Hitler's Master of the Dark Arts

by Bill Yenne

  Another intersection of the mystic and the scientific in the Third Reich, mentioned by Pauwels and Bergier, among others, is Vril. In modern pop culture, “Vril” is a term closely associated with the most esoteric of theories entertained by both Hitler and Himmler. However, the concept dates back to the nineteenth century. “Vril” is actually a word coined by the British novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the author of The Last Days of Pompeii. (He also coined the notorious opening line, “It was a dark and stormy night.”) In his 1871 novel The Coming Race, Bulwer-Lytton concocted Vril as an energy force. It was possessed by a race of beings who could have readily been concocted by a committee whose members included Guido von List, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, Madame Helena Blavatsky, Alfred Rosenberg, Karl Maria Wiligut, and, of course, Heinrich Himmler. These “coming race” beings had it all. Called “Vril-ya,” they were a powerful breed of supermen and superwomen, and they lived inside a hollow earth. Not unlike List’s Armanen or Wiligut’s Irminen, they were the descendants of a primeval superrace.

  In the late nineteenth century, many of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophists thought that Bulwer-Lytton was actually revealing a secret truth in his novel. It didn’t hurt that the author made reference to the work of many real nineteenth-century scientists—from Charles Darwin’s evolution studies to the electromagnetic research of Michael Faraday—using these people in the book as though they are characters.

  Indeed, the Vril-ya can be seen as protoypical of many of the concepts of mystical superbeings that were popular in the counterculture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. (In the twenty-first century, there are still believers.) In fact, with its mental telepathy, body morphing, great battles, and naughty sex, The Coming Race reads like the script of any number of science-fiction fantasies that have emerged from Hollywood.

  It was indeed a dark and stormy night when Hitler and Himmler got their hands on the book and seized upon the line that reads, “If they ever emerged from these nether recesses into the light of day, they would, according to their own traditional persuasions of their ultimate destiny, destroy and replace our existent varieties of man.”

  Far more sinister than any Hollywood tragedy is how the Nazis brought their own, similar concept into reality. Willy Ley, the German aerospace engineer who had emigrated to the United States in 1937, wrote of an organization called the Wahrheitsgesellschaft (Society for Truth) that was “literally founded upon the novel…. [This organization,] which was more or less localized in Berlin, devoted its spare time looking for Vril.”

  Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels mention a similar “Vril Gesellshaft” that existed in Germany before the Nazis came to power, and they suggest that it may have been a subgroup of the Thule Gesellshaft. It had further been asserted that this society was founded, at least in part, by Rudolf Hess’s old boss, the geographer Karl Haushofer.

  In recent years, especially since the 1990s, there has been a notion swirling in print and across the world wide web that the Nazis had made contact with a heretofore unknown subterranean race that resembled the Vril-ya of Bulwar-Lytton’s fiction, and that these beings introduced the Germans to “flying saucers.” A corollary to this theory holds that the subterranean people actually originated on another planet. (Of course, modern popular mythology holds that flying saucers are of extraterrestrial origin, so by conventional esoteric logic, if there are flying saucers, they cannot have originated on earth.) The supposition in the modern theory connecting flying saucers and Vril is that the “secret base” where the Nazis interacted with this phenomena was in Antarctica. This interaction, it is theorized, is the reason for Captain Ritscher’s visit to the ice continent in 1939.

  The term “flying saucer” actually entered the lexicon of pop culture in 1947, the same year as the American expedition to Antarctica led by Admiral Byrd and two years after the fall of the Third Reich. On June 24 of that year, a private pilot named Kenneth Arnold spotted mysterious flying objects near Mount Rainier in Washington State, describing them as appearing like “saucers” being “skipped across water.” This “sighting” begat media attention, which begat copycat “sightings,” which begat more media attention and a public outcry that the U.S. Air Force should look into the matter. After such a look, the air force shrugged off the sighted objects as “unidentified flying objects,” and the acronym “UFO” became a permanent part of the pop-culture lexicon.

  Unknown to Arnold or the news media of the late 1940s was that less than three years earlier, disc-shaped aircraft of a much more earthly kind may have been flying in the skies over Europe. An often repeated, but never confirmed, legend holds that a disc-shaped, gyroscopically stabilized German aircraft not only flew, but also exceeded the sound barrier in a test flight near Prague in February 1945. The February 1989 issue of the German periodical Flugzeug contains what is alleged to be an eyewitness account from a person who saw disc-shaped aircraft at Praha-Kbely airport (Prag-Gbell in German) near Prague. This is only one of many unsubstantiated stories of German experiments with advanced, disc-shaped aircraft of this type during the war. Today the term “Vril” usually comes up in references to German UFOs, and vice versa.

  This brings us around to that recent addition to conspiracy theory that suggests that scientists running one or more of the flying-saucer projects had escaped to Antarctica in the spring of 1945. Here, as the story goes, they continued to operate their aircraft from a secret underground facility in Neuschwabenland at a location surveyed by Captain Ritscher in 1939. Operation Highjump, the well-documented, fifteen-ship U.S. Navy expedition to Antarctica under the command of Admiral Richard Byrd in 1947 is thought by conspiracy theorists to have been a cover for a mission to attack this secret Nazi “flying-saucer base” at the South Pole.

  Just as there is no evidence that the Nazis communed with beings from within the hollow earth, there is nothing to establish that they were in touch with beings from other worlds. (Even though General Heinz Guderian did say that Heinrich Himmler “seemed like a man from another planet.”)

  As with the archeological theories of Gustaf Kossinna, and with scientific theories throughout history, artifacts and data can be manipulated and interpreted to say whatever the scientist or pseudoscientist wants them to say—and there will almost always be true believers of any unfounded theory.

  As with the dogma of Adolf Hitler, and with political doctrines throughout history, political doctrines, too, can also be manipulated and interpreted to promise whatever the honey-tongued politicians want them to—and there will almost always be true believers who think they are right.

  Germany, the nation that had produced so many Nobel laureates and led the world in many aspects of technology, had slipped into an epoch of scientific and political prevarication. As Edward Bulwer-Lytton might have said, the era of the Third Reich was the darkest of dark and stormy nights.

  CHAPTER 22

  The Reich and Its Stormy Night

  KARL PÄTEL WROTE in his 1955 book The SS in The Third Reich, “Ten months before the end, the SS finally had Germany in its grip. In 1944–1945, no agency of the economy, the State or the Party could stand in the way of the SS. The Order had taken possession, sometimes openly, sometimes more discreetly, of all power. All that was not part of it was, in its view, no more than an instrument. At the end of 1944, there were only two men who mattered in Germany: Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler.”

  As head of both the SS and the Gestapo, Himmler was still the police chief of occupied Europe. He also commanded the reserve army under the direct order of the Führer. He ran both the Abwehr and the Ministry of the Interior, as well as the Stabshauptamt des Reichskommissars für die Festigung des Deuthscen Volkstums (High Office of Reich Commissioners for the Strengthening of Germanism).

  At Posen in 1943, Heinrich Himmler still had the optimism to look ahead. He was still planning for victory. He told his men that with the war out of the way, “We begin our work. When the war will end, we do not know. The end can come sudde
nly, or the war may last for a long time: We will see that then. But I forecast to you today, already, if suddenly the armistice and peace come, nobody can believe that he can fall into the sleep of the fair one. Adjust also all your commanders, your SS leaders to it. Only then, my gentlemen, we will become alive.”

  The idea of the SS “coming alive” certainly thrilled the Reichsführer. Indeed, he was impatient to have the war out of the way so that he could indulge his passion of building his Germanic order into a supranational elite. He promised, “I will wake the whole SS in such a way, I will keep you so fundamentally awake that we can go then immediately to the structure of Germany. In the Allgemeine SS, the Germanic work will begin immediately.”

  Hermann Göring (1893–1946) was one of the most imposing figures of the Third Reich, both because of his physical size and his pompous presence. He was as visible in the halls of power as Himmler was a man of the shadows. He commanded the Luftwaffe and held ministerial portfolios from aviation to forestry. He ruled the state of Prussia, and he imagined himself as Hitler’s heir apparent. U.S. National Archives

  Still on Himmler’s mind was the importance of indoctrinating the SS, and future generations of the SS, to the Armanen, Irminen, and Nordic ancestors from which their precious blood had flowed. He believed that only with a firm understanding of this lineage could the SS men fulfill their destiny to be the Fürungsschict (Guidance Layer), the superior guiding elite for all of Europe. He told them:

  If the peace is final, then we will be able to go to our great future work. We will settle [the occupied lands]. We will instill the laws of the SS Order to [our children]. I regard it as inevitably necessary in the life of our peoples that we not only teach our grandchildren and future generations of our ancestors, but rather teach them how it feels as part of our nature…. It must be natural that from [our SS] Order, from this racially superior upper strata of the Germanic people, the most numerous offspring come. The SS must be able in 20 to 30 years, to impose a Fürungsschict over all of Europe. In the east, the SS, as well as the farmers, will work together to operate the settlements…. In 20 years, we will push the national boundary of the Reich eastward by 500 kilometers.

  In 1943, Himmler could still excitedly picture the SS as the guardians of that eastern frontier—indeed, as the masters of that expansive, 500-kilometer swath.

  “I asked the Führer that the SS—if we end the war with our task and our obligation fulfilled—gets the privilege to hold the easternmost German border as a military border,” he confided. “I believe that we alone have this privilege, as we do not have a competitor. I believe that nobody will deny us this privilege…. [This will] come only to us, because it is [our noble destiny] and because the black uniform will be naturally very attractive in peacetime.”

  By the end of 1944, however, it was clear that were black uniforms to be attracting attention, it would never be in that 500-kilometer swath of Russia that Himmler had planned to rule as his destiny. This swath was no longer ruled by the Reich.

  For Heinrich Himmler and his fellow Nazi leaders, 1944 would develop into a year of worry, a long, hard epoch of bad news. If, as Winston Churchill had pointed out, 1942 had marked the end of World War II’s beginning, then there is no doubt that 1944 was the beginning of the end. In a matter of weeks after his October 1943 speech at Posen, Himmler’s precious Hegewald was gone, overrun by the Red Army. His “great piece of colonization,” his model Völksdeutsche human experimental farm in Ukraine, was no more.

  As the year began, the Eastern Front was still deep within the Soviet Union. At the end of the year, the Red Army had rolled the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS out of the Soviet Union and back into Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia.

  In Italy, the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS began the year of 1944 bleeding the Allies dry on the apparently invulnerable Gustav Line south of Rome. However, during the year, the Allies had liberated Rome and pushed the Germans into defensive positions along the Gothic Line, far to the north.

  In Western Europe, the year had begun with the Third Reich in solid control of all their Blitzkrieg conquests of 1940. The Oberkommando Wehrmacht was certain that their Atlantic Wall fortifications would prevent the “weak-kneed” Americans and British from being able to invade France. However, on June 6 of that “beginning-of-the-end” year, the Allies had indeed invaded France, and they had come to stay. By the end of September, thanks to Gen. George Patton’s United States Third Army having conquered more territory in a shorter time than any American army ever, most of France had been cleansed of Nazi hegemony.

  It was a bitter paradox that the Reichsführer’s ultimate consolidation of internal power finally came as the noose was about to be drawn tight around the perimeter of the Reich. Perhaps nowhere is the irony more evident than in Himmler’s own portfolio of power.

  For the previous decade, this portfolio had included Walther Darré’s Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt (Race and Settlement Office), which guarded Aryan racial purity and proudly settled the limitless Eastern territories with the Völksdeutsche, who were intended to put down roots that would grow for a thousand years. However, his portfolio now also contained the Völksdeutsche Mittelstelle (Office for Repatriation of Ethnic Germans), whose mandate was to repatriate all of those hapless settlers who had lasted less than three years on the steppes of Russia and Ukraine. His proud Völkisch pioneers were now refugees, either rounded up by the Soviet Bolshevik equivalent of the SS Einsatzgruppen or running for their lives—westward, toward an imploding Reich, where the Völksdeutsche Mittelstelle would endeavor to resettle them for the second time in three years.

  Even inside the Aryan paradise of the Reich itself, trouble brewed. Within Germany, the year 1944 was marked by a paradigm shift of discontent, which culminated most dramatically on July 20, 1944, when a bomb went off at Adolf Hitler’s Wolfsschanze (the Wolf’s Lair) in Rastenburg, East Prussia (now Ketrzyn, Poland). One of several field headquarters, or Führerhauptquartier, used by Hitler during World War II, the Wolfsschanze was the one from which he had plotted and planned operations on the eastern front since Operation Barbarossa. The detonation of the bomb was the culmination of Operation Valkyrie, a long-running assassination plot aimed at removing Hitler permanently. Valkyrie involved a large number of military officers, who were at the crest of the wave of discontent that had come as the Wehrmacht began suffering an epidemic of serious reversals on the eastern front since the end of 1943. Notable among the conspirators were General Ludwig Beck, former chief of the general stall of the Oberkommando des Heeres (Army High Command), who had been earmarked by the plotters to replace Hitler as head of state.

  The assassination failed, but Hitler was badly shaken, both physically and emotionally. The latter was arguably the worst, especially when he saw how many people were involved in the conspiracy. The breadth of the conspiracy, more than the blast itself, illustrated that Hitler’s bubble had burst. The cult of Führer worship that had brought him to power a decade earlier had largely evaporated. The roster of conspirators, especially among the Wehrmacht officer corps, was sobering. How deep into the Nazi hierachy the plot went has been the topic of numerous studies, but suffice it to say that by German records, a total of 4,980 people, most of them professional soldiers, were tortured and executed—by Heinrich Himmler’s Gestapo. A few, including national hero Erwin Rommel, were allowed to commit suicide. Ludwig Beck failed in his own suicide attempt and was shot.

  Heinrich Himmler looks up from his work. “One man at least, believed in this specious story of SS omnipotence—its own Grand Master,” wrote Heinz Höhne of the Reichsführer’s outlook in 1944. “In a sort of ecstasy he proclaimed in August 1944: ‘What we are waging now is a sacred war of the people.’” U.S. National Archives

  If Hitler had not seen it coming, he was one of the few in the Reich who hadn’t.

  Heinrich Himmler had picked up on the discontent. He had only to look at the reports marked Geheime! (secret) that crossed his desk periodically from
the SD. Brigadeführer Walther Schellenberg’s SD snoops throughout Germany’s empire were submitting reports that were distilled into “Report from the Reich” intelligence assessments. On April 6, 1944, Himmler had read, “In this uneasy period of waiting for invasion and retribution and also for a change of fortunes in the East, many are wondering what would happen if we could no longer hold out. People are asking themselves whether the many severe sacrifices and hardships which the war demands and will continue to demand are worth it…. [P]eople are gradually beginning to long for peace.”

  A few weeks later, on April 20, the SD’s Report from the Reich informed the Reichsführer SS, “The continual pressure, alarm at developments in the East and the continually deferred hope of ‘a saving miracle’ are gradually producing signs of weariness among the people. In general people are ‘fed to the back teeth’ with the war. Desire for a rapid end to the war is everywhere very great.”

  As Heinz Höhne later summarized in The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS: