Nearly half a century after the defeat of the Third Reich, Nazism remains a subject of extensive historical inquiry, general interest, and, alarmingly, a source of inspiration for resurgent fascism in Europe. Goodrick-Clarke's powerful and timely book traces the intellectual roots of Nazism back to a number of influential occult and millenarian sects in the Habsburg Empire during its waning years. These sects combined notions of popular nationalism with an advocacy of Aryan racism and a proclaimed need for German world-rule. This book provides the first serious account of the way in which Nazism was influenced by powerful millenarian and occult sects that thrived in Germany and Austria almost fifty years before the rise to power of Adolf Hitler. These millenarian sects (principally the Ariosophists) espoused a mixture of popular nationalism, Aryan racism, and occultism to support their advocacy of German world-rule. Over time their ideas and symbols, filtered through nationalist-racist groups associated with the infant Nazi party, came to exert a strong influence on Himmler's SS. The fantasies thus fueled were played out with terrifying consequences in the realities structured into the Third Reich: Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Treblinka, the hellish museums of Nazi apocalypse, had psychic roots reaching back to millenial visions of occult sects. Beyond what the TImes Literary Supplement calls an intriguing study of apocalyptic fantasies, this bizarre and fascinating story contains lessons we cannot afford to ignore.
Nearly half a century after the defeat of the Third Reich, Nazism remains a subject of extensive historical inquiry, general interest, and, alarmingly, a source of inspiration for resurgent fascism...
My research and writing was supported by a 2012 Fulbright Scholar Fellowship, a 2012 Teaching Exchange with the Freiburg ... These include, but are not limited to, Ofer Ashkenazi, Benita Blessing, Erik Butler, Joel Davis, Michael ...
It had always remained independent of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists . Leese in fact regarded Mosley as an opportunist and argued that his fascism was not based on racial nationalism . Suspicious that Mosley's first wife had ...
Forget what you have read, seen and heard. This is the real secret history of Nazi Germany and its dark Messiah - Adolf Hitler.
New collection of essays promising to re-energize the debate on Nazism's occult roots and legacies and thus our understanding of German cultural and intellectual history over the past century.
It was directly due to this screening out of potential members that the minister-president of Bavaria's first Socialist government—the oddly sympatico Kurt Eisner—was assassinated, thus precipitating a national crisis.
David Luhrssen has written the first comprehensive study of the society's activities, its cultural roots, and its postwar ramifications in a historical-critical context.
The date was the thousandth anniversary of the death of Henry the Fowler (875–936), the German king who founded the royal Saxon dynasty and pushed the Slavs eastward across the River Elbe. In a mood of mystical pilgrimage, Himmler spoke ...
Interpretations of Akhnaton and his sun cult began with Sir Flinders Petrie's Tell el-Amarna (1894) and then A History of Egypt (1899), in which he paid a magnificent tribute to Akhnaton as a great religious reformer who anticipated ...
The worst of the worst, however, was almost certainly Oberaufseherin Ilse Köhler Koch. She was the archetype for blatant savagery among the women at the camps. Born in 1906, she joined the NSDAP shortly before Adolf Hitler came to power ...