Latest / Lost Civilizations: Ancient Aliens & Forgotten History / The Nazis’ Secret Obsession | Himmler, Atlantis & the Search for the Holy Grail

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The Nazis’ Secret Obsession | Himmler, Atlantis & the Search for the Holy Grail · Lost Civilizations: Ancient Aliens & Forgotten History

0:01
December 1938.
0:04
Five men sit around a campfire on the
0:07
border of Tibet.
0:08
The temperature has dropped well below freezing.
0:11
They haven't seen another human being in weeks.
0:15
Around them there is only sky, snow and
0:17
silence.
0:19
Officially there were scientists, a zoologist, a geologist,
0:23
a botanist and an entomologist, the guy who
0:28
catches insects.
0:30
And then there is one that they call
0:31
himself a physiological anthropologist.
0:35
He has a suitcase full of calibers, measuring
0:37
tapes and diagrams of skull shapes.
0:41
Unofficially there were SS officers in civilian clothes
0:44
sent by Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer der SS.
0:47
The man with the round glasses who looks
0:49
like an accountant but wields more powers than
0:52
those generals.
0:54
Himmler believes that the iron race, his race,
0:57
descends from Atlantis.
0:59
That survivors from the sunken continent fled into
1:03
the Himalayas and they were hiding up there
1:05
in the snow, in the fog.
1:08
He has sent five men to find the proof.
1:10
proof.
1:10
There's only one problem.
1:12
It's a lie.
1:14
There is no Ayans in Tibet.
1:16
Himmler is wrong.
1:18
But therefore the year is out that mistake
1:22
cost millions of people their lives.
1:36
My name
1:49
is René and you are listening to Ancient
1:50
Aliens Lost to Civilization.
1:52
Today we are not talking about gods from
1:54
the outer space.
1:55
We are talking about something much more down
1:57
to earth and much more frightening.
2:01
The Nazis, Himmler, the SS, the hunt for
2:05
the holy grail, Atlantis, rune magic, and a
2:08
castle in Westphalia that is now a museum
2:11
but that some still call the strongholds of
2:15
the black sun.
2:17
We are going to examine what's facts, what's
2:20
interpretation, and what is pure myth-making from
2:24
the years after the war.
2:29
And yes, I will inadvertently mispronounce half of
2:32
the German names.
2:33
That is the price of doing a podcast
2:35
in English when your sources are in German.
2:39
Elsa Danish and I will do my best.
2:42
But you have to forgive for the rest.
2:44
Let's begin.
2:48
May 1933.
2:50
Nazi students, SA men, and Hitler youth gathered
2:54
on the university squares all over Germany.
2:57
They were carrying torches.
2:58
They were carrying books.
2:59
They throw them on the fire.
3:03
There are in famous book burnings a feud
3:06
by Einstein.
3:08
Everything that's on German must be burned.
3:11
Most people know about that.
3:12
But what a few people know is that
3:15
while the books are burning, other texts were
3:17
being studied in the deepest secrecy.
3:20
Old Icelandic sagas were gods and heroes.
3:24
Medieval grey legends, esoteric theses on runes, divination,
3:31
and the sunken civilization on Atlantis.
3:35
Because the Nazis weren't just a political party.
3:39
They were, in their own minds, the beginning
3:41
of a new religion.
3:43
A religion that would replace Christianity, preach the
3:47
sanctity of the blood and soil, and the
3:50
identity of the German people as the Iron
3:53
Race's last hope.
3:55
For decades after World War II, historians have
3:59
debated how seriously we should take the Nazis'
4:02
interest in the outgrowth.
4:04
Was it a genuine belief, or was it
4:07
just a way to manipulate the masses?
4:09
Was Himmler a madman who wasted millions on
4:14
nonsense?
4:15
Or was he a cynical propagandist who knew
4:18
that myths bind people together, and he could
4:22
use them to create an unbreakable loyalty around
4:25
the Führer?
4:26
The answer is, as often in the cases
4:29
with the history, more complicated.
4:32
Today we are going down the rabbit hole,
4:34
but we are going to do it with
4:36
a cold head and the sources laid out
4:39
in front of us.
4:40
We are going to visit the Vivaldh book
4:43
castle, Himmler's so-called Camelot.
4:46
We are going to follow the grail hunter
4:48
Otto Hahn into the caves of the Pyrenees.
4:52
We are going with the SS researchers to
4:54
DDP, where they measured skulls to find the
4:58
irons, and we are going to talk about
5:01
this search for the mystical past ended in
5:05
something that wasn't a miracle.
5:09
It was very real. And it was horrifying.
5:15
Along the way we will discuss, we will
5:18
distinguish between what we know with high certainty,
5:21
and what is more uncertain, because as we
5:23
will see, some of the wildest stories about
5:25
the Nazi occult emerged after the war.
5:29
Others, less well known, are unfortunately quite real.
5:34
Let's start where the story begins, in the
5:37
back alleys of Vienna, in a small journal
5:39
called Ostrara, and a man named Jürgen Lanz
5:43
von Leibnizwels.
5:49
To understand Himmler's fascination of the occult, we
5:52
first have to understand Germany and Austria in
5:54
the late 19th century.
5:57
Industrialization has transformed Europe.
5:59
Millions of peasants flooded into the cities.
6:02
Old hierarchies, kings, nobility, church, lost their grip.
6:07
Science challenged religion.
6:09
Darwin has called into the question humanity's special
6:12
status.
6:13
The cities grew, and with them came slums,
6:16
poverty, and a feeling that something has been
6:19
lost.
6:20
For many Germans and Austrians, the loss was
6:23
something quite concrete.
6:26
They missed a world that made sense, a
6:29
world with order, beauty, and spirituality.
6:34
In this atmosphere, a wave of Lebensreform, life
6:38
reform, emerged.
6:40
Thousands of young people joined the Wandervogel, the
6:44
Birds of Passage, a movement that celebrated the
6:47
German landscape, folklore, and ancient rituals.
6:51
They turned their backs on the industrial civilization.
6:55
They became vegetarians, nudists, meditation practitioners, and many
7:00
of them began to take an interest in
7:02
the occult.
7:06
In the middle of this milieu, two figures
7:08
emerged who has enormous significance for the later
7:11
Nazi Germany.
7:14
The first was Guido von List, born in
7:16
Vienna in 1848.
7:19
List claimed to have occult vision in which
7:21
he saw ancient Germans and their rune magic.
7:25
He practically invented a whole religion around the
7:29
runes.
7:30
Old Germanic symbols interpended them into magical science.
7:34
He created the doctrine of the armorshaft, a
7:37
secret priestly caste that has been prevented by
7:44
the original Aryan wisdoms for the centuries.
7:48
According to List, Christianity has suppressed this wisdom,
7:51
but now, in the late 19th century, the
7:55
time has come to revive it.
7:58
The second was Jürgen Lanz from Lebensfeld, born
8:02
in 1874.
8:05
Lanz was a former cisternian monk who had
8:09
left the church to found his own order.
8:11
He called his doctrine the Zoology, a god
8:16
doctrine of the races, and this is where
8:20
it became really strange.
8:23
According to Lanz, the Aryan race descended from
8:27
the godmen who once lived on Atlantis.
8:30
These godmen had possessed telepathic abilities, supernatural powers,
8:35
and they were practical gods themselves, but then
8:38
something happened.
8:39
Some of the Aryans had made it with
8:42
animals, others with subhumans.
8:44
The blood has been polluted.
8:46
The result?
8:47
The Jews, the Slavs, the Gypsies, so on.
8:51
All the inferior races were, according to Lanz,
8:54
the product of this radical mixing.
8:59
Lanz's solution was simple and terrifying.
9:02
The pure Aryan had to breed like animals.
9:05
Polygamy should be introduced for the best.
9:08
Women with good Aryan blood should become broad
9:12
mothers, birthing Aryan children for the nation's benefit.
9:18
The inferior should be sterilized or sent to
9:21
Madagascar.
9:22
Oh, and here Lanz uses the word himself,
9:26
incinerated.
9:27
It sounds like a sick fantasy. And it was.
9:31
was, but Lanz had his own journal, Ostara,
9:35
distributed across the German-speaking world.
9:38
He claimed to sell over 100,000 copies
9:41
a year.
9:42
Historians think the number was lower, but it
9:45
was still significant, and one of his regular
9:48
readers was a young, starving artist in Vienna
9:51
named Adolf Hitler.
9:54
We don't know for certain whenever Hitler ever
9:57
met Lanz in person.
9:59
There is a photograph supposed from 1909 that
10:03
shows a young man in a cloak which
10:06
some claim is Hitler at some occult ceremony,
10:10
but the photo is uncertain, purely dated, and
10:13
many historians dismissed it as a later forgery.
10:17
What we do know is that Hitler read
10:20
Ostara.
10:21
We know he took his collections of issue
10:23
with him when he moved from Vienna to
10:26
Munich in 1913, and we know that in
10:29
Mein Kampf he wrote the struggle of the
10:32
races in a way that mirrors Lanz's idea,
10:35
but he never mentioned Lanz by name, and
10:40
that is worth nothing.
10:43
Hitler was never himself a member of any
10:46
occult lodge.
10:49
He never attended seances.
10:52
He didn't perform rituals.
10:54
Himmler was a different story entirely.
11:01
After World War I, a network of society,
11:04
secret societies emerged in Germany, all influenced by
11:07
Linz, Lanz, and Blavatsky, the
11:26
Russian-American occultists who had written about the
11:30
root races and the swastika as an iron
11:33
symbol.
11:35
The most famous of these societies was the
11:38
Thule Gesellschaft, the Thule Society.
11:41
In Greek methodology, Thule was the mythical land
11:45
in the far north, interpreted by the Nazis
11:48
as the iron race, place of origin.
11:52
The Thule Society symbol was the swastika.
11:55
Its members were wealthy aristocrats, industrial magnates, high
12:01
-ranking officers, and so on.
12:03
Its goal was to fight democracy, socialism, and
12:07
juridism, and to prepare for a new Iron
12:13
Age.
12:16
Thule helped finance the small party that later
12:19
would become the NSDAP, the Nazi party.
12:23
One of its members, a man named Dietrich
12:26
Eckhardt, took Hitler under his wing.
12:29
Eckhardt was a poet, a translator, and an
12:32
occultist.
12:33
He introduced Hitler to the wealthy beggars, taught
12:37
him rhetoric, and planted the seeds that would
12:41
later become the Nazi blood-and-soil religion.
12:45
Eckhardt died in 1923.
12:50
His last words supposedly follow Hitler, he will
12:53
dance, but it is I who have written
12:57
the music.
12:58
I have given him the means to communicate
13:01
with the higher, bless him, and pray for
13:04
us.
13:05
That's quite a quote.
13:06
The problem is that no one knows if
13:09
it's genuine.
13:10
It first appeared in a book in the
13:12
1930s, written by one of Hitler's followers.
13:16
The source level is what we in the
13:20
trade call heresy.
13:23
But even if the quote is questionable, the
13:26
point is clear.
13:27
Nazism wasn't born in a vacuum.
13:30
It grew out of the environment where occultism,
13:34
race theory, and esotericism was a common currency.
13:39
So the official narrative took form to something
13:43
like this.
13:45
Nazism emerged in the wake of the Treaty
13:48
of Versailles, the Great Depression, the fear of
13:51
communism, and a deep national humiliation.
13:55
Occultism was a part of the intellectual milieu,
13:58
sure, but it wasn't decisive.
14:01
Himmler was an eccentric, Hitler was more pragmatic,
14:05
more clinical, and Aryosofi, the race-mystical doctrine
14:13
that was ultimately just a side note.
14:16
Decoration for an ideology was really about power,
14:20
theory, and war.
14:22
That's the official narrative.
14:24
And it isn't wrong, but there are holes,
14:27
some holes.
14:29
Let's start with one of the bigger holes.
14:31
Let's travel to Wiewelsberg Castle.
14:37
Wiewelsberg Castle is in Westphalia near the town
14:40
of Paderborn.
14:41
It was built in the 16th century, but
14:44
stands on the ruins of a fortress from
14:46
the 18th century.
14:50
In 1934, a year after the Nazis took
14:53
power, Himmler got the castle for a symbolic
14:55
rent of one Reichsmark a year.
14:59
It was a steal.
15:01
The castle was beautifully situated, full of history,
15:05
and one of the most important of it
15:06
all, it was close to the Teutoburg forest.
15:11
Here in the year 9 AD, the Germanic
15:15
tribe had wiped out three Roman legions.
15:19
For Himmler, this was sacred ground, a place
15:22
where the Germans had defeated the decadent southern
15:26
European civilization.
15:31
Himmler spent millions of Reichsmark remodeling Wiewelsberg.
15:35
He hired architects, craftsmen, architects.
15:38
He had furniture, weapons, armor brought in from
15:42
all over Germany, anything that could give the
15:45
castle a Germanic feel.
15:47
Later, after the war broke out in 1939,
15:51
he also used concentration camp prisoners.
15:53
In a small camp right next to the
15:55
castle, up to 4,000 prisoners slaved away
15:59
day and night to dig a moat, build
16:02
walls, and lay rows.
16:05
Over 1,200 of them died.
16:08
Most of them were Jehovah's Witnesses, not Jews.
16:12
Why?
16:13
Because Jehovah's Witnesses refused to bear arms and
16:16
were easy to suppress, and because they were
16:18
known to be good workers who did not
16:20
try to escape.
16:22
There is a detail in most documentaries about
16:27
the Nazi's occult castles leaves out, but it's
16:34
important because Wiewelburg was not just a playground
16:37
for Himmler's fantasies, it was also a project
16:40
built on slave labor and human suffering.
16:46
The castle's north tower was the centerpiece of Himmler's plans.
16:49
Himmler's plans.
16:51
He had a room built called the Obergruppenführesaal,
16:59
the hall of the supreme leaders, 12 pillars,
17:03
12 niches along the walls, and on the
17:05
floor a dark green sun with 12 spokes.
17:09
Today the symbol is called the black sun.
17:12
It becomes a favorite emblem for the neo
17:15
-Nazis and the satanists worldwide, but it actually
17:19
means it's disputed.
17:20
Some think it represents a sun wheel, an
17:23
old Germanic symbol, others interpret it as a
17:26
reference to the 12 SS generals who are
17:29
supposed to form a kind of modern day
17:31
knights of the round table.
17:34
Beneath the hall, in the crypt, Himmler built
17:37
an even more mysterious room, a circular chamber
17:41
with space for 12 urns along the walls.
17:47
In the center, a depression where an internal
17:51
flame was supposed to burn.
17:54
According to the stories, the 12 urns were
17:57
to contain the ashes of the deceased SS
18:00
generals.
18:01
The flames were to symbolize the order's eternal
18:05
life, and the ceremonies, well yeah there are
18:08
plenty of rumors about those.
18:10
Some former SS men told stories after the
18:13
war that Himmler and his 12 closest generals
18:16
would sit in silence for hours and meditate,
18:20
or receive telepathic messages from the ancestors.
18:25
Others mentioned sinans, rune magic, sacrifice.
18:30
There is even one that claimed that Himmler
18:32
believed that he could communicate with King Heinrich
18:35
I, the medieval king he saw as his
18:40
own reincarnation.
18:42
The question is: Is there any substance to these stories?
18:45
these stories?
18:50
The museum at Wivalsburg today is very much
18:53
aware of this problem.
18:55
I'm quoting the museum director from a BBC
18:58
documentary.
18:59
You can't stop the legends, you can only
19:02
enlighten people, but it's difficult to work against
19:06
conspiracy theories.
19:09
In the museum they show the black sun,
19:11
but they put back on top of it
19:14
so you could not stand and admire it.
19:17
They deconstruct the symbols, they show that the
19:20
12 niches were never finished, that the crypt
19:22
was never used, that the eternal flame was
19:25
never lit.
19:28
Because here's the thing, work on Wivalsburg stopped
19:30
in 1943, the reason was the defeated Stalingrad.
19:35
Hitler issued a decree that all non-war
19:39
essential construction projects should be halted and Wivalsburg
19:43
was one of them.
19:45
The grand rituals – if they were ever planned – never took place.
19:48
never took place.
19:50
We only have one single well-documented gathering
19:54
of SS leaders at Wivalsburg.
19:56
That was in June from the 12th to
19:59
the 15th in 1941, one week before the
20:03
attack of the Soviet Union.
20:05
The meeting wasn't about occultism, it was about
20:08
planning the war in the east.
20:11
Himmler gave a speech in which he urged
20:13
his general to prepare for eliminating 30 million
20:17
Slavs.
20:18
The words are quoted in the minutes of that meeting.
20:21
the meeting.
20:23
So when people today talk about the Nazi's
20:26
occult rituals at Wivalsburg, there is a reason
20:29
to be skeptical.
20:31
There are no primary sources describing such rituals,
20:35
only eyewitness accounts given by former SS men
20:38
decades after the men who had every reason
20:42
to embellish their stories.
20:46
But that doesn't mean that the interest in
20:49
the occult was insignificant, because there were other
20:53
parts of this story that is far more,
20:57
that is far better documented.
20:59
Let's meet the Grail hunter. Let's meet Otto Rahn.
21:02
Rahn.
21:08
Otto Rahn was born in 1904 in a
21:11
small German town of Mittelstadt.
21:15
He grew up during World War I and
21:19
the terrible years that followed.
21:21
Like many young people of that area, he
21:24
sought refuge in myth, old sagas, King Arthur,
21:28
the Knights of the Round Table.
21:31
His favorite story was Percival, the young knight
21:34
who searched for the holy grail written by
21:36
Wolfram von Ischenbach in the 13th century.
21:41
Percival eventually finds the grail, not as a
21:45
cup but as a stone that falls from
21:47
heaven and grants eternal life.
21:49
For most people it's just a legend, but
21:52
for Rahn he took it literally.
21:54
He believed that Percival was a real person
21:57
or at least one based on real people.
22:00
That Ischenbach's poem contains a secret code and
22:05
that the grail was a real object hidden
22:07
somewhere in Europe.
22:09
In 1931 Rahn traveled to the southern France,
22:14
to the Pyrenees, to the area where they
22:20
locally called the grail country.
22:24
There he found the fortress ruin of Montségur,
22:28
built on the top of a steep mountain
22:30
surrounded by frost and mist.
22:33
In the 13th century Montségur was the last
22:37
bastion of the Christian sect known as the
22:40
Cathars.
22:41
The Cathars believed in two gods, a good
22:43
god of spirit and an evil god of
22:46
matter.
22:47
They rejected the pope, the bishop, the entire
22:50
hierarchy of the catholic church.
22:52
The pope called them heretics.
22:55
In 1249 he ordered the bloody crusade against
22:58
them, over 100,000 people were killed in
23:01
the following decades.
23:02
In 1244 after a 10-month siege the
23:08
last Cathars surrendered at Montségur.
23:11
Several hundred were burned at the stake on
23:13
the foot of the mountain.
23:16
But the legend is that four Cathars escaped
23:19
the night before with something, something very valuable.
23:26
Rahn became convinced that this "something" was the Grail.
23:28
grail.
23:29
He spent years exploring the caves around Montségur.
23:34
He crawled through narrow passages down into underground
23:38
chambers, through petroglyphs that no one has seen
23:42
for centuries.
23:44
In his notebook he sketched a pentagram, a
23:46
five-pointed star carved into the rock in
23:50
the cave called the Bethlehem Grotto.
23:53
He found human skeletons in which he believed
23:56
were the Cathars' remains.
23:58
But he never found the Grail.
24:00
Rahn ran out of money.
24:02
He had to return to Germany.
24:04
In 1933, the same year as Hitler came
24:07
to power, he published a book about his
24:11
experience crusade against the grail.
24:14
The book didn't sell particularly well, but one
24:18
reader was deeply fascinated, Heinrich Himmler.
24:23
Rahn receives a telegram.
24:25
Your book is very interesting.
24:26
I would like to talk you.
24:28
Come to Berlin.
24:29
The address was Prinz-Albert-Strasse 7 – SS headquarters.
24:34
Rahn went to Berlin.
24:36
He walked through the door and there behind
24:38
the desk sat Heinrich Himmler himself.
24:41
Himmler offered Rahn 1000 Reichsmark for a month,
24:46
a fortune at the time, to continue his
24:48
research.
24:49
There is only one condition.
24:51
He had to join the SS.
24:53
Rahn said yes.
24:56
In the years 1935-1936 Rahn traveled with
25:01
a small SS troop through Europe, Italy, France,
25:06
Spain, Scotland, Iceland.
25:08
Officially, he was a researcher studying old texts
25:11
and ruins.
25:12
Officially, he was to search for the Grail.
25:14
His reports were top secret.
25:16
His reports were top secret. Only Himmler and his closest advisors read them.
25:20
In 1937, Rahn published his second book: *Lucifer's Court*.
25:25
Court.
25:26
And this is where it gets complicated.
25:30
Because the crusade against the grail was relatively
25:33
neutral, a description of the cathars and his
25:36
own research, Lucifer's Court was more Nazi.
25:41
Rahn now wrote about the cathars as the
25:44
iron resistance fighters against the Jewish Rome.
25:50
He wrote about the purity of the blood,
25:53
the sanity of the race.
25:55
He quoted Himmler and used the same language
25:57
as the party propaganda.
26:00
The question is, did he believe it or
26:03
was he just writing something to please Hitler?
26:07
We know that Rahn had two secrets.
26:10
First of all, he was homosexual.
26:13
In Nazi Germany, homosexuality could send you straight
26:16
to a concentration camp.
26:18
The pink triangle was one of the most
26:20
hated symbols in the camps.
26:22
And if you don't know, all prisoners in
26:29
the concentration camp had a triangle.
26:33
I think there was eight or ten different
26:35
colors indicating what you were there for.
26:39
You could be anything from a gypsy to
26:41
homosexual to Jews and so on.
26:43
And they could even be combined.
26:45
And off of that, I continue.
26:48
The second was that his mother Clara was
26:51
of Jewish descent.
26:53
Rahn had to make a deal with the
26:55
great devil.
26:57
He got money, he got status, he got
26:59
freedom to research.
27:01
In return, he had to hide who he
27:02
was and he had to find the grail.
27:06
But he couldn't deliver.
27:09
In 1937, Rahn was transferred.
27:12
He was no longer traveling around looking for
27:14
holy relics.
27:16
He was to work in the concentration camp,
27:19
first Dachau, then Buchenwald.
27:22
Exactly what he did there, we don't know.
27:26
Officially, he was a guard, but some sources
27:28
suggest that he also worked as a secretary
27:32
or an archivist.
27:33
Whatever the case, he saw what SS really
27:36
was.
27:38
He saw the imprisoned, sick, starving prisoners.
27:42
He heard the shots from the execution.
27:44
He smelled the smoke from the crematorium.
27:47
Rahn was broken.
27:49
He wrote a letter to his friend.
27:51
I'm sorry, to a friend.
27:53
I have much sorrow in my country.
27:56
Impossible for a tolerant, liberal man like me
27:59
to live in a nation that my home
28:02
country has become.
28:05
In 1939, Rahn tried to leave the SS.
28:08
He wrote a resignation letter.
28:11
It was, in reality, a death sentence.
28:14
He traveled to Austria, to the Alps.
28:16
In the middle of the winter, he walked
28:18
into the mountains wearing his black SS uniform,
28:21
some say with a bottle of whiskey and
28:24
some sleeping pills.
28:25
He sat down under a tree, took the
28:27
pills, drank the whiskey, and froze to death.
28:30
He was 34 years old.
28:36
Rahn believed to the very end that the
28:39
Grail lay hidden in a cave near Montségur,
28:42
protected by a large stone and hundreds of
28:45
wipers, and he wrote in his book.
28:48
He was wrong.
28:49
But his story doesn't end there, because Himmler's
28:54
search for the Grail didn't end with Rahn's
28:56
death.
28:57
In 1944, in the middle of the war,
29:00
Himmler sent one of his most famous commandos,
29:03
Otto Skorsky, to Montségur.
29:06
Skorsky was the man who had freed Mussolini
29:09
from a mountain hotel in 1943.
29:12
He was a legend, feared, admired, fearless.
29:16
Officially, he was to search for the Grail.
29:19
According to the stories, Skorsky discovered a secret
29:23
route down the cliff, the way that Descartes
29:26
has escaped.
29:27
He followed the trail, found the cave, and
29:30
there, in an underground crypt, stood the Holy
29:32
Grail, an emerald green bowl glittering in the
29:36
darkness.
29:38
Skorsky sent it to Himmler, Himmler sent it
29:40
to the U-boat to Antarctica, to a
29:43
secret nature base in the ice.
29:45
It's a fantastic story.
29:48
There's just one problem: It's a lie.
29:49
It's a lie.
29:51
The story comes from an American author named
29:54
Howard Buchner, who in 1991 published a book
29:59
called The Emerald Cup.
30:01
Buchner claimed
30:02
that
30:16
as a young doctor in 1945, he had
30:18
obtained the information from a captured SS officer.
30:22
The problem is, we know that Otto Skorsky
30:26
was not in France in March 1944.
30:29
He was in Yugoslavia, where the Germans were
30:32
engaged in heavy fighting.
30:34
There are troop movements reports that confirmed it.
30:38
Buchner's story is – to put it bluntly – an invention.
30:42
invention.
30:47
But why would anyone invent such a story?
30:50
That brings us to an important question.
30:54
Why are we so fascinated by the Nazis
30:57
occultism?
30:58
Why do we want to believe that they
31:01
had sacred weapons, medical rituals, contact with extraterrestrials?
31:06
Maybe because it makes them more interesting.
31:10
Maybe because it explains evil in a way
31:12
that is easier to understand than the banal
31:15
truth that they were burial guards, that they
31:19
planned genocide in spreadsheets, that they were in
31:23
essence ordinary people doing horrible, terrible things.
31:28
But we mustn't let the fascination overshadow reality.
31:33
Because reality is far more frightening than any Grail legend.
31:36
great legend.
31:43
The Grail hunt is one rabbit hole. There are many more.
31:46
are many more.
31:47
Let's take one of the most famous: Atlantis.
31:51
According to Plato, Atlantis was a large island
31:54
or a continent west of the Straits of
31:56
Gibraltar, sunk into the sea thousands of years
32:00
ago.
32:00
For most historians, Atlantis is a myth, an
32:03
allegory about an arrogant society punished by the
32:07
gods.
32:08
But for Himmler, Atlantis was real.
32:11
In the mid-1930s, Himmler encountered an eccentric
32:16
historian named Hermann Wythe.
32:19
Wythe claimed to have found evidence for Atlantis,
32:22
not in the Atlantic, but in northern Europe.
32:26
According to Wythe, Atlantis was the great Nordic
32:29
civilization destroyed by a natural catastrophe.
32:34
Survivors had to flee to every corner of
32:35
the world and they brought the Iron Culture
32:37
with them.
32:39
Wythe pointed to petroglyphs in Sweden, to ancient
32:43
symbols in Germany, mysterious signs in Africa.
32:47
All of it, he said, was the remnant
32:48
of a lost civilization.
32:51
Himmler was thrilled.
32:53
In 1935, he joined forces with Wythe to
32:56
establish the Annerbe, the ancestral heritage.
33:03
It was the SS's own think-tank.
33:07
Archaeologists, historians, anthropologists, physicians, all of them were
33:11
to work to prove the superiority of the
33:13
Iron Race.
33:16
The Annerbe grew into over 50 departments with
33:20
about 200 researchers.
33:22
It was an impressive apparatus, but the results
33:25
were, shall we say, lacking.
33:29
The archaeologists dug into the existence a rock
33:34
formation in Germany that had been a pagan
33:37
holy site.
33:38
They found nothing that could prove an ancient
33:41
Iron civilization.
33:43
The historians searched for evidence that Jesus was
33:46
an Iron, not a Jew.
33:48
They found nothing.
33:50
The anthropologists measured skulls and eye color all
33:54
over Europe.
33:54
They found no systematic difference between basis that
33:58
could justify Himmler's theories.
34:00
Nevertheless, Himmler kept funding them.
34:03
Millions of Reichsmark year after year.
34:06
Why?
34:07
Because Annerbe was not about science, it was
34:10
about religion.
34:12
Himmler wanted to replace Christianity with a new
34:16
Germanic faith.
34:17
Christianity, he said, was Jewish, decadent, it was
34:21
debilitating, it fought people to turn the other
34:24
cheek instead of fighting for the race.
34:27
The new faith was to draw inspiration from
34:29
the Norse methodology.
34:31
Gods like Odin, Thor, Balthasar, Solstice ritual, rune
34:36
magic, the worship of blood and soil, blood
34:38
and burden.
34:40
The Ahnenerbe was to provide the "scientific" foundation for this faith.
34:43
for the faith.
34:44
And they did it by forging evidence.
34:49
There's a famous example.
34:52
In 1936, Himmler sent an expedition to Sweden
34:56
to study Petroglyphs.
34:59
The expedition took over 100 plaster casts of
35:03
stones with symbols and with concluded that they
35:07
were the remains of the forgotten Iron scripts.
35:11
But when other archaeologists examined the cast, it
35:15
turns out that Witt has, shall we say,
35:18
improved them.
35:19
He had drawn symbols that weren't there.
35:22
He had changed the direction of the runes,
35:25
he had created evidence that didn't actually exist.
35:29
It wasn't science, it was visual thinking, or
35:34
perhaps just thought.
35:37
Another rabbit hole is Tibet.
35:40
In 1938, Himmler sent five SS researchers to
35:44
the Himalayas.
35:45
Officially, they were to study Tibetan culture, geology,
35:52
wildlife.
35:53
Unofficially, and it was clear from the expedition
35:56
papers, they were to search for the traces
35:59
of the Iron Blood.
36:01
The anthropologist Bruno Bieger measured the Tibetan skulls,
36:09
eyes, noses, hair.
36:12
He took face casts, he compared them to
36:15
German measurement.
36:16
His conclusion is that there were traces of
36:18
the Nordic races in Tibet.
36:24
Today, we know that Bieger's conclusion was scientifically
36:27
unfounded.
36:29
There was no Nordic race.
36:31
There was no objective measurement that could separate
36:38
an Iron from a Jew.
36:39
This was pseudoscience from start to finish.
36:43
But the expedition was a success for Himmler.
36:47
First, it was a propaganda triumph.
36:51
There were the first German to reach Lhasa,
36:56
Tibet's holy city.
36:57
Second, and more importantly, the expedition proved that
37:02
the Anabe could be used to legitimize Himmler's
37:06
ideas.
37:07
Hitler, who otherwise teased Himmler about his Teutonic
37:13
nonsense, was impressed.
37:15
He met the expedition members personally at the
37:17
airport.
37:19
But there's a third rabbit hole. The darkest one.
37:21
perhaps the darkest one.
37:24
Because the Anabe was not just pseudoscience and
37:29
silly expeditioners, it was also a cover for
37:32
something more heinous crimes of the Holocaust.
37:36
In 1942, Himmler ordered a collection of Jewish
37:39
skeletons.
37:41
The purpose?
37:42
To prove the biological difference between Jews and
37:45
Irons.
37:46
To create a scientific reference collection that could
37:49
be used to identify Jews, even when they
37:54
tried to hide.
37:56
The task was given to Professor August Hirt,
38:02
head of the Anatomical Institute of Strasbourg.
38:07
Hirt was already notorious for his experiments on
38:10
living prisoners, and to help select the skeletons,
38:15
he got assistance from Bruno Bieger, the same
38:20
anthropologist who had measured skulls in Tibet.
38:24
In the summer of 1943, Bieger arrived at
38:28
Auschwitz.
38:30
He was allowed to review thousands of prisoners.
38:32
He measured them, he took notes, he selected.
38:36
86 people were chosen, men, women, teenagers.
38:40
They were sent to the Natzweiler-Stutthof concentration
38:44
camp in France.
38:45
In August 1943, they were murdered in the gas chamber.
38:49
gas chambers.
38:50
Afterwards, the bodies were sent to Strasbourg, where
38:52
Hirt stored them in vats of formaldehyde.
38:58
He planned to dissect them, clean the bones,
39:00
and display the skeletons in a museum as
39:03
proof of Jewish inferiority.
39:06
The project was never finished.
39:08
The war ended.
39:10
Hirt fled and later committed suicide.
39:16
But the remains were found.
39:17
For decades, they lay hidden in the Institute
39:20
of Strasbourg.
39:22
It was until 19, I say again, 2015
39:27
that they were identified and buried with dignity.
39:30
The story of these 86 people is almost
39:34
forgotten.
39:36
They have no gravestones.
39:38
Their name appears now nowhere.
39:43
Maybe you know some of them.
39:44
Elisabeth Klein, 42, from Vienna.
39:47
Moses Bernstein, 53, from Poland.
39:50
Sarah Goldberg, 19, from Hungary.
39:53
They were the victims of an ideology that
39:55
began with myth, Atlantis, the iron race, and
40:00
ended in the gas chambers.
40:02
That is important to remember, because when we
40:05
talk today about the Nazis' occult secrets, there
40:11
is a darker side, that we forget the
40:14
victims, that we turn the Nazis into something
40:17
mystical, instead of seeing them as what they
40:21
were, bureaucrats, executioners, people who use myth to
40:25
justify unthinkable acts.
40:33
And now it's time to turn to the
40:34
skeptics, the serious historians, because they will say,
40:38
yes, Himmler was interested in the occult, but
40:41
he was the exception.
40:43
Most Nazis weren't so cherished.
40:47
Himmler made fun of Himmler, of his teutonic
40:52
nonsense behind his back.
40:54
Albert Speer testified this in his memoirs.
40:58
They will say that the Archaeology was forced
41:03
and didn't stand up to scientific scrutiny, that
41:07
the Sweden expedition was embarrassing, that the Tibet
41:10
expedition yielded no results, that the money was
41:13
wasted, and Himmler knew it.
41:16
They will say that the primary source
41:26
describing the occult rituals was there, that the
41:29
twelve niches were never used, that the eternal
41:32
flame was never lit, that the black sun
41:35
was a concept that first appeared in the
41:37
1990s in a book about German esotericism, not
41:42
in Nazi Germany.
41:44
And most importantly, the Holocaust didn't require occultism.
41:49
It required bureaucracy, railway planning, gas technology.
41:54
It required ordinary people, doctors, engineers, accounts, and
41:58
so on, to do the job, while millions
42:01
died.
42:03
The historian Nikolaus Gottfried Clark, who wrote the
42:07
standard work, The Occult Root of the Nation,
42:12
put it in this way.
42:15
Ayusofi was a side issue.
42:18
It influenced Himmler's theories, but not his policies.
42:24
His politics was driven by power, territory, and
42:27
race, and not by rheumatism.
42:30
That's a strong argument.
42:32
But here, and here's my objection, or should
42:36
we say observation, it overlooked the fact that
42:39
the ideology came from somewhere.
42:44
Hitler read Ostrava.
42:46
Himmler read List Blavatsky.
42:50
They believed that the hierarchy of the races,
42:53
because they had a mythology that supported it,
42:56
without the mythology, without the idea that of
43:00
the Iron Race as God-men, of Jews
43:03
as subhumans, their politics would have lacked its
43:08
sacred justification.
43:11
You can't say that the Occult Room was
43:15
a decoration, but a decoration also influences.
43:19
If you spend 10 years talking about the
43:22
destiny of the Iron Race in front of
43:24
a podium, adored with the runes and swastikas,
43:28
you start believing in it, or at least
43:30
to the act that if you do.
43:35
Let me give you a concrete example of this problem.
43:39
the problem.
43:42
After the war, many of the Naibe archaeologists
43:45
and anthropologists were never punished.
43:48
They returned to their universities.
43:50
They continued their careers.
43:52
They wrote textbooks.
43:54
They trained new generations.
43:56
Buno Birga, the one that measured skulls in
44:00
Tibet and selected victims for the skeleton collections,
44:04
was never brought to a trial before the
44:06
1970s.
44:08
He was convicted as accomplice to murder.
44:12
The sentence?
44:13
Three years probation.
44:15
He lived as a free man until his
44:17
death in 2009.
44:19
The story of these people isn't over.
44:22
Their ideas about race, about heredity, about superior
44:27
and inferior humans lives on in far-right
44:30
circles on the internet, and so on.
44:34
So when historians say that the occultism is
44:39
a side issue, they are right in a
44:42
way.
44:43
But when I look into the consequences, the
44:46
86 skeletons in Strasbourg, the 6 million Jews,
44:50
the 22 million Slavs, Romans, homosexuals, disabled, I
44:55
have to ask, was it really a side
44:58
issue or was it the Indians?
45:00
The narrative that made ordinary people believe that
45:04
they were carrying out a sacred mission, I
45:07
don't know.
45:08
But I do know that we mustn't close
45:12
our eyes to the question.
45:19
## PART 8: WHAT ACTUALLY HOLDS UP?
45:23
Let me try to sort things out.
45:25
What do we know with certainty?
45:28
What is probable and what is speculation or
45:30
outright myth?
45:32
First, Himmler created the Annärbe.
45:35
That is documented in thousands of pages from
45:38
the SS archives, many of them preserved in
45:41
the Bundesarchiv in Berlin.
45:45
Second: Himmler remodeled Wewelsburg Castle. Building plans, accounts, photographs – all confirmed.
45:50
photographs, all confirmed.
45:52
Third, the SS has its own ritual weddings,
45:56
child naming ceremonies, death head rings.
46:00
There are photos and descriptions of these ceremonies.
46:04
They weren't particularly occult, but they were ritualized
46:06
and designed to create a new tradition.
46:13
Fourth, the Annärbe sent expeditions to Tobit, Sweden,
46:17
Finland, Croatia, Iraq, the list is long.
46:21
The travel reports are in the archives.
46:24
Fifth, the Nazis used the swastika, runes, and
46:27
other Germanic symbols on uniforms, buildings, official materials.
46:32
Sixth and most horrifying, the Annärbe participated in
46:36
medical experiments and killing of concentration camp prisoners.
46:41
The skeleton collections, the typhus experiments, the high
46:44
attitude chamber, and Dachau are all documented in
46:47
the Nuremberg documents.
46:50
If we look at what's probable but not
46:53
100% documented, it is that Himmler generally
46:56
believed in his own mythology, that he was
47:00
reborn as King Heinrich, that runes has magical
47:04
power, that Atlantis was real.
47:07
This is evident from his letters, his diaries,
47:10
his speeches.
47:12
The question is how deep the belief went.
47:15
Was he a cynic that used myth to
47:17
control, or was he a true believer who
47:20
generally thought that he was receiving telepathic messages
47:24
from the past?
47:26
Most historians lean forward the latter.
47:29
Himmler was, despite his cruelty, a romantic.
47:33
He believed in the supernatural, and that belief
47:36
made him dangerous.
47:39
If we go on to speculations without documentation,
47:42
we have a regular scene from Wiewel's book
47:46
with contact with deceased iron ancestors.
47:50
The Royal Society and its contact with extraterrestrials
47:53
from Aldebaran Nazi UFOs built with secret technology,
47:59
the discovery of the Holy Grail, or the
48:01
Ark of the Covenant, all of these come
48:04
from post-war literature.
48:06
There is no primary sources, no SS document
48:08
mentioning UFO, no photos of the Grail, no
48:12
minutes from seances with the aliens.
48:16
They're myths. Entertaining myths, fascinating myths – but myths.
48:19
myth.
48:20
And if you look at what is disproven,
48:23
is that Atlantis did not exist in a
48:26
Nordic super race.
48:28
We know this from geology, from genetics, from
48:31
microbiology, and from common sense.
48:34
Jesus was not an iron, he was Jewish.
48:41
We know that from all historical sources.
48:44
There is no evidence for a global iron
48:46
civilization.
48:47
Iron is a linguistic term.
48:52
It means noble in Sanskrit, not a race.
48:56
Wiewel's book were never finished.
48:57
The rituals are rare, if ever carried out
49:01
as planned.
49:03
The black sun is a magical symbol with
49:06
a construct from the 1990s, not from the
49:09
1930s.
49:11
So when you hear somebody claim that the
49:12
Nazis had contact with extraterrestrials who found the
49:15
Holy Grail, remember this, there is no evidence.
49:20
When you hear Wiewel's book was the center
49:22
of satanic rituals, remember that the best sources
49:27
say that virtually nothing appears there.
49:30
But when you hear that the Nazis murdered
49:33
people in the name of science, you know
49:36
it's true.
49:41
So – where does that leave us?
49:44
The Nazis occultism was a mixture of genuine
49:47
belief and cynical propaganda.
49:51
Himmler was both a bureaucrat who planned the
49:54
holocaust and a man who genuinely believed that
49:56
he was receiving messages from dead kings.
49:59
It's a strange combination. But humans are strange. And history is rarely pure.
50:02
and history is rarely pure.
50:06
The dangerous things about the Nazi mythology wasn't
50:09
that they believed in the Grail, or that
50:12
they searched for Atlantis, or that they had
50:17
ruin on the uniforms.
50:19
The dangerous things was the mythology justified that
50:22
other persons were worthless.
50:25
Once you have built an entire worldview around
50:28
pure blood, and radical soul, and the destiny
50:32
of the iron civilization, there is not a
50:37
long step to do cleansing.
50:40
And this is where the conversation about Nazi
50:43
occultism should end.
50:45
Not with UFOs or black suns, not with
50:48
Indiana Jones style relic hunting, but in the
50:52
But with the memory that ideas have consequences.
50:56
That when a powerful man uses myth to
51:00
define who is human and who is not,
51:02
it ends in gas chambers.
51:06
Many of the myths that we have talked
51:08
about today live on the internet, on the
51:14
documentaries, in games like Wolfenstein, which is actually
51:16
named after Wiewel's book, albeit in a different
51:21
spelling.
51:23
Some will say I'm demonizing the Nazis too
51:26
much, some will say I'm not demonizing them
51:29
enough.
51:30
It's not my job to judge.
51:33
My job is to investigate.
51:35
And my investigation says that the Nazis weren't
51:38
magicians, they were executioners.
51:41
But they used the language of magic, myth,
51:45
simple rituals to explain why the executioners were
51:48
heroes.
51:49
And that might be the worst or the
51:52
most frightening thing of them all.
51:58
In this episode, I use sources like BBC
52:02
documentary of Wiewel's book, their original American documents
52:06
from the Nuremberg trials, and several other of
52:09
the major historical works of the Nazi occultism,
52:12
including Nicholas Godric Clark's The Occult Roots of
52:17
the Nazis, which is still the standard word,
52:21
even though it came out in 1985.
52:25
I tried to distinguish between what we know,
52:28
what we believe, and what we hope.
52:30
And I hope that you come away with
52:32
a clear picture.
52:37
Next time on the ancient aliens lost civilization,
52:41
we will try to examine another mystery.
52:47
Until then – watch out for the myths.
52:51
on your own.
52:53
See you next week.