The Occult and the Third Reich: The Mystical Origins of Nazism and the Search for the Holy Grail

by Jean-Michel Angebert

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0025021508
• ISBN13: 9780025021501
• Release Date: January 1974
• Publisher: MacMillan Publishing Company
• Length: 306 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

How conventional historians miss out on Hitler

Your run-of-the-mill historian doesn't quite make it work for most students when it comes to Adolf Hitler and the whole Nazi movement. Hitler is either portrayed as an idiot, a fool, or a lunatic. And while there may have been parts of all these in his personality, none of these explain the attraction and drive that Nazism brought to a civilized, cultured country such as Germany, and which persuaded large numbers of Germans to cooperate in unspeakable acts of horror. These authors ("Jean-Michel Angebert" is a pastiche of the 2 authors' names) instead try to determine what lay under the Nazi movement and specifically beneath Hitler's personality, and they find it in occult and gnostic thought. In the end, the authors fail to clinch their case because -- at least when the book was published in 1975 -- the evidence is not there for tying up the loose ends. But the book makes a good and persuasive case for believing that Hitler and the Nazi movement had an underlying motif that explains their evil in ways not easily understood if we look at Nazism as a conventional political movement.

A book that clearly deserves reprinting and circulation

The importance of THE OCCULT AND THE THIRD REICH by two French scholars as translated by Lewis A. M. Sumberg of the University of Tennessee can scarcely be overstated. It was a vital resource in drawing the obvious parallels between the Nazism of the 30s and 40s and the modern New Age Movement. For sure, it does not give all the picture, but it supplies missing puzzle pieces unavailable elsewhere, except perhaps in the video series now conveniently available on line about the Nazis and the occult. I would well suspect the New Agers do not like the book -- it unmasks them to anybody reading it with knowledge of the buzzwords, spiritual practices and legendry of the modern New Age Movement. Buying it at any price is a good deal; however, the book deserves reprinting and McGraw Hill well knows there has been tremendous demand for it. How about it?

A worthy, worthy read.

I found this book in 1988, while researching the claim that Mary Magdeline's left arm was housed as a relic at Simopetra Monastery on Mt. Athos, Greece (I saw it ). Once I started to read The Occult and the Third Reich, I couldn't put it down. The theories were so credible that you had to think that the historians and governments deliberately tried to rewrite the history of Nazi Germany in their own view. What the book expertly does is to offer the National Socialism movement as a quasi religious quest. Readers of Eric Hoffer's True Believer will understand immediately. Much of the factual evidence presented is very speculative. The authors idolize Otto Rahn, a Nazi who wrote the Crusade Against the Grail and Lucifer's Court. He was the first to publicly connect the 12th century Cathari of southern France to the Holy Grail and an alternative stream of Christianity. Nevertheless, this book answered a lot of questions and filled in a gap of Hitler's almost unbelievable quest for complete world domination with a nation behind him. The book details correctly the order of the Nazi SS that was styled after King Arthur's Round Table. The Nazi movement was a religion to the chosen few. I continued my research into the book's accuracy. At one point, I telephoned the Nazi desk expert at the CIA with a couple of questions. The agent told me that this book was his bible. The Occult and the Third Reich is the beginning of all the alternative books on the Holy Grail and the Cathars. It may not be entirely accurate, but with only 3,000 English books in print, it was the blockbuster on the new genre. It inspired my own science fiction book: G.R.A.I.L.