The Nazi party's occult origins trace back to a pre-existing German occult environment dating back to before World War I, where Hitler was exposed to occult magazines and secret societies like the Order of the New Templars. The core Nazi occult belief system combined theosophical ideas with racial theory, positing that the German/Aryan race possessed inherent mystical knowledge encoded in their bloodline, which could be accessed through occult practices and meditation. This belief system was heavily influenced by Madame Blavatsky's Theosophy, which provided the concept of the Aryan race as a specially evolved 'fifth root race' and the sacredness of the swastika. The occult elements were institutionalized through the SS, which required members to prove racial purity and functioned as a religious cult. Hitler himself was trained by occultists like Hans Hensel, who taught him the psychological techniques of mass persuasion. After World War II, Nazi occult networks continued to operate globally through underground organizations like Operation Condor, maintaining their influence in South America and beyond.
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Nazis and the OccultAdded:
Cal. Yeah. What? Uh, what's going on with this?
>> What do you mean? What's he doing? There going to be reindeer up in the balcony.
He's waving at him. He's giving the Nazi salute. He's waving at the reindeer.
He's saying hyle Hitler.
[music] >> Change has come to America.
[music] >> The truth out there.
some alien race [music] to condone threats.
The military industrial conference, a highly [music] quoted yet unofficial government agency.
[music] Uh, I've now been in 57 states.
>> From a two-story bunker somewhere in the heartland of America, this is P Radio.
I'm Derek Gilbert. Sharon is taking the evening off. Well, not exactly. We're getting ready for company this evening.
uh one of Sharon's sisters will be coming to stay with us and uh so we've got a lot of things to do and uh thus rather than rush a show that wasn't properly prepared, we decided to dig into the archives for another show that we consider to be a foundational show in helping to understand what's going on in the world today. We'd like to dig back about 3 years and bring out an interview that I did with author Peter Lenda. Uh Sharon mentioned Peter Levenda a couple of times this week. She's gone back and rereading the books in his Sinister Forces series. But in May of 19 or rather 2006, I did an interview with Peter about a previous work of his about Nazis and the occult. Give it a listen.
This helps explain a lot about what's happening in the world today. We're pleased to welcome back to our interview line author Peter Levvena whose uh books Sinister Forces, The Nine, A Warm Gun, and the forthcoming Manson Secret detail the history of the political occult in the United States. Uh and his previous work, which will be the topic of our discussion today, uh Unholy Alliance, a history of Nazi involvement with the occult. Peter, welcome back to P Radio.
>> Thanks very much. Pleasure to be here.
This is a topic that we keep bumping into unintentionally uh as far as the Nazis and the occult and how that aspect of Nazi Germany has influenced world history since the 1940s.
I guess just to start u is it safe to say that the involvement of the Nazi party with the occult was more than just a product of Hinrich Himmler's fevered imagination?
>> Oh, certainly. I mean um there was an environment in which someone like Himmler could could thrive basically and that's what happened. Um there was a background to um to the occult in Germany that went back to before World War I. You know, in John Tolen's biography of Adolf Hitler, one of the definitive biographies of Hitler, um Hitler's poetry, I mean, Hitler wrote poetry in the trenches during World War I, and it was all poetry dedicated to the Tutonic gods like Odin and Votan and that sort of thing and Thor. So, there was this idea of a inherent paganism in in Germany.
that was the real religion or the the the true faith of the German people before uh Christianity came to the region you know uh by by the Catholic Church by missionaries and by and by you know uh force of arms actually in Germany. So there was this idea that somehow Germany was suffering because it had lost the link back to its ancient uh racial religion. So you had uh quite a a an environment of theosophy, spiritualism, um mesmeriism to a certain extent and a lot of old Masonic and Rosacrruian uh secret societies and occult lodges that were really operating very well in Germany uh as early as the late 19th century. So you had from the 1870s on, you had a a very strong presence in Germany and in the rest of Europe, but uh especially so in Germany of secret societies devoted to hermetic ideas, occult concepts, but couched in a neopagan uh framework. And all of this was current at the time that uh Hitler was a young man. Before he went into the war in World War I, he was reading occult magazines like Oara that was printed by a man called Lanson Leefeld who started at a secret society in Austria called the Order of the New Templars. Um, and this was a kind of Knights Templar order with pagan and occult overtones to it.
In fact, um, that order was begun just about the same day that Hitler's mother died uh, in Austria. I mean there's a coincidence of dates and Lance von Leon Levenfelds was a Catholic monk who had sort of defected from the church and formed his own cult secret society. So you had guys like von Leefelds that Hitler actually met at one point. He went to the offices of the magazine and von Leefeld gave him a few free copies of the magazine and some some money to get home. Uh Hitler was very very broke in Vienna in those days. And then you had people like Guido von List who was writing about creating a kind of paganism based on the runes the um the the old alphabet of the Germans with the German people the Tutonic people uh even creating a kind of yoga system based on the runes. So you had a lot of strange mystical ideas very prevalent in Germany at the time and out of this arose the Nazi party.
>> What were the outlines of this mystic belief?
Well, um it depends who you talk to. Uh [clears throat] there were a lot of theorists u around at the time who were trying to uh push their own agenda. But basically speaking um number one there the idea is that there is a mystical knowledge that not everyone has and that you have to study it or be initiated into a secret society to find out what it is. And this mystical mystical knowledge will give you a cult power.
But that was a that's a major facet of of almost every secret society whether it's German or or you know no matter what country or what realm you come from there's this idea that there's a cult knowledge hidden knowledge that the man in the street doesn't know and the only way you're going to find out is if you make contact with other people who do know now although this is common to everyone the German uh variation on this was that this secret knowledge was racial in nature that the blood had the secret your own race um had somehow the secret built inside of you in your DNA let's say which of course there was no DNA knowledge of DNA at the time but there was this idea that there was a racial memory there was a racial heritage and that uh purity of the race would enable you to go back in time uh through meditation and through occult practice to make contact with the ancient gods and the ancient practices and the ancient knowledge So there was a combination of what you might call philosophy uh or general occult ideas mixed with this idea of race. Uh this was very important to people like Lon Levenfel uh Guido Fon List and all of the other uh occult um gurus of the time. the belief that the German people in built into them, hardwired into the German people was the ability to tap uh powerful occult forces and that if the if the race had been polluted in in the terms the Nazis used, if there had been intermarriage with other races, then the power would have been less and less.
This is why in the SS for instance, you had to prove your racial purity going back generations to the year 1750. You had to be able to document that you were a pure German, a pure Aryan, as they would say, going back that long, over about 200 years. If you could prove that, then you were allowed to become a member of the elite SS, which was basically a kind of cult that had been created by Himler.
Was this a racial memory that uh traced lineage back to the the uh well I guess what uh uh the the uh Christian or Hebrew uh scholars would call the Nephilim, the the angels who came down to earth and mated with uh mated with humans >> or the Anunnaki, if you will.
>> Yeah, you could say that. In fact, from the point of view of of the German uh theorists of this doctrine, uh there's a reversal taking place in in biblical legend uh to the to the Nazis, Lucifer, for instance, was an angel of light. Uh and they they adopted this from Blovatki. I mean, and her Theosophical Society, they published a magazine called Lucifer. um this did not mean that they were Satanists the way we we would understand it because what they did was they re uh interpreted redefined all of these terms. So for them the the god of the old testament is not uh god it's actually a satanic figure which is the gnostic idea. So they go back to a kind of warmed overnosticism, a kind of duality. And to them, the the idea of of the Jewish people uh being the chosen ones, it takes on a reversal in their mind. The Jewish people are chosen uh not by God, but by the devil. So they interpreted everything backwards this way. And so their ancient racial memory, let's use another lat term for it if nothing else, supposedly goes back to to to ancient times, I mean hundreds of thousands of years ago. um going back to before uh humans as we know them walked the earth maybe to some pre predternatural form in which at which time human beings had all these marvelous occult powers. And what happened was the race, the German race or the Aryan race as they called it, became deluded through interaction with with other races. And they would they would specify uh Jews, Slavs, um Asiatics, quote unquote, or whatever was not pure Arian or pure German. Uh once the intermarriage took place, then the race became polluted and they lost their powers. So the occultists were trying to find ways to bring these powers back. So when you mention the Nephilim or the Anunnaki, this is the concept except they would have rejected the term Nephilim. Um they would have identified with the Nephilim probably.
>> They would identify with the Anunnaki and say that's where their origins came from. But they were not that sophisticated. Uh they were just talking about Tutonic u times, Tutonic deities and interpreting their their origins that way. a purely Nordic uh icebound, ice originated race, a race that came from the cold countries that came from ice uh and that uh they identified with Arctic regions. [snorts] >> Now, you mentioned Madame Bulvatsky. How influential was her work on on what developed into the uh Nazi belief system?
>> Well, Botszki's influence was extraordinary. You have to to realize that what Babotsky did was form a bullwark against materialism uh in the late 19th century by saying yes, you know, science is correct in so far as it goes and that even evolution, Darwinian evolution is correct in so far as it goes, but it's only part of the story. Lovatski was able to take whatever was known about science in general terms in those days and redefine all of that within an occult spiritual context. So philosophy had tremendous effect not only on the Nazis but on British secret societies, French, Italian and American secret societies that had nothing to do with the Nazis and nothing to do with ideas of racial purity. But uh her influence was paramount. So you had a number of occult organizations in Germany that were heavily influenced by Theosophy that many of whose members were Theosophists who then went on to join other secret societies and to bring her influence there. I think that her influence was I think I think we we're only beginning now to understand how how how deep and how broad her influence was over the entire occult revival of the late 18th late 19th and early 20th century. Um the idea of the Aryan race has lifted from Bllovzki. Uh the sacredness of the swastika uh Blovski was writing about that in the secret doctrine years before uh Hitler was born. So there was this idea that the swastika was a sacred symbol that the Arian race was a was a specially evolved race, the fifth root race I believe it's called. and uh that the Germans identified very strongly with these ideas is is obvious from their writings is obvious from the writings of all the the authors of of a cult uh racism uh in Germany at that time.
>> So who took the ideas that Bllovzky developed and then shaped them into the form that we saw come to fruition in the uh uh the 1930s in Germany?
>> Well, it actually began earlier than that. began in in World War I. At at towards the end of World War I, um communism was on the rise. There had been a communist revolution in Russia.
Uh the the Communist Party was was very contagious, you might say. It was affecting Germans in particular. The German soldiers going to Russia were told by the Russian soldiers, "We're not mad at you. Go home and create a new revolution." Uh the Germans had been defeated in World War I. the communist party and the socialist parties were very strong in Munich, in Berlin, everywhere. The the German navy was flying the the red socialist flag. You have to understand at that point in 1918, Germany was in danger of completely falling apart into separate little city states. Uh each of them had a very strong socialist presence. So this was exerting tremendous pressure upon the industrialists in Germany, upon property owners, factory owners. they they found themselves in danger of being eradicated by this new philosophy. So there was a lot of money being paid uh to underground movements to try to resist socialism and to resist communism. And one of the most famous of these was uh an organization called the Tula Gazelcha which met at the four seasons hotel in Munich. Now this was run by a guy called Baron Rudolph von Sabatondorf and his this was a real character. This was somebody who had traveled in the Middle East who claimed to be a Freemason who claimed he was initiated into oriental mysteries as he called it uh in the Middle East and was now creating an occult society at the Four Seasons Hotel uh teaching again the philosophies of race, the philosophies of um of oultism and hermeticism and uh using the swastika as a symbol. All of this was taking place at the time that Germany was in danger of really falling apart. Munich had been taken over by uh socialists. There was a socialist uh president or mayor you might say of Munich. Um and members of the Tula Gazelle shaft, this this German nationalist secret society were taken out one day and shot against a wall on I believe it was April 30th, 199.
This became the battlecry uh or lit the fuse for a general revolt of the German secret societies against the socialist.
Now if you can imagine this in November of 1919 we have uh what is essentially um a a street by street uh fight between occultists and communists. And that's what you had in Munich at that time.
It's like something out of a fantasy novel. You had people who were members of this occult society on the streets fighting against the communists. It was it was bizarre.
>> Was it reported that way in the press over here? Was it remembered that way in his in history books?
>> It was not not not really. No, it was reported as you know German nationalist movements or anti-communist movements without going into too much detail as to who they are, who who ran them, >> but this was the very first time that you had armies marching under the swastika banner. M >> uh you had uh a swastika uh um battalion marching into into Munich to free Munich from the communists at that time. Uh and everything was being run out of the Four Seasons Hotel by Baron Sabbathorf and the Tula Gazelle shaft. They were that was the nerve center for this revolt against the communists. So once they won and which they did, they found themselves in a position of tremendous authority and power in Munich and Bavaria in general. And Hitler, who had just come back from the trenches, had just come back from the this this this horrible defeat of the Germans uh at the end of World War I, was sent to spy on the Tulle Gazelle shaft. And he went to the Four Seasons Hotel uh and listened to the speeches about occultism, listened to the speeches about the the German race and the Aryan race and eventually joined a political action group of the Tulle Gazelle chef known as the German Workers Party. uh he became member number 555 of the German workers party.
>> Mhm.
>> He later had his membership card amended I think to look to make member number seven but initially he was member of triple 5 and within short order took over that group and it became the national socialist German workers party or the NSDAP the Nazi party. So the origins of the Nazi party began with the tulle gazelle began with an occult secret society and their symbol at that time was the swastika that's where it came from.
Okay. Now, how did it grow from there? I mean, u there there certainly were were elements of the the SS and um that that went far beyond just a a belief that uh the the German people were somehow special because of their bloodline. Uh >> well, yeah, it but it we must remember that this was the the fundamental understanding of of the Nazi party. We begin there first. because that explains the Nerburgg laws. It explains the laws against the Jews. It explains the Holocaust and the concentration camps.
All of this goes back to the Tula Gazelle shaft. All that goes back to occult ideas regarding race and religion. If we begin there and as the German uh as the Nazi party grew, what happened was you had elements that were more military in nature. You had elements that were more political. And you had Hitler trying to to manage all of this. and you had the SS which was a combination uh kind of a police force in in its early days and and a cult. So when Himmler became involved and Himmler took over the SS, he didn't create it but he took it over. Uh that's at the point where Himmler decided to create this new order. He wanted to pattern it on the Jesuits uh whom he idolized as being you know this this super uh elite and super efficient organization even so far as copying the color black for the uniforms.
>> That's interesting.
>> Oh yeah. He he idolized the Jesuits. A lot of Germans did. Although they despised them at the same time they feared them, they also emulated them.
They wanted to to create a kind of Jesuit order of their own. And that was what the SS was supposed to be. And that went all the way through to creating their their castle near Powderborn in Germany at Vaplesburg. That's another story we can get into a little later.
But >> sure, >> what happened was Himmler took over the religious function, we might say, of the Nazi party. And uh you had the the um the Vermacht, which was the army itself, which is the military function. You had Hitler running the politics and trying to keep all of these three uh major groups uh running efficiently. Um, and they all wore swastikas and they all, you know, swore devotion to the ideas of the Nazi party, which were supremacy of the German people racially and morally and ethically and in every other way. So that was the foundation. That's was something that they all believed. Some to lesser extent, some to greater extent. Himler was a fanatic about it.
Um, Gerbles was a kind of fanatic, the propaganda minister. He believed he believed in all of this entirely. people like Garing and Borman perhaps they were more politically minded and less uh religiously fanatic. Um but then you had people like Mangala and Iman and who were true believers also. I mean Iikman's first job was monitoring the Masons was keeping tabs on Freemasons.
[laughter] >> Interesting. And I want to go there too and find out a little bit more about the uh antipathy uh of the the Nazi party toward the Freemasons. Peter, there were some very interesting scientific expeditions that were undertaken at the behest of Heinrich Himmler. Uh especially the the ones into the Himalayas. What what was what were they all about?
>> Mhm. Well, part of the doctrine uh very complicated doctrine of the Nazi party regarding the superiority of the German people was this idea that the Germans were part of something called the Aryan race. Um and the Aryan race were believed to have originated uh somewhere either in the Caucasus or in the Himalayan mountains themselves. Himmler believed that uh Tibet held the the secrets of the origins of the Aryan people. So he financed expeditions to Tibet to try to find out as much as possible about their religion, about their uh their scriptures, uh their occult practices.
All of this he needed brought back to Germany. and he was financing these expeditions as late as 193738 which means right when the war was starting to get hot and right when international tensions were at their highest. Himler had sent a group of scientists to Tibet uh claiming these were the first white people to visit Tibet which of course was not true but those were the claims made in the newspapers and had sent these organizations out there to find out uh what they could about Tibetan mysticism and Tibetan religion. Um he had sent uh a number of people who were actually well-known archaeologists of the time not just in Germany but internationally wellknown who were members of a group within the SS called the Ananba which was the ancestral heritage research division of the SS. Ancestral heritage is the is the key. um trying to find out uh not only the origins of the German people or the Aryan people but exactly how far a field you could find evidence that the Germans had lived and had helped uh develop societies, civilizations around the world. So basically what happened was you sent archaeologists to various places to Asia um to the Tata Makan desert which is in the far western part of China and uh north of Pakistan and to dig around and see if they could find pots with you know swastikas inscribed on them that were thousands of years old. If they could do that they were happy. They figured that was evidence the Aryans had been there. Uh of course the swastika is an ancient symbol. I mean everyone uh you you'll find swastikas used by American Indians. You'll find them used um in China among Chinese Buddhists for instance in India it's a very popular symbol. So you almost guaranteed to find swastikas almost anywhere on earth and this gave credence to the German claim that the Aryans were once the masters of of human civilization.
Um so he sent uh as as I mentioned this one expedition to Tibet. They came back with newsreel footage with um which you can still see. It's been some of this footage has been replayed on various television stations for instance on the History Channel places like that when [clears throat] they do a special on this >> you'll see some of this very old footage that was taken by the Nazis while they were there >> and uh photographs of religious rituals.
They took back a lot of artifacts. They took back the Tibetan scriptures. an entire copy of those they brought on on the backs of mules and camels across dangerous mountain passes. All of this was being done just before the war actually broke out. But there was another element to this as well. Uh some Tibetans and uh an entire uh group of people in India believe that Hitler was a spiritual leader was an avatar.
>> And one of the reasons they fought this was of course the use of the swastika which to the Indians is a very sacred symbol. So they began to think that maybe Hitler was coming to uh free them, liberate them from the British. You know, India at that time was a British colony, >> right?
>> So you had leaders like uh Chandra Bose who was a a very popular Indian nationalist leader who virtually worshiped Hitler, wrote a lot of articles about the Nazi party, a lot of articles about Germany, a lot of articles about Hitler pro uh promoting this idea that Hitler was going to be their spiritual liberator. and his idea was to raise an army in India to meet Hitler's forces when they crossed the Suez Canal into the Middle East. They would join up and then take over the rest of the world from there. So you had this very strong idea among a lot of Indians and some Tibetans that maybe the Nazi party was a spiritual force to be reckoned with and maybe that it was on their side.
One of the archaeologists before we move from that subject, one of the archaeologists on that Tibet expedition is a man called Bruno.
>> This is a person that uh sort of shows you what we're dealing with. Here was a perfectly innocuous uh expedition to Tibet, we might say. I mean, nobody was being killed, nobody was being tortured.
These were scientists on a mission of discovery. They come back to Germany in 38. Um by 3839 the war is starting to break out. Hitler's invaded Poland, Czechoslovakia. It's all starting to happen. He's taken back Austria and the first uh camps the first concentration camps are being set up. One of the most famous was at Dhaka. And at Dha, they performed a lot of medical experiments.
But one of the archaeologists and scientists involved in these experiments was Bruno himself. The man who went to Tibet later came back to Germany and was one of the people or or the person responsible for selecting human skulls for a museum of race. And he would collect these skulls by visiting live prisoners at Dhau and deciding which skulls he wanted and telling the authorities to kill these people and preserve the skulls and have them sent to him. So here was this monster uh engaged in in hideous activities after during the war who only a year before had been visiting Tibet, the land of the Dalai Lama, the land of of mysticism and peace and compassion. Uh so you know what was this all about? You know, it makes me sometimes wonder a little bit also about the Dalai Lama who had a number of Nazis as friends um during that time who had befriended him when he was a young man, >> right?
>> Uh Hinrich Har, uh >> the adventurer who uh who wrote Seven Years in Tibet, which they made the movie with Brad Pitt, >> uh playing him. I mean, here was an SS officer, you know, um who downplayed his role in the SS when he was writing about his his trip in Tibet. But the reason he was in Tibet was because the war had broken out. He was in India which was British territory. He he fled to Tibet and for years uh soaked up you know Tibetan doctrine as well. But he was only one of many Germans and Nazis and SS officers who had been to Tibet and were doing the same sorts of things.
>> Yeah. And I'm glad you mentioned uh Dr. Bruno Beer. There's a picture on the Daly Lama's website, the official government of Tibetan exiles website dated 1994, which features the Dalai Lama standing with a group of Westerners, among whom are uh Mr. Hinrich Har and Dr. Bruno Beair, >> right, >> who remained friends of his into the '90s. Now, it's not likely that the Dalai Lama was unaware of their affiliations or their actions uh given the amount of attention that had been paid to uh you know the Nazi party in the aftermath of World War II. So, um which raises another question um what similarities, parallels or connections might there have been between the particular type of tantric Buddhism practiced by the Daly Lama and the beliefs of the Nazi party?
Wow. Well, there you struck on it. I mean, you struck on what's probably going to be the the material for at least a dozen a dozen doctrinal thesis that I can think of. I [laughter] mean, you're right there at at the crux of the matter. I mean, what was what was the connection? How was it how was the Daly Lama, I mean, whom we credit with such spiritual sensitivity, how how was he able to to stand next to someone like Bruno? I mean, here was a man responsible. It's documented. His atrocities are wellknown. I mean, there's no there's no escaping it.
Hinrich Ker, well, we could go either way. He was an SS officer, which meant automatically uh after the war, he was considered an enemy, a war criminal.
>> Um, as was Beggar himself. So, you ask yourself, you know, how could the Daly Lama, you know, really stand there and accept these people? Uh, as I said in my in in Unholy Alliance, what did he know, you know, and when did he know it? Mhm.
>> Um the old Watergate question, but Tibetan tantra and and the practices of Tibetan tantra are not pure Buddhism in the sense that we understand it from India and from the Gautama Buddha and and the Buddhist scriptures. Tibetan tantricism comes from another source. I mean it's much older and Buddhism is kind of a veneer over it. You have the native Tibetan religion which is which is called burn. B O N with an uml over the O. So pronounced sort of burn. the burn religion um which is which was a pagan faith very complicated but which also um has a number of things that we might object to in their in their rit ritual repertoire you know um some of the implements that they use are made out of human skulls and human bones for instance >> they believe in in contacting the spiritual forces they're they're kind of shamanistic that way there's all sorts of deep rituals involving blood and involving sacrifice so you know what was the relationship between that and the Nazis? Did did the Daly Lama see some kind of of finer uh connection between the two cultures that we don't see or that we're only beginning to see? It's a fascinating question. It deserves a lot further examination because we're we're too ready to accept the sort of Richard Gear version of of of Tibetan Buddhism, you know, um the kind of all all peaceful all uh compassionate version.
there's another element to it and there's been a lot of infighting in Tibet even before the Chinese invaded there was been a lot of people nominated as Daly Lama who mysteriously died after a couple of months or a year uh a lot of interine warfare there so the picture that is presented is one that is beautiful and and uh worthy of emulation but the history tells you something else >> it's was very telling statement let's say a very astute statement that was made by Christopher Hitchens uh some years back who made the observation that the Daly Lama has uh somehow reached a a point in the public perception that he is judged by his reputation rather than by his words and actions.
>> Right. Yeah. Which is >> I read that and it's it's I have to agree although I don't always agree with Christopher Hitchens in this case his remarks on on Tibetan Buddhism and Daly Lama I think were rather astute.
>> Yeah.
Were there other sources of power that Himmler and the Nazis tried to tap for their own purposes?
>> Absolutely. I mean, the the journey to Tibet was only one of the things that Himmler was financing. He definitely wanted to find the Holy Grail. Uh this was something that was of tremendous importance to him.
>> So, uh there's there's a bit about that in my book as well, and I think other researchers are now going going and looking at this. He was financing a search for the grail. Uh very similar to the Indiana Jones film concept uh that we we're familiar with. But that's based on reality. Uh the Nazis were trying to find uh artifacts of power, relics of different religions, of different faiths. It didn't matter. But as long as they were believed to have spiritual power within them, the Nazis wanted them. And they financed expeditions everywhere. Tibet was only one one of these. The other was the search for the Grail. And they had a young SS officer, Otto Ron, that they sent uh looking for it. And Ron was a kind of archaeologist, anthropologist, uh who studied uh the Cathars, the Knights Templar, and all of these things which have become now a bit more better a bit better known with the Da Vinci Code. Um and here here he was in the 1930s searching, you know, with a mandate by Hinrich Himmler. He was part of Himmler's personal staff being sent to look for the Grail to report back when he founded. I mean, a bizarre uh uh concept if you put your your mind to it.
Here's a here's a man eventually in a the full-blown SS uniform, you know, looking for the Grail. It's like something out of a bad movie. Also, >> um did he find it? Uh that's the big question. He died quite mysteriously before the real war broke out. Uh he had done a lot of research. He had been to the south of France and the Pyrenees looking for the grail. He had been to Reno Chateau, which comes up again in the Da Vinci Code material and other books about it. He had been to the caves. He had been to Montgur. He looking for the Grail everywhere. He wrote a couple of books regarding his searches regarding paganism. Uh very anti-atholic, very anti-Christian. Um and then goes back to Germany, is sent to DA for training because Daal was both a concentration camp and a training camp for the SS. And uh shortly after his training was complete, he was he was dead. He was on a climbing in the hills uh and died of exposure. they say uh in the spring in Germany, [clears throat] you know, uh an unbelievable story, but uh possibly murdered, you know, possibly even a suicide. We don't know.
>> Um the Spear of Destiny, was that one of the artifacts that was brought back to Germany?
>> Absolutely. I mean, there was a definite uh um urge on Hitler's part personally to get the Spear of Destiny. He had seen it in Vienna in the museum there when he was a young man. And you know Hitler was uh obsessed with Vagner and the Vagnerian opera. So when he saw the spear it was parsal it was tanoiser it was the whole gardamaran coming at him uh with the side of that and what he wanted to do was to get that as well for the Germans. I mean it was in Austria anyway which he took over and where he was born. Um so the spear was taken from the museum brought to Germany and it was eventually replaced after the war. But the spirit of destiny, the holy grail, um some say the ark of the covenant, that's a possibility. Uh there's some documents that talk about it. Uh so there is there was definitely this idea that he wanted to accumulate all of these treasures in one place and that Himmler and the SS was the the force that was going out to do this for him.
We don't know how many other things they they they brought back. Um they brought back a lot of things from Asia. They brought back a lot of things from the Middle East. We don't even begin to know how much that they did bring back and how much of it has since wound up in private collections around the world.
>> Mhm. There was another artifact that was mentioned sort of tangentially in the Bible that's kind of intrigued me uh in the book of Revelation, one of the messages from Jesus given to John is directed to the church of Pergamum in which he mentions that he knows that they uh are living in the seat of Satan's power or something to that effect. They you know they they live at the seat of Satan's power. And I had read that the Nazis um took an altar from the temple of Zeus at Pergamum and brought it back to Berlin. Do you know anything about that?
>> That story was was prevalent um I believe before the war started. This is when the we had a lot of German archaeologists in the Middle East in the 1930s uh after Hitler came to power in 33. from 33 to about 38, uh, Nazi archaeologists were all over the place, especially all over the Middle East, and they did take a lot of artifacts back from the Middle East and brought them back to Germany. Um, that story I I've heard. I don't know if it's true or not.
Like I say, a lot of that information was destroyed um at the end of the war.
Himler ordered a lot of documents destroyed. Hitler ordered a lot destroyed. So, we don't know the providence of some of these artifacts.
We don't know where they came from. We don't know where they are now, >> but it's entirely possible they did. I mean their interest in archaeology was not a purely academic one. Their interest in archaeology was something far deeper than that. Even Lawrence, Te Lawrence um ran into German archaeologists before World War I who were, you know, always in the same area that he was in when he was a young archaeologist and always looking for artifacts to bring back to Germany. This was something that has been going on for a long time >> and it was not a purely academic uh research. These were >> practically grave robbers, you might say. uh they were just on a search and destroy mission. They just wanted to find what they could find and bring it back. So this was a a kind of a culture of archaeology that went on that was sort of exacerbated when the Nazis took power.
>> How much of a believer was Hitler in the occult aspects of the Nazi belief system?
I believe um from my reading from my reading of Hitler's own writings from the the talks that he had with with other people such as his photographer and Hamstangle and some of the others he he did truly believe in in the big picture occultism. I don't think he was so much uh concerned with I mean I can't imagine Hitler himself you know practicing ceremonial rituals. I think his idea was that you know as the leader of Germany he was sort of the master magician. He didn't have to bother himself with with such petty stuff like that. He had others to do it for him.
You know, like Himmler, I could easily imagine, you know, performing occult rituals. But Hitler, no, I think Hitler saw himself as the Indians saw him as a kind of avatar, as what I call in the book an occult messiah. I think that um he believed in creating the new man.
This is something that he mentioned many times. He believed in creating a new the next step of evolution, you might say.
You might say a new a new type of human being. And he thought that in Germany they were going to do that. It was going to involve eugenics, uh, racial theories. It was going to involve a new religion. You know, the SS um abolished Christianity. You cannot be a Christian and be a member of the SS. All the religious rituals were changed. There was a kind of baptism which was bringing into the to the Arian faith. There was a kind of Christmas thing which was old the old pagan holiday. You cannot mention the word Christmas in any official documents of the Nazi party.
uh not just the SS but Nazism in general. So there was a deliberate attempt to eradicate Christianity and to create a new human being that was composed not only of pure German blood but a kind of pure German faith to go with it. So Hitler did believe I think very seriously in that from everything I've been able to read Hitler had this this sort of superman nichian concept of what he was what he was trying to accomplish.
But as far as the uh say the nuts and bolts aspects of it, the ritual aspects uh of of which Himmler uh for which Himmler is known, uh Hitler was not a participant in that uh at that level.
>> I don't think so. I mean, I've read I've read a lot of speculative stuff um about this. Uh the book Sphere of Destiny by Reverend Scra talks about Hitler attending seances and stuff, but there's been very little documentation to support it. I think when he was a young man in in Vienna before World War I, he read a lot of this material. Uh we know it's been documented he read a lot of Oara, this occult magazine. He read he he he he drank it in. But I think he was I think I don't think he was out there performing rituals or he may have attended a few um just to see what they were all about. But I Hitler was a kind of restless person and more of a of a man of action than anything else. I don't see Hitler doing the prerequisite of fasting and meditating and all the rest of it. [laughter] I think he wanted a quick a quick way, you know, to gain power and uh using symbols and creating the Nermberg rallies and performing ritual of that nature. Hitler was perfect for, you know, and he was trained in this and he was trained in how to speak to people uh professionally and he was trained by occultists. He was trained by hypnotists and and magicians who taught him how to speak, who taught him how to move and how to express himself. All of these things he understood and in those monstrous rallies he created those were rituals.
Anyone watching that could not come away with any other any other idea. This these were rituals he was performing and his speeches were incantatory. They were like chance. Even people who didn't understand German were swept away by it.
And that's the stamp of a magician.
>> You mentioned that he'd been trained by occultists. Uh c can you elaborate on that?
>> Sure. uh his his primary teacher where this was concerned was a man called Hanusen.
Uh Hanusen was a a popular sort of stage um occultist, hypnotist if you will. Um he was a an astrologer. He predicted the future. Uh he actually created a kind of salon in Berlin where very important uh Nazis were and and industrialists and people in high society were invited. uh and he would conduct all sorts of um uh experiments uh and uh demonstrations of psychic abilities at these things. Well, back in before Hitler became powerful, he had befriended Hanusen or or vice versa. I think Hanusen saw in Hitler um something that could be trained and molded and he realized that Hitler had a hard time dealing with people. I mean Hitler had a lot of very passionate ideas but in relating to humans on a onetoone level. Uh Hitler was kind of stiff. Uh was sort of an al Gore, [clears throat] an al Gore with with a swastika armband and you know a kind of a hard a hard way of actually connecting with people. And Hanusen was able to train him in how to project himself in how to pace his speeches on how to uh reach high points, go back down to low points, build up ahead of steam with rhythmic uh with rhythmic words, with alliteration with all of this until he actually was in a sense talking the way you might think a voodoo drum was beating. Well, the way you describe that almost sounds like a pattern that I've detected among some fundamentalist Christian preachers.
>> Well, it's very effective. You know, it's a very effective means of of getting a point across without actually having to to logically dissect it. I mean, it it plays on the emotions directly. And this is exactly what Hitler said in his own writings that he wanted to do. He wanted to get past the mind, get past the intellect which he did not trust, get past the thinking mechanisms completely and go straight to the heart of people, straight to their emotions and talk directly to that.
That's what Hitler was writing about in mine comp. That's what he was writing about in uh in his speeches in his um his table talk with the with the photographer friend um and with people like Rashning and the others. He said he wants to go straight to the person's soul. I mean, he was talking about magic was what he was he was talking about.
Let's go straight there. Let's manipulate people. Let's take their emotions and they'll follow you anywhere. And this was this was Hitler's idea, you know, let's not bother people with with the details. Let's not bother them with the facts. Let's just get them all all worked up. And Hanusen, an occultist and an astrologer. And the man who predicted precisely when Hitler would come to power >> really is the man who taught Hitler this. This is a very strange story but one which again which is covered in the documentation and we can't we can't fault it. Hitler was in deep trouble uh in Germany in 1932 towards the end of 1932. His girlfriend Ava Brown had tried to commit suicide. That was on Halloween of all things.
>> Um that news they were struggling to keep out of the press because that was bad enough. Hitler was was losing seats in the German bund parliament. he was uh in danger of having his party basically side sidelined completely. Hanusen told him that if he were to go to his place of birth to a cemetery and pull out a mandre route at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, I'm not making this up. If you were to do this at that time, he would then become the leader of Germany.
And Hitler said, "Could you do this for me?" [laughter] So once again, Hitler himself not actually taking part.
Hanusen went out to Hitler's hometown, Brown Amin in Austria, and he went at a stroke of midnight, found a mandre route, pulled it up at the at the right time, or so he said, came back and told Hitler, "You will become chancellor of Germany on January 31st." This is a month in advance when Hitler thought his life was falling apart completely. And because of some intering politics with Hindenburg and everyone else, on January 31st, 1933, Hitler became chancellor of Germany.
>> How about that?
>> And by the way, January 31st is a famous pagan holiday also. So that's the day that Hitler came to power. Hanusen made an impossible prediction, but it came true to the day.
>> 131 of course are 33 uh which is also a significant number.
>> Sure.
>> Yeah.
So here we have suddenly Hitler because of Honderson learning how to speak, learning how to make speeches, learning how to move, how to use hand gestures, and at the same time relying upon the same man to ensure he becomes chancellor of Germany. So of course Hitler paid him back. A few years later, Hanusen was taken out to the woods and shot.
[laughter] >> No good deed goes unpunished. Huh.
>> Exactly. Well, the the significance of what all of this led to can't be uh understated, I think. Um, and I think most of us who uh are are working from the little bit of history that we're taught in the public school system uh are of a belief that the Nazi party and its beliefs just sort of evaporated after World War II. We caught all the bad guys, tried them all at Nuremberg, and uh and life went on fine from there.
Um, is that really what happened?
>> If we were talking about any other country and any other political party, that might have made sense to a point.
But to me, as I say in my book, the Nazi party was not a political party. The Nazi party was a cult. And if you look at the Nazi party as a cult, everything becomes clear. People who are true believers don't give up their true belief just because they've lost a war.
>> Mhm. people who were dedicated to the Nazi ideals would not have just simply walked away and said, "Oh, well, we lost. You know, let's become good citizens of the world." Now, that wasn't going to happen. These were people responsible for some hideous crimes, for some horrendous acts. People with a kind of coldness, uh, cynicism, at the same time, a passionate belief in their own superiority that doesn't go away overnight. That doesn't go away because you lost a war. That might be true for some of the soldiers in the in the army in the Vermacht who were just wanted to get home, be with their families, that sort of thing. But for the SS, that was not possible. For that reason, the the the Allied forces considered the SS a criminal organization. Every member of the SS was a criminal as far as Nerburgg was concerned. And a lot of SSmen tried to hide their their association. They did whatever they could, but they didn't they didn't abandon their beliefs. And just as I hate to make this comparison, but Christians were persecuted for the first 300 years. They had to meet in catacombs and in tombs. They didn't abandon their beliefs because of their persecutions.
>> Right?
>> And on the dark side, the Nazis did not either. The Nazis viewed themselves as underdogs who were being persecuted by an evil conspiracy. And what they needed to do was to maintain their connections, maintain their networks because one day they would they would rise again. So we had people like Scorzeni, Hitler's favorite commando who was running something which the novelists have called Odessa um which is a very accurate uh term because some of the Nazis used the term Odessa themselves an underground network and organization of former SS officers around the world who helped each other escape in the first place to escape Nuremberg to escape the wrath of the allies. They went to South America as we all know. They went to North America. They went to the Middle East. They went to Australia. They went up all over the world in hiding financed by the money the Germans had stolen during the course of the war. So Scorzani was very close friends with Francisco Franco in Spain.
>> Franco covered the the the Nazi networks for a long time with Juan Peron in Argentina. Um Stressner in Paraguay.
There were a lot of of of heads of state around the world who were very sympathetic to the Nazis who had uh declined to declare war against Nazi Germany until the very last day just to be politically correct. Uh who had given a lot of cover. So these people were were were doing well uh after the war.
Klaus Barbie in Bolivia here was the butcher of Leon in France, a man famous for his depravity, famous for his torturing of political prisoners. uh the ultimate SS officer who wound up in Bolivia at one point becoming head of the Bolivian secret police, you know, as late as the 1960s and 1970s. Here was a guy who was running the show. Uh they used to have parties in in Laas replete with swastika of flags and singing the horse vessel song and the whole thing.
And so this was going on decades after the end of the war. Uh Chile was a was and still is a famous place where where Nazis were hiding out for a long time with a large German population that was very supportive of them. Argentina, Paraguay, uh the Middle East, Syria. We have Alois Griner still alive in Damascus. A man responsible for the deaths of 300,000 people in the camps who was then training the secret services of Damascus, of Syria, of Lebanon, of Egypt, you know, involved with Nasser in those days, training his people to go after Jews in in in Egypt.
I mean, they didn't go away, you know, this this was not they were not going to abandon their faith. And uh they kept it up until it's still going on. I mean, they just raided uh Colonia Dignad in Chile >> a few years ago, the place that I investigated back in the 70s. Uh, and the documents that have come out since then, there's been a trial this past few months of the man who ran that colony, a mysterious estate in Chile high up in the Andes Mountains, which as we now discover and which I had been writing about for years, and no one wanted to hear it, was a safe house for Nazi war criminals. This was a place the Nazis could stay. It was right on the border of Argentina and Chile. They could run across the border in either direction, you know, as as whenever they had to.
And they were running guns. They were running drugs. And they were using uh Colonia Dignit as a base for something called Operation Condor.
>> Operation Condor.
>> Condor. This was a uh South Americaw wide uh network that uh went after supposed communists, socialists, or just enemies of whatever regime happened to be in power. They would uh kidnap people, murder them, assassinate them.
And it didn't matter if it was in South America, Europe, or the United States.
Uh we know that Orlando Latellier, who was an ambassador from Chile, uh was murdered in Washington DC uh back in the 70s. This was after uh the country had been overthrown. The uh there was a president called Salvador Aende who was a socialist. He was elected president.
>> Uh there was a military coup. Aende was killed. Uh the generals took over Chile and then they went after uh enemies of the regime and one of their most vocal opponents was a man called Latellier.
His car was carb bombed in Washington.
He and his associate Ronnie Moffett were both killed. And as it turns out, all of those tendrils go back through anti-Castro Cubans who actually uh affected the bomb to an American called Michael Townley who designed the bomb.
Uh and Michael Townley was the son of a uh of an American Ford Motor Company representative in Chile. Townley was a was a rabid fascist, a rabid pro-Nazi, and his links to that colony, Coloni Digny are very strong. He designed the torture chambers at the colony >> where people could be tortured by remote control.
>> So you would essentially put a political prisoner, tie them up to a device, uh they would never see who was torturing them. They would never see who was asking them questions. It was all done with microphones and loudspeakers and a man in the control booth could effectively interrogate half a dozen prisoners at once.
So uh he designed this. He was an electronics expert. So and very pro-Nazi. This is run by a former former excuse me, former SS uh officer, Paul Schaefer, not to be confused with the guy who plays for Letterman, >> right?
>> Uh they were both bald. However, uh Paul Schaefer was a a Baptist minister >> in Germany after the war. Supposedly, he was wanted in Germany for pedophilia, for child abuse charges. He fled Germany in ' 62, brought a lot of Germans with him to Chile, set up this estate, and had the complete protection of the of the German military.
>> Uh, Chilean military.
>> Chilean military.
>> Yeah.
>> Well, excuse me, not German. Well, yes.
Hardly any difference. If you go to Chile, they wear the Vermach style helmets. They goostep. Hey, it's an easy mistake.
>> Interesting. Yes. Yeah. Um, this sounds like something that has been described by researcher Dave Emory as the underground Reich. Uh would you agree with that assessment of the uh of the postworld war II influence of Nazi beliefs around the world?
>> Is is is there an underground organization that is quietly influencing the direction of history over the last 50 years or so? as much as they're able to certainly there is I mean just in the case of plonia dignity dot alone which is one element of a much larger network we've discovered in the documents that were that were taken evidence of a worldwide network of of Germans who were supporting the colony financially and morally and in other ways this was only a drop in the bucket colony dignity dot is only the most obvious the most visible part of this network but when I was in Chile when I was investigating the colony the local military told me that the colony was being supported by funds from all over the world including from the United States that money was pouring into their bank account uh in Paral in the tiny town uh next to the colony have been coming in there for years that they were wealthy um this money is coming from somewhere you know and it's coming from a network of people who were supporting the colony they built an airirstrip at the colony they were flying planes in and out without going through customs or immigration they didn't have any problem with that so who were they smuggling the guns you know, to whom are they selling the drugs and what were they doing with the money? All of these things go back to evidence of a underground network, an underground Reich, you might say, or a forthright.
>> Um, that is trying to hold itself together and is trying to influence politics and they're doing that in the Middle East. They've been successful there for many years. Um, and they're trying to influence opinion here as well because for a long time it was much better to be um, anti-communist than it was to be anti-Nazi.
>> Right?
>> In our country, we kind of closed a blind eye to the activities of Nazis in our country after the war. As long as they were anti-communist, as long as they helped us against Soviet the Soviet Union, we didn't much care about their past. We helped a lot of people escape.
We just found out a couple of weeks ago that the CIA knew all about where Adolf Ikeman was >> in Argentina years before he was picked up by by the Israelis. And we simply didn't tell anybody. We kept it quiet.
The West Germans told the CIA where he was. Gave him his address.
>> We said nothing. We did nothing to do anything about Klaus Barbie or Mangala or any of the others that we knew were in South America. So there's been this unspoken protection of these people that goes back a long time. That means they had ability to influence our politics, to influence our foreign policy. God forbid our our domestic policy as well, you know.
>> So I I firmly believe this. This is not the end. Colombia dignity is only a kind of warning, a wakeup call.
>> Um well, to what end? What would be the goal then of this underground rake?
I don't think the goals have seriously changed much uh since the days of of the Second World War. Possibly they become a bit more accommodating where other races are concerned if only because it's more uh practical in the short term. Um they would never have uh um been friendly with some of the people they've had to deal with in South America, for instance, from a purely racial point of view.
um they would have they would have looked down on them during the war, but now in these days they're perfectly happy to work with them if they have to.
I think there's the idea that they want to reinstate their power and if they can't do it in Germany, they will do it somewhere else. They tried to do it in Bolivia, they've tried to do it in Chile. Um they're trying to operate below the radar, but they want to bring back their ideals. And their ideals are racial superiority uh implementing a kind of eugenics system or you know eradicating people that we don't like eradicating the handicapped eradicating the mentally ill for instance starting there as they did in Germany putting programs like this into place and slowly building on that until they they get back to uh to where they were back in 1938. I think their goal is eventually that >> let me throw this out. Uh do you see any connection between this belief system and uh say a group of European um nobility like the royal dragon court for example and I want to single them out but use them as a as a for instance u who uh may be attempting to assert a right uh a divine right of kings if you will or a divine bloodline. uh is do do they have any connections or are there similar goals in mind there or >> there's similar goals. I think if we look at what's happening to the world today um we're going to be having to make some pretty hard choices in the next 2030 years. If the environment continues to deteriorate, if uh conditions domestically in our own country continue to deteriorate, if things start to to go wrong in too many places, you're going to find the only people showing up with u with a plan are going to be the last people we want showing up with a plan. [laughter] Um and and I think that they're going to be very effective because they're going to say, "This is what we have to do. These are the hard choices. We're going to have to make these choices." Now, I think you're you're going to have have people listening to this because right now our leaders are kind of all over the place. No one seems to know what to do or what's going on or no one's taking decisive action. Some people are going to react very well to a leadership that comes on the scene and says, "We can take the decisive action. We can do what has to be done. Just give us the power."
And I think they're going to take advantage of of a lot of our fears and paranoia. Maybe the environment is not going to deteriorate when it's going to look like that. You know, we're going to expect more hurricanes and tornadoes and earthquakes. People are going to get frightened about that. They're going to get frightened about immigration.
Immigration is going to is a big issue for these people. You know, this is something that they love. This is something tailor made for them because it it's it's a code word for racism.
>> So, all of these things are going to come into play. you know, the environment is being created uh the political environment is being created, but someone who is uh an an inheritor of of these Nazi ideals would would find it very easy to come on the stage and in a very gentle and covert way still take control and still get the things done that the Nazis wanted to get done 60 years ago, 70 years ago, >> and offer a way to uh to create order from chaos as it were.
>> Sure.
>> Yeah. Peter Linda, the author of Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult. Um, before we go, uh, where can people find the copy of the book and of course the, uh, threebook series, Sinister Forces, The Nine, A Warm Gun, and the Manson Secret? Well, in Holy Alliance, you can get, uh, pretty easily at on Amazon.com. Uh, it's it's in sale. In fact, it's going into a Spanish edition uh, this month as well.
It's been translated already into five different languages, so shouldn't have any problem finding a copy where you are. Uh, Sinister Forces, of course, is also on Amazon, or you can contact the publisher directly uh with an 800 number. If you're not on the internet, you can call 1 800-5562012 and you can order copies of Sinister Forces from him.
>> Very good. And when will the Manson Secret, the third uh volume of the Sinister Forces uh trilogy, if you will, come out?
>> That should be ready uh by the by June 30th at the latest, I believe.
>> Uh excellent, Peter. It's been a real education and a pleasure once again, and we look forward to having you back when uh the Manson Secret is available.
>> I I look forward to it.
>> Yeah, Peter Lenda, our guest on P Radio.
Thank you, Peter.
>> Thank you.
>> And we are long overdue for that return visit with Peter Lenda. We highly recommend his three book set, Sinister Forces, and his previous work, of course, dealing with Nazis in the occult. You can find out more about where to get those books at his website, which is sinisterforces.info, www.sinisterforces.info.
If you have a comment about the program tonight or anything we do at pradio.com or peering into darkness.com, you can drop us an email at radio@pering into darkness.com. We love to hear from you and appreciate [music] uh your thoughts and support. And uh until tomorrow, I'm Derek Gilbert. Thanks for listening.
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