by Bill Yenne
The SS “lightning bolt” flash from the collar of an SS officer’s uniform. Photo by Kris Simoens, used by permission
Joining the SS was an act of religious conversion. Allegiances were pledged to Adolf Hitler, and the traditional Catholic or Protestant religions in which men had been raised were renounced. Christmas observances—a traditional favorite for Germans—were now superseded by solstice observances, just as they would be in the secular atmosphere later in the century.
Heinrich Himmler, the Catholic who had attended Mass regularly through his years at the University of Munich, had long since reinvented himself as a born-again pagan. He was now the chief priest of a religion far different from that of the young Heini who once stood in line beneath the twin towers of Munich’s cathedral for his communion wafer. The new altar of the SS, like the altar at which Guido von List had experienced his epiphany at age fourteen, was erected to Wotan and the Nordic pantheon.
However, the anti-Christian policy was largely ignored by the SS rank and file. According to records from the Reichsführer’s own office, now preserved in the United States National Archives, 54.2 percent of SS personnel continued to attend Protestant churches, while 23.7 continued to be practicing Catholics. This, of course, left up to 22 percent of SS men worshipping at the altar of Armanism.
The SS men were forbidden to have church weddings. Rather, they were encouraged to wed their brides in pagan wedding consecrations called SS Eheweihen, which had been created by Himmler himself. These wedding bonds were no less solemn that those exchanged in a church wedding. In fact, as marriage morphed into a pagan sacrament, even the desire to be married became a Nazi urge. As an unnamed SS wife wrote in 1939, in the pages of that year’s sixteenth issue of Das Schwarze Corps, “This instinct, which in us women is stronger than any other capability, was awakened because the Führer touched as a whole man upon those strings of our womanhood, its sound dedicated to the sacred concepts of sacrifice and of selflessness, because [Adolf Hitler], in short, awakens in us that which is eternal and unalterable in the German concept of woman: the heroic love that is a vocation to save eternal life for the German people, beyond need and death.”
In other words, an SS marriage was a tool in the perpetuation of both the Aryan race and the SS as a sacred order.
Naturally, in order to properly “save eternal life for the German people,” the SS men were required to marry women whose pedigree was as Nordically homogenous as their own. Under the SS Marriage Code cooked up by Darré and Himmler, prospective wives, like their husbands, were required to have a Sippenbuch that traced their lineage back to the eighteenth century. Himmler even went so far as to reserve the right to approve or deny marriage licenses for SS personnel.
As Gudrun Schwarz points out in her 1997 book Eine Frau an seiner Seite: Ehefrauen in der SS Sippengemeinschaft (A Wife at his Side: Wives in the SS Clan Community), “Heinrich Himmler thought of and formed [the SS] as a Sippengemeinschaft [clan society] of men and women. In 1929, shortly after taking office as Reichsführer SS, Himmler said about the SS Sippengemeinschaft that it was intended to be a ‘racial upper strata of a Germanic people,’ a leading elite of a Europe ruled by the Nazis. According to a ‘Marriage and Betrothal Command’ issued in 1931, SS men were allowed to marry only women that had submitted themselves to a racial and political review.”
According to the Anleitung für die SS Ahnentafel (Guidelines for the SS Genealogical Table) cooked up by Darré and his staff, “an SS leader and his future bride, alone for the entries into the SS Genealogical Table, had to provide at least 186 documents each [including birth or christening certificates for themselves and their ancestors] as evidence of the accuracy of the claims…. [I]n addition there were still the death certificates of the forebears, which, although not strictly proscribed, were nevertheless desired.”
Once married, SS couples were encouraged to have multiple children because doing so would perpetuate the racial ideals of the Aryan race. In this propagation effort, the wives were subordinated to their husbands just as is the case even today in many fundamentalist religious sects that decree the wife’s primary duty as motherhood.
“Father and mother are the purveyors of the family concept,” wrote the anonymous female author in that 1939 issue of Das Schwarze Corps. “Thereby the man is assigned naturally the spiritual direction of the family. He founds it, he leads it, he fights for it, he defends it. In contrast, the woman gives the family the inner attitude, she gives it soul. In quiet, rarely noticed fulfillment of her duties she upholds what the man created and builds the quiet motive in the family relationship.”
Himmler decreed that SS couples should each have four children, but this target was not met. Many SS personnel had no children. According to records in the United States National Archives, through 1939, SS officers had each produced an average of 1.41 children, while the SS as a whole had an average of just 1.1 per family.
In 1935, in order to encourage even more genetically ideal Aryans, Himmler created a program called Lebensborn, which means “fountain of life” in Völkisch Old German. Originally this program was intended to be a network of maternity homes for Aryan mothers having the children of Aryan fathers. These mothers included married SS personnel, as well as unwed Aryan mothers whose children had been fathered by certified Aryans.
After the war, it came to light that the Lebensborn had also contained a ghoulish selective-breeding program. Citing the work of French journalists Marc Hillel and Clarissa Henry, Time magazine reported on October 28, 1974, that “thousands of carefully selected German women were encouraged to have intercourse with SS men, who were presumed to be among the racial as well as the political elite. Once pregnant, the women were signed into one of twelve special maternity centers, where they received lavish medical and personal care. When one of his ‘new breed’ babies got sick, Himmler would fret and demand daily bulletins until the child was well.” The Time article went on to say that “new light is now being cast on a darker and less well-known phase of Lebensborn: the wholesale kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of blonde, blue-eyed foreign children for the purpose of adding to Germany’s breeding stock.” Again, Time cited the research done by Hillel and Henry, which revealed that Himmler had issued orders to have “racially acceptable” children in countries later occupied by German armies—such as Czechoslovakia, France, Norway, Poland, and Yugoslavia—“brought to the Fatherland to be raised as Germans” in Lebensborn orphanages or by adoptive German parents.
“How can we be so cruel as to take a child from its mother?” Himmler asked rhetorically. “How much more cruel to leave a potential genius with our natural enemies.”
Himmler was particularly interested in the bloodlines of Norway, which he considered to be the most Aryan of the countries that Germany would later occupy. There were at least as many Lebensborn homes in Norway as in the much larger German Reich, and, it has been reported, an equal number of children involved—around 8,000 each—in Norway and Germany. Because of the lack of documentation, the exact numbers of children involved in either the breeding or kidnapping programs will never be known.
As he was finally able to carry out his cravings for an order of racially ideal warriors with racially ideal progeny, Himmler was also now able to realize his Völkisch Blut und Boden, blood and soil, fantasy. However, fulfilling this fantasy would not involve Himmler getting any dirt under his own manicured fingernails. In fact, he no longer had his farm. When Himmler had moved his offices from Munich to Berlin after the NSDAP takeover, he sold the chicken ranch at Waldtrudering. He then moved Margarete and five-year-old Gudrun to idyllic Lindenfycht bei Gmund, a resort town on the Tegernsee, not far from Bad Wiessee, where the central events of the Night of the Long Knives had occurred.
Also doing his part for the ideals of the Lebensborn, Himmler took in a young boy named Gerhard von Ahe, the son of a deceased SS man, to live with his family at Lindenfycht. Some sources suggest that he formally adopted the boy, but he probably di
d not. In fact, Himmler had little contact with Gerhard and with his own family. Margarete remained at the Tegernsee, consciously avoiding the social maelstrom of Berlin. She wrote to her husband often, cynically prodding him to pay attention to his family, but he spent most of his time in Berlin while she wiled the way the hours on the lake. Occasionally though, Gudrun, whom he had nicknamed Puppi (meaning “Dolly,” not “Puppy”), was flown to Berlin for a well-orchestrated photo op. The Reichsführer SS, the photo cutlines insisted, was a family man. Naturally, the pictures of Puppi and her papa occasionally appeared in the newspapers, including Das Schwarze Corps.
While Walther Darré was setting himself up as the godfather of Third Reich agrarian policy, Himmler had other ideas in mind for his old Artamanen brother. He tapped Darré to head up the Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt (Race and Settlement Office), or RuSHA. The dual mandate of the RuSHA could literally be described as blood and soil. The race part of the mandate was to safeguard the “Aryan purity” of the German population. The settlement part was a goal not unlike that of the Völkisch utopianism of the old Artamanen Gesellschaft: to put more city dwellers onto the land.
As the Lebensborn came under the race side of the house, the settlement part settled on Lebensraum (living space), a theme that had been explored at length by Hitler in Mein Kampf. In his book, the Führer had wailed on and on about how Germany needed more living space for its growing population, more land for its Völkisch farmers. This idea would remain theoretical until 1941, when German armies began to conquer vast tracts of territory within the Soviet Union.
CHAPTER 8
Father Confessor to the New Order
MANY ORGANIZATIONS, from service clubs to fire departments, to armies and navies, have their chaplains. In military service, they are the priests, rabbis, ministers or other ordained clergy who provide pastoral and spiritual support to the troops. In secret and not-so-secret societies, they have been the traditional keepers of the faith, the interpreters of metaphysical mysteries. Often they have the ear of the leader of an organization, functioning as his close-at-hand spiritual advisor, his father confessor.
Within the SS, this role was held by a man named Karl Maria Wiligut. He was the conduit by which the pagan arcana of Guido von List, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, and their spiritual cronies was filtered into Heinrich Himmler’s views of the real world and spirit world.
Wiligut’s role in Himmler’s life is often compared to the role played by the controversial spiritualist Grigori Rasputin in the life and outlook of Russian tsar Nicholas II and his wife, the tsaritsa Alexandra. Often called the Mad Monk, Rasputin, like Lanz, actually spent only a short time in a monastery. Most of his life he spent as a self-styled visionary healer. In fact, he was a skilled hypnotist with a sexual appetite that would have made Reinhard Heydrich blush. Rasputin would have disappeared without a trace into the sands of time had he not found his way into the Russian family, summoned to “heal” the young hemophiliac son of the tsar and tsaritsa. His apparent success led to his being treated by the royal family—especially her highness—as an infallible prophet.
Himmler’s “Rasputin,” Wiligut, was born in Vienna in 1866, three years before the real Rasputin and seven years before Lanz. When he was a child, his father recited Völkisch proverbs called Halgarita, which formed a sort of neo-pagan primer for the impressionable boy.
He became a military cadet when he was fourteen, and three years later, he was mustered into the imperial army of Austria-Hungary. He began his military career in Herzegovina, then part of the empire. His first posting with the 99th Infantry Regiment took him to Mostar, the city that was to be a center of conflict in the Balkan wars more than a century later. In 1889, he joined the Schlaraffia fraternity, a German-speaking organization erroneously compared to Freemasonry, which had been formed in Prague three decades earlier by a group of German artists. (Having been repressed in the German-speaking world by the Nazis and Soviet communism for much of the twentieth century, the Schlaraffia still exists as a service club, with members from Europe to Australia to North America.)
Over the years, Wiligut developed an interest in Völkisch paganism. Like Madame Helena Blavatsky and Erik Jan Hanussen, he started to think of himself as having a mystic “gift.” In Wiligut’s case, the gift was imparted to him through a connection to an ancient civilization.
Like Guido von List, Wiligut became interested in ancient Germanic runes around the turn of the century, imagining them as being expressive of the platitudes of the Halgarita. He went on to publish his first book on rune lore, Seyfrieds Runen, in 1903, a full five years before List’s own book, Das Geheimnis der Runen was published. For this work, he used the nom de plume Lobesam, the first of many assumed names by which Wiligut would be known during his life.
In 1908, he formalized his beliefs about his connection to an ancient priesthood in a book called Neun Gebote Gots (Nine Requirements of God). Whereas List had his Armanen, his primeval priestly cult of Germans, Wiligut called his priests Irminen. Both terms were derived from Irminones, the name of the Germanic tribes who were untamed by Roman civilization and discussed by Gaius Cornelius Tacitus in his first-century work De Origine et Situ Germanorum (The Origin and Situation of the Germans). In other words, Wiligut’s Irminen were derived from the same source, and for all practical purposes were identical to, Guido von List’s Armanen.
While List enjoyed the devotion of a secret society that swarmed to his teachings, Wiligut went it alone. While List led dramatic, firelit solstice pilgrimages to holy sites, Wiligut merely communed with Irminist spirits in the privacy of his own small world. Spiritualists such as Madame Blavatsky had been speaking with “departed spirits” in middle-class drawing rooms for some time, but Wiligut’s connection to ancient Irminism had more in common with the late twentieth-century New Age practice of channeling. In channeling, the medium receives ancient wisdom from a specific departed or otherworldly spirit guide.
List’s Armanen derived their powers from Wotan, while Wiligut’s ancients were organized around a heroic deity named Irmin, a name that, coincidentally, was the ancient Saxon term for “strong.” Some scholars of ancient Germanic literature have suggested that Irmin may actually have been merely an avatar or pseudonym for Wotan, as this name does not come up in German writing until relatively recent times. Irmin’s name in Old Norse is Jörmunr, which is an alternate name for Wotan. Nevertheless, Wiligut continued to believe in Irmin’s unique identity as he believed that the ancient Irminists communicated with him. The spirits told Wiligut that the German people had originated about 2,300 centuries before, in a time when giants, dwarves, and mythical beasts moved about beneath a sky filled with three suns. The same or similar theme would be revisited by a number of later twentieth-century science-fiction authors, including Poul Anderson. For Wiligut, though, it was the real deal.
The Irminen went on to whisper to Wiligut that their religion dated to 12,500 BC, and they insisted it had evolved distinct from Wotanism. They told him that the Irminist god was named Krist, and that the Christians had stolen the term from them. (In fact, the word “Christ” was taken from the Greek word “Kristos,” meaning the “chosen one.”) In addition to feeling violated by Christianity, the Irminen had their long-running feud with the Wotanists, which—according to Wiligut’s belief—came to its head when the Wotanists destroyed the Irminen holy city near what is now Goslar in Lower Saxony.
Karl Maria Wiligut, walking stick in hand, was the center of attention as he led Heinrich Himmler and a bevy of SS officers on a tour of the Externsteine, circa 1935. Note the large daggers that were such a conspicuous part of the SS raiment. Author’s collection
Another sacred site that especially interested Wiligut was that of the Irminsul, or “Irminen ascending pillar.” Belief in the Irminsul had been current in Völkisch neo-pagan circles for some time, and mythologists have often linked this belief with that of the great tree known in Old Norse as the Yggdrasil—named again for Wotan, as “Ygg” is ano
ther of the names by which he is known. The legend of the Yggdrasil, or “world tree,” is by no means unique to northern Europe. Indeed, the world tree, the sacred leafy pillar that holds up the world, is common to cultures all across the breadth of ancient Indo-European civilization. Ancient shamanic scriptures from Hungary to Siberia include the world tree. In Hindu mythology, it is the Ashvastha, or sacred fig tree, while it was incorporated into Buddhism as the Bodhi tree, under which Siddhartha Gautama achieved enlightenment and became the Buddha. Not only do the Nordic Eddas mention the tree, but a Tree of Knowledge also figures prominently in the Bible’s book of Genesis.
Karl Maria Wiligut was not alone among Völkisch German neo-pagans in believing that the strange rock formations of the Externsteine were filled with mystical importance. Located near Detmold, in an area otherwise devoid of rocky outcroppings, the pillars rise as high as 120 feet. A pagan religious site for centuries, the site was thought by Wiligut to have been the “Irminsul,” or “Irminen ascending pillar,” of the primordial Aryan race known as the Irminen. Author’s collection
In De Origine et Situ Germanorum, Tacitus describes an actual stone edifice, rather than a metaphorical tree. Though he notes that it was located in a part of what is now Germany that had not been explored by Romans, he named the edifice the Pillars of Hercules. Anything so monumental, he reasoned, had to have some connection to Hercules, the Roman hero of heroes.