The Himmler's SS (26 page)

Over 120,000 Germans enjoyed an impressive neo-pagan summer solstice celebration in the Berlin Olympic Stadium on 21 June 1939. The event was organised jointly by the SS and the Ministry of Propaganda.

Exalted by the works of Wagner and by the writings of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), whose
Man and Superman
divided the world into masters and slaves and foresaw the coming of a great leader who would build a new order of ‘Übermenschen', a number of German nationalists founded the Thule Society in Berlin in 1912. The Society took its name from the legendary ‘Ultima Thule' or ‘Land at the End of the World', supposedly the birthplace of the Germanic race, and its primary purpose was to serve as a literary circle for the study of ancient German history and customs. After 1918, it became fanatically anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic, and eventually propounded the aim of unifying Europe under the leadership of a Great Germanic Reich. Significantly, the symbol of the Thule Society was a sunwheel swastika.

The Bavarian branch of the Society was small, but its membership was hand-picked and included Himmler, Hess and Röhm. The nobility, the judiciary, higher academics, leading industrialists and army and police officers were all represented, to the virtual exclusion of the lower classes. Thule conducted open nationalistic propaganda through its own newspaper, the Munich
Völkischer Beobachter
, edited by Dietrich Eckart (who later coined the Nazi battle-cry ‘Deutschland Erwache!' or ‘Germany Awake!'), and set up a secret intelligence service which infiltrated communist groups. It maintained and financed three Freikorps units, i.e. Oberland, Reichskriegsflagge and Wiking, and to win popular support to its cause promoted the German Workers' Party under ‘front-man' Anton Drexler in 1919. When Drexler's party was taken over by Hitler and expanded under its new name as the NSDAP, it completely absorbed the Thule Society, together with its newspaper, nationalist programme and racist policies.

Through his association with Thule, Himmler became obsessed with pagan Germanic culture, an obsession which grew ever stronger as the years went by and one which came to influence his entire way of life and that of the SS. During the early 1930s, the Reichsführer established an SS-sponsored Society for the Care of German Historic Monuments and acquired a publishing house, Nordland-Verlag, to spread his ideas to the general public. Plans for the systematic creation of a cultural framework to replace Christianity, referred to as the Development of the German Heritage, were worked out between Himmler's personal staff and selected academics in 1937. A new moral philosophy based on the supposed beliefs of the old Germanic tribes was formulated, and two pagan rites, the summer and winter solstices, were revived to replace Christian festivals. The summer event centred around sporting activities and the winter one, the Yule, was a time devoted to the honouring of ancestors. God became ‘Got' in SS circles (allegedly the old Germanic spelling), to distinguish the pagan SS god from the conventional Christian ‘Gott', a suggestion which came from Karl Diebitsch during his preparation of new SS wedding and child-naming ceremonies.

What distinguished Himmler from Rosenberg, Darré and the other blood mystics was the flair he brought to the practical task of realising his vision of a pagan Germanic Reich. The Reichsführer was considered a persuasive speaker, with his light Bavarian accent, and, more importantly, he clearly believed in everything he said at the moment he said it. No man looked less like his job or appeared more normal than the SS chief. He successfully convinced ultratraditionalists that they were the vanguard of the new Germany, while at the same time providing the young with the glamour of a dark and secret Order sworn to a pagan creed running counter to the rules of bourgeois Christian society. He also appealed to most women, tracing as he did the origin of the subjugation and undervaluation of women to the teachings of the Christian Church. The Church leadership, he asserted, had always been nothing more than a glorified homosexual male fraternity which on that basis had terrorised the people for a thousand years, to the extent of burning 150,000 good German women (not men, he emphasised) as witches. Far better to be pagan than Christian, he declared over the radio in 1937. Far better to worship the certainties of nature and ancestors than an unseen deity and its bogus representatives on earth. For a Volk which honoured its ancestors, and sought to honour itself, would always produce children, and so that Volk would have eternal life. It is evident that Himmler truly saw himself as founder of a new Pagan Order which would eventually spread across Europe and last at least as long as the German millennium being ushered in by Adolf Hitler. As late as 1944, Himmler spoke of the paganisation of Europe being a ‘never-ending task which will fully occupy the tenth or twentieth Reichsführer after me'.

While paganism dominated the spiritual side of his adult life, Himmler's first historical love was medievalism. As a child the young Heinrich had followed in his father's footsteps by collecting small and inexpensive medieval artefacts. At school, he read avidly about the arrival of Vikings in the Lake Ladoga area around the year 700, their adoption of the name Rus, and how their descendants, the Norse tribe known as Russians, repelled the Mongols and settled all across the east from the Baltic to the Black Sea. He was also fascinated by the tale of Rurik the Dane, founder of Novgorod and Kiev around 856, and the story of the Saxon king Heinrich I, ‘The Fowler', elected King of All Germany in 919, who had checked the incursions of Bohemians and Magyars from the east and laid the basis of the German Confederation of Princes which became, under his son Otto, the Holy Roman Empire. The aspect of medieval history which captured the boy Himmler's imagination completely, however, was that of the Order of Teutonic Knights, or Deutsche Ritterorden, founded by Heinrich Walpot von Bassenheim in 1198. Like the other hospital Orders of the time, i.e. the Knights of St John and the Templars, it was established to aid western knights who had been wounded or fallen sick during the Crusades. However, unlike the others, the Teutonic Order was distinguished by the fact that it was exclusively Germanic in its recruitment. In 1211, the Golden Bull of Rimini entrusted to its knights the colonisation of the Slavonic lands to the east of the Elbe. Under its Grand Master, Hermann von Salza, the Order immediately undertook a programme of German expansion, extending domination over Prussia and the Baltic states. It reached its height in the second half of the fourteenth century, but was brought to a sudden end in 1410. On 15 July that year, the Teutonic Knights were crushed at Tannenberg by a coalition of Poles, Lithuanians and Mongols. The power of the Order was broken, but the memory of its valorous deeds under the badge of the black cross never ceased to haunt German dreams thereafter.

It seemed to the adolescent Himmler that all of German medieval life had centred around the constant struggle between Norseman and Mongol, between Teuton and Slav, and he longed to continue the historic mission of his forefathers. Even as a nineteen-year-old student, he wrote in his diary that he hoped one day to live his life in the east and to fight his battles ‘as a German far from beautiful Germany'. Himmler eventually harnessed this romantic view of history to provide an attractive integrating factor for his SS, recruited as it was from all walks of life. It was not by chance that the SS colours, black and white, were those formerly worn by the Teutonic Knights, who simply handed them down to Prussia. And when Himmler later talked about blood as the symbol of honour and fidelity, he was again appealing to medieval tradition. The mysticism of the Blutfahne itself harked back to the chivalric initiation ceremony by which the feudal suzerain was linked to his vassal by sword, fire and blood. For the SS, the Führer was their liege lord.

When his power was consolidated in 1934, Himmler's early medieval fantasies could be realised and given free rein. Obsessed by the old legend that a Westphalian castle would be the sole survivor of the next Slavonic assault from the east, the Reichsführer scoured western Germany until he found the ruined mountain fortress of Wewelsburg near Paderborn, named after the robber knight Wewel von Büren, which had been a focus of Saxon resistance to the Huns and had been rebuilt in triangular form in the seventeenth century. Following the example of the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order who built his headquarters at Marienburg, Himmler determined to convert Wewelsburg into the stronghold of the SS. The castle was duly purchased and the architect Hermann Bartels, a Standartenführer on the Persönlicher Stab RfSS, was given 12 million Reichsmarks and set to work creating a ceremonial retreat for his master.

Entering the finished complex in 1937 was like stepping back in time. A grand staircase was bordered by a banister of forged iron, decorated with runic motifs, and the walls of the entrance hall were hung with huge tapestries depicting Germanic and rural scenes. All the woodwork was of oak and everywhere stood marble statues of Heinrich I, Friedrich von Hohenstaufen and other German heroes. Each room was furnished in medieval style. The 100 × 145 ft dining room held a massive circular Arthurian table in solid oak, around which Himmler and his twelve senior SS Obergruppenführer of the day occasionally held conferences seated on high-backed pig-skin chairs bearing the names of their owner knights. A fire crackled in the monumental chimney, and behind each general hung his SS coat of arms, specially designed by Karl Diebitsch. The dining room stood above a stone basement with 5 ft thick walls, from which a flight of steps led down to a well-like crypt housing twelve granite columns and known as the ‘Realm of the Dead'. The idea was that when each of the twelve SS lords died, his body would be cremated and his ashes entombed in one of these obelisks. Himmler's private apartments within the fortress were particularly sumptuous and adjoined a gold and silver strongroom, a hall for his extensive collection of medieval weaponry, a library with more than 12,000 books and an awesome chamber where the Extraordinary SS and Police Court could be convened in special circumstances. There were also magnificent guest rooms set aside for Adolf Hitler, who never appeared at the castle, giving rise to the local village rumour that one day the Führer would be buried there. Himmler intended that Wewelsburg should ultimately be used as a Reichshaus der SS-Gruppenführer or SS Generals' Residence, but the outbreak of the war saw its establishment as SS-Schule Haus Wewelsburg, a staff college for senior SS officers and academic research facility for the SS. Its commandant was SS-Obergruppenführer Siegfried Taubert, who was formerly Heydrich's chief of staff and was father-in-law of Ernst-Robert Grawitz, the SS medical chief.

Oak carving featuring a sword, shield, steel helmet and runes, typical of the pseudo-medieval wall decorations which adorned Himmler's castle at Wewelsburg.

A large section of Wewelsburg Castle was dedicated to the Saxon ruler Heinrich I. The Reichsführer approved of the fact that his men nicknamed him ‘King Heinrich', and came to see himself as the spiritual reincarnation of The Fowler and the embodiment of his aims to consolidate Germany against the hordes from the east. On 2 July 1936, the thousandth anniversary of the King's death, Himmler inaugurated a solemn remembrance festival at Quedlinburg, once Heinrich's seat, and in 1938 he founded the King Heinrich Memorial Trust to revive the principles and deeds of The Fowler. Numerous SS badges were subsequently struck to commemorate Heinrich as ‘Ewig das Reich' or ‘The Eternity of the Reich'. To instil a general feeling of knighthood in all his junior officers and men, the majority of whom never even saw the splendour of Wewelsburg, Himmler rewarded them with the three less grandiose trappings of dagger, sword and ring. That mystical combination, harking back to a warrior aristocracy and the legend of Nibelung, was to symbolise the Ritterschaft of the new SS Order, at one and the same time both new and yet rooted in the most ancient Germanic past.

Himmler's crippling enthusiasm for German history, the ideals of which were to form the basis of the new era, led to his foundation of the Ahnenerbe- Forschungs- und Lehrgemeinschaft, usually abbreviated to Ahnenerbe, the Society for the Research and Teaching of Ancestral Heritage. Its first President was Dr Hermann Wirth, a university lecturer known for his controversial work on the Middle Ages and Germanic antiquity. Wirth had joined the NSDAP in 1925, left in 1926, and reenrolled in 1933. His book,
What is the German Soul?
, was dismissed as claptrap by Rosenberg, but Wirth managed to seduce Himmler with the promise that he could study and research Nordic history for the purpose of verifying National Socialist and SS theories by scientific proof. Obergruppenführer Darré of RuSHA also became interested in the scheme, and his assistance was of enormous value since, as Minister of Agriculture, he had huge financial resources at his disposal. It was he who actually paid for the setting up and commissioning of the Society in July 1935, under the auspices of his Ministry.