The Nazis and the Occult by Paul Roland

Author:Paul Roland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
Published: 2018-01-05T15:08:00+00:00

Perhaps the most celebrated seer of all, the Frenchman Nostradamus: some people credit him with foretelling, among many other things, the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany.

Prophecy and Propaganda

‘The enemy is now making use of horoscopes in the form of handbills dropped from planes, in which a terrible future is prophesied for the German people. But we know something about this ourselves! I am having counter-horoscopes worked up which we are going to distribute, especially in the occupied areas.’

Goebbels’ Diary, 16 March 1942

During the first months of the Second World War prior to the invasion of France, the Nazis waged a crude but evidently effective psychological campaign against the civilian population of the Low Countries who were then living under the threat of imminent attack. Leaflets were dropped containing pro-Nazi interpretations of the prophecies made by Nostradamus as well as fake astrological magazines in Dutch, French and Flemish containing phoney predictions of future German victories.

Historians attribute the crushing defeat of France, Belgium and Holland in the offensive of May 1940 to purely practical factors – the ingrained defeatism of the French, the superiority of the German forces, their speed and the element of surprise gained by their audacious strategy of attacking through the Ardennes to circumvent the impregnable French defences known as the Maginot Line. But there are those who believe it was the Nazis’ employment of psychological warfare which proved highly effective in softening up the opposition and convincing the defenders that resistance was futile. The strategy was considered so successful that it was copied by the Allies later that same year.

The idea had originated with Magda Goebbels, wife of Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda and Enlightenment, who had chanced upon a book entitled Mysteries of the Sun and the Soul in which the author made a compelling case for interpreting one of the 400-year-old quatrains as foreseeing an expansion of the German Reich after a bloody conflict with France, Britain and Poland. Most astonishing was the naming of the year in which this conflict would take place – 1939 – which had been arrived at by calculating the date from which England would see the monarchy change seven times in a period of 290 years. According to the author, Dr Kritzinger, this could only refer to the period following the execution of Charles I on 30 January 1649. Consequently, Dr Kritzinger was summoned to Goebbels’ office on 4 December 1939, where he was invited to identify other verses which might be adopted in support of Nazi policy. Kritzinger was dismayed at the prospect of being recruited by a regime he despised, and so he stalled by playing the absent-minded academic, finally provoking the ever-impatient Goebbels into terminating the interview.

Frustrated, but not discouraged, the Reichsminister, known to his enemies as ‘the poison dwarf’ on account of his diminished stature and vitriolic tongue, turned for help to a paranoid anti-Semite whom he knew he could count on to compromise his principles in the interests of National Socialism.

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