The first name that comes to mind when we talk about Nazism or even when we refer to the Second World War is Adolf Hitler. It is a name that will be indelible for decades because he was the leader of the NSDAP, but others such as Göring, Goebbels, Bormann, Speer, Globočnik or Himmler, among many, many others, are also extremely relevant due to their actions before and during the war, as well as their appearance in films such as ‘Inglourious Basterds’ or ‘Downfall’.
However, the name that may not be as familiar to us is Karl Maria Wiligut. Wiligut was Austrian and served in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I and was no role model: he was violent, eccentric and doctors claimed he suffered from schizophrenia and megalomania. And if there was one thing he was obsessed with, it was having a male heir to whom he could pass on his secret knowledge.
What secret knowledge? Well, all that he coined by studying for years. disciplines such as magic, alchemy or divinationthat set of occult sciences that only a select few were worthy of knowing. And his figure captivated Heinrich Himmler, architect of the Final Solution and who became extremely obsessed with the occult, ancient history, Viking symbolism and the Aryans. He dedicated part of his life to finding that fantastical past of the Germans, but Hitler was not amused at all.
The search for the Aryans
Let’s go back to Wiligut for a moment. The Austrian was a member of a Masonic sect from 1889 to 1909. In those 20 years, Karl had achieved the rank of “Knight” and, above all, a great deal of knowledge about esoteric practices, as well as contacts within the world of the occult. He believed, in fact, that he was heir to a long list of Germanic masters which went back to prehistoric times and all this mishmash of ideas, together with the influence of positive Christianity, was the breeding ground for Karl to later attract Himmler’s attention.
During those years, the New Templar Order was founded, also in Austria. Born in 1900, it was a proto-fascist secret society that already began to promulgate the ideas of the “ruling class”, a superior race that should prevail over the “animal people”, who were the inferior race. According to the ideology of the group, the superior race could use all its strength to prevail over the inferior race. This led to Nazi eugenics and Hitler’s extermination policies.
The Ordo Novi Templi supported Nazism in its early years and the symbol of the order was a yellow flag with a swastika and four fleurs-de-lis. The meaning of the flag? A gold background symbolising eternity, the lilies of racial purity and the swastika being the Aryan hero.
Let us return to Wiligut. After being clinically diagnosed as schizophrenic, he was confined to a psychiatric institution. He spent the period from 1924 to 1927 there, and in 1932 he left his family and left for Germany. From there he remained in contact with former members of the New Templar Order and continued to cultivate his fame as an occultist, but now in Munich.
In 1933 his moment came: he met Himmler. They must have hit it off, because not only was he inducted into the SS, but within two years he rose to one of the highest ranks in the paramilitary group: Brigade leader. He moved to Berlin to be close to Himmler.. In fact, he was responsible for developing his plans for Wewelsburg Palace to be the “centre of the world” created by the Nazis. Wiligut developed a series of runes and designed the SS-Ehrenring, an SS ring of honour that was one of the most coveted awards of Nazism.
It was delivered directly by Himmler and had a series of rules:
- Each ring was to bear the name of the recipient and the date of the award.
- It had Himmler’s signature engraved on the inside.
- It was to be worn only on the ring finger of the left hand.
- If the recipient died, was fired, or retired from service, the ring had to be returned.
It was one more example of Himmler’s interest in Germanic mysticism, but it turns out that Karl, as much as he contributed to feeding the historical, supremacist and occult interest that Himmler already had, embarrassed the German high officialIn 1938, he learned that the Austrian had been admitted to a mental institution and Karl was “encouraged” to retire early – in February 1939.
In 1938, Himmler sent a team of Nazis to Tibet. It was not a sabotage or espionage mission, but rather an… archaeology mission? Both Hitler and Himmler, in their interest in knowing their racial roots, their “Viking” blood (with many quotation marks) and the history of the Aryans, thought that these same Aryans had arrived in India from northern Europe, mixing with the local population and distorting their “purity” (again, with many quotation marks). Such was the interest that, in 1935, Himmler founded a research institute in which 100 German “scholars” studied the past of the race.
Himmler believed that traces of the purest Aryan culture could be found in the Himalayas, and they arrived there without holding back: with flags bearing the swastika. Of course, in Eastern cultures, the swastika means something very different. There, Himmler and his team (among them the zoologist Ernst Schäfer and the anthropologist Bruno Beger) carried out field studies: they collected samples, artefacts, anthropological data, took photographs, measured the skulls of 376 Tibetans… but then the Second World War broke out.
They also took a lot of photos.
Habitat
At the end of the 19th century, the geographer Friedrich Ratzel popularized the term Habitat. Initially, it was key within the policies of “living space”, which are those in which the state had to provide sufficient space to its people for them to develop. The problem is that it implied social Darwinism, so The strongest had the right to take territory from other peoples.
This idea caught the attention of Hitler who, in his My Struggleperverted this idea of living space. In 1933, with Hitler already firmly in power, he presented his plan to his top officers: the plan for living space in the east. The General Plan Ost, or GPO, consisted of the colonization and Germanization of Central and Eastern Europe. It was implicit in its colonial character, but not only by expelling the inhabitants already present in the area, but also by allowing their extermination.
In 1939, with the attack on Poland, Germany not only initiated World War II, but also took the first steps towards conquering eastern Germany. Based on Hitler’s ideas, Himmler wanted to shape the settlement plan that, in his mind, would translate into villages full of Germans of the highest genetic purity with farms, sports grounds, political centres, and all of this surrounded by thick oak forests to reproduce the ancient forests of northern Germany.
“The Romans of today must be laughing at these revelations” – Adolf Hitler on discoveries about the Germans’ past
The underlying idea, of course, was that this colonisation plan would turn the high-ranking SS officers into a kind of powerful landowners so that they would not question any orders from the command and, thus, be more effective with any method at their disposal to clean up the eastern territories. Himmler began to put pressure on Hitler, insisting on carrying out the settlement plan, something to which the Führer agreed in July 1942. A victory for Himmler.
Hitler’s shame
Although Hitler had let Himmler get away with the settlement plan, he was not very happy with what Himmler was finding. In this eagerness to snoop around Germanic historydata were coming to light that embarrassed the Führer and the past of the German people.
As science and history journalist Heather Pringle wrote, the reason was that the Germanic peoples did not live in such an “orderly” way as the Roman Empire, for example, which broke the idea that the Third Reich was an empire inherited from the Romans. Hitler even ridiculed Himmler in his private circle: “It’s bad enough that the Romans erected great buildings when our ancestors still lived in mud huts,” he told Albert Speer.
These archaeological expeditions were carried out thanks to the Ahnenerbe, the ‘Society for the Study of the Ancient History of the Spirit’ with which the Nazi leadership justified its actions. And, specifically, Hitler’s quote was the following:
“Why are we drawing everyone’s attention to the fact that we have no past? It’s bad enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our ancestors were still living in mud huts. Now Himmler has started digging up these mud hut villages and is raving about every shard of pottery and stone axe he finds. Really, we should do everything we can to keep quiet about this past. Instead, Himmler is making a big fuss about it. The Romans today must be laughing at these revelations.”
However, Hitler must have considered that, in the midst of an expansionist war, there were better things to do, but I was happy with the settlement plans which Himmler was carrying out. He stated that “it is a practice which must be followed. To those districts where a tendency towards degeneration is evident, we must send a corps of elite troops and, in ten or twenty years, the stock will have improved beyond recognition.”
In the end, this was not to be, and all that remains of that plan are a few SS farms on a road in the town of Mehrow.
Imágenes | Carsten Steger, Michael Moynihan and Stephen Flowers, Equirhodont, MSWG, Bundesarchiv
At WorldOfSoftware | Who collaborated with the Nazis in Europe and why they want to erase it from their past now