Adolf Hitler and Wotan

History records Adolf Hitler as a dictator. In truth, he was something more terrifying: a vessel. He rose in a Germany broken by war, crushed by reparations, and humiliated by Versailles. Millions had lost faith in politics, in reason, in democracy itself. Into this void stepped a man who by all ordinary measures was unremarkable. He was a failed artist, a drifter, a soldier who had not risen in rank. Yet when he stood before the masses, lit by torchlight and thundered on by drums, he was transformed. His voice cut through the night like a storm wind. His body shook, his eyes burned, and the people roared back in ecstasy. At such moments he was no longer simply Adolf Hitler. He was the mask of something older, deeper, and more terrible: Wotan, the storm-bringer of the Germanic tribes, returned from the shadows of myth to march once again across history.

Carl Jung saw this more clearly than most. In 1936 he wrote Wotan, warning that an ancient archetype had awakened in the soul of the German people. Hitler, Jung argued, was not a normal statesman but a mouthpiece for the god. Wotan, known for frenzy, prophecy, and the Wild Hunt, had seized Germany in a fit of collective possession. Jung reminded his readers that myths do not die. They lie dormant in the blood and the memory of a people, waiting for a moment of weakness or chaos to break free. When they rise, they seize not only individuals but nations, turning politics into ritual and history into apocalypse.

This is the true question before us. Was Hitler a man using myth to gain power, or was he himself used by myth? Was he a cold manipulator of symbols, or a vessel through which an ancient storm broke into the modern world? To answer, we must recognize that the Nazi regime was not merely political tyranny but religious frenzy. Its rallies were not speeches but ceremonies. Its wars were not strategic contests but the enactment of myth on a world stage. Hitler was the vessel, but Wotan was the storm, and in the frenzy of the Second World War the Wild Hunt became real and the specter of Ragnarök stalked Europe.

To understand how Hitler could be seen as the vessel of Wotan, we must first recall who Wotan was to the ancient Germanic imagination. Wotan was no tame god of harvests or hearths. He was the storm-bringer, the wanderer cloaked in shadows, the master of frenzy and ecstasy. At the head of the Wild Hunt he swept across the night sky, leading a ghostly host of warriors and spirits, filling mortals with terror as the heavens howled above them. To encounter him was not to be comforted but to be swept away, consumed in madness, driven to war.

Wotan was the patron of warriors who abandoned themselves to fury. His gift was berserkergang, the battle-trance where men lost all fear and fought like beasts, their eyes glazed, their humanity drowned in frenzy. He was also the god of prophecy, whispering to seers in visions and dreams, sending them into trances where the veil of ordinary life was torn away. Wotan did not inspire gently. He possessed. He dragged men out of themselves, filled them with a force that was not their own, and left them shaking in its aftermath.

But Wotan was more than frenzy. He was also a wanderer in search of wisdom. He sacrificed his own eye for vision. He hanged for nine nights upon the world tree to seize the runes. He was cunning, ruthless, and wise beyond measure. He gave knowledge, but it was always knowledge edged with danger. To follow him was to gain power, but at the cost of destruction. He was paradox embodied: giver and taker, prophet and deceiver, protector and destroyer.

For the ancient Germans, Wotan was not confined to myth. He was the storm in the pines, the howl of wolves, the shadow of ravens circling over a battlefield. He was present in blood-fever and dream-vision, in prophecy and war. Later centuries tried to bury him under Christian altars, yet he lived on in folklore, in the sagas, and in the poetry of Wagner and the volkisch dreamers of the nineteenth century. He was never gone. He slept, waiting in the soul of a people. And when Germany fell into humiliation and chaos in the twentieth century, the old god stirred again.

In 1936 Carl Jung attempted to explain what ordinary historians could not. He saw that the rise of Hitler and National Socialism was not rational, not political in the normal sense, but mythic. In his essay Wotan, Jung argued that an ancient archetype had awakened in Germany. He wrote that Hitler was not a statesman but a medium, a man possessed by the god of storm and frenzy. Hitler was not speaking to the people; Wotan was speaking through him.

Jung understood that archetypes dwell in the collective unconscious, the hidden structure of human memory and imagination. They are not dead myths but living forces. In times of stability they lie dormant. In times of chaos they stir and seize men like a fever. Jung warned that Germany’s humiliation after the First World War had broken its defenses and left it vulnerable to possession. But Jung also made a deeper and more frightening observation: Christ himself had retreated. He wrote that Christ was unable to prevent the fratricide of the First World War. The cross could not restrain the machines of death, and the figure of peace gave way to the god of storm. With Christ withdrawn, Wotan returned.

Contemporaries saw this possession in Hitler’s very body. In private he was awkward and unimpressive. In public he became something else entirely. His voice rose to a howl, his gestures became violent, and his eyes seemed lit with fire. The masses responded in kind, shaking, roaring, and collapsing as if seized by a common madness. Jung compared Hitler to a shaman in trance, no longer speaking as a man but as a vessel. The German people did not elect Hitler with reason. They surrendered to him in frenzy.

Jung’s words cut deeply because they revealed that Hitler was more than a man. He was the mask through which a god returned. Christ had receded, and Wotan surged forward. The old order had collapsed in the trenches of the First World War, and in its place rose the storm-bringer. What had once been the Wild Hunt across the sky now thundered as armies, tanks, and banners of blood and steel.

Hitler was not without talents. His artwork, while never accepted by the academies, showed a decent eye for architecture and form. In private he could be warm, attentive, and even charming. He had charisma enough to win friends and gather loyal followers long before he rose to power. Yet these qualities alone cannot explain the hold he gained over millions. There was something in him that went beyond ordinary ability, something that emerged most clearly when he faced the crowd.

Witnesses described how he seemed to enter a trance before his great speeches, pacing and whispering to himself until the moment came. Then he erupted. His gestures grew violent, his voice rose to a howl, his whole body shook as if seized by another presence. The crowds mirrored his frenzy, roaring, weeping, and collapsing in ecstasy. This was not persuasion by reason but possession by force. Hitler did not merely speak to the German people; he carried them into a storm.

Jung explained this transformation in the language of archetypes. He wrote that Hitler acted as a medium, a man who had emptied himself so that an ancient god could speak through him. That god was Wotan, the storm-bringer and frenzy-monger of the Germans. What once drove berserkers into battle now drove a nation into war. Hitler’s charisma was not simply his own personality magnified; it was the eruption of Wotan through him.

The contrast to Christ is clear. Jung had already written that Christ receded during the First World War, unable to prevent the fratricide of Europe. Into that void stepped Hitler, not bearing the cross but wielding the storm. Christ offered reconciliation, but Hitler unleashed frenzy. Christ spoke of peace, but Hitler awakened the warrior spirit that lay dormant in the German soul. The people did not follow him with hatred. They followed him because they were seized by their natural state as warriors of the North, compelled to rise once more under the banner of storm.

This possession revealed itself most clearly in Hitler’s will to destruction. Even as the war was lost, he issued the Nero Decree, demanding that Germany itself destroy bridges, factories, cities, all to be left in ruin. This was not the calculation of a statesman but the frenzy of Wotan, the god of the Wild Hunt who sweeps his followers into death, the god of Ragnarök who consumes the world in fire. Hitler was not merely a tyrant clinging to power. He was the vessel of the storm, and his final act was to deliver Germany into the apocalypse.

If Hitler was the vessel of Wotan, then the war he unleashed must be understood as the Wild Hunt and Ragnarök made flesh. In Germanic myth, the Wild Hunt was the terror of the storm: Wotan riding at the head of a ghostly host, sweeping across the sky with howling winds and the cries of hounds, dragging mortals into frenzy and death. The Second World War bore this same character. It was not a limited conflict of nations, but a storm that engulfed continents.

The very name of Germany’s war doctrine revealed the archetype: Blitzkrieg, lightning war. It was Wotan’s storm made into strategy. Armored columns and dive-bombers moved like thunderbolts, crashing down on nations before they could resist. Poland was struck in days, France collapsed in weeks. Whole peoples were overwhelmed as if swept into the path of the Hunt. To the world it seemed less like a war and more like a tempest descending, sudden, violent, and irresistible.

Ragnarök, the doom of the gods, was also foreshadowed in this war. In the myths, the world ends in fire and blood. The sun darkens, the earth shakes, gods and men alike perish in the final struggle. At the end of the Third Reich, Hitler embraced this apocalyptic vision. He spoke of Götterdämmerung, a twilight of the gods, in which Germany would perish rather than survive without him. His Nero Decree was the attempt to enact Ragnarök upon his own people, demanding that bridges, factories, and cities be destroyed in flames.

The war itself mirrored the myth. The howling of Stuka sirens replaced the hounds of the Hunt. The armored columns were the new riders, steel instead of horse. The firestorms that consumed Hamburg and Dresden became the furnaces of Ragnarök, the world burning in the twilight of the gods. When Berlin itself fell in flames in 1945, the vision was complete. The old god had returned, and his path led only to destruction.

The Second World War was more than politics, more than ideology. It was myth erupting into history. It was the Wild Hunt made real, Blitzkrieg as storm, Ragnarök reborn in the age of machines.

The story of Hitler and Wotan was not a unique madness confined to Germany. It reveals a law of history. Archetypes live in the collective unconscious of every people. They are ancient patterns of spirit and imagination that lie dormant in the soul. In times of order they are buried, but in times of crisis they rise. They seize men and women, they seize nations, and once they rise they demand to be obeyed.

Germany was uniquely primed for Wotan’s return. For centuries his shadow had lingered in the German forests and in the sagas. The Grimm brothers had revived the old tales. Wagner’s operas had clothed Wotan in music and fire. The volkisch movements of the nineteenth century spoke openly of the northern spirit. When the First World War shattered Germany and Versailles deepened her humiliation, the storm-god no longer needed to wait. He had his hour, and he found his vessel. Hitler spoke, but Wotan roared.

This is the danger of archetypes. They are not relics of the past but forces of the present. The Greeks knew it when they told of gods descending into men. The Norse knew it when they spoke of Wotan riding into warriors. Jung knew it when he wrote that Christ had receded and Wotan had returned. Man does not outgrow myth. Myth waits for him. And when faith collapses, when order breaks, the gods return. They do not rise by accident. They rise because they must.

The eruption of Wotan in Germany was not the last such event. Every nation carries its own gods, its own sleeping myths, buried but alive. They wait in silence until the moment of fracture comes. History is not made only by reason. It is made by storms in the unconscious, by the return of forgotten gods who demand their place once more.