Karl Maria Wiligut's short Biography

[Ahnenerbe]

1866: HITLER'S WARLOCK

He was called "Himmler's Rasputin." He sent scores
of Nazi agents around the world on a quest for magickal
artifacts. He literally wrote the book on Esoteric
Nazism. And he claimed to be the last warlock or
magician of an order dating back to the lost continent of
Atlantis.

Of all the strange personalities in Adolf Hitler's
entourage, Karl Maria Wiligut was certainly the oddest.

Wiligut was born on December 10, 1866 in Vienna,
then the capital of the large eastern European empire of
Austria-Hungary. "Both his father and his grandfather
had served as officers in the Austrian army" and Karl,
"the eldest son followed this family tradition."

In 1880, "at the age of fourteen, he began attending
the Imperial Cadet School at Vienna-Breitensee and in
December 1884 he joined the 99th Infantry Regiment at
Mostar," in what is now Bosnia-Hercegovina. "He was
promoted second lieutenant in November 1888, (first)
lieutenant in 1892 and captain in 1903. During this
early period of his military career, he served with the
99th, 88th and 47th Infantry Regiments" of the Austro-
Hungarian Army.

In 1900, while stationed at Znaim in Moravia,
Wiligut became intrigued by a curious prehistoric menhir
called the Rabenstein, the subject of much local
folklore. As a result, he began reading the books of
Guido von List, a fellow Austrian and founder of the
Ariosophy movement, and tried his own hand at volkisch
poetry.

(Editor's Comment: You know your editor. Can't pass an
ancient monument or ruin without checking it out. If any
of our eastern European readers has more information
about these ruins at Znaim, please send an email to UFO
Roundup.)

In 1907, Wiligut married Malwine Leuts von
Treuenringen. His daughter Gertrud was born in Vienna in
1908 and, while there, Wiligut made the acquaintance of
Theodore Czepl, a member of the Order of the New Templars
(ONT). Czepl invited Wiligut to join "an occult circle
in Vienna, whose members included Willy Thaler, a cousin
of Wiligut's, his wife, Marie Thaler, the well-known
(stage) actress, and several ONT brothers."

During the course of these meetings, Wiligut
revealed "the he had received instruction on the runes
from his grandfather Karl Wiligut (1794-1883) and dated
his formal initiation into the family secrets by his
father" in 1890.

And what secrets! The elder Wiligut told 24-year-
old Karl that he was "the last descendant of a long-line
of Germanic sages, the Uiligotis of the Asa-Uana-Sippe,
which dated back to a remote prehistoric era. Wiligut
claimed to possess ancestral-clairvoyant memory, which
enabled him to recall the history and experiences of his
tribe over thousands of years."

Wiligut believed that Germany was originally settled
in 228,000 B.C. by people from the lost continent of
Atlantis and that his family began in the magickal city
of Arual-Joruvallas (now Goslar--J.T.). He insisted that
the Bible was much older than anyone thought, that the
events of the New Testament had taken place in Germany
and not Palestine, and that Jesus Christ was really
Krist, an avatar who had founded the Irminist religion in
12,500 B.C. The Wiligut family were supposed to be sages
of Irminism who were driven into the northern European
wilderness by rival sorcerers in 1,200 B.C.

Wiligut's budding career in Ariosophy was cut short
in 1914 by another catastrophe--World War I. "In October
1914, he became a staff officer in the 30th Infantry
Regiment, witnessing action against the Russian army in
the Carpathians along the northeastern flank of the
(Austro-Hungarian) empire. Following an exhausting
campaign during which he was either in battle or on long
night marches, Wiligut was promoted to lieutenant colonel
and and transferred back to Graz to organize
reinforcements for the 14th and 49th Infantry Regiments."
(Editor's Note: Graz is the boyhood home of actor Arnold
Schwarzenegger.)

"He was then posted to the Italian front where he
held a succession of commands between June 1915 and" was
"promoted to the rank of colonel in August 1917...In May
1918, Wiligut was recalled from the front in the South
Tyrol and placed in command of camps for returned
soldiers at Zolkiew, north of Lemberg (now Lvov--J.T.) in
the Ukraine."

Discharged in January 1919, Wiligut brought his
family to Salzburg. But like many Austro-Hungarian staff
officers, he felt that his country had been cheated of
victory in the war. The empire, he felt, had been
brought down by the political intrigues of (pick one) (A)
the Vatican; (B) Freemasonry; and (C) the Jews. What was
needed, he thought, was a new German-speaking empire.

In 1922, the retired colonel founded his own
volkisch newspaper, Der Eiserne Besen (German for The
Iron Broom--J.T.) and began calling for a rightwing
revolt to overthrow the socialist Austrian republic.
"Matters abruptly climaxed in November 1924 when Wiligut
was involuntarily committed to the Salzburg mental
asylum, where he was certified insane and remained an
inmate until his release in early 1927."

Wiligut's disciples--Ernst Rudiger, Friedrich
Teltscher, Friedrich Schiller and Werner von Bulow--
assisted his daughters, Gertrud and Lotte, in persuading
the Austrian courts to let him out. Five years later, in
1932, heeding the call of "the Higher Powers," Wiligut
emigrated to Germany and settled in Bogenhausen, a suburb
of Munich.

Shortly thereafter, another disciple, Richard
Anders, introduced the elderly sorcerer to his good
friend, Heinrich Himmler, a rising star in the NSDAP or
Nazi Party. Himmler, who was deeply interested in German
prehistory, "was evidently impressed by Wiligut's
ancestral-clairvoyant memory and decided to exploit as
fully as possible this unique source of information on
ancient Germanic religion and traditions."

"In September 1933, Wiligut joined the SS under the
pseudonym 'Karl Maria Weisthor.'" Wiligut and Himmler
became fast friends. Himmler never tired of hearing the
old man talk about "the hidden history of Atlantis," as
revealed in his visions, or reading Wiligut's endless
magazine articles on European prehistory.

Wiligut designed the dreaded SS Totenkopf ring and
hat badge, plus the runic symbols used on black SS
uniforms and flags. With his newest disciple, Gunther
Kirchhoff, he sent archaeological teams to investigate
prehistoric sites at Gaggenau in 1934, Germany's Murg
valley in 1936 and Glozel, France in 1940.

Money was no obstacle. Himmler created the SS-
Ahnenerbe in 1936, promoted his elderly mentor-in-magick
to SS-Brigadefuhrer (General), and turned him loose on
several dozen crackpot projects. First prize undoubtedly
goes to "Wiligut's Tunnel." This was a vertical tunnel
16 kilometers (10 miles) deep begun in Hungary in 1941,
designed to carry an elevator car that would lower
Himmler and Wiligut into "the Inner World of Agharti"
(Better known to readers of Edgar Rice Burroughs as
Pellucidar--J.T.) Millions were spent on the tunnel, and
work continued until November 1944, when the lack of
supplies forced the SS project to close.

But age had finally caught up with the old warlock.
He resigned from active duty in the SS in August 1939 and
moved to his "beloved Goslar" the following year.
Himmler sent Elsa Baltrusch, a member of his household
staff, to look after Wiligut, who spent his declining
years with his runes and spells and ancient artifacts.

Evacuated to Austria in 1943, Wiligut was there when
the war ended. He was briefly detained and questioned by
the British Army at Velden, but then was allowed to
return to Germany. He fell ill during the trip in
December 1945. "The journey proved too much for the old
man and he was hospitalized on arrival. Karl Maria
Wiligut died on 3 January 1946, the last of his secret
line." (See the book The Occult Roots of Nazism by
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, New York University Press,
1992, pages 177 to 191.)

[Weisthor]

Here is another one:

Karl Maria Wiligut

Personal Mystic of the Reichsführer-SS

Born in Vienna, Karl Maria Wiligut came from a long line of military officers, and was educated and served as an infantry officer in the Austrian army. During the First World War, he lead troops on the Carpathian and Italian fronts, and, following the collapse of Hapsburg Empire, was discharged as a colonel in January 1919. Wiligut settled in Salzburg, where he developed his already-formidable reputation among occult circles as a keeper of ancient knowledge.
As early as 1903, Wiligut had published poetry influenced by Germanic mythology. Between 1889 and 1909, he was a high-ranking member of the quasi-masonic lodge Schlarraffia, taking the lodge-name of Lobesam. But it wasn't until around 1908 that Wiligut became involved in the vibrant occult scene in Europe, when he joined an small circle in Vienna which shared members with Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels' Order of the New Templars (ONT). It was one of these members, Theodor Czepl, that interviewed Wiligut in the winter of 1920-1, and his own brand of Ariosophist mythology was first documented.

Wiligut claimed that his family descended from the prehistoric Uiligotis of the Asa-Uana-Sippe, an ancient bloodline descended from the coupling of the divine Asen (air gods) and Wanen (water gods). This bloodline had remained pure throughout the ages, bestowing upon Wiligut an ancestral-clairovoyant memory that allowed him to remember beliefs and traditions from the Nordic past. He could recall as far back as 228,000 BC, when the Earth had three suns and fantastic creatures like giants and dwarves were common. In 78,000 BC, Wiligut's ancestors ushered in an era of peace following many years of chaos, the "second Boso culture", by founding the city of Arual-Jöruvallas, the present-day site of Goslar. The peace was broken in 12,500 BC, when the faith of the Uiligotis, an Irminist religion venerating the Germanic god Krist, became the official religion of all Germans, to the outrage of the opposing religion of Wotanism. The wars between the Irminists and the Wotanists culminated in the crucifixion of the Irminist prophet, Baldur-Chrestos, at Goslar in 9600 BC. Baldur-Chrestos survived his crucifixion (or was reborn), and fled to Asia, where his Irminist faith in Krist would later be perverted into the Christian religion. The Wotanists destroyed the Irminist temple at Goslar in 1200 BC, and then took the new Irminist temple at Exsternsteine and corrupted it for their own worship. It was this corrupt temple that Charlemagne destroyed in the 9th century, by which time the Uiligotis had founded a kingdom in Burgenland. They fled the depredations of Charlemagne, travelling to the Faroe Islands and then into Central Russia, where the Wiliguts established a Gothic realm based in Vilna. This realm was destroyed by Christians and pagan Russians in the thirteenth century, and the Wiliguts made their ultimate move to Hungary.

His grandfather and father had initiated Wiligut into these secrets in 1890, teaching him the mystic power of runes. In 1909, the nine pagan commandments of their Irminist religion were revealed to Wiligut, the same year he entered the occult völkisch scene. His reputation was rising when he was forcibly committed to the Salzburg mental asylum in November 1924. His collapse, which included threats of violence against his wife, delusions of grandeur, megalomania, and schizophrenia, was brought on by marital problems and a failed business venture. Wiligut was rumored to be angered at his wife for not producing a male heir for which to continue the Uiligotis tradition. He was released from the asylum in 1927, and emigrated to Germany with his family in 1932 to escape the stigma. Wiligut settled in Munich, where, through friends in the ONT and the Edda Society, he quickly became an occult celebrity. These were tumultuous days in Germany, and the comfort of irrational beliefs made ariosophy a profitable industry, with many among the poor and rich alike hungry for the latest in the occult, astrology, and homeopathic medicine. It was in this atmosphere that Wiligut found success as an authority among rune scholars and a Germanic sage.

Wiligut stepped ahead of the ranks of his fellow Ariosophists to go beyond influencing German culture in the 1930s to affecting official government policy. As the Nazis rose to power in 1933, Wiligut caught the attention of the chief of the SS ,Heinrich Himmler. Introduced through their mutual friend, Richard Anders, Himmler saw Wiligut's ancestral-clairovoyant memory as the means to create a new SS religion that would take the place of Christianity in the thousand-year Reich to come. Wiligut's power of calling up the ancient Germanic traditions would provide the basis for the new pagan-inspired rituals and paraphenalia of Himmler's quasi-medieval brotherhood, the SS.

Wiligut took the name of "Weisthor" and joined the SS in September 1933 with the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer. Appointed by Himmler as the head of the Department for Pre- and Early History in the Munich headquarters of the Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt-SS (RuSHA, or Race and Settlement Office), Wiligut/Weisthor would design the rune-enscribed Totenkopfring bestowed on SS officers of merit, and assisted Himmler in his project of designing the Wewelsburg castle as a mystical stronghold for the new order of the SS. At Wewelsburg, Wiligut/Weisthor enacted weddings ceremonies and pagan festivals based on the ancient Irminist religion, presiding over them in the priestly role of his forefathers with an ivory-handled stick bound in blue ribbon and carved with runes. He created a series of Germanic mantras to develop his kind of ancestral-clairovoyance in other pureborn Aryans. And to fufill Himmler's dream of replacing the Christian religion in Germany, Wiligut/Weisthor wrote up a plan to "re-establish" the Irminist religion by restricting the Christian priesthood, nationalizing ecclesiastical property, and restored the ancient monuments and temples of the lost Germanic faith.

Among all his duties, Wiligut/Weisthor was most involved in communing with the past through his ancestral-clairovoyance, recording his remembrances, and being ready to discuss these matters with Himmler. A strong relationship developed between the two men, and Wiligut/Weisthor soon recieved the benefits of Himmler's patronage. He was promoted to SS-Standartenführer in April 1934, made head of Section Section VIII (Archives) of the RuSHA in October 1934, and promoted to SS-Oberführer the following month.

Wiligut/Weisthor used his position in the SS to benefit the research and careers of like-minded Ariosophists, most prominently Günther Kirchoff. A resident of Gaggenau near Baden-Baden in the Black Forest, Kirchoff was a member of the List Society in Berlin before the war, and began corresponding with Wiligut/Weisthor in spring 1934. Using legends as fact, Kirchoff had developed ideas on magical ley-lines crossing over continents. This correspondence convinced Wiligut/Weisthor that Kirchoff was a kindred soul, bearing ancestral-clairovoyant memory as a descendant of an ancient Germanic tribe, that of Günther the Redbeard, which moved to Scotland in 800 BC and became the clan Kirkpatrick. Kirchoff borrowed from the Armanenschaft of Guido von List to detail an elaborate hierarchy in ancient Germania, ruled by a triumvirate including Uiskunig of Goslar, King Arthur of Stonehenge, and Ermanrich of Vineta (Vilna). Based on this research, Wiligut/Weisthor and Kirchoff surveyed the Murg valley near Baden-Baden, claiming that a large Irminist temple based on the "eye of God in a triangle" had been centered on Schloss Eberstein.

Kirchoff used his relationship with Wiligut/Weisthor to submit 50 essays to the Ahnenerbe between 1936 and 1944. The Ahnenerbe found Kirchoff's research shoddy, based on purely occult works, with no kind of academic study. Though deriding Kirchoff as "the worst kind of fantasist", the Ahnenerbe was still forced by Himmler to follow-up on some his claims, and he continued to send in essays till 1944.

Another researcher that enjoyed Wiligut/Weisthor's patronage was Otto Rahn, who was obsessed with the relationship between the Cathar heresy and the legends of the Holy Grail. Born in 1904 at Michelstadt, Rahn was educated in literature in philology before beginning a study that took him through Provence, Catalonia, Italy, and Switzerland between 1928 and 1933. His results were that a gnostic Gothic religion had survived through the troubadour and Minnesang traditions, the Cathars, and the Grail legends. Rahn moved to Berlin in 1933 and joined Wiligut/Weisthor's department in May 1935, joining the SS with the rank of SS-Unterscharführer in April 1936. Rahn conducted SS-sponsored research in Iceland, and then served with the SS-Totenkopfverbaende at the Dachau concentration camp in late 1937. He then took leave from the SS to concentrate on his research, and resigned from the SS in February 1939. The next month, Rahn died of exposure during a walk in the mountains near Kufstein.

While Wiligut/Weisthor brought fellow Ariosophists like Kirchoff and Rahn into the patronage of the SS, he also used his position with Himmler to censure other mystics. The SS had Wiligut/Weisthor study the Italian poet Baron Julius Evola, who wrote books on racism, Grail mysticism, and archaic traditions based on his Aryan-Nordic cosmology influenced by solar mythology and patriarchal rule. Wiligut/Weisthor found Evola flawed for his ignorance of ancient Germanic traditions, and claimed that it was this flaw that would taint future relations between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The SS proceeded to keep Evola from lecturing in Germany after 1938. Wiligut/Weisthor saved his true vehemencefor rune occultists like Siegfried Adolf Kummer and Friedrich Bernhard Marby, who sold the medical benefits of runes while deemphasizing the Ariosophist element. Wiligut/Weisthor believed this kind of "rune-yoga" debased his Aryan faith and opened it to ridicule. Marby was incarcerated in a concentration camp from 1936 to the end of the war.

Wiligut/Weisthor abandoned his family and moved to Berlin in spring 1935, to work closer to Himmler in the Chief Adjutant's Office of the Reichsführer-SS Personal Staff. At his private villa in Grunewald, Wiligut/Weisthor presided over meetings with Rahn, Himmler, Anders, and fellow occultists. All of his hard work paid off in September 1936, when he was promoted to the rank of SS-Brigadeführer.

Three years later, Wiligut/Weisthor's career in the SS came to a sudden end. In February 1939, the same month Otto Rahn resigned from the SS, Himmler's adjutant Karl Wolff closed down his office in Berlin, informing the staff that Wiligut/Weisthor had voluntarily retired due to age and poor health. The old man's health had failed in recent years, requiring him to take strong medications that caused his behavior to become erratic and his smoking and alcoholism to become more intense. The true reason Wiligut/Weisthor resigned from the SS is still unknown, though Wolff had travelled to Salzburg in November 1938 and learned of his past in the asylum from his wife Malwine Wiligut. "Weisthor" was officially retired on August 28, 1939, and his SS dagger, sword, and Totenkopf ring were handed over to Himmler, who personally kept them locked away.

Wiligut's health deteriorated significantly following his resignation. The SS assigned Elsa Baltrusch of the Reichsführer-SS Personal Staff to be his caretaker. The two were quartered for a short time in Aufkirchen, until Wiligut settled in Goslar in May 1940. They were moved to an SS guest-house in Carinthia in 1943, until being evicted at the end of the war. After release from a British refugee camp at St. Johann, the two travelled to Salzburg, and then on to Baltrusch's family in Arolsen on December 1945. All of these travels wrecked Wiligut's already failing health, and he died on January 3, 1946.

[Weisthor]

And another one; including short biography of Otto Rahn, member of Wiligut's personal circle in Berlin. Along Rahn, Heinrich Himmler, Joachim von Leers, Edmund Kiss, Richard Anders and Friedrich Schiller where constant visitors in Wiligut's villa.


The Man Behind Himmler

Wiligut was born in Vienna into a military family and followed his grandfather and father into the Austrian army, joining the 99th Infantry at Mostar, Herzegovina in late 1884 and reaching the rank of captain by the time he was 37. Throughout his years in the army, he maintained his nterest in literature and folklore, writing poetry with a distinctly nationalistic flavour. In 1903, a book of his poems entitled Seyfrieds Runen was published by Friedrich Schalk, who had also published Guido von List. Although his studies in mythology had led him to join a quasi-Masonic lodge called the Schlarraffia in 1889, Wiligut does not seem to have been active in the volkisch or

Pan-German nationalist movements at this time. (2)
During the First World War, Wiligut saw action against the Russians in the Carpathians and was later transferred to the Italian front; by the summer of 1917, he had reached the rank of colonel. Decorated for bravery and highly thought of by his superiors, Wiligut was discharged from thearmy in January 1919, after nearly 35 years of exemplary service.At around this time, the Viennese occult underground began to buzz with rumours concerning Wiligut and his alleged possession of an 'ancestral memory' that allowed him to recall the history of the Teutonic people all the way back to the year 228,000 BC. According to Wiligut, his astonishing clairvoyant ability was the result of an uninterrupted family lineage extending thousands of years into the past. He claimed to have been initiated into the secrets of his familyby his father in 1890. Goodrick-Clarke has identified the source of this information about Wiligut as Theodor Czepl, who knew of Wiligut through his occult connections in Vienna, which included Wiligut's cousin, Willy Thaler, and various members of the Order of the New Templars (ONT).
Czepl paid several visits to Wiligut at his Salzburg home in the winter of 1920, and it was during these visits that Wiligut claimed that the Bible had been written in Germany, and that the Germanic god Krist had been appropriated by Christianity. (3)
According to Wiligut's view of prehistory, the Earth was originally lit by three suns and was inhabited by various mythological beings, including giants and dwarves. For many tens of thousands of years, the world was convulsed with warfare until Wiligut's ancestors, the Adler-Wiligoten, brought peace with the foundation of the 'second Boso culture' and the city of Arual-Joruvallas (Goslar, the chief shrine of ancient Germany) in 78,000 BC. The following millennia saw yet more conflicts involving various now-lost civilisations, until 12,500 BC, when the religion of Krist was established. Three thousand years later, an opposing group of Wotanists challenged this hitherto universal Germanic faith, and crucified the prophet of Krist, Baldur-Chrestos, who
nevertheless managed to escape to Asia. The Wotanists destroyed Goslar in 1200 BC, forcing the followers of Krist to establish a new temple at Exsternsteine, near Detmold. (4)
The Wiligut family itself was originally the result of a mating between the gods of air and water,and in later centuries fled from persecution at the hands of Charlemagne, first to the Faroe Islands and then to Russia. Wiligut claimed that his family line included such heroic Germanic figures as Armin the Cherusker and Wittukind. As Goodrick-Clarke notes: 'It will be evident from
this epic account of putative genealogy and family history that Wiligut's prehistorical speculations primarily served as a stage upon which he could project the experiences and importance of his own ancestors.' (5) In addition, Peter Levenda makes the salient point that Wiligut's 'cross-eyed thesis' was based on a spurious amalgamation of genuine cultural traditions (such as those described in the Eddas) and Theosophical belief systems that have little or no provenance in the actual history of mythology. (6)
In Wiligut's view, the victimisation of his family that had been going on for tens of thousands of years was continuing at the hands of the Catholic Church, the Freemasons and the Jews, all of whom he held responsible for Germany's defeat in the First World War. His already somewhat precarious mental health was further undermined when his infant son died, thus destroying the male line of the family. This placed a great strain on his relationship with his wife, Malwine, who in any event was not particularly impressed with his claims of prehistoric greatness for his family.
His home life continued to deteriorate, until his violence, threats to kill Malwine and bizarre occult interests resulted in his being committed to the mental asylum at Salzburg in November 1924. Certified insane, he was confined there until 1927. In spite of this, Wiligut maintained contact with his colleagues in various occult circles, including the ONT and the Edda Society. Five years after his release from the asylum, Wiligut decided to
move to Germany and settled in Munich. There he was feted by Germanoccultists as a fount of priceless information on the remote and glorious history of the Germanic people.
Wiligut's introduction to Heinrich Himmler came about through the former's friend Richard Anders, who had contributed to the Edda Society's Hagal magazine and who was now an officer in the SS. Himmler was greatly impressed with the old man's ancestral memory, which implied a racial purity going back much further than 1750 (the year to which SS recruits had to be able to prove their Aryan family history). (7) Wiligut joined the SS in September 1933, using the name 'Karl Maria Weisthor'. He was made head of the Department for Pre- and Early History in the SS Race and Settlement Main Office in Munich, where he was charged with the task of recording on paper the events he clairvoyantly recalled. His work evidently met with the satisfaction of the Reichsfuhrer-SS, who promoted him to SS-Oberfuhrer (lieutenant-brigadier) in November 1934.(8)
As if his own ravings were not enough, Weisthor introduced Himmler to another occultist, a German crypto-historian and List Society member named Gunther Kirchhoff (1892-1975) who believed in the existence of energy lines crossing the face of the Earth. Weisthor took it upon himself to forward a number of Kirchhoff's essays and dissertations on ancient Germanic tradition
to Himmler, who gave instructions to the Ahnenerbe (the SS Association for Research and Teaching on Heredity) to study them. One such dissertation concerned a detailed survey undertaken by Kirchhoff and Weisthor in the region of the Murg Valley near Baden-Baden in the Black Forest. After exhaustively examining 'old half-timbered houses, architectural ornament
(including sculpture, coats-of-arms, runes, and other symbols), crosses, inscriptions, and natural and man-made rock formations in the forest', (9) the two occultists concluded that the region had been a prehistoric centre of the Krist religion.Unfortunately for Kirchhoff, even the Ahnenerbe came to think of him as a crackpot who understood nothing of scholarly prehistorical research (quite an indictment, coming from that particular organisation). When Kirchhoff accused them, along with the Catholic Church, of conspiring against him, the Ahnenerbe responded by describing his work as 'rubbish' and him as
a 'fantasist of the worst kind'. (10) In spite of this, Himmler continued to instruct the Ahnenerbe to take seriously Kirchhoff's unscholarly rantings, until the outbreak of the Second World War forced him firmly into the background.
Weisthor, on the other hand, would make one further important contribution to Himmler's SS. While travelling through Westphalia during the Nazi electoral campaign of January 1933, Himmler was profoundly affected by the atmosphere of the region, with its romantic castles and the mist- (and myth-) shrouded Teutoburger Forest. After deciding to take over a castle for SS use, he returned to Westphalia in November and viewed the Wewelsburg castle, which he appropriated
in August 1934 with the intention of turning it into an ideological-education college for SS officers. Although at first belonging to the Race and Settlement Main Office, the Wewelsburg castle was placed under the control of Himmler's Personal Staff in February 1935. It is likely that Himmler's view of the Wewelsburg castle was influenced by Weisthor's assertion
that it 'was destined to become a magical German strongpoint in a future conflict between Europe and Asia'. (11) Weisthor's inspiration for this prediction was a Westphalian legend regarding a titanic future battle between East and West. Himmler found this particularly interesting, in view of his own conviction that a major confrontation between East and West was
inevitable -even if it were still a century or more in the future. In addition, it was Weisthor who influenced the development of SS ritual (which we shall examine later in this chapter) and who designed the SS Totenkopfring that symbolised membership of the order. The ring design was based on a death's head, and included 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, Rahnresigned 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)

[Weisthor]

The original Wiligut's works you can get here:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...books&n=507846