Ep. 79- The Nazi Occult with Eric Kurlander

There are lots of popular and sensationalist accounts of the Nazi obsession with the supernatural and occult, but what is the true history of this.  The truth is that various kinds of supernatural, occult, and border scientific beliefs influenced many of the leading Nazis.

In addition, these beliefs also ultimately provided a contextual background that influenced Nazi policy.  This is one of the reasons that these fringe and often outlandish beliefs are so important.  In this episode, I talk with Eric Kurlander about his detailed and scholarly exploration of the Nazi supernatural imaginary.

Eric Kurlander is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History and Director of the Jewish Studies program at Stetson University.

Kurlander, Eric.  Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich(2017)

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Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:00.824)
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Wakeman Bourne. And today we have a really, really interesting topic. And I'm sure that any of you who are interested in German history and the history of the Nazi regime and the history of the Holocaust have probably come across one of an almost amazing number of sort of weird pop history books about the Nazi occult and the crazy things that the Nazis might have believed.

and the supernatural and things like this, which is a really, really interesting topic. But a lot of those books, think, and our guests can probably confirm this, sort of play fast and loose with the history. But actually, it is a serious topic because a lot of these ideas were not just floating out there with no connection to actual policies and events. so understanding how the Nazis conceived of things like the occult and mythologies and things like that, I think are actually really important.

And so our guest today is Eric Kurlander, who has written an amazing book on this topic, which is a scholarly, serious study looking at sort of how the Nazis grafted onto these kinds of occult mythologies, and certainly not a kind Nazi zombies book. So Eric, thanks much for coming on.

Eric (01:23.106)
Thank you, Waittman. This was a pleasure. I'm very excited to be here.

Waitman Beorn (01:25.198)
So can you tell us how you got interested in this particular topic?

Eric (01:34.124)
Yeah, it's a great question that I think about this more as I get further into my career. Why do I pick certain topics? I think the number one thing in my mind when I'm picking a new book is how can I return to our laboratory, right? Which for you and me would be the first half of the 20th century, Central Europe, pretty much Central and Eastern Europe, right?

to better understand problems we're facing in the present. I'm very much aware now that every one of my books, maybe the first book was a little more influenced by what was going on in historiography per se than what was happening in the 1990s, know, when I started my dissertation. But certainly the last three, including the one I'm working on now, or four if I count global Germany, it was about what was happening in the world at the time, if nothing else.

And in 2007, eight, nine, you had the rise of the alt-right in Europe that was becoming stronger. Marine Le Pen, Garrett Builders, some of these folks. And you had what I would have considered already at the time with Sarah Palin and the Tea Party emerging, kind of what I call the alt-right here and the conspiracy theories.

I don't remember if the birther controversy was around in 2008 already. think it was. And so I had always been interested in what I end up calling the book, the supernatural or supernatural imaginary and fascism or Nazism. Like many people, I read Marvel comics growing up and saw.

know, some of those films about Nazi zombies and what have you, history channel profiles. But I really was thinking about to what degree was there a connection, if not causal, then certainly correlative in a cultural intellectual sense between that mode of thinking and the rise of fascism in Germany, right? So that's where it came from. I wasn't sure I would find much. I knew I would find more than I thought.

Eric (03:49.282)
people had found because I was realizing doing research in other areas that, you know, esoteric ideas, paganism, what I would later call border science, Grenzwissenschaft, were coming up.

places I didn't expect to find it, reading, know, bourgeois memoirs and someone's talking about the parapsychologists are saying this or Rudolf von Olden, I found he was this whole critique of the political culture at the end of Weimar Republic and he was talking about the soothsayers and clairvoyance and how they're all supporting the Nazis. So I'd found little anecdotal bits of evidence, but I really went in just saying what is there, right? What is actually empirically

Waitman Beorn (04:08.696)
Thank

Eric (04:29.486)
defensible about this connection and what was just made up because out of period interest. So that's where it came from. It was a long standing kind of curiosity that was then triggered when I was thinking about my third book by what I saw happening in the world around us.

Waitman Beorn (04:43.822)
And you're bringing this up initially, and think it's worth mentioning. There is a very popular sort of fascination with this. I'm a huge Indiana Jones fan. I love Indiana Jones. of course, whatever, two of the four movies, we don't actually two of the three movies, because we don't really recognize a crystal stall exists. Or maybe even right out of Temple of Doom, too, because that's got its own issues. But a number of those movies are literally focused around the Nazis.

Eric (05:03.704)
Yeah

Waitman Beorn (05:13.454)
and the supernatural, and the SS sort of going after things. And one of the people we'll talk about in the book was in the, you sort of say that kind of like the real Lennon Jones, sort of tongue in cheek, but sort of accurately, right? That the Nazis did go off to these people. And there is a very, I sense in the book, there is kind of a very real, both respect for the actual history of this, but also a gentle pushback against some of the more hysterical, imaginative sort of

Eric (05:14.765)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (05:43.498)
ideas that abound in the popular culture of the Nazis going off on these quests for incredible power and stuff like that. But also, like anything else, there's a kernel of truth to that, which I think comes out in your work.

Eric (06:02.722)
Well, everyone needs a kind of cosmological framework to help understand things that are beyond the material or the institutional, right? For some people, they have a healthy Cartesian kind of barrier between their everyday life where they make material decisions about voting and taxes and their job.

And then that area, what I kind of call the supernatural imaginary where they, you know, they get really into Harry Potter or Tolkien or, you know, back then Flash Gordon and Edgar Rice Burroughs. What I think is dangerous and not that healthy is when a society starts to blur those lines.

I think what you're seeing at the end of, not to get into the book too quickly, but what you see at the end of the 19th century is a world that's become overwhelmed by secularism and science and material explanations of the world, industrialization, the kind of breakdown of traditional rural life and traditional religious confessional belief and belonging.

Weber diagnosed it, Durkheim, I mean, this is widely discussed at the time that people are losing faith in some of the old things and they're not yet ready to fully embrace the new, which is too material and scientific and obscure, you know, quantum mechanics. I mean, come on. And so they're looking for new forms of kind of spirituality or as my colleague calls it,

science of spirit, it spiritual science, right? The Kiruna Tritel. They're looking for a way to make sense of their reality and kind of their place in the world, the universe, that's no longer traditional Methodism or Baptist or Lutheran or Orthodox Judaism, but it's also not yet embracing, you know, they're not reading science or the equivalent, right?

Eric (08:05.614)
And that's where a lot of this supernatural imaginary comes from. It's a natural outgrowth of modernity. The question is, are you kind of diving into that as an escape from the materiality of the everyday and the constant compromises you have to make politically and socially that you recognize are necessary for a functioning liberal democracy and civil society? Or is that your way of making sense of the world and you'd like to impose

these more simplistic, romantic, maybe post-rational views of mythology, race, space, spirituality, parapsychology, onto the political, institutional, and the socioeconomic. And so I'm not so much criticizing it as diagnosing it. I mean, this was happening. This reservoir of ideas developed and

certain individuals and groups, I argue in the book fascists more likely than liberals and socialists, traditional conservatives, invoke those ideas, both because they found them fascinating and found it a way to get a certain constituency to vote for them. That's where I started, right? That was the question. And then, you know, we can pull the thread from there.

Waitman Beorn (09:25.262)
Yeah, I mean, and just as when you mentioned Tolkien, I immediately thought of Palantir and it's interesting connections there with mythology. We can talk about that later, but I'm going to do something that I don't normally do, but I think it's really important. And I want to do it ahead of time because these concepts are going to come back as in the course of our conversation. So if we can do kind of a lightning round of just definitions of kind of, I picked six sort of modes of supernatural thought or the occult or whatever.

that I think are kind of building blocks that a lot of the other things we'll talk about are founded upon. So we can kind of get a quick sort of Cliff Notes definition of these, and then we can jump into sort of the book and then how these things, as you point out, sort of threads running through lots of different areas. So the first term here at the sort of lightning round is a thing called areosophy. So can you tell us what areosophy is really quickly?

Eric (10:23.02)
Yeah, let me tackle Ariosophy and Anthroposophy at the same time. They have the same root. And they both would be characterized by most historians and most kind of religious study scholars as occult doctrines, meaning they were doctrines that purported to reveal for the first time secret forces and secret histories and secret mythologies.

Waitman Beorn (10:26.274)
Okay.

Eric (10:49.42)
that explain the world that previous scholars, whether traditional Christians or Buddhists or scientists on the other side of the equation hadn't been able to reveal, right? So both Areosophy and Anthroposophy are kind of no pun intended given the core of theosophy, evolutionary kind of outgrowth of what's called theosophy, which Madame Blavatsky, a Russian emigrate of Britain and later America,

developed and the idea behind theosophy is that if you really unite the principles of Darwinian evolutionary theory with Eastern philosophy and religion Buddhism and Hinduism you recognize that human beings are striving again or could be striving again

towards the level of spiritual, parapsychological, and physical perfection they had in prehistory. So there's a prehistory before biblical times when an ancient civilization of superior races that the Ariosophists will call Arians, I think, I forget the term that Blavatsky used, possibly because they had encountered aliens.

had created this superior civilization, but then through a flood and possibly mating with lesser races, their civilization had collapsed. And Theosophy was about getting back to that spiritual and biological perfection through studying the secret doctrine, she called it. So Anthroposophy were, that was a bunch of Theosophists who not, unironically tended to be in Austria and Germany.

said we like this, but it doesn't quite fit the stuff we're working through in German speaking Central Europe. They didn't quite put it that they weren't, I would argue they weren't that self-conscious about it, but it's folks, including Rudolf Steiner, who said we like theosophy, but we have our own version of it. And that version eventually evolved into what Steiner called anthroposophy, which is much more focused on human beings, the anthro than.

Eric (13:02.21)
Theo and started to double down on the racial science and the perfect ability of humanity. Get a little more anti-Semitic. Still have a lot of occult doctrines, parapsychology, special kinds of dances where you can invoke magic and all this stuff. Still interested in Eastern religion, but a little more Eurocentric, a little more racialist, little more of a kind of frustration with

kind of Jewish materialist science and what have you. And then around the same time, 1890s, early 1900s, a few people who had also been involved in theosophy, Jorg Lans von Liebenfels, famously in Guido von List, again, were Austrian, there's a pattern here, lapsed Catholics who said, you know,

Waitman Beorn (13:55.682)
you

Eric (13:58.627)
We like the basic principles about seven root races and evolution and spirituality, but it really doesn't recognize how the purity of race is at the center of resuscitating these kind of superhuman race and civilization. And that's why they created Areosophy to emphasize the role of the Aryan civilization in all of this. Okay, so that I think gives you a sense of these occult doctrines.

And you can see how the last one is really akin to a lot of the stuff that Alfred Rosenberg and other Nazi ideologues were interested in.

Waitman Beorn (14:34.978)
Absolutely. So we have have ariostrophy, have anthroposophy. Our next term is parapsychology. So what do you mean by parapsychology?

Eric (14:47.566)
Yeah, so I would argue that, because you mentioned, you might talk about these, that three of the concepts you gave me would all fit under the rubric, not of the occult, which is one of my three rubrics to make up the supernatural imaginary. We have the occult, we have neo-Germanic religion, Eastern religion, paganism, what we might call religion. And then in the middle, there's

border science. Actually, I put a cult in middle and put border science on the other side. border science are supposedly scientific doctrines that present better answers to understanding things on the fringes of our understanding using methods that are on the fringes of mainstream science than mainstream materialist science, right? So Einstein and Max Planck and Lisa Meitner

might claim they're discovering the building blocks of the universe and physics and chemistry, but it's really parapsychology, cosmobiology, and world ice theory that we should turn to, not this Jewish physics, right? So parapsychology pretty clearly is looking at the paranormal as a legitimate psychological phenomenon. This is around the time that modern psychology is developing as a...

as a social science, maybe even natural science, looking at the brain as a kind of organ and what does it mean? It's of cognitive psychology and Freudian psychotherapy. And the parapsychologists say, what about our ability to project astral planes or clairvoyance or ESP? Why aren't we studying that? Those are real phenomena as well. So parapsychology is pretty clearly looking at what we might call paranormal spirits and your dead grandmother.

And taking that seriously is real phenomena, what we might call paranormal phenomena. And that way it's kind of the oor border science, right? All the way up through Ghostbusters, this idea that if you're really open, right, as a scientist to the beyond, you really need to get in tune with parapsychology and some of this. So that's what that is.

Eric (17:08.436)
If you want, can jump into world ice theory and casual biology.

Waitman Beorn (17:11.884)
Yeah, mean, maybe actually border science works here as well because it's kind of on a spectrum that you just talked about, right? So let's do border science and then we'll go back to those other two.

Eric (17:21.974)
Yeah, the border science is just kind of the general term, I would argue, for putatively scientific theories and practices that are obviously faith-based. They rarely could be reproduced or replicated in a controlled experiment. And that was the main criticism already at the time is you're claiming... So Steiner, who was also a border scientist, not just a cultist, would...

conduct certain experiments kind of like, have Sans's and supposedly be trying to communicate with spirits in his drawing room and so on, say, well, let some real psychologists come in or physicists and we'll record what you're doing or give us some data. You say, I don't have to do that. I know what I saw, know, stuff like that. So, science is...

claiming scientific legitimacy for things that we might call religious or a cult. And the reason I separated is some of those theories like World Ice Theory really had nothing directly to do with the cult doctrines or religion, but were nonetheless obviously a faith-based scientific doctrine. So it really is this kind of separate bucket, even though there's a lot of parallels. Many people are interested in

parapsychology as a border science like Heinrich Himmler are also interested in Nordic mythology and Thor's hammer and finding artifacts and are also interested in occult doctrines, right? But you don't have to be interested in all three to develop a kind of affinity for, let's say illiberal approaches to politics and society.

Waitman Beorn (19:04.78)
Yeah, I mean, it seems like, you know, going through, going through the book, you know, they're, kind of like Venn diagrams of people, you know, who are sort of like overlapping and very, someone could be kind of almost a serious scientist and a very sort of, you know, actual, you know, rigorous laboratory scientists, but also have one, one overlapping with some of these weird, weird beliefs as well.

Eric (19:24.948)
Absolutely. And in fact, let me do some, I'll bring in an article. So ex post facto, a few years ago, I had a colleague who studied conspiracism, a political psychologist who had quantitative methods that he could deploy and a statistician colleague. And we ran a survey where we took the political science scales for paranormal belief.

for pseudoscience, which maps on pretty well to border science and conspiracism, generalized conspiracy belief. And my theory, which they shared, is that those individual scales, which map on pretty well to right-wing authoritarianism and submissive social dominance orientation, we're actually not measuring different things, but we're all expressions of the same thing, meaning...

we would find in the questions in those three supposedly discrete scales, lots of people answering similarly for all three, the same individual, and we did. So it turns out there's some latent variable out there. We're calling it romantic thinking, what I call the supernatural imaginary maybe, that precedes any given society's commitment to any of these different things. For our survey in the present day with the American survey,

participants, I think the Loch Ness Monster and Area 51 were the two biggest predictors of being authoritarian from two different scales, right? One was conspiracism, one I think was paranormal. But you just hit on, I didn't have the survey at the time or the quantitative data. I'm identifying different modes of engaging with the world in a supernatural or romantic way. You don't have to buy into all of them.

If you buy into any of them, even if you are a doctor or engineer in everyday life, you're likely going to be very good at motivated reasoning and confirmation bias when it comes to bizarre ideas, right?

Waitman Beorn (21:29.718)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, and there's something, I mean, now that you bring it up, there's something very sort of, regardless of the subject or topic, there seem to be a lot of commonalities in sort of conspiracy theory slash belief in pseudoscience, which a lot of it tends to be this idea that authority is lying to me and that, you know, I have the ability to understand things myself, you know, that there's some greater truth out there that is

bigger and more important than the mundane explanations for things.

Eric (22:06.158)
You just hit on it. And now think about what a cult or esotericism means, a secret doctrine that only the initiated can understand. And then religion, revealed religions about faith and about... So you've just hit on, mean, we knew that going in, that it is about finding a kind of alternative authority which lies in yourself and your ability to figure out what's really going on. And that's why I would argue that it's no coincidence we're seeing...

arise in far right or fascist movements in the wake of the kind of disintegration of a very stable, predictable world in the 90s, right? And then you get the X-Files and you get all these kind of supernatural TV shows, know, people, what is it lost? That's appealing to something for people who don't find traditional institutions or science.

convincing and that's what we're seeing here. It's a moment in the 1890s to 1930s where those, the belief in those traditional or at that time new scientific paradigms had not really, was no longer working and border science, new age religion, Eastern religion, neo-paganism and the occult provided more satisfying answers, right?

Waitman Beorn (23:32.236)
Yeah, yeah. And so we've got only two more and then we can get into the meat of it. But World Ice Theory, which is amazing. So can you talk about World Ice Theory and then Cosmobiology? then I think then our listeners will have sort of a basis to talk about everything else.

Eric (23:47.459)
Yeah, and I do want to emphasize, even though I'm going to give a number of caveats later on, we actually talk about the Nazis and Third Reich, about to what extent this explains things versus it undergirds or infuses things. There's a difference between causal relationships and correlations, right? That said, these are all things that many Nazis believed in, sometimes all of them. These are not fringe ideas for the Nazi party. They might sound fringe now.

World ice theory was very popular in the SS. It was sponsored by the SS. And it was for a lot of reason. mean, I'll get into this later. It's two reasons that reinforce each other. One, Himmler and others really did believe in it. They really did think that the conventional view of the creation of the universe, the Big Bang, for example, things were very hot and then they got very cold and.

universe was expanding, which already existed by this time, you're starting to get those kinds of theories, were wrong. There was really large blocks of ice, as I understand it, which collided or exploded or melted at different times. And that's how you could explain everything in terms of the both physical universe and the geology of Earth. was about ice, things freezing and melting and ice, giant blocks of ice smashing into each other.

and it came to an Austrian border scientist in a dream and then he went to an amateur astronomer he knew and said you kind of understand astronomy and stuff can you write this out in ways that could sort of make sense to the lay person. They called it glacial cosmogony and then that became very popular in the teens and 20s in Germany and Austria as an alternative way to understand physics, chemistry, geology.

and in some ways history to conventional science, right? So the idea is there may have been a period in human history, you can see how this parallels the whole Euryosophy thing, when the world was peopled by a superior race that could tolerate extreme cold, there were frost giants potentially so that you could see like the Nordic thing and then of course the world heated up or some kind of meteor hit the earth and

Eric (26:12.974)
created and that water melted and created a flood, which is explaining the flood in the Bible in an alternative way. What's interesting here is the Areosophists also believed there was a flood in prehistory destroying an ancient civilization. And in their cosmology, the Aryans who fled Atlantis, what the real races call Hyperborea, after the old Greek term for it,

made it to Tibet because it was so high and that's where they preserve their ancient Aryan wisdom. And then when they came down out of the mountains, eventually they made it with what would become the Brahmin class, which is why they think Indo-Aryan civilization is superior. And I'm talking about the race theorists and eventually the Nazis, some of them. So you can start to see how these different doctrines are tied together, the Ariosophy and the World Ice Theory.

which helps you with the natural sciences, right? Cause these other doctrines are kind of social science or humanistic. And then Cosmobiology is really to simplify it. I'm not an expert on any of these things. I had to learn what they were, what they meant to people at the time in order to tell this story. But to this day, if you went to like the people who write for the Journal of Western Esotericism, they'd say, actually, parapsychology is much more scientific than Dr. Carl Andrew thinks. And there were...

three strains of parapsychology and even, you know, William James was interested in it at one point, it's not crazy. Sure, there is nuance to parapsychology. My point is I'm giving you a kind of general sense of what these things were. Cosmobiology is basically the belief that through a lot of the scientific astrological methods that were coming about at that time, like you really could.

Waitman Beorn (27:52.055)
Yeah.

Eric (28:05.004)
better understand the weather and agriculture and the human body through our relationship with the stars and the planets, the sun. Cosmobiology said there are ways you can better understand human biology and health by understanding the relationship between what we would call traditionally astrology and biology. That's my understanding. That's the simplest way to explain it. A corollary is something that Steiner invented called biodynamic agriculture.

which still exists, the idea if you plant, if you refuse artificial fertilizer and you, you know, sow your crops at a certain time when the stars are in a certain alignment, you'll get better results than if you do it at another time. And again, maybe there's some science to that. I don't know if it's because of the stars per se, but that was a border scientific doctrine that came out in the teens and twenties around the time of.

Cosmobiology, World Ice Theory. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (29:06.35)
Awesome. Well, thank you for that because I think now people will have an understanding of what we're talking about. So we can move on a little bit to that. One of the things that you seem to be suggesting a little bit without putting a Sonderweg on it, that there was something that these ideas hit particularly hard or differently in Germany and Austria in sort of the late 19th, early 20th century. Maybe you can talk a little bit about sort of how that was because then that moves into

sort of some ur-Nazi movements and then gets us into sort of the Nazi period.

Eric (29:42.221)
Yeah, think there are two trends that are kind of reinforcing each other to explain why these doctrines, which existed in France and American Britain, seem to find a little bit greater resonance in Germany. And even where the resonance was similar, took on a more political, racial, of spatial dimension. you know, an example I love to give, Alastair Crowley, everyone was fascinated with him and he was quite

well known in Britain. But everything he did was kind of privatized and apolitical other than supposedly being a spy. I mean, you could argue he just wanted to create a cult and, know, basically have kind of free love and all these other things in the context of starting an occult society and doctrine. If you look at the Theosophists in upstate New York or wherever they were meeting, it's again relatively apolitical. And then you look at

the Thea sauce, thea sauce, Anthroposos and area sausage, or we'd Austria and they're constantly talking about Jews and socialists and the Germanic or Aryan race. So just empirically there clearly is the manifestation is different empirically. I don't think you could argue there's the same commitment to kind of political engagement that you see elsewhere in Germany. Now the question is why a zone to vague explanation be well, you Germany,

didn't modernize in the same way as Britain, France and America. They didn't have as strong of a liberal bourgeoisie. So they resorted more reflexively to kind of racialist and nationalist and illiberal ideas. I don't think that's really what's going on. I think it's a combination of as many historians from Detlef Poykert or David Blackburn to

you know, most of the field today would say that modernity hit Germany and Austria pretty hard because Germany more so than Austria, but they modernized quite quickly and became leading kind of capitalist and industrialized countries, a little like the United States, right? Relatively fast, outpacing Britain and France at the end of the 19th century. And that was kind of shocking, right? I mean, look at Durkheim studies in France, which is still predominantly rural,

Waitman Beorn (31:48.046)
you

Eric (32:09.418)
of anomie and suicide rates. So what is it like to be in a country that's going from predominantly rural to majority urban industrialized airplanes and cruise ships and tanks in a generation or two, right? So I think it's just, it's a stronger experience of modernity and the contradictions thereof, which causes people to resort more.

reflexively and maybe in slightly greater measure to these border scientific and new age ideas. That's number one. The other thing, which I also don't think is unique to Germany, but I think the template is created by Germany. And that goes back to the first half of the 19th century. I do believe that everywhere in Europe, in the wake of enlightenment and industrialization of the French Revolution, there is a reaction, which we all know from English class, that we would call romantic, right?

And it was Byron and Shelley, wasn't just Fichte or Herder. It's Rousseau, who's French, but has romantic elements in some ways. He kind of predicts a certain romantic reaction to hyper individual classicism, rationalism. And Germany is kind of the most creative and dense space for this romantic reaction. It's not exclusively, I don't mean reactionary, I mean...

Can we really, are we really happy with a world where religion is dead and God is dead and everything's secular, Cartesian, rationalist, British, kind of materialist nation of shopkeepers. The Germans embrace much of it, but they also come up with a lot of the alternatives. And that romantic tradition is great when you're reading a horror novel, but when it's invoked in social and political terms can become problematic when you're.

dealing with the complexity of the modern material world. So I'd say the strong romantic tradition in Germany, which is only a generation or two removed from its classical phase in the late 19th century, combined with this hyper-modernity may explain why some of these doctrines had greater political and social valence by the 1890s than maybe they did in Britain or France, though they're obviously there, or the United States. And once they're...

Eric (34:28.768)
reconstituted and become politicized and tied to movements about race and demography and security and empire, which they do through anthroposophy, areosophy, world ice theory, right? Parapsychology. Now they're there as a template, that's what I'm calling the supernatural imaginary, to be invoked as needed by people who want to bring those people along.

So that would be my explanation for why it's more complicated than simply saying Germany had a different path to modernity, if that makes sense.

Waitman Beorn (35:03.366)
Yeah, I mean, and you can certainly see a lot of this coming through with sort of the return to the soil and, and, know, in the context of industrialization and cities, but placing the true Germany or true German people, the essence of them, right, is in is in an agricultural village environment, right? Yeah, yeah, I mean, and that, and that, you know, we have to have these cities to, you know, have factories to build tanks and whatnot, but

Eric (35:23.79)
Warrior peasants, says Himmler called.

Waitman Beorn (35:32.078)
If you want to find where the true sort of spiritual essence of Germans, it's, you know, with their hands in the dirt and the black soul and all that kind of stuff.

Eric (35:39.875)
And not to jump ahead, but because I don't know how much time we'll have, remember that the warrior peasants that Dari and Himmler wanted to recolonize Eastern Europe were supposed to be doing so with biodynamic agricultural techniques that didn't use modern fertilizers that were being developed at Dachau with slave labor to show you the tie if we get to the Holocaust. There are some connections here which are more

than coincidental, I think.

Waitman Beorn (36:10.594)
And of course that agricultural unit at Dhaka was called a plantation, which makes a whole nother, another interesting connection as well, but we'll get to that perhaps. So maybe we'll fast forward a little bit to sort of the early Nazi party and its connections because some of the elements, and of course the Nazis themselves tried to distance themselves from this. And you rightly point out, I think,

nicely in the book that a lot of Nazi opposition to things occult was not on the sort of intellectual ideological front insofar as it was you are challenging sort of what we have decided is the the occult version that we're going to do. So it's you know to jump ahead a little bit you know one of the arguments that you kind of refute is that the Nazis themselves were sort of anti-acult which is really just no we're anti anybody doing things that we don't

have improved up. So we talked a little bit about the beginning because the Thule society, which you might want to talk about, the Swastika is sort of their thing. And it has a lot of the precursors to the Nazis come from these Fulkish movements and the occult that kind of thing. So maybe talk a little bit about how those are related to the rise of the Nazi party.

Eric (37:32.783)
Sure. So at the same time and not independent thereof, would actually say interwoven with the rise of this kind of supernatural imaginary, modern occultism and esotericism, neo-paganism, obsession with Eastern religion and Indo-Aryan religions and border science, you get the rise of what we now call the Focush movement, right?

which is an idea which had its roots and inherited in Fishta in the first half of the 19th century, but has now become much more biologized that there are different ethnoracial groups with different characteristics. And the goal of a modern society is to nurture, preserve and resuscitate their own kind of ethnoracial and cultural patrimony.

And these focus groups thought that a modern industrialized cosmopolitan Germany with Jews and Poles and Colonials coming in was doing the exact opposite. And so their main political goals, some of them were in anti-Semitic parties, some were in conservative parties. As I point out in my first book, many of them were liberals at the time because they also believed in capitalism and representative government. But what they wanted was a more racially, ethnically, culturally pure Germany.

which again, we're seeing that with the alt-right in Europe and America today. This is not new, but this is the first time that became a kind of populist view. And they were invoking ideas, not only from the eugenics movement and modern science, but also from border science and esotericism. The areosophy was a perfect vehicle for focused thinking. It united Darwinism and evolution with ideas around frost giants and

ancient civilizations meeting with aliens. was perfect. And Thor and Odin and they gave themselves Nordic names. So what you're seeing in the period before World War I is this broad focus movement. And many of the leaders of that movement were also in esoteric societies. So Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna, Hitler's kind of role models of political figure was in an area-sophic society as well before World War I.

Eric (39:49.327)
So it's not a surprise that during World War I, one of the most prominent of those societies, this one was a German one, founded by the Saxon anti-Semite, Tador Fritsch, called the German Order, or right before World War I really, decided it needed to become more political. So it created a political association called the Hammer Association. You'll see this tendency with the Nazi party, that's why I bring it up. Say, well, we can talk about astrology and...

parapsychology and the powers of root races or the Aryan race, but we also have to fight for German empire and, you know, kick out the Jews and all these other things. So let's create a political association. It didn't go anywhere. In fact, World War I pretty much killed this kind of incipient far right, folkish, esoteric political movement. But what it did is it left people seeking an alternative.

And a member of that German order, of Teodor Fritsch's German order, who also happened to be a leading astrologer, he was the editor of one of the big astrologische Rundschau, or one of the big journals, was tasked with resuscitating the group in Bavaria at the end of World War I. And he found a guy named Walter Nowhouse who had his own esoteric group, an artist born in 1889, is that familiar?

an esoteric group called the Tula Gesellschaft, the Thule Society, which was the area name along with Hyperborea for the Atlantis that had supposedly collapsed. And Sabatner said, hey, why don't we use your group, which is seen as apolitical and artistic, as a cover for resuscitating the German order and this kind of far right political thinking. And so the Thule Society in summer of 1918 is having, they're reading the Four Seasons Hotel, still there in Munich.

They talk about dousing rods and one, know, divining in one session, and then how the Jews and liberals and feminists are destroying Germany and gonna lose them the war and the other, right? And then guess what happens? The war, they hear that it's over and they've lost, which radicalizes them. And so in October, November, 1918,

Eric (42:07.854)
they start to become more political and form something called the German Workers Circle. Because they realize they're bourgeois and out of touch, no one wants to hear about dowsing rods if you're a worker who can't eat or a decommissioned soldier. We're getting there, by the way. And one of the members of the German Workers Circle who's hanging out with the Bandorf is a guy named Anton Drexler, who works in the railroad industry and knows a lot of workers.

And at some point he and another one of these Thule society members, named Karl Harrer say, why don't we just create our own separate party? Remember the Hammer Association with the German order before the war. now this post German German order creates its own, the Thule society creates its own party, which they call the German workers party, because it was a German workers circle. Now it's the German workers party and that's the Nazi party. So there's this direct through line from all these focused Esoteric groups.

to the Nazi party founded by Drexler and horror, Drexler of course will then co-write the 25 points with Hitler a year later. So this is not some obscure trajectory. There's a direct link. The problem is like Fritch before him, even Sabotendorf and certainly Drexler and Hitler realize you can't be talking about dousing rods all the time or homeopathic medicine if you wanna create a mass movement.

Maybe there's a bunch of people believe in it, but you've also got to have a political message. You've also got to appeal to people who might not be as interested in that. So the tension in the early to mid 20s, which Hitler expresses openly in my copy says, we can't just be a party of focused wandering scholars clothed in bear skins, which I think is really precious now, right? You remember the QAnon shaman wearing animal skins? Because a lot of these people back to nature,

We're going to go back to our roots. We're not going to use vaccines, paleo diet or vegetarianism, whatever. So Hitler's saying that's all well and good, but that's not a party. We can't have a bunch of these focused scholars talking about astrology and wearing animal skins. We need to have a modern mass movement. So there's always a tension in the early Nazi party between the ontology and epistemology they know is linked to fascism, this supernatural thinking.

Waitman Beorn (44:05.038)
Paleo diet.

Eric (44:29.576)
and being taken seriously as a mainstream party that can build a larger kind of folks part, right? That gets votes from all sorts of people, not just. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (44:38.722)
Well, this is one of those things that I think is a nice sort of little microcosm from your work that speaks to the larger truth of the Nazi party as well, which is that one of the things that the Nazi party was incredibly good at was being all things for all people. If you're anti-communist, but not super anti-Semitic, that's great. If you were super anti-Semitic, that's great. If you were homophobic, that's great. But they never, as you...

Eric (44:55.139)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (45:06.59)
you're pointing out with regards to this, they didn't ever go all in on one thing or the other, you know, for fear of alienating potential voters. They offered you something and let you grab onto it.

Eric (45:10.848)
Exactly.

Eric (45:14.702)
Certainly. Except it's the romantic thinking, the supernatural thinking, unmoored from any specific doctrine, right? They're not gonna have arguments between the anthroposophists and the areosophists within the Nazi ranks. That would be the dumbest thing they could do. Goebbels also makes fun of it. He this whole speech in 27 or 28. You know, your job as propagandists is not to get into which form of homeopathy works better.

But my argument in the book, and it speaks to what you just said, how do fascists square the circle in terms of political economy and social reality, the real things that matter, and the fact that they really are triangulating between liberalism, socialism, and conservatism. That's what fascism is. It's a grab bag of those policy points, which are not compatible. It's why there's always a fluke knock for it. It's why it's always unstable.

romantic thinking, non-materialist thinking, nationalism, racism, xenophobia, to square the circle. Because if they had to actually commit to one thing or the other, that would undermine their ability to be a catch-all party. The problem of modern politics is how do you get different interests to compromise? Fascists say we aren't going to work through that. We're just going to get everyone who's frustrated with the realities of the world.

to our side through any kind of simplistic message we have, which usually tends to be a right-wing, racist and xenophobic message that is compatible with faith-based views of the world. That's all I'm really arguing. And their version of the supernatural imaginary is different than the modern alt-right, but it's the same process. And for those reasons, they can't get into niceties of doctrine. It's really gotta be syncretic, right? That's, yeah, go ahead.

Waitman Beorn (47:07.16)
Well, you know, I was going to say this is a nice sort of segue to kind of something that I found particularly fascinating, you know, which was your discussion of a guy named Schurte and Hitler's reading of him, because, you know, obviously one of things that everybody's always interested in is what did Hitler believe? You know, was Hitler this, was Hitler that? But I hadn't heard about this until I read your work, you know, that apparently we have a copy of Hitler's copy

of this book in which he's literally underlined things. And so we can almost in some ways replicate at least what he thought was important. And some of those things about how to convince people and how to influence people were both kind of shockingly utilitarian, but also mystical. Maybe talk a little bit about that and then we'll move on.

Eric (48:01.155)
Perfect, yeah. So first of all, it's Tim Rybach, who's a fellow historian of ours, who wrote a book on Hitler's library, who discovered the book, and who, to the best of his ability, corroborated it was Hitler's handwriting. We don't know for certain, but it was dedicated to Hitler, was in his library, and it looked like some of the notations are the ones that Hitler made in other books. Let's say we're 80, 90 % certain. It's certainly in his library. And if those are his notation, there's 66 of them. And a lot of them aren't about the doctrine per se. I mean, occasionally, you know,

the demonic lies in all of us and can be manifest. There are times he underlies something like he's almost interested in the occult or parapsychological, but a lot of the other things he underlines or comments on are passages about how magicians basically manipulate people or use their magic to manage people, to become kind of leaders or shamans. And it looks as if to me,

He might not necessarily believe any of it, but he sees the fact that this is the way a lot of people who are associated with all these 15 different focus groups he's trying to unite in Germany and are really disillusioned with modern science and political institutions. This is kind of how they think about the world, or this is the kind of, kind of the lost kind of spirituality they're seeking. And he wants to figure out ways of manipulating people.

by appealing to that, he could be a kind of shaman. I mean, there are intellectuals, think Jung and others called Hitler a shaman. So he's reading this shamanic account of magic and history, theory and praxis by this border scientist and occultist, Schertl, and he's looking for kind of lessons that he can use in manipulating people, I think, or literally performing when he, the dramaturgy or whatever you want to call it,

of his particular public persona. And that's one of the three kind of occult or border scientific individuals I use in that chapter. I think it's chapter three to show the connections between the Nazi rise to power and this esoteric or supernatural imaginary. There's also Hans Heinz Avers, who's like the Stephen King of the 1920s, who's a horror writer who has affinities, he gets sick of the Weimarer public and the political correctness and the...

Eric (50:28.174)
democracy and the loss of empire and starts hanging out with stormtroopers and then Goebbels and Hitler and a bunch of Nazis say, know, we like your work. Why don't you become a propagandist? And Brecht, who's a socialist is like, oh, this is perfect, right? They hire a horror writer who writes pornographic stories about witches and vampires to be a propagandist. That tells you what the Nazi party is about. He's like, this will never work. Of course it does work. He writes a biography of Horst Wessel, you know, the

Nazi martyr that gets made into a film. And then finally, Eric Connison, I mentioned, who's an open, you know, charlatan, right? He pretends to be able to manipulate magic and clairvoyance, but he was born into this Jewish guy, I believe in Austria, and just changes his name to a Danish name so he can pass. And he's hugely popular. Thousands, tens of thousands of people buy his magazine. He gives massive seances and then

He starts befriending the Nazi stormtroopers in Berlin, takes them out on his yacht, predicts the Reichstag fire, and then a few weeks later turns up dead in the woods. So the point is there are these everyday connections socially, not just cultural intellectually, between these esoteric groups and the Nazi party, because they can't completely extricate themselves from it, since they depend so much on that kind of thinking. And so many of the people in the party

buy into some of this stuff. It's not purely instrumental for Himmler or Hess or Dare or Ohlendorf. You know, they want to experiment with these ideas. So if Hitler or Goebbels are largely pragmatist about it, a lot of these other Nazi leaders think there's something there. It's not just a way of manipulating the petty bourgeoisie into voting for

Waitman Beorn (52:20.27)
Well, I think that's, that's, that's, we should go now because this is after all a Holocaust history podcast. the everything we've talked about, think is relevant. So can you talk a little bit about sort of how all of these things and maybe some, because I mean, there's, wish we had like seven hours because there's so many different really cool threads we could pull, but how, how are these ideas and maybe some of them is specifically connected to what I would call a Nazi genocidal project. So that way we encompass.

anti-Jewish violence, but also lots of other sort of genocidal policies.

Eric (52:55.534)
So let me start with the caveat that I should have said earlier, whether it's the rise of the Nazi party as a mass movement, I kind of alluded to this, the failure of the Weimar Republic, the kind of expansion of race science and antisemitic policy before World War II and the Holocaust thereafter. None of that happens without the conventional kind of interpretive frameworks we all accept, right? Without.

modern industrial capitalism, the polarization of parliament and the economic crises, the demographic, real demographic challenges that the Germans face, the Great Depression, biopolitics and obsession with eugenics and fixing things through science and technology. You don't get the Nazi party, they don't get elected and you don't get the Holocaust, empire, colonialism.

a lot of things which are occurring in other liberal empires. And I say that repeatedly in the book. And one of my frustrations is it literally says, this is a supernatural history of the Third Reich. I'm trying to fill in the gaps where this might help us explain something or say where it doesn't. And people who I'm not sure who read the book fully say, he thinks World War II happened because of the occult. I never say that. But insofar as we want to now talk about what those connections might be, whether they're correlation or causation,

There is obviously a link between this non-biological, right? This faith-based belief in an Ur-Aryan civilization that has been corrupted and marginalized and possibly even murdered by a combination of Jews, the Catholic Church and the Freemasons, right? That occult or whatever you want to call it.

border scientific conviction infuses almost all of Nazi doctrine. And for example, the witch division, you put that in there. Himmler and Darré and other Nazis do believe that there was an Ur-Aryan religion, that's part of what they had, Oto-Rahn, the real Indiana Jones research. Go to these caves in Montségur, where the Holy Grail supposedly was, and see what you can find. Not because they were sure there was a Holy Grail linked to Christ.

Eric (55:19.278)
because they thought there was a civilization that had either cross-pollinated with Indo-Aryan Tibetan civilization or was the return of that civilization after the flood subsided, which created modern Germanic paganism. And then the Catholic Church, which was really secretly being run by the Jews, recognizing that this Ur-Aryan civilization, which would be about the strength of blonde warrior peasants and not this weak Christian wait for the beyond.

manipulative religion that the Jews created, tried to wipe them out by accusing them of witchcraft. That's not a fringe belief. The Himmler, D'Arre think that there is a genocide being carried out by the Catholic Church under the guise of the Inquisition by accusing Germanic women of being witches. And then you could both destroy their culture and murder the people who would produce babies at the same time. So that's very palpable.

To show you Himmler takes it seriously, most of his, let's say border scientific hobbies, he funded through something called the Anna Nerba, the Institute for Ancestral Research, which was supposed to at the beginning just make sure that Nazis were actually Aryan, but became this massive research institute with all this money he gathered to do kind of alternative scientific expeditions, including Tibet. But he's so worried about this witchcraft thesis.

Waitman Beorn (56:23.81)
you

Eric (56:46.882)
He actually puts Heidrich in charge and Franz Alfred Zick, he puts all these SD and SS guys whose main job is arresting, killing, surveilling people and eventually carried out the Holocaust and who doing opposition research on socialists and Jews says, I want you to research this witchcraft thing. Because I really do think the Jews controlled the Catholic church and killed some of my aunt. He thinks he's related to some people.

Waitman Beorn (57:12.11)
you

Eric (57:15.47)
who died in the witch craze. And so, and that too, Henry the Fowler. By the way, his Areosophic advisor, Karl Maria Willegut, calls himself a Vizetor, Wythor, and came up with like the Death's Head ring and all the insignia. So Himmler's hanging out with this guy. So to just show you how intrinsic some of these ideas were, it wasn't enough to just explore it. Maybe, you like you hear now,

Waitman Beorn (57:18.478)
And Henry the Fowler. I love that. That's one of my favorite. One of my favorite himmler things.

Eric (57:44.441)
Well, why can't we go to this internet site and listen to this one scientist out of 40 who says vaccinations don't work? Why aren't you open to that alternative? Why are you so doctrinaire and you just follow the mainstream, right? So Himmler did that a lot through the on an air, but a lot of those things weren't directly connected to the Holocaust. Some of them were like the experiment experiments with human beings and for quote unquote military purposes.

But in this case, with this witchcraft obsession, it's directly given to the SD. So I just want to, that's one anecdote of where the racial thinking and the antisemitism and the kind of esoteric border scientific occult doctrines, you know, come together in an area where you have a really powerful Nazi who's going to be managing a lot of the population, basically the demographic management and the...

colonial projects in the East, including what ends up being the Holocaust, right? So they're not drawing clear lines here between those different things. I could give you examples, but that's a good one.

Waitman Beorn (58:53.678)
Well, and I think one of the things that you mentioned, know, Friedrich Retzel, who is the guy that coined the idea or came up with the idea of Lebensraum, right, which is in your description is more than just kind of a geopolitical, you know, geographical problem that we need more space with resources, there is a that he himself was occult adjacent, you know, and that

Eric (59:04.908)
Mm-hmm.

Eric (59:21.528)
Cult adjacent, I don't know that Roetzel himself, what happens is I think, it's through Haushofer, that his ideas get translated into the Nazi party. And Haushofer has some occult adjacent ideas. But yeah, Roetzel, I don't know how different Roetzel is than from, what is it, Frederick Jackson Turner and Manifest Destiny. There's a lot of similarities there, but there's definitely some focus.

If you want to put it that way, some focused undercurrents to the idea of Lebensraum.

Waitman Beorn (59:58.083)
Well, because as you point out, mean, that and as Gretzel points out, you know, that it's not just space, it's space in a particular place, right? Like all things being equal, everything is possible. He would say, we don't want land in South America or Africa or any place else. We need this land for, you know, again, if everything's equal in terms of resources and strategic, you know, pragmatic possibilities, there's something sort of non scientifically important about

Eric (01:00:05.346)
Yes.

Eric (01:00:27.022)
Yeah. Let me make a bigger point here about fascism then and now, or the alt-right and fascism then and now. Unlike liberal imperialism, liberal imperialism has been responsible for a lot of mass murder, maybe even genocide. don't care, Belgian Congo, you know, the French in North Africa, the idea that we're going to remake the world in a better way and include these non-European peoples in our

Waitman Beorn (01:00:28.032)
about the East and like these areas of it.

Eric (01:00:56.256)
in our kind of civil society and eventually make them into citizens. That's led to a lot of killing, but the premise is still a universalist one. I'll just explain the difference. I'm not justifying one or the other that these people, despite not being from our culture or background could still be citizens of our empire. Fascists have very particular ideas going back to Carl Schmidt or Gentile about who belongs and who doesn't. That's racial and spatial.

It's usually contiguous empire linked to a kind of occult esoteric border scientific view of history, race and space, right? And so you see that today, like there's a lot of America first, there's like, why are we worried about Israel or Iran? We like the Greenland thing, that's cool. And Canada, we get that, because that's contiguous, it's our culture.

And so Lebensraum is a good way to express this kind of, again, not quite material, rational, liberal, geopolitical idea. Let's find a way to spread markets and increase resources and then tell these people if they work hard enough, they can be members of our society. But where do we have a historical, mythological kind of romantic destiny to govern or create a Pax Germanica or a

you know, reconstruct the Roman Empire or Mussolini's case. And once we have that, we're fine. Like that's where we're gonna draw our borders and we can let the Japanese do their thing and the British can do their thing. That's a very different geopolitical view, which is reinforced with this kind of romantic idea of the world is supernatural, right?

Waitman Beorn (01:02:40.43)
Well, and there's an irredentist sort of element to this too, but less in a sort of, you know, this was our political space and then another country took it over. And much more in, again, now that I'm thinking about it and reflecting on it, similar to what you're arguing in the sense of this used to belong to us in a prehistoric or pre-modern historic way. And I'm thinking now about, you know, the Medicker guide to the general government.

Eric (01:02:58.934)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (01:03:07.254)
where it's like, to this Polish town. You'll notice a beautiful church that was built by the Germans. Because everything that was nice is like recover. And again, you talk about a little bit in the book too, this attempt to recover ethnic German material from this mess of Eastern Europe that has been overrun with lesser races.

Eric (01:03:29.518)
Exactly, which fits into this area, Sophic, world theory, cosmology, right? And there's that episode, I'll give you a couple. mean, you read the book, so you'll remember this. They weren't the spear of destiny comes up in all the pseudoscientific and pseudo historical like Hitler wanted to travel with it like the Ark of the Covenant in the pierce of long spear of longiness that pierce the site of Christ. As far as I can tell, first of all, it doesn't come up in the research I've done over those eight or 10 years.

He just wanted all the cool stuff that were part of the Holy Roman Empire further north in the center of Germany for various reasons now that he had united the Ostmark with the rest of Germany. It was not about any esoteric goals. However, we have Rosenberg and Himmler with one of the big archaeologists. They both had their own archaeologists. In a rare moment of kind of comedy of getting along.

where they're fascinated that the spear of Koval has been recovered, which is modern day Ukraine, kind of a part of where the Vartaland was, that they were analyzing with the archaeologists to say, this proves that this was a Germanic civilization. This is not a Slavic spear. And they were sending out the Ananaraba folklorists to collect ghost stories because stories about, for example, the wild hunt,

which is the basis of the headless horseman, the idea that at night sometimes these wounded soldiers will come and take revenge on people for being wronged. It's also, I believe, the inspiration in Tolkien for the, you know, when Aragorn goes and gets the dead soldiers to come fight for him. So they look for those kinds of stories. And even if it's written in a Polish script, they're like, these were Germans, because that's a German folk, that's German folklore.

So they're even looking at ghost stories as a way to justify empire, artifacts, ghost stories, right? That's why all these, know, philologists and folklorists are being sent east or north. It's to justify a more expansive view of empire.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:44.151)
Yeah, I mean, I think this stuff is really fascinating because as you point out, I mean, it's kind of like a contextual background to all of this stuff. It's like the Petri dish that these things are growing in, right? I mean, it doesn't it doesn't have to be a neat line to because they believe this they did this. But these things. Yeah.

Eric (01:06:05.326)
It doesn't have to be causal, but it can reinforce the ideology that made all this possible.

Waitman Beorn (01:06:10.798)
I I'm imagining this as I was reading, you know, a sort of intellectual social network, you know, and seeing if you could draw this out, you could map this, visualize it, you know, all these connections of like people who, mean, like Otto Ohlendorf, I never would have guessed Otto Ohlendorf, the Einsatzgruppen commander, you know, was a believer in some of these things, you know, and, you know,

He wouldn't necessarily have written something down that says, I'm doing this, this, and this vis-a-vis the Jews because I believe this, this, and this. But again, once you sort of do that Venn diagram or build that intellectual network, things start to come together. Again, it's not necessarily, as you say, causal, but it's like the operating system in a certain sense, it's like running in the background.

Eric (01:07:05.186)
And that's why I'm calling it the supernatural imaginary. It's there all the time, helping kind of in a predictable way, drawing certain connections and not others. So for example, you absolutely don't get the Holocaust without, or certainly the other medical experience without eugenics and biology and kind of modern scientific certainty, all the things that Adorno and Horkheimer talk about the dialect of enlightenment.

modern science and capitalism and colonialism do create the kind of necessary preconditions for a lot of the worst crimes of the 20th century, not just in practice, but in theory. But why did the German, or I want to say not even German, the Nazi version of that goes so far so fast? It has something to do with the fact that whenever they get to that fork in the road, do we back down and go with the actual science, which actually

As you know, Alfred Plotz and some of the real race theorists, the ones who had scientific backgrounds, were often getting into arguments with Himmler and his friends because they say, actually, Jews are not a pure race and, you know, someone has a little bit of Jewish blood is probably not a problem. That was frustrating, the focus theorists, because they didn't want to be hamstrung by actual science. If they could wield science to justify what they were doing, whether it's Himmler saying,

use bodily warmth to someone will we basically free someone to death. I read in Grimm's fairy tale that the fisherman who froze was was healed by his wife's body warmth. So put another live Jew with the with the Jew who died see if that works rather than actually using a heat lamp. I mean this is the kind of thinking that helps you. They don't have to actually think Jews were vampires but if they're

talking about them as vampires and parasites, whether it's Hitler or Himmler repeatedly, and associating them with Slavic folkloric views of vampirism, that's gonna create a different kind of mentality when you're in the middle of a war and you're being asked to do X, Y, or Z than if you're seeing these as human beings similar to you and everyone else, right? So that...

Waitman Beorn (01:09:19.182)
It's a great example of the connection, I think, between faith and science, because obviously, there's no, certainly for the Nazis in the 1940s, there was no genetic test, like for Judaism. So they couldn't like draw blood and say, you're a Jew, you're not, et cetera. Right. So ultimately, in a weird way, Jewishness is a faith-based bigotry for the Nazis because they have to just believe

Eric (01:09:43.586)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (01:09:47.692)
that either you are or you aren't. But of course, we know that the reality isn't that simple. it comes down to this idea of the blood, and the blood, whether you go one drop ruler or whatever.

Eric (01:09:59.915)
And here's what makes it even worse scientifically. If that were their only concession to a rational thinking, right, it'd be one thing or supernatural thinking. But not only are the Jews the epitome of all evil for many, not all Nazis. And I'm writing a book right now looking at the more, I don't want to say rational actors, but the Jewish experts and foreign office people and SD who had to solve the Jewish question and are often

having different kinds of conversations than the ideologues of the propagandists, right? It's a multivalent project. But the border scientific premises that Himmler and Hitler and Dara and Ohlendorf all shared allowed them to say that we actually, I mean, some of them actually say this outright, we're not antisemitic because we respect the Arabs and they're the true Semites. Whatever the Jews are,

is some bizarre mix of maybe some semis, but also, and they come up with all these different groups that, and they came up with the worst possible thing that's both clever, but can't produce anything. I mean, because they recognize that themselves, that if they went with the science, then they'd have to also be anti-Arab, but they're not. And then they take it further and say, well, we believe in this Indo-Aryan theory. So that makes Persia and Northern India and possibly Japan.

where some of these or races may have settled based on dubious anthropology and archeology are kind of sister civilizations, which doesn't make any, could a blonde blue eyed Jew grew up in Germany be the epitome of all evil, but the civilization of Northern India, Japan is your, are your kind of Aryan, I'm not saying that's a, I mean, it's a weird kind of racialist cosmopolitanism.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:35.938)
This was a question that I had that I'll ask it now.

Eric (01:11:55.202)
But it's not science, whatever it is, right?

Waitman Beorn (01:11:57.955)
mean, this is a question that I had just just a selfish question, is exactly that. You know, if we locate Aryan in essentially India, right, in the Nazi racialist worldview, surely they don't see brown skinned Indian people as racially equal to the Nazis. So how do they square this weird like

the Nazis came from this part of the world, but then how did they lose all of those racial characteristics?

Eric (01:12:34.636)
So, mean, even if you read Nazi race theorists closely, they don't see Germany as purely Aryan, right? That's part of their problem. They think the Nordic countries are still largely Aryan. They recognize that Germany, precisely because they didn't have a strong empire and are not a purely Aryan, they're mostly Aryan, but part of the job of Himmler is, you know, with his chicken farming knowledge was to re-engineer. That's why Ariosophy was so attractive. It was about

re-engineering, taking the better elements that have been lost since the flood, since the collapse of Atlantis or Thule, right? And recreating a master race. That helps you understand why he thought he could salvage something from the pure, pure Tsegoiner, the pure gypsies, right? In Auschwitz, he's arguing with the scientists. I forget the name of the expert he had on the gypsies, the so-called expert in the gypsies. I reviewed a book, Ritter.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:32.983)
Ritter, yep.

Eric (01:13:33.059)
Robert Ritter, who didn't get why would if the ones who have intermarried with Europeans are being eliminated or treated badly, why would the pure ones be even better for him? Well, because Himmler thought they might be or Indo-Aryans and you should study them anthropologically. That doesn't make any sense scientifically. And yes, they had darker features and everything. Clearly, we're not following contemporary Germanic cultural traditions.

But he believed that they might actually have those elements. Same thing with the Tibet expedition. They thought they were gonna find elements of Uriirian race and culture. So it wasn't even a phenotypical, right? I mean, the famous story about Himmler visiting the front lines, there was a blonde blue eyed child and no parents, because I think they'd already been killed. And he pulled the child out of line. He's like, must be a Polish kid or something. And then asked him, the child spoke German and said, no, my parents are...

are both Jewish. Is your father Jewish? I don't know if this is anecdotal, but I remember reading this. mother, sorry, there's nothing I can do. And he brought the child back because for him, it clearly, even the blonde blue, think at one point broke down. was this kind of romantic supernatural idea of Uriirians. Now there was a strain and you can see it with the Annanero leadership. The first leader, guy named Hermann Wirt was what we would call a proponent of Germanen.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:45.165)
Yeah.

Eric (01:15:03.458)
the idea that the Germanic peoples and the Nordic people in particular were the purest, greatest race. May have been around in prehistory, believed in some of Atlantis stuff certainly, but the race mixing and the Indo-Aryan stuff, if anything, it was an echo of the Aryans from, of the Germanic people. So in so far as you had some pretty decent civilizations in East Asia, it's because some of them made their way there, but there was no cross pollination, right?

It's still Nordic, blonde, blue-eyed people who are always the best. You then had proponents of what was called Aryartum, and I argue that Himmler was more aligned with this and some that many leading Nazis, Darae, that actually it's not clear who came, what the direction was. So maybe the Aryans, know, 10,000, 50 came from Northern India and then created the Nordic race and then the flood, some went back.

It wasn't just blonde blue eyes people radiating out. And they kind of argue over this. Again, it's not really science, so it's hard to say how much that overlaps or not. But what I think you're seeing and where the contradiction lies is those who really fetishized the Nordic were a bit less interested in this Indo-Aryan thing and found it confusing. And those who are more into the Indo-Aryan, and eventually Veret, he's such a bad border scientist, he actually takes

a forged book and tries to make it into the Nordic Bible, the Uralinda Chronicle. And he's so embarrassed when Dutch and German scholars expose it that he gets fired by Himmler and replaced by this guy named Wust, who is a well-known, I think at University of Munich, endologist. He studies Hindi and Hindu and Buddhist religion, and he's made head of the on in Arabian. You could see, I would argue that's Himmler's commitment to this broado indoor area like

Waitman Beorn (01:16:35.436)
you

Eric (01:16:59.692)
I want to explore Arianism all over South America. I think he sends people to Bolivia and looks for blonde hair, eye. So there is a tension, but that tension I think always gets resolved to the more opaque, more romantic idea of this kind post-biological conception of race. Darroch is comparing Japanese peasant houses to German ones and saying how great they are.

Hyderick's getting frustrated at the obsession with Shinto and the samurai. Himmler writes a forward to a book on the samurai warrior caste and how great they are. And Hyderick says something like flippantly, like, you know, our soldiers are already Judaified and Christianized enough, they're weak and they're cowardly. And now you're telling the Japanese are these perfect kind of fighting machines who will kill anyone to protect their race and their.

and their God and their ancestors and we're just waiting to die, know, the Christian, like we need less of this stuff, because we're not that area, I mean, we've lost that area in ideology. So it's almost to a fault that the way the Shatria warrior caste in India as this pure kind of warrior, peasant, whatever you want to call the warrior caste who had the martial and racial values really worked out.

So that is a strong ideological element in Nazi thinking, right? In the supernatural imaginary that I don't think we spent enough time looking at. don't think it's not scientifically accurate. They're obviously appropriating the way Edward Said would say, Orientalism always works. They're appropriating many of these ideas, not accurately, but they believe them. And by the way, there are people in India

Waitman Beorn (01:18:35.63)
you

Eric (01:18:55.734)
And Japan, as Ricky Law has shown and Chris Menjapra has shown for India, who like this and say, hey, maybe we are related to the Germans. Maybe we can create our own kind of post-colonial alliance against the British and the materialist West and the people who don't have Aryan blood. So it also worked both ways in the 30s. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:19:03.262)
Thank

Waitman Beorn (01:19:11.063)
you

Waitman Beorn (01:19:16.632)
Well, yeah, and one of the things that I wanted to of talk about a little bit, and I'm glad he gave a shout out to Ricky. Ricky was a graduate student with me at Carolina. So I know Ricky well. We both had same advisor. But one of the things that you mentioned, and it's worth bringing up and spending a little bit of time on, even though we're almost at the end, because I thought it was really fascinating. it's how some of these occult

Eric (01:19:27.158)
okay.

Waitman Beorn (01:19:46.103)
or supernatural imaginary mythologies relate to morality. And in particular, you make the argument that, and you can expand on this, essentially that in sort of traditional religions, Christianity, Judaism, et cetera, there's this idea, there's this universal morality that kind of tells us what's right and what's wrong. And this is sort of

God focused from a deity that sort of tells us this is what's right and it's wrong, which then relates in some ways to our focus on our focus is on the afterlife. know, live your life on earth so that you can get into heaven, whatever that looks like, or you can achieve enlightenment or whatever. But that the sort of morality that comes out of these occult ideologies or whatever is one that says essentially whatever the leader

of the group decides is correct. And as long as that's good for a smaller group, then that's what's right. That's what's right and what's moral. And that the focus is then on living our lives on Earth and not looking into the afterlife. So can you talk about how this, if I've summarized that correctly, and then how that

Eric (01:21:03.67)
Yes, you got to a more and an intro very interesting point, which I'll I'll pull on that thread, but I'll start with the more obvious and accessible one, which is their major critique, even a pragmatic one. Forget about the theology and ideology or ontology or epistemology, whatever you want to call it. They were frustrated that Judeo-Christian theology and kind of the Christian ethos was the meek will inherit the earth.

help the poor, certainly when you take the Catholic perspective, it's universalist, necumenical. That was antithetical to their idea of creating a master race that will dominate other races in a pre or post-Christian way. And they didn't really, I would argue, I mean, here's where I disagree with all these. One thing our survey showed is when historians try to commit to one construct to explain something,

I have a social scientific colleague who says you got to do the same thing in psychology, sociology, construct clearance. So you got pre-fascist, proto-fascist, political religion, a religion of nature, like all these different books. Richard Steinman Gall, they're actually all Christians. It's all right and it's all wrong. Clearly there are many paths, as Colbert once said, to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior. Remember that joke he made at the Bush dinner? There are many paths.

to accepting national socialism. They weren't that concerned whether you were a pre-Christian, post-Christian or Germanic Christian. What you couldn't be was a traditional mainstream Christian who really liked the Old Testament thought that converted Jews were still Christians and were waiting for the afterlife and going to follow your pastor or priests advice and not the Third Rites. What made that more powerful for a lot of Nazis is they actually then believed, I Himmler

walked around with the Bhagavad Gita, they read in their minds Tibetan Buddhist doctrine and Hinduism and Shinto, Dare, these other SS and Rosenberg said this is better. They are in touch with their race and their culture, with their blood and soil, their religion and their race and their ancestors are all tied together. They worship them.

Eric (01:23:25.944)
They fight to defend their culture and their race. They're not waiting for the afterlife. Now I'm not saying that's an accurate depiction of Eastern spirituality. That was their reading of it. And they were, and that goes back to German romanticism. I the Grimm brothers and others were starting to look into Indo-Aryan. They understood now that there's one Indo-Aryan language and maybe that's the same culture. They were starting to look at the mythology. So there were a lot of Nazis who believed

This was a superior or pure form of whatever had been that Indo-Aryan religion that the Catholic Church wiped out with the Inquisition, this pre-Christian Germanic Nordic religion, and that they could learn a lot from studying those people about the here and now, about the this worldly commitments you needed to have a warrior race and warrior peasants and Aryan purity and not this weak

slave mentality of the Christians, which they believe was just the Jews way of manipulating people, right? Since the Jews couldn't possibly, through the power of their race or ingenuity alone, dominate the world, they use Christianity to create slaves and all these people who had Nordic beliefs. So it's bigger than the, the pragmatism isn't the only thing. They actually believe in this stuff. And then to bring that back to esotericism, called, absolutely.

Their problem with Steiner, as Olandorf says, Olandorf goes to the leader in the Third Reich of the anthroposophic movement, I think it's Erhard Barge, and says, I love your stuff. I love what you do. It's fascinating. Biodynamic agriculture, we're gonna use it in Dachau. The stars, the moon, know, special dances, whatever the stuff that they still do in Waldorf schools or Steiner, he thought was fascinating. He said, but why do you have to keep talking about Steiner? He's like a martyr for you guys, like,

keep talking about Steiner, you offend all the Nazis because we have to pick, we have to be loyal to Hitler. He's our leader. He wouldn't say cult leader, but that's kind of what he meant, a cult, right? So if you could just take all the doctrines and make them palatable to Himmler and me and the rest of the SS by cutting out the Steiner all the time, referring to him as your leader, we'll be okay. And Barch, like most cult leaders, and that's what it says, I can't do that. He's our guru. He created this, right? And Barch is like,

Eric (01:25:52.027)
And all of sudden, I'm sorry, I don't know what I, you eventually gets arrested. But that's a perfect example. It wasn't about the ontology or epistemology, the supernatural thinking, or even the doctrines. It's about being loyal to the leader of the Nazi movement versus a leader of the anthroposophic movement. And that's where, again, to come back to the religion, they wanted a religion pragmatically and spiritually that supported this Nazi belt on shower.

with Hitler at the top and the Aryan race at the center, not one that competed with it. And so I think we under, it's actually kind of bizarre to me that so many historians who recognize that fascism is all about one party creating, know, managing consent, they don't like a bunch of competing narratives. Thinking that when they go after an astrological group or kill a Jewish occultist,

It's because they don't like occultism, they're somehow more rationalist or scientific. That's not the first explanation I would go to. They kill each other after all, right? They argue with each other in order to get one view. They don't deal well with having, you the Strasser brothers, right? So they're not against that epistemology. They just don't want a strong alternative occult group.

mean they get rid of the pan-Germans for God's sake. So yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:27:21.966)
Yeah, mean, it struck me as interesting because the idea again, I guess, with the sort of border scientific idea of race and the way that that supported a morality based on what's good for our race is what is good. And it doesn't matter if traditional

Eric (01:27:46.294)
Absolutely. Yes.

Waitman Beorn (01:27:52.619)
General universalist morality says doing that thing is bad. It's what's good for me and our race is good which then also so which also then reifies and supports what the Fuhrer says is good and because it's it's he's the leader He's the shaman if you your words the sort of shamanic ruler of our the visionary, you know faith based ruler of our race Therefore what he says is good is also morality

Eric (01:28:19.052)
He's the prophet who's gonna rescue the Aryan race from its decadence, right? And therefore you can't have rival Fjord, right? You can't have a rival leader that would confuse things.

Waitman Beorn (01:28:34.894)
But also not, I mean, again, but not a rival morality either. So if we're thinking about, if we're thinking about, why did some, again, I'm generalizing because Nazis, Nazi perpetrators did things for all kinds of different reasons. But if we're thinking about why did some Nazis, you know, legitimately think that, you know, murdering naked women and children was okay, one potential explanation, if they were in this intellectual milieu is,

This essentially has been decreed by our leader who spiritually, the morality exists only in our racial circle. And this is good for us racially, spiritually, tribally, and therefore it's okay. And therefore this is the right thing to do.

Eric (01:29:21.358)
And he would give speeches to that effect. We're going to keep this secret because we know, you know, normal people, even normal Germans won't get it. But you, of the SS, but that wasn't the only one. I mean, he gave other speeches where he alluded to hard tasks and tasks that a true Aryan or a true German needs to carry out on behalf of their race, which is his view of what the Japanese and the Brahmin cast had done.

Waitman Beorn (01:29:28.396)
Yep. The pose and speech.

Eric (01:29:48.363)
recognizing, and we need to be really kind of nuanced here, that most of Germany hadn't had time. mean, Hitler says this in his table talk. They didn't actually believe that the Germans had really embraced this new morality. And I think most sociological evidence, including Browning's Ordinary Men, shows that they hadn't. Like the average German, even many Nazis, I think you'd find the same thing with the alt-right today. It explains why Germans could vote for democratic parties 10 years after the end of World War II.

They have affinities in this direction, but it doesn't mean they're ready to go fully the way that Mengele or Himmler will. What they're trying to do is carry out a revolution in German mentality. They just happen to be the biggest proponents or the ones running the party. I mean, that's the real problem. Here's how you could reconcile arguments like Richard Steigman-Galls and mine, which is...

I think he's right that at a grassroots level, people who belong to the Nazi party were still get christening their children. And, you know, weren't going out of their way to report on a quarter Jew who was going to their church. They were Christian. Well, actually, he says because they were Christian, they're not. I would say a lot of them were still operating within a Christian cosmology. But as you move up the ranks, I think you've seen this. The indifference or act of hostility to Judeo-Christian ethos.

or organized Christianity is very, very strong.

Waitman Beorn (01:31:17.558)
It's kind of like if you to apply sort of a metaphor, it's kind of like in the communist idea of class consciousness, right? Like Germans haven't achieved race consciousness or occultish, folkish consciousness. And so they need the vanguard of the Nazi leadership to sort of do the stuff for them until such time as they catch up.

Eric (01:31:37.154)
Yes, absolutely.

Eric (01:31:42.733)
So while they might have found that what the Nazis were selling attractive, the Nazis are very careful about how they packaged it. know, Goebbels was very careful to hire scientific astrologers when he was doing his Nostradamus predictions. That would be believable. So they had a sense that they could appeal to the supernatural imaginary, but if they push too hard in the direction of outright murder or these totalizing ideologies, they might

loose some people, right? So I'm not saying that every German shared the same views as Himmler. I am arguing that about a third of German society was, and you can look at the journals and the astrology columns, there are a lot of people in Germany who embrace these ideas and there's a lot of overlap between the ones who did and the ones who appeared to reject liberal and socialist politics, right? Whether or not they became Nazis.

They're not the liberal and socialist voters. And that says something about why this movement was successful.

Waitman Beorn (01:32:43.448)
Yep, yep.

Waitman Beorn (01:32:49.484)
And of course, as you point out, there are, I think, you know, interesting parallels, you know, in the current world, you know, between who believes, as you said at the very beginning, and who believes in conspiracy theories, who believes in sort of alternate forms of medicine, I'm using scare quotes here, know, medicine, therapies, you know.

Even to a certain extent, and I've said this before, but the aliens as explanation for the pyramids and Machu Picchu and stuff like this is a racist kind of idea that brown people in the past could not have created these things unless they had some kind of help from a higher power, right? Which is, it.

Eric (01:33:38.647)
But let's follow through and not to get too contemporary, but look at how, especially in the second term, every time that there's a problem to the point where you've got Marjorie Taylor Greene transparently calling it out, Trump releases something about Area 51 or UFOs or the Epstein files, which is a conspiracy theory. You remember the blood libel and Hollywood liberals, you know, drink the blood of children. It all ties together.

literally recognize is that this template of whether I believe this or not, I can throw this red meat at the QAnon folks and the QAnon shaman, right? The January 6 guy, and they'll dive into that and then I can ignore the fact that gas prices are high or the tariffs aren't working. That's literally the, I mean, that's the playbook. It's the similar, it's almost identical, this ancient alien stuff.

which ties into World Ice Theory and Ariosophy and the alien sperm that some of the Nazis believe, you know, the aliens have bequeathed to the Arians. And we watch what, you know, Dianetics and Fondonican and the, these history channel shows are playing on that. I'd love to see the voting patterns of the people who watch those shows in Britain and America and the Brexit and Trump vote. I bet you it's somewhat predictive.

Waitman Beorn (01:34:58.456)
who watch ancient aliens and yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:35:06.478)
Well, and there's, you know, we're going a bit off piece, but that's fine. There's also kind of, and I've written about this too, that there's a similar sort of parallel obsession with the classical world, you know, in the sort of fascist imaginary, right? That, you know, that everything was great in the Roman Empire and everything was great in the Greek, know, statues were white kind of thing and all of this, you know, and so all of these aesthetic, I mean, like the Spartans.

is that the Spartan is ideal society, right? You know, it's not the same as the occult, but it's a...

Eric (01:35:42.287)
It's literally a term. Yeah, I think it's Lovejoy uses this because we've been reading him for our romanticism project. He says one of the core elements of romanticism is aesthetic occasionalism. Ideas that combine what is to you kind of beautiful or elegant and must come from somewhere other than the material or the obviously causal, right? The occasionalist. And so this, comes out of the romantic era like ruminating on beauty and

things that were, which were often the classical, right, or the Gothic. But the point is there's something, there is an aesthetic appeal there to a world that must have been more beautiful and elegant and pure compared to the one we have today, whether it's biological, architectural, superior, yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:36:33.506)
Right. Well, I mean, we've covered so much ground and I guess that I could go on forever and ever, but we probably shouldn't. So maybe we can close by. I'll ask the question that I normally do, which is what is one book on the Holocaust that you would recommend to our listeners?

Eric (01:36:54.786)
Yeah, I know you asked me about this earlier and I didn't decide. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going give you two books which get or bridge from this project to my current project, which I'll mention briefly. The first, Alon Confino's World Without Jews, which I think does a really good job in parallel to kind of what I'm trying to do here of showing the cosmology that's really much, it's way beyond if we called it biopolitics, right? That

defines the the the jew for the for the nazis that jews represent so much in terms of time and space and and morality and purity or lack thereof art architecture communism capitalism they're this universal kind of metonym for so many things in modernity that they don't like

that's well beyond any kind of scientific or concrete political or economic resentments. And I think that's a really important book to understand the non-material, non-capitalistic, non-biopolitical reasons why they would entertain and eventually carry out something like the Holocaust. On the other hand, the problem with that kind of intellectual and cultural history,

is that it really doesn't take into account the universality of lot of these patterns that undergird not just the Holocaust, but Rwanda, Cambodia, Armenian genocide, what happened to the Native Americans, we've talked about that. And that's where I would recommend that your listeners read something like Dirk Moos's Problems of Genocide.

which does a good job. Again, it's a very elegant argument. There's some things lost, I think, you know, between the cracks, so to speak. But to come back to Ohlendorf, this idea of permanent security, that colonial powers and modern states can justify closing their borders, kicking out refugees. Ultimately, as Ohlendorf was trying to explain the Eastern Front, mass murder, idea that, we need security.

Eric (01:39:10.734)
And if we just pick and choose through liberal juridical procedures, well then people slip through the cracks or they'll get out of jail or the mothers will have more children and then they'll just do what their fathers would have done. And that's part of what colonial regimes and modern kind of racial states do all the time to justify repression and murder. This is not unique to anti-Semitism or the Nazis in the 1930s.

And that it's that book and intention with Konfinos that informs my current project, which is looking at global history of the Nazi Jewish question. So how similar were Nazi conceptions of the Jewish question as a problem to be solved to what the British or the French or the even the even Zionists or Jewish territorialists, the Japanese were saying, you know, to what degree was it for them a demographic problem, problem of

Waitman Beorn (01:39:57.998)
Hmm.

Eric (01:40:08.95)
security, borders, economics, and to what degree was it really informed by this kind of romantic, irrational, extremist, vampiric conception of the Jew? Obviously, it's both. But having done this and respecting that kind of work in Confino's book, I think we also have to look at the colonial and capitalist and international legal demographic, juridical underpinnings of that period.

and not just assume that there's some kind of mystical hatred of the Jews that just inevitably at some point was going to produce the Holocaust. Not that you believe that, but there's almost an element to that in some of the more.

Waitman Beorn (01:40:47.609)
Yeah.

Eric (01:40:53.804)
some of the stronger intellectual and cultural historical examinations of antisemitism.

Waitman Beorn (01:40:58.574)
Well, there's also, mean, this comes through with this book as well, I think, is the Nazis, I'm going to generalize here, but the Nazis didn't really invent much of anything. They just kind of riffed on other people's stuff, you know, and adopted things. And sometimes, I'm using scare quotes here, you sometimes improved on things. But, you know, they weren't exactly sort of, you know, creative

thinkers in the sense of creating brand new things out of full cloth. I mean, to the extent that any organization or civilization does that. I mean, as you point out in your book, even with the occult stuff here, they're not inventing this stuff. They're just kind of picking and choosing what they like out of it.

Eric (01:41:43.566)
There's nothing original. The far right had already appropriated the swastika for reason, the focused movement, Indo-Ary and the swastika, had already done that in the 1890s. It was on books. So there's very little that the Nazis did other than create a syncretic ideology and movement that could unite all these different forces, which is itself an impressive political achievement if you're a political scientist looking at what Hitler was able to do.

Waitman Beorn (01:41:52.152)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:41:56.088)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:42:11.689)
I mean in some ways

Eric (01:42:13.262)
wasn't original in the sense.

Waitman Beorn (01:42:15.736)
I mean, in some ways, what they did was they just they gave it the platform. I they gave it the stage. And I mean, these things were sort of esoteric, pun intended, I suppose, you know, before. But the Nazis make them mainstream or acceptable mainstream, which, again, is maybe a lesson for the president. But at this point, you know, thank you so much for sharing all of this with us to our listeners. Again, thank you much. This this one would be a little bit longer of a

of a podcast, but hey, since we're only doing it every two weeks now, you have plenty of time to listen to the whole thing, because I think it's fascinating. Once again, thanks so much for everybody that's listening and sending feedback and suggestions for potential topics and guests. And Eric, again, thanks so much for coming on and talking about your project.

Eric (01:43:04.345)
Thank you so much, Waven. I really appreciate the conversation. It's good having a fellow historian as someone leading the conversation. Yeah.