HITLER’S CRANKS AND CRAZY MEN by Charles Whiting
Nazi Germany was always thought of as a strict martial state. Movies of that time always depicted marching Germans as sinister looking troops whose purpose in life was the no-nonsense business of killing for their Fuhrer. The reality was different. The German ‘Folk’ numbered enough cranks and crackpots to fill countless lunatic asylums. The Nazi Party, it seems, subscribed to strange religious, supernatural powers and general sorcery. A book recently published in Spain gives a typical example of just what lengths the Nazi crackpots, in particularly Heinrich Himmler, the most feared man in Europe, was prepared to go. In 1940 Himmler stayed in Barcelona’s swank Hotel Ritz while his Fuhrer held talks with the Spanish dictator General Franco. But Himmler, the chinless, ex-chicken farmer, had a secret agenda of his own. He set off for the famed Spanish Monastery, Montserrat. Here he believed there was to be found the celebrated Holy Grail which Christ was supposed to have used to consecrate the Last Supper. As Himmler saw it the Grail would give him supernatural powers. In addition it would somehow prove (only Himmler seemed to know how) that Christ had not been a Jew at all but of so-called Aryan blood. Naturally to the SS leader’s way of thinking, the Germans were Aryans. But how was he going to prove his strong racial theory: show that a race called the Aryans ever really existed. The major problem facing Himmler in this context was to find some proof that an Aryan race – blond and blue-eyed – had actually existed. Despite the fact that by
now Germany was at war, the Reichsfuhrer SS still continued his sometimes almost frantic search for his Aryans. Hitler himself had long believed there was a lost city of Atlantis which had once been inhabited by the Aryan people. He believed too that Atlantis harboured huge stocks of an energy based metal. This would be of great use in powering a new weapon of war which German was already working on – its V1 and V2 rockets and the ballistic missiles of our own age. Thus in the years 1942-1944 when Germany was fighting for its very existence, valued resources and otherwise essential fighting men were employed in trying to find the lost Atlantis. Already back in the late 1930’s a team of German explorers and archaeologists under the auspices of a crackpot German, Gauleiter Rosenberg, had pinpointed Tibet where they would find the lost city of Atlantis and the new metals which would make Germany all-powerful. Funded by a massive budget at a time when the Reich had introduced strict currency controls, no expense was spared. The task of the German expedition to that remote mountain country was dedicated to measuring the skulls and physique of select Tibetans. It was calculated that these would show the similarity between them and the modern Germans. In other words, it would prove the Tibetan Aryans were the forerunners of the modern Germans. Thus the Aryan link with a lost civilisation and lost race would be established. Naturally, nothing of the sort was the result. Still Himmler pursued ever larger expeditions, again with no tangible evidence that Atlantis and the lost Aryans had ever existed. In the meantime Himmler had restored a ruined castle in Westphalia. Here he planned to have a kind of Nazi Camelot. Arrangements were made to bury the 12
Senior SS generals here each with their own special burial place. But just like the Atlantis project, nothing came of the Nazi Camelot. As American troops advanced upon Westphalia the Nazi castle was blown up. However, the same bogus scientific anthropological research used in Tibet on the supposed Aryans was put to more sinister use. It was used in the camps to prove that the Jews were racially inferior to the German Aryans. A strange kind of archaeology now flourished in war torn Germany. The number of university chairs of archaeology flourished at great expense. But these worthy professors of archaeology had to toe the Party line. The same instruments which had been used to measure the racial traits of the Tibetan Aryans – their skulls and body mass, facial characteristics etc. were now used on Jewish prisoners, gypsies and Russian POWs and the like. Failure to meet up to Aryan standards was often a death sentence. Five years ago author Heather Pringle tracked down one of the surviving members of the Tibetan expedition. He was anthropologist Bruno Beger. Even all those years later, he was proud of what he had done for the Fuhrer and his crackpot henchman Himmler. The female writer knew of the old man’s unsavoury reputation. Once he had stood in front of the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp selecting men, women and children for his research on Jews using the same techniques as he had employed in Tibet. What did surprise Heather Pringle was Beger’s frankness. “To my astonishment, he casually boasted that he still possessed the callipers and sliding compasses he
had used to perform racial measurement. And he even showed me a notebook he had used for such calculations.” But Bruno Beger is not the only witness to that terrible time with its crazy and criminal experiments. Only last year it was discovered that both the French university of Metz and the Austrian one of Vienna, both once under Nazi control, conducted Aryan research and still possessed skulls of non-Aryan types. What suffering those to whom the skulls had once undergone is beyond our ken. Thank God, for we can guess the way these non-Aryans were treated before they were mercifully put to death and the flesh flayed from their skulls so that it would present perfect specimens for Aryan research. Today, so long afterwards we may be inclined to laugh at these nonsensical theories believed in and promoted by such important men as Hitler and Himmler. But should we? We live in a time where there are many who believe in racial purity of one kind or another. There are too many powerful men who are in a position to carry out their own racial or religious theories. What is currently happening in Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran are typical examples of what can happen when such people have unlimited power. Looking back we can conclude that Hitler’s and Himmler’s quest for the Holy Grail and the supposed lost city of Atlantis were just another example of Nazi madness. It is something we can supposedly laugh at. But dare we? For aren’t we confronted today by a similar set of madmen?