'Ve hav vays of making you relax': How SS recommended yoga to death camp guards as a good way to de-stress

Himmler was fascinated with ancient discipline, reveals historian in new book



A German historian has discovered how the SS in Nazi Germany recommended its members - including death camp guards - practice yoga to enrich their 'mind, bodies and spirits.'



The first ever book probing the Third Reich's fascination with the ancient discipline - intended to attain 'perfect spiritual insight and tranquility' - was published this week, entitled Yoga In National Socialism by historian and yoga expert Mathias Tietke.



It shows how S.S. overlord Heinrich Himmler was fascinated with the discipline and perverted it and its ancient roots into a philosophy to justify the Holocaust.



Evil: These SS officers at the Belzec death camp in Poland in 1942 could have done with some relaxing yoga after the horror they inflicted on their innocent victims

'Whoever thinks about yoga,' said the author, 'thinks of people sitting in the lotus position, greeting the sun in order to reduce the stress of everyday life.

'It is associated with mental equilibrium, the search for wisdom and inner peace and is not considered to be about force or persecution. Nevertheless, there is also this side to the history of yoga.'

Tietke ploughed through thousands of Third Reich documents to chronicle the history of this most peaceful of pursuits in the time of the savagery of Nazism.



Mind, body and spirit: S.S. commander Heinrich Himmler, left, was fascinated by yoga and was convinced it can 'internally arm' people and prepare them for battles.

As well as the book he is planning an exhibition in Berlin later this year in the Gestapo museum called the Topography of Terror.



The Nazi interest in yoga lay in its roots in the 19th century when India mysticism was a favourite pursuit of the middle and upper classes and a great influence on romantic poets and philosophers.



During the Wiemar Republic, as the Nazis gained strength, yoga enjoyed a boom among a people weary of war, inflation, unemployment and misery.



More than 50 yoga books were published in the 1920's in Berlin alone. And, as the Nazis corrupted most things they touched, so it was with yoga.



It was seized on by race experts in the party as being the pursuit of 'Ayran' people. Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, an S.S. captain and yoga expert, who influenced his chief Himmler and convinced him that 'yoga can internally arm us and prepare us for the forthcoming battles.'



In 1937, four years after the Nazis attained power, the country's first yoga centre opened up in Berlin and operated until it was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1943.



The teacher who ran it had disciples in 50 German towns and cities. Himmler, obsessed as he was with hocus-pocus race theories and mysticism relating to his S.S. 'supermen,' carried around a German copy of the Bhagavad Gita with him wherever he went.



Yogis: Yoga may be popular 21st Century past time but it can be traced back to 3,000 BC

He regarded the ancient Sanskrit epic as being a blueprint for cruelty and terror, using it, said Tietke, to ultimately justify the Holocaust.



He wrote; "He identified himself and the SS with the old Indian Kshatriya caste and its publicised attitude of unscrupulous killing for one's 'higher purpose.'"



Tietke says Himmler's attitude to 'karma'

was never better displayed than at the secret speech he made to senior S.S. men at Poznan in 1943 when he spoke of the noble, virtuous work his butchers were performing in eliminating the Jews of Europe and Russia.

