Original subtitles

- [Narrator] In the early part of the 20th century,

the Nazis rose to power on a dark platform.

Till this day, their racist ideology is overshadowed

only by their ambition for power.

But behind the battles lie more secrets than we know.

Their most elite and evil force, the SS,

plotted far beyond conquest.

They mounted global expeditions,

hunting for ancient relics of power

and long forgotten remnants of ancient civilization,

hell bent on proving a mythical heritage.

Now, secrets are revealed.

A new light is shed on dark schemes

and desperate adventures.

[ominous music]

[solemn music]

- It's human nature

to search out the unknowable, the forbidden.

We are naturally attracted to mysteries,

and there's probably no greater treasure or quest

than to find the Holy Grail.

- And in some sense, all of us have

our own personal grail which we're trying to find,

so the idea of the grail keeps people's curiosity,

enthusiasm, their sense of wonder alive.

- And I think that explains why, for over 2000 years,

archeologists, devoted Christians, adventurers,

everyone has been searching for the grail,

including the Nazis.

- [Narrator] In the early 1930s,

Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS and a fervent occultist,

was building the framework

for what would become the Ahnenerbe.

- Well, the Ahnenerbe is a think tank.

It is a grab bag of different academic

and pseudo-scientific approaches.

It had anthropologists and historians and cultural experts.

Many of them in different fields were widely disparaged

outside of Germany as being crackpots or pseudo-scientists,

and rightly so.

- [Narrator] In an attempt to rewrite history,

the Ahnenerbe would hunt down, loot,

and plunder ancient artifacts,

claiming them as German relics.

- The Nazis were very interested in finding alternatives

to Judeo-Christian theology and ethics.

It wasn't that they really wanted

to create their own religion,

but to recover ancient traditions

that were more compatible with being an Aryan,

so Himmler was always searching for vestiges

of ancient or prehistorical Aryan culture and religion.

While it was great if a relic could be actually validated

as part of some kind of Germanic

or pre-Germanic civilization, even when it couldn't,

he was willing to find someone who would ascribe value to it

or find an argument to make it fit his narrative.

- [Narrator] While Himmler was laying the groundwork

for his Ahnenerbe research team,

German anthropologist and historian Otto Rahn

was doing research of his own.

- Otto Rahn is a scholar, he's a medievalist,

and he has some considerable repute.

He is also a Grailist.

- I haven't seen evidence that he thought

there was really a magical grail with healing power

that was gonna pop up at some point.

What he did believe is that the Holy Grail represented

an important connection between ancient Aryan civilization

and religion and the heretics of the Middle Ages.

- [Narrator] Obsessed with the grail from a very young age,

Rahn was convinced that the clues found

in the many ancient and medieval grail legends

would lead him to the answers he sought.

- It's hard to imagine a more intriguing

or important artifact in history than the Holy Grail,

but it was not always the object of fascination

that it is today.

- The most ancient version of the grail story

seems to have its roots

in Welsh and Irish mythological material

about some kind of cauldron of plenty.

- [Narrator] The concept of a grail was first popularized

in the 12th century romance "Perceval"

by French poet Chretien de Troyes.

- In this story, Perceval goes to the castle,

and there he sees a wounded king lying on the bed,

the Fisher King, and he sees a mysterious procession

in which the centerpiece is a grail.

And in French, at that point,

the 'graal' was simply a term

for a very large serving platter.

- [Narrator] As Perceval rides away from the castle

the next day, he meets a woman who admonishes him

for not asking about the grail.

- And he says, "I didn't know that there was a question

that was to be asked."

And so he's fated now to Rome

until he can return to the grail castle

and put right his lack of curiosity.

The version that Chretien gives us is not finished,

so we don't know if Perceval ever makes his way back.

- [Narrator] The grail legend was introduced

to German audiences

through Wolfram von Eschenbach's "Parzival",

an epic poem written in the early 13th century.

- It gives a slightly different version of the story.

And here, Perceval does eventually make his way

back to the grail castle and asks the question,

"Whom does the grail serve?"

And this is sufficient to heal the Fisher King

and to allow the wasteland that surrounds the castle

to flourish once again.

And so, this seems like quite old and quite mysterious story

of loss and regeneration,

something which perhaps has to do with notions of fertility

that might inhere in this vessel.

- [Narrator] While "Parzival" was inspired

by the earlier French poem,

the grail would take another form here.

- It's this beautiful, shining, gleaming green stone

that supposedly sat on the head of Lucifer

when he was an angel.

And when Lucifer was cast out of heaven,

this stone falls from the heavens into this cave,

and the cave closes up on this stone,

so that mortals could not get their hands on it.

- Around the time that Wolfram was composing "Parzival",

a French writer, Robert de Boron,

was connecting this story up

with a more explicitly Christian tale.

- [Narrator] In "Joseph d'Arimathie",

the grail became the Holy Grail

and assumed the Christian form

that people in modern times are familiar with.

- From the biblical text,

we know of a person named Joseph of Arimathea.

He's said to have arranged to have Jesus buried,

and that's all we know,

but that gets elaborated throughout history,

and particularly into the 12th, 13th century,

that he was in proximity enough to the last supper

that he scooped the cup that Jesus used.

And then, Joseph went to the cross

and Jesus' side was pierced with a lance,

another relic that Himmler and his crew

were very interested in finding.

And Joseph used the cup from the Last Supper

to also capture some of that blood of Jesus.

- In a way, it's a work of Christian genius

to appropriate this story for the Christian church

and its key writer, the Eucharist,

and to make this mysterious symbol

of fertility and wellbeing the specific chalice

of the Last Supper and the one that's actually held

Christ's blood and water.

- Joseph is believed to have become a missionary

after the death of Christ, and traveled to Europe

and perhaps taken the grail with him,

where he converted thousands of people

to the early form of Christianity,

and apparently made it all the way to Britain.

[ominous music]

- Robert de Boron's tale of Joseph

and his followers in Britain

influenced the later 13th century grail stories

of King Arthur, the legendary hero,

famous for his court at Camelot

and for assembling the Knights of the Round Table.

- There's very little if any evidence

for historical Arthur himself,

but he's proved a really productive figure

to graft onto the kind of classic rise and fall

of the greatest king the kingdom has ever seen.

And as the center of a court,

he attracts a whole group of champions,

of warriors around him,

and they have their individual stories as well.

- [Narrator] One of those stories sees Arthur's knights

embarking on a quest for the Holy Grail.

The grail appears to the knights in a vision,

bringing with it feelings of wellbeing and camaraderie,

and then disappears.

- And there's a kind of almost addictive desire

to have that sense of community again,

and the knights swear that they will go and seek for it.

- And we find the knights, again, going on the quest

meeting with difficulties

and all kinds of obstacles and hurdles,

so the idea is that the knight

has to attain a kind of perfection of virtue

to be able to be worthy of receiving the grail.

- [Narrator] Of the 150 Knights of the Round Table,

only three were able to find the grail,

Bors, Galahad, and the original grail seeker, Percival.

- And so, the grail has been achieved,

but it's something which is not really consonant

with the more worldly life of the Arthurian Court.

Those who achieve it

can't really go back to normal life again,

and so it represents something which is unattainable,

but which is an infinite blessing.

- I think those stories resonate with people

and help them feel like, if they touch that relic,

then that's as close as we can come to touching God.

- No one knows what the grail really is.

Was it an actual chalice or cup?

Was it a symbol of Christ?

Was it a stone from Lucifer's crown?

So there's not even agreement on what the grail is or was,

yet alone of its whereabouts today.

Yet that did not deter the Nazis.

- [Narrator] Though still somewhat shrouded in mystery.

it's clear Himmler saw the grail,

along with other ancient relics,

as both a potential source of power

and a symbolic trophy for the Third Reich.

- The idea of possessing the world's greatest treasure,

that the Nazis would have it as a prize or as a trophy,

carried with their armies into battle,

that would be used to intimidate and put the fear of God,

literally, into their enemies.

- Even though it was associated with the Jesus story,

it's not entirely clear that they were looking for objects

associated with Christ.

With Otto Rahn's work, what he's looking for

is described as Lapsit exillis, a stone from elsewhere,

fallen from the sky, a meteorite, something like that.

- [Narrator] As a student of medieval literature,

Otto Rahn had obsessively studied Wolfram von Eschenbach's

German version of "Parzival",

and its imagining of the grail

as a stone from Lucifer's crown.

- Rahn comes the conclusion that certain place names

within that text are actual places

located in the French Pyrenees.

- [Narrator] While the idea of using a fictional story

as a roadmap may have appeared farfetched,

Rahn drew inspiration from a groundbreaking discovery

made decades earlier by a German archeologist

in the Eastern Mediterranean.

In 1873, German researcher Heinrich Schliemann

unearthed the city of Troy,

described in the epic poems, "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey"

by the eighth century writer Homer.

- Up until that point,

everyone had said that Homer had invented this city,

and Schliemann was so convinced that it was historical

that he set out to prove it archeologically.

He follows clues in Homer's text

to pinpoint where Troy is and starts digging,

and, of course, discovers the ruins of not one ancient city,

but multiple layers.

- [Narrator] Schliemann was able to turn fiction

into historical fact, sparking an international sensation.

- Schliemann, using "The Odyssey",

which most people agree was some form of oral history,

makes some sense.

"Perceval", by the time it was written down

in the Middle Ages, many people already thought

it was a collection of myths.

So I don't know to what extent someone using that

to uncover what actually happened anthropologically

was scientifically acceptable,

but it's not unusual for Nazi border scientists

to use literary or mythological or religious concepts

as hard evidence for something they really wished was true.

- [Narrator] Otto Rahn's fascination with the grail

intersected with another interest of his,

the history of the Cathars.

- The Cathars are a breakaway group from the main church

that, fed up with the corruption of the medieval church

and reading some early Christian writings,

formed a doctrine sort of counter to the mainline theology,

which saw a very dualistic division

between the body and the spirit.

- Himmler and many semi-serious academics and scholars

claimed that what the Cathars were practicing

could have been some version

of this pagan Germanic religion, or influenced by it,

and that's why the Catholic church

went after them as heretics.

- In the 13th century,

the Cathars were gaining more and more followers,

more and more power,

and whole towns were starting to believe

what the Pope thought was an aberrant theology,

and so ordered their massacre.

- And in 1243, they laid a nine-month siege to a castle

in Southern France called Montsegur,

and they kill almost everybody inside.

Legend suggests that some of them may have escaped

through a tunnel or a secret passageway,

or perhaps scaled over the walls of the fortress,

and they might have taken the grail with them.

- [Narrator] Rahn was convinced that Montsegur,

in the heart of the French Pyrenees,

was the inspiration behind Montsalvat,

the mountain castle described in Wolfram's grail story,

and that the Cathars had indeed been

the keepers of the grail.

Drawing inspiration from Schliemann's success

at finding proof of the legendary city of Troy,

around 1931, Rahn mounted an expedition to Montsegur,

though it remains a mystery how this early work was funded.

- You couldn't just travel around

doing what Otto Rahn did from your own pocket,

so there was always some funding coming from somewhere else.

He knew a lot of wealthy people.

He had connections and he could tell a good story

and he could convince people to invest in his pursuits.

- [Narrator] As Rahn was ramping up his research,

he met Antonin Gadal, a French mystic and historian

dedicating his life to studying the Cathars

in the south of France.

Gadal believed that the extensive cave system

in the vicinity of Montsegur had played an important role

in the Cathar faith, and that their galleries still held

their lost treasure, and possibly the Holy Grail itself.

- Searching for the grail in the caves and mountains

and the region around Montsegur

would have been an enormous undertaking.

You're talking about looking for a small object

amidst an intricate system of miles and miles of tunnels.

You could explore it for years

and walk right past the grail.

- [Narrator] But as locals started to question

Rahn's presence in the area, rumors began to swirl.

- As for his credentials, he is a medievalist.

He's relatively legit,

but given the tensions that are rising in Europe

in the early 1930s, there's certainly a lot of concern

about Germans poking around in the Pyrenees in France.

- [Narrator] In March 1932, a local newspaper

published an article associating Rahn

with a cult group called the Polaires,

excavating the caves near Montsegur.

In a show of solidarity, Gadal wrote a retort

stating that Rahn was a serious academic

who had studied the Cathars extensively.

In his own reply, appearing a few issues later,

Rahn himself was more upset

that they had gotten his name wrong.

Rahn explored the grottoes and caves around Montsegur,

most notably the massive cavern of Lombrives,

where he discovered Cathar emblems

carved among the ancient cave art and modern graffiti.

In 1932, Otto Rahn returned to Germany,

and in 1933, published his first book

detailing his explorations of the Pyrenees.

- Rahn's book, "Crusade Against the Grail",

brought to the fore the idea that the grail is find-able,

that there are clues out there, and so this makes a splash.

- [Narrator] While Rahn was in France,

the Nazi party was expanding its power.

On January 30th, 1933,

Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.

Hitler's plans to make the country a powerful,

unified one-party state began in earnest,

and Heinrich Himmler's ideas would play an important role.

- Once the Nazis take power,

the idea that the society can be transformed

into this Germanic-Aryo vision suddenly becomes very real.

For Himmler and the SS, it means expansion.

It means greater funding

to put money and effort into proving the existence

of this Germanic Aryan civilization that once existed.

- Himmler's goals and Otto Rahn's quest

would converge in 1933 when they were brought together

by Himmler's religion expert, Karl Maria Wiligut.

- Of all the interesting and colorful characters

in Heinrich Himmler's orbit, there's few that are

as fascinating and bizarre as Karl Wiligut.

- He comes from an Austrian military family,

was a decorated soldier.

He'd fought as a colonel in the First World War.

He comes to believe that he is the descendant

of this great line of Aryo-Germanic kings,

and he claims to be able to tap into

this vast ancestry through clairvoyant means.

- One of the most bizarre ideas Wiligut has

is tracing the ancestry of the Aryan people

thousands and thousands of years,

far beyond any recorded evidence

of the dawn of civilization.

There were mammoths roaming the earth.

People were living in caves as crude hunter gatherers,

yet he conjures up an advanced civilization of Aryans.

- [Narrator] Wiligut had written a book on Irminism,

which he claimed to be the religion

of this ancient Aryan civilization.

- Irminism is appealing to Himmler,

in large part because it's not Christianity.

But there's a lot of other religions

that are not Christianity,

and I think part of the appeal is also

that it has ancient roots that goes back pre-Christian,

but this takes it back even further.

So it's a more pure form of religion

that Aryans carried through.

- For the Nazis,

this was about remaking humanity in their image.

And according to them, Christianity was infected,

to use their word, with Judaism,

and Christianity was spiritually impoverished.

Christianity was the religion of the weak.

We have to return to a religion

which comes from the ancient German people.

- Wiligut was a big reader of Rahn's first book,

and somehow got into his head

that he was the foremost world expert on the Cathars

and on the grail,

and so, he becomes a very useful pawn in Wiligut's game,

vis-a-vis Himmler and the boss.

- [Narrator] After receiving a mysterious unsigned telegram,

Otto Rahn traveled to Germany,

where he discovered the sender of the telegram

was Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler.

- And Himmler clearly had read about the Holy Grail

before the 1930s,

but it was only after being alerted to the article

that Otto Rahn had written in '33 or '34

in the "Frankfurter Zeitung" about his book

that Himmler started to see the connections

between theories of the grail and the Aryan religion

he wanted to investigate and reconstruct,

and that's why he hired Rahn

to start conducting his own research on behalf of the SS.

- And there's this unique relationship

between Himmler, Wiligut, and Rahn,

all three crazed individuals whose views and theories

are utterly discredited, but they all

sort of feed one another in this loop of madness.

- [Narrator] Himmler's hiring of Rahn

was another step toward his goal of creating

the occult think tank that would become the Ahnenerbe.

And while Rahn's primary task was to continue

his study of the Cathars and the grail,

Himmler and Wiligut gave him additional assignments.

- Because Himmler was impressed by Otto Rahn's ability

to create a syncratic narrative

around all these disparate theories,

he would often send him on expeditions to Iceland

and some other places to help make sense out of artifacts

or evidence that was found in the field.

- [Narrator] Mystery and secrecy surround Rahn's travels

during this time with the SS.

It is said that Rahn was instructed

to communicate with Wiligut in coded dispatches.

These were to be shared with no one other than Himmler.

- I think it gives us this aura of mystery

that there was something maybe very sinister going on.

The simpler answer is that

some of the more outlandish SS cultic activities are hidden,

because Himmler and Hitler

are maybe worried about bad press.

And especially if you are advocating for something

that is unChristian, Hitler needs the churches

in order to have the support of the public.

And so, I think, for somebody like Rahn,

it was probably quite limiting.

I think he was somebody who was looking for fame,

looking to make that next great discovery,

and he was probably quite frustrated.

[curious music]

- [Narrator] Now funded by the SS,

Otto Rahn headed to Italy

to continue his exploration of pagan Europe's sacred spots

in hope of uncovering the secrets of the grail.

His quest took him to Bolzano in South Tyrol,

where Rahn wanted to walk in the footsteps

of King Theodoric, ruler of the Ostrogoths,

and known as Dietrich Von Bern in Germanic heroic legend.

- He's the king around the time that Rome is collapsing

in the four or 500s,

and one of the theories is that the Romans

would have had the grail,

but when the Goths sack and ultimately defeat Rome,

it would have been the great treasure

that they would have confiscated or looted from Rome.

The Goths may have presented it as a gift to King Theodoric.

That's attractive for Otto Rahn,

so that's another lead that he pursues

to try to find the grail's whereabouts.

- [Narrator] Theodoric, in his Germanic incarnation

of Dietrich Von Bern, also featured in "Laurin",

an anonymous medieval German poem.

The poem revolves around Dietrich's fight

against the Dwarf King Laurin

after Dietrich and his companions destroyed

Laurin's magical rose garden,

which was concealed within a mountain.

Rahn hypothesized that Dietrich Von Bern

could have been the inspiration for "Parzival's" grail king

and wished to walk the ancient rose path of the poem.

- The stories often have some truth to them,

and by following the footsteps of King Theodoric,

perhaps that will lead him to the place

that the grail may be hidden.

- To me, it's akin to people that go on pilgrimages

to the Holy Land to walk in the steps of Jesus,

or to India to walk where Gandhi walked,

that somehow that putting your feet on the same land

as someone else connects you to that person.

- [Narrator] Rahn stayed in Italy for weeks

following the rose path and climbing the mountain.

He lived in a hut in a meadow that he used as a base camp.

He mused on legend and lore, but found nothing

that tied this place to any physical treasure.

But despite Rahn's lack of a result,

Himmler was inspired to ramp up his plans

for his occult think tank.

In July of 1935, Himmler met with five racial experts

at SS headquarters in Berlin

to officially establish the organization

that would become known as the SS Ahnenerbe.

At the meeting, they designated its official goal,

to promote the science of ancient intellectual history.

In September of 1935, Rahn wrote to Wiligut,

requesting permission to travel to the ruins

of Wildenberg Castle in Bavaria.

Wildenberg Castle was built by the Lords of Durn

sometime between 1180 and around 1200.

Wildenberg is known as the Grail Castle in the area,

and it's believed that Wolfram Von Eschenbach

wrote parts of his "Parzival" here

as a guest of a knight from Durn.

Rahn believed that this castle

could have been the model for Monsalvat,

Wolfram's grail castle.

- It makes sense that the castle

would be linked to the grail

if the author is reputed to have written

parts of a poem like "Parzival" there.

Even that in and of itself, I think,

would put it on the map in terms of sort of grail legend.

But it's another step to say that

somehow the grail was housed there.

- [Narrator] Permission received,

Rahn drove to Wildenberg Castle

through a looming hardwood forest,

accompanied by two literary historians.

His companions agree that Wildenberg

is one of Germany's most beautiful castle ruins,

but questioned if Wolfram Von Eschenbach

had actually been there.

Rahn explored the castle grounds,

studying the stoneworks and various marks

made by the stone cutters.

But despite his efforts,

Rahn was unable to find anything definitive

to confirm that Wolfram Von Eschenbach wrote at Wildenberg,

and he maintained his belief that Montsegur in France

was the true inspiration for Monsalvat.

[ominous music]

In March 1936, Hitler sent over 20,000 troops

into the Rhineland, a demilitarized zone,

according to the Treaty of Versailles

that was signed after World War I.

- Also in '36, Heinrich Himmler is put in charge

of all policing inside Germany and German territories,

and this effectively makes Himmler

the second most powerful person in Nazi Germany,

and it emboldens him to the point where he can expand

the SS and state policing

into all aspects of German life and German culture.

- [Narrator] With Himmler's new status and power

came the need to justify his goals and speculations

with academic gravitas.

For this reason, in addition to Rahn's grail investigation,

the Ahnenerbe would fund multiple expeditions

to places like Scandinavia and Tibet

to search for evidence of Aryan origins.

Following further fruitless grail searches,

Rahn published his second book in 1937,

"Lucifer's Court: A Heretic's Journey

in Search of the Light Bringers".

Here, Rahn traces the roots of Catharism

back to the legends of the ancient Greeks,

Goths, and Germanic pagans.

- It's a bizarre book.

"Lucifer's Court" is about how Satan was misunderstood,

that he was ultimately good under pagan interpretations,

and then Christians distorted him and made him into evil.

It speaks to this idea, both of how Christianity

had eroded ancient German values and ideas,

but it also brings to the forefront

the idea of occultism generally speaking,

and certainly, that's where Himmler's own interests came in.

- [Narrator] The book takes the form of a travel journal,

beginning on the eve of Rahn's trip to Montsegur

in the early 1930s

and follows him on a number of grail hunts

and some other assignments from Himmler.

However, the story stopped short

of a discovery of a physical grail.

- "Lucifer's Court", it's a perfect case study

of how Himmler's money and influence

impacts the outcomes of the research,

because Rahn was primarily interested in the origins

and meaning of the grail and its possible connections

to Indo-Aryan religion and culture.

By "Lucifer's Court",

he's constructed this whole civilizational theory

that represents all these great Aryan civilizations.

That's very much Himmler talking.

- [Narrator] At the time of its publishing,

Himmler was pleased with the book

and ordered leather-bound copies to gift to the Nazi elite,

including Adolf Hitler,

but Himmler's enthusiasm for Rahn wouldn't last.

- If you're chasing a legend,

you'd better be prepared for failure.

The odds of finding it are pretty slim.

Otto Rahn's failure has multiple implications,

and some of them tragic.

- [Narrator] Rumors about how and why Rahn

fell out of Himmler's favor vary.

- There's multiple theories.

One has to do with his drinking problems.

When he was getting drunk,

he was engaging in homosexual acts, which was even worse.

- [Narrator] In 1937, Otto Rahn's assignments

took a dark turn.

- He's demoted and sent to the Dachau Concentration Camp

in 1937, where he serves as a guard for two years.

Dachau was one of the earliest concentration camps,

one of the most infamous, and one of the bloodiest.

It was a place for political prisoners.

- [Narrator] Extremely unhappy about his reassignment,

Rahn repeatedly wrote to Himmler's personal adjutant,

Karl Wolff, asking to be released from his duties at Dachau

and allowed to concentrate on his research

and write another book.

- You don't go up from there, you only go down.

The only hope I would think you would have,

would be to convince somebody close enough to Himmler

that the possibility of finding the grail

is still very real.

He's got nothing else to offer.

- [Narrator] But by this point,

he had lost the ear of the Reichsfuhrer

and his requests were ignored.

In a handwritten memo to Wiligut in February of 1939,

Rahn asked to leave the SS,

citing, "reasons of such a serious nature,

I can only explain them to you verbally."

- I've looked at a lot of SS documents.

I don't remember coming across lots of resignation letters.

My suspicion is that Himmler still wanted him around

in some capacity, was punishing him

or trying to toughen him up or something.

And Rahn is like, I can't take this anymore.

I'm out of here.

And by resigning from the SS, he thought,

okay, I'm no longer connected to them,

and shortly thereafter, died.

- [Narrator] On May 17th, 1939,

a Nazi newspaper published Rahn's obituary,

stating that Rahn was tragically killed in a snowstorm

in the mountains of Tyrol, Austria.

- He seems to be almost too good of a traveler

to get caught in a snowstorm.

That seems a little suspicious,

but it's hard to imagine also

that it was an orchestrated murder.

I can imagine Himmler wanted him dead,

but there were easier ways for him to do that.

The more popular story is he actually willingly went out

and killed himself, dying in the cold.

- [Narrator] Some conspiracy theorists claim

that he faked his death, but the true cause remains unknown.

[ominous music]

The Holy Grail was not the only object

the Nazis were seeking for its propaganda power.

Throughout World War II, they would pillage and loot,

procuring countless artifacts

in an attempt to rewrite history

and aid their nationalistic cause.

- Hitler was an artist earlier in his life

and was keenly interested in all different forms of art.

And therefore, he authorized the looting

of artistic treasures of all sorts all across Europe,

and the Nazis were bringing train after train of art

back to Germany as the spoils of war.

- [Narrator] Among the items looted

after the annexation of Austria in 1938

was the Imperial Regalia of the Holy Roman Empire,

including a spear purported to be the holy lance

mentioned in the grail stories.

- At the crucifixion of Jesus,

Longinus pierces his side with a lance,

and that blood which comes from the wound

is collected in a bowl,

and that is what has been called the Holy Grail.

- Like the grail was said to carry divine powers with it,

and in this case, sort of powers that were weaponizable.

It's said to sort of have this energy that comes out of it.

- [Narrator] Then, on September 1st, 1939,

the Nazis invaded Poland, officially kicking off the war.

The SS believed that Poland was made for German expansion.

The Ahnenerbe was intent on fabricating evidence

to prove the Germany was righting an ancient wrong

and seizing land that was legitimately theirs.

Shortly after the invasion,

a small group of SS moved into Krakow

in an attempt to capture the 15th century Veit Stoss Altar.

- A Germanic artist named Veit Stoss

produced this magnificent altar

that was put into a cathedral in Poland.

It's a Polish national treasure.

The Poles knew that the Nazis would be interested

in something like this.

- So they decide to actually take it apart.

They break it down into 32 different pieces

and they ship pieces all over, to different locations.

And yet, the Nazis somehow tracked down

each individual piece.

- [Narrator] Himmler would become fixated

on another artifact

to strengthen his Nazi Pan-Germanic ideology.

- So the Bayeux Tapestry tells the story

of the Norman conquest, 1066 and William the Conqueror,

and this is all sewn by hand

with beautiful gold and silver threads.

- [Narrator] The French had claimed the Bayeux Tapestry

as a national historic object since the early 1700s,

but the Nazi regime had another theory.

- The Normans were themselves the descendants

of Scandinavians who had had that part of France

ceded to them in the 10th century.

And the word Norman itself comes from Nordman,

men of the north.

- Himmler really becomes obsessed with this,

because he believes that the Normans are Aryan,

and, of course, this heritage belongs to the German race.

- A well-known and pretty widely respected archeologist,

Herbert Jankuhn, did want to study the tapestry

and did try to appropriate it for the Third Reich,

but it's not clear what role the tapestry would have played

in more mythological narratives.

- [Narrator] After the fall of France in 1940,

Jankuhn led a team of experts to Bayeux,

where they studied, drew, and photographed

all 70 meters of the embroidery.

In 1944, two SS officers attempted to take the embroidery

to an unknown, quote, safe place,

only to be thwarted by resistance fighters.

While many looted items, like the Veit Stoss Altar,

were eventually returned to their rightful places,

not all objects were so lucky.

- So much art was looted that, even today,

not all of it has been accounted for.

Some of it was taken by Nazi leaders like Hermann Goring,

and put in their homes as private collections.

And it's probable that much of it has been lost to history,

destroyed during the war

as buildings were reduced to rubble.

- [Narrator] Himmler's lust for the grail

did not die with Otto Rahn,

nor was it overshadowed by the war.

- It's curious that they continued to fund

the kind of pseudo-scientific ventures

that Himmler was overseeing,

while so many resources had to go into the war effort.

I think it's because he truly believed

that things that had esoteric kinds of powers,

they would make a difference in the war,

certainly at the propaganda level.

- Himmler is still searching for the grail,

and he finds a story that talks about the grail

possibly being taken to Spain,

to Montserrat, to an abbey there.

- [Narrator] The story was said

to have been partially inspired

by a folk song from Catalonia,

which cryptically mentions a mystical font of life,

and partially by Richard Wagner's opera, "Parsifal",

based on Wolfram's "Parzival"

and hugely popular with both Hitler and Himmler.

- Wagner's grandiose music,

sort of this epic soundtrack, if you like,

to what they imagined the Nazis to represent,

strength and power, grace and beauty,

and all the things that, of course,

the Nazis didn't represent at all.

- [Narrator] Wagner's "Parsifal"

is said to be set on the northern slopes of the Pyrenees.

While Rahn believed that it referred to Montsegur

in the French Pyrenees, others, including Himmler,

thought it referred to Montserrat

near the Spanish Pyrenees.

In October 1940, Himmler took a trip to Spain

to discuss security measures for Hitler's upcoming meeting

with Spanish leader, Francisco Franco.

- Spain's a neutral country,

and the Germans and the Italians were both interested

in drawing them into the war.

That's another ally with sizable military,

and occupying a very important geostrategic location

on the southern border of France.

- [Narrator] After seeing to Hitler security arrangements,

Himmler traveled to Montserrat

in a convoy of Gestapo agents, but when he arrived,

the Abbott refused to greet him.

- There's a number of reasons why the Abbott at Montserrat

would not want to greet Himmler.

One is just a refutation of the Nazi party

that has not been kind to the Catholic Church,

to say the least.

I also suspect that he knew what Himmler was all about.

He didn't want his monastery affiliated with

the kinds of things that Himmler is searching for and why.

- [Narrator] He was passed off to Andreu Ripoll,

the only monk there capable of speaking German,

who assured him that there was no grail in his temple.

Himmler found nothing of merit

on the mountain in Montserrat.

His grail hunt was fruitless

and he returned to Germany later that day

to concentrate on other pursuits.

- Himmler wanted to find a lot of stuff.

He had so many different branches looking for things.

The grail was an important one of those,

but it wasn't the only one, and this, I think,

is the difference between Himmler and Rahn.

Rahn was solely dedicated to finding the grail.

That was his life's work.

Himmler used him to find the grail.

- Himmler kept pushing his books after he died,

having thousands of new copies of "Lucifer's Court"

made during the war, and he wanted the Waffen-SS to read it.

So, clearly, in Himmler's mind,

it represented some kind of ideology of empire

that was going to motivate the troops

in the later stages of the war.

- [Narrator] Otto Rahn and Heinrich Himmler

were not alone in their interest in the Holy Grail.

- Even today, we still don't know

the whereabouts of the grail,

and it remains perhaps the greatest mystery

and the greatest quest for humanity.

- [Narrator] There are hundreds of claimants

vying for the title of Holy Grail,

many relics, like Genoa's Sacro Catino,

the Nanteos Cup in Wales,

and the Antioch Chalice,

currently residing in New York's Metropolitan Museum,

have been studied and dismissed.

The most famous contender for the Holy Grail

is the Santo Caliz.

It has been sitting in the Valencia Cathedral

in Spain since 1939.

Legend says that the agate cup

was taken by St. Peter to Rome

and was later sent to Spain for safekeeping

during the Roman persecutions of the Christians

in the third century.

The metal base and handles were added later,

likely in the medieval period.

Spanish archeologist Antonio Beltron

studied the chalice in 1960

and concluded that the cup portion originated

somewhere between the second century BC

to the first century AD,

likely from a workshop in the Middle East.

But in 2011, two Spanish historians make a discovery

that could debunk the claim of Valencia's Santo Caliz.

Margarita Torres Sevilla and Jose Miguel Ortega Del Rio

are doing research in a Cairo library

when they find two medieval Egyptian documents

that mention the chalice of Christ.

- I just can imagine the excitement.

As a historian, I get excited,

you know, working on ancient inscriptions,

when I discover something that I didn't know before.

On the other hand, I think that it would be very tempered by

can we trust these manuscripts?

Even if they brought me to a cup

that looked exactly like

what I thought the grail should look like,

that doesn't mean it's the grail.

- [Narrator] Using the information found in the scrolls,

Sevilla and Del Rio trace the history

behind what they now believe to be the true Holy Grail,

the Chalice of Dona Urraca,

which has resided since the 11th century

in the Basilica of San Isidoro in Leon, Spain.

After being taken from Jerusalem

and gifted to the Amir of Denea in Southeastern Spain,

it came into the possession

of the King of Leon in the 1050s.

It was passed down to the king's daughter, Urraca,

who embellished it with gold and jewels,

and later donated it to the Basilica.

The historians' research is backed by scientific dating,

which estimates that the cup was made

between 200 BC and 100 AD.

- It became so popular after they published their discovery,

that the church actually had to remove it from their museum

and put it away until a later date

when they can open a larger facility to house this cup.

- [Narrator] While they are convinced their grail

is the true chalice of Christ,

even Sevilla and Del Rio concede

that the first 400 years of its history remain unknown.

There is no evidence that this chalice

or any chalice, for that matter, ever touched Christ's lips.

- In some ways, the idea of the grail

is perhaps even less important than the idea of the quest.

Searching for the grail is the process

which allows a kind of spiritual wisdom to accrue,

and once you've got that wisdom,

maybe it doesn't matter if you find the thing or not.

[dramatic music]