a swastika, the double sig-rune of the SS and a hagall rune.
In 1935, Weisthor moved to Berlin, where he joined the Reichsfuhrer-SS Personal Staff and continued to advise Himmler on all aspects of his Germanic pseudo-history. Eyewitnesses recollect that this was a period of great activity, during which Weisthor travelled widely, corresponded extensively and oversaw numerous meetings. According to Goodrick-Clarke: ‘Besides his involvement with the Wewelsburg castle and his land surveys in the Black Forest and elsewhere, Weisthor continued to produce examples of his family traditions such as the Halgarita mottoes, Germanic mantras designed to stimulate ancestral memory … and the design for the SS Totenkopfring.’ (12) In recognition of his work, Weisthor was promoted to SS-Brigadefuhrer (brigadier) in Himmler’s Personal Staff in September 1936.
While in Berlin, Weisthor worked with the author and historian Otto Rahn (1904–1939), who had a profound interest in medieval Grail legends and the Cathar heresy. In 1933, Rahn published a romantic historical work entitled Kreuzzug gegen den Gral (Crusade Against the Grail), which was a study of the Albigensian Crusade, a war between the Roman Catholic Church and the Cathars (or Albigensians), an ascetic religious sect that flourished in southern France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Cathars believed that the teachings of Christ had been corrupted by the Church — and, indeed, that Christ was exclusively a being of spirit who had never been incarnated in human form. This belief arose from their conviction that all matter was the creation of an evil deity opposed to God. Thus they claimed that the dead would not be physically resurrected (since the body was made of matter and hence evil) and that procreation itself was evil, since it increased the amount of matter in the Universe and trapped souls in physicality. (13) The Cathars were eventually destroyed by Catholic armies on the orders of Pope Innocent III in the first decade of the thirteenth century.
As Levenda notes, Catharism held a particular fascination and attraction for Himmler and other leading Nazis. ‘After all, the very word “Cathar” means “pure,” and purity — particularly of the blood as the physical embodiment of spiritual “goodness” — was an issue of prime importance to the SS.’ (14) Just as the Cathars had despised the materialism of the Catholic Church, so the Nazis despised Capitalism, which they equated with the ‘excesses of the Jewish financiers that — they said — had brought the nation to ruin during the First World War and the depression that followed’. (15) The Cathar belief that the evil god who had created the material Universe was none other than Jehovah provided additional common ground with Nazi anti-Semitism.
Ritual suicide was also practised by the Cathars. Known as the endura, it involved either starving oneself to death, self-poisoning or strangulation by one’s fellow Cathars. Levenda makes another interesting point about the Nazi fascination with Catharism:
[T]he Cathars were fanatics, willing to die for their cause; sacrificing themselves to the Church’s onslaught they enjoyed the always-enviable aura of spiritual underdogs. There was something madly beautiful in the way they were immolated on the stakes of the Inquisition, professing their faith and their hatred of Rome until the very end. The Nazis could identify with the Cathars: with their overall fanaticism, with their contempt for the way vital spiritual matters were commercialized (polluted) by the Establishment, and with their passion for ‘purity’. It is perhaps inevitable that the Cathars should have made a sacrament out of suicide, for they must have known that their Quest was doomed to failure from the start. They must have wished for death as a release from a corrupt and insensitive world; and it’s entirely possible that, at the root of Nazism, lay a similar death wish. Hitler was surrounded by the suicides of his mistresses and contemplated it himself on at least one occasion before he actually pulled the trigger in Berlin in 1945. Himmler and other captured Nazi leaders killed themselves rather than permit the Allies to do the honors for them. … [L]ike the Cathars whom they admired, the Nazis saw in suicide that consolation and release from the world of Satanic matter promised by this most cynical of Cathar sacraments. (16)
The thesis of Rahn’s book was that the Cathar heresy and Grail legends constituted an ancient Gothic Gnostic religion that had been suppressed by the Catholic Church, beginning with the persecution of the Cathars and ending with the destruction of the Knights Templar a century later. From 1933, Rahn lived in Berlin and his book and his continued researches into Germanic history came to the attention of Himmler. In May 1935, Rahn joined Weisthor’s staff, joining the SS less than a year later. In April 1936, he was promoted to the rank of SS-Unterscharfuhrer (NCO).
His second book, Luzifers Hofgesinde (Lucifer’s Servants), which was an account of his research trip to Iceland for the SS, was published in 1937. This was followed by four months of military service with the SS-Death’s Head Division ‘Oberbayern’ at Dachau concentration camp, after which he was allowed to pursue his writing and research full time. In February 1939, Rahn resigned from the SS for unknown reasons, and subsequently died from exposure the following month while walking on the mountains near Kufstein. (17)
As with Rahn’s resignation from the SS, the reasons for Weisthor leaving the organisation are uncertain. One possible reason is that his health was badly failing; although he was given powerful drugs intended to maintain his mental faculties, they had serious side effects, including personality changes that resulted in heavy smoking and alcohol consumption. Also at this time his psychological history — including his committal for insanity — which had been a closely guarded secret became known, causing considerable embarrassment to Himmler. In February 1939, Weisthor’s staff were informed that he had retired because of poor health, and that his office would be dissolved. (18) Although the old occultist was supported by the SS during the final years of his life, his influence on the Third Reich was at an end. He was given a home in Aufkirchen, but found it to be too far away from Berlin and he moved to Goslar in May 1940. When his accommodation was requisitioned for medical research in 1943, he moved again, this time to a small SS house in Carinthia where he spent the remainder of the war with his housekeeper, Elsa Baltrusch, a member of Himmler’s Personal Staff. At the end of the war, he was sent by the British occupying forces to a refugee camp where he suffered a stroke. After their release, he and Baltrusch went first to his family home at Salzburg, and then to Baltrusch’s family home at Arolsen. On 3 January 1946, his health finally gave out and he died in hospital. (19)
The man who was so deeply impressed with the rantings of Wiligut, who would become most closely associated with the terror of the SS and an embodiment of evil second only to Adolf Hitler himself, was born in Munich on 7 October 1900. Himmler’s father was the son of a police president and had been a tutor to the princes at the Bavarian court, and thus applied suitably authoritarian principles on his own family. (20) As Joachim Fest notes: ‘No doubt it would be going too far to see in the son’s early interest in Teutonic sagas, criminology and military affairs the beginnings of his later development, but the family milieu, with its combination of “officialdom, police work and teaching”, manifestly had a lasting effect on him.’ (21)
Himmler was not blessed with a robust physical constitution, and this hampered his family’s initial intention that he should become a farmer. Nevertheless, the ideal of the noble peasant remained with him and heavily influenced his later ideology and plans for the SS. After serving very briefly at the end of the First World War, Himmler joined Hitler’s NSDAP. In 1926 he met Margerete Boden, the daughter of a West Prussian landowning family, and married her two years later. A fine example of the Germanic type (tall, fair-haired and blue-eyed), she was also seven years older than Himmler and is said to have inspired his interest in alternative medicine such as herbalism and homeopathy. (22)
Himmler was appointed head (Reichsfuhrer) of the SS on 6 January 1929. At that time the organisation had barely 300 members, but such were Himmler’s organisational skills that he increased its membership to over 50,000 in the next four years. In 1931 he established a special Security Service (SD) within the SS, which would oversee political intelligence. It was led by the psychopathic Reinhard Heydrich, ‘the only top Nazi leader to fit the racial stereotype of being tall (six feet, three inches), blond, and blue-eyed’. (23) Himmler took control of the party’s police functions in April 1934, and then took command of the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei or Secret State Police). SS units were instrumental in Hitler’s Blood Purge of 30 June 1934, which saw the end of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the brown-shirted and sadistic militia of the early Nazi Party, and its chief, Ernst Rohm. Members of the SS were required to correspond to special racial criteria (tall, blond, blue-eyed) and had to be able to trace their Aryan ancestry at least as far back as the year 1750. Initially, the SS membership included approximately 44 per cent from the working class; however, as its status increased following the Nazi rise to power, it attracted more members from the upper class.
By 1937, the three major concentration camps in Germany were staffed by the SS Totenkopfverbande (Death’s Head Units), and the following year saw the formation of the Verfugungstruppe (Action Groups), which
