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and American publics' fascination with the mysterious Orient - a fascination that had
already been kindled by Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society. (27)
Levenda writes:
There is evidence to suggest that the Ahnenerbe itself was formed as a private
institution by several friends and admirers of Sven Hedin, including Wolfram Sievers
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(who would later find justice at the Nuremberg Trials) and Dr Friedrich Hielscher who,
according to the records of the Nuremberg Trial of November 1946, had been
responsible for recruiting Sievers into the Ahnenerbe. In fact, there was a Sven Hedin
Institute for Inner Asian Research in Munich that was part of the Ahnenerbe and as late
as 1942 Hedin himself (then about seventy-seven years old) was in friendly
communication with such important Ahnenerbe personnel as Dr Ernst Schafer from his
residence in Stockholm. Moreover, on January 16, 1943, the Sven Hedin Institute for
Inner Asian (i.e. Mongolian) Research and Expeditions was formally inaugurated in
Munich with 'great pomp,' a ceremony at which Hedin was in attendance as he was
awarded with an honorary doctorate for the occasion. (28)
It is possible that Hedin may have met Karl Haushofer (whom we discussed in Chapter
Three) while in the Far East, since Hedin was an occasional ambassador for the Swedish
Government and Haushofer was a German military attache. 'Given Haushofer's excessive
interest in political geography and his establishment of the Deutsche Akademie all over
Asia (including China and India, Hedin's old stomping grounds), it would actually be odd
if the two hadn't met.' (29) Indeed, the Deutsche Akademie and the Ahnenerbe, whose
director was Wolfram Sievers, were run along very similar lines. Dr Walther Wust, the
Humanities chairman of the Ahnenerbe who carried the SS rank of Oberfuhrer, was also
acting president of the Deutsche Akademie. Both organisations conducted field research
at Dachau concentration camp. (30)
Himmler's vision of the SS required its transformation from Hitler's personal bodyguard
to a pagan religious order with virtually complete autonomy, answerable only to the
Fuhrer himself. As we have seen, Himmler chose as the headquarters for his order the
castle of Wewelsburg, near Paderborn in Westphalia and close to the stone monument
known as the Exsternsteine where the Teutonic hero Arminius was said to have battled
the Romans.
The focal point of Wewelsburg, evidently owing much to the legend of King Arthur and
the Knights of the Round Table, was a great dining hall with an oaken table to seat
twelve picked from the senior Gruppenfuhrers. The walls were to be adorned with their
coats of arms; although a high proportion lacked these -as of course did Himmler himself
- they were assisted in the drafting of designs by Professor Diebitsch and experts from
the Ahnenerbe. (31)
Beneath the dining hall was a circular room with a shallow depression reached by three
stone steps (symbolising the three Reichs). In this place of the dead, the coat of arms of
the deceased 'Knight' of the SS would be ceremonially burned. Each member of
Himmler's Inner Circle of Twelve had his own room, which was dedicated to an Aryan
ancestor. Himmler's own quarters were dedicated to King Heinrich I, the Saxon king who
had battled Hungarians and Slavs and of whom Himmler was convinced he was the
reincarnation, (32) although he also claimed to have had conversations with Heinrich's
ghost at night. (33)
Inside the dining hall, Himmler and his Inner Circle would perform various occult
exercises, which included attempts to communicate with the spirits of dead Teutons and
efforts to influence the mind of a person in the next room through the concentration of
will-power.
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There was no place for Christianity in the SS, and members were actively encouraged to
break with the Church.
New religious ceremonies were developed to take the place of Christian ones; for
instance, a winter solstice ceremony was designed to replace Christmas (starting in 1939
the word 'Christmas' was forbidden to appear in any official SS document), and another
ceremony for the summer solstice. Gifts were to be given at the summer solstice
ceremony rather than at the winter solstice ... (A possible, though by no means
documented, cause for this switch of gift-giving to the summer solstice is the death of
Hitler's mother on the winter solstice and all the grief and complex emotions this event
represented for Hitler. It's understandable that Hitler - as the Fuhrer and at least
nominally in charge of the direction the new state religion would take - would have
wanted to remove every vestige of 'Christmas' from the pagan winter solstice festival. As
a means of denying his grief? Or as an act of defiance against the god whose birth is
celebrated on that day, a god who robbed Hitler of his beloved mother? It's worthwhile
to note in this context that for a national 'Day of the German Mother' Hitler chose his
own mother's birthday.) (34)
Besides Christmas, weddings and christenings were also replaced by pagan rituals, and
pagan myths, as we saw earlier in this chapter, influenced Himmler's choice of
Wewelsburg as the SS-order castle. The meticulous work of Peter Levenda in unearthing
previously unpublished documents from the period allows us to consider the pagan world
view of the Ahnenerbe and the SS. The files of the Ahnenerbe contained an article by A.
E. Muller originally published in a monthly journal called Lower Saxony in 1903, which
describes the celebration of the summer solstice at the Exsternsteine monument near
the Wewelsburg in the mid-nineteenth century.
[They are] like giants from a prehistoric world which, during the furious creation of the
Earth, were placed there by God as eternal monuments ... Many of our Volk are known
to have preserved the pagan belief and its rituals, and I remember that some sixty years
ago, in my earliest childhood days ... the custom was to undertake a long, continuous
journey that lasted for whole days and which only ended on St John's Day, to see those
ancient 'Holy Stones' and to celebrate there, with the sunrise, the Festival of the
Summer Solstice. (35)
The town of Paderborn itself also had considerable pagan significance, as demonstrated
by a letter from a man named von Motz to the head of the Ahnenerbe, Wolfram Sievers,
which is quoted in Levenda's hugely informative book Unholy Alliance:
I am sending to you now ... six photographs with explanatory text. Maybe these can
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