Nazi Opera Conspiracies: a Right-Wing Rewriting of History

After much thought, a phrase occurred to me, one that encapsulated the very essence of the growing literature pointing the finger at Richard Wagner to single-handedly carry the blame for having caused World War II and the Holocaust, which are alleged to be historical events with purely cultural origins in nineteenth century romantic opera. Such theories should be called Nazi opera conspiracies. Today, we will reveal why this represents a gross distortion of history rewritten from a self-serving Christian right perspective, the primary aim of which is to protect the reputation of Martin Luther.

Martin Luther

There is an enormous and ever growing populist literature involving numerous Nazi conspiracy theories of various degrees of bizarreness. The question as to what the socio-political motivations underlying this literature might be has rarely been subjected to critical analysis. However, Nazi Secrets by Frank Lost is a rare book in that it does an excellent job of critically dealing with some of these popular conspiracies and myths that grow increasingly fantastic as they circulate around the internet:

The most extreme example of these are Nazi UFO conspiracy theories like this one:

The author claims to be persecuted for his "revelations". It is claimed that the author encountered "reports of UFO crews speaking German and behaving like German soldiers or of sightings and documentation showing a UFO landing gear imprint in a clear swastika shape". In the most bizarre versions of this, Hitler is transported up to UFOs developed in conjunction with the aliens, his body presumably kept in suspended animation ready to be reactivated for the impending Nazi UFO invasion of the world:

There are plenty of other such bizarre stories. For example there is an extensive Occult Reich literature, stories of Nazi antarctic bases, werewolves, and mystic treasures. Frank Lost puts it well when he writes:

It does not add anything to the uncanny spell of such stories to pollute them with material that cannot be verified or, even worse, with pure lies coming straight out of the imagination of poor authors in search of quick money and fame. These made-up stories are usually rewritten in a thousand ways on the Internet, and everyone ends up adding their own personal touch or interpretation, feeding on each other as makeshift sources. 

Lost also rightly identifies the desire for quick money as one of the dominant motives driving the proliferation of such lurid populist literature, although he also hints at the fact that it is not always that simple:

Fantasies, urban legends, literary inventions and pure lies came after the war at the beginning of the '60s. Any book that dealt with Nazis and the occult, Satan, UFOs or secret treasures was assured to be sold at thousands of copies. Among the purely commercial approach of fake historians and storytellers, there were a few "honest" though fanatic people who managed, by their writings and teachings, to develop a kind a semi-religious version of Nazism that has formed the basis up until today for neo-Nazi movements throughout the world. We shall therefore deal more deeply with such themes as the Black Sun and the Vril force that pervade many of these Nazi New Age creeds.

Lost tells us there is an entire populist industry capitalising on the morbid fascination amongst the public for such pseudo-histories:

Nazi occultism is a concept where it is difficult to separate historical facts from post-war fantasies. The latter are numerous, especially from the '60s onward. Two books helped this surge in Nazi occultism: Pauwels and Bergier's The Morning of the Magicians (1960) and Trevor Ravenscroft's The Spear of Destiny (1972). After these, any book that tackled the Nazi occultism theme was sure enough to make strong sales, well above 50,000 copies for the worst among them.

To the list of dubious literature on Nazi conspiracies, we need to add another class of conspiracy literature: Nazi opera conspiracies. The most archetypal of these is that by journalist Joachim Köhler, who writes that:

[In] the last radio address [Hitler] gave to the country, in January 1945, he repeated: 'Only he who gave this task can release me from it.'... The nature of this task was certainly not to pursue a set of political aims, that is, to arrange the political and social realities of the time in the interests of the nation whose Chancellor he was. Reality meant for him the task of transforming the world into a Wagnerian drama...  

Köhler: Wagner's Hitler, p270 

In Nazi opera conspiracies, the National Socialist Party becomes an opera company disguised as a political movement, its sole raison d'être being to secretly transform the world into a Wagnerian opera production. This, and this alone, explains the origins of WWII and the Holocaust, which are seen as little more than a grand conspiracy to enact opera on the world's stage.

Nazi opera conspiracies are increasingly beginning to show evidence of amalgamation with Occult Reich conspiracies. For example, Christopher Nicholson's Richard and Adolf: Did Richard Wagner Incite Adolf Hitler to Commit the Holocaust makes extensive use of Trevor Ravencroft's wildly speculative writings on the Occult Reich. In Nicholson's book we observe the crossbreeding of lurid urban myths involving the allegedly Satanist theosophical Thule Society with the story of the Spear of Longinus (supposedly the basis of the spear in Wagner's Parsifal):

An excerpt from Nicholson's Nazi opera conspiracy book shows the convergence
of the Nazi opera conspiracy literature with the Occult Reich popular literature

However, these myths have been subsequently largely debunked by David Luhrssen's book about the Thule Society:

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. 

Luhrssen: The Hammer of the Gods P203-206

It will not be long before the convergence of these fantasies will have pop culture peddling tall stories of occultist Nazi aliens invading the earth to the tune of the Ride of the Valkyries. That ought to sell well.

Naturally, there will be those who object to classifying the Nazi opera conspiracy theory as just another bizarre Nazi conspiracy theory or bizarre Occult Reich fantasy, and denounce such classification as a specious argument by association. However, academic historians have been totally unanimous in rejecting the Nazi opera theory. I have collected criticisms by Sir Richard J. Evans, Sir Ian Kershaw, Joachim Fest, and Saul Friedländer in my review of Köhler's book, so I they will not be repeated here. Other major historians in this field simply ignore Köhler, like they ignore Nazi UFO conspiracy books. There can be little doubt that the Nazi opera conspiracy has enjoyed as little success amongst mainstream academic historians as the myriad other lurid Nazi conspiracy theories in the popular literature. If academic historians were to accept the Nazi opera conspiracy theory, they would have to toss volumes of studies into the rubbish bin, all built on decades of meticulous research, and completely rewrite the history of the era from scratch—something as likely to happen as their acceptance of the notion of an impending Nazi UFO invasion.

So to find the Nazi opera conspiracy theories being seriously entertained by academic musicologists and cultural critics—who always show abysmal knowledge of the extensive literature by respected academic historians specialising in this field—is something of an acute embarrassment. They might as well be discussing Occult Reich Satanist conspiracies or Nazi UFO conspiracies. Sadly there is a whole industry of historically ignorant cultural historicist writers propagating the Nazi opera conspiracy theory, many of them astonishingly enjoying formal academic appointments. Their books are even being published by prestigious academic publishing houses, doubtless hoping to boost their bottom lines.

At this point, the most perverse Nazi conspiracy theory of them all must be mentioned: Holocaust denialism. This fully deserves classification as a conspiracy theory since it claims that the Holocaust is a fiction concocted by a mass conspiracy of left-wing historians colluding to make the National Socialists look bad. For some, the politicisation of the issues seems to lend it a modicum of seriousness that makes it harder to laugh off like UFO conspiracies, while ultimately remaining no less risible or insane. The most lamentable aspect of Holocaust denialism is that it represents a right-wing rewriting of history, where a fantasy pseudo-history replaces genuine historiography. Yet the distortion of history by right-wing Nazi opera conspiracy theories is almost as gross. To quote Sir Ian Kershaw:

It is nevertheless a gross oversimplification and distortion to reduce the Third Reich to the outcome of Hitler's alleged mission to fulfil Wagner's vision, as does Köhler, in Wagners Hitler.  

Kershaw: Endnote 121 from Hitler: 1889-1936—Hubris (my emphasis)

Unfortunately, while nowhere near as extreme, Nazi opera conspiracy theories share many of the features of Holocaust denialist conspiracies. Above all, it constitutes an aggressively right-wing rewriting of history, one falling short of being far-right, but not by much.

The original right-wing historian who made Wagner the scapegoat for the failings of the right was Peter Viereck, in his book Metapolitics. Viereck vigorously opposed interpretations of WWII based on socio-economic structural analyses, which he called "economic determinism" based on "the Protocols of the Elders of Wall Street". This is essentially Viereck's attempt dismiss all post-Marxist structural analysis of the Dritte Reich era as being a conspiracy theory concocted by left-wing historians. Viereck aggressively denied that the Great Depression had anything whatsoever to do with the rise of National Socialism. Instead, he posited a culturally determined view of a romantic history shaped by the pen of poets and other Great Men. In this way, the fanciful explanation of WWII as the enactment of opera on the world's stage by an Evil Genius blindly intoxicated by Wagner's music replaces rigorous structural historiological analysis.

Sir Richard J. Evans is rightly dismissive of such culturally based historiographies:

It has been all too easy for historians to look back at the course of German history from the vantage-point of 1933 and interpret almost anything that happened in it as contributing to the rise and triumph of Nazism. This has led to all kinds of distortions, with some historians picking choice quotations from German thinkers such as Herder, the late eighteenth-century apostle of nationalism, or Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century founder of Protestantism, to illustrate what they argue are ingrained German traits of contempt for other nationalities and blind obedience to authority within their own borders. Yet when we look more closely at the work of thinkers such as these, we discover that Herder preached tolerance and sympathy for other nationalities, while Luther famously insisted on the right of the individual conscience to rebel against spiritual and intellectual authority. Moreover, while ideas do have a power of their own, that power is always conditioned, however indirectly, by social and political circumstances, a fact that historians who generalized about the 'German character' or 'the German mind' all too often forgot [citation to Viereck's Metapolitics].  

Evans: The Coming of the Third Reich

In other words, who the right-wing chooses as a target for its polemic is totally determined by the intrinsic bias of the writer's own political agenda.

There are good reason why Richard Wagner has so perfectly suited the agenda of the right-wing historian, and the first of these was that Wagner was without doubt left-wing in his orientation. Despite claims to the contrary, examination of Wagner's writing showed that he maintained this political orientation to the very end. His fictional reinvention as a proto-fascist occurred entirely after his death in the hands of Cosima Wagner and Houston Chamberlain. Yet Wagner was always a bizarrely misappropriated black sheep amongst the political right. This misappropriation has conveniently played into the hands of those concocting a fictional post-war right-wing narrative about National Socialism being a left-wing movement—that it is a form of left-wing "Socialism". This is why Viereck tells us in Metapolitics that:

Yet in the 1869 edition of his 1850 polemic Judaism In Music he added that his work was being persecuted by Jews. The Nazis never mentioned how much this Wagner essay owed to Karl Marx, who had attacked Jews as bankers and for turning creations into commodities.   

My emphasis

Viereck follower Michael Haas tells us in his book that:

Wagner's view—not that different from issues Karl Marx was grappling with—was that Jews were avaricious capitalists and that giving them the same rights as Germans would not allow the new state to develop into the anti-capitalist society he envisaged, and for which he had fought on the Dresden barricades in 1848.  

Haas p23 (my emphasis)

So Wagner's demand for democracy in the name of the Fatherland plus his socialism = National Socialism:

The obvious rallying point for the National Socialists was Wagner. Indeed, he was very much the Ur-National Socialist, having been, at different stages in his life, both a nationalist and a Socialist.  

Haas p218  

It is certainly true that what Wagner's says about the Jews is virtually identical to what Marx says. Viereck could have also pointed out that Wagner's friend, Michael Bakunin, with whom he participated in the 1849 pro-democracy movement, also made similarly polemical anti-Semitic statements.

Right-wing polemicists and historians love to underline anti-Semitic strains in left-wing writers as a means of blame shifting the rise of far-right exterminationist anti-Semitism. In the case of Wagner, they can speculate that Hitler liked his music therefore Hitler surely got his brand of genocidal right-wing anti-Semitism from Wagner too. Although as absurd as blaming the Holocaust on Walt Disney because Hitler loved Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, it is tantamount to blaming the whole of the political left including Marx and Bakunin for causing WWII and the Holocaust on little more than the fact that Hitler liked Wagner's music ever since being taken to see one of his operas as a young boy. It is an accusation that has contemporary repercussions in that left-wing thinkers such as Noam Chomsky are the direct socialist anarchist ideological descendants of Wagner's friend, Bakunin—the father of socialist anarchism, a system of thought that remains extremely viable today. Andrej Grubačić puts it well in saying that:

[A]narchism, at least in Europe and the Americas, has by now taken the place Marxism once occupied in the social movements of the 1960s. As a core revolutionary ideology, it is the source of ideas and inspiration, and even those who do not consider themselves anarchists feel they have to define themselves in relation to it.  

The political thought of Richard Wagner can also be read as being fundamentally socialist anarchist like Bakunin. Herein lies the basis for the right-wing polemic about Wagner being the alleged Ur-Nazi of all history. It is a polemic made possible only by the embarrassing adoption by Hitler of someone who actually held political views totally antithetical to his—because Hitler was painfully ignorant of Wagner's political writings. Richard J. Evans tells us that:

Hitler never referred to Wagner as a source of his own antisemitism, and there is no evidence that he actually read any of Wagner's writings. 

Evans: The Third Reich in Power 

This does nothing to stop right-wing pseudo-historians from repeatedly asserting without a shred of proof that Hitler allegedly "knew every word" of Wagner's prose writings.

Joachim Köhler even insinuates Wagner and Bakunin's joint participation in the 1849 Dresden pro-democracy revolutionary movement caused WWII and the Holocaust:

A delight in the all-consuming fire remained with Wagner throughout his life. ... Wagner himself arranged for the necessary pitch torches and hand grenades to be prepared in the spring of 1849. ... For Bakunin, said Wagner, this conflagration was to end with the destruction of the whole of civilisation, a destruction launched from the streets of Dresden by the 'great Russian pyrotechnician'. ....[On] 7 May 1849, Wagner was compensated by witnessing the destruction of the old opera house, which gave him 'a strange sense of satisfaction'. The suspicion was often vented that he was looking for an alternative use for the petrol and pitch torches originally intended for the palace.  ... He would, of course, have had every reason to destroy a theatre that symbolised ... the ancien régime, whose time in Dresden was a long way from being over. Furthermore, nobody, apart from Röckel, knew the layout of the theatre as well as he did. ... It was a barbaric act...  

Köhler: Wagner's Hitler, p44–46 (Taylor Translation). My emphasis.

In other words, this alleged Wagnerian manic love of fiery destruction was the essence of National Socialist wanton destructiveness on the world's stage—the very historical origin of Nazi barbarism. Köhler virtually takes the side of the reactionary right in condemning Wagner and Bakunin for participating in a pro-democracy movement to the point of suggesting that Wagner was being disloyal to his King by whom he was employed at the Dresden Opera that was set alight during the revolution. The ultimate point of Köhler's polemic is that liberal revolutionary movements, especially Wagner and Bakunin's pro-democracy activism and its incendiary destruction of the old order, are to be condemned as the root cause of Nazism.

It is certainly true that Hitler and the National Socialists perverted terms like "socialism", "democracy" and "revolution" for their own ends. Hitler talked about "Jewish democracy"—like that of the Weimar Republic ("the Jewish Republic")—characterised by voting; in contrast to "German democracy" in which the people place their absolute trust in the Leader (Führer/Duce). Likewise, "socialism" becomes a base populist movement lead by a pseudo-grassroots movement of a racist mob of angry people (Volk). They even called their destruction of Weimar democracy their "revolution" just as Spanish and Italian fascists called their movements "revolutions". There is no evidence that perversions of all of these terms in this way predated the rise of fascism in the twentieth century. The attempt by the likes of Köhler to wilfully "discover" the origins of these perversions in Wagner, Bakunin and Marx-Engels is simply to be deplored as a malicious rewriting of history by a reactionary right-wing narrative hardly better than Holocaust denialist conspiracies claiming that left-wing historians colluded to invent the "fiction" of the Holocaust.

The final problem in the selection of Wagner as a target by right-wing writers is that it ignores the excellent point made by Evans that:

It has been all too easy for historians to look back at the course of German history from the vantage-point of 1933 and interpret almost anything that happened in it as contributing to the rise and triumph of Nazism.

At some point or another virtually every German thinker has had "choice" quotations ripped out of context by a polemicist trying to implicate them as a proto-Nazi. These polemics have mostly died down as the use of the "Nazi" accusation as a blanket polemical term to discredit one's ideological and political opponents in a self-serving attack has becoming increasingly frowned upon. The only exception has been Richard Wagner, where Nazi opera conspiracy books by right-wing authors seem to be on the steady increase and considered politically acceptable.

The real problem is that if you read Hitler's Mein Kampf he actually implies that he wants posterity to remember him alongside three German "predecessors". These are Richard Wagner, Friedrich the Great, and finally, Martin Luther. The question must be asked why of these three names, polemicists have chosen to single out Wagner as a target of their attacks. When journalist William Shirer published The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in 1960, he took a shotgun approach to implicating a wide range of German cultural figures, but his attacks focused especially on the figure of Martin Luther. His attack on Luther was considered so utterly blasphemous that the following passage had to be systematically censored from the German edition:

William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), p. 236. The German translation Aufstieg und Fall des dritten Reichs (Frankfurt am Main: Buchgilde Gutenberg, 1962), p. 232, deleted this passage: 

It is difficult to understand the behavior of most German Protestants in the first Nazi years unless one is aware of two things: their history and the influence of Martin Luther. The great founder of Protestantism was both a passionate anti-Semite and a ferocious believer in absolute obedience to political authority. He wanted Germany rid of the Jews and when they were sent away he advised that they be deprived of 'all their cash and jewels and silver and gold' and, furthermore, 'that their synagogues or schools be set on fire, that their houses be broken up and destroyed ... and they be put under a roof or stable, like gypsies ... in misery and captivity as they incessantly lament and complain to God about us.'... Luther employed a coarseness and brutality of language unequaled in German history until the Nazi time. 

Exposed by Heiko A. Oberman, "Luthers Beziehungen zu den Juden: Ahnen und Geahndete," in Helmar Junghans, ed., Leben und Werk.

Deleted selection quoted out of Eric W. Gritsch's book: Martin Luther's Anti-Semitism: Against his Better Judgement 

Since 1960, the number of books targeting Martin Luther as the greatest Ur-Nazi of German history have been few and far between, and when they are published, they are never as fanatically polemical, whereas authors continue to aggressively assert, on extremely dubious grounds, that Wagner is supposedly "without doubt" (assurance of this kind replacing any evidence) the original Nazi of German history and that National Socialism operated solely on Wagnerian principles. To rewrite history, they ignore the fact that Wagner called for "assimilation" of the Jews and for Jew and Gentile to become "united and without difference". They conveniently ignore Martin Luther's calls to throw "hellfire" at the Jews in an anti-Semitic polemic that makes Wagner seem utterly liberal and progressive by the standards of his day—an interpretation of Wagner that the great Holocaust scholar Saul Friedlander agrees with:

However, on the previous page [of Judaism in Music], in which Wagner call upon the Jews to follow the example of Börne in order to give up for the sake of "the redemption into genuine human beings", he clearly says that the vanishing of their social, cultural, and religious idiosyncrasies will restore them into a universal and redeemed humanity. In this interpretation of redemption there still echoes Wagner's revolutionary ideals of his age. One can interpret Wagner's first anti-Judaic pamphlet not as a call for the annihilation of the Jews, but rather read it as the appeal for the elevation of Judaism as a culture, in order to remove the "Jewish spirit" ... Can the Jews be liberated of their "Jewish spirit" like Börne? To Hitler it must have all seemed ideologically unacceptable.  

Saul Friedländer: Hitler und Wagner. My translation from the published German version. My bold emphasis.

Once Wagner has been understood correctly, it becomes all too clear that Wagner is being maliciously targeted by the religious right to protect Martin Luther from being crowned the ideological Ur-Nazi of German cultural history. As a key anti-Semitic religious leader, Luther is far better as a target to be called the "Prophet" of whom Hitler is the "Disciple" than Wagner ever was. The religious right are doubly motivated to blame-shift to Wagner, since one-time close friend Nietzsche almost certainly took his idea of the Death of God from Wagner. 

So little wonder that the Christian right finds it expedient to divert attention away from Luther by fanatically scapegoating Wagner instead. At the same time, right-wing Jews prefer not to target Luther because it would be politically inexpedient to reignite the ancient tensions between Christianity and Judaism, especially given Israel's need for the support of Protestant America to main their political hegemony in the Middle East. To run a polemic about Luther's Hitler—the Prophet and his Disciple would be dangerously inconvenient. That leaves Wagner a very vulnerable target, given that Wagner societies are small and carry precious little political and financial clout compared to churches. The reason why Wagner has been singled out by intellectual bullies as a safe modern scapegoat to pick on have more to do with present-day political tensions and expediencies than anything to do with anything in Wagner's writings, which are being aggressively rewritten by pseudo-historians to suit their malicious right-wing agenda. Wagner is being targeted by right-wing cultural vultures, and those willing to step in to stand up to such intellectual lynching are few and far between.

The real problem for right-wing pseudo-historians is this: people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. As Evans points out, you can choose your target for the cultural origins of National Socialism as it suits your polemical purposes. The reality is that there is much more independently verifiable information out there implicating the churches in complicity with the National Socialist regime. Fortunately, there have recently appeared two books of interest here. The first of these is the first English translation of God and the Fascists by prolific author, Karlheinz Deschner on the role of the Catholic Church in the rise of fascism:

Secondly, a book implicating the role of the Prophet, Martin Luther and the direct influence of his ideas on the Dritte Reich, called Demonizing the Jews:

Concerning the Jews and their lies by Martin Luther

By writing books entitled Wagner's Hitler: the Prophet and his Disciple, right-wing pseudo-historians have only opened up a can of worm for themselves inviting books carrying incendiary titles such as Pope Pius XII's Hitler: the Prophet and his Disciple, Luther's Hitler: the Prophet and his Disciple. In fact this is a period cartoon:

These titles, along with mainstream academic books on the history of this era, provide a refreshing contrast to the bizarre Nazi opera conspiracy books and their fantastic obsession with scapegoating Richard Wagner. It provides a reality check that makes you realise how utterly irrelevant Wagner is to a discussion of the origins of National Socialism.