New Templar Order

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Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (before 1907)

The Neutempler-Orden or Ordo Novi Templi (ONT) was a folk- religious organization. It was founded in 1900 by Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels in Vienna . Lanz used this order to disseminate his ideas, which he initially referred to as “Theozoology” or “Ario Christianity” and from 1915 as “ Ariosophy ”. The order combined Christian piety with the then modern concepts of racial studies and eugenics .

Emergence

Lanz had resigned from the Cistercian order shortly before and linked the name of his own order to the medieval Knights Templar . His interest in the Templars was aroused by the contemporary popular motif of the Grail Knights in the neo-romantic music and literature by Richard Wagner , Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer and Friedrich Lienhard . In addition, the Templars were closely associated with the Cistercians; Bernhard von Clairvaux , the founder of the Cistercian order, had also written the rules of the Templars and later praised them for their commitment to the crusades .

Around the time of the founding of the order, Lanz developed into a determined racist who saw the " Aryan " race as the highest race, which has been in a defensive battle against lower races since ancient times. Against this background he created the idea that the Templars had the goal of establishing a large Aryan empire in the entire Mediterranean region . He interpreted the brutal persecution of the Templars by the Roman Catholic Church from 1312 onwards as a triumph of racially inferior people whose goal it was to undermine the rule and preservation of the Aryan race. In addition, he was convinced that the Church had since then suppressed true Christian teaching, the core of which he regarded as his ideas of racial struggle . He therefore saw his own order as a new beginning of the crusade against the lower races, which had been interrupted for centuries.

Werfenstein Castle on the Danube (2010)

In 1907 Lanz acquired the small Werfenstein castle ruins near Grein in Upper Austria as the order's priory. In the same year he published a program of the order in which he described it as an association of Aryans whose goals were to promote racial awareness through genealogical and heraldic research, through beauty pageants and through the establishment of racially exemplary states in underdeveloped regions of the world. He developed its own liturgy and ceremonies for the order . The rules of the order stipulated that only blond and blue-eyed men were allowed to join, who also had to meet other criteria of Aryanism, which Lanz had set out in his Ostara series . A hierarchy was established within the order, which was based on the (supposed) racial purity. On Christmas Day 1907, Lanz hoisted two flags on the tower of his Ordensburg: one with the coat of arms of the von Liebenfels, a noble family believed to have died out around 1790, and one with a swastika (swastika), a member of the national movement at the time popular icon.

From 1908 onwards, high-profile celebrations were held on Werfenstein. Several hundred guests traveled by steamboat on the Danube, on which the castle is located, and were greeted with cannon shots, in order to then celebrate extensively in the castle courtyard. This received a great response in the national press and increased interest in Lanz's publications.

Lanz continued to work on the ceremonies and wrote devout chants and verses. He left the castle u. a. decorate with solemn depictions of Hugo von Payns , the first Grand Master of the Templars, and depictions of the "apes", which his theozoologists considered to be the origin of the lower races. In 1915 and 1916 a Neutempler breviary was published in two parts , which Lanz had written with other friars. It contained psalms and hymns of praise that followed the Christian tradition but implored Christ to redeem the Aryan race and to wipe out the lower races.

Ascent

Until 1914, activities were limited to Vienna and Werfenstein, and the order only had about 50 members. After the war , however, he began to expand and several bases were set up in Germany and Hungary, where Lanz had been since 1918. The main organizer of this renaissance of the order was initially Detlef Schmude. In 1914 he founded a second priory in Hollenberg near Kornelimünster (today part of Aachen ) and soon after his return from the front de facto took over the role of the emigrated Lanz. His priory of Hollenberg, however, remained a temporary arrangement, for which a suitable building was never found and which he closed in 1926. In the meantime, however, there have been two new priories: one in the Wickeloh ramparts in the municipality of Groß Oesingen near Uelzen in Lower Saxony and the Marienkamp priory, which Lanz founded himself and which, from 1926, had its official seat in a church ruin from the 13th century on the north bank of the Hungarian Balaton had.

In financial terms, the order owed its survival in the post-war period to the Viennese industrialist Johann Walthari Wölfl. He was an avid reader of the Ostara and offered Lanz considerable funds on the condition that he would be entrusted with the Werfenstein priory. He received this office and subsequently enabled the Austrian section of the order to flourish through his donations. In addition to Lanz, Wölfl contributed significantly to the further development of the liturgy of the order.

Dietfurt ruins (2005)

In the 1920s there was an initiative that came from members of the Hollenberg Priory with the aim of building a priory in northern Germany. In 1926 some friars acquired old earth walls near the Baltic Sea resort of Prerow , which were known as Hertesburg. A wooden church was built there and inaugurated in 1927 as the Hertesburg presbytery. This functioned as a center of the order's activities until the area was added to the Darß National Park in 1935 . Also in 1927 the Dietfurt ruins in the hamlet of Dietfurt , near the Hohenzollern town of Sigmaringen , were inaugurated as a priory.

In 1932 Wölfl founded the Lumenklub in Vienna , which was closely linked to the ONT in terms of personnel and was intended to bring its ideology to a wider public. The club also served as a center for recruiting members for the NSDAP, which was banned in Austria from 1933 . In connection with the Lumen Club , there was also the Ostara-Rundschau , which Wölfl published from 1931 and which was supposed to serve the international cooperation of radical right groups.

The order reached its peak around 1930 with around 300 to 400 members. Towards the end of the 1930s, like all other religious “sects”, it was dissolved during the Nazi era .

Aftermath

In 1942 Lanz founded the Order of Vitalis New Templars in the former Petena order priory near Waging am See , Upper Bavaria , with his former brother Georg Hauerstein. This also accepted female members and was active until 1973. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke sees the ONT's importance “more in what it has expressed than in what it has achieved. It can be taken as a symptom of diffuse dissatisfaction, whose own mix of typical worries, interests and lifestyles was clearly related to the subliminal fears within Austrian and German society. His elitist and eschatological answers to these fears completed the genozidischen pulse. "

literature

  • Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke : The Occult Roots of National Socialism . Marixverlag, Wiesbaden 2004. (Chapter The Order of the New Templars , pp. 96-109.)
  • Walther Paape: That's why we founded a temple house. The New Templar Order (Ordo Novi Templi, ONT) of Lanz von Liebenfels and his Archpriorate Staufen in Dietfurt near Sigmaringen . Gmeiner-Verlag , Meßkirch 2007. ISBN 3-89977-205-9 .
  • Walther Paape: In the delusion of being chosen. The race religion of Lanz von Liebenfels, the New Templar Order and the Archpriorate of Staufen in Dietfurt - an Austro-German story . Gmeiner-Verlag, Meßkirch 2015. ISBN 978-3-8392-1720-7 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke : Ariosophy . In: Wouter J. Hanegraaff (Ed.): Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism , Leiden 2006, pp. 91–97, here p. 93.
  2. ↑ Goodrick-Clarke 2006, p. 91.
  3. ↑ Goodrick-Clarke: The occult roots of National Socialism , Graz 1997, p. 98, and 2006, p. 93 f.
  4. ↑ Goodrick-Clarke 1997, p. 98 f.
  5. ↑ Goodrick-Clarke 2006, p. 94.
  6. ↑ Goodrick-Clarke 1997, pp. 102-104.
  7. ↑ Goodrick-Clarke 1997, p. 107 f.
  8. ↑ Burkhard Ohse: When the New Templars were in Zahrenholz . In: az-online, July 13, 2011.
  9. ↑ Goodrick-Clarke 1997, p. 105 f.
  10. ↑ Goodrick-Clarke 1997, p. 104 f.
  11. ↑ Goodrick-Clarke 1997, p. 104.
  12. ↑ Goodrick-Clarke 1997, p. 106.
  13. ↑ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: Lanz von Liebenfels . In: Wouter J. Hanegraaff (Ed.): Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism , Leiden 2006, pp. 673–675, here p. 675.
  14. ↑ Goodrick-Clarke 1997, p. 109.