THE NAZI NECROMANCER?

The Magical World of Heinrich Himmler

 

by Liam Rogers

Martin Bormann's fourteen-year-old son was a passionate young Nazi going into that day in 1944. He was staying up at the Nazi leaders' compound on Obersalzberg, whilst on holiday from his boarding school in Bavaria, when he saw something that brought the horrors of the National Socialist regime shockingly home to him. He, with his mother and younger sister, were invited by Himmler's mistress, Hedwig Potthast, to see the Reichsführer's special collection in the attic of his new house there. Martin Bormann Jr told this horrific story to a therapy group of the children of former high-ranking Nazis in 1990:

When she opened the door and we flocked in, we didn't understand what the objects in the room were - until she explained ... It was tables and chairs made out of parts of human bodies. There was a chair ... the seat was a human pelvis, the legs human legs - on human feet. Then she picked up a copy of 'Mein Kampf' ... she showed us the cover - made of human skin, she said - and explained that the Dachau prisoners who made it used the ... skin of the back to make it.

~Sereny

This, then, was the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler's collection of mementoes from the concentration camps and extermination centres that killed and tortured millions of innocent people - crimes for which he was directly responsible.


Q.: Did Himmler have furniture made from human bones in his castle, and did this inspire the homely interiors of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre?  

A.: Peter Padfield's recent epic biography Himmler doesn't mention this, even as a rumour. The only source for the claim is Bormann's son, who said that Himmler's wife or mistress once showed the Bormann children a chair made from a human pelvis in their house - but not the castle at Wewelsburg. Bormann Jr has stuck to the story pretty consistently, trotting it out on Channel 5’s recent Hitler's Henchmen series. However, since no one else has ever repeated the anecdote, it can be regarded as suspect and I don't know whether any of the other Bormann siblings have ever confirmed or denied it. Bormann's son may well have concocted the story, in a "Well, I know my dad was bad, but look how fucked up this guy Himmler was" kind of way.

 

Tobe Hooper, meanwhile, states that he got his inspiration from murderer and grave robber Ed Gein, who built all sorts of furniture, clothing and housewares from human skin and bones, including a dress with breasts, lip lampshades, chairs, bowls and bracelets.


Tune in to the History Channel if you want to see how the telescreen perpetrates nonsense that Establishment writers of books and articles wouldn't touch.

No Establishment historian nowadays lends any credence to the stories that the Nazis made soap and lampshades out of murdered Jews. But in the Himmler episode of the "Hitler's Henchmen" series, broadcast over and over and over  on the History Channel, your children can learn about those lampshades and also about furniture made with Jewish thighbones. They can even learn about a copy of Mein Kampf  that was printed on Jewish skin!

An informant says he grew up in a house in Germany with all those artifacts in the attic, and the producers of the show accept all his declarations as gospel. With respect to the innovative story about the Hitler volume, need it be added  that no mention is made of DNA testing or of any testing at all?

 

 


Himmler: the man behind the Holocaust

 

His gruesome collection sits rather oddly with the picture of the man we see from those who knew him. Many have described Himmler as coming across as a kindly, eccentric schoolmaster. Field Marshall von Blomberg's aide, Karl Böhm-Tettelbach, liked Himmler more than the other Nazis he met:

He was a very nice and agreeable guest because he always involved younger people like me and would enquire about the air force, how I was getting along, how long I would be with Blomberg, if I liked it, what I had seen the last trip to Hungary and things like that.

~Rees

And whilst he ran the administrative side of the "final solution" with meticulous efficiency, he had literally no stomach for the reality of mass murder. His persistent stomach pains are thought to have been psychosomatic, caused by the suppressed guilt of the former Catholic about what his SS was doing in the name of the German people. Unfortunately fewer may have died if his doubts hadn't caused this stomach ailment, as in August 1941 he had an experience that may have speeded up the extermination programme. On that day, SS officer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski stood beside Himmler as he watched an Einsatzgruppe (SS extermination squad) shoot a hundred people, including women, in Minsk. He reports:

 

When the first shots were heard and the victims collapsed, Himmler began to feel ill. He reeled, almost fell to the ground, then pulled himself together. Then he hurled abuse at the firing squad because of their poor marksmanship. Some of the women were still alive, for the bullets had simply wounded them.

~Graber

 

A residue of humanity, then, that made him ill, led Himmler to order soon afterwards that women and children should be killed in gas vans - a decision that led to the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of which could hold up to three thousand victims at a time, and where Eichmann reckoned that two and a half million Jews alone were systematically murdered. [Höss]

 

Why would such a mild-mannered bureaucrat as Himmler so ruthlessly attempt to destroy an entire race and subject Germany and the occupied territories to a reign of terror? Partly, I think, because of his own neo-pagan beliefs, and partly due to an unswerving loyalty to Adolf Hitler - whose rabid anti-Semitism Himmler sought to justify by researching proof for Aryan superiority in the Germans' pagan past.The SS and neo-paganism.The Nazi Party was more a mass movement than a political party, it was also a pseudo-religious movement - even perhaps a cult. Aleister Crowley realised this, and spoke of Hitler thus:

His magical technique was indescribably admirable; he adopted the swastika, the Hammer of Thor, the distinctive dress, the slogan, the gestures, the greeting; he even imposed a Sacred Book upon the people.

~Crowley

 

The Party also adopted a set of seasonal festivals. The cycle started with the Day of the Seizure of Power (30th of January), continuing with February the 24th's commemoration of the Party's foundation, the National Day of Mourning in March, Hitler's birthday on April the 20th, May Day (called the National Day of Labour), Mothering Sunday, the Summer Solstice, the Nuremberg Party Assembly, Harvest Thanksgiving Day, the anniversary of the attempted Munich Putsch on November the 9th, ending with the Winter Solstice. [Grunberger]

 

Much could be written on the subject of the pagan aura of the Nazi Party and its regime, but here I want to focus on the "high priest" of its "Knightly Order" - Heinrich Himmler and his SS. The Nazi slogan "Blood and Soil", indicating its tying together of the destiny of the German people with the very earth of the Fatherland and its glorification of agriculture and those who worked on the land, would have appealed greatly to the young Himmler who joined the Party in 1923 in time to take part in the Munich putsch - Hitler's first attempt to snatch the reins of power.

 

Himmler had already been moving nationalist circles and was associated with the Germanenorden (a secret society which established lodges based on those of freemasonry) and its offshoot the Thule Society, which had also inspired the birth of the German Workers Party (which was to be hijacked by Hitler and become the National Socialist Workers Party). The Thule Society was named after the Ultima Thule, the alleged birthplace of the Germanic race - members had to prove racial purity for at least three generations.[Padfield]

 

Peter Padfield notes that from late 1923 to early 1924, Himmler's reading included books on spiritualism, second sight, astrology, telepathy and the like. Himmler was interested also in herbalism, rural life and agriculture [Graber] - he was rather a "back-to-nature", "New Age" sort of man. His activities and growing beliefs led him to renounce his once strong faith in the Catholic Church by the summer of 1924.[Padfield]

 

Eventually, in 1929, he became the head of the then small and rather unimportant Schutzstaffel - the nightmare SS of the impending Third Reich.

 

The SS was modeled on the Teutonic Knights, an offshoot of the Knights Templar who were thought to have custody of the Holy Grail (as well as the ancient Indian warrior caste of the Kshatriya). Therefore SS teams were sent in search of the Grail, as well as the Ark of the Covenant. At first it would seem a little strange that a man who had renounced Christianity and oversaw the systematic murder of millions of Jews should be interested in such relics but the theory was that Jesus was Aryan and his father a Roman. The Grail that held his blood could therefore add to SS research into Aryan bloodlines. Himmler also wanted the spear that wounded Christ on the cross - the Spear of Longinus - which Hitler nabbed from a Vienna museum following the annexation of Austria in 1938. Hitler, a fan of Wagner's Parsifal in which the Spear appears, insisted on keeping it for himself - the story that Hitler's copy of the opera had notes in it showing Hitler to be a skilled magician planning an evil ritual with the spear is not one I give any credence to! The spear in question is medieval anyway. [Dyson, Carroll, Rainey]

 

A speech Himmler made to senior SS men in 1942 reveals his attitude towards Christianity:

 

This Christendom, this greatest pestilence which could have befallen us in history, which has weakened us for every conflict, we must finish with.

~Padfield

 

SS families received a "Yule-tide candleholder" copied from "an old specimen handed down from the early past of our Volk" instead of Christian Christmas gifts. In 1937 Himmler's personal staff began to plan a cultural framework designed to replace Christianity, a project that led to the opening of the Deutschrechtliche Institute at the University of Bonn the following year which researched into Germanic pre-history. Himmler also set himself to constantly improve the solstice celebrations that he felt had the deepest significance, and designed special SS wedding ceremonies. [Padfield]

 

It has been claimed (most speculatively) that Albrecht Haushofer (son of Karl, the geopolitician) who Hess knew from university had been a student of Gurdijeff and had set up the Vril Society (a lodge claiming contact with Shambhala, the Tibetan otherworld) and that Hitler and Himmler were members.

 

Himmler did know Haushofer (who knowingly or not seems to have been one of Himmler's spies in the resistance [Padfield]) but I seriously doubt that the Vril Society really existed. That said, Himmler did send SS research teams to Tibet, and Russian troops entering Berlin in 1945 found Tibetans who had committed ritual suicide wearing SS uniforms. [Dyson, Carroll] What it all adds up to is anyone's guess.

 

Many amongst the Nazi leadership found Himmler rather a figure of fun and would often take the Mickey out of him and his mystification of the SS (only behind this very dangerous man's back, though!). Architect, construction supremo, and armaments minister Albert Speer reports Hitler as saying of Himmler:

 

What nonsense! Here we have a last reached an age that has left all mysticism behind it, and now he wants to start all over again. We might just as well have stayed with the church ... To think that I may some day be turned into an SS saint! I would turn over in my grave...

~Speer

 

Himmler's intense interest in Germanic paganism is illustrated well by a letter that he wrote to the head of the Ahnernebe (a historical and cultural research unit that Himmler had incorporated into the SS). He believed the ancient Germans enacted legal ordinances and marriages upon ancient stones at burial places of the clan (Sippe), and had come across the following custom that he claimed had survived up to 1930:

 

If there was a girl in a village who had reached marriageable age and not found a man, the father went out on a moon-dark night, that is at new moon, with the girl and the villagers. The girl was placed on the dolmen or ancestral burial, the villagers stood in a wide circle around this stone, face outward. The father had spoken beforehand with a villager, thus with one of the blood-community. This man took himself from the ring to the ancestral burial and coupled with the girl. The love and sexual act took place on the ancestral burial ... What was done was no casual act, but took place in the sight of the ancestors and on the grave of the ancestors.

~Padfield

 

He goes on to suggest lines of research for after the war. That he still took time for such matters in August 1944 - with the Eastern Front collapsing, SS squads abusing and killing "partisans" and Germans who dared retreat, with the killing factories working overtime, and himself rooting out disloyal or troublesome factors in Germany (this was just after the bomb attack on Hitler) - says a lot about the man and his beliefs.

 

His own views about immortality owe something to Hinduism as well as Germanic beliefs in rebirth in the Sippe via the transmission of the bloodline - not at all incongruous since both beliefs are linked via the spread of Indo-European, or "Aryan", culture (the word comes from the Sanskrit Aryas - meaning "noble" or "freeman" - and Swastika is Sanskrit also). [Berresford Ellis] Speaking, in 1937, of the idea of rebirth in the Sippe, Himmler said:

 

A Volk that has this belief in rebirth and that honours its ancestors, and in so doing honours itself, always has children, and this Volk has eternal life.

~Padfield

 

He even ordered 20,000 copies of Karl Eckhart's Earthly Immortality: German belief in reincarnation in the Sippe for the SS.

 

This belief, as well as that of the SS being the noble warrior caste of the Third Reich, is reflected in his instructions for a great triptych for the entrance hall of Wewelsberg Castle - the symbolic seat of SS power. Of the first painting he wanted a depiction of "the attack of an SS troop in war, in which I envisage the representation of a dead or mortally wounded SS man, who is married, to show that from death itself and despite it new life springs". The next panel would show SS men tilling the newly won land, and the final panel would show a new village full of families with many children. [Padfield]

 

This idea is also reflected in the rather macabre "death's head" insignia adopted by SS killing squads - death and killing were necessary and noble as they kept the folk community pure and vibrant. Himmler could use this same idea to purge whole families such as the von Stauffenbergs (the family of the July 20th 1944 bomber). Witness a speech Himmler made to district leaders:

 

You only need to look up the Germanic Sagas. If they proscribed a family and outlawed them, or if there was a blood feud in the family, then they were drastically thorough ... they said, 'This man is a traitor, the blood is bad, there is bad blood in them, that will be eradicated'. And in the case of a blood feud it was eradicated down to the last member of the whole Sippe. The family of Graf Stauffenberg will be extinguished to the last member...

~Padfield

 

He then mercilessly hunted down the family, even to distant relatives and had them executed or shipped to concentration camps. Similarly, the disabled or mentally ill were killed or sterilised so as not to pass on their "bad blood", and Germans who had intercourse with slave workers, Jews or other "inferiors" were harshly punished. On the other hand, the "elite" SS were rewarded for having children, and had special brothels - the children of which were supported by the state.

The SS and Earth Mysteries

 

Archaeology in the SS was mainly carried out by the Ahnenerbe, whose "cultural research" also included devilish experiments on the inmates of the concentration camps. The idea of landscape alignments linking supposed sacred sites of the ancient Germanic people - that were being dubbed "leys" in Britain - appealed to Himmler, and many of the pioneers in this area were soon working for the Ahnernebe.

They looked for evidence of ancient landscape surveys in order to substantiate Germany's claims as the home of civilisation, and where proof of the primeval skills of the race was lacking, it could be fabricated.

~Harte

Indeed, so sparse and unimpressive were the finds from some of the pivotal sites in these grand landscape schemes that the evidence had to be manipulated or just plain invented. Hitler was rather embarrassed by Himmler's obsession with the past:

Why do we call the whole world's attention to the fact that we have no past? It isn't enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is starting to dig up these villages of mud huts and enthusing over every potsherd and stone axe he finds. All we prove by that is that we were still throwing stone hatchets and crouching around open fires when Greece and Rome had already reached the highest stage of culture. We really should do our best to keep quiet about this past. Instead Himmler makes a great fuss about it all. The present-day Romans must be having a laugh at these relegations.

~Speer

 

The Ahnernebe, following the theories of Wilhelm Teudt, found ancient Germanic "star temples" where sightlines supposedly radiated out towards important positions of sun, moon, and stars. These calendrical centres tended to turn up near SS colleges, and were often just natural rock formations, medieval remains, and in one case an old farm refuse tip! [Magin]

 

The Externsteine in the Teutoburger Wald near Paderborn

The most famous Nazi sacred centre was the Externsteine near Detmold, north-east of Dortmund. Here stand four spectacular columns of rock, one of which has a small chapel cut into it. The window of the chapel admits the rising sun at midsummer.

 

According to Teudt this was where the sacred pillar of the Saxons, Irminsul, stood until toppled by Charlemagne (it almost certainly didn't), and a carving of a "weeping Irminsul" is supposed to be on one of the pillars of rock. [Schmidt] The Externsteine was at the centre of alignments (never statistically tested by the Nazis) and was supposed to have been a sacred centre before Stonehenge. [Magin]

Excavations in the 1930's found only pottery from the seventh century CE, and the majority from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries.[Schmidt] The chapel is actually Christian, not pagan, and probably medieval. [Devereux]

 

Still, none of this mattered too much in a totalitarian state with "Spin Doctors" better than Tony Blair's, and the Externsteine became a major Nazi cult centre. Even today thousands of pagans come to this Christian site for the summer solstice, and neo-Nazis still gather here on November the first. The two groups are not entirely separate .[Schmidt,The Castle of Wewelsberg]

 

Fascinated by tales of King Arthur and his knights, Himmler's "Camelot" for his own knightly Order was the castle of Wewelsberg near Paderborn in Westphalia. Having acquired it in 1934, Himmler had massive reconstruction work done (paid for by his company "The Society for the Protection and Maintenance of German Cultural Monuments") - the labour came, of course, from the concentration camps.

The focal point of the castle was a huge round oak table with seating for his twelve of his senior Gruppenführers:

 

They sat in high-backed chairs made out of pigskin, on each of which was a silver disk on which the selected 'knight' had his name engraved. Here the chiefs of the SS were compelled to sit in the company of their Grand Master [Himmler] for hours of contemplation and meditation ... Each 'knight' had his own quarters in the castle...

~Graber


Beneath this room was a crypt containing pedestals where should one of the "knights" die an urn containing his ashes [Graber] or his coat of arms [Padfield] would be burnt. Vents in the ceiling would allow those in the main hall to see the smoke rise or "the spirit ascend into a type of Valhalla". [Graber]

 

Oakshield, carved with runic symbols
– typical of  the wall decorations hung in Wewelsburg Castle


 


 








Himmler's own private rooms in the castle were dedicated to the tenth-century Saxon King Heinrich the first (also known as Henry the Fowler) decked out in period fashion. According to Himmler's masseur, Himmler believed he was the reincarnation of the king, although Padfield notes that this sits uneasily with Himmler's ideas of life after death (by physical transmission of blood in the clan). Himmler shared his Christian name with the king, and may have felt he was an honorary member of a royal clan. His father had been tutor to Prince Heinrich of Bavaria, and the young Himmler was not only named for him but was the Prince's godson. [Padfield] Whatever the case, at midnight each July 2nd (the anniversary of the Saxon king's death) he would apparently commune in silence with King Heinrich. [Graber]

Necromancy or imagination? I wouldn't like to say for sure, when would the chronically overworked Reichsführer find time to learn the art? Still, it is a tempting conclusion to jump to. Any necromancers out there fancy asking him?

Himmler
and the SS

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References


Berresford Ellis, Peter, The Ancient World of the Celts, Constable, 1998

Carroll, Robert Todd, The Skeptic's Dictionary
Crowley, Aleister, Magick Without Tears, Falcon Press, 1982

Devereux, Paul, Secrets of Ancient and Sacred Places, Cassell, 1992

Dyson, Lowell K., The Nazis and the Occult: A sceptical annotated
Graber, G.S., History of the SS, Robert Hale, 1978

Grunberger, Richard, A Social History of the Third Reich, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971

Harte, Jeremy, "Taking Leave of Dod: Survey as metaphor", The Ley Hunter 126, 1997

Hoess, Rudolf, Commandant of Auschwitz, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1959

Magin, Ulrich, "An Assortment of Landscape Lines in Germany: Real and imagined", The Ley Hunter 133, 1999

Magin, Ulrich, "Heilige Linien: Wilhelm Teudt and his holy lines", The Ley Hunter 133, 1999

Padfield, Peter, Himmler: Reichsführer SS, Macmillan, 1990

Rees, Laurence, The Nazis: A warning from history, BBC, 1997

Schmidt, Martin, paper for the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference, 1996

Sereny, Gitta, Albert Speer: His battle with truth, Macmillan, 1995

Speer, Albert, Inside the Third Reich, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970

Rainey, Richard, Phantom Forces, Berkley, 1990


There is no evidence that the leader of the Nazis, Adolf Hitler, was particularly interested in the occult movements of the time, although he undoubtedly has known persons from these circles, whose political ideas in many ways were similar to his. Neither in Hitler's book collection or in his papers are traces of this. Furthermore, there is nothing that indicates that fantasies of a grandiose Germanic ancient kingdom have had any major place in his world view. On the contrary, we have clear evidence that he was not interested in archeaology, and that he viewed it as a waste of time, when romantic souls travelled around the world to track down glimpses of glory of yore. Hitler's driving force was primarily personal ambitions and a disdain for the existing society and a hatred of those parts of the population which he blamed for the miserable conditions in the 1920's in Germany. Romantic dreams were probably far from Hitler's mind.

 

All in all, there seems to be only one in the Nazi top who were interested in the occult, namely Heinrich Himmler.



It has been claimed that the world views of the top Nazi leaders was permeated by occult ideas, but that is probably somewhat exaggerated. It is known that Himmler's fooleries were an embarrassment to many of the Nazi bigwigs, and there was probably quite a bit of laughs in the corners. At any rate, Hitler became very annoyed by Himmler's archaeological activities. Albert Speer quotes Hitler for this statement:

"Why are we trying to bring to the attention of the world the fact that we have no past? Isn't it enough that the Romans built massive buildings, while our forefathers still had to live in miserable huts? Himmler has now started digging up the remains of these miserable dwellings, and is enthralled by every pottery shard or any stone axe he finds. The only thing that comes out of that is, that it is now clear to everyone that we were still throwing stone axes and huddling around the fire at a time when the Greeks and the Romans had for a long tmel reached the highest cultural level. In reality, we should keep quiet about our past, but instead Himmler is creating a quite unnecessary fuss with his activities. The Romans of our days must be highly amused over Himmler's discoveries!"

 



Hitler's  Archaeologists


For those who thought the zealous Nazi archaeologists in Raiders of the Lost Ark were a screenwriter's fabrication, here is the real story:

In 1935, Heinrich Himmler -- chief of the SS and architect of the death camps -- founded an elite Nazi research institute called the Ahnenerbe. Its name came from a rather obscure German word, Ahnenerbe, meaning "something inherited from the forefathers." The official mission of the Ahnenerbe was to unearth new evidence of the accomplishments and deeds of Germanic ancestors "using exact scientific methods."


Weedy and weak, a schoolyard snitch with a fanatical devotion to record-keeping, Himmler seemed an unlikely choice to command the elite praetorian guard called the SS. Yet, he was also fanatically devoted to Hitler. Moreover, he had a knack for shoring up fragments of Nazi ideology with fragments of half-learning that seemed self-evident to true believers. Thus, the Ahnenerbe Institute, in time, would employ more than 130 historians, linguists, geographers, agronomists, folklorists and classicists with an eye to producing evidence that the so-called Aryan peoples were the font of civilization.

Like Himmler, the Ahnenerbe faculty members had their own agendas, self-preservation high among them, but in the end, their body of learning was meant to be put to one collective end: to provide a kind of "Aryan education" for future generations of SS soldiers, who would use it to settle on the fertile steppes of Eurasia and there produce prodigious crops and a perfect race of latter-day Aryans. Ominously, the Ahnenerbe also provided scholarly justification, of a kind, for the elimination of the peoples who already happened to occupy that land. As Raiders of the Lost Ark had it, Ahnenerbe scholars mounted or planned to mount archaeological and scientific expeditions to the Arctic, Tibet, Africa and South America before the war confined them to German territories. Amazingly, most of those who survived the war "escaped virtually unscathed from denazification," and the postwar Allied occupation government even branded one of the institute's most virulent and vocal racists a "political victim of the Third Reich.".

 

In reality, the Ahnenerbe was in the business of mythmaking. Its prominent researchers devoted themselves to distorting the truth and churning out carefully tailored evidence to support the ideas of Adolf Hitler, who believed that only the Aryans--a fictional "Nordic" race of tall, flaxen-haired men and women from northern Europe--possessed the genius needed to create civilization. Most modern Germans, he claimed, were descended from these ancient Aryans. But scholars had failed to uncover any proof of  such a master race lighting the torch of civilization and giving birth to all the refinements of human culture. The answer to this problem, in Himmler's mind, lay in more German scholarship--scholarship of the right political stripe. His team of adventurers, mystics, and reputable scholars was charged with traveling the globe to compile "proof" that the Aryans had dominated the world in prehistoric times.

 

Before 1938, the Ahnenerbe largely confined its studies to ancient texts, rock engravings, and folklore, but in February of that year, Himmler transferred the Excavations Department of the SS into the Ahnenerbe. Himmler created the department to sponsor or direct archaeological digs at major sites in Germany. He intended these excavations to be exemplars of German research where SS men could be trained in the science of recovering the ancient Germanic past from the ground. The department had financed 18 excavations, from an ancient hill fortress at Alt-Christburg in Prussia to a major Viking trading post at Haithabu in northern Germany, not far from the Danish border. The Excavations Department brought new scientific acumen to the Ahnenerbe. Its staff consisted of dirt archaeologists trained in analyzing bits of ancient stone, bone, and ceramics. This new expertise, Himmler hoped, would help reconstruct the lives of Germany's ancestors before the first written histories and greatly extend knowledge of the mythical "Nordic" race. Indeed, one of the Ahnenerbe's most ambitious young researchers, archaeologist Assien Bohmers, claimed he could trace "Nordic" origins all the way back to the Paleolithic era in Germany, when woolly mammoths and cave bears wandered the chill tundra.

 

The Nazis' crackpot theories about prehistory and the Indiana Jones-style lengths they went to prove them were believed by some of the Ahnenerbe members, others perverted the facts for personal advancement or prostituted their reputations for the greater glory of Hitler.

Did the Institute provided the "academic" justification for the Holocaust - just how central was the Ahnenerbe actually to Hitler's thinking?



 


Heinrich Himmler was the Grand Master of a coven of 12 SS men. He was the 13th member. He conducted numerous black magick rituals at Wewelsburg Castle. These rituals were conducted in the utmost secrecy. They included necromancy (communication with the dead). Wewelsburg had many powerful Satanic symbols. In 1945, under orders from Himmler, Wewelsburg was blown up to keep it from the invading armies. Some of the castle survived and much has been restored. The symbol of the Black Sun is seen in many places and one room is designed much like Stonehenge. True Paganism which is synonymous with Satanism is known for its emphasis on the Sun (666).


Foreign Intelligence Chief Walter Schellenburg observed Himmler:

Himmler and his inner circle of Twelve Gruppenführers would engage in mystic communication with the dead Teutons and perform other spiritual exercises. Secrecy was the key element in the SS and most especially at Wewelsburg.

I happened to come into the room by accident and to see these twelve SS leaders sitting in a circle, all sunk in deep and silent contemplation, was indeed a remarkable sight. 1

 

Himmler worked diligently to destroy Christianity within the Reich. He fully understood the nefarious program of Christianity and how it was a most powerful tool created by the Jews for the enslavement humanity and the destruction of Aryan peoples. Jews have a long history of working to destroy their enemies from the inside. This is done mostly by their infiltration or the infiltration of gentiles in their employ. Book after book has been written about the Nazis being Christian. Nothing could be further from the truth. The many rune symbols, most notably the SS and swastika speak for themselves. Hitler played the Vatican.

Himmler on Christian marriage, 3rd May, 1943:

 

Marriage as it is today is the evil work of the Catholic Church. Regarded dispassionately and without prejudice, our present marriage laws are absolutely immoral. The marriage laws of today, presumably designed to protect the family, in fact led to a decrease in the size of families. After the war…monogamy will cease to be enforced upon promiscuous mankind. The SS and the heroes of this war will have special privileges. They will immediately have the right to take a second wife, who shall be considered to be as legitimate as the first. The permission to have two wives will be a mark of distinction.

 

SS Officer Otto Rahn SS-Obersturmführer wrote a book, titled "Luzifer's Hofgesind" [Lucifer's Court Servants]. He spoke before a large audience on January 9th, 1938 at the Dietrich-Eckart Haus in Dortmund, Germany. "Rahn set a new limit to the spirit tied to the Romans, to the belief in a life after death, and the fear of hell;" he rejected Yahweh and the Jewish teachings, and professed "Luzifer's Hofgesind" in whose name Kurt Eggers closed the evening with the following greeting: "Lucifer, who has been done wrong to, greets you." 2 

 

Here is an excerpt from Luzifer's Hofgesind:

There is much more [light] than in the houses of God—cathedrals and churches—where Lucifer neither is able nor wishes to enter due to all the somber, stained glass windows wherein are painted the Jewish prophets, apostles, and saints. The Forest, that, that was free!

 

Lucifer’s Servants is at least partly a genuine Nazi propaganda tract and several passages make a good case for the worship of Lucifer. Indeed, this idea of Lucifer as a benign or divine being was familiar and congenial to the “white light” Theosophists of the 1920’s who, after all entitled one of their official German publications Lucifer.


"For Rahn, the Grail was an emblem set up in opposition to the established Church—indeed, was a Luciferian symbol—and for this the Nazis were grateful." "…the eternal struggle between Light and Darkness. Light in this case was represented by—not Jesus or Jehova— but by another spirit, the “Light-Bearer.” To Rahn, this Entity represented the highest good. To Rahn, the Nazi Reich in general—and the SS in particular—became servitors of an ancient pagan cult whose God was known to the medieval Christians not as Jesus but as Lucifer." "…and having established that they celebrated—as the numerous examples have proved—the marvels of the Crown of Lucifer, it is permitted to believe that they had faith in the existence of a Luciferian crown of eternal life. And if we follow this thought to its logical conclusion, we will say that, for them, the God of Love was none other than Lucifer in person. The God Amor is the God of Spring, as is Apollon. Apollon brought back the light of the Sun: he is a light-bearer, or “Lucifer.” According to the Apocalypse of John, Apollyo-Apollon was equated with the Devil, and according to the belief of the Roman Church…Lucifer is Satan." 3

 

SS men were strongly discouraged from participating in xian religious ceremonies of any kind and were actively encouraged to formally break with the Church. Pagan religious ceremonies took the place of Christian ones. Winter Solstice ceremonies replaced Xmas. 4 Starting 1939 the word “Christmas” was forbidden to appear on any official SS document" and the Summer Solstice was formally celebrated. These ceremonies were celebrated the old way with sacred fires, and torch lit processions.

 

Weddings and baptisms were replaced by pagan SS rituals and gradually the entire Christian liturgical rubric was in the process of being replaced by a completely pagan version. Even the Hitler Youth were not immune. A so-called “Nazi Primer” published during the war contains many examples of pagan ideology and anti-Christian sentiment designed for its youthful readership. 5

 

An SS officer took the place of a Christian priest/minister in presiding over weddings, baptisms and funerals. A manual titled "The SS Family Procedure for Conducting Family Celebrations" was issued to every SS man and woman. Therein contained Pagan celebrations for all eight of the important Pagan holidays of the year.

 

Himmler’s dream was to create, out of the SS, a new religion based on the pagan elements of what he perceived to be the original, Ur-Aryan religion of Ancient India and Europe. However, many Germans were devout Christians. Hitler himself realized this, and knew that he had to play politics with them for as long as the churches held power and as long as the people felt they owed spiritual allegiance to the churches and what they represented. In this he was cynical in his dealings with the Church as he was pragmatic with the Capitalists. 6

 

Unbeknownst to many, daily meditation was the requirement of the SS.


Himmler set up a school of occultism in the Berlin Branch and many of the leading ranks of the Totenkopf SS, the Sicherheitsdienst and the Gestapo were ordered to attend courses in meditation, transcendentalism and magic. It was in this establishment that Himmler was persuaded to found the Ahnenerbe, the Nazi Occult Bureau. The Ahnenerbe incorporated the membership of Crowley's spurious Templar Order, the Vril, and the Thule Gesellschaft into the Black Order of the SS. 7

 

1 Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult by Peter Levenda
2 Westfalia Landeszeitung, January 9, 1938, Dr. Wolff Heinrichsdorff

3 Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult by Peter Levenda 

4 Ibid

5 Ibid

6 Ibid

7 The Spear of Destiny by Trevor Ravenscroft, 5th Printing, 1988

 


 

The Occult Corps (Geheimnisvolle Korps) - Hitler´s very own Majestic-12

In the late 19th and early 20th Century, there had been many flourishing esoteric orders in Germany and Austria that sought to establish a reborn Germanic identity and to reconnect the people with their repressed archetypes. One of the most significant of these Orders was founded in Germany in 1912 - the German Order, and from this sprang the Thule Society (Thulegesellschaft). The Thule Society took its name from the fabled land of Ultima Thule, which the Ukrainian witch Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky learned of after having been contacted by the Great Race that had survived its destruction.

These ancient, highly intelligent beings worked in concert with certain human adepts - individuals with highly developed occult powers. The truly initiated could, by means of magic-mystical rituals, establish contact with these beings and learn secret arts unknown to the rest of humanity. The Nazies believed that with the help of this Great Race they could create a race of Aryan supermen with supernatural strength and energy.

These Ancient Masters told Blavatsky that she had been selected to play a part in the revival and public promotion of their secret occult tradition, which had lain hidden for centuries in secret monasteries and libraries in the remotest reaches of the Himalayas. Accordingly, Blavatsky spent a number of years in Tibet, learning the ways of the occult and the keys to unlocking the mysteries of the secret doctrine. Among the magical runes and symbols was the swastika, which became a common good luck charm in Germany and the symbol of the Thule Society. But the traditional 'right-handed' swastika was to be reversed, forming an evocation of evil, spiritual devolution and black magic.

Both the Thule Society and the German Order became interchangeable in ideas and even membership.

In 1917 one woman and three men met in a cafe in Vienna under a veil of mystery and secrecy. The woman, called Anna Sprengel, was a spiritual medium and she too had made contact with the Great Race. The four Austrians formed the Vril Society, and their emblem was the 'Black Sun' symbol which could be found in many Babylonian and Assyrian places of worship. They depicted the Black Sun's inner light in the form of a cross almost identical to the German Iron Cross.

With the victory of the NSDAP, the SS (Schutzstaffel) carried on the occult tradition in the Third Reich. Its Reichsführer, Heinrich Himmler, was a member of the Vril Society and shared Hitler's obsession with the occult. He believed that the persecution of witches in the 17th century represented a kind of Holocaust of the German race carried out by the Roman Catholic Church. "The witch-hunting cost the German people hundreds of thousands of mothers and women, cruelly tortured and executed," Himmler said.



Reinhard Heydrich


 


The Necronomicon and von Juntzt´s Unaussprechlichen Kulten are fictional books invented by the American author
H.P. Lovecraft!

In 1935, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Security and Intelligence Service (Sicherheitdienst - SD) reported to Himmler that he had discovered the case of a witch called Margareth Himbler, burnt in Germany in 1629. The similarity of names encouraged Himmler's interest in German witchcraft, and in 1935 he set up Special Unit H (Sonderkommando H) in Archive Department 7 of the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptarmt - RSHA), the umbrella organization of the SS, Gestapo and criminal police. The "H" stood for the German word Hexen (witches).

Himmler deployed Special Unit H to discover any traces of old Germanic magic that survived the witch-hunts, while Archive Department 7 administered book stocks, archived the confiscated materials, and then assessed their value. Special Unit H would eventually loot more than 140,000 books on the subject of the occult from libraries across Nazi-occupied Europe, and among the manuscripts they found was a copy of von Juntzt´s Unaussprechlichen Kulten and a version of the Necronomicon written in ancient Gothic. These cursed books told of a race much older than mankind: the nightmarish Ancient Ones.

The top-secret Occult Corps (Geheimnisvolle Korps) was soon established as the Paranormal Division of SS-Hauptsturmführer Wolfram Sievers' Ancestral Inheritence Office (Ahnenerbe), which was responsible for investigating all aspects of ancient German tradition. The Occult Corps incorporated into one organization the Thule Society, the Vril Society and the German branch of Crowley's OTO. Despite her Slavic blood, Madame Helena Blavatsky's granddaughter Marianna Blavatsky was then recruited as its High Priestess. (Allegedly the Ahnernerbe traced the Blavatsky roots back to the Rhos - Scandanavian Vikings that had come into contact with the Slavs in 860 A.D.)

From Archive Department 7's stolen texts Marianna learned that violence begot a form of orgone energy which, if properly seized, could be forged into magical effects. Thousands died to help Marianna and her Meta-Psychic Operatives in the Bio-Energy/Psi-Enhancement Division better understand and control the new "blood magic" they had discovered.

Now under the direction of the SS Paranormal Division, Special Unit H continued to comb German-occupied territories in search of more arcane knowledge and magical artifacts. Archaeological expeditions were sent to the bottom of the Baltic Sea hoping to find some lost artifacts or magical items of Ultima Thule. The Spear of Destiny, the weapon that was used to pierce the side of the Messiah while he was nailed to the cross, was found in Versailles in 1940. Early attempts to recover the Lost Ark of the Covenant in 1936 and the Holy Grail in 1938, however, were less successful.

Likewise, during this same time Japan's own paranormal division, the Kuromaku (The Black Curtain), was attempting to recover ancient magical items in Asia, including Genghis Khan's sword, the magical Books of Shan, and a stone tablet left behind by Buddha.

The original base of operations for the Occult Corps was Castle Wewelsburg in Westphalia, which Himmler bought as a ruin and rebuilt over the next 11 years at a cost of 13 million marks. The central banqueting hall contained a vast round table with throne-like seats to accommodate Himmler and 12 of his favorite officers, making his modern-day "Order of the Black Knights" a dark covenant of 13. The Black Guard, the toughest, smartest and most dangerous officers from the SS, occupied the upper echelon of Himmler's personal guard. Beneath Castle Wewelsburg was the "Hall of the Dead" where plinths stood around a stone table and the covenant could practice their witchcraft in secret.

After a crashed spacecraft was discovered in the Black Forest (Schwarzwald) in 1936, the Occult Corps built the Institute for Science and Mysticism (Das Institut für Wissenschaft und Mystizismus), also known as "Walhalla", to examine the wreck and its dead crew. Walhalla soon became the headquarters for the Occult Corps' operations, while Castle Wewelsburg functioned more as more of a private retreat for Himmler and his fellow conspirators.

Over the following years, alien technology was taken and combined with the information the Vril Society had received through channeling and was made into a further project called the Haunebu I: the first large flying saucer (Flügelrad) developed in Germany - approximately seventy-five feet in diameter. With the aid of his assistant Dr. Schabbs, Dr. Strasse's twisted experiments with orgonomy produced many mutant X-Creatures (X-Geschöpfe).

During this same time, Himmler became convinced that he was the reincarnation of Henry the Fowler, and that he could raise Heinrich I from the dead. In doing so, the Third Reich would then possess the power to command an army of the undead against the Allies. With Hitler's encouragement, Himmler began methodically researching how to approach the dark ritual, throwing scores of scientists, great caches of wealth, and the full power of the Nazi war machine behind the efforts of "Operation Resurrection" while Dr. Hermann Schreck's Project Totengräber had considerable success in the X-Labs with the living dead (Die Untoten)...

A ritual the inner adepts of the Occult Corps (Karotechia) perfected in the winter of 1944.


There is a story that Hitler actually had zombie soldiers 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 too 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 obedience, or "obedient corpse", but there is 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 zombies was introduced to mainstream western culture in 1929 when W. B. Seabrook wrote The Magic Island, detailing his observations of life in Haiti, including the practice of voodoo. Zombies are part of the voodoo religion, although only of a small subsect, referred to as the "cult of the dead." The practitioners of mainstream voodoo typically wanted nothing to do with these necromancers, according to Seabrook. Nevertheless, in the decades to come, in western culture the ideas of voodoo and zombies became inextricably intertwined.

The release of this book inspired a movie in the burgeoning film industry.....
 
The 1940s brought some new things to zombie films. Unlike other undead, zombies required a human agent to bring them back, an agent who, of course, was evil. Given that most of the western world agreed that the Nazis were pretty bad people, the production of several Nazi zombie movies was inevitable. Borrowing voodoo for their own heinous ends, the Nazis used zombies to build armies, gather intelligence, and plan invasions of the USA. John Carradine played a Nazi scientist building a zombie army in a Louisiana swamp in Revenge of the Zombies (1943).

 


THE KAROTECHIA

The roots of the Karotechia are deep and varied. When the unit was officially created within the Ahnenerbe in 1939, it drew its members from within the Ahnenerbe, the disbanded Thulegesellschaft, and a little known section of Archive Department VII of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA, Reich Security Central Office) called Sonderkommando-H. Created in 1935 under direct orders from Heinrich Himmler, Sonderkommando-H (for Hexen, German for witches) collected records of the Catholic Inquisition against witchcraft from libraries in Germany and Austria. These records were collated into the Hexenkartothek, a catalog of over 33,000 index cards, each providing the details of a victim of the witch trials. While most of the Hexenkartothek concentrated on witch trials in Germany, Sonderkommando-H researched cases from as far away as India and Mexico.

 

The research of Sonderkommando-H was meant to provide propaganda that would justify an SS crackdown on the Catholic Church, as well as discover the ancient Germanic religion that Himmler believed had been eradicated by the Inquisition. The SS officers that collected the Hexenkartothek came to informally refer to themselves as the "Kartothekia," and what they discovered were arcane formulae and necromantic rituals. Enough was learned by Sonderkommando-H to create what some one hundred and fifty known witches, warlocks, and alchemists termed "the resuscitating of ye vital saylts." This formulae was first successfully put to effect by SS-Hauptscharführer Dieter Scheel when his team resurrected 17th century sorceror Jurgen Tess. It was this incident that created a new department within the Ahnenerbe to exploit the occult in service to the Reich: the Karotechia.

 

Occult research had been conducted by various arms of the SS for quite some time before the creation of the Karotechia. In the Ahnenerbe, the Abteilung zur Überprüfung der Sogenannten Geheimwissenschaften (literally, Department for the Examination of So-Called Secret Sciences) had analyzed the occult since 1933. Also since 1933, Karl Maria Wiligut and his Department for Pre- and Early History had been Himmler's premier occultist, a position that was undermined soon after the creation of the Karotechia. Suitable members of these organizations were drawn to the Karotechia, as were former members of the Thulegesellschaft and scholars from Nazi-allied regimes and occupied countries. Kabbalists and Gypsy practitioners were even forcibly recruited out of concentration camps, as well as those occultists rounded up through Aktion Hess.

 

Moreso than any other group researching the paranormal for their government during the Second World War, the Karotechia sought to exploit the occult to its fullest. With the full backing of the SS and the Nazi state, they raided the libraries and museums of Europe in an insatiable search for arcane power. No avenue of study was left unexplored, no matter how ridiculous it might seem to the more established academics of the Ahnenerbe. The Karotechia was shielded from inquiry within and without by direct patronage of Himmler, who passed certain information on to Hitler (the Führer remained basically unaware of the Karotechia). Members of the Karotechia were known by their initials in SS documents, and by their rune-names in internal correspondence, the names given upon induction into the unit. They were identified by the Sonnenrad runes worn on the lapels of their black Allgemeine-SS uniforms. This insignia and the men that wore it were equally feared and respected throughout the SS.

 

The Karotechia never had a central headquarters, as each project maintained its own base of operations, reporting directly to Himmler. When the Karotechia was required to perform some ancient Germanic ritual for Himmler (virtually always ineffectual), they were called to the SS-order castle at Wewelsburg. However, the isolation and provincial boredom of the place meant that the Karotechia officers preferred to conduct their operations elsewhere. This also allowed them to operate with great independence.

 

Never as successful as their reputation belied, the Karotechia did score a number impressive victories during the war. In particular was the discovery of a Gothic version of the Necronomicon in the spring of 1944, which opened up several new projects to exploit its potential. Most of these projects ended in failure, causing great destruction, such as the incident at Castle Naudabaum in early 1945, where seven Karotechia officers and seventy-three support personnel were killed and the castle destroyed during an abortive attempt to summon an extraterrestrial being called Azathoth.

 

This disaster lead to the final Karotechia operation of the war: Aktion Götterdammerung, the attempt by the Karotechia to reenact the Naudabaum disaster without aborting the sequence to summon Azathoth. Aktion Götterdammerung was foiled by the American Delta Green organization. In the end, of the one hundred and sixty-four members of the Karotechia, fifty-four were assassinated by the Allies, six died of natural causes, three died during Allied bombing, four were executed for disloyalty, fifteen were killed while conducting experiments, nine committed suicide, eleven were institutionalized, twenty-four vanished while on operations, and thirty-seven escaped the destruction of Nazi Germany through the ODESSA network.