More Evidence Of What Forward Thinking Sorts The Nazis Were

There's a new book out about the importance that Himmler attaching to getting the SS to do yoga.  From the February 22, 2012 Daily Mail:

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.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2104365/How-SS-recommended-yoga-death-camp-guards-good-way-stress.html#ixzz1nKcqTw70

If you read Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, you already know that there was a very strong overlap between progressives (then and now) and fascism, national socialism, and the other totalitarian sentiments of the time.  This is really no surprise: all of these movements were attempts to scrap traditional Judeo-Christian notions of right and wrong, which kept getting in the way of intellectuals doing what they wanted.

I am surprised at how much involvement various anti-Semitic, volkisch sorts had with yoga in the 1920s and 1930s, and apparently at least in part as part of the general anti-Christian sentiment that was popular among intellectuals (then as now), and after World War II as well.  Just snippets are visible, but this book published in 1998 also confirms the importance of yoga to the SS.