The
Ostara Connection
Lanz von Liebenfels (also known under other names and titles: Adolf Lanz, Dr. Jörg Lanz, Schurl Lanz, Georg Lancz von Liebenfels, Lancz de Liebenfels. The name on his birth certificate is given as Adolf Josef Lanz. He once told to a friend that he took various names to mislead astrologers, hence these "astrological pseudonyms."), was the son of middle class but well-to-do parents, was born in Vienna in 1874 as Adolf Lanz. He claimed, however, that ha was born at Messina, Italy, in 1872, and that his real father had been Baron Johannes Lancz de Liebenfels. (Allegedly, the incorrect date was created on purpose, to mislead astrologers, and his doctorate existed only in his imagination).
In 1893, at the age of 19, Lanz became a novice at a monastery of the
Cistercian order at Heiligenkreuz, on the present Austro-Hungarian border,
but was expelled six years later accused of being a victim of "worldly
and carnal desires." Shortly after being expelled he 
founded
his Order of the New Templars, which had a strong racial orientation. It
was inspired, as the name suggests, by the Templar knights. Since 1905
Lanz became the editor and publisher of the anti Semite magazine Ostara
.
Named after the ancient Germanic goddess of Spring, Ostara was
a grotesque, racially motivated magazine devoted to the diffusion of Lanz's
ideas. It displayed the swastika as a rallying symbol. Most of the ideology
of German racial superiority exposed by the Thule Society and later by
the Nazis was but a development of the theses published in Ostara
.
In Ostara Lanz began using the kruckenkreuz (the symbol depicted
on the chest of the knight, a design combining the two possible virtual
movements of the swastika; destro- and sinistroverse, also called croix
potent.) as well as the the swastika.
Lanz's notorious magazine attracted Hitler in his early days as an impoverish artists in Vienna. It is known that Hitler was so inflamed with the wild occult, racial, and anti-Semitic theories he found in Ostara , that he paid a visit to the editor's offices and came face-to-face with Lanz himself. Some authors claim that it was through the pages of Ostara that Hitler became inflated with the swastika as a symbol of the Arian people.
In 1934, a year after Hitler came to power, Lanz wrote that the Order
of the New Templars was the "first manifestation of the [Nazi] Movement,
which now, in accordance with the law of God, is most powerful in history
and unrestrainedly sweeping over the world."