Quest for the Ark

by Taggart Rehnn

  Now, the uncomfortable comparison: America emerged from the depression thanks to the New Deal. There were many Americans sympathizing with Hitler, notoriously Lindbergh, Ford, and a few other well-known family names. America, however, could spend, live on credit, and not count expenses. To this day, deficits are a colossal black hole, yet the economy ‘is booming’. In those days it wasn’t as bad, but you get my point: nobody cares. Every other country has to control deficits; but the United States, can live on credit, like a swindler in Vegas, for as long as world trade is denominated in dollars.

  Hitler tried to create his ‘New Deal’: he built and built and built, and funded ideological arts and what not; and infrastructure spending created jobs. So, from colossal unemployment and depressed humiliation, he gave Germans jobs, monumental buildings, and parades to feel good about themselves. But the state coffers were running on empty.

  So he did what all spendthrifts with power had done through history: kill those he owed money to—and, since he was at it, also everyone he could rob blind, within German territory. And nobody did much, except feel indignant, maybe make movies ridiculing him, produced and shown in places safely outside Germany.

  To make the massacres palatable to the masses, Hitler used propaganda: those he wanted to plunder he turned into ‘non-humans’. Humans or not, they had money, gold, artwork, finery of all sorts; and that, he could use to replenish German state coffers, which then became ‘his’ coffers. ‘Non-humans’, of course, were excluded from the ‘Nation’. So there were social programs, but only for those who were part of the Nation—hence, Nationalsocialism. Goebbels tinkered with the ‘cute’ expression Nazi-Sozi, but it didn’t catch on.”

  “Once spineless European powers let Hitler get the Sudeten,” interjected David, “and catch Czechoslovakia pants down, he went merrily invading around, and using some of what he could plunder from new conquered areas to build ever more gigantic things, including extermination camps.

  Then, when he attacked Stalin and Stalin became an ally of the Allies, since the word “Socialist” could have offended ‘uncle Josef’—who ground 25 million people to save his ass—the Allies popularized the word Nazi, to avoid ruffling ‘uncle Josef’s moustache.”

  “That takes care of the jobless, the hypocrites and the revisionists,” Haim took over now. “But there is a darker component of the Nazi psyche, far less well known, yet still very much alive, that might explain your stickman.

  Ehud repeated ad nauseam these are beasts and with beasts one does not negotiate; but all the same, one has to study how these beasts came into existence to understand how they became, well, beasts: Hitler needed money to build things and lower unemployment. He was fine with killing millions of Jews to take not just watches, menorahs, jewelry, furniture, paintings, but anything of value, even gold teeth.

  However, the origin, the justification, the theory that made this murderous madness palatable to the masses, that was not so much Hitler’s as Himmler’s—and his witchcraft’s creature, his druidic delirious design to destroy us. If you have some time, I can tell you all about the witches, since Ehud had studied that particular beast in detail.”

  “Sorry to interrupt, gentlemen, but lunch is served,” said Becky, as a mouthwatering whiff of roasted chicken and fries invaded the room. “Simple fare, but you guys have to eat something, if you want your brains to keep working well without sorcery.”

  “Isn’t she the perfect hostess?” smiled Tony. “Running around, dashing back home from work, driving the children, yet making time to feed the vultures. Haim is a lucky man and we’re hungry bunch. I thought I’d be gone soon, but I’d be delighted to take you up on your offer, Becky. Smells amazing!”

  “Well, thank you for the compliment. But the hostess is hungry too. Help yourselves. I have to go back to work soon,” she said, glancing at her watch. Everyone obliged and soon the entire group had moved to the kitchen to grab some food and bring it to Haim’s office where all their maps and photographs were now spread, covering most of the floor.

  For a brief time, lunch broke the gloomy atmosphere created by the previous conversation. Soon, however, most of the chicken and fries had vanished, and Becky joined the conversation, picking up where they had left off: “Himmler worked hard, for over a decade, to create a sort of second order of the Templars, inspired, in a sense, by Camelot—only his order was evil, not chivalrous. At the base of it all, Himmler wanted a new religion: a religion for Germany, the land where a new ‘master race’ should arise. The new Camelot, complete with a castle and a crypt, was inspired by Karl Maria Wiligut, a self-professed pagan, a follower of Irmin—a made-up Germanic ‘g-d’, made up from a smorgasbord of literary, linguistic, and onomastic ‘sources’, said to date as far back as 12,500BC.

  Later, Wotan—what most now would call Odin—supplanted Irmin. Wotanists claimed (still do, regrettably) that the white race faced extinction, brought about by a Jewish world conspiracy.”

  “They also believed,” added Haim, “that Christianity is a creation of us, Jews. One of those groups—ahem, Tony—called itself ‘The Order’, and was very active in America in the 1980s.” David’s face was asking what was going on, so loudly Tony just shook his head and twirled his index around his right ear. “No, not crazy, Tony,” protested Haim. “We’re all in this together, or we aren’t at all. So, if you want our help, you’d better come a bit cleaner.”

  Becky almost choked on some last fries. After sipping some water, she tapped her own chest, and then continued. “Hitler and Himmler originally were opposed to Freemasonry and such; but, under Wiligut’s influence, they started aping Freemason’s ritual or what they imagined it was. Their infatuation with Freemasons, Arthur’s ‘Chevaliers of the Round Table’, Templars, and similar, was hardly unique to Hitler and Himmler.”

  “At the beginning of the twentieth century,” Haim picked up the thread, “in part as counter reaction to positivism, Germanic elites longed for a more spiritual past, a sort of freedom from the ‘slavery to science’. This led to the creation of the ‘Völkisch’ movement: people who rejected science and medicine, nudists who embraced vegetarianism and herbalism, and sun-worshipping—a bit like a prequel to hippies, only in communes spread through the German countryside. In most cities occultism, astrology, magic and spiritual quests became fashionable. All these fads became known under the umbrella term ‘Lebensreform’, something Himmler embraced.”

  “One of the big gurus of ‘Lebensreform’,” continued Becky, fighting with her lone chicken drumstick, “was a Russian woman, Madame Blavatsky, who pretended to be a telepath. In 1888, she said she had travelled to Tibet and been initiated into the secrets of what she called the ‘Hidden Elect’, spiritual masters also known as ‘the Great White Brothers’—normal humans, who, by initiation and ascetic discipline supposedly had developed superhuman powers. Because of this, when Ernst Schäfer said he wanted to organize a scientific expedition to Tibet in 1938-39, and he asked the German state to provide funds, Himmler tried to force him to include members of the SS Annerhebe (the SS Ancestral Society). As a perquisite to authorize the trip, he even forced Schäfer to become member of the SS. Funny enough, since at the time the SS had no money, Schäfer in the end had to raise the money himself. The SS paid only for the return flight. Allegedly, one of the expedition’s objectives had been to determine whether Tibet was indeed the ‘cradle of the Aryan race’.

  Blavatsky didn’t claim to be a member of the ‘Hidden Elect’; but she said she was in constant telepathic contact with them, and, by telepathy, they had told her the secret history of the human race. According to her, each cosmic cycle is associated with seven cosmic—not comic, Becky clarified, chuckling—root races…”

  “Turnips, rutabagas, parsnips, onions, carrots, beets and cassava?” asked Tony, shaking his head.

  “No,” continued Haim, while Becky went back to the kitchen to get some sweets. The first one was the ‘astral race’—no crass jokes in front of my wife—of th
e polarians, made of pure spirit, beings that divided like amoebas. The second were the ‘hyperboreans’, who lived in a now gone continent in the ‘northern ocean’. The third were the ‘lemurians’, who went extinct because they practiced bestiality. The fourth, the ‘Atlanteans’ had advanced psychic abilities and built colossal cities using a mysterious source of energy, but perished during the Great Flood. The fifth—this is key—was the ‘Aryan race’, which Blavatsky said had created ancient Greece and should be responsible to raise humankind to new, hitherto unseen spiritual heights.”

  “But you said there were seven…” scoffed Tony, shaking his index like a dial measuring current.

  “Well,” said Becky chomping on blintzes, “the sixth is supposed to arise (according to Leadbeater, another occultist) in Baja California on the twenty-eight century—if you stay long enough discussing Nazis, maybe we can see it happen in real time—through the use of ‘eugenics’. Given weather collapse nowadays, I suspect they will also have to have gills. Who knows! The seventh should arise from the seventh branch of the sixth, on a continent yet to emerge from the Pacific, supposedly named Pashkara.”

  “The ‘paska’ in it could come from either a Eastern European dessert or Finnish for crap. I think more the latter,” chuckled Tony.

  “Well, I agree. However, gentlemen, my recreation is over. Maybe I’ll see you all when I’m back, but now I must go,” said Becky, kissing Haim goodbye.

  “Guess it’s my turn to tell you the rest,” continued Haim, following her to the kitchen, and then bringing more coffee. “By 1914, Blavatsky’s theory was very popular among the elites of Germany and Austria. The ‘Völkisch’ movement certainly had embraced it—Himmler among them. He believed in the paranormal, magic, psychic phenomena, demons, reincarnations, and the like. Himmler was so much into astrology that often cast horoscopes to decide what to do. Wilhelm Wulff, one of his ‘astrologists’ also introduced him to the ‘Artashastra’, in short an ancient Indian manual of lies, much older than Machiavelli. Although Himmler’s horoscopes forgot to tell him about World War I, he still remained very much obsessed with and guided by the occult, all the same. In any case, Hitler enjoyed the first war, but Himmler was too young at the time. He was still in training when it ended.”

  “The big problem,” added David, “was that all those prophecies crucially failed in one point: Germans and Austrians fighting in the war—especially those who had embraced the ‘Völkisch’ movement—thought, as many prophecies had foretold, that German-speaking peoples would win the war, and, from the ashes, would create a unified Empire.

  Before the First World War, Guido List, an occultist, playwright, journalist and novelist (who added a ‘von’ before the List, even though the ‘von’ is reserved for people of noble lineage, i.e. real German gentry), added to Blavatsky’s stories. Like Hitler, he was an Austrian raised catholic, who then became wotanist.”

  “In 1909,” added Haim, “List said materialism and democracy were corrupting the world. After the war—he prophesized—the Germanic tribes’ victory would cleanse the world of such ‘filth’. In 1919, acutely aware his prophecy didn’t come to pass, he died in Berlin. But his madness survived him: List had claimed he had visions of an elite class of priest-kings, the ‘Armannenschaft’, who had preserved the secret knowledge of the Arman ancestors of modern day Germanic tribes. Such knowledge, he argued, had been lost by the oppressive censure of Christianity, which had forced it underground. According to him, the Rosocrucians, the Freemasons and chivalry orders such as the Templars had preserved the Armans’ secrets.

  In the years before WWI, many German and Austrian officers had joined the ‘Germanenschaft’ that List had formed in 1912, an organization supposedly governed by a council of twelve men—as should, according to List, be governed the German Empire that should arise from the war. By the way, twelve like your whirlwinds.”

  “But we all know Germany lost WWI, and lost it badly,” picked up David. “Since, however, there had been victories in 1918, and in 1917 with the Bolshevik revolution Russia seemed destined to implode, after the war Germans started looking for scapegoats—traitors in their midst—to explain List’s failed prophecy.

  Their favorite targets competing for gold, silver, and bronze medal, were: capitalism, democracy, and the Jews. Since also the Kaiser and the princess abdicated, all German nobility—supposedly created by the Armannenschaft—who, in the view of List and his followers, should rebuild the German people’s greatness, was now done for as well. Consequently, a new savior and/or cult had to be found.

  By 1918, a new pseudoscience, whose objective was to purge weaklings, sicklings and the deformed, ‘Eugenics’ became so popular that German universities started teaching and ‘researching’ it under the name ‘Racial Hygiene’.

  Since List died in 1919, a new grand guru of Wotanism, Aryan supremacy and occultism emerged: Adolf Josef Lanz (a.k.a Jörg Lanz, a.k.a. Lanz von Liebenfels), a Cistercian monk who, in 1894—after ‘enlightenment’ following his stumbling on a knight Templar’s tombstone—began building his theories of the ‘blue-blond Aryanism’ and the ‘lower races’.”

  Haim continued. “He left the monastery in 1899, officially because of ‘growing nervousness’—seemingly at the sight of swelling Austrian penises: the reason of record for his leave, at the monastery, was ‘carnal love’.

  Six years later, in 1905, seemingly to counteract such rumors, he published a book: “Theozoology, or the Sodomite-Apelikes and the Divine Electron”, advocating the sterilization of the sick and the ‘lower races’, and forced labor for the ‘castrated untouchables’, while glorifying the ‘Aryan race’ as ‘G-ttmenschen’ (g-d men).

  Lanz justified his madness saying Eve (the one and same in the Bible), although divine, did have intercourse with a demon, and so gave birth to the ‘lower races’. He added that this also led to blond women being attracted to darker men—a temptation leading to ‘miscegenation’, which can only be stopped by ‘racial demixing’, required for ‘Aryan-Christian master humans’ to rule over the ‘dark beasts’ and attain divinity.

  Months later, Lanz started publishing his magazine “Ostara” (a sort of library for the blond law-maker), a magazine read by Hitler, Dietrich Ecker and the British Field Marshall Herbert Kitchener, the same one who used scorched-earth policy against the Boers and created concentration camps during the Second Boer War in South Africa.

  In 1927, Lanz tried to claim rights as an ideological precursor to Hitler’s madness. He even said: “the swastika- and fascist-movement are basically offsprings of Ostara”. But in 1938, after Hitler annexed Austria, ‘the Führer’ not only refused to give Lanz his patronage, but instead banned his writings, and copies of “Ostara” were removed from circulation.”

  “Even so,” David picked up, “Lanz’s claim that the decline of the ‘Aryan race’ resulted from ‘Aryans’ committing ‘bestiality’ with ‘subhuman species’ leading to the creation of ‘mixed inferior races’ stuck—to become one of the drivers of Nazi ethnic cleansing.

  Lanz believed early ‘Aryans’ were telepaths, a valuable ability lost by interbreeding with ‘animals’. So, to rebuild the ‘Aryan race’ from good German stock, he proposed breeding programs, including polygamy, in which ‘Aryan’ men would breed ‘Aryan’ women. The infirm or handicapped would be sterilized; and others, irredeemable, like us Jews, would be deported to Madagascar, or used as slaves. All those ideas, I kid you not, were either seriously discussed or even put in practice under the III Reich.

  Like Lanz’s, Hitler’s ‘Holy Grail’ became the ‘purification of the Aryan race’, no matter how. Hence the extermination camps—a convenient way to dispose of people, who at the beginning had merely been plundered to pay for pharaonic projects and so give jobs to unemployed Germans—acquired a gloss of philosophical ‘legitimacy’.”

  Arrived at this point, David buried his face between his hands and started sobbing. For a while, the heavy, glacial silence that followed seemed to
have sucked the air out of the office. Briefly, Haim left the room without a word. Tony and David kept looking at the coffee dregs on the bottom of their cups, or sometimes glancing at the stickman, both in complete silence. When they finally heard the water tank in the bathroom, they realized why Haim had left and as one man, smirked. They realized they should—and did then—follow suit.

  When both of them were finally back, Haim continued. “All this might help you understand why, if you’re looking for witches, ghosts, demons and anything esoteric,” he said looking Tony in the eyes, “you should perhaps concentrate on Himmler’s heirs, not Hitler’s. Eichmann was an inhumane beast, but all that abject, vile, savagery, inflicted to ‘our Biblical people’ during the Holocaust would not have been possible without Himmler’s witches, wizards, astrologists and telepaths—in short, his obsession with the occult.

  Here’s how bad it was: King Heinrich I, a Saxon king who conquered Slavic lands in the tenth century, became Himmler’s idol. He made an annual pilgrimage to his tomb. He believed he has King Heinrich reincarnated. He thought he got telepathic messages from the king’s spirit. Convinced he must complete his idol’s work, he decided he would turn the SS into a ‘knightly order’ that would conquer the world and rule the Aryan Empire—and objective similar to Lanz’s ‘New Templar’ Order avowed purpose.

  To kickstart the Aryan Empire, no sooner was Hitler in power that Himmler had started building Dachau. Since January 1929, when Himmler was appointed head of the SS (Hitler’s personal guard), he started working hard to push all the insanity concocted by Blavatsky, List and Lanz.”

  “Now,” pursued David, “there is another important point, to understand what came next: ever since the time of the Empire, we Jews were forbidden from owning land, so we had to live in cities.

  Then, to tie all this anti-Slavic, mystical, anti-non-Aryan cult into a nice bow, came the “blood and soil” doctrine: blood is not just blood; it’s a racially defined national body. Soil is the land that blood needs to settle, the ‘Lebensraum’—vital space.