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  HITLER’S MASTER OF THE DARK ARTS

  Himmler’s Black Knights

  and the Occult Origins of the SS

  Bill Yenne

  This man, Hitler’s evil spirit, cold, calculating and ambitious, was undoubtedly the most purposeful and most unscrupulous figure in the Third Reich.

  —General der Infanterie Friedrich Hossbach (longtime military adjutant to Adolf Hitler), from Zwischen Wehrmacht und Hitler, 1949

  He [Himmler] seemed like a man from another planet.

  —General Heinz Guderian (chief of staff of the German army and the architect of blitzkrieg tactics)

  I had never been able to look Heinrich Himmler straight in the eye. His eyes were always hooded, blinking behind his pince-nez. Now, however, when I could see them gazing at me from the photograph and I thought I could detect one thing in them—malice.

  —Alfred Rosenberg (Reich minister for the East and a key architect of Nazi ideology)

  This Germanic Reich needs the Order of the SS. It needs it at least for the next century. Then … one thousand or two thousand years.

  —Heinrich Himmler, in a speech delivered to SS leaders at Posen on October 4, 1943

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 Darkest Beginnings

  Chapter 2 The Court of the Godfather

  Chapter 3 Almost Hocus-Pocus

  Chapter 4 A Call to Duty

  Chapter 5 The Old Crooked Cross

  Chapter 6 Ballot Boxes and Long Knives

  Chapter 7 Black Knights of the Master Race

  Chapter 8 Father Confessor to the New Order

  Chapter 9 The Dark Temples of the Schutzstaffel

  Chapter 10 Das Ahnenerbe

  Chapter 11 Archaeologists in Black

  Chapter 12 A World of Ice

  Chapter 13 Black Knights in an Army of Field Gray Pawns

  Chapter 14 Drang Nach Osten

  Chapter 15 Bloody Hell

  Chapter 16 The Most Feared Address in Europe

  Chapter 17 Burdens Borne of Black Knighthood

  Chapter 18 The Witches of the Schutzstaffel

  Chapter 19 Aryans Beyond Nationality

  Chapter 20 Evil Science

  Chapter 21 Weird Science

  Chapter 22 The Reich and Its Stormy Night

  Chapter 23 Götterdämmerung

  Chapter 24 The Sands of Time

  Bibliography and Recommended Reading

  Index

  Heinrich Luitpold Himmler, Reichsführer SS (1900–1945) U.S. National Archives

  Introduction

  THE NAZIS WERE an evil cult.

  Few people will argue with this notion in the metaphorical sense. The political movement that seized control of one of the world’s largest industrialized nations in the 1930s and carried the world into its most destructive war can certainly be characterized as being evil. But can the Nazis really be characterized as a cult?

  Webster’s dictionary, which we always consult on matters of semantics, tells us that a cult is a system of religious rituals that involves an obsessive devotion to a person, principle, or ideal. The Nazi Party, or the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party), began not explicitly as a religion, but as a political party. However, this party did indeed morph into a personality cult devoted excessively to one person, Adolf Hitler. But can the Nazis really be characterized as a cult in the sense of their being a religious movement?

  In fact, the doctrinal underpinnings of the Nazi cult were very much drawn from a mystical dogma that had its own roots in ancient spiritual beliefs. This dogma had been forming in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from a swirling mass of ideas, concepts, and metaphysical currents that were flowing through Europe in those days. Guided by the Viennese prophets Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (both of whom had added “von” to their names for an air of nobility), the creed preceded the Nazis. It had originated, these so-called prophets said, long, long ago, in the misty distant past, in a cold and icy place that some would later call Thule. Paraphrasing and borrowing loosely from ancient Scandinavian scriptures, these prophets told of gods and of heroic supermen, who were gods themselves and who were the progenitors of a superrace. This idea, which became an ideal, infused a generation with the belief that their race had its roots among the god-men.

  At the same time that this mystical dogma was congealing, a pseudoscientific culture filled with strange theories and half-proven half-truths emerged to provide what some would argue to be a concrete foundation upon which this supernatural dogma could rest.

  What happened next in those turbulent times after the first world war was a fusion of this pagan mystical nostalgia with a nationalist nostalgia.

  Into the political maelstrom that was the Germany of the early 1920s came the Nazis, who spoke nostalgically of a golden political and military past that had been stripped from the nation and from the Germanic people by their defeat in World War I. Within the movement that congealed into the Nazi Party, there was the need to sanctify the uniqueness of the Germanic people and their transcendent superiority above all others. What better dogma than the belief in the Germanic people being descended from a race of god-men?

  Into the Nazi Party came the silver-tongued orator who would make it all happen politically—Adolf Hitler.

  Adolf Hitler, a 1941 portrait in charcoal by Conrad Hommel. U.S. Army art collection

  And into the Nazi Party, there soon came the man who truly believed in the complex notion of the Germanic peoples as the chosen people, as the descendants of the god-men. This man was Heinrich Himmler.

  In the decade after Hitler brought the Nazis to power politically, Himmler crafted a state religion, complete with the trappings of creed and ritual, which elevated one race to superhuman status. Over time, Himmler became so obsessed with the ideal of Germanic superiority that he created a mechanism by which Germany and all of the land that it conquered in World War II would be cleansed of races that he considered inferior, people whom he considered so subordinate as to be unworthy of life itself.

  As we look back today on the Third Reich of the 1930s, we are looking into a dream world on the threshold of becoming the nightmare world of the 1940s—the nightmare of World War II and of the Holocaust. Nazi Germany was like a scene from a fantasy film. Adolf Hitler was the evil emperor, ruling his kingdom with an iron fist from a dark and stony castle. In the shadows behind the emperor’s throne, whispering in the ear of the ruler, is the evil shaman, the evil sorcerer, the perpetrator and guardian of the canon law upon which the empire is based—Heinrich Himmler.

  Before them stand fierce, helmeted warriors—the black knights of Himmler’s Schutzstaffel (SS), a special class of warriors defined by race and blood. They were handpicked as the most racially Germanic of Germans. In Himmler’s mind, they were Germany’s tangible link with the primordial warriors, who were both supermen and gods, and with a future ruling class that would last for a thousand years. Even today, the image of an SS storm trooper in full regalia causes chills. They were the ruthless true believers, inspired by that witch’s brew that Himmler stirred in his caldron, using a recipe that was cribbed from a conglomeration of arcane sources and the doctrines of the prophets List and Lanz.

  Hitler was the charismatic madman who brought Nazism to power. Himmler was the ruthless figure in the shadows, the man who took the philosophies that were at the roots of Nazism and methodically shaped and codified them. Himmler is the man whom General Heinrich Hossbach described as “Hitler’s evil spirit, cold, calculating and ambitious … undoubtedly the most purposeful and most unscrupulous figure in the Third Reich.”

  CHAPTER 1


  Darkest Beginnings

  HEINRICH I, KING OF THE GERMANS, was born in Memleben in Saxony in the year 876, a turbulent time often referred to as the Dark Ages. It was an age of wars, of dark, cold castles, of blazing bonfires and stark banners.

  The son of Otto, duke of Saxony, and his wife, Hedwiga, a descendant of Charlemagne, Heinrich had been destined for greatness. He succeeded his father as duke in 912, and four years later he was crowned the first king of the Germans. As the originator of the medieval German state, Heinrich remained on the throne until his death in 936, but his memory would live on in the chronicles of German national identity.

  Heinrich Himmler, born over a millennium later just 250 miles south of Memleben in Munich, capital of the German state of Bavaria, fancied himself a reincarnation of Heinrich I. He considered himself to have been reborn in 1900, called again to be an important, even majestic, figure in the chronicles of German national identity.

  At the dawn of a century that many felt would be a golden age of technological promise, this Heinrich played a pivotal role in plunging the promising century into what most historians agree was a true dark age. This Heinrich would help to re-create a medieval world of dark, cold castles, of blazing bonfires and stark banners—and the greatest and bloodiest war the world had yet seen.

  Charlemagne (left) defeated the Saxons and resettled Franks in their lands. A millennium later, Himmler resettled Völksdeutsche peasants in the lands of Slavic peasants in the conquered Ukraine. Otto I (right), son of Heinrich I, ruled the Holy Roman Empire. They were memorialized on SS Feldpost postage stamps issued in occupied Flanders. The languages on the stamp are Flemish and German. Collection of Kris Simoens, used by permission

  COMING INTO THE WORLD on October 7, 1900, Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was not of noble birth, although his father had once tutored Prince Heinrich of the house of Wittelsbach, Bavaria’s royal family, and the sixteen-year-old prince became the young Himmler’s godfather and namesake. Heinrich was the middle child of schoolteacher Joseph Gebhard Himmler and Anna Maria Himmler, née Heyder, the daughter of a Regensberg merchant. His older brother, Gebhard Ludwig, was born July 29, 1898, and his younger brother, Ernst Hermann, was born two days before Christmas in December 1905.

  When the boys were young, Joseph took a job as headmaster at the Wittelsbacher Gymnasium in Landshut, about fifty miles northeast of Munich. Heinrich Himmler grew up here, in a comfortable and secure middle-class home, an environment where there was ample opportunity for daydreaming. Heinrich’s daydreams turned to the glorious days of old, to the days of castles and banners and of Heinrich I.

  Known as the Fowler, or der Vogler, because he was netting small birds when informed he had been picked to be king, Heinrich I was a true leader, a man who inspired his subjects—or at least the nobility among them—to elevate him to the throne. The twentieth-century Heinrich Luitpold Himmler inspired through inducing an unprecedented measure of mortal dread.

  Heinrich I was a father figure of German national identity, and he was the father of Otto I, known as Otto the Great, who in 962 was crowned emperor of what would be called the Holy Roman Empire. As emperor, Otto was the first ruler of a church-sanctioned empire that included much of what is now Germany and Austria, as well as adjacent lands and even parts of Italy.

  In Heinrich Himmler’s mind, the historical origins of the German identity stretched back into distant, murky mythology. Himmler imagined the mystical time before the church wielded both political and ecclesiastical power in northern Europe, a place where ancient Nordic warrior princes walked among the gods and iron weapons were forged in the fires that belched from the center of the earth. Most boys outgrow such fantasy worlds, but some remain within their fabricated universe, living in a comfortable place away from the disappointments of reality. Such was the case with the reborn Heinrich.

  Known until his twenties as Heini, the young Himmler grew up in a nice home just down the hill from Landshut’s most imposing landmark, the thirteenth-century Burg Trusnitz. Staring each day at this old stone castle that overlooked a bend in the Isar River, Himmler probably imagined himself living near the Rhine, the mother river of Germanic folklore, as part of the seminal legends of Germany. He probably fantasized about the Nibelungenlied, the ancient German epic whose central character, Siegfried, was the greatest German warrior of them all.

  Like his interest in Heinrich I, Himmler’s interest in artifacts of the past was not that of the archeologist. He cared not for what could be learned from the past but, rather, for what he could draw from his fantasy world and read into the past.

  Though he was raised as a Catholic and attended mass regularly until his midtwenties, Himmler was an early convert to the pagan creed of Heinrich I’s ancestors. It certainly suited his sensibilities to rhapsodize less about Jesus Christ delivering the Sermon on the Mount than about Wotan, the chief deity of Nordic paganism, seated in his rugged mountaintop abode. Called Ygg or Odin in Old Norse, Wotan in Old High German, and many other names across the mythology of ancient northern Europe, this god of gods holds the portfolios of wisdom, war, and death—as well as of victory and deception. In this ancient world, at the beginning of time itself, Wotan reigned with his earth-goddess wife, Jörd, and they beget a son, Thor (in German, Donar or Donner). With his fiery red hair and beard, Thor became an enduring figure in Norse mythology. The powerful god of thunder, Thor wielded an enormous hammer called a mjöllnir, and he was the hero of many tales preserved in the ancient Nordic scriptures known as the Eddas.

  Heinrich I receives word in 919 that he is to be the first king of Germany. The painting is by Willy Pogany, a popular book illustrator in the late nineteenth century. Author’s collection

  Wotan and Thor, as well as their mythic extended families, became part of the ancient folklore in Germany and Austria, and in the region from Britain to Scandinavia. Like the Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, they remained as integral parts of the literature and culture of Europe long after the arrival of Christianity. Indeed, like those of Greek and Roman deities, their names remain alive in popular culture to this day (and in the days of the week: Wednesday and Thursday).

  The image of Wotan seated, with his pair of wolves beside him, on his golden throne at Asgard has been a part of Nordic folklore for millennia. Donald MacKenzie, writing in 1912 in Teutonic Myth and Legend, describes the great city of the gods as standing on “a holy island in the midst of a dark broad river flowing from the thunder vapors that rise through the great World tree from Hvergelmer, ‘the roaring cauldron,’ the mother of waters. The river is ever troubled with eddies and fierce currents, and above it hover darkly thick banks of kindling mist called ‘Black Terror Gleam,’ from which leap everlastingly tongues of [lightning] filling the air and darting like white froth from whirling billows.”

  Such imagery, with its hammers, thunder, and ferocity, could easily have been drawn from the sorts of twenty-first-century fantasy films and video games that attract young boys today. It certainly inspired the impressionable imagination of the young Himmler. He saw Asgard’s “dark and lofty wall” in the walls of Burg Trusnitz, where he had acted out his own naive pagan fantasies as a child.

  The slight boy with the primeval imagination was a soft child, a poor athlete, and a mediocre student who overcompensated for his shortcomings through cunning. At school, Himmler spied on fellow students for his father, the principal. In fact, his deviousness apparently astonished even the elder Himmler. In an interview with the Berlin Kurier, reprinted in the New York Times in June 1947, a former classmate, Hans Hirthammer, recalled that the strict headmaster referred to his deceitful son as a “born criminal.” Hirthammer added that the boy “delighted in dreaming up ingenious punishments.”

  Hard of spirit, but delicate of body, Himmler resented his physical weaknesses and his poor eyesight. His early diaries, now in the collection of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, reveal a young man obsessed with bodybuilding and physical fitness. He was as
hamed of his inability, despite his efforts, to bulk up his slender frame. A psychologist might be tempted to suggest that his delight in concocting punishments flowed from the disgrace he felt about his lack of physical prowess.

  Shortly before Himmler turned fourteen, the German Empire found itself at war. The Holy Roman Empire, known as the Reich (German for “empire”), had outlived its glory days, fragmented, and ceased to exist as Napoleon Bonaparte rose to power at the turn of the sixteenth century. However, by the 1860s, one German state, Prussia, had emerged as one of the most powerful states in Europe. After inflicting a humiliating defeat on France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, Prussia became the nucleus for a new pan-German empire. Prussia’s King Wilhelm I was crowned as emperor, or kaiser, of a new German empire, and the Second Reich was born.

  In 1914, after four decades as the preeminent military power on the European continent, Germany went to war, imagining an easy replay of the Franco-Prussian War in the west and an easy defeat of the bumbling armies of Russia in the east. Allied with Germany was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a kingdom 25 percent larger than the Second Reich. Though a multiethnic empire, Austro-Hungary was German at its core and at its court in German-speaking Vienna.

  The war, then known as the Great War or the World War, and now known as World War I, began in August 1914. Like toppling dominoes, the nations of Europe virtually stumbled over one another with declarations and counter-declarations of war. It began easily, amid pompous pronouncements and unfurled colors, and everyone predicted a quick resolution.

  As the war began, Heinrich Himmler followed the progress of German armies intently, fantasizing about being a heroic warrior himself. When he saw troops marching near Landshut, he confided in his diary that he longed to “join in.” When his brother Gebhard enlisted in 1915, he was deeply jealous. Himmler also watched as his noble namesake, Prince Heinrich, went off to war and imagined him fighting bravely, which he actually did. However, exactly one month after Heinrich Himmler turned sixteen, his prince died a hero’s death, shot down by a sniper in Transylvania.