How crazy were the Nazi’s? -Nazi’s and the occult part 2

Hitler and the Nazi leadership’s had an obsession with magic and the occult,supernatural beliefs and practices penetrated the highest circles of the Nazi machine.

Propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels was an avid reader of Nostradamus and was delighted to be able to tell Hitler, having read some of the Frenchman’s prophecies, that the British were on the verge of defeat.

“Early to bed. Spent a long time reading. Nostradamus’s prophecies. Very interesting for those of us today,” he wrote in his diary on 23 November 1939 – just a few months into World War II.

Another member of the inner ring, Heinrich Himmler, even founded the SS Witches Division to investigate the plight of German ‘wise women’ that had been persecuted by Jews and Catholics.

Historian Kurlander claims that these odd beliefs stemmed from the Nazi’s acceptance of World Ice Theory, which held that the white ‘Aryan’ man was not evolved from apes like other humans but from an extraterrestrial ‘divine sperm’.

Hitler and many of those close to him believed in this inherently racist and unempirical philosophy rather than Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. It provided the regime with a theoretical justification for committing Jewish genocide.

By 1922, Rudolf Hess had introduced Hitler to the geopolitical, imperialist ideas of his mentor, based on the study of German antiquities,Professor Karl Haushofer (1869-1946), who taught at the University of Munich.

Haushofer – who became a general in the German Army by World War I – was fluent in Japanese, and had served as a military attaché to Japan for the Kaiser in 1908-1909. During the 1930s, Haushofer helped to establish the alliance between Germany and Japan; he also formed relationships between the Third Reich and South American governments, building ties that would later be useful to Nazi war criminals fleeing prosecution after 1945. His geopolitical theories helped to win intellectuals over to Nazism. However, Karl Haushofer fell out of favor with Hitler after Hess flew to Geat Britain in 1941.

He was suspected of involvement in the anti-Hitler resistance during 1944, and was held for eight months by the Gestapo in the Dachau concentration camp. The Professor survived the war, but he and his wife committed suicide by taking arsenic in 1946. Haushofer had taught Hitler the necessity of colonizing the “East” to gain Lebensraum for Germany, but there is no evidence that he was ever a member of the Thule Society, or that he initiated Hitler into occultism

Perhaps more surprisingly, the Nazis even found a role for irrational beliefs in their military planning.

The German Navy dangled pendulums over miniature battleships on maps of the Atlantic to try and identify where British vessels were located in a practice known as pendulum dowsing.

Nazi Admirals would look on as a member of the Pendulum Dowsing Institute in Berlin would hover the the ‘magical’ pendulum over the map, waiting for it to swing violently as it detected a British boat.

The Germans thought the British were using the same methods to locate German U-boats. In fact, they relied on radar.

After Italian dictator Mussolini fell from power and was arrested, the Nazi’s amassed a team of 40 astrologers, tarot readers, magicians and pendulum dowsers to find him.

“These magicians cost the SS a pretty penny,” said General Schellenberg. “They demanded – and got – huge quantities of luxury food, alcohol and tobacco before they could start work.”