CONSPIRACY CLAIM #13

Of all the claims on this site, this one may be the most upside-down. Adolf Hitler was never a Freemason, and neither was the Nazi movement. Far from being Masons, the Nazis treated Freemasonry as an enemy of the state, wrote it into their propaganda, and set out to wipe it from Germany and every country they occupied.

In his own words

We don’t have to guess what Hitler thought of Freemasons. He wrote it down. In Mein Kampf he cast Freemasonry as a tool of the Jewish conspiracy he imagined everywhere, saying that “in the freemason organization, which had fallen completely into his hands, he found a magnificent weapon”.

He also blamed Masonic ideals for weakening the nation: “The propaganda which the freemasons had carried on among the so-called intelligentsia, whereby their pacifist teaching paralysed the instinct for national self-preservation”. Brotherhood, tolerance and peace between nations: to Hitler, these were the crimes.

Not welcome in the Party

If the Nazis were secretly Masons, they had a funny way of showing it. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:

• From early 1934, Masons who had not left their lodges before 30 January 1933 could not join the Nazi Party.
• In May 1934 the Ministry of Defence banned lodge membership for everyone in the armed forces.
• Hermann Göring called on the lodges to “voluntarily” dissolve, and in August 1935 the Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick, ordered every remaining lodge dissolved and its assets confiscated.
• Closed lodges were ransacked for membership lists, libraries and archives, and the SS Security Service set up a special section just to deal with Freemasonry.

Reinhard Heydrich, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, described Freemasons as among the “most implacable enemies of the German race.” Some Freemasons were arrested and sent to concentration camps, and some were murdered during the war. Many of them were targeted twice over, for being Jewish or political opponents as well as Masons.

Lights, camera, propaganda

Having shut the lodges, the Nazis set about turning the public against the people who had been in them. When German forces occupied Paris, they staged an anti-Masonic exhibition there in October 1940, followed by another in Brussels in 1941, each presenting Freemasonry as a sinister plot.

Then they made a film. Forces occultes (“Occult Forces”) was commissioned in 1942 by the Propaganda Abteilung, the arm of Nazi Germany’s propaganda ministry in occupied France, and released in March 1943. It follows a young member of parliament who joins the Freemasons to advance his career and “discovers” that they are plotting with Jews and the English-speaking nations to drag France into war with Germany. None of it was true. It was the same old conspiracy theory, now with a soundtrack.

The director, Jean Mamy, worked under the pen name “Paul Riche” and wrote for collaborationist newspapers. After the liberation he was condemned for collaboration and executed in 1949. Yet his film still circulates: some anti-Masonic writers today still describe it as “revealing”, without mentioning who paid for it.

So where does the claim come from?

Mostly from confusion, and sometimes from people who would rather not look too closely. The Thule Society, a Munich group often linked to the early Nazi movement, is sometimes described as a “lodge”. It was a völkisch occultist group, not a Masonic lodge, and there is no evidence that Hitler ever attended it. A secret society is not automatically a Masonic one, any more than every choir is a church.

The irony is hard to miss. The “Jewish-Masonic plot” that some people still share online is the very same story the Nazis used to justify closing lodges and persecuting their members. Repeating it today, with the Nazis now cast as the Masons, turns history completely on its head.

Conclusion: Hitler was not a Freemason, and the Nazis were not Masons. They banned Masons from their party and armed forces, dissolved every lodge in Germany, seized their property, persecuted their members, and paid for exhibitions and a feature film to spread lies about them. The claim isn’t just false; it is the reverse of what happened.

Webmaster’s Personal Comment:
A significant share of this rumour can be traced to the Q movement, whose most vocal promoters are Pentecostal evangelist Christian extremists. Their hostility towards Freemasonry is longstanding and openly expressed: sermons denouncing the Craft are widely circulated, and hundreds of quotations and articles online, some written with an open agenda, others presented as neutral research, repeat the same unfounded accusations. Readers should be aware that the narrative these sources promote is, in substance, the anti-Masonic propaganda of the Nazi regime. It was without foundation then, and it remains so today. For that reason, we have deliberately chosen not to link to any of this material.