The relationship between the Nazis and the occult wasn’t black or white, but according to historian Eric Kurlander, Nazism and various branches of occultism became noticeably intertwined almost immediately after the founding of the National Socialist German Workers Party in 1919.
As Kurlander writes, by the 1920s,
prominent esotericists, including Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, one of the progenitors of the occult doctrine of ariosophy, and Rudolf von Sebottendorff, a leading astrologer and co-founder of the proto-Nazi Thüle Society, argued that Nazi ideology and iconography, as well as the party apparatus, had emerged from the Wilhelmine occult milieu.
Other contemporaneous sources corroborated this stance. Carl Jung equated Hitler to a “mystic medicine man.” In 1940, British journalist and esotericist Lewis Spence wrote the monograph The Occult Causes of the Present War. The 1947 film From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film by émigré Siegfried Kracauer singles out the irrational and macabre components of the Weimar Republic as the preconditions for National Socialism. Similarly, in Theses Against Occultism, Theodor Adorno analyzes the interwar culture and subculture in the same light.
Yet, occult practices had hierarchies. Early in the regime, most Nazi officials worked to differentiate between popular or commercial occultism, which they deemed ideologically “sectarian,” and acceptable “scientific” occultism, which was generally tolerated and intermittently sponsored by the regime. The branches of scientific occultism were treated as alternative forms of knowledge, referred to as “border science,” and included astrology, clairvoyance, theosophy, ariosophy, and various kinds of spiritualist, parapsychological, and “natural healing” practices.
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“Before 1937, various states passed individual laws reinforcing Weimar-era rules against fraud and commercial astrology,” Kurlander writes, “but most official astrological organizations and journals didn’t experience persecution or interdiction until 1938.”
In fact, even in the Weimar Republic, there was a legal loophole: occult practitioners simply had to frame their practices as “scientific occultism.” While it might be surprising to see that Nazi leaders honored that precedent, it makes sense, Kurlander explains, given that they also dabbled in a host of esoteric beliefs, including “biodynamic agricultural practices,” pendulum dowsing, cosmobiology, and natural healing. At the same time, pursuing and punishing career and commercial occultists aligned with the Reich’s mission to repress sectarian tendencies, which included engaging in “egocentrism,” communist agitation, and internationalism. Even the SD (Sicherheitsdienst, or Security Service) and the Gestapo commissioned dozens of reports and peer reviews aimed at differentiating between “scientific occultism” and charlatanry.
Professional debunkers, a category that flourished in the era, weren’t necessarily opposed to scientific occultism: they were allegedly trying to, per Kurlander, “root out the ‘vampire of superstition’ propagated by charlatans—religious sectarians, foreigners, and Jews.” In doing so, they used the same tricks of the trade as those they were pursuing.
“In attempting to distinguish between occult charlatanry and the ‘scientific’ study of magic and occult phenomena, the Gestapo, the Propaganda Ministry, and the Reich Office for Public Health were merely being consistent with positions taken by leading advocates of border science,” observes Kurlander, who offers a few notable examples of these inconsistencies.
For example, in January 1941, Helmut Schreiber, the president of the Reich Magicians’ Association, wrote to the professional debunker Albert Stadthagen complaining that he and his associate, the Police Commissar Carl Pelz, “were undermining illusionists everywhere by publicly demonstrating the ‘scientific’ basis of magic.” Within two weeks of receiving Schreiber’s letter, Pelz was given a direct order from the Gestapo to cease his campaign of public “enlightenment.” Pelz then went to the Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude, KdF) division of the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeiterfront, DAF) to advocate for his case.
“KdF, which found Pelz’s and Stadthagen’s presentations as entertaining as they were enlightening, lodged an official protest against the ban,” writes Kurlander. Still, the ban against these debunkers remained in place.
Then, on May 10, 1941, Rudolf Hess crash-landed in Scotland to broker a peace between the Third Reich and the British Empire. Hess was promptly detained after it became clear he wasn’t acting in an official capacity; his impulsive actions were attributed to his fixation with astrology. What followed was the approval of the so-called Hess Action, which had the Gestapo round up astrologers, clairvoyants, and occultists of every stripe.
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“The ‘Hess Action’ was certainly more systematic than any previous measures taken by the Third Reich against sectarian thinkers or esoteric groups,” writes Kurlander. “Hundreds of occultists were detained or arrested; thousands of books and esoteric paraphernalia were confiscated.”
Another notable case involved Eduard Neumann, a professional magician who went by the name Rolf Sylvero. Neumann dodged any type of notable censorship for a long time by, among other things, rebranding a fortune-telling routine as “thought power.” He managed to avoid any repercussions until July 1941, when, in the aftermath of the Hess Action, he was dropped from a number of engagements. Upon inquiring about the reasons and “well aware of the fine line between practicing occultism and ‘enlightenment’ in the form of occult-based entertainment,” writes Kurlander, “he decided to petition the Propaganda Ministry for official permission to perform ‘anti-occult experimental lectures,’ vehemently denying that he practiced magic or the occult arts.”
To further appease the regime, Neumann also offered to snitch on other swindlers. He was given a chance to do a try-out performance, which was promptly ruled occultist. Still, the KdF kept lobbying for him, and while the paper trail ended sometime in 1942, “a number of other cases from the twelve months following the ‘Hess Action’ indicate that most occult practitioners were not arrested or murdered, but instead required to clear their performances through the Propaganda Ministry,” notes Kurlander.
On a more absurd note, a book titled Sohn der Sterne (Son of the Stars), which detailed the evils of commercial astrology, was prevented from publication because it lacked astrological rigor.
“This is a case in which the one official in the Third Reich literally charged with ‘defending against astrology and World Ice Theory’ made a significant effort to prevent an ‘unfair’ misrepresentation of the former and forbid any criticism whatsoever of the latter,” writes Kurlander.
What emerges is that, because of how much both the civilians and the regime were inherently inclined towards the occult, enforcing hierarchies within it hardly worked. And as ridiculous as these anecdotes might be, “it is important to take these phenomena seriously if we want to gain a fuller understanding of the ideology and practice of Nazism,” concludes Kurlander.
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