Customer Reviews

Unholy Alliance

5 star:		(6)
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3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
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This is an excellent book, with good notes and documentation. With this and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's books, one gets a chilling, detailed look at occultism in Nazism. This one of a very few books in the English language to deal with this question in a scholarly manner, and should be in every school, university, and public library.

I wish that the author had cited the location of certain items/documentation that he'd consulted in the National Archives, most notably the 8+ page segment on runes. But this shouldn't take away at all from the impact of this book. I was particularly interested in the SS survival in South America.... doubtless, there are survivals elsewhere in the world.

I recommend this book most highly to the serious student of the Nazi world.

I have read Mr. Levenda's book several times. It is my "Bible" in regard to the occult background of the Third Reich. I am sure that any book that presents a side of history that some people would rather hide (modern Theosophists, Wiccans, New Agers, etc.) is likely to be controversial. However, Levenda has presented vast documentation of the roots of Nazism as a "cult" as well as a political movement. I agree with the previous reviewer that this information should be taught in schools alongside dates, battles, and the usual "stuff."

This book documents the connections between a number of occult belief systems and their influence on Nazi ideology. It also traces the Nazi movement's activities as they continued their activities after the war. Anyone who is interested in what is going on beneath the veneer of modern media needs to read this book.

In this definitive history of Nazi religious/occult thinking, UNHOLY ALLIANCE meticulously traces the roots of this primal evil. Levenda's warnings that the beast is not dead, but sleeping, and likely to wake again, have become tragically accurate. Indeed, while the author has been at pains to avoid hysteria and paranoia, passage after passage in this brilliantly-researched mix of historical analysis and contemporary investigation is eerily prescient.

The new edition adds an author's update, a small but excellent photo section, and a Foreword by Norman Mailer who reveals his own take on magic and Nazi occult thinking. Sadly, the daily headlines supply so many examples of the dangers of cultic, far-right ideologies that one frankly hopes the author is sketching out notes for a third edition. The darkest instincts of human nature are now everyday images on the TV news. Two misfit high school honor students spend a year planning vengeance on their tormenters and turn an affluent school campus into an abbatoir---on Hitler's birthday. And as the Colorado suburb mourns its dead children, a wave of copycat crimes and threats sweeps America. And we learn that the teenaged killer/suicides of Columbine had hoped to hijack jets and crash them into--yes--the World Trade Center.

We know only too well what is exploding into our headlines. For thoughtful readers who want to understand where and how it began, and continues underground right now, UNHOLY ALLIANCE belongs at the top of any must-read list. The expanded content, the photos, the essay by Mailer, and a handsome format all enhance this classic that belongs in the library of every reader with a serious interest in world affairs. A disturbing but very worthwhile read.

I just finished "Unholy Alliance". It is an excellent book and is very well researched. Mr. Levenda does a fantastic job of showing that the Nazi Party was much more than just a political party bent on world domination. He exposes the occult roots of the Nazis, and how this evil organization still exists worldwide to this day. It should be required reading in every college history class.

Unholy Alliance offers about fifty movie possibillities, in its multifaceted examination of not only Nazi's and the occult, but the relationship of the occult to just about any culture. From Madame Blavatksy, to Aleister Crowley to, F@#ken James Bond, the book just doesn't stop. One starts to think about how the whole world is comprised of secret societies. Whether they be Freemasons, Satanists, Christians, Jews, or whatever, it seems that there is occult type of behavior at the root of them all. Peter Levenda, isn't just talking about Nazis and the occult, he is on to the mysteries of pop culture. For the first time, I really know how the "-cryptic-Nazi-biker" type could have evolved, and it dates back way before Kenneth Anger made films in which he premeired this stereotype.

While I found this book slightly entertaining and the subject itself bouyant enough to support volumes of this kind of literature I'm afraid I found the aim of the thesis weak and uncompelling.

Levenda often juxtaposed Hitler with individuals involved in the early German/English occult movements of the 19th and 20th century without EVER clearly providing documented proof of their ACTUAL influence on Hitler as an individual or even as a hidden shadow policy behind the Nazis as a political force. If anything, those occultists close to Hitler often came to a bad end. Hanussen for example.

Are we to believe that Levenda could actually guess what Hitler was motivated by and thinking about in 1939 without this documentation? Lets not even mention all the secondary sources that were used to formulate many of his assertions.

I was so unimpressed with Levenda's approach in fact, that I found myself questioning even the smallest of his assertions from complete lack of trust in the author's bias. He seems to have gone into the research already knowing the answer, and after all that's not research, that's thesis padding. This book might as well have been written by Charles Berlitz for all its credibility.

Lots of smoke, very little fire. I think it would have been a much more satisfying book without all the conjecturing that was rampant throughout and in that case may have ended as a very short book.

Read it anyway though, since it does have some interesting tidbits, just don't take it as the definitive book on Nazi occultism since he draws very few empiric connections between the two camps beyond anecdotal similarities...

If you reread this work, you overcome your impression of how interesting the occult involvement has been in modern day society, and you start to see a need Mr. Levenda had in writing his book. But I am of the opinion that Levenda is inexperienced in book presentation.

He himself admits that the book changed and evolved very dramatically from when he had first set out to present a story. This speaks of a presumed novice approach to his endeavor, and lends a certain weakness to any centralized theme he might have tried to relate. Perhaps more experience would have lent him better results.

The most remarkable thing about Levenda seems to be his own struggle with the occult that comes out in bits and pieces. It would be interesting to know more about the author but that appears difficult to obtain. It appears as if he has done a massive literature search though at times it seems as if he conveniently applied it to personal experiences.

With Unholy Alliance, Mr. Levenda chronicles how esoteric andoccult books as well as organizations influenced Hitler and the ThirdReich in their relentless quest to create an elite, Aryan superrace.While the material is exhaustingly detailed and concise,Peter's leftism tends to rear it's ugly head one too many times.For example, while he villifies Hitler for being the monster that he was,people like Mao and Che Guevera are painted as heroes in addition to his sympathy for the Communist ideology.Indeed, one is at times almost reminded of Noam Chomsky when Peter criticizes U.S intervention in Latin America even though the U.S was their to help rather than hinder. At best, Peter Levenda is an occult expert who really doesn't tell you anything that a true occultist would already know. At worst, he sounds just like another whining leftist who's upset that Communism has been battled and defeated all over the world by right wing groups.