Miguel Serrano

Miguel Joaquín Diego del Carmen Serrano Fernández (10 September 1917 – 28 February 2009) was a Chilean diplomat, writer, occultist, and fascist activist. A Nazi sympathiser in the late 1930s and early 1940s, he later became a prominent figure in the neo-Nazi movement as an exponent of Esoteric Hitlerism. Born to a wealthy Chilean family, he developed an interest in writing and far-right politics, allying himself with the National Socialist Movement of Chile. During the Second World War, in which Chile remained neutral until 1943, Serrano campaigned in support of Nazi Germany and promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories through his own fortnightly publication, La Nueva Edad. In 1942, he joined an occult order founded by a German immigrant which combined pro-Nazi sentiment with ceremonial magic and kundalini yoga. It presented the Nazi German leader Adolf Hitler as a spiritual adept who had incarnated to Earth as a savior of the Aryan race and who would lead humanity out of a dark age known as the Kali Yuga. Serrano became convinced that Hitler had not died in 1945 but had secretly survived and was living in Antarctica. After visiting Antarctica, Serrano travelled to Germany and then Switzerland, where he met the novelist Hermann Hesse and psychoanalyst Carl Jung; in 1965, he published a reminiscence of his time with the pair. In 1953, Serrano joined the Chilean diplomatic corps and was stationed in India until 1963, where he took a keen interest in Hinduism and wrote several books. He was later made ambassador to Yugoslavia and then Austria, and while in Europe made contacts with various former Nazis and other far-rightists living on the continent. Following Chile's election of a socialist President, Salvador Allende, Serrano was dismissed from the diplomatic service in 1970. After Allende was ousted in a coup and Augusto Pinochet...