Nazi occult war – Nocturnal Revelries

I recently enjoyed James Herbert’s Rats books, and I’ve have been planning on reading his Nazi horror novel The Spear for years. It’s been a long time since I read anything about Nazi occultism, and I thought I’d read a non-fiction book on the topic refresh my memory first. I’ve had copies of Francis King’s Satan and Swastika and Peter Levenda’s Unholy Alliance on my shelf for years, both of which I plan on reading at some point, but I also had a copy of Michael Fitzgerald’s The Nazi Occult War on my kindle. I hadn’t heard anything about it, but I’m finding ebooks easier to get through recently, so it was an easy choice to make.

This was not a bad book, but I have encountered nearly all of its information elsewhere. It goes into some of the bullshitty stuff, but it doesn’t get bogged down in any one topic. There are sections on Nazi ceremonies and the SS that could be taken from a high-school history book. With all the bullshit rumours about the Reich’s UFOs and Hitler being a Satanist, it’s easy to forget quite how mental the Nazis truly were. This book does feature chapters on Atlantis, the Vril society, and the Holy Grail too though. I think it would serve as a good primer on the topic of Nazi occultism. I had a leaf through a paper copy of the book, and I was quite impressed with the layout. It looks really good. While I certainly wasn’t blown away by any element of this book, it served its purpose. I was reminded of all of the other books I have read about Nazi occultism.

The obvious starting point for this kind of thing is Nicholas Goodrick Clarke’s The Occult Roots of Nazism. This was one of the first books I reviewed on here, and it describes the occultists who actually influenced the Nazis. Stephen E. Flowers and Michael Moynihan’s The Secret King takes a more specific look at one of these loonies, a chap named Karl Maria Wiligut, and I had a good laugh when I read von Liebenfels Theozoology. Goodrick-Clarke wrote another book, Black Sun, about the conspiracies and nutty ideas that sprang up after the fall of the Nazis (much of which stemmed from Pauwels and Bergier’s Morning of the Magicians, and if you’re going to read that you might as well read Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race too. It’s fiction, but unlike the fiction I list below, it actually inspired the Nazis rather than being inspired by them.) I enjoyed Black Sun more than Occult Roots of Nazism because it was about the bullshit that was clearly made up. A good companion work to Black Sun would be Joscelyn Godwin’s Arktos, an interesting book which takes a closer look at some of these insane theories. Speaking of insane, Trevor Ravenscroft’s The Spear of Destiny is a must read for anyone researching the Nazi quest for the spear that pierced the side of Christ. Of course, this spear wasn’t the only holy relic they tried to get their hands on. I also spent a lot of time and effort researching Otto Rahn and the Nazi quest for the holy grail.