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Click here for information on how to order a copy. New Religions and the Nazis is an example of doing research in, or about, post-war situations. Nazism was the unique outgrowth of post-World War I conditions in Germany. Its motive was to avenge Versailles, destroy Jewish-Christianity, and help birth Germany's other, indeed, own religion. Radical leaders channeled defeated young men through deutsch-Germanic and Nordic religions (Bünde) to National Socialism. German style gurus mixed politics, religion, theology, Indo-Aryan metaphysics, literature, and Darwinian science into a national socialist worldview hostile to Jews. From this cultural milieu came Hitler's radical complotters, including Rosenberg, Himmler, and Goebbels, and their academic and literary ideologues. The latter included religion founders Hauer, Bergmann, Ludendorff and Klagges, anthropologists Günther and Clauss, theologians Hirsch and Künneth, nationalist writers Grimm and Kolbenheyer, SS intellectuals Best and Wüst, and the nationalist politician Hugenberg. Pagans all, they won over the leadership of the Protestant church and played havoc with it and the universities. Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, with his love for the Bhagavad-Gita, brought dozens of groups together to form the German Faith Movement. Flanked by SS intellectuals and party members, the German Faith Movement saw itself as the religious heart of Nazism and a bulwark against Jewish-Christianity and Roman Catholicism - until its organization and Hauer's charisma became inconvenient. New Religions and the Nazis contributes to both history and anthropology. It directs attention to the need for research that focuses specifically on post-war situations, especially of the defeated, because here new political directions tend to be forged by religious means. |
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Author: Karla Poewe 