The important lessons: Why Hitler considered himself a wolf and his enemies vampires – National Post

By Terra Arnone

Lesson #3:On werewolves and vampires.

Out of their depth. By 1942, British Navy vessels had begun to shift the tide in the Atlantic battlefront, sinking more German U-boats than Hitlers army could Allied submarines. Scientific progress proved a major factor in Allied dominance, with the development of Radar and Sonar technology significantly upping the odds of locating German vessels in deep water. But Germany Navy officials had a different strategy in mind: U-boat captain Hans Roeder convinced colleagues in arms the British were using pendulums to predict their boats location underwater. As an amateur pendulum dowser himself,the enterprising captain established the Pendulum Institute to pinpoint British ships, enlisting pendulum dowsers and occultists from across the country and tasking them with applying their clairvoyant powers to search for British vessels. Results were, unsurprisingly, not altogether successful.Nazi Werewolves and German Lycanthropy. Widespread belief in lycanthropy the magical metamorphosis of man into wolf dates back to Germanys ancient and medieval ages, when men would don the woodland animals pelts and take to the forest to transform fully. Waning in intervening centuries, Germanys lycanthropic predilections rose to new popularity under Hitlers Nazi regime, with Third Reich officials recalling images of the Germanic wolf in propaganda and commonly associating the term with their leading para-military groups, including the famed Organisation Werewolf. Hitlers name is itself a derivation of the animal, meaning father wolf a mammalian title he wore proudly, citing himself as a wolf on many public occasions throughout the war.

The Enemy Vampire. While members of the Third Reich drew on folklore to promote themselves during the Second World War, they used similarly mythic terms to alienate enemies at home. The historical evil counterpart to wolves good nature in Germanic folklore, the vampire became the preferred appellation for Jewish and Slavic people under the Third Reich. Alfred Karasek, a prominent SS folklorist, gained infamy for his documentation of vampiric behaviour, particularly among Danube Swabians Germans occupying the contested southeastern region of Banat. Eyewitness reports alleged a slew of atrocities under anti-German Yugoslavian leader Josip Tito, recounting observations of torture in which [Slavic vampires] cut off their ears or nose, poked out their eyes, ripped off their faces. This mythical matchup lingers in Germanic folklore today, with spooky stories featuring woodland creatures cast to characterize both victor and victim in modern fairytales.

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The important lessons: Why Hitler considered himself a wolf and his enemies vampires - National Post