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Ahnenerbe
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In 1938, Himmler sent a team of SS scientists on a mystical expedition to Tibet. Their mission: to seek the origins of the Aryan race.
Berlin, 1936. National pride is in the air, the preparations for the Olympics are under way and a young naturalist, Ernst Schäfer, is congratulating himself on his luck. He has just had a successful meeting with his new mentor, Heinrich Himmler. Such patronage will bring opportunities for an ambitious young scientist. Soon, with Himmler's blessing, he will lead an expedition to Tibet on a quest to investigate the origins of the Aryan race.
Schäfer is 26. He has just married Hertha Volz, a tall, beautiful blonde. He has already been on two American-led expeditions to China, where he demonstrated a brooding character and a fondness for shooting any creature that moved. He enjoys minor celebrity status as the author of Mountains, Buddhas and Bears. But he wants more: more fame, more power, more prestige. In 1930s Germany, the only way to get ahead is to get in with the Reichsführer.
'Schäfer was seduced by Himmler's power, like many well-educated German intellectuals,' says Christopher Hale, whose new book, Himmler's Crusade, chronicles the roots and results of the German Tibet expedition. Schäfer emerges as a slightly comical figure - 'a combination of Ernest Hemingway and Reginald Perrin' - on a ridiculous mission. Yet the expedition to Tibet was just one of hundreds of strange enterprises overseen by Himmler in an attempt to bolster Nazi ideology with phoney history and science.
During his research, Hale uncovered hundreds of photographs that had been locked away in an archive in Koblenz, Germany, for decades. 'I realised this was as close as I could come to being present,' he says. 'There was the first glimpse of the Himalayas... the trail of men and animals winding their way up to the Natu La pass... I could almost sense what those SS men were thinking - it was not a comfortable experience.'
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If it weren't so sinister, it would have been silly. Himmler thought he was the reincarnation of a 10th-century German king, Heinrich I, or Henry the Fowler. He appointed as his personal adviser a madman, Karl Maria Willigut, who claimed to be the last in a long line of German sages. He dabbled in prehistoric Venus figures, telepathy, homeopathy, 'Germanic astronomy', hypnotism, Hindu castes and runes. He belonged to occultist sects. At Wewelsburg castle, which Himmler had renovated (using slave labour) to resemble the mythical Camelot (round table and all), he trained his SS officers in pagan ceremonies and meditation. Dieter Wisleceny, an SS captain, said: 'The usual view of Himmler is that he was an ice-cold, cynical politician. This view is almost entirely wrong... Himmler was a mystic.'
Tibet might seem like an odd place to search for Germanic roots, but it was not an arbitrary choice. Many odd ideas were taken seriously in Europe long before Nazism took hold.
In 1786 an Englishman, Sir William Jones, had studied the similarities between Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, and concluded that Sanskrit was the oldest of the three languages.
In the next century, a German linguist, Friedrich Schlegel, claimed that Sanskrit had first been spoken by an elite race of light-skinned warriors in northern India, as mentioned in the ancient Hindu scriptures. Schlegel called them Aryans (arya is Sanskrit for 'noble'). They may not have existed, but it was an appealing idea.
Then there was the 19th-century religious fraud 'Madame' Helena Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Movement, who claimed to be in direct spiritual contact with the 'Great White Brotherhood' in Tibet. She convinced thousands that humans had evolved through various stages, each of which had succumbed to floods. An elite priesthood had escaped from the lost continent of Atlantis and fled to the Himalayas, and their successors were the Aryans. Others, too, proposed these Aryans, or Nordics, were descended from godlike men and had once lived in the icy north. These were the people Himmler was interested in. Perhaps there were still traces of them?
In 1935, Himmler had founded the Ahnenerbe, or Ancestral Heritage Organisation, to study the supposed roots of the Aryan nation, which by sleight of hand the Nazis had appropriated as their own. 'A Volk [people] that has this belief in rebirth and that honours its ancestors, and in so doing honours itself, always has children, and this Volk has eternal life,' Himmler told his SS men. 'A people live happily in the present and the future. so long as they are conscious of their past and the greatness of their ancestors,' ran the Ahnenerbe's motto. There were 46 departments, headed by top zoologists, botanists, archaeologists, meteorologists, historians and anthropologists. It even had its own publishing house, producing books and journals.
'Culturally and intellectually the Ahnenerbe was very significant,' says the author Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. 'Himmler wanted to forge a coherent ideological instrument to explain why the Aryan was the master race, and establishing a complete prehistory and geography was a way to do that.' If there were no physical signs of such a race ever having existed, it was because nobody had looked hard enough. Small but determined teams were dispatched to the ends of the Earth to seek evidence for superior Germanic ancestry.
Many Germans - even fellow Nazis - thought some of Himmler's ideas slightly embarrassing. But he wanted to make the Ahnenerbe a credible research institute. For this he needed to enlist ambitious scientists, such as Schäfer, to add prestige to the enterprise. It's unlikely that Schäfer shared all Himmler's beliefs, but he was one of hundreds of men who allowed themselves to be sucked into the ReichsfŸhrer's poisonous empire for personal gain. He was eager to be the first German to reach Lhasa, the Forbidden City. 'Schäfer knew that the Ahnenerbe was a bunch of cranks. Yet he knew he needed the support of Himmler, the second most powerful man in Germany,' says Hale.
But he had no reservations about Himmler's politics. He was a proud German nationalist. In a 1937 interview for the SS magazine, he enthused: 'The same essential ideas motivate me as an SS man and as an explorer and scientist. The ideas of the SS and the ideas of research are identical... science only grows on a racial basis.' The other team members were SS officers too: Ernst Krause, a botanist and entomologist, who would double as the official cameraman; Karl Wienert, a geophysicist; Edmund Geer, the expedition's manager; and Bruno Beger, an anthropologist.
The team reached Lhasa in January 1939 on a two-week tourist permit and stayed for eight months, despite strong British opposition. Tibet was on the edge of British India. Our man in Lhasa hated fascism and had vowed to keep the German party out of the Forbidden City. Schäfer had failed to get the expedition rubber-stamped by the India Office, despite support from some well-bred British fascists, but an explorer had advised him: 'Sneak over the border. Then find a way round the regulations.' During the Germans' time in Lhasa, the British maintained a polite front while keeping a close eye on their activities.
Schäfer cultivated friendships with important Tibetans, including the powerful regent. He assumed the perfect Tibetan character - calm, tolerant, smiling - while secretly abhorring their customs. He recognised Tibet's potential political use to the Reich. After all, they shared the swastika, the ancient symbol of good fortune.
Beger's dubious research involved making a precise series of measurements of people's heads and facial features with callipers. The aim was to compare and contrast bodily types - Hale calls it 'the mathematics of racial difference'. Beger carried eye-colour charts and swatches of hair to help him categorize people into neat racial types. He also took face masks of Tibetans, a process that required raw gypsum, water and disinfectant. The first volunteer had fearful convulsions as the plaster set, but Beger pressed on undeterred. He was forced to pose as a medicine man to win the favour of the Tibetan aristocracy, dispensing drugs and tending to monks with sexually transmitted diseases in return for his research. He gathered a huge amount of pointless information. During eight months in Lhasa, he recorded the measurements of 376 people and took casts of the heads, faces, hands and ears of 17 more, as well as fingerprints and hand prints from another 350.
Schäfer made a comprehensive survey of Tibetan flora and fauna and indulged his lifelong passion for hunting. This was a man who boasted of having shot rats in the family cellar at the age of three. In China he had proudly slain an eagle and a giant panda. Like Göring and Himmler, he saw nature as something to be mastered. A Tibetan guide observed he often drank his quarry's blood.
He was a difficult character, plagued by remorse over the death of his wife. They had taken a boat out onto a lake in Germany so that he could shoot game. He leapt up to fire at some ducks, but stumbled and accidentally shot Hertha in the head. She died an hour later, and Schäfer's guilt and grief heightened an already volatile nature. 'Schäfer's chief trouble is that he is unbalanced mentally,' a British official commented.
The Germans collected anything they could: thousands of artefacts, a huge number of plants and animals, including live specimens. Wienert took four sets of geomagnetic data. Krause studied Tibetan wasps. Schäfer observed Tibetan rituals, including sky burials (he even bought some human skulls). And they took stills and film footage of local culture, including the spectacular New Year celebrations when tens of thousands of pilgrims descended upon Lhasa.
Their time was limited. In March 1939, Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia, and war was becoming inevitable. The German expedition was suspected of espionage. A Punch cartoon showed the SS 'secret agents' standing next to a yak with a swastika burnt into its hide. In August, shortly before war was declared, the team hastily left for Europe. Himmler greeted his homecoming heroes personally and declared the expedition a triumph for the SS.
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While they had been away, the Ahnenerbe had been propagating Himmler's evil philosophies in a process far subtler than Göbbels's propaganda. Himmler had been clever recruiting scientists: it conferred a respectability on his ideas. 'Myths are never harmless,' says Hale. 'In Himmler's world they were the building blocks of genocide.' The theory that there is one master race under constant threat of extinction fed into the idea that 'outsiders' (for which read 'Jews') were a threat; mass murder could be justified as self-defence. 'Who would have thought in the 1920s that a crank like Himmler would ever have the political power to do something about such absurd and ridiculous ideas? Yet he did achieve that power and the results were catastrophic.'
Beger, Krause and Wienert were absorbed into the German military machine. Schäfer became an administrator in the Ahnenerbe. Now the Tibet expedition's sinister undertones would come to the fore. The 120,000ft of moving film they had taken was edited down into a documentary, Geheimnis Tibet (Secret Tibet), to fit Himmler's agenda. A unique record of Tibetan life and customs, it presents the expedition team as heroes, bravely crossing torrential rivers on rope bridges to reach their goal. The Tibetans welcome them with smiles, and one woman seems to find it all very jolly when Beger measures her with his callipers. In the unedited version, they came to blows.
The overriding theme is that Tibet, once a proud warrior nation, has been dominated and weakened by a religion from outside. 'It was presented as a clear warning from history,' says Hale. 'The inference was that if Germans allowed Jews and their religion to contaminate their country, they faced catastrophe.'
Himmler's protégés were slowly drawn further into his murderous empire. Schäfer was treated to a glimpse of the Reichsführer's master plan in action when he joined him on a visit to Poland. Here he learnt all about Himmler's scheme to liquidate the Polish intelligentsia. He breakfasted with some of Himmler's most savage SS henchmen. 'Schäfer wasn't interested in being an agent of genocide, but he would have been stupid or blind if he hadn't seen what was happening,' says Hale. Schäfer would later claim he had been trapped 'in a spider's web'.
On returning from Tibet, he had been given his own institute, which he named after an anti-semitic Swedish explorer. The Sven Hedin Institute for Inner Asian Research opened in January 1943. By now, the Ahnenerbe was a vast organisation. One of its departments was carrying out horrific experiments on Jews, other Germans, Russians and Poles. In 1942, Schäfer and Krause had photographed some of Dr Rascher's gruesome medical experiments in the labour camp at Dachau.
Beger became the Ahnenerbe's race expert. He realised that the Reich's 'resettlement camps' in the east created an opportunity for scientific experiment. On a spring evening in 1943, he arrived at Auschwitz station, had a hearty meal and the next day selected over 100 prisoners to measure. He stayed for eight days, then the prisoners were gassed and their corpses delivered to the anatomy department at Strasbourg university. There are clues to suggest that some of their skulls ended up in Schäfer's institute.
Schäfer spent the last part of the war investigating Himmler's latest obsession: the origins of a mythical red horse with a white mane. But he was no fool. When the allies' victory was declared, he surrendered, playing down his links to the regime. He tried to convince his captors that he had maintained a purely scientific vision, untainted by politics or ideology. He was let off with a fine, and in 1949 moved to Venezuela to create a new wildlife park.
Beger kept a low profile for more than a decade. Wienert, Krause and Geer quietly slipped back into academic life. Himmler himself had committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide pill while in British custody in May 1945. It wasn't until Beger's wartime anthropology came to light during Adolf Eichmann's trial in 1961 that he was implicated in the murder of 115 people. Beger faced trial in 1971. Schäfer testified in his defence. Beger admitted that he had measured the heads of prisoners at Auschwitz, but claimed he knew nothing of their subsequent fate. He was found guilty of being an 'accomplice to murder' and given a three-year suspended sentence.In the 1970s, Schäfer applied to set up a conservation project in northern India, but was denied a visa. In the last known photograph taken before his death in 1992, he looks distrustful, slightly wounded. His friends said he had never quite come to terms with the past. Bruno Beger, now 92, lives in a small town near Frankfurt. He appears to have suffered no such qualms. His Tibetan face masks are proudly displayed on a shelf above his front door.
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by Victor and Victoria Trimondi Visionary fascism was, and indeed still is, exceptionally deeply fascinated by the Buddhocratic form of state. In the late thirties (as the various fascist systems bloomed in Europe and the whole world) Spencer Chapman, a traveler in Tibet, wrote that even in the days of the dictators one can only be amazed at what uncontested power the Dalai Lama possesses” . The idea of kingship of the world, the uniting of spiritual and secular power in a single person, the ideology of war in the Shambhala myth, the uncompromisingly androcentric orientation, the tantric vision of the feminine, the whole occult ambience and much more besides were specifically adopted by several fascist ideologists and welded together into an aggressive myth. As we shall soon see, entire fascist systems are based upon the adoption of Tibetan/tantric doctrines. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s national socialist friends As depressing as it may be for the Nobel peace prize winner’s followers, there has been continuous contact between the Dalai Lama and the far right wing and former national socialists (Nazis). His close friendship with his German mentor, Heinrich Harrer has become the most well-known of these. It caused a small scandal in 1997-1998 when, after years of research, the Austrian journalist, Gerald Lehner, succeeded in making public Harrer’s “brown-shirt” (i.e., German fascist) past, which the latter had been able to keep secret for many years. Harrer is not just anybody. He is one of the best-known international authors and has sold over four million books in 57 languages (mostly about
The Austrian mountain climber and competition skier joined the SS on Dr. Ernst Schäfer, a specialist on But let us return to Heinrich Harrer. War broke out while he was still in The adaptation to film of Harrer’s autobiographic bestseller, Seven Years in Tibet, triggered an international protest. Since the famous traveler through Reinhold Messner, the famous mountain climber, found such an admission of guilt from It is a fact that Harrer — in his own account -- first turned against the Chinese invaders at the end of the fifties, after he had already left The journalist Gerhard Lehner also pursued a second lead: on The racialist, who was the last survivor of the “SS Schäfer Expedition” (dying in 1998), met His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama at least five times (in 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, and 1994). The meetings were all very hearty affairs. The former SS member dedicated a small brochure entitled “My Encounters with the The Dalai Lama (worshipped by his followers as the “ The Nazi–Tibet connection Were there occult intentions behind the “SS Schäfer Expedition”? In the neo-fascist literature these are considered a top secret mission of Himmler’s to make contact with the “adepts of Shambhala and Agarthi”. Authors from the scene like Wilhelm Landig, Miguel Serrano, Russell McCloud, etc., let their readers believe that through these expeditions a kind of metapolitical axis between Although in recent years comprehensive research findings about the interests of leading Nazis in occult phenomena have been published, this is currently played down by pro-Lamaist intellectuals, especially as far as an occult Nazi — Tibet connection is concerned. Ernst Schäfer and Bruno Beger, the two leaders of the undertaking (the SS Schäfer expedition), are depicted as sober natural scientists. Heinrich Himmler’ esoteric ambitions in We do not see it as our primary task here to historically prove the interweaving of the relevant SS members (Hitler, Himmler, Harrer, etc.) in an occult Nazi — There are certainly also other, non-fascist, authors who create an occult correspondence between national socialism and Tibetan Buddhism via a esoteric interpretation of the “Hakenkreuz” (the swastika), a Buddhist symbol par excellence: “The rightward hooked cross [signifies] a prayer formula in Tibet”, writes Friedrich W. Doucet, “In its left-turned form — like the national socialist swastika — it designates the orthodox Yellow Hats ... it is the Yellow Hats who supervise the spiritual rules in the Tibetan ecclesiastical state and also exercise worldly power”. It is also certain that Himmler’s spiritual advisor, Karl Maria Wiligut (“Himmler’s Rasputin”), saw the “SS Schäfer Expedition” as an extremely occult undertaking and at Himmler’s direction attempted to exert an appropriate influence on the participants in the expedition. The SS standard bearer Wiligut/Weisthor, who was one of Himmler’s personal staff, was accredited with mediumistic abilities and he himself was convinced he was in contact with transpersonal powers. Wiligut/Weisthor was considered to be the Schutz Staffel’s (SS’s) expert on runes and designed the legendary skull ring of the SS. His megalomaniac overestimation of himself (there are authenticated statements from him to the effect that he believed he was the “secret King of Germany”) and the fact that he was deprived of the right of decision by his family led Himmler to discharge Wiligut from the SS in 1939. The German author Rüdiger Sunner quotes the report of a member of the “SS Schäfer Expedition” over a meeting with Wiligut. During the encounter (in 1937 or 1938?), the latter was in a trance-like state and addressed his visitors in a guttural voice: “I telephoned my friends this evening … in Abyssinia and America, in Japan and Tibet ... with all who come from another world in order to construct a new empire. The occidental spirit is thoroughly corrupted, we have a major task before us. A new era will come, for creation is subject to just one grand law. One of the keys lies with the Dalai Lama [!] and in the Tibetan monasteries.” The visitor was not a little distressed, and goes on to report: “Then came the names of monasteries and their abbots, of localities in eastern Tibet which I alone knew about … Did he draw these out of my brain? Telepathy? To this day I do not know, I know only that I left the place in a hurry”. In the 80s the Chilean Miguel Serrano took up the speculation anew that the Dalai Lama plays a key role in the Nazi-Tibet connection. His “skill”, this author says of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, is “closely linked with that of Hitler’s Wiligut also believed that Otto Rahn, likewise a member of the SS, who in the 30s attempted to render the myth of the holy grail and the Cathar movement fruitful for the national socialist vision and the SS as some kind of “warrior monks”, assumed that the Cathars had been influenced by Tibetan Buddhism “One of the Cathari symbols of the spirit that is god which was taken over from Buddhism was the mani, a glowing jewel that lit up the world and allowed all earthly wishes to be forgotten. The mani is the emblem of the Buddhist law that drives out the night of misconception. In The myth of the “black sun” which was able to win a central place in the neo-fascist movement and displays similarities with the Tibetan Rahu myth from the Kalachakra Tantra, can be traced to the inspiration of Wiligut and his milieu among others. In a commentary on Wiligut’s runic writings, a pupil, Emil Rüdiger, mentions an invisible dark planet, Santur by name, which is supposed to influence human history and to be able to be microcosmically linked with the energy body of an adept. Appropriate yogic exercises(rune gymnastics) are recommended for producing “high intelligence effects” . Just how seamlessly such “rune gymnastics” can be linked to tantric exercises can be seen in the writings of Miguel Serrano, the father of “esoteric Hitlerism”. It is thus not at all the case that there is no historical foundation for hypothesizing an occult Nazi — In this process of myth construction it should also not be underestimated that the meetings known to have occurred between the Dalai Lama and former SS members (Schäfer, Harrer, Beger) have occult significance alone by virtue of the fact that anybody who mentally negotiates an esoteric network interprets a meeting with the Dalai Lama as an occult event. . In the meantime an enormous amount of literature about a suspected Nazi — In 1958 an American publisher released the book The Lightning and the Sun, by Savitri Devi (“Hitler’s Priestess”), which presents Adolf Hitler as an avatar (an incarnation) of the sun god, alongside Akhenaton and Genghis Khan. Devi does not mention a Nazi — In their best-seller The Dawn of Magic, Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwells (1962) first claim that the Shambhala/Agarthi myth strongly influenced the founders of the national socialist movement. Robert Charroux Verratene Geheimnisse [Betrayed Secrets] presumes that Lama priests had gained influence over Hitler and worked on “ a plan for exercising control over the world which was thoroughly the equal of that of the Germans “. The anti-fascist myth researcher Friedrich Doucet Im Banne des Mythos [In the Thrall of Myth], 1979) discusses “psycho-techniques of the monks and abbots in the Lama monasteries of Likewise, the anthroposophically oriented author, Trevor Ravenscroft [The Spear of Destiny, 1974], assumes that Hitler cooperated with “Tibetan leaders” in In the 80s, two books by the Chilean Miguel Serrano appeared, El Cordon Dorado [The Golden Ribbon] and Adolf Hitler el último Avatara [Adolf Hitler: The Final Avatar]). Both texts form the basis for “esoteric Hitlerism”. One of Serrano’s central themes is the relationship between sexual magic and political power (especially national socialism). The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, whom Serrano has met several times, is woven by the author into the creation of neo-fascist myths around Hitler. According to Jan van Helsing Geheimgesellschaften und ihre Macht [“Secret Societies and their Power”, 1993], Tibetan monks worked together with Templar Knights who were organized in the highest lodge of the “black sun” on the establishment of the Third Reich. The secret order had (and still has) an important base underground in the In Die schwarze Sonne von Tashi Lhunpo [The Black Sun of Tashi Lhunpo 1996], McCloud reports on the survival of the national socialist For Wilhelm Landig Götzen gegen In his novel [The Black Sun, 1997], Peter Moon reiterates the decisive influence of Tibetan Lamas on National Socialism and extends it with new images. He takes the side of the old Tibetan Bon religion, and accuses the Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhism of religious oppression. “Why”, Martin Brauen, a pro-Lamaist expert on Among the anti–Dalai Lama and anti-Tibet literature are works by S. Ipares Geheime Weltmächte [Secret World Powers, 1937], who was influenced by the orientalist Albert Grünwedel. In his book, the author talks of an occult hierarchia ordinis of the Lamaist theocracy, which invisibly influences and steers the East. J. Strunk’s arguments Zu Juda und Rom — Tibet, [To Juda and Rome — Tibet 1937] are more far reaching; he tries to uncover a conspiracy of an international ecclesiastical elite (with members from all the world religions) with the living Buddha, the Dalai Lama from Lhasa as their visible head. “What there are of organizations and new spiritual currents running alongside and in all directions nearly always end up on the ‘roof of the world’, in a In the same year (1937) Fritz Wilhelmy published the piece Asekha. Der Kreuzzug der Bettelmönche [Asekha: The Crusade of the Mendicant Monks]. In it “Tibetan Buddhism … [is] openly appointed to play a more than mysterious role in the great global hustle and bustle of suprastate pullers of strings” . General Ludendorff and his wife likewise took to the field with great vigor against the “Asian priests” and warned that the Tibetan Lamas had emplaced themselves at the head of Jewish and Jesuit secret orders [Europa den Asiatenpriestern? (Europe of the Asian priests, 1941). Clearly the most prominent of the anti-Lamaist Nazi faction was the racialist Alfred Rosenberg, who in his seminal work Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhundert [The Myth of the 20th Century] made the battle between the priests and the warrior caste into the primal conflict of the history of the world. The Tibetan lamas appear here as the representatives of a decadent Asian Catholicism. The problem with the construction of a fascist anti-Lamaism lies in the fact that apart from Alfred Rosenberg the right-wing authors cited definitely did not occupy positions of power like those of Himmler, the SS, and the Ahnenerbe project. “Hitler’s mythologist” ( Besides this, the national socialist opponents of Lamaism mentioned, who Martin Brauen so demonstratively parades to prove that fascism was hostile towards Tibetan Buddhism, are just as fanatically fascinated by the atavistic mythology of Tibet as the pro-Lamaist fascists whom we have listed above. They do not attack the Lamaist system out of a democratic attitude or rational consideration, but the opposite, because they fear the occult world of the Lamas — namely, control by magic, the conquest of the planet by Buddhist despots, the manipulation of awareness through rituals, etc. — all concepts which can indeed be found in the tantric texts. Thus, right-wing opponents of Lamaism, just like the right-wing advocates of Lamaism, see in Since the pro-Lamaist intellectuals can no longer deny that fascist authors increasingly sought out contact with Lamaist cultural images after the war, they emphatically reassure us that these were a matter of Western “illusions”, or at least Western hybrids of Lamaism which were in no sense just. With this they seem to think the problem is solved. But they leave us waiting for an examination of contents which reveals to what depth and extent ideas and practices from Lamaism have been directly incorporated by the fascist side. Yet a debate about the images, archetypes, metapolitical visions, political structures, and rituals from the Tibetan cultural sphere which the neo-Nazis refer back to is of far greater interest than the question of whether there was personal contact between lamas and Nazis. Here the actual work of cultural criticism begins, which entails:
discovering Lamaist myths of origin behind the “Nazi fantasies”
investigating these Lamaist myths of origin
examining structural similarities between neo-fascism and Lamaism
Only then when such “myths of origin” are not to be found can the Nazi-Tibet connection be said to have been exposed as a purely Western fiction. The following list of paradigms, concepts, theories, methods, and myths which have essentially shaped the culture of Lamaism (and still do) have become central for the neo-fascist movement: The combination of religious and political power
A strictly hierarchical state structure that rests upon a spiritually based “Führer principle”
The out and out patriarchal orientation of the state and society
A pattern of complete subordination of pupil to master
The appearance of divine beings on earth to fulfill political missions (the avatar, incarnation, and Bodhisattva principle)
A political micro-/macrocosmic theory according to which a Buddhist ruler represents a likeness of the entire universe.
The idea of a world ruler (Chakravartin) and a violent conquest of the world
The motif of spiritual/political redemption
The idea of a superhuman center of power in Asia, from where an influence on world politics is exercised (the Shambhala myth)
The legitimation of contemporary politics through mythic roots
The derivation of political control from myths of the sun and light
The myth of the “black sun” (Rahu myth in the Kalachakra Tantra)
Alchemic speculations (as in the Kalachakra Tantra)
An interest in secret men’s associations (members of orders)
The existence of a supernatural community of “priestly warriors” (Shambhala warriors) who observe and influence the history of the world
A “Buddhist” warrior ethic based upon spiritual control of the body and emotions
An apocalyptic final battle, in which good and evil stand opposed and all nonbelievers are annihilated (Shambhala war)
A fascination with the machinery of war (Shambhala myth)
Flying discs (UFOs) — corresponding objects (flying wheels) will be put to use in the final Shambhala war
A magical view of the world and the associated conception that the manipulation of symbols can affect history
Techniques for manipulating consciousness
A great interest in paranormal phenomena and their combination with politics (visions, oracles, prophecies)
A magic/political understanding of the system of rituals in the service of the state
Sexual magic practices for transforming erotic love and sexuality into worldly and spiritual power (Kalachakra Tantra)
The functionalization of the feminine principle for the purposes of politico-religious power
All these pillars of Tibetan Buddhist culture are likewise ingredients of the Kalachakra Tantra constantly practiced by the Dalai Lama and the Shambhala myth this evokes. For centuries they have determined the form of Tibetan monastic society, completely independent of any Western imaginings or influence. Hence the question about neo-fascism's inordinate interest in Some (not all) of the above-mentioned Tibetan cultural elements to which the new right has helped itself were also to be found in the Europe of old, yet these were either disempowered or relativized by the Enlightenment and “modernity” — only to be reactivated in the history of fascism and national socialism. In traditional Tibet (up until 1958), in the community of Tibetans in exile, but above all in the figure of the Dalai Lama and his clergy, in the holy texts and the rituals (the tantras), these images and archetypes were able to survive without pause. Through the active presence of the lamas in the West they are now visible and tangible once more and play an ever greater role in Western popular culture. Yet it is not just in comics and kitsch films that the Dalai Lama is portrayed as a god-king, but also both the respectable and the down-market western press, a label which gains fundamental significance in the political theology of fascism and is combined there with the Führer principle. Julius Evola: A fascist Tantric It was not just the ideologists and theoreticians of national socialism who were closely concerned with A further example is the work of the Italian, Julius Evola (1898-1974), for a time Benito Mussolini’s chief ideologist (mainly in the forties). In numerous books and articles he has investigated and further developed the relationship between tantric rituals and power politics. He has followed “tantric trails” in European cultural history and come across them everywhere: among the Cathars, the troubadours, the Knights Templar, in the work of Alighieri Dante, the mysticism surrounding the holy grail, European knighthood, alchemy. Using criteria drawn from Vajrayana, he propounds a cultural history of sexuality in his most famous book, Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex. Evola was not just a theoretician, he also practiced sexual magic rites himself. There are unmistakable statements from him about the “tantric female sacrifice” and the transformation of sexuality into political power. Like almost no other, the Italian has openly named the events that unfold in the mysteries of the yogis and then confessed to them: “The young woman,” he writes, “who is first ‘demonized’ and then raped, ... is essentially... the basic motif for the higher forms of tantric and Vajrayanic sexual magic” . In dictators like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini he saw the precursors of future Maha Siddhas who would one day conquer the world with their magic powers: “The magician, the ruler, the lord”, he proclaims in regard to Tantrism, “that is the type of the culture of the future!” (Evola, 1926, p. 304). He recommends Tantrism as “the way for a Western elite”. In the Shambhala myth he sees a confirmation of the European tradition of the savior king, especially the myth of the grail: “At a particular time decreed by one of the cyclical laws, a new manifestation of the solar principle from above will occur in the form of a sacred ruler who gains victory over the ‘dark age’: Kalki Avatara. Symbolically Kalki will be born in Shambhala — one of the terms in the Indian/Tibetan tradition for the holiest hyperborean [Nordic] center”. We could fill many pages illustrating the influence of Vajrayana (Tibetan Tantrism) on Evola’s work. But however, we will instead concentrate on a detailed discussion of the ideas of one of his pupils, Miguel Serrano. Serrano combines Evola’s fascist philosophy of power warriors with the national socialist thoughts on race. His works are particularly interesting for us not just because he is still alive (in 1999), but also because he has been linked with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama several times.
"Miguel Serrano”, writes his interviewer, Isidro Palacios, “was the only [!] western foreigner who traveled to meet the Dalai Lama as the monk-emperor of the Tibetan Buddhists fled from the holy land of Miguel Serrano was born in He published numerous books with an occult/poetic content. Even his work best known in the West, in which he recounts his encounters with the German poet Hermann Hesse and the depth psychologist C. G. Jung, displays a great deal of occultist speculation when one reads it attentively. Serrano titled his book The Hermetic Circle: Conversations, Correspondence, and Memories of Hermann Hesse and C. G. Jung. This title alone should signal that the author had formed an esoteric brotherhood with Jung and Hesse, a sort of triumvirate of magicians who had gained admittance to the archetypal storehouses of the human subconscious and are unique in the twentieth century. Jung was sympathetic towards the Chilean who had courted him. He wrote an effusive foreword to Serrano’s tale, The Visit of the Queen of Saba: “This book is unusual. It is a dream amidst other dreams, one could say, and completely different to the spontaneous creations of the unconscious with which I am familiar” . Serrano was also a great admirer of the American poet, Ezra Pound, who sympathized with the Italian fascists. Together with Pound’s widow (Olga Rudge) and Prince Ivanici, Serrano had a commemorative stone erected in His occult studies took him to all parts of the world. He saw himself as a modern Percival (Parsifal) and Minnesinger, who went in search of the Grail under the protection of his diplomatic passport. “The life of an ambassador is a farce and a folly”, he said in an interview in the journal Cedade, “My post allows me to meet with people of value like the Dalai Lama, Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Hanna Reitsch (Hitler’s famous female war pilot) and others” . The Chilean was rightly considered the occult eminence of modern, international fascism. Meanwhile, his phantasmagoric writings have also developed a fanatic following in the German neo-nazi scene: It is the Chilean author’s obsessive intention to convince his readers that Adolf Hitler was an avatar (a divine incarnation) or a tulku, and ever will be, since he lives on in another body in another sphere, that of the kingdom of Shambhala. According to Serrano, the Führer will reappear as the doomsday ruler and fight a terrible battle, and that in the next few years. How did this bizarre fantasy arise? Shortly after the Second World War a mysterious “master” from the beyond is supposed to have appeared to the Chilean and said to him: “Hitler is a initiate, he can communicate with those dwelling on the astral plane. I do not know who his spiritual leaders are, but I have decided to help him. Hitler is a being with an iron, unshakable will which he inevitably put into effect. He never yielded. I was in contact with him After this appearance of his spiritual guru, Serrano was absolutely convinced that he had been entrusted with the mission of the century: the worldwide dissemination of Hitlerismo Esoterico (of “esoteric Hitlerism”). Whilst still performing his international duties as a Chilean Ambassador he held himself back, although he carried the idea in his heart from the nineteen fifties on. During this period he published books of a poetic/esoteric content with several respectable western publishers which, although they without exception include tantric topics (especially the “female sacrifice”), studiously avoid mentioning the name of Adolf Hitler. Only in 1978 did the Chilean first dare to go public with an open profession of belief in the German Nazi dictator, and published El Cordón Dorado — Hitlerismo Esoterico [The Golden Ribbon — Esoteric Hitlerism]. In the mid-eighties the almost 650-page, large-format book, Adolf Hitler, el Ùltimo Avatâra [Adolf Hitler, the Last Avatar], followed. Serrano summarizes the results of his extensive occult research into this topic with the concise statement that, “esoteric Hitlerism is tantric”. Shambhala: The center of “esoteric Hitlerism” In the following sections, we hope to show just how much of his fascist world view Serrano owed to Tantrism. It is of especial interest in connection with this study that he recognized “esoteric Hitlerism” as a central doctrine from the Shambhala and Agarthi are thus the two occult regions (or cities) from which the national socialist dictator, Adolf Hitler, was sent to our planet. According to Serrano the two locations lie in a magic realm beneath the surface of the Earth. “Thus the submerged Agarthi and Shambhala are to be found there, which the Tibetans and Mongolians speak of as the seat of the king of the world, and also the symbolic orient of the [Knights] Templar and the true Rosicrucians. Thus the unknown leaders of these two orders, as well the organization of esoteric Hitlerism [the SS], betook themselves there. And from there Hitler clearly received instructions”. Following the Second World War the rumor (which Serrano seizes upon thankfully) arose in occult circles that Hitler had settled a brotherhood of Tibetan lamas in But Hitler — Serrano says -- did not suicide; rather he was able to return to his subterranean home of Shambhala. “Hitler lives. He did not die in In the near future, the “Führer” will ascend to earth from the subterranean Shambhala (now at the South Pole) for a second time, with a powerful army of UFOs in fact. (At another point Serrano reports that Hitler will lead his army on a white horse, like the Rudra Chakrin, the wrathful wheel turner from Shambhala.) The “last avatar” (Hitler) will plunge the planet into a terrible apocalyptic war between the forces of light (the hyperborean Aryan race) and the powers of darkness (the Jewish race). The Jews, who currently rule the world, will be exterminated and the Nazis will found the Edidad Dorada (the “golden age”) and the “Fourth Reich”. Serrano took his “fantasies” literally. To seek his spiritual leader (or the tulku Hitler), the Chilean diplomat (in EL/ELLA But the time was not ripe, Serrano was unable to discover the entrance to Shambhala. In Kalimpong, “before the gates of The pupil (Serrano) — we read in EL/ELLA — is prepared to go this way and is initiated into the tantras and the “laws of androgyny” by the master: “This knowledge has been passed on to us by the serpent [kundalini] that survived on the ocean floor as the world of the god-men was destroyed, in which the woman was not outside but rather inside and where man and woman were one. .... Until you are one with the woman ... you will be no priest king ... The stallion must become a mare, the man a woman ...” the guru continued his teaching. This is never, the pupil learns, possible through chastity and asceticism. Rather, the man must encounter the woman in the “magic love” in order to divert her feminine energies. As we know, this requires absolute control over the sexual act and above all the retention of the seed: “If the stallion expels the seed, he becomes impoverished by this. ... For as long as the seed flows outwards like a river, the play of the deceptive appearances will continue”. In another text it says: “the magic love that is taught in ... Shambhala. ... In it the seed may not be issued outwardly and be lost in the woman, rather it must flow inwardly into the body of its owner in order to impregnate him with the androgyne, ... as one in the likewise symbolic language of alchemy”. If the man does not expel his sperm he can absorb the woman’s gynergies completely. “If the woman does not receive”, Serrano says, “she gives! Through her skin she exudes substances, a concentrated energy, which satiates you and penetrates into your blood and heart” . But it can happen that the tantric experiment fails. If the sadhaka (the pupil) loses his seed during the magic sexual act then he is destroyed by the aggressive femininity: “The spider devours the male who fertilizes her, the bees murder the drones, the fearsome mother wears the organ of generation tied around her neck. Everything female devours, every mare, mother, goddess, or woman. In one way or another the man is consumed”. It is thus a matter of life and death. Ultimately, according to Serrano the “killing” of the external woman (the karma mudra) is therefore necessary, so that the inner woman (the maha mudra) can be formed. The author does not shrink from discussing the “tantric female sacrifice” directly: “Only those who are able to love the woman so much [!] that they externally kill her [!] in order to make possible her inner rebirth will find the immortal city of Agarthi (or Shambhala)”. For an uninformed reader hidden, but obvious to one who knows the logic of Tantrism, a tantric female murder is described in both of his initiatory writings, EL/ELLA [HE/SHE] and NOS [WE]. In a love scene from EL/ELLA a young woman expires in Serrano’s arms in order to then re-emerge within him as an inner maha mudra. He bends over her, strokes her hair and kisses her bloody lips: “They tasted like bitter honey, and he swallowed a little of her blood” Then he suddenly sees the stigmata: “Strangely, it [the blood] was only on her feet and the palms of her hands as if she had been crucified. 'Here!', she said. She indicated her side, at breast level. A white line seemed to run through it, like a spear wound”. The references to the sacrifice of Christ are obvious, indeed they seem quite blatant. “When I die,” the woman then says, “you will bear me within you; I will be you, live in you ... You have drunk my blood, and we are now two siblings. My character is already being transferred into your blood ... If god will, I shall love you even more when I am dead. ... I have to die that you may live”. With this she fulfills the wise saying of Serrano’s master: “The decay of the one [the woman] is the purification of the other [the man]". “The absolute woman”, he says at another point, “can sleep or she can die, which is the same thing”. Written in a fantasy manner, the book NOS — Book of the Resurrection also depicts a tantric female sacrifice. The heroine of this “hermetic biography” is called Allouine, the main hero is admittedly Serrano. Additionally, various “tantric” masters crop up. Among them are, unmistakably, C.G. Jung, Hermann Hesse, and the American poet Ezra Pound. The contents of the book depict the voluntary self-sacrifice of Allouine, her interiorization as a maha mudra by the author (Serrano), and the latter’s achievement of immortality through the absorption of gynergy. “The woman dies. She is dead. She must die. ... She is the warrior’s [the yogi’s] companion, existing only in his mind, in his spirit”, Serrano instructs us once more. “She [the woman] becomes interiorized in you through her death, she inspires you”, one of his masters explains to him and in another passage continues: “The secret path of yoga along which you are traveling is only for the warrior, for the initiated hero. It is not the path for the woman; because a woman has no chakras, no kundalini to awaken. ... A woman is the Kundalini. A woman has no soul. She is the soul. A woman has no eternity. She is eternity. Serrano stages a tantric séance with Allouine, in which they both consume the five forbidden foods. Then he drinks “the liquor of orgasm ... the heavenly Soma, an spirit of secret wine ... which is now only to be found in the river of your blood”. We know that he is talking about the sukra, the mixture of male and female seed, of menstrual blood and sperm. This magic potion grants the Tantric immortality. In NOS too the author longs for the blood of his lover like a vampire and goes into raptures if he detects it on his lips. After he has washed the dying Allouine, he kisses her and drinks of her blood. Yet Allouine patiently and will-lessly accepts her sacrifice: “My desire for you (i.e., for Serrano) is reaching its peak. The fire of sacrifice has already been lit in my vulva and beats there like a heart. ... My will no longer exists”. “The authentic, absolute woman sacrifices herself voluntarily,” we read in NOS, “immolating herself in order to give her eternity to her lover. ... The beloved is now the hidden beloved, she who has died and buried herself in your bones and your veins. The female Sophia, guru of the soul, she who courses through the blood, the female philosopher, Sophia, wisdom, the dove, gnosis”. Dying, his “wisdom consort” says to him, “I shall but love thee better after death. I give you my eternity. … My beloved, you will be my coffin of perfumed, precious wood!”. After he has internalized Allouine within himself, the Tantric Serrano can now overcome his EGO, he can now talk of NOS (WE), since his lover (maha mudra) will dwell in him for ever. Through this love, deadly for the woman, the man gains eternal life. In this context, Serrano plays upon the word AMOR, which does not just mean love, but also A-MOR, i.e., beyond death. Eternally united with Allouine’s gynergy following her physical death, Serrano buries her corpse and places a stone at her grave into which he has chiseled a leftward hooked cross, the supreme symbol of “esoteric Hitlerism”. The SS as a tantric warrior order from Shambhala For Serrano the tantric initiation is the central rite of a “hyperborean” (Nordic) warrior caste. Shambhala counts as the supreme mystery site for the initiation of the “priest-warriors”. “In Shambhala”, the author says, “ the use of the force through which the mutation of the earth and the people can be carried out is taught, and the latter [the people] are introduced into the martial initiation, which makes this possible. ... Those who follow this initiatory stream have struggled to found a new/old order here on the present-day earth which has its roots in the transcendent origins, with the goal of reawakening the golden age, and they will fight on to the end”. This order is the secret brotherhood of the Shambhala officers, who have for centuries been incarnated in our world — for instance as knights of the holy grail or as Rosicrucians or finally as the occult elite of the SS, Hitler’s notorious Schutz-Staffel. “Once a year”, we learn, “the inner circle of the SS people met with their supreme leaders for a few days of retreat, the solitude, and meditation. A kind of western yoga was practiced here, but nothing is known about it”. According to Serrano the SS were divided into two sections, an inner esoteric one and an outer one. The “exoteric SS” were selected to “be able to deal with the most difficult tasks and adventures in the external world”. “Nothing of the esoteric of the black order, its practices and teachings, its invisible connections and its occult doctrines was known” to them. The “inner circle” of the SS consisted of “sun people, supermen, god-men, the total human, the human magician” (Serrano, n.d., p. 96). The esoteric SS were siddhas (magicians) from the underground The author is convinced, of course, that sexual magic rites were practiced in the SS (the “new aristocracy of the Aryan race”). Like Julius Evola before him, the Chilean makes constant references in his writings to how sexuality may be converted into high-quality aggressive military energy and political power through tantric practices: “Come and take me like a warrior!”, a lover (his karma mudra) says to him at one stage in his key novels, “I give you my heart for you to devour. Let us drink our blood”. In EL/ELLA the author recommends to heroes initiated into the tantras that “the warrior should give death the face of his lover; the fiery femininity of death will be thus evoked”. For Serrano, tantric practices and the cult life of a fascist/esoteric warrior caste are one. Additionally, the sexual magic of the SS was connected with racial experiments. These aimed at a mutation of the human race, or better, a regaining of the formerly high-standing Aryan god-men who had in the dim and distant past tarnished themselves through “ordinary” sexual intercourse with human women and produced a lesser race. According to Serrano, such experiments were conducted in the Wewelsburg, the occult center of the SS. “Laboratories of leftward magic” for the re-creation of the original, pure Aryan race were to be found there. But these were nothing more than the above-ground branches of corresponding establishments in subterranean Shambhala. “ In Shambhala they attempted to produce a mutation of their kind which would allow them to return to that which they were before their interbreeding with the sons of man...” — when they still had a white, almost transparent body and blonde hair. As Tantrics, the SS were “beyond good and evil” and for this reason their “terrible deeds” were justified by Serrano, plus that they took place at higher cosmic command. The “final solution to the question of the gypsies” (many gypsies perished in the concentration camps), for example, is said to have come directly “from Just like the Knights Templar, the inner occult core of the SS were incarnations of the guardians of the holy grail, and “the grail of the siddhas [the magicians], of the solar and martial initiations” is to be found in Shambhala. The miracles which radiated from the grail were evident in the achievements of the black order in the course of the Second World War: “If one examines the achievements of the followers of Hitler in all areas of creation within a period of just six years, one cannot avoid admiring this miracle and making a comparison with the Templar order. And one comes to believe that the SS have likewise found the grail and even deciphered it” . Even the monumental architecture of the Third Reich is supposed to have been prepared on the building sites of Shambhala. The Hyperboreans (the gods of the north), we may read, “emigrated to two secret cities in the In the Second World War the forces of light and the “sun race” (Hitler and the SS) stood opposed to the forces of darkness and the “moon race” (the Allies and the Jews). It was no ordinary war, but rather a global battle between the gods (the Nazis, the light Aryan race) and demons (the Jews, the dark Semitic race), between Odin, the highest god of the Germanic peoples, and Jehovah, the highest god of the Jews. The Nordic (hyperborean) heroes fought the “lord of darkness”, the “satanic demiurge”. At heart, Serrano says, the patriarchal and matriarchal powers were at war. Admittedly Hitler outwardly lost the war, but through his sacrifice and his example he saved the ideals of the warrior caste from Shambhala. He shall return at the head of his “wild army” to finally liberate the white race from the lord of darkness (Jehovah). It will then come to a terrible final battle. “These are the dimensions of Hitler, the envoy of the hyperborean [Nordic] siddhas, the tulku, the Bodhisattva, the Chakravartin, the Führer of the Aryans, so that the demiurge Jehovah has to mobilize all his earthly and extraterrestrial legions”. One may well dismiss Serrano’s visions as the product of an overactive imagination, but it cannot be denied that modern fascism has found a home and a predecessor in the Shambhala myth and in Tantrism. Its mythological conceptions and visions of power can without difficulty be brought into harmony with the practice and political ideology of the Kalachakra Tantra for all fundamental issues. The occult right wing’s move toward Tibetan Buddhism is thus in no way to be understood as the exploitation of the dharma for ignoble purposes, since there is a profound inner relatedness between these two ways of looking at the world. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama and Serrano Naturally, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama would simply dismiss any link between the Shambhala myth and Kalachakra Tantra and the “esoteric Hitlerism” of Serrano, regardless of how closely matched even the conceptual principles of the two systems may be. Nonetheless, it is of great interest to our culturally critical study that the Kundun met with the racist Chilean several times (in at least 1959, 1984, and 1992). When His Holiness visited The first encounter with the Kundun took place in 1959. In his own account, the founder of “esoteric Hitlerism” was the sole foreigner to greet the Dalai Lama as he crossed the Indian border after his flight from It is at any rate interesting that the Kundun, who was introduced to western culture by a member of the SS (Heinrich Harrer), meets as the first (!) Westerner after his crossing of the Indian border the fascist Miguel Serrano, who sees a mythic command from the kingdom Shambhala at the esoteric core of the SS. Serrano says of himself: “I was employed as a tool and continue to be used” (Cedade, 1986). We may recall that upon crossing the border, the Dalai Lama gave vent to the cry of “Victory to the gods!”. The gods that Serrano represented and as whose tool he served were Wotan, Odin, and, in his own words, Adolf Hitler. As far as the “enchanting” Tibetan temple bitch of “honey yellow color” which was given him by the Kundun is concerned, this creature had a most special significance for the Chilean. The lamas, the author says, referred to the petite race as the “lion of the back door of the Thanks to this vision Serrano could once more experience the fascination which habitually flooded through him at the embrace of dying women, even if one of them had this time been incarnated in a bitch. In NOS, a dying dog (the fate of Dolma probably lies behind this) spoke to him like a tantric lover with a human voice: “You don't need me outside anymore. I will howl inside you, like my brother the wolf”. Such central “hermetic” experiences naturally tied the Chilean to the Kundun and his tantric world view profoundly and so it is also not surprising that Serrano linked “esoteric Hitlerism” and the fate of Germany to the Dalai Lama directly: His “skill”, the author says of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, is “closely linked to that of Hitler’s Germany ... on account of yet undiscovered connections. A few years after The Chilean did not yet know about the SS past of Heinrich Harrer, the Kundun’s “best friend” and teacher, since this first became known in 1997 in connection with the film Seven Years in Tibet. But we can be certain that this fact would have been cited by him as further evidence to justify an occult connection between Shambhala and the SS, between the Dalai Lama and Adolf Hitler, particularly as the Chilean indicates at many points in his writings that the SS sent “secret missions” to Tibet in order to search for traces of the Aryan race there. Serrano allows himself to be celebrated as the “Führer” of the National Socialist Party of Chile. His calendar commences with the year of Adolf Hitler’s birth in 1889. He describes “esoteric Hitlerism” as the “new religion of the young heroes and future warriors and priests, the true myth of the coming century”. In 1989, on the 100th anniversary of Hitler’s birth (the year 100 for Serrano) a commemorative celebration was staged at which the Chilean and representatives of “esoteric Hitlerism” from various countries (Chile, Spain, Italy, Germany) spoke: “On the peak of a mountain in the Andes ranges which dominates Santiago,” the Chilean newspaper, La Epoca, writes, “and to the sounds of the Ride of the Valkyrie from Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), some 100 Chilean followers and foreigners commemorated Adolf Hitler in yesterday’s evening twilight and promised that in the new Hitlerist age the continuing triumph of his ideas would proceed from Chile. ... Hitler, Serrano opined, would be resurrected from in the Andes ('Andes' means 'perfected, total human) and he would do like the Caleuche [a mystic hero of Chile, whose name means 'the man who returns’) and introduce the age of Hitler” (Epoca, April 21, 1989). This event should not be underestimated on the basis of the small number of participants. For Serrano it had a ritual/symbolic significance and was reported in detail in the German neo-Nazi scene, for example. In fascist circles worldwide, Serrano is a “hot tip” and his bizarre visions do in fact exercise a fascinating attraction on many young people. His nazi books are openly offered for sale in all South American countries. The German translation of Cordón Dorado Hitlerismo Esoterico is available as a hardback [Das goldene Band — esoterischer Hitlerismus] Highly sought after copies of the other works (about Hitlerism) in German translation and individual propaganda essays are in circulation and passed from hand to hand. “Serrano’s mystical neo-Nazism … [has] a distinct appeal to the younger generation”, writes the historian Goodrick Clark, “Here Nazism becomes a pop mythology, severed from the historic context of the Third Reich. The Gnostic Cathars, Rosicrucian mysteries, Hindu Avatars, and extraterrestrial gods add a sensational and occult appeal to powerful myths of elitism, planetary destiny, and the cosmic conspiracy of the Jews that culminate in a global racist ideology of white supremacism. … Books by Serrano … are now circulating among neo-pagans, Satanists, skinheads, and Nazi metal music fans in the |
