Synopsis
The documentary contains mainly black-and-white as well as some color archival footage, with narration explaining the influences of alternative belief systems (occult, paganism, mysticism, etc.) on the Nazi ideology and Hitler's personal philosophy. It also documents the history and development of ideas and symbols used by the Nazi Party and of the Nazi eugenics program.
In the early 20th century, the young Adolf Hitler was just one of many German-speaking people attracted by a new Germanic mythology that combined ancient legends and esoteric cosmologies with cutting-edge theories of genetic science. In the hands of the Nazis, the result was a new ideology that saw racial purity as the key to human destiny.
This was a belief system of arcane rituals and potent symbols, with the ancient swastika appropriated for the Nazi cause. By the time of the Third Reich, Hitler and the Nazis had evolved an entirely new faith, complete with holy book, venerated relics, and a priestly elite in the form of Himmler's SS. It was a religion based on obedience, power, and the cult of the leader, with Hitler himself conceived in Messianic terms.
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was a German politician who was the 4th Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel, a leading member of the German Nazi Party, and one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany. He is primarily known for being one of the main architects behind the Holocaust.
The Thule Society, originally the Studiengruppe für germanisches Altertum, was a German occultist and Völkisch group founded in Munich shortly after World War I, named after a mythical northern country in Greek legend. The society is notable chiefly as the organization that sponsored the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, which was later reorganized by Adolf Hitler into the National Socialist German Workers' Party. According to Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw, the organization's "membership list ... reads like a Who's Who of early Nazi sympathizers and leading figures in Munich", including Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Julius Lehmann, Gottfried Feder, Dietrich Eckart, and Karl Harrer.
Wewelsburg is a Renaissance castle located in the village of Wewelsburg, which is a district of the town of Büren, Westphalia, in the Landkreis of Paderborn in the northeast of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. The castle has a triangular layout, with three round towers connected by massive walls. After 1934 it was used by the SS under Heinrich Himmler, and was to be expanded into a complex which would serve as the central SS cult-site.
The Ahnenerbe was a Schutzstaffel (SS) pseudoscientific organization which was active in Nazi Germany between 1935 and 1945. It was established by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler in July 1935 as an SS appendage devoted to the task of promoting the racial doctrines espoused by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. The Ahnenerbe was composed of scholars and scientists from a broad range of academic disciplines and fostered the idea that the Germans descended from an Aryan race which was racially superior to other racial groups.
The association of Nazism with occultism occurs in a wide range of theories, speculation, and research into the origins of Nazism and into Nazism's possible relationship with various occult traditions. Such ideas have flourished as a part of popular culture since at least the early 1940s, and gained renewed popularity starting in the 1960s.
Otto Wilhelm Rahn was a German medievalist, Ariosophist, and SS officer who researched Holy Grail myths.
Armanen runes are 18 pseudo-runes, inspired by the historic Younger Futhark runes, invented by Austrian mysticist and Germanic revivalist Guido von List during a state of temporary blindness in 1902, and described in his Das Geheimnis der Runen, published as a periodical article in 1906, and as a standalone publication in 1908. The name seeks to associate the runes with the postulated Armanen, whom von List saw as ancient Aryan priest-kings. The runes continue in use today in esotericism and in Germanic neopaganism.
Armanism and Ariosophy are esoteric ideological systems that were largely developed by Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, respectively, in Austria between 1890 and 1930. The term 'Ariosophy', which translates to wisdom of the Aryans, was invented by Lanz von Liebenfels in 1915, and during the 1920s, it became the name of his doctrine. For research on the topic, such as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's book The Occult Roots of Nazism, the term 'Ariosophy' is generically used to describe the Aryan/esoteric theories which constituted a subset of the 'Völkische Bewegung'. This broader use of the word is retrospective and it was not generally current among the esotericists themselves. List actually called his doctrine 'Armanism', while Lanz used the terms 'Theozoology' and 'Ario-Christianity' before the First World War.
The Myth of the Twentieth Century is a 1930 book by Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi theorist and official who was convicted of crimes against humanity and other crimes at the Nuremberg trials and executed in 1946. Rosenberg was one of the principal ideologues of the Nazi Party and editor of the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter. In 1941, history professor Peter Viereck wrote: "In molding Germany's 'psychology of frightfulness' Rosenberg wields an influence as powerful as that of the much publicized Goebbels and the much feared Himmler and his secret police."
The 20th-century German Nazi Party made extensive use of graphic symbols, especially the swastika, notably in the form of the swastika flag, which became the co-national flag of Nazi Germany in 1933, and the sole national flag in 1935. A very similar flag had represented the Party beginning in 1920.
Nazi Germany was an overwhelmingly Christian nation. A census in May 1939, six years into the Nazi era after the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia into Germany, indicates that 54% of the population considered itself Protestant, 41% considered itself Catholic, 3.5% self-identified as Gottgläubig, and 1.5% as "atheist". Protestants were over-represented in the Nazi Party's membership and electorate, and Catholics were under-represented.
The religious beliefs of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, have been a matter of debate. His opinions regarding religious matters changed considerably over time. During the beginning of his political career, Hitler publicly expressed favorable opinions towards traditional Christian ideals, but later abandoned them. Most historians describe his later posture as adversarial to organized Christianity and established Christian denominations. He also criticized atheism.
In Nazi Germany, Gottgläubig was a Nazi religious term for a form of non-denominationalism and deism practised by those German citizens who had officially left Christian churches but professed faith in some higher power or divine creator. Such people were called Gottgläubige, and the term for the overall movement was Gottgläubigkeit ; the term denotes someone who still believes in a God, although without having any institutional religious affiliation. These Nazis were not favourable towards religious institutions of their time, nor did they tolerate atheism of any type within their ranks. The 1943 Philosophical Dictionary defined Gottgläubig as: "official designation for those who profess a specific kind of piety and morality, without being bound to a church denomination, whilst however also rejecting irreligion and godlessness." The Gottgläubigkeit was a form of deism, and was "predominantly based on creationist and deistic views". In the 1939 census, 3.5% of the German population identified as Gottgläubig.
Nazi archaeology was a field of pseudoarcheology led and encouraged by various Nazi leaders and Ahnenerbe figures, such as Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, which directed archaeologists and other scholars to search Germany's archeological past in order to find material evidence supporting an advanced, Aryan ancestry as alleged and espoused by the ultranationalist Nazi Party.
Esoteric Neo-Nazism, also known as Esoteric Nazism, Esoteric Fascism or Esoteric Hitlerism, represents a fusion of Nazi ideology with mystical, occult, and esoteric traditions. This belief system emerged in the aftermath of World War II, as adherents sought to reinterpret and adapt the ideas of the Third Reich within the context of a new religious movement. Esoteric Nazism is characterized by its emphasis on the mythical and spiritual dimensions of Aryan supremacy, drawing from a range of sources including Theosophy, Ariosophy, and Gnostic dualism. These beliefs have evolved into a complex and often contradictory body of thought that seeks to justify and perpetuate racist and supremacist ideologies under the guise of spiritual enlightenment.
Historians, political scientists and philosophers have studied Nazism with a specific focus on its religious and pseudo-religious aspects. It has been debated whether Nazism would constitute a political religion, and there has also been research on the millenarian, messianic, and occult or esoteric aspects of Nazism.
The celebration of Christmas in Nazi Germany included attempts by the regime to bring the Christian religious holiday into line with Nazi ideology. The Jewish origins of Jesus and the commemoration of his birth as the Jewish Messiah was troubling for some members of the Nazi Party and their racialist beliefs. Between 1933 and 1945, some government officials attempted to remove these aspects of Christmas from civil celebrations and concentrate on cultural pre-Christian aspects of the festival. However, church and private celebrations remained Christian in nature.
The Greater Germanic Reich, fully styled the Greater Germanic Reich of the German Nation, was the official state name of the political entity that Nazi Germany tried to establish in Europe during World War II. The territorial claims for the Greater Germanic Reich fluctuated over time. As early as the autumn of 1933, Adolf Hitler envisioned annexing such territories as Bohemia, western Poland, and Austria to Germany and the formation of satellite or puppet states without independent economies or policies of their own.
The ideology of the Schutzstaffel, a paramilitary force and an instrument of terror of the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany, emphasized a racist vision of "racial purity", primarily based on antisemitism and loyalty to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany.
