Steppenwolf's past life in the Wehrmacht: circa 1939−1944

Since I was quite young, I've had this inexplicable empathy for the German soldiers of the Second World War. And whenever I used to watch WWII documentaries, I would always hope against hope that they'd win this time. I know it's ridiculous and I realise it would have been awful if the Germans had won the war because there would have been slave camps and concentration camps everywhere because of their insane racial theories, but I still can't help this feeling of empathy with the front-line soldiers - whereas I feel nothing for the Nazi party itself and sheer horror for the evil schemes they concocted. And then there are the feelings I have for Germany as a country - it seems like my home away from home, like I'm an exile or something. I always like to have a map of it around my work, though strangely enough modern Germany has no great appeal for me. I guess it's a bit of a love/hate relationship in some ways.

As a kid I always thought that the war years seemed to me to be such a strange and difficult situation for the Germans to be in. By doing their duty for their country, they were attacking other countries and causing a large amount of grief and misery. (Maybe there are some parallels with other countries today!)

My own insights (or "resonance")

I believe that everyone by the age of 25 or so should probably have a rough idea of where their previous life was focused - because of the various areas that they feel naturally interested in. When I finally started to read about reincarnation, I felt almost certain that I was a German soldier because the way my life was oriented:

The only couple of hazy dreams I have had on any sort of a past life theme had me in the company of other German soldiers
Even though my father was a French teacher, I tried to teach myself German at the age of 10, and showed little interest in other languages. Even though I excelled in French at high school (where German was not available), at university I dropped this in favour of starting German again, which I learned as best as I could. (I have an good accent, though my vocab could do with some work.)
From the age of 10 or so I became fascinated with the German soldiers and military machine of World War II, and to an extent still am today. From that age, all my toy tanks and aeroplanes had to be German ones from World War II - those of any other nationality or time period had no interest for me whatsoever.
I am not really terribly interesting in theatre, but I found it was a fun way to meet girls while I was in my mid-twenties. I ended up getting roped into acting in a total of three German-language plays for the local University even though I wasn't a student there: "Die Tote Tante" and "Der Lampenschirm" by Curt Goetz, and "Der Dreigroschenoper" (1930) by Bertold Brecht. Interestingly all of them would have been very popular between the wars.
In 1997, I bought a pair of million Mark notes dating from 1923 and I was instantly fascinated by them. I went on to spend US$500 on more notes over the next year from every source I could find. This became an almost irrational obsession for me - though to the surprise of other collectors, I was not the slightest bit interested in any other kinds of currency. In the mid 1920's, almost all German children had these remarkable but worthless notes as playthings.
I spent many hours as a boy playing with my grandfathers rifles, unlike both my brothers, who had little interest in anything military.

Strangely enough, what stopped me thinking that I could possibly be a reincarnated Wehrmacht soldier was that the only times I'd heard of people remembering past past lives on TV, they would always remember lives from hundreds of years ago - never from recent history. It was only relatively recently that I found that the interval between lives can vary greatly - from under a year to hundreds of years.

A psychic reading from sister

My sister is an energy healer and also a bit psychic. At the time I began to get interested in the idea of past life exploration, she was getting impressions of the past lives of other people in our family. While I am quite sceptical of psychics in general, I was interested to hear what she thought.

She felt that I was a German soldier (an officer or an NCO as she visualised me wearing a peaked cap) in the last war and died in my thirties somewhere near the Czech/Austrian frontier (1944/1945). She thinks I was definitely not in the SS but probably the regular army.

She said she could see my face in her mind: I had a large black moustache and a reasonably handsome face. She said she could also visualise the German town I came from but couldn't tell where it was.

Her feeling about my death was that I was taken by surprise and strangled or stabbed in the back (or both), but definitely not shot and not a death in battle.

As for what I did during the war, she said that I was totally focused on the war and my work mainly involved organising things near the front and working with maps. I asked her if I killed anyone and she said that my orders caused many deaths though she never perceived me being involved personally in battle.

My own thoughts of my previous life - based on "resonance"

I think my sister was probably along the right lines but some details are likely to be a little off-course from her reading.

Personally I feel that I was in a branch of the standard Wehrmacht, as I feel the Panzer arm and the Luftwaffe were too glamorous for me somehow, while the Kriegsmarine holds little interest for me - there is no resonance there. I feel a strong pull towards the Luftwaffe planes and love the Panzers too, but I think that I only found myself in contact with them as part of my Wehrmacht duties.

Rank of Hauptmann would fit one incident which just seems to be more than coincidence: my grandfather presented me with his army captain's peaked cap when I was 6 or 7 years old and I still have it to this day.

I feel a lot of resonance with the Hitler bomb plot of the 20th July 1944. I think especially if Wehrmacht officers knew about the mass killing of civilians as early as the Polish campaign (when many officers filed official complaints about these atrocities) then with my kind of way of thinking I would have been happy to join with anyone to try to stop this at any cost. Also once the war looked like it was lost because of insane decisions from the top (war on two fronts, declaring war on America - what were these lunatics thinking???) I would have been even keener to act.

Regarding death, I think my sister's impressions could well be related to the post 20th July round-up where hundreds of Wehrmacht officers were rounded up and many were sentenced to death by hanging. This in a way might equate to her idea of not dying at the front.

Wishful thinking

There are so many gaps to fill in that I often wonder what might have been. I read a book about the bomb plot of 20th of July 1944, and I must say it would be good to think that I had been involved in that somehow. And this time round I am usually by far the strongest critic of any bad leadership where I see it - I am definitely no sheep!

Also even though it may be unlikely, I would love it if it turned out that I had something to do with the Luftwaffe at some stage even if it was just liaison or even just being a failed Luftwaffe cadet. I have read so many memoires by Luftwaffe pilots like Adolf Galland, Johannes Steinhoff, Erich Hartmann, Heinz Knoke, Uli Steinhilper, Peter Stahl etc. It seemed to be one of the few places where a "gentleman's war" was still possible. I remember having nightmares when I was younger where I was falling out of the sky towards the ground - but these could be a common experience for all I know. (For me free-fall is still the most unpleasant and unbearable experience in the world.)

Nazism

When I was 11, my teacher was talking about Nazi Germany and mentioned the "Third Reesh" and - being the arrogant little shit I was - I giggled and proudly said "I think it's pronounced REICH", even saying the "ch" the right way. (Couldn't roll an R back then though.) Well, I had after all been trying to teach myself German with Dad's help - very rare for kids my age. While everyone else looked on, she indignantly asked what might seem to be the most ridiculous question ever: "Richard - are you a Nazi supporter?" I denied it of course, but inside I knew that she'd hit a nerve, because I was really beginning to wonder... But did I even know what a Nazi was? I knew I didn't like what happened to the Jews or any of the other nasty stuff, but everything else I heard about everyday life in the Germany of the 1930s just seemed like what I yearned for in my heart. That year when I read "Time of the Young Soldiers" by Hans-Peter Richter, I wanted to click my heels, bow my head and join the Wehrmacht just like he did. I remember practicing clicking my heels at home and nobody would have cared either way, as kids always do all sorts of silly things. I suppose people enjoy reading books so much because they can just disappear into another world for a time, and I was no different.

But I can say that actual Nazi ideas still seem just as insane to me today. I'm not particularly interested in politics and I'm even a bit of an "inverse-racist" - I'm always delighted to meet people of different cultures (we have lots of Germans, Russian Jews, Yugoslavs and Indians here) and I often find it much more interesting being around them than the locals. Plus I always wanted to end up with a girl from a exotic culture. So I find it a bit hard to imagine that I could have that much time for National Socialist politics and racial theories - but who knows.

Karma?

After looking into the idea of karma quite a bit, I have decided that it is mostly too complex for ordinary people to understand. I believe that the levels of dharma (cosmic law) which rule karma are so multi-layered that it's very difficult to judge any action, as it must be taken from all angles. In the case of a killing, you have to look at motivation, coersion, frame of mind, etc etc. (Note that I do NOT believe in the death penalty!) However I do believe that if someone truly believes that they are doing the right thing, that they cannot incur bad karma. This is why I think that some returning senior Nazis have come back with a seemingly very low karmic debt. Whereas I think people who personally killed or tortured and took pleasure in their tasks may have really messed things up for themselves...

As for myself, I feel that even if I did kill various people in battle during my previous life, I must have somehow already paid the main karmic debt (perhaps when I was killed), because there have been so many close brushes with death in this life on my motorbike etc, and yet I have been spared - well at least so far!

In fact I'd probably have to say that my life is seems to be much better than the average - I'm a pretty happy person, I have an interesting and fairly well-paid job, I get on very well with almost everyone I meet and have a good relationship with my girlfriend. But there have been various ups and downs in the past so I guess it's all pretty subjective, and maybe I'm more philosophical than most. And I do make a great point of avoiding being on bad terms with people and always trying to put a smile on people's faces.

Other reincarnated people from Nazi Germany

Well, they're out there! Think about it - if Germany lost 5 million military personnel during the war, these people are now sprinkled in all sorts of places all over the world. Luckily with the internet I've been able to come across several other people who seem to have past lives from this time and all sorts of people too: a couple of Luftwaffe pilots, at least 4 Waffen SS men, a very high-ranking Nazi, a couple of Panzer commanders - and I've come across old posts from a woman who was in an SS Einsatzkommando shooting civilians (very tough to deal with I imagine). The cool thing is all of these people seem to now be the most decent and tolerant people in our society. I guess if you're in touch with your past life, perhaps your soul has evolved a bit more than others. I think most of us have gone through a period of despair thinking about how wrong a lot of the ideas were that we must have subscribed to, but then after that most people can see the value of having lived through a crazy and fascinating time. One observation is that perhaps half these men have now reincarnated as females which is an interesting switch, but I think that I've come across more women because in general, women are more in touch with past life stuff and more likely to reach out to other people than men are. (Though this is all a bit of an assumption of course.)

Unfortunately I believe that that many of the insane right-wing nutters around are past life Nazis too, which is sad. It's nice to have resonance from a past life, but not if it makes a mess of this one too! Though as I read somewhere - whatever happens in life, it often works out for the best in the long run. So perhaps these people are just taking a bit longer to learn their lessons. Or perhaps they are just still around as a lesson to everyone that it could happen again if we're not vigilant.

How reincarnation seems to work

Over the last few years or so I've read a ton of books from all over the place to try to see if my supposed past life makes sense with what the great mystics say and here's what I found out.

Most people alive today will have had well over 100 previous lives.
People don't necessarily reincarnate near where they lived during their previous life. The idea seems to be for a soul to get as much experience from all races and cultures, and from both genders too. (Although having said that, most people I have heard of seem to have been the same sex in their previous lives.) Also there is a school of thought that the soul has a certain amount of choice as to where it is born, and in that case it wouldn't seem unreasonable that Germans who experienced the downfall of Germany would want to try a life somewhere completely different (especially if they were from the confiscated Eastern territories). So this is why I think that so many ex-German soldiers etc are reincarnating in the US and Australasia, etc. Also people may choose (or be drawn) to be reincarnated near other people they particularly like or have karmic issues to be resolved with, in whichever country they are in. Also of interest, many patriotic Americans find their past-lives were in America, which makes sense if they loved their country so much in previous incarnations and never lost their faith in it.
Most importantly, it seems that you will have met many of the main people in your life again and again in your previous lives. Your friends, enemies (if any) and family seem to cycle around to a large extent, though the relationships usually change. Of course you meet new people each time and drift away from others too. It seems that the more you are emotionally attached to people (either by hate or love), the more likely you will be drawn together in the next life.
Even if you can't remember your previous lives, often important parts of previous lives will "strike a chord" in this life. Or as a negative example, often children's phobias can stem from unpleasant past life experiences. My only fear in childhood was an intense and irrational fear of drowning when I was smaller, which I have mostly gotten over. However I still can't swim and the sound of being underwater is still pretty unsettling for me .

My Family

The interesting thing is that in my family we have three Jewish past lives, two German/Austrian ones (Mum & me) and my youngest brother was possibly Russian last time round. So it's quite a mix really - especially as two of the Jewish souls perished in the Shoah (ie the Holocaust) while I was probably stationed on the Eastern Front somewhere... None of us seem to have had it too easy last time round!

Click here to view past life feelings - Part 2