New Religions and the Nazis 1st Edition

by Karla Poewe (Author)

6 ratings

ISBN-13: 978-0415290258

ISBN-10: 0415290252

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This book sheds light on an important but neglected part of Nazi history – the contribution of new religions to the emergence of Nazi ideology in 1920s and 1930s Germany.

Post –World War I conditions threw Germans into major turmoil. The loss of the war, the Weimar Republic and the punitive Treaty of Versailles all caused widespread discontent and resentment. As a result Germans generally and intellectuals specifically took political, paramilitary, and religious matters into their own hands to achieve national regeneration. Taken together such cultural figures as Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, Mathilde Ludendorff, Ernst Bergmann, Hans F.K. Günther, and nationalist writers like Hans Grimm created a mind-set that swept across Germany like a tidal wave. By fusing politics, religion, theology, Indo-Aryan metaphysics, literature and Darwinian science they intended to craft a new, genuinely German faith-based political community. What emerged instead was an anti-Semitic totalitarian political regime known as National Socialism. Looking at modern paganism as well as the established Church, Karla Poewe reveals that the new religions founded in the pre-Nazi and Nazi years, especially Jakob Hauer’s German Faith Movement, present a model for how German fascism distilled aspects of religious doctrine into political extremism.

New Religions and the Nazis addresses one of the most important questions of the twentieth century – how and why did Germans come to embrace National Socialism? Researched from original documents, letters and unpublished papers, including the SS personnel files held in the German Federal Archives, it is an absorbing and fresh approach to the difficulties raised by this deeply significant period of history.

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Product details

Publisher : Routledge; 1st edition (December 18, 2005)
Language : English
Paperback : 236 pages
ISBN-10 : 0415290252
ISBN-13 : 978-0415290258
Item Weight : 12.8 ounces
Dimensions : 8.5 x 0.54 x 11 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,555,666 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,761 in Religious History (Books)
- #2,478 in Judaism (Books)
- #6,614 in Religious Faith

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Kindle Customer

Solid academic work

Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2016

A very solid academic work that explores the new religious movements that inspired the national socialist (Nazi) movement. It is written partly as a refutation that the antisemitism of the Third Reich came from the Christian churches. Although it shows quite conclusively that the pagan/new religious movements were deeply antisemitic it doesn't do anything to absolve the Christian churches. I suspect that both were antisemitic.

But the investigation of these movements is valuable way beyond the roots of Nazi antisemitism. In this book we see the roots of the concept of "Fuehrer" and "third Reich" and the creation of the "Seige Heil" greeting. The attitude towards women is explored as well as the ideals of manhood. All in all this is a fascinating and scholarly work.

3 people found this helpful

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Jay Johnston

A really insightful book

Reviewed in the United States on March 9, 2006

This is a wonderful book that I wish had been available when I was a student. There are things here that I have never seen anywhere else. Reading it one understands National Socialism much better. In particular the fact that the Nazis hated "Jewish-Christianity" which they saw as a form of "cultural imperialism" was a real insight to me. I strongly recommend this book to anyone intersted in the history of the twentieth century, cults and new religions, or the way politicians create and manipulate propaganda.

18 people found this helpful

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Axel Schoeber

Courageous Scholarship

Reviewed in the United States on June 22, 2006

Inevitably claims that deny that Nazism was rooted in Christianity draw fire. As a scholar in modern and early modern Europe at the University of Victoria, I affirm this book as extremely well researched. The onus is on those who would disprove its assertions to do more thorough research--a daunting challenge indeed. The Nazis were as hostile to Christianity as to Judaism. The preparation for the ascendency of National Socialism provided by the advocates of new religions like Jacob Wilhelm Hauer is a sobering reality that needs to be understood more widely today.

18 people found this helpful

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Veleda

Irresponsible pseudo-scholarship

Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2016

This is not an erudite book at all, as the other reviews claim. In fact Poewe's interpretations are highly irresponsible and cannot be classified as serious scholarship.

The authors Poewe writes about (Hauer, Ludendorff) have not been translated into English, so she can write about them whatever she wants -- only people with good knowledge of German have a chance to correct her outrageous misreadings and misinterpretations of these authors. Except most Germans today have never heard of these names.

In a time of major depression and confusion and the failure of Christianity to provide moral and spiritual guidance in a recently industrialised and modernised country, these authors tried to formulate a new faith based on indigenous Germanic traditions and values. Poewe, however, is not looking at the situation and writers she discusses with empathy, hence we don't really understand what their agenda was or why they held certain positions that might seem problematic to us today. There is a misleading mistranslation of a very harmless statement by Rudolf Hess, which she presents as something outrageous -- when in fact it corresponds almost 1:1 with what the current German Basic Law says on the sovereignty of the German people (Alle (Staats-)Gewalt geht vom Volke aus -- "all political power is with the people" -- Poewe's translation: all force emanates from the Volk -- as if Volk was some kind of multi-headed hydra). With her German sounding name, she really should know better. Also the things she writes on her homepage on the German response to the refugee crisis is simply annoying and highly reductive, whilst she presents herself as an expert.

Her agenda in this book seems to be to whitewash Christianity of its alliance with National Socialism. A common Jewish accusation is that NS was antisemitic because it was Christian. Poewe turns it around by saying it was antisemitic because it was anti-Christian / völkisch (=evil). She doesn't even bother to explain völkisch properly, which in many English sources figures as "ultra-nationalist" -- which is factually incorrect. It was a movement for cultural renewal inspired by indigenous cultural traditions, myths, and literature, and it is actually very respectful of other cultures (Herder: "peoples are thoughts of God"). Volk means people, völkisch refers to the traditions of a people. It was a movement that supported ethnic identities for all peoples, including Germans (especially Hauer and Ludendorff). They never supported hierarchical racism, despite the fact they frequently use the word race, which was used by everyone in those days but needs to be historicized and understood in the sense of ethnicity.

There were other, more extremist strands, like Guido von List and Lanz von Liebenfels (himself of Jewish ancestry), who supported hierarchical racism and elitist, Arian fantasies. Moreover, he placed a great emphasis on "secret traditions" and was misogynist. Neither Hauer nor Ludendorff (whom Poewe focuses on) belong in that category. In fact, Ludendorff warned everyone of those cranks, who were occultists and fascinated with Eastern mysteries. Von Liebenfels was keen to emphasize his influence on Adolf Hitler to make himself look more important than he actually was, which gave rise to the myth of Hitler's occultism -- which many people used to believe for some time, but this theory is now debunked: Adolf Hitler explicitly distanced himself both from the völkisch division, and even more so from occult sectarians.

Strangely, von Liebenfels is not even mentioned in Poewe's book, instead, she makes Hauer and Ludendorff look like the "elite" that was preparing the "political religion" of National Socialism -- whilst ignoring the fact that Mathilde Ludendorff was against many of Hitler's political alliances and moves and openly criticized him for it. What's certain is that many Germans were looking for a new "Weltanschauung" because Christianity did not meet their needs any more, and instead of looking eastwards, they looked inwards, into their own tradition, to find values that were in harmony with their nature, as reflected in German literature and philosophy of the past centuries, and yes, Germanic mythology, why not. National Socialism, too, provided such a Weltanschauung. So did Hauer and Ludendorff in their own way, as did many others.

Poewe is correct in pointing out that much of the völkisch critique of Judaism was actually a critique of Christianity, which they felt had been forced onto the Germanic peoples and spiritually uprooted them. This is an interesting theory at least, and it should be communicated as such, instead of silencing the debate with the label of "antisemitism". Towards the end of the book, Poewe gives a good summary of what the völkisch authors held against Christianity, but then she makes it all sound like illegitimate criticism because it is alledgedly "antisemitic" and at the heart of fascism (regardless of the fact that the New Right in Europe nowadays identifies with Christianity).

„It is fair to say, therefore, that in Germany as well as in France neo-paganism was and is the heart of fascism and the New Right. It constitutes a radical rejection of Jewish-Christianity. It rejects Christianity for its imperialism (M. Ludendorff 1935), its radical judgements, its totalitarianism (...), its linear history, its denigration of woman and humanity, and its source in the culture of the Hurriter (Jews) (Hunke 1997: 31-3). You have to be blind not to see the anti-semitism here.“ (Poewe 2006: 172)

With this kind of reasoning, it is difficult to take this book seriously as a valuable contribution to the debate about the relationship between the völkisch movement and National Socialism.

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Top reviews from other countries

Phillip Gagnon

Incredible resource

Reviewed in Canada on June 3, 2014

Verified Purchase

Incredibly well researched and annotated. Also mind boggling as to how people can descend into such evil especially in its rationalization and banality.

discer21

Won't let you play on computer or Ipod

Reviewed in Canada on January 24, 2006

Verified Purchase

I purchased thise CD, then took it out of my amazon basket before it shipped because of the copyright protection that is on the CD.
The CD contains a virus program that prohibits you from legally transferring these songs to your Ipod, or legally ripping them into mp3 format for playback on your computer in winamp.
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