Hitler's Master of the Dark Arts

by Bill Yenne

  The man who had ordered the execution of Karl Koch was picked up by the Allies on April 13, three weeks before the war’s end. He was Waffen SS general Josias Waldeck, the hereditary prince of Waldeck and Pyrmont, at whose castle in Arolsen Himmler had considered making his last stand in May 1945. His highness was convicted on the somewhat ambiguous grounds of the Buchenwald concentration camp having been geographically located within his area of command and, amazingly, for executing Koch. Lucius Clay, the governor who had released Koch’s widow, commuted Waldeck’s life sentence to twenty years, although Waldeck was released for health reasons from Landsberg (the same prison where Hitler had done time) in 1953. He had been elevated to head of the House of Waldeck and Pyrmont in 1946 while incarcerated, and he exercised this noble office until his death in 1967.

  Ricardo Walther Darré, the Argentine Völksdeutscher prophet of the Blut und Boden doctrine, who was Himmler’s brother in the back-to-the-land Artamanen Gesellshaft, was arrested in 1945. He was tried several years later for his role in the crimes of the Third Reich while heading the Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt (Race and Settlement Office). Acquitted of the most serious charges, he was sentenced to seven years, but was released in 1950 due to advanced liver cancer exacerbated by decades of heavy boozing. He died on September 5, 1953, at the age of fifty-eight.

  Hermann Wirth, the impassioned Ariosphist and amateur rune scholar who was Himmler’s first head of the Ahnenerbe, was given a pass because his written work dwelt on the Völkisch ancient past of the Germanic people rather that the brutal recent past of the Third Reich. He lived out his years in relative obscurity, studying the lore and fate of the ancient city of Atlantis. He died in 1981 at the age of ninety-six.

  Walther Wüst was the credentialed university professor whom Himmler named to take over Hermann Wirth’s job at the Ahnenerbe in 1937 in order to give it more academic credibility. For him, there was good news and bad news. Unfortunately, his tenure at the think tank coincided with the ghoulish medical experiments of the Ahnenerbe’s Institut für Wehrwissenschaftliche Zweckforschung. But fortunately for Wüst, he was finally able to convince the postwar courts that he “knew nothing” of all that. Released in 1950, he melted back into academic life at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität (Ludwig Maximilian University) in Munich. He died in 1993 at the age of ninety-two.

  Franz Altheim, the Ahnenerbe’s real Indiana Jones, who conducted some of that agency’s most ambitious international field trips in the 1930s, was likewise written off by the tribunals as a mere researcher of quaint folklore. Altheim was able to profit academically from his Ahnenerbe years, using the fruits of his prewar field research in many postwar papers and monographs. He joined the faculty of the Frei Universität Berlin in 1950 and went on to publish numerous books on history and religion, including the five volume Geschichte der Hunnen, (History of the Huns), published between 1959 and 1962. His published work on runic studies from Italy to the Middle East is still showing up in academic bibliographies. He died in Münster in 1976, eleven days past his seventy-eighth birthday.

  Edmund Kiss, the Thulean amateur archeologist and disciple of Hanns Hörbiger’s Welteislehre/Glazial-Kozmogonie, was on the threshold of getting Walther Wüst to send him to the Bolivian Andes when the war started. He had joined the Waffen SS during World War II and served at Hitler’s Rastenberg command post late in the war. Interned along with other Waffen SS prisoners, he was released in 1947 for health reasons, as seems to have been the case for so many SS men over sixty. He died in 1960 at the age of seventy-four.

  Bruno Beger, the anthropologist who measured Heinrich I’s skull at Quedlinburg and 376 skulls of living Tibetans, was in Italy when the war ended, serving with the legion of Volga Tatars in German uniform. He surrendered to the U.S. Army and spent time in a series of prisoner-of-war camps from Pisa to Darmstadt. He was kept in custody for four years because he was an SS officer. Though his name came up repeatedly in the paper trail that condemned Wolfram Sievers to the gallows, Beger was finally released in 1948. Having conducted some further anthropological field trips during the 1950s, this time to the Middle East, Beger was later rearrested by German authorities on charges related to the skeleton collection. He was convicted as an accessory to murder in 1971, but did not serve time. When he was interviewed in 2003 by Christopher Hale for the latter’s book about the Tibet expedition, Beger was still alive and well at age ninety-two and living in a small town near Frankfurt, surrounded by souvenirs brought back from Tibet.

  Ernst Schäfer, the Tibet expedition leader, who had been exiled to the purposeless Sven Hedin Institute at Schloss Mittersill, surrendered to the Allies and hoped for the best. Having spent two years in various interment facilities, he finally reached the tribunal in Nuremberg in 1947. He testified, was fined, and was finally released in 1949. After spending several years establishing and operating a wildlife park in Venezuela, he and his family resettled in Germany in 1954. He lived there until his death in 1992 at the age of eighty-two.

  As the war ended, a few men remained from the mystical hard core, those who were active in the Thulean and Ariosophic subcurrents of the Germanic New Age in the early years of the twentieth century.

  Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorff, formerly Adam Alfred Rudolf Glauer, the prominent Thulean who had embarrassed Hitler by daring to suggest that the Nazi Party predated the Führer, spent World War II in Turkey. That country, which had been a German ally in World War I, remained neutral in the next. As such, Istanbul was a favored meeting place for spies on both sides. Various stories tell of Sebottendorff doing espionage work for the Abwehr or of his being a double or triple agent who was on the payroll of British intelligence. Others have him simply lounging about Istanbul and pontificating about this mystical dogma or that. He is said to have committed suicide on May 8, 1945, the day after Germany surrendered. However, this story also has an alternate ending, which has the old pagan philosopher changing his name once again and living on.

  Karl Haushofer, the famous geographer who influenced Hitler’s geopolitics, was among those of the Führer’s old acquaintances who earned the scrutiny of the Allied tribunals. Even though his son, Albrecht, had been arrested and executed for playing a part in the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler, the old academic was brought in for questioning. It was eventually determined that Haushofer had committed no crimes against humanity, but nevertheless, the seventy-seven-year-old geographer and his wife poisoned themselves on March 10, 1946.

  Karl Maria Wiligut, the man who influenced Himmler’s mystical side more than any other, also survived World War II. Having been Himmler’s close companion and mystical advisor throughout most of the 1930s, he was abruptly retired on the very eve of World War II. Keeping him on ice to avoid the embarrassment of his three years in the mental institution, Himmler had sent him into seclusion under the care of Elsa Baltrusch from his personal staff.

  In 1940, Wiligut and Baltrusch moved to Goslar, where he could live near where he imagined the Irminen to have built their long-vanished holy city. In 1943, she moved the old magus farther from Allied bombing, to the popular resort area around the Wörthersee, a lake near Klagenfurt in Austria. When the war ended, Wiligut, like so many others, was placed in a refugee camp. After suffering a stroke, he was moved again, finally winding up in Arolsen, Josias Waldeck’s bailiwick. It was there that he died on January 3, 1946, three weeks past his seventy-ninth birthday. The inscription on his headstone reads “Unser Leben Geht Dahin wie ein Geschwätz” (“Our life passes away like idle chatter”).

  And then there was Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, the creator of Theozoology and Ariosophy, which had helped provide the basis for the Völkisch racial doctrines of Darré and Himmler. The same Lanz who had been, in print and possibly in person, the muse of Hitler. The same Lanz who was the zealous understudy to Guido von List and the first Aryan-centric prophet to fly a swastika flag from the stone tower of a Germanic castle. Having spent World War II as an ignored spectator to the hellstorm that he had
helped create, the mad monk Lanz outlived his philosophical protege, Himmler, by nearly a decade. He died a forgotten man on April 22, 1954, at the age of seventy-nine.

  Guido von List had died a few months before Adolf Hitler had even become acquainted with the party that became the Nazis. The godfather of it all, he missed it all. But his spirit lived on. His system of runes, his Armanen Futharkh, survived the war and still survives. Scrubbed clean of Nazi connections and connotations—or as clean as possible—it was revived by the self-styled mystic Karl Spiesberger, a prominent figure in an organization called Fraternitas Saturni (Fraternity of Saturn). Citing what he called “the personal force of List and that of his extensive and influential Armanen Orden,” Stephen Flowers wrote in his 1984 book, Futhark: A Handbook of Rune Magic, that List’s Futharkh “by 1955 had become almost ‘traditional’ in German circles.”

  Also not forgotten are many of the doctrines that swirled around the Völkisch New Age in which men such as List and Lanz held court. One can walk into any number of alternative bookstores throughout Europe and America and, amid the smell of incense, have the sense of being back in time a hundred years or more. Astrology, numerology, and like pseudosciences have never faded away. Madame Helena Blavatsky’s works are still in print, and one does not have far to look before finding recent tomes on runic lore.

  The Bhagavad Gita, the ancient Hindu scripture, which Himmler carried in his briefcase, can be had today in a format to fit any twenty-first-century briefcase or backpack. Topics such as Atlantis and races of ancient god kings are as alive and vibrant on the Internet and in the multiplex as they were in the coffee shops of Munich and Vienna in the years before World War II.

  Gudrun Himmler, Heinrich’s only legitimate daughter, his beloved “Puppi,” was just two months shy of her sixteenth birthday when she got the news that daddy was dead. She spent her teens in British custody. As reported in a 1998 piece in the Berliner Morgenpost, “She complained later bitterly that these had been the worst years of their life, and that she paid [with those years] for her father.” She was finally released in 1949 as the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) was formed out of the British, French, and American occupation zones. She later married Wulf Dieter Burwitz, a journalist and author.

  Through the years, she was active in the organization known as Stille Hilfe für Kriegsgefangene und Internierte (Silent Assistance for Prisoners of War and Interned Persons). It was founded in 1951 by Princess Helene Elizabeth of Isenburg to aid former Nazis, especially SS men. According to Oliver Schröm and Andrea Röpke, in their 2001 book Stille Hilfe für Braune Kameraden, she had a reputation as a Schillernde Nazi Prinzessin (dazzling Nazi princess). Darius Sanai wrote in the February 1, 1999, issue of London’s Independent that she was still “an unreconstructed Nazi … in the news in Germany at the moment, and has been ever since she was revealed to be helping a former Nazi concentration camp commandant fight extradition to be tried for war crimes in the Czech Republic.”

  Far beneath Schloss Wewelsburg, an elaborate swastika is centered in the ceiling of the Obergruppenführersaal, the crypt set aside for the worship of glorious SS martyrs. Photo by Kris Simoens, used by permission

  Even in the twenty-first century, Puppi would remain a staunch champion of her father and still a popular figure among those with a nostalgia for the Germany of the late 1930s. She was among that dwindling number of diehards for whom the black uniform would be, in her beloved father’s words, “naturally very attractive in peacetime.”

  Along with Bruno Beger and Gudrun Berwitz, another figure from those earlier days who lived to see the twenty-first century was SS Sturmbannführer Heinz Macher, the man who set the demolition charges at Schloss Wewelsburg in the fiery days of Götterdämmerung. He died in Schenefeld on December 21, 2001, ten days before his eighty-second birthday.

  As for Wewelsburg itself, Macher’s shortage of explosives on that day in 1945 saved the shell of the building, and over the years, the castle has been gradually restored. A youth hostel first opened there in 1950, and in 1973 work began on rebuilding the heavily damaged north tower. Schloss Wewelsburg reopened as a war monument in 1982, and a memorial to the inmates of the Neiderhagen camp was added later. The Historisches Museum des Hochstifts Paderborn (Historical Museum of the Paderborn Bishopric) was unveiled in the south and east wings in 1996. The hostel is still one of the largest in Germany.

  A large ceremonial fire pit dominates the center of the floor of the Obergruppenführersaal. It was to have been an SS Valhalla to last a thousand years. Photo by Kris Simoens, used by permission

  The personal safe that Heinrich Himmler installed somewhere beneath the west tower has never been found, nor have the thousands of Totenkopfrings that Macher buried somewhere in the Niederhagen forest.

  Today, long after the sands of time have drifted over most of the moldering remains of the Third Reich, one may once again visit the restored crypt at the heart of this SS Valhalla. One may stand in the literal inner sanctum of the SS, at the edge of the stone fire pit around which the Black Knights once gathered.

  You will be chilled to the bone in any weather.

  Bibliography and

  Recommended Reading

  Andreas-Friedrich, Ruth. Berlin Underground (1939–1945). Oxford: Latimer House, 1948.

  Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press, 1963.

  ———. The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: Allen & Unwin, 1958.

  Bartz, Karl. Downfall of the German Secret Service. London: William Kimber & Co., 1956.

  Bennecke, Heinrich. Die Reichswehr und der “Röhm-Putsch.” Munich: Günter Olzog Verlag, 1964.

  ———. Hitler und die SA. Munich: Günter Olzog Verlag, 1962.

  Bernadotte, Folke. The Fall of the Curtain. London: Cassell & Company, 1945.

  Best, Werner. Die Deutsche Polizei. Darmstadt, Germany: L.C. Wittich Verlag, 1941.

  Biss, Andreas. Der Stopp der Endlüsung. Kampf Gegen Himmler und Eichmann in Budapest. Stuttgart, Germany: Seewald Verlag, 1966.

  Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna. Isis Unveiled: A Master Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology. New York: J. W. Bouton, 1877.

  ———. The Key to Theosophy. London: Theosophical Publishing Company, 1889.

  ———. The Secret Doctrine. London: Theosophical Publishing Company, 1888.

  Blum, Ralph. The Book of Runes, A Handbook for the use of Ancient Oracle. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1932.

  Bouhler, Philipp. Kampf um Deutschland. Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1939.

  Bramwell, Anna. Blood and Soil: Richard Walther Darré and Hitler’s “Green Party.” Oxford: Kensal Press, 1985.

  Browning, Christopher. The Origins of the Final Solution. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

  Buchheim, Hans, Martin Broszat, Helmut Krausnick, and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen. The Anatomy of the SS State. Translated R. H. Barry, Marian Jackson, and Dorothy Long. London: Collins, 1968.

  Bullock, Alan. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. London: Odhams Press, 1964.

  Burckhardt, Carl J. Meine Danziger Mission (1937–1939). Munich: Verlag Georg D. W. Callwey, 1960.

  Cooper, John C. Religion in the Age of Aquarius. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1971.

  Crankshaw, Edward. The Gestapo, Instrument of Tyranny. New York: Putnam, 1956.

  D’Alquen, Gunter. Auf Hieb und Stich. Berlin: Franz Eher II GmbH, 1937.

  ———. Die SS. Geschichte, Aufgabe und Organization der Schutzstaffel tier NSDAP. Berlin: Junker & Dünnhaupt Verlag, 1939.

  Däniken, Erich von. Chariots of the Gods?: Unsolved Mysteries of the Past. New York: Bantam, 1968.

  Darré, Walther. Neuadel aus Blut und Boden. Munich: Eher Verlag, 1934.

  Dawidowicz, Lucy. The War Against the Jews. New York: Bantam, 1986.

  Degrelle, Leon. Die Verlorene Legion. Linz, Austria: Veritas Verlag, 1955.

  Dicks, Henry V. Licensed Mass Murder. New Y
ork: Basic Books, 1972.

  Diels, Rudolf. Lucifer ante Portas. Zürich, Switzerland: Interverlag, 1949.

  Dornberger, Walther. V.2 New York: Viking, 1954.

  Dulles, Allen. Germany’s Underground. New York: Macmillan, 1947.

  Eisenbach, A. Operation Reinhard (Mass Extermination in Poland). Poznań, Poland: Instytut Zachodni, 1962.

  Epstein, Fritz T. “Wartime Activities of the SS Ahnenerbe.” In On the Track of Tyranny: Essays Presented by the Wiener Library to Leonard G. Montefiore, on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday. Manchester, NH: Ayer Publishing, 1971.

  Fest, Joachim C. Hitler. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974.

  ———. The Face of the Third Reich. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970.

  Flowers, Stephen E. and Michael Moynihan. The Secret King: Karl Maria Wiligut, Himmler’s Lord of the Runes. Los Angeles: Dominion Feral House, 2007.

  Flowers, Stephen E. Futhark: A Handbook of Rune Magic. York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1984.

  Frischauer, Willi. Himmler. Watford, England: Odhams, 1953.

  Gilbert, G. M. The Psychology of Dictatorship. New York: Ronald Press Company, 1950.

  Gilbert, Martin. Atlas of the Holocaust. New York: Routledge, 1988.

  Gisevius, H. B. To the Bitter End. London: Jonathan Cape, 1948.

  Goebbels, Josef. My Part in Germany’s Fight. London: Paternoster Library, 1938.

  ———. The Early Goebbels Diaries. Edited by Helmut Heiber. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962.

  ———. The Goebbels Diaries. Edited and translated Louis P. Lochner. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1948.