by Bill Yenne
Whomever it was who told Tacitus about this stone edifice was not making up its existance. Such a thing exists in the countryside near the city of Detmold in the Fürstentum Lippe (principality of Lippe), now part of the German state of Nordrhein-Westfalen (North Rhine-Westphalia). Known as the Externsteine, it is a peculiar rock formation comprised of five naturally occurring, early Cretaceous, sandstone pillars similar to those found at the Pinnacles National Monument in central California. Located in an area otherwise devoid of rocky outcroppings, the Externsteine pillars rise as high as 120 feet.
Apparently the place had been a pagan religious site for centuries before a twelfth-century Christian artist carved a bas relief into one of the pillars. This carving shows a man, identified as Nicodemus, whose name comes up in the New Testament in connection with the Resurrection of Jesus. The carving shows him removing Christ from the cross while trampling the Irminsul. In the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the Externsteine experienced renewed interest among the Völkisch neo-paganists, including Wiligut.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, Karl Maria Wiligut lived the more or less normal life of an Austrian army officer. He did not marry until the age of forty, wedding Malwine (Malvina) Leuts von Teuringen in 1906. As far as we know, this woman from the Austrian city of Bozen (now Bolzano in northern Italy) was his first wife. They had three children: a pair of twins—a boy and a girl—and a second daughter.
Karl Maria Wiligut believed that the old castle at Goslar in Lower Saxony had been built at or near an Irminen holy city that was destroyed many millennia ago in a great struggle between the Irminen and the Wotanists. In 1940, after he retired, Wiligut was taken by Elsa Baltrusch, a member of the Reichsführer SS personal staff, to live in Goslar. Author’s collection
When World War I began, Wiligut served first with the 30th Infantry Regiment against the Russian forces in the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Europe. Between June 1915 and June 1916, he was assigned to Southern Tyrol, on the mountainous southern front facing Italy. Thereafter, the fifty-year-old lieutenant colonel was posted to a reserve training command near Salzburg, and he ended the war running convalescent camps around Lemburg (now L’vov in Ukraine). Having been promoted to full colonel, he was retired from the army of the collapsed Austrian empire in 1919.
The Wiligut family, minus their son, who had died as a young child, retired to a small town near Salzburg. Here, Karl would lose himself in his imaginary pagan world, communing with his Irminist ancestors. He imagined his own ancestors had been Irminen ice kings, who were the fruit of the intermarriage of Vanir and Aesir (or Aesynja), gods and goddesses associated with wisdom, fertility, and fortune-telling. According to the mythology, they settled a long running feud through a fusion of bloodlines.
Malvina took a dim view of her husband’s hobby. This was not surprising; many wives would become perturbed with a husband who has decided that he is a king descended from gods. She was also frustrated with his often-uncontrolled anger over the death of his son. Most people would react badly to the death of a child, but Wiligut’s fury came because, without a male heir, he would be unable to pass on his kingliness and godliness to another generation.
The whispering voices of the Irminen had told Wiligut to despise the Christians, and he did not need the Ariosophists to tell him to mistrust the Jews. Of course, a distrust of both of these established religions was prevalent throughout the Völkisch New Age of the early twentieth century. Like many like-minded individuals within the indistinct parameters of this movement, he began to imagine a conspiracy against Irminists such as himself. As the Christians and Wotanists had once persecuted the Irminen, the Christians and Jews were now conspiring for this same purpose.
In his spare time, which in retirement he had in abundance, he even started a newspaper. As Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels had his Ostara, Karl Maria Wiligut had his Der Eiserne Besen (The Iron Broom). The theme was similar: the superior Aryan race was being threatened by its inferiors. The god-king Wiligut felt it his duty to communicate this dire threat to his fellow Aryans in print.
The retired colonel became increasingly abusive at home, estranging himself from the mistreated Malvina as he withdrew into his obsessions. Verbal abuse turned more serious, and death threats followed. Finally, she could take it no longer. Karl had to be locked up.
Having been diagnosed as a schizophrenic, he was legally declared incompetent by the courts, snatched from a Salzburg cafe in November 1924, and hustled off to the rubber room. Wiligut would remain in a mental institution 1927. His dossier called him delusional, a diagnosis that had to have really insulted this man, a god-king who communed with ancient Irminen spirits.
When he was finally released, Wiligut drifted into the welcoming arms of friends in Austria and Germany with whom he had corresponded—friends who were members of Lanz’s Order of the New Templars. Among them were Ernst Rüdiger, Käthe Schäfer-Gerdau, Friedrich Schiller, and Friedrich Teltsher. By now, the venerable Wiligut was regarded as a sort of patriarch, an elder statesman of Irminism. When he said that the spirits spoke to him, his friends hung on every word, convinced the voices in his head spoke the truth. At last he was being taken seriously. In the eyes of his new devotees, he had been locked up not because he was an abusive husband, but because he was a martyr being persecuted for his neo-pagan religious beliefs. Schäfer-Gerdau welcomed him into her Bavarian home as a sort of a permanent houseguest.
As Wiligut was communing with Lanz’s New Templars, he had also been communicating with Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels himself. It was in 1927, the same year that Wiligut got out, that Lanz resumed limited publication of Ostara, mainly reissuing earlier editions.
At this time, with Hitler on the rise within a movement that embraced the catechism of Ariosophy, it would seem logical that the great comeback of Lanz would be pending. But it never happened. Though Lanz heard from Wiligut, he never heard from Hitler. Like an aging silent movie star put out of business by the talkies, Lanz spent the coming decades waiting for a call that never came. Hitler had moved on. On the notion of Aryan superiority, Lanz and Hitler could agree, but in the orgiastic obsessions and the complicated zoology of primordial life forms, Hitler had no interest. Hitler’s vision lay in the future, not in the past, and his eye was on a much more tangible, much more political prize.
In 1932, as the neo-pagan NSDAP, with its swastikas and torchlight rallies, was climbing toward political power in Germany, the neo-pagan Wiligut made his way to Munich. The former brooding, solitary loner became a joiner. At last, he had found a movement to which to attach his star—or his rune, as the case may be. It was to be a mutual attraction.
In January 1933, the same month that Adolf Hitler was named Reichskanzler, a sixty-seven-year-old former Austrian colonel was ushered into the office of Heinrich Himmler. The man told Himmler that he communicated with the spirits of Germanic heroes of a bygone era of Nordic greatness, and Himmler hung on every word. Willigut spoke of runes and kings, of gods and ancient ancestors, mysterious and arcane—and the reborn Heinrich I was smitten.
The old colonel and the Reichsführer SS had each found a kindred spirit. Himmler saw Wiligut as a conduit into the ancestral memory of Germanic mythology, a window into a past with which he longed to forge a connection. In Himmler, Wiligut at last had found someone of great power who took him seriously.
When Wiligut finally formally joined the SS in September 1933, he did so under the pseudonym Karl Maria Weisthor, a surname that can be translated, eerily, as “Thor Knows.” Shortly after, Himmler assigned him to head up the Department of Ancient and Prehistory within Walther Darré’s Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt (Race and Settlement Office). The old Austrian officer’s climb up the SS ladder was quick. When he joined the SS, Himmler had given him the rank of Standartenführer, a rank equivalent to his old imperial rank of colonel. In October 1934, Himmler’s mystic was upgraded to SS Oberführer, the equivalent of general.
CHAPTER 9
The Dark Temples
of the Schutzstaffel
WATCH ANY HOLLYWOOD FILM of a sinister brotherhood with roots in an ancient, mysterious time and place, and there will be a cold, dark castle situated on a hilltop. Deep within that castle, there will be circular room, with high stone walls, blazing torches, and dark-clad members of a secret society speaking in an archaic and arcane language.
Such a scene did not originate with Hollywood. Nor did it originate with J. R. R. Tolkien, who certainly used such medieval trappings to great effect, nor with Geoffrey de Monmouth, the man who first started writing about the Knights of the Round Table back in the twelfth century. Nor did it originate in the samurai legends of Japan.
In Nordic mythology, such places were Fólkvangr and Valhalla, the great halls of slain warriors. The better-known Valhalla appears prominently in the Nibelunglied and has been celebrated in song by composers and musicians from Richard Wagner to Led Zeppelin. Valhalla was ruled over by Wotan himself, while Fólkvangr was the hall of Freyja (or Freya), whom the Eddas call the most beautiful of the Nordic goddesses. The patron goddess of war, magic, and prophecy, she was a popular and recurring figure in Nordic literature from the cold shores of Iceland to the dark and forbidding forests of northern Germany. She is often seen as a Mother Earth figure of the type that is still worshiped by various neo-pagan groups.
The image of a great hall of slain warriors is an age-old archetype, the sort of thing that Carl Jung would call part of our collective unconscious. Other psychologists would say that it is a fantasy born out of fear and insecurity, or from the need of adolescent moviegoers to scare themselves.
The dark-castle archetype certainly figured in the fantasy world of Heinrich Himmler as he grew up looking up at the towering, thirteenth-century Burg Trusnitz. It fired the imagination of Guido von List as he and his followers romped amid the torchlit ruins of ancient Carnuntum. It certainly drove Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels to acquire Burg Werfenstein, which he used as a mystic party house and as the place to first fly the swastika on a banner celebrating Ariosophy. While none of these men would ever know Led Zeppelin, they all had heard Richard Wagner’s operas, and they all thrilled to the thought of a Valhalla ruled by Wotan himself.
The SS would establish a number of specialized officer training facilities throughout Germany. In 1932, for example, Himmler organized the first of several SS Junkerschulen (leadership schools) at Bad Tölz, the alpine resort in Bavaria. However, the Reichsführer SS had something even more specialized and more special in mind.
As Lanz had made Bad Werfenstein his Aryan clubhouse, Himmler desired such a place for his own black-clad order of dark knights. Himmler wanted his cold, dark, brooding edifice. He wanted a castle. On a cold winter day in November 1933, when the shadows were long and the days short, he found such a place.
As the story goes, Karl Maria Wiligut accompanied Himmler on his first visit to the place that would become their SS Valhalla. The castle toward which the men drove, like a pair of typical house-hunters, albeit in a chauffer-driven Mercedes-Benz, was located in the Westphalian district of Paderborn. It was called Schloss Wewelsburg, meaning “the castle of Wewel,” as in the robber baron Wewel von Büren. Also known as Wifilisburg, the same site had been the location of another castle in the time of Heinrich I in the ninth century. This would have appealed to the twentieth-century Heinrich, who probably imagined that he had visited this hilltop in his other lifetime.
Wewelsburg was also thought to be close to the possible site of the celebrated Battle of the Teutoburgerwald (Teutoburg Forest), fought in AD 9. The actual site of this great battle had continued to elude archaeologists, but the importance of the Battle of the Teutoburgerwald was unquestioned. In this contest, the great Germanic warlord Hermann ambushed, defeated, and destroyed three Roman legions under the command of Publius Quinctilius Varus, a favorite of Emperor Caesar Augustus. In his Carnuntum, Guido von List had developed the thesis of conflict between the Germanic peoples and the Roman intruders, and in no other battle had the ancient Germans achieved such a resounding victory over the armies of Rome. In the popular image of the battle that was generally held in Germany through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it marked the end of Roman expansion into Germany.
As the Mercedes climbed the hill to the castle, Wiligut was no doubt discussing the pivotal battle with the Reichsführer SS. While both men are aware of the Battle of the Teutoburgerwald, Wiligut also surely mentioned the legend of the Schlacht am Birkenbaum (Battle at the Birch Tree). In this mythological saga, Paderborn is predicted to be the site of a future battle in which the armies of the East will be defeated by the armies of the West in a great apocalyptic struggle. Keen on symbolism, Wiligut saw Schloss Wewelsburg as a bastion in this monumental battle between East and West.
The Externsteine, the strange rock formations that the Irminists and neo-pagans—like Wiligut—believed to be the Irminsul, the tree of the world, were also in the Teutoburgerwald. Wiligut and Himmler probably discussed the Externsteine on their drive out to Wewelsburg, and perhaps even stopped by.
Wiligut had taken Himmler to the Externsteine before. Friedrich Franz Bauer, the Munich photographer who was a favorite of the Reichsführer, took a number of frames of Himmler and his entourage at the alleged Irminsul. There are photographs of Wiligut and Himmler studying the bas relief of Nicodemus, and of Himmler climbing among the rocks in his SS black leather, looking very serious. Himmler had been so intrigued by the rocks that a year earlier, he had established the Externsteine Stiftung (Externsteine Foundation) as a pseudoscientific entity to study the history and prehistory of the place.
Looking so benign on its hilltop in the Paderborn hills, Schloss Wewelsburg was Himmler’s Black Camelot. The north tower (at left) was the focal point of the castle complex and the sacred center of secret SS rites and ceremonies. Photo by Kris Simoens, used by permission
Had he and Wiligut stopped by on that cold November day, they might have chatted briefly with Wilhelm Teudt, the seventy-four-year-old, self-taught archeologist and neo-pagan who was in charge of the official excavations at the Externsteine. Like Wiligut, he had the “gift” of channeling the spirits of his ancient Germanic ancestors. As he put it, he felt their “vibrations.”
Arriving at Wewelsburg at last, Himmler knew that the castle from the time of Heinrich I was gone. The one that he beheld in 1934 had been completed by Fürstbischof (prince-bishop) Dietrich von Fürstenberg in 1609. This structure had functioned as a country home for the Fürstbischofen of Paderborn, who had owned the property since the beginning of the fourteenth century.
The footprint of the castle and its walls was triangular, rather than rectangular, an unusual configuration necessitated by its location on a narrowing hilltop. The north tower sat atop the steepest part of the hill like the prow of a ship, a fact that certainly appealed to Himmler’s sense of the dramatic. He is reported to have been thrilled by Schloss Wewelsburg’s triangular shape.
No castle is complete without its myths and legends, and stories of the thousands of witches who were racked and executed at Wewelsburg abounded in local folklore. Records existed of at least two witch trials, and a dungeon existed in the basement, all of which had to have excited Himmler’s imagination. He could probably almost smell the bonfires.
Karl Maria Wiligut (center) lectures to a group of SS officers outside the walls of Schloss Wewelsburg. Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler (foreground) and another officer examine a stone in the foreground as Wiligut explains the significance. U.S. National Archives
Taken over by the state of Prussia early in the nineteenth century, Schloss Wewelsburg was owned by the government of Paderborn. It was in a deteriorating state when Himmler found it, the north tower in ruins since a fire in 1815. Only part of the structure was habitable, and that part was being used as a Catholic rectory. The place was in only slightly better condition than the ruins of Burg Werfenstein had been when Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels had taken them over three decades earlier. As at Burg Werfenstein, it would
not be long before the new owner ran up a swastika flag.
Himmler was able to cut a good deal with the Paderborn government. Who would try to cut a bad deal with the Reichsführer SS? He signed a one-hundred-year lease for one reichsmark per annum, and the Catholic rectory became a pagan shrine. Though his rent was a pittance, Himmler went on to spend 11 million reichsmarks on remodeling and reconstruction in the first year alone. While much of the southern part of Schloss Wewelsburg was rehabilitated and placed into use fairly quickly, reconstruction of the north tower, under the direction of architect Hermann Bartels, was ongoing throughout the 1930s.
Work began in January 1934, and the labor was supplied at first by the Freiwilliger Arbeitsdienst, or FAD (Volunteer Labor Service). Later, construction crews and skilled craftsmen were supplied by the Reichsarbeitsdienst, or RAD (Reich Labor Service). The RAD was the German equivalent of the American Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which included historic restoration work among its many projects in the United States during the 1930s.
The guardhouse at the entrance to Schloss Wewelsburg. Note the partially obliterated SS Sig rune insignia carved into the panel above the gate. Photo by Kris Simoens, used by permission
Himmler needed to finance the project without skimming funds directly from the SS budget. While the SS could, in fact, do anything it wished, it was a government agency to which donations could not be made legally. Himmler wanted to keep everything straight with regard to his schoolhouse, so he created a “nonprofit” fundraising foundation in 1936. He named it the Gesellschaft Zur Fürderung und Pflege Deutscher Kulturdenkmäler (Society for the Advancement and Maintenance of German Cultural Artifacts). How could donors say nein to a foundation that was going to maintain their Germanic patrimony?
