Nazi Secrets: An Occult Breach in the Fabric of History (6 page)

People who still hesitate should read this article in full, easily to be found on Google, since it proves in detail that all that was written before were pure fantasies, if not even gross lies. A scientific approach is always preferable than some unsubstantiated claim based on "anonymous insiders" and "government conspiracies."

The Ahnenerbe

In 1935 Himmler met with racial experts and founded an organization called “Deutsches Ahnenerbe, Studiengesellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte” ("German Ancestral Heritage, Society for the Study of the History of Primeval Ideas"). In short it was just called the Ahnenerbe. The most prominent and final chief of the organization was Wolfram Sievers, who was condemned to death at the Nuremberg Trials.

The goal of the Ahnenerbe was to study and research the ethnological, anthropological and cultural history of the Nordic race, the so-called Aryan race. They organized expeditions in different parts of the world to search for the birthplace of the Aryan race, and proof that it once ruled the world. The outbreak of WWII put an almost complete end to all faraway expeditions.

Official insignia of the Ahnenerbe

The Ahnenerbe had different departments, and although most of them were dedicated to archeology, they had a meteorological section based on Hanns Hörbiger's World Ice Theory, and they even had a musicology section.

These expeditions were numerous:

Karelia, Finland
(1935): the goal was to record old sorcerers' and witches' chants, supposed to hold remnants of ancient Aryan pagan incantations.

Bohuslän, Sweden
(1936): the team set off to the most ancient rock art site in the country, where ideograms were carved. Wirth, the then-president of the Ahnenerbe, tried to prove that he had found a prehistoric alphabet among these petroglyphs, but was using a less-than-rigorous scientific method.

Italy
(1937) and
Middle East
(1938): Two researchers, Franz Altheim and Erika Trautmann, went to Italy and then to Romania, Turkey, Greece, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq in order to prove that the success of the Roman Empire was due to its Aryan racial base.

Germany
(1937-1938): researchers excavated ancient fortresses and found prehistoric caves with Cro-Magnon artifacts. Some other SS studied the famous Extern Steine that would hold the proof about advanced Germanic prehistoric tribes, with a highly organized and a sophisticated solar religion.

France
: the same researchers went to visit well-known prehistoric caves in France. Furthermore, during the war the SS tried to steal the Bayeux Tapestry (showing the invasion of England by the Normans) since this would have proven the superiority of the Germanic tribes.

The most mysterious case is that of Otto Rahn, an SS sent as a civilian to southwestern France pre-war to look for the Holy Grail, allegedly kept by the Cathars of Montségur. Rahn wrote interesting books about these legends. The strange part is that he died, literally frozen to death in the mountains, once he was back in Germany. Some suspect that it could have been neither an accident nor a suicide.

Spain
: a recent archaeological exhibition in Bremen (Germany) "Dig for Germania. Archaeology under the Swastika" shows how the Nazis launched an expedition during WWII to find the Holy Grail. Truth turns out to be stranger than fiction. The exhibition tells how SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler allegedly visited Spain because he believed the grail was at the Montserrat Abbey near Barcelona.

He believed that finding the grail "would help Germany win the war and give him supernatural powers." Many undercover SS scientists searched in vain for the grail. The SS budget for such projects was vast inside the Ahnenerbe as the Nazis intended their finds to rewrite history and prove Germans to be the master race.

Tibet
(1938-1939): Much has been said about this expedition. It would have had an esoteric and occult agenda to establish contacts with Bon Pö monks, who practiced shamanic black magic, enabling the Nazis to win the war. The only element of truth is that Himmler was very enthusiastic about Asian mysticism, and he wished to recruit "true Ahnenerbe scientists" like Edmund Kiss in order to test Hanns Hörbiger's World Ice Theory in Tibet.

SS of the Ahnenerbe with their Tibetan

hosts having a traditional meal

The truth, as stated by Ernst Schäfer in a 1994 Italian documentary called Il Nazismo Esoterico, is far less mystic than all the fantasies that flood the Internet with conspiracy theories. Schäfer stated clearly that there was nothing occult in this expedition, and that all other claims were nonsensical. Proofs should be brought by fantasy tellers, and not by their listeners. That is the way science and justice should work.

Ernst Schäfer led a normal expedition with many difficulties due to his passage through British India, just before the coming war, but he and his team only focused on geology, ethnology, botany, and zoology. They brought back to Germany many pictures, film rushes, samples of plants and animals, measurements and precious gifts from their Tibetan hosts, like a complete edition of the Tibetan sacred text, the Kangyur, in 108 volumes, and other ancient texts, one of which is an alleged document regarding the Aryan race. It has also been said that the Schäfer team brought back a statue called the "Iron Man" made of meteoritic metal, and probably as old as 1,000 years, dating from the pre-Buddhist Bon religion.

Poland
(1939): Wolfram Sievers convinced Himmler to loot certain museum pieces, like the famous Veit Stoss altarpiece in Cracow, but in many cases Goering's men were quicker. The Ahnenerbe was mainly left with scientific devices and historical artifacts bearing little commercial value.

Crimea
(1943): Himmler sent his men of the Ahnenerbe to go after the Gothic relics that were supposed to exist in this region, which then would have confirmed the presence of past Aryan tribes. All they found were just a few relics that dated back to ancient Greek colonies established in the region and stone-age artifacts.

Ukraine
(1943): Strange and mysterious botanic experiments were held in that region, perhaps in an effort to discover a resistant variety of wheat that would enable the Reich to feed its wartime population.

Cancelled expeditions

Once the war started, the Ahnenerbe had to cancel its planned expeditions because the British fleet was everywhere. Cancelled expeditions included: Tiwanaku (Bolivia), which was set out to prove that these wonderful gigantic pre-Columbian constructions could only have been built by ancient Aryan migrants; Behistun (Iran) to study the inscriptions pertaining to the Aryan origin of the Iranians, ordered by Shah Darius-I, which were found on top of a steep cliff; Canary Islands, where legends reported that the ancient inhabitants had blond hair, and where they had found mummies with these characteristics; and Iceland, to study ancient farming and architectural practices, as well as their folklore.

"Gateway of the Sun" at Tiwanaku

Human experiments

The most infamous attributes of the Ahnenerbe were their experiments on human beings, to test how far a human could resist in freezing waters, to try new medications, and so forth. Even a collection of Jewish skulls was ordered to facilitate racial measurements. These experiments made the whole Ahnenerbe a criminal organization, as sentenced by the Nuremberg Trials, which condemned Wolfram Sievers to death. It has been said that a Tibetan ritual chant was performed upon his dead body.

Much has been said about the Ahnenerbe, and the weirdest conspiracy theories have been propagated through the Internet and some cheap esoteric articles here and there. They are far from the truth, and they include tales about Nazi vampires, übersoldaten, parallel universes only accessible to Nazi UFOs,
etc.
Though it is pure fiction, the most respectable work in that field is Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones movie that portrays how eager Nazi secret agents were to get ahold on the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail.

The Wewelsburg

The Wewelsburg is a castle from the Renaissance era in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, close to the city of Paderborn. The overall shape of the castle is triangular, and dates back to the beginning of the 17th century, although some earlier strongholds had been built around that same place ever since the 9th century. It is worth mentioning that during the 17th century many women were held prisoner in the dungeon under the accusation of witchcraft, and they were consequently tortured and then burned at the stake.

Wewelsburg Castle

In 1934 Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler signed a lease of 100 years for one Reichsmark a year, with the intention to renovate the whole castle as an SS leadership school (SS-Führerschule). The works began first with volunteers of the Reichsarbeitsdienst, who were then replaced by forced labor from a nearby concentration camp. The bedrooms carried names of the Grail legend and King Arthur's adventures. The guests could also enjoy the use of a big dining room, an auditorium, a library and even a photographic laboratory.

They trained in such fields as ideology, early history, archeology, mythology and astronomy. Though it was already close to the defeat, Himmler had thought about building a planetarium and recruiting an astronomer to teach the high-ranking cadre of the SS. The teachings later became more oriented towards a special type of esotericism, made up of ancestral cults and practices (see Ahnenerbe), study of the runes and racial theories, as well as the worshiping of nature. This whole education was to serve as a kind of new and mysterious pagan cult, based on the legend of the Holy Grail and the Knights of the Round Table. New religious rituals were invented for this purpose, with the help of Karl Maria Wiligut, at least in the beginning, since his reputation and mental health was later questioned by many, even inside the SS.

Such rituals included SS marriages, most of the ancient pagan festivals like the Yuletide, and the winter and summer solstices. Himmler, who admired Ignatius of Loyola's book, Spiritual Exercises, allegedly practiced meditation with his higher-ranking generals (Obergruppenführer), although no hard evidence could ever be found except for the testimony of SS General Walter Schellenberg at the Nuremberg Trials. He described a curriculum consisting of "spiritual training and meditation exercises."