The Rise of the Fourth Reich

by Jim Marrs

  Noting that Patton, whose forces drove straight to the heart of Nazi research in Czechoslovakia, may well have been aware of Kammler and his Nazi superweapons, Farrell stated that if Patton was deliberately silenced, “then surely this [knowledge of Nazi super-science] is the most plausible motivation for the deed.”

  Did knowledge of the incredible ability to manipulate energy die with top Nazis at the end of the war? Consider the fate of Hans Kammler.

  As the war drew to a close, Kammler made no secret that he intended to use both the V-2 scientists and rockets under his control as leverage for a deal with the Allies. On April 2, 1945, on Kammler’s orders, a special train carried rockets and five hundred technicians and engineers escorted by a hundred SS troopers to an Alpine redoubt in Bavaria. According to von Braun and Dornberger, Kammler planned to “bargain with the Americans or one of the other Allies for his own life in exchange for the leading German rocket specialists.”

  “[Kammler] came to me in early April in order to say good-bye,” recalled Nazi armaments minister Speer. “For the first time in our four-year association, Kammler did not display his usual dash. On the contrary, he seemed insecure and slippery with his vague, obscure hints about why I should transfer to Munich with him. He said efforts were being made in the SS to get rid of the fuehrer. He himself, however, was planning to contact the Americans. In exchange for their guaranty of freedom, he would offer them the entire technology of our jet planes, as well as the A-4 rocket and other important developments….”

  On April 4, 1945, when von Braun pressed Kammler for permission to resume rocket research, the SS officer quietly announced that he was about to disappear for “an indefinite length of time.” He was true to his word: no one saw Kammler again. As everyone knows, von Braun and Dornberger, along with other scientists and many of the V-2 rockets, eventually made their way to the United States, becoming founding members of its modern space program with no help from Kammler.

  Jean Michel, himself an inmate of concentration camp Dora, which provided slave labor for Kammler’s rocket program, wrote of Kammler: “The chief of the SS secret weapon empire, the man in Himmler’s confidence, disappeared without a trace. Even more disturbing is the fact that the architect of the concentration camps, builder of the gas chambers, executioner of Dora, overall chief of all the SS missiles has sunk into oblivion. There is the Bormann mystery, the Mengele enigma; as far as I know, no one, to this day, has taken much interest in the fate of SS Obergruppenfuehrer Hans Kammler.” Michel, along with others, wondered, “Why had the ‘cold and brutal calculator’ described by Speer so abruptly discarded the trump cards he had so patiently accumulated?”

  As the war drew to a close, Kammler “had the good fortune to inspect the Czechoslovakian stretch of the front,” wrote Witkowski. “After this event, nobody knew what became of him. Perhaps he died, though it is unlikely that this would never have been recorded.”

  The reports of Kammler’s death are varied and mutually exclusive. One version has him committing suicide in a forest between Prague and Pilsen two days after Germany surrendered, while another said he was shot by his own SS aide in Prague. Another version was that he died in a shootout with Czech partisans. The Red Cross initially reported Kammler as “missing,” but this was later changed to “dead” upon the testimony of a relative. The one common denominator regarding Kammler’s various death reports was that he was last seen in north central Czechoslovakia, in close proximity to the Wenzeslaus Mine—and the Bell.

  Despite the lack of a body, no effort appeared to have been taken to establish the truth of Kammler’s death and, unlike his superior Bormann, Kammler was not tried in absentia at Nuremberg.

  Kammler was not alone in his escape. Dozens of high-ranking former SS or party members simply disappeared. Many of them were associated with advanced technology programs.

  Did Kammler and his cohorts escape with weapons plans for the amazing Bell project? Whoever controlled such secret technology was certainly in a strong position to strike a deal with one of the Allied nations.

  With secret projects in the hands of the fanatical SS and with factories and research facilities scattered over—and under—the countryside, it is entirely conceivable that saucers, uranium weapons, the Bell, and other exotic technologies could have been developed without the knowledge of anyone except Himmler, Bormann, and Kammler. The high-profile Himmler had been taken out of the loop as far back as 1943. The fates of Bormann and Kammler remain unproven. “[T]he evidence is strong enough to suggest collusion at the highest levels between the United States and Nazi Germany governments—and that collusion extends down to those within U-234, its officers, crew and passengers—and has been maintained by powerful parties with vested interests on both sides of the Atlantic ever since,” stated Hydrick.

  If the highest circle of America’s ruling elite indeed obtained Nazi super-science in the wake of World War II, it came with a price—one these prewar, pro-Nazi sympathizers were willing to accept. When American authorities realized the alternative and nonlinear physics within Nazi science, they knew it was beyond the frame of reference of most U.S. scientists, which is why they recruited so many Germans and brought them to America.

  “The trouble was,” recounted one government insider, “when the Americans took it all home with them, they found, too late, that it came infected with a virus—you take the science on, you take on aspects of the ideology as well.”

  The intense interest of the Nazi leadership in occult or hidden subjects—from ancient artifacts to legends of prehistorical high-tech super-races—is well documented. Toward the end of the war, their acquisition of super-science may have been matched by the recovery of an amazing and precious treasure.

  CHAPTER 4

  A TREASURE TROVE

  IN MARCH 1944, THE CRAGGY PEAKS SURROUNDING THE ANCIENT Cathar fortress of Montségur in southern France reverberated with the grinding gears and revving engines of military machines. The trucks and command cars belonged to a battalion of Nazi SS troopers led by Adolf Hitler’s top commando, SS Standartenfuehrer Otto Skorzeny. Standing six feet and four inches, Skorzeny was larger than life among his comrades, and his exploits during World War II only enhanced this reputation. An old dueling scar creased his face from the left cheekbone to his chin, earning him the nickname Scar.

  Born in Vienna in 1908, Skorzeny had joined the Nazi Party in 1930 while studying in Germany. By 1939, he had been accepted as a member of Hitler’s personal bodyguards. Sent home from the Russian Front in 1942 due to wounds, Skorzeny soon was directing secret agents in other countries.

  But worldwide attention became focused on Skorzeny in September 1943, when he led a glider assault by commandos on a mountaintop hotel where the dictator Benito Mussolini was being held captive following a coup in Italy. In a daring daylight operation, Skorzeny and his men liberated Mussolini, who had been contemplating suicide, and whisked him off to safety. Hitler declared Mussolini the rightful leader of Italy and the war there continued until Germany surrendered in May 1945.

  Mussolini’s ouster followed by Allied landings in Italy prompted Hitler to send his troops into what had until then been called Vichy, France, to ostensibly protect the “soft underbelly of Europe.” The Nazis had gained freedom of movement in the historic Languedoc region, located in the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains, which separate France from Spain.

  But in early March 1944, something more than military victory was on Skorzeny’s mind as his troops entered the area encompassing Montsegur and the village of Rennes-le-Château, the site of a great mystery since the discovery of strange documents by a young priest in 1891.

  SKORZENY’S THOUGHTS UNDOUBTEDLY were centered on the location of a fabulous treasure believed to have been located by a German author and occult researcher named Otto Rahn.

  Little is known about Rahn’s early life except that he was born February 18, 1904, in Michelstadt and educated in literature and philology at the University of Berlin. Durin
g his time in school, Rahn had become fascinated with legends of the Holy Grail as well as the little-understood Cathars—“pure ones,” as they were called—who had opposed the Roman Church and thus suffered near annihilation in a papal military campaign in 1209, known as the Albigensian Crusade.

  In the early 1930s, Rahn traveled widely in the Languedoc region of Southern France, even spelunking among the maze of cave systems in the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains. Here he gained firsthand knowledge about the Cathars and their descendants, many of whom became members of the fabled Knights Templar.

  Rahn’s book Crusade Against the Grail was published in 1933, the same year Hitler came to power. This and other books on the Cathars and Grail legends, as well as his many travel articles, brought him to the attention of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, who, along with many other top-ranking Nazis, had a keen interest in occult artifacts and knowledge. Rahn’s knowledge of both the Cathars and the Templars apparently intrigued Himmler, as Rahn was inducted into the SS as a lieutenant in 1936.

  Himmler and his cronies must have been entranced with Rahn, who had drawn connections between the Cathar fortress of Montségur and a fabulous cave housing the Holy Grail called Montsavat, mentioned in Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach in the thirteenth century. Rahn believed he had discovered the final resting place of a great treasure of antiquity, which included the Tables of Testimony, the Grail Cup known as Emerald Cup, and perhaps even the long-lost Ark of the Covenant.

  And by March 1944, the Nazis were free to move troops into Languedoc in search of this ancient wealth, known as King Solomon’s treasure.

  It was much too late for Rahn. By 1939, Rahn had become disenchanted with his Nazi superiors, writing, “There is much sorrow in my country. [It is] impossible for a tolerant, liberal man like me to live in the nation that my native country has become.” He resigned his commission in the SS in February 1939 and, barely a month later, reportedly died of exposure after having been caught in a snowstorm during a hiking expedition. Rumors circulated that he had been killed in a concentration camp. The National Socialist ideologue Alfred Rosenberg recorded that Rahn committed suicide by taking cyanide “for politico-mystical reasons as well as for personal ones.” However he died, Rahn’s knowledge was retained by Himmler.

  THE FABLED TREASURE of King Solomon is the greatest cache of riches known to humankind. Its fascinating history serves as a timeline for the evolution of Western civilization as it can be traced from ancient Mesopotamia up to World War II.

  Gold, silver, and precious gems—such as diamonds, pearls, emeralds, amber, amethyst, topaz, sapphires, rubies, turquoise, and others—comprised this priceless hoard of riches. But Solomon’s treasure also contained riches of quite a different sort. It included ancient scrolls, texts, and tablets upon which was inscribed some of the world’s most esoteric and occult knowledge. This knowledge had been handed down for thousands of years from the time of the world’s first recorded civilization in ancient Sumer—present-day Iraq.

  Thousands of translated Sumerian tablets along with their inscribed cylinder seals are now available and they tell of astonishing technology apparently in use prior to Noah’s flood. With recent scientific advancements—such as powered flight, the space program, DNA manipulation, and cloning—many experts are beginning to rethink the idea that today’s world is the apex of civilization’s evolution. It is now possible to consider that a technically advanced civilization was on the Earth in the far distant past, possessing knowledge that mankind is only just now relearning.

  Bits and pieces of ancient knowledge that survived the Great Flood formed the essence of the riches that were transported to Egypt by Abraham, the inheritor of the secrets of Enoch and the biblical patriarch of both Arabs and the Jews. Abraham, a native of Sumer, known early on as Abram, by some traditions was said to possess a tablet of symbols representing all of the knowledge of humankind handed down from the time of Noah. Known to the Sumerians as the Table of Destiny, it was this table of knowledge—known to the early Jews as the Book of Raziel—that reportedly provided King Solomon with his vast wisdom.

  The Sumerian Table of Destiny is thought to be the same as the Tables of Testimony mentioned in Exodus 31:18. Other Bible verses—Exodus 24:12 and 25:16—make it clear that these tables are not the Ten Commandments.

  British author Laurence Gardner believed this ancient archive was directly associated with the Emerald Table of Thoth-Hermes, and that its author was the biblical Ham. “He was the essential founder of the esoteric and arcane ‘underground stream’ which flowed through the ages,” stated Gardner. This table of knowledge was passed from Egypt and Mesopotamia to Greek and Roman masters, such as Homer, Virgil, Pythagoras, Plato, and Ovid. In more recent times, it was passed through such secret societies as the Rosicrucians and Knights Templar and on to the Stuart Royal Society in England.

  In Jewish history, the Cabala, also spelled as Kabbalah or Qabbalah, was supposed to contain hidden meanings. Such cleverly coded knowledge was thought to be found within the Torah and other old Hebraic texts, such as the Sefer Yezirah (Book of Creation) and the Sefer Ha-Zohar (Book of Light). These books, which predate the Talmud, a compilation of early Jewish laws and traditions first written in the fifth century A.D., were produced centuries before the time of Jesus. According to the Book of Light, “mysteries of wisdom” were given to Adam by God while still in the fabled Garden of Eden, generally believed to have been located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. These elder secrets were then passed on through Adam’s sons to Noah and on to Abraham long before the Hebrews existed as a distinct people.

  Much like our understanding of history and religion today, the information within the Cabala became both incomplete and garbled over the centuries through losses due to war and natural disasters as well as misinterpretations and foreign influences. But it was this ancient wisdom, taken from Egypt at the time of the Great Exodus, that formed the core of Cabalistic knowledge handed down through the centuries via several secret societies, some of which remain active among us even today.

  But what of Solomon’s treasure itself? What happened to the wealth—in both riches and knowledge—that found a resting place on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem with the construction of Solomon’s Temple nearly a one thousand years before the birth of Jesus?

  Much of this treasure fell into the hands of the Romans when they sacked Jerusalem following the Jewish Revolt of 66 A.D. By the time of this looting, Solomon’s Temple had been built over to become the palace of King Herod. With the certain advance intelligence that the Romans would be sending troops to put down the Jewish rebellion, keepers of the knowledge buried away much of the treasure in the catacombs beneath Herod’s palace. Alcoves and passages were closed off and sealed with earth.

  Thus, when the Romans sacked Jerusalem following revolts in both 66 A.D. and 132 A.D., they found only a portion of the treasure. To have hidden all the treasure would have prompted a strenuous search by the Roman authorities. As it was, they were content to move what they found to Rome as war booty. The best part of the treasure, including both wealth and knowledge, was safely buried under the Temple Mount and all but forgotten, as most religious leaders were killed or taken to Rome as prisoners.

  In 410 A.D., Alaric, who had been commander of Visigoth auxiliaries under Roman emperor Theodosius, sacked Rome. Alaric had been proclaimed king over the Visigoths with the death of Theodosius, and he began his march on Rome after invading Greece and Northern Italy. It was the first successful attack on Rome in more than eight hundred years.

  Alaric’s troops took the portion of Solomon’s treasure in Rome along with other prizes of war. “When Alaric withdrew his forces, the treasures of Solomon’s Temple went with them,” wrote Colonel Howard Buechner, a former medical officer with the 45th Infantry Division.

  This contention was supported by the work of Otto Rahn, who wrote in 1933 of four young men who discovered a casket in a Pyrenees cavern, “Was this reliquary casket part of ‘S
olomon’s treasure,’ which was taken by the Visigoth king Alaric from Rome to Carcassonne in A.D. 410? According to [the last major ancient Greek philosopher, Proclus], it was filled with objects that once belonged to King Solomon, the king of the Hebrews.”

  The Visigoths secured their booty in the Pyrenees foothills located in the Languedoc region of what was to become southern France. This area encompasses the Cathar stronghold at Montségur as well as the small village of Rennes-le-Château. The secrets of this treasure were handed from the Goths and the early Franks to the Cathars, the “pure ones” of southern France. They considered their Christian beliefs more pure than those of the Church of Rome, probably because they had access to original documents and were not dependent on the Church hierarchy to translate and interpret the Bible. In fact, according to Otto Rahn, Cathar beliefs were greatly influenced by Druids, priests, and soothsayers who had spread from Mesopotamia through eastern and western Europe to the British Isles. Catharism was an odd blending of ancient Earth worship, Eastern mysticism, Gnosis, and basic Christianity.

  The Cathar faith, sometimes described as “Western Buddhism,” might have spread to all the corners of Europe but for the blood and fire of the Albigensian Crusade begun in 1209, which may well have been more of a French civil war than a religious campaign. It was fought between the tightly controlled and austere northerners and the cultured, freedom-loving peoples of the south.

  Rahn noted the exotic ethnic mixture of the Languedoc region. “In the third century B.C., an immigration of peoples from the Caucasus to the West took place: Phoenicians, Persians, Medeans, Getules (actually Berbers of North Africa), Armenians, Chaldeans [Sumerians], and Iberians,” he wrote. Prior to the Vatican-approved bloodletting, the provinces of southern France were virtually independent republics that allowed extraordinary freedom of education, culture, and diversity. Jews were accorded the same rights as the rest of the citizenry. Both agriculture and the arts were flourishing. Many of the Cathars, while Christians, nevertheless still worshipped the feminine goddesses—Isis and Athena—as had their Gothic and Frankish ancestors.