Hitler: The Abiding Enigma

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Rudolf von Sebottendorff was the alias of Adam Alfred Rudolf Glauer, born on November 9, 1875 at Hoyerswerda, a town in Saxony. The son of a locomotive driver, Glauer shunned conventional family life and embarked on a life of adventure in the United States, Western Australia, and Egypt where he remained, between 1897 and 1900, working as an electrical technician. From there he went to Istanbul and began the serious study of occultism, practiced Sufism, became a Freemason and acquired extensive Rosicrucian and alchemical texts. These laid the foundation for his obscurantist and reactionary political attitudes—not to mention mystical irrationalism—that marked his later association with the esoteric Thule society, pan German circles and the Nazi party. (For biographical information on this shadowy figure, much of it sketchy and still disputed, see Ernst Tiede, Astrologisches Lexicon (Leipzig: Theosophisches Verlagshaus, 1920), Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (1985; New York: New York University Press, 1993), chap. 7; Georg Franz-Willing, Ursprung der Hitler Bewegung (Oldendorf: Schütz, 1974). 2. Thus Yehuda Bauer's observation: “Hitler is explicable in principle, but that doesn’t mean that he has been explained.” Yehuda Bauer, Is the Holocaust Explicable? (New York, 1990), introduction; Who Was Responsible and When: Some Well Known Documents Revisited (London, 1991); and Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, 2001). 3. Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler (New York, 1998), xiv. 4. Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler, xii; cf. Hugh Trevor Roper, “The Mind of Adolf Hitler,” in Hitler's Secret Conversations (New York, 1953), vi–xxx; Ian Kershaw, The Hitler Myth (Oxford, 1987) chap. 1; Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil (Cambridge, 1989) introduction; Friedrich Heer, Der Glaube des Adolf Hitler (Munich, 1968). 5. Quoted in Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler, 286; cf. Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World (New York, 1982); Lewis McRobert, “Emil Fackenheim and Radical Evil,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 58 (Summer 1985): 325–39. 6. See inter alia, George Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, (Middletown, CT, 1983); Rudolph Binion, Hitler Among the Germans (New York, 1976); Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler in History (Hanover, NH, 1989), and Das deutsche Jahrhundert: Eine historische Bilanz (Stuttgart, 1996); Jürgen Kocka, “The German Identity and Historical Comparison: After the Historikerstreit,” in Reworking the Past, ed. Peter Baldwin (Boston, 1987); Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1988); Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987); William Carr, “Historians and the Hitler Phenomenon,” German Life and Letters 34 (1981): 260–22; George Schreiber, Hitler, Interpretationen 1923–1983 (Darmstadt, 1984). 7. Nicholas Goodrick–Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism. 8. Cf. Robert G. L. Waite, Vanguard of Nazism (Cambridge, MA, 1952); Otto Höfler, Kultische Geheimbünde der Germanen (Frankfurt, 1934), chap. 1. 9. Cf. James Brennan, Occult Reich (London, 1974); Dusty Sklar, The Nazis and the Occult (NY, 1977); Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth (London, 1974); Friedrich Heer, Der Glaube des Adolf Hitler: Anatomie einer politischen Religiosität (Munich, 1968); Ulrich Hunger, Die Runenkunde im Dritten Reich (Frankfurt, 1984).