Miguel Serrano

Miguel Joaquín Diego del Carmen Serrano Fernández, known as Miguel Serrano (10 September 1917 – 28 February 2009), was a Chilean diplomat, writer, occultist, and fascist activist.

Miguel Joaquín Diego del Carmen Serrano Fernández was born on 10 September 1917.

On his maternal line, he was descended from the countesses of Sierra Bella.

His mother, Berta Fernández Fernández, died when Serrano was five years old, while his father, Diego Serrano Manterola, died three years later.

Between 1929 and 1934, he studied at the Internado Nacional Barros Arana.

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 of European descent, Serrano was orphaned as a child and raised by his grandmother.

After an education at the Internado Nacional Barros Arana, he developed an interest in writing and far-right politics, allying himself with the National Socialist Movement of Chile.

Serrano grew critical of Marxism and left-wing politics, instead being drawn to the Nacistas after their failed coup in September 1938.

By July 1939, Serrano was publicly associating himself with the Nacista movement, now organised as the Popular Socialist Vanguard.

He began writing for their journal, Trabajo, and accompanied their leader, Jorge González von Marées, on his speaking tours across Chile.

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.

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.

Through this work, Serrano developed close links with the German Embassy in Chile and its personnel.

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.

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.

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".

In 1942, he joined an occult order founded by a German migrant 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.

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.

Serrano became convinced that Hitler had not died in 1945 but had secretly survived and was living in Antarctica.

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.

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.

Following Chile's election of a Marxist President, Salvador Allende, Serrano was dismissed from the diplomatic service in 1970.

After Allende was ousted in a coup and Augusto Pinochet took power, Serrano returned to Chile in 1973.

He became a prominent organiser in the Chilean neo-Nazi movement, holding annual celebrations of Hitler's birthday, organising a neo-Nazi rally in Santiago, and producing a neo-Nazi political manifesto.

He wrote a trilogy of books on Hitler in which he outlined his view of the Nazi leader as an avatar.

He remained in contact with neo-Nazis elsewhere in the world and gave interviews to various foreign far-right publications.

In 2008, Serrano was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award (Premio a la Trayectoria) from the Universidad Mayor of Santiago.

After Savitri Devi, he has been considered the most prominent exponent of Esoteric Hitlerism within the neo-Nazi movement.

In that movement, he gained respect for his devotion to the cause even among neo-Nazis who regarded his ideas as far-fetched.

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.

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.

At the school he moved in literary circles.

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.

This event encouraged Serrano's involvement in left-wing politics as he began to take an interest in Marxism and the Chilean Marxist movement.

He wrote articles for leftist journals like Sobre la marcha, La Hora, and Frente Popular.

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.