Hitler and his God

The Order of the Death’s Head

“I am going to tell you a secret”, said Hitler to Hermann Rauschning somewhere in 1933, “I am founding an Order.” 820 The idea of “a small circle of real initiates” was not unknown among those close to Hitler, remembers Rauschning, for Alfred Rosenberg had already talked to him about it confidentially after having given a talk at the Marienburg, the central seat of the Teutonic Order. Actually the idea had nothing extraordinary, for whenever in history a really novel and compelling world vision appears, an almost automatic process of segregation takes place between its exoteric form, adapted to the mass, and its esoteric essence, destined for a select few.”

This corresponded in the main to the way Hitler saw his movement. Firstly, there was the mass of the members for whom he wanted to keep the original Party programme forever unchanged like the dogmas of a Church; they would be kept going by their unreflecting faith in the Party and its Führer. And there were the comrades who had stood at Hitler’s side during the years of struggle, die alten Kämpfer, and who were now the lower Führers in the Party pyramid, the “little Hitlers” as they were sometimes called. “Hitler knew that these men could not be won for a higher flight of the ideas. They were political toughs, hardened in the down-wearing struggle of every day. Their thought did not reach beyond the once accepted principles of National Socialism.” Hitler knew their strengths and their weaknesses very well, and rewarded their loyalty by satisfying their ambitions and greed.

Only when this generation had died out could, secondly, “a secular nation of priests” take shape, the first wave of “a new religion of humanity, the creation of a new human species”. Hitler realized that this would be possible only after the decisive war of world conquest “which was to come unavoidably”. National Socialism, or rather Hitlerism, was still in its infancy. “He touched repeatedly upon these topics in his conversations. And one felt, hidden behind his apparent resignation, the searing impatience to reach his proper stage: that of the creative statesman and lawgiver, of the exemplary artist and builder of cities, of the prophet and founder of a new religion.” 821

“‘Party’ is a wrong concept. I would prefer to say ‘Order’”, said Hitler. 822 What he had in mind was an organization like the one worked out by Freemasonry, based on the example of the medieval guilds. “They formed a kind of priestly nobility. They set themselves apart by adopting special customs. They developed a secret teaching which is not so much a simple verbal creed as the gradual revelation of a higher insight by means of symbols and secret rites.” The “danger and greatness” of Freemasonry lay in its hierarchic organization and the teaching through symbols and rituals which appeal to the imagination “without the intervention of the intellect”. This was what fascinated Hitler and what he intended to emulate. “Don’t you see that our Party must be something similar: an Order, the hierarchic ordering of a secular priesthood?” he asked Rauschning. “But this means of course that there cannot be something similar on the other side. Either we are there, or there are the Freemasons, or the Church, but never two simultaneously. They are exclusive, something the Catholic Church has plainly understood, at least where Freemasonry is concerned [by excommunicating it]. Now we are the strongest and we will get rid of both others, the Freemasons and the Church.” 823 In the case of the Church he had to tread carefully, for Christianity was deeply ingrained in the thought and customs of the German people, but there cannot be any doubt about his ultimate intentions. Freemasonry, on the contrary, was harmless and defenceless, and forbidden as soon as he came to power.

Hitler’s obsession of having to found an Order was given a concrete shape in the SS, the Order of the Death’s Head. The SS was founded at a time when Hitler, for strategic reasons, had to let the SA be included in a Kampfbund, a fighting association, along with other rightist paramilitary units. The SS was his: his personal bodyguard, sworn in on his name and loyal to him alone. Here was an elite created without any concessions, and this elite would be a new aristocracy of the Aryan blood, embodying the Hitlerian ideals to the fullest.

At first the SS was no more than some insignificant small units, in most cases unpaid, who accompanied Hitler as his bodyguard and would protect him with their life. But this changed in 1929, when Hitler appointed Heinrich Himmler as their commander. “Hitherto the SS had been no more than an organization”, writes Heinz Höhne, “now it was to become an Order. Himmler had discovered from history an example on which he proposed to model his Order: the Jesuits … In the Jesuits Himmler had found what he regarded as the central feature of any Order’s mentality: the doctrine of [unconditional] obedience and the cult of organization.” 824

“To have made from this handful of men [280 in 1929] the strongest ideological army ever, is [Himmler’s] merit”, said Hitler. “Little by little I have found in my SS the army against which I never had a complaint. There has never been a reason to expose them. It is Himmler who created their stature. From a small group of loosely connected men he has built a leadership apparatus. He is so to say the völkisch Ignatius of Loyola in the good sense.” 825 “The SS organization was built up by Himmler on the principles of the Order of the Jesuits”, writes Walter Schellenberg, himself an SS-general. “The service statutes and spiritual exercises preached by Ignatius of Loyola formed a pattern which Himmler assiduously tried to copy. Absolute obedience was the supreme rule; each and every order had to be accepted without question.” 826 This explains why Himmler was sometimes called “the black Jesuit” or “the Grand Inquisitor”, for safety’s sake behind his back.

Equivalent to the rule of unconditional obedience was the purity of the blood. “The discovery of any drop of non-Aryan blood in SS veins invariably excited Himmler. From 1 June 1935, every SS commander from the rank of regimental sergeant-major upwards had to show proof that neither he nor his wife had Jewish ancestors; from 1 October 1935 the requirement was extended to include quartermaster-sergeants and sergeant-majors, and shortly thereafter every SS man. Everyone had to be able to produce an ‘Aryan’ family tree going back in the case of officers and officer cadets to 1750 and in the case of other ranks to 1800.” 827 Moreover, the physical condition of a candidate had to be perfect. “The old Waffen-SS, the legion of pre-war National Socialist supermen, rejected every recruit with the slightest physical imperfection, even a single dental filling.” 828

“Like monks and priests, or Communist Party members, there was a lengthy noviciate or candidate-membership, involving ideological instruction, labour and military service, and the acquisition of sporting prowess … Arcane initiation rites heightened the solemnity of being admitted to a privileged caste, a sort of secular priesthood. The midnight oath-swearing ceremony was apparently evocative, according to one eyewitness: ‘Tears came to my eyes when, by the light of torches, thousands of voices repeated the oath in chorus. It was like a prayer’. There was a bastardized catechism, in which the questions and responses included: ‘Why do we believe in Germany and the Führer?’ ‘Because we believe in God, we believe in Germany which He created in His world, and in the Führer, Adolf Hitler, whom He has sent us.’ Like all sects and totalitarian organizations, the SS recognized no departures and no separate private sphere. The individual was in for life.” (Michael Burleigh 829) “I don’t doubt for a moment – many don’t understand this at present – that in one hundred years the whole German leadership will come from the SS”, said Hitler in one of his monologues.

We remember that Hitler had a rather low opinion of the racial purity of the Germans. After centuries of degeneration “a race is what we still have to become”, he said and estimated that the racial re-generation would take something like a hundred years. It was one of the functions of the SS in the Germanic-Nordic-Aryan nation to constitute a base, or an ambulant blood bank, which would render the regeneration possible. The documents of racial purity, demanded from every SS man and his marriage partner, were one step in this direction. Another step was the gathering of the best blood from all the Germanic peoples and their descendants (Flemings, Dutch, Scandinavian, Swiss, even French) into the SS. The Waffen-SS divisions Panzerdivision Nederland and Grenadierdivision Landstorm Nederland were Dutch, the Grenadierdivision Langemarck was Flemish, the Grenadierdivision der SS Charlemagne was French. (Waffen-SS divisions of Slavonic people were formed only when the military situation became critical and the conditions of entering the SS were considerably lowered.) Another step of heightening the degree of purity of the German blood was the kidnapping in the occupied territories of thousands of Aryan-looking children, who were then raised with families in Germany. In the chapter “Stolen Children” of her book The German Trauma, Gitta Sereny writes that these children numbered “possibly a quarter of a million”, most of them East European.

The SS men in their “dashing and elegant” black uniforms were very status conscious and conditioned to be so. At the bottom of the pyramid of the Nazi state there were the ordinary people, Jews and Gypsies not included; above them ranked the National Socialist Party members; then came the uniformed members of the SA; and on top stood the SS, looking down on everybody else, also on the SA from which they had originated, but who in their eyes remained a farrago of brainless street brawlers. The very crème de la crème of the SS were the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s pretorian guard, commanded by Sepp Dietrich; they were the closest an Aryan could resemble “the image of the Lord”, and they peopled the dreams of the League of German Maidens and the nightmares of non-Nazis.

Himmler stimulated the elitist character of the SS – “in the SS one found the better type of people”, writes Schellenberg – by trying to allure as many members of the German nobility as possible, and by recruiting educated young men. In the higher SS ranks the number of officers with a university education, especially lawyers, economists and physicians, was considerable. They ran the SS as drilled technocrats, which explains the cancer-like growth of the Order within the body of the Third Reich. On this aspect of the SS, Burleigh remarks: “Historians have made much of the fact that many of them were lawyers or economists, two-thirds of whom had higher education and a third doctorates; less is predictably made of the truth that a doctorate sometimes merely betokens an assiduous mindlessness, signifying nothing about the wider personality. For, ironically enough, the universities were precisely the places in Germany which fostered an elite form of anti-Semitism, whose radicalism was ill disguised within a carapace of ‘scientific objectivity’ towards the ‘Jewish Question’. Now these former student radicals had the chance to implement what they had so often talked of in their exclusive circles.” 830

It is now generally accepted that the SS was, in Peter Lebenda’s words, “a fully constituted cult … Himmler’s dream was to create out of the SS a new religion.” “Church marriages were prohibited for SS members, whose vows were solemnified in the SS’s own ceremonies. Since spouses were subjected to exhaustive racial vetting, they were being co-opted into the emergent elite, with their fecundity being monitored through the unlikely medium of gifts of SS kitsch for the birth of each child. Children of SS men underwent an alternative form of baptism, with the seventh child being eligible for having Himmler as godfather. The centrepiece of the ceremony was a portrait of Hitler; instead of clergy there were SS men bearing standards with the swastika and the legend ‘Germany awake’ … All of this is entirely in keeping with the well-documented habits of sects and other totalitarian organizations in shaping the individual member’s whole environment.” 831

The standard black SS uniform (they also had a greyish or feldgrau one for everyday activities), with the twin Sig rune and the death’s head on the cap, was feared by the German population no less than in the occupied countries, for everybody knew that it stood for ruthless Nazi-extremism, torture and death. “I know that there are many who fall ill when they see this black uniform”, a gratified Himmler said in a speech to his commanders. “We understand this and don’t expect that we will be loved by many people.” 832 They had their own ceremonies for birth, marriage and death, at which the local SS commander functioned as the priest; they had their own terminology for the ranks within the Order; and they had their own justice, for a member of the SS could not be called to account by anybody outside the Order, not even by the military tribunals. They lived in the conviction that they were the highest and noblest living beings on earth whose rightful task it was to rule the globe, as the descendants of the former Nordic master race which was now regaining its rights and its spiritual powers, residing in or resulting from the purity of their blood.

Himmler stimulated these pretences to superhumanity in every way he could. One of his close consultants, with whom he had for some years a most cordial friendship, was an Austrian seer, Karl Maria Wiligut aka Weisthor, “the last descendant of a long line of German sages, the Uiligotis of the Asa-Uana-Sippe, which dated back to a remote prehistoric era”. 833 Impressed by the proven veracity of some of Wiligut’s visions, Himmler made him a full colonel in the SS and put him to work in the SS research centres concerned with the glorious olden times of the Germanic-Nordic-Aryans. It was Wiligut who designed the death’s head ring, awarded by Himmler, as master of the Order, only to some of his highest-ranking and most deserving myrmidons, and it was Wiligut who convinced the Reichsführer-SS of the significance and the value for his Order of the Wewelsburg near the town of Paderborn.

This old and dilapidated castle was soon renovated by the inmates of a makeshift concentration camp, for it was to become “an SS-order castle comparable to the Marienburg of the medieval Teutonic Knights”; in other words, it was to become the “Vatican” of the Order of the Death’s Head. That Himmler took this very seriously is shown by surviving plans for a huge complex of buildings, destined to be the Order’s world centre and focused on the Wewelsburg. Several authors remind us, moreover, that after the Nazi wars of conquest, the SS would reside in its own state, more or less covering the former territory of Burgundy – not the present-day vineyard region in France but the old land of the Burgundians, from Southern Germany all the way down to the Mediterranean. The symbolical meaning of this choice may be found in the fact that the Nibelungs were Burgundians, and that the primary SS slogan, embroidered on the sleeve of their uniforms, was Meine Ehre heisst Treue, faithfulness is my honour, inspired by the Nibelungs’ legendary fealty, the Nibelungen Treue.

The freedom with which Himmler and his henchmen could act out their fantasies of past, present and future greatness is amazing; it demonstrates the extent to which Nazi Germany had become an island of irrationalism. Himmler could publicly proclaim that he was an incarnation of the medieval German emperor Henry the Fowler and, as the highlight of a grandiose ceremony, communicate with the Fowler’s spirit in the tomb where his remains had been laid to rest with military honours. Or he could authorize and finance, in 1938-39, the Ernst Schäfer expedition to Tibet, where he suspected that traces of the first, godlike Aryans might be found. Similar expeditions were also sent to Iceland and Antarctica, and more were planned to the Far East and to Tiahuanaco, the old Inca city in the Andes, but cancelled because of the war.

If we put all this together, and remember that Hitler already in Mein Kampf took his distance from the bearded, impotent völkisch dreamers, then we must conclude that the Hitler-Himmler relation was ambiguous. Not, as far as known, from the side of “the faithful Henry”, although the inner tension may have influenced his ambiguous attitude at the time of the Stauffenberg attempt on Hitler’s life and his decision towards the end of the war to negotiate with the Swedes. For he, Himmler, top policeman of the Reich, must surely have been aware of some of Hitler’s barbs at his expense. For instance, Speer writes that Hitler had little sympathy with Himmler in his mythologizing of the SS. “What nonsense!” exclaimed Hitler. “Here we have at last reached an age that has left all mysticism behind it, and now he wants to start all over again. We might just as well have stayed with the Church. At least it had tradition. To think that I may some day be turned into an SS saint! Can you imagine it? I would turn over in my grave.” Then follows the passage where Hitler says that “the Romans were creating great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts”, and the question why the whole world’s attention should be called to this fact. 834

But the relation was more complex than that. Himmler had forged his SS into an essential instrument of the Reich, subservient only to the Führer and animated by the Führer’s ideology and, most important, by faith. For the time being nothing of all this could be touched or altered, especially as it had grown under Hitler’s own inspiration and supervision. “I am doing nothing that the Führer does not know about”, said Himmler, who clicked his heels even when Hitler spoke to him on the telephone. There is every ground to believe him, at least till the time that the final collapse of the Reich seemed imminent.

We have therefore to disagree with the authors who would have us understand that Hitler distanced himself from some of Himmler’s projects, for instance the Wewelsburg. For Rüdiger Sünner mentions that Hitler signed, on 2 July 1940, a “decree by the Führer and Chancellor of the Reich concerning building works in the region of the Wewelsburg”, and that he thereby gave the Chief of the SS a free hand for all these plans. Höhne writes that Hitler “never appeared in the Wewelsburg”, but this is contradicted by a photo in Lebenda’s Unholy Alliance, showing Hitler and Himmler together in the hall of an old castle, with the caption: “Hitler and Himmler in the Wewelsburg”.

In fact, the Order of the Death’s Head was one of Hitler’s most authentic creations, with Heinrich Himmler as his instrument. The SS was “the chosen elite who held the decision about life and death in their hands”. 835 Once more Ernst Jünger had set the tone: “Our work is to kill, and it is our duty to do our work well.” The SS were trained to become the unfeeling, automatically obedient robots, or angels, or devils, of death. Theirs was “an unfeeling form of neo-barbarism”, ready at any moment “to give and take death” (den Tod zu geben und zu nehmen). No, the symbol of the death’s head on their caps, rings, weapons and tanks was not “death-fixated kitsch”, it expressed, together with the colour of their uniforms, exactly what it stood for. “Most of you will know what it means when one hundred corpses are laying there in a row, or five hundred, or a thousand. To have stood this and to have remained decent – not taking into account exceptions of human weakness – this has made us hard. This is a never written and never to be written glorious page of our history.” 836 Thus spoke Himmler to his commanders, and the emphases are his.

Reading about the Second World War in Europe, one finds that where there were Germans and death, there was the SS man. Doing evil made him feel stronger, more superhuman. Hans Hüftig had been the former commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp – on the Ettersberg near Weimar, where Goethe once walked. To an interviewer he told in 1986, from his comfortable retirement: “Today it seems so cruel, inhuman and immoral. It did not seem immoral to me then: I knew very well what I was going to do in the SS. We all knew. It was something in the soul, not in the mind. We all knew what we were going to do in the SS. When it comes down to it, it is a very simple story. I was a Nazi.” 837