Nazis, nutters – it’s business as usual in Germany’s far right

It’s no surprise to find psychics involved in those German coup plans – the Nazis drew much of their inspiration from cranks.

German special police forces detain Heinrich XIII Prinz Reuss last week. Picture: AFP

Last week’s German far-right coup plot has the full cast: the aristocrat with the cravat and the angry orange corduroy trousers; the gourmet chef; the antivax roofer; the classical tenor; the judge; the former paratrooper and the special forces commando.

And there, lurking at the back, but inevitably: two psychics.

No nutty German political conspiracy would be complete without its complement of occultists, soothsayers, mystics and others claiming paranormal powers and the ability to predict the future.

The mind-readers were apparently brought in for “vetting potential recruits” to the Reichsburger (citizens of the reich) plot, an affiliation of far-right conspiracists planning to storm the Reichstag, topple the German government and install as ruler Heinrich XIII Prinz Reuss, a 71-year-old scion of Thuringian nobility with an ancient pedigree and a loose grip on reality. A rich woman doctor apparently bankrolled the psychic element of the coup plot, as overseer of “spiritual issues”.

For at least 150 years, the far right in Germany has taken sustenance from a variety of occult, esoteric, psychic and mystical theories, a tradition that could be dismissed as ridiculous were it not also extremely dangerous, violent and enduring.

Fifty years before Hitler’s rise to power, Germany and Austria were home to powerful occult sects, millenarian groups that thrived in the waning years of the Habsburg Empire, feeding on political uncertainty, antisemitism and religious hunger to produce a toxic brew of popular nationalism, Aryan racism and belief in psychic powers.

Links between Nazism and supernatural beliefs are a staple of popular culture, with an entire subgenre of pseudoscientific books devoted to black magic under the Third Reich. Steven Spielberg’s 1981 blockbuster movie Raiders of the Lost Ark depicted Nazis seeking to harness the magical power of the lost Jewish Ark of the Covenant.

Yet such exaggerated fantasies have a firm basis in reality: the Nazi leadership was obsessed by the supernatural and no mass political movement in history has so consciously steeped itself in astrology, fringe science, half-baked folklore, psychic phenomena and the paranormal.

The ideas and symbols of the 19th-century occult German sects filtered directly into the nascent Nazi party, and particularly the SS. In post-Versailles Germany, among a people desperate for self-definition and hope, supernatural notions spread swiftly: psychics, astrologers, palmists, clairvoyants and other spiritual quacks proliferated. In 1943, there were 3000 tarot readers in Berlin alone.

Most senior Nazis believed in the paranormal. Hitler himself made notes on a book called Magic: Theory, History, Practice, underlining such passages as: “He who does not carry demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world.” Before moving into the chancellery, the Fuhrer employed a Nazi “ghostbuster” with a divining pendulum to sweep the building for cancerous death rays.

Joseph Goebbels read the prophecies of Nostradamus in bed and informed Hitler that these clearly predicted Britain would lose the war. Rudolf Hess employed a personal astrologer who drew up his horoscope before his flight to Scotland. Julius Streicher, the editor of Der Sturmer newspaper, who was later hanged at Nuremberg, believed in radiesthesia, the psychic ability to locate objects using rods and pendulums.

Such esoteric non-science had a direct impact on the war. Where Britain tracked U-boats using radar and information gleaned from breaking the Enigma code, the German navy had the Pendulum Dowsing Institute in Berlin to search for British shipping using a weight on a string. After Mussolini was toppled, the Nazis launched Operation Mars, corralling some 40 fortune-tellers, psychics and magicians into a large mansion with orders to “Find the Duce!”. This posse of frauds “demanded huge quantities of luxury food, alcohol and tobacco before they could start work”.

Much Nazi hocus-pocus can be traced to Hanns Horbiger, an Austrian engineer whose World Ice Theory (Welteislehre) claimed the Aryan race was created by divine sperm brought to earth by meteors. The SS tried to have this “cosmic truth” taught in German universities in place of Darwinism.

Heinrich Himmler was the most extreme in his paranormal obsessions. His science organisation, the Ahnenerbe, included a branch devoted to the occult and mind-control experiments. Himmler even set up the SS Witches Division to gather evidence of witch trials and wizardry, based on the notion that these represented an ancient Germanic religion persecuted and wiped out by a cruel Judeo-Christian inquisition.

The SS chief also employed an elderly soothsayer and former mental patient called Karl Wiligut, known as Weisthor (Wise-Thor), who fed him theories about a white superman, Teutonic deities and a mythical era when “giants, dwarfs and mythical beasts moved about beneath a sky filled with three suns”. Like Prince Heinrich XIII, the man who would be Kaiser of modern Germany, Wise-Thor believed he was “the bearer of a secret line of German kingship”.

Following the long German custom of harking back to a mystical past, Prince Heinrich appears to believe that his dynasty was “dispossessed … after thousands of years of rule”. He claims the dark forces behind the wars of the 20th century were the Rothschild banking dynasty and the Freemasons.

Just as fascist beliefs lingered on in Germany after the war, so did some of the paranormal beliefs that underpinned them.

In his 2018 book Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, Eric Kurlander notes how the current “renaissance in supernatural reasoning, shadowy conspiracy theories, extraterrestrial powers” links up with “fantasies of a racially pure, immigrant (Islam)-free Europe”.

The strange far-right ideological soup that has boiled over in the Reichsburger plot contains so many familiar ingredients: anti-establishment conspiracy, militarism, nostalgia for a mythical history and a dollop of mind-reading, fortune-telling mumbo-jumbo.

The Times