On April 6, 1919, in Bavaria, left wing socialists and anarchists proclaimed the Bavarian Soviet Republic. The brains of the revolution were a group of writers who had little idea of administration. Life in munich grew chaotic. The counter-revolutionary forces, the whites, composed of various groups of decommissioned soldiers known as "Frei Corps", equipped and financed by the mysterious Thule Society, defeated the Bavarian Soviet within a matter of weeks.

Many other decommissioned soldiers waited out the turbulence in barracks, pfc Adolph Hitler among them. After the Bavarian Republic had been defeated by the Whites, in May, Hitler's superiors put him to work in the post revolution investigating commission. His indictments injected ruthless efficiency into the kangaroo courts as he fingered hundreds of noncommissioned officers and enlisted men who had sympathized with the communist and anarchists. He was subsequently sent to attend special anticommunist training courses and seminars at the University which were financed by the Reichswehr administration and by private donors from the Thule Society. This led to an assignment in the intelligence division of the postwar German army, to infiltrate groups that could organize the working classes while the communists were weak. On a September evening, 1919, Hitler turned up in the Sternecker Beer Hall where members and friends of the budding German Workers Party had gathered.

He quietly listened to the presentation by engineer Gottfried Feder, a Thule Society member, who talked about jewish control over lending capital. When one of the other group members called for Bavaria to break away from the rest of Germany, Hitler sprang into action. The astonished audience stood by while his highly aggressive remarks and compelling oratory swept through the room. After Hitler had finished his harangue, party chairman and founder, Anton Drexler, immediately asked him to a meeting of the party's steering committee held a few days later. He was asked to join the committee as its seventh member, responsible for advertising and propaganda.

Back in 1912, several German occultists with radical anti-semitic inclinations decided to form a "magic" lodge, which they named the Order of Teutons. the main founders were Theodor Fritsch, a publisher of an anti-semitic journal; Philipp Stauff, pupil of the racist Guido Von List, and Hermann Pohl, the order's chancellor. (Pohl would drop out three years later to found his own bizarre lodge, the 'Walvater Teutonic Order of the Holy Grail'.)

The Order of Teutons was organized along the lines of the Free Masons or the Rosicrucians, having differing degrees of initiation, only persons who could fully document that they were of pure "aryan" ancestry were allowed to join.

In 1915, Pohl was joined by Rudolf Blauer, who held a Turkish passport and practiced sufi meditation. He also dabbled in astrology and was an admirer of Lanz Von Liebenfels and Guido Von List, both pathologically anti-semitic. Blauer went by the name of Rudolf Freiherr Von Seboottendorf. He was very wealthy, although the origin of his fortune is unknown. He became the Grand Master of the Bavarian Order and he founded the Thule Society, with Pohl's approval, in 1918.

After the Bavarian communist revolution of 1918, the Thule Society became a center of the counterrevolutionary subculture. An espionage network and arms caches were organized. The Thule Club rooms became a nest of resistance to the revolution and the Munich Soviet Republic.

Journalist Karl Harrer was given the job of founding a political "worker circle". He realized that the workers would reject any program that was presented to them by a member of the conservative "privileged" class. Harrer knew that the mechanic Anton Drexler, who was working for the railroads, was a well-known anti-semite, chauvinist and proletarian. With drexler as nominal chairman, Harrer founded the German Workers Party in January 1919

The German Workers Party was only one of many associations founded and controlled by the Thule Society. The Thule was the "mother" to the German Socialist Party, led by Julius Streicher, and the right-wing radical Oberland Free Corps. It published the Munich observer, which later became the National Observer. Hitler became the most prominent personality in the party. He caused Harrer to drop out, and he pushed Drexler, the nominal chairman, to the sidelines. He filled key positions with his own friends from the Thule Society and the Army. During the summer of 1920, upon his suggestion, the party was renamed the National Socialist German Worker Party (NASDAP). The new name was intended to equally attract nationalists and proletarians.

To go along with the new name his mass movement also required a flag with a powerful symbol. Among many designs under consideration, Hitler picked the one suggested by Thule member Dr. Krohn: a red cloth with a white circle in the middle containing a black swastika.

Hitler wanted to turn the German Workers Party into a mass-conscious fighting party, but Harrer and Drexler were hesitant, due in part to their woeful financial situation. The Thule Society was not yet supplying very much money and no one seemed to know how to build up a mass party. Hitler arranged two public meetings in obscure beer halls, and he drafted leaflets and posters, but there was no real breakthrough.

All of this changed dramatically at the end of the 1919 when Hitler met Dietrich Eckart. Most biographers have underestimated the influence that Eckart exerted on Hitler. He was the wealthy publisher and editor-in-chief of an anti-semitic journal which he called In Plain German. Eckart was also a committed occultist and a master of magic. As an initiate, Eckart belonged to the inner circle of the Thule Society as well as other esoteric orders.

Briefly, the creed of the Thule Society inner circle is as follows: Thule was a legendary island in the far north, similar to Atlantis, supposedly the center of a lost, high-level civilization. But not all secrets of that civilization had been completely wiped out. Those that remained were being guarded by ancient, highly intelligent beings (similar to the "Masters" of Theosophy or the White Brotherhood). The truly initiated could establish contact with these beings by means of magic-mystical rituals. The "Masters" or "Ancients" allegedly would be able to endow the initiated with supernatural strength and energy. With the help of these energies the goal of the initiated was to create a race of Supermen of "Aryan" stock who would exterminate all "inferior" races.

There can be no doubt that Eckart - who had been alerted to Hitler by other Thulists - trained Hitler in techniques of self confidence, self projection, persuasive oratory, body language and discursive sophistry. With these tools, in a short period of time he was able to move the obscure workers party from the club and beer hall atmosphere to a mass movement. The emotion charged lay speaker became an expert orator, capable of mesmerizing a vast audience.

One should not underestimate occultism's influence on Hitler. His subsequent rejection of Free Masons and esoteric movements, of Theosophy, of Anthrosophy, does not necessarily mean otherwise. Occult circles have long been known as covers for espionage and influence peddling. Hitler's spy apparatus under Canaris and Heydrich were well aware of these conduits, particularly from the direction of Britain which had within its MI5 intelligence agency a department known as the Occult Bureau. That these potential sources of trouble were purged from Nazi life should not be taken to mean that Hitler and the Nazi secret societies were not influenced by mystical and occult writers such as Madame Blavatsky, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Guido Von List, Lanz Von Liebenfels, Rudolf Steiner, George Gurdjieff, Karl Haushofer and Theodor Fritsch. Although Hitler later denounced and ridiculed many of them, he did dedicate his book Mein Kampf to his teacher Dietrich Eckart.

A frequent visitor to Landsberg Prison where Hitler was writing Mein Kampf with the help of Rudolf Hess, was General Karl Haushofer, a university professor and director of the Munich Institute of Geopolitics. Haushofer, Hitler, and Hess had long conversations together. Hess also kept records of these conversations. Hitler's demands for German "Living Space" in the east at the expense of the Slavic nations were based on the geopolitical theories of the learned professor. Haushofer was also inclined toward the esoteric. as military attache in Japan, he had studied Zen-Buddhism. He had also gone through initiations at the hands of Tibetan Lamas. He became Hitler's second "esoteric mentor", replacing Dietrich Eckart.

In Berlin, Haushofer had founded the Luminous Lodge or the Vril Society. The lodge's objective was to explore the origins of the Aryan race and to perform exercises in concentration to awaken the forces of "Vril". Haushofer was a student of the Russian magician and metaphysician Gregor Ivanovich Gurdyev (George Gurdjieff).

Both Gurdjeiff and Haushofer maintained that they had contacts with secret Tibetan Lodges that possessed the secret of the "Superman". The lodge included Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, Himmler, Goring, and Hitler's subsequent personal physician Dr. Morell. It is also known that Aleister Crowley and Gurdjieff sought contact with Hitler.

Hitler's unusual powers of suggestion become more understandable if one keeps in mind that he had access to the "secret" psychological techniques of the esoteric lodges. Haushofer taught him the techniques of Gurdjieff which, in turn, were based on the teachings of the Sufis and the Tibetan Lamas- and familiarized him with the Zen teaching of the Japanese Society of the Green Dragon.

From The Unknown Hitler by Wulf Schwartzwaller, Berkeley Books, 1990

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) was an English political economist and historian who in 1796 published a book called "An Essay on the Principle of Population" in which he said that poverty, and thereby vice and misery, are unavoidable because population growth always exceeds food production. Checks on population growth were wars, famine, and diseases.

Malthus's ideas had great impact, only a few asked on what his claims were actually based. Yet neither Malthus nor his later disciples ever managed to put forward any scientific proof for his theory. Many scientists have disproved Malthus' theory and the ideology resulting from it.

However, with the book, Malthus created an atmosphere which moved his adherents in 1834 to pass a new law providing for the institution of work- houses for the poor, in which the sexes were strictly separated to curb the otherwise inevitable overbreeding. This kind of philosophy urged the calling forth of drastic measures. The full title of Charles Darwin's famous book is not so famous: The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. In it he explains the development of life-forms as a struggle for existence. The result of this struggle would be a natural selection of those species and races who were to triumph over those weaker ones who would perish.

Francis Galton (1822-1911) was an english psychologist and a half-cousin of Darwin. Galton extended Darwin's theory into a concept of deliberate social intervention, which he said was a logical application of evolution to the human race. He called his theory "Eugenics", the principle of which was that by encouraging better human stock to breed and discouraging the reproduction of less desirable stock, the whole race could be improved.

Modern racism really began with Arthur Count de Gabon (1816-1882) who published his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races. He wrote in of a fair-haired Aryan race that was superior to all the others whose remnants constituted a tiny racial aristocracy decaying under the overwhelming weight of inferior races. A revival of his work in Germany began ten years after his death by the Pan-Germans, an extremely nationalistic and anti-jewish group.

In 1899, Gabon's disciple, Houston Stewart Chaimberlain (1844-1927), an Englishman, published The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, in Germany. He upheld the German race to be the purest and damned the inferior races, the jews and negroes, as degenerate. From this point on, Eugenics, Social Darwinism and racial hygiene fused into a single concept.

In 1904 the first chairs in Eugenics were instituted at University College, London, followed by the establishment of the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics in 1907. In 1910 the Eugenic Record Office was founded in the United States, both institutes used the research results of the Galton Laboratory of National Eugenics to propose practical applications. Eugenics was used an the "scientific" basis upon which racism was fused to politics.

Eugenicists believed that the child of a mentally-ill person and a mentally heathy person would be a mentally-ill offspring. This led to a series of escalating regimens: separation from society, restraint, separation of the sexes in defective's colonies, and sterilizations.

In Great Britain one of the leaders of the mental hygiene movement was Miss Evelyn Fox. She had been an active member of the Eugenics Society before the foundation of the National Council for Mental Hygiene, of which she was an officer and founder. among the board members was Sir Cyril Burt, who later founded Mensa, a high i.q. group which espoused eugenic principles. The mental hygiene movement drew strongly from the eugenic movements of whatever country they were in.

Shortly after the turn of the century eugenic organizations were set up throughout the world. While the whole world was being prepared by propaganda for the sterilization of the insane, the adherents of mental hygiene and eugenics were preparing their next step, euthanasia.

In the U.S.A., Dr. Alexis Carrel, a nobel prize winner who had been on the staff of the Rockefeller Institute since its inception, published his bookMan the Unknown in 1935. In it he suggests the removal of the mentally ill and the criminal by small euthanasia institutions equipped with suitable gases.

In 1933 the Nazi party rapidly consolidated its power. In June of that year, Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick put in motion the passage of the "Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases in Posterity"- the sterilization law. Architect of the law was Ernst Rudin, professor of psychiatry at the Munich University, director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute for Genealog, and of the Research Institute for Psychiatry. A separate legal system was set up consisting of "Hereditary Health Courts", which could decree sterilization against a person's will. By 1935 the "Nuremburg Laws" intended to insure the racial purity of the nation and was aimed specifically at the Jews.

In 1934 the Institute for Heredity, Biology and Racial Research was founded at Frankfurt University by professor Ernst Rudin's colleague at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Dr. Otmar Freiherr Von Verscheur. Von Verscheur's assistant there was Dr. Joseph Mengele.

In England, Dr. Charles Killick Millard, president of the Society of Medical Officers of Health, brought up in 1931 the question of voluntary euthanasia and proposed a suitable law. Later he became fellow founder of the Voluntary Euthanasia Legislation Society. In 1935 Lord Moynihan, president of the Royal College of Surgeons, founded the Euthanasia Society .

Sterilization and euthanasia were not the ideas of the Nazis and never had been. They were ideas which were supported and promoted throughout the world by groups with an interest in the development of mental hygiene. Germany, however, was the only country in which the political climate allowed materialization of the final goal of sterilization and euthanasia.

There is not a great deal known about "T4" compared to other aspects of Nazi Germany. T4 was the Fuhrer Chancellery and the initials came from the full address which was Tiergartenstrasse 4, Berlin. "Project T4" was fully integrated into the organizational structure of the Reich and fell under section 11b. ("mercy-death") of the Chancellery of the Fuhrer. Four cover organizations safeguarded the project T4: the Realms Work Committee in charge of collecting information on candidates for euthanasia from questionnaires sent to hospitals, the Realms Committee for Scientific Approach to Severe Illness Due to Heredity set up exclusively to apply euthanasia to children, the charitable company for the transport of the sick which transported patients to the killing centers, and the Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care, in charge of final disposition of the victims' remains.

At the time the questionnaires went out a number of mental hospitals were being converted for use as killing centers and schools for murder. Death chambers were built disguised as shower-baths and crematoriums, which were identical to those later to be established in the death camps in Poland.

Schooling of the personnel at Hadamar Mental Institution produced perfect murderers who were used to the smell of burnt flesh, had been taught to trick people being led to their death and to steel themselves against the crying and pleading of the victims. On arrival, the victims were stripped, dressed in paper shirts and forthwith taken to a gas chamber where they were murdered with hydrocyanic acid gas, and the bodies moved to crematoriums by conveyer belts, six bodies to a furnace. The psychiatrist in charge at Hadamar was Dr. Adolf Wahlmann, an active member of the German Mental Hygiene Movement.

After the state had been relieved of the burden of these undesireables, the operation, still under the direction of eminent mental health psychiatrists in T4, was expanded under the code of 14F13. From being limited to mental hospitals and institutions, it now embraced German and Austrian inmates and Jews in concentration camps who were sick or invalid. At Dachau at the end of 1941 a commission composed of 4 psychiatrists under professor Dr. Werner Heyde, SS Standartenfuhrer and lecturer in neurology and psychiatry at Wurzburg University, arrived at the camp and selected hundred of patients incapable of work who were transported to the gas chambers and disposed of.

The extermination camps had followed a separate evolution from the concentration camps that were opened a few months after the Nazi rise to power. These death camps had their headquarters, not in Himmler's SS organization, but in the Fuhrer's Chancellory (T4). Franz Stangl (Austrian Gestapo) said at the Nuremberg trials that his progression to builder and commander of the Sobibor Extermination Camp went through the Hartheim and Bernberg euthanasia centers. The original staff at Sobibor was taken from Hartheim.

During the war eugenics became associated with the Nazis and afterwards a global whitewashing began. The first step was the reconstitution of the many National Councils of Mental Hygiene. The first was the British Association for Mental Health. Lady Prescilla Norman, wife of Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England, had been working in the mental hygiene movement since the 20's. In 1944 they sponsored a congress held at the Ministry of Health in London where they established the World Federation of Mental Health-WFMH.

The first elected president of the WFMH was Dr. John Rawlings Rees, a British psychiatrist associated with the Tavistock Institute. In 1948 the WFMH was formally inaugurated at the Third International Congress of Mental Health. A vice-president of the Congress was Dr. Carl G. Jung who was described by fellow vice-president Dr. Conti as "representing German psychiatry under the Nazis". Dr. Jung had been co-editor of the Journal for Psychotherapy with Dr. M. H. Goering, the cousin of Marshal Hermann Goering.

It may be that the real key to the Third Reich lies buried in the history of Tibet, for it was here that Karl Haushofer, the initiate who taught the youthful Hitler, first met in literal fact the Superman of Nazi legend.

Origins of the swastika

By 1945 the Thousand Year Reich had become a smoking ruin. Russian soldiers pressed through the rubble, fighting from house to house, from street to street in order to link up with their British and American allies who also pressed in inexorably on the heart of the dying capital. Before they overran the eastern sector of Berlin, these Russian troops came across something very strange: vast numbers of Tibetan corpses. The fact is mentioned by Maurice Bessy and again by Pauwels and Bergier, who set the actual number of bodies at a thousand. They wore German uniform, but without the usual insignia of rank.

The religion of Tibet is Buddhism, but like the Zen of Japan, it is a brand of Buddhism far divorced from the Indian original. Many scholars prefer the term "Lamaism" to distinguish between Tibetan Buddhism and its parent root. The religious life of the country is concentrated in a multitude of monasteries, many of them built in almost inaccessible mountain regions. Side by side with the state religion of Lamaism, and flourishing particularly in the rural districts, is Tibet's aboriginal religion of Bon. The Bon-Pas follow a primitive, animistic creed, full of dark rituals and spells. If the holy Lamas of the Buddhist sects were looked on as personifications of spiritual wisdom, the priests of Bon had a potent reputation with the common people as magicians.

The Nazi leaders were attracted to Tibet by those of its secret doctrines which filtered through to the west. They believed, those members of the Thule group, the Luminous Lodge, and the various other occult organizations which helped shape the Third Reich, in an esoteric history of mankind. And it was in the archives of Tibetan monasteries that this history was preserved in its purest form.

Already, in the latter half of the previous century, intriguing hints about Tibetan secret teachings had been carried to the west by Helena Blavatsky, who claimed initiation at the hands of the Holy Lamas themselves. Blavatsky taught that her "Hidden Masters" and "Secret Chiefs" had their earthly residence in the Himalayan region. As soon as the Nazi movement had sufficient funds, it began to organize a number of expeditions to Tibet and these succeeded one another practically without interruption until 1943. One of the most tangible expressions of Nazi interest in Tibet was the party`s adoption of its deepest and most mystical of symbols-the swastika.

The swastika is one of mankind's oldest symbols, and apart from the cross and the circle, probably the most widely distributed. It is shown on pottery fragments from Greece dating back to the eighth century BC. It was used in ancient Egypt, India and China. The Navaho indians of North America have a traditional swastika pattern. Arab-Islamic sorcerers used it. In more recent times, it was incorporated in the flags of certain baltic states.

The idea for the use of the swastika by the Nazis came from a dentist named Dr. Friedrich Krohn who was a member of the secret Germanen order. Krohn produced the design for the actual form in which the Nazis came to use the symbol, that is reversed, spinning in an anti-clockwise direction. As a solar symbol, the swastika is properly thought of as spinning, and the Buddhists have always believed the symbol attracted luck. The Sanskrit word "svastika" means good fortune and well being. According to Cabbalistic lore and occult theory, chaotic force can be evoked by revers- ing the symbol. And so the symbol appeared as the flag of Nazi Germany and the insignia of the Nazi party, an indication for those who had eyes to see, as to the occult nature of the Third Reich.

One hundred years after Adolf Hitler's birth near Linz in Austria on April 20 1889, and decades after his malign empire metastasized in Bavaria in Bavaria, the Hitler phenomenon remains to mainstream historians largely inexplicable, or at least unexplained. The man and his awful work seem to stand outside history looking in. Perhaps our human fear of the irrational is so great that we instinctively hold Hitler at a great remove in order that we need not admit him to our company.

In light of this it isn't very surprising that an extensive literature exists seeking an occult rationale for the otherwise baffling catastrophe Hitler represents. As Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier point out in the Morning of the Magicians(1960), the Nazi era simply defies conventional analysis:

A self taught madman, surrounded by a handful of megalomaniacs,rejects Descartes, spurns the whole humanist culture, tramples on reason, invokes Lucifer, conquers Europe, and nearly conquers the world. The historian begins to feel anxious and to wonder whether his art is viable.

Pauwels and Bergier were among the first postwar proponents of a black magical explanation for the Third Reich. About a quarter of their book is devoted to a region they call "The Absolute Elsewhere," a neverland where Nazi pseudosciences and occult methodology held official sway. They quote a Hitlerian pronouncement to demonstrate that the Fuhrer's intellectual development was on a level wholly different from that understood by the Western tradition: "there is a Nordic and National Socialist science which is opposed to Jewish-Liberal science".2 Reality was defined by politics.

Nazi "science" has brought hoots of derision from those who hold to the Cartesian model. In place of psychology there was an occult frappe composed of the mysticism of Gurdijeff, the theosophy of Madame Blavatsky and the archetypes of Nordic mythology. In place of Newtonian physics stood the cosmic force called vril, the bizarre geology known as the hollow earth theory, and the frigid cosmology of Hans Horbiger's Welteislehre, the doctrine of eternal ice.

Nazi thought excluded psychoanalysis, which has in fact been not very helpful in explaining the etiology of great evil, although Robert G.L. Waite's effort, quoted above and published in 1977 by Basic Books, is good on several provocative subjects: Hitler's sadomasochistic sex life; the possibility he had a Jewish grandfather; and his Viennese mentors, who are described at greater length by the authors about to be mentioned.

Nazism officially rejected the theory of relativity as "Jewish science". Not only Freud but EInstein too was forced to flee Hitler's Europe. He and other physicists eventually were able to ensure that atomic secrets remained in the hands of the allies until they could be used spectacularly to climax the Pacific war.

Horbiger's physics derived from an intuitive flash he experienced late in the nineteenth century. " As a young engineer," he wrote, "I was watching one day some molten steel poured on wet ground covered with snow: the ground exploded after some delay and with great violence."

This conflict of opposites, of fire and ice, is a theme that inspired Horbiger and resonated for German nationalists because it recurs in the Icelandic Eddas, the sourcebooks of Teutonic mythology. It all makes good sense in Iceland, since that island's peculiar geology feature numerous volcanic rifts in the permafrost; fire and ice are commonly juxtaposed all over the landscape. As grounds for a cosmology- the word implies universality- it is at best dubious. It would be a hard sell in Hawaii.

Nevertheless, Nazi science was influential out of all proportion to its objective validity. Hoerbiger was immensely influential in the Third Reich. His followers numbered in the tens of thousands. There were scores of Horbigerian books, hundreds of Welteislehre pamphlets, and a monthly magazine called The Key to World Events.