“He who does not carry demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world.”
- Magic: Theory, History and Practice
In 1934, the year after he was appointed chancellor of Germany, Hitler hired a dowser to go over the Reich Chancellery in search of “death rays” that might damage staff in the building. He and Himmler held frequent conversations about “the World Empire of Atlantis, which fell victim to the catastrophe of the moons falling to Earth” and about a discredited pseudoscience called Welteislehre, or World Ice Theory, which taught that the cosmos was made of ice and which they saw as a “Germanic” counterbalance to the “Jewish” theory of relativity.
A supernatural command
All across the Nazi high command, in fact, esoteric belief was rife. Goebbels read Nostradamus in bed. Rudolf Hess was into homoeopathy and herbalism, and employed a personal dowser and astrologer. Other advocates of “radiesthesia” – the supernatural capacity to locate objects with rods and pendulums – included Julius Streicher, governor of Nuremberg and editor of the Nazi paper Der Stürmer, and Richard Walther Darré, head of the Race Settlement Office.
All these men were also fascinated by biodynamic agriculture, a mystical farming concept borrowed from Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophist movement which the Nazis believed would provide “harmony between blood, soil and cosmos”. Many high-ranking Nazis were also enthusiasts for Eastern mysticism – Indian myths, Tibetan spirituality, Japanese warrior codes – which they saw as the lost teaching of an ancient, Aryan race.
Himmler, the head of the SS, went farthest, setting up the Ahnenerbe – the Institute for Ancestral Research – which combed Germany and occupied Europe for records and folklore to support his ideas of Aryan heredity.
The SS had a witch division, responsible for bringing home evidence of witch trials and wizardry: witches, Himmler argued, represented an old Germanic religion that had been cruelly wiped out by Judeo-Christian religion (with the emphasis on the Judeo).