Hitler & the new age movement

[Obviousman]

Huh?

http://rense.com/general86/newagehit.htm

[McHrozni]

I am speechless ... really ... I believe that even "ROFLMAO" doesn't adequately cover it ...

McHrozni

[Sword_Of_Truth]

Renses opinion of Adolf Hitler is inconsistent (http://www.rense.com/general51/strange.htm) to put it lightly.

[dudalb]

The New Agers versus the Chistian Fundies: It does not get any better then watching those two groups go after each other.

BTW so much nonsense has been written about "The Occult and The Third Reich" it makes your head spin.
Bottom line: Some Nazi leaders..Himmler being the most obvious example..definently had strong occult beliefs..others did not, Hitler among them. We have several fairly reliable accounts of Der Fuehrer ridiculing Himmler's bizaare beliefs as soon as Himmler had left the room. Not that Hitler did not have his share of wacko beliefs,but the occult was not among them.

[Skeptic]

The idea that Hitler believed in astrology, or the occult in general, is almost certainly nonsense.

It comes from the same inaccurate biographies of Hitler that have him called "Shickelgruber", alternatively either a sex maniac or a lifelong virgin, a dirty beggar in pre-WWI Vienna, a dealer in fake art, a coward at the front during WWI, making a visit to his half-brother in England in 1912, having Jewish blood, escaping Berlin in the last moment to South America, etc., etc., etc. -- you name it, someone claimed it.

For an excellent exposition of such fake biographies, most of them written in the late 1940s or the 1950s to cash in on Hitler's notoriety -- during a time when the authors could assume that witnesses to the contrary would never emerge (as most were either dead of in Russian captivity) -- read the last section ("On Spurious Sources") in Waite's very interesting book about Hitler, "The Psychopathic God".

When it comes to Hitler's biographies -- and to a lesser degree that of other Third Reich persona -- fiction is much stranger than truth.

By the way, while on the subject: one of the most celebrated "autobiographies" -- Albert Speer's -- always reminded me of Kaiser Soze in The Usual Suspects. It is FULL of tiny little details about all of the Third Reich's luminaries' peccadilios, but for some reason "forgets" to mention a few little things -- like the holocaust, the conditions of the millions of slave laborers under his control, his letters to "party comrade Himmler" about how thankful he is that tens of thousands of "Jewish apartments" became magically "available" to Aryans lately, etc.

Strange, isn't it?

Speer got away, quite literally, with (millionfold) murder, getting 20 years instead of the death penalty, because he managed to play the "repentant sinner" and "non-political technocrat" role to perfection in Nuremberg. Others -- Syess-Inquart, for instance -- were hanged, despite being less guilty (although still hardly innocent), because they refused to turn away from Hitler.

[dudalb]

And some Nazi leaders defnently had the idea that though they did not buy into the occult themsleves, they thought it was very useful for their followers to believe in.

[headscratcher4]

While I accept the discription offered above -- that Hitler personally didn't buy into the occult beliefs of some of his followers (like Himmiler) -- it all seems a little irrelevant. It seems to me that if the leadership of German "Christians" (Catholics, Lutherns) had stood up to Hitler instead of accomodating him or even buying into the nationalist tilt of his ideology, Nazism couldn't have surrvived. Instead, they made accomodation, many even believed that Nazism and Christianity was compatible. My point is that whether or not Hitler belived in God, was an Athiest or was an out-right hippy tree-huger/worshiper is meaningless because Christians could not or would not stand by what they claim was their own beliefs.

The argument sort of seems to me that if you welcome the thief into your house and make him comfortable, don't be too surprised if he steals your belonging.

German Christians bought Hitler hook, line and sinker and made him possible.