The spread of romantic ideas contributed to a new political worldview among the Germans, who lived until the beginning of the 19th century in small principalities ruled by towering castles on top of hills and fought each other. The natural desire was to unite under a broader roof.
The Second German Reich, 1918-1871, was created by Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, who began to unite the German principalities gradually under Prussia, the largest and most powerful principality of all from the northern plains, in a process that came to an end only by dictatorial means after Hitler came to power.
As part of the process, Germany became a constitutional monarchy. The emperor was an influential symbol, uniting all the ends of the nation.
The actual control was in the hands of Bismarck. But after the demise of Bismarck, no political leader was found with a stature that would constitute a counterweight to the emperor. As a result, Germany was ruled in the early twentieth century by a powerful but capricious emperor with few skills to run a modern giant state.
The fall of the great European monarchies in Europe after the First World War, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire and the German Empire, created a huge political vacuum in Europe. It was a continuation of the political crisis following the French Revolution.
Monarchy is the practical embodiment of the dream of flight. It is the head of the vertical axis. For many generations the people looked up and saw their kings there in their glory, symbolizing all the sublime, dynamic qualities, as a symbol of heroism, wealth and splendor. This hierarchy was a form of social and mental order.
The Christian Church has completed the work of creating this order. The collapse of the monarchies accelerated the disengagement of religion from everyday life, a process that took place during the Enlightenment period. Thus the gap that was opened was even larger.
This was the culture in which the Jews played a role, sometimes symbolic and sometimes practical, as mediators between the people and the emperor and as religious symbols. In the new social order they did not find themselves. They were seemingly redundant. They were identified with the old regime, the reaction.
The natural fillers of space were the independent European states, which set themselves the goal of replacing the monarchies with the rule of the people, that is, democracy. But democracy, in which everyone is equal, produce horizontal dialectic. The tangible vertical dimension disappears in it.
In the embarrassment, which was great anyway from the very change of regimes, there was an urgent need also for substitutes for the vertical aspect of society.
The bourgeois society, which was the main factor behind the change of regimes, could not be content with domestic values while it had to run a state composed of different interests. There was a need for unifying factors, which would generalize the disagreements and elevate them to higher levels. In addition, the new democracies found themselves in a confrontation with each other and had to train strong armies. Companies became conscripted and military development became a central value.
Aviation was the ultimate solution. The solution was created by public opinion and in the media. It was a mesmerizing combination of will and necessity. It was the fulfillment of the human dream. But it was necessary to turn aviation into a comprehensive social and military system. The practice of mysticism and the connection to pagan, popular and national foundations on the one hand, together with extremist nationalism and anti-Semitism on the other, provided the basis for the vital totality. They provided a new, extreme definition of the self, more suited to survival in the new age.
It is the diversity and the unique scope of the origins of Nazi ideology that indicate above all that the reasons for its popularity are extraordinary. Philosophically it is a reinvention of the wheel. Creating out of nothing. This diabolical ideology was used to hastily meet needs previously unknown to the human race. This is because the reality of life has added a significant new component, which required human adaptation to it.
The political inspiration for the Nazis was provided by a number of thinkers, who linked the material need to the spiritual need. They processed the movement towards the skies into a method of action for modern Germany. They developed the German Superman theory, who controls the world from the air by force using the airplane and develops living space. But the spiritual flight and aviation organically identified with it are at the center of human interest and action, as a central symbol of human freedom wherever it is. The Nazi attempt to expropriate them for control and occupation acted like a boomerang.
During the Second Reich, a broad popular romantic-nationalist movement developed in Germany, the pan-German movement, which identified with the irrational belief in everything that was "German". The pan-German organizations were a vocal and influential political pressure group, proliferating with declarations of intent and mobilizing public support. They advocated modern paganism, which offered an alternative to institutionalized religion through appropriate rituals and texts.
Hitler and the rest of the leaders of the Nazi movement began their careers in the "Tula" and "Vril" associations. These were tiny cults for the development of consciousness, which drew their inspiration from famous spiritualist figures in the 19th century, among them the Englishman with the ability to hover Douglas Hume and his mystical disciple Madame Belvatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society.
Hitler certainly did not acquire his speech and writing skills before the war and certainly not during its time. He had to make the leap between 1919-1924. Between these years, after he ''Tula'' Association, he joined the German Workers Party and then was his imprisonment at Landsberg Prison, where he wrote ''Mein Kampf''.
The Nazi mysticism described in ''Mein Kampf'' became a kind of religion for the German people. It included a combination of Nazism with occultism, manipulation of history for political purposes, neo-paganism and of course racism. It attributed religious significance to the character of Adolf Hitler.
When the Nazis came to power they sought to change the cultural and religious base of Germany. Heinrich Himmler was the one who enthusiastically embraced the new direction, nurturing it until it became the destiny of the SS, Nazi party and Germany.
Heinrich Himmler rose up in the Nazi party from a pale and ridiculous figure to the head of the huge SS empire thanks to his organizational skills. He had a diploma in agriculture and was interested in animal hybridization and fertilizers, which brought him closer to racial theory. He was drawn to the theory of raising an Aryan race of tall and blond people and selected the SS recruits by appearance. He required them to marry girls with Aryan credentials.
