Alexander Rud Mills (1885 – 8 April 1964) was an Australian barrister and author, interned in 1942 for his Nazi sympathies and fascist beliefs. He was also a prominent Odinist, one of the earliest proponents of the rebirth of Germanic Neopaganism in the 20th century, and an anti-Semite. He founded the First Anglecyn Church of Odin in Melbourne in 1936. He published under his own name and the pen-names "Tasman Forth" and "Justinian".
Early life
Mills was born in Forth, Tasmania, in 1885. In around 1910, he moved to Victoria to enrol at the Melbourne University Law School. He graduated in 1916 and was admitted to the Victorian Bar in 1917.
Political sympathies and activities
Mills applied to join the AIF during World War I at which time he was living at Sea Lake. He was rejected on medical grounds. His soldier's reject badge was No. 65039. During 1914-15 he worked as a schoolteacher at Haileybury College, Brighton.
In 1930, Mills stood for preselection as Nationalist candidate for the seat of Hawthorn. He was not successful. The following year, having little work but some money, he embarked on a trip around the world. He visited South Africa but did not like either the climate nor the 'mixed races'. He then visited Italy, Germany, Britain and the USSR. Although already reactionary in nature, he claimed to have become disillusioned with communism, which he had come to view as a form of organised thuggery, during his trip to Russia. He claimed that conditions in the USSR itself were appalling and that "Russia will cure any Communist if he goes to work there." In England, he attended meetings of Sir Oswald Mosley's 'British Union of Fascists', and Arnold Leese's smaller and more radical 'Imperial Fascist League'. He aligned himself more closely with the Imperial Fascists and later helped to distribute Leese's newspaper, The Fascist, in Australia.
Historian of esotericism Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke characterises Mills as a "Nazi sympathiser". Mills' trip to Germany included a visit to the Brown House where, without appointment, he met Adolf Hitler "talking" (Mills would later recount) "to some of his confreres". At the 1944 Australia First enquiry, Mills claimed that Hitler had impressed him as a "kindly man" who "seemed to have the respect of his men and appeared kind to them." In Germany, Mills also met followers of General Erich Ludendorff, the famous First World War strategist and conspiracy theorist who was also, like Mills, virulently anti-Semitic.
Returning to Australia in January 1934, Mills established the Anglecyn Church of Odin. He told an undercover agent the following year that this 'religion' was a front which allowed him to pursue his dedication to fascism without fear of prosecution. In 1935, he also founded a group called the 'British Australian Racial Body'. He established two short-lived newspapers, the National Socialist and The Angle, as vehicles through which to espouse his racist, pseudo-religious and political views. At this time he maintained correspondence with officials of the British Union of Fascists. During wartime investigations into his views during the 1930s, it was established that he owned an autographed photograph of Julius Streicher, publisher of Der Stürmer. In 1941, he became associated with the anti-War, pro-Isolationist Australia First Movement and contributed to its newspaper The Publicist, which, before 1939, had described itself as being "for national socialism" and "for Aryanism; against semitism", and which was the mouthpiece for William John Miles, a leading member of the Rationalist Society.
Mills' The Odinist Religion: Overcoming Jewish Christianity was published in 1939. In that work, Mills claimed (without evidence) that Nordic races had established the ancient civilisations of Sumer, Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome, but that they had been weakened by miscegenation with other races. He was particularly affronted by the espoused Christian assumption that all humans were equal. The following year he stood for the Federal seat of Fawkner representing the Motorists' Protection League. He polled 2,152 votes compared to Harold Holt's 38,387 (for the U.A.P.) and A. E. Fraser's 22,558 (A.L.P.)