Adolf Hitler once argued that National Socialism represented “a cool and highly reasoned approach to reality based on the greatest of scientific knowledge and its spiritual expression.” If there are any people foolish enough still to fall for that, they will not enjoy this book. While the enthusiasm of some Nazi leaders, most notoriously Himmler, for the occult has been a staple of pop culture and the more disreputable corners of historical “investigation” for years, Eric Kurlander’s book, Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, shows that many others felt much the same way.
Kurlander depicts a Third Reich in which, despite uneven and often ambiguous efforts to rein them in, seers, magicians, and psychics flourished. Buddha was drafted into the master race, parapsychology “so long as it comported with ‘Nordic-Germanic feeling’” was recognized as legitimate, and the grounds were laid for an “Ario-Germanic” national religion as a syncretic (it wouldn’t all be Wotan) “substitute for Christianity.” Meanwhile, charlatan-historians and charlatan-folklorists hunted for proof that large swathes of Europe were part of an ancestral German homeland, charlatan-archeologists searched for evidence of “the Nordic origins of Asian civilization,” charlatan-doctors worked on monstrous human experiments, and charlatan-scientists struggled to develop weapons designed to draw on mysterious untapped electromagnetic forces. This arsenal was intended to include death rays, sound weapons, and anti-gravity devices — an absurdity and a waste made all the more grotesque by the contrast with the remarkably sophisticated technology successfully deployed by Germany during the war.
If the magical weapons proved harmless, the same cannot be said of the mix of superstition and pseudoscience that ran through the Nazis’ thinking about race, a mix that goes some way to accounting for both the intensity of their anti-Semitism and the meticulousness of the slaughter that followed. “Traditional” anti-Semitism rested on a distrust of difference reinforced by religious and then economic resentment. It generated exclusion, violence, and, as time went by, increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories. But the notion of Jews as perpetual enemies of an advanced “Aryan” race was a fairly new confection, dating back only to the mid 19th century.
Kurlander is an excellent guide to the complex and often conflicting “histories” of the Aryans’ origins, versions of which featured sex with angels, God-men from Tibet, a descent from heaven, moons made of ice crashing into the earth (the weirdly popular “World Ice Theory,” in which Hitler was one of numerous believers), and much more besides. These narratives also incorporated tales of a fall: The original Aryans had been scattered. Their racial integrity had been diluted by intermingling with “lesser breeds.” They had been preyed upon by — whom else? — the Jews, routinely smeared as parasitic and as a disease but also in terms that sometimes appeared to be more than metaphor: Hitler dubbed Jews the children of the devil and believed that forestalling the “Jewish apocalypse was our duty, our God-given mission.”
