first appeared in 1905, was the product of the extraordinary and warped imagination of an eccentric former Cistercian monk, who came to be known as Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (though his real name was plain Adolf Lanz). He later founded his own order, the ‘New Templar Order’ (replete with a full panoply of mystical signs and symbols, including the swastika), in a ruined castle, Burg Werfenstein, on a romantic stretch of the Danube between Linz and Vienna.
Lanz and his followers were obsessed by homoerotic notions of a manichean struggle between the heroic and creative ‘blond’ race and a race of predatory dark ‘beast-men’ who preyed on the ‘blond’ women with animal lust and bestial instincts that were corrupting and destroying mankind and its culture. Lanz’s recipe, laid down in
Ostara
, for overcoming the evils of the modern world and restoring the domination of the ‘blond race’ was racial purity and racial struggle, involving the slavery and forced sterilization or even extermination of the inferior races, the crushing of socialism, democracy, and feminism which were seen as the vehicles of their corrupting influence, and the complete subordination of aryan women to their husbands. It amounted to a creed of ‘blue-eyed blondes of all nations, unite’. There are indeed elements in common between the bizarre fantasies of Lanz and his band of woman-hating, racist crackpots and the programme of racial selection which the SS were to put into practice during the Second World War. Whether Lanz’s ideas had direct influence on Himmler’s SS is, however, questionable. Unsustainable is Lanz’s claim to a unique place in history as the man ‘who gave Hitler his ideas’.
The main evidence that Hitler was acquainted with
Ostara
comes from a post-war interview in which Lanz claimed to have remembered Hitler, during the time he lived in Felberstraße in 1909, paying him a visit and asking him for back copies of the magazine. Since Hitler looked so run-down, Lanz went on, he let him have the copies for nothing, and gave him 2 Kronen for his journey home. How Lanz knew that this young man had been Hitler, when it was to be well over ten years beforethe latter would become a local celebrity even in Munich, he was never asked in the interview more than forty years after the purported meeting. Another witness to Hitler’s reading of
Ostara
in post-war interviews was Josef Greiner, the author of some fabricated ‘recollections’ of Hitler in his Vienna years. Greiner did not mention
Ostara
in his book, but, when later questioned about it in the mid-1950s, ‘remembered’ that Hitler had a large pile of
Ostara
magazines while he was living in the Men’s Home from 1910 to 1913, and had vehemently supported Lanz’s racial theories in heated discussions with an ex-Catholic priest called Grill (who does not figure in his book at all). A third witness, a former Nazi functionary called Elsa Schmidt-Falk, could only remember that she had heard Hitler mention Lanz in the context of homosexuality, and
Ostara
in connection with the banning of Lanz’s works (though there is in fact no evidence of a ban).
Most likely, Hitler did read
Ostara
along with other racist pulp which was prominent on Vienna newspaper stands. But we cannot be certain. Nor, if he did read it, can we be sure what he believed. His first known statements on antisemitism immediately following the First World War betray no traces of Lanz’s obscure racial doctrine. He was later frequently scornful of
völkisch
sects and the extremes of Germanic cultism. As far as can be seen, if we discount Elsa Schmidt-Falk’s doubtful testimony, he never mentioned Lanz by name. For the Nazi regime, the bizarre Austrian racist eccentric, far from being held up to praise, was to be accused of ‘falsifying racial thought through secret doctrine’.
When Hitler, his savings almost exhausted, was forced to leave Felberstraße in mid-August 1909 to move for a very short
Lanz and his followers were obsessed by homoerotic notions of a manichean struggle between the heroic and creative ‘blond’ race and a race of predatory dark ‘beast-men’ who preyed on the ‘blond’ women with animal lust and bestial instincts that were corrupting and destroying mankind and its culture. Lanz’s recipe, laid down in
Ostara
, for overcoming the evils of the modern world and restoring the domination of the ‘blond race’ was racial purity and racial struggle, involving the slavery and forced sterilization or even extermination of the inferior races, the crushing of socialism, democracy, and feminism which were seen as the vehicles of their corrupting influence, and the complete subordination of aryan women to their husbands. It amounted to a creed of ‘blue-eyed blondes of all nations, unite’. There are indeed elements in common between the bizarre fantasies of Lanz and his band of woman-hating, racist crackpots and the programme of racial selection which the SS were to put into practice during the Second World War. Whether Lanz’s ideas had direct influence on Himmler’s SS is, however, questionable. Unsustainable is Lanz’s claim to a unique place in history as the man ‘who gave Hitler his ideas’.
The main evidence that Hitler was acquainted with
Ostara
comes from a post-war interview in which Lanz claimed to have remembered Hitler, during the time he lived in Felberstraße in 1909, paying him a visit and asking him for back copies of the magazine. Since Hitler looked so run-down, Lanz went on, he let him have the copies for nothing, and gave him 2 Kronen for his journey home. How Lanz knew that this young man had been Hitler, when it was to be well over ten years beforethe latter would become a local celebrity even in Munich, he was never asked in the interview more than forty years after the purported meeting. Another witness to Hitler’s reading of
Ostara
in post-war interviews was Josef Greiner, the author of some fabricated ‘recollections’ of Hitler in his Vienna years. Greiner did not mention
Ostara
in his book, but, when later questioned about it in the mid-1950s, ‘remembered’ that Hitler had a large pile of
Ostara
magazines while he was living in the Men’s Home from 1910 to 1913, and had vehemently supported Lanz’s racial theories in heated discussions with an ex-Catholic priest called Grill (who does not figure in his book at all). A third witness, a former Nazi functionary called Elsa Schmidt-Falk, could only remember that she had heard Hitler mention Lanz in the context of homosexuality, and
Ostara
in connection with the banning of Lanz’s works (though there is in fact no evidence of a ban).
Most likely, Hitler did read
Ostara
along with other racist pulp which was prominent on Vienna newspaper stands. But we cannot be certain. Nor, if he did read it, can we be sure what he believed. His first known statements on antisemitism immediately following the First World War betray no traces of Lanz’s obscure racial doctrine. He was later frequently scornful of
völkisch
sects and the extremes of Germanic cultism. As far as can be seen, if we discount Elsa Schmidt-Falk’s doubtful testimony, he never mentioned Lanz by name. For the Nazi regime, the bizarre Austrian racist eccentric, far from being held up to praise, was to be accused of ‘falsifying racial thought through secret doctrine’.
When Hitler, his savings almost exhausted, was forced to leave Felberstraße in mid-August 1909 to move for a very short
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