American Corporate Complicity Created Undeniable Nazi Nexus

Cutting Edge News | Mar 9, 2009

This article is based on the just released book, Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connection’s to Hitler’s Holocaust (Dialog Press).

By Edwin Black

Adolf Hitler was completely responsible for the Holocaust. But Hitler had help.

When zealous Nazis were motivated to wage war against an imaginary generation-to-generation Jewish conspiracy… when Nazis created ghastly extermination plans to help ensure their master race would rule the world… when the German military was enabled to smash across Europe with lightning speed in heavy Blitz trucks, bomb mercilessly from the air in advanced JU-88s, and create carnage across the seas with deadly torpedoes… when Josef Mengele saw the scientific need to undertake heinous medical experiments on twins in Auschwitz… when the Reich was enabled to identify the Jews everywhere in Europe and then systematically pauperize and destroy them… when all these terrible things were done, the shape and scope of the horror was pivotally determined by major American industrial giants.

Now the dots can be connected. They create an undeniably Nazi nexus between iconic American corporations and the greatest crime of the twentieth century: the Holocaust.

Who gave Hitler the initial basis for transmogrifying centuries of outgroup religious hatred into a new twentieth century political anti-Semitism? It was Henry Ford, acting directly through the Ford Motor Company. In 1920, the gullible but mercurial Ford acquired a forged typescript convincing him of an evil international Jewish cabal determined to subjugate the world through devious manipulation of the world’s governments, newspapers, and economic systems. The revelations were contained in the notorious and fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

To purvey this new brand of Jew hatred to the world, Ford purchased a failed newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, which serialized The Protocols for 91 weeks. His company then published the series as a book, The International Jew. Using the techniques of mass production, Ford was able to escalate the Protocols from a negligible, randomly circulated irritant to a national sensation of 500,000 copies. Devoting the national sales force and the assets of the Ford Motor Company to the task hatred made Henry Ford the first to organize political anti-Semitism in America. Indeed, he was the hero of anti-Semites the world over.

In Germany, where Ford was venerated, The International Jew was translated and published in February, 1921. It enjoyed six editions in two years with thousands of copies in print. Ford’s book quickly became the bible of German anti-Semites and early incarnations of the Nazi party. Nazis shipped the work throughout the country “by the carload.”

Among the many Germans massively influenced by the book was Adolf Hitler. Der Führer read the work at least two years before Mein Kampf was written. It shows. In Mein Kampf, chapter 11, Hitler wrote, “The whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie [as] shown incomparably by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion… With positively terrifying certainty, they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and … their ultimate final aims.” Hitler described Ford as his hero. No wonder Ford received Hitler’s German Eagle medal in a lavish Berlin ceremony. The medal was reserved for foreigners who rendered special service to the Reich.

Who gave Hitler the pseudo-scientific medical rationales to justify a war to achieve a blond, blue-eyed master race with the duty to obliterate all other races deemed inferior? It was the Carnegie Institution, the philanthropic incarnation of America’s greatest steel fortune that propagated the deadly American race science of eugenics. Beginning in 1911, Carnegie Institution scientists argued successfully that millions worldwide who did not conform to a blond, blue-eyed Nordic stereotype were unworthy of existence on earth.

American eugenics believed such social traits as poverty, prostitution, and laziness were genetic. The continuation of racially inferior bloodlines— a broad swath encompassing some 90 percent of humanity—was to be combated by various methods. These methods included organized identification, seizure of assets, marriage prohibition or nullification, forced surgical sterilization, segregation into camps, and publicly operated gas chambers. Various eugenic notions were enacted into law in 27 states. Ultimately, some 60,000 persons were forcibly sterilized, thousands more incarcerated in state camps, and untold numbers unmarried and in some cases subjected to organized lethal medical neglect. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes enshrined these policies as the law of the land when he ruled such acts justified. “It is better for all the world,” Holmes wrote, “if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”

The Carnegie Institution and its sponsored movement spent millions to propagate American eugenic theories in post-WWI Germany, financing race science programs in universities and official institutions. These included the idea that Jews must be eliminated.

While in prison, Hitler closely studied American eugenics. In Mein Kampf, Hitler insisted, “There is today one state, in which at least weak beginnings toward better conception… are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.” Hitler proudly told his comrades, “I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.” Hitler merely exchanged the American term “Nordic” for the Nazi term “Aryan” and then medicalized his pre-existing virulent anti-Semitism and fascist nationalism, to formulate the concept of the blond, blue-eyed Master Race he deified in Mein Kampf.

Hitler was so steeped in American race science that he even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant, called his writing “my bible.”

The Third Reich implemented all American eugenic principles with great ferocity and velocity backed up by a conquering army. “While we were pussy-footing around,” fawned Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society, “the Germans were calling a spade a spade.” As Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess insisted, “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.”

Who gave Hitler’s odious medical eugenic experimentation the wherewithal to commit unspeakable crimes against innocent twins? It was the Rockefeller Foundation, the philanthropic incarnation of Standard Oil. The foundation acted as a full partner with Carnegie in establishing eugenics across America and in Germany. In the quest to perfect the master race, millions of Depression-era dollars were transmitted by Rockefeller to Hitler’s most anti-Jewish doctors. In this quest, one specimen was desired above all: twins.

Rockefeller funded Hitler’s chief raceologist Otmar Verschuer and his insatiable twin experimentation programs. Twins, it was thought, held the secret to industrially multiplying the Aryan racial type, and quickly subtracting biological undesirables. Verschuer had an assistant, Josef Mengele. Rockefeller funding stopped during WWII. But by that time, Mengele had transferred into Auschwitz to continue twin research in a monstrous fashion. Ever the eugenicist, he sent precise clinical reports weekly to Verschuer.

Who took Hitler off the horse and put his killing armies into trucks to wage Blitzkrieg or lightning war against Europe? It was General Motors which built the Blitz truck for the Blitzkrieg. As the Reich’s largest car and truck maker, GM became an indispensible partner in Hitler’s war. From the first weeks of the Third Reich, GM president Alfred Sloan committed the company and its German division, Opel, to motorizing a substantially horse-drawn Germany, preparing it for war. Prior to this, Germany had been a nation devoted to legendary automotive engineering but only one vehicle at a time built by craftsman. GM brought mass production to the Reich, converting it from a horse-drawn threat to a motorized powerhouse.

Sloan and GM knowingly prepared the Wehrmacht to wage war in Europe. Detroit even secretly moved massive stores of spare Blitz parts to the Polish border in the days just before the September 1, 1939 invasion to facilitate the Blitzkrieg.

Using a charade of interlocking boards and special executive committees, Sloan kept GM’s role secret as long as possible. Where Opel lacked parts or foreign currency, Detroit ordered other international subsidiaries to stealthily assist.

In addition to motorizing the military, Sloan launched massive re-employment programs to help revive the Nazi economy—this at a time when the company declined to put Depression-wracked Americans back to work. GM’s success led to the need for the Autobahn. GM’s chief executive in Germany James Mooney received the same medal Ford was awarded, for special service rendered to the Reich.

Who custom-designed and co-planned the Nazi solutions to Jewish existence? It was International Business Machines, inventor of the Hollerith punch card, precursor to the modern computer. IBM enjoyed a monopoly on information technology. Under the micromanagement of its president, Thomas Watson, and advertising itself as “a solutions company,” IBM in 1933 reached out to the new Hitler regime. It offered to organize and systemize any solution the Reich desired, including solutions to the Jewish problem.

With IBM as a partner, the Hitler regime was able to substantially automate and accelerate all six phases of the twelve-year Holocaust: identification, exclusion, confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, and even extermination.

As it did with any other customer, IBM simply asked the Hitler regime what result was desired. Then company engineers devised custom-tailored punch card systems to deliver the results. First, who was Jewish and where did the Jews live–exactly. IBM solution: a customized racial and religious census designed and tabulated by the company. Second, once identified, systematically expel Jews from all segments of society. IBM solution: create databases cross-tabulating ordinary organizational and community directories from association membership rosters to lists of marriages, deaths and births.

Third, confiscate Jewish assets. IBM solution: all banks and financial institutions were run by IBM cards which could be programmed to seek out the Jewish names and their accounts for seizure. Fourth: ghettoize the Jews. IBM Solution: cross-match families from their existing residences into crowded dilapidated slums so that in a single day, thousands of people could be efficiently transferred from point A to point B. Fifth, deport the Jews to camps. IBM solution: most of the railroads in Europe were routed by IBM punch cards. Create special depots to ensure that trains with cattle cars were made available to transport Jews to camps. Inbound, these trains were crowded with helpless humans. Returning, they were empty.

Sixth: the Jews were to be systematically and industrially murdered. IBM Solution 1: establish different codes for each classification of concentration camp prisoners. Prisoner Code 8 designated a Jew. Status Code 6 designated killed by gas chamber. In this way, the Reich always knew how many Jews it was killing. In extermination camps, almost all Jews were murdered upon arrival in an IBM-aided system that metered victims from ghettos to train to death camp in murderous synchrony. IBM Solution 2: create the “Extermination by Labor” program using custom IBM punch card programs that matched the skills of Jewish prisoners wherever they were to Reich labor needs wherever they were. Once moved to the labor site, Jews were worked to death. There was an IBM customer site in every concentration camp.

Had it not been for the continued conscious involvement of iconic American corporations in Hitler’s war against the Jews, the speed, shape and statistics of the Holocaust as we know it would have been dramatically different. No one knows how different, but the astronomical dimensions could have never been achieved. For their part, American corporate collaborators have long tried to obscure or hide the details of their collusion using the well-known tools of corporate misinformation, financial contributions, and bought and paid for historian reviews. But in era when people no longer believe big corporations, the dots can be fully connected to unveil the outlines of an indispensible Nazi nexus.

Edwin Black is the New York Times best selling investigative author of IBM and the Holocaust, and his just released book, Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust (Dialog Press 2009), which can be see at www.nazinexus.com.

Scientists debate a robot war in new book ‘Wired for War’

Canadian Press | Feb 11, 2009

In the 1921 play that invented the word “robot” – Czech writer Karel Capek’s “Rossum’s Universal Robots” – mechanical, highly intelligent slaves mount a revolt and kill all humans but one.

Ever since, science fiction has explored the idea of robots outsmarting, dominating and destroying the human race. Author P. W. Singer, at 33 a Senior Fellow at the highly serious Brookings Institution, can’t resist the fascination of the topic, but he isn’t writing fiction. He treats the possibility with appropriate seriousness in “Wired for War,” a meticulous account of the latest military robots.

Two earlier books by him have explored two of the hottest issues in 21st century military developments. One was “Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry,” the reinvigorated ancient profession of mercenaries. The other deals with something relatively new: “Children at War” – the recruitment and enslavement of boys and girls in their teens and even younger.

Singer says some 40 countries are making military robots. The motive: reduced casualties. “When a robot dies, you don’t have to write a letter to its mother,” Singer quotes one unit commander as saying.

Military robots are already being built with greater endurance, firepower, precision and – for the moment, submissiveness – than human soldiers. The trend is to make them more autonomous, able to take decisions according to built-in commands, unmoved by fear, pity, revenge or other human emotion.

Whether they can or should be endowed with a system of ethics is controversial. How to tell a ragged soldier from a ragged civilian?

Scientists foresee the day when robots will develop what is called “strong AI” – high level artificial intelligence – and use it reproduce themselves without human intervention. Singer quotes Vernon Vinge, mathematician, computer scientist and science fiction writer, as predicting more than 15 years ago: “Within the next 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will be ended.”

Rodney Brooks, chief technical officer at iRobot, is more optimistic. The firm takes its name from Isaac Asimov’s “I, Robot,” which posits “laws” that robots must never harm humans. The firm also makes the first mass-produced robotic vacuum cleaner. Brooks says there’ll never be a robot takeover because by then, people will be part computer, part human.

Singer’s exhaustively researched book, enlivened by examples from popular culture, ends with a hint that he’s worried, too.

“We are creating something exciting and new, a technology that might just transform humans’ role in their world, perhaps even create a new species,” he concludes. “But this revolution is mainly driven by our inability to move beyond the conflicts that have shaped human history from the very start. Sadly, our machines may not be the only thing wired for war.”

New book claims women under Hitler were just as ruthless as men

Women who served under the Nazis, including those involved in the Hitler Youth, were just as ruthless as men according to a German historian

Behind every Nazi mass murderer was a woman: New book claims women under Hitler were just as ruthless as men

Daily Mail | Feb 3, 2009

By Alan Hall

Women who worked under Adolf Hitler were just as ruthless as men, a shocking new book reveals.

Female Perpetrators; Women Under National Socialism exposes the myth that women under Hitler were the fairer sex and were simply caught up in the cruel actions of men.

In Nazi art, films and magazines, women were always portrayed as the fairer sex, fighting on the home-front as their menfolk fought on the battlefields.

But the book, which goes on sale in Germany this week, shows this was all propaganda and that women who worked under Hitler were just as brutal as men.

In the first German post-war reckoning of the role of women in underwriting the crimes of the Nazis, historian Kathrin Kompisch has revealed what has been swept under the carpet since 1945.

‘The history of National Socialism has long been reduced to one that blamed men for everything,’ Ms Kompisch said. ‘This was and is the popular picture.’

But the fairer sex venerated by the propaganda machine of Josef Goebbels was, according to Ms Kompisch, every bit as eager to turn the thumb-screws on the victims held in Gestapo cellars across Europe.

Her book shows that women were also every bit as fanatical as the men when it came to crushing resistance to the state.

This was partially portrayed by Kate Winslet, who plays a Nazi guard accused of war crimes, in the Oscar-nominated film The Reader.

‘Apart from a few particularly cruel examples, the participation of women in the crimes of the Nazis has been blended out of the collective conscious of the Germans for a long time,’ Ms Kompisch wrote.

‘I tried to analyse the motives and the personal circumstances of the women involved and to pose the question about their own personal responsibility for what occurred.’

She found that Hitler and his satraps virtually hypnotised women to do the bidding of a regime founded on violence and race hatred.

As such they became handmaidens to the S.S.; staffed the ‘baby farms’ where ’supermen’ children were born and assisted the doctors who first sterilised.

Later women went on to become murderers of the disabled as well as guards in the gulag of concentration camps.

‘One should never forget the legions of women who supported their menfolk as they killed people by the tens of thousands in Russia, in Poland, in places like Auschwitz and Treblinka,’ Ms Kompisch said.

‘Women typed the statistics of the murdered victims of the S.S. Action Squads in the east, operated the radios which called up for more bullets, were invariably the secretaries – and sometimes much more – in all the Gestapo posts,’ Ms Kompisch said.

‘And at the end of the war they tried to diminish their responsibility by saying they were just cogs in the all-male machine which gave the orders.’

Analysing pre and post-war statistics, Ms Kompisch found there were more government, private sector and military jobs to be had for women under Hitler than in peacetime.

But even those who didn’t work bloodied their hands in other ways.

It was largely housewives who queued up at government warehouses to buy the furniture, jewels, household appliances and clothes of their Jewish neighbours who had disappeared in the night without a word.

She found the high-testosterone, all-male hierarchy of the Nazi state blocked out women from leadership positions from the very start, but the regime actively encouraged female participation in enforcing the Nazi terror at grassroots levels.

Most ‘Blockwaerts’ – apartment house snoops who reported on un-Nazi activities to the party – were female.

They also made unofficial denunciations to the Gestapo of suspicious neighbours, Jews and other enemies of the state at a rate of three-to-one compared to men.

The surviving files of the Gestapo in the city of Duesseldorf noted that they ‘try to change the power balance of the household by denouncing their husbands as spies or Communists or anti-Nazis.’

‘The cliché of Gold Mother Cross-wearing women having 10 babies and baking bread was as much of a myth as all women in the 1920’s drinking absinthe and doing the Charleston,’ she said.

‘Women could and did advance themselves massively through the Third Reich.’

Some 3,200 women served in the concentration camp gulag.

Ms Kompisch draws on several case histories of other more outwardly normal, intelligent women to try to get to the core of the corruption of their sex in Nazi Germany.

One of them Karin Magnussen, born in 1908 in Bremen, was a brilliant biologist and physicist.

She was a woman venerated by her profession, unaffected by the financial and political upheavals that propelled Hitler to power.

The book shows she ended up using the eyeballs from still-living prisoners at Auschwitz by the demented Dr. Josef Mengele for experiments on the pigmentation of the human iris.

Ms Kompisch concludes; ‘The fact is that women allowed their female characteristics to be suppressed to bind themselves to the Nazi state and its agencies.

‘To say, as most did at the end of the war, that they knew nothing of the terror and torture, is absolutely unbelievable. They supported and underwrote such terror and torture.’

Aristocratic occultist may have been model for Shakespeare’s Prospero

Prospero, The Tempest, RSC, Aldwych Theatre, 1983

Stewart was implicated in plots to kill the King and was rumoured to be heavily involved in witchcraft and sorcery. In 1590 he was said to have dressed as the devil during a witches’ sabbath, and cast a spell, summoning up a storm – just as Prospero did – in an attempt to wreck the king’s ship. He failed, and James survived to ascend the English throne as well 13 years later.

Exiled earl may have been the model for Prospero

The Times | Jan 24, 2009

Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, has always been one of Shakespeare’s most mysterious creations. Part mystic, part wizard, he weaves spells and conjures up storms. At the end of The Tempest he utters one of the great speeches in all the Shakespearian canon – “Now my charms are all o’erthrown; and what strength I have’s mine own.”

No one has ever been able to say with certainty what, or who, inspired the creation of Prospero, though many of Shakespeare’s characters were based on real people and events. Now, however, an amateur historian, rifling through the papers of an eccentric 16th-century Scottish Earl, has uncovered the life of a man he says may have given Shakespeare the idea for the character.

Brian Moffat, a 64-year-old retired policeman from Teviothead, in the Borders, said he stumbled upon the revelation after he and his wife bought an old chest that turned out to be the marriage trunk of Francis Stewart, the Fifth Earl of Bothwell, whose extraordinary antics and rebellious behaviour caused a political and religious scandal.

Mr Moffat decided to investigate carvings of Christian, pagan and satanic symbols on the trunk.

Stewart believed that his cousin, James VI, should invade England to avenge the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. When the King refused to consider it, he turned against him.

Stewart was implicated in plots to kill the King and was rumoured to be heavily involved in witchcraft and sorcery. In 1590 he was said to have dressed as the devil during a witches’ sabbath, and cast a spell, summoning up a storm – just as Prospero did – in an attempt to wreck the king’s ship. He failed, and James survived to ascend the English throne as well 13 years later. Stewart was imprisoned.

Mr Moffat believes that Shakespeare may have heard the stories of his eccentric behaviour from King James’s jester, Archie Armstrong, a high-ranking member of the king’s court who is thought to have inspired the character of the fool in King Lear.

“In 1590 Francis Stewart appeared in a pulpit at North Berwick Kirk dressed as the devil and summoned a storm to sink the King’s ship,” said Mr Moffat. “That incident is the starting point of The Tempest. There you have an exiled nobleman, who is also a necromancer, who summons up a storm to sink the ruling Duke’s ship. The similarities between the accounts and Shakespeare’s plot are striking. It is very likely Stewart is the inspiration for Prospero.”

Now Mr Moffat has written a book, Death, Resurrection and the Sword, in which he claims that Stewart’s link to Shakespeare’s play has been over-looked by scholars because, at the time, Stewart’s links to Freemasonry and the occult, along with his “dangerous” political beliefs, caused him to be “written out of history”.

He said: “This is an incredibly important piece of our history. Francis Stewart’s castle, Branxholme Castle, still stands. This is Prospero’s castle. This is Homecoming year, so we should really be celebrating this important link.”

Like Prospero, Stewart was finally exiled by his political rival, James VI. He was charged with treason for his part in a plot to abduct the King from Holyrood Palace in 1589, and also stood trial in 1591 on charges of witchcraft after the North Berwick Kirk incident. In 1594 he fell out with the King again.

He was finally exiled in 1595 and died penniless in Naples in 1612.

Dr Sarah Carpenter, who lectures on Shakespeare at the University of Edinburgh, said Moffat’s theory could not be proved beyond doubt, but a link with Stewart was possible.

Related

Francis Stewart Hepburn, 5th Earl of Bothwell

Francis Stewart, Earl Bothwell (b. c December 1562 – d. April 1612, Naples), was Commendator of Kelso Abbey and Coldingham Priory, a Privy Counsellor and Lord High Admiral of Scotland. Like his stepfather, Archibald Douglas, Parson of Douglas, he was a notorious conspirator, who died in disgrace.

Francis was son to John Stewart, Lord Darnley, Prior of Coldingham (d.1563), an illegitimate child of James V of Scotland by his mistress Elizabeth Carmichael. John Stewart’s wife was Jane Hepburn, Mistress of Caithness, Lady Morham (d.1599) sister to James Hepburn, the fourth Earl Bothwell. Francis is said to have been born in his mother’s tower house at Morham.

Francis Stewart Hepburn, 5th earl of Bothwell

Nephew of the 4th earl; by his dissolute and proud behaviour he caused King James VI of Scotland (afterward James I of Great Britain) gradually to consider him a rival and a threat to the Scottish crown and was made an outlaw. Through his father, John Stewart, prior of Coldingham, he was a grandson of King James V and was thus related to Mary, Queen of Scots, and the regent Moray.

Created earl of Bothwell in 1581, he became lord high admiral of Scotland and was a person of some importance at the court of James VI during the time when the influence of the Protestants was uppermost. He was eager that Mary Stuart’s death should be avenged by an invasion of England, and in 1589 he suffered a short imprisonment for his share in a rising. By this time he had completely lost the royal favour. Again imprisoned, this time on a charge of witchcraft, he escaped from captivity in 1591 and was deprived by Parliament of his lands and titles; as an outlaw his career was one of extraordinary lawlessness. In 1591 he attempted to seize Holyroodhouse, and in 1593 he captured the King, forcing from him a promise of pardon. But almost at once he reverted to his former manner of life, and, although James failed to apprehend him, he was forced to take refuge in France about 1595. He died at Naples in extreme poverty. He had three sons, but his titles were never restored.

The Devil & King James

Both ground breaking and revelationary, this book reveals the life, times and associates of Francis Stewart,”The King Devil” who has, until now, been almost entirely written out of history, although he came within an ace of becoming King of both Scotland and England.

The first Boys From Brazil: Nazi graveyard discovered deep in the Amazon rainforest

Final resting place: Brazilian natives at a Nazi grave in the Amazon. The wooden cross decorated with swastikas carries the inscription: ‘Joseph Greiner died here on 2.1.1936′

Daily Mail | Oct 24, 2008

By Alan Hall

A graveyard of former Nazis bent on creating a ‘foreign Fatherland’ in the Amazonian rainforests from which to spread Hitler’s maniacal beliefs has been discovered in Brazil.

The relics betray a madcap plan back in the 1930s to create a master race thousands of miles from Germany.

The graveyard and other ruins that fanatical Nazis left behind are chronicled in a new book.

Entitled ’The Guayana-Projekt. A German Adventure on the Amazon’ it says die-hard Nazis believed they were destined to settle the world like pioneers of the wild west in America.

It has long been known that Nazis wandered post-war into the remote regions of South America, befriended by fascist governments and military dictatorships.

The 1978 film Boys From Brazil told a of a bizarre plot to clone Hitler that was hatched by Joseph Mengele in his jungle hideout.

But the harshness of the Amazonian jungle was a strange choice of destination.

Historical Nazi ‘footprints’ are found in grave markers with swastikas, photos found in archives back home and the remains of dwellings.

On an island on a tributary of the River Jary in Brazil author Jens Gluessing found a nine-foot high wooden cross decorated with swastikas that testified to one of the explorers who never made it back to Berlin.

It carries the inscription: ‘Joseph Greiner died here on 2.1.1936, a death from fever in the service of German Research Work.’
nazi

Locals call the site ‘The Nazi graveyard’ but it was originally destined to be part of a string of Nazi settlements across the Amazon which Hitler missionaries would use as jumping-off points to spread the gospel of totalitarianism.

In archives of the Brazilian State Department and the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, Gluessing found details of Greiner’s jungle mission.

Greiner arrived in 1935, bankrolled by the Nazi government and died of yellow fever or Malaria. He was one of three sent out by S.S race specialists as the vanguard of what they perceived would be a wave of settlers.

Greiner and his compatriots had dozens of helpers with them exploring the region bordering French Guyana with a view to populating it for the Reich. They also had their sights on the neighbouring British and Dutch colonies.

They sent back to Berlin details of how a German soldiers should live in Brazil, even though their cover story was that they were collecting specimens of fauna and wildlife.

Schulz Kampfhenkel, an officer in the S.S. and leader of the expedition which claimed Greiner’s life, returned from the jungles and submitted to his boss Heinrich Himmler details of the ’Guayana Project.’

‘The two largest scantly populated, but rich in resources, areas on earth are in Siberia and South America,’ he wrote to Himmler. ‘They alone offer spacious immigration and settlement possibilities for the Nordic peoples.’

As Siberia semed likely to fall at that time to China, he recommended colonising Amazonia for ‘people without living space.’

He added in typically Nazi fashion: ‘For the more advanced white race it offers outstanding possibilities for exploitation.’

A film was produced showing Greiner’s work in the jungle in the 1930s. He believed the Nazis could colonise ‘Amazonia’

As befitting an S.S. man who bought wholly into concepts of Nazi race purity he said the people who lived there ‘cannot be measured in civilised terms as we known them in Germany.’

With one million German settlers in Brazil already, he argued the seedcorn was already there for the expansion of the Third Reich and that they could secure a ‘bridgehead’ against American influence in the region.

The author found evidence, however, that Himmler had ’scant interest’ in his grandiose settlement plans. A Nazi film was made of his travels – but no mention made of the Guayana Project: it remained classified by S.S. intelligence.

‘Given time, the plan may be submitted again,’ Himmler wrote to his jungle emissary.

But his experiences were put to use by the Nazi war machine: he became Nazi Germany’s leading expert in aerial photo-reconnaissance interpretation.

After the war the Americans arrested him and he was placed in a POW camp in Salzburg, Austria. Released, he died in 1989, still dreaming of a German colony amid the rain forests.

Vampire novelist Anne Rice reinvents herself as Catholic apologist with “Spiritual Confession”

Anne Rice, during her gothic heyday, at a book-signing for Memnoch The Devil

AP | Oct 31, 2008

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) — It’s Halloween, and Anne Rice has a new book — a memoir, in fact — that’s climbing best-seller lists. Everything is normal, then.

Anne Rice says she hopes to take her skills writing vampire books and “redeem myself.”

Interviewing Anne Rice: Pope Benedict XVI: Part 1

Normal if it were 1994 — the height of Rice’s megaselling fame as a queen of Southern Gothic pulp.

For those who haven’t been paying attention lately to vampire lit, America’s most famous chronicler of bloodsuckers doesn’t live in New Orleans anymore — and hasn’t since before Hurricane Katrina hit — and she’s riding new waves of enthusiasm: the memoir and Christian lit.

Her memoir, “Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession,” is the latest piece of evidence that Rice is reinventing herself in an attempt to build a reputation as a serious Christian writer.

In the memoir, the 67-year-old writer doesn’t disavow the two decades she spent churning out books on vampires, demons and witches — with a batch of S&M erotica thrown in — following the breakout success of her first novel in 1976, “Interview With the Vampire.”

From Anne Rice: a message to fans – Vampire occult books still “dear to my heart”

But she’s clearly moved on.

In a telephone interview from her mountain home in Rancho Mirage, California, Rice laid out her goal:

“To be able to take the tools, the apprenticeship, whatever I learned from being a vampire writer, or whatever I was — to be able to take those tools now and put them in the service of God is a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful opportunity,” she said. “And I hope I can redeem myself in that way. I hope that the Lord will accept the books I am writing now.”

The memoir follows the release of two books in a planned four-part, first-person chronicle of the life of Jesus.

And in this new 245-page memoir, Rice presents her former life as vampire writer as that of a soul-searching wanderer in the deserts of atheism; as someone akin to her most famous literary creations — Lestat, her “dark search engine,” Louis the aristocrat-turned-vampire and Egyptian Queen Akasha, “the mother of all vampires.”

“I do think that those dark books were always talking about religion in their own way. They were talking about the grief for a lost faith,” she said.

In 2002, Rice broke away completely from atheism — nearly four decades after she gave up her Roman Catholic faith as the 1960s started. It happened when she went off to college and found her peers talking about existentialism — Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre. Religion, she writes, was too restrictive to the young Rice. Too out of step.

Yet, religion had to come back into her life, she writes. For her, it was something she’d have to face up to again like an absent parent or a long-lost love child or Banquo the ghost in “Macbeth.”

By the late 1990s, when she went back to Mass, Rice — the author whose books sold in the tens of millions and who had recharged Hollywood’s appetite for vampire-inspired horror — had fallen on hard times.

Her husband, poet and artist Stan Rice, died of a brain tumor in 2002. And she had become victim to diabetes.

Always over-the-top and beyond the rational, she writes that her return of faith was preceded by a series of epiphanies — many while on travels to Europe’s cathedrals, Israel and Brazil. In one episode, when she visited the giant Jesus statue above Rio de Janeiro, she writes that she felt “delirium” as the clouds broke and revealed the statue.

Her professed revelations recall the religious intoxication she describes of her childhood.

When she was 12, she had her father turn a room on the back porch of the family’s Uptown home in New Orleans into an oratory modeled after St. Rose of Lima — the saint Catholics believe turned roses into floating crosses. She wanted to be a saint, she writes.

In the memoir, Rice describes a familiar Catholic upbringing imbued with opulence and mystery. The incense. The statuary. The stained glass. The darkness. She learned the world, she writes, through her senses, through a “preliterate” understanding of the world. She writes that she possessed “an internal gallery of pictorial images” that, lamentably, was replaced “by the alphabetic letters” she learned later.

“You might call it the Mozart effect, but it was the Catholic effect on me,” she said.

In a sense, the memoir also is a confessional about her struggle as a writer to be a reader, a thinker and an author with a distinct literary style. Her stories often are reveries with no end in sight — and all too often ugly with pedantic unwinding, numbing in detail and overly simplistic, a pastiche of cliches.

Her turn in direction — from vampire fiction to Christian musings — still isn’t winning the critics over.

In The New York Times, Christopher Buckley slammed Rice’s memoir as “a crashing, mind-numbing bore. This is the literary equivalent of waterboarding.”

And the bar is high when it comes to writing about Jesus.

“The best may be Nikos Kazantzakis’ ‘The Last Temptation of Christ,’ ” said Jason Berry, a novelist and journalist who has written extensively on the Catholic priest sex abuse scandal. “But also (G.K.) Chesterton, Norman Mailer. … A lot of narrative artists in both literature and film have taken on Jesus, so to speak.”

Rice isn’t out to impress the critics, though.

“My objective is simple: It’s to write books about our Lord living on Earth that make him real to people who don’t believe in him; or people who have never really tried to believe in him,” she said.

She pressed the point: “I mean, I’ve made vampires believable to grown women. Now, if I can do that, I can make our Lord Jesus Christ believable to people who’ve never believed in him. I hope and pray.”

For her devotees, whatever she writes invariably goes down like a smooth bloodbath, that favorite Goth beverage sometimes made with raspberry liqueur, red wine and cranberry juice.

“There are so many people dedicated to her. They want her to write more vampire books,” said Marta Acosta, author of the popular “Casa Dracula” series, a “comedy of manners” that plays on vampire themes. She also runs the Vampire Wire, a book blog for fans of gore and the undead.

As for her, Acosta couldn’t care less if Rice sinks back into the vampire vein.

“People think it’s sexual, but it’s not. It’s suppressed stuff. Southern Gothic,” Acosta said. “How many centuries is Louis (played by Brad Pitt in the movie ‘Interview With the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles’) going to whine?”

Never again, it seems.

Rice is busy writing about Jesus as a minister. And that’s a tall order, Rice said.

Yes, global warming “is just propaganda”

A former editor of New Scientist, Nigel Calder has written three books on climate change. His latest is The Chilling Stars (Icon Books) co-authored with the Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark and described by The Times as ‘the new totem of the climate-change sceptics’.

News Letter | Oct 3, 2008

by Nigel Calder

Worldwide interest in my quite run-of-the-mill comment, on the need to debate the manmade global warming hypothesis, is pleasing but not surprising. It confirms that my fellow science writers have miscalculated badly. Most readers don’t want endless
scare stories about climatic doom, accompanied by authoritarian lectures about their carbon footprints. They’re hungry for a variety of opinions.

Unfortunately only 1% of the huge number of articles on climate change in the posh London newspapers deviate from the official line of the Intergovernmental Panel. That’s not my reckoning. It comes from researchers at Oxford University who complain about the more balanced reporting in the not-so-posh papers, with a deviancy rate of 23%. They say it has ’skewed public understanding of human contributions to climate change’. In other words, kindly abandon the journalistic principle that different points of views should be heard on controversial matters, or else a lot of dreadful people out there (you or me) may not truly believe that climate change is their fault.

Yes, you’ve got it. Man-made global warming is just propaganda. My father Ritchie Calder was a science writer too, but during the Second World War he played a leading part in Allied propaganda against Nazi Germany. He told me quite a lot about the tricks, employed in what was then a good cause. Now I watch them being used every day by the global wamers.

For example: exaggerate small facts. A brilliant wartime example came when someone in occupied Belgium was chalking V on public walls. He meant V for Vrijheid, or freedom. But London announced that in occupied Europe people were writing V for Victory everywhere. So people listening secretly to the BBC went out and did just that, to annoy the Germans and hearten their neighbours.

The polar bears qualify as a similarly astute exaggeration from the global warming camp. Some years ago, a small family of bears was caught in a violent storm, and drowned. That could have happened a hundred or a thousand years ago. But no, the Disneyesque sob story is put about, by Al Gore and others, that bears are drowning because the Arctic ice is melting. Total rubbish, because the polar bears are thriving. But it’s dazzling propaganda.

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Global cooling soon to replace global warming

Another technique is to hush up unfavourable news. In wartime that can mean not informing even the bereaved relatives if an important warship has sunk without the enemy knowing. Again the polar ice provides a modern parallel. Last year you were told – shock, horror! — that Arctic sea ice was at its lowest extent since satellite measurements began. What went unreported was that Antarctic sea ice was simultaneously at a record high. The collusion of my fellow journalists in the deception is disturbing. Although the big freeze in Antarctica was plainly announced in a press release from the US weather bureau, NOAA, not a single newspaper in North America or Europe carried this unfavourable story.

My Dad’s chief opponent was Hitler’s propaganda minister Josef Goebbels. Among many meditations on his craft, he wrote, ‘The English follow the principle that when you lie, you should lie big, and stick to it.’ And of course Goebbels did the same himself – most wickedly in the case of the Jews.

One big lie about climate change is that man-made global warming is proven scientifically. Not so. On the contrary, any objective physicist would say that the evidence is strongly against it. The very mechanism for the supposed greenhouse warming, reinforced by that extra CO2, requires tropical air temperatures to rise faster at high altitudes (6 miles above the ground) than they do lower down. Weather balloons that routinely carry thermometers to those heights and beyond have shown no such trend over recent decades.

That negative result was an important element of what I had in mind when remarking, in my comment last Monday, that the scientific evidence is far stronger for a rival explanation of climate change. It’s the discovery that the Sun controls the cosmic rays that help to make the Earth’s clouds. The supporting observations and experiments are explained in simple terms by Dr Henrik Svensmark and me in our book The Chilling Stars.

The biggest lie of all, breathtaking in its audacity, is the insistence that mankind’s misbehaviour means that global warming is getting worse. The measurements for August 2008 are just in, and they confirm the world is distinctly cooler this year than last. It’s fair enough to argue about whether the Earth’s temperature has stopped rising, or merely paused, or gone into reverse. But the key fact is that, despite that indisputable increase of CO2 in the air, the Earth is no warmer now than it was 12 years ago.

Sir Walter Scott’s novel about the Knights of Malta to be published 200 years after his death

Grandmaster Jean Parisot de la Valette (1494-1568), commanded the Knights Hospitaller (Knights of Malta) during the Great Siege of Malta

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Malta Independent | Aug 18, 2008

by Michael Carabott

One of Scotland’s greatest writers’ so far unpublished works are to be published almost 200 years after his death – one of them is The Siege of Malta, written in 1831.

Sir Walter Scott came to Malta on doctors’ orders and, inspired by his stay, he penned the novel The Siege of Malta. The visit to warmer climes did not do him much good and he passed away in 1832, one year after completing the book.

The work is a novel, but is based on fact – the stand made by the Order of the Knights of St John against the massive Ottoman Army in the Great Siege of 1565.

Sir Walter had sent the draft of the manuscript to his publisher in 1832, the year in which he also wrote the other unpublished work, Bizarro, but his deteriorating health conditions took their toll on his literary abilities and led to the decision not to publish the work.

It is a known fact that another writer had used Sir Walter’s unfinished notes to publish The Siege of Malta in 1942. They were never printed, as both prospective publications were full of ‘silly’ errors and spelling mistakes brought on by the onset of ill health and old age. It was believed that the quality of the novels would have tarnished Sir Walter’s reputation.

The Edinburgh University Press took the matter in hand and has published a corrected version of both works in a single volume. Other literary works by Sir Walter Scott include Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, The Bride of Lammermoor and Waverly. His writing style altered after the publishing firm he part-owned went bankrupt in 1826 and he spent the next five years churning out reams of work to generate cash for his creditors.

In some ways Scott was the first English-language author to have a truly international career in his lifetime, with many contemporary readers all over Europe, Australia, and North America. His novels and poetry are still read, and many of his works remain classics of both English-language literature and of Scottish literature.

Information on the Knights of Malta

Solzhenitsyn, chronicler of Soviet gulag, dies

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst; the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

AP | Aug 3, 2008

By DOUGLAS BIRCH

MOSCOW (AP) — Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author whose books chronicled the horrors of dictator Josef Stalin’s slave labor camps, has died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89.

Stepan Solzhenitsyn told The Associated Press his father died late Sunday in Moscow, but declined further comment.

Through unflinching accounts of the eight years he spent in the Soviet Gulag, Solzhenitsyn’s novels and non-fiction works exposed the secret history of the vast prison system that enslaved millions. The accounts riveted his countrymen and earned him years of bitter exile, but international renown.

And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person’s courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.

Beginning with the 1962 short novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” Solzhenitsyn (sohl-zheh-NEETS’-ihn) devoted himself to describing what he called the human “meat grinder” that had caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.

His “Gulag Archipelago” trilogy of the 1970s shocked readers by describing the savagery of the Soviet state under the dictator Josef Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe.

But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person — Solzhenitsyn himself — survived, physically and spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice.

The West offered him shelter and accolades. But Solzhenitsyn’s refusal to bend despite enormous pressure, perhaps, also gave him the courage to criticize Western culture for what he considered its weakness and decadence.

After a triumphant return from exile in the U.S. in 1994 that included a 56-day train trip across Russia to become reacquainted with his native land, Solzhenitsyn later expressed annoyance and disappointment that most Russians hadn’t read his books.

During the 1990s, his stalwart nationalist views, his devout Orthodoxy, his disdain for capitalism and disgust with the tycoons who bought Russian industries and resources cheaply following the Soviet collapse, were unfashionable. He faded from public view.

But under Vladimir Putin’s 2000-2008 presidency, Solzhenitsyn’s vision of Russia as a bastion of Orthodox Christianity, as a place with a unique culture and destiny, gained renewed prominence.

Putin now argues, as Solzhenitsyn did in a speech at Harvard University in 1978, that Russia has a separate civilization from the West, one that can’t be reconciled either to Communism or western-style liberal democracy, but requires a system adapted to its history and traditions.

“Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth’s surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking,” Solzhenitsyn said in the Harvard speech. “For one thousand years Russia has belonged to such a category.”

Born Dec. 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk, Solzhenitsyn served as a front-line artillery captain in World War II, where, in the closing weeks of the war, he was arrested for writing what he called “certain disrespectful remarks” about Stalin in a letter to a friend, referring to him as “the man with the mustache.” He served seven years in a labor camp in the barren steppe of Kazakhstan and three more years in internal exile in Central Asia.

That’s where he began to write, memorizing much of his work so it wouldn’t be lost if it were seized. His theme was the suffering and injustice of life in Stalin’s gulag — a Soviet abbreviation for the slave labor camp system, which Solzhenitsyn made part of the lexicon.

He continued writing while working as a mathematics teacher in the provincial Russian city of Ryazan.

The first fruit of this labor was “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” the story of a carpenter struggling to survive in a Soviet labor camp, where he had been sent, like Solzhenitsyn, after service in the war.

The book was published in 1962 by order of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was eager to discredit the abuses of Stalin, his predecessor, and created a sensation in a country where unpleasant truths were spoken in whispers, if at all. Abroad, the book — which went through numerous revisions — was lauded not only for its bravery, but for its spare, unpretentious language.
After Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, Solzhenitsyn began facing KGB harassment, publication of his works was blocked and he was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union. But he was undeterred.

“A great writer is, so to speak, a secret government in his country,” he wrote in “The First Circle,” his next novel, a book about inmates in one of Stalin’s “special camps” for scientists who were deemed politically unreliable but whose skills were essential.

Solzhenitsyn, a graduate from the Department of Physics and Mathematics at Rostov University, was sent to one of these camps in 1946, soon after his arrest.

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Master of the Mysteries: A new look at mystical Los Angeles and its high priest, Manly Hall

Manly Palmer Hall with part of huge collection of Christian medals in photo from 1962. In his lifetime, Hall befriended notables as disparate as Bela Lugosi and John Denver. For his writings alone he was made an honorary 33rd-degree Freemason (the highest honor), and even Elvis was a fan, sending Priscilla Presley to one of the world renowned orator’s lectures.

“Master of the Mysteries” by Louis Sahagun takes a trip back in time to early 20th century L.A.’s obsession with the occult.

Los Angeles Times | Jun 21, 2008

By Steffie Nelson

Last Sunday evening at the Silent Movie Theater, a clip from the 1938 astrological murder mystery “When Were You Born?” was shown as part of an “Occult L.A.” program curated by the author Erik Davis. In the clip, legendary occult scholar Manly P. Hall, who had also written the movie’s script, appeared on screen to introduce the concept of astrology. With penetrating blue eyes, thick dark hair and a rakish mustache, Hall had the looks of a silent film star, and he radiated intensity as he explained the various personality traits of the different sun signs — Leos are loyal, Capricorns are brave, and so on. But that’s not all: “Astrology can solve crime!” he exhorted. “It has solved many crimes in the past.”

At this the audience burst into laughter: Yet another absurd Hollywood twist. It wasn’t the late Hall’s finest moment — in fact, he’d done the scene reluctantly. But afterward he held out hope that “When Were You Born?,” the first major motion picture to treat the subject of astrology seriously, might help “open the way for a great cycle of occult philosophy,” he wrote.

The film was a bomb, but the fact that this obscure clip was being screened before a sold-out crowd of artists, intellectuals and spiritual seekers shows that the cycle of Hall’s influence continues. And it may grow in the coming months, for Process Media has just published “Master of the Mysteries,” the first biography of Manly Palmer Hall, written by Louis Sahagun (who is a staff writer at The Times).

In his lifetime, Hall befriended notables as disparate as Bela Lugosi and John Denver. For his writings alone he was made an honorary 33rd-degree Freemason (the highest honor), and even Elvis was a fan, sending Priscilla Presley to one of the world renowned orator’s lectures because he was afraid of getting mobbed himself.

Aimed to be ‘high priest’

Hall died in 1990 at age 89, and it wasn’t until a few year later that Sahagun, who’d written his obituary, began to delve deeply into his history and body of work — which includes more than 200 books, most notably his magnum opus, “The Secret Teachings of All Ages.”

“It turned out he was a pretty darn good writer,” Sahagun said. “His books were strange and absolutely fascinating, and his whole raison d’être was applying ancient philosophies to solve modern problems. . . . He wanted to be the high priest, the hierophant, of Southern California.”

The year Hall arrived in Los Angeles, 1919, was the year the city started to boom. “It’s a fascinating parallel,” Sahagun said. “Southern California in general was the last best place, a place of new beginnings.” To Sahagun, Hall’s journey was “the spiritual equivalent of the California dream,” and when he decided to write “Master of the Mysteries,” he wanted it to be as much a history of mystical Los Angeles as a biography.

Jodi Wille, the editor of “Master of the Mysteries,” said, “I learned so much working on this book. Not only was Manly P. Hall this incredible thinker, but Los Angeles was this remarkable city run by wild bohemian visionaries who were totally tuned in. It makes me just want to turn everybody on to it so we can know what our real roots are. Our roots are not Britney Spears.”

A junior high school dropout from a broken home, Hall was regarded by many as a magician, but to Sahagun he was really a “one-stop scholar of ancient ideas.” One of Hall’s first friends was Sydney Brownson, a phrenologist with a booth on the Santa Monica Pier, who shared his knowledge of Hinduism, Greek philosophy and Christian mysticism. Hall, who had a photographic memory, furthered his studies of ancient religions and soon was speaking at the Church of the People downtown. By 1920, only 19 years old, he was running the church and delivering Sunday lectures about Rosicrucianism and Theosophy, the mystical philosophical system founded by Madame Helena Blavatsky; as well as the teachings of Pythagoras, Confucius and Plato.

And he was not addressing some fringe contingent. At this time Los Angeles was alive with esoteric ideas and populated by spiritualists with names like Princess Zoraida and Pneumandros. As Sahagun put it, “Even flamboyant holy roller Aimee Semple McPherson, who arrived in Los Angeles in 1918, was milquetoast compared to others setting up religious shops in town.”

Hall became the beneficiary of Caroline and Estelle Lloyd, a wealthy mother-daughter duo from Ventura, and in 1923 their generosity enabled a trip around the world that would provide the inspiration — and the information — for his encyclopedic masterwork, “The Secret Teachings of All Ages.” The publication of this lavishly illustrated, oversize text, which sold for $100 in 1928, turned Hall into an icon — no doubt partly thanks to the dramatic portraits done by his friend William Mortensen, a Hollywood cameraman who had also photographed Jean Harlow and Cecil B. DeMille.

Place for ‘truth seekers’

In 1934, Hall founded the nonprofit Philosophical Research Society. He purchased a plot of land near Griffith Park for $10 and commissioned architect Robert Stacy-Judd to design a Mayan-inspired center with a library and auditorium, which is still active today. A plaque in the courtyard, near where the current Sunday lecture schedule is posted, reads, “Dedicated to Truth Seekers of All Time.”

Yet for all his mental discipline, Hall was in terrible physical shape, with great folds of sagging flesh around his middle (Sahagun describes him as “avocado shaped”). According to Sahagun, Hall, when asked what he would wish for if he were given one wish, said that he would like to be placed in a swimming pool full of chocolate pudding so that he could eat his way out.

Nor did his vast knowledge help his personal relationships. Hall was married twice, the first ending with his wife’s suicide; the second, almost 20 years later, was to a woman who was emotionally abusive and was classified by the FBI as a certifiable nuisance. Both marriages were childless. Sahagun doesn’t believe Hall’s second marriage was ever consummated, and there were rumors that he might have been gay. Whatever the case, this was a man who lived primarily in the world of books and ideas, and also one, it’s important to note, who had always warned of the dangers of putting spiritual leaders on a pedestal.

“All followers who offer to adorn and deify their teachers set up a false condition,” Hall wrote in a 1942 essay. “Human beings, experience has proved, make better humans than they do gods.”

“That sets him apart from, say, a Deepak Chopra, who titles a book ‘Defying the Aging Process,’ ” Sahagun said.

Sadly, Hall and Los Angeles grew out of step with each other. His work might have been “the very soil that grew stories and myths like ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ ” but by the time George Lucas came along, Sahagun noted, “Manly’s trove of ancient notions just seemed so dusty and out of touch.” (Not so today, when Tarcher Penguin’s 2003 reissue of “The Secret Teachings” is already in its 16th printing.)

In the ultimate, final tragedy, this man who believed in reincarnation and who had planned to leave the earthly plane consciously, might have been the victim of a greedy plot devised by his assistant Daniel Fritz, who rewrote Hall’s will. Hall’s body was found under suspicious and horrifying circumstances, apparently dead for hours and with thousands of ants streaming from his nose and mouth. The case was never solved.

Not surprisingly, this was the beginning of a low point for the Philosophical Research Society, which sold rare alchemical texts to the Getty to pay for some of the legal fees incurred by Hall’s widow.

Today, however, the center is on an upswing. In 2002, the society formed a distance learning university, offering a master’s degree program in consciousness studies, with faculty including Jonathan Young, a protégé of Joseph Campbell, and Vesna Wallace, a professor in the religious studies department of UC Santa Barbara. This January, the university received national accreditation. The library, featuring some of the rarest philosophical, religious and occult texts in existence (books on black magic and Satanism are stored under a Buddha to balance the energies), remains open to the public every Saturday and Sunday.

Explore with a book

“People are hungry for the material,” said society librarian Maja D’Aoust, who co-authored the alchemical primer “The Secret Source” with Adam Parfrey and lectures most Sundays.

D’Aoust conceded that some might find the prospect of thumbing through 30,000 volumes intimidating, and she suggested just starting randomly. “There are very interesting synchronicities surrounding the research that happens in this building,” she noted. “Just pick a book, any book. Even if you don’t know what you’re looking for, it will probably find you.”