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UNHOLY ALLIANCE: A HISTORY OF NAZI INVOLVEMENT WITH THE OCCULT |
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8. The Psychics Search: For Mussolini, the Bismarck, Assassins, and the Human Mind Most of what the Ahnenerbe undertook had very little application in the real world other than for propaganda purposes. If they could prove -- through their archaeological researches -- that the "Aryans" had conquered everything east of the Rhine to the Chinese border, it would have at least justified (in their own minds) their military aggression against most of the world. If they could prove "Aryan" racial superiority through their anthropological experiments at Dachau, that would justify (again, to their own minds) their extermination of the "subhumans." And, if they could come away from the savage medical experimentation in the camps with a coherent scientific study of the effects of various drugs, of freezing and rapid thawing, etc. on humans, then they could justify to themselves the unbelievable sadism of their doctors, such as Sigmund Rascher. Occasionally, Hitler had to receive verification from his colleagues that the expense of such organizations as the Ahnenerbe-SS was justified. Himmler was under a great deal of pressure to show positive results. After all, he was spending a lot of money on his SS fantasies, including the fabulous shrine at Wewelsburg, which seemed to have no identifiable military purpose. Of course, he was also raising his Waffen-SS as a worthy competitor of the Wehrmacht (the regular German Army) and indeed these elite troops were distinguishing themselves in combat as well-trained, well-motivated, death-defying fanatics. But such competition gave rise to jealousy and suspicion on the part of the old- time generals who had fought Germany's battles with distinction in previous conflicts. And, when the Ahnenerbe's archaeological digs began coming up empty, Himmler was hard- pressed to demonstrate actual value in other areas. In September 1943 he had his chance. The Pendulum Solution When Hitler received word of the imprisonment of Mussolini by the Fascist Council on orders of the king on July 25, 1943, he was understandably distraught. On a personal level, although his political platform did not agree completely with Italian fascism, Hitler still saw Il Duce as something of a spiritual mentor. More importantly, Mussolini was an ally. He had been replaced by Marshal Pietro Badoglio, who at that moment was negotiating with the Allies for Italy's surrender. Only two weeks earlier, Allied forces composed of both British and American units had landed in Sicily and were meeting with less-than- enthusiastic resistance from Italian troops. This crisis caused the implosion at the emergency meeting of the Fascist Grand Council (which had not even met since 1939), resulting in a demand for the restoration of the monarchy under King Victor Emmanuel III; in essence requiring Mussolini's resignation as leader of the armed forces. This was enough to alarm the Fuhrer, but in early September Allied forces had crossed from Sicily onto mainland Italy ... and Badoglio rushed to sign an armistice with the Western powers. Italy -- bereft of Mussolini's leadership -- had been handed over to the Allies. Germany had been betrayed. No matter what, Mussolini had to be rescued and Fascism once more restored to its rightful place in Rome. But there was a problem. No one knew where Mussolini was being held. According to Walter Schellenberg, head of the Foreign Intelligence Division (AMT VI) of the RSHA (Reichsicherheitshauptamt or Reich's Main Security Office) in his published memoirs, [1] he had no idea where Mussolini had been taken after his arrest by the Carabinieri. The RSHA was an organization created by the notorious Reinhard Heydrich in September 1939 to combine the various secret police agencies (the Gestapo, the SIPO, and the Sicherheitsdienst des RFSS or SD) into a single, monolithic police organization under Himmler's control. According to Schellenberg, Hitler had given orders to find and rescue Mussolini as early as the beginning of August. However, Schellenberg was at a loss as to where Il Duce was being held. And he was already in hot water with the Fuhrer for suggesting that Hitler withdraw German troops to a position on the wrong side of the Po River to aid Badoglio in his efforts to "neutralize" Italy. Hitler considered such reasoning defeatist, and wanted Schellenberg arrested and thrown into prison (at best) or executed for treason (at worst). Himmler (who prized Schellenberg's abilities very highly and who would come to rely upon him extensively in the last days of the war) managed to run interference, and promised Hitler instead that his intelligence service would find Mussolini. Thus, both Himmler and Schellenberg were extremely motivated in their search for Mussolini, and were willing to try anything. Schellenberg, though, "had not the faintest inkling of where he was." To go on in his words:
The "quacks" were quite expensive, demanding the very best in food, wine, and cigars, all of which were paid for by Schellenberg's department. Imagine the scene for a moment, and savor it if you will: people who had been arrested and thrown into the death camps in 1941 were now, in 1943, summoned to the aid of the Reichsfuhrer-SS, Heinrich Himmler himself, on a mission of great importance to the Reich. A hairbreadth away from being sent back to the camps if they failed and possibly being tortured and killed as the very "quacks" Schellenberg said they were, they instead settled in quite comfortably and ordered the best of everything: like prisoners on death row requesting their last meal. It was either a mark of incredible audacity or an indication as to how far gone these individuals were that they were able to maintain their composure under these terrifying circumstances and go so far as to make the Foreign Intelligence Service foot a hefty entertainment bill for their "services." And a hefty bill it must have been, for it has been the author's experience from direct observation that occultists in general have tremendous appetites. For a while it must have been touch-and-go at the country house, and the anxiety levels of both SS officers and psychics alike must have risen to previously unrecorded heights. After all, finding Mussolini was a top priority of the Fuhrer himself. He was counting on the Italian leader's help in forming a new Fascist government and holding the line in Italy against the inexorable Allied advance. Moreover, there was danger on other fronts -- notably in the Balkans -- of the Italian Army simply surrendering en masse and leaving vast territories to the like of Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia. Thus, finding Mussolini was no sideshow. And the outlook for locating Il Duce using psychic powers didn't seem too optimistic at first. Even Himmler must have doubted the wisdom of employing his former prisoners in this ultrasensitive intelligence mission.
In other words, the "Master of the Sidereal Pendulum" had successfully located the most famous Italian prisoner of the twentieth century ... and with no more than a decent meal, a few drinks, a good smoke, and a pendulum swinging over a map of Italy. It will be remembered that one of Hitler's closest friends was the "Master of the Sidereal Pendulum" Dr. Gutberlet. Whether or not it was this same "Master" who worked on the Mussolini problem is not revealed. Yet, Schellenberg's use of the same phrase to describe both men is provocative, if only coincidental. At the same time, astrologer Wilhelm Wulff was summoned to the office of Arthur Nebe, the head of the Kriminalpolizei and an SS-Obergruppenfuhrer who was also charged with finding Mussolini. According to Wulff's own account, [4] he drew up a Hindu astrological chart and pinpointed Mussolini's location on the same island of Ponza, which had been identified by the "Master of the Sidereal Pendulum." Wulff's success with this and other projects for Nebe led to the Gestapo releasing all of his previously confiscated books and most of his papers, [5] and marked the beginning of his short career as Nazi astrologer working directly for Nebe, Schellenberg, and, eventually, Himmler. As for Mussolini, he was later taken to a hotel on the top of the Gran Sasso (in the Abruzzi), where he was spectacularly rescued by German commandos and glider pilots under the command of Austrian-born Luftwaffe officer Otto Skorzeny. Skorzeny will figure later in our account in a somewhat more sinister context, but for now let us examine the pendulum swingers a while longer. The Naval Research Institute Schellenberg's psychics were not the first pendulum specialists to be employed in an intelligence capacity by the Reich. Earlier, a mysterious department of the German Navy used just such a technique in an effort to locate Allied warships in the Atlantic Ocean. The best account we have of this agency -- referred to rather cryptically by some authors as the Naval Research Institute -- is from Wulff's memoir, Zodiac and Swastika, [6] in which he reports that he was recommended as a scientific research assistant by his friend, Dr. Wilhelm Hartmann, a Nuremberg astrologer and director of the astronomical observatory there in 1929, [7] who was obviously in the good graces of the Nazi regime. Wulff at this time had been recently released from Fuhlsbuttel prison and had been working for a pharmaceutical company. He had never heard of the institute to which he was now assigned in Berlin, and learned to his astonishment that the navy was engaged in paranormal research of the most extreme variety:
The man in charge of the top-secret institute was Captain Hans A. Roeder of the German Navy. His "crew" on this astral voyage was composed of specialists in every field from astronomy and astrology to ballistics and spiritualism. The top priority of this motley accumulation of psychics and scientists was the location of enemy ships. Before the days of satellites and AWACS, there was no reliable method for determining the location of enemy convoys beyond actually seeing them (by which time it was usually too late to do anything about it). Radar and sonar were good only for quite limited ranges. If a system could be developed that would pinpoint the location of battleships, destroyers, cruisers, and supply vessels hundreds if not thousands of nautical miles away, then absolute dominion over the sea could be virtually assured. U-boats could be sent directly to the spot on the map where the enemy convoys had been located and the offending vessels sunk without wandering about for weeks in the open sea looking for targets of opportunity, wasting precious time and fuel. The navy came up with the idea of using pendulum experts after an experience with an elderly architect by the name of Ludwig Straniak, whose home was in Salzburg. Straniak -- a master builder who was also an occultist and author of at least one book on the subject, The Eighth Force of Nature -- claimed the ability to locate anything with his pendulum, and said that if he were shown a photograph of a ship, he could locate it on a map. The navy decided to give him a try, and Straniak was shown photographs of two of Germany's proudest vessels: the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen. Naturally, these were ships whose precise location would have been considered a top military secret for the "unsinkable" Bismarck especially was the pride and hope of the whole country. A juggernaut of armed nautical might, the Bismarck was the flagship of the new German Navy put to sea in 1941. Its destruction had become an obsession of the British Admiralty. They would play hide- and-seek with it for weeks in a desperate attempt to sink it once and for all. Straniak studied the photos of both ships, and then held a small device on a string over a map. A pendulum in this instance can be virtually any small object -- like a crystal, a metal weight, a glass bauble, even a paper clip or a nail -- tied to a string and allowed to dangle over a map or a chart of numbers and letters (much like a planchette on a Ouija board). Subtle forces are believed to move the pendulum in various directions depending on the question being asked or the information sought. In this case, the pendulum was suspended over a map of the world's oceans and Straniak would slowly pass it back and forth until either the pendulum began to move on its own accord or until Straniak felt a stirring -- a weight slightly in excess of the normal force of gravity and possibly pulling in a different direction -- and then the position of the pendulum over the precise coordinates of the map would be noted at that time. Astonishingly, Straniak did what the British Navy could not. He identified the exact location of both ships. One can easily imagine the consternation of Naval Intelligence officers when it was learned that a man with a string and a weight could sit in a Berlin office building and locate their most prized warship without benefit of advanced electronics or a network of spies. And it meant that the British, too, might possibly have someone like Straniak working for them, pinpointing the exact location of their ships and transmitting that information to the submarine fleet. Indeed, the huge losses suffered by the German Navy due to the success of the British Admiralty in locating their ships and V-boats led many to assume an "occult" explanation. (They would not realize until the end of the war that the Brits had cracked the German code system.) Straniak's success actually irritated some people in Berlin, who -- perhaps suspecting some sort of hoax or weird series of multiple coincidences -- demanded that Straniak be tested thoroughly to determine the extent of his gift. In one of these tests, a piece of metal was placed on a sheet of paper for a few seconds and then removed. Straniak was then brought into the room and asked to identify the spot on the paper where the small metal object had rested. The results were consistent. Straniak could identify the precise spot, even when he was not allowed into the room to see the actual sheet of paper used but had to use the same size paper in a different room. Straniak's odd ability was evidence that there exists in nature a force that science has yet to recognize. As usual, this aggravates scientists. So, men of science were summoned to Berlin to devise even more strenuous tests for Straniak and the pressure on the old man became too much. Straniak began to fail these tests miserably, and then to fall ill. It would be awhile -- until the 1943 search for Mussolini -- before the pendulum swingers could cover themselves in glory again. Zen and the Art of Memory At about this time, astrologer Wilhelm Wulff was brought to Berlin, but on a rather different mission. Wulff's other speciality -- beyond Hindu astrology and his own preferred vocation, sculpture-was Asian religion and mysticism, including Hinduism and Buddhism. According to Wulff the Japanese had just captured Hong Kong, and in the process demonstrated to the world their suicidal fanaticism. This would have been in late December 1941 ... that is, only six months or so after the Hess flight to Great Britain and the roundup of astrologers and occultists that took place, but Wulff puts his internship at the Institute at March 1942, six months after his release from prison. [9] The Japanese troops had thrown themselves bodily into the attack on well-fortified positions in Hong Kong, anticipating the much-vaunted "human wave" tactic of the Chinese Communists. Japanese soldiers would block the firing apertures of pillboxes and other fortifications with their own bodies. They would rush, screaming, into strongly held positions and fall by the thousands and still not give up the charge. Clearly, the Wehrmacht could use a few divisions of men like that and it was Wulff's job -- as a specialist in Asian religion and mysticism -- to come up with a proposal on how best to instill such a complete and utter disregard for one's own safety into the common German soldier. [10] Sadly, we do not have any more information at our disposal on these proposals. We don't know if Wulff completed them, or if the Wehrmacht eventually made use of them if he did. One thing is certain, of course, and that is that the first SS divisions put into actual combat were models of just this type of "complete and utter disregard" for their own safety. They rushed into extremely dangerous situations and came out victorious. The Wehrmacht had to grudgingly admit their prowess and courage. The incident at the Naval Research Institute concerning Asian psychological techniques modified for German purposes takes us into another realm of psychic warfare, one that has persisted to this day. As in World War II, the impetus for developing a means of psychologically conditioning combat troops began with a threat from the East. Five years after the end of the war, another one broke out in Korea. This time, American soldiers were returning home from brief periods of captivity in Korea and Manchuria having undergone complete personality changes. The term "brainwashing" became the watchword of a generation of military men, intelligence officers, novelists, and filmmakers, who saw a whole world of terror and unseen saboteurs in the idea of men who could control human behavior -- Svengali-like -- from afar. As usual, the credit for the invention of this technique was given to unknown masters in the mysterious East. But brainwashing was more than simply a method for turning liberty-loving American troops into diehard Communists; it comprised the entire field of behavior modification, including the implanting of false memories and the retrieval of true ones. It also concerned the programming of the perfect assassin: one who would kill without regard for his personal safety ... and then forget who had programmed him to kill, and why. [11] To these sinister ends an entire menu of devices and theories were employed, from hypnosis to hallucinogens. And the first to experiment with drugs as a means of altering human behavior were the Nazis. As revealed by statements in Wolfram Sievers's diaries and by other records and Nuremberg testimony concerning medical experimentation at Dachau, [12] the Ahnenerbe was actively involved in a program of experimentation on unwitting prisoners with the use of mescaline. Under SS-Sturmbanfuhrer Dr. Kurt Plotner and an inmate-assistant, Walter Neff, [13] drinks given to concentration camp prisoners were spiked with mescaline and the prisoners observed for signs of altered human behavior. This experimentation continued right up to the end of the war. An entry in Sievers's official Ahnenerbe diary for February 1945 shows that discussions were being held with SS- Hauptsturmflihrer August Hirt concerning the use of both mescaline and canabinol by the Soviets, and this being coordinated with RSHA Amt VI, in other words, with Schellenberg's own Foreign Intelligence Section. The actual entry reads:
It is doubtful that either the Soviets or the Nazis were experimenting or using mescaline for purely medicinal purposes. Hirt, of course, was one of those involved -- with Bruno Beger, Oswald Pohl, and Rudolf Brandt -- in "anthropological research" carried out at Auschwitz, in which the skulls of POWs and concentration camp inmates were measured in order to develop a standard against which various grades of human and subhuman skull structure could be compared. Sievers's diary for 1943 is full of references to this work being carried out under Ahnenerbe jurisdiction at Auschwitz. Also being studied -- and this, by the notorious Dr. Rascher -- was the possible application of Hennyon root extract as a cure for cancer. [15] Rascher also developed his own styptic formula, [16] and one may well wonder just how this particular type of research -- the development of an agent to stop bleeding under battlefield conditions -- was carried out. One can be forgiven for doubting that the notorious sadist Rascher (whose thirst for other people's pain was exceeded only by that of his wife) used self-inflicted wounds as test samples. In fact, as Nuremberg testimony would eventually reveal, living prisoners were shot at close range to simulate battlefield conditions and the styptic formula then applied to see if it would work. During this same time, the OSS would not consider falling behind its enemies in mind- control research. A "truth drug" committee under the direction of Dr. Winfred Overholser at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C.:
These are the words of John Marks, who went a long way toward exposing the origins of CIA mind-control research in the bloody laboratories of Dachau in his book The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate." And, lest we rest comfortably in the assumption that our people were not as ruthless as the Nazis, Marks goes on to record that:
After the liberation of Dachau, US investigating teams read through the Ahnenerbe and Luftwaffe files on the concentration camp experiments, looking for anything that might be useful in a military application. Marks goes on to note that "None of the German mind- control research was ever made public." [19] Other than the hints of it we can discover in Sievers's diary and similar memoranda, that pretty much remains the situation today. A glimpse, however, into the techniques employed by the Nazis might be had from a look at the famous 1939 attempt on the Fuhrer's life by a possibly psychotic individual named Elser who planted a bomb in a wooden pillar which went off just a few minutes too late to do the world any good. The Beer Cellar Bombing Himmler himself was not unaware of the progress of the mind experiments and took an avid interest in their outcome. At the time of the attempt on Hider's life known as the Beer Cellar Explosion of November 8, 1939, Himmler ordered the suspect -- the Swabian engineer Georg Elser -- subjected to injections of a "truth serum" called pervitin and, eventually, interrogations by four hypnotists. [20] Thus, even as early as November 1939, Himmler's Black Order was aggressively employing drugs and hypnosis in intelligence matters. Hitler had just finished giving his usual November 8 speech in honor of the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 and had left the building when a bomb went off right where the Fuhrer had been standing. Oddly enough, Hitler had finished his speech a few minutes early as if he were aware of the threat. Anyone familiar with Hitler's speaking knew that he rarely, if ever, cut a speech short. In this instance, his change of habit saved his life -- just another instance of his famous intuition at work. A suspect -- Georg Elser -- was picked up and the interrogations began. Historians still disagree as to whom Elser was working for, if anyone. Nazis on the scene, such as Walter Schellenberg, tended toward the view that Elser was a psychotic who worked alone and who had planned the assassination attempt for a year before carrying it out. Others were not so sure, and Hitler was determined to show that he had been the intended victim of a conspiracy. The bombing had the effect of making everyone paranoid. Many Nazi officials agreed with Hitler and feared that Elser had not acted alone in the attempt, but had been conspiring with either a Communist cell, an Allied hit team, or even with an internal cabal of anti- Hitler Nazis. Himmler was certain that two British officers, Best and Stevens -- recently arrested by Schellenberg -- were Elser's handlers even though Schellenberg knew it wasn't possible. Arthur Nebe, the Nazis' chief Criminal Investigator, had to endure Himmler's other fear that a left-wing Nazi such as Otto Strasser might have been responsible. Himmler -- in need of confirmation from some source if his own Criminal Investigation people could come up with nothing more substantial than a "crazed, lone assassin" -- even went so far as to enlist the aid of a trance medium to scour the aether looking for signs that the dreaded Strasser was to blame. A further side effect of the Elser bombing was the prediction -- by the brilliant if eccentric Swiss astrologer Karl Ernst Krafft (1900-1945) -- of an attempt on the Fuhrer's life that very day. Krafft had tried to warn the Nazis of the possibility, bur his report was filed and forgotten. Krafft's contact within the RSHA (the Reich Security Service) was Dr. Heinrich Fesel (1890-1958), an amateur astrologer and yet another student of Sanskrit, who had been recruited by Schellenberg. Fesel worked for AMT VII of the RSHA, the "Ideological Research" Division that handled occultism, Freemasonry, and cults. From 1941-1945, this division had been under the leadership of one Dr. Franz Alfred Six, [21] a scholarly SS- Brigadefuhrer who earlier became prominent as the leader of the Vorkommando Moskau: a death squad that roamed occupied Russia, murdering hundreds of civilians, dissidents, and Jews in 1941. Six joined the SD in April of 1935 when he was only twenty-six years old; in 1939 he became head of AMT II of the RSHA. A year later, Heydrich named him his future representative in Great Britain after the hypothetically successful Nazi invasion of the British Isles. In other words, Dr. Six would have been largely responsible for a program of "ethnic cleansing" in England had the Nazis managed to invade and occupy that country. Prior to his involvement with the SS, Six had been the dean of the faculty of the University of Berlin, and a professor of law and political science; "one of the most distinguished professors of his generation." [22] He joined the Nazi Party in 1930, long before Hitler came to power. Dr. Six served about four years of a twenty-year sentence for war crimes after the war before returning to work for the "Special Forces" section of the Gehlen Organization (the spy cabal of ex-Nazis used by the American CIA for anti-Soviet intelligence work) together with longtime Rosenberg friend Dr. Michael Achmeteli and Dr. Emil Augsburg, a Standartenfuhrer with Adolf Eichmann's notorious S-4 department in charge of the "Jewish problem." It is said that Himmler created the bizarre occult research division of the RSHA- MT VII -- specifically for Six, so pleased as he was by Six's enthusiasm for hunting down the enemies of the Reich in Russia during the summer of 1941 at Smolensk. [23] In 1961, Six was still at large and this time working as an agent for the Porsche automobile company. Six's former subordinate, Adolf Eichmann, standing trial for war crimes in Israel, had worked for Daimler-Benz, Porsche's competitor. Six -- one of the most eager murderers of Jews in the Reich -- very kindly showed up in Jerusalem as Eichmann's defense witness. (As of this writing the scholarly and satanic Dr. Six is still at large and will probably never serve more than those four years in prison long ago for the war crimes he committed with such enthusiasm.) When the attempt on Hitler had actually taken place, Krafft began pestering the Nazis and calling their attention to his prediction. This was a mortal error, for eventually Krafft ended his days as a guest of the SS and would die in a concentration camp. He was one of many astrologers who came under official suspicion after the flight of Rudolf Hess to Scotland. and wound up arrested and packed off to the camps, even though in Krafft's case he had previously been on Fesel's payroll at AMT VII of the RSHA. The "affaire Krafft" has been described in great detail by occult historian Ellic Howe in Urania's Children, [24] but the salient points should be briefly mentioned here as an indication of the extent to which the Reich used occultists, astrologers, clairvoyants, etc. in a climate of total war. Although Krafft's peculiar character made him a difficult person to work with, his brilliance seemed to make him, at times, indispensable. He is typical of that type of genius for whom no science has yet been invented; i.e., imagine Einstein having been born in an age when mathematics was virtually unknown. Or Mozart, a child prodigy in music, born to a family of cavemen. That Krafft was a genius is probably without doubt; that he was forced to find an outlet for his genius in such areas as astrology is probably more an indication that whatever Krafft was born for had not yet been invented than evidence that Krafft was somehow congenitally neurotic or paranoid, or intellectually impaired. A few months after his prediction about the Hitler assassination attempt came true, Krafft was hired by the SS -- supposedly under contract to Dr. Goebbe1s, the Nazi propaganda chief -- to compose a translation of Nostradamus's famous prophetic quatrains in such a way that the medieval French seer would seem to be predicting a Nazi victory in the Second World War. This was obviously to be used in a propaganda effort against the Allies, and at first the task was undertaken with gusto. After a while, though, Krafft experienced pangs of conscience at distorting the message of the ancient astrologer and struggled to make his version an acceptable vision of the original. It should be mentioned that Krafft was an enthusiastic Nazi and sincerely believed that Nostradamus had predicted the Second World War and various German victories. Eventually, in December of 1940, Krafft's version of the Nostradamus prophecies was published in a limited edition of 299 copies, but it was not enough to save him from the camps. On June 12, 1941 -- a month after the flight of Hess -- he was arrested by AMT IV of the RSHA: the notorious Gestapo. This time, even his highly placed friends in the Party -- including the Nazi Governor-General of Poland, Hans Frank -- could not help him. Frank himself had attended the meeting with Hitler and Bormann in which it was decided to blame the flight of Hess on the astrologers. Karl Ernst Krafft -- the astrologer who accurately predicted the Beer Cellar Bombing -- joined that other famous Hitler seer, Hanussen, in a bitter, undeserved fate, for he died on the way to Buchenwald from Oranienberg concentration camp on January 8, 1945.
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