Book Review: Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult by Peter Levenda

More like "The Occult's Involvement with the Nazis"

This is an interesting book but it must be said that the cover and the title are a little misleading. Levenda does talk quite a bit about the Nazis and their occult movement. However, great swaths of the book recount general occult societies' history through the 20th century. Levenda lavishes chapters on Aleister Crowley (who Lavenda seems to think influenced almost every event in the first part of the century).

One further thing must be said about this book. Levenda approaches his subject from a number of assumptions. Assumptions that many people would call conspiracy theories. For instance, to Levenda, Martin Boremann's survival and escape to South America is not a theory but a fact. Levenda reminds the reader on several occasions that Boremann escaped to South America in the guise of a Catholic priest and with the help of the Catholic church. The fact that DNA testing in the early 1990s has pretty much overwhelmingly proved that Boremann died in Berlin in 1945 never comes into play.

The Catholic church does not come off well with Lavenda and he adds the fact that they were allied to the Nazis from the start (another "fact" Levanda accepts as gospel) to the many recent charges against them. Another "fact" is that Crowley was a British MI5 agent from WW1 and through WW2, actively working with the British government. These and other "facts", some just not well documented to others which are pretty much the territory of Conspiracy Theorists, really increase the "grain of salt" factor of the book.

Levenda, not a historian but some manner of journalist who spend most of his life investigating the occult, really knows his stuff though. Much of the text are obscure and phantasmagorical occult references to societies and personalities long forgotten and dead. Charles Manson gets a good airing as does LeVay, founder of Satanism. He does try to tie it all back to Nazi Germany in the first part of the book. Helena Blavatsky is fingered as one of the founding influences for Naziism, which she probably was.

Even for all the wild VonDaniken-esque ramblings and heapings of "facts", this book is a really good read. Lavenda's story of how he tried to penetrate a secret "Nazi" compound in Chile (which indeed is there and in which the Chilean dictatorship of the time did carry out very gruesome acts) is very gripping. Whether or not Martin Boreman and every other unaccounted for Nazi was hiding there at the time is really up for debate though. Its also good if you are up on your occult knowledge to know some of what Levenda is talking about. I recommend this book but go into it as a book written by an occultist with an axe to grind, not as a history written by an academic.