holocaust

The Nazis themselves were murder nerds. Now their successors are LARPing as wizards of racial superiority as they commit very real atrocities—as seen in the recent parent killing in Wisconsin. Deep in northwestern Westphalia, Germany, stands a twelfth-century castle conceived by Heinrich Himmler, leader of the paramilitary Schutzstaffel, as a kind of “Camelot” for the triumphal knights of the Aryan race. The Wewelsburg Castle was also a fantasy nerd’s dream come true. In its bowels lies an occult enclave straight out of Cecil B. DeMille: an Arthurian-style set of catacombs designed to look medieval but actually made of concrete. Above, in the Hall of the Supreme S.S. Leaders, there’s a marble floor inlaid with a design of the Black Sun, or Sonnenrad—a circle containing swastika-like arms that epitomizes Nazi striving to create an idealized Norse-Aryan past for themselves. Himmler started renovations on the castle in the mid-1930s; the Nazi paradise he built was meant to host S.S. ceremonies, such as handing particularly distinguished murderers the Totenkopfring, a ring adorned with the signature S.S. skull but also a variety of quasi-Nordic runes and symbolic oak leaves, designed by Himmler’s personal occultist, a purportedly clairvoyant mystic by the name of Karl Wiligut. The Nazis, in short, were obsessed with legend and magic. Consider the swastika itself: First written about in Germany by the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered the symbol in the ruins of Troy in 1868, the swastika was seized on by Hitler—whose birthday falls on Easter Sunday this year—as emblematic of the idealized, quasi-mythical Aryan race he sought to recreate. More to the point, the Nazis were murder nerds, LARPing as wizards of racial superiority as they committed very real atrocities. And the same is true of their successors today. Partly aping their dead heroes and partly engaged in a similar delusion—self-mythologizing as the scions of an ancient white race—neo-Nazis are a remarkably myth-oriented bunch. This manifests in a lot of different ways, like engaging in werewolf-themed cultic neopaganism or dedicating themselves to Norse gods. Or, in a recent newsworthy example, following the Order of the Nine Angles, a late-twentieth-century neo-Nazi pseudoreligion that seeks to turn its adherents into racially pure Satanic wizards. Earlier this week, a Waukesha, Wisconsin, teenager and devotee of the Order of the Nine Angles, or ONA, was charged with murdering his mother and stepfather and plotting to assassinate President Donald Trump, in order to further the Order’s goals of a world plunged into chaotic violence. “Jewish occupied governments must fall. The white race cannot survive unless America collapses,” the 17-year-old, Nikita Casap, wrote in a manifesto. “Huge amounts of violence will be required.” He called himself a “niner” (a Nine Angles devotee) and encouraged his imitators to read a variety of extremist books. In doing so, Casap drew on nearly a century of blood-drenched legacy in his pairing of violent death with a potent dose of magical thinking. The symbol of the Order of the Nine Angles looks, more than anything, like a mutilated cat’s cradle, just as their ideology is a muddle of inverted myths, profligate cruelty, and pure bigotry. It’s a religion of shock and destruction, and as such, it has appealed particularly to young men—teens seeking to break away from their parents, and aimless mid-twenties men who want to blaze a path of dubious glory by blood. The movement was created in the 1970s by a British neo-Nazi named David Myatt, nicknamed the “Cat Strangler” by his friends because of his affinity for torturing animals. His ideology reflects the charming sobriquet. In 1999, a 22-year-old man reportedly inspired by Myatt’s book A Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution planted bombs embedded with nails in areas frequented by London’s minority and gay communities, injuring 129 people and killing three. In Myatt’s work and speeches, an increasingly elaborate cosmology is paired with direct calls to terrorist action, all in the service of ushering in an eschatological race war. Affiliated with the so-called “Left-Hand Path” of magic—dark or black magic—the ONA offers such occult hokum as a world divided into the seven branches of the “Tree of Wyrd,” a creator deity named Vindex, and individual cells called “nexions.”

via newrepublic: Why Neo-Nazis Are Obsessed With the Occult