The Vril Society: what the German records actually support
A Nazi occult order harnessing a secret energy, sometimes tied to the Nine. The energy comes from a novel of 1871, the society from a book of 1960, and the flying discs from the 1990s. Here is the paper trail.
Photo by MART PRODUCTION on Pexels
No occult claim of the twentieth century has travelled further on less than the Vril Society. In its mature form it is an inner circle of Nazi mystics, in contact with non-human intelligences, drawing on a secret energy called vril to build craft that outperform anything the Allies had. Some retellings graft it onto the Nine. The claim can be dated, source by source.
What is documented
Vril appears in The Coming Race, a novel published in 1871 by Edward Bulwer-Lytton — the same author responsible for "It was a dark and stormy night". In it, a subterranean people wield an all-purpose energy called vril. The book was popular and widely read, and the word entered the language; the beef extract Bovril takes the second half of its name from it.
The first widely read link between vril and Germany appears in "Pseudoscience in Naziland", an article by the science writer Willy Ley published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1947. Ley, who had left Germany in 1935, described among other oddities a small Berlin group interested in vril. That is a real contemporary reference — and it describes a fringe club, not an arm of the state.
What was claimed
The full version holds that the Vril Society was a functioning esoteric order inside National Socialism, that it received technical information through mediums, and that this produced advanced aircraft. In the versions that touch this cluster, the communicating intelligences are identified with the Nine.
The 1990s German publications of Jan Udo Holey, writing as Jan van Helsing, are where the flying-disc material becomes explicit and detailed. That is seventy years after the events they describe.
What was added later
Historians who work directly on the Third Reich’s relationship with occultism — Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s work is the standard reference — find no evidence of a Vril Society operating as described. The regime’s genuine esoteric entanglements are documented, and they look nothing like this: they are institutional, bureaucratic and traceable in surviving files.
That is the tell. The Third Reich is one of the most exhaustively documented regimes in history. Its archives survived, in enormous volume, and have been worked over by generations of researchers. An organisation of the significance claimed for the Vril Society would leave a trail. It leaves none.
What remains unexplained
Nothing about the society. What is worth explaining is the appetite: why this particular story is retold so persistently when the sources are so thin, and why it keeps attaching itself to whatever else is current.
Part of the answer is that it makes the Second World War legible as a metaphysical event rather than a political one. That is a comfort of a kind, and it is also a distortion with an unpleasant afterlife, because it dresses a regime in mystique it did not have.
Join the discussion
Still open on this one:
- 01
What exactly was the Berlin group Willy Ley referred to in 1947?
It is the only near-contemporary reference in the whole chain. Establishing what it actually was would settle how much, if anything, sits underneath the legend.
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See also
Everything this piece touches
Sources
Open them and check for yourself. Where a record is public, it is linked.
The Coming Race
Edward Bulwer-Lytton · 1 Jan 1871 · no public copy located
Pseudoscience in Naziland
Willy Ley, Astounding Science Fiction · 1 May 1947 · no public copy located
Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, NYU Press · 1 Jan 2002 · no public copy located
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