alleged influences of various portions of the teachings of H. P. Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society with doctrines as expounded by her book The Secret Doctrine, and the adaptations of her ideas by her followers, through Ariosophy, the Germanenorden and the Thule Society, constituted a popularly unacknowledged but decisive influence over the developing mind of Hitler. The scholars state that Hitler himself may be responsible for turning historians from investigating his occult influences. While he publicly condemned and even persecuted occultists, Freemasons, and astrologers, his nightly private talks disclosed his belief in the ideas of these competing occult groupsdemonstrated by his discussion of reincarnation, Atlantis, world ice theory, and his belief that esoteric myths and legends of cataclysm and battles between gods and titans were a vague collective memory of monumental early events. In his childhood, Hitler had admired the pomp of Catholic ritual and the hierarchical organization of the clergy. Later he drew on these elements, organizing his party along hierarchical lines and including liturgical forms into events or using phraseology taken from hymns. Because of these liturgical elements, Daim's claim of Hitler's messiah-like status and the ideology's totalitarian nature, the Nazi movement, like other fascist movements and communism, is sometimes termed a "political religion" that is anti-ecclesiastical and anti-religious. Although Hitler expressed negative views towards the mystical notions of some of his senior Nazi underlings in private, he nevertheless appointed Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg to senior positions in the Nazi movement. William L. Shirer wrote that, "under the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann and Himmlerbacked by Hitlerthe Nazi regime intended to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods with the new paganism of the Nazi extremists". The regime launched an effort toward coordination of German Protestants under a unified Protestant Reich Church (but this was resisted by the Confessing Church), and moved early to eliminate political Catholicism. Blainey wrote: "Nazism itself was a religion, a pagan religion, and Hitler was its high priest ... Its high altar [was] Germany itself and the German people, their soil and forests and language and traditions". In 1924, during his imprisonment, Hitler had chosen Alfred Rosenberg to lead the Nazi movement in his absence. In his seminal 1930 work The Myth of the Twentieth Century, Rosenberg wrote: "We now realize that the central supreme values of the Roman and