Hitler's Master of the Dark Arts

Himmler's Black Knights and the Occult Origins of the SS

Bill Yenne

• Editorial: Zenith Press
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781610600736
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Seconda guerra mondiale

At the heart of the evil of Nazism was Hitler's "witch doctor, " Heinrich Himmler, and his peculiar and deadly organization with the mundane name Schutzstaffel, literally "protective squadron." Undoubtedly you know them better as the feared SS, the very essence of Nazism. Their threatening double lightning bolt is perhaps the most dreaded symbol of the Third Reich.

The facts of the SS's origins are truly stranger than fiction. If you thought Raiders of the Lost Ark was an inspired Hollywood fiction, think again. Hitler's Master of the Dark Arts reveals the hidden "truths" of the SS in full and morbidly fascinating detail.

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 ashamed 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.

The duplicitous boy with the soft hands reached his late teens as the war reached its climax. By 1918, the enthusiastic days of banners and glory had been superseded on German streets by the harsh reality of wounded veterans, food shortages, and bad news from the front. Nevertheless, the middle son of the stern schoolmaster still hung on to dreams of glory.

Seeing his middle son yearning for the military life, the elder Himmler pulled some strings with his friends in the Bavarian court in June 1917, and got young Heini on the list for future army-officer candidate school. In the meantime, the young Himmler had apparently joined the 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment as an enlisted man. He had entertained thoughts of joining the kaiser’s navy, but they did not accept recruits who wore glasses. Though he was on the roster of the 11th Regiment, he never served anywhere near the front. His later claims to have led troops in battle were fabricated. He saw no combat and had not completed officer training before the war ended on November 11, 1918.

For Germany, it was a crushing defeat. In losing World War I, the Second Reich imploded. With the failure of the bold spring and summer 1918 offensives crafted by Field Marshal Erich Ludendorff, it was apparent within Germany that defeat was imminent, and social order began to disintegrate. Once the most powerful monarch on the continent of Europe, Kaiser Wilhelm II saw his authority weakened by discontent within the ranks by 1918 and abdicated on November 9—after three decades on the throne as the second and last modern German emperor.

Meanwhile, the Austro-Hungarian Empire also ceased to exist. Austrian emperor Franz Josef I, who had reigned for sixty-eight years, died in 1916, but his grandnephew Karl abdicated within days of Kaiser Wilhelm, as the last of the empire’s non-German dominions slipped away. While the Second Reich imploded, the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated. The land ruled from Vienna at the end of 1918 was about 12 percent the size of the empire that was ruled from that city in 1914.

In both countries, especially in Germany, there was a power vacuum into which flowed idealogues from across the political spectrum. On both ends of the spectrum, extremist political parties, some with their own private armies, cropped up. Indeed, numerous alternative parties had been growing in popularity during the latter months of the war, as Germany lost the battlefield initiative and as the kaiser’s government grew visibly weaker. Many of these political movements shared an opposition to the war and the monarchy, especially when it became apparent that the war was not winnable. And all shared a dissatisfaction with the postwar status quo after the November armistice.

On the far left, socialists and communists, inspired by the success of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, attempted to seize power. In fact, a socialist government led by the charismatic Kurt Eisner ruled in Bavaria for a few months during the winter of 1918–1919.

Heinrich Himmler grew up in Landshut on the Isar River, just down the hill from the thirteenth-century Burg Trusnitz. He spent his childhood staring up at this stone castle and imagining a bygone era of ancient heroes, knights, and glory. Author’s collection

On the right were the nationalists who were nostalgic for the glory days of German military and political power. After decades of being subjects of the most powerful and well-ordered nation in Europe, the nationalists felt the emptiness of disorder and of the remnants of their reich collapsing around them. Many nationalists blamed wartime industrial strikes arranged by communists and socialists for Germany’s loss of the war and, therein, the loss of its honor as a nation. Their perception that the communists and socialists had stabbed Germany in the back infuriated the nationalists.

In June 1919, the wartime allies who had defeated Germany in World War I handed German extremists of all stripes a gift upon which they could agree. The Treaty of Versailles, which officially concluded World War I, was so harsh in its humiliating treatment of Germany that it was vilified by both the right and left within Germany. Indeed, the treaty demanded that Germany accept sole responsibility for the war. While Germany had been the principal combatant among the Central Powers, plenty of nations on both sides had a share in the blame for the war having started. Because Germany had been so obviously singled out, the treaty provided the extremist rabble-rousers with a convenient lightning rod to use in their public diatribes.

After a winter of discontent, a conference held in the city of Weimar in August 1919 finally settled on a democratic constitution to replace the German monarchy. Though the Weimar Republic brought some structure to the postwar political void in Germany, it was a compromise that essentially pleased no one. The extremist political parties on both right and left merely added disaffection with the Weimar Republic to their long lists of grievances.

Also on this list was the economic collapse that Germany suffered after the end of the war. It is impossible to exaggerate the impact of this economic crisis. Unemployment and hyperinflation reached staggering levels that have few, if any, comparisons in the history of modern industrialized nations. These conditions crippled and eventually doomed the Weimar Republic.

Heinrich Him...