Book Review: "Hammer of the Gods" by David Luhrssen

The full title of the book by David Luhrssen is Hammer of the Gods - the Thule Society and the Birth of Nazism.

Hardcover: 312 pages
Publisher: Potomac Books Inc. (February 28, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1597978574
ISBN-13: 978-1597978576


Books that claim to expose the intellectual origins of National Socialist as the cause of all their deeds are generally fraught with problems. The main problem identified by Sir Ian Kershaw* is that, ideologically, National Socialism was extremely heterogeneous, and encompassed a ridiculous range of different social groups. Included within it was a chaotic mixture of Catholic, Protestant, atheist, socialist, capitalist, and neo-paganist subgroups. Even some Islamic groups jumped on board. This is in marked contrast to the Soviet Union under Stalin, which was ideologically far more homogeneous and uniform.

The heterogeneity of National Socialism means that you can freely pick and choose who you wish to bash from those included under its intellectual umbrella. For example, if you have an anti-Catholic streak in you then you might want to do what Daniel Goldhagen did in unleashing his crusade on the Vatican. If you are an Islamophobe, then you will be playing up this aspect as Edwin Black does, so you can rant about "Islamofascism". We all know of Joachim Köhler's theories about the machinery of the National Socialist political system functioning totally on the ideas of a nineteenth century opera composer – bashing Wagner is the aim of his game. You would think that people would have more respect for such a tragic episode of human history than to use it as an instrument to bash opponents on the head with in crudely self-serving ideological polemics. Alas, it is not to be.

Much of the literature on Wagner reads like an intellectual Punch and Judy show

So whenever a book appears on National Socialism which reduces everything down to one simplistic causative factor, historians specialising in this era tend to run for the hills. Doubly so when it serves the end of some polemic or worse still, it is merely sensationalist. It is little surprising since there is a vast populist literature with all sorts of weird theories, such as those by Joachim Köhler. Too often it can degenerate into the downright nutty, right down to the invocations of UFOs, Freemason conspiracies and occultism. Here is an excellent example by Joseph Farrell:

We are told in the Amazon summary that:

Oxford-educated historian Farrell continues his best-selling book series on suppressed technology, Nazi survival and the postwar psyops with his new book Saucers, Swastikas and Psyops. Farrell discusses SS Commando Otto Skorzeny; George Adamski; the alleged Hannebu and Vril craft of the Third Reich; The Strange Case of Dr. Hermann Oberth; Nazis in the US and their connections to "UFO contactees” The Memes-an idea or behavior spread from person to person within a culture-are Implants; Adamski's ET Message: The Danger of Weaponized Gravity; and tons more. What do the following things have in common: George Adamski, Fascists, Nazi scientists, American engineers, the CIA, the Wall Street Morgan interests, I.G. Farben, ITT, SS Commando Otto Skorzeny, the post-war Nazi International, American Intelligence and the Mafia Drug Lords? Answer: they are all components of a "breakaway civilization” seeking to protect its control over advanced technologies and to project itself into outer space while waging a covert war here on earth with the same advanced technologies-and the rest of humanity be damned. Join internationally-known researcher Joseph P. Farrell in this next chapter in his expose of secret Nazi wartime and postwar research that he began in The SS Brotherhood of the Bell and Nazi International.

David Luhrssen seems well aware of these pitfalls. The last chapter of his book is devoted to the history of populist literature on the Thule Society that paints a picture of National Socialists as Satanic occultists. It is probably the best chapter in the book:

The lacuna in scholarship attracted the interest of fantasists and frauds, imaginatively coloring the blank spaces with lurid depictions of the Thule Society as a nexus of Satanism, politics, and conspiracies stretching across time and space. The Third Reich was so aberrant and, for many, so perversely intriguing, that irrational explanations have been eagerly and often carelessly embraced by popular audiences as supplement or substitute for the economic and political rationales of mainstream historians. Lending a false note of credence to a farrago of ungrounded speculation, the Thule Society gained a prominent place in the legend of an "occult Reich" after being cited in several prominent pseudo-histories. In the pantheon of popular culture Thule became evil incarnate, a shadow in the dark zone where fantasy eclipsed facts. 

. . . many of these books professed horror at the dark doings of Nazi occultists while offering titillating glimpses into their secrets.

 The Hammer of the Gods p.203-206 (my emphasis)

He also mentions conspiracy theorists invoking both the Thule Society and the Spear of Longinus. One of these accounts, Spear of Destiny by Trevor Ravenscroft, is dismissed by Luhrssen as "pulp fiction in the guise of history". Does that sound familiar to you? As in Joachim Köhler. Not to mention Christopher Nicholson and his attempt to invent a link between the Spear of Longinus and Parsifal with an oblique intellectual side step. Nicholson's primary textual source on this subject is – of course! – Trevor Ravenscroft. Nicholson also relies heavily on Köhler as his primary source.

Christopher Nicholson relies almost completely on Ravenscroft's "pulp fiction in the guise of history", especially his Spear of Destiny, for his information on the Spear of Longinus. Both the text and accompanying picture come from Nicholson's book Richard and Adolf

Unfortunately, this insight fails to protect Luhrssen from falling into less obvious academic traps, even if he never quite condescends to evoking lurid conspiracies involving Satanists, aliens and UFOs. Part of the problem is that he comes across as trying too hard to write out a heterogeneous National Socialist ideological and political action plan. This is despite the rejection by most historians of the notion of a black-and-white, fixed genocidal "Final Solution to the Jewish Problem". Few historians claim there was a pre-ordained "script", which the National Socialists rigidly adhered to from beginning to end. Indeed, even as late as 1940 Heinrich Himmler wrote:

I hope completely to erase the concept of Jews through the possibility of a great emigration of all Jews to a colony in Africa or elsewhere. . . . However cruel and tragic each individual case may be, this method is still the mildest and best, if one rejects the Bolshevik method of physical extermination of a people out of inner conviction as unGerman and impossible. 

Quoted from Christopher Browning's book The Origin of the Final Solution p70 of eBook edition. 

So when you get someone saying that Hitler and Himmler just mindlessly followed some fully formed "script" for the Shoah handed to them from a nineteenth century opera composer, or an esoteric occultist-theosophical society, in the eyes of most serious scholars this results in instant disqualification. You would be taken just as seriously if you had evoked the aliens and UFOs.

Luhrssen is simply too keen to try to make the National Socialist ideology fit neatly into the paradigm of the Thule Society. This society was a mixture of occultism, neopaganism, theosophy, eastern mysticism, folkloristic nationalism, racial theory, and anti-Semitism. Alfred Rosenberg was a member of the Thule Society. Rosenberg's book The Myth of the Twentieth Century reveals its debt to the society. It is little surprising that Luhrssen tries to convince us that, since the official propagandist of National Socialism wrote the book, therefore it constitutes the official orthodoxy of the movement. For example Luhrssen writes:

Hitler’s silence on questions raised by the controversial book was a tactical maneuver to reassure German church leaders and the faithful. As the party's ideological spokesman, Rosenberg would never have been permitted to publish the book had Hitler opposed its message. The Mythus would not have been imposed on the curriculum of German schools if Hitler had found it objectionable.

The Hammer of the Gods P165.

Obviously, Luhrssen wants this to be true and he wants it badly. He wants it so badly that in his eyes, at least, it becomes the truth. He skates over evidence that Hitler had regarded Rosenberg's book as "impenetrable". According to Timothy Ryback, Hitler's personal ex libris copy of Rosenberg's Mythus shows little to no physical signs of having been read. This is in keeping with what Hitler said about only reading the start of the book before giving up. Ryback also says that Rosenberg repeatedly asked Hitler to give his book official status, but Hitler refused each time. The Catholic Church, to which Hitler belonged, objected to the book's anti-Christian bent, and indexed it in its prohibited books. In October 1936, Hitler dismissed the book as the product of a "narrow minded Balt who thinks in horribly complicated terms". All along Bishop Alois Hudal was campaigning to win Hitler back to the Catholic roots of the Nationalist Socialist movement.

Hiter's personal copy of The Foundations of National Socialism by Bishop Alois Hudal. From Hitler's Personal Library by  Timothy Ryback

Luhrssen comes across as a little desperate to make Rosenberg's bizarre anti-Christian ideas the official ideologically of National Socialism.  This is because being a victim of National Socialism is the ultimate stamp of validation these days. So Luhrssen understandably seeks to collect this stamp on behalf of Christendom. The surreptitious polemic he is running is that Christianity – the "sinless victim" of the Nazis – is the opposite of Rosenberg's wicked National Socialist ideology. The further insinuation is that interest in Eastern thought, yoga, and New Age-occult type of things are all "Nazi". You had better be a good traditional Christian – or else hang from the same gallows as Eichmann!

The next piece of academic dishonesty is in making it appear that Hitler was an unofficial member of the Thule Society. Nothing more could be further from the truth. While members of the Thule Society were opposing the socialist Kurt Eisner in Bavaria during the revolutionary period at the end of World War One, Hitler was busily working for the Eisner revolutionary camp! When the Jewish Eisner was assassinated, a Bavarian Soviet Republic was announced. Hitler was present at the head of Eisner's funeral:

Hitler remained very guarded and secretive about this period of his life. Thomas Weber explains it well:

Perhaps surprisingly, once back in Munich, Hitler did not act in any way consistent with his later beliefs. In fact, his actions during the five months after his return to Bavaria did not show any consistency at all. They were full of contradictions and reveal a deeply disorientated man without a clear mental compass to steer him through the post-war world. Hitler, who in painstaking detail described all other periods of his life in Mein Kampf, skated at great speed over the first five months after his arrival back in Bavaria, including the time of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, as though he were hiding something — and he had a lot to hide. 

Thomas Weber, Hitler's First World War, p 268 of eBook edition

Hitler could have joined the Thule Society implicated in the assassination of Eisner, but he was working for the other side:

Hitler appears on one of Heinrich Hoffmann's photographs of the funeral procession for Eisner taken shortly before Eisner was eulogised: ‘Kurt Eisner, the Jew, was a prophet who fought relentlessly against the fainthearted and wretched, because he not only loved mankind, but believed in it and wanted it.' While Hitler could easily have joined, for instance, the Thule Society, which had inspired Eisner's assassination and which was full of future National Socialist leaders, such as Alfred Rosenberg, Rudolf Hess, or Hans Frank, Hitler chose publicly to show his support for Eisner.

Thomas Weber, Hitler's First World War, p 268-9 of eBook edition

Luhrssen so badly wants to explain everything in terms of the intellectual background of the Thule Society that he credulously accepts some rather incoherent claims by Hitler to the effect that he had never been on the side supporting the Soviet Republic. To that end, Luhrssen edits out anything from history that might suggest that Hitler may have at one time supported communism or that he retained sympathies for the Catholic Church in which he grew up. All this does is highlight the problems with any explanations of National Socialism within a narrow intellectual paradigm. Of course, Luhrssen is nowhere as absurd as the likes of Joachim Köhler and his attempts to explain everything on the basis of a nineteenth century opera composer. In that respect Luhrssen's book remains of some interest, but he still overstates the importance of the Thule Society in the engendering the entire historic misdeeds of National Socialism. This makes the book read uncomfortably like just another reductionistic, monocausal explanation.

Luhrssen even goes as far to claim that detailed plans for Jewish genocide emerged fully hatched from the Thule Society:

The hell described by Lanz resulted from miscegenation, from the Aryan despoiling his seed in carnal pursuit of lower races, As a solution, he advocated the extermination of those races. Lanz’s proposed genocidal methods, all of them adopted at one time or another during the Third Reich, included incineration, castration, sterilization, and death by forced labor. Calling for the creation of a new race from the material of the Aryans, he declared that “the Future man must become God-like . . . the Future Man will be different from the past. The beast-men will disappear and the remainder diffused as mixed breeds, as the white race exterminates them. The community of men will be improved by the chosen ones." His burning hatred of lower races, whom he called ”Tschandala” from a Sanskrit word for the lowest untouchables, echoes in the hate literature of contemporary neo-Nazis.”

The Hammer of the Gods P40. My emphasis.

It is all very well to claim to have proven structuralists wrong and to have discovered a fully formed plan for the Holocaust mapped out decades in advance. Nor do I wish to defend Lanz (who I had never before heard of). It is just that Luhrssen fails to provide us with a primary citation that proves that Lanz had a plan to methodically "incinerate" Jews in concentration camps. Nor does he provide us with the quotation to prove that Lanz advocated systematically killing Jews through forced labour. Not even the leaders of National Socialism planned to exterminate countless Jews this way – it just happened to work out that way. Even if Lanz did plan such a genocide, Luhrssen does not prove that the National Socialist regime systematically followed Lanz's "script". Considering the boldness of the claims, Luhrssen pays scanty attention to proving them, and largely glosses over matters. If Luhrssen wants to fly in the face of orthodoxy, he has to prepare his case much more meticulously.

There are even signs of Luhrssen going down the same slippery slope as Köhler. On page 10 Luhrssen states that:

Epitomising the French vogue for Nordic superiority was Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau's Essay on the Inequality of Races (1853-1855), which warned of the contamination of Aryan blood, sounded the alarm over the yellow peril from Asia, and disparaged the Mediterranean peoples for their Semitic and Negroid features. A literateur of the Romantic tradition, Gobineau pictured a remnant of beleaguered Aryans clinging to the European peninsula of Eurasia, assailed by the rising birthrate of lesser races. He had absorbed the new biological ideas of the polygenists, who held that humanity did not descend from common ancestors. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Wagner expressed admiration for Gobineau, and the Theosophical Society circulated his writings.  

The Hammer of the Gods P10. My emphasis.

No citation is given to back his claims about the three authors expressing admiration for Gobineau. So I looked through the complete published works of both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. I also searched through a database of Nietzsche's letters. Neither author even once mentions Gobineau, let alone expressing admiration for him.  With respect to the relationship between Wagner and Gobineau, Luhrssen repeats his claim:

[Wagner] would become Hitler’s favorite composer. While he took many seemingly contradictory stands, the composer's prose writings offered comfort to the emerging völkisch movement. Wagner wrote that Aryans “trace hack their origins to gods” and that “depravity of blood” threatened Aryan dominance.” The Ariosophists would magnify those sentiments. Some authorities all but indict Wagner for the crimes of the Third Reich.

The Hammer of the Gods PXI 

Of course, Luhrssen fails to provide any evidence that any of the National Socialists actually read Wagner's prose writings. Not a single volume of his prose writing exists in Hitler's library. Rather bizarrely, the only citation he can give here is that of Bryan Magee, who makes no such claims. The truly sad thing is that in Heldentum und Christentum (from which the quotation has been ripped out of context) Wagner summarises Gobineau's world view:

Whereas the yellow races saw themselves as having originated from apes, the whites claimed to have originated from the gods and as being alone suited to domination. 

Während gelbe Stämme sich selbst als von Affen entstammt annsahen, hielten die Weissen sich für von Göttern entsprossen zur Herrschaft einzig berufen. 

Wagner is paraphrasing Gobineau position — this is not Wagner's own position. He then goes on to rebut Gobineau:

The blood of the Saviour flowing from his head, from his wounds on the cross — who would commit such an outrage as to ask whether it might belong to the white or any other race?

We have to keep a hold of the fact that the efficiency of the noblest races' domination and exploitation of the lower races, justified entirely in naturalistic terms, has established a completely immoral world order. A possible sameness of all people made equal to each other through the intermixing of races can only lead to an aesthetically ordered world if this sameness were conceivable when grounded on a universal moral consensus such as the true Christianity . . . 

This is in keeping with Cosima's observation that when the two men met, Wagner "literally exploded in favour of Christianity as opposed to the racial theories." Wagner was divinely arrogant enough to invite Gobineau all the way to Bayreuth as a guest only to tell him to his face that he was full of it. In fact, Wagner not only told it to Gobineau, he literally exploded in his face. Let nobody say that it was beneath Wagner's dignity to do such a thing! In other words, Wagner was so arrogant in his unshakable belief in the oneness of humanity that nothing Gobineau wrote or said was ever going to change his mind. 

However, this sort of noble arrogance from Wagner fails to fit in with more recently developed mythical stereotypes, and are conveniently deleted from history to fit with popular mythical narrative. It is the same dominant narrative that Luhrssen wants to retell. It is a narrative about the evils of humanism and how Wagner's art leads to the ideology of Alfred Rosenberg's Mythus and there on straight to the gas chambers of Auschwitz — so you'd better go to church and say your prayers. Never mind the fact that Rosenberg is often quite dismissive of Wagner in his book.

Oddly enough Rosenberg expresses the same views on Wagner in his Mythus as Adorno in his Wagner polemics. Adorno dismisses Wagner after saying "there is much Hitler in Wagner" and says that Götterdämmerung is incoherent hodge-podge but that Tristan isn't half bad. That is almost the identical line that Rosenberg takes towards Wagner, both towards Tristan as well as Götterdämmerung – only Wagner is not Nazi enough for his taste. He says of Wagner's Ring that: 

In the rapidly swelling sound image, the expressions of folkloristic nationalism are completely destroyed. The audience hears only loud inarticulate exclamation. They only apparently see meaninglessly raised hands. This leads not to form but to chaos. 

Alfred Rosenberg: The Myth of the Twentieth Century [429] My own translation.

He effectively rejects Wagner as not being good enough, and campaigned to enthrone Nietzsche alone as the official central philosopher of National Socialism. Not surprisingly too – just like Rosenberg – Adorno also sides with Nietzsche over Wagner.

In conclusion, both Luhrssen and Köhler are both equally guilty of forcing facts to comply with their simplified and populist narrative of about the origins of National Socialism. Both try too hard reduce a very complex and heterogeneous phenomenon to a simple formula. This sort of reduction of this tragic, yet immensely complex episode of human history, to simplistic monocausal narratives leads to dubious results. Likewise, the attempt to claim the existence of precisely pre-meditated National Socialist plans to commit mass genocide, plans that long predate the foundation of the party itself. While Luhrssen is nowhere near as comically grandiose as Köhler in his vastly reductionistic analysis, nonetheless he is guilty of some of the same errors, if to a much lesser degree. The result may present a more polished veneer of quasi-academic respectability than plainly crank narratives involving lurid stories of aliens and Satanic cults, but they are all the more dangerous for it. 

* Ian Kershaw: Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution. Especially the chapters entitled Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism, and Working Towards the Führer.