It is not my intention to make light
of National-Socialism by interpreting it in terms of picturesque fantasies.
However, to neglect and to view as harmless the totally irrational
elements of Nazism, evident from its very inception, has at least
partially helped to conjure up a seemingly "incomprehensible
nature"1 of the Nazi actions.
In National-Socialism the contradictions
and irrationalities of a classical capitalist socioeconomic system
and its power structures were transmuted into an apparently "natural"
ideology and apology. The exploitative and class-bound power became
racism, with a master race and its leadership mystique; cycles of
economic crisis and other-directedness became the cosmic law of recurrent
cycles; the alienating character of science and technology misused
as means for ruling became central concepts of pseudo-religious secret
cults; the backwardness of economy and technology as well as of prevailing
social conditions became an obscure mixture of industrialism run wild
with a "Blood and Soil" theory. The continuation of obsolete
ruling classes was safeguarded by myths of "conspiracies,"
while the oppressed masses were offered scapegoats as an outlet for
repressed aggressions.
Anyone who is unwilling to identify
the apologies for irrationality in "serious" philosophy
(from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Spangler or Jung) as leading to
obscurantism, will naturally be stunned to see that such fantasies
are suddenly taken very seriously indeed when fascism comes to power.
By 1919 the German bourgeoisie must
have felt any means to be justified in the defense of its power. As
of this time, myths and magic moved out of the drawing-rooms and coffee-houses
to fight against reason and revolution. The flood of pseudo-scientific
pamphlets and treatises became overwhelming. SF, read by the social
classes that were not reached by pseudoscientific and philosophic
pamphlets, also succumbed to such irrationality. The idea that the
time was ripe for a "spiritual re-orientation" in literature
too was ceaselessly suggested by such authors. They called for sensations
and imaginative fantasies that would help to conquer gross "materialism"
and its literary counterpart, realism. One seemingly non-political
articulation of these tendencies went as follows:
There are many indications that mechanistic
materialism--derived from the exact sciences which has impressed
its stamp on the last decade, is at last dying out, due to the recent
spiritual revolution. Obviously, the transcendental longings of
the majority of humanity cannot be suppressed in the long run....
To begin with, we have again arrived at the point of view of "wonder"--i.e.,
we no longer dismiss as nonsense all things that are not explicable
in terms of the known laws of physics. Mysterious connections between
human beings, independent of spatial and temporal separation, spooks,
the appearance of ghosts, all are again in the realm of the possible.2
This quotation comes from the magazine
Der Orchideengarten which was devoted to publishing only fantastic
fiction and drawings--analogous to American "weird" and
"fantasy" SF magazines. Max Valier, the later rocket pioneer
and chairman of the "Society for Space-Flight," who toured
the country lecturing about the end of the world, about Atlantis and
Lemuria, about Glacial Cosmogony and the breakthrough into Space,
and in 1929 made an unsuccessful attempt to interest Hitler in the
military potential of rockets,3 was even more explicit,
whether writing alone--
Our present time, more than any other,
requires a truly cosmic source and center for spiritual orientation.
We need a tremendous, even super-Terran shock, in order to regain
a sense of our identity which we have lost in the whirlpool of everyday
selfishness.... On the basis of a new theory of cognition we will
seek a more profound knowledge; and for our emotions, we will seek
sensations of truly primaeval shock, so that even the end of the
world and of this Earth shall be a constructive experience.4
--or together with G. W. Surya:
We believe that astronomy and astrophysics
among the natural sciences are by the nature of their subject-matter
particularly suited to give rise to that elevation of thought, that
spiritual revolution, which we so desperately need if the fate of
our Fatherland, yes, even that of the entire world, is to take a
turn for the better.... Only the return to a profound, transcendental
world-view can hope to heal our wounds from the inside .5
Valier went on to make his nebulous
metaphors of contemporary political and social realities more precise
by stating that "he felt obliged to regard Einstein ... as a
representative of the extreme left."6 A new publication
of Surya's, The Metaphysical and the World War, which attempted
to prove that world wars are not due merely to human activities but
that "other forces" were also at work, was more forthrightly
touted as "an extremely important political treatise."7
The political function of such seemingly
highly transcendental theorizing is clearly demonstrated in the works
of the former Cistercian monk, Adolf Joseph Lanz, alias "Jörg
Lanz von Liebenfels," alias "Dr. Jörg Lanz." He
was the founder of "Theozoology" and the "Ordo Novi
Templi" (ONT). In his works, terms like "materialism"
and "egoism" become cyphers for rational politics, socialism,
revolution, and "Judaeo-Bolshevist intellectualism." "Spiritual
revolution," "Faith in transcendence" and "idealism,"
on the other hand, stand for social appeasement, reactionary domestic
policies and a nationalist foreign policy:
in the course of its further development
the Talmudic-Tachandalic Empire succeeded in harnessing the intelligence
of the Aryan Christians to its purposes by way of the ... secret
society of Free-Masons. This society of obscurantists is
responsible for the so-called "Enlightenment," the various revolutions,
liberalism, socialism and materialism in the 19th century, and for
the Bolshevism in the 20th .... During the Middle ages...there was
no proletariat and no proletarian problem. This class only
came into being through the daemonic efforts of modern Free-Masons
and their false doctrines of the so-called "Enlightenment."8
Anyone who sees reason as the highest
activity of the human mind is as backward as those Renaissance scholars
who regarded the Earth as the centre of the universe.9
The conceptual manure-heaps, the mental
excrement that is materialisticrationalistic-socialdemocratic-Bolshevist-Tachandalic
philosophy and science of the modern period will not be of even
historic interest in future generations.10
Lanz derives these insights from his
"theozoology" and "racial metaphysics," each of them a kind of occult
science. If one subtracts the no longer fashionable overt racism,
racial metaphysics could be seen as the blueprint for a considerable
part of the SF produced nowadays:
Practical race-metaphysics are concerned
with research into the history of the races before their earthly
development cycle (pre-terrestrial) ... into the future of
the races following their earthly period (post-terrestrial),
and finally with research into the extra-sensory, extra-terrestrial,
cosmic forces that influence racial development in the present.11
The inherent contradictions of this
or similar systems will not be discussed here. An analysis of such
items as the simultaneous rejection of Darwinism and the acceptance
of the pseudo-Darwinist "survival of the fittest," or the
arguments for a universe peopled with intelligent beings which are
contradicted by the concept of a racially ethnocentric universe, would
merely illustrate the irrational basis of these insane systems in
detail. It seems more fruitful to point out the striking congruence
of such constructs with the psychotic symptoms and fascist tendencies
of the "authoritarian character" such as (1) the sado-masochistic
desire for submission to an irresistible external force (variously
interpreted as an "agent" of Providence, or Nature, or Fate,
etc.), with the concomitant desire to make weaker people pay in compensation
for it; (2) the projection of one's own destructive and primitive
drives onto unpopular minorities; (3) the rejection of rational politics,
indeed, of any and all intellectual enlightenment; (4) the legends
of "conspiracies."12
The degree to which conspiracy fantasies
were pure projections of their own secret intentions is demonstrated
by the way they were first nurtured in occult-science groups of a
secret society kind. These groups and their obscurantism were of considerable
significance in the early development of the Nazi Party, its ideology,
and its later cadre organization in "orders.13
From the confused mass of abstruse concepts
that were used in SF, four vague attempts at systematization can be
abstracted: "Glacial Cosmogony," the Atlantis/Thule myth,
Theozoology, and the Hollow World theory. These systematizations could
mingle, and lean one on the other.
Glacial Cosmogony or the Universal Ice
Doctrine (Welteislehre) and the Atlantis myth had a particularly
close relationship. Atlantis (or Thule) represented the Earthly Paradise
and the original home of the Teutonic Aryans, while the cyclic recurrence
concept of Glacial Cosmogony ensured that Atlantis would rise again.
Thus the Atlantis myth and Glacial Cosmogony became the dominant themes
of German SF in the 1920s and 1930s. Either the re-emergence of Atlantis
caused the submergence of the countries of the Entente14
(possibly according to the principle of communicating vessels), or
remains of Atlantis, which had been destroyed by cosmic events, were
discovered in space, admonishing the German astronauts to reconstruct
the legitimate Aryan (i.e. German) global empire, to return to racial
purity, to a leadership mystique and to irrationalism called "Aryan
science":
Human beings were much closer to the
soil in those days. They controlled the mysterious forces of nature
not by virtue of their knowledge, let alone their science, but by
virtue of their very being. The more humanity learned to think rationally,
the more they lost their visionary powers. They delighted in their
cleverness and failed to notice the waning of their primaeval powers.15
Naturally, the various crashes of the
Moon onto Earth in Glacial Cosmogony always occurred at times of racial
and ethical turpitude.
The Atlantis-faith and Glacial Cosmogony
also inspired the about 600 members of the "Society for Space
Flight"16 who wished to escape from the German
misery by means of spaceships. They wanted to discover "new worlds,
as modem conquistadors";17 they planned to augment
Germany's greatness by building a space-station whose "strategic
value" was among other things to consist, as Willy Ley wrote,
in "creating tornadoes and rainstorms, destroying marching troops
and their supply-lines, and burning entire cities."18
Thanks to the active propaganda of this society, the idea of space
travel grew so popular that moon-rockets became a regular item in
carnival parades, and Fritz Lang was stimulated to make the film The
Woman in the Moon (1928) for which he asked the Society for expert
advice.
The leading Nazis had a special weakness
for the Atlantis myth. The racist professor and pamphleteer Herman
Wirth played a leading role in this connection, advocating in their
inner councils "a tremendous turning back of culture, away from
the age of reason and consciousness, toward the age of a `sleepwalking
certainty,' the age of supra-rational magic." Heinrich Himmler
and Wirth founded the "Study Group for Spiritual History"
"Deutsches Ahnenerbe" (German Heritage)-which propagated
such pseudosciences and which was, for example, responsible for the
deep-freeze experiments (with subsequent coition, "an ancient
folk-remedy"!) in the concentration camps, as well as for the
collection of skeletons in Strasbourg plentifully supplied from murdered
"inferior race" specimens.19 Thus they found
praiseworthy the efforts of Government Building Counsellor (Regierungsbaurat)
Edmund Kiss, one of the most successful exploiters of the Glacial-Cosmogony/Atlantis
themes. Apart from general adventure novels, he wrote a tetralogy20
in which he presented a mythologized version of the fall of the German
empire, its reconstruction, and its coming world supremacy under fascist
rule.
In Kiss's first volume, The Glassy
Sea, John's apocalypse, which "embodies the primaeval knowledge
of the cosmos and our world,"21 is re-interpreted
as a description of the global catastrophe which resulted from the
fall of the "tertiary moon." Before that event there had
been order in the world: slaves had been trained with the "mammoth
whip" (pl2O). Now the time has come for the "blue-eyed blonds"
to "keep their heads high under the bludgeonings of fate"
(pl69), and to ensure "the continued existence of the human race"
by seizing the available women--motto: "Make them trust you,
then grab them" (p240).
In the second volume, Spring in Atlantis,
the "Ases" (i.e. Aryans) have succeeded. They have multiplied
rapidly in their northern kingdom, to the point where they have built
the "organic community of a world-wide empire" (p11) with
its centre and capital in Atlantis. "Slant-eyed brown-skins"
work for the "blonds with the narrow skulls." Thanks to
an effective "spiritual guidance," the Ases are revered
as "white gods" (pl2, pl8). "The slave nations visit
Atlantis in order to take the profound and ineradicable impression
of the overwhelming and irresistible might of the Nordic will back
to their distant homes" (p4l). (Hitler had the same ideas concerning
the measures he would employ to inculcate a "master-consciousness"
in the "non-German population of the occupied Eastem zones":
"He also thought that superstition was a factor that had to be
reckoned with in the business of leading men, even if one is oneself
quite superior to it and laughs at it"; "the only allowed
purpose of geography lessons should be to teach that the capital city
of the Empire is called Berlin, and that everybody should have visited
Berlin at least once in his life"; "once a year a troup
of Kirghizes will be given a guided tour through the capital city
in order to impress their imagination with the might and power of
its stone monuments.")22 Back to Kiss: the "Racial
Bureau of Asgard" (pl7) supervises the maintenance of racial
purity in the master race;23 however, the leaders have
to make the same concessions that the Nazis found unavoidable:
The desire of millions [is] to create
a granite racial cornerstone as the foundation of the empire, not
a block of absolute racial purity--the sins of our forefathers have
made that impossible--but a block of precious racial assets with
the wealth of the Nordic soul as its important heritage. (p278)
The hero already has the fixed "Führer
stare" that Hitler is supposed to have practiced in front of his mirror,
and that is strongly reminiscent of the results of a hyperactive thyroid:
But in the same moment...the golden
spark shone again from the depths of the grey compelling eyes, the
spark that constituted the mystery of the child-like radiant essence
of this man. When this spark died, the eagle features set into an
expression of iron-willed and predatory determination, and the pale-grey
icy glare compelled many an enemy, not usually given to such actions,
to avert his eyes. (p72)
The third volume, The Last Queen
of Atlantis, shows the empire of the Ases at the height of its
power. The "Nordic men" live in "isolated castles and fortified farmsteads
on the border marches." Atlantis continues to provide them with "racially
pure" or pedigreed women (p28)--as we can see, precisely the way of
life that the Nazi elite envisioned for itself in occupied East European
territories:
We watched the labourers for a while,
those strong, animal-like Zipangus, whose skulls are bound in early
infancy to develop backward so that they can be kept as the group
designed for physical labour. (p48)
We Atlantians knew from our millenial
history, so full of conquests and defeats, that only a caste of
higher human beings can effectively govern the globe that is our
beautiful Earth. Inferior races must be trained and shaped to fulfill
the needs and purposes that promote the growth of the realm. (p49,
and similarly p258)
Alas! The "hammer of fate"
(p101) "strikes with mighty blows" (p118), the appearance
of a new Moon (ours) dooms Atlantis, and the Ases are once more reduced
to a people who must "fight for their place in the sun"
(pl92).
In The Singing Swans from Thule,
the surviving Atlantians fight their way (bearing with them, naturally,
the blue and white swastika-banner of Atlantis) back to the country
of their origin. In their "struggle for life, territory, and
power" (p27) the principle of leadership is re-asserted: "Desperate
situations can only be saved if one man commands and the others obey"
(p65). In order that even the dimmest reader will understand the reference,
the Ases find "Teutenland" inhabited by a "Nordic peasant
population of...fairly good race" (p2O8). With the genetic help
of the natives, the Ases breed--in a world full of "coloured
rabble," "human animals" and "useless men"
(pl83)--"a new, hard and chill nobility" (pl88). In order
to achieve this, they occasionally raid neighbouring tribes for "blood
stock" (pl69), to use Hitler's terminology.24 The
novel culminates in the following statement:
Only a man who will protect both his
aims and his freedom with a keen sword in attack and defence, can
retain mastery over his life on this earth. Attack is his best policy.
It is never a question of our right to do so. This is ours by virtue
of our existence. It is a question of might. (p206)
The things which Kiss projected into
the distant past, and which Hitler and Himmler wanted to realize in
Eastern Europe, were projected into the near future by Paul Alfred
Mueller (pseudonym "Lok Myler") in his pamphlet series Sun
Koh, The Heir of Atlantis, and Jan Maygn.25
The heroes, charismatic leader types, have been chosen by fate--and
also provided by it with the resources of a sophisticated and extremely
powerful technology. It is their vocation to create new and arable
territories for the German people and the White races. This they achieve
by raising Atlantis out of the ocean and by making Greenland (Thule)
arable. The manner in which "Sun Koh" and "Jan Mayen"
treat the rest of humanity in the pursuit of their aims is distinguished
from Nazi methods only insofar as the fictive inferior peoples speedily
submit. Mueller was also one of the authors who propagated the "Hollow
World"26 theory. This theoretical import from the
USA experienced the height of its popularity in 1941-42, when the
German Fleet Ministry apparently actually performed radar experiments,
that would have--were the theory correct--permitted them to observe
the Scapa-Flow from Reugen in the Baltic Sea. The Hollow World theory
was tolerated by the Nazis27 but had only a few adherents
in the party's higher echelons. Thus Mueller had to maneuver carefully
when he tried to make the Hollow World theory into the official world-picture
of the Nazis. In his novel, the high Nazi party functionary who has
been converted to the theory has a fatal accident on his way to speak
to the Fuhrer.
"Theozoology," propagated
by Josef Lanz in the Ostara pamphlet series, The Library of Blonds
and Males' Rights,28 was not overtly adopted in
official Nazi treatises, and was only rarely exploited in SF.29
However, this theory shows the most obscure motivations of racist
Mernicheanism, ideas that are still widespread in SF today. Lanz cannot
even lay claim to being the originator and inventor of this sexually-neurotic
delusion system. A textbook case for psychoanalysis, Lanz merely reinterpreted
the theosophic anthropogenesis of Blavatsky and Besant in sexual terms.
In theosophy, mankind fell because the men copulated with female animals;
in Lanz's system "all calamities in the history of the world
... have been caused by the liberated woman."30
According to his theory, first announced in 190531 (August
Strindberg was one of the first converts):
The race of full-blooded and whole
Aryan Man was not the result of natural selection alone. Instead,
as the esoteric writings indicate, he was the result of a careful
and conscious breeding process by higher and different kinds of
being, such as the Theozoa, Elektrozoa, Angels, et sim.,
which once lived on this Earth.32
They were perfect electro-biotic machines,
characterized by their supernatural knowledge and power. Their knowledge
encompassed everything to be found in the universe and beyond, in
the metaplfysical spaces of the fourth, fifth and nth dimensions:
They perceived such objects by way of their electro-magneto-radiophotic
eye on their forehead, the rudiment of which is the human pineal
gland. They had knowledge of all things, and could read past, present
and future from the ether. This is why they performed the office
of oracles until well into historical times and live on, even today,
in mediums. They possessed supernatural, "divine" powers,
whose centre is located in the lumbar brain. (Note: see the "magic
belts" that conferred inordinate power on gods and demons;
the "invisibility hood" of Siegfried and Alberich.) Their
bodies exude rays of fire and light, which ... materialize on
the one hand and dematerialize on the other, breaking down atoms
and reconstructing them, canceling out gravity.33
All harmful and useless species of plants,
animals, and humans are naturally the work of the "Daemonozoa" (i.e.
fallen angels). The original sin of the "Homo sapiens or, more
precisely, the Homo Arioheroicus"34 was caused
by the women of these blond, god-like Aryans, who--then as now--were
attracted, "because of the magnitude of the member," to the male anthropo-saurians"
(with their "penis bone"!) and to their descendants, the man-animal
races" (Negroes, Mongolians, Jews, etc.). The women copulated with
these lower beings "more sodomitico."35 Especially the
facial features of the "Bolshy-Jewish blood-hounds ... remind us even
today of the horrible faces of antediluvian dragon-monsters"; they
are the direct "descendants of...the two-legged dinosaur-hominids"
and properly still belong to "the animal kingdom"; Rosa Luxemburg,
the murdered leader of the German left and Jewish by origin, was a
"small, pure-breed Bezah-dwarf"--"just like those bred 2000 years
ago in the temple-zoos of Palestine."36 Bolshevism,
Marxism, Sovietism, Communism, Socialism, Democratism ... are offshoots
... of these primaeval, base, and inferior racial origins."37
In order to correct these racial and political conditions, the Aryans
must practice scientific racial purity and breeding:
Through conscious and goal-oriented
influencing of the secreting glands, we shall be able in the coming
two centuries to rebuild atoms and cells of all living beings and
... finally to create a new human race, which will develop out of
the Aryoheroical one.38
Any such technique, "the technology
... [And] all higher scientific wisdom ... is to remain the secret
knowledge of a numerically small, pure-bred, heroic-Aryan ruling
elite":39
A newly bred slave being with crude
nerves and strong hands whose mental potential has been carefully
limited ... will perform for us all those jobs for which we have
not invented machines.... The proletariat and the under-humanity
cannot be improved or saved or made happy. They are the work of
the Devil and must simply be--of course humanely and without pain
eliminated. In their place, we will have biological machines, whose
advantage over mechanical machines will be that they repair and
procreate themselve.... This `robot' will be the key to the future
since his existence will solve not only the technological but also
the social and racio-economic problems--and thereby all political
problems--that beset us. Total equality is nonsense!... The social
question is a racial question and not an economic one.... Who can
say where the equality of rights should stop? Why should it stop
with the Australian aborigine? Gorillas, chimpanzees and bats have
exactly the same claim to socialist "human rights."40
Lanz found himself in illustrious company
with such ideas. Oswald Spengler articulated the fascist-technocratic
concept of technology, science, and philosophy as instruments for
domination in much the same manner--the Aryans were to again become
"the learned priests of the machine"41
and cultivate the sciences as a ruling-class religion:
The group of Fuhrer-natures remains
small. They constitute the pack of the true beasts of prey, the
pack of the talented, which will dominate the growing herd of the
others in one fashion or another.
There are ... not only two kinds of
technology ... but also two kinds of human beings ... those whose
nature it is to command, and those who obey, subjects and objects
of any political or economic processes. The most significant
symptom of the impending decline and fall is to be found in what
I would like to call the betrayal of technology.... Instead of keeping
scientific knowledge secret, the knowledge that represents the most
sacred possession of the "White" peoples, it was boastfully
revealed to all and sundry in universities, in conversations, lectures,
and publications.... The irreplaceable advantages that the
white peoples held have been wasted, dissipated, betrayed.42
Himmler and Hitler43 wanted
to prevent the imminent break-down of "Western" civilization,
in the conquered East-European territories at least, by means of precisely
those methods that they imputed to the Judaeo-Bolshevists: "try
to eliminate the national carriers of intelligence within a few years,
in order to make the peoples ... ready for a lot of permanent slavery
and oppression."44 The population of the "Eastern
Territories" was, according to the ideas of Hitler and Himmler,
to live in isolated village communities and develop their own "magic
cults": "It would be best to teach them to understand only
a sign language. Radio would provide unlimited music, which is good
for such communities. They are not to learn to use their brains."45
Lanz's disciple Hitler also considered
"Pure and applied science ... an almost exclusively Aryan achievement."46
Only "when knowledge re-acquires the character of secret, initiate
knowledge, and ceases to be accessible to all and sundry, will it
again fulfill its normal function, namely that of being the means
and the power to control both human and non-human nature."47
With his undeniable instinct for what was publicly acceptable, Hitler
discussed his favourite theories only among intimates. These ideas
proved to be garnered almost exclusively from "popular scientific"
treatises such as those of Boelsche and Lanz:
I have been reading a work on the
origin of human races. I used to think a great deal about this subject
in my younger days, and I must say that if one looks more closely
at the traditional myths and legends ... one arrives at most peculiar
conclusions. Nowhere is there a development within a species that
is comparable in degree and kind to that which man must have undergone
in order to cover the distance between a quasi-simian state and
his present mode of being.... Myths cannot have been constructed
without any foundation. Any concept must be preceded by the phenomenon
from which it is derived. There is nothing to stop us, and Indeed
I believe we would be right, to assume that mythological characters
and situations are representations of a former reality.48
A new type of human being is beginning
to manifest itself, very much in the scientific sense of a new mutation.
The old, hitherto extant species of man now necessarily enters into
the biological stage of degeneration.... The one will sink underneath
man and the other will rise far above present day man.... Yes, man
must be transcended.... The new man lives among us. He exists!...
I shall tell you a secret. I have seen the new man, fearless and
pitiless. And I was afraiid.49
Lanz could not only claim to be one
of the "grandfathers of Fascism and National Socialism,"50
he is also a legitimate ancestor of modern SF. As he himself stated
in 1930, "a whole new generation of authors is already living
off their exploitation of `Ostara'-ideas."51
A science and technology functioning
as a mass religion and the "transcending of man" are even
now the favourite concepts of precisely those technocrats (and their
literary allies) who think of themselves as particularly progressive
and unprejudiced. Just as in fascism, frequently they also propagate
a sane-way-of-life pseudo-philosophy, usually consisting of a Social-Darwinist
barbarism as style of government and principle of social organization.
As Hitler said: "Yes, we are barbarians. We actually choose to
be such. It is a princely title. It is we who will renew the world,
This world is dying."52 The epitome of all counter-revolutionary
slogans, Lanz's "In our most distant past lies our most modem
future,"53 was the sociopolitical motto of fascism.
In SF--German and U.S.--this concept is still constantly utilized
and reanimated (as for von Daeniken's bestselling title Memories
of the Future, one could almost start a copyright-suit against
him). Its traditional conjunction with racism has no doubt become
less prevalent, but the programmatic combination of "sword and
sorcery" as power-style and social structure with "science
fiction," standing for uninhibited capitalist and technocratic
industrialism, is still with us.
--Translated by Sabine Kurth, edited
by DS.
NOTES
1 See Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Der
hilflose Antifaschismus, Frankfurt 1967.
2 Der Orchideengarten,
Vol. 1, No. 2, p23.
3 See Bernd Ruland, Wernher
von Braun: Mein Leben fuer die Raumfahrt, Offenburg 1969, p56ff.
Valier is also the author of Der Verstoss in den Weltenraum,
München and Berlin 1924 (the 5th and 6th edns appeared in 1928
and 1930 with the title Raketenfahrt.)
4 Max Valier, Welt-Untergang
(augmented edn of Untergang der Erde, München 1923, pp7-8.
5 G.W. Surya (i.e., Demeter Georgievitz-Weitzer)
and Max Valier, Okkulte Weltallstehre, München 1922, p294.
6 Valier (¶4), p19, note
1.
7 Surya and Valier (¶5),
p352.
8 Joerg Lanz-Liebenfels, "Der
zoologische und talmudische Ursprung des Bolochewismus" in
Ostara, No. 13/14 (2nd edn 1930), p8ff (italics in the original).
9 Idem, "Rassenmystik,
eine Einfuehrung in die ariochristuche Geheimlehre," in Ostara,
No. 78 (2nd edn 1929), p14.
10 Idem, "Theozoologie
oder Naturgeschichte der Goetter, IV," in Ostara, No. 15
(2nd edn 1929), pl4.
11 Idem, "Einfuehrung
in die praktische Rassenmetaphysik," in Ostara, No. 80, 1915,
pl (italics in the original).
12 See also Erich Fromm, Escape
from Freedom (Die Furcht vor der Freiheit, 2nd edn, Frankfurt
1968, pp2O3-234); Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (Kindheit
und Gesellschaft, 2nd edn, Stuttgart 1965, pp320-346); Theodor
W. Adomo et al., The Authoritarian Personality (Der autoritaere
Charakter, Amsterdam 1968, 1:88-187).
13 See also Joachim Besser, "Die
Vorgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus im neuen lacht," Die
Pforte 2, 1950; Wilfried Daim, Der Mann, der Hitler die Ideen
gab, München 1958; George L. Mosse, "The Mythical
origins of National Socialism," Journal of the History of
Ideas 22 (1961), No. 1; Reginald Phelps, "Before Hitler Came:
Thule Society and Germanen Orden," Journal of Modern History
35 (1963), No. 3; Dietrich Bronder, Bevor Hitler kam, Hannover 1964;
Allan Mitchell, Revolution in Bayern 1918/1919, München
1967, p91ff, Friedrich Heer, Der Glaube des Adolf Hitler. Anatomie
einer Politischen religiositaet, München and Esslingen 1968;
and Karl Dietrich Beacher, Die deutsche Diktatur, Koln and
Berlin 1969, pp52-98.
14 E.g.: F.O. Bilse. Gottes
Muehien, Berlin 1924.
15 0tto Willi Gail, Der Stein
vom Mond, Breslau 1926, p269ff (pbd in the USA as Stone from
the Moon in Science Wond@r Quarterly, Spring 1930). See
also O.W. Gail, Der Schuss ins All, Brealau 1925, and Hans
Hardts Mondfahrt, Stuttgart 1928; this juvenile book (an abbreviated
version of the above mentioned novels) was translated into Danish,
Finnish, French, Dutch, Norwegian, and Hungarian. The last German
edition (21st, 30th thousand) was in Stuttgart 1949. Excerpts of this
novel appeared in Die Rakete, the journal of the Society
for Space-Travel. Der Schuss ins All was serialized by numerous
German daily newspapers and published in the USA as The Shot into
Infinity twice (in Science Wonder Quarterly, Fall 1929,
and Science Fiction Quarterly, 1941). For the Glacial Cosmogony doctrine
see, e.g., Ph. Fauth ed., Hoerbigers Glazial-Kosmogonie, 2nd
edn, Leipzig 1926 (1st edn 1913).
16 Its perhaps most prominent
member, Hermann Oberth, author of Die Rakete zu den Planetenraumen,
1923 (3rd edn Berhn and Munchen 1929 with the title Wege zur Raumschiffahrt)
continued in the same tradition after the Second World War. He propagated
the belief in flying saucers, wrote the Katechismus der Uraniden,
Wiesbaden-Schierstein 1966, and occasionally functioned as a figurehead
for the NPD (neo-Nazi party).
17 Hans Dominik, Das Erbe
der Uraniden, Berlin 1928, pl37.
18 Willy Ley, Die Fahrt ins
Weltall, Leipzig 1926, p67.
19 The quote is from Hermann
Rauschning's account of his talks with Hitler Gespraeche mit Hitler,
Zurich and New York 1940, p2l5. On the Nazis and Atlantis see their
leading ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts,
München 1936, pp24-28. See also, Michael H. Kater, Das "Ahnenerbe",
Diss. Heidelberg 1966 (for material on a secret meeting about Glacial
Cosmogony from July 12-19, 1939 see plO2/394, notes 21-22); Reinhard
Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg und seine Gegner, Stuttgart 1970,
ppl78250; Helmut Heiber ed., Reichsfuehrer! - Briefe an und von
Himmler, 2nd edn, München 1970 (about Atlantis, see letters
58 and 59; about Glacial Cosmogony, see letters 26, 33a and 87). Concerning
Hitler's belief in Glacial Coamogony--he wished to put a commemorative
statue to its author Hanns Hoerbiger in Linz, beside those of Ptolemy
and Copernicus--see Henry Picker, Hitler's Tischgespraeche,
ed. P.E. Schramm, 2nd edn, Stuttgart 1965, pl67 and 298. The theosophic
and anthroposophic competitors in matters concerning Atlantis, who
had originally inspired the Nazis, were forbidden during the Third
Reich--e.g. Rudolf Steiner's Die Kosmische Vorgeschichte der Menschheit,
Dornach 1941. Today, Juergen Spanuth--Das entraetselte Atlantis,
Stuttgart 1953, Und doch! Atlantis entraetselt, Stuttgart 1957;
Atlantis, Heimat, Reich und Schicksal der Germanen, Tübingen
1965--and former employees of the Rosenberg'Bureau are still propagating
a Germanophile Atlantis-theory in the West German fascist press such
as Deutsche Nachrichten, etc. See Bollmus, op. cit., p259ff, note
3, and p3l5ff, note 158.
20 Edmund Kiss, Das glaeserne
Meer, Leipzig 1930 (4th edn 1941); Fruehling in Atlantis,
Leipzig 1933 (2nd edn 1939); Die letzte Koenigin von Atlantis,
Leipzig 1931 (4th edn 1941); Die Singschwaene aus Thule, Leipzig
1939 (3rd edn 1941). Early on, Kiss received a prize for this work.
21 Kiss, Das glaeserne Meer,
p3O5. In the subsequent text, numerals in brackets refer to the pages
in the last named novel.
22 In Picker (¶19), pp462-469
and p143.The "ethnologist" Himmler on the same subject:
"We must do even more in order to inculcate a peaceful and non-militant
attitude towards us in the minds of the people behind our lines....
We must support all religions and sects which encourage pacifism.
For all Turkish peoples, Buddhism is most suitable. For other nations,
Biblical pietism should be helpful"--in Heiber (¶19), letter
330.
23 Hitler: "A true domination
of the world can only be founded on one's own race"--Picker (¶19),
pl68.
24 Ibidem, p253.
25 Lok Myler, Sun-Koh, der
Erbe von Atlantis, series of 150 pamphlets (1933-39); Jan Mayen,
120 pamphlets (1935-39). The SunKoh serial was so successful
(average edn 60,000; largest edn 90,000), that Jan Mayen was
written as a kind of echo. Both series appeared in several printings.
(Especially the Sun-Koh serial contained blatantly plagiarized
passages from Robert Kraft's prewar serial novels.) Both series reappeared
after 1945. Jan Mayen--now the "Master of Atomic Energy"
(edn Utopia-Zukunftsromane, 1949/50)--only lasted for ten sequels,
but the Sun-Koh series managed another 110 sequels between
1949 and 1953. At that point, the publisher, Planet Verlag, discontinued
the series because a law against "youth-damaging books"
was imminent. (This publisher also produced The Sixth and Seventh
Book of Moses.) Between 1958 and 1961, the series appeared in
a lending-library edition of 37 volumes, published by Borgsmueller
in Muenster. Under his postwar pseudonym "Fireder van Holk,"
Mueller has written another two dozen SF novels, published by Biel
Verlag and Weiss Verlag, both in Berlin. He managed to publish a number
of rewritten Sun-Koh sequels in the Utopia pamphlet series
of the Pabel-Verlag and co-authored the series Mark Powers der
Held des Weltalls.
26 See Johannes Lang, Die
Hohlweittheorie, 2nd edn, Frankfurt 1938, p281; also K. Neupert,
Welt-Wendung! - Inversion of the Universe, Augsburg 1924, and
Geokosmos - Weltbild der Zukunft, Zurich and laipzig 1942.
27 Lang's Welt, Mensch und
Gott, Frankfurt 1936, was examined under File P/100 by the Supervisory
and Advisory Branch for Astrological and Related Publications in the
Reichsschrifttumakammer, Berlin, and passed. Lang subsumed in his
work the Atlantis myths, astrology, glacial cosmogony, theozoology,
hollow world theory--they are all there in concord.
28 Ostara, Buecherei der Blonden
und Mannesrechtler, was published from 1905 to 1930. Individual
issues sometimes went to three printings. According to Heer (¶13),
p7Ol, Lanz claimed a total of 500,000 printed copies.
29 E.g., in St. Bialkowski, Krieg
im All, Leipzig 1935; implicitly in Gail's Stone from the Moon
(915); transferred to another planet in Dietrich Kaerrner, Per
Krag und sein Stern, Berlin 1939.
30 Ostara No. 33: "Die
Gefahren des Frauenrechts und die Notwendigkeit der mannesrechtlichen
Herrenmoral," 1909, plO.
31 Lanz-Liebenfels, Theozoologie
oder die Kunde von den Sodoms-Aeffligen und dem Goetterelektron,
1905.
32 Idem, Bibliomystikon oder
die Geheimbidel der Eingeweihten, Vol. II: Daemonozoikon, Pforzheim
1931, pl58.
33 Ibid., Vol. III: Theozoikon,
Pressbaum bei Wien 1931, p4O.
34 Ibid., Vol. I: Anthropozoikon,
Pforzheim 1930, p9O.
35 "Woman has thus been
responsible for a 2000-year selection in the direction of larger genitals"--Ostara
No. 21: "Rasse und Weib und Vorliebe fuer den Mann der minderen
Artung," 1909, p9.
36 Ostara No. 13/14, picture-page
1, and p13, note 27.
37 Ibid., p1.
38 "Theozoologie IV:
Der neue Bund und der neue CTott," in Ostara No. 15 (2nd
edn 1929), pl2. See also "Theozoologie VII" in Ostara
No. 19 (2nd edn 1930).
39 "Die Blonden als Traeger
und Opfer der technischer Kultur," in Ostara No. 75, p18;
quoted according to Heer (¶13), p7l5.
40 Ostara No. 19, p5f.
41 Oswald Spengler, Der Mensch
und die Technik, München 1932, p7O (italics here and in his
other quotes are Spengler's).
42 Ibid., p27, p5O, and pp84-86.
43 Hitler never openly mentioned
that he had read the Ostara publications during his Vienna period,
but see his Mein Kampf, München 1942, p2l and pp59-63.
Daim (¶13) and Heer (¶13) found a number of blatant plagiarisms
straight from Lanz.
44 Hitler (¶43), p358.
45 Picker quoting Hitler (¶19),
p19O. See also ibidem, p271, and Himmler's memoir concerning the administration
of the occupied "Eastern Territories" (in Vierteljahreshefte
fuer Zeitgeschichte, Vol. 5, 1957, p197).
46 Hitler (¶43), p317.
47 Hitler, as quoted in Rauschning
(¶19), p4O.
48 Hitler, as quoted in Picker
(¶19), p166.
49 Rauschning (¶19),
pp230-233. The Strasbourg skeleton collection, for which "perfect
specimen," selected from among concentration camp prisoners and
Soviet commissars, were slaughtered, had, one must suppose, the purpose
of proving Lanz's "zoological origin" of the "Bolshy-Jewish
race."
50 Lanz, Bibliomystikon
(¶32), 2:145.
51 Ostara No. 12/14, from the
appendix, without page numbers.
52 Hitler, quoted in Rauschning
(¶19), p78.
53 Lanz, Bibliomystikon
(¶32), 3:28.