On January 14, 1941, the professional debunker Albert Stadthagen received a terse letter from Helmut Schreiber, the president of the Reich Magicians’ Association. According to Schreiber, Stadthagen and his Nazi associate, Police Commissar Carl Pelz, were undermining illusionists everywhere by publicly demonstrating the “scientific” basis of magic. Insisting that the debunkers’ performances contradicted “a point of view expressed at the highest level,” Schreiber advised Stadthagen and Pelz to “follow up with the Führer's adjutant, Herr SS-Gruppenführer [Julius] Schaub, should they have any doubt about what that meant.”Footnote 1 Within two weeks of receiving Schreiber's letter, Pelz was given a direct order from the Gestapo to cease his campaign of public “enlightenment.”Footnote 2 As a good National Socialist, Pelz turned to his most frequent sponsor, the Strength through Joy (Kraft durch Freude, KdF) division of the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeiterfront, DAF) under Robert Ley, the Nazi labor czar. The KdF, which found Pelz's and Stadthagen's presentations as entertaining as they were enlightening, lodged an official protest against the ban—no surprise, given that it employed debunkers to give performances in which they first “demonstrated” occult-based magic before then explaining the science behind the supernatural. The Gestapo official's response to the KdF's protest, however, was unambiguous: “I note that the Führer has personally ordered these measures against Pelz and that any lifting of, or change in, these measures are only possible with the agreement of the Führer… [I]n the meantime, Pelz must be stricken [from your list] as a potential speaker.”Footnote 3
On May 10, 1941, only fourteen weeks after Adolf Hitler's intervention on behalf of the Reich Magicians’ Association, Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess absconded with a plane and crash-landed in Scotland, intent on negotiating peace with Great Britain. Martin Bormann, who replaced Hess as the new head of the Party Chancellery, and Joseph Goebbels, the Reichspropaganda Chief, blamed Hess's wholly unauthorized, ultimately disastrous diplomatic effort on the Deputy Führer's well-known preoccupation with astrology. As a result, Hitler approved the so-called Hess Action, during which the Gestapo rounded up astrologers, clairvoyants, and occultists of every stripe. By June 1941, nearly every major player in the Third Reich—Hitler, Bormann, Goebbels, and Ley; Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and Reich Police; Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and Gestapo; and Alfred Rosenberg, the party's chief ideologist––was involved in a lively debate regarding the role of occultism and the need for “public enlightenment” or “education” (Volksaufklärung) in Nazi Germany. This episode, its prelude, and its aftermath—which I refer to in this article as the “Nazi Magicians’ Controversy”—hardly confirm the popular stereotype of occult-obsessed Nazis practicing the dark arts in pursuit of world domination.Footnote 4 But it does encourage us—after three decades of scholarship calling the “occult roots of Nazism” into question—to reevaluate the putatively hostile relationship between esotericism and the Third Reich.Footnote 5
The perception of an affinity between Nazism and the occult emerged only a few years after the founding of the National Socialist German Worker's Party (NSDAP) in January 1919. Already in the 1920s, prominent esotericists such as Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, one of the progenitors of the occult doctrine of ariosophy, and Rudolf von Sebottendorff, a leading astrologer and cofounder of the proto-Nazi Thule Society, argued that Nazi ideology and iconography, as well as the party apparatus, had emerged from the Wilhelmine occult milieu.Footnote 6 In the 1930s, Hermann Rauschning, the Nazi Gauleiter-turned-Hitler-critic, likewise attributed the success of National Socialism to the fact that “every German has one foot in Atlantis, where he seeks a better fatherland.”Footnote 7 The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung compared Hitler to a “truly mystic medicine man… a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity” who had managed to manipulate the “unconscious of 78 million Germans.”Footnote 8 In 1940, British journalist and esotericist Lewis Spence even published a book-length monograph, The Occult Causes of the Present War, which attributed the Nazi ideology of conquest to a range of German occult fantasies and pagan religious traditions.Footnote 9
Prominent German émigrés writing directly after World War II reinforced this widespread preoccupation with the occult roots of Nazism. In his seminal work of Weimar film criticism, From Caligari to Hitler (1947), Siegfried Kracauer located the cultural and intellectual preconditions for German fascism in the macabre, irrational, expressionist-fueled, “collective psychology” of the Weimar Republic.Footnote 10 That same year, Theodor Adorno, Kracauer's colleague at the Frankfurt School, published his Theses against Occultism, in which he suggested that the interwar renaissance of occultism—“the metaphysics of dunces”—had made the rise of Nazism possible.Footnote 11 In her 1952 bookend to Kracauer's study, The Haunted Screen, film critic Lotte Eisner blamed the rise of Nazism on “mysticism and magic, the dark forces to which Germans have always been more than willing to commit themselves… [on] the eternal attraction towards all that is obscure and undetermined… [on] a weird pleasure… in evoking horror.”Footnote 12 In the 1960s and 1970s, a younger generation of postwar historians again reinforced the idea of a unique relationship between Nazism and the occult: notably George Mosse and Fritz Stern, who traced the “intellectual origins of the Third Reich” back to völkisch-esoteric ideologies that had flourished in Germany and Austria during the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote 13 Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism, first published in 1985, is arguably the best book in this genre: it illustrates the significance, as well as the limits, of the influence of Austro-German occultism on National Socialism.Footnote 14
Following the end of the Cold War and in the wake of the gradual “unburdening” of German history in the 1990s, a revisionist trend has called into question both the purportedly reactionary character of the völkisch-esoteric vogue in German culture, as well as any special relationship between Nazism and occultism.Footnote 15 According to historians such as Corinna Treitel and Heather Wolffram, there was nothing inherently antimodern, protofascist, or illiberal about the late-nineteenth century renaissance of occultism. On the contrary, these scholars contend that practices that one might now condescendingly call esoteric or pseudoscientific were, in fact, highly modern, malleable, and intrinsic to the way educated Europeans responded to the onrush of modernity. Faced with the putative disenchantment of the world and a decline in organized religious devotion, Germans sought relief through alternative forms of knowledge, forms that occultists of the era referred to as “border science” (Grenzwissenschaft): astrology, clairvoyance, theosophy, ariosophy, and various kinds of spiritualist, parapsychological, and “natural healing” practices.Footnote 16 These historians not only play down the Nazis’ occult proclivities, but also argue that “the larger story of the Nazi regime and the occult movement is one of escalating hostility.”Footnote 17
A closer look at Nazi attitudes and policies toward the occult through the lens of the Nazi Magicians’ Controversy suggests a more complex picture.Footnote 18 In contrast to the experience of so many Communists, Jews, Gypsies, and “asocials” during the first six years of the Nazi regime, officials did not target occultists for arrest, detention, or murder. The outbreak of war did not lead to escalating persecution of occultism, as it did for the racial and ideological victims of the Third Reich. Rather, despite the pro-“enlightenment” and anti-“sectarian” efforts of many Nazi officials, the regime continued to show surprising tolerance of occult ideas and practices and to make use of such doctrines in its policies and propaganda. To be sure, the Nazis did not selectively tolerate and even appropriate occultism without reformulating border-scientific ideas and practices in terms they deemed ideologically acceptable—a process that entailed a gradual loss of independence for many occult practitioners, journals, and organizations, which were subject to increasing “coordination” (Gleichschaltung) by the Reich Literary Chamber (Reichsschriftumskammer), the Reich Office for Public Health (Reichsamt für Volksgesundheit), the SD, and the Gestapo. Yet, while many astrologers, diviners, and clairvoyants lost their ability to practice, publish, and organize themselves freely, “border scientists” who were willing to conform to the regime's requirements did find room for maneuver. Even some popular and commercial occultists—those whom the regime targeted most aggressively—managed to avoid surveillance or arrest by claiming to be professional magicians or, more disingenuously, professional debunkers. In short, the Nazi Magicians’ Controversy suggests the need for a significant reframing of how we view the role of occultism, border science, and public education (“enlightenment”) during the Third Reich.Footnote 19
Policing the Occult?
On March 25, 1933, one day after the Reichstag's passage of the Enabling Law securing the Nazi dictatorship, the prominent Weimar clairvoyant Erik Hanussen (born Hermann Steinschneider) was found dead in an alley, shot three times by unknown assailants. The perpetrators, we now know, were a group of Nazi storm troopers (Sturmabteilung, SA), and historians have viewed the murder as emblematic of the Third Reich's hostility toward occultism. The timing and circumstances of Hanussen's murder suggest a different reading, however. Prior to 1933, Hanussen had repeatedly invoked his “clairvoyant” and “astrological” abilities to reinforce Germans’ belief in the inevitability of the Third Reich—and the NSDAP had done nothing to intervene. High-ranking Nazis—the same ones who carried out the assassination—had been friendly with Hanussen for years before the seizure of power. Prominent SA leaders such as Karl Ernst and Graf Wolf von Helldorff maintained close personal and political ties to the occultist, attending parties on Hanussen's yacht, borrowing his car for SA events, and enlisting the magician's financial support to maintain their lavish lifestyles. Neither the Great Depression, nor accusations of charlatanry, nor the revelation that Hanussen was Jewish, had previously affected the magician's career or undermined his relationship with the NSDAP. His stage shows attracted capacity crowds and his popular magazines sold thousands of copies. Hanussen even opened a “Palace of Occultism” on Berlin's Lietzenburgerstrasse, where, during a séance held on the night of February 26, 1933, he supposedly “predicted” the Reichstag Fire of February 27 that provided Hitler with a justification for imposing martial law.Footnote 20 Karl Ernst himself had attended this séance.Footnote 21 Why, then, only four weeks later, was Hanussen dead, murdered by his erstwhile Nazi compatriots?
The answer appears to lie in the proximity of leading Nazis to—rather than their hostility toward—Hanussen and occultism. The debate over whether the Nazis had planned the Reichstag Fire, or merely exploited it for their own purposes, remains unsettled.Footnote 22 But regardless of whether the Nazis burned the building, the close relationship between Hanussen and the Berlin SA—as well as the presence of a high-ranking storm trooper at a séance where Hanussen had “predicted” the fire—suggest that their leaders believed that the relationship had become a legal and public relations nightmare. Two additional facts must also be taken into account: first, Ernst and other storm troopers owed Hanussen significant amounts of money, and, second, right- and left-wing rivals were parading the clairvoyant's Jewishness in the press, accusing “the Jew Hanussen” of being “Hitler's clairvoyant.”Footnote 23 Hanussen's murder consequently had less to do with National Socialist hostility toward the occult than with the Nazis’ historically intimate, if fraught and complicated, relationship with esotericism––a relationship that explains the NSDAP's proximity to Hanussen before the seizure of power, as well as its embarrassment about his connection to the party thereafter.
Indeed, during its first four years of rule, the Nazi regime showed little consistency in the way it policed esoteric groups or practitioners. In comparison to practices during the Weimar Republic, the Nazis increased the surveillance of occultism—just as they increased the surveillance of virtually everything else. In some cities and states, such as Berlin or Düsseldorf, bans against commercial occultism (e.g., palm reading for money) were also put in place. In these early years, however, the Gestapo and Reinhard Heydrich's SD, the party institutions most preoccupied with surveilling, policing, and rooting out “sectarian” tendencies, made little effort to arrest or interrogate occultists.Footnote 24 From an ideological perspective, moreover, Nazi authorities appeared less concerned with the erroneous nature of esoteric doctrines or “border-scientific” practices than with occultists’ adherence to worldviews that “espoused an independent belief system” while “obstinately maintain[ing] their separation from the state. In the eyes of Nazi officials, this stubbornness turned sects into a distinct barrier to the creation of a united Volksgemeinschaft.”Footnote 25
The record of Nazi policies toward the quintessential border-scientific practice of astrology, for example, was remarkably desultory during the first four years of the regime. Before 1937, various states did pass individual laws reinforcing Weimar-era rules against fraud and commercial astrology, but most official astrological organizations and journals did not experience persecution or interdiction until 1938.Footnote 26 In 1935, Hitler even sent a warm personal telegram to Hubert Korsch, the president of the German Astrological Central Office (Astrologische Zentralstelle), congratulating him on a successful congress of astrologers that had recently taken place in Wernigerode.Footnote 27 The theosophically-affiliated Esoteric Study Society (Esoterische Studiengesellschaft) in Leipzig was allowed to continue promoting lectures on “characterology, chirology, graphology, and occultism”—as long as the group indicated its “solidarity with Hitler's antimaterialism, on the one hand, and [his] aggressive nationalism, on the other.”Footnote 28 Many Freemasons and anthroposophists even joined the party with little trouble, following superficial reviews of their ideological loyalties.Footnote 29 Provided that occult groups or individuals were deemed sufficiently supportive of the Nazi “racial community” (Volksgemeinschaft)—i.e., non-“sectarian”—the Third Reich appeared reluctant to carry out police actions against them.
In addition to claiming Nazi ideological affinities and non-sectarian tendencies, occult groups had already learned another effective way to avoid surveillance and evade legal restrictions against “fraud” before 1933: by pitching their work as “scientific occultism.”Footnote 30 This strategy had worked in the Weimar Republic, not because authorities believed in the authenticity of occultism, but because they were generally tolerant of diverse beliefs. Even highly skeptical legal experts felt a juridical obligation to distinguish between charlatans seeking commercial gain and those acting in “good faith,” no matter how questionable their claims.Footnote 31 Given the Nazis’ general disdain for such legal niceties, the Third Reich's similarly nuanced attitude toward occult groups claiming “scientific” practices is curious—until one takes into account the fact that many Nazi leaders, including Himmler and Hess, trafficked themselves in a range of esoteric beliefs, from astrology and pendulum dowsing to natural healing.Footnote 32 The dubious scientific provenance of anthroposophy did little to dissuade numerous National Socialists from appropriating its border-scientific, “biodynamic,” agricultural teachings—even after the parent organization was banned in 1935.Footnote 33 Hitler himself employed diviners to check the Reich Chancellery for cancer-causing “death rays.”Footnote 34 As one professional debunker lamented in the pages of the Völkischer Beobachter in 1937, the Third Reich had permitted “the proclivity for superstition and mysticism” to be “systematically fomented,” leaving “nearly 80 percent of Germans… still in some form susceptible to this nonsense.”Footnote 35
Because the Third Reich showed little interest in combating occultism, a number of anti-occultists already active during the Weimar era took it upon themselves to weed out the “vampire of superstition.”Footnote 36 At the forefront of these efforts was the so-called Ludendorff circle, loosely centered around former Hitler putschist Field Marshall Erich von Ludendorff and his second wife, Mathilde. A sometime Nazi fellow traveler, sometime critic of Hitler, Mathilde Ludendorff was a trained psychiatrist who had begun her debunking career by dissecting the work of the famous Munich parapsychologist Albert von Schrenck-Notzing in the mid-1920s.Footnote 37 Allied with respected Weimar-era skeptics like Pelz, Stadthagen, and Albert Hellwig, editor of the Journal for Critical Occultism (Zeitschrift für kritischen Okkultismus), the Ludendorffs employed their eponymous publishing house to wage an unrelenting campaign against the evils of occultism.Footnote 38 Ludendorff publications attacked respected “scientific” occultists such as Hans Driesch and H.H. Kritzinger, who would later work for the Third Reich gathering wartime intelligence and producing propaganda, and even criticized the Nazis for associating with “the Jew Hanussen… Hitler's clairvoyant,” whose charlatanry had “already been exposed” by their colleague Pelz.Footnote 39
Upon closer inspection, however, the Ludendorff circle's motivations for combating occultism reflected some of the same esoteric predispositions and epistemological contradictions seen within the Nazi Party itself. In a series of books and pamphlets with picturesque titles such as Christian Terror Against German Women (Christliche Grausamkeit an deutsche Frauen, 1934), The Jewish Power: Its Essence and End (Die Judenmacht, ihr Wesen und Ende, 1939), The Creeping Poison: Occultism, Its Teachings, World View, and the Means to Combat It (Das schleichende Gift. Der Okkultismus, seine Lehre, Weltanschauung und Bekämpfung, 1935), as well as Pelz's Vampire of Superstition (Vampyre des Aberglaubens, published under the pseudonym Fred Karsten in 1935), the Ludendorff circle argued that an unholy triumvirate of Jews, Christians, and Freemasons had infiltrated the upper echelons of European state and society in an effort to destroy Ur-Germanic race and religion. The circle's participants were, in other words, partial to their own völkisch “Germanic religion” (deutsche Gotterkenntnis) based on esoteric racial science, fanatical antisemitism, and pagan mythology.Footnote 40
The Ludendorff circle nevertheless expressed the important caveat—as did many Nazis—that “there are sensible people who, in some cases, are capable of manifesting clairvoyance or telepathy, not to mention other mysterious powers.” According to Pelz, professional debunkers did not oppose scientific occultism: they merely sought to root out the “vampire of superstition” propagated by charlatans—religious sectarians, foreigners, and Jews like Hanussen—who attempted to “profit from their abilities” by exploiting the German people.Footnote 41 In light of these fine epistemological distinctions, Heydrich's SD found it difficult to determine whether the Ludendorff circle was occultist or anti-occultist in nature, observing in June 1939 that “reports contradict each other insofar as [one of Ludendorff's closest collaborators] is portrayed, on the one hand, as an occultist and, on the other, as a fanatical Ludendorff supporter.”Footnote 42
Despite their crypto-esoteric agenda, Pelz and his colleagues continued to view themselves as pro-enlightenment crusaders in an existential struggle for the soul of the German people.Footnote 43 In February 1937, frustrated by the dearth of anti-occultist policies four years after the Nazi seizure of power, Pelz submitted a long report on the persistence of occultism that came to the attention of Heydrich and the chief of the criminal police (Kripo), Arthur Nebe.Footnote 44 Impressed by Pelz's detailed analysis, Heydrich instructed Nebe in March 1937 to come up with a set of parameters for combating occultism across the entire Reich and to forward his recommendations to Himmler.Footnote 45 It is interesting that Nebe's instructions were careful to differentiate between “the investigation of all the occurrences that are inaccessible through natural human perception (scientific occultism)” and “every activity that rests on and exploits superstition.” Scientific occultism, Nebe emphasized, “remains beyond our purview from a policing standpoint… By contrast, unscientific and pseudoscientific occultism requires the sharpest police oversight and countermeasures, especially insofar as it is done for commercial purposes.”Footnote 46 The important distinction Nebe made here between putatively “scientific occultism” and the commercial exploitation of “unscientific” occultism is essential to understanding the seeming contradictions in Nazi attitudes toward “border science” and the policing of occultism in general.
This episode is crucial for two additional reasons. First, it suggests that the SD's and Gestapo's efforts to police occultism in the spring of 1937 were generated not by Himmler or Heydrich, but rather from below—apparently by Pelz himself. In the polycratic Nazi state, it was not unusual for the Gestapo to implement policy based on unsolicited reports from lower-level functionaries or civilian informers.Footnote 47 Given recent scholarly emphasis on the Third Reich's purported hostility to occultism, the fact that the Gestapo's coordinated efforts to police occultism first emerged from Pelz's report is nonetheless revealing. Second, this episode provides insight into the highly differentiated responses to occultism by individual leaders within the Nazi police apparatus. It was no coincidence that Heydrich used the receipt of an unsolicited report from Pelz, a relatively obscure police commissar, to initiate a coordinated campaign against commercial occultism. As chief of the SD, Heydrich was the Third Reich's most ardent opponent of “sectarian” tendencies.Footnote 48 Conversely, it was not likely a coincidence that, more than four years into Nazi rule, Himmler had yet to charge Heydrich with developing a coordinated campaign against occultism—or that it took a number of weeks, and a second letter from Nebe, for Himmler to respond to Pelz's report. Himmler was deeply invested in occult and border-scientific thinking and saw no incompatibility between actively policing commercial occultism and selectively appropriating “scientific occultism,” whether for developing military technology, gathering intelligence, or making political prognoses.Footnote 49 These differences within the upper echelons of the SS and police administration might explain why Nebe, as head of the Kripo, proposed a middle way that preserved a space for “scientific occultism” while moving against “every activity that rests on and exploits superstition.”
Responding to Pelz's report and Nebe's recommendations, the SD and the Gestapo began a campaign of surveillance and repression of “sectarian” tendencies in the spring of 1937.Footnote 50 But practicing “occultism” did not figure prominently in the list of suspect activities, which included engaging in “egocentrism,” communist agitation, and internationalism; the failure to give the Hitler salute or accept absorption into Nazi party associations; a refusal to do military service or work in military industries; the promotion of faith healing and “ignorance”; support for homosexuality and the denial of Nazi racial doctrine.Footnote 51 Still, many prominent occult journals and organizations were banned by the Gestapo between the spring of 1937 and the fall of 1938, based on some combination of these reasons.Footnote 52 The anti-occultist efforts of the SD and the Gestapo were later joined by those of the Reich Office for Public Health under Bernhard Hörmann, who used his journal, “The People's Health Watch” (Die Volksgesundheitswacht), to wage a campaign of anti-occult (pro-“enlightenment”) public education.Footnote 53 Possibly inspired by Hörmann's efforts, the SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps, ran its own short-lived series of anti-occultist articles under the headline: “Danger Zone Superstition.”Footnote 54
As part of this “public education” campaign, Hörmann also encouraged professional debunkers—most notably Pelz and Stadthagen—to perform their anti-occultist “demonstrations” before large audiences of soldiers and civilians. Pelz later claimed that he had performed 105 times for the Wehrmacht alone between 1937 and 1940.Footnote 55 It was hardly a coincidence that he and Stadthagen were employed most frequently by the entertainment section of the KdF. At the same time that they were “enlightening” Germans about the scientific basis of magic, they were entertaining soldiers and civilians with tricks gleaned from the occult.Footnote 56 Indeed, the fact that the Reich Office for Public Health and the German Labor Front took the lead in commissioning pro-“enlightenment” demonstrations did nothing to dampen Ley's personal interest in mysticism or Hörmann's sponsorship of experiments by astrologers, cosmobiologists, and anthroposophists.Footnote 57 The new campaign against occultism also failed to dissuade Goebbels's “Expert for Cosmobiology” in the Reich Literary Chamber, Werner Kittler, from eagerly recruiting dozens of famous astrologers, dowsers, and cosmobiologists to study the potential benefits of various border sciences.Footnote 58 Even the SD and the Gestapo commissioned dozens of reports and peer reviews aimed at differentiating between “scientific occultism” and charlatanry. Himmler himself advocated this policy in a January 1939 letter to Heydrich: “As you know, I do not consider astrology to be pure humbug, but believe that there is something behind it… We must do much more to restrict [charlatans] so that we only allow specific communities of research (bestimmte Forschungsgemeinschaften) in this sphere.”Footnote 59
Hence, nearly every Reich office charged with combating occultism—Hörmann's Reich Office for Public Health, Goebbels’s Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda), Himmler's SS, and even Heydrich's SD and Gestapo—appeared to take the same approach, pronouncing the evils of “sectarian” tendencies and occultist charlatanry while simultaneously permitting, and in some cases sponsoring, “scientific occultism.”Footnote 60 Needless to say, the Third Reich's remarkably nuanced approach to policing occultism was enormously frustrating to professional debunkers such as Pelz, who failed to understand why Reich authorities did not move more aggressively against “occult teaching that promoted popular stupidity.”Footnote 61 Given their naïveté regarding the esoteric proclivities of Nazi leaders themselves—or, for that matter, those of the Ludendorff circle—one should hardly be surprised that Pelz and his colleagues failed to foresee that their pro-“enlightenment” demonstrations would bring them into the crosshairs of the most unapologetic of commercial occultists: professional magicians.
The Limits of Enlightenment
In February 1940, barely five months into the war, Helmut Schreiber, the president of the Magic Circle (Magischer Zirkel), sent a frustrated letter to Alfred Rosenberg's Party Education Office (Amt Rosenberg): by revealing the tricks of the trade, Pelz's and Stadthagen's debunking activities were undermining the livelihood of magicians everywhere—and, no doubt, drawing away their audiences through state-subsidized “demonstrations.” These performances had to stop, Schreiber argued. After some debate, the KdF and the Amt Rosenberg, the Reich offices most sympathetic to Stadthagen and Pelz, helped craft a modus vivendi with the Reich Artists’ Union (Reichsfachschaft Artistik), which represented a number of occult performers, including the Magic Circle. The Union agreed to allow Pelz and Stadthagen to “perform,” provided that they focused on debunking only occult phenomena and did not reveal specific “magic” tricks. Pelz and Stadthagen were dubious about the implications of this modus vivendi. For them, the line between “magic” and “occultism” was porous at best. But they accepted it, based on a mutual “agreement to clear up bilaterally and collegially any questions in borderline or doubtful cases.”Footnote 62
Only three months later in May 1940, the Reich Artists’ Union nevertheless appealed to the same authorities, this time addressing the Reich Press Office and the Reich Film Chamber, as well as Hitler's Personal Chancellery under Philipp Bouhler. At issue was Stadthagen's bread-and-butter presentation, “Apparent Miracles of Occultism,” which revealed various secrets behind clairvoyance, telepathy, and other traditional occult practices—much of which apparently overlapped with the province of “magic.”Footnote 63 Finding little sympathy from his longtime Nazi sponsors, Stadthagen promised to modify his act accordingly. But on January 14, 1941, the Magic Circle once again renewed its complaints, first against Pelz, then against Stadthagen, for revealing “card tricks.” This, it claimed, contradicted the May 1940 agreement reached among the president of the Reich Theater Chamber, the Reich Press Chief, the president of the Reich Film Chamber and, ostensibly, Hitler himself.Footnote 64 Schreiber's January 1941 complaint led to the Gestapo ban on Pelz's performances described above, followed on February 20 by an acrid letter to Stadthagen threatening a similar ban if he did not modify his act.Footnote 65
Stadthagen responded to the Magic Circle on March 16 in an extensive letter that he copied to Hörmann. Proclaiming his status as one of the “oldest pioneers of the struggle against occultism,” who had fought for decades “against attempts to deceive the public with supernatural activities,” Stadthagen insisted that his “scientific conscience… could never stand by patiently and watch as frivolous conjurers pretend that their tricks are scientific achievements.” It was precisely this kind of attempt to pass off a well-known card trick as “proof of occult phenomena,” he declared, that exploited “the uncertainty and gullibility of our fellow human beings.”Footnote 66 He continued:
Since an immense number of our comrades have been brought over to superstitious beliefs through fraudulent maneuvers and still hold for real today what in truth is only a lie and deception, [it is] in the interest of the people that supporters of enlightenment must intervene in order to dispel this nonsense. For superstition is ultimately the worldview of the intellectually inferior—of fatalists. No state could tolerate this state of affairs, least of all our Third Reich!Footnote 67
After twenty years of battling “occult swindlers, Jewish masons, and Jesuits,” and of withstanding the attacks of “the Jewish press mob… and other degenerates,” Stadthagen found it infuriating that his work was now being threatened by “charlatans and ‘supersensory’-oriented Professional magicians” who “have not only dabbled in numerous, supposedly ‘occult matters’ but even endorse them.”Footnote 68
Although Stadthagen directed most of his bile toward Schreiber, he was obviously frustrated with the role played by Hitler's Chancellery and the Gestapo in fomenting the controversy. The Magic Circle “could never have obtained [the ban],” Stadthagen admonished Schreiber, “if the authorities… had [had] any inkling… that the orders that are supposed to protect the magician's craft would be employed against popular enlightenment, which is viewed by the Third Reich as unconditionally necessary in an ideological sense and has been ordered and sponsored by the highest authorities.”Footnote 69 The Gestapo did, of course, recognize that the ban prevented enlightenment presentations in favor of commercial occultism (“magic”)—but did nothing to reverse it. Implicitly recognizing the firm position taken by the Reich Magicians’ Association, Stadthagen returned to the terms of the 1940 modus vivendi, insisting that his “enlightenment work [was] directed and has always been directed expressly against superstition and occult nonsense,” and that it did not undermine artistic “‘works of magical art’” or deprive “artists of their opportunities for subsistence.” Stadthagen attempted to intimidate Schreiber in closing, reminding him that Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry had approved his and Pelz's anti-occultist demonstrations every year since 1935, and that they had since worked almost exclusively for Ley's KdF.Footnote 70
Taken in isolation, the Nazi Magicians’ Controversy might appear to be typical of the many conflicts over competency in the polycratic Third Reich. The lack of clear policies and competing party-state bureaucracies meant that apparently minor issues—such as whether to allow horse racing during the war—could escalate into larger controversies requiring Hitler's direct intervention.Footnote 71 Stadthagen recognized that he was complicit in this process of what Ian Kershaw has called “working toward the Führer.”Footnote 72 Moreover, he admitted to Hörmann that he had been reticent to bring in higher authorities to adjudicate a dispute that the relevant parties should have been able to resolve collegially by themselves. Since Schreiber had brought in the big guns, however—involving both Hitler and the Gestapo (“This is how far it has gone!”)—Stadthagen felt he had no choice but to enlist his own high-ranking allies.Footnote 73
Stadthagen, like Pelz, was keenly aware of the larger ideological and epistemological context in which this seemingly minor dispute over the practice of “magic” was taking place. The issue was not about revealing magic tricks, Stadthagen argued, but rather a bellwether to gauge the Third Reich's seriousness about eliminating occultism eight years after the seizure of power. The ban not only prevented Germany's most talented debunkers from combating occultism, but also elevated a group of (in Stadthagen's view) known charlatans “into a position of silencing [pro-enlightenment] opponents in such an uncomfortable fashion. And this in the twentieth century!”Footnote 74
Stadthagen's admonition regarding the importance of free speech and scientific inquiry might seem odd coming from a Nazi fellow traveler during the most brutal war in history. But Stadthagen was genuinely surprised that the Reich's highest authorities would accede to a backroom request for police repression in favor of commercial occultism. As Stadthagen wrote Hörmann, his unwillingness to accept this state of affairs had nothing to do with a lack of “party discipline.” After working in the interest of enlightenment for thirty years, how could he or Pelz stomach the Magic Circle's exploitation of ignorant Reich authorities (including Hitler's Chancellery!) to obtain “well-meaning protective bans” that were misused for the purposes of “violating the truth and maintaining the people in a state of superstition”?Footnote 75 Hörmann was supportive but realistic: there were limits to what he could do to reverse a Gestapo ban, especially one ordered personally by Hitler. Hörmann's advice was thus to “direct his enlightenment work exclusively against superstition and occultism” so that there could “be no question of unveiling artistic achievements and magic tricks.”Footnote 76 Frustrated by this unhelpful response, Stadthagen decided to accept Schreiber's challenge to telephone Hitler directly––or at least Hitler's personal adjutant, Julius Schaub.Footnote 77 Stadthagen followed up on February 22 with a long letter to Dr. Brümmel in Hitler's Chancellery, in which he indicated frustration that his “enlightenment work [was] being hindered by a small cabal of artists practiced in deception.” Referring to Pelz's fate, Stadthagen wanted an assurance from Hitler's Chancellery that the Gestapo would not move against him.Footnote 78
Pelz, for his part, was fighting for his professional life. In early February 1941, he sent a detailed letter and curriculum vitae to the KdF to enlist its help in lifting the ban. Having applied to join the NSDAP in 1931 and having worked with the Gestapo against “occult swindlers” since the middle years of the Third Reich, Pelz was outraged that his former Gestapo colleagues would now enforce such a ban.Footnote 79 The Gestapo was apparently unmoved: the day after the Labor Front received Pelz's letter, the police sent a response to the DAF reiterating “that the Führer had personally ordered the measures affecting Pelz and that lifting or modifying these measures would therefore be possible only with the Führer's approval.”Footnote 80 That the ban had originated specifically with Hitler and that the Gestapo had Pelz under surveillance were clearly matters of some consternation in the offices of the KdF.Footnote 81 Its officials nonetheless composed a letter on Pelz's behalf, noting that “for years, we have organized enlightenment lectures on occultism, spiritism, clairvoyance, telepathy, and other subjects precisely in order to satisfy the wishes of the Amt Rosenberg and the Reich Office for Public Health; the demand for these lectures was always exceptionally great, though only very few lecturers were available for this purpose.”Footnote 82
The key word for understanding the KdF's willingness to lobby the Gestapo is demand. Pelz, the organization emphasized, was an outstanding speaker and performer.Footnote 83 He had developed, for dramatic effect, a technique of pretending to be a clairvoyant, telepath, or card reader during the highly entertaining first half of his performance, only revealing the mechanics behind his tricks in the second half; it was then that he took a more sober, scientific tone. Pelz himself conceded that one could not reveal these basic methods without first demonstrating how magicians carried out “a whole row of singular tricks and methods” that were, after all, “first discovered and utilized by occult and spiritualist swindlers.”Footnote 84 “Obviously we support the view,” the KdF added in Pelz's defense, “that there is nothing objectionable to the entertaining art of magic employed by magicians, but the deceptive use of a few tricks in the sphere of occultism, etc. must be combated with all severity.”Footnote 85 The KdF therefore requested “that the ban against Carl Pelz be lifted as soon as possible”—before his “truly important enlightenment work is undermined… We would consider it appropriate if Reichsleiter Party Comrade Rosenberg were to request a change in the ban from the Führer directly.”Footnote 86 Rosenberg apparently did intervene with Hitler, but the ban nevertheless remained in effect.Footnote 87
Is this surprising? As suggested earlier, Nazi interest in occultism was nothing new. The NSDAP had emerged, after all, from the occult-oriented Thule Society.Footnote 88 Himmler and Hess both practiced astrology and promoted border-scientific doctrines such as cosmobiology, pendulum dowsing, and biodynamic agriculture throughout their careers. Before 1933, Himmler, Walther Darré (the future Reich Agriculture Minister), and Rudolf Höss (the future commandant of Auschwitz) had studied ariosophy and anthroposophy, belonged to the occult-inspired Artamanen movement, which sought to (re)create a racially-pure, peasant-based Germanic utopia in eastern Europe, and promoted a mystical blood-and-soil paganism.Footnote 89 In 1932, Goebbels even gave the Weimar-era horror writer and esotericist Hanns Heinz Ewers the responsibility of composing the official biography—and speaking at the grave—of the Nazi martyr Horst Wessel.Footnote 90 Meanwhile, Hitler apparently read and annotated at some point before 1933 the parapsychologist Ernst Schertel's book, Magic: History, Theory, and Practice, hoping to glean insights into manipulating public opinion.Footnote 91
How was it possible for so many Nazi leaders to be attracted to occult and border-scientific doctrines and, at the same time, declare their hostility to occultism? The answer lies in the fine-grained, politically-motivated distinction between popular (i.e., commercial) and scientific occultism articulated by Nebe (discussed earlier). As Schertel's colleague, the parapsychologist Walther Kroner, explained in a 1938 treatise, The Rebirth of the Magical, “magic and occult phenomena” were actually scientific phenomena that conventional science were unable to detect. It mattered little whether one called people who studied such phenomena “occultists, parapsychologists, or metabiologists”: they were all working to transcend “materialist-induced confusion and ignorance regarding all things magical.”Footnote 92 In order to render the scientific study of “magic and occult phenomena” less contentious, Kroner proposed to “dispense with the term occultism and replace it with the word ‘magical.’” That would move the field of border science (“scientific occultism”) past the idea of studying something “‘dark’ or ‘hidden’ and toward a ‘lucid’ science of light, whose rays will illuminate in new ways a worldwide space from the lowest physical to the highest intellectual and cosmic events.”Footnote 93 Thus, in attempting to distinguish between occult charlatanry and the “scientific” study of “magic and occult phenomena,” the Gestapo, the Propaganda Ministry, and the Reich Office for Public Health were merely being consistent with positions taken by leading advocates of border science.
This interest in investigating and deploying the powers of “magic” along border-scientific lines only increased with the outbreak of war.Footnote 94 Beginning in September 1939, Himmler, Hess, and Goebbels recruited dozens of “scientific” occultists to assist with obtaining military intelligence and producing domestic and foreign propaganda.Footnote 95 As an antidote to “Jewish” physics, Hitler and Himmler sponsored Hans Hörbiger's “World Ice Theory,” which postulated—based on “visions” Hörbiger had had of prehistoric frost giants and of blocks of ice floating in space—that all human history, mythology, geology, and physics could be explained by moons of ice hitting the Earth.Footnote 96 At the same time, a number of Reich officials, including Himmler, Hess, and Darré, enthusiastically advocated Rudolf Steiner's biodynamic approach to agriculture, which was based on a belief that nature could be manipulated by studying the planets’ “cosmic” rhythms.Footnote 97 These border-scientific doctrines flourished after 1939, receiving official government sponsorship in ways that would have been impossible in the “materialist” Weimar Republic—or even during the first six years of the Third Reich. Yet, at the same time, Hitler and the Gestapo literally forbade a few leading debunkers to present evidence against the reality of “magic and occult phenomena.” For Pelz, Stadthagen, and other Weimar-era skeptics, the first twenty months of World War II seemed to confirm the regime's indifference toward—and perhaps even open enthusiasm for—occultism.
The Hess Action
On May 10, 1941, Rudolf Hess climbed into a small plane and crash-landed in Scotland, intent on brokering peace between the Third Reich and the British Empire. When it became clear to the British that Hess was not acting in any official capacity, he was imprisoned and interrogated, beginning a forty-six-year prison sentence that ended with his suicide in 1987. Hitler was livid, deemed Hess a traitor, and allegedly ordered him shot on sight. For propaganda reasons, Goebbels was all too happy to portray Hess as a madman.Footnote 98 But Martin Bormann and Alfred Rosenberg, who were preoccupied with the persistence of occultism in the Third Reich and repeatedly frustrated by the Deputy Führer's unwillingness to combat it before absconding to Scotland, had a more ambitious agenda. Only three days before Hess's flight, Bormann had sent a circular to Nazi officials in which he lamented the persistence of occultism eight years after Hitler's seizure of power and nearly two years into an existential war for Nazi ideological and territorial hegemony:
Confessional and occult circles have recently attempted to spread confusion and insecurity among the people through the conscious dissemination of miracle stories, prophecies, astrological predictions of the future… Hell and the devil, purgatory and apocalypse are systematically portrayed in all their horrors to the population; fabulous visions and miracle cures are disseminated, and religious prophecies regarding the supposed political and military future spread across the population through whisper campaigns. The personal use of holy pictures, medallions, and amulets to ward off dive bombers spreads as if it were a religious chain letter… Soothsayers, clairvoyants, palm readers, and tarot practitioners are exploiting the understandable tension… These events show how important ideological education and enlightenment is, especially during the war.Footnote 99
This circular confirmed Pelz's and Stadthagen's impression, shared by Bormann and Rosenberg, that the first twenty months of World War II had been a remarkably successful time for astrologers, clairvoyants, magicians, tarot readers, and other occult practitioners.
Bormann was concerned about more than just the persistence of occult and magical thinking among the German population at large: “The National Socialist ideology,” his circular continued, “is built upon the scientific knowledge of racial, social, and natural laws.” As such, it “must not allow such intentional attempts at poisoning by our enemies… You have to be careful that no party members, especially in rural areas, take part in the propagation of political fortune-telling, confessional belief in miracles, superstitions, or occult miracle making.” Like Stadthagen and Pelz, Bormann continued to perceive an underlying occult bent within the ranks of the Nazi Party. “The party,” he concluded, “can and will not tolerate irresponsible elements attempting to influence, using medieval methods, the trust of the people in their political leadership.”Footnote 100
It was no coincidence that Hess's flight took place only three days after Bormann's circular. Both Nazi leaders were reacting to plans for the impending German invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa. Hess's chief motivation in flying to Great Britain was to secure peace with the United Kingdom prior to Barbarossa, which, the ostensibly “mad” Deputy Führer correctly worried, would prove disastrous.Footnote 101 The obsequious Bormann refused, by contrast, to question Hitler's military strategy, which included secret orders to murder, in contravention of international law, thousands of Bolshevik “commissars,” partisans, and “Jews in party and state employment.” In the Third Reich's final reckoning with “Judeo-Bolshevism,” Bormann saw a political opportunity—perhaps even the ideological necessity—of moving once and for all against occultism.Footnote 102 As chief of the SD and Gestapo, Reinhard Heydrich shared Bormann's and Rosenberg's antipathies to freemasonry and other “cosmopolitan” sects, which he linked directly to “Judeo-Bolshevism.” This was why Heydrich similarly envisioned Barbarossa as an opportunity (one more easily justified by Hess's “occult”-inspired flight) to unleash the full fury of the Nazi police state against “sectarian” tendencies—regardless of the fine distinctions Hess, Nebe, Himmler, Hörmann, and others wished to make between “scientific” and popular occultism.Footnote 103
On June 4, 1941, barely three weeks after Hess's flight and two weeks before the invasion of the Soviet Union, Heydrich notified all Gauleiter and regional governors that the Third Reich was about to embark on a coordinated “action against occult teachings and so-called ‘occult sciences.’”Footnote 104 The detailed directive, which many contemporaries referred to as the “Hess Action,” was issued to all state, criminal, and secret police across the Reich. Heydrich explained that it was essential—in light of the pending existential struggle against the Soviet Union—that the Third Reich preserve the people's mental and physical powers. Any teachings pretending that humanity's fate was “dependent on magical, esoteric forces” consequently had to be combated with the “sharpest immediate measures.” Echoing Bormann's circular, Heydrich further indicated that the measures would be directed against “astrologers, occultists, spiritualists, supporters of occult radiation theories, soothsayers of any kind, faith healers, supporters of Christian Science, and supporters of anthroposophy, theosophy, and ariosophy.”Footnote 105 As a follow-up, Heydrich urged his subordinate Hinrich Lohse to encourage Gestapo and SD speakers to promote “suitable enlightenment and propaganda” measures that might combat the influence of the occult—a sign that the regime's attitude toward professional debunkers might be changing.Footnote 106
The “Hess Action” was certainly more systematic than any previous measures taken by the Third Reich against sectarian thinkers or esoteric groups. Hundreds of occultists were detained or arrested; thousands of books and esoteric paraphernalia were confiscated. Many individuals or groups that had managed to survive earlier campaigns against popular occultism—including the German Society for Scientific Occultism (Deutsche Gesellschaft für wissenschaftlichen Okkultismus)—were now outlawed.Footnote 107 Yet, the relative moderation of Heydrich's action, which paled in comparison to measures taken against communists and socialists, Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, as well as the mentally and physically disabled, continued to reflect the Third Reich's underlying ambivalence toward policing the occult.
As Rosenberg complained to Bormann shortly before the “Hess Action,” the widespread investment of Germans in the occult was a function of “rather complicated ideological questions” that “could not be resolved simply by sending out a circular.”Footnote 108 He observed, further, that the “success of National Socialism and the unique appearance of the Führer have no precedent in German history… The consequence of these historic and unprecedented political events is that many Germans, because of their proclivity for the romantic and the mystical, indeed the occult, came to understand the success of National Socialism in this way.”Footnote 109 Soon after he had come to power, many Germans “stamped the Führer as a messiah and attributed the great results of the struggle to otherworldly powers,” Rosenberg added: “Astrologists made a special effort to exploit this ideological situation for themselves and obscured the achievements and goals of National Socialism with prophecies and soothsaying of the most primitive kind.”Footnote 110
Instead of taking the war as an opportunity to settle old scores with occultism, Rosenberg continued, party officials had lifted bans on occult publications and instituted bans on debunkers. Reich officials were particularly lax toward astrologers, the quintessential “border scientists,” whom Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry refused to attack with any degree of consistency (this was not altogether surprising, given that Goebbels himself was employing professional astrologers to draft anti-Allied propaganda).Footnote 111 Such backsliding by the party on occultism and superstition was nothing new, Rosenberg concluded. Hess had already written Rosenberg in 1937, when the SD and Gestapo issued the first concrete measures against astrology, suggesting that “scientific astrology” be exempted from such measures. Little had changed in the intervening years, Rosenberg noted, and he sent to Bormann an enclosure indicating that a large cohort of Nazis “supported astrology and occultism.” It was bad enough that no one seemed interested in disciplining such party members when Hess was still Deputy Führer. But what, he wanted to know, accounted for persisting tolerance toward occultism nearly three weeks after Hess's flight?Footnote 112
Chiefly to blame for the lack of decisive action, according to Rosenberg, were Philipp Bouhler, the head of Hitler's Personal Chancellery, and Goebbels himself, who seemed disinterested in carrying out Bormann's directives against superstition and occultism. This proclivity was made worse, Rosenberg claimed, by a precedent set by the Party Chancellery under Hess, namely the deciding of ideological questions that should have been left to the Führer. Now that Hess was gone, it was Bormann's duty to reverse this trend.Footnote 113 Rosenberg concluded by offering Bormann a policy paper, which, he hoped, the latter would deliver to Hitler (there is no evidence that Bormann ever did). In this paper, Rosenberg conceded that there was a distinction between scientific and popular occultism, but noted that the regime had not moved effectively against the latter. “[E]very human being should investigate whatever his research requires,” Rosenberg opined, but “the propagandistic action of astrologers and occultists with their tens of thousands of [astrological] calendars… hinders the ability of men to make decisions and makes them dependent on uncontrollable influences.” If Bouhler and his associates agreed with this principle, Rosenberg asked, why, then, had their first act as censors of occult activity been to lift the ban on “trashy astrological brochures.”Footnote 114
Bormann was usually dismissive of Rosenberg, whose influence had waned by May 1941, but he was equally frustrated by his Nazi colleagues’ indifference to matters of popular occultism, something he indicated in a letter to Goebbels several weeks after the Hess Action. Hess's flight, he claimed, had inspired Hitler to combat the occult with the “sharpest means” possible. Heydrich, Bormann continued, had done his part to fulfill the Führer's intentions with the “Hess Action,” but “police measures can only be decisive if a practical policy of enlightenment is simultaneously employed to prevent, in the future, wide circles of the population from becoming confused by occult teachings.” “It has been reported to me,” Bormann added, “that you have indicated the need to pull back from this kind of enlightenment.”Footnote 115 Bormann cited here Bernard Hörmann's anti-occultist Volksgesundheitswacht, which Goebbels had suspended in Autumn 1939, ostensibly because of paper shortages. In closing, Bormann urged Goebbels to renew the publication of this magazine—“perhaps with greater distribution across the widest possible circles of the population” so that it could have an even greater “enlightening effect.”Footnote 116
Goebbels’s response, four days later, typified the more nuanced attitude toward enlightenment and occultism that many Nazi leaders articulated. The propaganda minister began by reassuring Bormann that he shared his antipathies to popular occultism, citing the Propaganda Ministry's own May 15 directive forbidding individuals “to perform in public occultist, spiritist, clairvoyant, telepathic, astrological, and similar displays, as well as hypnotic experiments”—but with the important caveat, clearly inspired by Hitler's orders from January 1941, that the “artistic practice of magic is not to be included in this directive.”Footnote 117 Goebbels nevertheless indicated to Bormann that, for “tactical reasons,” it did not make sense to push the anti-occultist agenda too far: a full-scale propaganda barrage might have the paradoxical effect of strengthening the public's perception of the links between Hess and the occult, and thus create even greater interest in the affair. For the time being, Goebbels argued, the limited radio and press space available to the Propaganda Ministry should be devoted to anti-communist and wartime propaganda. “As soon as the suitable moment arrives and a somewhat lighter burden is required of our… propaganda,” Goebbels assured his colleague, “I am ready to pursue suggestions for enlightenment work in the broadest possible fashion”—especially by founding a magazine.Footnote 118 Needless to say, the suitable moment never arrived.
Accommodating Occultism
How successful, then, was the “Hess Action” in eliminating “sectarianism” and abetting “enlightenment”? As noted earlier, the summer months of 1941 saw a brief flurry of arrests, followed by a series of compromises between the purveyors of “enlightenment” and apologists for the occult. In September 1941, after four months of haggling with the Gestapo and the Magic Circle, Pelz and Stadthagen—using Rosenberg and the German Labor Front as interlocutors—received permission from Hitler's Chancellery to resume their public education efforts.Footnote 119 The two longtime debunkers should have been given carte blanche in the wake of the “Hess Action,” but they were still required to sign a statement promising to consult the Magic Circle with regard to any “experiments” related to “magic.”Footnote 120
The fascinating case of the occultist and magician Eduard Neumann (aka Rolf Sylvéro) is also important in this context. The regime had been aware of Neumann's occult activities since at least June 1939, when Hörmann received a report that Neumann had been advertising powers of “telepathy, clairvoyance and hypnosis.” Neumann tried to avoid censure for practicing fortune-telling, which had been banned in 1934, by labeling it “thought power”—a transparent ruse, the report remarked.Footnote 121 An openly commercial occultist, he nevertheless continued to perform with impunity, even as debunkers such as Pelz and Stadthagen faced increasing restrictions. It was only in July 1941, in the aftermath of the “Hess Action,” that the regime finally decide to intervene.Footnote 122 In response to an inquiry by Neumann on August 3, asking why he had suddenly been dropped from a number of engagements, the local Bavarian division of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry responded that they were forwarding his letter to higher authorities: there was a lively internal discussion regarding “similar presentations of this kind,” they explained, and asked him to indicate the nature of his “experiments”—“in particular whether they contain occultist, clairvoyant, spiritualist, or similar displays.”Footnote 123
Well aware of the fine line between practicing occultism and “enlightenment” in the form of occult-based entertainment, Neumann decided to petition the Propaganda Ministry for official permission to perform “anti-occult experimental lectures,” vehemently denying that he practiced magic or the occult arts. He emphasized instead the “enlightened” nature of his show, which began with various “experiments” explained “then in the second part of my program… Only in this fashion is it possible to protect the public from succumbing in the future to the swindle of ‘clairvoyants.’”Footnote 124 The consummate occult charlatan, Neumann then brazenly offered to report true “swindlers” who were perpetuating occultism by passing themselves off as magicians (which was exactly what Neumann himself was doing).Footnote 125
Instead of immediately repudiating Neumann and his transparent attempt to practice commercial occultism under the cover of “enlightenment,” the Propaganda Ministry offered to organize, in conjunction with the KdF, a “trial performance” in which “Sylvéro” could demonstrate his tricks before a small circle of experts. Unbeknownst to Neumann, the Propaganda Ministry also invited representatives of Heydrich's Security Service.Footnote 126 The report on Neumann's performance by the Propaganda Ministry was less than sanguine. His truly “mystifying” performance was in every respect “occultist,” it concluded, and could only have a negative impact on public “enlightenment.” The RMVP official concluded by agreeing “with both colleagues from the SD that Sylvéro's artistic pieces leave behind a much deeper impression than the accompanying language of popular enlightenment” and “that these presentations must be fundamentally forbidden.” It was only in the aftermath of this trial performance, in fact, that the Propaganda Ministry exercised due diligence, unearthing a number of reports on Neumann's occult activities in the 1930s. These reports indicated that “Sylvéro” now wanted to exploit anti-occultism for “business” purposes, “but had earlier done just the opposite” by practicing commercial occultism. On September 30, 1941, the German Popular Education Division (Amt Deutsches Volksbildungswerk) of the KdF provisionally agreed to stop employing “Sylvéro.”Footnote 127
The KdF nevertheless continued to lobby on Neumann's behalf—despite his decade-long record of propagating occultism for commercial purposes (the one occult practice universally criticized in the Third Reich), despite the disingenuous nature of his “anti-occultist” demonstration, and even despite the “Hess Action.” According to a sympathetic report that September, Sylvéro had been hindered during the performance by the “critical environment and rather cold atmosphere,” which had supposedly made him shy and nervous.Footnote 128 The Munich representative of the KdF concurred, writing on October 16 that “throughout the show, I could not dispel the feeling that this was the case of a man who, through force of circumstances, must follow a particular line with which he is absolutely uncomfortable and that does not appear to be especially honest.”Footnote 129 The KdF representative nevertheless indicated that he and his colleagues believed that Neumann's performance could support the organization's efforts to achieve public “enlightenment.”Footnote 130 Clearly the KdF's sponsorship of Neumann—like that of Pelz and Stadthagen before him—was less about promoting public education than about providing state-sponsored, occult-inspired entertainment along the lines of the Reich Magicians’ Association. Meanwhile, Neumann rejected the Propaganda Ministry's report out of hand. “My lectures had a more entertaining character,” Neumann explained to Walter Tiessler, the Propaganda Ministry contact in Bormann's Party Chancellery, because “the audience was drawn primarily from working class circles.” He then accused the ministry official who had suggested that Neumann had been openly dishonest of making “slanderous statements.” “[My] right to defend myself cannot be abrogated,” Neumann insisted, “and those sources who have so casually made such statements must be called to account.”Footnote 131
One might have expected a known occultist who had, in the wake of the “Hess Action,” accused Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry and Heydrich's SD of slander to end up in a concentration camp—or worse. Yet, Tiessler proved sympathetic and reopened Neumann's case, appealing to Rosenberg directly.Footnote 132 The response he received from the Amt Rosenberg reiterated the feeling that Neumann's performance lacked “inner honesty” and merely mimicked the famous occult debunker Wilhelm Gubisch. This dishonesty made complete sense, the official argued, given that Neumann had earned his living for more than a decade “from all manner of telepathic and hypnotic experiments.”Footnote 133 Neumann's penchant for deception extended far beyond his occult performances, the report continued. He had lied about the support of Hitler's Reich Chancellery and had stolen the identities of other performers. In subsequent exchanges with Neumann, Tiessler chose not to cite these damning statements by his colleague in the Amt Rosenberg, simply responding apologetically that “the permission of anti-occult presentations and performances is supposed to remain restricted.”Footnote 134
Neumann refused to take no for an answer. On February 17, 1942, he wrote Tiessler angrily, “I have neither time nor desire to carry on a war of paper and hope that my situation can finally be resolved through a conversation in your office at the earliest opportunity… [U]nfortunately, I cannot dispel the impression that there is somehow a regrettable lack of social empathy for my situation.”Footnote 135 In the winter of 1942—just as the leaders of the Third Reich were organizing the systematic murder of millions—Neumann's appeal to “social empathy” appears almost risible. Yet, some kind of agreement favorable to Neumann must have been reached during a subsequent meeting, for Neumann's next letter to Tiessler, dated April 29, 1942, confirmed their discussion and assured Tiessler that he would return in six months to review the situation.Footnote 136 The paper trail ends there, leaving open the possibility that Neumann may have received some restricted permission to perform, made conditional on its being reported to Tiessler. Indeed, a number of other cases from the twelve months following the “Hess action” indicate that most occult practitioners were not arrested or murdered, but instead required to clear their “performances”—whether for “entertainment” or “enlightenment” purposes—through the Propaganda Ministry.Footnote 137
Even the Amt Rosenberg, which had worked assiduously to combat occult tendencies both inside and outside the party before 1941, remained constrained by Nazi affinities for border science. Kurd Kisshauer—Rosenberg's “expert” in the Office of Defense against Astrology and World Ice Theory (Abwehrstelle gegen Astrologie und Welteislehre)—incredulously believed that nearly every other Nazi office, from Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry to Himmler's Gestapo, was infested with occultists.Footnote 138 He nevertheless prevented the publication of an anti-occultist novel about the evils of commercial astrology, Son of the Stars (Sohn der Sterne), because the book lacked “astrological rigor.” The plot's attack on popular occultism was good in its portrayal of the manipulative “schemes of two dishonest horoscope readers,” but its representation of astrology was too “unscientific.” Kisshauer simply could not bring himself to approve a publication that failed to recognize the difference between commercial and exploitative popular astrology, on the one hand, and respectable scientific astrology, on the other. He demanded, furthermore, that the author of Son of the Stars delete a section mocking Hörbiger's “World Ice Theory” and belittling its proponent's erstwhile coauthor, Phillip Fauth, whom “the Führer had honored with a professor's title in recognition of his services.”Footnote 139 This is a case in which the one official in the Third Reich literally charged with “defending against astrology and World Ice Theory” made a significant effort to prevent an “unfair” misrepresentation of the former and forbid any criticism whatsoever of the latter. Goebbels and Himmler even employed Kisshauer to review the talents of German astrologers and pendulum dowsers, the most “scientific” of whom they hired to assist the SS and the Propaganda Ministry in gathering military intelligence and producing propaganda.Footnote 140
In those rare cases when Reich officials were unanimous on the deleterious nature of a particular manifestation of “unscientific” occultism, they often could not bring themselves to risk offending the German people—or fellow party members. A December 1941 report to Tiessler by Rudolf Irkowsky, a Propaganda Ministry official active in the countryside around Hitler's hometown of Linz, was revealing in this regard. Irkowsky began by describing an action against “superstition” that had seemingly been initiated by the local Nazi subsidiary of Rosenberg's Party Education Office. The goal of the action, which was emblematic of the competing efforts by Heydrich and Rosenberg described earlier, was to produce a pamphlet devoted to “the enlightenment of political leaders with regard to all forms of charlatanry, superstition, and occultism.” Irkowsky nonetheless recommended that the pamphlet not be distributed, noting that “themes that do not directly contribute to victory should not be dealt with in public, especially in the sphere of charlatanry, which is a very delicate theme.”Footnote 141 Tiessler concurred that morale outweighed public education in such cases.Footnote 142 He subsequently wrote Rosenberg in frustration that the Party Education Office should have consulted the Propaganda Ministry about such controversial anti-occultist pamphlets, noting that Goebbels's office had remained “extremely skeptical about dealing with the question of superstition” through public education.Footnote 143 As Irkowsky himself then wrote Tiessler a few days later, “the education of the population on this question [was] very impractical because… material for conflict would undoubtedly be introduced here.”Footnote 144 In other words, when it came to stamping out “occult” thinking among otherwise loyal Germans, it was best to leave well enough alone.
Conclusion
Over the past two decades, a number of historians have questioned the existence of any meaningful relationship between Nazism and the occult.Footnote 145 These scholars acknowledge, to be sure, the remarkable prevalence and popularity of occult and border-scientific ideas across German (and broader European) culture and society.Footnote 146 But most such studies are careful to point out the eminently modern, pluralist, and inherently liberal nature of these esoteric movements. There was nothing inherently völkisch or proto-fascist in German occultism, they argue. More important for our purposes, most recent research has argued explicitly that the Third Reich was actively hostile to occultism and its practitioners, treating esoteric beliefs and border-scientific doctrines as antithetical to National Socialism.Footnote 147
This examination of the Nazi Magicians’ Controversy paints a different picture.Footnote 148 On the one hand, there is no question regarding the proliferation of rhetorical and, at times, legal and police measures taken against occultism in the name of public “enlightenment.” On the other hand, during the first four years of the Third Reich, the actions of Nazi authorities suggested virtually no urgency in combating occultism. Reich officials only began to police occult journals and organizations more aggressively in the spring of 1937, simultaneously employing professional debunkers like Pelz and Stadthagen to enlighten the population about occult charlatanry. That moment was followed, however, by another lull in persecution that extended well into World War II—a time, it should be noted, when many other so-called Reichsfeinde did experience “escalating hostility.”Footnote 149 Even when Hess's flight in June 1941 inspired a more systematic campaign against occult practitioners, it did little to change the regime's longer-term ambivalence toward policing the occult, which remained uneven for the duration of the Third Reich.
From a bird's-eye perspective, the desultory nature of the regime's policing calls into question the seriousness of Nazi “anti-occultism.” But when we examine Nazi attitudes to occultism from the ground up, through the lens of what this article has christened the Nazi Magicians’ Controversy, we discover underlying patterns that help to explain this unevenness and reconcile various contradictions in the historiography. First, virtually all Nazi leaders, even those most critical of occultism, appeared to recognize the widespread popularity of occult practices and border-scientific thinking—not only across the German population but within the Nazi Party itself, even at its highest echelons. According to Rosenberg, it was precisely the popularity of occultism that had prepared the way for Hitler and that continued to explain the unwillingness of so many of his colleagues to move against occult or border-scientific doctrines.
Second, the Nazi Magicians’ Controversy helps to explain the contradictions within the Third Reich regarding the need to police occultism. It was not Hitler, the Propaganda Ministry, the Gestapo, or even the SD, but rather a group of relatively obscure debunkers around Mathilde Ludendorff who advocated the most vociferous anti-occult policies during the first four years of the Third Reich. When the regime did begin its putative “crackdown” on the occult in 1937, it was Pelz, a member of the Ludendorff circle, who helped draw the attention of the SD and the Gestapo to the problem. Yet, because of official efforts to differentiate between popular and scientific occultism, this policing remained highly uneven and rife with exceptions. By drawing a distinction between occult “charlatanry,” on the one hand, and scientific occultism, on the other, the regime made it possible to have their cake and eat it, too, thus policing occult groups they viewed as ideologically or organizationally dangerous while exploiting border-scientific doctrines for their own purposes.Footnote 150 Indeed, Nazi leaders in Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, Hanns Johst's Reich Literary Chamber, Hess's Party Chancellery, Hörmann's Reich Office for Public Health, and Himmler's SS all made extraordinary attempts to understand better, tolerate, and, in some cases, even sponsor “acceptable border sciences,” including World Ice Theory, cosmobiology, pendulum dowsing, “scientific” astrology, and biodynamic agriculture.Footnote 151
Third, and equally revealing, was the regime's reticence to eradicate popular and commercial occultism—reflected in the fact that the environment for professional debunkers actually became more hostile with the outbreak of the war. Hitler's personal desire to assuage professional “magicians” at the expense of public “enlightenment” was emblematic of a more general tendency not to move aggressively against popular occultism—a trend noted resentfully by Bormann and Rosenberg and exemplified by the permissive attitudes of Ley's KdF, Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, and Hitler's Chancellery. From early 1940 on, Pelz and Stadthagen faced increasingly restrictive guidelines for their anti-occultist activity and eventually bans seemingly established by Hitler himself. Even the “Hess Action,” upon closer inspection, did little to eliminate popular—much less “scientific”—occultism. Multiple authorities, from Goebbels to the Gestapo, gave the benefit of the doubt to Neumann and other occultists after 1941; in fact, the regime actively dissuaded Rosenberg and Bormann from offending the sensibilities of esoteric-minded Germans and Austrians. As Hitler himself observed in 1942, with an equanimity he rarely showed toward Christianity, recourse to folk superstition and magical thinking was necessary in order for people to explain “unexpected events which they cannot possibly foresee and with which they cannot cope.”Footnote 152
A fourth and final point: some Nazis intervened on the side of the occultism for reasons of public opinion, but many did so because they truly believed in its “scientific” value. Magic, occultism, and border science were taken seriously by leaders of the Third Reich for their potential dangers, as well as for their benefits. In fact, many Nazi leaders took the opportunity afforded by the more restrictive legal environment after May 1937 and especially by the “Hess Action” in May 1941 to enlist out-of-work occultists for their own purposes. Instead of condemning Germany's occultists to concentration camps, Goebbels and Himmler hired the Reich's most “scientific” astrologers and pendulum dowsers to obtain military intelligence and create propaganda. Hitler and Himmler advocated World Ice Theory as a replacement for “Jewish” science. And Himmler, Hess, and Darré all promoted biodynamic (anthroposophic) approaches to farming as an alternative to industrial agriculture.Footnote 153 Confiscated materials were not destroyed but housed instead in SS libraries, as well as the occult Paracelsus Institute, which was run by Germany's leading parapsychologist, Hans Bender, and financed by the SS and by Hitler's Chancellery.Footnote 154 Notwithstanding Nazi paranoia regarding “sectarian” tendencies, the Nazi Magicians’ Controversy indicates the widespread popularity of occultism in the Third Reich, the regime's active sponsorship of “magic,” and the undeniable fascination of many Nazis with border science. It is important to take these phenomena seriously if we want to gain a fuller understanding of the ideology and practice of Nazism.
