Forbidden History - Hitler's Occult Conspiracy

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

As the Nazis waged war for world domination, they began to develop a strange mythology of occult rites and pagan beliefs. In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast, experts investigate just how far the Nazis may have gone to transform their party into a new, cult-like religion. Cast List: Dominic Selwood: Historian, barrister, bestselling author, novelist and frequent contributor to national newspapers including The Independent, The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph Lynn Picknett: Historian and researcher specialising in exposing historical conspiracies. She is also the co-author of several notable works Andrew Gough: Writer, presenter and editor of The Heretic Magazine Dr. Karen Bellinger: Anthropologist, archaeologist, and historian  Tony McMahon: Former BBC news producer, author, print journalist and historian  Eric Kurlander: Professor of History & Author Richard Felix: A historian and lecturer specialising in local and paranormal history Guy Walters: A British author, historian, and journalist who has written several books on WWII. As a journalist for The Times, he writes on historical topics for the national press. Gavin Bone: Author & Lecturer of Magic & Runes Klint Janulis: Archaeologist & Former Special Forces Operative Neil Tobin: Magician, Psychic Entertainer & Playwright Philip Heselton: Wiccan & Author Janet Farrar: Wicca Priestess Kirsten John-Stucke: Director of the Kreismuseum, Wewelsburg Castle Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. The Nazis and their ruthless pursuit of world domination is the stuff of legend. But is there any truth to the idea that Hitler was using black magic and witchcraft in his quest to take over the world? For the Nazis, the occult was like oxygen.

It was the backbone. of their ideology. They were trying to use pseudoscience of the time to justify why the Aryan race was superior. They basically turned normal civilized human beings into monsters, so that has to be a sinister occult ritual. If magic is ever used to destroy something, it is used to destroy evil,

such as stopping the Nazis from invading Britain. If the Nazis had stopped all this nonsense with astronomy, astrologers, dowsing, tarot cards. If they'd stopped all that and got on with the war properly, I think they'd probably have beaten us. In the years leading up to Nazi Germany's declaration of war, a bizarre obsession began to take hold within the newly formed political party. A strange, twisted mythology based on ancient pagan beliefs and sorcery was beginning to emerge.

Today, when we think of Nazism, we tend to look at a political ideology that was bent on territorial conquest and on racial extermination. But actually, it's broader than that. There's a more philosophical part of Nazism as well. The Nazis subscribed to an extreme version of Ariosophy. Ariosophy was the idea that there was an ancient, Germanic, Aryan race, that was a pure race, a strong race. This notion of this ancient, mystic, Aryan race that's been

around thousands of years, they felt that gave them entitlement and was the motivation and the justification for all of their despicable actions. Heinrich Himmler was Hitler's second in command and the man chiefly responsible for actively encouraging, not only the belief in the occult, but also the idea that the Nazis really were descended from a super race of beings. Heinrich Himmler was one of the most powerful men in Germany. He was Hitler's right-hand man and the commander of the SS. He was a rabid occultist and really brought to Hitler a whole panoply of propaganda tools that he could use to justify what the Nazis were doing and to really place it in the roots of a false Aryan mythology designed to make the average German person feel.

not just okay with what Hitler was doing, but proud of it. Heinrich Himmler was the founder and the head of the SS. He also ended up leading the Gestapo and eventually founded the concentration camps that killed millions of people. And what drove him in his mission was this underlying belief that the German people were set apart from the rest of humanity.

And in order to prove that, he delved very deeply into the occult. He needed to find a supernatural backstory to the German people. And that led him on the trail of the Holy Grail. It led him to send people all over the world looking for non-evolutionary roots of the German people. Eric Kurlander is a historian and author who has researched Nazi occultism for decades. He has traveled to Kwedlenburg Castle, a 1,000-year-old fortress in central Germany to uncover the origin of Himmler's occult obsession. The Kwedlenburg Castle and Abbey, which was founded 1100 years ago by Henry

the Fowler, the great Saxon King. Henry the Fowler was seen as more authentically German than other Germanic kings of the Middle Ages by Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsphere SS, who decided that this would be a site where you could celebrate Germanic paganism. Henry the Fowler was King Heinrich the first, and he unified for the first time the German state in 956 and brought together everybody out of warring territories, and it was the launch of what became known as the First Reich. So it makes a lot of sense that Himmler is going to appropriate this myth for propaganda purposes. So Himmler was raised Catholic, but he very early on rejected his Christian upbringing and sought to create through the SS, a kind of pre-Christian religious tradition in Germany, an Aero-Germanic religion.

One way he was going to do that was by taking Christian festivals like Christmas and replacing them with the old winter solstice festivals, the Yule celebrations of pre-Christian pagan tradition. For example, in this room, in 1936, he inaugurated the first festival in honor of Henry the Fowler, the great Saxon King, who for him represented. the pre-Christian German reality that he wanted to recreate. Himmler genuinely believed that he was either the reincarnation or the descendant of Henry the Fowler, and Himmler, in his deluded state, used to go to the Abbey,

hold seances in the abbey, prayed at the grave or the shrine of Henry the Fowler, and genuinely believed that he was able to connect with the spirit of his dead ancestor. In the oldest part of the Kedlenburg Castle and Monastery, where Henry the Fowler, who built the very foundations of this monastery, was buried a thousand years ago. So one of the reasons that Heinrich Himmler found this space so interesting is it wasn't just the Saxon origins, the basis of the Arro-Germanic Empire that he and the SS wanted to recreate.

He actually believed he may have been the reincarnation, of Henry the Fowler. So this space really represent one part of what I call the supernatural imaginary that many Nazis subscribe to. It's linked to pagan religion and Aero-Germanic religious beliefs, kind of pre-Christian beliefs,

that was an important pillar of Nazi thinking. It overlaps in some ways with occult and esoteric ideas, but it's not the same thing. And that's why the Kedlenberg is more a kind of pagan religious site for Heinrich Schimler. So what you see with this young Himmler, he's very impressionable. He looks back on the Prussian and Germanic past, myth and legend, and there he finds examples

and stories of the kind of heroes that he always wants to be. And so therefore he's very seduced by the whole feel of that legend and myth and also by the esotericism of it. He really buys into all the ruins and the culture and the magic and all the mumbo-jumbo. But Himmler's strange beliefs in ancient German mythology and esotericism soon took a much more sinister turn. While studying farming at the Technical University in Munich, Himmler became fascinated with breeding, selective breeding, not just animals, but also human beings.

Could we create or recreate, more importantly, a master race? Since Himmler believed that the Aryan race had been perfect thousands of years earlier, maybe you could use modern breeding techniques to bring this... Aryan utopia back into being. Nazism was for the whole person. It wasn't just about the political side of an individual. And so elements that were brought in that people really identified with,

and there's so much literature from the period on this, was particularly linking. They are descended from these super people who lived millennia ago. So this is a tradition, it's a continuation. The Nazis didn't think they were inventing something. They thought they were tapping into an ancient force. From the outset, the Nazis were heavily influenced by occult ideas.

Hitler, Himmler and others were desperate to prove that the Aryan race had somehow originated separately from the rest of humanity. And in order to prove that highly unscientific theory, they needed to resort to something supernatural, something occult. By telling the German people that they were descended from a master race, a superior race, of beings that literally derived from epic mythology of a superb peace, harmony, and achievement. This was really canny.

I mean, this was directly addressing the psychological damage done upon the German national psyche by World War I. Guido von Liszt was a key figure in early Nazi occultism and a major influence on Heinrich Himmler. Guido von Liszt was an occultist who revealed revived religious movement which showed the ancient Aryan roots of the Germanic people. And why this was so important is that it served as inspiration to Himmler, who would later adopt these same beliefs. Guido von Liszt was a paganist who was responsible largely for the runic revival,

which became a really central part of the symbolism and iconography of the Nazi party, and particularly of the regalia worn by the SS. It was Liszt's teachings that encouraged Himmler to turn his twisted mind to an ancient language made of magical symbols called runes. Gavin Bone is a historian and expert on runes, who believes they are the key to understanding Nazi iconography. So the word rune comes the old German runen, which means a mystery, a secret, to whisper, something hidden.

And the ruins originally were a system of writing amongst the German peoples. Going back, they believe, as far back as 200 BC. There were origins in Nazi occultism derived from an Austrian journalist, playwright, an author named Gido Liszt. Gido von Liszt believed that there had been a Germanic empire that worshipped a pagan god, Wotan, and that used this runic script. And in fact, the Nazis latched onto this idea of the runic alphabet being a true German alphabet, and it informed their iconography, in particular the SS logo that we all know today. What it lists is responsible for is the integration of the runes into the SS as symbols. One of the most famous symbols the Nazis were associated with was the double lightning flash,

the double Zeg, of the Schultzaffen, the SS. which comes from the Zague Room, also known as the Soilo Room. This room was originally a symbol of success, of happiness, of peace. It becomes twisted. It becomes a symbol for victory. Hence the Nazi salute, Zeig Hale, is Hale Victory. Himmler wanted the SS to stand for something out of the ordinary. And to do that, he infused it with all these different currents of the occult. So most obviously he did it visually.

So things like the SS run, the two letters S you see, the lightning bolts. Those are old Germanic runes. It's called the Sig Rune. They have meaning, they can be interpreted. Many other runes were used in SS uniforms, in SS banners, on the daggers that they had. All sorts of articles of SS paraphernalia were engraved and emblazoned with these runes. It was Gido Liszt who introduced one of the most well known and was become one of the most hated symbols in the world.

And that was the swastika. Of course, that was not its original German name. It had civil names. The hook and crots, the hooked cross. The Philfoot, the many-footed cross. Now one of the great fallacies which has occurred since the Second World War is the Nazis, specifically Hitler and Himmler, reversed the rotation. But that's actually not true.

It is in fact going in the same direction. The double Zeig is actually the same as the swastika. If you take two say croons and interlock them, they actually become a swastika. They were originally meant the same thing. But of course the swastika was never originally a symbol of hate. You still find it around the world in many cultures and traditions. And still you see in places such as India, Tibet, the swastika still in use as a sacred symbol. It represents the sun.

It represents good luck, good fortune. You've got to remember that the Nazis were really good at the branding business, is what we'd call it today. I mean, there is no better brand than the swastika. I mean, it's a very, very powerful icon set on the white and the red. You know, these are incredibly captivating colours normally, and then the symbol of the swastika is very powerful. And equally, the SS ruins, and they were ruins from Norse culture. So obviously, you've even got the uniform of the kind of elite armed unit of the Third Reich, were dressed, you know, with these symbols which had their roots in mythology.

Eric Curlander is an academic and author who has spent decades on covering the Nazis' occult obsession. Cored to the Nazis' twisted ideology was a belief called erminism, a pseudo-religion, which SS-Commander Himmler believed was worshipped at various pagan sites in ancient history across Germany. So armenism, or erminism, as the Ariasophis called it, believed that there was an ancient Germanic civilization that lived in prehistory, where there were frost giants and dwarves, and potentially that this Aryan civilization

had originated from mating with extraterrestrials, which is why it was so powerful and had a third eye and could exercise greater mental acuity than normal races on Earth. And this superior civilization practiced a kind of religion, a culture that they thought lasted until the early medieval period, and was practiced just at the Externstein.

Often compared to Stonehenge, the Externstein is a collection of giant sandstone pillars used as a pagan religious site for millennia. So the Externsteina are a site where Himmler's various fantasies kind of come together. His religious beliefs about a pre-Christian, Germanic religious tradition. His border scientific beliefs

that you could use archaeology and astrology to recreate the foundations of this ancient Germanic civilization. And of course, his occult belief, all of that comes together at the Externstein. Himmler was a nutter, and like all nutters, he was preoccupied with pseudoscience. So he created, within the SS,

a division called the Arna nabar, which means ancestral heritage. And his idea was that this would be a think tank that would roam the world and gather evidence of these ancient cultures and demonstrate that his racial theories and theories about Germanic superpeople superpeople were actually right. And they even got scientists, archaeologists,

biologists, et cetera, in on these teams, going around looking for the origins of true Aryans and the ancient giants, the Nephilim and these sorts of things, and measuring people's heads out in Nepal. And so I can't imagine respected scientists signing up for one of these projects unless they were forced to do so politically. According to legend, the urbanists,

like the mythical civilization of Atlantis, had a fantastically advanced technology. And Himmler believed that if he could find evidence of this ancient technology at the Externstein, it would prove that the German people were descendants of a master race and therefore the true rulers of the earth. So one of the things that the archaeologists in the Institute for Ancestral Research were looking for

was evidence of a superior pre-Christian civilization tens of thousands of years old. They were excavating, looking for evidence of this superior civilization. What they found were Neolithic tools and other evidence showing that there had been some, you know, transient human settlements here, but nothing connoting a great Germanic civilization. But Himmler wasn't deterred by this lack of archaeological evidence. Meanwhile, what were Hitler's beliefs during this time? Like Himmler, was he under the influence of black magic and mythology?

Naziism was more than just a political ideology. It was a philosophy full of occult ideas based on pagan mythology. The Nazi occult beliefs were extreme. For a start, they believed that their lineage went back thousands of years. They believed that their life was seated on earth from a meteorite from space, not like the rest of us. The occult was centrally important to the Nazis, but not just for what people thought it might affect. as magic. It meant so much on a false but deep, deeply rooted mythological basis that legitimized the entire project. Heinrich Himmler was Hitler's right-hand man and founder of the dreaded

SS. Himmler fully believed in the occult. But what about the Fuhrer himself? What influence, if any, did Black Magic have on Adolf Hitler? Hitler had a very unique skill. He had the ability to capture an audience, to capture their minds, their eyes, their attention, and their hearts all at the same time. And he used that to great effect. And he got better and better at it as he became more and more powerful within the German government. Hitler didn't really use magic, although his hold over people was almost magical.

And I think that's an important thing to bear in mind that Hitler presented himself and was presented as a kind of messianic figure. And what do messiahenic figures have to have? It's not just charisma, but they also have to have this sense of otherworldliness. So was it just charisma? But if it was, surely that would have showed much earlier in his life. You don't just learn that. You've got it or you haven't.

So it must be something surrounded as he was with all of this occult, with dowsers and tarracards and mediums. Then perhaps he became some form of conduit for the whole thing. And perhaps Hitler really really. was possessed by something to do with Satan or the devil or some other deity of some sort. Perhaps it's real. So was Hitler really channeling demonic forces during the infamous Nazi rallies? Or is there another explanation?

Neil Tobin is a Chicago-born playwright and performer. In 2015, Tobin wrote a play about arch-Nazi occultist Eric Jan Hanneson, the man credited with teaching Hitler mass hip-hip. Pneosis. Eric Jan Hanneson was the most popular psychic entertainer in Germany pre-World War II. He conducted performances that incorporated hypnotism. He was a telepathist. He read minds.

He made predictions. He filled the largest performance spaces in Europe. He was very popular with the Nazis, mainly because it is said at least that he was was Hitler's teacher in one sense. He taught him stagecraft. He taught him how to hold an audience in the palm of your hands, how to look them in the eye, how to mesmerize them. When we look at the newsreel footage of Hitler

at one of the great rallies, you see how he uses his body. You hear how he, even if you don't know German, you hear how he uses his voice for emphasis. You see the broad gestures, the sense of drama that can carry through an immense space. And one has to think that that did not just happen by accident. Interesting thing. Eric Jan Hanneson was not the Danish person he claimed to be. He was in fact Jewish and he was playing with fire.

One would have thought he would have known better. The fact that Jan Hanneson was found murdered with a bullet to the back of the head is probably due to several things. One, the discovery that he was Jewish. Two, he was so wealthy that prominent players in the Nazi party owed him a lot of money. And also, he had perhaps become too influential with Hitler. So there would have been this issue of jealousy. So there were many motives why the Nazis would want to have him murdered.

In 1939, war finally broke out, and the Nazi forces of darkness, fueled by the twisted occult ideology of Arianism, invaded Europe. Missiles were launched, and bombs dropped. But in hidden bunkers, a much more sinister force was being put to work, witchcraft. The difference between the Allies and the Germans, the Nazis, was that we were using radar to find their submarines and their planes. They were using dousing pendulums. That's a piece of string with a bit of brass on the end of it or some quartz crystal. They were dangling it over a map

and looking for our submarines. Hitler even brought these faddy beliefs into battle planning. Instead of using intelligence and spotter planes and all the normal things, Hitler had teams of dowsers. And bizarrely, it actually seemed to have been successful on more occasions than you would imagine. The Nazis were so impressed.

It inspired them to take the occult far more serious and really put a lot of money into that division of the SS. So they created this organization called the Institute for Occult Warfare, full of mediums and psychics who were using all these strange occult powers to fend off the West. In the last desperate stages of the war, the Nazis even released thousands of astrologers, and magicians and dowsers from concentration camps trying to help Hitler win the war. As the Nazi forces of darkness ravaged Europe, Hitler had his sight set on England.

The Luftwaffe dropped thousands of bombs. Children were evacuated, and fear and chaos shrouded Britain like a great dark cloud. But beneath the surface, an occult war was being waged too. It's fascinating to realize that there was a secret occult war going on. and it didn't take long for the Allies to realize that the Germans were using magic, maptowsing, and with great accuracy finding their ships. So what did they do?

They had to retaliate with some occult magic of their own. So they are alleged to have enlisted the most famous occultist in Britain, Alastair Crowley, who is said to have helped Churchill by giving him the V for V. victory symbol. As far as I know, British intelligence did recruit Alistair Crowley to help them in the same way as the Germans were doing against us. It was Alistair Crowley's idea to combat the Nordic runes that the Germans were using and came up with the Victory V sign to sort of, for one of a better word, point at the Germans when they were pointing their runic devices at us. But it wasn't just British intelligence who began using magic.

In the forests of southern England, a coven of witches took it upon themselves to gather and perform a ritual called the Cone of Power in an attempt to stop the imminent Nazi invasion. Operation Cone of Power was basically a bunch of modern witches, getting together in the new forest, under the guidance of Gerald Gardner, who more or less created modern wicker, to do a ritual to prevent the Nazi. from invading Britain. Philip Hesleton is part of that ancient order of witches, or Wicca. He has spent decades researching what happened on the night of the cone of power. We don't know how, or where this ritual took place. Gerald said we were taken at night to a place in the forest. It would be in the forest.

It wouldn't be in the open air. It would be, however, a clearing. that they had enough space to do what was a really big ritual. Apparently they had 17 people and they held hands, rushing forward and at the same time giving the wording, which was something like, you cannot cross the sea, not able to come, not able to come, you cannot cross the sea. And they repeated that.

And it wasn't just words, it was the mind power, was concentrated and working together and they created this what they called a cone of power which wasn't physical you couldn't see it but it was there on the psychic level and was sent over specifically to the German high command to change their thinking because the human mind is one of the most flexible things it's one of the things that's easier to work magic with. Janet Farrer is a Wiccan High Priestess and is one of the world's leading experts and teachers of witchcraft.

Janet has performed the cone of power ritual multiple times. Ritual is a drama. Now, witchcraft is not just about ritual. It's about the equivalent, I suppose, of in Christian terms, prayer. That's what magic is. It's when you transport, you. transport your mind to a place where you say, I know this can be made to happen.

When you perform the dance of the cone of power, it feels as if you're floating, as if you're about six inches off the ground. And there's a sensation that, no matter how fast you're dancing, that you're moving twice as fast. And sometimes you get the very strange effect, time stands completely still.

And it's as if that's just as if that's. that Kona Power stops time. You feel totally elated from it, totally in harmony with the universe, totally elated inside yourself. And of course, this is what would have happened to the coffin in the new forest. They would have achieved what they wanted.

They'd have gone home that night, probably made some hot chocolate and gone to bed. Forgotten all about it. Don't talk about it. Don't discuss it amongst ourselves. It's done. It's the full stop. It's the telegram that's been sent.

In the midst of World War II, a secret occult war was being waged between the ruthless Nazis and the Allies. British intelligence was aware of Hitler and Himmler's rather dark obsession with the occult, so much so that they tried to use the occult against the Nazis. And one of the things they did was creating a fake magazine, German occult magazine called Zenit, which was circulated within Germany with dark astrological predictions against Hitler and Himmler, and suggestions framed in an astrological kind of way that Germany was bound to lose the war.

With the Allies now attempting to dispel the Nazis using magic, Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's right-hand man, was stepping things up back in Germany. Eric Curlander is an academic and historian who has spent years researching Nazi occultism, and he believes that Velsberg Castle is the key to understanding Himmler's bizarre, chivalric beliefs connected to the mythological King Arthur. So we're on our way to a castle known as the Vavilsburg. And Himmler, when he saw the castle for the first time, and he consulted with other SS leaders about whether this would be the right place to create an order castle for the SS,

a place for SS education, SS indoctrination, and eventually almost a kind of religious center for the SS. The ultimate statement of Himmler's occult chivalric beliefs was Wevelsburg Castle. He purchased this and wanted to turn it into the cult center of the SS. There was a room in the basement with places for the 12 knights of the SS and all their death's head rings. There were rooms above with solar suns on the floor, black suns for occult ceremonies and SS weddings.

It was to be the tip of a spear, the tip of a cosmic spirit that would be the spiritual center of the SS cult. Wevelsburg was the heart of Himmler's vision of the SS. Kirsten John Stuka is the museum curator at Vevelsburg Castle, an expert on its dark history. Himmler was searching for an old castle in this area. For Himmler, this area, next to the Teutaburger Forest, was a special section territory,

and he, in a very Germanic tradition, and so he really wanted to have a castle here. So this was very, yes, a little bit of secret. So again, secret, and then you can have a lot of ideas why it was a secret place now. Because for Himmler, he really wanted to have a special ideological here in Babesburg Castle and no other people should come here. Right.

Himmler wanted his castle at Vavasburg to be a kind of Nazi, Camelot and that was hugely significant for him because he revered the Arthurian knights and also the German legendary knight Parcival as people who had been on the quest for the Holy Grail and he was obsessed with finding the Holy Grail as well because he thought that the Grail it wasn't about Jesus so much as finding a key to the underlying truth about the Aryan race. Himmler was fascinated by fairy tales of King Arthur, the Holy Grail. He was also into knights, templars and stuff like that. He was fascinated by the number 12, and he had 12 SS officers

who used to, I suppose, for want of a better word, attend, stand round the table representing the 12 knights of King Arthur. In the north tower of the castle is a very strong, strange room indeed. Originally a Christian prayer space, Himmler had it redesigned with 12 pillars representing the 12 knights and a mysterious black sun symbol. But if we look at the plans for this room, they took a sacred space from the Christian tradition of this building and they mapped onto it a more pagan religious, Germanic, pre-Christian symbology. And that's characterized best by this sunwheel, Zonenrod, with the

the 12 different Z-Groons. The point about Velsberg is Himmler's effort to try and create a Camelot. You know, if Himmler is Arthur, Vvelsberg is Camelot. This is where his high order of knights, the SS, will have as their quasi-spiritual home. And it's from there that every SS man's ring when he's killed will be sent back to be held in eternity. Now, these are kind of religious, cultist, concepts. And Velsberg was the perfect place for that. Vevilsberg is a creepy place today. It really is. You walk into the North Tower and you feel like

you're walking into an evil ritual center where gosh only knows what rituals were performed. But you have swastikas everywhere. You have eagles. You have a black sun. You have fire marks on the walls. It really feels like something bad had happened here, and it's imbuted with that sort of energy. So if we think about Himmler's personal journey, we have everything that Himmler aspired to coming together in this site, the center of his entire empire, where he hoped after the war to become kind of the second-in-command,

the second most important leader of this Third Reich, next to Hitler, his right-hand man. So it's fitting that we conclude our journey at the Vavilsburg. Because the Vavilsburg brings together all three of the strains that kind of made up Himmler's supernatural imaginary. The Nazi's ideology of racial discrimination and hate was built on twisted pagan mythology and black magic. On one level, all this Nazi occult activity is deeply silly and a great distraction. But on another, actually, it's deathly serious because this sense of superiority, this sense of being descended from a greater race, a different race, a race apart.

They thought they came from divine sperm, not from the apes like everybody else. This actually created a mindset that was capable of the horrors of the Second World War and ultimately their own defeat by taking on far more than they could manage. And Hitler's faith in the occult was about to seal his fate. Himmler's obsession with the occult had an appalling consequence when it came to the Battle of Stalingrad, because apparently he told Hitler that it would be okay having the German soldiers

marching into the Russian winter because Aryans could withstand cold better than non-Aryans. Well, that proved to be entirely false. So despite being fantastic strategists, engineers, military organizers, they still had some really interesting ways of approaching decisions. making and one of them was that they were using occult sort of processes and they believed that they could invade Russia and succeed where Napoleon failed because their ancestry dated back to the hyperborean culture of the northern climate fierce people and they thought that even if they ended up stuck in

Russia in winter they were tough enough they had the genetic background they could deal with it had stopped all this nonsense with astronomy, astrologers, dowsing, tarot cards. If they'd stopped all that and got on with the war properly, I think they'd probably have beaten us. In 1945, Hitler committed suicide and Nazi Germany surrendered. Millions had been killed, and World War II would cast a dark shadow forever. But what went wrong for the Nazis? How did they get so close to world domination, only to fall so spectacularly?

Certainly not every last Nazi was into what we would call the occult. In fact, very, very few of them ever were. And even Heinrich Himmler, who was the great Nazi, quotes, occultist, was more really of what we would think of as a new ageer, more mystically inclined than casting dark spells, although, of course, he was a Nazi, didn't have to. There were desperately dark sides to this occult obsession as well. The planning and execution of the final solution

was left to the SS. And there's no doubt that this, one of the most horrific acts in modern history, was carried out by people who believed that they were superior to others. And those occult beliefs had a strong component in creating that vision of the SS as people who were capable of and entitled to do this. The Nazi obsession with the occult is one of the reasons, ultimately why Project Hitler or Project Third Reich, if you like, was going to be doomed.

Why? Because they kind of saw this idea of a story before it even took place. So they have this idea that there's a narrative that we're going to last for a thousand years and we're going to build these enormous buildings and leave behind all these ruins and this temple called Devilsburg effectively.

Therefore, you know, we are going to be this new kind of culture and civilization that has its own religion and mysticism. So what you're doing is you're creating a narrative for yourself that's going to go on for a thousand years. And what does that give you? That gives you an enormous sense of arrogance and hubris. It makes you think that genuinely you are going to last for that long.

And actually, instead, it doesn't really work out like that. It goes from 1933 to 1945, you know, and it ends with a big bang. Magic is neither black nor white. It's like electricity. You can plug in something so useful or an electric chair. The energy of the universe is neutral. People who misuse it, such as the Nazis, and yes that's black magic ended up destroying themselves.

From the moment they put the finger in the socket, it was the electric chair all the way down the line.