Hitler and the Occult --

Hitler and the Occult -- Video Summary

Formal Rationalization of Belief Systems

The history of German beliefs about racial purity can be traced back well into the 19th century and long before they manifested themselves in the large-scale rounding up, imprisonment, and murder of millions of innocent civilian men, women, and children. To a certain extent, concepts and beliefs about the origin and supposed superiority of Germanic or "Aryan" people was purely romantic and not necessarily immoral, because it was no different from the analogous ethnocentric beliefs of many native peoples. Even the erroneous scientific and pseudo-scientific beliefs and concepts espoused by late 19th century and early 20th century German anthropologists and lay historians was unremarkable during the period before it was incorporated into a national philosophy that included restoring the so-called "purity" of German blood by the elimination of other so-called "inferior" races.

The Nazis succeeded in cultivating a national obsession with racial purity and insensitivity toward Jews, Slavs, and other races and peoples through gradual indoctrination of the masses using (for the first time) mass electronic media in the form of the radio, then the latest and most revolutionary development in the communication of ideas and ideologies that had ever been devised. In addition to legislating Jews out of public life and higher education through the 1933 Nuremburg Laws, the Nazis employed propaganda films in the form of images and narratives depicting Jews as rat-like vermin spreading across the globe, corrupting superior people in the process. By incorporating established academic authorities into an ancestral heritage preservation arm of Himmler's S.S., the Nazis corrupted their academic credibility to bolster belief in and acceptance of a worldview and an ancestral history that was based in pure fantasy and mythology.

Justifying Genocide in Principle

The Nazi fantasies about the origin of the Germanic people and their relative superiority over other peoples evolved from harmless nonsense to deadly consequences when Hitler consolidated government authority in the Nazi party in 1933. Before that, Nazism played a similar role in German society to contemporary white supremacist groups today whose activities constitute isolated hate crimes against individual victims.

By infusing an aura of academic legitimacy into the concept of Aryan superiority in combination with formal national policies prohibiting Jews from German universities, highly skilled professions, and civil service, the Nazis made the transition from intellectually and ethically offensive ideological conceptual beliefs into operationalizing a national system of denial of rights and state-sponsored persecution. Nazi schoolchildren learned from lecturers and textbooks that featured scientific theories and related seemingly credible theories about the various worth of different races in conjunction with the promotion of fanatical psychological orientation with nationalistic and cultural pride.

Hundreds of thousands regularly gathered themselves into sports stadiums and historic courtyards where Hitler and other senior Nazi officials publicly proclaimed the duty of "true" German citizens to unite in national pride and issued vitriolic speeches about the manner in which the Jews had brought about the outcome of World War I and their responsibility for poisoning German society. On the eve of World War II, Hitler himself warned his nation of fanatical followers that it was "international Jewry" that was threatening the entire world, that the world was on the verge of global military conflict because of the Jews, and that it would be the Jews who reaped what they had sewn should Germany be plunged into another war.

Justifying Genocide in Practice

By the time that millions of Jews were being rounded up and incinerated by the millions throughout Europe, the German people were sufficiently indoctrinated with racial animus toward the Jews and cultural hatred for the Slavic people that ordinary citizens were completely indifferent to the obvious evidence that their government was conducting genocide throughout the European Continent with the full intention of replicating it in Britain and the United States as soon as possible.