Review: New Religions And The Nazis -- By: Ross Clifford

Journal: Global Journal of Classical Theology
Volume: GJCT 06:1 (May 2007)
Article: Review: New Religions And The Nazis
Author: Ross Clifford


Review: New Religions And The Nazis

Ross Clifford

Principal, Morling Theological College Sydney

President, Baptist Union of Australia

New Religions and the Nazis, Karla Poewe , Routledge , New York and London , 2006.

This book claims to highlight an important but neglected part of Nazi history, that being the role of new religions to the emergence of Nazi ideology. Its genesis is the burning question, “how Germans came to support the National Socialist worldview that ended in the Holocaust and the loss of countless lives”. The author’s quandary is surely universally held. Its ultimate findings about the role of New Religions - neo-pagan/New Age - are significant in the light of the rise of such movements today (p.95).

The author is not guilty of reductionism as she documents other factors such as an unwanted Weimar democracy and “the postwar punishment of the Treaty of Versailles”, however her additional insights into the role played by “new religions” deserve serious consideration. This is not based on conspiracy theories or secondary sources, but rather a painstaking investigation of primary sources (letters, diaries, articles, conference papers etc.) of the German Faith movements over an eight year period.

A valid methodology of exploring a worldview is to focus on one of its key exponents. Poewe, with academic rigour, takes the reader into the life and work of the founder and “fuhrer” of the German Faith Movement, Jacob Wilhelm Hauer . She claims Hauer sought a national regeneration that gave birth to a community of one Volk. A Völkisch worldview puts priority on group and personality above the individual and individualism. The group is a biological entity made up of a distinct racial, cultural and intellectual substance. It is a worldview of a community of one people (p.175). Hauer was not envisioning a Judaic-Christian faith based political Volk, but a genuinely German (Nordic) one.

The relativism of postmodern spirituality is not a new thing, as this faith based movement was just as eclectic. In Hauer’s list of the “concrete content” of German Faith there is a reliance on Hinduism, especially the Bhagavad Gita as the language “eternal fate”, “eternal law,” “battle and tragedy” has its source in that sacred text (p.76-77). There are other elements, as Poewe documents that the founders of these deutsch-Germanic religions deliberately chose elements of “the Yogic tradition, pre-Christian Germanic beliefs, and German philosophical idealism”(p.34). Like postmodern spirituality of today the German Faith Movement was not without metanarrative, it was also based on myth, in this case a focus on Germanic/Icelandic sagas.

The German Faith Movement of Hauer and o...

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