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- [00:00]
Mark
We're going to discuss one of the most interesting topics in history. To me, it's a combination of history and occultism. But they had this weird fascination with the supernatural.
- [00:09]
Eric Curlander
The supernatural imaginary, this collection of beliefs. Himmler might be the only leading Nazi who believed in almost every doctrine. We've talked about. Wagner and Gotter, Dammerung and werewolves and vampires.
- [00:20]
Mark
So the Toole Society and named after this place, Atlantis, Hyperborea, these are all effectively the same place of some type.
- [00:27]
Eric Curlander
Of lost civilization in the North Atlantic. There might have been frost giants or they might have had a third eye. They might have mated with aliens. So it's more like a fun project. They don't know that they're gonna lose. Then they lose.
- [00:39]
Mark
Why does he put Himmler basically as his number two? And Hess, who's also very interested in occultism, is so close in the high brass of the Nazi Party.
- [00:47]
Eric Curlander
Even Goebbels and Hitler believe in some of this stuff. Himmler and Hess were so into it, they got made fun of. Hitler himself recognizes that we need to move away from that if we're gonna become a mass movement.
- [00:58]
Mark
He had sent his men to go find Thor's hammer. Did they uncover, did they find any artifacts?
- [01:03]
Eric Curlander
So this is an interesting thing. It's a question I often get.
- [01:06]
Mark
Hitler is now going to start an eastern front war with Russia and Hess is concerned about this. So he consults with his astrologer, flies to basically broker a deal, gets captured. And Hitler is livid about this. And basically they pin it on the astrologer and he bans all this mysticism in Nazi German.
- [01:25]
Eric Curlander
That's the narrative that Bormann and Heydrich and Goebbels give Hitler. It's not completely accurate.
- [01:38]
Mark
Eric Curlander. How are you, sir?
- [01:41]
Eric Curlander
Excellent. How are you?
- [01:42]
Mark
I'm doing excellent. Thank you so much for being here. I'm really, really excited to talk because today we're going to discuss one of the most interesting topics in history. To me, this is a combination of some of the most sort of morbid and interesting things. It's a combination of history and occultism. You wrote an excellent book, Hitler's Monsters, sort of an exploration of occultism in the Third Reich. And to me, it is the only thing that put the context of the Nazi atrocities into perspective. It made me understand the fundamental, I guess, idea that went behind sort of the war and then the ethnic cleansing that followed there. Therefore, this idea, like, you know, when we talk about Aryanism and it's, you know, I think in school people are taught, okay, there's this bad guy, Hitler, and he wanted to make the master race where people have blonde hair and blue eyes. And I was like, okay, all right, that makes sense. And that's why they wanted to kill the undesirables, quote, unquote. And I go, okay, that makes sense. But then they say, the. Not the Russians, they're not Aryan. I was like, they're blonde hair, blue eyes. And they go, okay, but the Italians, they are. And I was like, well, not many Italians have blonde hair. And they go, and the Japanese, they're Aryan.
- [02:57]
Eric Curlander
I was like, well, what is partially.
- [03:00]
Mark
I'm like, how does any of this make sense? And then they're like, oh, but we need to preserve the Nordic and Scandinavian traditions. I was like, they're not even. What is it? It. All of. All of it kind of falls apart from that fundamental principle of, you know, what Arianism, I think, is commonly thought to be. So I guess as a starting point, I guess I would love to sort of unpack that idea. Unpack, you know, Hitler's religion. What was the religion of the Nazis? What did that look like? Some people claim he was Catholic and the thought leadership in sort of the. The National Socialist Party and what many of the high ranking executives, what they believed. And there's all this, you know, interesting mysticism around, like objects that they were attempting to find. There's a lot of like lore, kind of Indiana Jones style, you know, trying to uncover cauldrons and holy lances and Thor's hammer and all these really, really interesting things, looking at this sort of, you know, terrible regime. But they had this weird fascination with the supernatural. So I guess to unpack it, could we start around the turn of the century, around the 1900s, what was happening culturally and spiritually in Western Europe that sort of paved the way for this philosophy to take hold in Germany?
- [04:16]
Eric Curlander
Great. Well, thank you, Mark. And again, it's great to be on the show. And I'm glad that you want to start in the 19th century because this is important. It's important to kind of mention three things in response to your kind of excellent summary. The first is that the subtitle is A Supernatural History of the Third Reich. Precisely to get away from this idea that the occult per se is the fuel to Nazi ideology. The argument I make is a bigger one, that there are multiple elements of ideas in the 19th century, which include folklore and mythology. That's not technically occultism or esotericism, what we call border science, Grenz, Wissenschaft, what we might call pseudoscience. Now which, as we would say now, it might be adjacent to occultism or conspiracism, but it's not the same thing. Right. And then you have religion. Right. You have paganism, you have German Christianity. Again, does it fit the same kind of mental universe? Certainly, but not the occult, not witchcraft, not werewolves. So when you bring this all together, I would say there's something developing which I call the supernatural imaginary and has all these elements in it. I'll unpack that a little more in a second. The second thing from your introduction that I want to make sure everyone's aware of is that there's this tension between science and religion and science and faith based views of the world which percolate the supernatural imaginary. And one way of squaring the circle throughout our conversations to remember that when fascists and far right thinkers, much like many occultists, esotericists and people who are invested in particular evangelical or fundamentalist belief, operate, they will quickly abandon materialist science when it doesn't fit their view. So they'll invoke science to get legitimacy, but when pushed, they will then abandon it. So the way that all these things worked is they would often invoke some scientific theory, sometimes a legitimate one, sometimes less legitimate. And if someone then pushed them and said, well, that doesn't make sense, how can they would just try to exclude that person from the conversation? So that's just a rhetorical and kind of psychological approach that you see on the far right than a now. So that's not unique to the Nazis. That's just what people who often have these faith based ideas, they want to be seen as legitimate do when people who don't accept them engage with them.
- [06:47]
Mark
Interesting. So utilizing scientific data, but not scientific.
- [06:50]
Eric Curlander
Methods or even scientific forms. So they talk about experiments and they talk about theories and hypotheses, but they're still based in what we would call faith. And when actual scientists who will themselves often say, we aren't sure about this or that, say, well, let's conduct an experiment and it doesn't prove their theory true, they want to abandon those individuals or freeze them out, we can talk about that when we talk about world ice Theory is a great example of this.
- [07:17]
Mark
Right.
- [07:19]
Eric Curlander
And then the third thing, and we'll get to it later on, which really isn't going on in the late 19th century. But you mentioned ethnic cleansing and racism and Aryanism. The important thing to point out is for me, the supernatural thinking is kind of the special sauce, so to speak. It's the catalyst for a lot of the worst human experiments and kind of genocidal plans, but it's not the foundation. The foundation is much broader, and that is in eugenics and Western science and imperialism and theories of race that many Western countries accepted. That's how you get to the Holocaust or the precipice of it. But that's also going to be where the Nazis and other kind of far right thinkers break off. Because what happened in the 30s and 40s is a lot of these experiments, like the Tuskegee experiments in the United States, right? Giving syphilis to African Americans, claims that different racial groups had lower IQs. There were enough mainstream scientists testing those things and saying, actually that's not true. There's much more diversity within populations in between them, whether it's IQ strength, anything. And so what was happening is a lot of scientists, even if they were ideologically driven to be racist or sexist, when the science kept coming back saying this can't be proven, they'd pull back from it. If you're a far right thinker immersed in esotericism, when the science doesn't back you up and you still want to commit something like the Holocaust, you just invoke the fact that the Jews, they aren't just biologically inferior, they're also vampires and parasites and innately communistic. So I want to just get those three things out at the beginning. We're talking about a larger framework, the supernatural, imaginary, I call it. We could call it romantic thinking. It's not just esotericism or occultism. The fact that there is this tension between invoking science. Everyone from the late 19th century on, every party in the west and later on all industrialized societies, Japan will invoke science and need to use science and technology to win war. So no one's completely rejecting science. This isn't the 12th century. But what you see that's very interesting in liberal societies, while there's a lot of tension around scientific truth, very often you will see a sort of consensus build after lots of experiments and theories get proven time and again in fascist societies, you can see a great selectivity about it because they'll invoke faith as often as they invoke science and ideology. And that's how you get what I would argue the radical. My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career.
- [10:04]
Mark
Day and said he was a big roas man.
- [10:07]
Eric Curlander
Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend. My friends still laugh at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn. You'll be able to reach people who do get $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com results to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn the place to be to be this episode is brought to you by Shopify. Upgrade your business with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. Shop pay boosts convers up to 50%, meaning fewer carts going abandoned and more sales going cha ching. So if you're into growing your business, get a commerce platform that's ready to sell wherever your customers are. Visit shopify.com to upgrade your selling today. Nature of Nazi racial policies they weren't any different. I mean if you look what the Belgians did in the Congo, what United States did with Native Americans, in the long run they also killed millions of people of a different race. But the systematic nature of it and the justifications were more I think radicalized by this faith based ideology. Science alone wouldn't have allowed the Nazis to get away with what they did. They needed ideology. They needed some of these esoteric and mythological almost religious beliefs.
- [11:23]
Mark
Interesting. And I guess even the pursuit of trying to create a history which is very interesting, even excellent. Like I forget the term in German it was Himmler's on in Arabak Institute.
- [11:37]
Eric Curlander
For Ancestral Research is what is how.
- [11:39]
Mark
We translate it is conceptually fascinating. I think has sort of almost modern parallels in certain ways where you know, there's an attempt to make history to sort of go out and find what we need. Having an agenda and then proving it to be true.
- [11:52]
Eric Curlander
Yeah, let's unpack that for a second. So first of all, many historians, sociologists, political scientists have talked about the way that it was really first liberals wasn't fascist invented traditions to create a modern nation state. Right. Because, because going I mean for 5,000 years of history, people identified based on where they grew up, their kin network, their family, their culture, their language or religion. Right. In the Islamic world or Christian world you can have very different ethnicities and kind of pre Christian or pre Islamic traditions and still feel like you're part of this universal network well into the Middle Ages. And so a bunch of historians, social scientists have been trying to figure out well why does that change? And their argument, I'm not saying this is the only argument out there, but one argument is that a bunch of middle class liberals who wanted to create a nation state right in the late 18th, early 19th century invented traditions. They took selectively things from the history of wherever they Were they codified the language and said this is the only way to speak and write the language. And they created nations or invented traditions. Famous article by Terence Ranger on this, that the Scots actually didn't wear kilts really that often. If you look at the data. And then the minute they were forced to be part of the British Empire in 1707, all of a sudden you start to have these new cultural traditions, including wearing kilts as a way to differentiate yourself from the English.
- [13:26]
Mark
Interesting. And are you suggesting that that's a top down change where exactly?
- [13:30]
Eric Curlander
So these historians would say that it's the middle class, it's not the aristocracy, because the aristocracy in this bizarre way are universalist. Right. They can be racist, but the race can transcend nation. Right. So you have all these different Germanic, Italian and Spanish nobles intermarrying and they don't mind having multi ethnic nation, multi ethnic empires. In fact, nationalism, liberal nationalism, is dangerous for their empires because liberalism is about freeing the individual and giving you self government. Nationalism is about creating your own state around your ethnicity, not your class or your birth. So liberal nationalism was a threat to the aristocracy. So I don't want to say it's elites in the sense of like aristocrats, but a rising middle class that was literate, that saw the benefits of a strong nation state that was both free and capitalist, had a constitution, had an army. How do you create that when you have all these peasants who don't read very well? You've got workers over here are frustrated at their lives. You've got a bunch of elites in different parts of the country who see themselves as southern, northern, Sicilian, you know, Piedmontese. You invent these traditions, you spread it through what Benedict Anderson calls print capitalism. Everyone reads the newspaper, they start to feel like they're part of the same culture, country, they have the same interests. Interesting to see what Bennett Henderson is saying now with the Internet, because you don't have those common things anymore and that creates nations. So what I would argue the fascists are doing is they're simply taking slightly different traditions, also looking at mythology, history, culture. Right. Ideology, religion, and figuring out what is best at promoting their particular view of nation and empire. Right. They're not the first to do that. It's the liberal nationalists of the 19th century do it first.
- [15:28]
Mark
That's interesting.
- [15:29]
Eric Curlander
But the alternative explanation is that it's ground up that people actually have affinities. Anthropologists study this, historians with people who are like them, psychologists, whether it's appearance, culture, language. So that's always there. It's called the Primordialist argument. And then all that leaders have to do is invoke it. So in this theory, right? And this is how Italian fascists viewed the world. The first fascists, all the stuff that made you Italian was already there. It preceded the liberal nation state. You, you beloved your language, you had vestigial memories of the Roman Empire. And you know, you were into Apollo and, and were, were, you know, the, the Roman versions of all of these, of all the same gods. The Greek gods and the Greeks were part of your kind of national tradition, right?
- [16:20]
Mark
Greek culture, it feels very blood and soil and all.
- [16:23]
Eric Curlander
And all you had to do was kind of operationalize it. So one view which you could say is more liberal or Marxist is that you create the, it's constructivist, right? You construct the nation and identity in a very conscious way. And the more I don't want to say just right wing, they're obviously liberal and left wing sociologists and theorists who look at it say actually it's already there, so you just have to operationalize it. You don't have to create it.
- [16:54]
Mark
Right. If this ambient, as you said, primordial feeling is existing, you can just sort of catalyze it and then it'll, it'll persist. And then furthermore, I guess if people are looking for a countercultural, you know, attitude, if they already are feeling this counterculturalism, you just kind of need to give them the token to say, hey, wearing these tartans is, you know, our counter culturalist ideal. And then they can jump onto it. And it raises a really interesting moral question as far as like nation building goes, which is a, you know, is a difficult task. The idea of nation building, I mean, it's a fascinating thing that any nation can even get created specifically not on, you know, geographical or like ethnic lines, but just as an idea is crazy. But it raises the question, is it okay to lie to your populace in order to form the nation? I don't know if I'm qualified to answer it, but it is an interesting question.
- [17:44]
Eric Curlander
Any kind of affinity group though is going to have to at some point smooth out certain individual differences, right? Whether it's a church or a religion or even a large family or a kinship group. So the question is not so much about lying or not lying, it's what do you seize on that feels authentic or has a real history. If you take the primordialist, that can get these people to work together, right? So not to get too much off topic, but one way that I've tried to test the theories in my own book because again, I do believe in social science. And historians should test their theories. If they can't reproduce the experiment in the past by going back to the archives, then try to do it in the present. Is we looked at what it is, this kind of supernatural Romantic mindset, what it means psychologically. Right. Using a historian named Lovejoy, intellectual, historian, philosopher. And he had noted that Romantics tend to think in certain core ways, like he called it diversitarianism, organicism, meaning they're always looking for a way to create an in group and an out group. It's not always racial like the early Romantics weren't. You know, even Herder, the founder of, in some ways of German nationalism, thought everyone should have their own nation, state and ethnic group that fits their culture and ethnicity and blood and soil. But the idea that that's how you have to organize the world. Diversitarian in diversitarian ways. Meaning there are certain ways where everyone can't just get along because they're always going to be different.
- [19:20]
Mark
Right. There's an intrinsic segregation and the same.
- [19:22]
Eric Curlander
Thing with the descanza, the holistic view that we're all part of societies are best when you're part of the same organism, even if it's hierarchical and you can't have elements that don't belong to your organism. These things weren't biologized in the late 18th, early 19th century, but you can see how they were susceptible to that. So his argument, and we're riffing off of this, is that this romantic way of viewing the world, it's a reaction to the Enlightenment and liberalism. Right. That's where the Romantic era comes from. Can be weaponized by the far right. The us versus Them. Carl Schmitt and the best way to do it is draw in the supernatural, imaginary theories that can't be tested. You're different, you're better, you're being oppressed in some way. These other groups think that everyone could get along and there are universal laws and everyone should tolerate each other and there should be international institutions. That's the core belief of liberalism. Liberals and socialists don't like each other in a lot of ways. But the two basic principles behind liberalism and socialism is that you can have universal liberation, whether it's around capitalism and the individual or about the socialist community. Right. As a. As a group, they both say everyone can share in this ideology and these outcomes. The far right does not believe that. Right. It's your own blood and soil, your own traditions that need to be preserved.
- [20:47]
Mark
Your own borders that can be Manipulated.
- [20:49]
Eric Curlander
And that's why we're using this term romantic, because there's a tradition within Romanticism of saying, why are we trying to get everyone to, you know, live together like these liberals and socialists? It doesn't make sense. Let's just be who we are, what we've always been, the primordialist. And if you don't know what those elements are, we'll give them to you. Here they are. It's this form of ethnicity and this kind of dress and this parade and this view of race. And here's where our borders end, and here's where they. Or here's where they should end, Right? And these people can belong and these people can't. And that's the diversitarianism and the organicism. And he also uses the term Streben Striving or competition. Romantics, even before Darwin, didn't see it as possible for a nation or a people to survive if they weren't working to do it, fighting against something. So when you get the second half of the 19th century and you get Darwin and then you get Carl schmidt In the 20th century, us versus them, you always have to fight against an internal, external enemy. This is inherent to the Romantic framework as well. And what do you draw on the things I talk about in the book Supernatural, imaginary.
- [21:59]
Mark
Oh, that's interesting. And so what role does theosophy play in the early parts of the 1900s?
- [22:05]
Eric Curlander
Great way to kind of illustrate this. Right? So theosophy is definitely an occult doctrine. It's a combination, like all of these new ideas, right, of science and religion, faith and material explanations of the world. Because in the late 19th century, and this is where we started, traditional religion isn't working for people anymore. They're bored going to church, especially men. It was declining everywhere, but women were still more likely, statistically than men to attend church. They were looking for new forms of spirituality. And. And science, which did have a lot of answers, was too complicated and too materialistic. And technology, a lot of people felt overwhelmed by it. They couldn't understand an article on relativity, so it must not be true. They understood rocket ships as big, big phallic things that go up in the sky. So they believed in rockets and things that exploded and guns, but things that are very small, like quantum mechanics, or very large, like planets and dark matter. I don't get it. It must be a weird Jewish conspiracy.
- [23:11]
Mark
I also, I wonder if it lacked a sort of emotional or like a sort of an emotive explanation where, like, you know, there's a hyper rationalization Specifically in this time, people have used the term like scientism. But to say, like, oh, that feeling you have when you pray or when you meditate, that's nothing. And that's, you know, there's. There is no God. But then I wonder if there's people that say, like, well, I feel something.
- [23:35]
Eric Curlander
Yeah, absolutely.
- [23:36]
Mark
So this science thing is not exactly satisfying. That what, what invented the universe, what created us? There's obviously some type of prime mover, the cause.
- [23:44]
Eric Curlander
I mean, that, that's all of kind of Western philosophy. But in the late 19th century, it's getting scary because the more you can uncover material explanations and the more that traditional religion isn't working to counter them, you get these things like esotericism, right? Border science, all these new ideas to fill the gap. Not just in Germany and Austria. And this is why theosophy is such a great example, because that started with a Russian emigre who spent time in Britain and America. It has nothing to do with Germany and Austria. And it was just basically taking kind of Hindu and Tibetan and Buddhist ideas and mixing them with Darwinism, vulgar Darwinism. So root races, seven root races that evolved over time. The most superior of them probably maybe mated with some kind of extraterrestrial race or had some kind of cosmological sperma come to Earth. Unfortunately, whether it's through race mixing or some other thing, that society, which we now call Atlantis collapses. Right. And we could get back to that. If you really study hard and are really good spiritually and physically, you might be able to get back as a European to that, to the talents, the divine wisdom, the spiritual kind of balance, the physical balance of this original root race. I'm not an expert on theosophy. That's kind of the core that was still universalist. Anyone could do it. It wasn't just Europeans. And Blavatsky was very interested in India and Tibet and all these things. What's interesting then is to see how this, because I just had. Universalism is more intrinsic to socialism and liberalism than it is to right wing thinking. So what then happens in Austria where people are struggling? Remember, they don't have a nation state. And in fact, after 1866, when Austria loses, the Austrian Empire loses to Prussia, they get frozen out of the whole German. This episode is brought to you by me. Undies, underwear, drawers are like the Wild West. You never know what you're going to pull out or what shape it's in. So upgrade your collection with the buttery, soft comfort of me Undies, meundies, signature fabric is as soft as a warm hug from your favorite sweater. Plus, it's breathable and, oh, so comfy, making it ideal for all day wear. Get 20% off your first order, plus free shipping at MeUndies.com Spotify with code Spotify. That's MeUndies.com Spotify code Spotify Experiment. So if you're a German nationalist or if you were used to having this mega empire and running the whole German empire since Charlemagne, right, the Holy Roman Empire, you're now in this tiny rump empire that's just basically hanging on with Hungary, trying to prevent it from falling apart completely. You want to join a lot of these Germans want to join with the other Germanic and Aryan peoples. And in that environment, a guy named Rudolf Steiner, who's a Theosophist, says, you know, this is all a little too esoteric and religious and Eastern. I'm going to create my own version. I like the idea. I like uniting, you know, spiritual and organicist stuff with, you know, good, sound science. But there's not enough of the science. It's not quite Eurocentric enough. I'm going to create something called Anthroposophy, which is, instead of it being about Theo God, it's about Anthro Man. Now, was it actually more methodologically rigorous than theosophy? We're talking about occultism here. Not really. He conducted experiments to supposedly show, like, you could see your astral cell for all this. And actual scientists have come and said that we don't. I mean, he's just like, got photos and they're not showing anything. But he created a whole cult around him. It's still around. Waldorf schools you ever heard of. There's one in New York. They're these progressive schools where you, like, do occult dancing and it's very pro environmentalist.
- [27:54]
Mark
I haven't heard this.
- [27:54]
Eric Curlander
Yeah. Steiner has a tradition throughout Europe and other parts of the world. People. I mean, he did some interesting things, but it was a new form of occultism. And if you read him, he's much more concerned with race and Jews than Blavatsky was.
- [28:11]
Mark
Interesting.
- [28:12]
Eric Curlander
Go figure. Operating in Austria.
- [28:14]
Mark
Would you say Blavatsky's ideas around theosophy were, through our modern lens, racist? I understand. There's this idea of root races question, and it's like, okay, saying that we got inseminated by, you know, aliens on its face.
- [28:28]
Eric Curlander
Potentially. I forget.
- [28:30]
Mark
Sure.
- [28:30]
Eric Curlander
It's hard for me. I didn't come at this as someone who's interested in the occult.
- [28:34]
Mark
Right.
- [28:34]
Eric Curlander
Came at this as Someone studying German history. I just written a book on why do liberals sell out to fascism? You know, in the wake of the Iraq resolution and Patriot Act. Living with Hitler, right? And I'm looking. This is 2008, 9, and I'm seeing the rise of the Tea Party and Sarah Palin, who's not a traditional conservative, she's not a classical liberal libertarian. There's this populist right wing element. Like, is this stuff? And I'm looking at Europe, Marine Le Pen and Jorg Heder in Austria, and I'm saying, is there a resurgence of this? They have these conspiracy theories. So I wanted to go back to my laboratory, Germany, and say, what's going on before 1933? Can you predict when a society will become more susceptible to this? Right. So I didn't come at it. Why am I saying that? I'm not an expert. The Journal of Western Esotericism does not like my book because I don't get into the details of how complicated theosophy was. I accept that I'm seeing that as a one of many elements in the supernatural imaginary. So I don't want to go on. I want this in the podcast. I'm not an expert on it. I'm not saying everyone who was into theosophy is going to become a fascist. Quite the opposite. Many of them were just hippies or they still go around and they're. They're reading the Bhagavad Gita. Just because Himmler also read the Bhagavad Gita does not make you. That being said, I want to be clear that these, these preoccupations with race, even if they were common in the 19th century, get exacerbated in the next two iterations, right? Anthroposophy and then Ariosophy. So, yeah, in the late 19th century, every white Western intellectual is talking about the rise and fall of Western civilization in racial terms. They've all read Darwin. Again, this comes from Britain and France, right? It's Darwin, it's Alfred North Whitehead. Right. It's Herbert Spencer, it's Gobineau in France. It's not a German. The Germans aren't the ones to invent this modern science of race and racial decline and fall. But that, not coincidentally, infuses all the major theories of the late 19th century. Even sometimes socialists talk about race problematically. Right. So we shouldn't be surprised. And that is racist, Right? The idea that you have these distinct races. The one thing I'll say in the defense of modern Blavatsky is it's before evolutionary biologists, as I just mentioned, by the 30s and 40s has started to show that these theories don't hold. There aren't pure races that have distinct characteristics. It's not like looking at animal species. Of course the Nazis don't care about that science, but, but, or the Ku Klux Klan or even some people today. But the actual science shows it's way too complicated. Because all the. First of all, race is just a kind of construction as we talked about already, based on putative skin color or the shape of people's heads, which turns out to not be. It's not a real thing. And then whatever it does reflect that is real biological difference doesn't map onto any one to one distinctions. So scientists are already starting to realize that in the 30s and 40s, but not in the 1870s and 80s. So I don't want to be anachronistic and dismiss all these people as inherently racist by the standards of the 1870s, 80s. If you're still pushing this in the 1930s, however, might be a problem. The ideology is now very strong.
- [32:06]
Mark
But phrenology at one point was all the race.
- [32:07]
Eric Curlander
Exactly. That's another great example of phrenology.
- [32:10]
Mark
You could feel the lumps on someone's head and be like, oh, you're smart.
- [32:13]
Eric Curlander
And William James, brilliant psychologist at Harvard, is open to testing spiritualist claims in the late 19th century. By the 1930s and 40s, there are many psychologists, including Freud, saying come on, what are we doing here? And don't you see, even I have this in my book. I found Freud basically criticizing Jung. His student said, why are you still so into this wacky stuff? Don't you see this is what the far right loves doing. Talking about monsters and demons and astral planes. Like you realize this is dangerous because the same kind of thinking that leads to antisemitism. Jung's like, no, no, it's cool. And it might be true. We should pursue it. And sure enough, look what happens. Freud, who's more materialist, is like, I'm done with that kind of thing. There's no proof for it. And it's abetting race theories that are dangerous, that are not grounded in science. And Jung, who's not Jewish like Freud, right, didn't feel as threatened by it. He's younger, he grew up with more of these esoteric ideas. Is is okay with it until after the war. I have it. In the conclusion of the book he's like, maybe that wasn't such a good idea. Maybe we should be more careful about these Supernatural claims and conspiracy theories and a straw planes, right? He says that in the 40s.
- [33:30]
Mark
Oh, wow.
- [33:31]
Eric Curlander
But he wasn't saying that in the 20s and 30s.
- [33:33]
Mark
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- [37:41]
Eric Curlander
Right. So ariosophy is the third iteration of these three major occult doctrines of the late 19th century, the one that's most clearly a precursor to Nazism. And that's because it takes what Theosophy has, this idea that combines science and religion, kind of Eastern spirituality and Darwinism. It adds to it the already racial kind of more human element that Anthroposophy under Steiner had brought in, that we should really be talking about what this means in the world as well as spirituality and talking a little bit more about race and space. And he even has some opinions on the Jews and whether they can be liberated. And it adds a more kind of purist sense of Aryan history, Aryan pre history, Aryan mythology, saying that, you know, it's all well and good to believe in root races, Atlantis, the way that race and spirituality combine. But if we don't make this about restoring the primacy of the Aryan, then it's not a helpful doctrine. So under Guido von List and Lanz Jorg, Lanz von Lebenfels, they take the tradition of Theosophy, which had been relatively universalist, very popular in Britain and America as well as Germany and Austria, and they take the version that had already become a little more Germanized under Steiner, also an Austrian. Right. And make it very racialized and very Germanic or Ario centric. It still has mystical elements, it still has Masonic doctrines, it still believes in root races, but it's now clearly differentiated from Theosophy in the way that it's become so racialized and so obsessed with Germanic race and space.
- [39:28]
Mark
Now, before we go on to how Ariosophy goes through Europe, can you explain Aryanism as an idea? Because again, I know that it comes from Sanskrit, it's like almost like an Indo, Persian ethnic subset, but then somehow gets attributed to the Nordics. Where does that disconnect come from?
- [39:45]
Eric Curlander
Right, so the modern word for Persia, Iran and Aryan have the same root. Right. It's the peoples who lived in that kind of Northwest Indian, slash, Central Asian area, supposedly thousands of years ago. What happens is the kind of scholars who are interested for the first time in a post Christian history of language, you know, kind of linguistics, anthropology, Indology, the studies of India and the roots of all kind of modern civilization. The Fertile Crescent in the early 19th century, some of them German. Right. Even the Grimm Brothers became fascinated with the idea that the root of All Indo European language and culture was this Aryan civilization, right, that spread out from Northwest India through Persia, possibly east as well. That's all well and good and there are some elements of truth to that linguistically, right, Indo European languages. But what they started to do already in the first half of the 19th century is project onto that the idea that what is pure and authentic and great about Germanic civilization in Europe is its Indo Aryan roots, not its Judeo Christian roots, not its liberal materialist and French Cartesian rationalist roots. That is those are foreign elements imposed on Germany from outside. And that what's truly Germanic or Aryan about German civilization goes back to the Aryans of prehistory. Now a competing ideology emerges in the second half of the 19th century. So you have this Indo Aryan ideology and obviously it spreads across Europe. You have Houston Stewart Chamberlain talking similarly about the great Indo Aryan races and how, you know, different civilizations, depending on how many, how much Aryan blood they have, are going to be better or worse and more sustainable or less. Gobineau alludes to Aryans. So it's not just a German thing. But what happens in the late 19th century is a alternative view develops among people. One historian calls them Germanists or Germanocentric theorists. Germanen tomb instead of Arya tomb. So Arya tomb is Arianism. Garmanentun is kind of Germanism who say, yeah, maybe there are some connections to these races, but what's really important are the Nordic peoples who are blonde and blue eyed and were actually in Atlantis or Tula, the Thule Hyperborean civilization. And to what extent they ended up creating other Aryan civilizations or their blood helped the Persians, we don't know. But let's focus on reconstituting this North European race and not worrying so much about these Indo Aryan elements and connections. And so what I talk about in Hitler's Monsters is a way that these tensions persist without getting resolved within the Nazi party. And you can even see it in Himmler's Ahnen Erba. So this institute for ancestral research that he founds in some ways the office preceded the Third Reich, but it's definitely there by 1935 as a large institute. Its first director, Hermann Wirth, is a German Dutch scholar of Nordic and Germanic tradition. And he's fascinated by the North Germanic roots of what he sees as kind of Nordic civilization in Germany and elsewhere. He does talk at times about Arianism and Indo Arianism, but he's really focused on having the SS research the lost civilization of Atlantis and going to Scandinavia and looking at witchcraft and natural healing. And all this stuff. Interestingly, he's very much a border scientist. He actually studies something called the Uralinda Chronicle, which Almost everyone by 1935 or 36 says is a forgery. It was probably written in the 19th century, supposed to be this like, or pre Christian, I think Dutch, early Dutch text that talks about Germanic traditions and Thor and Odin. And he just sticks to it. He's like, this is great. It's like the Book of Mormon or something for him. He is so embarrassing that Himmler eventually gets rid of him in 1938.
- [44:24]
Mark
Oh, wow.
- [44:24]
Eric Curlander
Replaces him with a guy named Vooster. I think it's Walter Woost or Wilhelm Voost, who is an Indologist, meaning he actually reads Sanskrit, studies Hinduism, Buddhism and is an accepted scholar, I think at the University of Munich. And he becomes the director of the Ahnen Arab. And remember, in both cases, these are humanists who are directing now an institute that's going to end up covering the rocket program and, and energy research. It just shows you how little they care about actual science or materialism, you know, explanations of the world. But as an endologist, he pushes more of this Indo Aryan framework that there are connections to these other great civilizations. So Ariosophy, I would argue, in some ways wins out the elements of Ariosophy that we can see in Nazism over the more Germanic centric Nordic tradition. But really both traditions survive and kind of there's a healthy tension between them.
- [45:24]
Mark
I see. And I don't know if I missed it, but why Nordic? Why couldn't the. The thought leaders of the time say the Germans are the end all, be all true Aryans?
- [45:34]
Eric Curlander
Because whether you're an Indo Aryan or a kind of Nordic Germanic scholar, you recognize that Central Europe has been a space of colonization, like Germanic peoples came down from the north, much like Great Britain.
- [45:51]
Mark
I see.
- [45:52]
Eric Curlander
And as fast and loose as they play with science, they recognize that everyone isn't as pure, purely Nordic as the actual Nordic people and the Vikings were before they came down.
- [46:02]
Mark
I see.
- [46:03]
Eric Curlander
So if you're going to restore, if you're going to emulate any civilization, it should be the Nordic ones and whatever races were in the Thule. This North Atlantic civilization, Ur civilization, not the admixtures of whatever they have these terms like denarite and Alpine and Slavic. And they do accept that most Germans are mixed. And so part of what Himmler wants to do in a lot of these races is selective breeding. So breed out the foreign elements and breed in more of the Nordic ones.
- [46:37]
Mark
I see. Right. So yeah, Germany because it's been colonized. It cannot be the breadbasket of human civilization. It had to come from someone else.
- [46:46]
Eric Curlander
It's still the biggest and most powerful Aryan nation. It's not like they aren't proud of it, but they recognize there are pure elements of Nordic civilization that had to.
- [46:55]
Mark
Come from somewhere else.
- [46:56]
Eric Curlander
Yes.
- [46:56]
Mark
And everyone else at the time accepted that it was sort of Indo Persian, and they said, no, no, no, it's actually from the north. Completely unfounded.
- [47:05]
Eric Curlander
The only variation between this Nordic version and the Indo Aryan one, as I understand it, is the Indo Aryan one says that the Ur civilization actually came from the Fertile Crescent in northern India and went everywhere in prehistory and then was part of what founded Atlantis or Thule.
- [47:26]
Mark
I see.
- [47:27]
Eric Curlander
And then when that collapsed, those people who were left went back to Tibet to kind of preserve the. Or religion and what have you. While the Nordic. I think the Nordic version, again, this is neither of what I'm saying is scientific, but I'm trying to recall their different arguments said that the Atlantis collapses and then they. They colonize outwards. Obviously the purest Nordic people were still in the area they had originally been in, and whatever made it to India or Japan wasn't that worthwhile. So instead of that being an area where all Aryans came from, it's just an area where some Nordic people went to, which is why there's still connections. They're still willing to entertain the connections, but the. But the transfer is reversed.
- [48:11]
Mark
I see. And that ostensibly influences a lot of the art of the Third Reich. Right.
- [48:18]
Eric Curlander
Well, the reason they embrace the swastika regardless is they see that as an Ur kind of Indo Aryan symbol of fertility in the sun, which precedes a kind of purely Germanic or Nordic Europe. And the Nordicists just try to find examples of a swastika in northern Europe to prove that it started there.
- [48:38]
Mark
Right.
- [48:39]
Eric Curlander
The Indo Aryans don't care. It's just. It's a root of all. It's in Persia, it's in India. So for them, that's the sign of Aryan culture.
- [48:46]
Mark
And at the time, wasn't it like a talisman almost of the. Of the times? Like many people wore the swastika, I guess, at the turn of the century. And it was kind of a symbol of good luck. Is that fair to say?
- [48:56]
Eric Curlander
So we talked about the origins of classical modernity in the late 19th century. All these people in the west who have become so kind of inured to modernity and technology, and they aren't really getting the spiritual sustenance they need from traditional Christianity are looking elsewhere. So just like the 60s, this is just a cycle. From the 1890s on, there are all sorts of people in urban areas studying yoga and Hinduism and Buddhism and the Kabbalah and trying to find Eastern or alternative ways to get in touch with their spirituality or alternative narratives of how the great civilizations came about. The core of a lot of those imports, if you're talking about India, is are things related to the swastika. It pops up, right? In one form or another. What's interesting is that people obsessed with the Indo Aryan roots of European civilization start in the 19th century, start to put swastikas on their books to connote these connections. So when the folkish movements form in Germany and Austria in the 1890s and later, they often use the swastika, which is already an accepted emblem connecting Indo Aryan civilization and Germanic or European Nordic civilization. It's not the Nazis. The Nazis just appropriate it. It's already around.
- [50:22]
Mark
Right.
- [50:22]
Eric Curlander
And these folkish groups, these kind of groups that are quasi biologistic, biopolitical, they kind of believe in eugenics and race science, kind of religious and mythological. They're obsessed with Thor and Odin and Ariasophy. They like to use the swastika as this unifying symbol for those two different strains of belief.
- [50:43]
Mark
Interesting.
- [50:44]
Eric Curlander
So it's not surprising that the Nazis who come out of that milieu would also appropriate it.
- [50:49]
Mark
So it seems like the stage has been set. Right. Like Ariosophy is around, it's being distributed in pamphlets. There was one magazine scene that was very popular, Ostara.
- [50:58]
Eric Curlander
Ostara, which he claims he remembers Hitler. After Hitler became famous, I think in the 20s, Lonson Liebensol says, I remember when he showed up 10 years ago to get some back issues, like he was collecting comic books or something. Hitler didn't never affirm that. I see, but it's probable he saw it. We need to be very careful, though. Ariosophy is the purest expression of this combination of folkish ideology, which is widespread. The idea that Germanic and Indo Aryan races are superior and millions of people are interested in that and the occult, where I would say it's more like tens of thousands before the war, it's still fringe. The reason we're so interested in Ariasophy is the. The group that eventually forms the Nazi Party came out of an erosophic Masonic group. So it's not that everyone who was into Arianism or philosophy was an ariosophist. It's just that Ariosophy was one expression which was clearly tied to the occult of that movement, a pretty popular one. Some famous people were members. So one of Hitler's. Couple of Hitler's most influential kind of theorists, Carla Weger, who was the mayor of Vienna and kind of operationalized anti Semitism. So it's not that fringe, but it's not like it's the core of all these folkish movements. Right. It just happens that the Nazi Party comes out of one of these ariasophic groups.
- [52:29]
Mark
Ah, interesting. Now the Tool, it would be like.
- [52:33]
Eric Curlander
If Churchill came out of Aleister Crowley's orders on the New Templar. Like, if that had happened, we'd be spending a lot more time talking about it than we do now as a fringe movement. And it just so happens that the German Workers Party comes out of an erisophic group called the Thule Society.
- [52:49]
Mark
If a famous person comes out of a cult, that cult all of a sudden gets a lot more attention.
- [52:52]
Eric Curlander
Even if the tensions, even if the connections are somewhat tenuous. Exactly.
- [52:56]
Mark
That makes sense. So the Tool Society, again, named after this place.
- [53:00]
Eric Curlander
And it's Atlantis. Yeah.
- [53:02]
Mark
Hyperborea.
- [53:03]
Eric Curlander
Hyperborea.
- [53:04]
Mark
These are all effectively the same place of some type of lost civilization that existed of once great people.
- [53:09]
Eric Curlander
Now, in the North Atlantic, there might have been frost giants, they might have been taller, they might have had a third eye. They might have mated with aliens, ancient aliens. And then people, other great civilizations and built temples, whether Incan temples or pyramids of Egypt. Right. We're all familiar. The irony of this is, given how popular these kinds of mythologies are on National Geographic, the History Channel. Now, I don't have to work as hard to give you a sense of what they were talking about or believed.
- [53:40]
Mark
Right.
- [53:41]
Eric Curlander
Could it be that aliens came down and created. Well, now a bunch of people think that it could be. Back then, this is the first time we started hearing about all of this.
- [53:49]
Mark
And this is originally penned by the ariosophists.
- [53:52]
Eric Curlander
This is, I would argue, that the Theosophists were the first to kind of create a coherent doctrine that alluded to this lost civilization. To this lost civilization. I mean, Atlantis had been around since the Greeks, but that that was actually where the root, the superior root race was of the seven root races that then declined. That's where that trope comes from.
- [54:13]
Mark
I see.
- [54:14]
Eric Curlander
There were other people, I think this guy Hans Schindler, Bellamy and others who wrote literature that kind of riffed off of this in the British English speaking world. But that's kind of where it comes from. The eriosophist people just make it even more racial. I See, and more existential.
- [54:31]
Mark
And so now this tool society exists in Germany around, I guess, the early 1900s, mid teens of the 1900s actually.
- [54:39]
Eric Curlander
So what happens? And this does show you the valence of, of Ariosophy. One member of the Erosophic Society in Germany, I think in Dresden, a guy named Theodor Fritsch, right before World War I, he's the most famous anti Semite in Germany. He writes something called the Anti Semitic Catechism going back to the 1880s about how the Jews are at the root of all evil. And he's so frustrated by 1912 that even the German conservatives just seemed kind of lukewarm towards anti Semitism and this idea that Jews are behind socialism and liberalism and feminism and all these evil things. He adds to his German order, which is this Thule Masonic group, not Thule Ariasophic masonic group in 1912, something called the Hammerbund or the Hammer Association. And I'll explain why this is important, which is supposed to be a political affiliate, because he recognizes that for political purposes, having everyone get together and talk about dowsing and astrology and going through weird Masonic rituals vaguely linked to Aryan civilization is not terribly productive. So he creates another group and many people in his German order also belong to the Hammer association to try to get votes and try and get right wing people to vote for them and not for normal conservatives. Why is this important? During the war, neither group does well. No one wants to pay dues or discuss astrology during an existential war. So by 1916 or so, the German order is struggling. I think the Hammer Association's already dissolved. And a guy named Hermann Pohl, who's hanging out in Munich, meets a guy named Sibatendorf. Rudolf von Sebattendorf, who is the editor of the leading astrology journal in Germany. And basically he's given the task of resuscitating the German Order, this eriosophic group that was also anti Semitic and had these political ambitions. And he's not very successful at it until he meets another occultist born the same year as Hitler, a guy named Walter Nauhuis, who has this kind of discussion circle. He's an artist called the Thule Society because he's interested in Atlantis and Thule. So Botmur says, look, I can't get the German Order going again. Why don't we combine forces and we'll still talk about art and astrology, and all that stuff, but we'll also talk about how the Jews are trying to destroy Western civilization and how much we hate communism and feminism. And because It'll be under the COVID of the Thule Society. No one will associate us with far right groups or whatever. This is all still during the war. It's like Summer, Fall, 1918. So it's more like a fun project. They don't know that they're going to lose. Then they lose. And Nauhaus and Sebatendorf start recruiting people saying, look, the Jews won, the Socialists won. They destroyed our society. They stabbed us in the back. Join our Thule Society and we will first get rid of the Socialists who are running Bavaria, and then we'll take over Germany. And they even have a plot to kill the Socialist prime minister. Bavaria, which gets uncovered and seven people get arrested for treason and get executed in their society. Yeah, so he's incompetent as a political leader, but he's merged this erosophic tradition of Theodor Fritsch with a political movement in immediate post war Bavaria about destroying the left and the liberals and taking Germany back and rebuilding. He doesn't use the word Third Reich, but recreating the German Empire. And in early 1919, some of the members, actually late 1918, of the Thule Society, who are friends with Sebattor Fink, he doesn't really get it. So they form their own corollary. Remember the hammer association that Fritsch created called the German Workers Circle?
- [58:44]
Mark
Sounds familiar.
- [58:45]
Eric Curlander
Because they're like, we gotta do something practical. People don't want to come to the Four Seasons Hotel and talk about pendulum dowsing. And then we tack on at the end, oh, by the way, the Jews are evil and taking over the world. Let's overthrow the government. We need an actual political vehicle. So this guy Carl Harrer and Anton Drexler form something called the German Workers Circle to try to recruit normal workers at the railroad yards. They realize it's still kind of associated with the Thule, though, which isn't really great. So in January, they rename it the German Workers Party and explicitly meet separately from Subatendorf. Sobottendorf's still around and still doing the Thule stuff. They're still members of the Thule, and famous Nazis are coming to Thule meetings. Dietrich, Alfred Rosenberg, pardon me, are all part of that milieu. But there's now this separation developing, as Fritsch tried to do before the war, between the actual kind of occult stuff, which a lot of these people like but recognize isn't that politically accessible and it's kind of bourgeois and elitist and the political activism. And it's that German Workers Party that Hitler Visits in September. He's supposed to be surveilling fringe right and left wing groups for the army. And he kind of likes what they're talking about, but he doesn't think they are really good rhetorically. So he starts speaking himself he wasn't supposed to. And they're like, this guy's great. Why don't you join us? So you can see this link between the pre war erosophic movement and the leading anti Semit in Germany who wants to become more politically activist and pragmatic. Doesn't work. This Sabattendorf guy tries to pick up the reins during the war, joins another occult group, and that group produces the early Nazi party.
- [60:32]
Mark
Wow. And Hitler takes over that worker's party and then that ultimately becomes the National.
- [60:37]
Eric Curlander
Socialists a year later. And when he writes Mein Kampf five years later, he's still complaining. As we talked about before, wandering scholars clothed in bearskins. He's still obsessed with the fact that the roots of his party are in this folkish occult movement with people like the Qanon shaman running off into the woods and doing homeopathic medicine and arguing over which mythological tradition, how strong was Thor, how strong was Odin? And he doesn't think that's gonna be terribly useful in expanding the party. So this tension has been there for now 15 or 20 years between these right wing occult groups that are obsessed with Aryan civilization and eliminating Jews and socialists and feminists, and at the same time recognize that that might not be a mass, political, politically accessible way in a modern society. So they're trying to resolve that tension. And Hitler himself recognizes that we need to move away from that if we're going to become a mass movement.
- [61:40]
Mark
Now, at one point, I believe Rosenberg has a quote where he says, occultism in Europe paved the way for.
- [61:46]
Eric Curlander
I found that in the archives. I think that's the first time anyone's published anything.
- [61:50]
Mark
Oh, really?
- [61:50]
Eric Curlander
So let's first take a step back and acknowledge that Rosenberg, despite hanging out with these people, always claimed that traditional occultism or esotericism was not Arian. For him, Aryans practiced a kind of ur religion or Wiccanism we would call witchcraft and other esoteric traditions, which while to a layperson don't look a lot different than occultism for him mattered because magic in the Aryan tradition and. And esotericism or Christian witchcraft were two different things. So the fact that he acknowledges in 1941 how important occultism per se, popular occultism was, Nazi movement was really important for me in my book because showed that even Rosenberg, who Draws these very nuanced distinctions between a kind of primitive Christian or even Jewish exploitative occultism and true Aryan magic practiced by earth mothers based on their embrace of Aryan traditions. And not Judeo Christianity, which he thought was Jewish. Right. Shows that he's being pragmatic. And acknowledging that for normal people, they don't see the difference. Being into the occult is why they thought Hitler was so interesting and charismatic and could wield magic himself. So that's why that quote was important for me, because I acknowledge that Rosenberg was officially critical of occultism. The reason I don't use occultism but supernatural in my book is to acknowledge that among all these different people and all these different doctrines, much like Christianity or religion in general, everyone had their pet supernatural doctrine, which for them was true scientifically and religiously. And everything else was, was just fantasy and made up by unscientific people. When you put it all together, you see that's just the way that faith based people dismiss those people they see as rivals. They're scientific, they have authentic knowledge. The other astrology group doesn't. Once you realize that, you see why some Nazis seemed hostile to the occult. It wasn't that they rejected these supernatural ways of viewing the world, certainly not in the way of exploiting people's superstition. It's that they didn't want rival groups claiming authority based on their connections to the spiritual world or magical forces.
- [64:18]
Mark
Interesting.
- [64:19]
Eric Curlander
And that's really what I talk about in chapter four of the book is what seems like a war on the occult is actually an attempt, which is what every fascist government does, to control and discipline everything. So it fits their ideology. And they still wait four years to really do anything because they're so sensitive. The fact, as Hitler was already in 1924, that a lot of people like us like this and it doesn't do us any good to attack it too openly.
- [64:46]
Mark
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- [69:06]
Eric Curlander
So again, showing you, I mean, it's not fair to call Hitler a cultist because of this, but a famous occultist named Aaron Schertel, who had written and a parapsychologist, he considered himself a scientific occultist. I also think he was a practicing anthroposophist and did kind of magical dances which he thought helped with spirituality and all this, he like taught it in a school. He wrote a book called Magic, which is about how magic could be wielded to not only have a better life, but also manipulate people and kind of be become a perfect kind of human. Being and live a truly full life where you get what you want. And Hitler, for whatever reason, he saw Hitler as someone who would appreciate this book. And after Hitler became famous, at some point in 24, 25, we don't know when, but it looks like it was before 33, he sent a copy to Hitler and signed it, like to Adolf Hitler, Aaron Shertel. And it had the stamp that a lot of Hitler's books had. Hitler had stamps put in his own books to show they were part of his library. And unlike many of those books, it had annotations in it, I think 66 different annotations. So historian named Tim Reibach, who read the book, the original version, I have only seen reproduced versions, thinks it looks like Hitler's handwriting and it has not been dismissed. So Hitler clearly was reading it closely, according to him. I say in my book, it's likely that Hitler read it. It looks like he read it. And if he read it, here's the passages that he annotated. And a lot of it shows that he, because he did study modern psychology, mass, you know, crowd psychology and how to manipulate people, it looks like he was reading it not because he necessarily believed in supernatural forces, but he thought that people were susceptible to the techniques that parapsychologists use to manipulate them.
- [71:10]
Mark
I see. And so some of his annotations, I'm only vaguely familiar with a couple of them that, you know, I guess allude to like Satanism or things like that. Are there any specific annotations that you find compelling?
- [71:22]
Eric Curlander
Well, so we have to remember, despite Rosenberg's claims, trying to differentiate Aryan Wiccanism from Christian witchcraft in heretical Christianity, like the Cathar heresy, the Albigensians, Middle Ages, who were in southern France, ironically, or maybe not near Monsegur, where the Holy Grail was supposedly hidden. They were maybe the protectors of the Holy Grail in this mythology. They were nominally Christian, but they were Manichean Christians, meaning you couldn't have light without darkness. And that's why they called the devil Lucifer, the light bearer, because he was actually the one who was more pro human and wanted you to live and experience and have sex and get in touch with blood and soil. And it was, you know, God who was trying to restrain you. And you needed both.
- [72:19]
Mark
Almost Gnosticism, in a way. Gnosticism, you have demiurge and you have this light bear, almost a Prometheus serpent that comes in.
- [72:27]
Eric Curlander
So a lot of occultists, which now I suppose some devout Christians would just call Satanists, saw this cult of Lucifer as A positive aspect of pagan or proto Christian or Germanic Christian tradition. For people who are into the Holy Grail and Indo Arianism like Otoran, we could talk about him later, who Himmler hired. This was the connection to Indo Aryan religion, the Gnosticism. Right. If you look at Persia and places like that where a lot of these Gnostic ideas were, it's probably come in through the Aryans. It was pre Christian and the fact that it was being practiced in France and ostensibly other parts of Europe and Germany meant that somehow this Indo Aryan tradition had survived Christianity and conversion. And the reason for Himmler and Darre and a lot of these Nazis that the Catholic Church created the Inquisition was to wipe out this Germanic Indo Aryan religion and the women who bore it as witches. So they could kill two birds with one stone. They could further Christianize German people, which meant Jewifying them because they thought the Catholic Church was run by the Jews. And they could also murder a bunch of them because if they killed the women who were childbearing age, they couldn't have children.
- [73:48]
Mark
Right.
- [73:49]
Eric Curlander
So there's a long tradition. I'm not saying this is in any way accurate anthropologically or religiously among right wing thinkers, Indo Aryan obsessed ideologues, that this Luciferianism and the book that Otto Rahn writes for Himmler is called Lucifer's Court is actually an expression of this Indo Aryan or religion that may have been practiced in Atlantis and was brought to Tibet. And the Judeo Christian conspirators who want to destroy Germanic and Indo Aryan tradition call it witchcraft. So Shertle, by being into demonology and wanting to get to these pagan forces, was basically tapping into a popular belief that there's something pre Christian linked to nature, blood, soil, Indo Arianism that subverts Christianity. That if we could get rid of this veneer of Christianity, we could get in touch with it again. Which in a way parallels Ariosophy, Anthroposophy. Right. If we could get back to the Indo Aryan spirituality combined with an awareness of race science and biology that we now have, we could transcend the kind of constraints that Judeo Christian and Franco British material liberalism have put on us as Germanic peoples.
- [75:06]
Mark
Interesting. Like the guy that wrote the Osteria, what was his name?
- [75:12]
Eric Curlander
Yeah, Lance von Lebenfels. Ostara.
- [75:16]
Mark
Ostara. So Lebenfeld's originally he was a Catholic priest. Right. But then leaves the church because he can't worship a Jew. Is that.
- [75:27]
Eric Curlander
I don't know if that was the only reason. I think he was also kind of disillusioned there may have been some corruption involved. I don't remember. I will say it's not a coincidence in my mind that so many of the Nazi leaders were from Catholic parts of Germany. Because the thing about Catholicism versus Protestantism is it's a universalist religion, which means it's very hard to be a fascist and be a devout Catholic in a country divided by religion. It's very hard to be a Catholic in Italy or Spain where everyone's Catholic. You can have fascism that is actually buttressed by the church. But in Germany or America it's much easier to be a fascist and a racist if you're Protestant. Because Protestants can construe anything they want out of the Bible. They pick their own pastor, they pick their own variation in Christianity. The further they get from Lutheranism and Episcopalianism, the more malleable it is. I mean, think about the Klan. They were devout Protestants, had these weird racial theories. Catholics, there are barriers, right, Because Catholicism is a universal religion, ecumenical. So what I think happens in those places, especially in Austria where the far right had a movement literally called Los von Rome, let's be free of Rome, is in order to be German, you had to get away from Catholicism and replace it with something else. In northern parts of Germany where people were Protestant, they already kind of combined their Protestantism with a belief in blood and soil and being German. Luther was German. So that they didn't have that same kind of binary tension. So what you're seeing, I think in Austria especially, it's not a coincidence. A lot of these race theories, supernatural and otherwise, come out of Austria and Bavaria are people who are lapsed Catholics who were immersed in this very totalizing ideology instead of liturgies and rituals and things. I mean, even Masonry comes from copying the Jesuits, let's remember that. And Himmler would refer to the Jesuits as a model for the ss. And then they want to create their own traditions around like pagan Grail, you know, like if you look at Wewelsberg, what Himmler did, right? These are. It's a version of Masonic secret occult societies that's no longer linked to Catholicism.
- [77:51]
Mark
I see. But even more black, some of the roots of the Catholic ritualism, right?
- [77:57]
Eric Curlander
Or the need to replace it, at least whether they were consciously doing it consciously or subconsciously. Again, in Protestant areas, I'd argue that Christianity was much more malleable and personalized. I mean, Jesus is your friend. If you want Jesus to be a blonde, blue eyed scion of Balder the brave Nordica, you can just make that up. And it's fine.
- [78:16]
Mark
Right.
- [78:17]
Eric Curlander
Catholics have to have the authority of the Pope, which is a universal religion. It's harder to play fast and loose with the rules.
- [78:23]
Mark
Right, interesting. So now could you make some type of conjecture as to what Hitler's religion was? I know many people have debated this. I'm curious if you have any thoughts.
- [78:32]
Eric Curlander
So my observation, not just from the research for this book, but, you know, generally researching the Third Reich, is that none of the main Nazi leaders were devout Christians. Many of their constituents were and lower level party level. And that's why this debate has been unnecessarily polarized. Number one, it was very hard to be a devout Catholic and a devout Nazi. Some were. But none of the leadership who were born Catholic were still, in my experience, devout Catholics by the time they became Nazi leaders. So Hess was born Catholic. Goebbels, Hitler, Himmler, none of them were doing traditional Catholic stuff. By middle age they had pagan rituals that they were doing or quasi Christian solstice stuff. So let's just start with that. Among Protestant Germans, there was more of a symbiosis. They even created a Protestant church called the German Church, which had its own Nazi bishop, this guy named Mueller, which just threw out the Old Testament because it was Jewish, and said now Jesus was a lost Aryan, part of a lost Aryan tribe. You can be a Nazi and a Protestant or an a Christian. So in that sense, Christianity was directly allied with Nazism, but it was a version of Christianity which we see in contemporary America as well, which was so local and specific to your pastor, your church, wherever you live, and your ideology, it's hard to say it fit a traditional Christian idiom. Right? Because if you see what's happening in the United States in the last 40 or 50 years, there's a bunch of people who will call themselves Christian. But if you ask them. So what version are you Episcopalian? Are you Missouri Synod Lutheran? I don't know. I just have a pastor down the street. And I love the Bible and I love Jesus. Well, if that's true, then Jesus can be an Aryan. So that kind of Christianity was very compatible with Nazism. But the leaders, including Hitler, did not seem very interested in it. What Hitler and Drexler I mentioned put in the Nazi program, which they never changed, they never followed it, but they never changed it either. 1920 program was we support positive Christianity. And then later on they say, we don't care what religion you are as long as you're not Jewish. So you could see again, typical fascism, kind of split the difference we're in a country that fought the Reformation and murdered each other over which specific version of Christianity people were going to be right. I mean literally millions of Germans died. So they're not going to dismiss Christianity openly, whatever their private beliefs. And their private beliefs were nasty. The stuff Hitler and Himmler say about Christians sometimes is pretty impressive. And how anti Christian they are. So they say they're positive Christians, meaning if you're not causing problems, you're anomaly. We don't care. Later on they say we don't care what religion you are as long as you're not a Jew. Because that's not a religion. It's race in that sense. They're very. I mean that sounds like the traditional liberal thing, church and state. As long as you don't get in our way, you can practice what you want. So again, they're kind of triangulating. They don't want to alienate people who aren't motivated by religion anymore, but they also don't want to alienate Christians.
- [81:42]
Mark
Interesting.
- [81:43]
Eric Curlander
What they don't do, which some historians claim they tried to do, but I would argue they don't. They never try to replace Christianity is in the 12 years they're in power at least it's too strong. They talk about it. I mean Hitler has throwaway statements what will I do with the churches once we consolidate the Third Reich and win the war? But because that never happens, we don't know if that's just speculation.
- [82:04]
Mark
Now at one point, and correct me if I'm wrong, I believe Hitler wrote in a letter that effectively his final solution is doing the work of the Lord. I believe this is something that I read.
- [82:15]
Eric Curlander
I don't.
- [82:16]
Mark
This might, I might.
- [82:16]
Eric Curlander
I don't know that he uses the work of the Lord what he often uses as a stand. And I think this is very intentional. He again recognizes he's operating in a Judeo Christian context, which he's not thrilled as Judeo Christian. And this goes beyond their belief that Jews are using Christianity to enslave Aryans and keep them from being muscular and blonde and Thor like. They also believe that that Judeo Christian ethos because it's focused on the afterlife and maybe this is connected to what I just said, weakens people's desire to self determine and be aggressive and live life to the fullest and worship their ancestors and fight wars in the here and now because you're just living for going to heaven later on. You just follow the rules like sheep. That's one reason they like Shinto and Hinduism, the Kshatriya warrior caste and all these Eastern. Because in their mind they really worship their ancestors and want to fight to maintain their race and have a Bushido code. Christians and Jews are always talking about going to heaven and forgiveness. Forgiveness. This is not helpful in building an Aryan empire.
- [83:32]
Mark
Interesting.
- [83:33]
Eric Curlander
Right. So, yeah. So that's intrinsic in a lot of their frustration with Christianity as an ideology and an institution.
- [83:43]
Mark
I see.
- [83:44]
Eric Curlander
Even if they try to meld it with Nazism through the German church, which doesn't work, it ultimately causes a bunch of conservative Protestants who are happy to take Jewish rights away in a limited way, still allow them to go to church if they were converted, but not have them dominating society, to get so frustrated at the fact that they can't take confession and they can't read the Old Testament anymore, that they actually become opposed to the Third Reich. Even though as conservative Protestants are then and now usually okay with fascism as long as no one's screwing with their religion.
- [84:15]
Mark
Ah, they took it away and it.
- [84:17]
Eric Curlander
Backfired by contesting it and creating an official church that rejected the Old Testament, said Jews who converted still can't go to heaven and can't go to church. They pissed off enough conservative Protestants. There's a movie coming out about one of them, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Martin Emoller is also famous. He's a guy that said, first they came for the trade unionists, then they came for the Communists. So both of them initially were. I mean, Bonhoeffer was more principled than Niemoller. Neither of them were on the barricade saying, why are you taking away rights from Jews? Why are you putting Communists in jail? Right. They're conservative Protestants. I think they voted for Hitler. I think Niemoller voted for Hitler. I don't know if Bonhoeffer did, but by 34, they're getting frustrated with these attempts in their minds to paganize or Germanize Christianity. And they create an alternative church called the Confessing Church, which Hitler again. We talked about how fascism, unlike Communism, needs to accommodate liberal and conservative capitalist, military, industrial complex, the churches. They don't initially move against the Confessing Church. They don't throw them in camps. It's only much later when they get really frustrated and some of the leaders like Niemoller start criticizing things outside theology, like their policies, you know, on, you know, their legal policies and anti Semitism, that they go after some of these people. I think Bonhoeffer only gets thrown in a camp during the war, despite all of his criticism. So they don't want to go after these confessing Protestants. But they do alienate them by their attempts to Germanize the church, showing you they're not traditional Christians.
- [85:50]
Mark
I see. So now, if Hitler is not Christian and is, I guess maybe in his early teen years, has like some maybe loose interest in this sort of ariosophy and kind of reading about these sort of Aryan mystical, occult ideas, why does he put Himmler basically as his number two and Hess, who's also very interested in occultism, so close in the high brass of the Nazi party?
- [86:16]
Eric Curlander
The way to look at it is to reverse the question and say as long as Himmler and Hess were doing the stuff they needed to do, there was nothing in being an occultist. That's my argument in the book. Or supernatural and thinking that disqualified you from being a Nazi as long as you were a loyal Nazi first. If anything, it helped you. So did Hitler and Goebbels sometimes make fun of Himmler and Hess and some of their beliefs? Yes. Did Hitler consciously and subconsciously appropriate some of these ideas, from allegories to the solstice festival, the swastika and the sun, to having a douser go through the Reich Chancellery, to believing in world ice theory and that German soldiers might be more resilient to the ice? He definitely did. Right? Goebbels. At first, when I was reading through his diaries and his recordings of his meetings in the Propaganda Ministry, I was like, it looks he's very instrumentalist in the way he treats astrology. Like, I'm going to use it for propaganda because Germans believe in it and some Europeans believe in it. And I'll try to convince them by quoting Nostradamus that, you know, the Belgians are going to lose and the Germans are going to win. But then he starts getting really excited about it. Like, this is. Nostradamus actually predicted this and he wants to hire scientific astrologers who are famous. So there's this guy, Karl Croft, who claimed to have predicted the assassination on the attempt on Hitler in 1938. And once they kind of surveilled him and made sure he didn't actually know about it, like, hey, maybe he did know it. And they hire him to do propaganda. And a parapsychologist who's friends with him, a famous parapsychologist who after the war will go on TV and, like, he becomes like a partner with Uri Geller and, you know, who tries to dispute his. His own magic. Like, they have debates about whether magic is real and all this stuff. During the 30s, he was getting money from the Nazis to do parapsychology experiments. And his buddy Kraft was working for Goebbels in the propaganda ministry. So this isn't purely instrumental. Even Goebbels and Hitler believe in some of this stuff.
- [88:26]
Mark
I see.
- [88:27]
Eric Curlander
Himmler and Hess were so into it, they got made fun of. I mean, Hess had magnetopathic things on his bed and started a homeopathic institute, natural healing institute, named after him. Himmler. I mean, we could get into it. So much stuff. Himmler might be the only, like leading Nazi who believed in almost every doctrine we've talked about, whether it's the occult doctrines to some degree, whether it's border science, parapsychology, astrology, biodynamic agriculture. He at some point seems to have been willing to entertain almost all of these different ideas that I say are part of the supernatural imaginary. There are other Nazis who are into a lot of them. Hess, Darre Ohlendorf. But Himmler's really into it. But he was so efficient and it was so mainstream at the time. Hitler wasn't going to dismiss him because he was making death's head rings and had a guy who thought he was the. Was the descendant of Thor as his right hand man, a guy named Carl Maria Villegut, an SS leader who would develop aesthetically all the kind of items that the SS used in rituals. And he changed his last name, his ritualistic name was Vaistor Wise Thor, because he thought he was related. Of course, Himmler thought he was related to witches who were murdered by the Jewish Vatican as well.
- [89:53]
Mark
What?
- [89:53]
Eric Curlander
Yes.
- [89:55]
Mark
So why did Himmler have such a fascination with objects and expeditions like we talked about Wewelsburg Castle, that he. This is the, I guess the head of the SS or it was like a training facility for the ss, like they were going to send.
- [90:08]
Eric Curlander
Yeah, it's kind of like a training facility.
- [90:10]
Mark
And I guess some people speculate that that was going to be almost like a grail room for all of the things that he collects, all of these famous artifacts that he believed have some type of mystical power. So there was a quote that we had talked about before. We recorded that he had sent his men to go find Thor's hammer and that he believes that it is some type of. Possesses some type of power.
- [90:34]
Eric Curlander
It wasn't so much. And this goes for the grail as well. We need to be careful. Even Himmler recognized some of this stuff could have been allegorical.
- [90:41]
Mark
Okay.
- [90:43]
Eric Curlander
So whether it's Thor's hammer, he recognized that like pagan people 3,000 years ago might have called something a Hammer as a physical manifestation of some force in the universe. That hidden force, Holy Grail for Ron and Himmler was a symbol of a kind of religious tradition that Christians appropriated, but was Indo Aryan. It might not have been a physical thing, it might have. They weren't sure. What they didn't care about was whether or not it was a cup of Christ per se. It was simply an object or an allegorical tradition that represented Indo Arian religion and magic. And so when Himmler talks about Thor's hammer, he's saying whatever the ancient Nordic people were calling the electricity that came out of Thor's hammer might have been a real or electricity that we could harness for scientific purposes. And I want you to go research it and see if the stuff that we see in mythology and ancient texts is actually some lost. This is where we get into homeopathy, allopathy, naturally, some lost tradition or energy that modern mainstream science doesn't know how to get in touch with. It wasn't that he thought there was actual Mjolnir, the hammer that gave off those forces. At least I haven't seen that. But he does think there might be magical or hidden forces linked to what we see as Thor's hammer that have been lost to history because all these materialist and Christian Westerners rejected Nordic and Indo Aryan mythology, religion and science.
- [92:23]
Mark
Did they uncover anything? Did they find any artifacts?
- [92:27]
Eric Curlander
They literally found. So this is an interesting thing and it's a question I often get. Literally nothing was ever discovered linking or justifying any belief they had in anything. They didn't come up with anti gravity, they didn't create a flying saucer, they didn't find Thor's energies, they didn't create lasers out of natural. It's truly remarkable the degree to which some of these leading Nazis kept experimenting or kind of trying to justify these research expeditions when they weren't really uncovering anything. I mean, in some cases. So, for example, the Tibet exhibition expedition did have some benefits in terms of botany. Like Ernst Schaeffer, who was a botanist, the guy who went along with it. Some of the anthropologists found some interesting stuff. It's not that every expedition they did was completely useless then or now. It's just that it didn't prove any of the things they wanted to prove by any scientific measure.
- [93:28]
Mark
Certainly, yeah. I don't think they found any supernatural artifact. But did they find, I guess, like a grail that they had heard about and went to a different place and found a piece of gold or something?
- [93:38]
Eric Curlander
They went to Mount Segura I mean, remember lots of people, I mean, the Freemasons, the Knights Templar, there were all sorts of groups interested in this stuff before the Nazis. The really important thing to remember here is the Nazis are merely reconfiguring or reinventing existing traditions. They didn't come up with any new stuff. Whether it's folkish groups or broader British, French and German kind of esoteric beliefs or doctrines, they're simply recombinating or directly appropriating ideas that were already popular by the 1920s and 30s and still are in the British and American History Channel. Whether it's ancient aliens, hidden forces, the third eye, interesting, Atlantis. So when does all this stuff start to pop up? Second half of the 19th century, in the wake of romanticism, with the kind of decline of traditional Christianity and rise of modern science, which is alienating to these people. And then it just gets recon. I mean, Dianetics, Scientology, Erich Von Daniken, we have those traditions in the British and American context as well. Ancient aliens, temples in South America and Egypt that could only be built by a superior race. The Nazis lapped that stuff up. That justified their idea of ancient Aryan civilization that had spread out and then declined. And now it was their job to reconstruct that and the Axis by getting in touch with the Tibetan civilization. The Northern Indians fighting for British independent against for independence from Britain. The Japanese. They could use these partner Aryan civilizations or partially Aryan civilizations to help them in their quest to resuscitate Aryan civilization.
- [95:25]
Mark
Interesting. Now, speaking of objects with mystical powers, there's a story that I think is probably apocryphal, but I'm curious, your opinion that when Hitler invaded Vienna and got control of Vienna, that Spear of Destiny. Exactly. That the Spear of Dany, the Holy Lance. That he went into the house of treasures in Vienna and seized the Holy Lance that was once carried by Charlemagne through battle. Is there any credence to this?
- [95:55]
Eric Curlander
What Hitler did do, which I think any German statesman would have done, is having annexed Austria, being an Austrian and wanting to make it clear that the capital of the Germanic Reich was no longer in Austria. It wasn't the Holy Roman Empire, which he hated because Vienna was associated with all these lesser races and the Germans were only a minority, he transferred, I forget, to where. I don't remember if it was Regensburg, which had been the other seat of the Holy Roman Empire at some point, but he just transferred all the imperial treasures further north into what had traditionally been Germany, which would now be kind of the center of the Reich. There's no evidence that I've seen in the archives that he did so because he had any mystical investment in any of the holy treasures other than they were valuable. Christians like them, a lot of German people thought they were important part of German identity and tradition and he wanted them more centrally located.
- [96:55]
Mark
I see.
- [96:56]
Eric Curlander
The only spear or holy lance that I found in looking at thousands and thousands of pages over 10 years of Nazi archival documents is an episode which I found in the archives in Berlin where Rosenberg, Himmler and one of the SS archaeologists. I mean Rosenberg and Himmler had their own archaeologists. So Rosenberg's office and the SS Annenerba were rivals and kind of collecting treasure and things from all over Europe and proving that they're Aryan and see who could come up with cooler stuff. Rosenberg and Himmler didn't really like each other because they overlapped in so many of these theories. Right. But in this case, what was interesting in this letter I found they're enthusiastically or letters writing each other because they had found something. You can look it up. I mean, I hadn't heard of it before the Spear of Kovel, which is an area of what would now be western Ukraine, I believe, that was supposedly representative of a superior Germanic civilization, you know, a thousand years earlier, which they wanted to find because they wanted to annex as much of Eastern Europe as they could that fit their idea of the furthest expanses the Aryan or Germanic race. And finding this spear and studying it showed that the Germans had gotten further than or as far as they thought they had gotten. Right.
- [98:15]
Mark
I see.
- [98:15]
Eric Curlander
So it wasn't so much about its mystical value as this other border scientific, somewhat supernatural belief in folklore and mythology that by studying ghost stories and vampire and werewolf stories and looking at old artifacts, you could reconstruct the limits of the Germanic races by differentiating what people said, even if they sometimes used a Slavic language from Slavic traditions. So they had these archaeologists going out there and studying the artifacts and the museums collections of course, raiding it and taking it back to Germany in many cases to say, oh, this is an area that could be Germanized.
- [98:54]
Mark
This is an area that can't because they're finding artifacts. There's archaeological evidence that they had gone this far and that case or their ghost story.
- [99:02]
Eric Curlander
So they. I have an episode in the book where in chapter seven there's this tradition which is where we get the headless horseman from.
- [99:09]
Mark
Oh, what's that?
- [99:10]
Eric Curlander
The wild hunt. So in Germanic or German speaking countries, remember he was a Hessian and this is an area where a bunch of German immigrants were that there are And I think this is also in, if not in Faust, in one kind of famous work of literature. At night, coming out of the mountain, these. It's in Tolkien, dead soldiers come out, some of them headless or missing arms, and they ride the night kind of screaming. And they. I think they can punish sinners and they can, you know, you're supposed to be wary of them. It's called the Wild Hunt. Again, I'm not an expert on this. It is part of the core route of the Headless Horseman, who would come out at night, I think, out of a tree. And it was Germanic, right. So they would look for people who had folklore that talked about the Wild Hunt. And if they did, regardless of ethnicity, I mean, regardless of language, said, oh, these must be. Or Germanic people. And if they didn't, they weren't. I'm just giving you one example of the arbitrary way I see they used ghost stories in the supernatural to differentiate.
- [100:14]
Mark
Oh, wow. Yeah, fascinating. So now there's an interesting moment that you discuss. I believe in the book, you also did it in a talk that I'd watched, that there's this little saga that happens where Hitler is now going to start an Eastern front war with Russia. And Hess is concerned about this. So he consults with his astrologer, flies to Britain to basically broker a deal, gets captured, and Hitler is livid about this and basically they pin it on the astrologer who gave him the idea to fly there in the first place, and he bans all the. This mysticism of, you know, in Nazi Germany.
- [100:53]
Eric Curlander
That's the narrative that Bormann and Heydrich and Goebbels give Hitler. It's not completely accurate, but let's take a step back to 37. Remember I said they didn't really do anything to the occult until 37. What happens by 37 is there are so many members of the police, not necessarily Gestapo and certainly not members of the ss, but kind of normal criminal police are supposed to kind of investigate public decency and stuff. There are members of police, some of whom are directly linked to debunkers who want to push for science and enlightenment and against occult ideas. Writing the police and the Gestapo saying, look, we've got all these occultists around, they're still making money, they're meeting. When are you going to do something about it? And so the head of the criminal police, this guy named Arturneba, who I think also becomes a Einsatzgruppen leader later on, he's one of the high ranking SS men, he's like, we need to do something about this. Heydrich really wants to go after all occultists. He's the head of the intelligence service and later on the Gestapo. The architect of the Holocaust. He's very high ranking SS guy. Himmler is really into all these ideas and only wants to go against after popular occultists who are exploiting like grandmothers and Jewish occultists he calls boulevard occultists. So NEBA comes up with a compromise and says, why don't we make a move and ban some of these organizations, arrest a few astrologers and stuff and meanwhile the really good ones, the scientific ones, will get the sponsorship of the SS and they can do their research under your protection. Heydrich's like, fine, whatever. That's better than what we have now. Himmler's like, that's cool. So they've already made a move against the cultists and decide to compromise because too many Nazi leaders, including Himmler, are interested in it. They're not just gonna throw everyone in jail, but they're also not gonna let them run rampant anymore. And that lasts for about four years. And what happens in 41, which is really interesting, it's two years into the war. During the war, fascists always get more repressive. I mean even liberal states get more repressive. So they've moved against jazz clubs and gay and lesbian people and they've started arresting Jews and all this other stuff. They haven't done anything with the cultists yet until Hess flies to Scotland now. Did he consult with his astrologer? He did have an astrologer. So did Himmler by the way. So did Nancy Reagan. I mean, this is not that unusual. He probably did. But the real issue is how embarrassing it was that Hess, the Deputy Fuhrer, had without prior approval or any diplomatic communiques, commandeered a plane, flown there, instead of being treated like a representative, gets captured and is made to look stupid and make makes Hitler look stupid and makes the Third Reich look divided. So Hitler was already livid about this and was talking about he hopes Hess gets executed. Can't believe he betrayed him. The irony is Hess, for all his supernatural thinking, was a smart guy. He went to University of Munich and recognized that Hitler was about to cause a two front war. The same two front war he had constantly said because of World War I he wasn't going to do so. He was hoping he could get Britain to make a deal and say, look fascism, you may not love it, but aren't we better than the communists? Why don't you stay out of this let us defeat Communism, then we'll be friends. Fortunately, with Churchill in charge, that wasn't going to happen. If Chamberlain or Lord Halifax had been in charge, who knows? But. But either way, they just capture him, interrogate him. So Bormann, who has been gradually displacing Hess, getting more and more power and trust from Hitler and becoming the guy in charge of who gets to see Hitler, and he's helping with policy, he's happy that Hess has gone and did this. And he and Heydrich and Goebbels, who all didn't like Hess and don't like occultism, use this as an excuse and say, by the way, the reason we think he did this is he was an occultist who. And asked his astrologer, which isn't why he did it, he was going to do it anyway. He just asked the astrologer if he did it all about weather and timing. The reason he did it when he did it in May is the original invasion of the Soviet Union was going to be like May 15th, I think, and he flew on May 10th. I mean, come on. That being said, Hitler was like, oh, that's why. Go after all the occultists. I'm done with them. He called it the Hess Action.
- [105:19]
Mark
Right?
- [105:20]
Eric Curlander
But what's funny about this, to show you again, their ambivalent attitude is that Gestapo, Rosenberg, Goebbels, they all start attacking occultists in the press, blah, blah, blah, lasts for like six weeks, by which point the forces of going after the occult have kind of dissipated, partly because Himmler wants to keep their libraries and keep the good ones for himself. There are a bunch that go into concentration camps, but many of them are released in 42 and 43 for the Navy Pendulum Institute and Himmler's own pendulum operation to try to find Operation Mars to try to find Mussolini. Meanwhile, Hitler is getting frustrated because the debunkers who take advantage of this to try to make fun of magicians and occultists publicly and show that nothing they do is real. Hitler's friends with the head of the Reich Magicians Association. He thinks it's cool that people like magic. And he doesn't differentiate between magic and occultism. He doesn't really understand the difference. So he says, stop debunking these things.
- [106:23]
Mark
Oh, wow.
- [106:24]
Eric Curlander
People like it, the army likes it. I'm friends with the guy. So right after this movement, you're getting all these debunkers saying, hey, I thought we're going to move against the occult. And they're being told, yeah, well, the Fuhrer doesn't want this, Himmler doesn't want that. So it kind of fizzles out.
- [106:42]
Mark
So now when you say the Magicians association, do you mean people that are doing sleight of hand and tricks?
- [106:46]
Eric Curlander
Right, but remember, a lot of these people are also, also saying that they can call on. They're clairvoyant, they're talking to dead people, they're doing spiritualism, they're doing parapsychology, which is all bread and butter, occultism and border science. So debunkers are saying the two are linked. You can't differentiate magic from other claims to having esoteric powers.
- [107:08]
Mark
And Hitler only defended them because he was close with the head of the organization.
- [107:12]
Eric Curlander
It's not clear that Hitler believed it was all real. He was just like, why are we going after them? Which again, if they really believed in public enlightenment, you know, which already again, we had kind of these debunkers writing. One of them was a police officer, commissar named Carl Peltz, who's writing his superiors in the Gestapo and criminal police. Why aren't we doing something already in 37? So my point in chapters four and five, to say, rather than go after them like they go after Jews and communists and socialists and. And Jehovah's Witnesses, they try to discipline them and control them. Another famous example, we talked about Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy. Very, very popular. It's popular in America and Britain, really popular in Germany and Austria. There's Waldorf schools, there's this astrologically based form of agriculture called biodynamic agriculture, which is based on the stars and the moon. It's still around today, by the way. You plan at certain times and you read the stars. A bunch of Nazis, some of whom had been in anthroposophic movement. Some of them just read Steiner, like all this stuff. What they don't like or recognize is going to be problematic with Hitler and Himmler around. And Heydrich is claiming Steiner is a guru who's a charismatic leader and what he says is law because he died in 1924. But a lot of his followers like, oh, he's like, Jesus, right? Everything he wrote is awesome. Because again, this isn't really science, it's religion. And obviously for Hitler and Himmler, who want everyone to be loyal to them, the ss, the party that's not going to fly. So you have a bunch of SS Lee, I have letters from SS leaders talking to leaders of the anthroposophic movement, saying, look, we like what you're doing. The biodynamic agriculture. You can have your Waldorf school. Just stop saying that. Steiner is the most important figure in history. You're in the Third Reich. We can't defend you if Hitler and Himmler keep hearing about this. So you see how it's not the doc to supernatural doctrines. It's the hierarchy, it's the ideology, it's the party. And this guy, Erhard Bartsch, one of the figures, is so into anthroposophy, he's like, no, no, let me talk to Hitler. I'll convince him. I don't remember how far he got, but he pissed off so many Nazis, they eventually demote him.
- [109:27]
Mark
Oh, wow.
- [109:28]
Eric Curlander
But they still use biodynamic agriculture. Himmler has people in Dachau, prisoners using the methods. And when he wants to colonize the east, he wants warrior peasants to go east and farm with biodynamic agriculture, because it's not using materialist, environmentally poisonous artificial fertilizer.
- [109:48]
Mark
And when you say biodynamic agriculture still used, what do you mean by that?
- [109:52]
Eric Curlander
I don't know how it's called, but that technique, if you look it up.
- [109:55]
Mark
Oh, really?
- [109:56]
Eric Curlander
There are people who still use a version of that, or they follow Steiner's rules. Again, I'm not a scientist. Maybe there are elements to obviously, organic farming. Let's say it's akin to organic farming, which are good, right? But I don't know why you need to talk about the stars and the moon to do that properly. So I'm not saying that everyone who does biodynamic agriculture, I think it was called the Bio Dunamische Wirtschaft or Agrawtschaft, or whatever it was called in German, is inherently an authoritarian. I'm simply pointing out that this tradition was embraced by the Third Reich as an alternative to industrial agriculture. Artificial fertilizer.
- [110:38]
Mark
Fascinating.
- [110:38]
Eric Curlander
Yeah.
- [110:39]
Mark
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- [112:12]
Eric Curlander
So let's talk about three different examples of this. First of all, Goebbels manages to protect or take out of the camps. I forget which depends on who. He had multiple astrologers working for him, which he continues through 1943. So despite the 1941 Hess action, Goebbels has occultists doing astrological horoscopes and tables for him that he can use as propaganda. In 1942, the German Navy is kind of nonplussed at Y. For the first time in the Battle of the Atlantic, the British seem to be able to predict where the U boats are coming from. Now, you would think the foremost country of science until a few years earlier in world history, Germany, per capita. I mean, physics, chemistry, engineering, they were pretty impressive, right? Might have thought that the British had developed some kind of technology that helped them pinpoint where U boats were. They had used radar, which they now knew about in 1940, to win the Battle of Britain. By weather, clouds or whatever, they could see where the German planes are coming in. Instead of assuming they had developed an equivalent sonar, they thought they had figured out some occult way through pendulum dowsing. Not all of them. Some members of the navy, but not Nazi leaders. This is really important to show how widespread this is. There's a guy in the Navy officer named Hans Reuter who theorized, and this would be bad enough, right, that they had come up with some kind of occult way through dowsing radius. It's called radiosthesia, the scientific term to locate large heavy metal objects under the water and they're therefore pinpoint and, and, and bomb them right before they could torpedo British convoys. Rotor actually gets the support of other officers to create his own pendulum institute within the Navy. Again, this isn't officially a party or SS operation. This is now the Navy. And they give him money and he's allowed to take a bunch of pendulum dousers out of the camps. Not all of them were in the camps, but many were. Give them food, whatever, pay them. Of course it didn't work. They didn't find any British ships that way. They decided that British probably weren't using that or they were better at it, who knows. The fact that the Navy invested in this at all though says something about how widespread the supernatural imaginary was and romantic thinking was at the higher echelons even of the military.
- [114:45]
Mark
Is there an element of this that it's just sort of a low cost, high impact behavior that could help maybe their.
- [114:52]
Eric Curlander
So we know the CIA did similar stuff, right?
- [114:55]
Mark
MK Ultra, things like this. They think the Russians are using mind control. So they say, yeah, let's throw a couple hundred thousand dollars in mind control.
- [115:01]
Eric Curlander
See what we get. The difference is, I would argue you cannot find at the upper echelons of the actual government or people running the economy or industry, people with this kind of romantic or supernatural mindset in Churchill's government, Roosevelt's government. Right. So the fact that the CIA, that a massive bureaucracy occasionally tried some fringe stuff is a lot different than the leaders of the Navy, of the ss, of the party saying let's open whole homeopathic and natural healing hospitals. Let's not only have concentration camps based on border or pseudoscientific race theories about Jews being vampires and parasites, let's have them farming with biodynamic agriculture. It's the scale, the depth and breadth of it. It's not whether it happens at all. We know the British actually had their own people working on horoscopes, eventually more as a counter espionage operation. Right. But it was way bigger in the Third Reich. So all that to say, sure, you could say this particular episode didn't cost a lot. But the agglomeration of all these different things is why I do think there is A story to be told. And again, I'm not saying you can only understand the Third Reich from a supernatural point of view. There's lots of concrete, material and geopolitical reasons they did what they did or they wouldn't have been successful. I'm merely saying that by leaving this element out because it was relegated to the fringes of historical inquiry, we lose a lot of nuance and a lot of color to help understand why they did what they did, how they thought about things and why they made decisions in certain ways that can't be explained purely through a materialist or eugenical or biopolitical or capitalist lens. Right?
- [116:53]
Mark
Right. Now, perhaps most interestingly, when it comes to the remote viewing stuff, Himmler claims that they used remote viewing and maybe this pendulum dousing type ritual to liberate Mussolini after he's captured by the Allies.
- [117:09]
Eric Curlander
Himmler thinks I don't know that he claimed because we don't have him claiming this. What we have are the memoirs of Schellenberg, who replaces Heydrich after Heydrich gets assassinated as head of the intelligence service, saying that Himmler believed in it. We have other SS guy, what's his name? Name escapes me. Kind of mid level SS guy who's also important, trying to understand the Holocaust and the kind of hierarchy there and decision making, who changes his mind. I think his name is Wilhelm Htel. At one point he claims the intelligence came from elsewhere. There's no way it worked. And Himmler was just into that stuff. And some other memoir, I forget which was first says actually it might have been that, because I don't know what the alternative intelligence would. All that matters is there were SS leaders, including Himmler seemed to think they might be able to find Mussolini by having people concentrate over a map with pendulum pendulums, right sidereal pendulums swinging back and forth. And they let out some astrologers too, and parapsychologists, just in case. There's like 30 or 40 of these people in a villa in Wannsee or near Wannsee. I don't remember if it's in Wannsee or right next door, the same place, near the same suburb where they had planned the Holocaust a year earlier, being given cigars and alcohol and nice food as long as they would pour over these maps. And however it was found, one theory is that conventional intelligence found out one of the islands he was likely in and they fed it to the astrologers so they can make Himmler happy. So Wilhelm Wolf, his favorite astrologer, could say, oh, I think we found him and Then Himmler's like, oh, it worked.
- [118:54]
Mark
Interesting.
- [118:55]
Eric Curlander
Then there's other accounts that, no, they don't know how they got the information. Maybe it did work. What matters here is that they've spent so much money and time on this.
- [119:05]
Mark
What other examples are there? Those are all the ones that really stand out to me. What other examples are there within the Third Reich of using or utilizing supernatural rituals or behavior to gain power?
- [119:17]
Eric Curlander
Well, to gain power. I don't want to. Well, the whole first three chapters are the way that they exploit these beliefs to get voters to support them. Right. So we talked about Shertle and how Hitler read his magic book, possibly to manipulate people. They would hold solstice festivals and invite people to them and talk about, you know, the, or Germanic religion and race. In the early to mid-20s, in the late 20s, early 30s, they hire one of the most famous horror writers in Europe, probably the most famous horror writer in Germany, who had been a kind of liberal or libertine writer before the war. I think he'd been to America a few times. He wrote, he had all these exotic locations, stories about witches and vampires and weird sexual demonic orgies. And he was considered kind of, you know, a little bit out there, like almost R rated stuff. And he was so annoyed that Germany lost its colonies because he loved traveling to all these places and competing with the British Empire and then, you know, the left wing taking over and the loss of land that he started to hang out with Nazis and far right people and wrote a book about how awesome the Fry Corps and the far right was and how it was cool that they were killing left wing people called Rider in the German Knight. Basically knights in the German Knight. Like people who come. These are all people who are on trial for murder and all this stuff. Ernst Rohm, the head of the Stormtroopers, somehow knows him. Goebbels thinks he's really interesting. And then I think Putsi Hamstangl was Hitler's chauffeur, actually brings him for his birthday to meet Hitler. And through all of this he manages to be hired by Goebbels to write propaganda for the Third Reich. It's like hiring Stephen King to come up with propaganda because you're good at coming up with fanciful horror stories. He gives a speech at a. In a graveyard. There is as part of a propaganda in 1932, shortly before they take power, I think right before Hitler, right before Rome gives a speech. So he's not that marginal figure. And clearly this is the Nazi saying, despite him, I don't Remember if I think it was Rosenberg who was kind of moralistic, who's like, how can you have this guy who's talking about, like, witch semen and whatever he's doing hanging out with us and writing for the party? Isn't that kind of problematic? And Goebbels is like, no, it's fine. Hitler likes him and it's fine, and we're going to do it anyway. I think it was Rosenberg who complained that this is kind of embarrassing. And then what's so funny is Bertholdt Brecht, the famous playwright, the Threepenny Opera. When he hears about this, he writes this scathing article. We knew they were weird and into supernatural stuff, but. But there's nothing better in showing how absurd and stupid and supernatural the Nazi movement is than imagining Goebbels hiring this embarrassing horror writer who screws around with women and has all these horrible pornographic vampire stories as their propagandists. Like, there's no way these guys could get elected now and then. Of course they do.
- [122:50]
Mark
Wow.
- [122:52]
Eric Curlander
But even then, that's not it. In 1932, the most famous parapsychologist, magician, whatever you want to call him in Germany, a guy named Erich Hanussen, who gave himself a Danish name. He's actually an Austrian Jew, born the same year as Hitler, but named Hermann Steinschneider. He kind of made his way through the ranks doing, like, magic shows and kind of writing comic books and stuff in the twenties, and becomes so well known that he has thousands of people reading his magazine, multiple magazines. He just puts out all these different magazines. And when he sees that the Nazis are starting to do well, he starts to write horoscopes saying how awesome Hitler is and the Nazis are probably going to come to power. Meanwhile, a bunch of storm troopers in Berlin, where he has his house of occultism, his palace of occultism, start to hang out with him because they like what he's writing. They could party on his yacht. He loans some of them money. We're talking about leading Stormtroopers. So there's this direct connection between this most famous parapsychologist magician who has tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of Germans who know who he is and think he can predict the future and manipulate people's minds and these Stormtroopers. And then this is what's really interesting. Shortly before he's murdered by the Nazi Party, a few weeks after Hitler comes to power, he announces at a seance that he has seen, I think, on February 26th, the Reichstag fire, I think is February 27th or 28th that he's seen a giant building on fire, and then a day or two later, the Reichstag's put on fire. Now, one explanation is he actually predicted it or got lucky. Another is he's hanging out with the Stormtroopers who are going to set it on fire, and that it was a.
- [124:45]
Mark
False flag that he knew about.
- [124:47]
Eric Curlander
Either way, between the rumors that he's Jewish, which are now pretty obvious, that the left has been promoting because they hate him for supporting Nazism, like this guy Bruno Frey, a leftist right, like, why are you hanging out with this guy? He's Jewish. The fact that he's been hanging out with Nazi Stormtroopers and they owe him money, which they don't want to pay him, and now he's claiming to have predicted the Reichstag fire publicly for all, all sorts of those reasons. They kill him. A few weeks later, his body shows up. It's pretty clear some stormtroopers who were friends with him probably invited him out and killed him. Now some people say, oh, that proves they don't like the occult. No, it's the opposite. They were so embarrassed by their close ties to this guy, the fact that he just couldn't keep things quiet, plus he's Jewish, that they take him out. But that for me shows again how both directly and indirectly, in terms of these affinities between supernatural thinking and fascism, conspiracism, pseudoscience, whatever you want to call it, that that is one reason they appealed, as Rosenberg said later on, to a certain subsection of the German population that after so much war and depression and crisis, having all these supernatural things around them, what I call the supernatural imaginary. The Nazis were really good at, at wielding those ideas, operationalizing them. Torchlight processions, talking about the spirituality and racial purity and ancient history, prehistory, Aryan history of the German people. They appeal to people seeking some kind of sustenance.
- [126:24]
Mark
Wow.
- [126:25]
Eric Curlander
And still only got a third of the vote. Let's remember that there are a lot of rural white white men and small town white men disillusioned with capitalism, who hated communism, who saw this as a solution. Let's give it a try.
- [126:40]
Mark
And it seems like they gave it a try for a long time in the sense that many of these high ranking Nazis, they believe this for, well, just talk.
- [126:48]
Eric Curlander
You asked about how they got power, right? Once they're in power. We already talked about that. They're kind of ambivalent at times about what to do with it. Again, I wouldn't explain their economic or tax policies or social Policies through recourse to supernatural. I do though talk about in chapter eight and nine, how the Holocaust and human experiments and also some of the partisan warfare and miracle weapon development was linked to the supernatural thinking. There are aspects of the war, again, chapter seven, like how did they justify their empire in the East? Folklore and mythology.
- [127:23]
Mark
Right.
- [127:24]
Eric Curlander
Biodynamic agriculture. So they weaponize this stuff during the Third Reich, but it's a whole different story about how they come to power in kind of appealing to these ideas that are already there.
- [127:35]
Mark
I see. Okay. And so just I guess to. To wrap up the. The actual weaponizing. I mean, you had just mentioned that, you know, the Holocaust and things like that they were weaponizing the supernatural.
- [127:48]
Eric Curlander
Yeah. So I can't say. Obviously there's no Holocaust without race science, which goes back to Darwin and Herbert Spencer and Gobineau and Chamberlain. It's not even a German tradition which is widespread in Europe and America between the 1890s and 1940s. Right. The idea that there are different races with different qualities, let's say better or worse, and that you can breed better races through eugenics. The Nazis are immersed in that. That's part of it. And the Jews are clearly a race. They don't want to be dominant. And capitalism and economic imperatives are important. If these are lesser races, life unworthy of life, as eugenists say, how much energy are we going to take treating them like full citizens? If we can't get them out, maybe we'll enslave them. Slave labor. So there are a lot of imperatives that are also true of other European colonial powers. The United States in why people of a different race, in this case Jews and Slavs, get the short end of the stick. But the reason it gets so radical and so totalizing, I argue in chapter eight, is this is all leavened or catalyzed by occult, esoteric and mythological beliefs about Jews and Slavs being almost mythological monsters. Right. There's constant comparisons, not only from Hitler, but in propaganda pamphlets. Jews being this kind of Eastern vampiric presence that comes in the ostuden to the. To the pure Aryan Germanic Reich and the women and exploits their economy and sucks them dry. Hitler has a phrase in Mein Kampf where he says the vampire comes in and like all vampires and parasites, it sucks the blood out of its victim. And then when the victim dies, it dies too, because there's no more blood to suck. I mean, this is literally a few years after Dosferatu comes out, which is this Eastern European looking almost anti Semitic caricature ish vampire that comes into this pure little German town and sucks the blood literally and figuratively out of the town. He brings disease, pestilence. He attacks a blonde woman.
- [130:05]
Mark
Was Nosferatu intentionally made to represent these?
- [130:08]
Eric Curlander
There's a whole debate on whether it was intentional or not. Murnau was not known for being a fascist, whether it was subconscious or accidental. My point is simply the Nazis were appropriating and operationalizing tropes that invoked the idea of Jews being monsters who have an international network where they can carry out their monstrous Judeo Bolshevik plot to destroy Aryan civilization, which goes back to them accusing Aryan women of being witches. Right. To exterminate them. Well, why not return the favor? So once things get brutal and they're already killing millions of people and getting killed themselves, this, in my mind helps justify, doesn't explain completely, their attempt to eliminate the Jews. It's not a purely technical or biological exercise. It's not a purely materialist one. We just don't. We have too many mouths to feed. And then they use the same tropes with Slavs, Most famously in early 1945, you have a bunch of ethnic Germans fleeing from what's now basically Yugoslavia, where there had always been ethnic Germans, but during the Third Reich they were treated very well because they were part of the Greater Germanic kind of Reichstag, claiming that, and this is very interesting, the gender dynamic, that partisans of Tito, the Communist leader who was helping the Soviets fight the fascists disproportionately, women were transforming into vampires. Blood drinkers, they called them, and saying, we need Schwabenblut. Schwaben means Germans from Swabia and Southwest Germany. A lot of the Germans who had moved, and whether it's Catherine of Great's Russia or Serbia, were from Southwest Germany, because during the economic crises of the early modern period, a lot of them left were invited because they were hard working and good with finances and stuff, good farmers. So they call them all Schwaben and they claim that they're getting overtaken with a kind of psychosis and foaming at the mouth and they want to drink Schwabenblut and they're attacking and sometimes killing Germans. And there's an SS folklorist, Karasek, one of these guys who had been justifying German expansion to the east, who's collecting these stories in DP camps. You can find it. They're all collected in a German archive for East European anthropology. I saw them. I have a colleague who saw them. Just report after report of being attacked by these partisans. Now they don't always say it, but these are communist Slavs who are supposedly turning into vampires to attack Germans. At the very same time, what were Goebbels, Hitler and Himmler doing with one of the special forces leaders who had rescued Mussolini? Creating their own partisan force. And guess what they called them?
- [133:01]
Mark
Werewolves.
- [133:02]
Eric Curlander
Werewolves. And what's so interesting as I talk about throughout the book is there's a whole tradition going back to the 19th century. Now remember the 19th century, even the late 18th century, the romantic era is when the British and the French take the East European vampire, which in Serbian or Polish tradition is this like zombie like thing that comes out of the grave and disgusting and feeds on its own relatives. And they romanticize it into a kind of noble East European figure who represents this, the, the pre industrial world who's coming kind of a fish out of water and doesn't want to kill people, but has to. This didn't start with Bram Stoker. This is already with Lord Byron. This is with Coleridge's Christabel about this beautiful lesbian vampire that seduces a woman in the woods. So while the French and British and Americans are romanticizing the East European vampire, not exoticizing it or creating a racial monster out of it, the Germans are arguing that vampires are these diseased Eastern interlopers, whether they represent Slavs or Jews, that are coming to destroy the pure Aryan race.
- [134:18]
Mark
Wow.
- [134:20]
Eric Curlander
Conversely, the werewolf in West European tradition, especially the French tradition, lycanthropy. Right. That's where it comes from. Are tied to the devil in witchcraft. So people who become werewolves have done something evil or had a horse jump over there. I mean, the traditions are all. It's all linked to Christian cosmology and witchcraft. But you know, werewolf isn't a good thing. It's a curse. We know that also from the novels and movies and British and American tradition, the Germanic tradition in the 19th century romantic era, the werewolf is resuscitated as a noble, if troubled figure in Nordic mythology. Who's there tied to nature, blood and soil, to kind of defend Germanic pagan civilization against Christian interlopers and protect wayfarers.
- [135:09]
Mark
Complete inversion.
- [135:10]
Eric Curlander
I found one of Rosenberg's acolytes who did a dissertation on this, showing how the werewolf is a positive figure in Germanic tradition. The berserkers of Odin put on wolf skins and turned into wolves, all this stuff. And so there's this tradition there that then gets invoked. Right before World War I, a kind of right wing nationalist writer writes a book called Werewolf about the Germans in the, I think kind of the Westphalian area, fighting against the Catholic church in the Inquisition, who are murdering their family and their wives as werewolves, like partisans in the woods. Then the 20s, there's something called the werewolf. Though interestingly, it's still using, playing on the Wehr of the Wehrmacht, like to. To defend yourself in terms of national defense, not the wer, which means man wolf in German and English, but to the werewolf. So they're playing on the Wehrmacht and wolf as a paramilitary group that's going to fight against the French and Belgian occupation. And then you see, in the Third Reich, I think Himmler names an SS division werewolf. Hitler names one of his headquarters in the east the werewolf. And then in 1944, 45. We shouldn't be confused. I'm trying to show you the tradition there. When they need to come up with a name for their paramilitary, they do werewolf and they take out the H to invoke the truly supernatural version of the man wolf.
- [136:51]
Mark
Wow. And this werewolf is trying to exterminate the vampire.
- [136:57]
Eric Curlander
It's trying to. Right, well, so what's happening are two parallel narratives that are only connected by what I call the supernatural imaginary. Germans in the east claiming they're being attacked by Slavic vampires, which they've learned somehow through folklore, mythology, to view Slavs as vampiric and evil and degenerate, but still superpower, just like the Jews as vampiric parasites that can control everything. At the same time, though independently. The Nazi leadership is saying we need our own partisan movement to defend against the communists that are coming in, and we're going to call them werewolves.
- [137:33]
Mark
Bizarre, coincidental in the literal sense, but still there's an ambient, this feeling of.
- [137:41]
Eric Curlander
Supernaturalism, that the supernatural imaginary, this. This collection of beliefs that may go back a hundred years, whatever it is that people use to make sense of difficult reality, rather than taxes and tariffs and military strategy and democracy and science, it's easier to invoke Wagner and Gotter Dammerung and werewolves and vampires. Not every German did this. My argument is simply that this helps us understand the attractiveness of fascism and the persistence of fascism after the Third Reich. Because if there is a party willing to exploit these ideas which are always there in every society, every industrialized capitalist society, where science and liberal institutions that are so clinical and impersonal are in charge. You'll always have people who feel alienated, who want to fall back on their own romantic beliefs, and this gives them a vehicle to do that. And if a party can appeal to that, they can get a pretty large percentage of the electorate do you need.
- [138:43]
Mark
A supernatural component to create a fascist government?
- [138:47]
Eric Curlander
It seems to be there. It seemed to be there in the Italian fascist movement. I mean, Franco drew more on a supernatural imagery linked to the Catholic Church. But I would say that liberalism and socialism are very much secular. It's always about institutions, science, historical stages, processes, and even traditional conservatism. In the Anglo Saxon tradition, it's usually classical liberalism or libertarianism, which is secular. Even if you throw in a William F. Buckley kind of Christian conservatism, it's still very much more than traditional Christian institutions that are, if you believe Weber, already compatible with liberal individualism and capitalism, the Protestant work ethic. And so what fascists do is they have to compete with that. So they create an alternative way of viewing the world, which is illiberal, does not believe in neutral processes, institutions, the deep state to resolve problems objectively. It wants it to all be under someone who is directly tied through blood, soil, ideology, mythology to the people. Bypass this clinical state, certainly legislative processes, right? Science gets in the way, materialist, methodical science. You just have to come up with alternatives. Science is wrong. Why do we trust them? They're part of a. A liberal conspiracy to hold us down. Right. And so by doing that, you have to invoke some alternative, and that alternative has to be supernatural or romantic. You could never share the view that these things need to be worked out scientifically, transparently, through negotiated rules. Right.
- [140:35]
Mark
They would fall apart. Interesting.
- [140:37]
Eric Curlander
So it's inevitable they're going to have to resort to that somehow, what some political scientists call political religion. I would say it's. It's more amorphous than that because it can vary in content, but it gets operationalized when there are politicians on the right who no longer care about liberal with a small L, proceduralism, science, material reality, or recognize what it is, but think they can't get elected anymore with their particular interests. Maybe they're very wealthy, maybe they're, you know, very powerful and recognize that the only way to get normal people to vote for them is exploit their frustration, superstitions, desire for a world based on intuition and their own beliefs. Right. We talked about this earlier, but a lot of people who support fascist parties want their beliefs validated. They're not interested in objective scientific inquiry or compromising with people who have different ideas or interests. They want someone to say, you're right, this is really happening. You're on the right side of history. You're not. Your conspiracy, conspiratorial view of the world is correct. And I agree with you, and I'm going to make you powerful. I'm going to validate your personal view of the world. Your skepticism is real. They don't want someone to say, actually, let's take a step back and look at what's really going on.
- [142:06]
Mark
Recognize this.
- [142:07]
Eric Curlander
And let's talk to scientists and experts. Why don't we just have the people you elect work this out in a very transparent compromise, data driven way? They don't like that. They want someone who has totalizing solutions. Right.
- [142:23]
Mark
Is there anything regarding the supernatural and the Third Reich that we have not discussed that we'd be remiss not to tell the good people?
- [142:34]
Eric Curlander
No, I think, I think we've gotten to. I mean, the one thing I would say as a kind of final episode, we talk about vampires versus werewolves. I think it's very interesting that the armaments minister, Speer, despite being an architect and not trained technically in armaments, took over and did a really good job using modern management techniques. Capitalism, bureaucracy, hiring experts regardless of whether they were Nazis. And at the end of the war, having built the V1 and V2 rocket or helped build it and keeping the Nazis afloat for a year, maybe more than they should have been, given their resources, is constantly getting bombarded by Nazi leaders. Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Bormann. When are you going to come up with the miracle weapons that'll help us take out New York and London? Where's the V3? Where is all this stuff? And he keeps saying, what are you talking about? I've never promised you miracle weapons. What we need are more flak, more guns to shoot down allied bombers, and we need more fighters to shoot down allied bombers. And we don't need big tanks with huge phallic guns on them because we're not going to be fighting offensive war anymore. And we, we don't need weird rockets. They haven't done any good and it's too late for them now. I mean, we can bomb. All we're going to do is piss people off more. And he keeps being asked about these miracle weapons. And my conclusion, in a way, Spears, is that the Nazis have started to get high on their own supply, so to speak. They really are starting to believe that you can through will and magic. I don't mean like literally that they believe in all, in magic, that somehow Speer and the German ingenuity will come up with some weapons that are going to be decisive. And the irony is, because of this thinking, I say this in the book, they don't invest in atomic weapons. Because for people like Himmler and Bormann and Rosenberg and Hitler, who are still stuck like teenage boys in a phase where they're fascinated by rockets and bombs and tanks, the things that in our society, the people who are otherwise anti science, all go out to watch rocket launches, right? Because you can see it and you see the fire coming out and it's cool and it's going somewhere. And you've got heroic astronauts. You know what? They're not interested in Quantum mechanics, biochemistry, Relativity. Nuclear. Too complicated. Right. Same thing. Back then. Hitler basically said, I don't even know what you're talking about. Seems like a long shot. Let's focus on more rockets. Meanwhile, the socialists and the liberals who believed in science were making much more progress by using, in many cases, German scientists, Jewish and liberal, who had fled this Third Reich, that was far too invested in supernatural thinking. So that's a lesson, I think, as well.
- [145:35]
Mark
So their interest in this supernatural Hail Mary to get this V3 rocket, it slowed them down from creating a nuke.
- [145:42]
Eric Curlander
Not just a V3. Himmler puts an SS guy who built concentration camps, that was his main claim to fame, in charge of the rocket program because he and Hitler don't trust the generals and the rocket engineers anymore because some of them had tried to kill Hitler again because they were rational. And we're like, we're going to lose. Let's get rid of this guy. So what I'm saying is this miraculous thinking that was in tension with Nazi rationality and German rationality for much of the war is starting to displace more rational thinking. And if not for people like Speer, if you just took the Nazi leaders who don't have PhDs in physics, but think as amateurs, they can figure things out, boy, they would have been in even worse shape, you imagine if you actually put Himmler directly in charge of the emerenssen industry instead of Speer.
- [146:31]
Mark
Yeah.
- [146:32]
Eric Curlander
I mean, who's writing nasty letters? Leave me alone.
- [146:34]
Mark
War would have ended two years earlier.
- [146:35]
Eric Curlander
Probably, well, maybe six months. Like, I'm not arguing the Nazis would have won. Right. They lasted longer than they should have. And part of it is because the more rational thinkers in the party were able to hold out. But, you know, you see what Himmler and Hitler believed, right?
- [146:51]
Mark
Dr. Kurlander, this has been excellent. Truly. I mean, just between us, I mean, your recall and I mean, ability to go. I mean, we've been recording for a long time now is remarkable. Truly. Like, I'm blown away. This has been excellent and really, really engaging. If anyone's interested in obviously checking out the book Hitler's Monsters. Hitler's Monsters. That is the third book that you've written. You have two others, if you would like to tell the people where they can find those.
- [147:18]
Eric Curlander
My first book, though I think it's out of print, Price of Exclusion, about the decline of German liberalism. The second one, which I think is about to be reprinted, called Living With Liberal Democrats and the Third Reich, about how liberal Democrats made compromises with the Nazis and fascism to kind of survive, but also sometimes because they agreed with certain things. Hitler's Monsters is what we were just talking about. My third book from 2018 and then I have a new book called Modern A Global History with a couple co authors with Oxford University Press. And it's a attempt to look at German history from a global perspective. So not just from what's going on in Germany or Central Europe, but really how is Germany a laboratory for modernity in a global context from 1500 to the present? Yeah. And my next project is called before the Final A Global History of the Nazi Jewish Question. So we'll see where that takes us. Thank you.
- [148:17]
Mark
I would love to have you back and we can discuss that one when it comes out.
- [148:20]
Eric Curlander
Thank you.
- [148:20]
Mark
Thank you again.
- [148:21]
Eric Curlander
All right, Mark, talk soon. Appreciate it.
- [148:22]
Mark
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