Myths & Legends of the Second World War by James Hayward

Author:James Hayward
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752495538
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2014-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

Books written about Nazi occultism between 1960 and 1975 were typically sensational and under-researched. A complete ignorance of the primary sources are common to most authors, and inaccuracies and wild claims were repeated by each newcomer to the genre until an abundant literature existed, based on spurious ‘facts’ concerning the powerful Thule Society, the Nazi links with the East, and Hitler’s supposed occult initiation … The modern mythology of Nazi occultism is scurrilous and absurd.

One of the best known, and most absurd, of these books is The Spear of Destiny by Trevor Ravenscroft, which first appeared in 1973. During the war, Ravenscroft was commissioned in the Royal Fusiliers, then served in a commando unit and took part in the abortive Keyes raid on Rommel’s headquarters at Beda Littoria in Libya in November 1941. Ravenscroft was captured during this operation, and was held as a prisoner until 1945. After the war he became a journalist on the Beaverbrook press, and developed an interest in the occult and the supernatural, which in turn led to contact with an Austrian historian named Walter Johannes Stein. Stein was an expert on Grail Romances, as well as the so-called Spear of Destiny or Holy Lance, with which a Roman centurion named Longinus was said to have pierced Christ’s side as he hung on the cross at Golgotha. According to Stein, the Spear was thus invested with great supernatural power, which enabled its owner to control the destiny of the world.

A shared interest in the Spear led Stein to a passing acquaintance with Adolf Hitler in Vienna between 1909 and 1913. According to Ravenscroft, Stein ‘himself witnessed at this time how Hitler attained higher levels of consciousness by means of drugs and made a penetrating study of medieval occultism and ritual magic’, and as a result ‘knew more about the personal life of Adolf Hitler than any man alive’. A staunch opponent of Nazism, Stein fled to Britain in 1933, and during the war acted as ‘a confidential advisor to Churchill regarding the minds and motivation of Adolf Hitler and the leading members of the Nazi Party’. Incredibly, Stein claimed to be able to capture lost moments in history through transcendental meditation or ‘mind expansion’, and in turn taught Ravenscroft this highly original research methodology after the pair met in 1948. In 1957 Stein was taken ill suddenly and died. According to Ravenscroft:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.