Hitler’s Pagans

Posted on September 19, 2007 in History Myths & Mysticism Propaganda

From A History of Pagan Europe:

It is often written that Hitler’s regime in Germany (1933-1945) was Pagan in inspiration, but this is untrue. Hitler’s rise to power came when the Catholic party supported the Nazis in the Reichstag in 1933, enabling Nazi seizure of power. Many churchmen of both Protestant and Catholic persuasion were committed supporters of the Nazi regime. The belief that it was Pagan in outlook comes from propaganda during the Second World War. As anti-German propaganda, occultist [[Lewis Spence]] wrote:

The ancient faith of Germany and Scandinavia, popularly known as ‘the religion of [[Odin]] and [[Thor]]’, has been the subject of many a literary ecomium. To myself, as a student of Folklore and Mythology, it makes an appeal no more gracious and stimulating than any other religion of the lower cultus, and very much less so than those even of Polynesia or old Peru.

It is, indeed, only the fact that it is being resuscitated by extreme Nazi fanatics which makes it important at all, and, even so, it is worthy of notice only in a temporary sense, for with the downfall of Hitler and his caucus it will go the way of all artificially revived heterodoxies.

Himmler and Hess, two ‘extreme Nazi fanatics’, seem to have been active followers of an [[Ariosophical]] mysticism, promoting the future rule of the super-race. But Hitler himself said in 1941: ‘It seems to me that nothing would be more foolish than to re-establish the worship of Wotan. Our old mythology ceased to be viable when Christianity implanted itself.’

Spence wrongly connected National Socialist ritual, derived from Prussian and Austrian military custom, with Paganism, as ‘The Nazi Pagan Church’. Recent research by John Yeowell has shown that, far from being influential in Nazi Germany, Pagans were persecuted. Leading Pagans were arrested by the Nazi regime. For example, in 1936, the noted runemaster [[Friedrich Bernhard Marby]] was arrested and spent the next nine years in concentration camps. He was not alone. In 1941, on orders from Heinrich Himmler, many Pagan and esoteric groups were banned (including the followers of [[Rudolph Steiner]], the Ariosophists and followers of the religion of [[Odin|Wotan]]). Like other victims of Hitlerism, many Pagans subsequently died in concentration camps. (pp. 218-219)