Authors: Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
ISBN-13: 9780814730607, ISBN-10: 0814730604
Format: Paperback
Publisher: New York University Press
Date Published: September 1993
Edition: 1st Edition
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke is the author of several books on ideology and the Western esoteric tradition, including Hitler's Priestess and The Occult Roots of Nazism, which has remained in print since its publication in 1985 and has been translated into eight languages. He writes regularly for European and US Journals and has contributed to several films on the Third Reich and World War II.
Nearly half a century after the defeat of the Third Reich, Nazism remains a subject of extensive historical inquiry, general interest, and, alarmingly, a source of inspiration for resurgent fascism in Europe. Goodrick-Clarke's powerful and timely book traces the intellectual roots of Nazism back to a number of influential occult and millenarian sects in the Habsburg Empire during its waning years. These sects combined notions of popular nationalism with an advocacy of Aryan racism and a proclaimed need for German world-rule.
This book provides the first serious account of the way in which Nazism was influenced by powerful millenarian and occult sects that thrived in Germany and Austria almost fifty years before the rise to power of Adolf Hitler.
These millenarian sects (principally the Ariosophists) espoused a mixture of popular nationalism, Aryan racism, and occultism to support their advocacy of German world-rule. Over time their ideas and symbols, filtered through nationalist-racist groups associated with the infant Nazi party, came to exert a strong influence on Himmler's SS.
The fantasies thus fueled were played out with terrifying consequences in the realities structured into the Third Reich: Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Treblinka, the hellish museums of Nazi apocalypse, had psychic roots reaching back to millenial visions of occult sects. Beyond what the TImes Literary Supplement calls an intriguing study of apocalyptic fantasies, this bizarre and fascinating story contains lessons we cannot afford to ignore.
Explores a number of influential occult and millenarian sects in the Hapsburg Empire during its waning years, showing how their ideas filtered through the social and intellectual upheavals of the late 19th and early 20th century to form the underlying belief system of Nazism. Not sensationalist. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Acknowledgements | ||
Illustrations | ||
Foreword | ||
Introduction | 1 | |
Pt. 1 | The Background | |
1 | The Pan-German Vision | 7 |
2 | The Modern German Occult Revival 1880-1910 | 17 |
Pt. 2 | The Ariosophists of Vienna | |
3 | Guido von List | 33 |
4 | Wotanism and Germanic Theosophy | 49 |
5 | The Armanenschaft | 56 |
6 | The Secret Heritage | 66 |
7 | The German Millennium | 78 |
8 | Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels and Theozoology | 90 |
9 | The Order of the New Templars | 106 |
Pt. 3 | Ariosophy in Germany | |
10 | The Germanenorden | 123 |
11 | Rudolf von Sebottendorff and the Thule Society | 135 |
12 | The Holy Runes and the Edda Society | 153 |
13 | Herbert Reichstein and Ariosophy | 164 |
14 | Karl Maria Wiligut: The Private Magus of Heinrich Himmler | 177 |
15 | Ariosophy and Adolf Hitler | 192 |
Appendix A: Genealogy of Lanz von Liebenfels | 205 | |
Appendix B: Genealogy of the Sebottendorff Family | 207 | |
Appendix C: The History of Ariosophy | 209 | |
Appendix D: New Templar Verse | 215 | |
Appendix E: The Modern Mythology of Nazi Occultism | 217 | |
Notes and References | 227 | |
Bibliography | 265 | |
Index | 289 |