And I found that fascinating that Hitler was reading kind of a magical tome.

Right.

So we can't we can't confirm 100 percent that he read it.

But what we know is it was in his library because it's a. historian journalist named Tim Rybach, who wrote a book on Hitler's library, actually went to the Holdings and Library of Congress and said, what did he have in his library when the American army kind of came in and appropriated all this stuff? And one of the books, which had, I think, 60 something annotations, was this book by Ernst Schertl, published in 23 or 24.

So at some point, After that, and Hitler was already becoming well known because of the Beer Hall Putsch, right? He sent it to Hitler.

It seems like he probably sent it in the 20s and dedicated it to him.

And Hitler clearly didn't throw it out.

Exactly,

Maybe you can talk a little bit about sort of how that was, because that, then that moves into sort of some Ur, Ur-Nazi movements, um, and then gets us into sort of the Nazi period.

Yeah.

I think it's, it...

There are two trends that are kind of reinforcing each other to explain why these doctrines, which existed in France and America and Britain, seem to find a little bit greater resonance in Germany, and even where the resonance was similar, took on a more political, racial, kind of spatial dimension.

So, you know, an example I love to give, Aleister Crowley, everyone was fascinated with him, and he was quite well-known in Britain.

Um, but everything he did was kind of privatized and, and apolitical other than supposedly being a spy.

I mean, you could argue he just wanted to create a cult and, and, you know, basically of, uh, kind of free love and all these other things in the context of starting an occult society and doctrine.

... how those are related to the rise of the Nazi party.

How were they fascinated with witchcraft?

So...

To the degree that they were pagan or interested in Germanic paganism, they believed that the real Germanic religion that preceded Christianity was a kind of nature-oriented Nordic paganism.

which the christians would try to wipe out right they tried to convert all the germans and anyone who still practiced the old religion they accused of witchcraft and then tried to kill right now there's some i mean that's somewhat historically accurate that the inquisition did go after pagans and heretics where they where the witchcraft becomes important Himmler starts a witchcraft division of his security service, which does research on all the witchcraft trials.

And he's trying to prove two things or study two things by doing this.

One, that what the Catholic Church, which he claims was run by the Jews, and he's not the only Nazi to claim that.

Rosenberg and others think the Jews were behind everything bad that happened with Christianity.

Are you seeing an increase in anti-Semitism and excusing the Nazis and excusing Hitler?