Karl Haushofer and Chinese Mysticism

Haushofer is known to have had a reputation for precognition, manifested when he was a young field artillery officer in the Bavarian army. In 1908 the army sent him to Tokyo to study the Japanese army and to advise it as an artillery instructor. The assignment changed the course of his life and marked the beginning of his love affair with the Orient. During the next four years he traveled extensively in the Far East, adding Korean, Japanese, and Chinese to his repertoire of Russian, French, and English languages.
Karl Haushofer had been a devout student of Schopenhauer, and during his stay in the Far East he was introduced to Oriental esoteric teachings. He became proficient enough to translate several Hindu and Buddhist texts, and became an authority in Oriental mysticism. Some authors even believe that he was the leader of a secret community of Initiates in a current of satanism through which he sought to raise Germany to world power, though these occult connections have been denied.
It is also believed that he belonged to the esoteric circle of George Gurdjieff. Others claim that he was a secret member of the Thule Society. Some authors have linked Haushofer’s name with another esoteric group, the Vril Society, or Luminous Lodge, a secret society of occultists in pre-Nazi Berlin. Before the war Professor Haushofer and his son Albrecht allegedly maintained close contacts with British members of the Golden Dawn.

Karl Haushofer’s son, Albrecht, was a Professor of Geography at the University of Berlin, and a consultant to the nazi foreign office and worked in the wartime resistance against Hitler. The Haushofers fell from grace. Albrecht was indicted in the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. Karl Haushofer was sent to the infamous Dachau concentration camp, and Albrecht to the Moabite prison in Berlin. Waiting for his trial and most likely execution, he wrote sonnets and hid them very carefully. On April 23, 1945, as Soviet troops closed in on the center of Berlin, the prison authorities released Albrecht and a group of fellow inmates. But immediately outside the gates a group of SS or SD men took charge of the prisoners, marched them to a vacant lot nearby, shot them, and left their bodies where they fell. Some weeks later, Albrecht’s body was found by his younger brother. The dead man’s right hand was hidden under his coat, still pressing to his heart the five folded sheets of paper bearing the sonnets.
The Moabit Sonnets were first published by a group of American Army officers in the occupation forces in Berlin. Since then they have been reprinted in Germany and many European countries and languages.
Following the war, Haushofer was interrogated by the allies and put to trial before the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, but acquitted. Together with his wife Haushofer committed suicide on March 13, 1946, in Pähl, W. Germany.