For
personal reasons I have ceased my translation and will not continue. I
highly encourage any willing spirit to make use of the material on this
site or to expand on it, perhaps in an effort for a full translation.
Currently 35% of the novel has been given a rudimentary translation. You
can find the original texts at the bottom of this entry.
Notice that the "BUCH" label divides Goetzen gegen Thule into three sections and does NOT signify the three books of the Thule trilogy (the others being Wolfszeit um Thule and Rebellen fuer Thule). Goetzen gegen Thule,
Landig's first novel in the trilogy, has nineteen chapters. These are
merely chapter divisions that further divide it into tripartition.
Information
Landig
was either told this story by somebody else or created it on his own, or rather
“experienced” it if those implications are to be believed. Serrano was
unconcerned with him when they met, indicating that he knew something about the
normalcy of the matter. We must think of Landig’s prose and purpose. If he was
told this story by somebody else, by “the mutterings of a prisoner in an
English internment camp”, then he wrote the book to fulfill his mission to his
comrade both to get the information out and to keep alive the legacy of the
“Leipzig group” around which the book is centered.
Landig was well known for his
leadership in an occult society in Austria post-bellum, where he propagated
certain viewpoints akin to those in the book and even more scientifically
extreme. The book is not that imaginative in comparison.
If the book was indeed dictated and
written from memory and a sense of duty, it may account for the dryness and
bluntness of the prose. Written in a typical chap-book style that increases
word-length with various sequential instances more akin to a list of facts than
a literary piece, the book is tedious and is compounded by the presence of
sequels. Perhaps this was a safeguard against readers who were not fanatical
enough, or else the mere product of his lack of craft. In any case the books
remain untranslated in English or any other language. The translation provided
of the first book’s first part is the only one that I know of to date, which
requires major editing for literary smoothness.
Perhaps because it has not been
translated, the works remain relatively obscure in the underground web of
information. A certain select group of people know about it from none other
than coincidence with their interests. Otherwise it is obscure. Physical copies
of the book are still in circulation for high prices and limited quantities on
popular internet retail services like Amazon.com, but they are virtually
unheard of in physical bookshops.
However, one current of literature
does give mention to these books. Works about what has been called “Esoteric
Nazism” or “Nazi Occultism” are the only literary bodies which give reference
to them, often citing from them ideological and esoteric-related matters
relevant to the subject. In no other writing is Landig’s work mentioned. The book ARKTOS alone has probably been the sole source of knowledge about his works, of
which Godwin, the author, gives brief glimpses and summaries in parts of the
text. From this we have gained the entirety of our knowledge on the subject.
A summary of the book will be given
here at a later date.
Wilhelm
Landig was the leader of a folkish movement in Vienna, Austria known as the
Landig Group. He is a complicated figure, if not more so because of the things
he has said concerning the German power structure during the Second World War
and its aftermath. It is common of post-war folkish activists to denounce
Hitler and Nazism, firstly because it prevents their activism from acceptance
by the mainstream, and secondly because the nature of conspiracy theorists
often tend to dismiss every organization other than their own as being antagonistic.
The purpose of this article is to discern the probable truth concerning Landig,
his statements and experiences that he has propagated.
His
Weltschauung falls in line with those who believe that Masons are the main perpetrators
of the “global conspiracy” and have infiltrated everything. Only the SS, he
believes, was not under their control. How the “Masons” controlling Germany
through the 1930’s allowed the SS to rise independent of their control is an inconsistency
that can’t be overlooked. Also, Landig has the frequent urge to call everyone a
traitor but himself, which fits in line with the massive paranoia circling
among the German troops at the end of World War II. It was believed that
traitors and conspiracies were everywhere, Hitler himself recognizing and
issuing several orders in response to the treason of various government
officials. Those who were not around Hitler or who were not heads of state
would have known even less and the truth that we get from them may have been exaggerated.
For example, Landig calls Bormann a Soviet spy and that in the end Hitler was “surrounded
by figures of high-finance and Masons”. Landig did not adjourn Hitler anywhere
nor were they ever in proximity to each other, and we can only guess that he
had this information from the rumors and words of his fellow SS. It was also
known that Himmler was becoming increasingly distant from his loyalty to
Hitler, as Skorzeny testified when he visited one of the internment camps.
Neither Himmler nor the camp guards responded to his Hitler salute. It could be
gathered that Himmler spread rumors about Hitler spread through the ranks of
the SS, first through his immediate subordinates. At this point in the war, Himmler
wanted most of all wanted to retain a cache of SS loyal to him even in the probable case of Hitler dismissing him from his
position as head of the SS. In this case, it was most important to cause Hitler
to look like someone who had betrayed the fatherland and no longer deserved the
loyalty of the SS, or at least was under the control and manipulation of a
foreign power such as Masons. He could not claim that Jews were manipulating
him because Jews had been systematically rooted out of Germany and the German
government with prejudice, while Masons could have gone into hiding easily more
so. Masons could be ethnic Germans at the same time. Many of the German
government figures were still Catholics, which further provided the possibility
that they were Masons.
Other
inconsistencies reveal the rumor’s exaggeration and paranoia. For example, if
it was known that multiple Masonic figures surrounded Hitler, why did no one
take action, not even the SS like Landig or his superiors who could have easily
drawn them up on false charges? The risk of death was not something feared by
SS-men. The SS was also more powerful than any other public organization in
Germany, and its independence - rather than subjecting it to the dictates of
hidden organizations – gave it the ability to instead dispose of organizations within
Germany as they pleased.
Hitler
was betrayed by many people when the Reich was falling and this was a generally
known fact. Hitler called them traitors even when they hadn’t been disposed of
their official positions yet, because he knew by their insubordination. Many of
these people had been close to him. It could not be said, then, that Hitler was
unaware of the forces which conspired against him. The documents and accounts
left over from this time, from people who were there, prove this. Landig was on
the front. Hitler was not under the influence of his cabinet because he, most
of all, had the selective eye for betrayal at a moment’s notice. He had
identified the traitors before anyone else had. He was ready to dispose of
anyone who didn’t follow his will.
The
strictness kept around Hitler prevented anything from going on that wasn’t
according to his orders. When this did
happen, Hitler dismissed them indefinitely. He was sorrowed by the betrayals
but took solace in those who remained under his command. A popular notion that
Hitler was under the influence of drugs and his doctor has also surfaced after
the war and was espoused by several Denazification groups operating by the
Americans in Germany, and generally historians of a later era that sought to cash
in on the Hitler-sensationalism with books like “The Goebbels Diaries”, which
are known to be a fake. However this era of academia disregarded veracity in
the name of sensationalism. We can therefore dismiss this claim among the many
others that tried to play up the image of Hitler as a raving madman, when
eyewitness accounts from the time never reported such a thing. The memoires of
the people living in Hitler’s bunker are the most historically accurate to take
from. The effect of this sensationalism from the 1960’s onward is evident in
the fact that Hanna Reitsch testified against herself decades after the war
with the claim that Hitler was withering away under drugs, while in the era
directly after the war her account was much different and that rumor had not
even begun to surface yet. Under this gigantic web of rumor and subterfuge, there
is a truth to be discovered.
The
rumors of Hitler’s loss of control were most prominent among the SS stationed
outside the fatherland and the groups under Himmler’s direct control.
There
is no doubt that conspiracy theorists who had long had their eyes on Masonic
activity, and who believed that the entirety of the world was under the control
of Masons, encouraged Landig after the war in these ideas. It fit the idea that
Masons had orchestrated the war for high finance and had used Hitler, which is
still a prominent view today. Landig no longer had to have reserves in claiming
that the Reich’s government had been Masonic, and therefore subscribed to these
theories in their full weight. This still totally disregards the Jews, which
Landig partially blames but does not focus on because of the rumor about Hitler’s
cabinet mentioned before.
Another
factor allowing Landig to propagate claims against Hitler was the fact that the
surviving folkish movement did not require, and nor did it want, the worship of
Hitler. Landig could view Hitler’s person as anathema and still propagate an
ariosophical, “Aryan” world-view such as he did in the Landig Group and the
ideology of the Black Sun. This effectively establishes a “new movement”
without the full stigma of Nazism from the past. In one word, it was
convenient.
Other
claims made by Landig are that the “last of the flying disks are rotting in the
Andes, without the personnel or money to get materials to repair them”. One
would think that if Landig believed in the fully-operational base of Point 103
in his first book, “full of facts” he hints, then they would be prepared with a
plan in the long run to maintain their base. His books pander to a folkish
crowd with various references and dealings of subject matter with the
Externsteine for example and Base 211. It is suspected that Base 211 came late
to his attention, only surfacing in his last novel in 1991 even though an
Antarctic base to rival Point 103 seems too big of a fact to not mention for
that long. Especially if an “accurate” picture of the world is attempted to be
given from these novels. There have been
claims that Landig was “given a mission by Himmler to revive the Aryan imagination
after the defeat through symbolism”, therefore prompting the creation of the
Landig Group and its literature. Subordination to Himmler and a personal
mission given by him could have also been responsible for his anti-Hitler
views, which nonetheless try to revive a Germanic, “Aryan” culture through
literature. Himmler was known for his praise of the Bhagavad Gita and the Gitas
of India, which Hitler was variously indifferent to over the works of his own
Germanic countrymen, like the mythology of Wagner and Nietzsche. Landig also
has a huge Vedic influence in name, which may have been part of the
instructions from Himmler*. It could even be proposed that the world-view
espoused in Goetzen gegen Thule and its sequels is actually the view of the
world that Himmler wanted to survive had the war-effort failed, which
invariably doubted and dethroned Hitler in favor of the heads of the SS.
However Himmler did not want to heroify himself because of the suspicion that
would have arose. Had Himmler survived, he believed he would have made his own
name without the propaganda efforts he had instructed.
We
could therefore view this sub-current of folkish ideology as “Himmlerian”,
rather than “Hitlerian” National Socialism. Landig does not mention National
Socialism and presents its party members as counterproductive or antagonistic,
despite the fact that the entirety of the Germanic-folkish movement of the SS
was founded by the NSDAP and Hitler. In a way it provides an ideology “free of
Hitler”, as Himmler would have it. It is often said that the leaders in the
NSDAP each had their own personal version of National Socialism, and this one
may have been Himmler’s, distinctly different from Hitler’s. That is what
accounts for the major differences in ideology that appear as idiosyncrasies in
Landig’s works.
*The
ideology espoused by Himmler and Landig is strictly mythological rather than tantric,
and therefore cannot be rooted in the Esoteric Hitlerism that Serrano learned
from.
