Nazis: The Occult Conspiracy

The Nazis wanted to build a sinister New World Order led by a so-called race of Aryan supermen, spreading a reign of terror unlike any the world had ever known. Many believe the Nazis conjured strange spirits and followed occult practices that had lain dormant in Europe for thousands of years. Now documents prove that their beliefs were based on a perversion of ancient pagan law; a twisting of mythic battles between forces of light and darkness and of a terrifying journey into a world ruled by mystics, madmen and murderers.

In the 1930s, the Nazis began searching the top of the world, the Himalayas of Tibet, for evidence of ancient high-priests who they believed were their blood ancestors. The Nazi belief in these ancestors was to form the foundation of Germany's new religion. A religion with Adolf Hitler as its high-priest. Inspiring Hitler's evil crusade, was a belief that pure Aryan blood was being contaminated by so-called "inferior races" and that once rid of foreign elements, a new race of Aryan supermen would rule the world. This was the Nazi interpretation of ancient myths and occult lore dating back thousands of years.

To prove their superiority, the Nazis would leave no myth or religion unexplored. In effect, borrowing from any belief they could adapt to the Aryan cause. As a foundation for this new faith, Hitler needed to eliminate competing religions. To achieve absolute control, he not only used the power of myth, but co-opted Christian ritual. His inner circle who had strong ties to the occult, would help him to accomplish this goal. Among them were: Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, whose correspondence reveals a devotion to astrology and forecasting by the stars; Nazi Commissioner for Philosophy and Education, Alfred Rosenberg who wrote the book "Laying Out the Tenets of the Nazi Religion"; Josef Göbbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, whose diary records his use of astrological forecasts in planning the war against the allies; and Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and the Nazi death camps, whose personal papers reveal that he was the master occultist of the Third Reich, and ultimately the architect of the new Nazi religion.

At the foundation of this new religion was an ancient occult legend that tells the story of a continent somewhere in the north Atlantic. There lived a race of super-beings who'd fallen from grace through evil and vice. A great flood wiped these beings off the face of the earth, but before they could all be destroyed, certain priests escaped by boat eventually finding their way to India and the high peaks of Tibet. These escaped priests, believed by mystics to be the original race of Aryan god-men, were said to be the ancestors of all Indian and European people. The land was called Atlantis.

Certain German mystics claimed the Atlantis myth was actual history; their proof that Aryans were the chosen people descended from the super-beings of Atlantis and that they had lost their powers by mating with mere mortals. In these theories lay the seeds of Nazi doctrine.

Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, an extreme nationalist, made it his mission to prove that the Germanic peoples were the descendants of the Atlantic master race.

Nationalists, particularly those who believed in the superiority of the Aryan race, always had entertained a notion of a vanished island, hidden world, some kind of utopia. Himmler may have thought it was in Tibet and that this master race, the Atlantic master race as Himmler liked to call it, might have been in the Tibetan mountains and that their descendants would still be alive.

Himmler believed the occult legend of Atlantis was true; that the mythical super-beings of Atlantis eventually made their way from Tibet to northern Europe and that their descendants became the Nordic, or Aryan races.

Government funded expeditions under Himmler's direction were sent to Tibet searching for evidence of their ancestors. To document this process, Nazi researchers took this film footage. In 1946, in a post-war interrogation by the US Army, the SS scientist who led one of the Tibetan expeditions described his first meeting with Himmler. He said:

Himmler mentioned his belief that the Nordic race did not evolve, but came directly down from heaven to settle on the Atlantic continent and that ancient immigrants from Atlantis had founded a great civilization in central Asia.

Although he was a very rational, calculating power broker, he was also a romantic idealist and he certainly believed in these myths, otherwise he wouldn't have spent the money and the time and the energy he did sending expeditions to Tibet.

In Tibet, villages were subjected to full body inspections by Nazi researchers looking for what the party called "Aryan physical traits": narrow foreheads, long limbs and angular features.

The quest to prove the superiority of the Aryan race soon moved into the criminal. The Nazis would begin killing people and using their bodies for experiments. They believed that once they had proven that their ancestors were gods it would be a simple step to recreate this race of Aryan god-men through selective breeding; that you could somehow force human evolution in a sort of hot-house environment by selecting the parents of a child and then rebreeding their offspring until the day when eventually you managed to breed the superman who was predicted by all their occult theories."

Hitler proclaimed:

Humanity accomplishes a step-up every 700 years and the ultimate aim is the coming of the sons of God. All creative forces will be concentrated in a new species. It will be infinitely superior to modern man.

The breeding stock was Himmler's SS. He recruited only the strongest, best conditioned and what he considered the best looking young men: tall, blond and blue-eyed. These future warriors had to be well educated and only from families of pure Aryan heritage.

The SS had been generally rather tall, well-made men/warriors. Himmler did decree this for the SS in so much that they should all be at leat 5'9" tall, [Himmler was 5'9"]. In addition to their size, they had to be of pure blood. For the officers, they had to prove pure German ancestry without interbreeding back to 1750.

Himmler's SS, at one point three million strong, were encouraged to father as many children as possible regardless of their marital status. The SS, he told them, had a sacred duty to their nation and to their Fuhrer to beget healthy Aryan babies.

One of Himmler's ideas concerned polygamy. The only way in which he could breed the master race ever faster was by instituting the practice whereby SS men would be able to take more than one wife.

In 1935, Himmler created the SS Lebensraum, "Fountain of Life," Program. Lebensraum was designed to facilitate the birth, housing and raising of as many pure Aryan babies as possible. Himmler's program was documented by actual images of Lebensraum babies.

The SS Lebensraum was providing conditions whereby young girls could in fact be served by SS studs. He suggested that young Aryan girls in Germany who hadn't been able to find a boyfriend or a husband, need not forego the pleasures of motherhood.

According to Lebensraum doctrine an illegitimate child was no disgrace as long as the mother was genetically fit. Women were thought to have only one function, to breed the children whose offspring the Nazi party believed would become gods. An estimated 11,000 Lebensraum babies were bred between 1935 and 1945. Most of these children never knew their parents.

The SS weekly newspaper declared:

Only when the number of cradles constantly exceeds the number of coffins, can we look forward with good cheer to a better future.

The babies of the Lebensraum immediately became property of the state. Some were raised at Lebensraum homes, while others were adopted and raised by SS families. During the war, children with Aryan appearance were abducted from conquered nations and sent to Lebensraum homes in Germany. Nazi records indicate that 200,000 Polish babies alone were kidnapped and placed in Lebensraum homes where they received careful training in every aspect of Nazi culture and mythology.

Long before Hitler came to power, these beliefs were flourishing against an already racist backdrop. There were many organizations in Germany and Austria around the turn of the century which blended racist ideology with occult practices. But their ideas became popular only at the conclusion of World War I.

The once mighty empire of Germany had been disarmed and at the mercy of the victorious nations after the First World War. In formerly wealthy cities, disabled veterans haunted the streets like ghosts from another lifetime.

Millions were unemployed; inflation was rampant; recession, starvation and poverty were everywhere.

People looked for a scapegoat. Fear and distrust of foreigners intensified. Both ends of the political spectrum made a bid for the loyalty of the German people.

After serving with distinction in the First World War, Hitler was stationed in Munich where it was his job to infiltrate left-wing organizations for the army. One assignment changed the course of his life. He infiltrated an organization that was a back-room political club called "The German Workers Party." But, far from being the communist organization that its name implied, the party turned out to be extremely right-wing. Hitler liked what he heard, joined and eventually became leader of the organization. Attending an early rally where Hitler spoke, was a disillusioned war veteran named Rudolf Hess. [Wolf Rüdiger Hess, son of Rudolf Hess: "He came back taking three steps by one, jumping up and said 'I saw a man this evening, he's going to bring back Germany to what it was before the war and this is the only man who is able to do it.']

Hess was convinced the dynamic orator he heard was the long-awaited messiah prophesied in German occult circles. With racist philosopher, Alfred Rosenberg, Hess was a supporter of one of the more prominent groups, the "Thule Society," which actively sought a Germanic messiah and was dedicated to the revival of the so-called "Aryan master race." Members practiced astrology, sun worship and other occult sciences thinking that this would help them reach their goal. Their emblem was a dagger set against a curved swastika. With a membership that included some of Munich's richest and most powerful citizens, the society financed Hitler's German Worker's Party. In 1920, Hitler's party officially changed its name to the German National Socialist Worker's Party, the NSDAP or as it would soon become known, the Nazi Party. With Hitler as its leader, the Nazi Party grew quickly, sweeping people up in a frenzy of fear-mongering and fiery oratory. He gave them the strong, charismatic leader they'd yearned for since the war.

Like many Germans and Austrians of the time, Hitler lived in an environment that was already hostile to Judaism. He would have easily found these ideas in popular publications such as Ostara, an overtly racist occult magazine written by a renegade and ultimately defrocked monk and mystic named Lance von Liebenfels. Ostara magazine was a good example of how Hitler would have picked up his racism and his antisemitism. He even paid a visit to Lance's editorial office to obtain back numbers.

Immensely popular at the time, the journal preached that the Nordic or Aryan races had much to fear from people darker than themselves and targeted Jews as the most threatening. The Ostara claimed that the Jews were preventing the Aryans from taking their rightful place as rulers of the world, an eternal struggle dating back to Biblical times. Headlines read, "Are you blond? Then you are in danger. You should therefore read Ostara. Publications for blonds and the male rights movement." The publication outlined what would become the Nazi world view, racial selection, Lebensraum, and even the Nazi death camps. With these ideas in place, Hitler's developing theories of race were ready to be further influenced--this time by Thule Society supporter Alfred Rosenberg, the racist philosopher and occultist who would eventually become the Führer's voice in spiritual matters. In his book "The Myth of the Twentieth Century," Rosenberg reinvented Germanic history and laid out the foundation for the new Nazi creed, "the religion of the blood."

He saw blood, particularly in a religious sense, as the determining factor. In other words, a church had to be a church of the blood, rather than a church of faith or a church of belief. The blood tied together the Nordic races. So for Rosenberg the blood, racial stock, racial identity, became the keynotes of this new ideology.

Rosenberg preached that the blood of the people carried the soul of the race.

Nordic myth replaced the Christian Bible as the foundation of the new Nazi religion. In a pageant orchestrated by Rosenberg and captured on film, the Nazis celebrated their newly conceived version of Aryan culture and history. Rosenberg wrote:

Today a new mythos is dawning, the mythos of the blood, the belief that the godly essence is to be defended through the blood.

Hitler took Rosenberg's idea further when he wrote:

The old beliefs will be brought back to honor again. The whole secret knowledge of nature, of the divine, the demonic. We will wash off the Christian veneer and bring out a religion peculiar to our race.

As a symbol for the new religion, Hitler chose the swastika. The swastika can be found all over the world in many different cultures throughout history. From earliest times, it was the symbol of good luck in China, and to this day it remains a religious emblem in the Hindu and Buddhist faiths.

Among the Norseman the swastika was a reminder of the Arctic sun worshiped throughout pagan lore as a bearer of life and good fortune. For Hitler, the swastika held a different meaning. He wrote:

In the swastika we see the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man.

Hitler's bid for power began on November 9, 1923 with an attempted overthrow of the Bavarian government. Leading a private army called Storm Troopers, he launched a surprise attack on a beer hall where government leaders were meeting. With Hess and Rosenberg at his side, Hitler brashly announced the formation of a new government, then took to the streets, marching 3,000 Storm Troopers through Munich. They were confronted by police, shots were fired and 16 of Hitler's men were killed. It was a failed coup, but in the ten years before Hitler seized power, the 16 would become martyrs.

At that time they were carrying a swastika flag and this sort of fell with the people and the blood of the dead got upon it and a ritual arose whereby every new Nazi flag and banner was not empowered until Hitler had touched the flag against this flag. Nazi blood attained a sacred symbolic power, ritualized and sanctified in the ceremony known as "The Rite of the Blood Flag."

The Blood Flag was the crucifix of Hitler's religion. It would come to symbolize his new reign. In 1933, Hitler succeeded in becoming the Führer, "the leader." A title which would come to resonate with religious connotations of the anointed one, or even the messiah. Adolf Hitler's time had come.

The party is Hitler, Hitler is Germany and Germany is Hitler.

With Hitler's elevation to leader, the blood religion became the undisputed religion of the Nazi party complete with holy days and martyrs. Propaganda Minister Göbbels orchestrated a ritual in which the 16 Nazi heroes were honored as martyrs of the Reich; the dead were resurrected then achieved eternal life. Göbbels assured that all Germans would partake in the ceremony by broadcasting it over loudspeakers placed on street corners throughout the country. Part of the message said:

The night of the dead, the dead march in. At midnight a mystical ceremonial play, the birth of the Reich. They fight, die and are victorious just as the Third Reich was founded.

According to Hitler, their blood was the holy water of the Third Reich.

The first martyrs of the Reich became known as the "Sixteen Immortals." In Munich, the ritual began with a funeral march down the very streets where the "Immortals" fell. At the front of the procession, they carried the "Blood Flag." Along the route hung huge red flags bearing slanted Germanic runes, the ritual symbol of sacrifice from pagan lore.

The bodies of the 16 heroes were interred in a building known as the Feldherrenhalle. It would become a Nazi shrine. During this annual ceremony, the names of the 16 were called out with anonymous voices answering the heroes' role-call as if the dead marched in spirit with the living.

With the rituals of his new religion in place, Hitler unleashed the next step of his plan. He wrote: "Force without spiritual foundation is doomed to failure."

Indoctrination into the Nazi faith with Hitler as god began early and continued into adulthood. (Children singing "Adolf Hitler is our saviour, our hero. He is the noblest being in the whole, wide world. For Hitler we live. For Hitler we die. Hitler is our Lord.")

In 1933, the party took over all Germany's youth organizations. For girls, the compulsory organization was the League of German Maids where they were taught self-sacrifice, to marry young and that their bodies belonged to the nation.

Ten year-old boys became members of the Organization of Young German People. At 14, they joined the Hitler Youth and at 18, the Nazi Party. At each stage they were taught the Nazi creed of sacred blood rituals, racial superiority and total allegiance to Hitler, even to the death.

Hitler stated: "I want to see again in the eyes of youth, the gleam of the beast of prey." The Hitler Youth chanted a song of death.

At the core of every German's indoctrination was Hitler's autobiography "Mein Kampf," or "My Struggle." In it, he outlined the philosophy of the plans for a thousand year Nazi reign. Mein Kampf became the Nazi Bible.  

In conjunction with Mein Kampf, the principles of the blood religion began to form the basis of Nazi policy. Forced sterilization laws were enacted, even Aryans were investigated for hereditary diseases. Ailments ranging from tuberculosis and epilepsy to alcoholism and depression were cause for automatic sterilization. Over 400,000 Germans suffered this fate. Hitler rationalized, the demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of clearest reason and if systematically executed, represents the most humane act of mankind.

Children with health problems were registered at birth. If their problems persisted, Nazi doctors would secretly administer lethal injections, telling their parents they died of natural causes. The euthanasia program was instituted for the mentally and physically impaired. Propaganda films claimed these were acts of kindness, freeing trapped souls from tormented bodies.

By 1935, Hitler had created the blood laws which made it a criminal act for a pure German to marry or even have sex with a Jew. And German Jews were stripped of their rights as citizens. But the worst was still to come. Purifying the Aryan bloodline was only half of Hitler's demonic plan. To finally clear the way for the last stage of human evolution and assure the coming of the Aryan millennium, the Nazis felt that one obstacle remained. The very existence of non-Aryans.

Hitler wrote:

The greatest and most ruthless decisions will have to be made. A barbaric measure for the unfortunate who is struck by it, but a blessing for his fellow man and posterity. The passing pain of a century can and will redeem millenniums from sufferings.

The idea that the few should be sacrificed for the good of the many extended even to Hitler's SA, the Storm Troopers. Eventually the SA, who were among Hitler's first supporters, became an obstacle, one that he had no qualms about removing.

The middle-class and the army came to fear the SA. To the army the SS was a more acceptable organization, like themselves, but members of the SS were from the German upper-class. The SS consisted very often of professional people, doctors, solicitors and so-on. They joined the SS while ordinary working people were in the SA and they didn't like each other.

The military offered the Führer a deal: their full support if Hitler would eliminate the SA. Hitler accepted and with Himmler rid the Party of the Storm Troopers in one night. the 'Night of the Long Knives' that happened on the 30th of June in 1934.

The SA leadership was rounded up and executed so quickly, so ruthlessly, many never knew why. It is reported some were still shouting "Heil, Hitler" when they died. After the purge of the SA, Himmler transformed the SS into an elite military order. In time, they would come to run the concentration camps where Jews and all other enemies of the state were being executed.

But Himmler's vision of the SS was not yet complete. He planned to turn the SS into Germany's new aristocracy, the new supermen prophesied by Hitler's religion of the blood. Himmler's conception of the SS was no less than the creation of a new blood stock elite for the Nazi order in Europe. At every stage, the SS was constantly reminded that it was no less than a warrior elite whose values of hardness and military valor were absolutely central to its existence. And more than that, that they were in fact ensuring the survival of the race in this way.

Himmler was born a Catholic, but by the time he met Hitler, he was already a confirmed occultist.

Himmler brought a range of unlikely influences to his design for the SS including the Hindu religion. During the war he reportedly traveled with a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, a holy book from the Hindu religion. It tells the story of a great battle on the "Field of Righteousness" between the forces of good and evil. The Hindu belief in reincarnation and its rigid caste system appealed to Himmler. It was a perfect model for a Nazi warrior elite which would rule the world.

Historians now say that Himmler was convinced that he was the reincarnation of King Heinrich, a German leader from the middle ages who stopped the Slavs from invading Germany. As the Nazis prepared to march on eastern Europe, Himmler believed he was on the path to realizing his karmic destiny, that his SS had returned to the Fatherland to fight a similar holy war. Himmler modeled his SS on the 13th century order of Teutonic Knights who killed and enslaved the people they conquered. The parallels with Nazi Germany's own practices were unmistakable.

The Reichsführer SS attempted to reinstate the feudal system that the Knights had lived by. As new lands were conquered, each SS officer was to take possession of a feudal estate. Local people were either killed or turned into slave labor.

Like the Teutonic Knights, Himmler transformed a series of ancient castles into SS training schools that were both military and religious centers, here, recruits were initiated. At the Wewelsburg Himmler tried to create a replica of the Grail Chapel from the Arthurian legend. A mystical chalice, the grail was said to have contained sacred blood. To Himmler, the sacred blood of the grail legend was pure Aryan blood. He believed it possessed a magical quality. His closest advisor on grail law was archeologist Otto Rahn. Also obsessed with the grail legend, Rahn believed it was hidden in the caves of southern France. Himmler was drawn to Rahn's knowledge of the occult and his life-long pursuit of the grail. Once in Himmler's inner circle, Rahn would continue his quest for the holy grail, only now as a knight of the Nazi Party. Himmler personally funded Rahn's expeditions, several in Southern France. There stood the sight of the great fortress of the Cathars, the heretical sect accused of devil worship and wiped out by the church in the 13th century.

Rahn's expeditions also took place in Germany. A letter on file from Rahn to SS headquarters, suggests that he believed he was close to realizing his life-long dream.

To bring my work to a successful conclusion, I must personally inspect the sites. First, I have to go to the Wildenberg ruins, the German castle of the holy grail. There are currently digs under way. Heil, Hitler.

But, Rahn was never able to secure the ultimate prize--the sacred chalice itself. In 1939, Otto Rahn mysteriously resigned from the SS. Many believed Himmler issued orders to have Rahn killed once it was clear his quest for the grail had failed. Two months later, he was found dead in the Austrian Alps. The cause of his death remains unexplained.

In his continued quest to prove the superiority of the Aryan race, Himmler created a research institute called the "Ancestral Heritage Organization." In addition to conducting medical experiments on human beings and checking bloodlines to ensure racial purity, the organization's mission was to resurrect and reinterpret occult practices, ancient Germanic myths and pagan lore. This Nazi film shows one such ritual--young girls dancing around a Nordic pagan symbol of war and divine order.

To control all occult knowledge, Himmler confiscated the libraries and artifacts of any occult society that was not associated with him. This included secret societies such as the Freemasons, who the Nazis believed were an occult organization created by the Jews to conspire against the Germanic people.

While Himmler suppressed certain occultists, he also advanced the careers of others, such as Karl Willigut. In Willigut, Himmler believed he had found the key to popularizing the ancient pagan tradition in modern Germany. The mystic became a high ranking SS officer and one of Himmler's prized possessions.

Willigut believed he was a direct descendant of the Norse god, Thor. Copies of his papers, found in Himmler's personal file, reveal that Willigut believed he possessed extrasensory powers. One document entitled the "Nine Commandments of God" was signed by Willigut and initialed by Himmler. Written in both modern German and the runic alphabet, it suggests that Willigut thought he was using his powers to rediscover the ancient rites and rituals of Germany's pagan past.

According to Nordic legend, the runic alphabet used by Willigut was given to mankind by Odin, the supreme god in Norse mythology. This sacred alphabet was his gift to mankind. These symbols appeared throughout the Nordic world on such objects as Viking ships, battle spears and shields. The alphabet of ancient priests and magicians, runes were believed to be mystical tools for fortune telling, casting spells and invoking magical spirits.

These mysterious figures were worn on the shoulders and helmets of all SS uniforms. The Hitler Youth used a single SIG rune. These ancient mystical symbols were seemingly everywhere. Serving as a constant reminder to Germans of their pagan past.

After the SS recruit had passed his training and taken the oath, if he was an officer he was then given the SS dagger which was a sort of hunting knife with a black handle, the SS runes on it, the swastika and a wreath and a German eagle. This was a very prized possession. Engraved into the dagger were the words "my honour is called trust." SS men received the dagger in a solemn ceremony. Every member of the SS wore the SS signet ring, but for his inner circle the elite of the elite, Himmler personally handed out the death's head ring.

In a speech given to SS officers stationed at Dachau, Himmler stated:

Never forget. We are a knightly order from which one cannot withdraw, to which one is recruited by blood and within which one remains body and soul.

Borrowing from Germany's pagan past and his own Catholic upbringing, Himmler invaded SS family rituals from the moment of birth.

The marriage ceremony also became an SS ritual. Mimicking ancient Germanic tribes, SS officers took on the role of the clan leader who presided over marriages. Himmler himself officiated at one such ceremony. This rare footage shows one of his SS officers marrying Gretl, the sister of Hitler's mistress, Eva Braun. Rings were exchanged, as well as bread and salt, the ancient pagan symbols for fertility and purity of the soil.

The Nazi year was marked with celebrations taken from the ancient Germanic calendar. The May-Pole Festival, initially accepted as a celebration of fertility, was transformed into a show of nationalism and military strength. Hitler said:

And so it is that this day the first of May, the land is filled with celebrations of the resurrection of the German people out of eternal inner strife.

Nazis even began to restore ancient pagan temples like Externstein which was dedicated to a solar deity. At Externstein , during the summer solstice, a shaft of light shines through a window and lines up with a point on the altar. While Externstein  was considered a holy place for Germanic tribes, it is far from unique among ancient temples in tracking the sun's movements. Himmler was convinced, however, that it was proof of the superior intellect of prehistoric Germanic priests.

In Nazi Germany, the festival at the summer solstice would be turned into a fascist rite. Traditionally, summer solstice festivals were a celebration of life and of the sun's powers. Dramatically staged and carefully choreographed, speeches were given preaching self-sacrifice and heroism. In this particular ritual, Propaganda Minister Göbbels gave the speech. In ancient times, the bonfire represented the ritual relighting of the sun. In Nazi Germany, they were tributes to the Fuhrer. In the largest of these rituals, torch-bearing troops created symbolic patterns in the night.

At the end of the year, the long night of the winter solstice honored Germany's dead. Himmler explains in his Dachau speech: "The winter solstice is not just the end of the year, but it is also the festival on which one thought of the ancestors and of the past, on which the individual is clear that he is nothing--an atom to be wiped away at any time while linked in the eternal chain of his lineage by a true humility."

The full calendar of rituals culminated with the rally at Nuremburg where the vows between party and people were renewed year after year. Tens of thousands of uniformed Nazis joined forces. The week long rally was orchestrated to sweep people up in a spectacle of sheer power.

As the Nazi frenzy swept Germany, Hitler made clear what he expected from the nation:

The Party is the selecting ground for German political leaders. It's doctrine will be unchangeable. It's organizations will be as hard as steel. It's total image, however, will be like a holy order.

The Nazi mass rallies were carefully orchestrated to build to an overwhelming emotional epiphany that evoked a religious fervor. At the center of this ritual was Hitler. Everything was constructed to make Hitler look like divinity, a messiah.

Having won the unquestioning support of the German people, Hitler was now ready to dominate the world. From the onset of the war in 1939, country after country fell to the Nazis. By the winter of 1942, however, the tide turned and the Nazis began to experience what they thought was impossible--defeat. As the Nazi war effort grew more and more desperate, they expanded their use of the occult sciences. From research and ritual to a basis for making military decisions. Certain members of the German naval command became convinced that the allies were already employing mystical forces to wage war against Germany. They believed that the British successes of locating and destroying German U-boats had been achieved through occult means and that the best way to combat this was also by using the occult as a weapon.

This led Himmler to establish a top secret institute dedicated to the ancient occult practice of pendulum dousing. Over maps of the North Atlantic, clairvoyants would swing an object suspended from a string attempting to locate the position of allied convoys. German u-boat missions were dispatched based on the results. In this letter written by Himmler dated January 12, 1943, he refers to dousing research and training having made great progress during the year.

Still, the most common occult arts employed by the Nazis were astrology and prophecy although they were approached in two distinctly different ways. Rudolf Hess and Heinrich Himmler genuinely believed in the occult and used it for making political decisions. But Josef Göbbels, head of the Propaganda Ministry, wanted to use the occult purely for propaganda purposes, to manipulate people and undermine allied morale. Göbbels soon became aware of a great source of mystical knowledge, the predictions of Nostradamus one of the most celebrated visionaries of all time. Nostradamus completed his masterpiece of prophesy in 1555. The book contains subtle references to a crisis in Britain and Poland in the year 1939, the year Nazi Germany invaded Poland, nearly 400 years after Nostradamus wrote his book. For Göbbels, Nostradamus was a perfect propaganda tool who's work could be interpreted as predicting a great victory in Germany's future.

To interpret the French prophet, Göbbels recruited renowned astrologer and Nostradamus expert, Karl Ernst Kraft. A particular quatrain that Göbbels seized on, seemed to refer directly to Hitler and quickly became part of the Nazi leader's mystic.

In Göbbels' diary, he expressed his excitement when a member of his staff began to formulate a plan to use the prophesy. May 19, 1942:

Burndt handed in a plan for the occultist propaganda to be carried on by us. We are getting somewhere. The Americans and English fall easily to this kind of propaganda. We are, therefore, pressing into service all star witnesses of occult prophesy. Nostradamus must once again submit to being quoted.

The creation of fake prophecies and fraudulent mysticism to influence the enemy became known as "black propaganda."

British intelligence discovered the deception and recognizing its propaganda potential, began to wage their own Nostradamus campaign. Just as the Nazis had flooded France with fake Nostradamus prophecies, the allies smuggled their own "black propaganda" into Germany. The "black propaganda" campaign in England soon took a new turn with the arrival of Hungarian-Jewish emigre and astrologer, Louis DeValle Recruited by British intelligence, DeValle was assigned to work with master counterfeiter, Elik Howe.

Howe and DeValle decided to create a counterfeit version of Germany's leading astrological magazine, Zenit. But Howe's master stroke came with a so-called special edition of Der Zenit dated April, 1943. He cleverly waited until July to publish an April edition, thus seemingly being able to predict events he knew would come true. British intelligence believed that if these predictions were picked up by the crews of German U-boats, the result would be a loss of morale and possibly even mutiny. The British counterfeit Der Zenit, however, contained one glaring error. They incorrectly titled the magazine Der Zenit instead of the actual title Zenit.

Astrology and espionage would soon collide again in what is still considered by many to be the most bizarre incident of the Second World War When Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Führer and one of Hitler's closest friends and advisors, made an astonishing solo flight to Scotland. Hess's idea to make the flight began with his belief that the British, a Nordic race, would be made sympathetic to the Aryan cause and could even be persuaded to side with the Germans if only Churchill could be overthrown. One of Hess's mentors, Karl Haushofer, reinforced this idea by telling Hess about a dream he had. In it he saw Hess walking through a Scottish castle with tapestries hanging from the walls, bringing peace between Germany and Great Britain. In addition to prophesy, astrology would also come to play a role in Hess's decision to make the flight.

Astrologer and close friend, Ernst Schulte-Strathaus, cast a horoscope for the Deputy Führer that revealed an auspicious arrangement of the planets.

On May 10, 1941 there was a particularly powerful astronomical line-up. Basically there were six planets in Taurus and a full moon exactly on the opposite side of the zodiac in Scorpio. According to astrological tradition, when you get such a line-up you'll get a major shift in global affairs and, therefore, it was fair to assume that May 10, 1941 could provide the turning point in the war.

There has always been some doubt whether Hess flew to Scotland based upon astrological advice. However, recently discovered documents written by Hess from prison in England, include a letter to his mother. In it he asked her to have two documents notarized: a record of Karl Haushofer's dream and the horoscope cast by Schulte-Strathaus.

Before Hess made the flight, some believe he conferred with the Führer. [Wolf Rüdiger Hess, son of Rudolf Hess: "Six days before my father flew, there was a discussion between Hitler and my father which lasted four hours. Nobody knows what they were talking about, but one knows that when the four hours were over, my father came from the room and Hitler had his arm around the shoulder of my father and said 'Yes, you have always been and are still a very stubborn chap.' This was a very friendly good-bye." ]

Whatever words passed between Hitler and Hess, at 5:45 pm on May 10, 1941 Hess climbed into a Messerschmidt fighter and set off for Scotland. His plan was to meet with the Duke of Hamilton, a man he'd met through Karl Haushofer. Hess hoped to use the Duke to bypass Churchill and attempt to make peace directly with the King of England. Having written the Duke several letters in advance of his mission, Hess was expecting a warm welcome.

Instead of a greeting party, when Hess entered British airspace, he was shot down by the RAF and forced to bail out.

Hitler's reaction to Hess's flight was one of his major acting performances. He made a tremendous performance of surprise, shock, horror and everything else. When it appeared that Hess's mission had failed, of course, then all propaganda came out that Hess was a lone madman.

Hitler blamed the entire Hess affair on the advice of Hess's astrologers. In response, the Nazi Propaganda Ministry issued an edict called "Action Hess" that forbade the public practice of any occult sciences including astrology. The result was a further clamp-down on the activities of astrologers who were eventually all rounded-up in the 'Action Hess' a month after Hess's flight. They arrested all the prominent astrologers that they knew about and took them away for interrogation.

Karl Kraft, the man who provided Göbbels with the powerful reinterpretations of Nostradamus as well as strikingly accurate astrological predictions, would suffer the ultimate punishment , he went to Buchenwald and he was killed there.

The astrologers who were arrested under the "Action Hess" were treated in different ways depending on their use to the Reich. Those already working for Himmler were released immediately and allowed to continue their work. During this time, Himmler came into contact with one of Germany's leading astrologers, Wilhelm Wulff.

In 1943, Wulff predicted that Hitler would survive a great danger on the 20th of July, 1944, that he would fall ill in November of 1944 and die a mysterious death before the 7th of May 1945. On the basis of these predictions, Wulff became Himmler's personal astrologer and one of his most trusted aides. All of these predictions came to pass.

In a post-war interrogation by the allies, Walter Schellenberg admitted using Wulff to advance his own position. He believed that Wulff's influence would carry great weight with Himmler.

According to Schellenberg's interrogation, during the final weeks of the war Himmler became obsessed with the astrology of a coup when the stars suggested that he might successfully overthrow the Führer.

Reading Hitler's chart, Wulff saw planetary arrangements that indicated a downfall. Wulff and Schellenberg continued to urge Himmler to overthrow Hitler and install himself as the leader of the waning Reich.

Despite Hitler's order to continue the exterminations to the end, Wulff was instrumental in convincing Himmler to temporarily stop the killing. Having taken this action, it appeared that Himmler was ready to launch his coup. But ultimately, his fear and loyalty to the Fuhrer prevented him from seizing power. Himmler remained hopeful that some mystical force of destiny would alter the defeat that was clearly at hand.

Himmler was also very interested in historical parallels between the situation in the mid 40s and previous historical periods. Himmler looked back to a previous great German war with Russia, the Seven Years War, fought between Frederick the Great of Prussia and the Russians. Fortunes were said to have turned then when the Russian Tsarina Elizabeth died. In April, 1945 President Roosevelt died and Himmler took this as a sign that history was about to repeat itself and Germany was going to be saved."

Two weeks later, Göbbels and his entire family descended with Adolf Hitler into the Führer's private bunker. On April 30th, Adolf Hitler and his bride Eva Braun committed suicide. Göbbels poisoned his six children, then shot his wife and himself. Dressed as a common German soldier, Heinrich Himmler almost managed to escape. He was arrested by the British but during a physical examination crushed a cyanide capsule he kept in his mouth. At 11:04 pm on the 23rd of May, the Reichsführer who had summoned occult forces in the service of Aryan glory was dead.

In November, 1945 several top Nazis were brought to trial by the allies at Nuremburg. Rudolf Hess was sentenced to life in prison. He died there at the age of 93. Occultist Alfred Rosenberg was found guilty of crimes against humanity and hanged in October, 1946.

The Third Reich which was to have lasted over a thousand years ended after only twelve. Nearly 50 million had died. Ironically among them were the first generation of Hitler's so-called "master race" who were to father further generations of Aryan supermen.

Throughout history, mythology has had a powerful influence on the human mind. All cultures have been mythically driven. However, in Nazi Germany, the linking of political aims to a corrupted mythology led to an evil unparalleled in history.