The final three episodes of the Mystery Babylon series, broadcast in late February and early March 1994, form an arc unlike anything else in the series. Rather than reading from books with his own commentary, William Cooper aired segments from a commercially produced British documentary series, The Occult History of the Third Reich, narrated by Patrick Allen. The documentary is the four-part series released in 1991, written and directed by Dave Flitton, which treated the swastika, the SS, and Heinrich Himmler across its parts. Cooper provided brief commentary before and after each segment, framing the documentary as confirmation of the thesis he had been building across 38 previous broadcasts.
This hub documents the three episodes, the historical content of the documentary Cooper aired, what primary sources are involved, and the historians’ view of both the documented facts and the interpretive framework Cooper placed around them. It also states plainly: the Holocaust is documented historical fact. The murder of six million Jews and millions of others by the Nazi state is not a matter of dispute, speculation, or competing interpretation. The series Cooper broadcast documented genuine occult influences on the ideological formation of the Nazi movement; that is a matter of established scholarly record. What mainstream historians do not support is the extension of that lineage into a still-active global conspiracy operating through modern institutions. This site records the claims as broadcast and marks that distinction clearly.
As on every page of this site, the framing is documentary. These are the claims the broadcasts made. The site does not endorse them. For the full series, start with the complete episode guide.
How the Series Frames the Third Reich Arc
Cooper’s argument in this arc had two layers. The first was factual and broadly consistent with established scholarship: the ideological foundations of National Socialism were deeply shaped by Theosophical racial cosmology, particularly Helena Blavatsky’s concept of root races and the Aryan fifth race; Guido Von List’s runic nationalism provided the swastika’s pre-Nazi meaning; the Thule Society’s Munich lodge helped found the German Workers Party; and the SS under Himmler was built as a racial breeding experiment drawing explicitly on occult Volkisch tradition alongside eugenics science. These connections are matters of documented historical record, confirmed by historians including Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke in The Occult Roots of Nazism (1985).
The second layer was Cooper’s own interpretive frame: that these facts confirmed his larger thesis, that the same Mystery Babylon system he had traced from ancient Babylon through the Templars, Rosicrucians, and Freemasonry also produced the Third Reich, and that the same system was operating in the United States in 1994. This is where the series parts company with mainstream scholarship. Historians document the occult-nationalist lineage as a German and Austrian historical phenomenon, not as evidence of a still-active transnational conspiracy.
Cooper’s commentary before each documentary segment also carried an explicit and emphatic rejection of white nationalist ideology. He told listeners who had been drawn into Aryan identity movements that the master race concept was invented rather than discovered, that no historical Aryans resembled white nationalist claims, and that those caught up in such movements were being manipulated by the same system they believed they were opposing. These statements are part of the broadcast record.
The Third Reich Arc: Episodes and Air Dates
MB39: The Occult and the Third Reich Part 1 (February 28, 1994)
The episode opens with Cooper addressing listeners who had been drawn into Aryan nationalist movements, telling them that the Aryan master race concept was invented rather than discovered and that the pattern of events in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s was repeating itself in the United States in 1994. He then plays the first segment of the documentary, titled The Enigma of the Swastika. The documentary opens with a narrator describing Nazi Germany as a state that would sterilize, enslave, and systematically murder millions, and frames National Socialism as an enigma that conventional political analysis cannot explain. An eyewitness account of the 1934 Nuremberg rally is quoted, comparing the spectacle to a Gothic cathedral mass. The documentary’s central argument is that the swastika was not the Nazi party’s invention. Helena Blavatsky’s 1888 The Secret Doctrine described it as the most potent of seven esoteric symbols, associated with the sun and with the Aryan fifth root race. A German-language Theosophical periodical was the first German publication to carry the swastika on its cover. From Blavatsky, the documentary moves to Guido Von List, the Austrian occultist who developed an interpretation of Norse runes as a hidden Aryan alphabet and identified the swastika as the symbol of constant generation. His List Society inspired a network of German-nationalist groups whose members wore swastika talismans in the Great War. The Thule Society, Munich lodge of the anti-Semitic German Order, co-founded the German Workers Party in January 1919; its chairman Karl Harrer co-founded the party with Anton Drexler. On September 12, 1919, an army intelligence operative named Adolf Hitler attended a party meeting as a spy and within weeks had joined it. Cooper’s closing remarks note that he has been trying to tell his audience this for a long time.
MB40: The Occult and the Third Reich Part 2 (March 1, 1994)
Cooper opens by reading from the 1924 edition of Mackey’s Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, noting that its entry for Aryan traces the term to Blavatsky, and that its 1893 edition lists the swastika as a cross symbol, connecting Masonic scholarship to the same Theosophical-racial lineage. He then plays the second documentary segment, The SS: Blood and Soil. The documentary covers the cultural conditions in German-speaking lands around the turn of the century, the Lebensreform and Wandervogel movements, Aleister Crowley’s claimed 1909 Adepthood, and the figure of Jorg Lanz, an Austrian ex-monk who fused List’s Aryan occultism with emerging eugenics science into a doctrine he called theozoology. Lanz’s journal Ostara, founded in 1905, proposed polygamy for pure Aryans, compulsory sterilization of the impure, and deportation of inferior races to Madagascar; Hitler was a documented reader since the age of twenty. The documentary traces the formation of the SS through the Stosstrupp Hitler bodyguard, Himmler’s appointment as SS head in January 1929, and his transformation of the organization into a racial breeding experiment. The Race and Resettlement Bureau was examining nearly two thousand SS marriage applications a month by 1933. Compulsory sterilization laws passed within months of Hitler becoming Chancellor; over 56,000 sterilizations were ordered in 1934 alone. The Night of the Long Knives on June 30, 1934, in which Himmler and Heydrich manufactured evidence of an SA coup, resulted in the murder of up to five hundred people and established the SS as the dominant security force. After the death of President Hindenburg on August 2, 1934, the army swore its oath to Hitler personally. Cooper closes in German: Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer, then asks his audience to wake up.
MB41: The Occult and the Third Reich Part 3 (March 2, 1994)
The final broadcast of the Mystery Babylon series. Cooper opens with remarks on current political events, then plays the third documentary segment, Himmler the Mystic. The documentary covers the SS’s full eugenic program in detail: the requirement that SS ancestry be traced back to 1750, the rigorous racial vetting of all marriage partners, and Himmler’s vision of breeding a race of super-humans from whom the Aryan’s psychic powers would grow ever stronger. The documentary traces this vision to its intellectual foundations: Sir Francis Galton’s eugenics, the American state sterilization laws that German eugenicists praised and studied, and the SS catechism’s equation of God with the race. By 1927 eugenics under the name racial hygiene was gaining academic respectability in Germany; university faculties offered courses in it. The documentary covers the Edda Society, founded by Rudolf John Gorsleben in 1925, which aimed to decode the Aryan heritage in Norse runes, and General Erich Ludendorff’s belief that national salvation lay in reviving Norse worship. Himmler himself, trained as an agriculturist, had avidly consumed German occultist writings as a youth and grown obsessed with astrology, spiritualism, and herbalism. The documentary is the most direct in the arc at describing the full scope of the Nazi state’s crimes: the eugenics program from sterilization through the extermination of those deemed unfit, the SS breeding program’s intended multi-generational scope. Cooper’s brief final remarks close what he calls the last episode of Mystery Babylon.
A Note on Format
All three episodes consist primarily of audio from a commercially produced British documentary series, The Occult History of the Third Reich, narrated by Patrick Allen. The documentary is under copyright and is not available through this site. Cooper aired the material with his own brief framing commentary before and after each segment. This page summarizes the material Cooper chose to broadcast and his stated framing of it. Short quotations are used for documentary and critical purposes only. For historical research into the documented connections between occultism and National Socialism, the primary scholarly sources are Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Occult Roots of Nazism (1985) and George Mosse’s The Crisis of German Ideology (1964).
Key Figures the Series Discusses
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891)
The Russian founder of Theosophy whose 1888 work The Secret Doctrine introduced into European occultism the concept of seven root races, with the fifth, named Aryan, as the current race of ascending spiritual evolution. Blavatsky was not a racist in the sense the Nazis would later employ: her occultism was universalist in many respects. But her racial cosmology, including the swastika as the Aryan race’s symbol, provided the vocabulary that German-nationalist occultists adapted into something Blavatsky herself would not have recognized. The Secret Doctrine is public domain.
Guido Von List (1848-1919)
The Austrian occultist who claimed psychic visions of ancient Germanic tribes and developed the interpretation of Norse runes as a hidden Aryan alphabet. He identified the swastika as the twice holy secret of constant generation and his List Society inspired the German and Austrian nationalist groups whose members wore swastika talismans in the Great War. His writings directly influenced the Thule Society and, through them, the early Nazi movement.
Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954)
The Austrian ex-monk who, in his journal Ostara (founded 1905), fused List’s Aryan occultism with eugenics into a doctrine he called theozoology. He proposed polygamy for racially pure Aryans, compulsory sterilization of the impure, and deportation of inferior races to Madagascar. His Order of the New Templars, founded in 1907 at Burg Werfenstein, anticipated the SS in its racial vetting of members. Hitler was a documented reader of Ostara from around the age of twenty.
Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945)
The Reichsfuhrer of the SS, whose combination of agricultural training, eugenics science, and deep immersion in German occultist writings produced what the documentary calls the strangest eugenics experiment in human history. Himmler’s vision was explicitly drawn from Volkisch occultism: if the Aryan blood ran most strongly in the purest individuals, breeding from them would eventually produce super-humans whose psychic powers would grow stronger with each generation. The Race and Resettlement Bureau he built was the institutional mechanism for that program.
Key Concepts
The Blavatsky-to-Swastika lineage
The documentary’s core historical argument is that the swastika entered European nationalist movements through Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophical writings, spread through Guido Von List’s List Society into German military culture before 1914, and reached the Nazi party through the Thule Society. This lineage is confirmed by mainstream scholarship. The symbol had much older origins in Tibetan, Hindu, and other traditions; its specific modern European meaning as an Aryan racial symbol derives from the Blavatsky-List pathway the documentary traces.
The Thule Society and the founding of the NSDAP
The Thule Society was the Munich lodge of the German Order, an anti-Semitic nationalist secret society founded in 1912 and devoted to Guido Von List’s teachings. On September 12, 1919, Hitler attended a meeting of the German Workers Party, which had been co-founded by Thule chairman Karl Harrer, as an army spy and within weeks had joined it. The Thule Society’s involvement in the early Nazi party is documented historical fact, confirmed by multiple mainstream historians. Cooper uses it as evidence for his broader lineage thesis; historians understand it as a German-specific phenomenon, not a transnational conspiratorial network.
The SS eugenics program
The documentary covers the eugenics program in factual detail. By 1933 the Race and Resettlement Bureau was processing nearly two thousand SS marriage applications a month. Compulsory sterilization laws were passed within months of Hitler becoming Chancellor, and over 56,000 sterilizations were ordered in 1934 alone. The German program rapidly outgrew the American one its architects had studied: between 1907 and 1939 more than 30,000 people were sterilized in twenty-nine US states, while in Germany, where compulsory sterilization began in January 1934, an estimated 400,000 people were sterilized under the 1933 law. The documentary presents the SS program as the largest and most terrifying eugenics experiment in history. This characterization is consistent with the historical record.
Cooper’s anti-racist framing
Before each of the three documentary segments, Cooper told his audience that the Aryan master race concept was invented rather than discovered, that those caught up in white nationalist ideology had been deceived by the same Mystery Babylon system they believed they were opposing, and that British Israelism and Christian Identity were tools of this system. He explicitly and repeatedly stated that racial supremacism was a manipulation originating within the secret society network, not a legitimate Christian or historical tradition. This framing is part of the broadcast record and distinguishes Cooper’s use of the documentary from white nationalist uses of similar material.
Primary Sources Involved in This Arc
- Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (1888) — Public domain. The Theosophical foundation of the swastika’s racial symbolism. Search archive.org for scans.
- Albert Mackey, Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, revised edition, Vol. 1 (1924) — Public domain. Cited by Cooper before MB40 for the Aryan entry and swastika cross entry. Search archive.org.
- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1925) — Still under copyright in many jurisdictions; historical and critical editions widely available in libraries. Brief passages quoted within the documentary.
- The Occult History of the Third Reich (documentary series) — Under copyright; narrated by Patrick Allen. Not available through this site. Available through commercial distributors.
- Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism (1985) — Not public domain; available in libraries. The principal academic treatment of the lineage the documentary covers. Scholars regard it as the authoritative study of the Blavatsky-List-Thule-NSDAP connection.
The full cross-reference of every source cited across the series is in the sources and bibliography hub.
The Historians’ View
The documented connections between occultism and the ideological formation of National Socialism are matters of established scholarly record. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Occult Roots of Nazism and George Mosse’s The Crisis of German Ideology confirm the lineage from Blavatsky through List, the Volkisch movements, Lanz von Liebenfels, and the Thule Society to the early NSDAP. The Thule Society’s co-founding of the German Workers Party, Hitler’s documented readership of Ostara, the SS eugenics program, the Night of the Long Knives, the swastika’s Theosophical prehistory: all of these are accepted historical facts, not fringe claims. The documentary Cooper aired is substantially accurate on these points.
Where mainstream historians diverge from the series’ framing is on scale and continuity. Historians contextualize the relationship between occultist ideology and Nazi practice as complex: Hitler himself was skeptical of some of Himmler’s more elaborate occult projects, the Holocaust was primarily an administrative and ideological phenomenon driven by bureaucratic and political structures, and the occult element, while real and historically significant, does not fully explain a state-industrial genocide. The crimes of the Nazi regime are not reducible to mystical cosmology, however genuine the mystical element was.
Cooper’s extension of the lineage to a still-active global conspiracy operating through modern American institutions is his own interpretive framework, not a conclusion that follows from the documentary’s factual content or from the historical scholarship. The Thule Society dissolved in the 1930s. The connections Cooper draws between it and present-day organizations involve a chain of inference, not documentary evidence.
Where the Third Reich Arc Connects to the Rest of the Series
In Cooper’s chronology this arc arrives at the series’ end, after the Rosicrucians and before the final episode MB42. The mystery schools hub traces the ancient origins of the doctrine Cooper argues produced Nazi ideology. The Luciferian Doctrine hub covers Blavatsky’s Lucifer Magazine and the Theosophical thread that runs from the mystery schools through to the Third Reich. The Rosicrucians hub includes Cooper’s argument about British Israelism and Anglo-Aryan ideology, which he presents as the same tradition the Thule Society tapped. The lineage map diagrams the full claimed descent from Blavatsky to the Nazi party, and the series timeline dates every historical event Cooper cites in the arc from 1848 through 1945.
Listen to the Third Reich Episodes
All surviving audio is preserved at the Internet Archive: Mystery Babylon audio collection on archive.org. This site embeds and links the archive.org copies and never hosts or distributes the recordings. The documentary Cooper aired is separately available through commercial channels. For Cooper’s biography and the context of the Hour of the Time program, see Who Was William Cooper.
Sources for This Page
| Source | Status | Where to find it |
|---|---|---|
| The Occult History of the Third Reich (1991), four parts, written and directed by Dave Flitton, narrated by Patrick Allen. The documentary Cooper aired across MB39–MB41. Every historical claim summarised on this page is a claim the documentary made, not an independent finding of this site. | Under copyright. Not hosted, embedded or distributed here; short quotations are used for documentary and critical purposes only. | Available through commercial distributors. No copy is linked from this site. |
| Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (1888). The source of the root-race scheme and of the swastika’s Theosophical treatment. Volume 2 (Anthropogenesis) is where both sit: it uses the spelling Svastika, calls it "the most sacred and mystic symbol in India" and "the most philosophically scientific of all symbols", and discusses the Fifth (Aryan) Race throughout. | Public domain. Note that the "most potent of seven esoteric symbols" phrasing above is the documentary’s paraphrase rather than Blavatsky’s own wording, which is quoted here so readers can compare the two. | Volume 1 (Cosmogenesis); Volume 2 (Anthropogenesis) at the Internet Archive |
| Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, Ostara — the journal he founded in 1905 and in which he set out the doctrine he called theozoology. | Public domain. The scans linked here are later numbers of the run (1927 and 1930), not the 1905 issues; we link what is actually available rather than imply a first-year scan exists. | Ostara Nr. 3 (1927); Ostara No. 1 (1930) |
| Albert G. Mackey, An Encyclopedia of Freemasonry and Its Kindred Sciences. Cooper read the Aryan and swastika entries from this work aloud before MB40. | Public domain. Cooper cited a 1924 revised edition; the scan linked here is the 1921 printing of the revised encyclopedia, so entry wording and pagination may differ from the copy he read. | 1921 printing at the Internet Archive |
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, The Biological State: Nazi Racial Hygiene, 1933–1939. Records the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases of July 14, 1933, the Hereditary Health Courts that administered it, and an estimated 400,000 Germans sterilized under it. | Institutional reference source. This is the source for the German sterilization figures in the text above. | encyclopedia.ushmm.org |
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, German Law Authorizes Sterilization for Prevention of Hereditary Diseases. States that German forced sterilizations began in January 1934, and separately that between 1907 and 1939 more than 30,000 people were sterilized in twenty-nine US states. | Institutional reference source. These are the two figures the paragraph above now keeps apart; an earlier version of this page conflated them and attributed the American number to Germany. | newspapers.ushmm.org |
| Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (first published 1985; New York University Press edition 1993, 294 pages, ISBN 0-8147-3060-4). The principal academic treatment of the Blavatsky–List–Thule–NSDAP lineage, and the book the documentary largely follows. | In copyright, so we link the edition record rather than a full-text scan. | Open Library edition record |
| George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (1964). The standard account of the Völkisch intellectual milieu in which these movements formed. | In copyright, so we link the work record rather than a full-text scan. | Open Library work record |
| The Hour of the Time — MB39, MB40 and MB41, broadcast February 28, March 1 and March 2, 1994. The primary record of what Cooper actually said around the documentary segments, including the rejection of Aryan-identity movements described above. | Listener-compiled archive. | Audio at the Internet Archive |
What these sources do and do not establish. The occult-nationalist lineage this page describes — Blavatsky’s root races, List’s runic nationalism, Lanz’s theozoology, the Thule Society’s part in founding the German Workers’ Party, and the SS eugenics program — rests on Goodrick-Clarke and Mosse and on the primary texts linked above. Cooper’s further claim, that the same system was still operating through American institutions in 1994, rests on none of them: it is an inference he drew, and no source on this list supports it. Two narrower cautions. The first-year sterilization figure quoted above is the documentary’s own, and published counts for 1934 differ depending on whether they tally court orders or completed operations, so it should be read as approximate against the USHMM total of roughly 400,000 for the program as a whole. And the summaries of the documentary’s contents are ours, taken from the broadcasts, not transcripts published by its makers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which Mystery Babylon episodes cover the occult history of the Third Reich?
Three consecutive episodes: MB39: The Occult and the Third Reich Part 1 (February 28, 1994), MB40: Part 2: The SS: Blood and Soil (March 1, 1994), and MB41: Part 3: Himmler the Mystic (March 2, 1994). These were the final episodes of the series.
Did the Thule Society really help found the Nazi party?
Yes. This is documented historical fact confirmed by mainstream scholarship. Thule Society chairman Karl Harrer co-founded the German Workers Party in January 1919, and other Thule members were among its early activists. Hitler first attended a party meeting on September 12, 1919, as an army intelligence agent tasked with monitoring the organization. The Thule Society’s documented involvement in the early NSDAP is not a fringe claim. The interpretive step from that fact to a transnational still-active conspiracy is Cooper’s own, not the historical record’s.
Where did the swastika come from before the Nazis?
The swastika appears in Tibetan, Hindu, and other ancient traditions as a symbol of good fortune. Its specific modern European meaning as an Aryan racial symbol derived from Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophical writings of 1888, which described it as the symbol of the fifth Aryan root race, and from Guido Von List’s runic nationalism, which called it the fire-whisk of creation. The documentary Cooper aired traces this lineage in detail, and mainstream historians confirm it. Before the Nazi period the symbol appeared in British wartime charity campaigns and American jewelry; its association with racial ideology came specifically through the Blavatsky-List pathway.
What was the SS eugenics program?
As documented in MB40 and MB41, Himmler built the SS as a racial breeding experiment. Every SS applicant’s ancestry was traced back to 1750 by the Race and Resettlement Bureau, which also vetted all proposed marriage partners. Compulsory sterilization laws were passed in Germany within months of Hitler becoming Chancellor; over 56,000 sterilizations were ordered in 1934 alone. Historians confirm these figures. The program drew on eugenics science as developed in Britain and the United States, combined with the Aryan occultism of the Volkisch tradition. The Holocaust that followed was the extermination phase of the ideology the SS breeding program embodied.
Did Bill Cooper endorse Aryan or white nationalist ideology in these episodes?
No. Cooper explicitly and repeatedly rejected such ideology in his commentary before each of the three documentary segments. He told listeners caught up in Aryan identity movements that the master race concept was invented rather than discovered, that they had been deceived, and that those promoting British Israelism and Christian Identity were serving the New World Order agenda rather than opposing it. These statements are part of the broadcast record documented in the episode pages for MB39, MB40, and MB41.
