[Above: Vollrath (2nd from right) at the Astro Congress, 1923.]

  • A few years ago a stamp dealer sent me a stack of postcards for free as a thank you. The type of postcards were common, from Austria, and had been used over a century ago. They were addressed to Hugo Vollrath, a name that sounded familiar to me, but I wasn't sure from where. After searching his name online I realized where I had learned about him, the artist Fidus had done artwork for some of his works he'd published. Vollrath was an important publisher of occult/theosophy/metaphysics/astrology books in the years proceeding WWI in Germany. He also led the Leipzig-based Theosophical Society. It was pretty amazing being sent these postcards and the fact that in over one hundred years none of their owners ever knew they had once belonged to a semi-famous man. Maybe they had been stored somewhere and had only a couple of owners? I asked the stamp dealer who had given them to me where he had acquired them and he told me he had gotten them from Denmark (with many other items). Anyway, let's have a look at Vollrath and who he was. Like Fidus, history has tried to claim he was 'anti-Nazi', but there is no proof of this, and overwhelming evidence that he was the opposite.

    In 1931 Vollrath became a member of the National Socialist German Worker's Party [NSDAP]. In 1933 Vollrath declared Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP to be 'the will of God.'
    -Between Occultism and Nazism - Anthroposophy and the Politics of Race in the Fascist Era, Peter Staudenmaier, 2014, pg. 42.

    Also in 1933, Vollrath reacted to a letter in the magazine The Theosophist, written by the one time leader of the Order of the Eastern Star and the Theosophical Society (and translator of the booklet At the Feet of the Master), where he defended the NSDAP's views on race and supported its anti-Jewish defensive measures.
    -The Politics of Divine Wisdom, Herman A.O. de Tollenaere, 1996, pg. 92.

    'Vollrath [was] even more aggressive in establishing a strongly pro-Nazi version of theosophy... As late as 1936, Vollrath still preached the full compatibility of theosophy and National Socialism and boasted of his own contribution to integrating the theosophical movement into the Nazi state. In a letter to Heydrich, he even proposed establishing a "department for theosophy, mysticism and related areas" in the Reichskulturkammer, the Nazi cultural apparatus.'
    -Between Occultism and Nazism - Anthroposophy and the Politics of Race in the Fascist Era, Peter Staudenmaier, 2014, pg. 378.

    The Wikipedia page on Vollrath goes so far as to say:
    'Vollrath was arrested in 1941 in his birthplace Loitzsch near Zeitz and detained there. His health suffered greatly as a result. His Theosophical friends therefore abducted him in 1942 to Lützschena, a place near Leipzig. There he died under their care in 1943.'

    Of course, there is no citation to this absurd claim. Abducted him from where? Did 'his friends' hide him like Anne Frank for two years before he mysteriously died?