Nazi spiritual eugenics (I): the German occulture
In previous chapters of the spiritual eugenics project we have ambled down relatively unpopulated lanes of historical research. Now, we emerge onto a daunting autobahn: Nazism. No topic has been more pored over by historians. And there are no more awful events in human history than the Nazis’ programme of mass murder.
Nonetheless, this is an important part of our story and we will try and explore how the ideas we’ve been covering — the overlap between new age spirituality and eugenics — fed into the German ‘occulture’ and then into Nazi ideology and policy.
Once again, I am not arguing that new age spirituality is essentially and always fascist-leaning, or that spiritual eugenics is essentially and always fascist and white supremacist. We’ve covered other varieties — communist, feminist, cosmopolitan, anti-colonial. The Nazis’ faith in spiritual eugenics was not unique for their era. What was unique was their willingness to murder millions of people in the service of that faith.
We will cover the Nazis’ interest in spiritual eugenics in four parts:
1) The German occulture, its tendency to spiritual racism and eugenics, and how this fed into Nazi ideology
2) Hitler’s spiritual eugenics as explored in his speeches and Mein Kampf
3) Breeding supermen in the ideas and policies of two leading Nazis, R. Walther Darré and Heinrich Himmler
4) Finally, how the Nazis’ spiritual eugenics inspired their murderous sterilization, euthanasia and genocide policies
1) The German occulture and its tendency to spiritual racism and eugenics
As we’ve explored, from the 1870s to 1930s, there was a mystical revival across the western world, as cultures reacted against the triumph of Darwinism and scientific materialism in the 1860s. This mystical revival was particularly powerful in Germany. The historian Eric Kurlander writes:
the sheer size and diversity of the occult marketplace in Germany and Austria suggests that it tapped into a mass consumer culture that was unique in depth and breadth when compared to other European countries. [Hitler’s Monsters, p.14]
In the years before and after WW1, one finds in the German occulture an insatiable appetite for astrology, spiritualism, magic, myths and folk tales; for occult orders, secret societies, and mystical fellowships known as bunds; one finds a flourishing interest in ‘border science’, in parapsychology and psychical research, in anti-reductionist forms of thinking that emphasized wholeness, like gestalt psychology.
One finds the lebensreform or Life Reform movement, which rejected urban, industrial civilization and sought a more natural and pure existence through vegetarianism, nudism, wild swimming, allotments, nature-worship, sandal-wearing, alternative medicine, health food stores and other pre-hippy innovations (the influence on Californian culture is direct — Germans from this movement emigrated to California in the 30s and 40s and spread the gospel of natural living). Out of the lebensreform milieu grew the Wandervogel (‘wandering free spirits) movement, a in which thousands of young Germans joined together to ramble through the countryside, singing German folk songs. And the lebensreform movement also inspired radical ideas around healthy sex and reproduction — free love, liberated homosexuality, sexual hygiene and eugenics.
None of this is so very different from the spiritual revivals of other western countries during the same period. But the German occulture overlapped with the nationalistic and racist Volkisch movement, and spiritual ideas often took on a markedly nationalistic, far-right, racist tone. The Wandervogel movement, for example, has been described by historian Peter Staudenmaier as ‘right-wing hippies’ — many of its members later joined the Hitler Youth, and their favourite artist, the Theosophist Fidus, also joined the Nazi party (six of his drawings are shown below, the last is for a conference on eugenics).
What was the Volkisch movement? German thinkers had, since the end of the 18th century, been obsessed with the mystical idea of the German volk (folk or people), and the spiritual superiority of the German soul. For example, in his wildly-popular Addresses to the German Nation of 1808, philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte declared:
All those who have within them the creative quickening of life…these are part of primal humanity. These may be considered as a true people, these constitute the Urvolk, the primal people — I mean the Germans.
This sense of spiritual superiority easily led to what the Italian mystical fascist Julius Evola called ‘spiritual racism’ — a belief in the physical, cultural and spiritual superiority of the German race, which might be defined as Teutonic, Aryan, Nordic, or Ario-German, depending on which racist you read.
Spiritual and scientific racism was widespread throughout German culture during the 19th and early 20th centuries. A particularly influential racist was the English émigré Houston Chamberlain, son-in-law of the composer Richard Wagner. Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), a work of racial history, was read by everyone from Kaiser Wilhem to Adolf Hitler. Through two long volumes, Chamberlain preached Aryan-German racial supremacy:
Physically and mentally the Aryans are pre-eminent among all peoples; for that reason they are by right … the lords of the world. [vol 1, p.542, 1913 edition]
Against the soulful, mystical Aryan stands the materialist and corrupt Jew. Chamberlain writes: ‘Not only the Jew, but also all that is derived from the Jewish mind, corrodes and disintegrates what is best in us’.
The volkisch yearning for a mystical racial wholeness led, often, to a desire to expel the alien elements in the body politic — above all, Jews.
One finds this sort of spiritual racism throughout the German occulture, particularly in German theosophical movements. The founder of Theosophy, Madame Helena Blavatsky, outlined a bizarre and racist theory of human evolution in her last book, The Secret Doctrine (1888) written while she was living in Bavaria. Humanity, she professed, had spiritually evolved through various ‘root races’ and ‘sub-races’ (including the Atlanteans, Lemurians and ‘Water-Men’) up to the various ethnic groups of today, in a process guided by higher spiritual intelligences. She suggested some races — particularly the Aryan race — are more evolved, soulful, ‘elect’ and ‘God-informed’, while other races are less evolved, ‘inferior’, ‘savage’, ‘soulless’, ‘blackened with sin’, more bestial or ape-like, ’degenerate in spirituality’ and possibly even demonic.
[See The Secret Doctrine, Library of Alexandria edition, p. 1347, 1390, 1391, 1395, 1461, 1479, 1492, 1508, 1528, 1549, 1568, 2412)
Her spiritual racism was developed by German theosophists like Rudolf Steiner. He wrote:
On one side we find the black race, which is earthly at most. We also have the yellow race, which is in the middle between earth and the cosmos. If it moves to the East, it becomes brown, attaches itself too much to the cosmos, and becomes extinct. The white race is the future, the race that is spiritually creative. [VOM LEBEN DES MENSCHEN UND DER ERDE — ÜBER DAS WESEN DES CHRISTENTUMS, p. 62.]
Aryans ‘comprise present-day civilized humanity’, Steiner said. ‘Blond hair actually bestows intelligence… If the blonds and blue-eyed people die out, the human race will become increasingly dense …’ Steiner believed evolution could not take place ‘without the most violent struggle…between white mankind and coloured mankind in the most varied areas.’
[Health and Illness, Vol. 1, Anthroposophic Press, 1981, p 85–86; DIE GEISTIGEN HINTERGRÜNDE DES ERSTEN WELTKRIEGES, Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1974, GA 174b, p. 38]
It was imperative, according to Steiner, that white nations preserve their racial purity: ‘The French are committing the terrible brutality of moving black people to Europe … It has an enormous effect on [French] blood and the [French] race and contributes considerably toward French decadence. The French as a race are reverting’. [Faculty Meeting with Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophic Press, 1998, pp. 558–559.]
If white people breed with coloured people, the children would have less ‘clairvoyant power’. What was needed was what one of Steiner’s followers called ‘cosmic eugenics’, a breeding programme to preserve the purity and vitality of the white race.
The most Volkisch mutation of Theosophy was Ariosophy, a movement developed by two Austrians, Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, between 1890 and 1930. Inspired by Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, List insisted the ‘Ario-German race’ was the most spiritual, while other races were spiritually inferior, particularly the materialistic Jews. List called for an Ario-Germanic occult state, in which magi ruled through the Germanic runes later beloved of the SS, and in which only ‘Ario-Germans’ could become citizens, hold positions of power, or breed with each other (this is roughly what the Nazis introduced with their Nuremburg race laws of 1935).
Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, meanwhile, was a former monk who in 1900 launched an Ariosophical society called the Order of the New Templars, whose symbol was a swastika. He published an esoteric, Volkisch and horrendously anti-semitic magazine called Ostara (historians debate whether Hitler read it as a young man in Vienna) and wrote a book called the Theozoology or the Science of the Sodomite Apelings and the Divine Electron. This weird sci-fi spiritual work argues that ‘the Aryan hero is on this planet the most complete incarnation of God and of the Spirit’. In fact, Aryans are the descendants of angelic aliens called Theozoa, while other races are the descendants of sodomite ‘ape-men’. Lanz advocated the mass castration of other races to protect the divine Aryans.
The symbol of Lanz’ New Templars, and his esoteric anti-Semitic magazine, Ostara
The early Nazi party and the occult
As we’ve previously discussed, ideas and movements easily cross-fertilize and mutate into new forms in the petri-dish of the occulture. In the German occulture of the early 20th century, ideas of spirituality, spiritual racism and spiritual eugenics cross-fertilized with far-right extremist politics.
One of the many secret societies found in the Volkisch occulture was the Thule Society, which formed in Munich in 1918. Several of its members or guest speakers would go on to be important figures in the Nazi party, including Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank and Dietrich Eckhart. The German Workers Party would evolve out of the Thule Society and later turn into the Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler’s leadership.
Thule Society members embraced the Ariosophical idea of the mystical superiority of Aryan ‘blood’. Its members swore ‘blood declarations’ concerning their lineage:
The signer hereby swears to the best of his knowledge and belief that no Jewish or coloured blood flows in either his or in his wife’s veins, and that among their ancestors are no members of the coloured races
It was a eugenic organization. The Bavarian police commissioner visited one meeting and asked what sort of organization it was. The founder, Rudolf von Sebottendorf, replied: ‘This is an association for the elite breeding of the German race.’ As we’ll see, that’s what the SS aimed to be as well.
The Thule Society, and later the Nazi party, believed in Aryan supremacy and Jewish global conspiracy. Figures associated with the Thule Society and the Nazi party, such as Dietrich Eckhart and Alfred Rosenberg, were deeply impressed by anti-Semitic conspiracy theories like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
This infamous text was published in 1903 as a tool of psychological warfare by the Russian secret services, then circulated widely in European occult circles. In it, a secret Jewish cabal lays out their evil conspiracy to achieve world domination. It was a big influence on leading Nazis like Dietrich Eckhart, Alfred Rosenberg, Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler — even if they later admitted the text was a forgery, they all firmly believed in a global Jewish conspiracy to destroy the Aryan race.
A Nazi propaganda poster proclaiming a global Jewish conspiracy
Why, we should ask, are people interested in occultism and spirituality particularly prone to conspiracy theories? There are several possible reasons, as I explored here. Both occultism and conspiracy-thinking appeal to a narcissistic belief that you’re special, you’ve seen the secret truth or hidden patterns behind conventional reality.
Isaiah Berlin and Frances Yates have both written of two moods one finds in spirituality. The first is optimistic occultism, such as one finds in Blavatsky’s Theosophy. Humanity is evolving to a higher dimension or species. A secret order of superhuman Masters is helping bring this about, and you are connected to this special secret order. Everything is happening according to a cosmic plan. Ordinary reality is filled with signs of the coming new age, for those with the vision to see it.
But then the new age doesn’t materialize and the believers wonder why not. This leads to the second mood one finds in spirituality — paranoid occultism. There is a secret order working behind the scenes, but they are evil. They may be Freemasons, Jesuits, Jews, paedophiles, demons or aliens — or an amalgam of all of these. They are working to block humanity’s spiritual evolution. They control everything, especially the stock markets and the lying press. Ordinary reality is filled with signs of their conspiracy, for those sufficiently awakened to decipher the code. There is a good secret order in a cosmic battle with the evil secret order. For the new millennium to dawn, the evil demons must be exterminated.
This is the fantastical, mythical and catastrophically-stupid way of thinking embraced by Adolf Hitler and other leading Nazis (and by a worrying number of spiritual seekers today).
We should not over-emphasize the occult leanings of the Nazi leadership. These were not merely New Age drifters or idle conspiracy-theorists. They were efficient and brutal gangsters prepared to terrorize and murder in their quest for power, led by a demagogue of extraordinary skill.
But it is nonetheless the case that Nazism grew out of the Volkisch movement and the German occulture. That explains why leading Nazis were into occult and pseudo-scientific ideas, why Rudolf Hess was such a fan of astrology, why Hitler believed in vegetarian Vikings and the myth of Atlantis, why Heinrich Himmler was into yoga and runes, and why he employed a man who claimed to be descended from Thor to tell him where to build the SS headquarters according to a prophesy, complete with a ‘grail room’ installed with a magic crystal. It explains why the Nazi leadership sponsored various kinds of occult or fringe-science research, from dowsing to pendulums to alternative medicine to nature-worship to life-reform to parapsychology and psychedelic research.
You could, in fact, make a case for fascism as a sort of new age spirituality gone very wrong: in its anti-materialism and anti-rationalism; its turn from egalitarian democracy to ideas of order, tradition, spiritual hierarchy and total surrender to a guru-like leader; its search for wholeness and spiritual community; its eclectic hodgepodge of rituals and weird beliefs; its spurious myths and nativist ancestor-cult; its environmentalism and nature-worship; its conspiracy theories; its beyond-good-and-evil morality; its celebration of violence and war as ecstatic practices; its spiritualized theory of evolution, and its millenarian vision of the perfection of a master race and the eradication of anything deemed bestial, impure or demonic. That explains some of the appeal of fascism for New Age seekers, and it also explains why some New Age movements (Osho, Scientology) end up looking quasi-fascist. (See Hanzi Frenacht on the ‘totalitarian potential of New Age spirituality).
We will explore this further in the next chapter, when we examine how Adolf Hitler placed spiritual eugenics at the heart of Nazi ideology.
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For more on the German occulture and the occult leanings of the Nazi leadership, see Eric Kurlander’s Hitler’s Monsters; Kurlander and Black’s edited volume, Revisiting Nazi occultism; Peter Staudenmaier’s Between Occultism and Nazism; James Webb’s The Occult Establishment; Anne Harrington’s Re-Enchanted Science, Corinne Treitel’s Science for the Soul, and George Mosse’s The Crisis of German Ideology.