Arnoldo Krumm-Heller’s Hitlerianismo, anti-Semitic propaganda, NAPOLA documents, Rosicrucian myth-management and Crowley’s Hitler dreams: an uncomfortable dossier, presented with maximum distance and minimum theatre.
This page contains translations and facsimiles of racist and anti-Semitic primary-source material. The design deliberately separates these documents from the editorial and analytical text: the purpose is documentation and criticism, not aestheticisation or endorsement.
The following material is retained because the documentary record requires it. Its typography is deliberately quarantined: source, translation and moral temperature are not allowed to merge with the authorial voice.
Martha Küntzel, born in 1857 (Sister ‘Ich Will Es’ — I want It) stumbled feverishly from one cult to another, until Crowley’s Book of the Law put her on the right path and was sustained in her last years by the Law of Thelema. Frau Küntzel’s translation of Liber AL [= Book of the Law] produced in 1925, of which she claimed to have delivered a copy to Hitler, met with neither Karl Germer’s nor Henri Birven’s approval; or so Germer passed on Birven’s opinion to Crowley: “he calls her translations childish and silly”. [17]
Nevertheless, in the beginning of the 1940s when he read Hermann Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks (1939), Crowley opined: “Yes, it is astonishing how closely his [Hitler’s] intimate thoughts run on the same rails”. For example, when Hitler had said that “we are now at the end of the Age of Reason. The intellect has grown autocratic and become a disease of life”, he seemed to paraphrase Crowley’s Liber AL II;27-32; and when he had said “A new age of magic interpretation of the world is coming, of interpretation in terms of the will and not the intelligence”, he was similarly paraphrasing I;44 of Crowley’s Book of the Law.
On March 28th 1937 Crowley toyed with the idea of using Hitler’s Swastika as a logo on Thelemic flags and porcelain on which to base a business. At exactly the same time, the Nazis set up a factory in Wewelsburg in order to put swastikas on its chinaware.
Crowley got a fixation on Hitler. He scribbled in his copy of Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks many comments that reveal how much he thought Hitler had taken over from Liber AL. On 4th February 1939 he dreamt “about Hitler & cigars & Magick & my horse Sultan. I was running Germany for him,” because “Fascism must always fail because it creates the discontent which it is designed to suppress.” On 2nd June 1939 he again dreamt: “I had several long talks with Hitler a very tall man. Forgot subject, but he was pleased & impressed: ordered all my books translated & made official in Germany.” Diary, 17 October 1939: “Hitler reported dead from a surfeit of raspberries.” On 24 January 1940 another dream with Hitler and “Phallic geometric pictures, Satanic parodies of diagrams” etc.
On 29 July 1943, Crowley went to the movies to see a cartoon film: “Saw show of cartoons lampooning Mein Kampf, with appropriate quotations. Taken in these selected doses, what a masterpiece! And how patent & profound a debt he owes to AL!”
After World War II he promptly u-turned his opinion: “Himmler, the Schweinhund [sic] & worse who put Karl Germer in Concentration Camps chiefly because he was my friend! killed himself after capture.”
Through Mrs. Küntzel, Arnoldo Krumm-Heller met Aleister Crowley in 1930. And Crowley was so enthusiastic about the Rosicrucian that he wanted to give him the leadership of the Ordo Templi Orientis in California in 1936. In vain. It is this branch of the O.T.O., the ‘Caliphate’, which nowadays presents itself as the only and true O.T.O.
The ‘Caliphate’ promotes Krumm-Heller’s work by publishing his 1930 book Logos Mantram Magia, which is void of any anti-semitic attacks or pro-Hitler ramblings but with an introduction by Parcival Krumm-Heller and a whitewashed historical account of Arnoldo Krumm-Heller’s biography.
Nevertheless, the son of Krumm-Heller provides some connection of his father to the extremely racist Ordo Novi Templi (O.N.T.). “In 1925, my father worked with Prof. Ernst Issberner-Haldane on the theories of Plasmogenia and its relation to the origins of life.” Parcival Krumm-Heller, one of Krumm-Heller’s children (he also had Hiram Aguirre, Guadalupe, Cuauthemoc and Sieglinde), adds that Issberner-Haldane (1886–1966) was an Ariosophist and that his 1935 book Arisches Weistum was banned by the Nazis.
To no surprise: the Nazis considered all occult stuff to be dangerous to real Ariosophy. Nevertheless, racists like Liebenfels, Issberner-Haldane and Krumm-Heller survived Germany, and Krumm-Heller even managed to travel to Brazil in the disastrous after-war situation in Germany.
The Ordo Novi Templi was founded by Lanz von Liebenfels, “Der Mann, der Hitler die Ideen gab” (The Man Who Provided Hitler With Ideas), and the interested reader is referred to the following sources:
The Swiss Head of the O.T.O., Hermann Joseph Metzger, also was interested in Liebenfels.
Of course, Metzger also knew of Issberner-Haldane, as both contributed to the Swiss occult magazine Die Arve, where Metzger had published his first article. Issberner-Haldane, born 1886, died in 1966.
In the early part of December 1950, Metzger described Liebenfels as “the last Grand Master of the Temple”, and in his obituary — Liebenfels died on April 22nd 1954 — of June that year, Metzger spoke of his “unswerving faith and exalted virtue [...] all who knew him confirm their high opinion of him.” Rudolf J. Mund, one of Liebenfels’ adherents, visited Stein, the place of the Swiss O.T.O.
Metzger’s house-mate Anna Werder-Binder had only good things to say of Liebenfels: “He proposed a Law of Life [...] and for the preservation of the race. He was writing as a well-known race-hygienist in 1918.” [20]
Of course, Metzger considered himself to be the successor to Krumm-Heller’s Fraternitas Rosicruciana Antiqua.
Read more on the Swiss O.T.O. as The Psychosophical Publishing Company.