Yenne Bill - Hitlers master of the dark arts: Himmlers black knights and the occult origins of the SS

Himmlers Black Knights
and the Occult Origins of the SS

Bill Yenne

This man, Hitlers 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 themmalice.

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

Heinrich Luitpold Himmler, Reichsfhrer SS (19001945) 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 worlds 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?

Websters 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 Jrg 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 politicallyAdolf 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 1940sthe 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 emperors 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 basedHeinrich Himmler.

Before them stand fierce, helmeted warriorsthe black knights of Himmlers Schutzstaffel (SS), a special class of warriors defined by race and blood. They were handpicked as the most racially Germanic of Germans. In Himmlers mind, they were Germanys 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 witchs 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 Hitlers evil spirit, cold, calculating and ambitious undoubtedly the most purposeful and most unscrupulous figure in the Third Reich.

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.