As horrific as the Lebensborn project was, it was only one of many criminal schemes perpetrated during the war in the name of racial purity. What the Thule Society had begun blossomed during the Nazi era in ways unimaginable to most of humanity. On 15 September 1935 Hitler implemented the Nuremberg laws which effectively stripped the Jews of their basic human rights by separating them from the rest of the population. The Jews, though extremely disturbed by the situation, had little choice but to comply. In common with most of the rest of the world, they hadn’t recognized the full implications of what Hitler had said, for hidden in the same speech the Fuhrer explained that if the plans for these arrangements broke down then it would be necessary to pass further laws, ‘handing over the problem to the National Socialist Party for final solution’.8
Hitler’s Aryanization programme continued apace until, on September 1, 1939, the Final Solution started in earnest. Initially the killings were confined to the mentally or physically disabled in what Hitler termed his euthanasia programme, but soon these murders merged with the extermination of the Jews. Killings were carried out by two methods: in gas chambers within the concentration camps and by mobile killing units. The six biggest death camps were Auschwitz, where over one million people died, Majdanek, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno and Sobibor. But the horrors of the gas chambers were not the only atrocities lying in wait for the inmates of these camps. Racially motivated experiments were carried out on a daily basis, for the Party required concrete evidence that proved they were racially superior to all other men. In Mein Kampf Hitler states that ‘anyone who wants to cure this era, which is inwardly sick and rotten, must first of all summon up the courage to make clear the causes of the diseases.’
The Nazis chose to believe that ‘the causes of the diseases’ centered around the Jews, the gypsies, the mentally infirm and any other group they chose to victimize. Thousands of men, women and children were photographed and examined by Nazi doctors, who declared that, among the many other outrageous ‘results’ derived from their experiments, gypsies produced a different blood to the rest of us and were more inclined to criminal behavior.
Alfred Rosenberg had become Nazi Minister for the Baltic States by 1940, when this photograph was taken during a Hitler Youth gathering in Kiev.
At Auschwitz a laboratory was set up (known as Block 10) the main aim of which was to discover a means of mass sterilization, while the infamous Joseph Mengele, who was as obsessed as Himmler with the Nazi ideology of racial purity, began to conduct experiments on identical twins. Each twin would be examined, body part by body part with measurements and notes being taken on the length of the nose, the shape of the mouth, skin coloring, eye coloring and any number of other details. The children would be made to stand for hours whilst these examinations took place, while some unfortunate victims had dye dropped into their eyes which often caused partial loss of sight. These latter experiments were Mengele’s attempts to change the color of Jewish children’s eyes from brown to blue. Two victims, Hedvah and Leah Stern, later recalled that, ‘Mengele was trying to change the color of our eyes. One day, we were given eye-drops. Afterwards, we could not see for several days. We thought the Nazis had made us blind. We were very frightened of the experiments. They took a lot of blood from us. We fainted several times, and the SS guards were very amused. We were not very developed. The Nazis made us remove our clothes, and then they took photographs of us. The SS guards would point to us and laugh. We stood naked in front of these Nazi thugs, shaking from cold and fear, and they laughed.’9
All these experiments were conducted with Himmler’s full approval but they were only one of several research areas in which the Nazis became involved.
Certain sections of the Thule Society, including to some extent Sebottendorff himself, harbored a curious mixture of beliefs that included not only Teutonic myth, but also Eastern mysticism and that all-encompassing, late-nineteenth-century obsession, anthropology. Following on from where the Thule Society left off, Heinrich Himmler continued to study all the above disciplines with the sole intention of supporting his (and the Thule Society’s) theories on the origins of the Aryan race. In 1935 Himmler created yet another branch of the SS, this time called the Ahnenerbe Forschungs und Lehrgemeinschaft – the Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society.
Much as members of the Thule Society had previously believed, there were those among the Nazi Party who were convinced that the true origins of the Thule lay in the lost but not-so-mythical city of Atlantis located somewhere between Greenland and Iceland. In direct contradiction to this, Karl Haushofer, who was the founder of yet another far-right secret society called the Vril, believed that the origins of the Aryan super-race lay in central Asia or, to be more precise, in Tibet. The Swedish explorer (and practising Nazi), Sven Hedin supported Hausofer in this theory and in 1938 Himmler’s Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society mounted an expedition to Tibet led by a German naturalist and big-game hunter, Ernst Schäfer, who was once described by a British diplomat as being, ‘volatile, scholarly, vain to the point of childishness, disregardful of social convention or the feelings of others, and first and foremost always a Nazi.’10 The second principal figure on the expedition was Bruno Beger, an anthropologist and member of the SS who believed that the Aryans might well have originated in central Asia because the physical characteristics of Tibetans in particular, with their high cheekbones and, ‘imperious, self-confident behavior’11 mirrored the prototypical Aryan. Beger and his men took over 60,000 photographs, collected numerous moulds of the Tibetans’ faces and shot over 120,000 feet of film after which he concluded that, in anthropological terms, the Tibetans were almost certainly a human type of stepping-stone between the Mongol and European races.
On their return to Germany Himmler declared both men heroes, but although Schäfer remained close to his patron, he never fully understood or agreed with the oncoming Holocaust. In contrast, Bruno Beger continued his studies into the Aryan race by selecting over 100 people from Auschwitz, the majority of whom showed signs of having Asiatic genes, who were studied, photographed, then executed.
Despite the ‘success’ of Schäfer and Beger’s research, however, most people believe that no more Nazi-funded expeditions took place. One exception was the writer Trevor Ravenscroft whose book, Spear of Destiny, argues that between 1926 and 1943 other trips were undertaken, all with the aim of studying the origins of the Aryan race. Whatever the truth, Himmler’s desire to pin-point where his ancestors originated, led him during World War II to commission a series of archaeological digs in western and southern Russia, afterwards shipping back his ‘finds’ to the SS headquarters at Wewelsburg. Many people, including Hitler, considered this a step too far, but Himmler remained undeterred and throughout the war continued his researches into what Sebottendorff would no doubt have termed legitimate Germanic studies.
As for Sebottendorff, by the beginning of the 1930s, just as Hitler was starting to realize his dreams of power, the Thule Society’s influence was dwindling. After being ousted as leader of the society, Sebottendorff grew increasingly bitter towards Germany’s new political movement. Not content simply to fade into the background, he published a book claiming that the origin of the Nazi Party was none other than the Thule Society and that they owed him everything, a theory to which, unsurprisingly, the Nazis took great exception. Sebottendorff’s book was confiscated, and every copy the Nazis could find destroyed, while he himself was placed under arrest by the SS who then ‘persuaded’ him that his best option was to leave Germany for good.
Sebottendorff fled from Germany, a broken, friendless man, taking himself off on a world tour that eventually led him to Istanbul. Shortly after the end of the war, on 9 May 1945, having seen Germany defeated, Sebottendorff died. The circumstances surrouding his demise are somewhat unclear as he drowned whilst swimming in the Bosphorus, but most historians agree that it was probably suicide. Having seen everything he held dear destroyed, there was nothing much left t
o live for.
An interesting footnote to the Thule Society’s history is the present-day plethora of web sites dedicated not only to the preservation of the Society’s memory, but also (and more disturbingly) to the promulgation of its vile theories. Tap in the words ‘Thule Society’ to any search engine and it brings up a multitude of results, although some of the listed sites present ‘facts’ verging on the ludicrous. The Thule, says one site, were Satanists who practiced Black Magic. Thule Society members also enjoyed a bizarre form of Sexual Magic which ‘awakened penetrating visions into the workings of Evil Intelligences and bestowed phenomenal magical powers’. The Thule Society held occult séances. One site spells Sebottendorff’s name incorrectly not just once but three times; Sebetondof, Sebettenduff and Sebetendorf while another can’t decide when precisely the Thule Society first opened its books, stating that it did so in 1908, and then again in 1910, and then again in 1919. Perhaps realizing that their research isn’t quite up to scratch, further sites fantasize that Hitler, far from dying in his Berlin bunker, is still alive, having escaped Allied forces and flown to Thule, which they generally believe lies in a northerly direction. Indeed, if you believe these sites, Hitler has been living happily on an ice floe for the past sixty years.
But perhaps the most curious of all the claims now available comes from a web site called Unexplained Mysteries which claims that Thule Society members believed the Aryan race originated on another planet or star system called Alderbaran whose inhabitants were blond and blue eyed. Their leader was a woman or ‘queen’ called Isais whilst other eminent Alderbarans included someone called Malok who was ‘the commander of their military presence on earth’.12
Whatever some may believe, the fact is that the original Thule Society was a secretive, far-right organization whose highly suspect beliefs flavored what was to come in Germany for the next decade and a half.
MUTI – RITUAL SACRIFICE IN LONDON
The victim may be a blood relative or one of their own children, but is never a stranger and definitely never an enemy. The child is not killed because they are angry with it. They are thankful to the child. The child is actually being sacrificed so that these people can have something of an advancement. It is to attain a goal that is unattainable by normal sacrifice [the sacrifice of an animal], whether that goal is prosperity or high political office. To our western minds, the concept of ritual murder is gruesome. But 2,000 years ago Jesus Christ was sacrificed for the good of the community – and the theory is that this is good for the community.
PROFESSOR HENDRIK SCHOLTZ, review of Goal of Human Sacrifice by Jeevan Vasagar, the Guardian, April 20, 2002
During an average year in London, the Metropolitan Police and the Coroner’s Court deal with between forty and forty-five bodies recovered from the River Thames, but on September 21, 2001, officers were shocked to find the badly mutilated corpse of a child floating in the water near Tower Bridge. The body appeared to be that of an Afro-Caribbean boy, aged about five. For want of a real name, the police decided to call him ‘Adam.’ An autopsy revealed that Adam’s legs had been severed above the knees, his arms had been cut off at the shoulders and his head removed. It was concluded that the boy had died from a violent trauma to the neck after which his limbs had been ‘skillfully’ removed by an experienced butcher.
If this wasn’t horrific enough, speculation then grew as to whether Adam had in fact been the victim of a muti-style killing. It was also speculated that this murder might not have been the first of its type in Britain, but was perhaps the latest in a long line of killings by a murderous cult which had established itself within London’s African community.
Professor Hendrik Scholtz, an expert in muti murders, was swiftly flown in from South Africa. After examining the body, he concluded that the boy’s throat had probably been slit before the head was removed in order to drain blood from the body for use in a ritual. More significant still, it was discovered that Adam’s first vertebra (the one located between the neck and the spine) had been removed. In Africa this is known as the Atlas bone, the bone on which Atlas was said to have carried the world. In muti medicine the Atlas bone is a highly prized piece of the skeleton, for it is said to contain magical powers and give all those who ingest it the property of great strength. Professor Scholtz, together with a London-based forensic team, were also able to establish that the boy had been well-looked after prior to death. He was neither underweight nor malnourished and his stomach contents showed signs of containing Pholcodine, a cough medicine, suggesting Adam was well cared for before he died. In fact, everything pointed to a classic muti killing – the young boy had probably been ‘donated’ for sacrifice by his own family.
Muti, which in Zulu stands for ‘medicine,’ is a form of witchcraft prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa. A muti murder is a particular manifestation, therefore, of a traditional type of African healing, but one with an especially black heart, calling as it does for human sacrifices. Some muti witchdoctors (known as Sangoma) make medicine from grinding down the body parts of the dead, and often call for children to be sacrificed because their flesh is said to be ‘purer’ than that of adults. Less than a decade ago in Africa, almost 300 murders a year were blamed on muti and even as recently as 2003 cases were being reported of muti killings. Six people were arrested by police near to a squatters’ camp in Bloemfontein, South Africa, after they had been seen trying to sell the body parts (head, hands, heart, feet, genitals and liver) of a twenty-year-old man. But although this case was gruesome in the extreme, it was only one among numerous other such cases in South Africa during 2002 and 2003.
In 2004 in Cape Town, two men and one woman were charged with killing a baby and afterwards frying her intestines in order to eat them. According to the accused, the intestines were supposed to help all three find a job. In South Africa, the incidents of muti killings have grown to such proportions that theirs is the only police force in the world to have established a special muti task force. The head of the task force, Gerard Labuschagne, admits that, although several hundred muti murders are investigated every year, most killings go unreported.
They happen in South Africa fairly regularly, at least one a month. But for many police officers they are nothing unusual. They are just treated as another murder, so there are a lot of muti-related killings out there that never come to our attention.1
Not all muti medicine or muti practices result in death. The Sangomas’ powers are said to be based on their being either directly connected to, or the reincarnation of, an ancestral spirit and more often than not the type of healing they practice is completely harmless. Sangomas are often involved in everyday affairs as mediators to sort out arguments between different parties. They are also called upon to heal souls, mend broken hearts, promote good luck and generally soothe their clients’ ruffled feathers. Research has shown that over 80 percent of South Africa’s population has, at one time or another, consulted a Sangoma – sometimes up to three times a year.
In this role, the Sangoma can be seen as vital to maintaining order within a community, and most of the 300,000 Sangomas working in Africa openly condemn any type of ‘black magic.’ Even when most Sangomas practice medicine, the type of products he or she uses will almost always be vegetable-based – roots, bark, herbs and flowers. Muti medicine can, therefore, be seen as another type of herbal healing and the practice of muti is simply the act of balancing ethereal elements with the physical complaint. For the more adventurous muti practitioner, animal products are implemented. Ingredients such as dried puff adders, crocodile fat or any number of potions made up from different parts of the elephant, lion and hyena may feature in the Sangoma’s healing repertoire. Visit any African market and there will be stalls piled high with animal bones, skulls and skins as well as fresh herbs. Women sit hollowing out gourds which are then used as medicine bottles. There might even be small huts erected next to the medicine stalls which act as consulting rooms. Yet for all that mainstream muti is innocuous, but when i
t is extended to include the use of human body parts to heal or bestow special powers on the patient it can surely only be described as evil.
Investigations in several African countries (other than South Africa) have concluded that it is the Sangoma who orders a killing to be undertaken, normally because he has a client who has made a particular request for help. If someone has suffered a stroke, for instance, the muti medicine required to remedy the condition would be a paste made up from the ashes of a severed hand mixed with water. Below is a short list of some other muti medicines made up from human body parts.
• Male and female genitals are often used to confer virility
• The eyes of a child would bestow far-sightedness
• A victim’s blood would help restore vitality
Other body parts can also be used to promote vague concepts, such as good luck.
• The breasts of a female victim would bestow good fortune
• The Adam’s apple would be used to silence someone
• The tongue would help smooth the path to a young girl’s heart
• Body fat would ensure a good harvest
• Brains would improve one’s mental abilities
Further to the ‘Adam’ case in London and the police concerns that his killing was connected to a muti-style cult, officers began investigating allegations that human flesh was now readily on sale in London. Police were already aware that West African gangs were importing large quantities of exotic animal meat such as that from lions, chimpanzees and giraffes, but now they were concerned this illegal trade was hiding darker secrets. Operation Swalcliffe was launched and in one dawn raid by environmental health officers on a shop in north London, two tonnes of unfit meat were confiscated along with the head of a crocodile which was being prepared for use in an upcoming ritualistic ceremony. The Observer newspaper, which reported on this raid, also recorded that Clive Lawrence, a meat transport director at Heathrow airport, was convinced that human flesh was finding its way into Britain and that this trade was inextricably linked to gangs who smuggled both illegal immigrants and drugs into the country.
The Most Evil Secret Societies in History Page 6
