The 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of “a new cottage industry,” writes Eric Kurlander: “the crypto-history of Nazi occultism” (xii), which claimed that an occult-esoteric irrationalism underlay the apparent irrationality of the Third Reich's aims and actions. This popular phenomenon of little fact and much fabulation was soon challenged by historians, such as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (The Occult Roots of Nazism [2003]), who severed the ties of Nazism and occultism by arguing that the völkisch-esoteric notions of movements such as ariosophy may have reflected and refracted National Socialist ideas, but that they did not have an influence on post-1933 Nazi policy. Against this portrait of the Third Reich's “escalating hostilities” (xiii) toward occultism, Eric Kurlander has undertaken an extensively researched, “post-revisionist” (xiv) history of the Third Reich and the roles played by occultist-esoteric and “border-scientific” ideas and their advocates. Neither finding the origins of National Socialism in what he calls a “supernatural imaginary” that had permeated German popular culture and proved an uncanny guest of much elite culture, nor seeing National Socialism as a necessary consequence of such thinking, he argues for the Third Reich's ideological affinity with, and instrumental use of, many of the imaginary's particulars. That imaginary drew upon “occultism and ‘border science,’ pagan, New Age, and Eastern religions, folklore, mythology, and many other supernatural doctrines” (xi) interlaced with völkisch/Aryan exceptionalist notions that together reframed the supernatural aspect of Christianity.
Kurlander divides his monograph into three roughly chronological parts: i) the pre-1933 development of the völkisch supernatural imaginary, as well as the rise of “border sciences” and their relationship to the development of the National Socialist party and to its leadership; ii) the changing roles of supernatural ideas, practices, and practitioners during the Third Reich against the background of the Nazi leadership's periodic anti-occultist campaigns; and iii) the involvement of this supernatural matrix in the conduct of World War II and the Holocaust. Starting with an intellectual history of many of the beliefs and doctrines (e.g., the well-attested “longing for myth,” Germanism/Aryanism, geopolitics, anthroposophy, ariosophy) that stocked the imaginary, and the “border sciences” (e.g., [para]psychology, World Ice Theory, “scientific” astrology, radiesthesia, cosmobiology) that complemented it, Kurlander argues for the involvement of those “scientific” fields in Third Reich policies and practices, including genocide.
Although his array of documentation confirms the participation and occasional promotion of their practitioners amid the battles for influence among high-level party officials, Kurlander inflates the roster of “border sciences.” For example, he includes “racial hygiene” (the German academic designation for eugenics) and “racial-breeding” among the “border scientific fields” (22), which allows him to assert that “this supernaturally infused, holistic approach to biology helped transform the applied practice of eugenics … into a hugely ambitious and fanatical programme of human experimentation and genocide” (30)—and thereby magnify the alleged influence of “border scientific fields” on that program.
Kurlander then moves to the emergence of völkisch-esoteric organizations, like the German Order and the Thule Society, and their interaction with völkisch-political movements, and to their eventual engulfment by the Nazi party. He then details early dealings with the supernatural imaginary by Adolf Hitler and other party leaders, and the subsequent use of occult periodicals; he also focuses on writers noted for the use of supernatural literature, such as Hanns Heinz Ewers, and “Germany's most flamboyant clairvoyant” (85), Erik Hanussen, to mobilize popular support during the party's rise to power. The discussion of “Hitler's magic” introduces the Führer’s “probable” (58) reading and “apparent” (58) underlining of Ernst Schertel's Magic: History, Theory, Practice (1923), but soon loses any conditional qualification (see p. 64). Kurlander repeatedly adduces those underlinings to corroborate his claims about the influence of the supernatural imaginary on Hitler's thinking and policy (e.g., pp. 138, 171, 182, 189). Buttressing his claim for Schertel's influence, he draws upon Hermann Rauschning's conversations with Hitler, as he often does—and usually with the same qualifier (“must be taken with a grain of salt” [138]) that the Führer was familiar with “a ‘savant of Munich’ who had written some curious stuff about the prehistoric world, about myths and visions of early man, about … the organ of the magic perception of the Infinite” (138). Kurlander then claims that the “Munich occultist to whom Rauschning alludes was probably the parapsychologist Ernst Schertel” (138). Though born in Munich, Schertel had lived, studied, and taught elsewhere since before World War I; the more likely reference, in terms of both location and subject matter, is the ariosophist Karl Maria Wiligut, “Heinrich Himmler's mentor in ideological and spiritual matters and head of the SS Archives” (22).
When detailing the distinctions among the various occult-esoteric doctrines and practices that a given Nazi leader supported, Kurlander characterizes Hitler, Reinhard Heydrich, Martin Bormann, and Alfred Rosenberg as generally anti-occult, but Walther Darré, Rudolf Hess, and Heinrich Himmler as more open. He then maps how supernatural practices and practitioners were caught in leadership power struggles and in the opposition between those “border sciences” deemed as commercial variants (led by charlatans and swindlers, and often coded as “individualist,” “internationalist,” and “Jewish”) and those dubbed as scientific, which often found homes in universities and the regime's various working groups. The major concern for the party leadership was whether particular occult sites challenged National Socialism's hegemony or were politically reliable. Nazis sought to control rather than eliminate occult ideas. Kurlander thus argues that the round-up of astrologers and other occultists in 1940, though broader than earlier efforts, was a response to the purported role that astrological readings had on Rudolf Hess's May 1941 flight to Scotland. The release of virtually all those arrested shortly thereafter corroborates the situational rather than ideological aspect of the crackdown. The lack of consistent and ongoing persecution of occultists belies the claim of Goodrick-Clarke and others that National Socialism, once in power, became increasingly hostile toward occultism.
Finally, Kurlander addresses the roles of border scientists and supernatural thinking during World War II and the Holocaust. Moving beyond archive-based accounts of personnel, projects, and the, at best, inconclusive results of their attempted application, such as Joseph Goebbel's use of astrology in the propaganda war, the work becomes more speculative when attempting to ascribe a significant role to the supernatural imaginary with regard to the regime's genocidal actions. Kurlander's sources do not always support his claims about its alleged influence: for example, the “Slavic-Jewish vampire” is absent from the cited study (282 and note 175) on German fears of vampiric Slavic partisans. Further, Kurlander's references to “faith-based” sciences (i.e., ones based on a belief in the supernatural) veil both an apparent conflation of a belief in magic with the psychological condition of “magical thinking” (that saying something will make it so), and a failure to address German philosophical ideas about the will creating the conditions for its own actualization. There is something even more troubling: that the threat of monsters appeared in occultist works and “border science” folklore studies and was also ascribed to “the Jew” in National Socialist discourse does not justify Kurlander's assertion that the Holocaust was “only possible in its scope and severity because of the elision [sic!] with völkisch-esoteric, fantastical, even magical conceptions of Jewish monstrosity” (252). He notes that “the Jew” had been demonized in the Christian imaginary, but he more asserts than argues that it was subsumed and superseded by the supernatural imaginary. That there was a “decades-long” addition of “pagan and occultist” demonization does not mean that, without such supplementation, “the radical conception and solution to the ‘Jewish Question’ would most likely not have occurred” (252). Just as unwarranted is Kurlander's claim that, since Hitler employed the “quasi-biological, quasi-scientific metaphor” of the “Jewish virus,” “Auschwitz, in this sense, is the border scientific byproduct of the Nazis’ faith-based vision” (259). In the end, such claims undercut the historical value of the “supernatural” material that Kurlander has conjured from the archives and made available to his readers.
