TEXT: © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com
  
  THE NAZI OCCULT
  KENNETH HITE
  © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com
  
  CONTENTS
  Introduction 
  4
  The Secret of the Runes 
  6
  The Thule Gesellschaft 
  11
  Hidden Energies 
  16
  The Ahnenerbe 
  20
  Tibet and the Secret Kingdom 
  39
  Unholy Quests 
  47
  Aktion Hess 
  59
  Werwolf 
  64
  Black Sun and Fourth Reich 
  68
  Further Reading, Watching, and Gaming 
  75
  Glossary 
  77
  Index 
  80
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  4
  Introduction
  The Nazi occult legend predates the war, coming into its own alongside 
  the Nazis themselves. Various “Aryan mystics” claimed the Nazi Party was 
  predestined, even mythic, but the theory of occult, conspiratorial forces 
  intertwined with the rise of the Third Reich ﬁrst explicitly appeared in a novel 
  entitled Les Sept Têtes du Dragon Vert (The Seven Heads of the Green Dragon; 
  1933) by a French journalist (and possible French spy) named Pierre Mariel. 
  A number of other French publications elaborated on this theme during the 
  1930s, culminating in Edouard Saby’s Hitler et les Forces Occultes (Hitler and 
  the Occult Forces; 1939). That same year, the disenchanted German politician 
  Hermann Rauschning published Gespräche mit Hitler (Conversations with 
  Hitler; UK title Hitler Speaks) a book describing Hitler’s encounters with “the 
  new man” of quasi-Theosophist lore, and his “bondage to … evil spirits.” 
  With the outbreak of war in September 1939, the “occult Reich” theory 
  reached the English press in Lewis Spence’s The Occult Causes of the Present 
  War (1941). The actual business of ﬁghting slowed down such speculations, 
  but the concept re-emerged in Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier’s Le Matin 
  des Magiciens (The Morning of the Magicians; 1960) and Trevor Ravenscroft’s 
  The Spear of Destiny (1972), both of which sold millions of copies and 
  spawned hundreds of imitators, all of which reconstruct and emphasize each 
  others’ larger claims while contradicting each others’ details. This pattern will 
  be familiar to historians in other ﬁelds.
  This book attempts to synthesize and systematize a history of the Nazi 
  occult. It draws, as far as possible, on the work of serious historians both of the 
  occult and of German intellectual and political history. Where documentation 
  or ﬁrm evidence exists, this text does not depart from it. But as the great 
  historian Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper (himself an authority on both Nazism 
  and the occult) observed, writing history is inevitably an act of imaginative 
  reconstruction. In this ﬁeld, where so little has been uncovered by academic 
  research, imagination – mine or other authors’ – is a necessity. Just as the 
  history of some ancient land, where only one or two archaeologists have dug, 
  must rely on myth, legend, and folktales, for now so too the history of the 
  Nazi occult must incorporate those elements of its mythology most likely 
  to reﬂect actual events. In some places I have resorted to extrapolation and 
  interpolation; in almost all places I have been required to choose between 
  divergent narratives.
  (opposite)
  The front page of Hanussens 
  Berliner Wochenschau (July 8, 
  1932) depicts the horoscope of 
  the Reichstag, showing dangers 
  and mishaps after the end of 
  July, and correctly predicting the 
  Nazi percentage of the upcoming 
  vote. Hanussen also predicted 
  (correctly) that Hitler would 
  not join the government, that 
  the socialists and communists 
  would fail to unite, and that Hitler 
  would not marry the composer’s 
  daughter-in-law Winifred Wagner.
  His final successful prediction in 
  this issue: “The National Socialists 
  will remain at the helm in the 
  foreseeable future. Supported by 
  a robust militia, which is blindly 
  devoted to their leader and highly 
  disciplined, they will continue to 
  field a force of great power. Their 
  commitment and toughness is 
  something the uninitiated cannot 
  imagine.” (Mel Gordon Archive)
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  5
  One narrative I can reject. Hitler was not an occultist. He had little 
  patience for Himmler’s Ariosophist obsessions, repeatedly condemning them 
  in private conversation and public speech. He despised astrology, although he 
  was willing to use it as propaganda, and was suspicious of all secret societies. 
  His conceptions of race and history were operatic, even mystical at times, but 
  he was no mystic. He was willing to accept Hörbiger’s World Ice Theory as 
  legitimate astrophysics, mostly on poetic grounds, but he mocked notions 
  of Atlantis or giants. His beliefs were pragmatic, as beﬁt a street-brawling 
  politician. The Holocaust was not 
  a sorcerous ritual. It was a political 
  mass murder, driven by National 
  Socialist ideology. That ideology 
  was shaped by Ariosophy, but 
  also by the trauma of World 
  War I and by the theories of 
  leading scientists like Haeckel and 
  philosophers such as Nietzsche 
  and Schopenhauer. The occultists 
  who surrounded Hitler, and who 
  took advantage of the suspension 
  of both morality and skepticism 
  in his regime, used those killings 
  for their own ends, but they did 
  not engineer them. They did not 
  have to.
  ERIK JAN HANUSSEN
  According to a 1943 US Oﬃce of Strategic Services 
  (OSS) report, Hitler took “regular lessons in speaking 
  and in mass psychology from a man named Hanussen, 
  who was also a practicing astrologer and fortune-
  teller.” Erik Jan Hanussen combined stage magic, 
  mesmerism, séances, and the occult in varying degrees 
  during his long career. By 1930, he was holding orgies 
  and magical rituals in his “Palace of the Occult” with 
  high-ranking members of the Sturmabteilung (Storm 
  Detachment; SA). In 1932, he clairvoyantly predicted 
  Hitler’s rise to power, earning him at least one meeting 
  with the then-sidelined politician. Various sources say 
  that he trained Hitler in mesmerism, broke a curse 
  put on Hitler by an unknown magical enemy, and 
  volunteered his own services as Director of the Occult 
  in a Nazi government. When Hitler baﬄed onlookers 
  by becoming chancellor in January 1933, Hanussen 
  seemed on the verge of triumph.
  Then, the night before the Reichstag Fire, Hanussen 
  clairvoyantly predicted “a Great House consumed by 
  ﬂames.” Suddenly, The Man Who Was Never Wrong 
  became The Man Who Knew Too Much. Hanussen’s 
  real name came out: Hermann Steinschneider. The 
  Danish magus was a Jewish fraud! He vanished on the 
  way to a performance; his bullet-ridden body turned up 
  in a shallow grave. On trial, the Reichstag ﬁre arsonist, 
  a simple-minded communist named Martin van der 
  Lubbe, showed every sign of mesmeric control.
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  6
  The Secret of the 
  Runes
  “Only today, now that almost the whole world has succumbed to  
  ape-nature – right up to the Germanic countries which have not been 
  fully spared either – does the truth begin to dawn on us, that we  
  are lacking a certain divine humanity in a general ﬂood of ape-men. 
  But it will not be long before a new priestly race will rise up in the 
  land of the electron and the Holy Graal …”
  – Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, 1905
  On Christmas Day, 1907, the defrocked monk Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels 
  hoisted a swastika ﬂag over Castle Werfenstein in Upper Austria. By this 
  symbolic birth-ritual, Lanz raised up powerful energies that would either 
  recreate the primordial Aryan empire of Thule or leave Germany a blasted 
  ruin. Although a practicing mystic, and an assiduous student of the occult, 
  Lanz may not have known just what forces he was unleashing. At the time, 
  his action seemed indistinguishable from the rituals, symbolic concerts, poetic 
  evocations, and other seemingly petty activities common all across Germany 
  and Austria in the three decades before World War I.
  Although German nationalism awakened during the Napoleonic period, 
  the German nation spent most of the 19th century in frustrated fragmentation. 
  Following the creation of the German Empire in 1871, romantic German 
  nationalists relieved these frustrations in paroxysms of heroic myth-making 
  about the pre-Roman, “purely Teutonic” past. All over Europe, anthropologists, 
  linguists, archaeologists, and other scholars were piecing together new national 
  histories using the newest tools in their ﬁeld. Their ﬁndings became national 
  propaganda, providing a glorious past and proving their ancestral rights to 
  any disputed territory. Poets, mystics, and politicians alike used these histories 
  to create epics, rituals, and pretexts for national expansion. Again, thanks to 
  the delayed realization of an “authentic” uniﬁed German nation, the German 
  expression of these trends was more extreme than most. Also, since German 
  nationalism deﬁned itself in opposition to the invading French revolutionaries, 
  it took on a strongly anti-modern, anti-Enlightenment character, seeking 
  instead the pure, untainted wisdom of the Volk.
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  7
  By the 1880s, scores of völkisch societies existed 
  in Austria and Germany. The word völkisch has no 
  speciﬁc translation in English: depending on context, 
  the words “folkloric,” “populist,” and “ethnic” could 
  equally apply. These societies studied Germanic 
  mythology, celebrated heroes and legends, and tried 
  to imbue everything from forestry to sing-alongs with 
  nationalistic signiﬁcance. As Germany and Austria 
  urbanized, and as rival nations began to ally against 
  them, the völkisch societies rejected “cosmopolitan” 
  inﬂuences and valorized the “eternal struggle” of the 
  German people against Latin and Slavic inﬂuence. 
  Their publications and poetry contrasted the glorious 
  fantasy of Germany’s pagan past with the uncertain, 
  dirty reality of Germany’s Christian present. Some 
  sought a renewal of pagan nature-worship, while 
  others merely wanted to purify Germany of all 
  foreign inﬂuences.
  Guido von List
  Guido List came to the forefront of Vienna’s 
  völkisch community with the publication of his 
  novel Carnuntum in 1888. Fond of long nature 
  walks and an avid sportsman, List wrote primarily 
  travel journalism, spangling his narratives with lore about the pagan past 
  and folk traditions of the countryside. Carnuntum was diﬀerent: a rousing 
  historical novel about heroic Germans smashing the decadent Roman state 
  and building a pagan utopia. Best of all, List vouched for its accuracy since 
  its events came to him in a clairvoyant vision! The novel’s success caught the 
  eye of the pan-German and anti-Semitic publishers Georg von Schönerer 
  and Karl Wolf, who commissioned more ﬁery works from List.
  In the 1890s, List wrote novels, poems, and plays, and lectured about 
  the ancient German religion of Wotanism and its elite and holy priesthood. 
  Searching for details about this hidden and suppressed belief, List began to 
  read more deeply in the occult. He encountered theosophy during this time, 
  and it fundamentally reshaped his views. Founded by the Russian adventuress 
  Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, theosophy blended the Hindu cosmology of cyclic 
  time with a sort of Darwinian notion of competing and changing “root-races.” 
  In her books Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), Blavatsky 
  explained that theosophy was a scientiﬁc truth expressed in religious terms. 
  Hidden for millennia, Secret Masters in Tibet had revealed “the Occult 
  Science” to her now that mankind was capable of comprehending it.
  Guido von List (1848–1919), 
  founding father of the völkisch 
  movement, is shown here in 
  1913. By this point, List was 
  devoting his energies to further 
  deepening the connection 
  between Teutonic lore and 
  theosophy in a series of  
  ‘Ario-Germanic research reports,’ 
  and passing on his wisdom to 
  a secret order of initiates called 
  the Hoher Armanen-Orden (High 
  Armanen Order, HAO). His primary 
  disciple after 1911 was a fellow 
  reincarnated clairvoyant calling 
  himself Tarnhari, who later 
  became a key member of Dietrich 
  Eckart’s circle. (Bundesarchiv,  
  Bild 183-2005-0814-501,  
  photo: Schiffer, Conrad H.)
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  8
  Most signiﬁcant to List was Blavatsky’s revelation that true mankind 
  comprised several diﬀerent sub-races, all oﬀshoots of the Aryan root-
  race that had emerged from the Atlantean root-race 100,000 years ago. 
  Of those sub-races, the most recent and elevated was the Teutonic race, 
  which had migrated to Germany from the “City of the Bridge” in Central 
  Asia in 20,000 BC. Other seeming humans were actually descended from 
  other non-human root-races: the Australoid and Dravidian peoples were 
  degenerate Lemurians, while the Mongolian, Amerind, Malay, and Jewish 
  peoples were degenerate Atlanteans.
  In 1902, List underwent an operation to remove his cataracts, and was 
  blinded for 11 months. During this time, he pondered his new theosophical 
  learning and meditated on the sacriﬁce of Wotan, who according to Teutonic 
  myth gave up an eye in exchange for true wisdom. While blinded, his “inner 
  eye” opened, and List had his own revelation: like Wotan, he received the 
  secret of the runes. Wotan’s runes were more than just the alphabet used 
  for Germanic inscriptions – they were a secret language of power and their 
  symbolic shapes were the underlying geometry of creation. In 1903, List (by 
  now using the aristocratic “von” in his name) sent a preliminary version of his 
  rune discoveries to the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna. The Academy 
  returned his manuscript without comment, much less publication.
  The insult to List became a cause célèbre for the völkisch movement. 
  In 1905, a number of supporters, including the mayor of Vienna, signed 
  a petition calling for the creation of a “List Society” to promote his 
  studies. With such backers, List produced more work uncovering the runic 
  inﬂuence in heraldry, architecture, and place names. He also expanded his 
  clairvoyant readings of the Austrian landscape, revealing the history of the 
  Armanenschaft, the sacred priesthood of Wotan. This priesthood of initiates 
  knew the true meaning of the swastika symbol of the sun: it represented 
  This illustration, captioned  
  “Im Reiche der Runen” (In the 
  realm of the runes), comes 
  from Geheime Mächte? (Secret 
  Powers?), a picture book on the 
  history of magic published in 
  1931 by an Austrian tobacco 
  company. Note the swastikas 
  spinning in both directions; there 
  is no historical difference in usage 
  between “left-handed” and  
  “right-handed” versions of 
   the symbol.  
  (Mel Gordon Archive)
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  9
  the “invisible primal ﬁre” underlying all creation. Most importantly, the 
  Armanenschaft ruled the ancient Germans as benevolent dictators, using 
  their occult powers to protect and expand the homeland. In his 1908 work 
  Das Geheimnis der Runen (The Secret of the Runes), List spelled out these 
  occult powers: by a combination of meditation, physical culture (such as 
  yoga), and vocalization, the Armanen could re-tune the world to its true 
  runic nature, and change it.
  Eine Unheilige Lanz (An Unholy Lance)
  Born Adolf Josef Lanz in 1874, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels proudly signed the 
  List Society petition. He and List regularly exchanged visionary interpretations 
  of the Austrian countryside and theosophical arcana; Lanz coined the term 
  “Ariosophy” to refer to their speciﬁc version of Aryan theosophy. Expelled 
  from a Cistercian monastery for engaging in “carnal love,” Lanz turned from 
  orthodox religion to mystical journalism. He started an occult magazine in 
  Vienna, Ostara, which claimed a circulation of 100,000: its readers included 
  a young art student named Adolf Hitler.
  Lanz’ magnum opus Theozoologie laid out his own visionary discovery, 
  which he buttressed using Gnostic texts and other recondite sources he had 
  uncovered while still a Cistercian monk. According to Lanz, humanity was 
  divided into two main strands. The pure Aryans were god-men (“Theozoa”) 
  with telepathic and other occult powers, who came from other stars (or 
  dimensions) and bred by electricity. Sadly, they corrupted their lineage by 
  breeding with beast-men (“Anthropozoa”), who survive to this day both in 
  THE SWASTIKA
  Depictions of the swastika go back at least 10,000 years. 
  To the Greeks, the Japanese, the Navajo, and many other 
  cultures, the swastika represented ﬁre, fertility, the sun, 
  and the circling stars around the North Pole. It blazoned 
  forth at the court of Charlemagne and in temples to 
  Thor. The word “swastika” comes from a Sanskrit phrase 
  meaning “be well,” but in German it was called the 
  Hakenkreuz, the “hooked cross.” This ﬁt in well with the 
  völkisch agenda of altering Christianity and replacing it 
  with proper Aryan paganism.
  The French anthropologist Émile Burnouf declared it 
  the soul-symbol of the Aryan race in 1852 and the pan-
  Germanist Georg von Schönerer adopted it as a völkisch 
  symbol in 1879. To List, the swastika (or fyrfos, as he 
  called it) represented race fertility, immortal power, and 
  national return. He added it to the orthodox rune list 
  as a hidden rune concealed between the 17th and 18th 
  runes; it thus also stood for occult energy.
  Hence, the Thule Gesellschaft (Thule Society), a 
  self-described “study group for German antiquity,” 
  adopted the swastika as its emblem in 1918, and when 
  its erstwhile political wing, the Nazi Party, was looking 
  for symbols, the swastika was close at hand. Hitler 
  took credit for the ﬁnal design of the Nazi ﬂag (which 
  debuted on May 20, 1920), basing it on a local Party 
  emblem designed by a Thule member named Friedrich 
  Krohn. The eﬀect, as Hitler said later, “was as if we had 
  dropped a bomb.”
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  10
  mixed-blood descendants (the vast majority of humans) and in 
  pure monstrous form. Lanz called for eugenic attempts to breed 
  back to a true Aryan race, essentially the future SS Lebensborn 
  (Spring of Life) campaign; and for the sterilization and eventual 
  extermination of the Anthropozoa-descended, preﬁguring the 
  Holocaust.
  To accomplish these vast goals, Lanz revived the medieval 
  knightly order of the Templars, who he believed guarded the 
  Aryan lineage in celibate isolation until the beast-men who ruled 
  the Church destroyed them. Lanz explained that the Templars 
  (whom he conﬂated with the Teutonic Knights) sought a “greater 
  Germanic order-state,” stretching across the Mediterranean and 
  deep into the East. To accomplish this goal, they sought the Holy 
  Grail, an “electrical symbol” of the “pan-psychic powers” of the 
  Aryan race. He designed a swastika ﬂag for his Ordo Novi Templi, 
  or Order of the New Templars (ONT), and raised it in 1907. 
  Although the ONT attracted a number of Austrian occultists and 
  völkisch enthusiasts, it didn’t accomplish Lanz’ expansive ambitions. 
  Instead, it put on folk-music concerts, held quasi-Freemasonic ritual meetings, 
  conducted anthropological and genealogical research, and founded “utopian 
  Aryan” communities in spots of great natural beauty. It would be another 
  order that actually changed Germany.
  The Germanenorden
  By c.1910, the völkisch societies had identiﬁed two main enemies of their 
  pure Aryan Germany: the Freemasons and the Jews, who embodied both 
  French Enlightenment ideas and cosmopolitan capitalism respectively.  
  The industrialist Theodor Fritsch, whose explicitly political Hammerbund 
  anti-Semitic movement was going nowhere, decided he needed a counter-
  Masonry to promote anti-Semitism. In 1911, he recruited the Magdeburg 
  bureaucrat Hermann Pohl to organize this Germanenorden (German Order) 
  along the lines of List’s and Lanz’ researches.
  The ceremonies of the Germanenorden blended völkisch Wagner with 
  quasi-Masonic rituals lifted from the ONT. Members had to be good-looking, 
  well-oﬀ, and pure-blooded Aryans; these requirements slowed recruitment 
  considerably. The outbreak of World War I splintered the Germanenorden, 
  as half its membership found themselves in the trenches. Pohl dithered until 
  a rebellious faction forced his resignation in 1916; he responded by declaring 
  himself the head of a new Order, the Germanenorden Walvater von Heilige Gral 
  (German Order of the All-Father of the Holy Grail). He took the seals and 
  other magical regalia of the Germanenorden with him, and started looking for 
  recruits in fresh territory: Munich.
  Járg Lanz von Liebenfels 
  (1874–1954) wearing the 
  monastic robes of his neo-
  Templarist order, the ONT. In 1894 
  at Heiligenkreuz Abbey, while still 
  a Cistercian monk, Lanz received 
  an “illumination” at the tomb of 
  Berthold von Treun, a Templar 
  knight. Von Treun’s gravestone 
  depicted a knight (or perhaps 
  the prophet Daniel) trampling 
  a writhing dragon, an allegory 
  Lanz extended to deduce an 
  ongoing war between Aryans and 
  subhuman beasts. (PD-US)
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  11
  The Thule 
  Gesellschaft
  “At bottom, every German has one foot in Atlantis, where he seeks a 
  better Fatherland and a better patrimony. This double nature of the 
  Germans, this faculty they have of splitting their personality which 
  enables them to live in the real world and at the same time to project 
  themselves into an imaginary world, is especially noticeable in Hitler 
  and provides the key to his magic socialism.”
  – Hermann Rauschning, 1940
  It was Walpurgisnacht (Walpurgis Night), April 30, the night that witches 
  and dark powers roam the world. On that night, the boundaries 
  between Earth and the Outside weaken and splinter under the assault 
  from demonic forces. That year, 1919, Germany also weakened and 
  splintered: the communists and their enemies the Freikorps (Free 
  Corps) battled in the streets, while the people starved in the husk 
  of their defeated empire. In Munich, the communists had seized 
  power on April 12 after a failed right-wing putsch against a week-
  old hapless anarchist government. They began cracking down on the 
  wealthy and aristocratic supporters of the old order, and especially on 
  the Thule Gesellschaft. A rejected Thule member had killed Bavaria’s 
  socialist president Kurt Eisner earlier that year, and the Thule’s newspaper, 
  the Münchener Beobachter (Munich Observer), had supported the putsch.
  On April 26, the Bavarian “Red Army” raided Thule Gesellschaft oﬃces 
  and seized the society’s secretary Countess Heila von Westarp and the Thule 
  membership roster. Working quickly, the communists rounded up six more 
  Thulists, including the society’s co-founder Walter Nauhaus and Prince Gustav 
  von Thurn-und-Taxis, related to every royal family in Europe. Four days later, 
  the communist guards stood the seven Thule members against the wall of the 
  Luitpold Gymnasium and shot them. The royal blood (four of the hostages 
  were titled aristocrats) spilled on Walpurgisnacht blasphemously reversed the 
  ancient sacriﬁce of the sacred king: ritually, the king dies in the fall and is born 
  in the spring to heal the land. The Reds had killed Germany’s sacred king in 
  the spring, awakening the Outer Beings with seven human sacriﬁces.
  The “sunwheel” swastika was 
  the symbol of both the Thule 
  Gesellschaft and the DAP.  
  It later appeared in various 
  insignia and medals such as  
  SA belt-buckles, collar tabs of 
  Danish and Norwegian SS units, 
  and the Frauenwerk women’s 
  group. (NsMn)
  tches 
  es 
  a’s 
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  12
  The human reaction was also intense: the Münchener Beobachter report 
  of the atrocity triggered rebellions all across the city, the insurgents using 
  weapons stockpiled by the Thule for months beforehand. That day, the 
  Freikorps stormed Munich, massacring the communist resistance after three 
  days of ﬁghting. Spearheading the assault were the swastika-bedecked Ehrhardt 
  Brigade of the Freikorps – and the Kampfbund Thule (Battle League Thule) 
  militia under the command of the Thule’s head Rudolf von Sebottendorﬀ, 
  who had been conveniently out of the city during the communist raid.
  Rudolf von Sebottendorff
  Born Adam Glauer, Rudolf von Sebottendorﬀ took his noble name when he was 
  adopted by the elderly Baron von Sebottendorﬀ in Turkey, where he split his time 
  between his career in engineering and his avocation for Freemasonry, Kabbalah, 
  Rosicrucianism, and Suﬁ mysticism. Returning to Germany in 1913, he avoided 
  the war thanks to his Turkish citizenship; instead, he fell into Pohl’s dissident 
  Germanenorden Walvater. Put in charge of Germanenorden recruitment in 
  Munich in 1918, he and the sculptor Walter Nauhaus established the Thule 
  Gesellschaft as a cover organization. They took the name “Thule” from the 
  mystical northern continent considered by Lanz the original home of the Aryan 
  race. (Lanz called it Arktogäa; the name “Thule” comes from the voyage of the 
  classical Greek navigator Pytheas of Massilia, who encountered an unknown land 
  in the far north around 325 BC.) To drive the point home, they adopted a dagger 
  superimposed on a curvilinear swastika as the society’s emblem.
  Es Werde Licht! (Let There Be 
  Light!) This early (1923) Austrian 
  Nazi Party publication presents 
  a Masonic–Jewish conspiracy, 
  revealing their secret rituals  
  and role in the fall of the Austro-
  Hungarian monarchy. Note the 
  Thulist sunwheel in the center of 
  the shield. (Mel Gordon Archive)
  On May 27, 1942, SS Sturmbannführer Jochen Seifen-
  Triebacher died in an attic in Prague while conﬁscating 
  the library of an elderly Czech member of an obscure 
  astrological order, the Hvězdnatý Moudrostřád. His 
  two SS escorts suﬀered incurable neurological disorders 
  including hysterical blindness; their broken, disjointed 
  testimony is illustrated here. The fate of the book Seifen-
  Triebacher was reading at the time of his bizarre death is 
  unknown. Once the sightless, raving SS men managed 
  to summon assistance, the library had been unguarded 
  for several hours; most security personnel in the city were 
  distracted by the (ultimately successful) assassination 
  attempt on Heydrich that day. The bulk of the books were 
  shipped to the RSHA Amt VII B archives; the tome in 
  question may have vanished into Kaltenbrunner’s Projekt 
  Leo collection in the fall of 1944. Alternately, SS E-IV may 
  have obtained it: the Laternenträger Projekt made a number 
  of breakthroughs about that time after the addition of one 
  Hermann Mülder to the staﬀ, a specialist in medieval 
  epigraphy who translated the Central Asian necromantic 
  text the Ghorl Nigral for the Ahnenerbe in 1935.
  Seifen-Triebacher wears normal SS rank tabs and  
  an Allgemeine-SS uniform with only his cuﬀ band,  
  Ar-rune, and Irminsul badge (indicating advanced 
  magical training at the Externsteine) to indicate his role 
  as an Ahnenerbe UdG specialist. The hard-headed and 
  skeptical Heydrich deprecated the “magical element” 
  around Himmler and was an active supporter of Aktion 
  Hess. He did, however, allow Seifen-Triebacher to 
  participate in intelligence operations, and used him to 
  hunt down Czech and Jewish secret societies conspiring 
  against the Reich Protectorate.
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  13
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  14
  In the apocalyptic years of 1918 and 1919, solid 
  citizens sought völkisch certainties and occult escape: 
  membership increased from a handful of cranks to 
  more than 1,500 seekers. One member was a young 
  law student, Hans Frank, who would later become 
  the Nazi governor-general of occupied Poland. Also 
  a Thule member was the Egyptian-born Rudolf Hess, 
  an eager student of astrology and mystical geography. 
  The völkisch and mystical poet and playwright Dietrich 
  Eckart likewise became a ﬁxture at Thule events, as 
  did the future chief ideologist of the Nazi Party, Alfred 
  Rosenberg. The Thule took oﬃces in Munich’s Four 
  Seasons Hotel and began laying the groundwork for 
  the overthrow of Bavaria’s various left-wing regimes.
  In January 1919, Thule members Anton Drexler 
  and Karl Harrer set up yet another front group, this 
  time to build a working-class political bridge to anti-
  communists and anti-Semites who would be out of 
  place at the swanky Four Seasons. The Thulists called 
  their new group the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German 
  Workers’ Party; DAP). Its 55th member was a military 
  informer named Adolf Hitler. When Eckart met Hitler 
  that December, he exclaimed in ecstasy, “There is the coming man of Germany 
  of whom the world will someday speak!”
  The Eclipse
  Eckart and Hitler became inseparable. The poet trained Hitler in stage 
  presentation, diction, and oratory. Some hinted that Eckart also provided 
  instruction in the darker arts of mesmerism and channeling, the mediumistic 
  discipline of inviting spirits to possess the body. He introduced Hitler to 
  rich patrons of anti-Semitic politics, and to the realities of Party inﬁghting. 
  Hitler began to mold the DAP in his own image: he forced out Harrer in 
  January 1920, and renamed the Party the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche 
  Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party; NSDAP) the next 
  month. The divorce was hardly acrimonious, however; Eckart helped arrange 
  the purchase of the Party’s newspaper – renamed the Völkischer Beobachter 
  (völkisch Observer) – from the Thule in December 1920.
  And the Thule Gesellschaft did not abandon direct action. It became the 
  de facto coordinator of the old Germanenorden network and the Ehrhardt 
  Brigade’s secret death squad, “Organisation Consul” (OC). In August 1921, 
  OC assassins killed former ﬁnance minister and signer of the Treaty of Versailles 
  Matthias Erzberger in a Black Forest spa. The next year, the OC gunned down 
  Dietrich Eckart (1868–1923) as a 
  young man. His 1912 translation of 
  Ibsen’s Peer Gynt changed the hero 
  from an aimless near-vagabond to 
  a fighting superman and became 
  the second most successful  
  play ever staged in Germany.  
  He published Alfred Rosenberg’s 
  The Myth of the Twentieth Century, 
  a key text in Nazi racial ideology. 
  (Library of Congress)
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  15
  the Jewish foreign minister of the Weimar Republic, 
  Walter Rathenau, on the summer solstice while the 
  völkisch Germanenorden lit bonﬁres to Wotan across 
  Germany. Rathenau’s death may have attracted the 
  attention of Wotan, but it also turned the public against 
  the violent far right. Misjudging the historical moment, 
  Hitler led his NSDAP in an attempted coup against the 
  Bavarian state government without Thule support on November 
  8, 1923. Swept up in the arrests of Hitler’s backers, Eckart went 
  to jail but kept his faith: “It will and must be. I believe in Hitler.  
  A star hangs over him.” Hitler’s premature putsch was not the end 
  of Hitler, but the Thule Gesellschaft did not long survive it, fading 
  from sight in 1925.
  By the time Hitler came into the orbit of Thule, Sebottendorﬀ 
  had left it. The society expelled its founder in June 1919, blaming 
  him for the loss of their membership rolls to the Reds. He published 
  an astrological newspaper for several years, then became the Mexican 
  consul at Istanbul in 1924. When the Nazis took power in 1933, 
  Sebottendorﬀ returned to Munich with a new book, Bevor Hitler 
  Kam (Before Hitler Came), revealing part of the occult background 
  to the ascendant Party. The Nazis aborted his attempt to restart the 
  Thule Gesellschaft by arresting him and banning his book. In 1934, 
  released from prison, Sebottendorﬀ returned to Istanbul, where he collected 
  a mysterious stipend from German intelligence for the next decade. He 
  disappeared on May 8, 1945, reportedly committing suicide by drowning 
  himself in the Bosporus.
  The Thulists and the Erhardt 
  Brigade were not the only 
  mystical völkisch militias in 
  the Weimar era. This banner, 
  badge, and book are from the 
  Wehrwolf Bund Deutscher Männer 
  (Werewolf League of German 
  Men) founded in Halle in response 
  to the Allied occupation of the 
  Ruhr in January 1923. By the 
  end of the year, it had over 1,000 
  members; by 1930, there were 
  50,000 ‘werewolves’, mostly in 
  Thuringia, Saxony, and Hesse, 
  including a large youth division. 
  (INTERFOTO / Alamy)
  t
  t, 
  he 
  n November 
  Eckart went
  ve in Hitler. 
  not the end
  ve it, fading 
  ebottendorﬀ 
  19, blaming 
  He published
  the Mexican 
  wer in 1933, 
  Bevor Hitler 
  background
  to restart the
  Erik Jan Hanussen (1889–1933) 
  performs a séance in his Palace  
  of the Occult for an audience of 
  Nazi Party officials, German film 
  stars, and Berlin journalists.  
  (Mel Gordon Archive)
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  16
  Hidden Energies
  “The next group was literally founded upon a novel. That group which 
  I think called itself Wahrheitsgesellschaft — Society for Truth — and 
  which was more or less localized in Berlin, devoted its spare time 
  looking for Vril. Yes, their convictions were founded upon Bulwer-
  Lytton’s The Coming Race. They knew that the book was ﬁction, 
  Bulwer-Lytton had used that device in order to be able to tell the 
  truth about this ‘power.’”
  – Willy Ley, 1947
  November 18 is the date of the ancient Aryan festival Ardvi Sura, the holy day 
  of the Persian goddess Anahita, the “Mother of Stars.” On that date in 1925, 
  Rudolf Hess and Rudolf von Sebottendorﬀ met at Hess’ apartment in Munich. 
  Around a table draped in black they, along with the astrologer Ernst Schulte-
  Strathaus and a young Germanenorden recruit named Conrad Buch, clasped 
  hands. With the lights lowered, they concentrated on the Outside realms. The 
  goal of their séance: to contact the spirit of Dietrich Eckart. Eckart, weakened 
  by morphine and the rigors of channeling spirits with Hitler, had sickened in 
  prison after the putsch and died shortly after his compassionate release.
  The medium was a beautiful blonde named Maria Orsic, a Croatian 
  clairvoyant who had left Vienna in 1919. In Munich she ran a circle  
  of völkisch young women, the Alldeutsche Gesellschaft für Metaphysik  
  (All German Society for Metaphysics), who wore their hair unfashionably 
  long as a solar rite. She had selected the date and designed the ritual based on 
  her own insights into Aryan lore. This time come around, her head lolled back 
  and the familiar, coarse voice of Dietrich Eckart boomed from her throat: 
  “Follow Hitler! He will dance, but it is I who have called the tune. I have 
  initiated him into the ‘Secret Doctrine,’ opened his centers in vision and given 
  him the means to communicate with the Powers. Do not mourn for me:  
  I shall have inﬂuenced history more than any other German.”
  Then he announced that he was obliged to open the way for another 
  entity. A strange, inhuman piping ﬁlled the room, and Orsic began scribbling 
  frantically on sheet after sheet of paper. When she fainted at last, breaking the 
  contact, the group examined the writing. Some of it was in a Templar code 
  that Sebottendorﬀ recognized; that portion implied a stellar connection (to 
  © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com
  
  17
  Aldebaran or the Pleiades) for the material. The rest was in an unknown script of 
  vaguely Near Eastern appearance. Hess knew reliable scholars among Germany’s 
  archaeological and Orientalist community: the “Panbabylonians” who argued 
  that the Jewish scriptures were debased versions of Babylonian and Assyrian 
  stellar chronicles. Hess showed Orsic’s manuscript to three Panbabylonian 
  scholars: the Grail poet and philologist Eduard Stucken, the linguist Wolfgang 
  Schultz, and the pan-Germanist, völkisch philosopher Paul Schnabel.1 They 
  conﬁrmed that the language was Sumerian, the earliest known writing, and 
  thus quite possibly related to Aryan runes. Oblique and elliptical, it nevertheless 
  described the fundamental electrical-occult force of the universe: vril.
  Vril
  That 1925 séance became the founding event of a group that went by many 
  names: the Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft “Das kommende Deutschland” (National 
  Working Group for the Coming Germany), the Wahrheitsgesellschaft (Society 
  for Truth), and the Leuchtendeloge (Luminous Lodge) are only some of the ones 
  known to us. (Later writers, simplifying matters, called it the Vril-Gesellschaft, 
  or Vril Society.) The Lodge’s public head called himself “Johannes Täufer” (John 
  the Baptist), implying someone close to the Aryan Messiah, Hitler. Using the 
  occult publishers Wilhelm Becker and Otto Wilhelm Barth as cutouts, the group 
  released two brief pamphlets on the nature of the vril in 1930. Apparently they 
  didn’t get the response they wanted; the subject dropped out of Nazi discourse.
  This may have been because, as anti-Nazi rocket expert Willy Ley pointed 
  out, the word vril ﬁrst appeared in a novel. The Rosicrucian Edward Bulwer-
  Lytton wrote Vril, the Power of the Coming Race in 1871. In it, his protagonists 
  uncover the Ana, a hidden race of supermen inside the Earth. A caste of Ana 
  called the Vril-ya were masters of the “Vril force,” an omnipresent cosmic 
  energy combining electricity and telepathy; later readers noticed parallels to 
  nuclear forces also. Soon, the novel hints, the Vril-ya will expand onto the 
  surface world and conquer the Earth using their vril staves, the least of which 
  can level a city. Bulwer-Lytton’s extensive occult contacts led many, including 
  H.P. Blavatsky, to speculate that he had uncovered a genuine truth disguised 
  as ﬁction. The French occultist Louis Jacolliot claimed he had encountered 
  the vril force in India; the English theosophist William Scott-Elliot revealed 
  that the Atlanteans had ﬂying craft powered by vril.
  The Orsic manuscript contradicted Bulwer-Lytton on one point at least. 
  Rather than his “vril staﬀ” device, vril containment and control was more 
  reliable with a spherical shape, or better yet one using cardioid curves. 
  A cardioid curve is best described as the cross-section of an apple without 
  1 Stucken and Schultz died mysteriously in 1936; Schnabel had a breakdown in 1937 after contracting an 
  inexplicable case of “malaria.”
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  18
  the stem: Emmanuel Swedenborg’s angelic devotions, Rudolf Steiner’s 
  “anthroposophic” mysticism, and even the original magical mathematician 
  Pythagoras all focused on the apple as a cosmic symbol. Pythagorean magic 
  also stressed the role of sound energy, a topic well-explored by the Ariosophist 
  rune scholars. Acoustic energy-magic, according to some theosophists, had 
  raised the Pyramids and hollowed out the temples at Petra.
  Furthermore, according to a 1931 book by the theosophist writer  
  H. Spencer Lewis, a sub-race of Blavatsky’s Lemurians called the Yaktavians had 
  mastered acoustic energy and used it to hollow out a kingdom underneath Mt. 
  Shasta in California. Their tools were special bells, which the Leuchtendeloge 
  had already determined would ﬁt the cardioid curve of the vril. (Turn an 
  apple upside-down: the result is a bell shape.) Lewis’ source for this lore was 
  almost certainly the head of the American “I AM” cult, Guy Ballard, who met 
  with an Aryan secret master identifying himself as “Count St. Germain” (after 
  the legendary 18th-century alchemist) on the slopes of Mt. Shasta in 1930. 
  Ballard was well-connected to the burgeoning American fascist movement 
  of William Dudley Pelley: whether a Yaktavian bell made its way from Mt. 
  Shasta to the Luminous Lodge at this time or not remains unknown. But the 
  Vril-Gesellschaft now knew what to look for. Or, if necessary, what to build.
  The Bell and Zero Point
  In 1926, the Vril-Gesellschaft recruited the dowser Karl Schappeller.  
  An Ariosophist and amateur engineer, Schappeller had been experimenting 
  with occult magnetism to draw buried metals toward the Earth’s surface and to 
  locate the tomb of Attila the Hun. They shared portions of the translated Orsic 
  manuscript with him, and he began research on what he called Raumenergie 
  (space energy), the energy ﬁeld suﬀusing all space-time. Schappeller’s version 
  of vril had much in common with the 19th-century physics of the ether, as 
  well as the theory of “zero-point energy” ﬁrst promulgated by Albert Einstein 
  and Otto Stern in 1913.
  Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler met with Schappeller in Vienna 
  in 1933, and was soon convinced of the military and strategic utility of 
  Raumenergie, which could not only power various wonder-weapons but also 
  make Germany independent of outside energy sources. He soon attached 
  Schappeller to the SS Entwicklungsstelle-IV (Development Oﬃce IV; 
  SS E-IV), a top-secret program to investigate alternative energy, especially 
  including occult energy production. (Hans Coler’s “magnetromapparatus” 
  worked on similar principles, but Coler was snapped up by the Kriegsmarine 
  instead.) SS E-IV continued Frenzolf Schmid’s “tripartite ray” experiments 
  in radiesthesia, and also moved forward on Nobel laureate Walter Gerlach’s 
  theory that placing mercury under magnetic stress could alter its fundamental 
  nature and unleash cosmic power, a kind of diesel-driven alchemy.
  Privately published in 1932, 
  Friedrich Wilhelm Raub’s Lebende 
  Elektrogeist (The Living Electrical 
  Spirit) presents another variation 
  on the vril lore disseminated by 
  the Wahrheitgesellschaft. Raub’s 
  book claims the Elektrogeist, 
  hidden inside the Earth and 
  radiating throughout the 
  cosmos, is the secret behind 
  Christ’s miracles, and the hidden 
  wellspring of Hitler’s power.  
  (Mel Gordon Archive)
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  19
  Upon the outbreak of war in 1939, Himmler placed SS E-IV under the 
  physicist Pascual Jordan, at the time languishing in Wernher von Braun’s 
  shadow in the Luftwaﬀe. By 1942 Himmler and Jordan had decided, most likely 
  after considerable behind-the-scenes manipulation by the Vril-Gesellschaft, to 
  attempt the creation of a full-scale Yaktavian Bell, one capable of powering the 
  entire Third Reich. In autumn 1943 construction on Das Laternenträger Projekt 
  (Project Lantern-Bearer) began at the Wenceslas Mine, a site in Silesia near the 
  Czech border. The SS invented a cover, Projekt Riese (Project Giant), ostensibly 
  the building of a new bomb-proof armaments factory in the mountains, to 
  explain the vast diversion of concrete, steel, and chemicals to the Bell facility.
  Based on Polish Resistance 
  reports, this modern 
  reconstruction depicts “die 
  Glocke,” the full-scale (9ft x 15ft) 
  beryllium-steel Bell (replicating 
  Lemurian technology) was built 
  underneath the Wenceslas Mine in 
  Silesia. The violet glow comes from 
  Xerum 525, a radioactive mercury 
  fuel used in two counter-rotating 
  cylinders to jump-start the vril 
  reaction. There is no basis for the 
  reports that the Bell mounted a 
  concave mirror that reflected the 
  past. A UFO that crashed near 
  Kecksburg, Pennsylvania in 1965 
  resembled die Glocke, but was 
  immediately recovered by the U.S. 
  Army before it could be examined 
  by outside scientists. (Artwork by 
  David Winship)
  WELTEISLEHRE
  In 1894, the engineer Hanns Hörbiger had two visions 
  that explained the universe to him: he saw blocks of ice 
  stacked on the moon’s surface, and he saw a gigantic 
  pendulum extending out to Neptune. From this epiphany 
  came his Welteislehre (World Ice Theory), explaining the 
  cosmos in terms of the eternal struggle between ﬁre and 
  ice. He published his theory in a 1912 tome explaining 
  that ice spiraling inward from outer space created the 
  moon, planets, other solar systems, and the Milky Way. 
  Some planets were back-blasts from ice worlds hitting 
  the hot metallic sun and exploding into steam; others 
  were outer worlds pushed relentlessly toward the sun 
  by the pressure of interstellar hydrogen. The Earth, 
  Hörbiger explained, had captured many icy moons, each 
  of which spiraled toward the planet’s surface, broke up, 
  and bombarded the Earth with catastrophic hail. At such 
  times, life retreated to the mountain peaks to be reborn 
  again in the Edenic time before the next moon’s approach.
  The Welteislehre had an instant appeal to the 
  Ariosophists: it explained history in terms of mighty 
  catastrophes and cycles like theosophy, it accounted 
  for the loss of Thule under water or ice or both, its 
  cosmology recalled Norse myth, and it was the product 
  of German thought rather than of the new Jewish 
  physics of Einstein. Hörbiger died in 1931, but his 
  theories had caught ﬁre with Himmler, who added a 
  Hörbigerian meteorology bureau to the Ahnenerbe 
  (see Glossary). Occult archaeologist Edmund Kiss was 
  an avid Hörbigerian; the Tibet expedition (see below) 
  took Hörbigerian samples from Himalayan glaciers. 
  Even Hitler praised Hörbiger, and planned to construct 
  a Hörbigerian observatory in Linz after the war. In 1936, 
  Himmler mediated the Pyrmont Protocol, making 
  Hörbigerian science the oﬃcial position of the Party.
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  20
  The Ahnenerbe
  “Have the following researched: Find all places in the northern German 
  Aryan cultural world where an understanding of the lightning bolt, the 
  thunderbolt, Thor’s Hammer, or the ﬂying or thrown hammer exists, 
  in addition to all the sculptures of the god depicted with a small hand 
  axe emitting lightning. Please collect all of the pictorial, sculptural, 
  written and mythological evidence of this. I am convinced that this 
  is not based on natural thunder and lightning, but rather that it is  
  an early, highly developed form of war weapon of our forefathers … 
  and that it implies an unheard of knowledge of electricity.”
  – Heinrich Himmler, May 28, 1940
  July 1, 1935, was a sunny day in Berlin. Heinrich Himmler, head of the 
  SS and the second-most powerful man in Germany, eagerly awaited his 
  meeting with Hermann Wirth, a Dutch-born professor of languages 
  at Magdeburg University. Wirth was a minor celebrity, to be sure: 
  his lectures on Thule, the Nordic Atlantis, played to packed houses, 
  telling the story of how the Nordic race emerged two million years 
  ago in an Edenic polar continent and settled the world in dragon 
  ships only to fall victim to racial degeneracy and climate change. His 
  dazzling Haus Atlantis in Bremen combined initiatory experiences 
  with archaeological exhibits. Wirth had extrapolated his theories 
  of Thule from fragments of evidence in all disciplines: archaeology, 
  paleontology, geology (especially the wildly controversial continental 
  drift theories of Alfred Wegener), linguistics, and historical records. 
  Wirth wanted to turn the full academic resources of the Nazi state to 
  gathering up more evidence for a past Aryan golden age – and Himmler 
  wanted to help him do that.
  Himmler was a self-taught occult scholar. After rejecting Christianity in 
  the wake of World War I, his early reading in spiritualism sparked a belief in 
  continual reincarnation within a single bloodline. (Himmler believed himself to 
  be descended from, and the reincarnation of, both King Henry I “the Fowler” 
  of Saxony and Duke Henry “the Lion” of Saxony and Bavaria.) This particular 
  strain of mysticism melded ideally with Ariosophy and with völkisch thought 
  in general, as well as with Nazi racial ideology. Himmler’s devotions to Nazism 
  The insignia of the Ahnenerbe 
  depicts a sword inside the Odal-
  rune. The word odal means “estate” 
  or “inheritance,” a reference to 
  the word Ahnenerbe’s meaning: 
  “ancestral heritage.” (Krzysztof 
  Zajaczkowski under the Share 
  Alike creative commons license)
  July 1,
  SS
  m
  W
  gath
  d
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  21
  and to the occult blossomed together, and both fertilized his 
  interest in breeding and purity, further accelerated by his 
  experiences in the Artamanen “back to the land” movement 
  in the 1920s.
  In the Artamanen, he had met Richard Darré, the father of 
  Nazi Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) ideology. An outright 
  worshipper of the old Germanic gods, and a devotee of Nordic 
  racial purity, Darré joined the Party in 1930 and soon headed 
  up its rural outreach program. In 1931, Himmler appointed 
  Darré the head of the SS Rasse- und Siedlingshauptamt  
  (SS Race and Settlement Main Oﬃce; RuSHA), initially the 
  body in charge of vetting SS candidates’ ancestry, monitoring 
  their procreation, and arranging their eventual settlement on 
  farm colonies. In 1933, Darré became Reichs Minister for 
  Food and Agriculture. His duties kept him from attending 
  the July 1935 meeting, but he sent Obersturmführer Conrad 
  Buch and four other subordinates representing RuSHA and 
  the causes of race-purity and paganism in general.
  The seven men spent most of the day working out the 
  details of a group that would unify all research into German 
  prehistory, culture, and traditions – explicitly including occult traditions. 
  With preferential access to all academic resources, the ability to mount 
  independent expeditions, and a working ritual research program, the group 
  would be able to recreate fully the primordial Aryan super-culture, and thus 
  recreate Germany in its image, restoring the golden age of the Armanenschaft. 
  Himmler and the others decided to add SS resources too and combine a 
  number of pre-existing groups, among them the “Hermann Wirth Society” 
  in Berlin, the Wahrheitsgesellschaft (also represented at that meeting by 
  Buch), and a prehistoric research institute established by the province of 
  Mecklenburg when it elected a Nazi government in 1932. The name of the 
  Mecklenburg oﬃce became the name of Himmler’s new Aryan research 
  bureau: Studiengesellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte Deutsches Ahnenerbe 
  (Academic Society for Research into the Spiritual Roots of Germany’s 
  Ancestral Heritage). Or, more conveniently, “das Ahnenerbe.”
  Karl-Maria Wiligut
  For some reason, Himmler’s primary adviser on the primordial Nordic past, 
  Oberführer Karl-Maria Wiligut, was not at that meeting. By 1935, Wiligut 
  was on Himmler’s personal staﬀ. At Himmler’s behest, Wiligut composed SS 
  rituals and designed SS insignia, including the SS death’s-head ring. Despite 
  these signal contributions, he was frozen out of the Ahnenerbe from the 
  ﬁrst. The most likely explanation is that one of his ideological or political 
  This 1508 woodcut by Hans 
  Baldung (called “Grien”) depicts 
  witches engaged in a number of 
  traditional activities including 
  flight, necromancy, and the 
  brewing of poisons and storms. 
  In the 1920s, a new fascination 
  with witchcraft emerged: Benjamin 
  Christensen’s 1922 film Häxan 
  illustrated and animated the 
  medieval witch-hunter’s Malleus 
  Maleficarum, and in The Witch-Cult 
  in Western Europe (1921).  
  British Egyptologist Margaret 
  Murray postulated that the witch-
  cults actually existed as a pagan 
  mass religion. Murray’s theory had 
  much in common with Ariosophist 
  notions of pagan survival and 
  echoed the tenor of völkisch 
  studies in general. (Lebrecht Music 
  and Arts Photo Library / Alamy)
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  22
  rivals – Wiligut had plenty of both in the Reich’s tangled 
  occult infrastructure – blocked his invitation. His rise in the 
  SS had been meteoric: after ﬁrst meeting Wiligut in 1933 (a 
  meeting arranged by Richard Anders of the ONT), Himmler 
  created the Abteilung Vor- und Frühgeschichte (Department 
  of Pre- and Early History) within RuSHA and appointed 
  him head of it so that “Weisthor” (Wise Thor, Wiligut’s new, 
  initiatic name in the SS) could transcribe his insights into 
  the Aryan past for SS researchers.
  These insights stemmed from Wiligut’s uniquely pure 
  Aryan lineage: he was descended directly from Uiligotis, the 
  son of the Aesir and sorcerer-king of humanity who ruled 
  the world in 228,000 BC when three suns burned in the 
  sky and giants walked the earth. He possessed perfect recall 
  of his various ancestral lives, and of the true Aryan religion, 
  Irminism. He denounced List’s Wotanism as schismatic heresy, 
  and promulgated a diﬀerent set of runic arcana in the pages of 
  Hagal, the journal of the Edda Society, which had supplanted 
  Ostara among the Ariosophical set. He even had rival occultists 
  sent to the camps, among them the runic healer Friedrich 
  Marby, the rune-magus Siegfried Alfred Kummer, and the 
  List disciple Ernst Lauterer, who under the name “Tarnhari” 
  channeled his own heritage as heir to the Volsungs. Himmler 
  backed Wiligut in all these disputes, trusting to Weisthor’s pure blood.
  Even after the Ahnenerbe’s foundation, Wiligut maintained his own 
  coterie of researchers within RuSHA. For example, in June 1936, he and 
  the ley-line mapper Günther Kirchhoﬀ spent 22 days deep in the Black 
  The Irminsul at the Externsteine 
  at the height of Irminist worship 
  there, as depicted in Geheime 
  Mächte? (Mel Gordon Archive)
  EXTERNSTEINE
  An imposing formation of ﬁve natural sandstone towers, 
  the Externsteine towers over the Teutoburger Wald near 
  the town of Detmold. The oldest known evidence of 
  human habitation there is an inscription dated to 1112, 
  when the bishop of Paderborn consecrated a stone grotto 
  as a chapel. However, in 1929 the psychic archaeologist 
  and dowser Wilhelm Teudt identiﬁed the spot as the 
  home of the pillar or tree called Irminsul, the legendary 
  soul-symbol of the pagan Saxons. Charlemagne cut 
  down the Irminsul in 772, imposing Christianity on his 
  new subjects: a sore spot with the völkisch enthusiasts 
  despite Charlemagne’s German nationality.
  Wiligut’s channeled recollections conﬁrmed Teudt’s 
  hypothesis, adding that the Wotanists had defeated the 
  Irminists at the Externsteine in 460. Himmler once more 
  acted on Wiligut’s insights, establishing an Externsteine-
  Stiftung (Externsteine Foundation) under the direction 
  of Wolfram Sievers in 1934. Völkisch archaeologist Julius 
  Andrée carried out the initial excavations, but the next 
  year the foundation came under Ahnenerbe control and 
  its work became top secret. The Externsteine became an 
  Ahnenerbe magical “proving ground,” where occultists 
  tested rituals and spells. The Irminsul badge of the 
  Ahnenerbe was issued to survivors of such tests.
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  23
  Forest uncovering Irminist 
  ruins and power vortexes in 
  the Murg Valley. Kirchhoﬀ 
  used these readings to plot 
  a ley grid of interlocking 
  hexagons linking the Black 
  Forest, Vienna, Giza, Ulan 
  Bator, and Tibet, among 
  other locations of magical 
  potency. In 1937, Wiligut 
  carried out his own magical 
  survey of the Goslar region 
  beneath the shadow of the 
  Brocken, Germany’s highest 
  peak and a legendary witches’ 
  gathering place.
  Wewelsburg
  The other reason Wiligut might have missed the founding meeting of the 
  Ahnenerbe lay a short bus ride away from Paderborn in Westphalia, near 
  the Teutoburger Wald, where Arminius’ Teutonic heroes overthrew Roman 
  dominion. In a vision, Weisthor identiﬁed the castle of Wewelsburg as the site 
  of the apocalyptic future battle between the Aryan West and the degenerate 
  East. In November 1933, Himmler decided that made it the ideal spot for the 
  ritual center of the SS and deputized Wiligut to oversee the reconstruction of 
  Wewelsburg Castle.
  Wewelsburg Castle from the east. 
  The north tower, center point of 
  Himmler’s occult Camelot, is the 
  low round tower on the right. (vario 
  images GmbH & Co.KG / Alamy)
  Measuring approximately 50ft in 
  diameter, the crypt at Wewelsburg 
  underneath the north tower 
  began as the castle’s cistern. 
  Bartels and Wiligut remodeled it 
  after Mycenaean “beehive tomb” 
  designs, suiting its necromantic 
  purpose. Twelve stone benches 
  line the wall; niches above held 
  funerary urns or other relics. A 
  gas pipe under the central ring 
  produced an eternal flame. In 
  Himmler’s absence, the UdG used 
  this space for goetic rituals at least 
  once (Walpurgisnacht, 1941) 
  invoking (though perhaps not fully 
  binding) a Hyperborean demon. 
  (DC Premiumstock / Alamy)
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  Previously occupied by the Teutonic Knights, the hill sported a triangular 
  castle built between 1603 and 1609 and formerly owned by the prince-bishops 
  of Paderborn. They tried and executed witches there in the 17th century, 
  charging it (perhaps unwittingly) with occult energies. By 1933, it was a 
  tourist attraction and youth hostel; Himmler leased it (for 100 marks and 100 
  years) and planned to make it an elite academy for the occult and ideological 
  instruction of the SS leadership cadre. Under Wiligut’s esoteric supervision, 
  the architect Hermann Bartels began construction in January 1934.
  As Himmler’s ever more grandiose plans escalated costs, Bartels switched 
  to using concentration camp labor, initially from Sachsenhausen and then 
  from a smaller camp set up at Niederhagen exclusively for the Wewelsburg 
  work. Nearly two-thirds of the more than 3,000 slave laborers died building 
  Himmler’s sanctum. Even then, Himmler spent over 15 million marks on 
  Wewelsburg. An Ahnenerbe archaeologist, Wilhelm Jordan, excavated relics 
  from all over the region for a museum in the west wing. It eventually included 
  skulls, grave goods, and the 10ft- long fossil of an ichthyosaur: a dragon for 
  Himmler’s black knights.
  Bartels renovated the north tower (which had been destroyed, save for the 
  walls, by a lightning bolt in 1815) as a center for occult study, moving in a 
  16,000-volume library of Aryan occult lore, ancient heraldic ﬂags of Henry 
  the Fowler, and other treasures. Specially designed rooms, including the Grail 
  Room, the Aryan Room, and the Rune Room, culminated in a high medieval 
  dining hall. Here Himmler installed a ceremonial Round Table with 13 seats 
  of power circled by 12 hollow pillars recalling the Irminsul. Deep in the crypt, 
  an eternal ﬂame burned at the heart of the SS “Black Camelot.”
  In 1941, Himmler demolished Wewelsburg’s village church to expand 
  his castle complex still further; his builders were still at work in 1943 when 
  wartime shortages forced construction to stop.
  Wiligut designed the Black Sun 
  emblem for the floor of the 
  Obergruppenführersaal (Generals’ 
  Hall) in the north tower of 
  Wewelsburg Castle. Originally, the 
  axis of the Black Sun was a disk 
  of pure gold, intended to mark the 
  mystical center point of the Third 
  Reich. (Germany Images David 
  Crossland / Alamy)
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  Ahnenerbe Structure
  The July 1935 meeting in Himmler’s oﬃce established the basic command 
  structure of the Ahnenerbe. Hermann Wirth became the society’s president; 
  his personal secretary Untersturmführer Wolfram Sievers took the post of 
  Reichsgeschäftsführer (general secretary). Wirth provided overall intellectual 
  and scholarly direction, while Sievers the “Reichsmanager” did all the work 
  and directly organized the Ahnenerbe’s activities in the ﬁeld. Himmler 
  reserved the post of Ahnenerbe superintendent for himself, and chaired the 
  society’s board of trustees. The Ahnenerbe oﬃces at 29/30 Brüderstrasse 
  in Berlin held seven full-time administrative staﬀers, an excellent occult 
  library, and a small collection of rune stones. Himmler’s paranoia led him 
  to hide the full extent of the Ahnenerbe’s reach: Freemasons and other 
  British magical societies had secret chapters in Berlin, and they could not 
  be allowed to ﬁnd out the truth about the Nazi “Occult Bureau.” Most of 
  its work was done in over 50 separate Forschungsstätten (institutes) tucked 
  away in SS facilities, university buildings, castles, or research installations 
  all across the Reich.
  Some of the Ahnenerbe’s more signiﬁcant institutes, in 1935 and afterward, 
  included the following:
  �� The Abteilung Ausgrabungen (Excavations Department; AAG) served 
  as an overall coordinator and cadre for Ahnenerbe archaeological expeditions. 
  Originally an independent SS unit, Himmler folded it into the Ahnenerbe 
  in February 1938. Medieval archaeologist Herbert Jankuhn, an expert in the 
  Vikings and the Teutonic Knights, joined the Ahnenerbe in 1937 and became 
  the head of the AAG in 1940. From September 1942 on, Sturmbannführer 
  Jankuhn directed the department from 
  the frontline as Ahnenerbe liaison (and 
  intelligence oﬃcer) with 5. SS-Panzer 
  Division “Wiking.” His immediate 
  command, Sonderkommando Jankuhn, 
  coordinated excavations and museum 
  looting under wartime conditions.
  �� The 
  Forschungsstätte 
  für 
  Indogermanisch-Deutsche 
  Musik 
  (Research Facility for Indogermanic-
  German 
  Music) 
  studied 
  Aryan 
  musicology, 
  recording 
  folk 
  songs, 
  traditional chants and tunes, and regional 
  dances. Hauptsturmführer Dr. Fritz 
  Bose of the Institut für Lautforschung 
  (Sound-Research Institute) in Berlin led 
  its team of experts in analyzing the runic 
  content of the oldest songs, deriving 
  Hermann Wirth (1885–1981), 
  head of the Ahnenerbe from 1935 
  to 1937, badly damaged his 
  scholarly reputation with his 1933 
  translation (as Die Ura-Linda-
  Chronik) of the Oera Linda Book. 
  This manuscript, written in Old 
  Frisian, included material (by the 
  goddess Freya herself!) dating 
  back to 2194 BC, the year before 
  the sinking of “Atland,” although 
  most of it purported to be a 13th-
  century chronicle of the Frisian 
  Over de Linden family, hereditary 
  priestesses of the goddess. Wirth 
  accepted that the manuscript 
  was on some level a 19th-
  century forgery (it was written 
  in medieval script on machine-
  made paper), but held that the 
  forger had incorporated actual 
  traditions of Germanic myth, 
  runic symbols, and the history of 
  Thule. Himmler met Wirth in 1934, 
  during the height of the academic 
  controversy over the book. The 
  Reichsführer strongly supported 
  Wirth’s view, leading some to call 
  Die Ura-Linda-Chronik “Himmler’s 
  Bible.” (ullsteinbild / Topfoto)
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  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
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  1. This figure illustrates field wear for 
  an Ahnenerbe archaeologist in the 
  1930s. Based on a photograph of future 
  Excavations Department head Herbert 
  Jankuhn, the archaeologist wears sensible 
  garb for digs in hard country: a fedora, 
  belted coat, and high boots. He wears a 
  Luger in a holster for personal security, 
  and holds an idol of the god Wotan 
  uncovered from an Armanen burial site.
  2. This Ahnenerbe-SS runic sorcerer 
  wears the black Allgemeine-SS uniform 
  of 1936. The hash mark on his right arm 
  indicates Party membership before 
  1933; he may be an old Thule comrade. 
  In addition to the SS dagger slung at his 
  left hip, he carries (scabbarded over his 
  right breast) an Ahnenerbe-SS athame, a 
  ritual dagger used in ceremonial magic. 
  He wears the Ahnenerbe cuff band and 
  the Ar-rune on his left forearm indicating 
  runic training. His shoulder boards (with 
  the Ar-rune for the Ahnenerbe) and rank 
  tabs indicate he is a Sonderführer, an 
  officer with special training outside the 
  regular chain of command. He holds 
  his body in the “AR” runic pose as he 
  chants the rune; he holds a copy of List’s 
  Geheimnis der Runen.
  3. This is a “Hexensoldat” from 
  Sonderverband Z, seconded to front-
  line duty in Russia with 2. SS-Panzer 
  Grenadier Division. Like many 
  Allgemeine-SS troops in the field, he 
  wears a field-gray Waffen-SS uniform, 
  although his cap is a pale grey M38 
  Allgemeine-SS cap with the Ahnenerbe 
  piping color, pale blue (changed from the 
  original maroon in 1940). His collar tab 
  shows the Hagal-rune, officially symbolic 
  of faith in Aryanism, but likely selected 
  as the emblem of Sonderverband Z as 
  the first initial of Hexe (witch). He wears 
  Sonderführer shoulder boards. His SS 
  athame is scabbarded at his belt; the 
  larger scope of his binoculars contains 
  a crystal for scrying and ley-line tracing. 
  He carries two dowsing rods, used on the 
  front primarily for mine detection, here 
  pointed in the AR configuration to gather 
  magical energy.
  SONDERAUFTRAG H
  The Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main 
  Oﬃce; RSHA), was the SS umbrella group running 
  the security and police services. Its seventh oﬃce, Amt 
  VII (Amt II before December 1941), was the written 
  records division, headed initially by Gregor Schwartz-
  Bostunich, a clairvoyant anti-communist conspiracy 
  theorist who had been initiated into esoteric disciplines 
  by the Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieﬀ. Abteilung B 
  (Section B) of Amt VII handled “ideological research 
  and evaluation” against enemies such as Jews, Gypsies, 
  Freemasons, and other banned brotherhoods and secret 
  societies. Amt VII B stored its main library of 500,000 
  conﬁscated books in its headquarters, the former Great 
  Masonic Lodge on Eisenacherstrasse in Berlin.
  Within Amt VII B, approximately 20 specialists 
  (eventually including archivists removed from the camps) 
  in Referat C3 (Department C3) accumulated, classiﬁed, 
  and analyzed every known record of a witchcraft trial 
  in Germany. Directed by Obersturmbannführer Rudolf 
  Levin, this was Sonderauftrag H (Special Commission 
  H); the H stood for Hexen, or witches. Academics 
  and researchers, they never entered combat areas and 
  seldom cast spells themselves, leaving such dangerous 
  tasks for younger (and more ideologically trustworthy) 
  SS men. In 1939, they discovered that Himmler himself 
  had a witch for an ancestor: Margarethe Himbler, 
  burned at Morgentheim in 1629. They uncovered a 
  great deal of the practical “hedge magic” used by the 
  Sonderverband Z (Special Group Z) Hexensoldaten 
  (witch soldiers) in the ﬁeld, while performing odd tasks 
  in conjunction with the Ahnenerbe. For example, at 
  one point Sonderauftrag H worked with Ahnenerbe 
  ornithologists to discover why ravens tended to ﬂock 
  at sites where witches had been executed. (Hermann 
  Göring, of all people, had noticed the connection.) 
  Himmler also wanted his hex-historians to establish a 
  case indicting the Catholic Church for spilling German 
  blood in the witchcraft trials, to counter a possible 
  papal denunciation of the Holocaust. In 1944, to escape 
  bombing raids, Sonderauftrag H removed its research 
  from Berlin to Castle Haugwitz in Glogau, Silesia. Its 
  records mostly fell into Soviet hands.
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  powerful spells and rituals. To perform them, they built replicas of ancient 
  instruments such as the lur, syrinx, and kantele, often charging them with runic 
  power. The Vril-Gesellschaft paid particular attention to developments in this 
  institute, hoping to harness its insights for the ongoing Bell project.
  �� The Pﬂegestätte für Wetterkunde (Meteorology Section) directed by 
  Obersturmführer Dr. Hans Robert Scultetus analyzed and predicted the 
  weather on the basis of Hanns Hörbiger’s Welteislehre. It also studied and 
  practiced weather magic, to dire eﬀect in 1941. Scultetus’ use of Wiligut’s 
  rune system instead of List’s (thus exalting the Black Sun over List’s solar 
  Wotan energies) may have caused the catastrophic wet, cold winter of 1941 
  that bogged down Operation Barbarossa mere miles from Moscow.
  �� The Forschungsstätte für Runen, Schrift und Sinnbildkunde (Research 
  Facility for Runes, Alphabets, and Symbols; FRSS) served as the central 
  clearinghouse for Ahnenerbe rune-magic research. Wiligut’s jealousy of List 
  and of Germany’s leading rune-magician Siegfried Adolf Kummer stalled 
  progress in this area for three critical years. In 1942, Kummer was repatriated 
  from Sachsenhausen and added to the staﬀ of the institute, but it was too late. 
  Virtually every major Nazi sorcerous defeat during the war can be traced to 
  faulty runic lore caused by Wiligut’s delays and false interpretations.
  �� The Forschungsstätte für Karst- und Höhlenkunde (Research Facility 
  for Karst and Speleology; FKH) studied not only caves and geological 
  formations, but tales of tunnels and underground realms. Along with 
  the Forschungsstätte für Geophysik (Research Facility for Geophysics), 
  it investigated remnants of previous moons and the antediluvian giants 
  postulated by the Welteislehre.
  �� The Hügelgrabforschung (Burial Mound Research) group is better 
  known by its nickname Die Todesbruderschaft: the Brotherhood of Death. 
  Devotees of the Black Sun, the necromancers attached to this institute 
  investigated barrows, kurgans, and burial mounds in occupied Norway and 
  Ukraine. Their program to create an army of Nazi zombies never altered the 
  war’s strategic balance: undead soldiers remained vulnerable to artillery and 
  had none of the ability to react tactically required in modern warfare. Their 
  tendency to experiment on the Waﬀen-SS’ own dead and dying also led to 
  friction with supporting German units, as in the famous mass-trepanation 
  incident near Nikolayev in 1944.
  �� The Ueberprüfung der Geheimwissenschaften (Survey of the Occult 
  Sciences; UdG) studied other occult lore besides the runes, especially 
  alchemy and thaumaturgy. Himmler also encouraged the UdG to master 
  goetia, the summoning of inhuman entities, believing that the word goetia 
  derived from the name of the ancient Goths and that it was therefore 
  ideal Aryan magic. Headed by Sturmbannführer K.R. Krönen, the UdG 
  established and ran Sonderauftrag H (see box).
  Other Ahnenerbe institutes investigated such subjects as entomology, fairy 
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  29
  tales, heraldry, astronomy, yoga, horse breeding, “zoogeography and animal 
  stories,” folk medicine, Celtic ethnography, northwest African culture, and 
  medieval Latin. The cream of their researches appeared in the Ahnenerbe’s 
  monthly magazine Germanien, which the society published until 1944.
  From Wirth to WÜst
  Not all of Wirth’s Nordic theories met with full Party approval. For example, his 
  research indicated that the Thuata, the inhabitants of Thule, were matriarchal 
  socialists. Wirth’s public denunciations of Christianity were embarrassing to 
  the Nazi government politically, and his exhortations to remake Germany 
  in the light of prehistoric Thule contradicted the Party’s message that the 
  current regime would restore industrial growth. Wirth’s sheer incompetence 
  with money and paperwork led him to the edge of embezzlement, with only 
  Himmler’s checkbook between him and prison. The ﬁnal blow fell at the 
  Nuremberg rally in 1936. In a speech on National Socialist culture, Hitler 
  denounced “those elements who only understand National Socialism in terms 
  of hearsay and sagas, and who therefore confuse it too easily with vague Nordic 
  phrases … based on motifs from some mythical Atlantean culture.”
  Himmler was forced to purge Wirth to save the vital work of the 
  Ahnenerbe. He demoted Wirth and prohibited him from publishing and 
  lecturing, ending his career. On February 1, 1937, to cover his tracks further, 
  Himmler renamed the bureau. It was now oﬃcially the Forschungs- und 
  Lehrgemeinschaft das Ahnenerbe (Research and Teaching Association for 
  Ancestral Heritage), although everyone still just called it the Ahnenerbe. 
  Himmler replaced Wirth with the renowned (and meticulously professional) 
  Indologist Walther Wüst. Wüst was a scholar of Sanskrit who believed that 
  the Rig-Veda, a sacred Hindu text, demonstrated that the prehistoric Aryan 
  invaders of India had come from a Nordic homeland in Germany. Isolated 
  groups of Aryans must still exist in central Asia, he argued, in an echo of 
  Blavatsky’s theosophical theory that the Aryan root-race had come from the 
  Gobi Desert. Intrigued by the occult truths Himmler revealed to him, Wüst 
  accepted the position of Ahnenerbe president, but kept his main oﬃces at 
  Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilian University.
  Under the surface, then, the work of the Ahnenerbe continued, and even 
  accelerated. Its headquarters staﬀ increased to 38, and it moved to more private 
  oﬃces in the fashionable Berlin neighborhood of Dahlem, in a mansion at  
  19 Pücklerstrasse. The competent, loyal, and silent Wolfram Sievers remained 
  as general secretary, and even received a promotion to Obersturmführer.  
  He won another victory in November 1938 when Himmler’s adjutant  
  (and the Ahnenerbe’s military liaison) Gruppenführer Karl Wolﬀ discovered 
  the sordid details of Wiligut’s past: Weisthor had a record of beating his wife 
  and sexually threatening his daughters.
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  Worst of all, Himmler’s pet clairvoyant had spent three years in a Salzburg 
  insane asylum ranting about the Ku Klux Klan and making patterns with the 
  6,000 stones he had collected from nearby creeks and hillsides. Regardless of any 
  genuine occult gifts Wiligut might have had, his previous institutionalization 
  made him an embarrassing vulnerability for the Reichsführer, and potentially 
  for the entire SS. Although Wiligut had baptized Wolﬀ’s son in an Irminist 
  ceremony in 1937, Wolﬀ knew when to cut the elderly alcoholic loose.  
  In February 1939, he explained to Wiligut’s staﬀ at RuSHA that Weisthor’s 
  “application for retirement on the grounds of ill health” had been reluctantly 
  accepted. The SS bundled Wiligut into seclusion in Goslar; Himmler 
  conﬁscated Weisthor’s SS ring and dagger, which he kept in his own oﬃce.
  Possibly to prevent any more such ugly surprises, Himmler fully 
  incorporated the Ahnenerbe into his personal staﬀ in January 1939, 
  although the bureau did not formally become part of the Allgemeine-SS 
  (General SS) command structure (as SS Hauptamt A) until April 1, 1940.  
  In 1941, Sievers and Himmler established the 
  Darstellende und Angewandte Naturkunde Abteilung 
  (Descriptive and Applied Natural History Division) 
  in Strassburg, Himmler appointing Sturmbannführer 
  Dr. Walter Greite its director. Its goal was to determine 
  empirically the physical nature of Judaism by examining 
  Jewish skulls and skeletons in great numbers.
  It took Sievers and Greite a surprisingly long time to assemble their 
  collection – a typhus outbreak in Auschwitz was only one obstacle – but 
  in August 1943 their anatomist, Haupsturmführer August Hirt, began 
  his work. By then Sievers had become director of another Ahnenerbe 
  institute, the Institut für Wehrwissenschaftliche Zweckforschung (Institute 
  for Military Scientiﬁc Research), which conducted human experiments at 
  Dachau beginning in May 1942. Dr. Sigmund Rascher, the institute’s head 
  experimenter at Dachau, also carried out other experiments for other sections 
  of the Ahnenerbe (including the Todesbruderschaft) and for the Luftwaﬀe as 
  Germany’s experimental aircraft programs expanded.
  They weren’t expanding fast enough – in August 1943, the increased 
  risk from Allied bombing raids on Berlin forced another move for the 
  Ahnenerbe headquarters. Sievers ordered the Ahnenerbe library moved to 
  Oberkirchberg Castle near Ulm. Many of the Ahnenerbe institutes (and 
  other occult players such as the Vril-Gesellschaft, Admiral Canaris’ MFA (see 
  Glossary), Kaltenbrunner’s Projekt Leo, and the remnants of Wiligut’s Irminist 
  cult) managed to reroute vital texts or particularly eldritch tomes to their 
  own headquarters during this process, badly damaging the ability of the 
  Ahnenerbe as a whole to conduct meaningful magical research. The core 
  Ahnenerbe staﬀ relocated to the tiny village of Waichsenfeld in Bavaria, 
  setting up shop in the 17th-century Steinhaus nearby.
  This ceremonial lamp stand was 
  used in evocation magic (burning 
  various oils and perfumes 
  summoned various entities, or 
  opened the magus up to their 
  communications) and as a 
  runically attuned instrument in 
  other rituals. (INTERFOTO / Alamy)
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  Sonderverband Z
  In May 1936, as Himmler was laying the foundations for the Waﬀen-SS, he 
  ordered his adjutant, Karl Wolﬀ (then a Brigadeführer), to create and train a 
  military component for the Ahnenerbe. Wolﬀ was well-suited to the mission: 
  a decorated veteran of World War I, a practitioner of pagan Irminism, and an 
  expert at public relations and ideological conditioning. The ﬁrst mission for 
  such troops would be security. Ahnenerbe expeditions had begun entering 
  dangerous territory, rife with bandits or rival tomb raiders. The second 
  sort of mission for the unit would be clandestine raids to capture valuable 
  artifacts or targets. In these cases, the military commander would decide 
  on tactics, and the civilian specialist assist with target identiﬁcation and 
  cultural intelligence work on the mission. The third mission Wolﬀ was told 
  to prepare for was actual integration of the Ahnenerbe’s sorcerous discoveries 
  into military operations. Ahnenerbe troops would test theoretical magic in 
  battle conditions and, once the processes were thoroughly understood, act 
  as cadre to train entire SS divisions in magical combat.
  The ideal troops for these purposes would be pure Aryans, more naturally 
  tuned to the runic postures and tones of their ancestry. They would be 
  capable of operating in remote wilderness 
  locations, and should at least be open to the 
  possibility of pagan rituals and occult lore. As 
  with most military requirements, in the Third 
  Reich and elsewhere, the ideal personnel were 
  not always available. But by the end of the 
  year, Wolﬀ’s staﬀ had combed through the 
  membership records of the various occult 
  and völkisch societies, and of the Artamanen 
  “back to the land” groups, and recruited 115 
  men, including several NCOs from the old 
  Ehrhardt Brigade. (Some of those ﬁrst recruits 
  were also former SA men promised a fresh 
  start by Wolﬀ after the Night of the Long 
  Knives, Hitler’s purge of the SA leadership.) 
  Along with 83 recruits from the other services 
  or elsewhere in the SS and 168 miscellaneous 
  volunteers with promising ancestries (and an 
  interest in avoiding regular military service 
  with the Wehrmacht), Wolﬀ had the makings 
  of a large company or a small battalion. He 
  turned the nascent Sonderverband Z (for 
  Zauber, meaning “magic”) over to Conrad 
  Buch (who could see the writing on the wall 
  for Wiligut and wanted out of RuSHA) for 
  Karl Wolff (1900–84), shown here 
  in 1937, became Himmler’s chief 
  of staff in 1933. After the purge of 
  Wiligut in 1938, Wolff had almost 
  total control of SS occult research 
  programs. (Bundesarchiv, Bild 
  146 - Sammlung von Repro-
  Negativen)
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  32
  training and indoctrination, promoting him to 
  Hauptsturmführer for the occasion.
  In the event, the ﬂexibility required for the unit’s 
  future missions, and the likelihood that it would be 
  deployed in small teams on numerous simultaneous 
  operations, led Buch to organize his Hexensoldaten in 
  three companies with a minimal headquarters staﬀ 
  based out of the Reichsführer’s oﬃce. 1. Kompanie 
  (Wotan) began with the highest percentage of geweckt 
  (Buch’s term, literally “awakened” or “bright,” for 
  magically aware troops) personnel, and ran through 
  grueling training at top speed to provide support 
  to key Ahnenerbe missions in 1937. The survivors 
  helped shape training for 2. Kompanie (Donar) 
  and 3. Kompanie (Frô); by the end of the year, 333 
  men, almost all of them geweckt at some level, made 
  up Sonderverband Z. In January 1938 Himmler 
  appointed the commandant of Wewelsburg Castle, 
  Standartenführer Manfred von Knobelsdorﬀ, as 
  commanding oﬃcer of Sonderverband Z. A devout 
  Irminist, von Knobelsdorﬀ’s primary qualiﬁcation 
  for the position was his good fortune in being 
  married to Richard Darré’s sister-in-law. Even so, 
  Sonderverband Z rune-magic was very eﬀective in 
  the ﬁeld, especially during the invasions of Denmark and Norway. On some 
  ﬁelds, it was less successful, notably at Zerzura in Egypt in April 1942.
  Between that disaster and Darré’s forced resignation from the cabinet in 
  May 1942, von Knobelsdorﬀ’s inﬂuence ended, and so did any possibility of 
  raising a larger unit of occult soldiers. After that date, most of Sonderverband 
  Z’s Hexensoldaten wound up individually seconded to other units as 
  Sonderführer (specialist oﬃcers), typically dowsing for mines and serving 
  as weather-augurs. A few geweckt small units retained cohesion. Herbert 
  Jankuhn brought a platoon of Kompanie Frô to the Crimea with him; they 
  remained with “Wiking” Division for the rest of the war. Wolﬀ secured 
  two platoons of Kompanie Wotan as one component of his headquarters 
  division when he became military governor of northern Italy in October 
  1943. Some special forces commanders such as Adrian von Fölkersam and 
  Otto Skorzeny managed to attach whole squads of Hexensoldaten to their 
  units. When able to reinforce each others’ sorcerous skills and cast runic 
  rituals requiring multiple voices, Hexensoldaten could contribute materially 
  to the success of conventional actions – and in many actions in the Balkans, 
  their training helped their ungeweckt comrades survive monstrous and 
  demonic dangers.
  Born in 1900 in Bad Rappenau 
  in northern Baden, Conrad Buch 
  joined the Germanenorden as a 
  youth recruit in 1915. He served 
  in World War I, receiving the Iron 
  Cross 2nd Class. After the war, 
  he drifted into the Freikorps 
  movement, eventually becoming 
  part of Organisation Consul. After 
  Weimar stabilized, he joined the SS 
  in 1926, eventually rising through 
  the ranks (in the Ahnenerbe after 
  1936) to Brigadeführer. This is 
  the only known photograph of 
  Buch. Taken in 1939, it shows him 
  (rear, between Hitler and Himmler) 
  observing maneuvers, possibly 
  on hand to advise the Wehrmacht 
  on the capabilities of the 
  Sonderverband Z Hexensoldaten 
  he had trained. (Pictorial Press Ltd 
  / Alamy)
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  33
  Ahnenerbe Expeditions
  In addition to magico-military operations and the highest-priority quests 
  discussed in later chapters, the Ahnenerbe mounted dozens of expeditions 
  during its decade of existence. Many of them seemed at the time, from the 
  outside at least, to be nothing more than eccentric or slapdash attempts 
  at archaeology or anthropology. Until 1974, historians doubted even the 
  existence of these expeditions; only in this decade have they begun to study a 
  This supplementary pamphlet 
  appeared in September 1938 in 
  Der Aufbau, a paper published 
  by Rosenberg’s office. Enthüllte 
  Welt-Freimaureri (Uncovering 
  World Freemasonry), by Edgar 
  Bissinger, graphically illustrated 
  Masonic practices as a warning 
  to all good Germans. Gregor 
  Schwartz-Bostunich assembled a 
  small museum of Masonic regalia, 
  including coffins full of skulls and 
  bones, in the offices of RSHA Amt 
  VII B. (Mel Gordon Archive)
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  34
  few of the best-known and most superﬁcially mundane missions. Ahnenerbe 
  correspondence with the Ryokuryūkai (their opposite numbers in Japan) 
  mentions (possibly joint) expeditions to Hawaii, southern Nigeria, and 
  Manchukuo about which nothing more has been uncovered. The Ahnenerbe 
  may have also covertly added staﬀ to expeditions by the Frobenius Institute 
  (an archaeological and anthropological body with a side interest in Atlantis) 
  or the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation; 
  DFG), such as its oceanographic survey of the Cape Verde Islands in 1937–
  38. (The DFG was ostensibly non-political, but it provided much of the 
  Ahnenerbe’s funding, and co-sponsored major expeditions such as Schaefer’s 
  mission to Tibet.) Some missions were oﬃcially canceled, but then reactivated 
  by the whims of Nazi bureaucracy or carried out under secret conditions. The 
  gaps in the surviving Ahnenerbe records (none of the victorious Allies have 
  declassiﬁed all the documents they seized after the war) and the conservatism 
  of conventional historians mean that the full scope of Ahnenerbe activity may 
  never be visible.
  Here, however, is some of what can be pieced together of some of the 
  Ahnenerbe’s characteristic operations:
  This Roman mosaic in the town 
  of Hadrumentum in Tunisia 
  (modern Sousse) dates from 
  the 2nd century A.D. Ahnenerbe 
  scholars in the Forschungsstätte 
  für Klassische Philologie und 
  Altertumswissenschaft (Research 
  Facility for Classical Philology and 
  Antiquity), headed after 1938 by 
  the classicist Rudolf Till, recorded 
  and mapped such swastikas 
  while seeking the Aryan core of 
  Roman occult-imperial geography. 
  (Maciej Szczepanczyk)
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  35
  �� After spending the winter of 1935 researching the origins of Finnish 
  myth, the Finnish folklorist Yrjö von Grönhagen led an expedition to 
  Finnish Karelia in 1936 to gather songs, rituals, and magic rites. Along 
  with musicologist Fritz Bose, he recorded pagan chants and interviewed the 
  prophetess and witch Miron-Aku, stealing her magic for the Ahnenerbe.
  �� The Ahnenerbe assumed direction of Projekt Guiana, Obersturmführer 
  Otto Schulz-Kampfhenkel’s zoological and botanical expedition to the Jari 
  River in Brazil. Between 1935 and 1937 Schulz-Kampfhenkel gathered 
  specimens, studied tropical conditions for warfare, and ﬁlmed shamanic rituals 
  of the Aparai people. During his time in the jungle near French Guiana, he 
  also hunted dinosaurs and the lost city of El Dorado, and wrote a report for 
  EINSATZSTAB REICHSLEITER ROSENBERG
  An intimate of Dietrich Eckart and a frequent presence 
  at Thule Society meetings, NSDAP ideologist Alfred 
  Rosenberg had no trouble accepting the role of the 
  occult in Germany’s history and future. His magnum 
  opus, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Myth of 
  the Twentieth Century; 1930), synthesized Gnosticism, 
  Ariosophy, Grail myth, paganism, and anti-Semitism in 
  turgid prose worthy of any occultist. As “supervisor of 
  intellectual and ideological education,” he involved his 
  oﬃce in cultural activities, including archaeology and 
  historical research.
  At ﬁrst, Rosenberg’s oﬃce cooperated with the 
  Ahnenerbe, but as the SS rose in power and inﬂuence, 
  Rosenberg became jealous of Himmler’s usurpation 
  of what he saw as his rightful province. He recruited 
  scholars and occultists of his own, and competed for 
  digs, funding, and access to overseas sites. Rosenberg 
  had a formal role in the Foreign Ministry as head of the 
  foreign political oﬃce, giving him overseas connections 
  he used to advance his agents, men like the archaeologist 
  Dr. Hans Reinerth.
  In January 1940, Rosenberg secured theoretical 
  authority over all art and artifacts in occupied Europe 
  from Hitler and set up his Special Staﬀ, the Einsatzstab 
  Reichsleiter 
  Rosenberg 
  (Reichsleiter 
  Rosenberg 
  Taskforce; ERR). Conﬁscating whole libraries from 
  the cities under his power, he assembled his own 
  archive of occult, Masonic, and other works alongside 
  a “Museum of the Extinct Race” holding Judaica from 
  all over Europe. Dr. Georg Ebert managed to capture 
  the Grand Orient Lodge in Paris with its secret and 
  esoteric library intact; it became the core of the ERR 
  Hauptarbeitsgruppe (Head Working Group) Paris. 
  (Other ERR ﬁeld oﬃces in Amsterdam, Brussels, Riga, 
  Belgrade, and Prague overﬂowed with similar trophies.) 
  The ERR took over Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria as 
  a central clearinghouse for two million boxcars’ worth 
  of art and artifacts. Rosenberg’s staﬀ, however, was small 
  and unprofessional compared to the Ahnenerbe; key 
  relics slipped through his ﬁngers, and in the ﬁeld a black 
  SS uniform trumped credentials from the ERR.
  As head of the Prehistory Department of the ERR, 
  Reinerth determined to focus his attention on one 
  question: the nature of the Greco-Nordic gods. Were they 
  supermen, giants, psychic beings like the Lemurians, or 
  astral-electrical entities as List speculated? He led another 
  expedition to Cape Matapan in the Peloponnese after 
  the fall of Greece in 1941. His objective was the Gates 
  of Hades, a cavern complex believed in ancient times to 
  communicate with the realm of the dead. Attempting to 
  invoke Poseidon using a runic inscription he discovered 
  there, Reinerth instead entered into communication 
  with batrachian undersea beings dwelling in the Hellenic 
  Trench just oﬀshore. His new insistence that the true 
  master race dwelt in the deeps made him ideologically 
  unreliable, and he was expelled from the Party in 1945.
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  36
  Himmler on the possibility of creating a new Reich in Brazil 
  with the 1 million German-Brazilians at its core.
  ��
  In August 1936, Hermann Wirth and Wolfram 
  Sievers traveled to the Bohuslän region in Sweden, the location 
  of some of Europe’s oldest petroglyphs. The involvement of 
  both directors indicated the importance Himmler attached to 
  correct understanding of ancient Nordic runes. Wirth took a 
  complete set of plaster casts of the key runes and then damaged 
  and defaced some of the carvings to prevent later scholars from 
  making the same discoveries. When Wirth was purged in 1937, 
  the Ahnenerbe refused to return his casts.
  ��
  While on a trip to Bolivia in 1928, the architect and 
  novelist Edmund Kiss had discovered evidence of primordial 
  Nordic civilization at the ancient site of Tiwanaku. After the fall 
  of Abyssinia to Mussolini, he traveled to the Gondar highlands 
  in 1936 searching for fragments of the previous moon, then to 
  Tanganyika where he meet Ludwig Kohl-Larsen on the shores of Lake Elyasi 
  to examine his discovery of giant skeletons. Himmler sent Kiss on a similar 
  hasty expedition to Libya in February 1939 to narrow the search for the djinn 
  city of Zerzura, but he spent most of his time with the Ahnenerbe planning 
  a large-scale follow-up expedition to Bolivia. The war forced him to scale 
  it back, but in January 1940 Kiss and a picked team of archaeologists and 
  geologists secretly ﬂew to Bolivia, and may have been one of the expeditions 
  that recovered a Yaktavian bell for SS E-IV. After returning from his Bolivia 
  trip, Kiss transferred into the 1. SS Division “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler,” 
  served with Sonderverband Z troops during the invasion of Greece, and 
  eventually reached the rank of Obersturmbannführer.
  �� Iceland may have been the original Ultima Thule encountered by 
  Pytheas in 325 BC. Wirth and Wiligut both believed it to be the home of pure 
  Aryan culture, founded by Nordic pagans ﬂeeing Christian persecution in 
  medieval times. Himmler sent several diﬀerent agents to the island: Otto Rahn 
  traveled there in 1936 searching for the Grail (discussed in a later chapter), the 
  linguist (and head of the Ahnenerbe’s Research Center for Germanic Cultural 
  Studies and Landscape Science in Detmold) Dr. Bruno Schweizer in 1938 
  looking for pagan survivals and runic landforms, and the linguist Dr. Bruno 
  Kress in 1939 to record Icelandic pronunciations for further runic study.  
  A fourth, ethnological and botanical, expedition (to be headed by Schweizer) 
  in 1939 fell apart in a glare of bad publicity and a sudden shortage of Icelandic 
  crowns in the SS’ coﬀers.
  �� Untersturmführer Hans Schleif headed up the Ahnenerbe expedition to 
  the Greek city of Delphi in spring 1937, visiting Troy and Pergamon later that 
  year. An architect by training and a respected classical archaeologist, Schleif 
  gained a European reputation leading the excavation of Olympia that the 
  Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946) 
  was an ethnic German from 
  Estonia. After the failure of the 
  Whites in the Russian Civil War 
  he emigrated to Munich, where 
  he joined the Thule Gesellschaft 
  and the Aufbau Vereinigung 
  (Reconstruction Organization) 
  headed by Max Erwin von 
  Scheubner-Richter. The latter 
  was a secret society dedicated 
  to the overthrow of the Russian 
  and German governments, linking 
  right-wing German politicians with 
  wealthy and connected Russian 
  exiles to their mutual benefit. 
  Such connections included Henry 
  Ford, who believed in the Aufbau 
  Vereinigung missions of anti-
  Semitism and anti-communism, 
  and donated heavily to the 
  cause. The Russians added a 
  hearty dollop of conspiratorial 
  and apocalyptic-minded thinking 
  to the Thulist-Nazi brew, but 
  after Scheubner-Richter’s death 
  during the Munich putsch the 
  Nazi emphasis on race rapidly 
  separated the Party from the 
  Russians. (Bundesarchiv, Bild 
  146-1969-067-10, photo: o.Ang.)
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  37
  Nazis funded in 1936 as propaganda for the Berlin Olympics. 
  His orders were to ﬁnd the treasure of Delphi, lost during the 
  Galatian invasion under Brennus in 280 BC. Conrad Buch 
  accompanied Schleif with a training squad of Hexensoldaten 
  and (on the basis of reconstructed runic rituals) consulted the 
  Oracle itself; this may have been the undertaking’s real purpose. 
  Later assigned to Ahnenerbe digs in East Prussia, Poland, and 
  Slovenia, Schleif spent yearly “vacations” in Greece until 1944, 
  probably still searching for the Treasure of Delphi.
  �� Dr. Franz Altheim and his lover Erika Trautmann 
  explored Roman remains in the East for evidence of the Nordic 
  racial core within the Roman Empire. In August 1938 they 
  arrived in Romania to study Dacian fortiﬁcations, moving 
  on to Assur and Hatra in Iraq. (Altheim and Trautmann had 
  previously scouted Serbia and Croatia in 1937 while looking for 
  more Nordic-Roman runic petroglyphs.) While there, they also 
  prepared reports and established asset relationships for the Sicherheitsdienst 
  (Security Service; SD), the Nazi overseas intelligence service. Doubtless, other 
  Ahnenerbe expeditions were merely cover for such clandestine operations,  
  or possibly joint occult-espionage ventures.
  �� Having sparked Himmler’s and Wüst’s interest with his 1935 discovery 
  of Aryan descendants of Alexander the Great’s soldiers living in Kaﬁristan, 
  the orientalist Inge Kircheisen returned to Afghanistan in 1938. His mission: 
  track down reports of a vimana craft (a ﬂying chariot from Vedic myth) hidden 
  somewhere in a remote valley. With local allies (eager to attack British India 
  when war broke out) his team constructed a “weather station” in the Hindu 
  Kush, possibly intended as a broadcast point for vril power.
  �� The Dutch geologist Dr. Assien Bohmers of the AAG, following his 
  discovery of Cro-Magnon remains in the Mauern caves in Bavaria, toured 
  paleontological sites and libraries all over western Europe in 1938. In December 
  1938, he was allowed to enter the Cave of the Sorcerer at Trois-Frères, believed 
  by its custodian the Abbé Breuil to contain the ﬁrst image of divinity or 
  magic ever painted. Bohmers viewed this horned, bestial ﬁgure alone, and 
  the Ahnenerbe mined his classiﬁed report not only for insights about the 
  primordial runes, but also Cro-Magnon musical instrumentation (horns are 
  painted on the wall of the cave) and the partial skeleton key to lycanthropy.
  �� In the fall of 1939 following the invasion of Poland, Sievers and RSHA 
  Amt VII head Franz Six prepared a list of crucial archaeological, antiquarian, 
  and artistic treasures to be looted from Polish museums and collections.  
  The Ahnenerbe commander of the mission, Untersturmführer Peter Paulsen, 
  was completely outmaneuvered by Göring’s own art expert, Sturmbannführer 
  Kajetan Mühlmann, and by operatives from Alfred Rosenberg’s staﬀ (see feature 
  box). Only the unauthorized action of Hans Schleif secured ﬁve boxcars full 
  Before being arrested for political 
  activity in 1905, Ferdinand 
  Ossendowski (1876–1945) 
  mingled with occult circles in  
  St. Petersburg and Paris, meeting 
  Rasputin and the eminent French 
  magus, Papus. From them, 
  he picked up the doctrine of 
  Agartha, described by Saint-Yves 
  d’Alveydre, that he incorporated 
  into his book Beasts, Men, and 
  Gods. Between 1921 and 1939, 
  he worked as a travel writer and as 
  a political adviser and sometime 
  spy for the Polish government. 
  He joined the Polish Resistance 
  during the war, and may have 
  used his old occult skills to 
  discover, and then mastermind the 
  gathering of intelligence on, Das 
  Laternentrâger Projekt. His death 
  in January 1945 likely aborted an 
  SAC:ST operation to sabotage the 
  Bell site. (2006 TopFoto / Fortean)
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  38
  of artifacts from the Warsaw Archaeological Museum for Ahnenerbe study.
  �� Theologian turned archaeologist Otto Huth was scheduled to lead 
  an expedition to the Canary Islands in September 1939 to search for ruins 
  of Atlantis or Thule. Huth and Sievers were also interested in reports of 
  blond mummies found on the islands, and the theory that the indigenous 
  Guanches were full-blooded Nordic pagans. Huth’s expedition was canceled 
  due to the outbreak of war, but the head of the Spanish General Commission 
  for Excavations (CGEC), Julio Martínez Santa Olalla, used German aircraft 
  and Ahnenerbe specialists in Spanish excavations on the islands between 
  1940 and 1944. Martínez Santa Olalla also supplied Visigothic artifacts 
  from Spain to the Ahnenerbe headquarters.
  �� In November 1940, Conrad Buch led a team from the Geophysics 
  Institute and the Indogermanic-German Music Institute to explore 
  Lemurian ruins in the interior of Madagascar, at that time under Vichy 
  French administration. Buch and his team allegedly secured a Yaktavian bell 
  in the stone forest of Bemaraha in January 1941; Buch returned to Germany 
  in March.
  �� In August 1941, the FKH began sinking shafts into cliﬀs and caves 
  near the Black Stone of Stregoicavar, considered by most to be a Hunnic 
  victory stele. Himmler believed it to be one of the “world chakra points” 
  mapped by Kirchhoﬀ and Wiligut, and possibly a marker for the entrance 
  to a subterranean empire; according to rumor he ordered an elevator shaft 
  drilled at the spot so he could visit the underworld. The Ahnenerbe site 
  team vanished completely on midsummer night, 1942. Skorzeny sent a 
  heavily reinforced Sonderverband Z squad to the stone during his Hungarian 
  Operation Panzerfaust in October 1944 with orders to photograph it, take 
  complete rubbings, and then destroy it with high explosives. No trace of the 
  stone has been found since the war.
  �� One of the goals of Operation Barbarossa was the conquest of new 
  living space for German colonists and settlers in the East. The Crimea, with its 
  salubrious climate, was an ideal target for such colonization. Better yet, according 
  to Ahnenerbe historians it was also the center of a mighty Gothic empire and 
  thus historically German territory. Once Sevastopol fell to the Wehrmacht in 
  July 1942, Himmler ordered the Ahnenerbe to ﬁnd proof of Crimea’s Gothic 
  past and seize any archaeological treasures in Soviet museums, especially the 
  garnet-studded Crown of the Crimea. Sturmbannführer Herbert Jankuhn, 
  accompanied by archaeologists Karl Kersten and the Latvian Baron Wolf von 
  Seefeld arrived in August and followed the 5. SS-Panzer Division “Wiking” all 
  the way to Maikop, where Jankuhn’s Hexensoldaten proved their worth in the 
  surprise capture of the city. Jankuhn looted several crates of artifacts (including 
  many Scythian pieces), but the crown (and all the Gothic remains speciﬁcally) 
  eluded him. He stayed at the front with “Wiking Division,” sending Kersten 
  back to the Crimea to inventory cave cities for Himmler.
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  39
  Tibet and the 
  Secret Kingdom
  “[Hitler] has set us the goal for our generation to be a new beginning 
  – he wants us to return to the source of the blood, to root us again 
  in the soil – he seeks again for strength from sources which have been 
  buried for 2,000 years.”
  – Heinrich Himmler, January 1935
  On August 4, 1939, at 5:10 p.m., a Junkers Ju 52 passenger aircraft taxied 
  to a stop at Oberwiesenfeld Airport in Munich. Waiting on the tarmac 
  were Heinrich Himmler and Karl Wolﬀ, eager for a ﬁrst-hand report of the 
  Ahnenerbe’s latest triumph. The propellers stopped, the doors opened, and 
  in his dress-black Allgemeine-SS uniform Hauptsturmführer Ernst Schaefer 
  stepped down to meet his masters. He had returned to Germany despite every 
  bureaucratic obstacle the fading British Raj could throw at him, returned a 
  hero after 13 months in Tibet. In his black-gloved hands he held an idol 
  carved from meteoric iron, fallen to Earth in the Gobi Desert in 20,000 BC 
  – the very place and time that the Teutonic race had begun its migration to 
  Germany, according to theosophical lore. The idol’s Nordic features, 
  Tibetan headgear, and swastika breastplate proved the theosophists 
  correct: Tibet and Germany were two branches from the Aryan root-
  race that had been born in Inner Asia!
  A renowned hunter and ornithologist, Schaefer had been part 
  of two previous expeditions to Tibet, in 1931 and 1934–35 under 
  the American adventurer (and future OSS oﬃcer) Brooke Dolan II. 
  Schaefer joined the SS in March 1933, one of the “March violets” 
  who suddenly sprouted Nazi convictions when Hitler came to power. 
  Trumpeting his success in his second expedition, he sought Ahnenerbe 
  support for a planned third expedition under his own leadership. He 
  expatiated on the Aryan symbols he had seen in Tibetan graves, and 
  on the prestige he could bring to German science. After meeting 
  Schaefer, Himmler agreed to sponsor the trip on two conditions: the 
  entire expedition complement must be SS personnel, and Karl-Maria 
  Wiligut must approve of Schaefer. In May 1937, Schaefer and Wiligut 
  Dr. Mathilde Ludendorff 
  (1877–1966) met General 
  Erich Ludendorff in 1923 and 
  married him in 1926, providing 
  her with a vastly larger audience 
  for her völkisch beliefs and 
  conspiratorial theories. She was a 
  devout pagan, seeing Christianity 
  as a Jewish cult, but she also 
  deprecated the occult, which 
  she derived from Semitic and 
  other anti-Germanic sources. 
  She helped turn Ludendorff’s 
  personal mass-conspiratorial 
  movement, the Tannenbergbund, 
  into a pagan society devoted 
  to Gottserkenntnis, or “God 
  Knowledge.” (With 100,000 
  followers in 1925, it rapidly 
  tapered off in rivalry with the 
  Nazis.) Among her bêtes noirs 
  were the Jesuits, the Masons, the 
  Dalai Lama (whom she fingered 
  as the head of the global Jewish 
  conspiracy), yoga and Hinduism 
  in general, and spiritualists. 
  Her 1937 book Ein Blick in die 
  Dunkelkammer (A Moment in the 
  Dark Chamber) attacked mediums 
  and the parapsychological 
  researches of Albert von Schrenck-
  Notzing. (Mel Gordon Archive)
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  40
  met at the latter’s Grunewald villa. In an opium haze, the aging clairvoyant 
  slipped into a trance and began listing, and then describing in detail, 
  lamaseries and sacred places in eastern Tibet, places Schaefer had visited or 
  dreamt of. Schaefer later wrote that it felt as though Wiligut was inside his 
  mind, comparing the experience to the legendary telepathic abilities of the 
  Tibetan adepts.
  After that meeting, Schaefer transformed from a cynical scientist hoping 
  to exploit Himmler’s Asiatic ﬁxation to a true believer in Aryanist magic. 
  Even the tragic death of his wife in a shooting accident on a remote lake – 
  Schaefer dropped his shotgun in the boat and it went oﬀ – could not stop 
  him. (A conﬁdential OSS report suggested Herta Schaefer’s death was actually 
  a human sacriﬁce, much as Agamemnon sacriﬁced Iphigenia before the attack 
  on Troy.) As he pored over the occult manuscripts and secret research papers 
  in the Ahnenerbe library, Schaefer realized that his idealized “Forbidden 
  Kingdom” of Tibet was only the surface and shadow of the true Forbidden 
  Kingdom in Central Asia: the hidden empire of Agartha.
  The Path to Agartha
  Agartha was ﬁrst revealed by Louis Jacolliot, a French colonial jurist in 
  Chandernagore, a French colony in India. In Les Fils de Dieu (The Son of 
  God; 1873) he told the story of “Asgartha,” the solar capital of ancient India. 
  In his telling, when the Aryans conquered Asgartha in 10,000 BC, its priestly 
  rulers initiated the invaders as their warrior caste. The occultist Alexandre 
  Saint-Yves d’Alveydre showed a diﬀerent face of “Agarttha” in his Mission de 
  l’Inde (Mission of India; 1886). Trained in Sanskrit and in the elder alphabet 
  of Vattanian by a mysterious Indian guru, Saint-Yves described an ancient 
  subterranean kingdom beneath the Himalayas powered by electrical force, 
  ruled by the Sovereign Pontiﬀ. The legend of Agartha went underground for 
  40 years, surfacing again in the travel narrative Beasts, Men, and Gods (1922) 
  by the novelist and adventurer Ferdinand Ossendowski. Having barely 
  survived a civil war in Mongolia, Ossendowski reported that all of Inner 
  Asia was in a ferment, expecting the King of the World and his supermen to 
  emerge from his cavern empire of “Agharti” deep inside the earth. However 
  it was spelled, Agartha was clearly a force to be reckoned with.
  While Ossendowski was dodging communist cavalry in Mongolia, 
  another Asian traveler was teaching Rudolf Hess everything he knew. 
  Karl Haushofer, a Bavarian general and professor of geopolitics, had been 
  Bavaria’s military attaché in Japan from 1908 to 1910. While there, he had 
  been initiated into the Ryokuryūkai, and possibly met Gurdjieﬀ in China. 
  He also met with the Ryokuryūkai agent Narita Yasuteru, who had visited 
  Tibet in 1901 and contacted the mysterious eminence grise of the Tibetan 
  priesthood known as Gyanggu Chhashup Pönpo, or the Man With Green 
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  41
  Gloves. Between Haushofer’s return to Germany and his service in World 
  War I, he formulated his geopolitical theories of Lebensraum (living space) 
  and the crucial strategic position of Central Asia in any coming world 
  conﬂict. After the Armistice, Haushofer returned to academia; Hess became 
  his assistant and intellectual heir. Hess introduced Haushofer to Hitler in 
  Landsberg Prison in 1923 after the failed Beer-Hall Putsch; whether their 
  talks covered more than global strategy and the virtues of the Japanese 
  military state remains unknown.
  The Man With Green Gloves had sent his message west. Another failed 
  putsch sent the reply east. In 1920, the Ariosophical stormtroopers of 
  the Ehrhardt Brigade instigated the so-called “Kapp Putsch” in Berlin, 
  brieﬂy seizing the capital from the Weimar government until they were 
  forced to step down four days later in the midst of a general strike. Their 
  propaganda minister, a Hungarian adventurer, spy, and occultist (initiated 
  into Aleister Crowley’s magical Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO)) named 
  Ignacy Trebitsch-Lincoln, ﬂed the ensuing welter of betrayal with a valise 
  full of secret documents. When he surfaced in China in 1925, it was as a 
  theosophical Buddhist lama variously named Chao Kung or Dordje Den. 
  He had made his way to Tibet with the Thule’s counter-oﬀer, and it was 
  accepted. During the years between 1928 and 1932, Trebitsch-Lincoln 
  traveled between China and Europe, meeting up with his fellow Kapp-
  putschist (and sometime Hitler supporter) General Erich Ludendorﬀ, 
  himself converted to runic Ariosophy in 1926 by his second wife Mathilde. 
  Trebitsch-Lincoln moved through all esoteric circles, from the Polaires in 
  France to Hanussen’s “Palace of the Occult,” his agenda always mysterious. 
  During those same years, reports and rumors ﬂew that the Man With 
  Green Gloves was seen in Berlin – possibly Trebitsch-Lincoln had opened 
  the way for the master to bilocate at least his astral form to the burgeoning 
  sorcerous capital of the West. But some things could only be accomplished 
  by a meeting in the ﬂesh.
  41
  41
  41
  41
  41
  (OVERLEAF)
  Although no records survive of the meeting, SS 
  Hauptsturmführer Ernst Schaefer likely met Gyanggu 
  Chhashup Pönpo, the Man With Green Gloves, 
  on March 25, 1939 in the fabled Black Lamasery 
  somewhere in the Yarlung Valley near Yumbu Lagang in 
  southeastern Tibet.
  The lama’s dress is speculative, based on that of the 
  Panchen Lama; other reports describe a ﬁgure swathed 
  in maroon robes with only green gloves and a “pale, 
  waxy, mustached face” visible. Schaefer wears his black 
  Ahnenerbe-SS uniform; SS Obersturmführer Karl 
  Wienert, at parade rest behind him, remains in the 
  expedition’s normal garb. From the cessation of Schaefer’s 
  and Beger’s reported discussions of the yeti after their 
  return from the Yarlung Valley, presumably there were 
  yeti present at the meeting, perhaps as representatives of 
  the Third Root Race.
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  SS Tibet Expedition
  The Japanese invasion of China in 1937, while welcome to Himmler for racial 
  reasons, blocked Schaefer’s preferred route for the SS Tibet Expedition. Now, 
  it would have to enter the Forbidden Kingdom through British India, which 
  meant keeping a lower proﬁle. Schaefer obediently downplayed the involvement 
  of the Ahnenerbe in his mission planning and support, even printing two 
  sets of letterhead (with and without the phrase “under the patronage of the 
  Reichsführer-SS Himmler and in connection with the Ahnenerbe”) for his 
  renamed “Deutsche Tibet Expedition Ernst Schaefer.” However, Schaefer’s 
  agenda and his personnel remained Ahnenerbe to the core.
  Along with his cameraman and entomologist Ernst Krause and his technical 
  staﬀ oﬃcer Edmund Geer (both SS men), Schaefer selected two other key 
  specialists. SS Untersturmführer Dr. Karl Wienert was the team geophysicist 
  and geologist. A pupil of Germany’s premier Tibetan explorer Wilhelm Filchner, 
  Wienert was an expert in geomagnetic mapping. An intensive Ahnenerbe course 
  trained him to map ley lines and other occult forces, and briefed him on the 
  importance of ﬁnding the gateway to Agartha. The FKH had been searching 
  for a more convenient opening to the inner world in Sicily and Greece, but 
  some force had apparently closed those ancient conduits of chthonic power. 
  If Germany was to harness vril or ally itself with a race of advanced Aryan 
  supermen, it would have to make a pilgrimage to the source of life, Tibet.
  Himmler selected a section head in Wiligut’s RuSHA, SS Untersturmführer 
  Bruno Beger, to be the team’s anthropologist and race specialist. Beger’s 
  consuming passion throughout his career was the determination of empirical 
  physical diﬀerences between the Nordic and Jewish races. In the Himalayas, 
  he measured the skulls and limbs of the people he met, looking for traces of 
  Aryan blood left over from the dawn of mankind. (In 1943, the same urge led 
  him into eager partnership 
  in Sievers’ and Greite’s 
  program of anatomical 
  mass murder.) He and 
  Schaefer discussed the yeti, 
  that mysterious “Wild Man 
  of the Snows.” Schaefer 
  was certain the yeti was 
  an unknown species of 
  bear; Tibet, as the place 
  Ariosophists theorized that 
  evolution began in this 
  aeon, must logically have 
  produced 
  hundreds 
  of 
  species unknown in lower 
  lands. Beger was not so 
  SS Tibet Expedition personnel, 
  from left to right: staff officer 
  Edmund Geer, geophysicist Karl 
  Wienert, entomologist Ernst 
  Krause, anthropologist Bruno 
  Beger, leader Ernst Schaefer. 
  (Bundesarchiv, Bild 135-KA-03-
  076, photo: Krause, Ernst)
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  45
  sure; he had also heard it called the mi-gö, a name he derived from 
  Aryan roots meaning “the changing horror.” Perhaps the supermen 
  of Agartha emerged to kill subhumans in the ice.
  The British resident in Sikkim on the Tibetan border attempted 
  to stall Schaefer’s expedition, but the explorer would not be 
  hindered by bureaucrats. While in London, Schaefer had met with 
  Sir Francis Younghusband, who had invaded Tibet for Britain in 
  1906 and 30 years later was promulgating belief in stellar gods 
  who controlled the Earth telepathically. Younghusband had told 
  Schaefer simply to “sneak across the border,” and on December 
  20, 1938, bolstered by a polite invitation to visit a local potentate, 
  Schaefer did essentially that.
  Inside Tibet at last, the expedition could begin its real work. 
  Schaefer discussed the power of the swastika and the hateful 
  qualities of British and Chinese imperialism with the Reting 
  Rinpoche, regent for the as-yet unmanifest Dalai Lama. Wienert set 
  about charting the magnetic deformations around Tibet; he spent the party’s 
  two months in Lhasa mapping the ley ﬂows to determine the speciﬁc global 
  chakra point that would mark Agartha. In a tiny lamasery tucked under the 
  eaves of the Potala, Wienert consulted mandalas and set compasses by a small 
  meteoric-iron idol the monks were surprisingly eager to give up. Beger had his 
  own successes: in addition to many more physical casts and measurements, he 
  managed to obtain a version of the Kangyur, the compiled wisdom of Tibetan 
  Buddhism. The copy he received included a black terma, dark wisdom revealed 
  by a Secret Master: speciﬁcally, ratios and chants found in the Cryptical Books 
  of Hsan, which supposedly predated the destruction of Lemuria.
  With Wienert’s measurements and the hints teased out of Beger’s terma, 
  Schaefer led his men to the fortress of Yumbu Lagang, the oldest building in 
  Tibet. Here, the ﬁrst Tibetan god-kings had descended on a golden rope from 
  heaven and uplifted the sub-creatures dwelling there by mating with them. In 
  these hills, concealed by a vibratory barrier, lay the Hidden Lamasery of the 
  Man With Green Gloves, gatekeeper of Agartha. Schaefer and his team proved 
  their worth by ﬁnding the entrance, and the legate of the King of the World 
  welcomed them to his sanctum. No record remains of that meeting; presumably, 
  Schaefer agreed that Nazi Germany would play the role of the ancient Aryan 
  warriors of “Asgartha” long ago: become the earthly army of the Secret Empire 
  in exchange for the power of the gods. In token of this agreement, Schaefer 
  received a phurba, or sacred dagger, made from an unknown metal. In Tibetan 
  Bön practice, the phurba both represents and controls powerful demons or 
  thought-forms. The phurba Schaefer received contained these wrathful energies, 
  penned in a trapezohedral geometry that may have also encoded the true secret 
  of vril. Whatever it contained, it was enough. Less than a month after Schaefer 
  brought it back to Berlin, Germany was at war with the world.
  Bruno Beger taking skull 
  measurements in Sikkim. 
  (Bundesarchiv, Bild 135-KB-15-
  089, photo: Krause, Ernst)
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  46
  Unholy Quests
  “Out of Parsifal I make a religion.”
  – Adolf Hitler, September 30, 1923
  On April 2, 1938, Adolf Hitler had just entered Vienna in triumph. His 
  homeland, Austria, had joined the Third Reich after a bloodless invasion and 
  a resounding vote of approval. He was returning in power and glory to the city 
  where he had been poor and despised, with only the city’s museums as refuges 
  from the cold of the street. As a young man in the Kunsthistorisches Museum 
  of the Hofburg Palace, he had contemplated the regalia of the medieval Holy 
  Roman Emperors. Today, he gazed upon them again. The crown and sword of 
  the Hohenstaufens remained in their cases, as did the Hapsburg crown jewels. 
  Only one relic had been removed, by a special team of Ahnenerbe custodians 
  who had entered Austria under cover and seized it in the ﬁrst minutes of 
  the Anschluss. Their leader, SS Standartenführer Conrad Buch, now stepped 
  forward and extended the Spear of Destiny to his Führer.
  While he was an impoverished failure in Vienna, Hitler had somehow 
  scraped together the money to attend the opera. His ﬁrst experience of 
  Wagner’s Lohengrin had been a life-changing event, and he soaked up as 
  much of the composer’s cocktail of Teutonic myth, racial exaltation, and 
  theatrical power as he could. Hitler was particularly obsessed with Parsifal, 
  Wagner’s enigmatic opera about the motherless knight who redeems the 
  Order of the Grail by recovering the spear that left the Grail King Amfortas 
  wounded. Parsifal seizes the spear from the evil magician Klingsor, an 
  act that shatters Klingsor’s power, but must spend years searching for the 
  Grail Castle before he can use its power to heal the king and restore the 
  land. Wagner equates the Spear of the Grail legend with the holy lance 
  that pierced Jesus’ side during the Cruciﬁxion – although he never refers 
  explicitly to Christ in the opera’s libretto.
  The Spear of Destiny
  The fate of the Roman centurion’s lance that pierced Christ’s side remains 
  unknown. The Lance of Longinus may have traveled to Britain with Joseph 
  of Arimathea, or been passed down as a cult object through the years 
  by secretly Christian legionaries. It appears in hagiography as the Lance 
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  47
  of St. Maurice, who used it to rally his legion of martyrs in 286, as the 
  Spear of Constantine, who used it to win the battle of the Milvian Bridge 
  in 312, and as the Holy Lance of Antioch, uncovered during a Turkish 
  siege of the Crusader city in 1098. The fate of those objects is unknown.  
  In more orthodox Church history, the Holy Lance is reported by travelers in 
  Jerusalem from the 6th century; when Jerusalem fell to the Persian emperor 
  Chosroes II in 615 he broke oﬀ the spear’s tip and sent the shard to the 
  Byzantine emperor Heraclius. Heraclius defeated Chosroes, recaptured the 
  whole spear and returned it to Constantinople; Baldwin II sold the lance-
  tip to King Louis IX of France, who enthroned it in his church of Sainte-
  Chapelle. (The lance-tip vanished during the French Revolution.) The lance 
  in Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, but Sultan Bayezid II sent it to 
  the Pope in 1492 as a bribe. Ever since, it has lain beneath the dome of St. 
  Peter’s; Hitler never tried to remove it.
  Hitler depicted as Parsifal, with 
  the Nazi banner in place of the 
  Spear. Hitler interpreted Parsifal 
  as a story of racial, not spiritual 
  redemption, saying: “It is not the 
  Christian religion of compassion 
  that is acclaimed, but pure noble 
  blood ... The king is suffering 
  from the incurable ailment of 
  corrupted blood. The uninitiated 
  but pure [Parsifal] is tempted to 
  abandon himself in Klingsor’s 
  magic garden to the lusts and 
  excesses of corrupt civilization 
  [Kundry] ... For myself, I have the 
  most intimate familiarity with 
  Wagner’s mental processes. At 
  every stage of my life I come 
  back to him ... If we strip Parsifal 
  of every poetic element, we learn 
  from it that selection and renewal 
  are possible only amid the 
  continuous tension of a lasting 
  struggle.” (Peter Newark Pictures / 
  The Bridgeman Art Library)
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  48
  The Spear of Vienna, however, was another matter. The Holy Roman 
  Emperors held that spear in the Hofburg as a symbol of their ability to 
  rule. Before them, the kings of Germany wielded it, in direct line from 
  Charlemagne. Charlemagne took the spear from the Germanic Lombards 
  when he proclaimed himself their king in 774. At some point in time, smiths 
  inserted one of the nails of the True Cross into the base of the spear; possibly 
  at the accession of Aripert, the ﬁrst Catholic king of the Lombards, in 653. 
  The royal Lombard dynasty was called the Guningi, meaning “wielders of 
  Gungnir,” Wotan’s spear; their kings claimed power by grasping the royal 
  lance. In short, Buch may have not intended the gift of the spear as invoking 
  Christian power at all, but as the exaltation and proclamation of a new 
  Wotanist kingship of Germany, and Hitler may have received it in that spirit.
  Brigadeführer Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Austrian SS, oversaw the 
  shipment of the spear (along with the rest of the imperial regalia and several 
  additional crates of treasure) to the city of Nuremberg. Nuremberg was not 
  only the cult city of the Nazi movement, it had also been the home of the spear 
  from 1424 to 1796, the spear and the other regalia being moved to Vienna only 
  when it seemed that Napoleon might seize the treasure and whatever occult 
  power it possessed. Kaltenbrunner had the spear enshrined in St. Katherine’s 
  Cathedral, where it rested until the RAF bombing raid on Nuremberg of 
  August 29, 1942 damaged the church. (Churchill never commented on the 
  rumor that he targeted the cathedral deliberately to destroy Hitler’s sacred 
  talisman.) Burgomaster Willi Leibel transferred the spear to a bank vault, then 
  in 1943 to a tunnel beneath Nuremberg Castle. When another suspiciously 
  well-aimed RAF raid nearly destroyed the tunnel on October 13, 1944, Leibel 
  moved it again, to a cave beneath a school on the Panier Platz.
  The Ark of the Covenant
  Unlike the reappearing spear, the Ark of the Covenant had vanished 
  completely. Contradictory apocryphal texts suggest that the Ark was carried 
  oﬀ to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar or hidden by the prophet Jeremiah, but 2 
  Chronicles 12:9 seems very clear: “So Shishak king of Egypt came up against 
  Jerusalem, and took away the treasures of the house of the Lord, and the 
  treasures of the king’s house; he took all away.” On March 17, 1939, the 
  Alsatian archaeologist Pierre Montet discovered the tomb of the Pharaoh 
  Shoshenq I, the Biblical “Shishak,” at Tanis, the capital of the 22nd Dynasty 
  of ancient Egypt. Inside was a hieroglyphic fresco making it clear that the 
  victorious Egyptians had taken the Ark of the Covenant to Tanis.
  Montet tried to keep the discovery secret until he could translate the script, 
  but word leaked out in the French occult underworld. Two secret societies 
  immediately sent agents to ﬁnd the Ark before Montet could: the Polaires 
  and the Veilleurs (“Watchers”). The Polaires had emerged in Paris in the mid-
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  49
  1920s as an “Agarthist” movement inspired by Ossendowski’s book and by a 
  mysterious oracle discovered by two music students. Concerned with astral 
  projection, the lost polar continent, and the lost treasures of the Cathars, they 
  wanted primarily to eclipse their rivals. Their former guru, the anti-modernist 
  esoteric scholar René Guénon, lived in Cairo; his occult contacts doubtless 
  brought in the Polaires.
  The Alsatian chemist and theosophist René Schwaller de Lubicz founded the 
  Veilleurs in 1919 in the aftermath of the war; their goal was to install a “Synarchist” 
  government modeled on Saint-Yves d’Alveydre’s description of Agartha. Schwaller 
  considered the swastika the operative symbol of society, denounced lower races, 
  and designed a uniform for the Veilleurs featuring a brown shirt and jackboots. 
  He oﬃcially dissolved his order in 1922, but it remained active on the French 
  right wing as La Cagoule (“The Hood”). In 1928 Schwaller moved to Luxor in 
  Prior to Montet’s discovery, the 
  eccentric American evangelist 
  Antonia Frederick Futterer (male, 
  despite the name) claimed to 
  have discovered the Ark in 1926 
  in a cave high atop Mt. Nebo in the 
  Transjordan. According to a report 
  by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 
  Futterer received a map to the Ark 
  from “a German specialist recently 
  arrived from Germany.” Was 
  this an Ahnenerbe or Veilleurist 
  spoiling operation, or did the 
  “tunnel lined with hieroglyphics” 
  that Futterer discovered hold 
  some other occult truth? (PD-US)
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  50
  Upper Egypt, to interpret its architecture and inscriptions according to his own 
  mystical insights. When he heard about the discovery at Tanis, he called on his 
  old brown-shirted colleagues – who included Rudolf Hess.
  Hess had brieﬂy joined the Veilleurs while at loose ends in 1919, but by 
  1939 he served a new master. He ordered an Ahnenerbe team to Tanis to seize 
  the Ark by force if necessary. The squabbling and inﬁghting of the two French 
  conspiracies, and Hess’ insistence on micro-managing the operation from 
  Berlin, created near chaos at Tanis. The American government’s Inquiry Group 
  (a team of Middle Eastern intelligence specialists recruited in 1918, with a 
  growing interest in occult matters) picked up Hess’ transmissions and sent their 
  own team to Egypt, headed by 
  an archaeologist from Marshall 
  College in Connecticut. After 
  a series of ambushes, ﬁreﬁghts, 
  and considerable damage to 
  the dig site (which incidentally 
  prevented Montet from being 
  able to publish his ﬁndings), 
  the Ark was in Washington 
  D.C. and Hess’ Ahnenerbe 
  team were all dead.
  Otto Rahn (1904–39?) in the 
  Grotto of Lombrives in 1931, 
  before he joined the SS. With the 
  resources of the Ahnenerbe, Rahn 
  deciphered the petroglyphs in the 
  Grotto to deduce the location of 
  the Grail. Lombrives is the largest 
  open cave system in Europe, 
  located near Tarascon (another 
  cognate with Sarras?) in the 
  French Pyrenees. Its opening near 
  Ornolac is just 11 miles from the 
  Cathar stronghold at Montségur on 
  the other side of the ridge, and the 
  Lombrives cave complex extends 
  easily twice that distance. (PD-US)
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  51
  The Holy Grail
  In 1929, a young historian named Otto Rahn joined the Polaires in Paris. 
  He was obsessed with the Cathars, dualist heretics whose principality in 
  the south of France the Church extirpated in the 13th century. Believing 
  that they held the secret of the Holy Grail, he used his Polaire contacts to 
  visit a small Cathar community in Montségur, where the Cathars had made 
  their last stand in 1244. In 1931 and 1932 he explored the area thoroughly, 
  taking hundreds of photographs of various caves and grottos. In 1933 he 
  published some of the results of his research as Kreuzzug gegen den Gral 
  (Crusade Against the Grail), a neo-Wagnerian screed hailing the Cathars as 
  a pure-blooded elite destroyed for their beliefs by a hateful alien religion. He 
  hinted that the Grail was, as the poet Wolfram von Eschenbach described it 
  in Parzival, a “stone fallen from heaven,” and that the Cathars derived their 
  purity from its power.
  Even in 1932, Rahn was given to wearing clothing embroidered with 
  the Sieg-rune of the SS. By 1935, Rahn was on Himmler’s personal staﬀ, 
  working closely with Wiligut at stone circles and ruins all over Germany. 
  The next year, he traveled to Iceland on Ahnenerbe business; in 1937  
  SS Untersturmführer Rahn published another work of Cathar mysticism, 
  Luzifers Hofgesind (Lucifer’s Courtiers) and returned brieﬂy to Montségur. 
  That fall, he served a mysterious tour at the old Templar castle and new 
  concentration camp at Dachau; the oﬃcial story of a “disciplinary action” 
  was obvious disinformation. He spent 1938 researching a new book about 
  Orpheus, who descended into the underworld and returned; that year it also 
  transpired that Rahn had not ﬁlled out a racial purity form. A public purge 
  of Rahn would have been too much, given Wiligut’s near-simultaneous 
  forced resignation: Hitler might possibly have shut down the Ahnenerbe, 
  or transfer it to Rosenberg. On May 18, 1939, SS Obersturmführer Rahn’s 
  obituary appeared in the Völkische Beobachter, stating that the expert 
  outdoorsman had died on a low mountain 
  in the Tyrol in March.
  Otto Rahn knew too much to be allowed 
  to live. But he also knew things Himmler 
  needed, such as the possible location of 
  the Grail. So Wolﬀ turned him over to the 
  Brotherhood of Death to be reconditioned 
  into a proper state of Kadavergehorsam, 
  “corpse-like obedience.” Then he sent him 
  oﬀ to Syria under Foreign Ministry cover 
  (using the name “Rudolph Rahn”) to check 
  on the rumor of another Grail discovery 
  near Alexandretta. Wolﬀ decided not to 
  order the Cathar Grail recovered at once: 
  This picture of Otto Rahn was 
  taken during his Ahnenerbe 
  service. Note his characteristic 
  archaeologist’s fedora. (PD-US)
  (opposite)
  This 1895 painting by Edwin 
  Austin Abbey depicts Galahad 
  as “King of Sarras” attaining the 
  Holy Grail. The 13th-century Prose 
  Lancelot describes Sarras as 
  an “island” between Britain and 
  Palestine and places it in Egypt. 
  Other sources conflate Sarras 
  with the mysterious mountain 
  of Munsalvaesche (Montsalvat) 
  mentioned in Parzival, and 
  describe it as a mountainous 
  kingdom. One wing of the 
  Ahnenerbe believed that the Grail 
  kingdom of Sarras was the Aryan 
  Visigothic kingdom in the Spanish 
  Pyrenees, especially the region 
  around Saragossa. In October 
  1940, Himmler visited Spain and 
  with an Ahnenerbe escort toured 
  the mountainside monastery at 
  Montserrat (a potential candidate 
  for Montsalvat) near Barcelona. 
  Whether he sought to confirm 
  or contradict Rahn’s placement 
  of the Grail in France remains 
  unknown. (Library of Congress)
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  52
  the ongoing circus in Egypt demonstrated what happened when French 
  mystics discovered something. Rahn spent the next four years building 
  his diplomatic cover, liaising with the Afrika Korps on occult matters, and 
  mounting the occasional treasure hunt. When Wolﬀ transferred to Italy, 
  he had Rahn appointed ambassador to Rome. Spurred by the threat of an 
  Allied invasion of France, Wolﬀ sent Rahn to collect the Grail from a grotto 
  near Montségur in March 1944, supervised by the increasingly geweckt Otto 
  Skorzeny. After evading a Polaire astral hunting team, Rahn and Skorzeny 
  returned to Berlin with the Grail.
  In early 1944, with the Eastern Front near collapse 
  and an Allied landing imminent, Himmler authorized 
  the recovery of the Cathar Grail from Montségur in 
  Vichy France, by then under German occupation. On 
  March 15, SS Obersturmführer Otto Rahn (oﬃcially 
  dead for ﬁve years) and a squad of Sonderverband Z 
  Hexensoldaten seconded to SS-Jäger-Bataillon 502 
  rappelled down the side of the 1,200m mountain to 
  enter a subterranean grotto beneath the Cathar fortress. 
  Rahn carried one of the Yaktavian Bells, recovered on 
  an earlier Ahnenerbe expedition to Madagascar, using 
  its vibrations to create a resonant wave within the 
  Grail. Having lowered in pieces and rebuilt in situ an 
  experimental hydrophone to detect echoed responses, 
  Rahn’s command rapidly navigated the maze of tunnels 
  and caverns beneath the mountain to discover the 
  original Cathar treasure-house.
  Rahn’s men wear the Waﬀen-SS uniform, although 
  with the original Ahnenerbe maroon piping. Many 
  Hexensoldaten, having been trained in knot- and cord-
  magic, were reluctant to discard parts of their old insignia 
  (which could also be used against them in “voodoo 
  dolls” or other poppet-magic) despite the oﬃcial change 
  to pale blue.
  FRATERNITAS SATURNII
  In 1925, bookseller Gregor A. Gregorius (born Eugen 
  Grosche) founded a Pansophic magical lodge with, 
  among others, Albin Grau, the set designer for the ﬁlm 
  Nosferatu. After an organizational wrangle with Aleister 
  Crowley in 1928, Gregorius split his followers oﬀ as the 
  Fraternitas Saturnii, or Brotherhood of Saturn. Gregorius 
  identiﬁed Saturn, Lucifer, and Wotan as a single being 
  called “the GOTOS entity.” His new lodge was explicitly 
  “Luciferian,” dedicated to channeling astral demonic 
  power from the “sphere of Saturn” through the “gates of 
  the square” using drugs and sexual rituals, even vampirism.
  The Saturnians’ enthusiasm for the “left-hand path” 
  attracted many magi in the late Weimar sorcerous scene; 
  the rune-magician and dowser Karl Spiesberger was a 
  Saturnian Brother. But Saturn fell afoul of Wotan: the 
  Gestapo seized Gregorius’ bookshop in 1936. He ﬂed to 
  Switzerland and then to Italy, only to be extradited by the 
  Salo government in 1943. Sturmbannführer Dr. Heinrich 
  Fesel of RSHA Amt VII (an astrologer himself and former 
  Saturnian Brother) engineered Gregorius’ mysterious 
  release from the Leipzig city jail, possibly as part of 
  Kaltenbrunner’s shadowy Projekt Leo (see below). In 1945, 
  he became a police constable in Dresden, something 
  impossible without Kaltenbrunner’s patronage.
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  Zerzura
  The lost oasis of Zerzura, the City of the Birds, fascinated an elite group of 
  adventurers and explorers based in Cairo in the late 1920s and early 1930s. 
  Called the Zerzura Club, it included many future members of Britain’s famed 
  Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), including Ralph Bagnold. Its most 
  exotic member was a gifted pilot and Hungarian count named László Almásy. 
  The son of a noted explorer of Central Asia, Almásy was an initiate of the 
  ONT and, given his interest in mystical Asia and Arabia, possibly aligned 
  Pendulum divination goes back 
  to the Romans or before, and 
  even pendulum dowsing over a 
  map dates from at least the 18th 
  century. However, in 1906 the 
  French priest Abbé Alexis Mermet 
  began to use the pendulum to 
  “dowse” harmful energy flows 
  within the human body, setting off 
  a new occult fad for radiesthesia 
  (a term coined in 1930 combining 
  “radiation” and “aesthesia,” or 
  “feeling”) across Western Europe. 
  Tarot-diviner A.F. Glahn published 
  Radio der Natur (Radio of Nature) 
  in 1925, about the use of the 
  pendulum to detect disease or 
  crime, heal wounds, dowse for 
  metals, or communicate with the 
  stars. He was recruited by the MFA 
  as a pendulum seer and died of 
  heart failure in 1941 after working 
  with Thule fragments from 
  Greenland. (Mel Gordon Archive)
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  55
  with the “Turanian” neo-pagan and racialist wing of the Hungarian Etelköz 
  movement. He was also a spy for the Italian fascist military, charting possible 
  oases and observing British security in Egypt.
  With his occult background, Almásy knew that Zerzura was more than 
  an oasis, or even a famous treasure-house. He was familiar with the legends 
  that it had been built by exiled Templars, and was guarded by the fearsome 
  djinn. Its name also evoked the Aryan legend of the Simurgh, the bird who 
  remembered all the ages of the world. Convinced that Zerzura held the key 
  to occult knowledge and power over the entire East, Almásy deliberately 
  misidentiﬁed a mundane Egyptian wadi as Zerzura to his adventuring 
  friends. In 1940, after Hungary became part of the Axis, Almásy joined 
  the Luftwaﬀe and shared his information with the Abwehr. Transferred 
  to Libya with the Afrika Korps, Almásy found himself working with old 
  Templarist comrades in the MFA on a series of secret occult missions in the 
  deserts and tomb complexes of Egypt.
  The MFA could not keep the existence of Zerzura secret from the SS 
  forever. Almásy was ordered to provide the coordinates of the true Zerzura 
  to the Ahnenerbe for a Sonderverband Z strike planned for Walpurgisnacht 
  1942. A jealous von Knobelsdorﬀ refused his oﬀer to accompany the venture, 
  to Almásy’s good fortune as it happened. Obersturmbannführer Reiner Galt 
  mounted a frontal assault on the City of the Birds after a botched attempt 
  to exorcise its djinn defender. A third of Kompanie Donar were killed or 
  maddened; Galt and his immediate command staﬀ disappeared without a 
  trace. (In 1961, Mossad special agents found dog tags from Galt’s men for 
  sale in Leopoldville in the Congo.) Almásy continued special operations for 
  the MFA, establishing the secret “Dora” airﬁelds in the Sahara that later 
  allowed much of Germany’s saucer ﬂeet to escape capture.
  55
  55
  55
  55
  (OVERLEAF)
  SS Obersturmbannführer Reiner Galt’s presumptuous 
  assault on the djinn guardian of Zerzura certainly sealed 
  the fate of Kompanie Donar’s April 30, 1942 assault 
  on the City of the Birds, probably doomed the whole 
  Sonderverband Z project, and possibly altered the course 
  of the war. Without control of (or an alliance with) the 
  djinn of Zerzura, the Afrika Korps could not outﬂank 
  the British forces in Egypt; three months later, Rommel’s 
  last oﬀensive ground to a halt at El Alamein.
  The Sdkfz 250 carries a modiﬁed version of Marius 
  Zippermayr’s Wirbelringkanone (“vortex-ring cannon”), 
  using compressed hydrogen to ﬁre a miniature cyclone at a 
  target. Intended as an antiaircraft weapon, the Ahnenerbe 
  repurposed it as a runic sound-and-air projector: the Odal-
  rune (representing “blood and soil”) “grounds” the djinn, 
  a being of air and ﬁre. The halftrack itself carries standard 
  anti-magic precautions, including mirrors and inscribed 
  scrolls copied from the black terma of Agartha; the  
  Ka-, Yr-, and Lagu-runes painted on the Greif provide 
  magical invisibility. The rune-mage (per normal SS 
  practice with the Afrika Korps, wearing a standard DAK 
  uniform with no SS badge except his Hagal-rune tab) 
  summons the djinn with blood poured in the Gibor-rune 
  “arising” pattern and a congeries of spheres.
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  Aktion Hess
  “All inﬂuences which might impair or damage the leadership of the 
  people exercised by the Führer with the help of the NSDAP must be 
  eliminated … the deleterious inﬂuences of astrologers, seers and other 
  fakers are to be eliminated and suppressed by the State … Not until 
  this has happened, does the state leadership have inﬂuence on the 
  individual citizens. Not until then are the people and Reich secure in 
  their existence for all time.”
  – Martin Bormann, Party Chancellery Decree, June 7, 1941
  On the evening of May 10, 1941, expert pilot and Deputy Führer Rudolf 
  Hess climbed into a twin-engined Messerschmitt Me 110 ﬁghter-bomber on 
  the tarmac of the Messerschmitt works at Augsburg. Shortly after 10 p.m., a 
  man calling himself “Alfred Horn” walked up to a Scottish farmer near the 
  town of Eaglesham (south of Glasgow) and asked to be taken to Dungavel 
  House, the home of the Duke of Hamilton. The suspicious farmer called 
  the authorities, and “Horn” was rapidly unmasked as Rudolf Hess. Hitler’s 
  propaganda machine immediately declared Hess to have gone insane; British 
  propaganda, on the other hand, did almost nothing to exploit the defection. 
  Hess was locked up in the Tower of London, then transferred to a secret 
  “Camp Z” site in Surrey, and thence to Abergavenny in Wales.
  Also on May 10, 1941, a conjunction of six planets occurred in Taurus, 
  coinciding with a full moon. Hess’ personal astrologer, Ernst Schulte-Strathaus, 
  pointed out the unique conﬁguration to Hess, noting that it combined 
  extraordinary danger to Hitler with extraordinary potential for world-shaking 
  changes in international politics. The old Thulist Hess decided to take Hitler’s 
  fate as his own (why “Alfred Horn” had the initials “A.H.”), make a separate 
  peace with Britain, and thus redeem Germany – and Hess’ ﬂagging political 
  fortunes. As a gesture of good will, he brought with him an Irish Druidic 
  manuscript, the Lebor Feasa Rúnda, which the British magus John Dee had 
  brought to Germany in the 16th century. Himmler considered it a crucial work 
  of runic prophecy, and had had it translated into German by Dr. Heinrich 
  Thorensen of the Ahnenerbe’s Keltische Volksforschung (Celtic Folk Research) 
  institute. Hess, however, took the original grimoire, thinking it might open 
  doors in what he fondly imagined was a still-magical Celtic Scotland.
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  Instead, it vanished into the hands of “MS,” the British 
  occult team that had, as it transpired, helped inspire Hess’ 
  ﬂight. Run by Sir Maxwell Knight, who had studied 
  sorcery under Crowley in 1937, MS planted “ﬁxed” 
  astrological information created by their own astrologer 
  Louis de Wohl in periodicals Schulte-Strathaus would 
  read. (A Naval Intelligence oﬃcer named Ian Fleming 
  had operational control of “Operation Mistletoe,” as 
  the occult eﬀort to destroy Hess was called.) Although 
  the Germans never discovered a direct British role in 
  Hess’ action, Himmler’s rivals quickly pointed out 
  Hess’ astrological inspiration. Goebbels issued an order 
  prohibiting the performance, broadcast, or publication 
  of any occult material, conﬁding prophetically to his 
  diary: “The miracle-men, Hess’ darlings, will now be put 
  under lock and key.”
  Hess’ successor as Party Chancellor, Martin 
  Bormann, ordered all Gauleiters to consider astrologers 
  – and faith-healers, fortune-tellers, clairvoyants, 
  graphologists, homeopaths, and unlicensed psychiatrists – enemies of the 
  Party and Reich. On June 9, responding to Hitler’s fulminations against 
  “astrological cliques” and “stargazers,” the Gestapo swept over Germany, 
  arresting hundreds of astrologers and fortune-tellers in the appropriately-
  named Aktion Hess. Schulte-Strathaus had been arrested in May;  
  a month later Himmler’s personal astrologer, Wilhelm Wulﬀ, was tossed 
  into Fühlsbuttel. Even the astrologer Karl Kraﬀt, who had predicted the 
  Burgerbraukeller assassination attempt on Hitler in 1939 and was busily re-
  writing Nostradamus’ prophecies for Goebbels’ own Propaganda Ministry, 
  was not immune. The Gestapo arrested him on June 12 and sent him to the 
  camp at Oranienburg, where he died in 1945.
  Unfavorable Conjunctions
  The Aktion Hess was not the ﬁrst Nazi clampdown on rival cults. In 1934, 
  the Reich passed an anti-witchcraft law. That same year, as part of the Röhm 
  purge, fortune-tellers were banned in Berlin due to Röhm’s friendship with 
  the astrologer Karl-Günther Heimsoth. Sebottendorﬀ’s brief resurfacing that 
  year reminded Himmler just how many occult skeletons were in the Party’s 
  closet: the Gestapo put völkisch groups and leaders on watch lists and ran 
  many old runic agitators out of Germany.
  The Nazis had long considered Freemasonry a special threat to their new 
  order: it represented bourgeois society, Christianity, and egalitarianism, 
  all wrapped in a secret society with tendrils everywhere. In Mein Kampf, 
  Hitler identiﬁed Freemasonry as one of the many modern institutions 
  Even those Nazis opposed to or 
  uninterested in the occult were 
  willing to use astrology (more 
  popular in interwar Germany 
  than in any other country) 
  as propaganda. In 1923, the 
  astrologer Elsbeth Ebertin created 
  a stir by predicting the failure of 
  the Beer Hall Putsch while saying 
  the stars showed that Hitler “is 
  destined to play a ‘Führer-role’ in 
  future battles [and to] sacrifice 
  himself for the German nation.” 
  Other astrologers coveted the 
  resulting publicity blitz and 
  tried to score similar coups. This 
  horoscope of the Nazi Party from 
  Hanussens Berliner Wochenschau 
  (August 8, 1932) predicts rapid 
  growth and unexpected success, 
  not a particularly daring augury 
  given the enormous victory 
  the NSDAP had won in the July 
  elections. (Mel Gordon Archive)
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  60
  totally corrupted by the Jews. In 
  1935, he ordered the complete 
  dissolution of the order and 
  any other society organized 
  in lodges and the conﬁscation 
  of all lodges, manuals, and 
  materials. This edict especially 
  applied to magical societies: 
  Karl Germer, head of the OTO, 
  was thrown into Esterwegen 
  despite (or perhaps because of) 
  his declaration that Hitler was 
  Crowley’s “magickal son.”
  The Gestapo continued its 
  hunt for underground magical 
  orders, 
  conﬁscating 
  occult 
  libraries by the yard and sending 
  them back to RSHA Amt VII B. 
  A few groups protected by one 
  or another inﬂuential patron 
  continued to publish. Werner 
  von Bülow ran his Edda Society 
  until 1939, Lanz’ writings were 
  not banned until October 1941 
  in the aftermath of Aktion 
  Hess, and the ONT continued 
  working and meeting until 
  ﬁnally suppressed by Heydrich 
  in March 1942.
  The Pendulum Swings Back
  But nothing lasts forever. On his deathbed, Heydrich cleared Herbert Backe, 
  the Minister for Food – and a member of the neo-pagan Skald Order – of 
  disloyalty. In March 1942, Himmler ordered Wilhelm Wulﬀ freed from the 
  camps; Wulﬀ went to work for the MFA, most likely as an SS inside man 
  in the Abwehr’s occult oﬃce. During the urgent search for Mussolini in 
  August 1943, Himmler brought Wulﬀ back into the SS, doubtless believing 
  that the prestige of a successful operation would outweigh blowing Wulﬀ’s 
  cover, such as it was.
  The hunt for Mussolini was too important for the bureaucratic, academic 
  Ahnenerbe. Himmler cloned the MFA and put Walter Schellenberg, the 
  head of the SS’ foreign intelligence division SD-Ausland, in charge of this 
  By 1934, the tide had turned 
  against the astrologers. Their 
  attempt to create a pro-Nazi 
  astrological congress had 
  disintegrated into personal 
  feuds and vendettas, while the 
  Röhm purge ended the Party’s 
  use of astrology for propaganda. 
  Published that year, Mathilde 
  Ludendorff’s pamphlet Der 
  Trug der Astrologie (The Burden 
  of Astrology) fit the times, 
  denouncing astrologers as 
  charlatans and enemies of the 
  state. (Mel Gordon Archive)
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  61
  new unit. In addition to Wulﬀ, Himmler gave Schellenberg the authority 
  to free any other occultists or diviners from the camps. Finally, Himmler 
  loaned the new task-force his personal dowser, an old Thule comrade named 
  Dr. Wilhelm Gutberlet. Gutberlet, the “Master of the Sidereal Pendulum,” 
  could divine the exact degree of Jewish blood in any person; he and Hitler 
  were personal acquaintances. He headed a pendulum-dowsing team 
  modeled on Roeder’s Pendulum-Institut, substituting Kirchhoﬀ’s ley maps 
  for Muck’s Thule fragments. Both Gutberlet and Wulﬀ correctly pinpointed 
  the island of Ponza as Mussolini’s prison, but the Italians moved him before 
  Schellenberg could act on their intelligence.
  THE MARINEFORSCHUNGSABTEILUNG
  Admiral Canaris established the Marineforschungs-
  abteilung (Naval Research Institute; MFA) as a secret oﬃce 
  of the Abwehr devoted to unconventional reconnaissance 
  methodology. Its initial missions were theft of British 
  radar and sonar secrets, and the deployment of concealed 
  weather stations in the North Atlantic. Headed by Otto 
  Friedrich Muck (who invented the submarine snorkel in 
  1942), MFA employed a number of Thulist mystics as 
  part of its general concern with Arctic matters, but did 
  not prioritize occult researches until a series of events in 
  1938 surfaced coincidentally.
  The ﬁrst was a March 1938 contact with the astronomer 
  and astrologer Wilhelm Hartmann of Nuremberg 
  Observatory, a member of the Vril-Gesellschaft who 
  demonstrated the possibility of harnessing comets 
  by electrical force. Then in May came the report 
  of Untersturmführer Paul Birkert, who had led a 
  meteorological and geological expedition to Greenland in 
  August 1937 after the Ahnenerbe rejected his proposal. 
  He described Eskimo angakoks who could accurately 
  describe conditions in the South Paciﬁc in their dreams, 
  and he returned with artifacts taken from fortress walls 
  crushed by glacial ice – relics of Thule itself. These relics 
  matched material from the Von Lorfmon expedition to 
  the Cape Verde Islands in 1912, and from the wreckage 
  of U-29, lost in 1917 and salvaged by an expedition to 
  the Azores in October 1938. These three widely separated 
  ﬁnds convinced Muck of Thule’s reality. In 1940 after 
  the fall of Norway, the MFA pushed for a sorcerous and 
  meteorological station on Spitsbergen, another likely 
  Thule remnant in the Arctic. In September 1943, just such 
  a team landed on Hopen Island under cover of Operation 
  Zitronella; it included at least one Hexensoldat, a veteran of 
  the Navy’s Brandenburger special forces.
  During the battle of the Atlantic, the MFA (now 
  commanded by Fregattenkapitän Hans A. Roeder) 
  kept a house full of pendulum dowsers and astrologers 
  in 
  Admiral-von-Schroeder-Strasse, 
  near 
  Abwehr 
  headquarters. By swinging a special pendulum of Thule 
  material over a map of the Atlantic, a trained dowser 
  could locate Allied shipping. The seers (such as the Tarot-
  diviner A.F. Glahn) who used the techniques derived 
  from the Greenland Eskimo shamans had a much higher 
  success rate, but died or went insane at an alarming rate. 
  The Pendulum-Institut’s star diviner, the elderly Ludwig 
  Straniak, nearly died of a stroke during the cruise of the 
  Bismarck. In 1943, Roeder moved the Pendulum-Institut 
  to the island of Sylt oﬀ Schleswig-Holstein, likely to keep 
  his astrologers out of the clutches of the SS. In September 
  1942, Canaris moved the MFA from the Abwehr to 
  a billet under the larger Kriegsmarine Amtsgruppe 
  Forschung, Erﬁndungs- und Patentwesen (Navy Oﬃce 
  Group Research, Inventions, and Patents; FEP), possibly 
  to disguise it from bureaucratic SS poaching. This proved 
  prescient when Ernst Kaltenbrunner purged Canaris’ 
  Abwehr completely after July 1944.
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  Projekt Leo
  It may have been Schellenberg’s report that spurred the last major occult 
  initiative in the Third Reich, or it may have been something more intimate. 
  In early 1943, just before the creation of the Schellenberg Amt, his superior 
  oﬃcer, RSHA head Ernst Kaltenbrunner, took a new mistress. The girl 
  in question was the Countess Gisela von Westarp, the niece of Heila von 
  Westarp, the Thule Gesellschaft secretary martyred in 1919. In late August 
  1943 Kaltenbrunner began a survey of the complete occult infrastructure 
  of the Reich. Perhaps he saw himself as an occult Speer, unifying and 
  streamlining tangled bureaucracies for a ﬁnal war eﬀort. Or perhaps his 
  motive was personal power or survival.
  Whoever the spark and whatever the drive, Kaltenbrunner established 
  something codenamed Projekt Leo. He sent an ambitious SD oﬃcer, 
  Obersturmbannführer Werner Göttsch, to the Amt VII B library in the 
  fall of 1943, with orders to collect the most important occult books 
  and study them. Göttsch was an old SD hand, having run death-squads 
  in pre-war Czechoslovakia and spy rings in the Balkans; his adjutant 
  Karl Wolff (third from right) worked 
  well with Reinhard Heydrich 
  (1904–42; second from left) 
  despite their entirely different 
  approaches to the occult. This 
  picture was taken in the spring of 
  1941 during a visit by Himmler 
  and his top SS staff to Albert 
  Speer, who had even less time for 
  magical thinking than Heydrich. 
  (INTERFOTO / Alamy)
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  63
  Sturmbannführer Hans Richter had run the Masonic section of Amt VII 
  B since 1936. In January 1944 Richter removed 8,000 books and 24,000 
  periodicals (including some from the Ahnenerbe library and Sonderauftrag 
  H) to Niemes Castle in the Sudetenland. (Some of the Projekt Leo collection 
  included pornographic works, raising the possibility of Saturnian sex-
  magick as the group’s methodology.) Göttsch carried a hundred of the most 
  important tomes with him to Vienna for further study. Richter moved 
  his operation to Neufalkenberg Castle in Pomerania that spring; in July, 
  Kaltenbrunner added the Abwehr’s library to the project. On May 1, 1945, 
  Göttsch joined Kaltenbrunner and von Westarp at his superior’s villa in 
  Altaussee for a week, and met with Skorzeny on May 3, but whatever he 
  brought was apparently insuﬃcient. The Allies closed in and captured the 
  Altaussee coven; Kaltenbrunner was hanged at Nuremberg on October 15.
  Himmler did not approve of his 
  subordinates getting along, 
  preferring to play favorites to 
  prevent alliances against him or his 
  pet projects. With Heydrich dead, 
  he promoted Ernst Kaltenbrunner 
  (1903–46) to replace him 
  and transferred Wolff to Italy. 
  Kaltenbrunner (right) is shown 
  here inspecting the concentration 
  camp at Mauthausen in 1941. 
  (©Ullstein Bild / TopFoto)
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  Werwolf
  “God has given up the protection of the people … Satan has taken 
  command … We Werewolves consider it our supreme duty to kill, to 
  kill and to kill, employing every cunning and wile in the darkness of 
  the night, crawling, groping through towns and villages, like wolves, 
  noiselessly, mysteriously.”
  – Josef Goebbels, April 18, 1945
  Listeners might have been forgiven for imagining it to be a joke in particularly 
  poor taste, even for the Nazis. On the morning of April 1, 1945, Radio 
  Germany announced that it was, for the time being, Radio Werwolf, and 
  that thousands of werewolves had begun to destroy the invading Allies, 
  slaughtering soldiers and bombing tank convoys from the Rhine to the Oder. 
  This, it turned out, was a slight exaggeration.
  In September 1944, a tag-team of SS oﬃcials decided to take a leaf from their 
  enemies’ book. Specialists had studied the French Resistance, Russian partisans, 
  and Polish Home Guard with an eye toward creating similar organizations to 
  attack the Allies as they pressed further into the Reich. Its manpower would 
  come primarily from Hitler Youth, with some specially selected oﬃcers from the 
  Waﬀen-SS and the Wehrmacht. Himmler tapped SS Obergruppenführer Hans-
  Adolf Prützmann to head this group, known as “Werwolf” – under the auspices 
  not of the Waﬀen-SS, but of the SS regional police inspectorate. Although many 
  other factors eventually drove the Werwolf groups from organized partisan 
  activity into “death squad” type revenge-killings, this detachment from the 
  regular armed forces set the stage right from the ﬁrst.
  64
  64
  64
  64
  Cologne was a center of Nazi Werwolf resistance, both 
  the human and lycanthropic sorts. On May 20, 1945 
  after an anti-fascist riot nearly ended in bloodshed, ﬁve 
  of Skorzeny’s “Division Lüneburg” Wolfen ambushed 
  an American Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives 
  (MFAA) team (most likely actually working for the 
  Inquiry Group within the OSS) in Lehrichstrasse 
  northwest of the Cathedral. In the two-minute action, 
  the Americans lost three men killed and two seriously 
  wounded. Since Cologne was in the British zone of 
  occupation, the U.S. Army was unable to mount 
  an operation to pursue the attackers or recover the 
  unknown cargo captured in the raid.
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  The Werwolf’s best-known action, Operation Carnival on March 25, 
  1945, resulted in the successful assassination of Dr. Franz Oppenhoﬀ, the 
  American-appointed mayor of Aachen, but depended upon Otto Skorzeny’s 
  SS commandos rather than Werwolf recruits for cadre and support. Skorzeny, 
  Bormann, Schellenberg, Kaltenbrunner, Goebbels, and other top Nazis all 
  attempted to hijack Werwolf for their own empire-building purposes, which 
  (along with the rapid Allied advance and Prützmann’s lack of organization) 
  rapidly turned the Werwolf group into an uncoordinated morass of small-
  unit guerrilla teams and so-called “Vehme” death-squads to execute “traitors 
  to the Reich.”
  This 1512 woodcut by the 
  German artist Lucas Cranach the 
  Elder depicts the standard early 
  modern view of werewolves: 
  that they were human wretches 
  deluded by Satan or an imbalance 
  of melancholic humors into 
  believing themselves wolves. 
  However, by the 17th century, 
  German scholars and jurists were 
  reporting bestial, man-eating 
  figures such as the sheep-
  mutilator Peter of Dalheim in 
  1581, the mass murderer Peter 
  Stubbe of Bedburg executed 
  in 1589, a pack of werewolves 
  haunting Greifswald in 1640, 
  another pack reported from 
  the Palatinate in 1663, and 
  the Ansbach werewolf of 1685 
  thought to be the town’s mayor. 
  (The Art Archive / Alamy)
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  67
  Beneath the Skin
  Beneath these ﬂurries of insurgent activity 
  and bunker politics, the real werewolves 
  of the SS carried out their own missions. 
  Himmler, fascinated by the Icelandic sagas 
  about wolf-men, demanded his occultists produce 
  them. Ahnenerbe research in the 1930s, and the 
  work of Herbert Jankuhn in the Ukraine, had 
  pinpointed bloodlines descended from the 
  ancient Neurians, a Scythian tribe identiﬁed 
  by Herodotus as becoming wolves every year. 
  Sonderauftrag H had a complete dossier on 
  the lycanthropic Benandanti of Croatia, Friuli, 
  and Lithuania; their descendants likewise 
  had been located. The signiﬁcantly named 
  Monsignor Comte Mayol de Lupé, chaplain 
  of the Charlemagne Division of the SS, 
  opened his castle to the Ahnenerbe in 1943 for 
  further research into his own family background. 
  Ernst Schaefer contributed specimens of the night-
  blooming Mariphasa lumina ﬂower harvested from Tibet, 
  reported to control lycanthropy. But even such material and intellectual 
  resources produced no real results.
  It was the Japanese Ryokuryūkai – speciﬁcally its Mireniamu project – 
  that cracked the lycanthropic code. Folklorist Kubodera Itsuhiko applied the 
  de Lupé data and his own theozoological insights to the rituals described by 
  Herodotus and repeated in Sonderauftrag H’s witch-trial testimony. Using 
  as test subjects pure-blooded Ainu, according to Japanese legend descended 
  from the wolf goddess, Unit 731 biologist Masaji Kitano managed to develop 
  a regimen of injections and meditation that would reliably awaken the lupine 
  nature of those with the correct blood. The Ryokuryūkai exchanged the 
  Mireniamu data for nuclear material in March of 1945, and the Reich had 
  true werewolves at last.
  Otto Skorzeny controlled the actual lycanthropic operations of Werwolf, 
  concealing them under the same code name as the feckless resistance 
  movement. For extra confusion, he placed his shapeshifters in a nominal 
  “Division Lüneburg,” named for the setting of Hermann Löns’ best-selling 
  1910 novel about a German resistance movement: Der Wehrwolf. However 
  named or spelled, the job of the true Werwolf was to cover up Ahnenerbe 
  research, move archives and artifacts to pre-placed locations in the Bavarian 
  Alps, and block and harass American Operation Paperclip and British 
  Operation Surgeon scientiﬁc assessment and recruitment teams long enough 
  to get the core of the Nazi occult apparat safely out of Germany.
  As part of his policy of 
  misdirection, Skorzeny used 
  the badge of the Weimar-era 
  Wehrwolf Bund for some of his 
  Werwolf fighters, both human 
  and lycanthropic. This applique 
  skull and crossbones features a 
  scarlet W, a popular symbol for 
  Werwolf protest graffiti, along 
  with the Wolfsangel (wolf-hook) 
  resembling a narrow, backward 
  letter “Z.” Another common 
  Werwolf graffito was “the sign of 
  the dark man,” the shadowy figure 
  of a man in a slouch hat, stenciled 
  in black to indicate that the 
  Werwolves were always watching 
  from the shadows. Skorzeny or his 
  Hexensoldat advisers may have 
  picked the image for its resonance 
  with the Black Man of the ancient 
  witch cults. (INTERFOTO / Alamy)
  uce 
  he 
  d. 
  ight-
  rom Tibet
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  68
  Black Sun and 
  Fourth Reich
  “The German submarine ﬂeet is proud of having built for the Führer, 
  in another part of the world, a Shangri-La on land, an impregnable 
  fortress.”
  – Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz, 1943
  On July 10, 1945, the war in Europe had been over for two months. Hitler 
  had committed suicide on Walpurgisnacht, one ﬁnal sacriﬁce to the dark gods 
  of Thule. But below the surface, the currents of vril and sorcery still ﬂowed. 
  Himmler’s disgraced shaman, Karl-Maria Wiligut, had spoken of a “burnt 
  sun” called Santur, the true source of Thule’s power. He had encoded it in the 
  ﬂoor at Wewelsburg Castle, in the form of a black sun with 12 rays, composed 
  of three overlapping swastikas: rising, setting, and zenith. This 
  Black Sun, Wiligut had prophesied, would rise again.
  That cold July day, what rose oﬀ the coast of 
  Argentina was a Type IXC/40 submarine, the 
  U-530. Its men wore no identiﬁcation, and 
  its captain, Oberleutnant Otto Wermuth, 
  had thrown his logbook overboard. 
  He gave no explanation for his boat’s 
  disappearance, and no account of his 
  whereabouts for two months. Five 
  weeks later, on August 17, another 
  U-boat arrived in the Mar del Plata. 
  The U-977 also carried no logbook, 
  and at least 16 crew members were 
  missing. Oberleutnant Heinz Schäﬀer 
  claimed he had dropped them oﬀ 
  in Norway and then sailed straight to 
  Argentina, submerged the entire time. 
  In all, 55 German submarines were listed as 
  “missing” after the war, a hidden armada for the 
  Black Sun.
  The Black Sun designed by 
  Wiligut for the Generals’ Hall 
  at Wewelsburg. It resembles a 
  design seen on brooches worn 
  around AD 400 by the Alemanni, 
  a Germanic tribe, and studied 
  by the Ahnenerbe in the early 
  1930s. It also evokes the 15th-
  century sol niger, the symbol 
  of the first stage of alchemy, 
  indicating the preparation by 
  destruction necessary for the 
  Great Work to commence. The 
  “Panbabylonians” consulted by 
  the Vril-Gesellschaft and cited by 
  Hermann Wirth would identify 
  it with the invisible starlight 
  commanded by Ishtar, often 
  thought to be a reference to the 
  hidden eighth star in the Pleiades. 
  (Ratatosk under the Share Alike 
  creative commons license)
  Black Sun, W
  That 
  Argen
  U-
  i
  A
  In a
  “missin
  Black Sun.
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  69
  Projekt Saucer
  Other craft never made it onto the registry in the ﬁrst place. In August 1943 the 
  architect of the SS Building and Works Program, Brigadeführer Dr. Ing. Hans 
  Kammler, assumed control of secret weapons production; his concentration 
  camps held desperately needed labor for the various projects. A year later, 
  promoted to Gruppenführer, Kammler took control of all secret weapons 
  development also. Himmler fed Kammler specialists from the Ahnenerbe’s 
  scientiﬁc institutes, and placed SS E-IV under his control in February 1945. 
  By March 1945 SS Obergruppenführer Kammler controlled the development, 
  production, and deployment of all rockets, jets, and experimental aircraft in 
  the Third Reich. His “Kammlerstab” of esoteric and technical experts tucked 
  away in the Skoda Works had free reign to build anything they could design 
  – and dictatorial power over the last remaining industrial center of the Reich.
  Rudolf Schriever’s schematic for 
  the Flügelrad II; the final BMW 
  design, essentially a jet-driven 
  autogyro, was a compromise 
  with the more-stable vane blades 
  developed by Klaus Habermohl. 
  The Flügelrad II only flew once, 
  in a brief level-flight test in 
  Prague in April 1945; the fate 
  of the prototype is unknown. It 
  might have been disassembled 
  for parts or materials, destroyed 
  intentionally, or captured by the 
  Russians. (INTERFOTO / Alamy)
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  70
  Even in 1943, Kammler had green-lit the development of Feuerball 
  (Fireball), an electrostatic weapon system designed to interfere with Allied 
  radar and bomber controls. These glowing disk-shaped drones, called “foo 
  ﬁghters” by American pilots, lifted using a modiﬁed dielectric eﬀect. They 
  proved too expensive to mass-produce and almost impossible to control: 
  after a wave of tests from October 1944 to February 1945, Feuerball was 
  abandoned. In August 1944, Kammler’s team started a parallel design 
  called Flügelrad (Flying Wheel), aimed at upsizing the electrostatic disk 
  to accommodate a pilot and more conventional armament. Dr. Richard 
  Miethe built a jet-powered Flügelrad outside Breslau, but it never ﬂew: 
  the Russians captured his facilities in March 1945. By that time, Rudolf 
  Schriever and Klaus Habermohl had completed their “ﬂying turbine” 
  Flügelrad II in Prague, and were well underway with the larger Flügelrad 
  III. But on February 10, 1945, just before Flügelrad II’s test ﬂight, Kammler 
  received a brieﬁng as new director of SS E-IV that changed his approach: 
  he found out about vril.
  The Vimana Connection
  While Pascual Jordan slowly crafted the Bell at the Wenceslas Mine, other SS 
  E-IV teams drove their own investigations forward. Alchemical research at 
  Siemens had developed Luftschwamm, a light, strong alloy similar to bronze 
  that conducted vril. Viktor Schauberger’s “Repulsine” implosion turbine 
  had destroyed several under-engineered Heinkel bomber prototypes, and 
  he was working on a more robust prototype in Vienna. On the ley nexus 
  and old Templar stronghold of Bornholm in the Baltic, Karl Schappeller 
  studied vril under the cover of nuclear research, and Maria Orsic channeled 
  an Agarthan version of the Vaimānika Shāstra, the ancient Sanskrit text 
  concerning the construction of vimanas, the legendary ﬂying chariots of 
  Vedic lore.
  The engineer Georg Otto Erb combined all these research streams into 
  a single design: the Haunebu, a bell-shaped aircraft built of Luftschwamm, 
  with a Repulsine engine powered by vril. He even adapted the Feuerball 
  weapons system: ﬁred and controlled from the Haunebu, it could reliably 
  hit and bring down an aircraft. When Kammler learned of Erb’s design, 
  he ordered production stopped on all but the Flügelrad III, which still 
  mounted heavier weapons than the Haunebu. He also put Erb, Miethe, and 
  Habermohl on the task of designing and building a heavy, long-range saucer 
  craft. Code-named “Dora,” it used the same fuel as the Bell’s control system: 
  Xerum 525, a glowing violet mercury compound similar to the red mercury 
  Soviet alchemical technology would produce in the 1980s. Dora would be 
  Kammler’s escape hatch: the Allies were too close, and he had too little time 
  to mass-produce enough vril craft to halt their oﬀensive.
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  71
  Rat Lines
  What Himmler and even Kammler could not accomplish, the Allies had. 
  The Nazi occult infrastructure was uniﬁed on one goal: escape. Karl Wolﬀ 
  cut a deal with the Americans, surrendering Italy in exchange for a certain 
  number of “free passes” for key Ahnenerbe personnel. Skorzeny’s ODESSA 
  “underground railroad” for SS war criminals also shipped his remaining 
  werewolves and Sonderverband Z Hexensoldaten through Italy and Spain, 
  into Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. Kammler’s saucer squadron ﬂew to 
  Norway, and thence to Point 103, a secret base in the Arctic prepared by the 
  MFA. Kammler himself took oﬀ in Dora’s maiden voyage, landed at the secret 
  airﬁeld in the Sahara laid out by Almásy in 1944, evacuated its elite crew of 
  pilots, and continued southward.
  Artifacts disappeared also. Conrad Buch carried the Grail out on U-977; 
  the Agarthan phurba simply vanished. Lieutenant Walter Horn discovered the 
  Spear of Destiny in Nuremberg on August 5, 1945, and the US government 
  returned it to Vienna in 1946 – unless the duplicate spear Himmler made for 
  Wewelsburg was the real spear. Or the Americans made their own duplicate, 
  removing the true spear to be concealed in the foundations of the under-
  construction Pentagon. A prototype Junkers Ju 390 codenamed “the Truck” 
  ﬂew the Bell to Angola, refueled and lifted oﬀ for points farther south.
  This newly discovered photo most 
  likely depicts Kammler’s saucer 
  fleet preparing its final evacuation 
  from an airfield somewhere in 
  Silesia or the Sudetenland. Dora 
  is visible in the right background, 
  which rules out Norway or Point 
  103 as the location of this image. 
  The aircraft in the left background 
  is probably a Junkers Ju 52 
  transport, making it unlikely to 
  be an image from the Antarctic 
  refuge surreptitiously taken by 
  one of Byrd’s men, as has been 
  theorized. (Dale O’Dell / Alamy)
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  72
  The Antarctic Refuge
  In December 1938, a freighter under the command of Kapitän Alfred Ritscher 
  left Hamburg for Antarctica on a secret mission. Equipped with two Dornier 
  Wal seaplanes, his German Antarctic Expedition surveyed over 200,000 
  square miles of frozen landscape, dropping ﬁnned metal swastika markers 
  along the boundaries to literally “stake a claim” to the territory Ritscher named 
  Neuschwabenland. Ahnenerbe specialists on the voyage captured penguins, 
  planted experimental seeds, and surveyed the landscape for pockets of vril or 
  vortices of ley energy. Upon Ritscher’s return in April 1939, the Ahnenerbe 
  began planning an invulnerable refuge in the icy south where the surveys had 
  detected an enormous ice cavern over geothermally heated lakes.
  During the war, both the Ahnenerbe and the MFA devoted what resources 
  they could to Point 211, as the refuge was code-named. By spring of 1945, 
  Point 211 contained airﬁelds and submarine pens, vaults full of food and 
  Operation Highjump, commanded by Rear Admiral 
  Richard E. Byrd, was a probing raid against Point 
  211, the Nazi Refuge in Antarctica, under the cover 
  of a combined training exercise and aerial survey of 
  Antarctica. Byrd’s force, TF 68, comprised 13 ships, 
  including the amphibious command ship USS Mount 
  Olympus, the destroyers USS Brownson and USS 
  Henderson, the submarine USS Sennet, and the ﬂagship, 
  the aircraft carrier USS Philippine Sea. For operational 
  security, the ships left U.S. ports in several task forces 
  during November and December 1946; the Philippine 
  Sea didn’t depart Norfolk until January 2. Its complement 
  included an air wing of 12 F8F Bearcat ﬁghters, secretly 
  loaded in Cuba. The bulk of TF 68 reached three points 
  around Antarctica in late December 1946. Screening 
  Nazi U-boats trapped the Sennet under an iceberg; it 
  withdrew to Scott Island in early January.
  On February 6, 1947, the Nazi saucer ﬂeet attacked 
  Byrd’s Central Group several hundred miles from 
  Point 211. After shooting down seven Bearcats, the 
  Nazi squadron attacked the ﬂeet, damaging the Mount 
  Olympus as well as the cargo vessels USS Yancey and USS 
  Merrick. This illustration depicts the Haunebu (a name 
  taken from its cover designation “Hauneburg Industrie-
  Projekt”) armed with the Feuerball electrical weapon 
  system and Flügelrad III (mounting an improved version 
  of the vortex gun) clearing the American ﬁghters from 
  the Antarctic skies. The Dora command craft mounts 
  conventional 30mm cannon; none of the saucer craft 
  carried weapons capable of sinking a ship, however, and 
  their bronze alloy Luftschwamm skin proved vulnerable 
  to concentrated ﬁre. Nevertheless, having lost air 
  superiority, Byrd was forced to withdraw.
  On February 23, 1947, the icebreaker USS Burton 
  Island evacuated all American personnel from the Little 
  America base in Antarctica; the early onset of winter was 
  the oﬃcial explanation for the early end of Highjump. 
  When he arrived in Chile, Byrd gave an interview to the 
  INS, which quoted him in the Chilean newspaper El 
  Mercurio as urging that “the United States should adopt 
  measures of protection against the possibility of an 
  invasion of the country by hostile planes coming from 
  the polar regions. … The cruel reality is that in case of a 
  new war, the United States could be attacked by planes 
  ﬂying over one or both poles.” He continued, “I have to 
  warn my compatriots that the time has ended when we 
  were able to take refuge in our isolation and rely on the 
  certainty that the distances, the oceans, and the poles 
  were a guarantee of safety.”
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  74
  oil, and stockpiles of weapons. A functioning prototype of the Elemag 
  “Thorshammer” device that suppressed electromagnetism by destroying the 
  atmosphere was too dangerous for even Himmler to deploy; the Marconi 
  microwave death-ray was slower and far more expensive than regular artillery. 
  During 1946, Kammler expanded the colony; thousands of former Nazis 
  made their way to Neuschwabenland, and the freighter Sankt Pauli shipped 
  the crew and facilities of the now-disassembled Point 103 south along with 
  the Flügelrad and Haunebu squadrons.
  Eventually, the Allies found them. MS and the Inquiry Group had joined 
  forces during the war as Supreme Allied Command: Shadow Theater, and 
  SAC:ST knew how to follow the clues in thousands of debrieﬁngs and hundreds 
  of black sites slowly coming to light in the ruins of Germany. In November 
  1946, the US Navy launched Operation Highjump, ostensibly a peaceful 
  exploration of the Antarctic Ocean. In actuality a probing raid, it ended in 
  the defeat of the American task force. Before a select SAC:ST evaluation 
  team called the Majestic Group, Reichsführer Kammler and Karl Schappeller 
  demonstrated the potential of the now vril-powered Thorshammer: complete 
  destruction of the atmosphere. The Majestic team recommended that Truman 
  accept an armistice for the time being, while working to develop Allied esoteric 
  capacity on a crash basis.
  The surface war against the Third Reich was over. The occult war against 
  the Fourth Reich had just begun.
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  75
  Further Reading, 
  Watching, and Gaming
  This list is designed as an overview and introduction to the rich history and 
  legendry of the Nazi occult, rather than as a complete compendium.
  Books
  Farrell, Joseph P., Reich of the Black Sun (Adventures Unlimited Press, 
  Kempton, IL, 2005). Manages to combine Nazi paraphysics, alchemy, 
  the Antarctic refuge, and UFOs into a barely uniﬁed ﬁeld theory.
  Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas, The Occult Roots of Nazism (I.B. Tauris & 
  Co, London, 2004). Oxford historian examines the solid historical 
  record of German occult beliefs and societies, and their links with 
  the Nazi Party.
  Levenda, Peter, Unholy Alliance (Continuum, New York, 2002). New York 
  occultist oﬀers a freewheeling history of Nazi occultism, from the 
  Ahnenerbe on down.
  Pringle, Heather, The Master Plan (Hyperion Books, New York, 2006). 
  Factual history of the Ahnenerbe; the ﬁrst such work in English.
  Stevens, Henry, Hitler’s Flying Saucers (Adventures Unlimited Press, Kempton, 
  IL, 2002). Complete and credulous compendium of Nazi UFOs.
  Comics
  Captain Gravity and the Power of the Vril by Joshua Dysart and Sal Velluto. 
  African-American Hollywood super-hero battles Nazi magicians!
  Hellboy by Mike Mignola. Born of a failed Nazi ritual, Mignola’s hero battles 
  Nazi occultists, Nazi war-apes, and other monsters.
  Luftwaﬀe 1946 by Ted Nomura. This alternate-history comics series focuses 
  on aerial combat and “Good German” angst, but features beautifully 
  drawn experimental aircraft including those of Projekt Saucer.
  Games
  GURPS WWII: Weird War II by Steve Jackson Games. Compendium 
  of weirdness for tabletop role-playing games, encompassing not 
  just the occult but alternate histories, conspiracies, giant monsters, 
  superheroes, and unbuilt wonder-weapons.
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  76
  Hard Vacuum by Fat Messiah Games. Tabletop wargame simulates battles 
  against spacegoing Nazis.
  Return to Castle Wolfenstein by Gray Matter Interactive. Sequel to the 
  classic ﬁrst-person shooter dials up the Nazi occultism to maximum.
  Weird Wars: Weird War II by Pinnacle Entertainment. Tabletop role-playing 
  sourcebook for a secret war against monsters, evil magicians, and 
  killer robots on all fronts.
  Movies
  Fullmetal Alchemist the Movie: Conqueror of Shamballa (2005). The Thule 
  Society stars as the villains of this anime extravaganza.
  Invincible (2002). Werner Herzog directed this ﬁlm about a Jewish 
  strongman featuring Erik Jan Hanussen and the hot-house carnival 
  atmosphere of Weimar.
  Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). 
  Steven Spielberg and George Lucas mainstream and perfect the Nazi 
  occult adventure subgenre in these two ﬁlms.
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  77
  Glossary
  Agartha: Secret underground kingdom beneath Asia allied to the Third 
  Reich; it is ruled by the King of the World.
  Ahnenerbe: SS research organization for study of Germany’s “ancestral 
  heritage,” especially its occult, racial, or para-scientiﬁc aspects.
  Ariosophy: Speciﬁcally Aryan interpretation of theosophy focused on 
  Teutonic paganism, rune lore, and the race-consciousness of the 
  German people.
  Armanenschaft: According to Guido von List, the elite, totalitarian sorcerer-
  priest caste of the ancient German people.
  Artamanen: Back-to-the-land movement current in Germany in the 1920s, 
  combining nature appreciation, agronomy, and defense of the country 
  against Slavic incursions.
  Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg: Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce 
  (ERR); organization oﬃcially tasked with conﬁscation of all artistic 
  and cultural material from the occupied territories.
  Externsteine: Natural stone formation revealed by Wiligut as the sacred 
  center of the Irminist faith; magical proving ground for Ahnenerbe.
  Feuerball: Fireball; German name for the “foo ﬁghter” program of 
  electrostatic interceptors.
  Fraternitas Saturnii: Brotherhood of Saturn; ritual sex-magick lodge founded 
  in 1928 by Eugen Grosche; suppressed by the Gestapo in 1936.
  Germanenorden: German Order; elite quasi-Masonic völkisch order 
  founded in 1912 to work for uniﬁcation of all German territories and 
  promote anti-Semitism.
  Geweckt: Literally “awakened” or “illuminated”; term in Sonderverband Z 
  for a soldier who had encountered the supernatural.
  Haunebu: Vril-powered experimental aircraft.
  Hexensoldat: “Witch-soldier,” a colloquial term for magically trained 
  military personnel.
  Irminsul: Legendary pillar worshiped by the pagan Saxons; badge issued to 
  Ahnenerbe survivors of exercises at Externsteine.
  (das) Laternenträger Projekt: Project Lantern-Bearer; SS project to 
  construct a vril reactor on the pattern of a Lemurian bell; also called 
  die Glocke, “the Bell.”
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  Leuchtendeloge: Luminous Lodge; esoteric lodge founded in 1925 to study 
  the vril.
  Marineforschungsabteilung: Naval Research Institute (MFA); special 
  occult research unit set up within the Abwehr (later under 
  the Kriegsmarine) initially for purposes of “unconventional 
  reconnaissance.”
  Mireniamu: Japanese project to develop werewolves and other supernatural 
  beings.
  Order of the New Templars (ONT): Knightly and occult order founded 
  by Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels for the renewal of the German nation 
  and race.
  Organisation Consul (OC): “Vehme” death-squad run by underground 
  members of the Ehrhardt Brigade of the Freikorps.
  Raumenergie: “Space-energy” similar to ether or zero-point energy; 
  the cover term used for vril in oﬃcial papers of the SS technical 
  development staﬀ.
  RSHA Amt VII B: Oﬃce within RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or 
  Reich Security Main Oﬃce) tasked with maintaining a complete 
  library and archive of “hostile ideological” material, including 
  Masonic, Jewish, and occult lore.
  Ryokuryūkai: Green Dragon Society; the Japanese equivalent of the 
  Ahnenerbe operating under the umbrella of the Japanese Navy.
  Sonderauftrag H: Special Commission H; the oﬃce within RSHA Amt 
  VII B devoted to assembling a complete record of witchcraft trials in 
  Germany.
  Sonderverband Z: Special Group Z; military unit associated with the 
  Ahnenerbe; tasked with occult warfare operations.
  SAC:ST: Supreme Allied Headquaters: Shadow Theatre, the division of the 
  Allied military set up speciﬁcally to combat Axis occult programs.
  SS Entwicklungsstelle-IV (SS E-IV): SS directorate for alternative technical 
  research.
  Theosophy: System of esoteric knowledge drawing on both religion 
  (primarily Hinduism) and science (primarily quasi-Darwinism) to 
  elaborate a uniﬁed theory of human development both spiritually and 
  physically.
  Thule Gesellschaft: Recruiting movement for the Germanenorden in 
  Bavaria that developed into an esoteric political party.
  Todesbruderschaft: Brotherhood of Death; institute of the Ahnenerbe 
  concerned with necromancy.
  Vehme: Medieval courts of justice administered by secret societies in 
  Germany and Austria.
  Vimana: Flying chariot from Vedic mythology.
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  79
  Völkisch: German term meaning “ethnic,” “folkloric,” and “populist,” 
  applied to various occult political and cultural movements in 
  Germany and Austria between c. 1880 and 1940.
  Vril: Fundamental cosmic force of the universe, both physical and 
  metaphysical, unifying heat, gravity, and electromagnetism.
  Vril-Gesellschaft: Term of convenience used to refer to the secret core 
  behind several overlapping societies dedicated to the study, unlocking, 
  and utilization of vril.
  Wahrheitsgesellschaft: Society of Truth; an esoteric study group devoted to 
  the search for vril.
  Welteislehre: World-Ice Theory; the catastrophist belief in a series of icy 
  explosions that deﬁnes the creation of the solar system and the 
  continuing development of Earth and its moons.
  Werwolf: Both a last-ditch insurgent network in the ﬁnal days of Nazi 
  Germany and a secret program of lycanthropic covert operatives.
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  Index
  acoustic energy  18
  Afghanistan, expedition to  37
  Agartha  40–41
  Ahnenerbe, the  20–24
   
  Antarctic refuge  72, 72–74
   
  the Black Sun  68
   
  escape  71
   
  evocation magic  30
   
  expeditions  33–45
   
  insignia of  20
   
  Nazi clampdowns  58–61
   
  Projekt Leo  62–63
   
  Projekt Saucer  69–70
   
  Sonderverband Z  31–32
   
  structure of  25–30
   
  unholy quests  46–55
   
  uniforms  27, 41, 52
   
  “Werewolf” group  64–67
  Aktion Hess  58–59
  alchemy  28
  Almásy, László  54–55
  Antarctic, refuge in the  72, 72–74
  anti-Semitism  10, 12, 30
  Ardvi Sura (festival)  16
  “Ariosophy”  9, 41
  Ark of the Covenant  48–50, 49, 50
  Armanenschaft, the  8–9
  Artamanen “back to the land” movement  21
  astrology  4, 59, 60, 61
  Bagnold, Ralph  54
  Ballard, Guy  18
  Beer Hall Putsch  59
  Beger, Untersturmführer Bruno  44, 44–45, 45
  Black Sun, the  68
  Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna  7–8
  Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) ideology  21
  Bolivia, expedition to  36
  Bormann, Martin  58, 59
  Bose, Dr. Fritz  25, 35
  Brazil, expedition to  35–36
  Brotherhood of Death  28, 51
  Brotherhood of Saturn  52
  Buch, Standartenführer Conrad  16, 31–32, 32, 37,  
  38, 46, 71
  Cathar Grail, the  50–51, 52, 71
  Catholic Church, the  27
  communists  11, 12
  concentration camps, experiments in  30
  Crimea, artefacts from the  38
  Delphi Oracle, the  37
  Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Worker’s Party; DAP)  14
  Dönitz, Grossadmiral Karl  68
  dowsing  32, 54, 61
  Eckart, Dietrich  14, 14, 15, 16
  Edda Society  22
  Einsarzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR)  35
  El Dorado  35
  electrical energy  18
  energies, hidden  16–19
  eugenics  10
  evocation magic  30
  Externsteine, the  22
  Finland, expedition to  35
  Flügelrad II, autogyro  69, 70
  Fraternitas Saturnii  52
  Freemasons, the  10, 12, 25, 33, 59–60
  Freikorps, the  11, 12
  Galt, Obersturmbannführer Reiner  55, 55
  Germanenorden, the  10, 12
  Germanien (magazine)  29
  Goebbels, Josef  64
  “GOTOS entity,” the  52
  Greece, expedition to  36–37
  Grotto of Lombrives  51
  Hagal (magazine)  22
  Hanussen, Erik Jan  5, 15
  Haushofer, Karl  40–41
  “hedge magic”  27
  Hess, Rudolf  14, 16–17, 40, 41, 49–50, 58–59
  Heydrich, Reinhard  62, 63
  Himmler, Heinrich  18, 19, 20–22, 23–32, 36, 38, 39, 44, 
  50, 50, 60–61, 62, 63, 67
  Hitler, Adolf  4, 9, 14–15, 29, 31, 46, 47, 59,  
  59–60, 68
  Hoher Armanen-Orden (High Armanen Order; HAO)  7
  Holocaust, the  5, 10, 27
  Holy Grail, the  50–54, 71
  Hungary, expedition to  38
  Iceland, expedition to  36
  India, expedition to  40–41
  Iraq, expedition to  37
  Irminism  31, 32, 52
  Irminsul, the  22
  Jankuhn, Sturmbannführer Herbert  25, 32, 38
  Jews see anti-Semitism
  Kaltenbrunner, Ernst  62–63, 63
  Kammler, Klaus  70, 71, 74
  “Kapp Putsch,” the  41
  Kiss, Edmund  19, 36
  Knobelsdorﬀ, Standartenführer Manfred von  32, 55
  Kummer, Siegfried Alfred  22, 28
  Lance of Longinus, the  46–47
  Ley, Willy  16, 17
  ley ﬂows  23, 45
  Liebenfels, Jörg Lanz von  6, 9–10, 10
  List, Guido von  7, 7–9, 28
  Ludendorﬀ, Dr. Mathilde  39, 60
  Ludendorﬀ, General Erich  41
  Madagascar, expedition to  38
  Marineforschungsabteilung (MFA), the  61
  Münchener Beobachter (newspaper)  11, 12
  musicology  18, 25, 28, 35
  nationalism  6–10
  Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National 
  Socialist German Worker’s Party; NSDAP)  14, 15
  Nauhaus, Walter  11, 12
  necromancy  28
  Night of the Long Knives  31
  Operation Carnival (1945)  66
  Operation Highjump (1946)  72, 72–74
  Oppenhoﬀ, Dr. Franz  66
  Oracle of Delphi  37
  Order of the New Templars (ONT)  10
  “Organisation Consul” assassins  14–15
  Orsic, Maria  16–18, 70
  Ostara (magazine)  9
  pendulums  54, 61
  Pohl, Hermann  10
  Polaires, the  48–49, 51
  Poland, artefacts from  37–38
  Projekt Leo  62–63
  Projekt Saucer  69–70
  Pyrmont Protocol  19
  radiesthesia  54
  Rahn, Obersturnführer Otto  36, 50, 50–54, 51
  Raumenergie (space-energy)  18
  Romania, expedition to  37
  Rosenberg, Alfred  14, 35, 36
  rune-magic  6–10, 22, 28, 32, 36, 55
  Schaefer, Hauptsturmführer Ernst  39–40, 41, 44,  
  44–45, 67
  Schappeller, Karl  18, 70
  Schellenberg, Walter  60–61
  Schleif, Untersturmführer Hans  36–37
  Schulz-Kampfhenkel. Obersturmführer Otto  35–36
  Schwartz-Bostunich, Gregor  27
  séances  15, 16
  Sebottendorﬀ, Rudolf von  12–14, 15, 16
  Secret Doctrine, The (Blavatsky)  7
  secret weapons development  69–70
  Seifen-Triebacher, Sturmbannführer Jochen  12, 52
  Sievers, Wolfram  22, 25, 29, 30, 36, 37, 38
  Sonderauftrag H  27
  sound-energy  18, 25, 28, 35
  space-energy  18
  Spain, artefacts from  38
  Spear of Destiny, the  46–48, 71
  SS Lebensborn (Spring of Life) campaign  10
  swastika symbol, the  8, 8–9, 11
  Sweden, expedition to  36
  thaumaturgy  28
  theosophy  7–8
  Theozoologie (Lanz)  9–10
  Thuata, the  29
  Thule Gesellschaft, the (Thule Society)  9, 11–15
  Tibet expeditions  19, 39–40, 44–45
  Veilliurs, the  49–50
  viminas  70
  völkisch societies  7–10, 14, 16, 59
  Vril-Gesellschaft, the  17–19, 28, 61
  Walpurgisnacht (Walpurgis Night)  11
  weather magic  28, 32
  Wehrwolf Bund Deutscher Männer (Werewolf League of 
  German Men)  15
  Welteislehre (World Ice Theory)  19
  “Werewolf” group  64–67
  Wewelsburg Castle  23, 23–24, 24
  Wiligut, Oberführer Karl-Maria  21–23, 28, 30, 39–40, 68
  Wirth, Hermann  20, 25, 25, 29, 36
  witchcraft  21, 27, 59
  Wolﬀ, Gruppenführer Karl  29, 30, 31, 31, 39, 51–54, 62, 71
  Wotanism  7, 15, 22
  Yaktavian Bells  19, 28, 36, 38, 50
  yeti, the  44–45
  Zerzura, City of the Birds  54–57
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  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Osprey Publishing,
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