Julius Evola

The Philosopher and Magician in War: 1943-1945

Gianfranco de Turris

• Publisher: Inner Traditions
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781620558072
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosopher Biographies

An intimate portrait of Evola and his wartime activities that rebuts many of the Fascist pseudo-myths about him • Traces the Baron's activities in Italy, Germany, and Austria during World War II • Clarifies Evola's relations with Nazism and Fascism and reveals how he passionately rejected both ideologies because they were totalitarian • Draws on personal conversations with those who knew Evola, new documentation never before made public, and letters from the Hakl and Scaligero archives Baron Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola, known to the English-speaking world as Julius Evola (1898–1974), was an Italian philosopher, magician, painter, occultist, Orientalist, linguist, and champion mountain climber. Often considered a pillar of Neo-Fascist thought, Evola opposed Fascism and called himself a "radical traditionalist." In this exploration of Evola's inner and outer life from World War II into the early 1950s, Gianfranco de Turris, who knew Evola when he was alive and is the executor of his estate, offers a new portrait of Julius Evola and debunks many of the pseudo-myths about his activities during the war. Drawing on personal conversations with those who knew him and new documentation never before made public, including letters from the Hakl and Scaligero archives, the author traces Evola's activities--including his time on the run and living under assumed names--in Italy, Germany, and Austria from 1943 into the mid-1950s. He shares a thorough account of the Baron's sojourn at Hitler's headquarters in Rastenburg, his work for the German secret military services, and his passionate rejection of the racial theories that were the core of Nazi ideology. The author outlines Evola's critiques of Fascism and Nazism and also explores Evola's disapproval of the Italian Social Republic because it was destroying traditional values in favor of modernity. Detailing the Baron's occult and magical work during the war, de Turris shows that the only thing Evola took with him when he escaped Italy was the UR Group papers, material that would later become the three-volume work Introduction to Magic. Sharing details from Evola's long hospital stays during and after the war, the author proves that the injury that led to Evola's paralysis was caused by an Allied bombing raid in Vienna and not, as rumor has it, by a sex magic act gone horribly wrong. The author shares photographs from the time period and the Baron's correspondence with René Guenon on the possibility of restoring the spiritual and magical power of an authentic Freemasonry. Offering conclusive evidence that Evola was not part of the Nazi regime, de Turris sheds light on the inner workings of this legendary occult figure and what Evola believed was the best approach for the magus to take in the modern world.

ONE

July 25 to September 8, 1943—A “Danse Macabre”

The proclamation of the Italian armistice on September 8, 1943, caught Julius Evola off guard while he was in Germany. Since the middle of August, on the advice of Giovanni Preziosi, German military and political circles had requested the philosopher to secretly travel to Berlin to “report on the situation [in Italy], and to clarify matters in person.”¹ But why secretly, given that the two nations were still formally allied according to the pronouncements by General Badoglio and King Vittorio Emanuele III? One thing is for certain: Evola was not in Germany on a lecture tour, as the essayist and journalist Giorgio Bocca has written.²

After the events of July 25, 1943, Julius Evola had remained in Rome. He had not sought refuge in Germany like other “intransigent” Fascists who had managed to avoid being arrested (Alessandro Pavolini and Roberto Farinacci,³ for example, whereas Preziosi had fled to Agram⁴ in Croatia and afterward would move to a locality near Munich).

Moreover, Evola’s personal situation was hardly favorable. In fact, he had suddenly lost his salary as an employee of the Italian Ministry of Popular Culture (MinCulPop), for which he wrote articles and reviewed texts, and had never been paid for his work carried out in July.⁵ Nevertheless, he was not in the habit of letting his commitments and jobs fall by the wayside, even in more difficult and complicated moments. For example, between the end of July and the beginning of August he had corrected the final draft of his new book La dottrina del risveglio (The Doctrine of Awakening),⁶ which arrived on August 9 at the Laterza publishing house in Bari;⁷ while at the end of June he had sent his translation of Gustav Meyrink’s occult novel Walpurgisnacht to the Milanese publisher Bocca; and in mid-August, he also had his manuscript Lo yoga della potenza (a new version of his 1926 work, L’uomo come potenza), which had already been prepared since the mid-1930s, delivered to Bocca with the help of a friend.⁸

All in all, Evola continued to work as if nothing unusual was going on. This did not, however, mean that he was oblivious to the dramatic situation that surrounded him in Rome. In a letter written to Carlo Torreano in Milan he employed a suggestive but terrible medieval image to describe it: “Moreover, if you were still thinking of coming here [from Milan to Rome], a meeting would be most appropriate, also concerning other matters of interest to us both, even though in this period of a danse macabre, plans can only be short-term and are always subject to a ‘God willing.’”⁹ But Evola’s self-discipline, his conscience that he must do whatever he believed his duty was at any given moment, and the inner detachment he had achieved—these things allowed him a corresponding style of life about which, moreover, he never would boast, and indeed hardly ever spoke of.

Therefore he remained in Rome. In fact, he believed that his friendships at the German Embassy could indeed be considered a positive element rather than a negative one, so long as “the war continued” alongside the Third Reich. In addition, there was a second motive for remaining in the capital even during the Badoglio government: “The lack of any reaction after the betrayal, the absolute inertia at the highest levels of the regime, and the Militia itself, had painfully astonished both me and friends who had been close to me for some time. It was a confirmation of the lack of any truly solid and tempered strength within the hierarchal and orthodox Fascist structures, which, unfortunately, had already been evident on more than one occasion,” recalled the traditionalist thinker in one of his rare writings about the events of the period in which he was a protagonist. “Now it was a matter of drawing all the conclusions from the harsh lesson: to see what had withstood the test, by considering which elements were previously hampered by a system that is not entirely flawless, and what other new elements could be counted on to maintain, in a manner appropriate to the circumstances, positions on both the Italian internal political problem and the continuation of the Axis war.”¹⁰

Still there were difficulties, given that opposing assessments of the situation had emerged on the part of the Germans as to how to conduct themselves at this juncture: there was the German Foreign Ministry (Auswärtiges Amt), which placed credence in the proclamation by Badoglio;¹¹ but on the opposite side of the SS—in all probability Office VI or VII of the SD (Sicherheitsdienst), with whom Evola was in contact—there was the belief that the inevitable consequence of the Grand Council’s vote against Mussolini, and the latter’s arrest on the part of the king, would be the armistice and Italy’s surrender.

Thought had even been given to a coup d’état against the Badoglio government, and for this purpose SS Major Otto Skorzeny¹² arrived incognito in Rome in August and apparently was met and maybe given hospitality by the philosopher himself. However, the initiative was called off by Berlin, claiming that an action by Italian Fascists would be a more effective strategy and one less disliked by the population than an operation carried out by “foreigners.” Evola had already spoken of this concrete possibility based not only upon his own firsthand knowledge but also that of other sources. After the war in 1950, and seven years before the publication of his series of articles in Il Popolo Italiano, Evola wrote a review of Eugen Dollmann’s autobiographical book, Roma Nazista (Nazi Rome),¹³ in which he makes the following observation: “The inferior nature of Dollmann’s book doesn’t detract from its value in many respects, as a chronicle and source of information, which, although distorted by the aforementioned habit of the author, is not falsified. We may mention only three references worthy of consideration, the first of which is after the 25th of July, when the orders on the German side were to intervene and restore order immediately. As far as the Italian side, the Fascist side, someone already had come forward calling exactly for this action.”¹⁴ All of this came to naught, however, due to the assasination of Ettore Muti on the night of August 23–24 at Fregene, a seaside town a few kilometers from Rome.¹⁵ He was the individual designated to be put in charge of the coup d’état, although, according to what Evola believed, Muti had no knowledge of this.¹⁶ It had been just a month since “the night of the Grand Council” and the fall of Mussolini (which had been achieved democratically, by a majority vote). It was decided by the Germans that the best solution was to entrust Mussolini with the iniative of a response to the current situation; Skorzeny was then assigned the task of discovering where Mussolini was being kept prisoner and liberating him, as would take place the following month.

According to a number of testimonies that have been gathered and chronicled by Marco Zagni,¹⁷ one of which derives from Skorzeny himself, the Germans also resorted to “unconventional methods” to identify and locate the place where Mussolini was held prisoner. At the behest of Heinrich Himmler, psychics and seers were questioned and their indications, however precise these may have been, served to complete and substantiate the results that had been obtained via the traditional espionage networks utilized by the SD.

One must ask: Did the Italian secret service and political police—which were still fully operative, albeit under a new regime—have knowledge or possible suspicions regarding these underground maneuvers? In all likelihood, yes, for apparently rumors of a “Fascist plot” were spread by the Italian Military Intelligence Service (SIM)¹⁸ and immediately exploited by Badoglio to remove troublesome characters who were ex-Fascist leaders or senior officers. The order was given on August 22 for the arrest of Muti and others. This order included the arrest and imprisonment of former Chief of Staff Marshal Ugo Cavallero¹⁹ at Fort Boccea. Liberated after September 8 by the Germans, Cavallero was taken to the Hotel Belvedere in Frascati, the headquarters of German fieldmarshal Albert Kesselring. It is there, on the night of September 14–15 (just when Benito Mussolini was arriving from Hitler’s Headquarters), that Cavallero was found with a bullet hole in his right temple from a pistol. No definitive light has ever been shed on what actually occurred in this incident.

According to an August 26 diary entry by Giuseppe Bottai,²⁰ the last he wrote before his own arrest the following day at Badoglio’s orders, the plot was discovered because a German professor named Wagner (who was secretly an anti-Nazi) had become alarmed when he had been told to make his schedule known, since all the Germans in Rome were to be accounted for immediately. This Professor Wagner confided about the situation with an Italian colleague who, in turn, confided with an official of the Italian Ministry of National Education. Hence the rumor of an upheaval by the Germans in Rome would have been known to the SIM and Badoglio, who would have enacted the Preventive Action of Repression.²¹

All the while Julius Evola was still under surveillance, a practice that had carried over from Mussolini’s regime to the new regime of Badoglio. Evola was kept under such close observation that the last document concerning him in the dossier kept by the Political Police Division is an ungrammatically written report by an anonymous informer who, it must be assumed, is making reference to the eve of Evola’s secret mission to Berlin. We present it here in its entirety. At the top of the page is the curious handwritten heading, “Evola Jules—avv. Barone,” and a rubber stamp “23 AGO. 1943”; this is followed by the typewritten text: “Rome, 20 August 1943. The foreign journalists at the Foreign Press Association in Rome observe that Baron Evola, formerly a collaborator of Farinacci and Preziosi, often goes to the Foreign Press [Association], where he has long meetings with the German journalist Ludwig Alwens, Roman correspondent for the Völkischer Beobachter. The foreign journalists wonder what the two might be plotting and they all consider these meetings to be very suspicious.”²² The text is followed by some illegible initialing.

One hypothesis would be that Evola “plotted” his own secret journey to Germany, which, apparently, the philosopher had been contemplating for several days, since a week before the statement by the informer, in the aforementioned letter of August 16 to the publisher Bocca, he writes: “It is possible that I may leave Rome.” This would coincide with the “mid-August” specified in the memories he recounts in his 1957 articles. As for the Völkischer Beobachter, it was the daily newspaper of the National Socialist German Workers Party. The informer’s statement—or, more accurately, gossip—does raise a singular question: Of what nationalities were the “foreign journalists” who would have considered the conversations between a German reporter and an Italian one (insofar as Evola could also be seen as such)—that is, journalists from two countries that were still formally allied, considering that “the war continued”—to be suspicious in a decisive year of now total war? Which “foreign” nations would have been accredited by the Foreign Press Association of Rome except for Axis-allied nations or neutral countries like Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and so on? It is a curious question, but it may have an equally curious answer: it seems that there were indeed correspondents from officially declared enemy nations of the Axis who circulated in Rome in 1943 because they were recognized by the Vatican, which is a foreign state. If this is the case, then the presence of such journalists must have been “normal” and therefore not something that would have aroused any particular concern on the part of the anonymous police informer.

This is the reason for the secret invitation to Evola, which was put forward by Preziosi, as has been mentioned earlier. Preziosi, who was at that time in Agram, “planned to install a radio station in Croatia against the Badoglio government and to promote active propaganda aimed at the government of Rome. The utmost importance of this propaganda project had to consist of the escalation and expansion of anti-Judaic anti-Masonic agitation.”²³

In a telegram sent from Agram to the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Berlin on August 11 and also signed by Siegfried Kasche, German ambassador to Croatia, the following is stated:

To intensify the potential transmission project, and because, according to the statement of P. [Preziosi], it is also of particular political importance to send by special courier from Rome via Berlin the proposed P. correspondence and the collection of documents that concern the compromise of Italian government circles with Freemasonry and Judaism. For longdistance communications, establishment of a secret service for information between Berlin and Rome. Transmitting station. P. proposes as collaborator absolutely trustworthy Count [sic] Evola, whom Prinzing²⁴ also knows well. Evola should come to Germany.²⁵

Two days later, on August 13, another telegram confirms:

P. considers Baron Evola as more than a faithful friend of Germany and an excellent collaborator for the present task; he himself has known him for years as a collaborator. Proposes to have Evola come to Germany without delay. There are no doubts regarding Evola’s availability. Evola is also indispensible here and above all because P. wants to withdraw from his present work.²⁶

But a telegram from Rome by Prince Otto von Bismarck, German Charge d’Affaires for the Italian capital since August 1942, warns on the 17th that “Evola has stated he does not want to leave. Further assessments of him by Prinzing have come to the same conclusion.”²⁷ A reason for this reluctance is that Evola in all probability was waiting for the development of the “Fascist plot.” But the situation was clearly taking a very dif...