Introduction

WHILE MANY OCCULT FIGURES and groups were surveilled or policed by the Third Reich, a closer look at Nazi policies suggests a more complex picture. Reflecting back on the first eight years of the Third Reich, the Nazis’ chief ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg, wrote, “The success of National Socialism, the unique appearance of the Führer, has no precedent in German History… . The consequence … is that many Germans, due to their proclivity for the romantic and the mystical, indeed the occult, came to understand the success of National Socialism in this fashion.” For Germans, Rosenberg suggests, esoteric thinking was perfectly compatible with, perhaps even intrinsic to, Nazism. This may explain why the multiple waves of arrest, detention, and murder that defined the experience of so many Communists, Jews, and “asocials” during the first few years of the Third Reich failed to envelop practitioners of occultism. Nor did the outbreak of war in September 1939 lead to the systematic eradication of esoteric practitioners as it did to Jews, Gypsies, or the mentally and physically disabled. To the contrary, as Uwe Schellinger, Andreas Anton, and Michael Schetsche's contribution to this volume indicates, the Nazi regime employed occultism “pragmatically” throughout the war, recruiting astrologers and clairvoyants to provide military and diplomatic intelligence both before and after the May 1941 Hess affair.

Except the Third Reich's interest in occult and border-scientific (grenzwissenschaftlich) doctrines—what I call Hitler's supernatural sciences— extended far beyond a few pragmatic “experiments” conducted during the Second World War. As an antidote to “Jewish” physics, Nazi leaders sponsored Hans Hörbiger's world ice theory, which postulated that events in the Bible and the putative destruction of Atlantis were caused by moons of ice hitting the Earth. Multiple Reich officials advocated Rudolf Steiner's occult-inspired (“biodynamic”) approach to agriculture, based on the moon and planets’ cosmic rhythms. Finally, both astrology and divining were employed widely to obtain political insights and spread propaganda. Certainly many proponents of these supernatural sciences faced renewed interrogation and arrest in the wake Rudolf Hess's flight to England in May 1941, which was widely attributed to the deputy führer's immersion in occult doctrines. Even after the so-called Special Action Hess, however, the regime continued to experiment with multiple supernatural sciences.