space". On the basis of mystical and spiritual considerations that identified
the center of the world in the German nation, but also making reference to
other theoreticians of geopolitics such as the Englishman Halford John
Mackinder, who had identified the "heart of the earth" as being in eastern
Europe and in European Russia, Haushofer was convinced that a huge area
going from western Europe to the Urals was necessary for the rebuilding of
the Aryan civilization. The living space - Lebensraum - of the new Aryan
civilization. Germany was the foundation stone of a geopolitical arrangement
as prelude to the creation of a new civilization and of a new man who would
recover the ancient lost virtues. The Jews, who have an opposing hegemonic
world dream, were to be set aside and then eliminated. Thus the Drang nach
Osten arose out of a project of an esoteric nature.

But the leadership of the Third Reich included men who didn't share the same
culture as Hitler and his allies...

GALLI: That's true, but even they were influenced by the occult: pragmatic
Göring was interested in the theory of the "hollow earth", Goebbels was
intrigued by Nostradamus... And in any case Goebbels and Göring shared
Hitler's project precisely because they were overawed by his esoteric
convictions.

Let's come to Hess's journey to Scotland in May 1941. That flight also took
place under an esoteric sign...

GALLI: The project for co-dominion with England on the basis of Lebensraum
as prelude to the construction of a new mankind never faded, not even after
the start of the war, when it became evident that Great Britain's hoped-for
neutrality hadn't come true. The "bridge" still existed. And for that matter the
episode of the halting of the German tanks at Dunkerque in 1940 that
allowed the French and English to get away can be read in that key: an
attempt to come to an agreement with esoteric interlocutors living in
England. On 10 May 1941 Hess flew to Scotland to try to persuade such
people not to intervene at the moment of the invasion of the USSR. He
probably wanted to meet the heirs of societies of the type of the Golden
Dawn that had relations with the Royal family and with whom he could talk. It
was however without doubt the Duke of Hamilton that Hess was looking for.
He was a confidant of the king of England. He was pro-Nazi and had had
contacts with Hess and the leaders of the Reich for some time. The decision
to make the journey probably followed debate among the esoteric Nazi
leaders, hence it's plausible that Hitler was aware of it. The operation was
covered by massive disinformation. But Hess and the National Socialists were
deluding themselves: the "bridge" was still there but by then it was too flimsy
to allow for an agreement between Germany and England on the Drang nach
Osten. In May 1941 even the English aristocracy was "resigned" to making
war on Germany.

You explain in your book that Hitler was trying to come to an agreement with
England right up to the end.

GALLI: Yes. After the defeat in Russia, instead of trying to block the Russian
counterattack, Hitler moved his armoured divisions from the eastern to the
western front. The tactic was always the same: «Constrain England to make
peace by force», as he himself seems to have said. Right up to the end he
believed that the esoteric "bridge" could be rebuilt.

How is it possible that the enormous power Hitler and his allies gained in
Germany came out of esoteric experiences?

GALLI: I've always tried to avoid insisting the esoteric is the exclusive
interpretative key for explaining certain facts. Certainly, as I've already said,
it is an important and neglected aspect. But Hitler gained consensus for
reasons that historiography has studied abundantly already and I don't
question them: German humiliation after World War I, the frustrations
consequent on defeat and the Treaty of Versailles, the economic crisis of
1929 that caused 6,000,000 jobless, the Weimar policies that were incapable
of providing an effective answer to the problems. Those were the chief
reasons that enabled Hitler to take power. Hitler dealt with unemployment
even before rearmament by means of great public works, taking the advice
of the financier and politician Hjalmar Schacht, who was a Keynesian. And in
"Mein Kampf", for that matter, he presented a political program that had
normal aspect, such as, in fact, the battle against unemployment.

August von Galen, bishop of Münster during the Nazi period, described by the
New York Times as «the most obstinate opponent of the Nationalsocialist
antichristian program», spoke of Nazism as «religious trickery»...

GALLI: In a certain way it is. And Pius XI also showed strong concern with the
publication of "Mit Brennender Sorge". He spoke about neo-paganism. In
reality one can speak of something more than neo-paganism. All the
Nazionalsocialist ceremonies were patterned on a religious model: the lights,
the Führer appearing like a magical apparition. They all had the quality of a
magical liturgy.

It seems that even Churchill, the great opponent of the Führer's esoteric
programs, didn't scorn the company of occultists...

GALLI: In my book "Politics and the magicians" I explain how even Churchill
put trust in clairvoyants. Churchill was an absolute conservative and an
absolute anti-communist. Don't lets forget that he wrote for Mussolini's
newspaper "Popolo d'Italia". In his vision of the world only English-speaking
peoples are up to democracy. For other peoples any form of regime is ok. For
him the history of the West coincides with the history of the English-speaking
people. So Hitler might have been able to please him, as he pleased various
conservative sectors of English society. But, according to me, he had contacts
with English esoteric societies that had provided him with a certain amount of
information on the "contra-initiation of the Führer".

Meaning?

GALLI: In esoteric culture there is a fundamental difference between

"initiation" and "contra-initiation". Initiation - that of the Masons, to make
myself clear - is held to be positive. Contra-initiation instead is thought to
have something diabolic about it: Churchill had found out that Hitler was a
"contra-initiate". Churchill, then, knowing of the "esoteric-diabolic"
background to Hitler's contra-initiation, was afraid that behind the negotiable
objectives - a free hand in Europe and in the East for Germany and guarantee
of the continuity of the British Empire - that were probably acceptable to him,
there were non-negotiable objectives: the empire of evil. Hitler didn't want
only an empire of a geopolitical sort. He wanted an empire over minds, based
on a series of values that even the conservative anti-communist Churchill
saw as negative and unwarrantable. It's a fact, however, that Hitler's
prophecy of the end of the British Empire has in substance come true. Hitler
prophesied that Churchill would destroy the English Empire and hand over
the imperial sceptre to the United States.

One last question, Professor. René Girard said in a recent interview that «the
Nazi contempt for Christian tenderness toward the victims has not gone out
of history». The French professor also said he was afraid that «in future
somebody will try to reformulate the principle in more politically correct
fashion, maybe by draping it in Christianity». What do you say?

GALLI: Girard is a great scholar, thoroughly documented and rich in insights. I

think that it is possible to conceive of a Nazism "draped in Christianity", not
least because Nazism with its specific characteristics is unrepeatable. And I
don't believe that the representative democracy can be put into crisis by
authoritarian movements like those of the 'twenties and 'thirties. There is
however the danger that in the western democracies the forms of democracy
are kept up without the substance. Political parties won't be banned any
longer, civil liberties will be guaranteed to a certain extent but, at the same
time, there could be the danger that only the formulas of democracy remain
and the substance disappears. There could be a non-democracy disguised as
democracy. Likewise, Girard's insight is plausible: just as it's possible that an
anti-democracy presents itself with apparently democratic features, so it's
possible that an anti-Christianity that despises victims as did Nazism, can
actually operate by draping itself in Christian forms. I wouldn't want to hazard
myself in a field I don't know, but I know that there are - and are ever more
widespread - publications that express tendencies that I think can be
described as "apocalyptic fundamentalist". These tendencies might in some
way prefigure a danger like the one Girard mentions. Some isolate features
that came together in the spread of Nazism could reappear in that context.