VIENNA WAS A gray city in the aftermath of the Second World War. Its
Habsburg glories, the charm and gaiety of its music and theaters were a thing
of the past. For some eight years since the Anschluß, Austria had formed a
mere province of the Third Reich. In the closing months of the war, Vienna
was badly bombed and the Red Army had fought its way into the city. From
1945 to 1955 the capital was divided up into sectors among the Allies. Russian,
British,American and French military personnel were responsible within
their respective sectors for administration, police work and security. The Four
Powers each presided in turn for a month at a time over the Inner City within
the Ringstrasse and its battered statuary and public buildings. Food, fuel and
medicine were in short supply. Black market trading, prostitution and espionage
were a means of survival for the local population. The gloomy, wintry
atmosphere of Graham Greene’s famous novel, The Third Man (1950), hung
like a heavy pall over the defeated and occupied city.
Most Austrians now viewed Hitler and German rule as a nemesis and the
bringers of catastrophe. However, a significant minority of Nazi loyalists
found defeat intolerable after the power and exuberance of Germany’s continental
dominion. In the early 1950s, an Aryan-Nordic mythology took root
in Vienna that was in marked contrast to the flagrant Hitler worship of postwar
Anglo-American Nazi cults. Since Hitler and politics were now such
painful memories, this mythology was characterized by speculations about
ancient Nordic races, Thule and Atlantis, and Germanic religion. Also important
was the rediscovery of ideas and individuals in the Ahnenerbe, Heinrich
Himmler’s SS office that researched Aryan archaeology and anthropology
from 1935 to 1945.Apocalyptic hopes for national resurrection and salvation
focused on wild speculations about the supposed existence of German miracle
weapons, including flying saucers and secret polar bases at the end of the
war. These ideas were very much a product of the grim desolation prevailing
in postwar Vienna. They provided the seeds of the neo-Nazi mythology of the
Black Sun which has been circulating in the far-right German underground
since the 1990s.
128
The origins of this mystique lie in a small occult-racist circle that first gathered
for discussions at the studio of the designer Wilhelm Landig (1909–
1997) in the Vienna IV district in 1950. Born in Vienna in December 1909,
Wilhelm Landig was a staunch pan-German nationalist. As a schoolboy he
had joined the youth section of the Freikorps Roßbach and later fought in the
Freikorps “Deutsche Wehr” in Vienna, two of the many private armies formed
after the First World War to defend Germany’s borders and suppress left-wing
revolts. He served in the Third Reich first in 1937–38 at the Labour Science
Institute in Berlin, then until 1941 in a government department in Vienna.
From 1942 to 1944 he fought with the Waffen-SS in the Balkans, receiving
German and Croatian decorations in fierce anti-guerrilla campaigns against
partisans. In 1944 he was directed from Belgrade back to Vienna for “special
tasks” involving new military technology. In autumn 1945 he was subject to
automatic arrest as a former SS man and interned in a British POW camp
until 1947. Upon his release he entered the world of inter-Allied espionage,
hawking low- and medium-grade Soviet intelligence to Western security services.
Another member of the circle, Rudolf J.Mund (1920–1985), had been an
illegal Nazi stormtrooper in Vienna while in his teens and later served on the
Russian front and in the Ardennes as a lieutenant in the Waffen-SS. He too
had been imprisoned and subject to postwar disqualifications.
These fighting men were drawn to occultism and racist myths as a way of
transcending their defeat and the humiliation of the German Reich. The focus
of their discussions was a secret center in the Arctic known as the Blue Island,
which could serve as a source point for a renaissance of traditional life. This
idea was taken from Julius Evola, whose Erhebung wider die moderne Welt [Revolt
against the Modern World] (1935) became the Bible of the Landig group.
Landig’s völkisch ideology of Ario-Germanic superiority was embedded
within the high-flown metaphysics of Evola’s primordial Tradition. Only the
Northern Atlantic races, especially the Aryan Germans, understood the sacred
nature of regal authority, the mystery of ritual, initiation and consecration,
the divine origins of patrician rule, chivalry and a rigid caste hierarchy. Evola’s
polar mythology of Thule and trenchant anti-modernity had already been
current among German conservative and right-wing periodicals during the
Third Reich. As a Waffen-SS officer, Landig may also have met Evola during
the last year of the war. After June 1944, Evola had worked in Vienna, helping
to recruit a pan-European army ofWaffen-SS volunteers from all over Europe
to defend the continent against the invasion of the United States and the Soviet
Union.
The Vienna group also hungrily devoured the ideas and books of Herman
Wirth (1885–1981), the Dutch-German lay scholar of ancient religions and
WILHELM LANDIG AND THE ESOTERIC SS 129
symbols. Born on 6 May 1885, the son of a schoolmaster in Utrecht, Wirth
embraced pan-German ideas early and served as a German volunteer in the
First World War.After moving to Germany in 1923,Wirth began to write and
published his major works on Germanic prehistory, Der Aufgang der Menschheit
(1928) and Die Heilige Urschrift der Menschheit (1931–36). By comparing
the scripts of the Mediterranean countries and the Orient, the symbols
of North and West Africa, the languages of the North American Indians and
the Eskimos,Wirth posited the existence of a former great civilization of the
proto-Germanic Thuatas in the North Atlantic basin. He discovered the oldest
remains of this Nordic-Atlantean culture in the carved symbols of the Old
Stone Age in southwestern Europe.Wirth’s methods and conclusions were rejected
by most university academics, and he attracted further controversy by
editing Die Ura Linda Chronik (1932), a Friesian manuscript generally regarded
as a nineteenth-century forgery, as a chronicle of Germanic life in the
sixth to first centuries b.c. But these Nordic speculations brought Wirth the
favor of Heinrich Himmler, and in 1935 he was invited to found and direct
the SS Ahnenerbe institute for anthropological and archaeolgical research.1
Owing to Wirth’s predilection for ancient matriarchy—evidence of his intellectual
debt to the Swiss scholar Johann Jakob Bachofen—and archaic collectivism,
which seemed sympathetic to socialist ideals, he subsequently fell
from Nazi grace and left the institute in 1937.However,Wirth’s following and
influence among German völkisch groups was considerable from the outset.
His vision of an ancient high Thuata civilization from which the Nordic sea
peoples had set forth in their swan and dragon ships to colonize the Atlantic
world reflected a utopian imperialism for those who bewailed the impotence
and demoralization of the Weimar Republic. Pessimists and opponents of the
present were drawn to his idea that a revival of this Thuata-Atlantean culture
would signal the rebirth of the Germanic race and the liberation of mankind
from the curse of modernity. Besides his major works and a host of controversial
brochures,Wirth lectured widely in Germany,wrote numerous articles
for the learned and popular press and presided over his own “Herman Wirth
Society” in Berlin.2 He survived the Second World War and cautiously resumed
work on Germanic prehistory.Wilhelm Landig was an early admirer
of his books and, once he had founded his own Volkstum-Verlag in Vienna in
1958, began to publish new works by the antediluvian prophet, who lived at
Marburg on the Lahn until his death at age ninety-five on 16 February 1981.
But the interests of the Landig circle were not simply confined to cultural
pessimism and nostalgia for a lost golden age. These men believed that spiritual
contact could be made with the Blue Island, the hidden polar center. Another
member of the circle, the Swiss engineer Erich Halik, supervised the
130 WILHELM LANDIG AND THE ESOTERIC SS
pouring of large plaster casts for mediumistic purposes, and meditation exercises
were undertaken in an effort to tune in. Halik claimed that esoteric circles
of the SS had sought the favor of this spiritual world center. These SS
“heretics” were particularly interested in the Cathar tradition and directed
their quest toward the Arctic and Tibet. Halik cited the work of Otto Rahn,
the Grail scholar commissioned by Himmler to study the polar traditions of
the Cathars in southern France. Halik saw world history in profoundly esoteric
terms. German bases on Greenland represented the attempt of SS
“heretics” to reach the “Midnight Mountain” of polar tradition, while the UN
flag with its blue polar symbol indicated the inspiration of rival Rosicrucian
groups in California (on the Allied side). Halik speculated that the “militant
esotericism” of the SS was also inspired by Ossendowski’s tales of Agharti and
the mystical fascism of Julius Evola.Halik was also the first to link the esoteric
SS with the “Black Sun” roundel insignia carried by German aircraft in the
polar region at the close of the war.3
Halik was especially excited about the contemporary postwar UFO sightings.
In a series of articles published in the Austrian esoteric magazine Mensch
und Schicksal between 1951 and 1955, Halik related the flying saucers to
the Black Sun myth. He identified the saucers as manifestations of the Grail,
“a cultic vessel used by the supreme hierarchy of Christian Gnostics.”He analyzed
the etheric constitution of flying saucers on the basis of their glowing
concentric rings.4 At the same time,Halik seemed to believe that the Germans
had indeed established “polar empires” in both the Arctic and Antarctic,
under the signs of the “Golden Sun” and the “Black Sun.”While the former
represented a Luciferic, solar quest (linked with Otto Rahn and the SS
Cathars), the latter was driven by Saturnine, satanic lodges of the SS.5 Halik
understood the UFOs not so much as a technical invention as the application
of a metaphysical and alchemical principle. The alchemical metaphor of sol
niger (Black Sun) was said to represent occultation, blackening, a sinking into
the mystery of self-discovery. This was the supposedly idealistic message of SS
“heretics” operating from the Blue Island, harbingers of a millenarian world
transformation.6
The literary and intellectual interests of Rudolf Mund cast further light on
the occult-nationalist heritage of the Landig group.While held in an American
POW camp at St. Avold in 1945, Mund was thrilled to discover a fellow
inmate in Edmund Kiß, an author whose books he had avidly read before the
war. A surveyor in the town of Kassel, Kiß had penned a series of novels that
combined epic tales of life in prehistoric Atlantis, the Thuata culture of Herman
Wirth and the World Ice Theory of the maverick Austrian cosmologist
Hanns Hörbiger (1860–1931). First published in 1913, the World Ice Theory
WILHELM LANDIG AND THE ESOTERIC SS 131
held that all stellar and planetary phenomena were the result of violent encounters
between fire and ice. Besides the origin and movements of the heavenly
bodies, the theory also offered an account of earth history and prehistoric
mankind. Hörbiger maintained that the earth had captured several
planets as moons before our present Moon and that these had successively
crashed onto the earth, accompanied by geological upheaval and flood. He
posited the existence of men in the Tertiary era, the rise of the oceans due to
the approach of the former moon, and the subsequent establishment of asylum
cultures in Mexico and the South American Andes.7While the World Ice
Theory attracted mythologists of lost continents, its elemental cosmology
seemed to mirror the Nazi ideology of struggle and was officially sponsored
by the Brownshirts (Sturmabeteilung, or SA).8
An early supporter of the World Ice Theory, Kiß had already traveled in
1928 to Peru and Bolivia, where he sought evidence of such a late-Tertiary
asylum culture in the Andes.With the émigré German professor Arthur Poznansky,
long employed by the Bolivian government, Kiß studied the ancient
ruins of Tiahuanaco on Lake Titicaca.He was convinced that the carved relief
on the sun gate of the city was an astronomical calendar confirming prehistoric
human experience of the most recent lunar catastrophe and subsequent
flood. In the cordillera he found a gigantic sculpture of a Nordic head hewn
out of the rock, for him striking evidence of earlier Atlantean migration and
colonization when the oceans had encircled this high Andean plateau. Once
he had returned to Germany, Kiß wrote a number of scientific works devoted
to his speculations on Hörbiger’s theories.9 Even more influential, however,
was Kiß’s tetralogy of best-selling novels that popularized the Nordic Atlantis
hypothesis and the heroic-catastrophic events of upheaval, inundation and
Nordic migrations to a wide public. In these works, Atlantis and its submergence
became a political symbol for the social chaos of the Weimar Republic
or even Oswald Spengler’s doom-filled prediction of Western decline. Only
the Germans—the last people of the heroic Nordic race—could restore order
in this disjointed world by means of their powerful will to survive and prevail.
His first novel, Das gläserne Meer (1930), described the catastrophic earthquakes
and floods following the downfall of the first Tertiary moon. Driven
out by glacial conditions and hunger, the Nordics migrate over an ice bridge
to the hospitable climes of the southerly continent. This blue-eyed, blond
master caste of Atlantis keeps its dark-skinned slaves in strict subjection and
secures the survival of the white race by plundering women from adjacent
lands. The novel Frühling in Atlantis (1933) is set against the golden age of Atlantean
civilization. The pure-blooded, Nordic “Asen” number only two million
out of the sixty million inhabitants of the state, the rest being “darks” and
132 WILHELM LANDIG AND THE ESOTERIC SS
partial citizens. The rulers’ chief task lies in breeding the Nordic type to guarantee
their authority, but the inferiors are restive and eventually murder the
young leader, Baldur Wieborg of Thule, a hero of climatic disasters and eugenic
policy. This ominous political note was clearly intended to reflect Kiß’s
own anxieties about the threat of the Slavs or other racial inferiors to German
superiority.10
Kiß’s next novel, Die letzte Königin von Atlantis (1931), is set against the
background of the sinking of Atlantis due to the climatic disasters resulting
from the capture of our present Moon some 14,000 years ago. Remnants of
the Nordic master race, former creators of an empire and high civilization,
migrate to conquer the highlands of South America, including the Peruvian
plateau of Atzlan. Here in this asylum they practice strict eugenics to maintain
the purity of their blood, while condemning the inferior races to menial
labor. In this book, Kiß brings the Nordic head he discovered to life as Godda
Apacheta, the astronomer of Atzlan, who is the narrator. In the final novel of
the series, Die Singschwäne aus Thule (1939), all the surviving Asen, under
their blue banner with a silver swastika, attempt to return to the ancestral
Arctic home. But instead of a perpetual spring as in former moonless times,
a terrible cold prevails and hardens them anew. After many years they swarm
forth again southward to Hellas, where they found the famous high Greek
culture of the first millennium b.c. And so the cycle begins again. Throughout
all history, the Nordic Germans will always send forth their supernumerary
populations to colonize, found new states and breed up the declining inferior
races.11
Renowned as the “poet of Atlantis,”Edmund Kiß was also drawn by Heinrich
Himmler into the SS Ahnenerbe. Already in July 1936, Kiß and others
signed the Pyrmont Protocol agreeing to the official SS patronage of the
World Ice Theory. The project was established as a meteorological section of
the Ahnenerbe, in which Philipp Fauth, Hörbiger’s prewar co-author, played
an important part.When, in August 1936,Kiß began to plan a new expedition
to the highland of Abyssinia to find traces of the human civilization of the
Tertiary period and remains of the earlier moon,Himmler was swift to promise
Ahnenerbe support. The Ahnenerbe was also involved in Kiß’s plans for a
further research trip to Peru, scheduled for 1940 but ultimately abandoned
due to the war.12 One might add that the World Ice Theory achieved near official
endorsement in the Third Reich: Hitler’s own enthusiasm for it is mentioned
several times in his Table Talk and illustrated by his promise to build
an observatory at Linz, representing “the three great cosmological conceptions
of history—those of Ptolemy, Copernicus and Hörbiger.”13 Kiß then
joined the Waffen-SS, achieving the rank of SS Obersturmbannführer, and
WILHELM LANDIG AND THE ESOTERIC SS 133
later served as commandant of the guard at Hitler’s headquarters. At the end
of the war he hoped to lead a group of commandos to Tibet, where it was intended
to gather the support of Mongolian tribes for a struggle that would
commit Soviet forces to a Central Asian theater and thus relieve the embattled
Reich.
During the cold, dark nights of late 1945, Rudolf Mund listened with rapt
attention to the old explorer’s tales. The ruined cities on the Marajo island in
the Amazon delta, Tiahuanaco and Lake Titicaca, the mausoleum of Puma
Punku and the astronomical observatory of Kalaseseya rose before his mind’s
eye. Kiß’s epic storytelling gifts briefly banished the misery of defeat in the
wretched camp. Nordic heads in the Andean cordillera, wide-ranging SS expeditions
to confirm prehistoric high-Nordic civilizations in Africa and
South America, and the huge timescale of Hörbiger’s World Ice Theory conjured
a world of immemorial Aryan superiority against which the defeat of
the Third Reich seemed a minor setback. The catastrophic nature of these distant
events suggested a world of violent struggle and renewal deeply attuned
to the Nazi view of nature. That an ancient Nordic people had survived such
upheavals, floods and ice ages only served to confirm the perennial heroism
of the Germans in the face of enormous challenges.14
In April 1946 Mund met Kiß again in another camp at Augsburg. Learning
of the young Waffen-SS lieutenant’s plan to escape, the elderly Kiß gave him
a hundred marks. Once more, fate brought them together at Dachau. Although
weak and ill, Kiß expressed his intention to travel to Tibet upon his
release. Mund was deeply impressed by these encounters, which somehow
held the promise of far horizons beyond the present calamity of German defeat.
Mund remained ever attracted to the esoteric Aryan mystique which he
believed had lain behind the SS. As a young Waffen-SS soldier he had no direct
contact with mystical SS circles during the Third Reich. However, the
comradeship, heroism and sacrifice of his frontline experience in the Waffen-
SS were the formative experiences of his life.He had believed the myths of this
“first volunteer European army” in which the bravest young men of Germany
and other Western nations had fought a crusade against Soviet communism.
Defeat, capture, the shocking discovery of Nazi atrocities and the disgrace of
his SS uniform drove him in search of a noble SS that had championed the
utopian Aryan world against all that was dark, chaotic and inferior. Throughout
the postwar years,Mund pursued his occult-völkisch investigations in an
attempt to make sense of his former ideals.
These romantic researches led Mund to the works of the young SS-Unterscharführer
Otto Rahn, who was deeply interested in the medieval Cathars
and Grail legends. Originally intending to write a dissertation on Kyot, the
134 WILHELM LANDIG AND THE ESOTERIC SS
Provençal troubadour whose lost Grail poem served Wolfram von Eschenbach
as a source for Parzival, Rahn had gone to the Languedoc in 1931. He
soon identified the Grail knights with the Cathars and Montségur castle as
Montsalvat. He settled at Ussat-les-Bains, where he was encouraged by the
local neo-Cathar expert, Antonin Gadal, to explore the caves of Sabarthès,
where the Cathar treasure was supposedly hidden. In his book Kreuzzug gegen
den Gral (1933), Rahn ultimately fused the troubadour and Minnesang traditions,
the Cathar heresy and the legends of the Grail to posit an underground
Gnostic religion of Aryan-Visigothic origin, which had been brutally suppressed
by the Catholic authorities in 1244.His quest for a Germanic religious
tradition based on heresies and legends interested Himmler, who sought his
collaboration in SS-sponsored research. In March 1936, Rahn joined the SS
and undertook a research tour of Iceland under SS auspices.He subsequently
published the travel journal of his quest for the ancient Cathar-Visigothic tradition
across Europe as Luzifers Hofgesinde (1937).15 Here in the whimsical
ideas of Himmler and the passionate quest of Otto Rahn,RudolfMund found
evidence of the mystical mission of the SS.
In 1958 Mund joined the Order of the New Templars (ONT), a racist
chivalrous sect that cultivated a heretical dualist Ario-Christian theology of
blond heroes in eternal struggle with the inferior beast-men. Originally
founded on Christmas 1900 by Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, the ONT achieved
some influence in Vienna before and during the First World War, when Lanz
was publicizing his Ariosophy, a conflation of Aryan racism, Gnostic Christianity
and Theosophy in his Ostara magazine. These mystical racist
brochures are reputed to have strongly influenced the young Hitler. The sect
expanded from Austria into Germany and Hungary during the 1920s but
went underground in Vienna after 1945.16 Mund immersed himself in the
archives of this Aryan cult, studied the writings of the early Church fathers
and the history of the Knights Templar, and later wrote a hagiographical book
about Lanz von Liebenfels.17 In 1979 Mund succeeded Walter Krenn as prior
of the ONT.
Through his research into the ONT, Mund also became interested in the
mystical rune theories of Karl Maria Wiligut (1866–1946), the so-called
Rasputin of Himmler. By virtue of his alleged possession of ancestral memory
and an inspired representation of archaic Germanic traditions, Wiligut
became the favorite mentor of Heinrich Himmler on mythological subjects
and was given an official assignment for prehistorical research in the SS between
1933 and 1939. Consulted by his patron on a wide range of issues,Wiligut’s
influence extended to the design of the death’s-head ring worn by
members of the SS, the conception of the Wewelsburg as the order castle of
WILHELM LANDIG AND THE ESOTERIC SS 135
the SS, and the adoption of other ceremonial designed to bestow a traditional
aura upon the SS ideology of elitism, racial purity, and territorial conquest.
Wiligut’s ideas were similar to those of Guido von List, the runic occultist and
Ariosophist close to Lanz von Liebenfels, and Wiligut had links with members
of the ONT from as early as 1908. His introduction to Himmler was effected
by Richard Anders, an SS officer who was also an ONT brother.Mund was delighted
to find a further source of SS esotericism and produced a biography
of Wiligut, which was published by Landig’s Volkstum-Verlag.18
Wiligut also provided a further source for the myth of the Black Sun. In
one of his Halgarita mottos, a series of cryptic religious revelations written for
Himmler in the 1930s,Wiligut described an ancient sun called Santur.Wiligut’s
contemporary adepts, Emil Rüdiger and Werner von Bülow, interpreted
this heavenly body as a second sun that shone 230,000 years ago upon the Hyperboreans
in the North Pole and promoted their spiritual development. Santur
still orbits in the vicinity of our planet today as an extinct star, thus invisible,
but as a Black Sun it still emits a powerful intelligence.19Wiligut’s reconstruction
of a prehistoric Germanic “Irminist” religion was at least partially
inspired by Guido von List’s Armanism, the ancient faith of the Ario-Germans,
which reflected a kind of Germanized Theosophy in the völkisch-occult
underground of the era prior to the First World War.20 By tracing Wiligut’s
own inspiration back to this period, one discovers an even earlier source for
the Black Sun in Theosophy, which had been highly influential in German esoteric
circles since the turn of the century.
In her major opus The Secret Doctrine (1888), Helena Blavatsky occasionally
mentioned a “central sun” in the Milky Way, “a point unseen and mysterious,
the ever-hidden center of attraction of our Sun and system.”As the energetic
center of the galaxy or even the universe, this dark central sun represents
the mass of potential energy prior to the Big Bang of modern
cosmology.While the Jewish Cabala described its “black light,” Eastern initiates
of Aryan tradition regarded it as the source of “creative light” and the
“center of Universal life—Electricity.”21 Blavatsky thus emphasized a distinction
between the Semitic and Aryan cosmogony: the former materializes and
humanizes the mysteries of nature; the latter spiritualizes matter. Blavatsky’s
ideas were taken up by völkisch-theosophical authors in Germany before the
First World War and after. Guido von List wrote of an invisible “primal fire”
as the ancient Ario-Germans’ notion of the highest divinity.22 Peryt Shou
(1873–1953), a German occult writer, had described humanity’s heightened
receptivity to the ultraviolet spiritual light of the “central sun” in the Age of
Aquarius and related this to Germany’s future in the troubled postwar era.23
136 WILHELM LANDIG AND THE ESOTERIC SS
If Mund was primarily an esotericist, Landig was a political activist. In the
mid-1950s he was the Austrian representative of the European Social Movement
(ESB), the fascist international organization founded at Rome and
Malmö, which sought German alliance with a worldwide league of nonaligned
nations, especially the Arab states, between the two superpowers. In
1955 Landig was in regular contact with Per Engdahl, the Swedish neo-Nazi
leader, and Karl-Heinz Priester, a former Hitler Youth leader who had extensive
contacts in the German nationalist underground. In 1958 Landig
founded his own nationalist press, Volkstum-Verlag, whose logo featured an
Ostrogothic eagle brooch dating from the reign of Theoderich the Great in
the fifth century. In the same year he also began publishing his monthly international
news service Europa-Korrespondenz, which adopted a nationalist
and anti-communist line. It was speculated that Johannes von Leers, the former
Reich propaganda ministry official who had sought refuge in Nasser’s
Egypt, was involved in the latter’s funding.24 In 1970 Wilhelm Landig became
the Austrian representative of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL),
founded in Taiwan in 1967 after a merger of the Asian People’s Anti-Communist
League and the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations. This was arguably the
most important far-right network in the world and accounts for Landig’s
highly informed international news service.
However, it was Wilhelm Landig’s own novels that ensured the revival of
occult-nationalist themes among a younger generation of neo-Nazis in the
1990s. The ideas and interests discussed by the Landig group in the 1950s
found permanent expression in Landig’s trilogy of Thule novels. The first
of these, Götzen gegen Thule (1971), was begun in the late 1950s and incorporated
the thought of Julius Evola and Herman Wirth. Theories of Aryan
polar origins and Atlantis are mixed with powerful new nationalist myths
of “the last battalion,” secret German UFO bases in the Arctic, alchemy,
Grail myths and Cathar heresies, and a Nazi-Tibetan connection involving
Himalayan masters and an underground kingdom in Mongolia. In this
novel and especially in its successor, Wolfszeit um Thule (1980), a global
Jewish conspiracy always lurks in the shadows, seeking to foil the revival of
Nordic German rule, but its Judeo-Christian idols are powerless against the
resurgence of the Black Sun. The last novel of the series, Rebellen für Thule
(1991), is a wishful fantasy of right-wing radicalism among German youth.
A former SS officer, the hero of the second novel, is invited to lecture on the
Atlantean heritage of the Aryans at a German secondary school. The pupils
reject the liberal views of their despised left-wing history teacher and hungrily
embrace the new nationalist myths of Thule.
WILHELM LANDIG AND THE ESOTERIC SS 137
Götzen gegen Thule is an allegory of the Landig circle’s attempts to make
contact with an esoteric center of Nordic traditions, the legendary realm of
Thule, the final bastion of the Germanic world in defeat. The story describes
the world odyssey of a small group of SS soldiers and Luftwaffe airmen across
four continents in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. In the
first part of the novel the two airmen, Recke (“beserker”) and Reimer
(“bard”), are sent from Norway to Point 103, a secret base that has been established
by the esoteric SS elite in Arctic Canada, unknown to the Allies and
also to most German authorities. Point 103 is a large underground complex
equipped with highly advanced technology, including flying saucers whose
apparent mission is to maintain the spirit of German defense after the final
surrender of the Reich. But Point 103 is also a combatant in a metaphysical
war between hidden forces on a spiritual plane. In this great power struggle,
the secret base seeks the proximity and support of the esoteric world center of
ethically positive forces located somewhere nearby at the Midnight Mountain
of polar myth. Its symbol is the alchemical Black Sun, a round disk that is not
exactly black but the deepest violet.25
Like Landig’s bloc of unaligned nations against the superpowers, Point 103
seeks to promote an international alliance for the ideals of the Black Sun.
Many foreign delegates attend a great conference held in the assembly hall of
the base decorated with astrological symbols and an enormous icon of
Mithras slaying the Bull. The delegates have all been flown to the conference
by means of the V-7, a German flying saucer with a speed of 4,000 kilometers
per hour and a range of 2,000 kilometers. These include a Tibetan lama,
Japanese, Chinese, and American officers, Indians, Arabs, Persians, an
Ethiopian, a Brazilian officer, a Venezuelan, a Siamese and a full-blooded
Mexican Indian. The Arabs speak darkly of secret Islamic brotherhoods, the
Indians and Persians invoke old Aryan traditions, the Orientals allude to their
occult orders and a mysterious world center. Attired in their uniforms or national
dress, many of the delegates make speeches identifying their national
myths and ideals with those of the Thule and pledge their full support when
the time comes for action.26
Recke and Reimer are accompanied by an enigmatic Waffen-SS officer,
Gutmann (“GoodMan,” a descendant of German Cathars or “perfect ones”),
who acts as their guide and mentor, initiating them into the Thulean philosophy.
He quotes the Iranian Avesta and the theories of the Munich paleontologist
Edgar Dacqué as evidence of a golden age when the Arctic region was
green and fertile, the primaeval homeland of the Aryans. He mentions the
sinking of Atlantis as a result of a lunar collision according to Hörbiger’s
World Ice Theory, and the subsequent forced exodus of the Aryans due to sin-
138 WILHELM LANDIG AND THE ESOTERIC SS
ful egoism and climatic disaster. Kiß’s researches in the Andes and his discovery
of the stone head with Nordic features in Bolivia offer proof of these
Aryan migrations. The Dogger bank area around Heligoland was known as
“Holy Land” in old annals, sure evidence of a sunken Aryan-Atlantean culture,
for wherever they settled in Europe, Iran and India, the Aryans sought
to re-create their lost paradise and recalled its memory in their myths, legends
and place-names. Gutmann considers that the flood myth of the Bible
is simply derived from ancient Hindu texts and the Gilgamesh epic, implying
that the Old Testament is a merely local Jewish adaptation of worldwide
Aryan traditions. Following Herman Wirth, he claims that the ancient
Tuathas and Germans are blood heirs of the old Atlantean race on the European
continent.27
Following the formal German surrender in May 1945, the chief of staff at
Point 103 orders that all German insignia be removed from uniforms: the
Black Sun disk is now the symbol of their secret independent Reich and is
substituted for German markings on their aircraft and flying saucers. He follows
this announcement with a pep talk offering a panoramic review of
Thulean prehistory and destiny, based on Herman Wirth and Julius Evola.
The Arctic and Atlantean Nordic races created the oldest German state, the
Tuatha empire of Doggerland with its neolithic long barrows. The solar deity
and a belief in cycles of cosmic regeneration are manifest in the bull-slaying
Iranian warrior cult of Mithras, the heroic religion of the Age of Taurus,
which the new Thuleans of Point 103 practice. But the virile horned son of
God, the ancient revelation, gave way to the pale “fish head” of Jesus Christ:
[The Age of Pisces initiated] the demolition of the aristocratic principle with
the revolt of the slaves, the disinherited, those lacking heritage and tradition
and with a grudge against everything which signified energy and leadership.
As Evola recognized, the poison of proselytizing fanaticism sweeping over ancient
Rome in a barbarian Semitic wave, was simultaneously a reinforcement
of all Asian-southern factors of decline, which had already penetrated the edifice
of pagan imperialism, and the germ of western affliction. The collapse of
Rome opened the gates for all subsequent aberrations and degeneration leading
to the present state of Europe.
Faced with the current German military defeat, the chief of staff takes solace
in these long-term cosmic cycles of decline and renewal. The Age of
Aquarius is approaching, and Europe, the land of the white man, awaits a
spiritual revival. The modern German heirs of the Tuathas must once again
rise to the historic challenge of a cosmic crisis. The black uniforms of the SS
WILHELM LANDIG AND THE ESOTERIC SS 139
and the Black Sun symbolize the winter solstice of the Aryan race, harbingers
of a glorious new era. The supernatural glowing, flying disks (“manisolas”)
are portents from the hidden esoteric world center near the pole that proclaim
the advent of global changes on a vast scale. The Thuleans will meanwhile
develop their technical and military potential in seclusion at Point 103
for a further five years before intervening on a metaphysical plane in alliance
with other friendly organizations for a global Aryan revival.When this apocalyptic
transformation is complete, their symbol of the Black Sun will turn a
shining silver-white.28
Sustained by this vision of Nazi revival, the German servicemen initially fly
to the French Pyrenees to bring a French collaborator named Bélisse (from
Bélisane, sun god of the Gauls), back to assist the alchemical experiments in
the laboratories at Point 103. Living near Montségur, Bélisse is a neo-Cathar
deeply versed in Grail lore, who supposedly helped Otto Rahn in his prewar
researches. Due to his family allegiance to the old heresy of Visigothic origin,
he recognizes the Germans as spiritual and racial kinsmen. He is also an authority
on the manisolas, allegedly attributed by the Cathars to the Grail as
the signatures of the highest love (Minne).29 By means of these allusions,
Landig recruits the Cathars and the cult of love among the medieval troubadours,
symbolized by the shining disks of light, for the invisible forces of the
Thule in their global struggle against evil and decay. However, after Bélisse is
killed in a mountain fall, the mission is abandoned. Unable to regain contact
with their aircraft, the Germans travel on to Spain for further instructions.As
the novel proceeds, they embark on an odyssey halfway around the world
through France, Spain, Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran,
Pakistan, India and Tibet, always trying to find a means to return to Point 103.
Throughout their journey they meet many foreign allies,with whom they discuss
Indo-European mythology and their common Aryan roots.
Behind the defeat of the Third Reich and the emergent new world order of
the superpowers stands Israel, the deadly enemy with which the Thuleans are
locked in a Manichaean conflict. According to Gutmann, this rivalry extends
far back into prehistoric times, when black magicians of Semitic origin ruled
over the Aryan Atlanteans in an interregnum.At this time the Jews set up their
own Baal gods beside the Atlantean god Poseidon and later celebrated Mount
Sinai as a bowdlerized version of Mount Meru or the Midnight Mountain in
the Arctic. The restless Jewish tendency to migrate northward and westward
from Israel is explained as a kind of nostalgia or folk-memory of their brief
dominion over the Aryans and a desire to rule once again from the North.
Gutmann alleges that this contest for the pole between the Jews and the Indo-
Aryan groups that aspire to an Atlantean renaissance will ultimately result in
140 WILHELM LANDIG AND THE ESOTERIC SS
victory for one or the other side.30 The flag of the United Nations, founded in
October 1945, reveals the Jewish determination to encircle the pole and usurp
the esoteric world center from the Aryans. Its design, featuring a map of the
world centered on the North Pole, contains cabalistic symbolism and is displayed
in the telltale Israeli colors of blue and white.31
At a meeting with an old Jewish rabbi in Toledo,Gutmann expands on this
immemorial rivalry between Semites and Aryans in the context of the new superpowers.
The black magical power of the Jews is opposed to the white magic
of the Aryans, and their battlefield is the rest of the world which, with the defeat
of the Third Reich, is now a gray magical circle with a black center at
Mount Sinai. According to Gutmann, the Ark of the Covenant is an accumulator
for astral energies used in magical operations.32 This paranoid myth is
compounded with references to cults and Freemasons. A similar Ark is said to
be guarded by the American Shriners in New York. Their headquarters in
Chicago control all Masonic lodges dedicated to the goal of One World government.
Both Roosevelt and Churchill belonged to this brotherhood and
were always working for its aims. This world brotherhood gathers all powers
within its network and works with them all to conquer the Midnight Mountain.
On the one hand, this magic works to buttress the Jewish racial substance,
on the other it dissolves other peoples into a multiracial chaos.33
In the final part of the novel, Landig introduces a Nazi-Tibetan connection
as a further dimension of world conspiracy and mystery. Passing references
are made to the cordial German-Tibetan relations established by the SS
Ahnenerbe-sponsored expedition of Ernst Schäfer to Tibet in 1938–39.34 But
if Tibetan secrets were withheld from the Nazis, the presence of a Tibetan
lama at the Point 103 conference suggests a continuing interest. When the
German servicemen are abducted from India by Mongols and flown to a Tibetan
monastery high in the snowbound Himalayan ranges, they recall the
Mongolian legend that these people await the coming of the Lord of the
World from the hidden underground city of Agartha. This revelation will
usher in a yellow world empire that will stretch as far as Mount Meru at the
pole, thus creating another rival for the Aryan Thule and Point 103. The Tibetans,
it seems, were allies of the Germans against common enemies in the
war, but in the end they too must pursue their imperial vision according to
their own racial myth.35
The Tibetan abbot, Ngön-kyi Padma Dab-yang, gives another account of
Mongolian mythology, which Landig has evidently borrowed from Louis
Pauwels and Jacques Bergier’s sensational account of Nazi occultism, Le matin
des magiciens (1960). He describes two cities as the respective realms of material
and spiritual energies. Revered by the secret brotherhoods and lodges of
WILHELM LANDIG AND THE ESOTERIC SS 141
the West, Shambala is the terrestrial city of power and might, the source of
material energies on the left-hand path, ruled over by a King of Fear. Agartha
is the inner, underground realm of contemplation and spirit, the right-hand
path, presided over by the Lord and King of the World, who will at the appointed
time lead good men against the evil ones and establish the Mongol
Empire. The abbot reproves the German soldiers, saying that certain figures
in the Third Reich broke the Nazi-Tibetan treaty by allying themselves exclusively
with the energies of Shambala and its naked violence, and thus played
into the hands of its agent, Stalin. Both sources must be balanced, otherwise
evil will result. Tibet has lost years of work through the fall of the Third Reich,
and now the dark clouds of communism are gathering in the East. However,
he urges the Germans to join them as there is an old prophecy that a Great
Khan will once again come to the West and establish a great empire, and the
time for its fulfillment is close at hand.36
With these revisionist legends, Landig wishes to imply that a few traitors in
the Reich leadership betrayed the Nazi cause and brought about Germany’s
downfall. Eventually, the German servicemen succeed in escaping from their
courteous Tibetan captors but are finally picked up by the British in India and
interned in a prisoner-of-war camp. Repatriated to Germany and Austria,
they find a sullen, gray world of defeat, evasion and distrust. The former
Aryan-Nazi vision is forgotten, atrocity propaganda has invented the extermination
camps, the Nuremberg executions are a pretext for a Jewish ritual of
vengeance, and German girls sleep with black American soldiers. The storm
of the idols against the Thule has begun.At a reunion in Salzburg, the soldiers
ruefully accept the withdrawal of Point 103 from world affairs. They concede
that the Aryans, scattered and dispossessed, have now become the new
Ahasverus (the traditional name for the Wandering Jew). They can only be
patient and wait until the blue and gold banner of the Aryans flies again,when
“Greater Thule will become the new spiritual concept for all white men in the
northern world, an ideal empire above all states, in Europe and America . . .
the Fourth Reich of the Germans!”37
Landig’s second novel, Wolfszeit um Thule (1980), describes a similar
odyssey in the wake of German defeat. Here the narrative follows the adventures
of two naval officers, Krall and Hellfeldt, and SS-Major Eyken, formerly
stationed at Point 103. Assigned to a flotilla of German U-boats which leaves
Norway in early May 1945, they achieve a devastating victory over an Allied
naval convoy in the North Atlantic. The flotilla collects all equipment and
personnel from Point 103, which is then evacuated and totally destroyed.
During the voyage their conversations touch on the Midnight Mountain and
its connection with the legendary Blue Island in the Arctic Ocean. Rumors
142 WILHELM LANDIG AND THE ESOTERIC SS
from earlier expeditions regarding landmass below the polar ice cap and
chance sightings by Canadian pilots of “monastic structures” recall Evola’s
ideas of a lost Hyperborean civilization in the Far North.38 With the official
surrender of the Third Reich, the northern world is forfeited and the flotilla
sets sail for the South Atlantic to make contact with the new bases of the Black
Sun, the epithet of the shadow Reich government in exile. The geographical
focus of this novel thus indicates the shift of Nazi survival toward Latin America
and Antarctica, the new Thule of the Southern Hemisphere.
Landig uses the dialogue of his characters to convey his own brand of esoteric
Nazi political theory. Major Eyken explains that the North Pole is the
theonium of the world, associated with Lucifer, the light-bearer of the north,
and Prometheus and represents the spiritual source of all Aryan strength. As
its counterpart, the South Pole is the place of greatest materialization and all
demonic energies. Using the ying-yang symbol as a model, he indicates that
this “white” northern spiritual zone has spawned a “black” point: materialist
forces of high finance and Masonic lodges prevail in the United States superpower;
the Americans are usurping the Aryans with their own “Thule”
base in Greenland; and the Soviets are seeking to develop their own military
presence in the Arctic. The Aryans must therefore shift their spiritual potential
southward and form a “white” point in the “black” spiritual zone in order
to tap its powers for their own purposes in the reclamation of the North.
Their goal is the repurified, white sun, the sol invictus of Mithraism, which
will ultimately succeed the Black Sun, their present symbol of revanchist military
power.39
Although Argentina had declared war on Germany in March 1945, the
fugitives find support in Buenos Aires and travel on to La Paz, Bolivia. Here
they receive confirmation of Edmund Kiß’s high standing in Bolivia on account
of his prewar investigations of the Nordic-Aryan heritage of Tiahuanaco,
the mausoleum of Puma Punku and the observatory of Kalasasaya.
Eyken enlightens the others regarding the full breadth of Kiß’s work on the
prehistoric calendar with the aid of Hörbiger’s World Ice Theory to prove
that the Nordic Atlanteans founded the first Egyptian civilization. When
their local contact confirms the presence of Aryan bloodlines among the
Quecha Indians of Bolivia, who have blond hair and blue eyes, the conversation
turns to other ancient and medieval European colonizations of Latin
America, long before the much-vaunted discovery of the “half-Jew,” Christopher
Columbus.40
Kiß’s research in Bolivia links up with new developments. Along the
western side of the Andes mountains he discovered an extensive tunnel system
stretching from the Atacama Desert as far as Ecuador, attributing it to a
WILHELM LANDIG AND THE ESOTERIC SS 143
mysterious people with unimaginable technology many thousands of years
ago. Here among the dense forests, deep inside the Andean labyrinth, several
hundred German military and technical personnel have established a secret
base called Mime’s Smithy as a companion to Point 211 in Antarctica. (Mime,
a figure in Norse mythology, is the smith who forges Siegfried’s sword in Wagner’s
Rheingold.) Eyken and his comrades spend many months at this site,
marveling at the advanced technology brought by German scientists who
have escaped the American and Soviet dragnets for Third Reich miracle
weapons researchers. Another, smaller secret base in the Andes has been established
in the Brazilian forest near the Beni Valley.While the dark powers of
the postwar world condemn the old Nazi leadership to death at Nuremberg
in October 1946, a new Thulean Reich, a provisional “Aggartha of the North,”
is growing deep inside the Andes.41
Meanwhile, Landig also describes a sinister new episode in the hoary myth
of the Elders of Zion. Following the founding of the state of Israel in May
1948, members of the American Jewish elite gather one hot July day at a secluded
villa off Riverside Drive in Manhattan to discuss the progress of their
world dominion. Since the Elders’ historic nocturnal meeting in the Prague
Jewish Cemetry in 1787—the tale in Goedsche’s novel Biarritz, which inspired
the notorious Protocols—the Jews have realized their ambition of controlling
both gold and the press. Through communism and liberalism, they
are now breaking the influence of white elites worldwide. With the slogan
“Nazism” they have brought everything Germanic into disrepute and can disarm
any resistance to their plans. A banker reviews the growth of Jewish
power through the Federal Reserve system. The Bretton Woods agreement of
1944 only served to internationalize public debts owed to Jewry, while the
Marshall Plan shall create a complaisant and materialist postwar Germany,
forgetful of its higher ideals. A scientist then outlines the future of humanity
with a shocking description of genetic engineering, mind control through
electronics and drugs, robot policemen and the creation of a docile population
subject to Jewish world government.42
Landig’s intrepid resistance fighters now turn their attention to a postwar
alliance with anti-communist forces in the Far East. Earlier links with Tibet
are now weakening due to the ascendancy of Red China, and their hopes are
now focused on Mongolian exiles in Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Traveling
across the Pacific by V-7 flying disk, the trio arrives in Hong Kong to make
contact with the Green Dragon, a Chinese nationalist league with former
links to the Thule in Germany.When Eyken is kidnapped by the Maoist Red
Dragon order, which tries to recruit him as a German communist agent, Taiwanese
members of the Green Dragon come to his rescue. Along the way they
144 WILHELM LANDIG AND THE ESOTERIC SS
meet a sympathetic Briton, and conversations range over such themes as the
cabalistic design of the U.S. Pentagon, British-Israelism, and the hostile secret
elites such as the Council on Foreign Relations. Eyken explains their esoteric
mission to their new friends:
A circle of initiates within the SS bear the Black Sun as a secret insignia for
Thule. It is the sol nigra of alchemy. . . . The Greek mysteries already recognized
a secret sun besides the golden disk of Atlantis. This was the star Antares
in the sign of Scorpio. . . . The deep purple color of the Black Sun is not without
illumination, but the pervasive splendor which illuminates the initiate.
According to ancient Germanic tradition, God is omnipotent and invisible.
Light perceptible to the human eye is material, a shadow of the invisible, spiritual
light and fire, a tiny spark of which still glows in the Age of the Wolf
around Thule and awaits rekindling. . . . The Black Sun is the sign of invisible
divinity which stands above the material golden glow of daylight, once the
golden sun of the Atlanteans was usurped by the servants of Mammon and
Freemasonry. The deep purple disk represents the accomplishment of divine
will and law against the presumptive power of gold, together with its masters
and slaves. . . . Charged with secret knowledge, this symbol was seen on the
military aircraft of the SS shortly before the end of the Second World War. The
Black Sun illuminates a Reich and will never set.43
Their companion regrets that Britain remains ignorant of this Aryan heritage
and still serves the stars of David and Moses. He sees the spiritual confidence
of the Germans and fears that noninitiates (i.e., the former Allies) will be
overwhelmed by an apocalypse.
In South Korea, Eyken meets the Gusdä Menen Tudun, an anti-communist
and former senior officer of the Mongolian Army who fled when the
Russians established a puppet regime in his homeland. Eyken explains their
interest in the secrets of the Gobi Desert and Shambala and outlines the
racial anthropogeny of Blavatskyan Theosophy, already known to Tibetan
initiates 10,000 years ago. Tibetan traditions also indicate an Atlantean
myth of seven subraces, including the Aryans, Akkadians, Toltecs, Turanians,
Rmoahalians, Tlavatlians and Mongolians. The swastika symbol
emerged at the time of the Aryans’ dominance on Atlantis, prior to their
prehistoric migration to the Himalayas. Ever since, the Aryans have retained
a secret longing for Mount Meru and Hyperborea, their original
homeland in the Far North. The Güsda recognizes Eyken as an initiate of
the secret doctrine that unites these esoteric Nazis with the mysteries of the
Orient. The free Mongolians believe that the Eagleland (Germany) is their
WILHELM LANDIG AND THE ESOTERIC SS 145
ally in the West, for Hitler was believed to be a descendant of a great warrior
in the entourage of Genghis Khan, while Stalin is a changeling from
the tribe of the “yellow eyes” and a family of Japhetic priests and backed by
black magicians. He also relates how the Bogdo Hutuchtu, the living Buddha
of the red cap lamas in Mongolia, has been deposed by the communists,
and how no one now dares speak about the realm of Agartha or the
King of the World. But he is biding his time and will appear at the appointed
time to lead the good of this world against the bad.44
Shortly afterward, the Germans are captured by Korean communist insurgents
from the North and interned together with an American, a Czech and a
Japanese. The captives find a common cause in anti-communism in the new
Cold War world order. Following the outbreak of the Korean War on 25 June
1950, the Germans manage to escape and make their way to Hadong. Their
mission in the Far East is now accomplished. Besides discovering a shared esoteric
heritage, the warriors of the Black Sun have established the presence of
potential allies among the victims of Soviet and Chinese communist expansion,
thus mirroring Landig’s own interest in the World Anti-Communist
League (WACL) with its strong base in the Far East.WACL originated in the
Asian People’s Anti-Communist League, founded in Taiwan by the Chinese
nationalist Kuomintang in 1954, which joined with East European émigré organizations
in 1966 to form WACL, with world headquarters in South Korea.
By seeking friends in Taiwan and Korea, the Thule is seeking to become a third
force between the West and the communist world.
Meanwhile the German servicemen are unable to renew contact with the
bases in the Andes and decide to return to Europe. In late 1950 they arrive in
Allied-occupied Vienna to find Hellfeldt’s property confiscated and family
apartment occupied by strangers, reflecting Landig’s own bitter experience of
the postwar regime and its harsh treatment of former Nazis.Under the pall of
defeat, occupation and restrictions, the old soldiers form a circle of undying
loyalty to their ideals. Once again, they recall the secret lore of Thule and the
Far North and its evangel for the German Reich. The mob rule of democracy,
they comfort themselves,will be but short lived.Hitler was not a Thulean initiate
but left the secret gnosis of the North to special circles within the SS, to
whom he offered his protection. Eyken equates the esoteric symbolism of the
Grail according to Evola with the Hyperborean doctrine of a sacred center in
the North, with its powerful legends of root-races, Atlantis and all-conquering
Aryans. The quest for the Grail is identical to the Aryan longing for contact
with the Midnight Mountain. At the twilight of the gods in Norse
mythology, everything falls into the jaws of the wolf Fenrir, bringing chaos
and darkness. The Thuleans must now endure the Age of the Wolf, for when
146 WILHELM LANDIG AND THE ESOTERIC SS
the Third Reich sank in flames, all forces that ranged against the North triumphed,
and evil overcame good.45
In Rebellen für Thule (1991), Landig traces the origins of the Black Sun to
Babylonian religion. An ancient cuneiform inscription makes explicit reference
to the Black Sun “shining within us, you give us the power of understanding.”
Landig recalls the vision of Marduk grieving over the collapse of
the empire until the goddess Ishtar commands the stars to shine a new invisible
light. Landig sees this prophecy as referring to the temporary defeat of the
German Reich and its restoration through the esoteric illumination of the
Black Sun. “The Black Sun shines above the Midnight Mountain. The human
eye cannot see it—and yet it is there: Its light shines within. The bold and the
righteous are solitary but they have divinity.”46 The knowledge of the Black
Sun was lost through Christianity, until the Templars rediscovered its lore in
the Levant. Their knowledge was lost by the Freemasons, and finally only a
small circle of SS esotericists cultivated the Black Sun as the “inner light.” Like
the Templars and Cathars, the SS were persecuted after the war primarily as
heretics in Landig’s mythology.47
This German völkisch interest in Babylon can be traced back to the turn of
the century when Friedrich Delitzsch (1850–1922), the famous Assyriologist,
argued that the Old Testament and Jewish monotheism were derived from
Babylonian religion. His initial lecture, “Babel und Bibel” (1902), aroused
widespread controversy, as it clearly weakened Jewish claims of divine revelation
and election.48 Taking the debate a stage further,Houston Stewart Chamberlain
and Herman Wirth regarded Babylonian culture as a heritage of the
Sumerians, whom they identified as early Aryan colonizers of Mesopotamia.
Landig’s interpretation of the Gilgamesh epic and inscriptions from Babylon
follow this Nordic-Sumerian line by highlighting their correspondences to
the Edda and old Norse sources. Landig also referred to Peter Jensen’s scholarly
interpretation of Gilgamesh as a Babylonian cosmology focusing on the
constellation of Taurus and its major star Aldebaran.49 The supposed common
Aryan ancestry of the Sumero-Babylonians and the Germans would lead
to a lively esoteric discourse in the 1990s involving ancient Babylon, German
flying saucer technology, and extraterrestrial ancestors from Aldebaran.
Landig’s ariosophically colored novels have greatly popularized Aryan
mythology and occult anti-Semitism. The names and doctrines of Julius
Evola, Herman Wirth, Edmund Kiß and Hans Hörbiger, hitherto scattered
shards of Third Reich memory, are here skilfully woven into adventurous narratives
and presented anew to a modern readership. Throughout the books of
Landig’s Thule trilogy, the Black Sun is a mystical symbol for an esoteric order
within the SS, the refined distillate of the Nazi spirit, temporarily eclipsed but
WILHELM LANDIG AND THE ESOTERIC SS 147
still potent during the postwar ascendancy of the Jews and their superpower
puppets.According to this neo-Nazi mythology, the lost war of 1939–45 is but
a prelude to an even greater metaphysical conflict.50 However, like all powerful
symbols, the Black Sun is many-sided. Besides the myth of alchemical occlusion,
signifying the latency of Thulean-Nazi power, Landig also identifies
the Black Sun as the source of spiritual light and inspiration, a symbol of divine
illumination and coming salvation.51 Gathered from such diverse
sources as the Gilgamesh epic, secret Templar legends, and esoteric SS lore involving
Otto Rahn, Cathars and a Luciferic polar world center, Landig’s Black
Sun is a powerful myth invoking the Nazi gnosis in the darkness of defeat.
The myth of the Black Sun was elaborated further with the publication of
another occult-Nazi thriller,Die schwarze Sonne von Tashi Lhunpo [The Black
Sun of Tashi Lhunpo] (1991) by Russell McCloud. It is the first decade of the
twenty-first century and the European Union and the United Nations together
administer a New World Order devoted to democracy and economic
prosperity. The assassinations of the president of the European Bank and a
leading member of the UN Security Council are linked by a brand mark of the
Black Sun on the foreheads of the victims. In this case, the symbol is a sun
wheel, a black disk surrounded by twelve radial sig-runes.52 This unique SS
sun wheel design actually exists at the Wewelsburg castle near Paderborn,
originally acquired by Heinrich Himmler in 1934 as an SS staff college whose
special emphasis was on the Germanic heritage and Nordic religion. Between
1936 and 1942, Himmler rebuilt and expanded the Wewelsburg as a ceremonial
place, where his top SS leaders would celebrate pseudoreligious rituals.
Himmler regarded the castle as the magical omphalos, marking the center of
the Germanic world, and planned ultimately to develop the whole site as an
SS vatican of Aryan spirituality. The large circular sun wheel with twelve sigrune
spokes decorates the white marble floor of the Gruppenführer hall in the
northern tower.53
McCloud is the first writer to identify the Wewelsburg sun wheel with the
Black Sun myth, thereby indicating the esoteric influence of Wiligut and the
SS heritage of Aryan-theosophical lore at the heart of Himmler’s imaginative
world. However, it has been suggested that this twelve-spoke sun wheel derives
from decorative disks of the Merovingians of the early medieval period
and are supposed to represent the visible sun or its passage through the
months of the year. These disks were discussed in scholarly publications during
the Third Reich and may well have served the Wewelsburg designers as a
model.54 Moreover, the fact that Peryt Shou and Wilhelm Landig described
the Black Sun as deep purple seems to contradict its representation at the
Wewelsburg as a mottled dark-green pattern on white. But if the Black Sun is
148 WILHELM LANDIG AND THE ESOTERIC SS
the cosmogonic source of all creative energy in the universe, the Wewelsburg
symbol surely evokes both the rotational and explosive power of the Big Bang
at the creation of the universe.
In the novel, the journalist hero follows a lead from the Wewelsburg to
Tibet, where he finds Karl Steiner, a former SS man living in a Himalayan
hermitage a day’s march from the Tashi Lhunpo monastery, the seat of the
Panchen Lama and the yellow-hat monks. Although youthful in appearance,
Steiner is over ninety years old and came to Tibet on the final (fictional) SS
Ahnenerbe expedition of 1942. His explanation of world history places the
Nazi-Tibetan link in the familiar context of the Thule and Mongolian myth.
The prehistoric Thuleans were originally the offspring of the gods: one party
wanted to remain aloof and use mortal men as cattle, the other decided to educate
and improve mankind. These parties divided into the camps of Schamballah
and Agarthi. McCloud reveals a certain Nazi sympathy by identifying
Schamballah with the secret governors of the “New World Order,” the UN secret
service, the European Union and the Freemasons. But the Nazis, we are
told, made their alliance with Agarthi, for it was their plan to transform men
into supermen. The Third Reich, the Second World War and the recent wave
of assassinations are thus mere episodes in the perennial battle of Agarthi and
Schamballah regarding the destiny of man. The climax of the novel is reached
with a winter solstice ritual at the Wewelsburg attended by Steiner and highly
placed agents of Agarthi intended to restore Nazi world dominion.55
Between 1971 and 1991, the Black Sun thus developed from Landig’s signature
of eclipsed Nazi power at Thule to the Wewelsburg SS sun wheel, identified
as the symbol of Agartha, a secret Himalayan realm embedded in Nazi,
Tibetan and Theosophical myth. Charged by these exotic references to remote
or hidden centers of power and initiation, the Wewelsburg Black Sun has become
an esoteric symbol among younger neo-Nazis from Austria to the international
scene since the 1990s. Arun-Verlag in Engerda (in the former
German Democratic Republic) has published further editions and a film
script of McCloud’s book, while the Nation Europa book mail-order catalog
offers Black Sun stickpins and a wristwatch with a Wewelsburg sun wheel
face. Kadmon (a pseudonym for Gerhard Petak), an industrial musician in
Vienna, publishes Aorta (1991–95), a periodical devoted to pagan traditions
and the neo-fascist avant garde. His music label, Allerseelen, has released a
CD, Gotos=Kalanda (1995), adapted from Wiligut’s pagan calendar cycle of
poems presented to Himmler in 1937. The Wewelsburg Black Sun is prominent
on Petak’s letterhead and the Allerseelen label.56
In his study of far-right esotericism in Germany, Rüdiger Sünner suggests
the Wewelsburg Black Sun has become a key symbol in the neo-Nazi cults.An
WILHELM LANDIG AND THE ESOTERIC SS 149
image in Elemente, the journal of the Kassel-based Thule-Seminar, a research
association for Indo-European culture, shows a martial warrior holding a
shield decorated with the Wewelsburg sun wheel.His upheld sword proclaims
the struggle for a “rebirth of Europe” against the “holocaust of peoples on the
altar of multiracialism.” The German völkisch magazine Sol invictus uses the
symbol as its masthead. The issue devoted to “Midnight” (Black Sun) shows
two somber knights standing guard beneath the sun wheel symbol, whose invisible
power prevails against the gloom, cold and pain of the interregnum.
An accompanying verse reads: “As knights of the sun we are returning
home/we will be the new nobility/rare scions of our own rank/we were orphaned
and the journey was long/the darkness did not swallow us/we rose
up/the children of the sun, when they see us/will understand the words of
fire!”57 The Wewelsburg sun wheel is also the logo of German Thule-Netz on
the Internet, which has offered widespread access to far right and racist websites
in Europe and America since 1992. The SS sun wheel is widely discussed
in neo-Nazi underground magazines in Germany and on their international
links. Black Sun badges are now even sold by a group in New Zealand.58
Rüdiger Sünner has also made a documentary film entitled Schwarze
Sonne about the occult background of National Socialism. His treatment extends
from the Ariosophists and Thule Society as mystical Nazi precursors
through Himmler’s SS ceremonial to the current neo-Nazi cults.59While filming
at the Wewelsburg, he was threatened by a skinhead, brandishing his fist
with a Black Sun tattoo. He regarded Sünner’s film a desecration. Just as the
Black Sun symbolized Landig’s “last battalion” of the Thuleans at Point 103 in
the frozen North in the early postwar months, this emblem has come to signify
the magical evocation of a lost homeland among young neo-Nazis. The
enigmatic symbol of the Black Sun indicates the faraway ideals of Thule, an
alternative world in total opposition to a multiracial Europe.