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January 4, 1937

DOCUMENT:

Today, on January 4, 1937, in his home at Schorn zu Rottach-Egern at the Tegernsee, SS Brigadeführer Karl Wolff, in the presence of his Reichsführer SS, made the following announcement:

“Reichsführer SS: I hereby announce the birth of our third child, born of my wife Frieda, née von Römheld, as the first son born on January 14, 1936, at the end of the third year of the Third German Reich.”

I replied:

“I thank you. I have heard your announcement in the presence of witnesses, the Goden of this child, myself, SS Brigadeführer Weisthor, SS Gruppenführer Heydrich and SS Sturmbannführer Diebitsch. Your child will be entered in the Birth Register of the SS and a note will be made for the Family Book of the SS.”

Brigf. Wolff then gave the child to his mother, who accepted him.

I then appointed SS Brigadeführer Weisthor to carry out the naming ceremony.

SS Brigadeführer Weisthor wrapped the child in the blue ribbon as he spoke the conventional words:

“The blue ribbon of loyalty may stretch throughout your entire life.

“He who is German and feels he is German must be loyal!

“Birth and marriage, life and death are bound by this symbol of the blue ribbon.

“And now may your child be the family’s own with my innermost wish that he become a proper German boy and an upright German man.”

SS Brigadeführer Weisthor took the cup as he spoke the conventional words:

“The source of life is Got!

“Your knowledge, your tasks, your purpose in life and all insights to life come from Got.

“Every drink from this cup may bear witness that you are bound to Got.”

He gave the cup to the father of the child.

SS Brigadeführer Weisthor then took the spoon as he spoke the conventional words:

“This spoon may nourish you until you reach the maturity of youth. May your mother herewith attest her love to you with it and punish you by not nourishing you with it as an offense against Got’s laws.

He gave the spoon to the mother of the child.

SS Brigadeführer Weisthor then took the ring as he spoke the conventional words:

“This ring, the SS family ring of the house of Wolff, shall you wear one day when you have proven yourself worthy of the SS and your lineage.

“And now, according to the wishes of your parents and on behalf of the SS, I give you the name Thorisman, Heinrich, Karl, Reinhard.

“It is up to you, parents and godparents to raise this child to be a true, brave, German heart according to the will of Got.

“I wish for you, dear child, that you prove yourself so that when you reach the maturity of youth, you may receive the proud name of Thorisman as your Christian name for your entire life.

“OUR GOT REIGNS!”

I hereby sign this document and have requested the godparents to bear witness by signing their names.

The commander:

The Goden:

1.Gode : Reichsführer SS

2.Gode: SS Brigadeführer

3.Gode: SS Gruppenführer

4.Gode: SS Sturmbannführer

Because it would be some time before the child reached maturity, the son at first was named Karl-Heinz. This combination of “Heinrich” with “Karl” was a favorite name for quite a while, popularized by the sentimental play “Old Heidelberg.” The Gode Himmler never missed the opportunity at birthdays or Christmas to send packages to Rottach-Egern to his godchild: a silver plate, a white bear, a game of rollers. Even in January 1945 as Heinrich Himmler was going through great distress, Karl-Heinz was not forgotten. He received from Uncle Heinrich a saw kit and chocolate.

There was a special reason for the naming ritual to be so pompously celebrated in the Wolff household. On November 9, 1936, he was elevated from his position as head adjutant to “Chief of the Personal Staff of the Reichsführer SS.” With this new position, he also took over responsibility for the cults of the SS, where Himmler’s predilection for abstruse romance always ran amok with new ideas. Wolff also now headed a department of several hundred men, who received the honorary ranks of the SS from Himmler, like the members of the “Ahnenerbe” (ancestral heritage research unit), the “research and teaching community,” for which college professors and scientists of completely different disciplines were mainly approached. They gladly came because the uniform of an SS Führer provided them with a National Socialist alibi. As proud of this academic following the graduated chicken breeder and farmer Heinrich Himmler was, he always felt somewhat unsure in their company. But having the cosmopolitan officer’s club conversationalist Wolff at his side increased his self-confidence.

Chief of the Personal Staff Wolff also felt his self-importance rise through his frequent contacts with university graduates who were among the first-rate German scientists, and even more so since he was being courted by them. Of course, he did have money at his disposal, for research grants and stipends. He adapted to his new environment and in 1936 information was added to his personal file that he studied law and political economics, even though the diplomas were “not yet” obtained. The question remains open as to where the bank official, officer, advertising expert and SS Führer could have more or less regularly attended lectures. Wolff did not name his universities, but he did state the years of study: “1920–1923 and since 1935.” This would mean that, as a bank apprentice in Frankfurt, he attended the university there; during his work as an employee in Kehl, he attended Freiburg University, which was about 80 kilometers away; and then as SS Führer, he attended Berlin University. Given his constant complaint of being overworked, this would be a remarkably energetic commitment.

Due to Himmler’s tastes for the bizarre, the “Ahnenerbe” quickly developed into a grocery and general store, where, except for the cultural achievements of the Nordic Indo-Teutonism, one could find a selection of rare items and, finally, even crime. Because Austrian engineer Paul Hörbiger’s Cosmic Ice Theory was rejected by serious scientists, but still promoted by the Ahnenerbe, it is, at worst, laughable as an amateurish bad investment. The same held true for the Ura-Linda-Chronik, which was
trumpeted for years as a valuable cultural document from pre-Christian Teutonic times, despite the fact that experts in the field had proven to its discoverer and translator, the Dutch scholar Hermann Wirth, that he was dealing with a forgery from the 1900s. There were, however, several cabinets at the Ahnenerbe whose access was restricted (marked “Secret”) the content of which was only made public after 1945 through the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. It shall be discussed further, along with the issue of how much Wolff knew about criminal experiments on humans.

This cultivation of science and art reminded Wolff of the spiritual orders during the Middle Ages. This was the reason why he viewed it as an especially favorable sign of his destiny when, upon visiting the Brown House in October 1931, he was met by the SS, the Guard of the Movement, and not by the mass organization of the SA. That he, as a former officer of the only Hessian Guard Regiment, could begin his second officer’s career with the oldest SS Standarte was further evidence that Providence had been assigned to nurture the German elite. To Himmler and to the Führer of his SS, the unit was far more than a simple militant division of the NSDAP; they considered themselves the successors of the German knights who conquered the East for the Germans centuries before. At the same time they admired the Jesuits, who with strict discipline and unlimited obedience fulfilled their tasks. When Himmler referred to them as a “soldierly order,” the two images became one in his imagination. The SS should “be bound by discipline and by blood” to the Nordic blood, a family community…people used to say a community of nobility.” That feeling of nobility was exactly what Wolff was striving for.

The Ahnenerbe was to develop a type of religion for that aristocratic community. During the first half of 1937 Wolff made an effort to hurry along a plan from his department that would develop the Teutonic heritage.” This religion was expected to give the SS “a non-Christian character, the ideological basis for the lifestyle and structure of life as a type of religion and ethics.” Himmler revealed what his goals were most succinctly in a speech he held in Berlin in 1942: “We must cope with…this Christianity, the biggest plague that could have befallen us in all of history.”

Wolff had already set his sights on the same goal in 1937 with the previously mentioned plan; only he didn’t underscore it so crassly. “Overcoming ideological opponents, meaning the unruly Christians of both denominations.” This was to be achieved by developing the Teutonic heritage. A collection of examples from the Teutonic past was planned in approximately fifty volumes.

Wolff made every effort to assemble the required committee of respected scientists. The pile of books was to contribute “to the creation of a new type of man, by education and selection…able to master all the great tasks of the future and replace the decadent old aristocracy.”

Himmler’s historical musings drove him to think that his order also needed a huge, visible focal point. The fat, Reich Chief of Organization of the Nazi party, Dr. Robert Ley, had already stolen the term “Ordensburg” by immediately having thee such buildings constructed to train the Party’s political leaders but the romantic dreamer who headed the SS had something less mundane in mind, something comparable to Monsalvat, the castle of the Knights of the Grail surrounding their king, Parsifal, or the castle of King Arthur sitting at the Round Table. For him it seemed reasonable to settle into the castle in the Proto-Germanic landscape, so to speak, of North Germany, where Hermann der Cherusker had defeated the Romans. It was here that Widukind, the Duke of Saxony, and his fellow fighters first converted to Christianity, following Charlemagne, which Himmler named Karl the Slaughterer, since he supposedly held mass executions of the pagans of Lower Saxony. The Reichsführer SS, accompanied by his adjutant, Wolff, went in search for a suitable location in November 1933, and visited the neglected and dilapidated Wewelsburg, near Büren, which had offered shelter to the former bishops of Paderborn during times of unrest. When he was told that the county council was looking for a tenant, he considered setting up an SS officers’ school at the castle.

It is quite possible that at the time he recalled the old legend, which prophesied that the castle, located on a steep hill in the middle of some flat land, would one day be the last shelter for the German knights before the great hordes of horrible armies from the east. From this castle, or so it was told by people of the region, the knights would begin the fight for liberation, which after many hard battles would also end in their victory. After the First World War, Himmler had belonged to the Artamanen League for several years. The league saw in the farming community the source of the people’s energy striving for an agricultural settlement in the east as a bulwark against the Poles trickling into the Reich. He may very well have seen the old legend as a prophecy. He decided to turn the castle into something more than just a training center. After the project was first entrusted to the SS Race and Settlement Main Office, and therefore under Obergruppenführer and Reich Minister of Nutrition, Walther Darré, it was transferred to the Personal Staff of the Reichsführer SS in 1935
because of its expanded duties. That was how Karl Wolff became responsible for the project.

In a few short years, Himmler’s plans grew to be gigantic. In 1940, shortly after the victory over France, Himmler and Wolff presented their Führer with a model of the future SS shrine. The new buildings took up so much space that a town that was part of the castle had to be moved almost one whole kilometer into the plains. A fifteen-meter-high wall, 450 meters long, was to surround the castle with a circle on three sides, and parallel to that a road would run in an even larger circle. Hitler, the lover of all things gigantic, authorized the construction.

Because the castle was to be reserved for the Führer’s elite circle, no large halls were planned. In the round north tower, the various Gruppenführers and the Obergruppenführers were supposed to assemble, but by the end of 1938 there were only sixty-nine of them. Only the Obergruppenführers were to be allowed into the ground floor—this was a rank, which included forty-three men plus the two superior Obergruppenführers Dietrich and Hausser in 1943. They had therefore reached the highest rank under that of the Reichsführer. The floor of the basement was made of natural rock; there was a circular-shaped seating hollow chiseled in the rock. Visitors today call the room “Valhalla,” named after the seat of the Teutonic gods.

Himmler forbade anyone who did not belong to the higher Führercorps of his order from visiting the castle. In 1939, as he once again inspected the construction, he told the commander in charge that it was a particular honor to be invited to the castle. The press was absolutely not to be allowed in, because any publication of the inside of the castle was forbidden. Himmler would not allow this under any circumstances because he feared being ridiculed by the fuss of the SS cult. But even more than that, since he was having the Freemasons persecuted as a secret society, he wanted Wewelsburg to be shrouded as a modern mystery meant to become an object of shy admiration for ordinary people.

SS Brigadeführer Karl Maria Weisthor, who had played such a grotesque role during the naming ceremony of Wolff’s son Thorisman, always stimulated the Reichsführer’s preference for things mystical. Weisthor was sure to find a willing listener for his fantastic ideas in Heinrich Himmler, the musing self-taught dreamer who despised exact science. The Brigadeführer’s real name was Wiligut. He claimed to have come from the family of Hermann der Cherusker, and that almost all of his relatives had been beheaded. The rest of his family roamed through Europe as
refugees, founded Vilna, and also found shelter in Swabia. They then wandered into Austria. He was born in Vienna in 1866 and supposedly managed to rise to the rank of captain during the First World War in the K.u.K. (Austro-Hungarian) Army. In Salzburg in 1918 he founded an anti-Semitic group, accusing the Jews, the Freemasons, and the “Rome churchmen” of multiple crimes, and occasionally spent time in a mental institution. Nevertheless, he became part of the personal staff of the Reichsführer SS. Because he supposedly had access to the spirituality of the ancient Teutons through his family traditions and other supernatural inspirations, he was promoted as high as Brigadeführer, a rank comparable to major general in the SS. It wasn’t until 1939 that the SS realized that they were dealing with a madman; he was dismissed from the Black Corps by reason of insanity.