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UNHOLY ALLIANCE: A HISTORY OF NAZI INVOLVEMENT WITH THE OCCULT |
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PART 3: WITCHES' SABBATH IN AMERICA
10. Walpurgisnacht, 1945
Hitler came to power in Germany on a day sacred to the pagan calendar, and would die by his own hand on another sacred day. As there are only eight days of major pagan importance -- called Sabbaths in modern parlance -- the odds against this must be pretty high. For those interested in such coincidences -- perhaps what Swiss psychologist (and sometime Nazi admirer) Carl Jung would have called "synchronicity"- -- submit the following in addition to the November 9 coincidences mentioned in Chapter Four: APRIL 30, 1919. The seven Thulists are murdered by the Red Army in Munich. APRIL 30, 1945. Adolf Hitler commits suicide in Berlin as the Red Army advances on the city. Also: APRIL 30, 1975. Saigon falls to the North Vietnamese Communists. Thus April 30 had grim associations for not only was it the famous Witches' Sabbath of German folklore but the day on which the seven Thulists -- the Ur-Nazis -- were murdered by the Reds. While it provided the spark that ignited the popular revolt against the Bavarian Soviet, it also served to oust Baron Sebottendorff from the Thule Society and thus to rob the cult of its most charismatic and powerful leader. If we were to take only the above three dates as a guide, we might be forgiven for thinking that April 30 -- the Witches' Sabbath -- is an auspicious day for Communism as well, and that their celebration of May Day is perhaps but another indication that, on some level, they realize this. But what about the Witches' Sabbath that Gauleiter Koch speaks about in the quotation above? Is America -- North and South America -- ripe for conflagration? We have focused on the Nazi Party as a cult, and the Third Reich as a government of dark initiates. Black magicians, if you will. This is not a traditional perspective on German history, but the author believes it is vitally important that we come to terms with this aspect of the Third Reich if we are to understand its current manifestations around the world. From the Skinheads of Germany and America to Colonia Dignidad in Chile and from the underground SS organization in South America, Asia, and Africa, to the domestic racial violence of the United States, this phenomenon is not comprehensible in purely economic, political, or social terms but as a virtual religious movement with its ikons, its litanies, its satanic rituals. Its bloody sacrifices. But didn't the Nazi cult effectively die in Berlin on April 30, 1945 with Hitler's suicide? Of course not; if nothing else, his death can be seen as a martyrdom to the Luciferian cause he represented and is, even now, being viewed that way by those of his followers who keep the black candle of their unholy faith brightly lit. The Final Days Since the disastrous defeat of German forces at Stalingrad in 1943, Hitler's much-vaunted powers of intuition began to fade, and fade quickly. This was something that was noticed by many of his associates, and remarked upon in their memoirs. [2] Stalingrad seemed to rob the Occult Messiah of his strength, and he began to withdraw more and more from his inner circle of friends and acquaintances. He grew even more short-tempered than usual, and started to make serious strategical mistakes. Ignoring the advice of his generals, he demanded victory after victory, refusing to retreat or to listen to appeals to negotiate with the Allies. The idea of negotiation, to Hitler, was tantamount to treason. Offenders would be sent to the camps. Then, of course, came the D-Day invasion of June 1944 and suddenly Europe was swarming with well-armed and well-fed British and American forces. A month later, and a cabal of patriotic but terrified German officers and civilians planned and carried out the assassination attempt on Hitler by placing a bomb in a briefcase beneath a conference table where Hitler was discussing military strategy with his staff. The bomb went off, but the Fuhrer (once again) miraculously survived. As in the Rohm purge ten years earlier, Hider demanded the death of the traitors who had conspired against not only himself but Germany. Guilty and innocent alike were either executed or offered suicide as a way out. The unfortunate victims of "Operation Thunderstorm" included Professor Karl Haushofer and his eldest son, Albrecht. As we saw previously, Professor Haushofer was sent to Dachau, where he survived the war. Albrecht was imprisoned in Berlin and later taken out -- ostensibly to be moved to a safer location as Russian shells were falling on the city -- and shot against a wall on a side street. Albrecht's connections with the Resistance movement had become known; what is not known is the extent to which the Gestapo ever discovered his putative involvement in the disastrous Hess affair. The search for traitors and would-be assassins involved in the July plot continued right up to the last days of the war: to April 1945. Himmler's final days are ably recorded by his favorite astrologer, Wilhelm Wulff, in Zodiac and Swastika, and in the memoir of the man who hired Wulff, Foreign Intelligence chief Walter Schellenberg, as well as in Felix Kersten's memoirs. What is remarkable about all of these is the picture they give us of the terrified head of the most dreaded police force and secret society in modern history -- second, perhaps, only to the Office of the Holy Inquisition itself -- asking Wulff for astrological updates on the political and military situation as the war was rapidly coming to an end. Kersten and Schellenberg were trying to get Himmler to commit to a deal with the Allies through the mediation of the Swedish government and the World Jewish Congress, but Himmler's constant indecision from day to day and hour to hour made it impossible to reach any kind of settlement. Himmler would keep referring to the oath of loyalty he took to the Fuhrer as being sacred; this enabled him to feel he had a moral reason for what was really moral cowardice. Himmler was continually being advised to have Hitler either arrested or shot, and to take over the country and negotiate with the Allies; but his fear that the plan might possibly fail (after all, Hitler had already survived several assassination attempts) made him choose to do nothing and bear those ills he had, rather than fly to others he knew not of. Further, Wulff had advised Himmler that Hitler would not die from an assassination, although his aspects for the end of April looked particularly bleak. A prognostication like that only seemed to confirm Himmler's worst fears. In the final days of the conflict, Wulff was by Himmler's side day and night, ready at a moment's notice to cast a chart ... even going so far as to accurately predict Allied air raids; a talent the Nazi High Command might have made better use of much earlier in the war. Wulff was summoned to Himmler's quarters at Harzwalde on the day Germany learned of the death of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt -- Friday, April 13, 1945 -- and told to bring all his charts with him, including those of Martin Bormann, Albert Speer, Seyss-Inquardt, Count Schwerin von Krosigk and Field Marshal Schorner to see who among them might be appropriate for the formation of a new German government. He also brought the charts of Churchill, Eisenhower, and Montgomery to determine the outcome of peace negotiations with them through Count Bernadotte of Sweden. To understand how desperate Himmler was for this type of astrological advice, it must be remembered that transportation and communication services were all but nonexistent at that late date in the war. Wulff was at his home in Hamburg, and the fact that a phone call got through to him at all is amazing in itself. Hamburg was being heavily bombed at the time, and the phone and electrical lines were severely damaged. Wulff was then expected to negotiate his way -- with the car and driver reserved for him by Himmler -- along the shell craters, bombed-out vehicles, wounded soldiers and civilians, and the corpses of the less fortunate along the road, meanwhile dodging lethal strafing runs by Allied planes, just to be able to arrive at Himmler's hideout to (in effect) read him his daily horoscope. Alas for the Reichsfuhrer, he had waited too long. Events were running along faster than anyone had thought possible. Wulff spent Hitler's fifty-sixth birthday at Harzwalde with Himmler, Schellenberg, Kersten, and a representative of the World Jewish Congress, pondering the gloomy situation and trying to negotiate -- unsuccessfully -- for the release of ten thousand more Jews. In the last days of April, Wulff finally managed to extricate himself from the deadly scene at Harzwalde and made his way home to Hamburg. A few weeks later, and his most famous astrological client -- Heinrich Himmler -- would be dead by his own hand after chewing a cyanide capsule while a prisoner of the American forces. Thousands of miles away, Rudolfvon Sebottendorff -- the man who started it all in rented rooms of the Four Seasons Hotel with a "literary-cultural" society, an occult society known as the Thule Gesellschaft -- ended his own life by drowning himself in the Bosporus, grieving for the end of the Third Reich he had helped to create in those heady days on the streets of Munich when the swastika banner was the symbol of all that was good and right in the world, the last best defense against the horrors of Communism and the Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic conspiracy to rule the globe. But not all the Nazi cultists were dead by war's end, not by any means. Some of the most notorious would remain alive to stand trial at Nuremberg, while still others would go into hiding aided and abetted by one of their sworn enemies, the Roman Catholic Church. The Vatican Rag The mass destruction of files that took place at the end of the war is one indication of how aware the Nazis were of their culpability for acts that would be considered heinous by the rest of the world. Most of the Lebensborn records were destroyed, for instance, rendering the tracing and identification of babies born out of wedlock or stolen from their homes in the Occupied Territories virtually impossible. Thousands of people now alive today in Germany and in the rest of Europe as well as in North and South America do not know who their parents -- and particularly their fathers -- were. Many are the descendants of high-ranking officials of the SS who were encouraged to "breed" with the racially pure maidens of the Lebensborn communities. The records of many of the concentration camps were also destroyed as the relentless advance of Allied troops brought them closer and closer to the murderous estates. The results of medical experimentation on prisoners were particularly sensitive and haste was made to destroy both the documentary evidence and, where possible, the physical evidence as bodies -- and body parts -- that had been experimented upon were burned in the crematoria. But another indication of Nazi guilt lies in the fact that many of the SS dived underground immediately it became apparent that they had lost the war, and that the Allies were condemning the Schutzstaffel as a criminal organization; this was certainly a precedent in modern history, for the armies of the vanquished are generally disarmed and the divisions dissolved, but rarely have all the members of an entire military and police apparatus been declared criminals prima facie. This was not so of the regular German Army, the Wehrmacht, which was immune from such treatment. The horror and outrage of the Allies was reserved solely for Himmler's secretly occult and openly pagan Black Order, and for the doctors who helped carry out sadistic medical experimentation under the aegis of the Ahnenerbe-SS. This resulted in an underground movement of SS personnel across Europe and out to North and South America and North Africa. The Order functioned, even in defeat, as solidly as it had during the days of victory. Safe houses and secret transportation were arranged for the SS, who were being hunted all over the world. Some SS officers, confident that their identity was successfully concealed, remained behind in Germany to help organize this "underground railroad" and are still there today, as numerous reports and published research have shown. The secret and often lethal ODESSA was not merely a fantasy of fiction writer Frederick Forsythe; it existed then (in various forms, from the fiendishly effective Die Spinne to Hans Ulrich Rudel's Kamaradenwerk) and still does as I write these lines. What does seem fantastic, however, is the assistance given to many of these men by what was always believed to be their sworn enemy: the Roman Catholic Church. While Ladislas Farago -- mentioned in the Introduction to this book -- must be credited with bringing this story to worldwide attention, [3] it is useful to know that, since then, it has been corroborated many times over by other authors. [4] Why would the Catholic Church help the very men who had vowed to eradicate it, who had participated in pagan rituals designed to replace those of Christianiry, who worshipped Baldur and Thor and Freya in candlelit ceremonies in the forests and castles of Bavaria, Thuringia, Westphalia, and the other German Lander? Men who had caught and imprisoned thousands of Catholic and Protestant clergymen, sent them to the camps, and executed them in cold blood? Was it simply that the Church found common cause with Nazi anti-Semitism, and figured it would help them now and deal with Nazi paganism at a later date? Or was it more practical than that? Did the Church hope to negotiate a separate peace with the Nazis so that they both could concentrate on "the real enemy": international Communism? There is certainly enough evidence to suggest that both of the above rationales played parts in the Church's unofficial policy toward the SS. In the early days of the Parry, few German Christians of any denomination would have been upset by the blatant anti- semitism shown by Hitler, Streicher, Darre, Rosenberg, et al. Hitler very carefully sought to cultivate Christian (and especially Catholic) support for the Party as they remained a substantial voting bloc within the country. Indeed, the Catholic Center Party played a pivotal role in Reichstag elections that catapulted Hitler to power. And just as he wooed the financial support of leading industrialists in contradiction to his personal beliefs concerning the evils of that "Jewish invention," Capitalism, he also courted the powerful Catholic and other Christian lobbies in the country. He knew he could not afford to alienate them entirely from his program, at least not until after he had won the war; for this reason he occasionally found it valuable to attack occultism and volkisch paganism in his speeches, even while encouraging it among his entourage and condoning its manifestation in the SS. On its side, the Roman Catholic Church played a similar game of realpolitik with the Nazi Party, while at the same time many Catholic priests performed heroic service underground in rescuing Jewish and other potential victims from the camps. But there were those Catholic officials who found themselves in secret agreement with much of the Nazi platform, particularly where the potential threat of Russian Communism was concerned. Pope Pius XII, for example, was notoriously silent regarding the fate of the Jews and was eager to avoid any confrontation with the Nazis. He jumped to praise the Fuhrer, however, when the latter moved against the "godless Communists" in the East. Like many of his contemporaries, he figured the Allies were shooting in the wrong direction. It should be remembered that this was not an unusual position to take. Many otherwise respectable Allied leaders felt quite similarly. Even General Patton was known to have growled on occasion that they had fought the wrong enemy, and lobbied for permission to take his famous spearhead right into the Soviet Union. [5] It was this attitude that -- directly or indirectly -- permitted many war criminals who had committed ghastly crimes against humanity to escape forever the long reach of the Nuremberg Tribunal and even, in some cases, to find themselves working in official capacities for the Allied intelligence services in their Cold War against the Soviet Union. While Patton may represent the peculiar stance of a United States Army four-star general, it would be Bishop Alois Hudal who would carry the fascist flag for the Vatican. [6] Born -- probably in Austria -- on May 31, 1885, he was ordained a Catholic priest in 1908. The parallels between his career and that of Lanz von Liebenfels are striking. In the first place, both were Austrians, born within eleven years of each other (von Liebenfels was born on July 19, 1874, in Vienna-Penzing). Both entered the Catholic priesthood, with von Liebenfels entering the Cistercian novitiate in July of 1893 and taking his solemn vows in September 1897, eleven years before Alois Hudal. Hudal became a professor of Old Testament and Oriental languages; von Liebenfels, under the direction of the anti-Semitic novice-master Nivard Schlagl, also studied precisely Old Testament and Oriental languages and would later (in 1905) become such an acknowledged expert in this field that he was chosen to be one of the editors of the Monumenta Judaica, a collection of early Hebrew and Aramaic sources for the books of the Old Testament, along with a panel of Jewish and Protestant scholars. Von Liebenfels was selected as the Catholic editor because of his unequaled knowledge of these ancient texts. The first five volumes of this series had appeared by 1908, so it is certain that Hudal would have been quite aware of his Landsman, Lanz von Liebenfels. What is even more certain is that, as the years went by, Hudal would have become an admirer of von Liebenfels's work in the Pan-German community for Fr. Alois Hudal himself became something of an Armanist and fellow traveler. Just as von Liebenfels became the head of his own order of knights, the Order of the New Templars, Hudal became Procurator General of the Order of German Knights, a Catholic institution. And, on May 1, 1933 -- in honor of the pagan holiday approved by the Nazis and known as Walpurgis or Beltane to the Celts, celebrated with the famous Witches' Sabbath at midnight -- Father (now Bishop) Hudal presided over a meeting in Rome attended by over seven hundred members of the German expatriate colony there, including many Church officials, Nazis, and Nazi leaders such as local SA and Hitler Youth officials. On that occasion, he made a fiery speech defending the Nazi Party and its program in a blend of Catholic and Teutonic slogans, ending with the battle cry of Arminius (the hero of the Pan-Germans, volkisch cultists, and Aryan mystics) in the Teutoburg Forest: "German unity is my strength, my strength is German might." It was Arminius who was the inspiration for Guido von List's Armanenschaft, the cult that List formed to worship Wotan and to instigate a return to the old, pagan, ways of the ancient Teutons. For Alois Hudal to invoke Arminius at this gathering in Rome was tantamount to aligning himself with the neo-pagan, Pan-German, volkisch movement represented by List, Liebenfels, and Sebottendorff. This strange little man then went on to publish The Foundations of National Socialism in which he outlined and defended the Nazi Party programs, including the exclusion of the Jews, in no uncertain terms. Soon, his efforts in combating Marxism -- a legacy of his friendship with the future Pope Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, which dated from 1924 -- became widely known as the Aktion Hudal in Nazi circles. Like many anti-Communist and pro-Nazi Catholic leaders such as Archbishop Ivan Buchko of the Ukraine (who managed the incredible escape of the entire Ukrainian Waffen-SS division of eleven thousand men plus their families to North and South America and Australia)'? Monsignor Krunoslov Draganovic (who helped the Croatian Fascists escape justice, many to Argentina), [8] and lay Catholic Gustav Celmins of the Nazi Latvian organization Perkonkrusts and leader of the Latvian SS (who became an important member of the notoriously anti-Communist Intermarium Society [9] of the Roman Catholic Church which, in addition to helping Nazi war criminals escape justice, also served as an arm of German intelligence), Hudal was greatly admired in Nazi circles and every effort was made to cooperate with his underground network of spies and collaborators even as official Nazi policy remained stridently anticlerical. Intermarium itself is interesting, not least because one of its goals was the establishment of a new Holy Roman Empire of Eastern European nations encircling the atheistic Soviet Union. [10] Intermarium developed a close working relationship with Alfred Rosenberg, [11] who was not only the Nazis' chief pagan ideologue but also a Baltic native who was tremendously sympathetic to anti-Soviet causes of any kind. After the war, many Intermarium notables became involved with the CIA and other Western intelligence services. On Intermarium's agenda was the formation of an exile army of anti-Communists, many of whom would be former Nazis, to defend Europe's borders against the Soviet Union and eventually to partition the USSR into small, separate ethnic enclaves ala the Alfred Rosenberg and Heinrich Himmler plans. [12] This involved dividing and conquering the Soviet state and thus eradicating the "cancer" of Communism forever while ensuring that the Russians could never again consolidate their power and threaten the world. Intermarium, like Hudal's Caritas Internationalis, was to provide escape routes and "ratlines" for fleeing Nazis for many years, supplying the necessary passports and travel documents as well as steamship fare to ports all over the world. One wonders how today's Roman Catholics would feel about their Sunday donations, Widow's Mites, Peter's Pence, and other charitable contributions being used to help 6nance the survival of Heinrich Himmler's Black Order. Some of the beneficiaries of Hudal's operation -- which was being run by Cardinal Montini (the future Pope Paul VI) in his capacity as Vatican Secretary of State -- include Heinrich Muller, the Gestapo chief who once debriefed astrologer Wilhelm Wulff, Walter Rauff, who was in charge of the mobile gas vans in which thousands of Jews were murdered, and (alleges Farago and many other European officials) Hitler's second-in-command, Martin Bormann himself. Muller disappeared at war's end and followed the ratline to Argentina along with Eichmann, Mengele, and so many others, comforted in exile with a suitcase full of American dollars. Rauff turned up in Chile. Bormann -- according to Farago -- did them all one better, and arrived in Buenos Aires dressed as a Catholic priest, a Jesuit. In what must be one of the most sickening scenes to any believing Catholic is that of Bormann -- as "Father Augustin" -- celebrating Mass at the Cathedral of San Juan de Dios in La Paz, Bolivia, where he escaped when Argentina became too hot. (Klaus Barbie would find a safe house with another Nazi "priest" living in Bolivia, in this case a Croat war criminal -- see Chapter Eleven.) He also performed weddings, baptisms, and other sacraments while serving in the role of "auxiliary priest." This, of course, is the ultimate blasphemy. The most-wanted war criminal in the world, a devoted Nazi since the 1920s, special assistant to pagan mystic Rudolf Hess and third in line for leadership of the Reich after Hitler and Goring, a man whose womanizing was excused by his wife because by fathering children out of wedlock he was only doing his sacred duty by the Fatherland to produce as many Aryan citizens as possible ... this man with the blood of millions on his hands, celebrating Mass and dispensing Holy Communion to the faithful in the fiercely Catholic country of Bolivia ... what Black Mass could ever be Blacker? And they call Aleister Crowley a Satanist! We will return to the exiled Nazi leaders in the next chapter for they are the springboard to today's problem of neo-Nazism, neo-Fascism, and racism around the world. As recent discoveries have made clear, many hundreds (if not thousands) of Himmler's Black Order managed to escape capture and set up shop in South America where they still wield tremendous influence. Nuremberg Not all the SS men managed to flee, however. Some of the worst names in German history were captured alive. Alfred Rosenberg, the Baltic-born architect and rabid anti-Semitic, anti-Christian ideologue from Hitler's early days in Munich with Dietrich Eckart was captured and made to stand trial. Rosenberg was sentenced to death, and alone of all the condemned Nazis nearly collapsed from fright on the way to his execution. Hermann Goring, defiant to the end, took his own life in his prison cell rather than permit his captors to do the honors. Hess -- whose story has occupied so many of these pages for it highlights the extent to which occultism was employed on both sides of the conflict -- was spared execution but was sentenced to life imprisonment at Spandau; real life imprisonment, for the Russian vote made it certain that he would never be paroled even after many attempts by British and American authorities to have him released on humanitarian grounds. The Soviets felt that Hess had gone to Britain to arrange a separate peace so that Germany could invade Russia with impunity. World Jewish leaders wanted Hess to stay in Spandau since he had been a signatory to the infamous Nuremberg Laws, laws which robbed Jews of their rights as German citizens and as human beings, and which paved the way for the atrocities of the camps. They felt, and quite rightly, that life imprisonment was better than Hess deserved since his policies had helped exterminate many millions of innocent human beings. When Hess died the New York Times ran a cover story on his life, [13] and tried to explain why the British did not exploit the Nazi's flight to Scotland as well as they might. To the British psychiatrists, Hess was a borderline madman. As proof, they cited his interest in astrology, his paranoia, and his lapses of memory. (One wonders what they would have made of Ronald Reagan. Where was British psychiatry when we needed it?) But an interesting sidelight to the Hess story concerns one of the Allied inheritors of Nazi medicine, particularly in the area of mind control. [14] The above news story notwithstanding, British psychiatrists had already examined Hess and decided he was sane enough to stand trial, but the Americans wanted to perform their own examination. For this purpose, the Scotland-born Dr. Ewen Cameron was sent to Germany to interrogate Hess and draw up a psychological profile of the Reichs Deputy. Before he was able to do so, he was approached by Allen Dulles, the man who was so successful running spies for the ass (America's precursor to the CIA). Dulles asked Cameron to perform a small service for him during the course of his examination. There was reason to believe -- said Dulles -- that the man in custody was not Rudolf Hess at all, but a double! He asked the astonished Dr. Cameron to find some way of getting Hess to show Cameron a scar he should have received from an accident he had long before the war. If the scar was there, it was probable that the prisoner really was Hess. If it wasn't, then the man was an impostor and perhaps a plant by British Intelligence to disguise the fact that they had executed the real Hess soon after his arrival in Scotland. Needless to say, Dr. Cameron agreed to Dulles's request and -- during the course of many hours of intense psychiatric examination -- attempted to get the prisoner to remove his shirt for a routine physical. The guard, however, refused to allow Hess to remove his handcuffs to enable the examination, saying that he had no such authorization. Cameron had to return to Dulles with the sad report that he was not able to verify whether the man in the prison cell was the infamous mystic Rudolf Hess. Cameron's failure did nothing to cool Dulles's appreciation of his talents, however, for the psychiatrist soon became the architect of the CIA's notorious Montreal-based mind-control project at the Mount Royal clinic in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a project whose goal was to discover a means of countering the effects of Russian and Chinese brainwashing and to develop an American version for use as an offensive weapon. The experiments were nearly the equal of anything the Nazis themselves had come up with under the aegis of the all-powerful Ahnenerbe-SS and were, indeed, based at least partly on the results of those concentration camp experiments, the records of which had been confiscated by American intelligence, becoming part of CIA and Pentagon files shortly after the Nuremberg Tribunals. As CIA investigator John Marks points out, [15] the records of Ahnenerbe-SS experimenters Dr. Kurt Plotner and Walter Neff regarding mescaline and hypnosis research at Dachau were sent back to the States and never revealed. Thus, the files of Nazi brainwashing, interrogation, and mind-control experiments using drugs, hypnosis, and torture -- techniques associated today with the worst of America's religious cults and secret societies -- are still classified if indeed they survived at all the famous shredding of MKIULTRA documents ordered by Richard Helms in the 1970s. In a related development, Hess's final statement before the Nuremberg Tribunal on August 31, 1946 was never finished. As it seemed he was in danger of rambling on forever, the president of the Tribunal ordered him to cut it short and history was cheated out of a bizarre tale of mystical phenomena (or saved the dreary task of recording the paranoid fantasies of a mass murderer, depending on your point of view). But there are elements within Hess's statement that bear repeating here for they either cast doubt on the pronouncement of his sanity (and thus question his fitness to stand trial) or they are evidence that some form of mind-control was being tested on Hess while he remained a prisoner in the Tower.
At this point, one would imagine that Hess was simply being realistic. It was not unusual for the Nazi defendants and witnesses to invent all sorts of stories and alibis to excuse away their crimes (Sievers is just one possible example); Hess may have tried to insinuate that the prosecution witnesses were all lying. The Nuremberg jurors were certainly in no mood to entertain such a notion, and that might have been the end of it except that Hess went on to say:
Here Hess is obviously referring to the infamous show trials which had taken place in Stalinist Russia. It should be remembered that the Soviet Union formed one-fourth of the Nuremberg Tribunal, along with France, Great Britain, and the United States. Later on in his statement he specifically mentions the "Moscow trial." One imagines that this is a decidedly unwelcome tactic on the part of the defendant. Hess goes on to link the method used to mentally condition these Russian defendants to the acts of otherwise sane Germans carrying out atrocities in the camps. His implication is that mind-control was used in a massive way to robotize the German population. He wisely drops that rather pathetic line of approach, but then his statement takes on a strange angle all its own:
This Kafkaesque monologue goes on to cover British concentration camps (implying that the Nazi camps were no worse, and that concentration camps in general must be an internationally recognized means of solving what Hess calls "incomprehensible riddles"), and then winds up with a speech in which Hess is clearly leading up to an exposition of just what exactly happened to him in the spring of 1942, prefaced by oaths to God that he will tell the truth and calling God as his witness. "In the spring of 1942" he begins, then is cut short. The president of the Tribunal tells him he has already used up his twenty minutes. Hess demurs, then agrees to end his statement by simply saying, "I am happy to know that I have done my duty to my people, my duty as a German, as a National Socialist, as a loyal follower of my Fuhrer. I do not regret anything. If I were to begin all over again, I would act just as I have acted, even if I knew that in the end I should meet a fiery death at the stake ..." [19] A fiery death at the stake. Hess imagining himself as heretic, or witch? Was Hess insane? What had happened to him while he remained a prisoner of Great Britain? Why was his flight to Scotland not exploited in a more obvious manner? What was the relationship between the mysterious, Scottish-born Dr. Johnston and the Scottish-born Dr. Cameron, the mind-control expert? The author feels certain that, owing to the Official Secrets Act, we shall never know the whole story about the Nazi's most famous mystic, Rudolf Hess. As for Hess himself, who practiced yoga conscientiously while imprisoned in Spandau, he never abandoned his occult beliefs and was said by his wife to be in constant telepathic communication with her until the day he died. And what about Martin Bormann? Did he really die in Berlin in the final days as has been reported? Or was Farago right? Did Martin Bormann escape to South America? Ironically enough, as I write these lines in the early days of 1994, new evidence has come to light to suggest that the much-maligned Ladislas Farago may have been correct after all. Hundreds of files newly released by the Argentine government of President Menem show that many more Nazis managed to flee to South America than had ever been previously imagined, not even in the wildest dreams of veteran Nazi hunters. [20] Included in these records -- which consist of official files of the Argentine police and intelligence services -- are the faint traces of el gran fugitivo. As the files reveal, the American Ambassador to Argentina had come into possession of intelligence that neatly confirmed Farago's claim that Bormann had managed to make his way into Italy through a series of safe houses and then shipped out to Buenos Aires. Due to a typographical error in transcription, the province to which Bormann had subsequently fled was incorrectly identified and the Argentine officials -- at that time, working for the administration of pro-Nazi and pro- fascist Juan Peron -- shrugged their shoulders and replied that they could not help the American authorities as no such town existed in that province! These newly released reports will, hopefully, help vindicate the late Mr. Farago's efforts to track down the most famous Nazi war criminal of all, and rehabilitate his most controversial work, Aftermath. The Interrogation of Wolfram Sievers The Ahnenerbe, for all its reputation for horror, is mentioned only rarely in the forty-two- volume set of the published Nuremberg Trial transcripts. The interrogation of Wolfram Sievers covers less than fifty pages in total, [21] and most of the evidence at the time was in the form of his Ahnenerbe Tagebuch or diary and which contained references to the camps and to the hideous experiments that took place under his stewardship. It is from his diary that we learn, for instance, of former SS-Tibet Expedition member Dr. Bruno Beger's involvement in the "anthropological research" being undertaken at Auschwitz. We learn of the Ahnenerbe's medical experimentation involving cancer cures, coagulating agents, and low-and high-pressure research using human guinea pigs, freezing research using prostitutes to "thaw out" frozen concentration camp prisoners, etc. In the coagulation experiments, for instance, living human beings were shot with live ammunition to create wounds to which would be applied various experimental styptic formulas to see which could be used in the field as an interim measure to stop bleeding until proper medical attention could be obtained. Before the Tribunal, Sievers did his best to extricate himself from the medical experimentation taking place at Dachau and Auschwitz under his jurisdiction, and even went so far as to claim he was actually a member of the Resistance -- calling on his old friend Dr. Friedrich Hielscher (who was imprisoned by the Gestapo for his role in the July 20, 1944, assassination plot against Hitler) as a corroborating witness [22] -- but the Nuremberg jurors weren't having any. Sievers admitted to being present at some of the above-mentioned experiments, and other witnesses put him on the scene of many more. Sievers, who claimed to be little more than the business manager for the Ahnenerbe and a relay center for reports, "one of these distinguished Nazi post offices" in the words of one Nuremberg attorney, [23] was eventually prosecuted himself during that series of trials (the Doctors' Trials) which took place after the celebrated Nuremberg Trials of Hess, Goring, et. al., at which he testified. Wolfram Sievers -- Himmler's aide and chief of the Ahnenerbe -- was given the death sentence and executed in 1947. The records of the Ahnenerbe, however -- some ninety microfilm rolls at the National Archives alone -- remain a treasure trove for the historian of the bizarre. It is an enlightening task to wade through the thousands of documents detailing research in astronomy, anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, Icelandic lore, Celtic studies, rune symbolism, Tibetan religion, the World Ice Theory, and Norse paganism and to realize that this massive undertaking by hundreds of university professors and serious academics was pointed directly at world conquest and genocide. These Nazi academics and "mythologians" -- the Joseph Campbells and Mircea Eliades of their country in some cases -- were as at home in the foul abbatoirs of the death camps as they were in the lecture halls of the great German universities. To them, Auschwitz and Dachau were simply other forms of laboratory and schoolroom; higher education in the lower depths, a continuation of scholarship by other means. Many of these men escaped justice. The former Catholics and Protestants who had become converts to Nazi paganism -- and there is truly no fanatic like a convert -- made their way to freedom and, as numerous interviews by a wide range of journalists has shown, they remained (and remain) unrepentant: true believers in the Cult of the Black Order, Himmler's Schwarze Orden. And, as they grow old and die, they leave behind a new generation of believers who carry on the rites of a new faith -- sometimes in secret, sometimes openly -- in their adopted lands.
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