Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich by Eric Kurlander (review)

The subject of the possible influence of occult and other esoteric beliefs upon Hitler and the Nazis has been rife with sensationalism and poor scholarship—so much so that many historians have seriously undervalued or simply rejected its significance. With Eric Kurlander's impeccable scholarship this should no longer be the case.

In his introduction, the Stetson University history professor states that "no mass political movement drew as consciously or consistently as the Nazis on what I call the 'supernatural imaginary' . . . in order to attract a generation of German men and women seeking new forms of spirituality and novel explanations of the world that stood somewhere between scientific verifiability and the shopworn truths of traditional religion" (xi). This "supernatural imaginary" was an elaborate mix of occultism, pseudoscience or border science (Grenzwissenschaft) as it was termed in Germany, neopaganism (Nordic or Aryan), New Age and Eastern spirituality, and folklore and mythology (Volkskunde). Importantly, Kurlander clearly demonstrates that the supernatural imaginary informed not only the worldview and policy goals of Hitler, Himmler, and many other leading Nazi thinkers and ideologues, but was also shared by millions of everyday Germans, and this coalescence of belief helped bring the two groups together. In other words, far from being a peculiar belief system of a handful of Nazi leaders, the supernatural imaginary was embraced by a large percentage of the German populace, of whom many Nazis were a part.

In uncovering this supernatural imaginary Kurlander has provided an encyclopedic compendium of now lost or largely forgotten individuals and ideas. The book is structured in three sections, each with three chapters, including 85 pages of notes and a useful 20-page bibliography. The documentation alone will benefit scholars of the modern supernatural for years to come. The first section covers the pre-Third Reich period, focusing on the Ario-Germanic occult revival (including theosophy, arisosophy, and anthroposophy) and the growing popularity of border sciences (including such things as dowsing, astrology, phrenology, eugenics, and various forms of parapsychology). This section also includes a detailed discussion of the Thule Society—an important Munich esoteric group that the provided intellectual and political roots of the Nazi movement—as well as an extended look at Hitler's own magical interpretation of world history.

The second and third sections focus on the time of the Third Reich (1933–1945), divided by the pre-war and wartime periods. In these sections Kurlander reveals just how much these beliefs played a role in influencing the policy goals of key Nazi leaders, including Hitler, Himmler, Rosenberg, and Hess. While many scholars have noted that once in power the Nazis persecuted or suppressed occultists of all sorts, and concluded therefore that they were anti-occult, Kurlander provides a welcome corrective to this notion. He clearly demonstrates that the Nazi "war on the occult" was more about "ideological policing" and "eliminating political and ideological sectarianism," and "not eradicating occultism per se" (103–4). For example, Kurlander shows that while the Nazis disapproved of anthroposophists who valued the movement's founder Rudolf Steiner more than Hitler, many other anthroposophists worked in Himmler's Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage) research institute, and some even ran biodynamic gardens in concentration camps.

Pertinent to today's political and scientific debates, Kurlander reveals that the very Germans who tended to support the Nazis the most likewise embraced the supernatural imaginary more than their fellow countrymen. This included a rejection of scientific method and factbased research (and the materialism they seemed to embrace), in favor of pseudoscientific beliefs that felt true, and thus were more faithbased. This "science of the soul," as Corinna Treitel termed it, included such things as Hans Hörbiger's cosmological World Ice Theory, socalled "scientific" astrology (not the daily horoscope kind), as well as various eugenic and geo-political notions of "race and space." These faith-based "sciences" were used to support and justify a wide-range of racial, political, and...