Account of Nazis’ mystical interests muddled

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/09/2017 (3303 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The sudden outbreak of neo-Nazi activity in Charlottesville, Va., in August included chants of “blood and soil,” an important part of German “volkisch,” or race-based, ideas from various streams of pseudo-sciences such as astrology, parapsychology, “World Ice Theory,” as well as straight magic and Germanic and Norse mythology that supported Aryan supremacy.

One, radiesthesia (dousing or divination using rods or pendulums), emphasized the connection between the Earth and the Nordic master race — blood and soil — essential to counter-contamination by lower races and to replace outdated religions such as Christianity.

Stetson University Prof. Eric Kurlander’s third book is a deep examination of the background of racialist mythology and “border science,” which the Nazis used to promote and advance their racism and desire to create a super race.

Kurlander is an expert on Nazism. His previous books have chronicled the decline of German liberalism in the decades before Nazis took power, and how liberal democrats fared under the Third Reich.

Hitler’s Monsters goes back even further, into the 19th century, to trace the influence of folklore and pseudo-scientific theories that promoted German ethnicity over any other groups, especially the Jews and Slavs.

A premise of the film Raiders of the Lost Ark was that, as is said in the film, “the Nazis have had teams of archeologists running around the world looking for all kinds of religious artifacts. Hitler’s a nut on the subject.”

It wasn’t only Hitler — many National Socialist leaders were obsessed with occult and supernatural ideas that would support the racist agenda underpinning the Third Reich.

Kurlander details the cultural “supernatural imaginary,” the framework of narrative and pseudo-science which supported the superiority of German people over other groups, through which the Nazis added emotional appeal to the disillusionment of economic depression in their quest for power.

The fascinating background to one of the most devastating movements of the 20th century, however, is not particularly well served by this book. It may be too detailed and academic — too dry for readers attracted by the title, expecting a sensational history of supernatural support for the evil that was Nazism.

While many of the ideas were prominent all over Europe, Germany’s treatment after the First World War as well as the charismatic leadership of Adolf Hitler provided fertile soil for the nonsense that marginalized Christianity and subverted real science in the service of the Third Reich.

Kurlander’s scholarship is overwhelming — more than 100 pages of notes and bibliography show exhaustive sourcing. However, quotations and parenthetical translations constantly interrupt the flow of the reading, and the account seems to crawl by at a snail’s pace.

Throughout the book, Kurlander demonstrates the anti-Semitism of the German “supernatural imaginary” without explaining its source in the supernatural underpinnings he catalogues.

Anti-Semitism and anti-Slavic prejudice were more important than even the shaky “scientific” foundations of the Third Reich. Nazi scientists assumed experiments on “subhuman” Jews were somehow applicable to Aryans, supposedly a completely different race.

The Third Reich embraced anti-Jewish support from the Middle East, ignoring Islam’s equally Semitic background.

Mystical “border science” propaganda promised superweapons to win the war, long after conventional military victory was obviously impossible. Some purveyors of junk science survived, and even profited, after the war.

The book’s epilogue warns of the pseudo-scientific proclivities of the internet, as well as the emotional appeals of the so-called alt-right, nationalism and radical Islam. Perhaps it’s fortunate so many leaders do not seem to be able to add charisma to the “fake science” of various lunatic fringes.

Bill Rambo teaches at the Laureate Academy in St. Norbert.