Original subtitles

[suspenseful music]

- [Narrator] Saturday, March 31, 1945,

from his headquarters in Breslau Heinrich Himmler

orders the complete destruction of Wewelsburg Castle.

Three days later American troops capture the smoking ruins

only to find a strange and ominous place.

- But there were no military installations there.

So, why would he give those orders

unless he was trying to hide something?

- [Narrator] What does the head of the SS want

with the ruins of an old castle?

- The whole feeling of this castle is dark and threatening.

- [Narrator] Why in the middle of a global war

is the SS dispatching secret expeditions around the world

for archaic objects and stuff of legends

- Himmler is fascinated by the occult.

He wants to imbue Hitler and himself with mystical powers.

[dramatic music]

[doors thudding]

[tense music]

- [Narrator] Wewelsberg Castle is located in Westphalia

in North-Western Germany near the Teutoburg Forest.

- When you see this castle from the outside,

it's actually quite attractive.

It's like many of the picturesque German castles

you'd imagine today perched up high amongst dense forest.

- Everything just seems really majestic

and big and very elaborate.

It looks like it's really dominating that mountain.

- It's a masonry structure,

pretty standard construction methodology for that time.

Lots of windows, lots of towers,

which indicative the architecture of the time.

- The personality that I get from the building

is power and dominance.

This is a place that you are

able to enter only by invitation.

- The Wewelsburg was built in the 17th century

by the Prince-Bishop of Paderborn.

He was the leader of the Catholic church,

and he used it as a second residence.

He went here when he wanted to hunt or to have some parties.

After secularization at the beginning of the 18th century,

this region was gone to the Prussian state,

and the castle was more or less a ruin.

- [Narrator] In 1933, Wewelsburg gets a new tenant,

Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS.

- Himmler wanted to be surrounded by symbols and buildings

and ideas that inspired pride in being German.

- He was looking for old historical buildings,

and then some Vasalians Nazis said to him,

"Well, let's try to get the Wewelsburg."

- Himmler is interested in

Medieval times and the Renaissance,

and the idea of Teutonic Knights and codes of honor,

and that his SS are the present day versions

of these great warriors from a bygone era.

- [Narrator] Himmler has found the perfect

Medieval castle for his knighthood,

but things are not as they seem at Wewelsburg.

- The whole structure itself looks quite majestic,

but then when you take a look,

you realize that it's not Medieval.

- The architectural design

is they take a Renaissance castle

and turn it into a Medieval castle

and evoke these Medieval images,

the type of columns,

the type of imagery that's in them.

- That to me is very curious.

There's a wall where the brick looks like it's come off,

and then you think, "Wait, that was done on purpose?"

- [Narrator] Himmler and architect, Hermann Bartels

draw up plans and apply for government funding.

In 1934, they spend 11 million Reichsmarks on renovations,

almost 85 million in today's U.S. dollars.

[dramatic music]

- You have to ask why did Himmler place so much emphasis

on reverse engineering this Renaissance castle

back into one that looked like it was from the Middle Ages.

- When you take a look at Renaissance castles,

they weren't really made to be bastions

or strongholds as the Medieval castles were,

and that could be one of the reasons

why they shifted it back to make it look more like

a Medieval castle than a Renaissance castle.

They're trying to key into

the psychology of a war frame of mind,

but also to key into the people who would be in the castle,

would feel like they are the center of strength

and that they're unassailable.

- [Narrator] To make Wewelsburg into what Medieval castle,

Himmler and Bartels build a moat,

refinished the outer wall,

and adorn it with rod iron

created in a specially built onsite smithy.

Himmler fills the castle with art

and decor featuring historical elements.

- It seems inconsistent with the other structures

that the Nazis built.

This is the only building that I've seen so far

where it looks like the Nazis

actually put effort into aesthetics.

I don't see any sculptures

in the other construction projects.

I don't see this elaborate need for decorated walls.

- The plans went through several iterations,

and the evolution of the project grew

to encompass several more structures

and an expansion into a village.

- [Narrator] Calling this complex,

"The Center of the World,"

Himmler and Bartels have elaborate plans

to expand the property, flooding the valley,

and displacing the nearby villages.

- Renovations took place at this castle continuously,

even throughout the war.

Himmler's main priority was running the SS,

so how did he find the time

to keep coming back to this castle?

- [Narrator] But despite the castle's

importance to German culture,

Himmler imposes a ban on visiting in 1935.

Then in 1939,

forbids the publishing of information about the castle,

increasing the mystery surrounding it.

- Himmler had so much power.

He could pretty much get away with doing whatever he wanted.

Yet, he went to great lengths

to keep this place top, top secret.

Even the local townspeople

had no idea what was going on next door.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] Under the pretense that the castle

is to become an SS training school,

Himmler is able to justify the use of forced labor.

From 1940 to 1943,

a concentration camp nearby provides Himmler

with the labor he needs for this major overhaul.

The campus named Niederhagen

in an effort to distance it semantically

from Wewelsburg Castle.

Niederhagen is the only concentration camp

established in the North Rhine-Westphalia

and houses 3900 inmates.

Over 1,000 would lose their lives.

Among other tasks,

inmates are ordered to paint the north tower in camouflage

to prevent the allies from spying the castle from the skies.

[birds chirping]

- The Germans are in the middle of a total war,

and yet for Himmler,

this site seems to have some kind of special significance.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] Perhaps a clue can be found

in the location of the castle

and another strange structure in its proximity.

- We know that Himmler had strong beliefs about the occult.

I can certainly see how someone who believed in that

could project the idea of magical powers

onto these rock formations.

- Himmler was investing time and money

in building this new religion,

and he was going to be at the epicenter of it.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] Strange changes are being made to the ruins

of a castle by the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler.

As the Nazis rise to power,

he pours more funds into this structure

located in a very specific region in Germany.

[tense music] [beeps lowly]

Westphalia is home to the Ruhr District,

an important industrial center for Germany.

But it's the region's history

dating back as far as the 1st century

that holds significance for Himmler.

- He thought that this was the heartland of the Saxons.

They got new ideas that

the Germanic tribes were the superior people

and wanted to have evidence about that,

and so they searched in this area.

- There was a foretelling of a great army from the west

that would defeat a great army in the east.

Himmler likely imagined it to be about him and the SS

and the German state fighting off this Slavic monsters.

- And the castle is quite close to other sites

that many Nazis thought were very important

to the preservation of German history and culture.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] Not far from Himmler's chosen site,

an alien looking stone formation reaches out of the earth

and curves on awe-inspiring picture on the land.

- Still, within the Westphalia region

is a series of geological formations

known as the Externsteine.

- [Narrator] The Externsteine

is first mentioned in writing in 1129.

Located in the Teutoburg Forest 33 miles from Wewelsburg,

it's a sandstone formation

with 13 freestanding pillars

believed to have been formed

during the Lower Cretaceous period.

- Natural monuments like that, they're awesome.

It was something greater than us, forces of nature,

that made those rocks in that configuration,

and that feels unstoppable and really powerful.

- [Narrator] Folklore, going back almost 400 years,

describes the Externsteine

as a sacred site for pagan Saxons,

but no evidence has been found to confirm this.

- On the external stones there is relief,

with this Christian motif

and this shows that this was a place

for the early Christians.

- [Narrator] Some Nazi researchers believe

that one section of this relief is a depiction

of a bent-over Irminsul, a secret tree

that played an important role in German paganism.

- So on the one hand,

this relief looks like someone carrying a cross,

but if you have got a different way of thinking,

you can see the Irminsul on it.

So they did some excavations there,

but it was no holy place for the Germanics.

There is no evidence for that.

- [Narrator] Not finding what they want,

Nazi researchers rewrite history to suit their needs,

and adopted the Irminsul as a Nazi symbol.

This tactic would become common with Heinrich Himmler's SS.

[dramatic music]

In the early 1920s,

Heinrich Himmler is at university

in Munich studying agriculture

and participating in paramilitary groups

when he meets some of the leaders

of the newly formed Nazi Party.

- Heinrich Himmler joined the Nazi party

in the very early stages,

and he proved himself to be a very loyal follower of Hitler.

He becomes increasingly instrumental over time in the 1920s,

and by 1929, he's appointed as the head of the SS.

- The SS is the Schutzstaffel,

and it's created as a kind of

personal bodyguard to Adolf Hitler

in the very early stages of the National Socialist Movement.

- [Narrator] Himmler begins to reorganize the SS,

creating new divisions like the security service

and the race and settlement office.

- He was extraordinarily ambitious

and also extraordinarily violent.

- [Narrator] Under Himmler's leadership,

the SS grows from 290 men to one million

by the end of World War II in 1945.

- The SS is a state within a state, an army within an army,

a police force within a police force.

It runs all of the concentration camps,

and Himmler is vying for power

with all the other major Nazi leaders,

and he's winning.

[suspenseful music]

- [Narrator] Men who wish to join the SS

must meet strict requirements.

- The SS was to only recruit the most elite of Nazi society.

But if you look at Heinrich Himmler himself,

he hardly fit the ideal of what an SS man would look like.

The ideal SS man would be tall.

He would have what were considered

to be classic Aryan features,

such as blue eyes and blonde hair.

- You had to meet specific standards

in terms of your physical acumen,

your masculinity, and physical prowess,

and you had to prove your racial lineage

going back generations,

and you were supposed to be already sufficiently convinced,

demonstrably so, about Aryan's supremacy,

and about everything the German state stood for.

- But the main criteria for being a part of the SS

was fanatical devotion and loyalty.

You would give your life for Hitler.

- The word religion, I think is appropriate.

They believed in the Nazis' policies,

and they were going to be the ones that would carry it out.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] The SS men dressed entirely in black uniforms,

decorated with runes and symbols of death.

- The color black in uniforms

leads people to be more aggressive,

and also leads people who see somebody in black

they see them as more of a threat or more of a danger.

- You call also the SS as a black order.

This is because of the black uniforms,

but also to be like a knight order.

- It never strayed very far from this idea

of it being a sacred knighthood,

and people bought into that

because most people are hard-wired to serve.

So, having convinced them that the service was required

and then telling them that they're unique and extraordinary,

they're going to want to join the SS.

- [Narrator] Himmler's choice of Westphalia

reinforces this idea

by hearkening back to a great Germanic hero.

[dramatic music]

A few miles from Externsteine

stands at 19th century monument to Arminius or Hermann

who led an allegiance of Germanic tribes

against the occupying Romans in the 1st century,

- There was a famous battle that the Germans

fought against the Romans in this region,

and upon winning it, they routed the Roman armies.

- [Narrator] In the battle of Teutoburg Forest,

Hermann's warriors destroy three Roman legions,

over 20,000 men,

in what has been called Rome's greatest defeat.

- Himmler is dusting off ancient historical facts

and mixing it up with mythology,

and he came to the conclusion that this

was a great place to create an emblem

of the SS and of the Nazi movement.

- [Narrator] Germany's history influences

the decor of the castle.

- Heinrich, Himmler and SS filled these castles

with priceless works of art and literature.

- [Narrator] But some of the art in the castle

is filled with pagan symbols and dark occult mysticism.

- On the outside, it looks like a regular castle.

- When you step inside Wewelsburg,

things get very dark, very quickly.

[suspenseful music]

- It looks like a movie set.

You walk into a place like Wewelsburg,

and you say, "This can't be real."

- The design of some of these rooms

clearly reflects the Nazi's fascination

with the dark powers of the occult.

- Himmler was a student of the occult,

and he immersed himself deeply in it.

- Around the whole castle complex,

there are a number of varied runes

integrated into the walls and the floors.

It's almost as if it was an intention

that any visitors would be subliminally influenced.

- [Narrator] The building contains a reception hall

for the SS captain with Nordic runes

set into the tile of the floor.

- One can only imagine these SS officers

coming in there with a secret ceremony, most likely at night

and all the trappings of the castle

and the architecture of it just reinforced

the secretive, mythical, and mystical nature

of what they were trying to accomplish.

- And the ideas seem absurd,

and then you realize that this is ideological underpinning

for what is about to become the world's worst genocide.

[tense music]

- [Narrator] In addition to the SS officers,

members of a new strange organization,

including archeologists, scientists, and other scholars

set up offices at the castle with ambitious plans.

- Why establish an archeology team within the SS?

What were they hoping to find?

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] The ruins of a castle are transformed

into an elite SS officers' structure.

But unlike many other Nazi buildings,

this one isn't for defense.

It has darker intentions.

In the garden on the south side of the castle,

there is a strange structure.

- SS scientists are digging up the grounds,

and they find bones and all sorts of relics

and items from the ancient past.

What sort of purpose that they got here?

Is this a mundane thing where they're trying to invest

some kind of secret religious energy into it?

- As they knew that it was very typical

in this area to have those grave stone tombs,

they built a new one,

but these items are from the Medieval times.

They were not Germanic.

- The grave itself is pretty nondescript,

but why would they be going to this effort?

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] The answer may lie with the new team

that moves into the castle, one that is made up of

scholars, archeologists, and explorers.

The Ahnenerbe, meaning ancestral heritage,

is an SS think tank started by Himmler in 1935.

The group, comprised of scholars

from across the spectrum of academic fields,

is formed to justify Nazi racial doctrine

by trying to prove their belief that Germans are descended

from a biologically superior Aryan race.

[dramatic music]

- And this is what Hitler wants.

So, Hitler allows the budget,

and allows Himmler all this discretion.

- Himmler was willing to surround himself

with a lot of pseudo-scientists,

who had really no credibility in the academic community,

and he was enamored of offbeat ideas

and was willing to entertain them in a way

that other members of the leadership were not.

- [Narrator] One of Himmler's pseudo-scientists

is Austrian occultist Karl Maria Wiligut.

He believes that Germanic culture

stretches back to 228,000 BC,

and the Earth was populated

by mythical creatures like giants.

Wiligut contributes significantly

to the development of Wewelsburg

as the ceremonial center of SS pseudo-religious practice.

- He thought that in establishing their presence in a castle

that had a very long historical pedigree in Germany,

they were linking themselves to a celebrated Germanic past.

- [Narrator] But Himmler wants

more than just a symbolic castle,

and his plans take shape inside the castle itself.

[tense music]

- One of the spaces that Himmler had built

was this large circular chamber

known as the Supreme Leader's Hall.

- It's a really imposing room.

These pillars and arches

are symbols of strength from Roman times.

Even in our modern day homes,

we'll have these large pillars out front.

They're not doing anything structurally,

but they are conveying a message.

- A room like this seems to try to evoke

the same kind of feeling that you might get in a church.

Part of the goal of SS indoctrination

was to overcome any belief systems that,

would-be members of the SS might have,

that would cause them to hesitate

to carry out their nefarious tasks,

and so they're creating a kind of

an alternate religious experience

where you engaged in activities as a group,

like a political priesthood.

[tense music]

- Your attention is drawn to the center of the room

on the floor where there's this large black sun

that's being created from mosaic.

- The symbol on the floor is a kind of sun wheel.

It was used by the Germanic folks,

but it is an older symbol.

You find it in Tibet,

but also in South America,

so it is a very common symbol,

and it stands for success.

- If you come in believing in that symbol,

you're going to have a physiological response

that reinforces that belief,

and that's going to also reinforce the belief in yourself.

- It's the only one of its kind found,

and although it's not entirely clear

what the Nazis were planning here,

it has been suggested that this was

the start of this black sun symbolism,

that you can also find in ancient mysticism

that the Nazis were borrowing from.

After all, the Swastika,

the, essentially, the Nazi symbol,

actually has its roots back in ancient history.

[dramatic music]

- Off to the side of that room there's a set of stairs

that lead down to an even darker room.

- The SS is the darkest

most terror inspiring organization in Nazi Germany.

Any space that they took to be sacred

can only inspire horror and terror in its viewers.

- The men that would have gathered here

were practically demigods in their own right.

They are the most important people in the SS.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] As the Nazis plot

the beginning of their empire,

Himmler begins construction

on a strange castle in the heart of Germany.

But in exploring the site,

modern researchers discovered dark and ominous designs.

[ominous music]

- Off to the side of the Supreme Leader's Hall,

there's a set of stairs that lead down

to an even darker room.

- When you go down to the crypt, it's colder.

- It looks very unfriendly.

This is not the open natural world that we're in anymore.

This is a world of secrets and a world of strife.

- In the center of the room,

there's this sunken circular pit,

and right in the middle of that,

there's a pipe that emanates through the floor.

- There are small pedestals around the room

that would hold possibly important artifacts.

- The crypt, as far as we know, was never used,

but it begs the question, what was it intended for?

- [Narrator] The ceiling of the crypt

is designed to look like that of a Mycenaean tomb.

It's cast from concrete

and covered with stone from a quarry nearby.

- The shape of the walls in the dome

bring it into a very intimate setting

and allow sounds to bounce and move around the room

so that everybody could hear things.

- Yeah, I would expect that it would be a bit echoey

and have a lot of resonance.

When you get a number of people in a space,

and there are sounds that start

resonating against each other,

what you find is that your brainwaves

start resonating at the same frequencies,

and this leads to a sense of community.

That you become as a person

and as a group at the same time.

- Now, what came out of that pipe?

Maybe it was water for a fountain,

or maybe that was an eternal flame

that continuously burned in the middle of the room.

- If the pipe carries water

and that central circle was a pool,

we know that there's a lot of religious ceremonies

across a variety of religions that involve water,

that involve submersion,

or involve spraying the water on somebody.

If that central pipe keys into the idea of an eternal flame,

the flame is a symbol of control over nature.

"This is what we took to defeat the old gods

"and take control of the world."

- [Narrator] And what is the purpose of these pedestals?

- There are rumors that these were used

to display urns that contained the ashes

of dead SS officers.

- This would be fitting

because the SS called this hall a crypt,

which belongs to death.

But, of course, no urn was found.

- Knowing what we know of SS crimes,

we can only assume that there had to have been

sinister elements to some of these rituals and ceremonies.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] The posters hanging in this room today

are Holocaust Memorial Art meant to counter visitors

that are Nazi sympathizers

and ground the site in its role as a memorial.

- I think it is necessary to show

because some visitors came here and said,

"Oh, it is the black order.

"They had got strategies,

"and they were successful in war times,"

and we have to show the other side of the SS.

They were murderous.

They were brutal.

They were criminal.

- [Narrator] These rituals and symbols

are part of the SS fascination with death.

- A lot of religiously-backed armies

have worked on the idea that if you die for the cause,

this leads to Valhalla,

the afterlife for the best and strongest warriors

who died in battle.

It's taking away the power of death

and instead making death a reward.

- The SS was obsessed with death.

They wore shiny black.

Images of death for everywhere.

- There was a series of symbols that the SS valued

and were used to denote membership,

we're used to remind members that they were an elite,

and to bind them together under a common set of principles.

- The most obvious symbolic representation

of the Nazi's obsession with death is on the caps

and the rings of the SS, the Totenkopf,

the Death's Head symbol.

The actual symbol itself has its roots back

in the Prussian units that wore the same kind of symbol.

- The skull and crossbones has been

widely used throughout history.

Pirates used that amongst other things,

so it's a useful construct.

It's taking something that many Germans were familiar with

and putting a new spin on it.

- Seeing a skull or symbol of death

tends to increase your arousal level.

Your heart rate goes up.

You start getting closer to fight or flight state.

The people who are wearing them feel more empowered by them.

They're strong.

They can conquer.

They can do things.

- The SS Death's Head ring was a personal gift

bestowed by Himmler on SS officers.

It could be neither bought nor sold.

- [Narrator] The ring was designed

by a Ahnenerbe occultist Karl Wiligut

and only 14,500 were awarded.

- Part of the desire to get

the SS to overcome their scruples

and to participate in violent acts in the Third Reich,

was bonding them together as a unit,

and the ring was designed to bring prestige to the wearer

and make a powerful visual statement

about their membership in the community of the SS.

- If somebody died, they tried to collect those rings,

and they would have secret ceremonies or bury the rings.

There's this idea that,

even in death, they will live.

They will be a part of a secret brotherhood.

They are immortal.

- [Narrator] In 1938, an order from Heinrich Himmler

seized the return of all the Death's Head rings

of fallen SS men to be stored in a chest

at Castle of Wewelsburg.

Then in 1944,

he orders that all the remaining rings,

over 11,000, also be returned to the castle.

- But he goes further.

In order for them to be sealed farther,

he orders them to be blast-sealed into the hills,

never to be found again.

- The uniforms, the skulls, all these images of death,

it must've struck fear into their enemies

when the SS shows up with that type of attire and imagery.

- It's well-known that Himmler invested time and energy

in these weird occult fantasies.

I think he says that he was a sick, crazed, weird individual

who would stop at nothing to try and prove

his importance to the Nazi 1,000-year Reich.

- [Narrator] But is Himmler's belief in the occult genuine

or an elaborate ruse?

- I think a lot of other Nazi leaders

used it to make their followers more fanatical,

to give themselves mythical powers,

or at least the image of having such.

But Heinrich Himmler,

I think he believed all this stuff.

He actually bought into this madness.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] But Himmler has plans far greater.

[thunder crashing] He imagined his ancestors

had special powers that were lost.

- When you're losing the war,

you're looking for that next advantage,

something that will make the other side's weapons obsolete.

- [Narrator] What dark path is Himmler

willing to go down to win?

[dramatic music]

In the Westphalia region,

the Nazis find ancient mythical evidence

to support their wild theories.

- Himmler was obsessed with the occult

and had a deep belief that the Aryan race

might somehow have descended directly from the gods.

- [Narrator] Since he has no legitimate academic proof,

Heinrich Himmler constructs a strange SS center

in the ruins of castle Wewelsburg

to try and radicalize others into believing his theory.

- They looked all around the world,

and they were quite prepared to borrow

from ancient religions and mystical cults

in order to give this sense of having this rich background

that was going to take the Nazi Reich forwards.

- [Narrator] The first of these fantastical expeditions

is to find the legendary lost continent of Atlantis.

Plato describes Atlantis as a vast island kingdom

and its people as a powerful advanced civilization.

But after being overthrown by the Athenians,

Atlantis was destroyed by the gods

and disappeared into the sea.

- Certainly over millennia,

there have been civilizations and cultures

that have disappeared from the face of the planet.

There's lost cultures in Africa.

There's lost cultures around the Mediterranean,

and I think some of that gives rise

to that idea of Atlantis.

- While it's generally agreed that this place is a myth,

Himmler believes that Atlantis was real,

and that the Aryans and therefore the Germans,

are descendants of inhabitants who escaped the destruction.

- We have got a lot of myth about Atlantis,

and some people said the Atlantis island

was in the Mediterranean Sea.

Others said it was in the North.

- [Narrator] The Eddas, Icelandic sagas,

tell of the gods seeking shelter

in the mountains during the great winter.

Himmler believes that this story

and Plato's tale of Atlantis

are different accounts of the same event,

and that Atlantis was, in fact, in the North Atlantic Ocean.

In support of this theory,

Ahnenerbe co-founder Herman Wirth,

leads an expedition to examine

Sweden's ancient rock carvings.

He finds a number of lines and circles

among the depictions of animals, warriors, and ships,

and decides that they formed

the ancient alphabet of the Atlanteans,

predating all of their writing systems.

However, no evidence exists of this being an alphabet,

and credible researchers knew, even in the 1930s,

that when these carvings were created

between 1700 and 500 BC,

several written languages,

such as those from Egypt and Sumeria,

had already existed for over 1,000 years.

[dramatic music]

- If you look hard enough,

and you don't have any ethical scruples,

you can find something to back

darn near anything you believe,

and this is the kind of work that they were doing.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] Other debunked theories

and pseudoscience are put into practice

during Ernest Cheever's 1938 expedition to Tibet.

Some SS researchers believed that Tibet may have been

the new home of Atlantean refugees seeking higher ground.

If this is true, there will be traces of

the Nordic bloodline in modern day Tibetans,

most prominently in members of the upper caste,

the highest of which, according to Tibetan lore,

hailed from the race of gods.

[dramatic music]

To find evidence of this,

anthropologist, Bruno Berger,

used widely discredited methods,

measuring the skulls and facial features

of 300 Tibetan villagers

and concludes that these tests confirm this theory.

Some of this research would give Himmler

what he was looking for

and propel him to go even further in his mad occult quest.

He is so pleased that when the team arrives home in 1939,

Himmler greets them at the airport,

where, according to witnesses,

he presents Cheever with a Totenkopf ring.

[eerie music]

Soon strange new missions are dispatched by Himmler.

One in particular creates a new mystery

for modern researchers, The Spear of Destiny.

According to legend,

the spear was originally the sword

that was used to pierce Jesus's side during the crucifixion,

and that whoever owns it

holds the destiny of the world in their hands.

- The Nazis were bound and determined

to find these types of artifacts,

and that would then give Hitler

and Himmler these special powers.

- [Narrator] A relic purported to be the spear

is passed down through the centuries

belonging, at one point, to holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne

and at another to Napoleon.

Eventually, it lands at a museum in Austria

where it is seen by a young Adolf Hitler.

When the Third Reich annexes Austria in 1938,

they loot the museum taking the so-called Spear of Destiny,

as well as Charlemagne's imperial crown

and put them on display in Germany.

[dramatic music]

But the most famous Christian relic is the one synonymous

with a sought after object, The Holy Grail.

Believed to be the cup used by Jesus at the last supper,

legend says it will bestow happiness and eternal youth

upon anyone who drinks from it.

- Himmler resigns SS historian Otto Rahn

to the task of finding the Holy Grail.

Rahn is obsessed with the grail

and believes there are clues in the "Legend of Perceval",

a Medieval story about King Arthur's search for the grail.

However, Rahn comes up empty in his quest,

and after falling out of favor with Himmler, dies in 1939.

Himmler, undeterred, sets out to find the grail himself

searching while on a trip to Spain.

While Rahn and Himmler failed to find the grail,

throughout World War II,

the Nazis will loot every country they invade

procuring a number of artifacts.

- The SS seem to have this desire

to find some mystic property of items of antiquity.

I find it strange and unusual

from a society that was so determined

to be progressive and technologically driven.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] Pursuing so many different avenues

makes it difficult to find

any consistency in Himmler's plans,

but there may be mythic to the madness.

- The very incoherence of the mishmash of a wide variety

of stories and myths and legends and symbols

can be in itself an effective tool of propaganda.

It can perhaps inspire adherence to want to know more

and to start rejecting some of the ideas

that they had developed outside of Nazi ideology.

- [Narrator] Himmler's thirst for power

would ultimately lead to a search so dark and ominous

in his efforts to create the ultimate imperial weapon,

a super soldier army.

[dramatic music]

At Wewelsburg Castle,

Heinrich Himmler's research teams are hell bent

on finding the ancient roots of the so-called Aryan race.

Expeditions are mounted around the world

to find these origins,

including one at home in Germany,

proving that the Nordic race

is directly descended from Cro-Magnon man,

and another showing that ancient Rome

was actually founded by Nordic immigrants

in spite of evidence to the contrary.

- Confirmation bias is really what's driving this.

That you start off with the belief,

and you will find evidence to support it,

and so, the more you look,

the more evidence you'll find to support it,

but you'll just ignore the evidence that refutes it.

- [Narrator] But Himmler's next quest

might finally give him the power he's looking for.

Himmler and Karl Wiligut want to replace Christianity

with an Aryan religion.

[dramatic music]

- Himmler wanted to have SS men who believe in something,

but not the church.

- [Narrator] To replace Christian ceremonies

like marriages and baptisms with Aryan rights,

they turn to old pagan practices like witchcraft.

[fire crackling]

Ancient folk rituals

were commonly practiced throughout Medieval Europe,

but after the Protestant Reformation,

religious institutions deemed these

pre-Christian practices witchcraft

and persecuted its practitioners.

- When you talk about magic, witchcraft, or mysticism,

our brains are wired to see these connections,

if we can't come up with another explanation,

that's what we'll believe.

If you've had a drought long enough

and you do a rain dance every day,

and eventually it rains,

then the rain dance caused the rain.

- [Narrator] Of the 90,000 witch trials held in Europe

in the 16th and 17th centuries,

it's estimated that 30,000 to 45,000 Germans,

mostly women, were found guilty and burned alive.

- Himmler believed that practicers of pagan religion

who had been Germanic were persecuted by the church,

and there was an attempt to eradicate them

through witch trials.

- [Narrator] To find evidence of his theory,

Himmler sets up a separate research team,

even more mysterious than the Ahnenerbe,

the Hexenkartothek, or H-Special Order.

Led by Rudolf Levin,

they compile and study books and documents

describing the activities of accused witches.

- The desire to recapture some of those pagan beliefs

was part of Himmler's attraction to these scholars

who were largely rejected by the academic community,

but who were feeding him alternative versions of history.

- [Narrator] After going through thousands of documents

and under pressure to come up with something,

Levin is able to temporarily satisfy Himmler

by discovering that his supposed ancestor,

a woman named Margareth Himbler,

was executed for witchcraft in 1629.

But old books can only tell so much.

So in 1936,

Himmler recruits Finnish anthropologist, Yrjo von Gronhagen,

to lead an expedition to Karelia, Finland.

Karelia was relatively untouched by the witch hunts,

and its people still practice

the pre-Christian pagan sorcery

described in the "Kalevala",

a 19th century, Finnish epic,

similar to the Icelandic Eddas.

Himmler tasks the team

with documenting these ancient rituals

in the hope of reintroducing them

into modern German culture

and his shadowy SS religion.

[dramatic music]

Musicologist, Fritz Bose uses a magneto phone,

an early type of tape recorder

to make over 100 recordings of villagers singing,

playing traditional instruments, like the kantele,

and performing chants and rituals.

Himmler, pleased with von Gronhagen's progress,

makes plans to implement the music

and rituals in future SS solstice ceremonies.

[dramatic music]

[footsteps stomping]

While Himmler believes the secrets

of the murdered Aryan witches

will make his men into the SS super soldiers he desires,

he decides to hedge his bet

by introducing some modern super powers into the mix.

In 1937, Nazi doctors

start giving soldiers medical methamphetamine,

a drug Hitler himself routinely uses.

This will keep the men awake

and energized for days at a time.

As military operations become increasingly mechanized,

methamphetamine will become

more and more critical to their success.

By early 1945, the tides have changed,

and the war is going badly for Germany.

With the Allies only days away,

Himmler gives the order for Wewelsburg to be destroyed.

- Why would he do that?

There were no installations there.

There was nothing that the enemy

was going to gain an advantage from by conquering.

- This castle is a sacred site of their occult for the SS.

If he can't have it,

it should be destroyed,

and that was the MO for the Nazis:

Destroy everything as they're evacuating.

[tense music]

- [Narrator] Having run out of explosives,

the men fit tank mines in several locations on the site,

completely destroying them.

The castle is then set on fire

and looted by nearby villagers.

However, the north tower,

the home of the Supreme Leader's Hall

and the crypt remains intact.

[dramatic music]

On May 31, 1945,

three weeks after Hitler's suicide and Germany's surrender,

Heinrich Himmler is captured

and commits suicide himself two days later.

Himmler is buried in an unmarked grave near Lemberg.

The exact location remains unknown.

The Nazi regime is over.

Himmler and the SS are defeated,

and Wewelsburg castle is in ruins.

But as more secrets are revealed,

the complete plans of their evil dark legacy

takes full shape.

- The occult vision of Himmler

and his SS acolytes is terrifying,

and who knows what chilling vision

they would have realized in a post-war Germany.

- Since the SS is so shrouded in secrecy,

it's created something of a mythologization of them,

which is alarming.

These are war criminals,

and it's one of the most inhumane organizations

ever created in human history.

That's the legacy of the SS.

[suspenseful music]

[dramatic music]