Original subtitles

The world knows how the Third Reich ended,

few know how it began.

By the time that Hitler was born there was a new wave of spiritualism.

Mystics, now forgotten by history, conjure visions of a Master Race,

and foresee peril from other races.

Occult fanatics who rewrote history and invented science.

When Hitler seizes power, the occult follows right into his inner circle.

Hess was a fanatic for astrology and occultism.

You have Goebbels with his propaganda, you have Himmler in charge of the SS.

Himmler, a mass murderer convinced he was an ancient king reincarnated.

What kind of vision could turn humans into guinea pigs,

turn mortals into supermen,

and turn a myth into a nightmare?

History's darkest chapter has a hidden side.

This is a story from World War I.

September 28th, 1918.

Near the French village of Marcoign,

Henry Tandey becomes Britain's highest decorated private of the war.

A one man firing squad.

During the battle, a lone German enters his sights.

And the German soldier is ready to accept his fate

waiting for private Tandey to shoot him.

Tandey sees the corporal is just a desperate looking individual

and he passes him by and refuses to kill him.

Tandey is later told the German was a corporal in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment.

His name is Adolf Hitler.

Hitler himself was the source of the story,

according to author Peter Lavenda.

So there was a painting of the battle by an Italian painter

and this painting hung in Hitler's library at Berchtesgaden,

at his retreat in Austria.

At one point, Neville Chamberlain, visiting Hitler wondered why would Hitler

have a painting of the victorious allied soldiers at this French battle.

And Hitler replied, "because this man saved my life".

Perhaps. Some historians say Hitler never fought in this battle.

But whether he faced Tandey or not,

he used such stories to prove he was chosen for a higher purpose.

Hitler would convince an entire nation that he alone could lead it to glory.

But instead, he plunges it into a bloodbath of genocide.

Lots of people have had crazy genocidal ideas,

but very few people have projected those ideas into the chilling,

global concert of bloodshed that Hitler was able to orchestrate.

The Nazis launch a mad quest to remake the world.

The vision of German supremacy concocted by Hitler and his henchmen,

bubbled up from a toxic brew.

Among its ingredients, phoney history, pseudo-science, ethnic lies,

and the legend of a Master Race,

with a good luck charm turned into a symbol of hate.

Yet some wonder if Nazism had a secret ingredient,

an ingredient missing from history,

the Occult.

Chief among the occult faithful was a chicken farmer turned mass murderer,

Heinrich Himmler.

Charged with fulfilling the Final Solution,

from spreading their own genes to cleansing Europe,

the Nazi mission echoes doctrines steeped in the occult.

Why are these esoteric doctrines important to Hitler?

What is the occult allow us to do?

It allows us to take the supernatural, that is the highest source of authority,

in a realm that is not regulated by the Church,

the universal message of salvation of Christianity

is absolutely not going to work out for you if you're on a genocidal mission.

A year before Hitler's birth, one of the occult doctrines

that would foreshadow Nazism was spelled out for the whole world

in an unlikely place, by an unlikely writer.

Living in London is a Russian aristocrat turned best-selling author

named Madame Helena Blavatski.

In more than 1,000 pages she rewrites the history of the world,

from the Creation to the present.

Her story is based on unconventional sources,

Babylonian astrology, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and a mishmash of the occult.

She's not making it up, but what's great about this kind of information,

it has all the power of a lost great civilisation,

but the people who used to control this information and regulate it, are all gone now.

So it can mean whatever you need it to mean.

It did.

As Blavatski tells it, giants from the lost continent of Atlantis,

produced a race of supermen, the Aryans.

Blavatski's book is mysticism masquerading as history,

but it sells.

Timing is everything. And a book challenging the standard version of history

arrived at the right time.

For nearly 2,000 years the Bible was gospel truth,

then Darwin challenges the very origins of history,

new evidence of evolution shakes peoples' faith.

The late 19th century was the heyday of a new kind of religion, spiritualism.

Based on the belief that the living could contact the dead.

Spiritualism was not something that was on the fringes.

By the time that Hitler was born there was a new wave of spiritualism.

A wave of palm reading and astrology, Tarot cards and séances.

With believers from Mary Lincoln to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

To an audience starving for fresh answers, Blavatski's occult opus is a banquet.

Blavatski is important because of her showmanship,

because occult traditions were by their very nature élite secret practices,

but she tells the whole world about it.

An Austrian writer and occultist named Guido von Liszt

picks up Blavatski's idea of an Aryan race.

Now he takes this idea and he germanises it.

The Master Race then becomes specifically identified

with a kind of German racial destiny.

Blavatski rewrote history, Liszt rewrote geography.

He transplants the origins of the Aryans from Persia to Northern Europe.

He envisions a blond-haired, blue-eyed master race.

Now, this great people is displaced to the North.

Who's the authentic expression of Aryanism now?

The Norse people.

To validate his theory, Von Liszt searches for a link between the mythic Aryans

and modern Germans.

He believes he found one.

An extinct Germanic alphabet called Runes.

And in a game where the deeper the antiquity, the greater the authority,

what the Runes do, is they allow the Germans to get into that game.

Blavatski described the race of supermen.

Von Liszt made them German.

But something was missing. What's a superman without an archenemy?

An enemy is supplied by a former Austrian monk

named Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels.

In his abbey he finds an image in a flagstone,

showing a nobleman treading on a beast.

Lanz became convinced that all history could be explained in terms of

noble races needing to suppress and conquer lower, inferior,

and potentially demonic races.

After leaving the abbey, von Liebenfels begins to publish a magazine

named after the German goddess of spring, Ostara.

Von Liebenfels warns the Aryan super race must defend itself

against the so called lower races, among them, the Jews.

They're sources of racial pollution that through their insidious interbreeding

with master races are destroying that race from within.

They don't have to take up arms against you,

their weapon is their very existence.

He was describing mongrelisation of the races.

Advocating for a kind of racial purification program that was based upon his occult ideas.

Von Liebenfels' solution:

extermination through sterilisation and castration.

Enough readers agree to keep Ostara circulating on the streets of Vienna.

Among its readers is a rootless youth with no past and a dim future.

A homeless dropout and struggling artist named Adolf Hitler.

Eyewitnesses recall that Hitler actually had a collection of Ostara volumes.

Von Liebenfels himself claimed young Adolf visited his office.

In Hitler, Von Liebenfels' dream of a world purged of lesser races

finds a fertile mind.

There was a book written about him by a schoolboy friend, August Kubizek,

who said that even as a child Hitler expressed anti-Semitic feelings.

This was not something that simply came by itself

it was nurtured in the surroundings in which he lived.

Hitler recalls in his political autobiography "Mein Kampf", that he left Vienna

with the granite foundation of his world view already in place.

And it seems absolutely doubtless that this granite foundation included

Hitler's racial world view based on some kind of absolute distinction

between the blond, light-skin races and the dark, inferior, threatening, lower races,

he later came to identify with the Jews.

In 1913, Hitler realises a lifelong dream.

He leaves the ethnic stew of Austria and moves to Germany.

To him, a land of racial purity.

When WWI breaks out the next year, Hitler signs up to fight for Germany.

Hitler had been quite a lowlife pretty shiftless, directionless prior to the war,

and in many ways, he felt that there was a way he would gain spiritual belonging

to the German nation through military service.

In the trenches of WWI,

millions of frightened soldiers write poems and letters to wives and lovers.

Not Adolf Hitler.

In a short, occult influenced poem, he pictures magic signs made by the moon

that render his enemies powerless.

He's writing poetry in honour of the German gods, the Teutonic gods,

that he's learned about from Von Liebenfels, from Von Liszt,

and from the whole occult, pagan atmosphere of Vienna in those days.

It's a very curious poem.

It gives one pause to think what kind of state of mind

Hitler might have been in at the time.

His state of mind may have been altered by the constant threat of death.

Years later, Hitler would recount a narrow escape

as he ate dinner with his comrades in the trenches.

Suddenly a voice seemed to be saying to me, "Get up, and go over there."

It was so clear and insistent that I obeyed automatically,

as if it'd been a military order.

Hardly had I done so than a flash and deafening report

came from the part of the trench I had just left.

A stray shell had burst over the group in which I had been sitting

and every member of it was killed.

Hitler always felt that he was chosen for something special.

But it was a nagging feeling that had not been justified or verified by experience.

And suddenly, in war he found himself being saved from certain death

on more than one occasion.

And these episodes of salvation reinforced in his own mind

that he was being saved for some higher purpose.

In the final days of the war Hitler is wounded and recuperating

and he gets news that feels like a second wound.

Germany has surrendered.

Defeat is so shocking, Germans conceive a myth to explain it,

"Dolchstosslegende".

Dolchstosslegende is the legend of being stabbed in the back,

that Germany should have won the war, everything was going well.

We didn't lose because we were defeated fairly in battle,

but because somebody knifed us when we weren't looking.

Who wielded the knife?

Socialists and that arch-villain of the Aryan, occult doctrine,

the Jews.

A band of anti-Semites form an exclusive group aimed for Thule,

the legendary Aryan homeland.

Members debate politics, the occult, and the Jews.

The Thule society becomes the cradle of the Nazi party.

In 1919, a Thule member forms de Nazi forerunner,

the German Workers' Party.

One meeting becomes a crossroads of fate.

The German army sends an embittered soldier to spy on the group.

He kind of likes what he hears at this meeting.

It's a strange mix of ideas about a German animating spirit,

some anti-Semitism, a little bit of anti-Capitalism thrown in,

a whole mishmash of ideas.

He stops becoming a spy and decides that this is the perfect laboratory

for him to experiment politically and socially

with the ideas that he has for a greater Germany.

Adolf Hitler, the spy, becomes German Workers' Party member 555.

For the most part these guys are right-wing rabble-rousers

unable to reintegrate into civilian society.

The war is eternal for them, and they are determined to overcome

the shame, the humiliation and rebuild what they believe to be the true Germany

that had been subverted in that stab at the back.

Soon after Hitler joins, the group renames itself,

the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

Nazi, for short.

Among its leaders, Dietrich Eckart,

a journalist drug addict, and occultist.

Eckart becomes the spiritual guru of the Nazi party.

He takes Hitler under his wing and grooms him for power.

Hitler was literally drinking in anti-Semitism under the pernicious

influence of Dietrich Eckart.

He was Hitler's mentor.

He was the person, I think more than any other, influenced Hitler

at a very crucial part of Hitler's development.

Eckart very much wanted to cultivate this messianic notion in Hitler

because he himself thought that thinking politically you needed

a powerful instrument, a lightning bolt.

Dietrich Eckart dies of a heart attack in 1923.

On his deathbed, he allegedly said of Hitler,

Hitler will dance, but it is I who plays the tune.

Do not mourn for me for I will have influenced history more than any other German.

So Eckart had a very inflated idea of his own influence over Hitler

but it might have been very well justified.

The occultist Eckart was among the few to foresee Hitler's rise.

Another is a popular astrologer who never even met Hitler.

Elsbeth Ebertin.

Amongst Hitler's enthusiastic female followers in Munich,

was a woman who in fact sent Ebertin the days of Hitler's birth

and asked Ebertin to make a prediction concerning this individual's future.

He's destined to play a führer role in future battles,

and he is destined to sacrifice himself for the German nation.

Also to face up to all circumstances even when it is a matter of life and death.

Ebertin's prediction eventually reaches Hitler in late 1923.

Hitler had mixed feelings about this.

Hitler did not want to believe that the stars were controlling his destiny.

As a person who wanted absolute, total control over Germany, his life and the world,

Hitler did not want to believe that there are other forces

that could have greater power than he did.

Hitler's chance for power rises from the chaos of defeat in WWI.

Germany owes the allies billions in war reparations.

And the German Government gets the idea that,

"You want your money? We'll give you all the money we owe you."

And they just begin to print money with nothing to back it.

This is the period of hyper-inflation, pictures of people pushing wheelbarrows

of Deutsche Marks to the grocery store to buy a loaf of bread.

The German economy sinks to an all time low.

So does the popularity of the new government.

Hitler seizes the moment to grab power.

With about 600 armed supporters Hitler and his Nazi cronies

storm into a political meeting in a Munich beer hall.

They convince the group to join them in a coup.

The next day 2,000 men march on the government.

And they get the idea that this is their moment,

this is the moment to act.

We're going to rise up and we're going to overthrow this State.

The march ended up more of a drunken brawl than anything else.

That's kind of a pathetic attempt at a coup d'etat.

What it does is it ends with Hitler in jail.

Hitler is joined in prison by Rudolf Hess,

who one day will become his right hand.

Hitler also begins "Mein Kampf", a blueprint for the Third Reich.

Inspired by the racist creeds of his occultist mentors.

The book is largely ignored.

Hitler dedicates his book to his deceased mentor, Dietrich Eckart.

In December 1924, after 9 months in prison for treason,

Adolf Hitler is freed.

He goes right back to organising the Nazi party.

The Nazi party are one of a number of parties that are out there

propagating certain ideas about a mythic Aryan race,

the stab-in-the-back theory that places the Jew as the evil principle

behind the defeat.

The shameful defeat of WWI.

With their pride wounded and their army vanquished,

Germans look to their leaders for hope.

Some settle for hate.

By 1928, the Nazi party is still small, 100,000 members led by Hitler.

But that will soon change.

It's really with the great depression, with the crash and the economic catastrophe,

the widespread unemployment, that the Nazis will finally get

the rich field of recruits they had always hoped for.

Desperate voters seize the Nazi message.

An election in 1930 establishes the Nazis as a major party.

Then, a private misfortune and a public setback.

In November of 1932, Hitler's lover, 20 year old Eva Braun,

attempts suicide.

Within that same week, Hitler's Nazis loose seats in the Reichstag,

the German congress.

Everything is going wrong.

There are recorded instances of him breaking down, weeping.

This was a time at which he thought all was lost,

although he had come so near to power.

Hitler himself talks of suicide.

Then Hitler reportedly meets famed astrologer Erik Jan Hanussen.

Hanussen makes an unlikely prediction.

In 30 days, a turning point. Perhaps, even power.

This is impossible, in December of 1932,

Hitler had no hope of gaining this type of power.

Hanussen suggests there is a tool to help him realise his goal.

A good luck charm.

Hanussen tells Hitler that he must go back to the town where he was born

and find a mandrake root.

A mandrake is a man-shaped root said by European occultists

to possess powerful medicinal properties.

According to author Peter Lavenda Hitler asked Hanussen to find the root.

Hanussen travels to Hitler's hometown

and digs up a mandrake from a butcher's backyard.

On New Year's Day, 1933, Hanussen presents the charm to Hitler.

According to Professor Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke,

this is Hitler's mandrake.

That Hitler had even received such an object and was prepared to accept it

suggests some remarkable susceptibility to superstition or occult power at this time.

This Vienna newspaper shows Hitler with the mandrake.

From a wire around its neck hung a capsule.

And in this capsule were some verses that Hanussen had allegedly written

describing a league or bond between himself, the mandrake and Hitler.

These verses described that Hitler would have unlimited power and good fortune

so long as he held true to this bond between himself and Hanussen and the mandrake.

Hitler's luck changes.

Within 30 days, because of a series of political negotiations

that are taking place behind the scenes, suddenly Hitler finds himself

Chancellor of Germany on January 30th, 1933.

Hanussen's prediction, an impossibly optimistic prediction, comes true to the day.

Whether Hanussen read the future or had an inside tip, no one can say.

Then, on February 26th, in a séance led by Hanussen,

another vision was said to appear, a great building on fire.

The next day the Reichstag, home to parliament, goes up in flames.

Some still question who started the fire, but not who benefited,

the Nazis.

With the Reichstag fire, they begin to pass a series of decrees

that increasingly give them the legal means

in which to go after people they deemed to be their enemies,

and they can incarcerate them, they can hold them without charge.

Within a year and a half of the Reichstag fire, President Paul von Hindenburg dies.

Hitler's allies pass a law making him head of state, leader of the army

and master of Germany.

Once in command, the Nazis consolidate power and eliminate rivals.

Among the casualties are astrologers, mystics and occultists

who helped Hitler on his rise to power.

In 1933, a book entitled "Before Hitler came" reveals Hitler's connection to occultists.

The author of the book is a founder of the Thule society and devout occultist,

Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorf.

The Baron alleges that he with other members of his secret society

inspired Hitler's anti-Semitism, his Aryanism, his entire vision.

Hitler was very offended by that because he saw himself as the Messiah,

someone who recognised no precursors, no inspirers, no forerunners.

Sebottendorf is forced to flee Germany.

Few learn his revelations.

Hitler has already shown how far he'll go to ensure no one hinders his quest for power.

And he will continue to do whatever it takes to protect it.

On June 30th, 1934, the Nazis target nearly 200 people for death,

including the occultist Hanussen.

It's known as the "Nacht der langen Messer",

the Night of the Long Knives.

Hitler himself doubted the power of the occult,

but did his inner circle hold true believers?

Perhaps deputy führer Rudolf Hess.

Some say occult beliefs triggered a desperate act in the early years of WWII.

In June of 1941, Hitler invades the Soviet Union.

The month before a bizarre mission unknown to Hitler is launched.

Rudolf Hess flies to Britain to negotiate peace.

According to Peter Lavenda, timing of Hess' mission was determined by the stars.

Hess' flight to England took place on an astrologically important day,

a day of a major conjunction of planets.

This day was picked by his astrologers around him.

Hitler views Hess' mission as a disgrace.

He publicly condemns Hess' occultism and his use of an astrologer.

As the war goes on, Hitler continues to round up those he deems enemies.

Among them Communists, Gypsies, Jews and occultists.

Adolf Hitler denounced occultism,

yet his own inner circle contained occult fanatics.

You have Goebbels with his propaganda, you have Himmler in charge of the SS.

Heinrich Himmler led the Schutzstaffel, or SS,

guardians of the Nazi vision.

The SS are really the instruments of this vision, without which

you couldn't have had the impetus, let alone the coordination to make the Holocaust,

to make the National Socialist vision happen.

Himmler's power was really absolute,

and yet at the same time Himmler maintained a remarkable array

of private occult interests.

He believed he was the reincarnation of one of the early medieval Germanic emperors,

Henry the Fowler, and convened rather mystical anniversary celebrations

around his grave in Quedlingburg Cathedral.

Himmler was so fascinated by the Zodiac he once hired his own astrologer.

Himmler, in many ways embodied the spiritualism of the late 19th century.

When he married, he and his wife got a poultry farm,

in an attempt to do what von Liszt calls on people to do,

get back to nature, get back to truth, get back to the real Germany in the land.

To prove the German people superior to all others,

Himmler founds the "Ahnenerbe",

an ancestral research institute.

Through sham science, the Ahnenerbe seeks to prove the superiority of the Aryan race.

They try to prove not only ancient roots of the so-called Aryan-Germanic peoples,

but also their psychic roots and spiritual roots as well.

Himmler uses the Ahnenerbe to invent science that supports his own beliefs.

SS recruits must prove racial purity.

The Ahnenerbe scientists and researchers

spread their dubious findings to SS soldiers and the public.

Aryanism is the true faith in Himmler's eyes,

but Himmler lacks a Mecca.

He makes one,

at Wewelsburg Castle in Westfalia.

It is picked for its own occult heritage.

It was an old castle that had been used for a while

to interrogate witches during the Inquisition.

It's close to a number of pagan holy sites or shrines in Germany.

The thousand-year Reich was going to have Wewelsburg Castle as its Vatican City.

According to author Peter Lavenda, Himmler transformed Wewelsburg

into an occult version of Camelot.

It was designed around the idea of King Arthur,

the twelve knights of the Round Table and the Grail Castle.

The twelve knights, his twelve highest members of the SS

would sit in silent contemplation and meditation.

The North tower held a stone chamber called the "Obergruppenführersaal",

or "Generals' Hall".

On the chamber's floor Himmler installed a stylised swastika

shaped like a sun wheel, adorned with SS victory runes.

Under the floor, according to the castle's warden, was the realm of the dead.

Around the walls, beyond the croft, these pedestals might well have contained

the urns containing the cremated remains of those generals who had died in battle.

One of Himmler's most trusted advisors on the occult is Karl Maria Wiligut.

A veteran of WWI and a major general in the SS,

Wiligut is an avid student of runes.

The runes were not only supposed to be a writing,

they were supposed to in fact have magical powers.

They were carved and inscribed in the form of prayers, invocations.

He convinces Himmler he has a psychic connection with the ancient Germans,

stretching back 2,000 years.

Once diagnosed as a schizophrenic and a megalomaniac,

Wiligut is the high priest of the SS.

He influences many of the rituals that take place at the castle.

Wiligut designed the secret SS rings as well as this.

Rarely seen by the public, this chair is decorated with runic symbols,

some say it was designed as a throne for Himmler himself.

A testament to his faith in the magic of runes.

How much did the Führer know of Himmler's obsession with the occult?

Some experts suggest Hitler and Himmler had a tacit policy,

"Don't ask, don't tell".

As long as the "treue" Heinrich, the loyal Heinrich did his job,

which was assigned to him, whether it was the mass murder,

or protection of Hitler, or the creation of elite combat troops,

what he did in his private passions were left up to him.

Himmler serves Hitler faithfully.

One branch of Himmler's SS becomes an army within an army,

infamous for ruthlessness in battle.

Another branch carries out the Final Solution, the murder of the Jews.

Himmler runs the Nazi concentration camps.

The camps exploit prisoners for slave labour.

They also serve as instruments of mass murder, targeting the Jews and others.

The Nazis murdered approximately 6 million Jews,

perhaps between 9 and 10 million others.

We'll never know exact numbers.

Thousands more suffer under Nazi science.

They conducted horrible experiments on human beings

at Dachau and Auschwitz and other places, all under the aegis of the SS,

some of them under the aegis of the Ahnenerbe.

Some of the most horrendous experiments were undertaken by scientists

working for Himmler's occult research division.

Adolf Hitler dreams of wiping out an entire people.

The engineer of the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler, dreams of creating another people.

Himmler's goal: restoring the blood line of Aryan supermen.

Himmler was from the branch of spiritualism, or racism, whatever you want to call it,

that believed that the Aryan peoples were forged through conflict.

And that it forged a stronger race.

And that this race could be furthered through careful breeding of the Aryan people.

The Nazis launch an Aryan breeding program called "Lebensborn",

German for "source of life".

The Lebensborn movement was an attempt to further the so-called pure Aryan race.

Girls from Nazi organisations, such as the BDM, were recruited

to bear children out of wedlock to SS men.

They would have your proverbial one-night stand with them,

perhaps impregnate them, the girls would be taken care of

during their pregnancy and their children would be taken care of as well.

The Lebensborn program also supports war widows of pure-blooded Germans,

and curbs abortions by unwed mothers.

It's estimated the program produced as many as 20,000 babies.

Future supermen and superwomen.

And interestingly enough, experimentation and surveys afterwards

showed that these children instead of being of superior intellect

were nothing close.

The myth of the Master Race is shattered by Germany's defeat.

The Thousand-Year Reich lasts just twelve years.

Hitler's obsession with race actually helped undermine the Third Reich.

The great priority was the war against the Jews,

to such an extent, that he was knowingly willing to divert trains

to carry German troops to and from the front

for the purpose of taking Jews to death camps.

Winning the war was not as important to him as wiping out the Jews.

And if you understand, as Hitler, that you are a messiah

come to reconstitute the purity of your race,

you have to defeat that viral corruption.

The Holocaust was the logical outcome of Hitler's occult beliefs.

Hitler did believe in racial purity, in eugenics.

The purity had to be redeemed in the German race.

That it was an occult necessity, a spiritual necessity.

In the Reich's final days, even Hitler may have turned to the occult.

He was willing to grasp at any straw.

He was told by Goebbels that "the astrologers have predicted that

Germany will somehow be saved once again."

They were wrong.

Hitler's enemies closed in.

The Soviets at his front door and the Americans at his back.

The Nazi messiah can't even save himself.

Deep inside the Führer bunker, on the afternoon of April 30th, 1945,

Hitler and his new bride, Eva Braun, commit suicide.

What he had set in places, what he thought was a living organism,

his Third Reich is coming to an end.

If it's going down, he has to go down with it.

Could the ashes of the Third Reich hold a final clue to the Nazi occult connexion?

He came to power the night of January 30th to 31st,

which was a pagan holiday, one of the eight pagan Sabbaths.

He committed suicide on another Sabbath, April 30th,

called Beltane or in some cases Walpurgisnacht in Germany.

Walpurgisnacht is the night when witches gather.

So Hitler chose this day, either deliberately or unconsciously,

but it was chosen as a final fitting end

to an occult empire that began on a pagan holiday.

It ended on a pagan holiday.

By coincidence, Hitler's death holds another link to the occult.

Twelve years earlier, astrologer Erik Jan Hanussen

claimed a magical mandrake root would bring Hitler to power.

The astrologer also claimed the root was a bond between Hitler and himself.

On the Night of the Long Knives any bond with Hitler was broken

when Hanussen was killed.

It was stated repeatedly that if the bond of the three were maintained

all would go well for Hitler.

But if it was broken all would end in flames within twelve years,

and that's exactly the length of time the Third Reich survived.

The bond was broken.

Three weeks after Hitler's suicide another bond was broken,

another link between the occult and the Nazis.

In British captivity, Heinrich Himmler swallowed a cyanide capsule.

The man who believed he was once a king was captured in the uniform of a lowly private.