Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels
Austrian political and racial theorist, occultist, and publisher
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Early life
He was born on 19 July 1874 in the Penzing district of Vienna in what was then Austria-Hungary, as the son of schoolmaster Johann Lanz and his wife Katharina, née Hoffenreich. His maternal grandfather Samuel Hoffenreich (later known as Josef Hoffenreich) was born in 1815 in Holíč, Slovakia, and was the son of a Jewish merchant.
His parents were middle class, and his father's ancestors had been burghers in Vienna since the early 18th century. Consequently, he claimed to be the son of Baron Johannes Lancz de Liebenfels and began to call himself "Baron Adolf Georg (Jörg) Lanz Von Liebenfels Ph.D."
As a young boy, he was fascinated by Arthurian legends about the Holy Grail.
Liebenfels became a monk in the Cistercian Order in 1893, assuming the name Georg and living in the Heiligenkreuz Abbey. In 1894, he claimed to have become "enlightened" after finding the tombstone of a Knight Templar, and began developing his theories of "blue-blond Aryanism" and "lower races". In 1899, he left the Cistercian Order.
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Work with Theozoology
In 1905, he published his book Theozoologie oder die Kunde von den Sodoms-Äfflingen und dem Götter-Elektron (lit. 'Theozoology, or the Science of the Sodomite-Apelings and the Divine Electron') in which he advocated sterilization of the sick and the "lower races" as well as forced labour for "castrated chandals", and glorified the "Aryan race" as "Gottmenschen" (lit. 'god-men'). Liebenfels justified his esoteric racial ideology by attempting to give it a Biblical foundation; according to him, Eve, whom he described as initially being divine, involved herself with a demon and gave birth to the "lower races" in the process. One year later, in 1905, Liebenfels founded the magazine Ostara, Briefbücherei der Blonden und Mannesrechtler, of which he became the sole author and editor in 1908. Liebenfels himself claimed to have up to 100,000 subscribers, but it is generally agreed that this figure is grossly exaggerated. Readers of this publication included Adolf Hitler, Dietrich Eckart and the British Field Marshal Herbert Kitchener among others. Liebenfels claimed he was visited by the young Hitler in 1909, whom he supplied with two missing issues of the magazine.
As a student of Guido von List, Liebenfels further expanded his theories; other influences included Otto Weininger, of whom Liebenfels was a fervent follower, and Helena Blavatsky.
Secret Society Order of the New Templars
The Order of the New Templars – Ordo Novi Templi (ONT) was a proto-fascist secret society in Germany founded by Lanz in 1900. It was modelled after the Catholic military order the Knights Templar and similar in its hierarchical structure to the Order of Cistercians, of which Lanz had been a member.
Members used code names so that betrayal was difficult.
Lanz functioned as ideologue and agitator of the group, justifying violence and punishments such as castration in order to establish a fascist state in Germany and defend it against communism.
Interactions with Aryan societies
In 1905 Liebenfels and some 50 other supporters of List signed a declaration endorsing the proposed Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft (Guido von List Society), which was officially founded in 1908. He also founded his own esoteric organisation, the Ordo Novi Templi (Order of the New Templars) in 1907. These movements were supposed to "further the racial self-confidence by doing pedigree and racial research, beauty contests and the founding of racist "future sites" in underdeveloped parts of the Earth" (das Rasse Bewusstsein durch Stammbaum- und Rassekunde Forschung, Schönheitswettbewerbe und die Gründung rassistischer Zukunftsstätten in unterentwickelten Teilen der Erde zu fördern). To further this agenda, he purchased the ruins of Burg Werfenstein on the Danube in Austria. Neither organization managed to attract a large member base; though, it is estimated that the order had around 300 members, most prominent of which was the poet Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando. Liebenfels‘s claim that the organization was already founded prior to 1900, and that he met with August Strindberg in 1896 and managed to convince him to join the order, have been shown to be fabricated.
After Hitler's rise to prominence in the 1920s, Liebenfels tried to be recognized as one of his ideological precursors. In the preface of issue one in the 3rd series of Ostara, c. 1927, he wrote:
One shall remember that the swastika and fascist movements are basically offspring of Ostara.