Himmler's Fortress of Fear

HIMMLER'S WALHALLA: THE WEWELSBURG

 

The location

 

At almost equidistance from the German cities Hamm and Paderborn the Wewelsburg is situated. This Burg is not as old as German castles go; in its present shape it dates from the Renaissance period, while some parts of it are built even later. The Burg never became a touristic attraction. It is neither large nor powerful; it had been decaying for a long time. The last occupants left the castle already during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648); new residents never arrived. The castle has the shape of a triangle. A round tower stands at the top, a lineal descendant of the early-medieval donjon; from this tower two wings stretch southward, connected at the basis by a third wing. In consequence the inner court also has the form of a triangle.

 

The castle stands at the northern end of the flat top of a low but steep hill. The plateau contains two other buildings, the Roman Catholic church and also another, smaller building that belongs to the castle. The village of Wewelsburg is situated at the foot of the hill; it then had nine hundred inhabitants, almost all of them Catholics. The church on the hill was their parish church. The village had always been served by a monk of a nearby monastery, but about 1700 the abbot had decided to no longer put one of his monks at the disposal of the villagers. Therefore, the bishop of Paderborn resolved to give them an ordinary parish priest. Because the village had never had a parish priest, there was no vicarage. When the first parish priest arrived, he took up his residence in the southern wing of the castle. He had his church straight before his windows.

 

Himmler

This peaceful situation remained unchanged for more than two centuries. However, shortly after Hitler had come into power in January 1933, the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, nicknamed Reichsheini, became interested in the Wewelsburg. We have become accustomed to view the SS as a gigantic military and paramilitary organization, with its twelve divisions Waffen-SS and its Allgemeine SS, the men in the black uniforms. Yet in 1933 the SS was still only small. and Himmler had not yet become one of the highest in the Nazi hierarchy. The important organization was then the SA, under the leadership of Röhm, the strong-armed gangs of the party, the hard-fisted brutes who had done so much to intimidate Hitler’s opponents. However, the SA was becoming too powerful in Hitler’s eyes and its leaders too ambitious. In `the night of the long knives’, in June 1934, Hitler himself made a radical end to all real or supposed strivings to power by the SA.

 

This was Himmler’s great chance and he took it. He and his men helped Hitler energetically in these horrible and bloody days. From then on the star of the SS began to rise. Himmler finally became one of the most powerful and influential potentates of the Third Reich, but he always avoided making the mistake of Röhm. He never became dangerous to the Führer; quite the contrary, he always remained one of his most loyal servants.

 

In the course of 1934 Himmler wanted to give his SS more adherence; the best means to achieve this, he found, was an attractive ideology. This man differed in this from other ambitious and cynical Nazi-leaders that he had a mystical trait in his character; a quasi-religious ideology was of essential importance to this originally evangelical Christian. It must be stated in advance that Hitler took no interest in SS-mystics which he found poppycock. What Himmler wanted was a religious centre, something like St.Peter’s in Rome or the Temple of Jerusalem.

The discovery of the Wewelsburg

 

In 1934 Himmler dispatched scouts with the to find an appropriate Burg that would bring him into contact with Germany’s heroic and romantic past. The task of the scouts was not an easy one: many castles were in a bad state, others were in the possession of families or institutions not willing to sell them, still others were too expensive. In the summer of 1934, however, somebody brought the Wewelsburg to Himmler’s attention. He was immediately enthusiastic. What appealed most to him was the fact that the axis of the castle, the perpendicular line of the triangle, runs exactly north-south. In Christian times the east-west line had always been the world’s basis line; churches had always been built with their absis to the east, where Christ had suffered and had risen and from where comes the light of the world. Himmler, however, wanted his SS-men make acquainted with another direction, at right angles to the traditional one.

This blueprint shows unambiguously the form of a spear whose handle is the road to the castle and the tip represents the castle itself.  Hitler allegedly was in possession of the Holy Spear of Golgotha with which Jesus on the cross was stabbed.  Perhaps the Wewelsburg in the Third Reich was therefore rebuilt in this shape.

Another advantage was that, according to the prophecies of the German poet Ferdinand Freiligrath (1810-1876), the final struggle between east and west, between the armies of civilization and those of the barbarian hordes, would, within one hundred and fifty years, took place in the immediate vicinity. Himmler, a superstitious and credulous person, accepted this straightaway. In his opinion the Wewelsburg stood exactly in the centre of the world, even of the coming world.

 

Practical problems

 

There were some practical problems. First of all, the parish priest lived in the southern wing of the castle. With a combination of promises and threats the SS succeeded in forcing the bishop of Paderborn to make the parish priest evacuate his house; the man got another house in the village. A second obstacle was the church. The SS would have preferred to have the entire hilltop to itself, but demolishing the building and erecting a new one for the parish somewhere else proved impossible, also for financial reasons. The result was that the SS-garrison of the castle could every Sunday enjoy the Gregorian chant coming from the church just opposite.

 

A third problem was of a financial nature. The building itself, dilapidated as it was, was not expensive, but it must be thoroughly rebuilt and renovated. Himmler had to proceed very carefully; his friends were few and he had many enemies who were jealous of his growing power. Hitler did not feel inclined to help him with his financial problems. Only when Himmler declared the work to be the restoration of a valuable cultural possession and that the castle would become the home of a SS-educational centre, he got the necessary funds. Thus the Wewelsburg officially became a SS-Ordensburg, where, as in other Ordensburge, training courses for SS-officers would be given. In reality a course of this kind was never given in the Wewelsburg.

 

Himmler had yet another means to help himself out of his financial problems. The SS controlled the concentration camps; therefore, the Reichsführer could establish a small KZ just behind the hill. By putting its Häftlinge to work at the renovation of the castle, he had the disposal of a cheap working-force; he could do without the help of loquacious and curious workmen hired in the villages in the neighbourhood. This concentration camp remained virtually unknown, but it was one of the worst. Its regime was harsh, there was much beating, punishments were exceptionally cruel. In the last months of 1934 a small SS-detachment arrived and made the castle its abode.

 

Problems with the villagers

 

Himmler would have preferred to have the entire village in his possession, in order to transform it into a SS-settlement. He succeeded in convincing two peasants to sell their farms to him, in exchange for farms in Silesia. When this became known, the villagers were terrified. Luckily for them there was not enough money to buy more farms. Himmler went out of his way to placate the villagers. The SS-men in the castle had the strictest orders to avoid even the slightest incident with the villagers; a social centre was built for the village community, opened by Himmler in person.

 

Yet soon enough the relations began to deteriorate. The Roman Catholic population did not like this special branch of SS-ideology and had no understanding for it. What they understood was that it was profoundly anti-Christian. There were rumours, and more than that, of what was done to Jews in the villages and towns of Westphalia; and although it was forbidden to the villagers to come near the KZ, it nevertheless did not remain unknown how the inmates were treated. All this did not make the SS-men beloved by the villagers. And then, they could not keep their hands off the village girls.

 

In 1938 it literally came to blows. There was a quarrel between a villager and a SS-man in the course of which the former was hit so hard that his jaw was broken. Himmler was furious, when he heard this; the unfortunate man was brought to a hospital in Dortmund, where he was nursed for six months at the expense of the SS. Yet, somewhat later, during a harvest festival, it came again to words and from words to deeds. This time a SS-NCO was kicked in the belly so hard that he became unconscious; the frightened villagers fled to their houses and the festival was immediately over.

 

The commander of the garrison panicked and sent a telegram to Paderborn: "Rebellion in Wewelsburg, need heavy assistance immediately". The SS-command in Paderborn dispatched some units. When, in the early morning of the next day, a column of cars approached the village, its heavily armed occupants were in an abysmally bad temper, because they had had to get out of bed in the middle of the night. They expected to have to storm the barricades, manned by armed villagers, but there was not the slightest sign of resistance and everybody was asleep. Nonetheless, some people were arrested, who had to spend some months in SS-prisons. This time Himmler was still more furious; he fired the incompetent commander. This man immediately defected to Himmler’s arch-enemy, Walther Darré, the head of the Nazi agrarian organization; from this safe hiding-place he started a venomous campaign against his former chief.

Note the eight sided Chandelier which corresponds to the Star of Isis (Astaroth) The symbol of the Black Sun is on the floor and the windows are aligned like Stonehenge An image of Stonehenge reconstructed

Secrecy

 

In 1935, when the work was making good headway, Himmler decreed that everything concerning his pet project should be kept strictly secret: no visits, no guided tours, no publications. Even SS-men were not admitted. Men who were not members of the small garrison and who had a reason to visit the castle, needed a permit signed by the Reichsführer personally. For ten years the Wewelsburg disappeared behind a curtain of silence. This silence was so complete that American tank crews who stood within shooting distance of the castle in April 1945, had not the slightest idea of what kind of castle it was. Even the allied secret services knew nothing at all. The reason was not so much that Himmler feared ironical commentaries from his Nazi comrades but rather that secrecy is well-known trait of esoteric societies like the SS; they are all exceptionally secretive and do not feel any need to defile their ideas by communicating them to the profanum vulgus.

 

The renovation of the castle was never completed in fact; in the years 1935-1945 it did not serve as a SS-temple, as was the intention. Only once there was an assembly of high SS-officers. There never was enough money, and when the war broke out, even Himmler had other priorities. He was the commander-in-chief of twelve SS-divisions that were fighting on several fronts, but also the management of the always growing concentration camps; the Endlõsung der Judenfrage was also a responsibility of the SS. On the southern slope of the hill the visitor can still see the majestic but only half finished staircase on which the SS-high priests would ascend the hill in order to solemnly enter the temple.

 

Destruction and restoration of the temple

 

When the end of the war was nearing, in April 1945, Himmler, who then had his headquarters in Hamburg, knew that all was lost; he therefore decided to destroy his pet project. He ordered a twenty-six-year-old SS-officer, whom he knew as courageous and ruthless, to take the destruction of the Wewelsburg upon himself.

 

In the evening of Holy Saturday the officer departed with four half-trucks loaded with explosives and a demolition squad of fifteen SS-men. They drove the whole night without meeting resistance. In the early morning of Easter Sunday they arrived in the vicinity of the Wewelsburg, but could not reach it directly, because an American tank unit had taken up a position there. The officer succeeded in disengaging his group and retired for a mile. There they found a dug-in Wehrmacht battalion. One of the sergeants was a local; he volunteered to bring the SS-commando to the castle. Along narrow country roads they arrived late on Easter morning on the hilltop. At half a mile distance American tanks stood firing. The SS-officer was lord and master of the Wewelsburg for four hours. First he ordered to take away the white flags that hung out of all the windows of the castle. Then the explosive charges were brought into the castle; soon there were loud explosions. The SS-temple was no more! The officer returned to Hamburg safely; a few days later he was, together with his chief, made prisoner by British troops.

 

Once again deep silence descended on the Wewelsburg. But after thirty years the German Federal Republic became interested; a few years later the renovation works began. It is highly intriguing that the castle has not been rebuilt as the Renaissance castle it once was, but as the SS-temple. It is obvious that the German government does not fear that this would make the German people feel nostalgic. This monument from an already distant past makes the same impression on the visitors an Inca temple would make. The entries in the visitors’ book have, in the very great majority, an anti-fascist tendency.

 

The SS-temple

 

The great round tower at the northern end of the hill has been very ably restored. One descends a stone staircase and enters the inner hall through a small door. The interior is mathematically circular. Himmler had the tower restored after the model of a Mycenean dome-shaped tomb he once visited. Accoustically the tower is the exact opposite of a whispering gallery. One must press oneself to the wall in order to understand a speaker in the middle of the hall. One step forward, and one hears nothing at all because of the reverberation and the echoes. In the top of the cupola one sees a swastika with the SS-runes at the four ends. This is a unique emblem; everywhere else it is either the swastika or the runes. In any case this proves convincingly that this is not a Nazi monument but a specific SS-sanctuary. The tower is now popularly known as the Valhalla.

 

Perpendicularly under the SS-swastika, in the exact middle of the circle, stands a table in the form of a dish. In this dish a flame can burn, symbol of the eternal fire in the heart of the earth. High in the walls there are four windows. They have been designed as light shafts through which the sunbeams radiate into the interior. The four sunbeams cross each other just above the dish. The place of the dish indicates the exact centre of the earth. The navel of the earth is not found in Jerusalem or in Rome or in Delphi, but in Westphalia. The table with the round dish stands in a lowered part of the floor; one reaches it along some steps. There are three concentric circles: the table and the dish, the lowered part of the floor, and the wall of the tower. These circles enclose the whole `Nordic’ world, the – in SS-ideology – only authentic world. Elsewhere in the castle there is another great circular hall with twelve pillars against the wall and a great solar disc with twelve beams in the form of runes.

 

On June 17, 1940, France asked for negotiations and Hitler ordered a "re-enactment" of the armistice of WW1 in Compiègne on June 21, where he was present as a "mute", god-like figure. However, he also visited old battle-fields that day, including the site near Soissons where he had been awarded his Iron Cross 1st Class. Then - on the evening of June 22. 1940 - he received the official document, stating that France had surrendered.   From a psychological point of view this must have been the final confirmation to Hitler of his "chosenness". He called upon Heinrich Himmler right after having received the document around 9 p.m. and installed him by an oral order with the task to annihilate all European Jews.   This hypothesis, based on an analysis of Hitler's traumatic pattern of behaviour, is supported by one written source. According to Himmler's masseur Felix Kersten, Himmler at first refused to accept the order, because he considered it to be "un-Germanic" to kill an entire people, but finally he gave in and accepted the dreadful commission. Kersten claimed that this command was given by Hitler "immediately after the capitulation of France" - and that Himmler explicitly blamed Göbbels as the person who had made Hitler take the decision   As usual when confronted with moral problems Himmler got stomach cramps and let Heydrich - the real "Architect of the Final Solution" - take over.   In return for this acceptance there is some evidence that suggests that Hitler promised Himmler a both significant and somewhat odd "fee": On July 12, 1940, the Reichsführer-SS got permission to tear down a church and enlarge the Wewelsburg Castle near Paderborn which Himmler meant to be the future "Centre of the World". The architecture of the North Tower as well as the planning of the whole site implies that Hitler's body was going to be buried here, and the possession of this most sacred "relic" of The Third Reich would secure Himmler's power after Hitler's death.

 

There has been much speculation as to whether the Priory of Sion is a shadowy secret society made up of some of the world’s most illustrious figures, a paranoid delusion, or an elaborate (but baseless) hoax. The men and women said to be its Grand Masters are certainly real, most of them key players in science, the arts, and the occult. Yet certain names seem to jump out from the list, seeming at first glance to be so absurdly inappropriate as to cast doubt upon the rest. Two such names would no doubt be those of Leonardo da Vinci and Jean Cocteau. Both Da Vinci and Cocteau were men of genius, and both evinced an interest in the occult/religious matters, but... guardians of the bloodline of Christ?   Was the Thule group a Germanic franchise of the Priory of Sion?   A decorative plaque from about 400 AD found in Inzing There are a few more stunning correspondences that suggest the possibility. First, Himmler’s "Grail castle", the Wewelsberg, can be shown to embody the same pentagonal sacred geometry that is found in the landscape of Rennes-le-Chateau (and elsewhere.) Plans drawn up for the massive construction of a city to have been built around the Wewelsburg would have incorporated the same geometry on a much larger scale. Additional buildings adjacent to the castle would have mimicked the shape of the Spear of Longinus, with the castle as its tip. That this was intentional and not merely some bizarre coincidence can be gleaned from the fact that for a time, the Spear of Longinus was actually kept in the Wewelsberg’s north tower, and was intended to be housed there on a permanent basis after the war. Furthermore, the symbol of the Black Sun, emblazoned on the marble floor of the very same north tower, is not a symbol designed by Heinrich Himmler, but is in fact an emblem used by the Merovingians in early medieval times. Author Nicholas Goodrich-Clarke says that this symbol and its connection to the Merovingians was discussed in a number of scholarly publications during the period of the Third Reich. This is rather amazing, considering the fact that this symbol is said to have represented the esoteric secret doctrine of the S.S., and it can be tangibly linked to the family of the Grail bloodline. Groups or organizations which use symbols as a means of communication chose their symbols with a very specific intent. The notion that the choice of this sigil was at all arbitrary, accidental or coincidental seems highly unlikely. The stunning confluence of so many ultra-esoteric ideas and symbols seem to permeate this saga on any number of levels. And as examples of these correspondences multiply, it appears possible that the ideological similarities in these groups’ worldviews may considerably outweigh any perceived differences.

 

The Black Order was not just a military organisation, but a sect, a fraternity of warrior priests. Though it never claimed the heritage of the Knights Templar, the parallels between the two orders are uncannily similar. Both snowballed into vast international forces. Both maintained a certain independence with economic systems that allowed them to accquire and keep vast wealth. Both were composed of highly disciplined and elite warriors who were fanatically dedicated to their creeds. Both were exempt from the laws that governed most of their contemporaries, answerable only to the head of their orders (Himmler or The Grand Master) and the representative of their sacred creed on earth (Hitler or the Pope). Both planned to institute separate and independent states, and both were ostensibly, Christian.. One of the titles bestowed upon Karl Weisthor (born Karl M. Wiligut in Vienna, 1866) was that of "The Black Jesuit" because he loosely based the structure of the SS upon the fanatically-secretive Catholic Society of Jesuits. The Black Order may have actually been a clever disguise for The Black Sun Order (an elite ultra-secret order within the ranks of The Thule Society). Traditionally, the acronym of "SS" referred to "Schutzstaffel" (Guard Detachment). But there is some evidence that points to the fact that it may have actually stood for "Schwarze Sonne" (Black Sun). While every member of the SS may not have been a member of this elite order it does point to the fact that the Nazis were magically attempting to invoke the hidden power of The Black Sun itself (this Black Sun being the invisible sun in the center of the earth) whenever the SS runes were displayed. There is a story that Hitler actually had zombie soldies made. It also states that the zombies were let loose in a small town somewhere in Russia to test them out. The inhabitants saw this and went inside and locked their doors and windows. The zombies, not really to bright just stood there. They were not aggressive nor were they looking to eat.   It says eventually, the SS just ended up destroying them all because they served no use at all.   The Germans have a phrase Kadavergehorsam, that denotes blind obediance, or "obediant corpse", but no evidence of experiments to reanimate corpses for military (or other purposes). The nearest anecdotal account is that of a ceremony that was rumoured to take place at Schloß Wewelsburg  where the preserved heads of SS Officers killed on the Eastern Front were returned and communication (via necromancy) was attempted in order to gain information.   There are claims by Anton LaVey and Michael Aquino that they adapted this ceremony into their ritual "The Rite of the Stifling Air", but there is no proof any written evidence from Wewelsburg actually exists.   The idea of reanimating dead soldiers to fight as shock troops isn't all that insane (at least to the military), and it was pursued by military scientists on all sides.   However, there is no documented proof (or even good evidence), that any of them actually succeeded. There is some evidence that it was one of Hitler's suggested projects, but there is nothing to point to it ever being implemented, or its subsequent success rate. The project in question is known as "The Litchfield Experiment". Be forewarned though, that any search on this is likely to turn up an “X-Files” episodes (Chris Carter used the name as an homage to the alleged Nazi project in an episode).

The Black Sun is a Nazi emblem consisting of three swastikas arrayed within a circle to form a sun design. The black sun symbol is found in the ornamental floor design of Wewelsburg Castle in Germany, Himmler's "World center" for the Nazi party, the headquarters of the SS.

The design was drawn for Heinrich Himmler from an old Aryan emblem, and was meant to mimic the Round table of Arthurian legend- each spoke of the sun wheel represented one "knight" or Officer of the "inner" SS.

The "Black Sun" of and its attendant mythology has fueled a number of bizarre conspiracy theories involving UFOs, secret societies, the Hollow Earth, and worse, none of which have any real basis in fact. The Wewelsburg sun should not be confused with the alchemical black sun (any more than it already has been), a symbol of hidden spiritual potential.

Karl Haushofer made several trips to India, studied the ancient Vedas, lived in Japan where he was initiated into an esoteric Buddhist society The Green Dragon. He later served as a connection to bring many Tibetan Lamas into Germany as SS officers on an advisory staff at Himmler’s castle in Wewelsburg. When allies overran the castle in 1945 they found over 1,000 monks in German uniforms lying burned to death in ceremonial circles of suicide.   A Polish traveller researching the occult crossed southern Siberia towards the town of Urga (since 1924 Ulan Bator). He was interested in the Buddhist lamas there and claimed to have met "a Buddha Incarnate", and apparent human who unified "the words of the Visible and the Invisible, of the Living and the Dead." The Bogdo janes, or Buddha's Incarnate, are said to be the guardians of the Earth's mysteries and use a Black Stone to predict and arrange the future. A number of passages in Chapter V of the traveller's book (Ferdinand Ossendowski, Beasts, Men & Gods, Paris, 1924) describe his encounter in the proximities of the mythical kingdom of Agharta while crossing the prairie Tzagan Luk in Mongolia. Another occult writer and traveller of that epoch (Rene Guenon, Le Roi du Monde, Paris, 1927), said that Agharta is populated by humans who have returned to the primordial state, totally integrated with cosmic forces. Agharta is the Holy Land of our era, invisible and inaccessible. The cosmic intelligence is conserved in a spiritual centre, which is the depository of the sacred tradition of non-human origin, and is transmitted to those deemed worthy to receive it. Once the present cycle of destruction has run its course, that Knowledge will reorganize the Earth on its new foundations. Here we have the idea of a Sacred Centre in Asia, which is the seat of the Higher Powers, and which manipulates affairs at the appropriate time. This centre is in a remote desert location in the mountain ranges near Ulan Bator. The founder of the Thule Society, von Sebottendorf, is alleged to have visited Agharta in 1919 for instructions. These is no doubt whatever (Geoffrey Brooks, Hitler's Terror Weapons, Pen & Sword, 2001) that there were Buddhist lamaist monastery annexes in Berlin from the 1920s until 1945, that these were run by Buddhist lamas, that they received visits from Hitler from time to time, and that they were described as "Lodges of the Most Luminous Vril".