Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich. By Eric Kurlander

Abstract

As Eric Kurlander points out in the opening pages of this book, the image of Nazis engaged in forbidden occult research has become almost a cliché in popular culture, appearing everywhere from the Indiana Jones franchise to such films as Hellboy (2004) and Captain America: The First Avenger (2011). But with the rare exception of scholars such as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, historians have tended to downplay Nazi interest in the occult, ceding this topic to conspiracy theorists and sensationalist cable documentaries. This is not just a lacuna in historical literature: left unanalyzed, the popular myth of Nazi occultism can suggest that the Nazis were totally other and that fascism arises only among extraordinary individuals preoccupied with highly deviant ideas. This is a comforting idea, but there is little evidence to support it. In this ambitious book, Kurlander seeks to neither dismiss nor overemphasize the significance of supernatural ideas in the rise and fall of the Third Reich, but rather to provide a “comprehensive study of the relationship between Nazism and the supernatural” (xiv). Kurlander also moves beyond the language of “the occult” to emphasize Nazi engagement with “the supernatural imaginary.” The “occult” implies secrets known only to an initiated elite, but Kurlander notes that the Nazis invoked supernatural ideas that were “eminently public and widely popular” (xiv). Much like the terms “cultic milieu” and “occulture” used in the sociology of religion, Kurlander’s supernatural imaginary is broad and includes practices such as dowsing and astrology, “Ariosophy,” attempts to reconstruct Germanic paganism, “border science” (including the bizarre “world ice theory” of Hanns Hörbiger), and even horror movies such as Der Golem (1915) and Nosferatu (1922). Far from the Hollywood image of Nazi elites engaged in secret rituals, Kurlander portrays Nazi engagement with the supernatural as a secret in plain sight.