Reply #48: Nazi's christian? No. or pagan? Yes. [View All]

[workenstiff]

Hitler's Search for the Holy Grail

I saw this on pbs Monday. I couldn't find anything on PBS site but I found this article

http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/sep1999/nazi-s23_prn.shtml

Nazism and the myth of the "master-race"
Britain's Channel Four Secret History documentary on "Hitler's search for the Holy Grail"
By Peter Reydt
23 September 1999
Back to screen version

Britain's Channel Four television recently broadcast the documentary “Hitler's search for the Holy Grail” as part of its Secret History series . Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, was the chief driving force in developing the nationalist and racist myths advanced by the Nazis. The documentary showed how he was able to recruit broad layers of leading academics in pursuance of this aim.

When Himmler joined the Nazi Party in 1925, he was already a member of the Thule society, which believed in the greatness of German history, reaching back to the year 9AD, when the Teutonic tribes defeated the Roman army. It promoted the superiority of the Aryan race, an ancient northern European people.

These ideas formed the basis of Nazi racial philosophy that was to have such an impact on history. The programme's commentator—British historian Michael Wood—explained that, when the Nazi Party took power, Himmler sought to create an Aryan knighthood in the shape of the SS. Originally founded as Hitler's bodyguards, the SS had grown rapidly. By 1939, it was 300,000 strong. Its members would run the concentration camps and take charge of the deportations of Jews. It became the standard bearer of “racial purity” within Germany and in the campaign directed especially against the peoples in the East.

The centre of this new order of knights, an "aristocracy of soul and blood", was the Wewelsburg castle. This was Himmler's “Camelot”, with SS commanders cast as the Knights of the Round Table. Rooms were dedicated to figures of Nordic history and mythology like King Arthur. Himmler's room was dedicated to King Heinrich I, founder of the first German Reich (empire). Himmler believed himself to be the reincarnation of Heinrich. Another room was set aside to house the Holy Grail, which was to be searched for all over the world.

The director of the Wewelsburg museum, Wulff Brebeck, explained that Himmler's goal was to "create a focus point of all the aspirations he had towards religion, towards science, forming a new policy”.

To this end, Himmler set out to re-establish an ancient Aryan religion within Germany in opposition to Christianity, as a basis for Nazi ideology. Himmler maintained that many sacred symbols had been stolen from a more ancient Aryan religion and set out to restore them. One such symbol was the Holy Grail. One leading academic recruited to the Nazi cause was Otto Rahn, the leading German authority on the Holy Grail. He was brought into the SS to lead the search for it the world over.

Dr. Henning Hassmann of the Archaeological Institute in Dresden explained: “Himmler saw the potential of archaeology as a political tool. He needed archaeology to provide an identity for his SS. But Himmler also believed that archaeology had a certain pseudo-religious content. There were excavations; there were myths and legends, a feeling of superiority. They believed by drawing on the power of prehistory they would achieve success in the present day.”

In 1935, Himmler established a new arm of the SS, Das Ahnenerbe (the Ancestral Heritage Society). It was staffed by high-profile academics and headed by the Nazi Wolfram Sievers. Of the 46 heads of departments, 19 were professors and another 19 held doctorates. Amongst them were such eminent figures as Walter Wust, a leading expert on India; Ernst Schaefer, a veteran explorer; and Walter Jankuhn, an archaeologist.

Through these academics the Nazis sought to lend their propaganda the status of objective truth. The Ahnenerbe organised expeditions into many parts of the world—to Iceland in search of the Grail, to Iran to find evidence of ancient kings of pure Aryan blood, to the Canary Islands to seek proof of Atlantis.