By 1945 the Thousand Year Reich had become a smoking ruin. Russian soldiers pressed through the rubble, fighting from house to house, from street to street in order to link up with their British and American allies who also pressed in inexorably on the heart of the dying capital. Before they overran the eastern sector of Berlin, these Russian troops came across something very strange: vast numbers of Tibetan corpses. The fact is mentioned by Maurice Bessy and again by Pauwels and Bergier, who set the actual number of bodies at a thousand. They wore German uniform, but without the usual insignia of rank. The religion of Tibet is Buddhism, but like the Zen of Japan, it is a brand of Buddhism far divorced from the Indian original. Many scholars prefer the term "Lamaism" to distinguish between Tibetan Buddhism and its parent root. The religious life of the country is concentrated in a multitude of monasteries, many of them built in almost inaccessible mountain regions. Side by side with the state religion of Lamaism, and flourishing particularly in the rural districts, is Tibet's aboriginal religion of Bon. The Bon-Pas follow a primitive, animistic creed, full of dark rituals and spells. If the holy Lamas of the Buddhist sects were looked on as personifications of spiritual wisdom, the priests of Bon had a potent reputation with the common people as magicians. The Nazi leaders were attracted to Tibet by those of its secret doctrines which filtered through to the west. They believed, those members of the Thule group, the Luminous Lodge, and the various other occult organizations which helped shape the Third Reich, in an esoteric history of mankind. And it was in the archives of Tibetan monasteries that this history was preserved in its purest form. Already, in the latter half of the previous century, intriguing hints about Tibetan secret teachings had been carried to the west by Helena Blavatsky, who claimed initiation at the hands of the Holy Lamas themselves. Blavatsky taught that her "Hidden Masters" and "Secret Chiefs" had their earthly residence in the Himalayan region. As soon as the Nazi movement had sufficient funds, it began to organize a number of expeditions to Tibet and these succeeded one another practically without interruption until 1943. One of the most tangible expressions of Nazi interest in Tibet was the party`s adoption of its deepest and most mystical of symbols-the swastika. The swastika is one of mankind's oldest symbols, and apart from the cross and the circle, probably the most widely distributed. It is shown on pottery fragments from Greece dating back to the eighth century BC. It was used in ancient Egypt, India and China. The Navaho indians of North America have a traditional swastika pattern. Arab-Islamic sorcerers used it. In more recent times, it was incorporated in the flags of certain baltic states. The idea for the use of the swastika by the Nazis came from a dentist named Dr. Friedrich Krohn who was a member of the secret Germanen order. Krohn produced the design for the actual form in which the Nazis came to use the symbol, that is reversed, spinning in an anti-clockwise direction. As a solar symbol, the swastika is properly thought of as spinning, and the Buddhists have always believed the symbol attracted luck. The Sanskrit word "svastika" means good fortune and well being. According to Cabbalistic lore and occult theory, chaotic force can be evoked by revers- ing the symbol. And so the symbol appeared as the flag of Nazi Germany and the insignia of the Nazi party, an indication for those who had eyes to see, as to the occult nature of the Third Reich. The Controversy off the Occult Reich By John Roemer One hundred years after Adolf Hitler's birth near Linz in Austria on April 20 1889, and decades after his malign empire metastasized in Bavaria in Bavaria, the Hitler phenomenon remains to mainstream historians largely inexplicable, or at least unexplained. The man and his awful work seem to stand outside history looking in. Perhaps our human fear of the irrational is so great that we instinctively hold Hitler at a great remove in order that we need not admit him to our company. In light of this it isn't very surprising that an extensive literature exists seeking an occult rationale for the otherwise baffling catastrophe Hitler represents. As Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier point out in the Morning of the Magicians(1960), the Nazi era simply defies conventional analysis: A self taught madman, surrounded by a handful of megalomaniacs,rejects Descartes, spurns the whole humanist culture, tramples on reason, invokes Lucifer, conquers Europe, and nearly conquers the world. The historian begins to feel anxious and to wonder whether his art is viable. Pauwels and Bergier were among the first postwar proponents of a black magical explanation for the Third Reich. About a quarter of their book is devoted to a region they call "The Absolute Elsewhere," a neverland where Nazi pseudosciences and occult methodology held official sway. They quote a Hitlerian pronouncement to demonstrate that the Fuhrer's intellectual development was on a level wholly different from that understood by the Western tradition: "there is a Nordic and National Socialist science which is opposed to Jewish-Liberal science".2 Reality was defined by politics. Nazi "science" has brought hoots of derision from those who hold to the Cartesian model. In place of psychology there was an occult frappe composed of the mysticism of Gurdijeff, the theosophy of Madame Blavatsky and the archetypes of Nordic mythology. In place of Newtonian physics stood the cosmic force called vril, the bizarre geology known as the hollow earth theory, and the frigid cosmology of Hans Horbiger's Welteislehre, the doctrine of eternal ice. Nazi thought excluded psychoanalysis, which has in fact been not very helpful in explaining the etiology of great evil, although Robert G.L. Waite's effort, quoted above and published in 1977 by Basic Books, is good on several provocative subjects: Hitler's sadomasochistic sex life; the possibility he had a Jewish grandfather; and his Viennese mentors, who are described at greater length by the authors about to be mentioned. Nazism officially rejected the theory of relativity as "Jewish science". Not only Freud but EInstein too was forced to flee Hitler's Europe. He and other physicists eventually were able to ensure that atomic secrets remained in the hands of the allies until they could be used spectacularly to climax the Pacific war. Horbiger's physics derived from an intuitive flash he experienced late in the nineteenth century. " As a young engineer," he wrote, "I was watching one day some molten steel poured on wet ground covered with snow: the ground exploded after some delay and with great violence." This conflict of opposites, of fire and ice, is a theme that inspired Horbiger and resonated for German nationalists because it recurs in the Icelandic Eddas, the sourcebooks of Teutonic mythology. It all makes good sense in Iceland, since that island's peculiar geology feature numerous volcanic rifts in the permafrost; fire and ice are commonly juxtaposed all over the landscape. As grounds for a cosmology- the word implies universality- it is at best dubious. It would be a hard sell in Hawaii. Nevertheless, Nazi science was influential out of all proportion to its objective validity. Hoerbiger was immensely influential in the Third Reich. His followers numbered in the tens of thousands. There were scores of Horbigerian books, hundreds of Welteislehre pamphlets, and a monthly magazine called The Key to World Events. Our Nordic ancestors grew strong amidst the ice and snow, and this is why a belief in a world of ice is the natural heritage of Nordic men. It was Austrian, Hitler, who drove out the Jewish politicians, and another Austrian, Horbiger, (who) will drive out the Jewish scientists. By his own example Hitler has shown that an amateur to give us a thorough understanding of the Universe. Hitler's fatal confidence in the success of his troops on the Russian front during the 1941 - 2 winter is generally believed to have been a result of his misplaced faith in Horbiger's weather forecasts. Despite such setbacks, the Welteislehre managed to thrive even after the war. The popular speculations of Immanuel Velikovsky derive in part from Horbiger. In 1953 a survey conducted by Martin Gardner showed that more than a million people in Germany, England, and the U.S. believed that Horbiger was right6. The Horbigerian cosmology posited an early epoch, some fifteen million years ago, during which a hugh moon moved across the sky very near the earth. Its gravitational attraction gave rise to a race of our ancestors, the giants. These giants, which appear in the ancient Norse and Icelandic sagas, sleep, yet they are alive. To the Nazis, they were Supermen. In one set of myths, contained in the Nibelungenlied, they lived beneath Teutonic mountains. In another they were prototype Aryans from the East, inhabiting vast Tibetan caverns. Three other books that investigate hidden influences on Gerald Suster's Hitler: The Occult Messiah; Jean-Michel Angebert's The Occult and the Third Riech and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism. Suster's book largely rehashes Pauwels and Bergier. Angebert (actually a pen name for two French writers) interestingly links Hitler to an ancient dualist tradition he traces from Manichaenism in Persia through the Essenes, Jesus's Palestinian forebears, to the Cathars in the south of France in the Middle Ages. It's philosophy in which, in its Nazi incarnation, solar forces of light represented by blond, fair-skinned Aryans strive against the evil forces of darkness, who are of course dark skinned Semites. Both books, but especially Suster's are written in prose that stops just this side of tabloid journalese. This is too bad for two reasons. One, the authors diminish some important material by this kind of presentation. Two, the lessons we have to learn about mass psychopathology and about the history of fascism are too important to be trivalized in this way. Goodrick-Clark's is a serious and compelling historical look at ariosophy, a dangerous amalgam of Aryan racism, pan-German nationalism, and occultism that flourished in Austria and Germany from around 1890 well into the era when Himmler's Death's Head SS was organized. Himmler is said by Pauwels and Bergier to have taken the Jesuits for his model, and to have installed a regular hierarchy ranging from lay brothers to father superior, and to have used this Black Order in horrific rites.8 The Occult Roots of Nazismidentifies wide circle of proto-Nazi philosophers, previously almost unknown, who saw in the chaos that beset Germany after the Treaty of Versailles the working out of ancient Aryan prophecies. Among them was Rudolf John Gorsleben, who interesting career Goodrick-Clarke sums up in a sentence: "on the basis of the runes, occultism, and the Edda, Gorsleben created an original racist mystery-religion which illuminated the priceless magical heritage of the Aryans and justified their spiritual and political world-supremacy." Gorsleben was active in right-wing politics in Bavaria in the years Hitler was forming his political convictions there, and he lectured to the Thule Society, a Munich club thought to have greatly influenced Nazism in its infancy. He also edited a weekly newspaper called German Freedom; in 1927 he changed the name to Aryan Freedom. He derived the word 'race' from rata, an Old Norse term meaning 'root', in order to conclude that God and race were identical. He maintained that racial mixing was always detrimental for the racially superior partner, since his purity was debased in the progeny, and he repeated the common volkisch [folkish] conviction that woman could be 'impregnated' by intercourse, even when no conception occurred, so that her subsequent offspring bore the characteristics of her first lover. Given these overwhelming pressures towards the increasing bastardization of the German descendants of the Aryan race, only the strict practice of segregation and eugenics could guarantee the reversal of racial contamination in the world. Another book which hold that Hitler learned many of his occult lesson from avatars in Vienna and Munich may well be the best known black magical explanation of Nazism to have been put forth so far. Trevor Ravenscroft's The Spear of Destint was published by that famous British house of occultism, the aptly named Neville Spearman Ltd,.in 1972, and has since gone through many edition. Ravenscroft is intriguing because instead of reporting historical influences on Hitler, he presents secret history in a narrative form that purports to be factual and that-if true maybe even if only poetically "true"-goes a long way toward finding a convincing occult explanation for the Nazi phenomenon. Two challenges to Ravenscroft's facts, discussed below, have led some readers to conclude his book is more nearly a novel than strict history. Nonetheless, its provocative premise and fluent synthesis of black magical thematics will keep it on occult booklists until a better effort at explaining Hitler comes along. Ravenscroft, a British journalist, historian, and World War II commando officer, spent four years in Nazi prison camps after he was captured attempting to assassinate General Erwin Rommel in North Africa in 1941. His personal perspective on the Hitler era is based on material he says he got in a state of transcendent consciousness while imprisoned. He introduces his methodology by speaking of: my own experience of higher levels of consciousness whilst in a Nazi Concentration Camp during the war, and how the nature of this transcendent experience had guided me to a study of the Spear of Longinus and the legend of world destiny which had grown up around it. Later, in London, his intuitive suspicions about certain grail relics and their importance in occult Hitlerian history were confirmed by a Viennese exile called Dr. Walter Johannes Stein who died in 1957. Dr. Stein spent much of the war as a British secret agent, but before that time he was a scholar who employed white magical means to clairvoyantly investigate historical events. It was his book on the grail mythos published in Stuttgart in 1928 and titled The Ninth Century: World History in the Light of the Holy Grailthat attracted Ravenscroft to him. The Spear of Destinyfocuses first on Hitler's lost years in Vienna from 1909 to 1913. During that time, Ravenscroft writes, Dr. Stein was pursuing his occult researches as a student at the University of Vienna and getting to know Hitler, then a dropout living in a flophouse. Vienna was during Hitler's years there a vortex of modern thinking. Freud was in practice at Berggasse; Ludwig Wittgenstein was in residence pondering avant garde philosophy and metaphysics; Gustav Mahler had returned home to die and to name his protege, Arnold Schonberg. In contrast there persisted the deep anti-Semitic currents that had caused Mahler to convert to Catholicism, that forced Freud eventually to flee to London and that informed the ancient pan-German folkoric nostalgia espoused by Guido von List. This old black magician, whose occult lodge Ravenscroft says substituted the swastika for the cross in perversion and the practice of medieval thaumaturgy, looked like a wizard in floppy cap and long white beard. His link to Hitler was allegedly through an occult bookseller, Ernst Pretzche, in whose shop the future Fuhrer found a second home. In the shop Dr. Stein found a copy of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, the medieval grail romance that Dr. Stein was himself researching for his work on the ninth century. In the book's margins were handwritten annotations; looking them over Dr.Stein was fascinated and repelled: This was no ordinary commentary but the work of somebody who had achieved more than a working knowledge of the black arts! The unknown commentator had found the key to unveiling many of the deepest secrets of the Grail, yet obviously spurned the Christian ideals of the Knights and delighted in the devious machinations of the Anti-Christ. It suddenly dawned on him that he was reading the footnotes of Satan! The footnotes, of course, proved to have been Hitler's. Soon afterward, Dr.Stein and Hitler saw the Reich's lance together in the Imperial Museum at the Hofburg. Dr. Stein had been there before and had never failed to be moved by the sight of the old relic, supposed to have been moved by the original spear with which the Roman centurion, Longinus, pierced the side of Christ during the crucifixation. Longinus was a German, and his "spear of destiny" was fated to play a magical role in the careers of German leaders like Charlemagne, Otto the Great, and Frederick Barbarossa. Dr. Stein said the spear inspired in him the emotion expressed in the motto of the knights of the holy grail: Durch Mitleid wissen, "through compassion to self knowledge." Then he glanced at Hitler: Walter Stein found he was not the only one moved by the sight of this historic spearhead. Adolf Hitler stood beside him, like a man in a trance, a man over whom some dreadful magic spell had been cast... The very space around him seemed enlivened with some subtle irradiation, a kind of ghostly ectoplasmic light. His whole physiognomy and stance appeared transformed as if some might Spirit now inhabited his very soul, creating within and around him a kind of evil transfiguration of its own nature and power. Latter Hitler took Dr. Stein up the Danube to visit his mystic teacher, a rustic woodcutter and herbalist named Hans Lodz "who retained in his peasant's blood the last traces of the atavistic clairvoyance of the ancient Germanic tribes" and who "resembled a mischievous yet malevolent dwarf from the pages of Grimm's Fairy Tales or an illustration from a book on ancient Germanic folklore".16 The men took a swim in the river at which Dr. Stein noticed that Hitler had only one testicle. It was Lodz, Dr.Stein learned, who had prepared for Hitler a peyote concoction that afforded him psychedelic insight into his past lives. The peyote itself had come from Pretzche, who had lived for a time in the German colony in Mexico. Hitler had hoped that his former existences, viewed in his drug trance, would include an early incarnation as a powerful Teutonic ruler, but it was not to be. Instead his psychedelic perception revealed non Eschenbach's Parzival to have been prophetic of events that would take place a thousand years after it was written, i.e. in the present. And it showed Hitler to have been the historical personage behind the evil sorcerer Klingsor, the very spirit of the anti-Christ and the villain of Parzival. According to Dr. Stein's work Klingsor was in fact Landulf II of Capua, the traitorous confidant of the Holy Roman Emperor who betrayed Christianity to the Moslem invaders of Italy and Spain. Armed with the knowledge of his black spiritual ancestry, Ravenscroft writes, Hitler moved to Germany, joined the Bavarian Army, survived the hellish trench warfare on the western front, won the Iron Cross, second class, and got discharged in Munich where he encountered the men who were to invent National Socialism. Virtually every study of Hitler's time in Munich mentions the Thule Society as superficially a kind of Elk's Club of German mythology which met often and openly at a fancy metropolitan hotel and for a time counted Hitler as a member. Behind the scenes, however the society seems to have been considerably more sinister. Robert Payne whose excellent Hitler biography contains no occult explanations, describes the Thule Society as the center of the right wing opposition to the brief Bavarian postwar socialist coup under the Jewish intellectual Kurt Eisner. The reaction set in swiftly, as the extreme right gathered its forces. The headquarters of the reaction was the Hotel Vierjahreszeiten, where several floors were given over to the Thule Society, ostensibly a literary club devoted to the study of Nordic culture but in fact a secret political organization devoted to violent anti-Semitism and rule by an aristocratic elite. The name of the organization derived from ultima Thule, the unknown northern land believed to be the original home of the German race. The symbol of the Thule Society was a swastika with a dagger enclosed in laurel leaves. Most of the occult historians of the era believe the Thule Society operated on a deeper level still, a level headed by a mysterious figure called Dietrich Eckart. Goodrick-Clarke calls Eckart Hitler's mentor in the early days of the Nazi Party, along with Rudolf Hess and Alfred Rosenberg.18 According to Ravenscroft, Eckart, like Hitler, first achieved transcendence through psychedelic drugs. Research on peyote by the German pharmacologist Ludwig Lewin had been published in 1886, leading to widespread popular experimentation. Later a heroin addict, in earlier days Eckart used peyote in the practice on neo- pagan magic in Berlin. He came to believe that he, too was the reincarnation of ninth century character. In his case it was Bernard of Barcelona, a notorious betrayer of Christianity to the Arabs and a black magician who used thaumaturgy to hold off Carolingian armies in Spain. Eckart assertedly organized Kurt EIsner's assassination and personally chose Hitler-by then a battle-scarred veteran of the horrors of trench warfare and a fervent critic of the armistice-to lead the Aryan race back to supremacy. Ravenscroft writes that Hitler had been prepared for satanic initiation by his experiences in Vienna with peyote and with the spear and by his mustard gassing in 1918, which left him blind and in a state of enforced trance for several days. He also says that the techniques Dietrich Eckart used were in part derived from the sexual magic of Aleister Crowley. In 1912 this famed British magician was named IX British head of a secret Berlin lodge called Ordo Templi Orientis which practiced various forms of sexual magic.19 Ravenscroft writes "there can be little doubt" that both Crowley and Eckart conducted deep studies of the Arabian astrological magic performed by Klingsor's real life counterpart, Landulf II. It was to Sicily-then a Moslem stronghold-that Landulf fled after his traitorous links to Islam were disclosed. And it was in a dark tower in the mountains of the southwest corner of that island that his evil soul festered with additional bitterness over his castration by the relatives of a noblewoman he had raped. There he practiced sadistic satanism of a nature that foreshadowed the horrors of Nazi concentration camps. If the legends that have come down from these dark centuries of European history are true, these rituals carried out at Kalot Enbolot included terrible tortures such as the slitting open of the stomach of sacrificial victims and the slow drawing open of the stomach of sacrificial victims and the slow drawing of their entrails, the driving of stakes through the orifices of their bodies before disembowelling them, and the invoking of Spirits of Darkness (incubis) to rape young virgins kidnapped from their families. It was from his studies of the power available to practitioners of such perversities that Eckart devised the rituals he used when he "opened the centers of Adolf Hitler to give him a vision of and a means of communication with the Powers." Ravenscroft concludes, though he declines to furnish the full details: "Suffice it to say that they were indescribably sadistic and ghastly." Having done his worst, Eckart soon died, proudly advising those around him: Follow Hitler! he will dance, but it is I who have called the tune! I have initiated him into theSecret Doctrine, opened his centers of vision and given him the means to communicate with the Powers. Do not mourn for me: I shall have influenced history more than any other German. Not unnaturally the question rises whether any of The Spear of Destinyis true. It's certainly a great story, one which Ravenscroft elaborates with a lengthy investigation of Hitler's sex life, in which he makes a case for associating the reports of the Fuehrer's missing testis to the perversities resulting from Landulf's castration. The problem lies with Ravenscroft's primary source, Dr. Walter Johannes Stein. And the problem with Dr.Stein is really two problems: one his method of historical research: and two, the fact that he is dead and unable to speak for himself. Given his method, of course, this second problem should not be insurmountable. Had we the technique, Dr. Stein could presumably verify each of Ravenscroft's assertion for us from beyond the grave. For Dr. Stein is alleged to have studied history not in the libraries and archives that are the usual haunt of the historian but in an arena called the Cosmic Chronicle where, according to Ravenscroft, past present and future were united in a higher dimension of time. What's more Ravenscroft reveals in his introduction, Dr.Stein taught the same techniques to him. It is, however, undeniably difficult, if not unprecedented, to footnote clairvoyance. We have to take on faith that the The Spear of Destiny is what Dr.Stein told Ravenscroft. This is not to say that all of his information came from the Cosmic Chronicle; Dr. Stein as we have seen is purported to have been present in Vienna during Hitler's lost years there. Nor did their close association end in Austria. Ravenscroft says Dr. Stein "watched at close quarters" the founding of the Nazi party and Hitler's association with Eckart and other sinister mentors. When Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler ordered Dr.Stein's arrest in Stuttgart in 1933 in order to press him into service with the SS Occult Bureau, he escaped from Germany and brought with him to Britain the most authoritative knowledge of the occultism of the Nazi Party. Nowhere does Ravenscroft made it clear whether he's talking about eyewitness knowledge on Dr.Stein's part or about the sort of information to be gleaned from the Cosmic Chronicle. But two critics of the The Spear of Destinydo cast doubt on several of the factual assertions upon the factual assertions upon which Ravenscroft's argument is built. One is Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, whose book on the occult roots of Nazism is quoted above. In an appendix called The Modern Mythology of Nazi Occultism, Goodrick-Clarke takes Ravenscroft to task for the story about Hitler's relations with the occult bookseller in Vienna and for his claim that Guido Von List was forced to flee from outraged Viennese Catholics in 1909 after the sexual rites of his blood brotherhood were exposed. he writes flatly. There is not a shred of evidence for such rituals. List was never obliged to leave Vienna and he enjoyed the patronage of prominent Vienna figures...The fictional nature of the whole episode surrounding the annotated copy of copy of Parzival is suggested by the similarity of Pretzsche's obscure bookshop to the one described by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton in Zanoni, (1842), which probably served Ravenscroft as a literary model. Goodrick-Clarke also criticizes Jean Michael Angebert's book, The Occult and the Third Reich, cited above. He brands as imaginary Angebert's account of the young Hitler's association with Lanz von Lebenfels. As noted earlier, Goodrick-Clarke's book is an important and serious piece of research on Guido von List and Lanz von Lievenfels. But the author seems a little over-sensitive toward other writers who invoke his two subjects. Nevertheless, his critique of Angebert and Ravenscroft, though brief, does offer a glimpse of the misgivings that professional historians feel regarding such material. More extensive criticisms have been offered by Christoph Lindenberg in his review of THE The Spear of Destiny in the German journal Die Drie. Lindenberg has done some effective digging at the Vienna Records office. Ravenscroft has Hitler sitting high up in the cheap seats of the Vienna Opera House in the winter of 1910 - 1 watching Wagner's Parzifal and sympathizing with Klingsor. This proves to have been impossible, because Lindenberg learned that the first performance of Wagner's opera took place three years later, on January 14,1914. Ravenscroft's second mistake was to name the Viennese bookseller who introduced Hitler to drugs. "No better name occurred to him than Pretsche, popular among English writers of fiction for German malefactors," Lindenberg writes scornfully before revealing that extensive checks of Vienna city and business directories and police records for the years 1892 through 1920 were negative for the name in question. Next, Lindenberg takes issue with Ravenscroft's description of the Danube trip Hitler and Dr. Stein took in May 1913, to visit the mystic woodcutter, Hands Lodz: We can overlook Ravenscroft's mistake of speaking of "Wachau" as a place and not of the region which really it is. But the details do not fit: the snow melting in May, the steamer running in spite of the floods, bathing in the river- it makes no sense. Certainly wrong is the statement that Hitler had only one testicle... all this has been completely refuted by Werner Maser. Ravenscroft's account of Hitler's circumstances in Vienna also come in for some heavy criticism. Dr. Stein reportedly sat in a window seat in Demel's Cafe, reading the anonymous marginalia in the copy of Parzival he'd found and concluding they were "the footnotes of Satan" when he looked through the glass and beheld "the most arrogant face and demonical eyes he had ever seen". This was of course the future Fuehrer in his legendary guise as an impoverished pavement artist, selling homemade postcards, dressed in a big black "sleazy" coat, his toes visible through the cracks in his shoes. When in August, 1912, he sought Hitler out at the "flophouse" he lived in , in Meldemannstrasse, he was told Hitler was away at Spittal-an-der-Drau collecting a legacy left him by an aunt. Thereafter, Hitler dressed well. Hitler did receive a legacy from his aunt, Johanna Poelzl, Lindenberg reports. But this happens in March, 1911, and the aunt lived in Spital-with-one-t, not on the Drau but in southern Austria. Furthermore, At no time of life did Hitler live in impoverished conditions, rather he had always sufficient money. In the Meldenmannstrasse, a kind of large hotel, Hitler paid a rent of 15 Kronen a month. So he could afford a fairly expensive room and had no need to sell his pictures, which in any case were no postcards. So this scene too, that impoverished Hitler dressed in an oversized black coat selling water colors in front of the Cafe Dehmel does not agree with the facts either (cf. the two works by Werner Maser who with incredible care collected all ascertained facts of Hitler's youth). In his discussion of the holy lance's power to evoke transcendent experience, Ravenscroft has a scene in which the chief of the German general staff, Helmut von Moltke, visited the relic in the company of Conrad von Hoetzendorf, an Austrian general, shortly before the outbreak of World War I. The spear's presence led von Moltke to have a trance vision of himself incarnated as Pope Nicolas I, a ninth century pontiff concerned, like von Moltke, with the balance of geopolitical power between east and west. Untrue protests Lindenberg. "For Moltke visited Vienna neither in 1913 nor in 1914. Conrad and Moltke met on May 12, 1914 at Karlsbad, from September 7 - 10, 1913, in Silesia, and at Leipzig on October 18 at the Centenary of the Battle of Leipzig. They had no other meeting." Lindenberg has several other criticisms to make, such as the assertion that "A number of people who intimately knew Walter Johannes Stein in the last years of his life state that Stein never met Hitler." Unfortunately Ravenscroft's aversion to footnotes has also afflicted his critic, and Lindenberg nowhere names these people nor does he document his other assertions. Lindenberg doesn't like Ravenscroft's book; he calls it " a pollution of our spiritual environment." And it is manifestly difficult for him or anyone to rebut research done on the cosmic level. What, in the end, was Hitler all about? Perhaps no better explanation can be found than W.H. Auden's suggestions, made in his poem "September 1,1939" and printed as an epigram to Robert G.L. Waite's book. The date is the beginning of Hitler's Blitzkrieg against Poland: Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. Walter Stein, a native of Venice and an British intelligence agent, spent many years studying the occult in Germany during the 1920s and 30s. There he became well acquainted with a fellow student of the arcane arts, Adolph Hitler. Stein followed Hitler's occult involvement very closely, schooled himself from the same texts. Hence, Stein became the world's foremost authority on Nazi Occult activity outside of the party itself. Stein soon became frantic over developments in Germany. Hitler's rise to power coincided directly with his initiation into The Secret Doctrine, a gathering of the most elite and powerful Mages in the world. Further, the core of the Nazi party leadership w as dominated bypowerful occultists. Stein realized that although they had studied occultism together, Hitler had traveled down the shadowed path of dark magic. Stein knew that Hitler's admission into The Doctrine could be disastrous for all those who oppo sed him. With this power and a cadre of dark mystics, Nazi Germany had a secret weapon the Allied forces would be ill-prepared to meet. The Nazi mystics sensed Walter Stein's presence, and in 1933 he fled to England, narrowly escaping forced service into Germany's Nazi Occult Bureau. Upon arriving in England, Stein warned Winston Churchill of the impending danger posed by Hitler's indoctr ination. It was clear that action must be taken to either quell Nazi progress in matters Arcane or find a way to match it. Stein had further grim news, however. Stein had uncovered evidence while spying on the Nazis that Hitler's English intelligence netw ork was alarmingly extensive There was little chance of an English counter-occult program remaining hidden from Nazi spies. Churchill had no choice but to contact President Roosevelt and ask the Americans for help. Churchill arranged a meeting between the crippled President and Stein. Roosevelt was skeptical, but decided to leave no stone unturned in his efforts to defeat the Nazis. Less than a week after Walter Stein's meeting with Roosevelt, one of the President's most trusted advisors was placed at his disposal. Stein was charged wi th the creation of an organization whose purpose was to monitor and analyze Nazi Occult activity. Most importantly, the group was to devise counter-measures in the event that mundane firepower alone could not stop Hitler. This group became known among it's participants as The Watch. The Watch was an eclectic collection of individuals whose only common thread was power and influence. Stein was the group's unofficial leader. Roosevelt's advisor acted as the president's proxy. Eleven other members brought the total to thirteen. Most of the original thirteen were high-ranking Military Intelligence officers or scientists, the most notable exceptio ns being a Catholic Arch bishop and a powerful and respected U.S. Senator. FDR kept the existence of The Watch completely secret, even from the American government and military, to avoid the inevitable public backlash in the event that government-sanction ed occult research ever be uncovered. Despite the doubts of President Roosevelt, over the next decade the Watch was consistently and horrifyingly successful. Only Stein was unshaken by discoveries that threatened the sanity of the other members of The Watch. The conspirators used their authority and positions to fund and conduct research into the occult, gradually expa nding to all areas of paranormal and psychic investigation. The accomplishments of The Watch's occult and psychic research allowed them to undertake several successful missions that kept the Axis occult power in check. The Watch's wartime operations inclu ded the assassination, by both mundane and arcane means, of several leading Nazi occultists and the recovery of certain artifacts of mystical significance, including the famed Spear of Destiny. By 1945, The Watch had become extremely powerful organization , and yet remained completely hidden from the world. The end of the World War II was in large part due to the success of The Watch's endeavors in destroying Nazi occult power. That ultimate success also meant the loss of the primary impetus for the Watch's activities. As usual with any powerful and motivate d group, however, The Watch soon found another Focus. From the debriefing of Axis scientists and review of German military records, the conspirators learned that accounts by Allied airmen of mysterious German experimental aircraft, dubbed "Foo Fighters", were erroneous. Axis command records revealed that Luftwaffe pilots reported identical craft, and assumed them to be Allied experimental aircraft. This evidence, coupled with similar reports uncovered from accounts during World War I and earlier, convince d the Watch that the phenomena of Unidentified Flying Objects deserved attention and investigation. While continuing its occult and parapyschology research, The Watch redirected a large part of its manpower and resources toward the study of UFOs and their possible source. It would not have long to wait for answers. By 1947, UFO sightings had become more frequent. The U. S. government and military decided to institute new programs todiscretely investigate these strange phenomenon. Monitoring these investigations, unseen, was The Watch.