Hitler's Master of the Dark Arts

by Bill Yenne

  A smiling Reichsführer Himmler looks on happily in the midst of a solstice party for children held at Schloss Wewelsburg. It was almost like Christmas, but only almost. The SS made a point of not celebrating holidays with Christian significance. Author’s collection

  Though Wewelsburg was dear to Heinrich Himmler’s heart, he also had a special fondness for another cold stone edifice at Quedlinburg in what is now the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. Schloss Wewelsburg was being remade as the creation of the reborn Heinrich, but Quedlinburg was the creation of the widow of his former self. Even before the death of Heinrich I der Vogler, his wife, Queen Mathilde, later canonized as St. Mathilde, was notable for her pious devotion to prayer. She often left Heinrich’s side in the middle of the night to go to the chapel to pray. She was also one to put her money (and her husband’s) where her mouth was, endowing various religious institutions. Among these was a school and frauenstift (religious community for women) near Heinrich’s castle on Quedlinburg’s castle hill.

  When Heinrich I died in 936, he was interred at Quedlinburg, where his widow and his son, Otto I, established the Abbey of Quedlinburg. Construction of a Romanesque basilica on the remains of earlier churches began at the site sometime before 997, three decades after Mathilde’s death, and was completed in 1021. This church, known as Quedlinburger Dom (Quedlinburg Cathedral), although it was never officially a cathedral (the seat of a bishop), incorporated a crypt for Heinrich I and his queen.

  Naturally, Heinrich Himmler was quite attracted to this site. As colorfully described in the New York Times of March 31, 1996, “So extraordinary is the city’s historical and artistic patrimony—in the 10th and 11th centuries it was often the residence of the Saxon German emperors, thus a magnet for works of art—that during the Nazi years, Heinrich Himmler, leader of Hitler’s SS, turned Quedlinburg into a shrine to the country’s Germanic past. SS troops took over the cathedral and installed a Romanesque-style apse window emblazoned with the German eagle and the Nazi swastika.”

  The New York Times did not mention that Heinrich Himmler’s redesign of Quedlinburg Dom also included a prominently placed “König Heinrich Window,” a stained glass window created by the Reichsführer’s favorite artist, Karl Diebitsch. Nor does it mention that Himmler brought a young anthropologist named Bruno Beger to examine the alleged remains of King Heinrich I. Recruited into the SS in 1935, Beger was an attractive candidate both for his impeccable Aryan pedigree and for his anthropology credentials. High among the latter was his being a disciple of Hans Friedrich Karl Günther. It was while he was a young anthropology student at the university in Jena that Beger had fallen under the spell of Professor Günther, the Völkisch anthropologist and racial theorist who had written The Racial Elements of European History, among other works. Hitler himself attended Günther’s lectures and had even endowed a chair for him at the university. By the late 1930s, Günther’s name was so entwined with the concept of Aryan racial superiority that he had been nicknamed Rassengünther, or “Race” Günther.

  Using rulers and calipers, the standard tool kit of early twentieth-century physical anthologists in Western countries from Britain to the United States, Beger measured the alleged skull of Heinrich I and decreed it genuine. It is not known if he compared the measurements to Himmler’s skull.

  On July 2, 1936, exactly one millennium had passed since the death on Heinrich I, so his reincarnation naturally planned a special commemoration. As reported in the SS weekly newspaper Die Schwarze Corps, Himmler staged a dramatic procession to the Quedlinburg Dom and its crypt. Himmler was there, of course, accompanied by such Nazi luminaries as Martin Borman and Dr. Robert Ley, as well as dozens of SS officers. As stirring martial music was played, they marched through the castle and cathedral complex, their route flanked by an honor guard of hundreds of SS men in full black regalia. Himmler wore his Reichsführer SS uniform, complete with helmet.

  Quedlinburg Cathedral, in what is now the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, was founded by St. Mathilde, the queen of Heinrich Himmler’s former self, Heinrich I der Vogler. It therefore became a sacred site for the SS. The building still exists, although the peaked roofs of the towers are currently much shorter than shown here in Himmler’s day. Author’s collection

  The Nazis, especially the SS, thrived on putting on a good show, but the crypt beneath Quedlinburg Dom did not become Heinrich I’s final resting place until 1,001 years after his death. The mortal remains of the man whom Himmler thought of as himself would be interred in the crypt during another solemn spectacle in July 1937.

  According to SS economist Enno Georg, the crypt became “a sacred spot to which Germans make pilgrimage to do honor to King Heinrich.” Georg is remembered as the author of Die Wirtschaftlichen Unternehmungen der SS (The Economic Enterprises of the SS), published in 1963, which is considered the definitive work on the history of SS business activities. According to the New York Times, “Beginning in 1936, the SS celebrated King Heinrich Day here on the second of each July to commemorate the death of Heinrich I, or Henry the Fowler, the 10th-century Saxon duke who united several German-speaking states, a forerunner of the German nation.” For Himmler, the camp and kitsch of Wewelsburg and Quedlinburg represented the ceremonial trappings of a pagan religion that he and Hitler assumed would last at least until the 2,000th anniversary of Heinrich I’s original interment.

  When the teenaged Guido von List had visited the literal underworld of Vienna and had beheld what he just knew was an altar of Wotan, it was a religious experience. The chills ran up his spine, and he was changed forever. The thrill was like a drug that powered the rest of his life. It’s not hard to imagine that when Heinrich Himmler visited Quedlinburg, he could feel the presence of his former self. When he gazed upon the Armanen runes, or the runes that were carefully selected by graphic designers such as Walther Heck, he could hear the ancients from the court of Wotan as though they were whispering in his ear.

  When the Reichsführer SS drove through the Teutoburgerwald on his way to his castle, his magic castle at Wewelsburg, the ancient history of Germanic roots that went back for millennia—to Hermann’s glorious victory and beyond—was swirling all around him, cloaking him like the warm air from the Mercedes’s heater. In the Obergruppenführersaal, he felt the presence of the past and saw the future.

  The chills that ran up Heinrich Himmler’s spine at Quedlinburg and Wewelsburg were the drug that powered him, and the quest for that thrill drove him on. He was obsessed by an ancient Germanic past that became ever more real each time he found and touched a concrete artifact of that past.

  CHAPTER 10

  Das Ahnenerbe

  IN 1935, AS ADOLF HITLER was consolidating his power in Berlin and dreaming of future expansions of the Third Reich, Himmler was consolidating the Aryan sense of identity. He was a believer, and he surrounded himself with believers. The next step was to institutionalize the credo of Aryan superiority, turning it from a passionate belief into an unquestioned dogma. At the turn of the century, the Lithuanian archeologist Gustaf Kossinna had shaped an understanding of the Aryan race by announcing that it had originated in Northern Europe, and he had backed up his assertion with tangible artifacts. Himmler needed tangible facts and an institute to validate a firm academic footing.

  In July 1935 Himmler and his Irminist colleague, Walther Darré, founded the Ahnenerbe, an umbrella agency for a broad range of scientific and pseudoscientific organizations directed to study ancient Germanic cultural history and its holy pagan roots, with the goal of proving the mythology of Aryan superiority that Himmler and Darré just knew was true. A U.S. Army overview of Ahnenerbe documents, now in the U.S. National Archives, says, “The stated aim of the Ahnenerbe was the systematic exploration of the Northern Indo-Germanic race and its achievements. This was to be accomplished by the unified coordination of all separate disciplines of letters and sciences bearing upon the ‘living space,’ spirit, achievements and heritage of the Indo-Germanic people.”

  Ori
ginally designated the Studiengesellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte Deutsches Ahnenerbe (Study Society for Primordial Intellectual History, and German Ancestral Heritage), it was renamed two years later as the Forschüngs und Lehrgemeinschaft das Ahnenerbe (Research and Teaching Community for Ancestral Heritage). For short, this organization was simply known as Das Ahnenerbe, or “the Ahnenerbe.” Though Himmler was officially in charge of the Ahnenerbe from its beginning, it was not formally integrated into the SS until 1939.

  “Die Schmiede Grossdeutschland” (“The Forge of Greater Germany”). As Völkisch workers forge steel weapons, a Germanic warrior draped in swastikas dons her helmet and prepares to take her sword. Fire, runic heraldry, steel, and heroic warriors were all elements of the ancient Nordic culture that the Ahnenerbe sought to rediscover, reinterpret, and reassert into the psyche of the Third Reich. U.S. Army art collection

  Its center, located at 35 Widmayerstrasse in Munich, became a sort of Smithsonian Institution of strange artifacts and dubious science. It came to incorporate spiritualism and many of the favorite parlor pseudosciences that had been coffee-house diversions for the early twentieth-century Germanic New Age. One of the many practitioners of the spurious arts who drifted through the Ahnenerbe in those days was the astrologer Wilhelm Wulff, who had earlier claimed to have discovered an astrological “DaVinci code,” while studying DaVinci’s drawings in Italy. According to Wulff’s own account, he worked on an Ahnenerbe project aimed at harnessing “supernatural forces.”

  Although the Ahnenerbe as an umbrella organization covered all manner of shady and esoteric undertakings, from musicology studies aimed at “confirming” the inferiority of Hebrew musical traditions to grisly human medical experiments, the agency was primarily tasked with archeological research.

  The nominal head of the Ahnenerbe, and a founding father along with Himmler and Darré, was a fifty-year-old, Netherlands-born German named Hermann Wirth. He was a nonacademic scholar of Völkisch culture, religion, and runes who had recently published several books supporting the the godly origins of the Aryan race. Among these were Der Aufgang der Menschheit (The Stairway of Mankind) and Die Heilige Urschrift der Menschheit (The Holy Origins of Mankind). Obviously, this line of thought was in keeping with the deified-ancestor school of thought proclaimed by List, Lanz, and Wiligut. What most attracted Himmler to Wirth was the fact that the latter had just translated the ancient Ura Linda, or Oera Linda Book, into German. This book, like the fruits of Gustaf Kossinna’s neolithic excavations, was a tangible artifact that offered a concrete bridge from the German present to the Nordic past.

  As the story goes, there was an old manuscript that had been in possession of a Dutch family in the Netherlands province of Friesland for centuries. In 1867, Cornelis Over de Linden, a member of the family, donated it to the provincial library. It appeared to be written in the ancient Frisian language that had been spoken in the coastal regions from what is now northern Netherlands, northwest Germany, and southwest Denmark. Dated to the year 1256, the manuscript described itself as a compilation of earlier works that had been written in northern Europe between the twenty-second century BC and the early ninth century AD. The Ura Linda was a chronicle of ancient Völkisch priestesses going back to the goddess Freya herself. The book not only describes a Nordic origin of the Aryan race, but also indicates that the Aryan race was the master race for Middle Eastern civilizations. For Aryan-centrics such as Hermann Wirth or Heinrich Himmler, the content of the book seemed almost too good to be true.

  Many believed that it was too good to be true. When the book was first translated into Dutch in 1872, two years before the death of Cornelis Over de Linden, there was a good deal of controversy. It was had been denounced as a hoax because it contained various nineteenth-century idioms that were not in use in 1256. Further, it seemed that the Frisian language in which it was written bore too much resemblance to the nineteenth-century Frisian dialect. Nevertheless, it had its coterie of believers, and Wirth was one. So, too, was Heinrich Himmler.

  To be the Reichsgeschäftsführer, or business manager, of the Ahnenerbe, Himmler appointed Wolfram Sievers, who, like Himmler and Darré, had been a member of the Völkisch, back-to-nature Artamanen Gesellschaft. In 1933, when Himmler first set up the Externsteine Stiftung (Externsteine Foundation) to study the ancient Irminsul rock formations in the Teutoburgerwald, he assigned Sievers to the project. The mandate of the Externsteine Stiftung was a sort of prototype for that of the Ahnenerbe. In other words, subjects that were related to ancient Nordic literature, or theories based on Nordic and Völkisch themes, or theories that Himmler merely wanted to believe were true, were to be researched archaeologically and documented scientifically.

  Karl Maria Wiligut, meanwhile, functioned as a free agent as part of Himmler’s personal staff and had the Reichsführer’s blessing to follow any mystical lead that struck his fancy—or that of the voices in his head. While the old pseudoarcheologist Wilhelm Teudt was feeling the Völkisch vibes of the ancients at the Externsteine, Wiligut was chasing other primeval phantoms. Hermann Wirth, who fancied himself to be a “serious” amateur archeologist, never took well to the old, hard drinking mystic. He regarded Wiligut as little more than a crank. Of course, it never mattered what Wirth thought, so long as Wiligut had the blessing of Heinrich Himmler.

  In 1934, even as he was getting the Reichsführer excited about Wewelsburg, Wiligut directed the attention of both Himmler and Darré to the “work” being done by the Völkisch prehistorian and Nibelungen scholar Günther Kirchhoff. Like Wiligut, Kirchhoff believed in the Irminen, their importance in Nordic lore, and the presence of their holy sites within Germany. Like Teudt, Kirchhoff had been feeling “vibrations.” According to correspondence now preserved in the German Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, Teudt had mapped intercontinental “energy lines.” He had even gone so far as to map an important energy-line intersection point that coincided with an important Irminen holy center. This site was in the Schwarzwald (Black Forest), conveniently not far from where Kirchhoff lived.

  In 1936, reportedly with the Ahnenerbe footing the bill, Wiligut accompanied Kirchhoff on a dig in the Schwarzwald’s Murg Valley. They uncovered a number of old stone ruins, which were, of course, interpreted as being of Irminen origin. They calculated that the crumbling old wreck of Schloss Eberstein (now called Alt Eberstein) was a former power center for the Irminen. Conventional archaeologists date the ruin to around the eleventh century, when it was built by the minor nobility of Eberstein. Wiligut and Kirchhoff considered it to be thousands of years older, and unlike conventional archaeologists, they could count on the authority of what the vibrations were telling them.

  Wiligut also spent a great deal of time studying the maypoles and solstice festivals of the Völkisch people of the Schwarzwald and elsewhere in rural Germany. His idea, shared by Himmler and Darré, was that these people of German blood, so close to the German soil, still possessed some of the original unblemished spirit that had been present in their ancient Nordic ancestors.

  Over several years, the Ahnenerbe continued its work in the Black Forest. In 1937 and 1938, the agency sent academically trained archeologist Gustav Riek of the University of Tübingen to the Heuneburg, a prehistoric complex near the towns of Herbertingen and Ulm. Dating back to at least twelfth century, Heuneburg had a succession of occupants, including an important early Celtic settlement established around the seventh century BC. Rediscovered in the nineteenth century, it continues to be the site of various digs, including a major excavation between 1950 and 1979, and another initiated in 2004. Riek poked around the burial mounds for a couple of seasons, but apparently found no Irminen.

  Wolfram Sievers (1905–1948), strikes a mystical pose with his handlebar mustache and Völkisch jacket. In 1935, Heinrich Himmler named him Reichsgeschäftsführer, or business manager, of the SS think tank known as the Ahnenerbe. The agency encompassed a broad range of scientific and pseudoscientific organizations directed at the study of ancient Germanic cult
ural history and its holy pagan roots. Though the Ahenenerbe had academic figureheads, it was Sievers who actually ran the agency. U.S. National Archives

  In 1937, the Ahnenerbe digging did, however, make an archaeologically important discovery. Dr. Assien Bohmers, a Dutch citizen on the Ahnenerbe payroll, discovered a Cro-Magnon site in the Jura Mountains of Bavaria that was among the oldest yet discovered in Europe.

  Meanwhile, Wirth sent Ahnenerbe teams abroad to remote corners of Nordic Scandinavia in 1936. The 22,000-verse Kalevala is a work with a very long history within Finnish literature. Indeed, fresh in the minds of Wirth and Sievers was its having been credited with inspiring Finland’s declaration of independence from Russia in 1917. (Among other distinctions, the old rune scholar J. R. R. Tolkien identified it as a source for his book Silmarillion.) Himmler had read about the Kalevala and the Völkisch, northern peoples who still subscribed to the ancient pagan mythology that it celebrates. Excited by the prospect of a folklore that may have been virtually unchanged since the most ancient past of the early Aryans, he insisted that the pagan dirges of the people in the Karelian woodland region of Finland be recorded so that he could hear them.

  In 1935, the German electronics firm Allgemeine Elektrizitäts Gesellschaft (the still extant AEG company), an innovator in magnetic-tape technology, had just rolled out the Magnetophon, one of the first reel-to-reel tape recorders. The Ahnenerbe teams Himmler sent to Scandinavia obtained one of these cumbersome beasts for their trip. It was an example of leading-edge, twentieth-century technology in the service of pagan spiritualists who yearned to grasp the ethos of a culture older than time.