![]() And it’s the story of what can happen when a fragile democracy, under the strain of economic collapse and rapid cultural upheaval, sees its leadership abandon civic traditions, indulge in vivid fantasies, and lose any stable sense of reality. ![]() But it’s also a reminder of the deep connections that sometimes appear between illiberal politics and certain kinds of occult or supernatural beliefs. His book is a grim museum of Nazi exotica. Kurlander is documenting something zanier, more particular, and somehow more frightening. We’re used to understanding Nazis as cruel automatons, and their regime as the horrific triumph of secular rationality and bureaucratic efficiency. This isn’t what Americans are accustomed to hearing about the Third Reich. There were biodynamic farms at Dachau and Auschwitz. The second most powerful Nazi leader, Heinrich Himmler, was an avid reader of the Bhagavad Gita and had a personal astrologer. SS officers studied runes, compared themselves to a Hindu warrior caste, and traveled to Tibet in the middle of the war, looking for a lost Aryan tribe. ![]() Kurlander writes about Nazi scientists hunting for death rays, and about a government team that tried to suss out submarines using a map of the Atlantic and a metal cube on a string. Some of the details in historian Eric Kurlander’s new study of Nazism and the occult, Hitler’s Monsters, sound more like plot points from a Captain America movie than facts from the historical record. ![]() Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich ![]()
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