Himmler's Holy Lance Part 2:
The logbook
of a Relic
Trevor Ravenscroft (1921-1989) served as an officer with the Commandos in World War II and spent four years in Nazi prison camps after he was captured attempting to assassinate General Erwin Rommel in North Africa in 1941. Later, as a journalist and historian, he devoted much of his time to researching arcane and occult subjects, and was
fascinated by the early life of Adolf Hitler. His feeling for history, which he said was gained in a state of transcendent consciousness while imprisoned and achieving ‘higher levels of consciousness’ in Nazi Concentration Camps might not have been the best academic foundation for the work he produced. Yet those bleak years led him to study the legend of world destiny which has grown up around the Spear of Longinus. He was also fascinated by the influence of black magic, and wrote a further book on the quest for the Holy Grail.
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| Trevor Ravenscroft |
His greatest influence, and much of his contested information, came via a Viennese exile called Dr. Walter Johannes Stein (1891-1957). Here’s where it becomes a little creaky; Stein was undoubtedly a scholar, but he claimed to use ‘white magic’ to ‘clairvoyantly investigate’ historical events. When your primary sources become disembodied spirits, then anything can happen. His 1928 book The Ninth Century: World History in the Light of the Holy Grail was of great interest to Ravenscroft, and the possibility that Stein had known Hitler in his lost years in Vienna from 1909 to 1913 was the missing link in the occult chain he was attempting to complete. Ravenscroft firmly believed that Dr. Stein, whilst a student at the University of Vienna, was deeply into the occult and had met with Hitler, who was supposedly living in a flophouse and surviving off the proceeds of his lacklustre water colours.
The trouble with Ravenscroft’s Spear of Destiny is that when it was published, by the suitably named house of Neville Spearman, he would have preferred it to have come out as a novel. Yet it contained so much ostensible ‘research’ that it was issued as a history book. That said, it has been a massive best-seller and remains a fascinating read, with some genuinely dark, dramatic scenarios, yet the problem is, a lot of the ‘facts’ don’t stack up.
The Vienna Hitler experienced in his so-called ‘destitute’ years was a great centre of intellectual activity. It was the workshop of Freud and the philosopher Wittgenstein, the place where Gustav Mahler composed and conducted one of Europe’s greatest orchestras. Yet the rising tide of anti-Semitism lapped around their ankles, forcing Freud to escape to London whilst Mahler denied his Jewish ancestry by converting to Catholicism. Vienna was the perfect place for a dedicated student of the black arts to practice and prosper, and one such specialist in the darker side of ancient pan-German folklore was Guido von List (1848-1919). List crops up from time to time in the various legends about the occult roots of the Nazi party, but later members of his circle fell out with the Nazis because List’s mystical views on Aryan history did not match Himmler’s. List’s ideas, and his research into ancient runes, (the ‘sig’ rune, ϟ became the emblem of the SS ϟϟ) were used to found a Masonic society, which later embraced National Socialism. Subsequently, numerous members of the NSDAP embraced List’s ideas and writings in furthering their own political agendas.
Trevor Ravenscroft suggests that List was the inspiration for Hitler when, in the 1920s, the imprisoned Fuhrer designed the Nazi flag with the swastika. However, it was already in use by the mystical Thule Society. Between 1919 and 1921 Hitler frequented the library of a dentist from Sternberg, Dr. Friedrich Krohn, a very active member of the Thule Society. Dr. Krohn was named by Hitler in Mein Kampf as the designer of a flag similar to the one he conjured up.
According to Ravenscroft, Dr. Johannes Stein’s connection with Hitler is alleged to have taken place through an occult Viennese bookseller, Ernst Pretzche, in whose shop ‘in the old quarter by the Danube’ the future Fuhrer was a regular browser. It was there that Stein found a copy of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, which Dr. Stein found very useful as he was researching the same story for his work on the ninth century. In the book’s margins were handwritten annotations; looking them over Dr. Stein was both fascinated and repelled:
‘This was no ordinary commentary but the work of somebody who had achieved more than a working knowledge of the black arts! The unknown commentator had found the key to unveiling many of the deepest secrets of the Grail, yet obviously spurned the Christian ideals of the Knights and delighted in the devious machinations of the Anti-Christ. It suddenly dawned on him that he was reading the footnotes of Satan!’
These mysterious scribbled footnotes were, apparently, Hitler’s.
Ravenscroft tells us that Dr.Stein and Hitler went to see the Spear of Destiny together in Vienna’s Hofburg Imperial Museum. Stein was no stranger to the relic; he’d seen it before and was always deeply moved by it, claiming that it inspired in him the emotion expressed in the motto of the knights of the holy grail: Durch Mitleid wissen, ‘through compassion to self-knowledge.’
Now it gets strange again. Ravenscroft, when writing about Stein’s research regime, foregoes the usual haunts of the historians, such as archives and libraries. He informs us that Stein studied in something named the ‘Cosmic Chronicle’ a place where past present and future were united in a higher dimension of time. So whatever this psychic location was, as Stein had used the method, Ravenscroft, in his introduction, maintains that the peculiar Viennese boffin taught the same techniques to him, thus clearing the way to issue forth with a stream of unverifiable data. As you can’t footnote or cite clairvoyance, whatever Ravenscroft wrote we have to take on extremely fragile trust. Here then, is an amalgam of his and other researchers, knowledge of the Holy Lance’s history.
The Holy Lance: A Chronology
Constantine the Great (272 – 337), the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, also known as Constantine I or Saint Constantine, was Roman Emperor from 306 to 337. Constantine gave his mother, Helena, unlimited access to the imperial treasury in order to locate the relics of Judeo-Christian tradition. In 326 Helena made her way Palestine. Legend has it that she excavated a site where she discovered three different crosses. According to various Roman sources, Helena was looking for solid proof that the crosses she’d discovered were those used at Christ’s crucifixion. She selected a woman who was close to death. There are echoes of Goldilocks and the Three Bears here … apparently, the sick woman touched the first cross, no luck … then she touched the second cross, no sign of improvement in her health. But the the third and final cross was just right; whatever her ailments, she suddenly fully recovered. And so, Helena declared the third cross to be the True Cross. It must have been absolutely enormous, because today there are purported bits of it in churches all around the globe. Constantine ordered the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the site of discovery, and wherever Helena made more finds, churches were also built. There were other claims that Helena also found the nails used in the crucifixion. Due to their supposed miraculous power, she allegedly had one placed in the bridle of Constantine’s horse, and another in his helmet.
The Spear of Longinus was unearthed by Helena at the same time and place as the Holy Nails and the True Cross, and was later buried at Antioch to prevent its capture by the Saracens.
It had become transformed into a prime religious relic which had pierced the flesh and absorbed the blood of Jesus, and seemed to be ample proof of Christ’s death and his subsequent resurrection.
According to Ravenscroft, Hitler visited the Hofburg many times following his first sight of the lance with Stein. ‘He was excited to find that in century after century the astonishing legend of the Spear had been fulfilled for good and evil’. Although Himmler had employed scholars to research the history of the lance, their results were not as thorough as those gained through Dr. Stein’s ‘unique method of historical research involving ‘Mind Expansion’.’ So the richly textured Spear history issuing forth from Stein’s ‘Cosmic Chronicle’ offers some startling revelations. This ‘historical’ information from beyond the veil is doubtlessly rich fodder for X-Box or PlayStation games, but its veracity remains dubious. However, it’s dark, sinister fun, so let’s continue.
Apparently Mauritius, Commander of the Theban Legion (now venerated as St. Maurice) held the spear in his hand when he was martyred for refusing to serve the gods od Rome in 287 AD. Then the Roman Emperor Theodosius (347-395) tamed the Goths with the spear’s assistance.
One of the Holy Lance’s other early owners appears to have been Attila the Hun (?-453). How it came into his possession is unclear. Whilst campaigning in Italy, when his army were starving, he seems to have realised the relic wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Apparently he rode to the gates of Rome and hurled the lance at the feet of the Roman generals, shouting ‘Take back your Holy Lance! It is of no use to me, since I do not know Him that made it holy.’
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| Justinian |
In 529 AD the Emperor Justinian (482-565) is claimed to have brandished the spear aloft as he closed down the School of Athens, an event which is often cited as ‘the end of Antiquity’.
It was not until the ‘Anonymous Pilgrim of Piacenza’ St. Antoninus of Piancenza (570) visited Jerusalem that the Spear appears again. In his itinerary, Itinerarium Antonini Placentini) he wrote that he saw in the basilica of Mount Sion ‘the crown of thorns with which Our Lord was crowned and the lance with which He was struck in the side’. Then comes the first mention of Longinus. In the Laurentian Library at Florence there is a manuscript from the year 586, illuminated by one Rabulas detailing the opening of Christ’s side, and the illustration of the Roman soldier thrusting his lance has above it in Greek characters LOGINOS.
In 615 a lieutenant of the Persian King Khosrau II captured Jerusalem and spirited away the Holy Relics, including the Cross and Spear. According to the 7th-century Greek Christian chronicle of the world, the Chronicon Paschale, the point of the lance was broken off, and somehow came into the possession of Nicetas, the Patriarch of Constantinople who took it there and deposited it in the church of St. Sophia. Now we have two potential bits of the lance which somewhat confuses the story. Now the legend starts to become very German. Hitler must have been over the moon when he discovered that his early favourite military hero, General Charles Martel (686-741) a.k.a. ‘The Hammer’ and the grandfather of Charlemagne, had held the Holy Lance and actually used it as a weapon in the Battle of Poitiers in 732 AD, which defeated the Arabs and curtailed the spread of Islam throughout Europe.
The Hammer’s grandson, Charlemagne (742-814) the first Holy Roman Emperor, later dubbed by the Vatican ‘the Father of Europe’ is supposed to have slept with the spear at his side and carried it into 47 victorious battles.
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| Charlemagne |
If Hitler was thrilled by all this, Heinrich Himmler must have suffered moist palpitations when he discovered that the spirit which possessed the Reichsfuhrer-SS as a reincarnation, King Henry The Fowler (876-963) (like Himmler, another chicken fancier) ruled with the spear, as did his successor Holy Roman Emperor Otto the Great (912-973). Then it became the property of Frederick I Barbarossa (1122-1190) who had held the spear in his hands as he kissed the feet of the Pope in Venice. Here the other part of the legend surfaces – lose hold of the spear and you die. Barbarossa dropped it when he was crossing a stream in Sicily, and duly expired.
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| Barbarossa |
Next are the colourful chronicles of the First Crusade and the lance gets a mention on two important dates (which vary slightly depending on sources).
June 10, 1098: Peter Bartholomew, a peasant serving in Count Raymond of Toulouses ‘s army, had gone to the Holy Land from Provence. He claimed St. Andrew had appeared to him in several visions wherein he revealed the location of the lance. He informed the sceptical spiritual leader of the crusade, papal legate Bishop Adhémar of Le Puy, but he wasn’t impressed. However, Bartholmew led Count Raymond to the Cathedral of St. Peter in Antioch and after a day of strenuous, unproductive digging, leaped into the hole and produced a piece of iron which he announced as the lance. Raymond was awestruck, regarding it as an authentic relic, and the Crusaders, besieged in Antioch by Emir Kerboga, their confidence renewed, carried it with them into battle against the Muslims.
June 28, 1098: Battle of Orontes: in Antioch, holding the lance aloft, the Crusaders drove back the Turkish army of Emir Kerboga, Attabeg of Mosul, who failed in his mission to recapture the city. The 75,000 strong Muslim army was split by internal dissent and poor morale, defeated by a just 15,000 ill-equipped and worn-out Crusaders. The Holy Lance’s reputation was growing.
The larger Constantinople relic eventually fell into the possession of the Turks, and Sultan Bajazet II (1447-1481) gave the lance to Pope Innocent VIII (1432-1492) as a peace offering, because the Pope was holding Bajazet’s brother Zisim as prisoner. It has been in the Vatican ever since, preserved under the dome of St. Peter’s. Pope Benedict XIV (1675-1758) sent to Paris for an exact drawing of the spear’s broken-off point of the lance, which when compared with the larger St. Peter’s relic satisfied the Pope that when matched together, the two relics had once formed one single blade.
The second, smaller piece of the lance had been incorporated into an icon, and centuries later, in 1244 it was presented by Baldwin II of Constantinople to the only canonised King of France, St. Louis IX (1214-1270). Louis built Sainte-Chapelle in Paris to house the Holy Lance, the crown of thorns, a fragment of the True Cross, relics of the Virgin Mary, and even the Holy Sponge, which had been dipped in vinegar at Christ’s crucifixion. As for the missing, larger bit of the lance, there are reports that in 670, various scribes saw it in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. Ravenscroft even has the spear in England at one point, in a story told by William of Malmesbury of the giving of the Holy Lance to King Athelstan of England (893-939). The Athelstan Museum at Malmesbury tells us on their website www.athesltanmuseum.co.uk that:
‘Duke Hugh of the Franks, when seeking the hand of Eadhild, Athelstan’s half-sister, sent Athelstan relics which included the Lance of Charlemagne which had pierced the side of Jesus. He also gave him the Sword of Constantine which had fragments of the cross including a nail set in crystal in the hilt. Athelstan gave these relics to Malmesbury abbey. Others, more bizarre, like the head of St. Branwaladr or St.Samson’s arm he gave to other churches.’
The trail goes cold for a while until Sir John Mandeville, in the work The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, a book circulated between 1357 and 1371, which relates his supposed travels, written in Anglo-Norman French, said that when he was in both Paris and Constantinople in 1357, he saw the blade of the Holy Lance in both locations. The Constantinople piece appears to have been the larger, although much of Mandeville’s work is considered by some scholars to be fanciful.
In 1411 the son of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, Sigismund of Luxemburg (1368-1467) was made Holy Roman Emperor. As Nuremburg was also Sigismund’s birthplace, it was fast becoming the unofficial capital of the Holy Roman Empire. In 1424, Emperor Constantine’s bit of the lance, which enshrined a nail or some portion of a nail of the Crucifixion, became part of the Holy Roman regalia in Nuremburg. In that same year, Sigismund announced:
‘It is the Will of God that the Imperial Crown, Orb, Sceptre, Crosses, Sword and Lance of the Holy Roman Empire must never leave the soil of the Fatherland.’ The relics became known collectively as the Reichkleinodien or Imperial Regalia. They were taken from Prague, his capital, home to his birth place, Nuremberg. The regalia seemed safe for a couple of centuries, but war was never far away.
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| The Imperial Regalia of the Holy Roman Empire |
In the spring of 1796 Napoleon Bonaparte was rampaging his way across Europe and heading in the direction of Nuremburg. The city council became concerned for the safety of the Imperial Regalia. If the spear fell into Bonaparte’s hands – what then? Therefore the treasures were moved to Vienna, where they were entrusted to a certain Baron von Hügel, on the understanding that he’d return the objects as soon as peace had been restored.
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| Napoleon Bonaparte |
The Holy Roman Empire was officially dissolved in 1806, but of course Bonaparte still had unfinished business. In the meantime, Baron von Hügel had pulled off a fast one. Whilst arguments raged over the ownership of the relics, he flogged the entire collection, including the Spear, to the Habsburgs. It wasn’t until Napoleon had been defeated at Waterloo that Nuremberg’s confused and angry councillors realised what had occurred, and asked for their treasures back, but the Austrians hung onto them. And there they stayed until the Anschluss, when Adolf Hitler incorporated Austria into his Reich and took the Spear of Destiny for himself.
Ravenscroft’s telling of the night of March 14 1938 when Hitler and Himmler purloined the Holy Lance and the rest of the regalia is intriguing. He writes as if he was actually there, which he patently was not – and neither was his oracle Dr. Stein, who had fled to England in 1933 to escape Himmler’s arrest warrant. To it remains difficult to prove this is what actually took place. When Hitler returned from visiting his home town, Linz, he moved into his palatial suite at Vienna’s Imperial Hotel. Himmler and a few SS officers had arrived days before to clear the way for taking over Austria by arresting prominent members of the First Republic. The SS rounded up Jews, Communists, Social Democrats, any political dissenters they could find and packed them all off to concentration camps. By 12 March, 70,000 people had been arrested. Himmler had been on the case of the Holy Lance from the day he arrived, and organised troops of the elite SS-Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler as well as Austrian SS platoons under command of Austria’s SS leader, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, to form a ring of steel around the Weltliche Schatzkammer museum in the Hofburg. Every member of the museum staff right down to the cleaners were ‘interviewed’ by Gestapo officials and went into Himmler’s sinister card index. If the bona fide Vienna police force sought to intervene in anyway with enquiries regarding the constitutionally illegitimate cordon around the Hofburg, the SS had carte blanche to shoot to kill.
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| The SS Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler |
Just after midnight on the 14th, Hitler left the Imperial with Himmler and they made their way to the Hofburg where they were met by the General Secretary of the Ahnenerbe, Wolfram von Sievers, the Nazi’s internal ‘legal’ expert (and Martin Bormann’s father in law), Major Walter Buch and Kaltenbrunner. Hitler and Himmler went inside to be alone with the lance, and allegedly Hitler remained in solitude with it for an hour before leaving. Together with Himmler, he now believed he held the key talisman for successful conquest. In October 1938 the treasures of Charlemagne were loaded onto a sealed SS train and returned to Germany, to end up on display in Nuremberg.
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| Kaltenbrunner with Himmler |
Now the legend is bent and shaped to suit every ‘Nazi occult’ nerd’s fantasies. Web site after website will tell you the following, usually repeated word for word:
‘During the final days of the war in Europe, at 2:10 PM on April 30th, 1945, Lt. Walter William Horn, serial number 01326328, of the United States 7th Army, took possession of the Spear in the name of the United States government.’ Of course, that ‘serial number’ makes it all very official. April 30thfits in neatly with the Spear legend – it’s the same day Hitler committed suicide. Ravenscroft also tells a colourful yarn about General Patton handling and inspecting the spear and barking at those gathered around him, berating German officials who can’t answer his questions. But for the story of the rediscovery of the Holy Roman regalia we need better sources. One of the finest books on the mass theft of European art is Lynn H. Nicholas’s The Rape of Europa (Macmillan, London 1994). What happened is as follows.
Mayor Liebl of Nuremberg was a dedicated Nazi whose brief was to protect the Reich’s treasures in the city. After heavy bombing in 1944, he consulted Himmler on the security of the treasures. Convinced that they might be discovered by the advancing US Army, Liebl had elaborate bunkers built 80 feet (24m) beneath the 11thcentury Kaiserburg. The bunkers were well disguised because their entrance was through the back of what appeared to be a prosaic little shop on a side street. These tunnels stretched out beneath the city’s streets. Special copper containers were constructed to contain the treasures and were soldered shut. They were then walled up in great secrecy in one of the passages on March 31 1944 by two city officials, Dr. Lincke and Dr. Friese, in the presence of Mayor Liebl. They were even meticulous enough to build what they thought would be a convincing cover story, that the relics had been taken from the city to Austria, where the SS had sunk them in Lake Zell. To add weight to this smokescreen, they got two SS members to move boxes into a truck and driven away. This way they probably hoped witnesses might verify their story.
On April 16th 1945 US troops entered Nuremberg. Still no doubt in fear of Himmler and losing his confidence over his stewardship of the treasures, Mayor Liebl, fanatical Nazi to the last, burned all his documents and on April 19 committed suicide. He no doubt thought that at least if he was dead, then the treasures might never be discovered.
The Concluding Part 3,
Death, Patton and The Lance's fate
To follow.
And it's all in the Mammoth Book of Unexplained Phenomena
(UK: Constable & Robinson, USA Running Press Inc.)
600 pages of head-scratching weirdness.
