Page 37 - All About History - Issue 56-17

Hitler’s Occult War

Raider of the lost grail

A passionate historian of Medieval grail lore the monster that his efforts were feeding.
often referred to as the “real Indiana Jones”, Himmler, for his part, was delighted with
Otto Rahn was lured into the SS inner circle Lucifer’s Court, which linked the Cathar
by Wiligut on the strength of his widely read heresy to wider witchcraft cults through the
1933 book Kreuzzug gegen den Gral (Crusade figure of Lucifer — the Devil — here a pagan
Towards the Grail), which spread the idea bringer of light demonised by the Christian
that the 13th-century Cathar Church, and ordered 5,000
heresy was in fact the remnants copies bound in leather to be
of a Germanic pagan cult. presented to the Nazi elite.
Rahn was particularly Hitler was even given one for
taken with accounts of three his birthday.
Cathar knights slipping over Punished for a drunken
the walls of the doomed scrape with a three-month
The SS lead a solstice Montsegur Castle with the tour of duty on the staff of
festival in Berlin Holy Grail — the cup used to Dachau concentration camp,
catch the blood of Christ at Rahn was horrified by what he
his crucifixion, believed by saw and naïvely tried to resign
Rahn to be a pre-Christian his commission. Rumours of his
relic that fell from the sky — in sexuality and possible Jewish
a sack and travelled to the heritage were beginning to
Languedoc region of southern make the rounds.
France to explore the subterranean passages While stories vary on the exact chain
used by the Cathars. of events, some say his resignation was
Himmler loved Rahn’s work so much he refused and a solution that better suited the
committed it to memory and signed off a Reichsführer-SS was proposed. Either way,
1,000-Reichsmark a month stipend for Rahn in March 1939, 34-year-old Rahn climbed
to work on his next book. Rahn took on SS a snow-covered slope in Austria’s Tyrol
rank and uniform to better ingratiate himself mountains and was found dead the following
with his new patrons. As an openly gay man morning, his lifeless eyes staring out across
he should have been on his guard, but his the serene landscape.
obsession with finding the Holy Grail blinded
him to all else. Only when his ‘sequel’ Luzifers
Hofgesind (Lucifer’s Court) appeared in 1937
with anti-Semitic passages crudely inserted
by another hand, did Rahn perhaps realise

Ernst Schäfer during
the Tibetan expedition
“As custodians of Aryan superiority

whose work fed the ideological engine
that drove the Holocaust, the Ahnenerbe

found themselves on the frontline”

he presented Hitler with a set of leather-bound Himbler, a woman who was burnt alive as a witch plundering Polish treasures from the Warsaw
volumes recording the great Ahnenerbe discoveries in 1629. Archaeological Museum and looting Jewish
on his 50th birthday. It’s important to remember that this seemingly homes in the country. The anthropologist
Despite the all-consuming growth of Ahnenerbe, ridiculous obsession with chronicling an imagined from the Tibet expedition, Bruno Beger,
Himmler’s voracious hunger for occultish past of magical rituals and storybook heroes was procured skeletons for racial categorisation,
knowledge also led to the eye-catching Hexen- part of an ideology of unrivalled venom and intent. selecting an estimated 100 prisoners
Sonderauftrag (Special Assignment — Witches), Himmler’s genocidal campaign in the wake of from concentration camps
or H-Sonderkommando (H-Special unit), which Operation Barbarossa — cleansing the east of Jews, for murder and study.
ultimately found itself concerned with cataloguing Roma and Sinti, communists and a bloody swathe Finally, folklorist
lore and artefacts relating to witch trials and hunts. of the Slavic population in preparation for German Alfred Karasek
They managed to fill a detailed library of colonists — was a dark dream drawn from his days took control of
reference cards — the Hexenkartothek — with in the Artaman League. As custodians of Aryan the resettlement of
accounts of lusty Germanic pagans facing off superiority whose work fed the ideological engine Germans in Ukraine
against the feeble-minded Church. Despite having that drove the Holocaust, the Ahnenerbe found and ultimately became
some overlapping areas of interest, they avoided themselves on the frontline. an active participant
being absorbed by the Ahnernerbe by ‘discovering’ Archaeologist Hans Schleif was given custody in mass murder and
that Himmler was a direct descendent of Margareth of Ahnenerbe’s activities in occupied Poland, population clearance.
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