Miguel Serrano

Childhood: 1917–1938

Miguel Joaquín Diego del Carmen Serrano Fernández was born on 10 September 1917.^[6] On his maternal line, he was descended from the countesses of Sierra Bella.^[6] His mother, Berta Fernández Fernández, died when Serrano was five years old, while his father, Diego Serrano Manterola, died three years later.^[6] He had two younger brothers and a sister, who were then all raised by his paternal grandmother, Fresia Manterola de Serrano, moving between a Santiago townhouse and a 17th-century country mansion in the Claro Valley.^[6]

Between 1929 and 1934, he studied at the Internado Nacional Barros Arana.^[6] The school had been heavily influenced by Prussian staff members who had arrived in the late 19th century, with Serrano attributing his later Germanophilia to this early exposure to German culture.^[6] At the school he moved in literary circles.^[6] A close friend of his was Hector Barreto, a poet and socialist. Aged 18, Barreto was killed in a brawl with uniformed Nacistas, members of the National Socialist Movement of Chile, a fascist group inspired by the example of the Nazi Party in Germany.^[6] This event encouraged Serrano's involvement in left-wing politics as he began to take an interest in Marxism and the Chilean Marxist movement.^[6] He wrote articles for leftist journals like Sobre la marcha, La Hora, and Frente Popular.^[6] His uncle, the poet Vicente Huidobro, encouraged him to join the left-wing Republicans in the ongoing Spanish Civil War, but he did not do so.^[6]

Nazism and occultism: 1939–1952

Serrano grew critical of Marxism and left-wing politics, instead being drawn to the Nacistas after their failed coup in September 1938.^[6] By July 1939, Serrano was publicly associating himself with the Nacista movement, now organised as the Popular Socialist Vanguard.^[7] He began writing for their journal, Trabajo, and accompanied their leader, Jorge González von Marées, on his speaking tours across Chile.^[7] At the outbreak of the Second World War, in which Chile remained neutral, Serrano expressed support for Nazi Germany; from July 1941 he launched a fortnightly pro-Nazi publication, La Nueva Edad.^[7] Among the magazine's regular contributors were the journalist René Arriagada, General Francisco Javier Díaz, and Hugo Gallo, who was the cultural attaché at the Italian Embassy.^[7] Through this work, Serrano developed close links with the German Embassy in Chile and its personnel.^[7]

Although Serrano had initially shown little interest in Nazi attitudes towards Jewish people, he became increasingly interested in antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jews manipulating world events.^[7] Two Chilean artists gave him a Spanish language translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a text purporting to expose this alleged international Jewish conspiracy.^[7] According to the historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, it was this discovery of the Protocols which "marked a crucial point in the development of Serrano's Nazism".^[7] From November 1941, he began printing excerpts from the Protocols in La Nueva Edad.^[7]

Serrano also developed an interest in forms of religious or spiritual practice, including both Western esotericism and Hinduism.^[8] In late 1941, Gallo suggested that Serrano could support the German and Italian war effort not just through his publications, but also on the etheric Inner Planes, introducing him to an esoteric order sympathetic to Nazism.^[8] Serrano later claimed that this order had been founded near the start of the 20th century by a German migrant known as "F. K."^[8] Serrano was initiated into the group in February 1942.^[8]

F. K. claimed that the group owed its allegiance to a secretive Brahmin elite who resided in the Himalayas.^[8] It practiced combined kundalini yoga with ceremonial magic and expressed a pro-Nazi position.^[8] It espoused a belief in an astral body which could be awakened through various rituals and meditative practices.^[8] The group revered the Nazi German leader Adolf Hitler as the savior of an Aryan race and presented him as a shudibudishvabhaba, an initiate of immense willpower who had voluntarily incarnated onto Earth to assist in the overthrow of the Kali Yuga, a present dark age for humanity.^[8] F. K. claimed that through the astral realm, he was able to establish a connection with Hitler, during which they had various conversations.^[8]

As the Second World War ended in defeat for Nazi Germany in 1945, Serrano was convinced that Hitler had not committed suicide in Berlin as was claimed by the victorious Allies. Instead, Serrano believed that Hitler had escaped and was living in Antarctica, either in a secluded warm environment on the continent or under the ice cap itself.^[8] This idea had been suggested to him by F. K.—who claimed that he remained in astral contact with Hitler—but was also widely rumoured in the Latin American press.^[9] In 1947, Ladislao Szabó's book Hitler est vivo had been published, exerting an influence on Serrano. Szabó's book alleged that a U-boat convoy had taken Hitler to safety in Queen Maud Land.^[10] In 1947–48, Serrano travelled to Antarctica as a journalist with the Chilean Army.^[10] In 1948, he wrote his own short book, La Antártica y otros Mitos, which repeated Szabó's claims about Hitler's survival.^[10]

In 1951, Serrano travelled to Europe, and in Germany visited various sites associated with the Nazi Party, including Hitler's Berlin bunker, Hitler's Berghof home, and Spandau Prison, where Rudolf Hess and other prominent Nazis were then imprisoned.^[10] During this trip he also visited Switzerland, where he met and befriended the writer Hermann Hesse and the psychoanalyst Carl Jung.^[10]

Diplomatic career: 1953–1970

In 1953, Serrano—following a number of other family members—joined the Chilean diplomatic corps.^[10] He hoped to gain a posting to India, a land which he considered to be a source of great spiritual truths. He was successful in this, and remained in India until 1962. In this period, he visited many Hindu temples and searched for evidence of the secretive Brahmanical order into which F. K. had alleged initiation.^[10] In his role as a diplomat, he met various prominent figures, including Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, and the 14th Dalai Lama.^[10] It was while in India that he wrote and published two books: The Visits of the Queen of Sheba (1960), which had a preface by Jung, and The Serpent of Paradise (1963), which discussed his experiences in the country.^[10] Serrano had engaged in further correspondence with Jung between 1957 and 1961.^[11] In 1965 his book, C. J. Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships, was published.^[11]

Leaving India, from 1962 to 1964 he was posted as the Chilean ambassador to Yugoslavia.^[10] From 1964 to 1970 he then served as his country's ambassador to Austria, for which he lived in Vienna.^[10] During the latter posting, he also represented Chile at the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, both of which were based in Vienna.^[10] While in Europe, he had sought out a number of individuals linked to Nazism and to the far-right more broadly; these included visits to the Ahnenerbe co-founder Herman Wirth, the designer and occultist Wilhelm Landig, the poet Ezra Pound, and the Traditionalist thinker Julius Evola.^[12] He established friendships with a number of individuals involved in the old Nazi movement, including Léon Degrelle, Otto Skorzeny, Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Marc "Saint-Loup" Augier, and Hanna Reitsch.^[12] He also discussed issues with the ancient astronaut proponent Robert Charroux.^[12]

In the 1970 Chilean presidential election, the Socialist Salvador Allende was elected president. Later that year, Serrano was dropped from the country's diplomatic service.^[13] Rather than returning to Chile, he moved to Switzerland, renting an apartment in the Casa Camuzzi—where Hesse had lived from 1912 to 1931—at Montagnola in the Swiss Ticino.^[11]

Later life: 1973–2009

The loss of his diplomatic position, coupled with the establishment of a Marxist government in Chile, led Serrano to take a revived interest in Nazism.^[11] He began reading a number of recently published books that purported to identify links between Nazism and occultism.^[11] In 1973, his book El/Ella: Book of Magic Love was published.^[11] After Allende was ousted in a September 1973 coup and a right-wing military regime under Augusto Pinochet took power, Serrano returned to Chile. He nevertheless found that the Pinochet administration was not interested in his neo-Nazi and Esoteric Hitlerist ideas.^[12] In 1980, his book Nos: A Book of the Resurrection was published, a form of autobiography influenced by Jungian psychology.^[11] He also produced a trio of books that came to be known as his "Hitler Trilogy": El Cordón Dorado: Hitlerismo Esotérico (1978), Adolf Hitler, el Ultimo Avatãra (1984), and Manú: "Por el hombre que vendra" (1991).^[14]

He increasingly associated with old Nazis living in Chile as well as with their neo-Nazi sympathisers.^[12] In May 1984 he attended the funeral of Walter Rauff—a member of the Waffen SS who had played a role in organising the early stages of the Holocaust and who had fled to Chile after the Second World War—and there gave the Nazi salute.^[12] In 1986 he published a political manifesto for Nazism in the Southern Cone of South America.^[15] He began organising annual celebrations of Hitler's birthday at a rural retreat in Chile.^[16] In September 1993, he led a neo-Nazi rally in Santiago—dressed in what had become his trademark black leather coat—in honor of the Nazi Rudolf Hess and the Nacistas summarily executed by Chilean police officers following their 1938 coup attempt.^[15] As well as playing a role in organising the Chilean neo-Nazi movement, Serrano maintained correspondences with neo-Nazis elsewhere in the world, such as the American Matt Koehl.^[15]

Serrano was the subject of an extensive interview in the Greek far-right magazine ΤΟ ΑΝΤΙΔΟΤΟ. Here, he sought to engage a younger audience by contrasting his millennial vision of Nazism with his perception of the corruption of modern liberalism.^[15] He was also the subject of a feature in The Flaming Sword, a magazine issued by the Black Order, a neo-Nazi Satanist group established by the New Zealander Kerry Bolton.^[17] Bolton had also written his own study of Serrano's Esoteric Hitlerism,^[18] and the Black Order's occult framework was influenced by Serrano's ideas.^[19] Despite the interest that Nazi Satanists took in Serrano's work, he was critical of attempts to combine Satanism with Nazism, in 2001 stating that individuals who did so "will only damage our sacred fight with all the kookiness from California, like Satanism". He added that "Many Satanists do not know that they are manipulated, psychotronically, in fact hypnotized, when not infiltrated by the CIA, Mossad and other such secret organisations."^[20]

By the early 1990s, Serrano's Esoteric Hitlerist ideas were spreading among modern pagans,^[21] gaining particular popularity among far-right Germanic heathens in the United States.^[22] The American Heathen Katja Lane of the Wotansvolk group secured the rights to publish English translations of Serrano's work,^[23] with Wotansvolk becoming the main promoter of Serrano's writings in the Anglophone world through their 14 Word Press.^[24] One of the prominent far-right Heathens to be influenced by Serrano's ideas was Jost Turner.^[25] Another American occultist to cite an influence from Serrano's ideas was Michael Moynihan, who also cited having been influenced by Evola, Muammar Gaddafi, Mikhail Bakunin, and James Mason.^[26]

In 1994, Serrano, a close friend of Degrelle, wrote a book dedicated to him titled Nuestro Honor Se Llama Lealtad.^[27] Serrano had three children with his first wife.^[28] On 28 February 2009,^{[29][30][31][32][28][33][3]} Serrano died after suffering a stroke in his apartment in the Santa Lucía Hill sector of Santiago, the capital.^[34] During his funeral at the General Cemetery, the procession paused at Irene Klatt Getta's crypt, where his coffin and the crowd of over 100 people stopped momentarily before continuing.^[28]