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The Spear of Destiny: The Relic That Changed History · Midnight Signals: History, Folklore and Unexplained Mysteries

• 0:00
  [gentle music] In October of 1938, an armored train left Vienna under SS guard. Its cargo was not gold or weapons, but a single iron spearhead, said to be the lance that pierced the side of Christ on the cross.
• 0:16
  An old prophecy claims that whoever holds it holds the destiny of the world, for good or for evil. Roman emperors carried it. Charlemagne swore by it.
• 0:26
  Napoleon reached for it and missed, and Adolf Hitler finally seized it.
• 0:31
  Seven years later, it vanished into the ground beneath a burning city, and the timing of the day it left his hands is the strangest detail in its 2,000-year story.
• 0:41
  The story starts on a hill outside Jerusalem on the afternoon Rome executed Jesus of Nazareth. Crucifixion killed slowly by design.
• 0:50
  With the Sabbath approaching, the authorities wanted the bodies down before sundown, so soldiers went out to break the legs of the three condemned men and finish the executions quickly.
• 1:01
  They shattered the legs of the two criminals beside him. When they reached Jesus, they found him already dead, and one soldier raised his lance and drove the point into the Son of God's side to make certain.
• 1:13
  Blood and water poured from the wound, and the record says this fulfilled words written centuries earlier that not one of his bones would be broken and that people would look upon the one they had pierced.
• 1:25
  Scripture never names that soldier, but tradition does.
• 1:28
  The early Church came to know him as Longinus, a Roman soldier whose eyes were failing, and the old accounts hold that when the blood and water ran down the shaft of his spear and touched his face, his sight returned.
• 1:41
  A man sent to confirm a death walked off that hill converted.
• 1:45
  The Church later honored him as a saint with a feast day in March in the West and another in October in the East, and painters kept placing his lance into images of the crucifixion for centuries afterward.
• 1:58
  The wound itself became a doorway for believers.
• 2:01
  Medieval Christians meditated on the opening in Christ's side, and teachers of the faith read the blood and water that flowed from it as living symbols of baptism and communion, the two streams that carried salvation into the world.
• 2:15
  The spear that opened that wound sat at the center of the image, and it appeared in paintings and carvings for 1,000 years. His weapon took a stranger road than he did.
• 2:25
  The instruments of the Passion, the cross, the nails, the crown of thorns, and the lance became the most sought-after objects in the Christian world because they had touched the blood of Christ himself.
• 2:38
  Bones of saints and scraps of holy cloth filled church treasuries across Europe, but these stood apart.
• 2:45
  In the centuries that followed, kings and churches would trade for them, steal them, and kill for them, and no instrument of the Passion would gather more blood along the way than the lance.
• 2:56
  Somewhere in those early centuries, the lance picked up a promise.
• 3:00
  The legend, repeated in one form or another for more than 1,000 years, holds that whoever possesses the Holy Lance and understands the powers it serves holds the destiny of the world in his hands, for good or for evil.
• 3:13
  No other object carried a claim like that.
• 3:16
  The Church sorted its relics into ranks, with the bodies of saints in one class and their belongings in another, but anything tied directly to Christ and his Passion sat above all of it.
• 3:27
  A lance that had entered his body occupied a category of one. The first great name that tradition attaches to that promise is Constantine.
• 3:35
  He ruled as the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity, a man who credited his crown to help from heaven, and the old accounts place the lance among his possessions as he reshaped an empire around a new faith.
• 3:48
  With him, the pattern begins. The lance finds its way to men who are building something enormous, and it arrives right as their power crests. The wording of the promise matters because it cuts both ways.
• 4:01
  Possession alone isn't enough, since the holder must also understand the powers the lance serves, and the tradition never explains exactly what that means.
• 4:11
  What the tradition does supply over and over is a warning written in the lives of the men who carried it. The lance lifts its holder while he keeps it, and it collects a price the moment he loses it.
• 4:23
  For centuries, that price stayed a rumor, easy to dismiss and impossible to test.
• 4:29
  Then, under the walls of a starving city in Syria, the lance decided a war in front of thousands of witnesses, and the man who pulled it out of the ground paid the price in full.
• 4:41
  In 1098, the armies of the First Crusade captured the ancient city of Antioch. Within days, they became prisoners inside their own conquest because a massive relief army arrived and surrounded the walls.
• 4:54
  Food ran short, and the crusade that had fought its way across the known world began to starve inside a city it had just bled to take. Into that despair walked a peasant named Peter Bartholomew.
• 5:06
  He told the leaders of the army that Saint Andrew had been appearing to him in visions and that the apostle had shown him where the Holy Lance lay buried, beneath the floor of the cathedral of Saint Peter inside the very city where they were trapped.
• 5:20
  So the men dug. They cut through the cathedral floor for hours and found nothing, and then out of the packed earth came an iron spearhead.
• 5:30
  Peter proclaimed it the lance that had pierced the side of Christ, and word moved through the starving army like a fever breaking.
• 5:37
  The army carried the lance in procession, and then it carried the lance out of the gates and into battle against a force that should have crushed it. The besiegers broke and ran.
• 5:47
  Exhausted, half-starved men routed a fresh enemy that outmatched them, and the chroniclers of the crusade pointed at the relic riding at the front of the line.
• 5:57
  Overnight, the spearhead turned into the most powerful object in the crusader camp.
• 6:03
  Power like that attracts powerful men, so the leaders of the crusade maneuvered to control it and to attach its authority to their own names, because an army that believed God had handed it a sign would follow whoever carried that sign.
• 6:15
  Some of the clergy quietly doubted the whole affair, and whispers spread that the spearhead might have been planted in the ground before the digging ever started. Those whispers cost Peter Bartholomew everything.
• 6:27
  To silence the doubters, he volunteered to walk through fire while carrying the lance, an ordeal meant to let God himself prove the finder honest. He came out of the flames with injuries he didn't survive.
• 6:40
  The lance had lifted an army and destroyed the man closest to it, all within a single year.
• 6:45
  And while crusaders bled for one lance in Syria, another blade had already spent generations in the treasure wagons of emperors farther north. That northern blade is the one this story has been following.
• 6:58
  It's the spearhead that would one day ride Hitler's train, an iron lance head with a central blade, reinforcing strips along its body, and a hollow core.
• 7:08
  Bound into that core, held in place by bands of silver and gold, sits an iron nail, long claimed to be one of the very nails that fixed Christ to the cross.
• 7:18
  The weapon even carries old inscriptions tying it back to the age of Constantine, so whoever held it gripped two relics of the crucifixion folded into a single killing tool.
• 7:28
  The traditions around it read like a warning label.
• 7:32
  Pope Leo III is said to have placed the lance in the hands of Charlemagne, the Frankish king who rebuilt an empire in Western Europe, and legend holds that Charlemagne carried it through forty-seven military campaigns without losing one.
• 7:45
  The same legend records how his story ended, because he dropped the lance and death found him soon after. Frederick Barbarossa learned the second half of that lesson, too.
• 7:57
  Tradition tells that the great red-bearded emperor lost his hold on the lance and drowned soon afterward, one more ruler whose luck ran out the moment the relic left him.
• 8:07
  In 955, the tradition places the lance with Otto I at the Battle of Lechfeld, where his army broke the Magyar invasions that had terrorized Europe for decades, and this time, the holder kept his grip and won.
• 8:22
  Around these men grew the Holy Roman Empire, a German empire claiming the mantle of ancient Rome, and the lance settled into the heart of its crown jewels.
• 8:32
  The imperial regalia included the crown, the sword, the orb, the imperial cross, and the lance. Together, according to their beliefs, those objects turned a German king into God's chosen emperor.
• 8:45
  Because a ruler crowned without them was just a king with an army, but a ruler crowned in their presence claimed authority over the whole Christian West, handed down from heaven itself.
• 8:56
  For roughly 1,000 years, emperors took power in the presence of these objects.
• 9:01
  The collection eventually came to rest in Nuremberg, the city trusted to guard the empire's most sacred possessions, and generations of pilgrims and princes passed through to stand near the lance that legend said had opened the side of God.
• 9:15
  1,000 years is a long run for any empire. This one died in front of a new kind of conqueror, and for the first time in its long history, the lance had to run for its life.
• 9:27
  In December of 1805, Napoleon crushed the combined armies of Austria and Russia at Austerlitz, and within months, the old Holy Roman Empire dissolved for good. The old order of Europe died on that battlefield.
• 9:42
  Everything the emperors had owned suddenly needed a hiding place. The tradition says Napoleon wanted the lance. He knew exactly what it was supposed to grant, and he reached for it.
• 9:54
  But the keepers of the regalia moved faster than his armies, and the lance slipped out of Nuremberg and traveled to Vienna before he could close his hand around it.
• 10:03
  The most feared conqueror since the Caesars arrived to claim the prize of emperors, and the prize was already gone.
• 10:11
  That makes Napoleon the one great empire builder in this story who never touched it, and the rest of his life sits uncomfortably beside the legend.
• 10:19
  His invasion of Russia gutted the finest army in Europe, his throne collapsed twice, and he died in exile on a small island in the South Atlantic, further from power than any man who had ever held so much of it.
• 10:31
  The Habsburg sheltered the lance, and their empire outlived his by a century. From 1804 onward, the lance rested in Vienna's Hofburg Treasury.
• 10:42
  The empire that had carried it no longer existed, but the object kept its quiet place among the Habsburg crown jewels, waiting through a century of peace and collapse.
• 10:53
  It sat in that display case while the world changed outside, and in the early years of the 20th century, a thin young man with no money and no prospects found his way into the room.
• 11:05
  His name was Adolf Hitler, and he was around nineteen or twenty years old. He'd come to Vienna dreaming of life as a painter.
• 11:13
  The art academy rejected him, and he spent his years there drifting through the city while everything he'd planned fell apart.
• 11:21
  Vienna in those days held the treasures of six centuries of Habsburg rule, and the treasury of the Hofburg Palace held the lance.
• 11:29
  The story that later entered legend puts him in that treasury somewhere around 1909 to 1912, standing in front of the Holy Lance.
• 11:38
  As the account tells it, he fell into something like a trance before the case, felt he had held the lance before in some earlier age, and swore that one day the spear and whatever power lived in it would belong to him.
• 11:52
  A penniless drifter had just claimed the talisman of emperors.
• 11:56
  That account reached the world decades later through the recollections of a Vienna scholar who had devoted his life to the Grail legends and claimed to have known the young Hitler in those years.
• 12:07
  Historians have fought over how much of it happened ever since, and the argument will probably never close because the two men who could settle it are both gone.
• 12:17
  What nobody disputes is what Hitler did the moment Austria dropped into his hands. The regime he built ran on more than politics.
• 12:25
  The SS, under Heinrich Himmler, wrapped itself in ritual and symbol, chased lost relics and lost origins, and treated sacred objects as instruments of real power.
• 12:37
  Whatever Hitler privately believed about the spear in that Vienna case, the machine around him took such things deadly seriously, and in March of nineteen thirty-eight, it rolled across the Austrian border.
• 12:50
  Germany annexed Austria in March of nineteen thirty-eight, and Hitler entered Vienna in triumph.
• 12:57
  The palace, the treasury, and the lance inside it passed into his control in a single stroke, and the man from the display case now owned everything he'd once stared at through the glass.
• 13:09
  The regalia had rested in that treasury since eighteen oh four, surviving Napoleon, revolutions, and a world war, and now they belonged to a former Vienna drifter who'd come back as the master of the country.
• 13:23
  He didn't leave the lance in Vienna long.
• 13:26
  On October thirteenth of that year, on his orders, the Holy Lance and the entire imperial regalia left the city aboard a special train under SS guard bound for Nuremberg, where the treasures went on display in the Church of Saint Catherine.
• 13:40
  The destination carried its own message, since Nuremberg was both the old keeping place of the empire's treasures and the stage for the Nazi Party's enormous rallies, and the regime presented the relics as proof of its right to rule.
• 13:54
  The symbolism was the point of the whole operation. Hitler called his regime the Third Reich.
• 14:00
  The First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire itself, and bringing the emperor's crown and lance back to Nuremberg stitched his Germany onto a thousand years of sacred history.
• 14:11
  The painter Vienna rejected now held the object the prophecy said would hand him the world. For a while, the bargain seemed to hold.
• 14:21
  In the first years of the war, the man holding the lance conquered nearly everything he touched, and his army swallowed most of Europe with a speed no one alive had ever witnessed.
• 14:31
  Nation after nation folded in weeks, sometimes in days, and the failed painter with the emperor's spear looked for one terrible stretch of history unstoppable. Then the war turned.
• 14:43
  The bombers came for Nuremberg, and the lance went underground. Allied bombing hammered Nuremberg until the old city began coming apart.
• 14:52
  Officials moved the regalia into an art bunker, a vault system cut into the rock beneath Nuremberg Castle, and then went a step further with the most sacred pieces.
• 15:02
  In a chamber roughly eighty feet below the surface, off an underground corridor, workers sealed the lance and its companions behind a freshly built masonry wall. Then came the lie.
• 15:14
  Officials spread the story that the treasures had been carried off and sunk in an Austrian lake so that even if the city fell, the lance would stay lost forever.
• 15:24
  When American forces fought their way into Nuremberg in April of nineteen forty-five, the most famous relic in Europe had effectively ceased to exist. The legend tells the next part its own way.
• 15:36
  In that telling, the lance passed into American hands on April thirtieth of nineteen forty-five, and roughly two hours later, in a bunker beneath Berlin, Adolf Hitler put a pistol to his head.
• 15:48
  The pattern held one final time on the largest stage in history because the man who lost the lance lost everything with it. The documented record moves slower, and it's stranger for it.
• 16:00
  That summer, a German-born American art historian working in Army intelligence drew the assignment of finding the missing regalia.
• 16:08
  Over three days in late July of nineteen forty-five, he questioned twenty-one people in the ruined city, and among them sat two city councilmen who had helped hide the treasure and had stuck to the lake story through the fall of the Reich.
• 16:21
  On August seventh, nineteen forty-five, the two men led him to a bunker entrance.
• 16:27
  The masonry wall came down, and in the small chamber behind it lay the crown, the sword, the orb, and the Holy Lance, untouched beneath eighty feet of rock while the city above them had burned flat.
• 16:40
  On January fourth, nineteen forty-six, an American officer escorted the entire treasure onto a plane and flew it back to Vienna, where Austria formally took its relics home.
• 16:52
  The lance returned to the same treasury room where a failed painter had once stood, staring through the glass, but the questions followed it there, and half a century later, science finally got its chance to ask them.
• 17:05
  It's still there. The Holy Lance sits today in the Imperial Treasury of the Hofburg in Vienna on public display, a dark iron blade with a nail bound into its heart by bands of silver and gold.
• 17:19
  In two thousand and three, a metallurgist received permission to do what no one had done before, and he carried the lance into a laboratory, removed those bands, and tested the metal itself.
• 17:30
  The blade's iron dates to around the seventh century. That places its forging hundreds of years after the crucifixion, and for a moment the case looked closed.
• 17:39
  But the nail bound into its core, the piece long claimed to come from the cross, measured consistent in length and shape with a Roman nail from the first century.
• 17:49
  A later examination disagreed and dated the nail with the blade, so now even the laboratories argue with each other over what the thing actually is. In the end, the legend never really depended on the metal itself.
• 18:03
  Charlemagne dropped the lance and died. Barbarossa lost it and drowned. Napoleon reached for it and missed, finishing his days exiled on a lonely rock in the Atlantic.
• 18:14
  And Hitler took his own life in a ruined bunker while the lance sat quietly beneath a conquered city, slipping forever from his grasp.
• 18:23
  Modern tests suggest that at the very core of the blade sitting in Vienna today, there is iron over two thousand years old. Every empire that placed its faith in that metal has turned to dust.
• 18:36
  The artifact remains, but the argument over what it all means has never truly ended. This has been a broadcast from Midnight Signals. I'm Russ Chamberlain guiding you through the shadows where history meets mystery.
• 18:51
  Visit midnightsignals.net to continue the conversation, explore more episodes, and say hello. If you enjoyed tonight's journey, please like, subscribe, and share to help more listeners find the show.
• 19:04
  Until next time, stay vigilant, seek the hidden, and remember in every silence there is a signal, and in every signal, a story waiting to be told. [eerie music]