HIMMLER'S HOLY LANCE PART 3:
DEATH, PATTON AND THE LANCE'S FATE.
When it came to storing money or valuables and committing robbery for Himmler, SS
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| Josef Spacil |
By June 1945, the CIC in Nuremberg knew there was something amiss. It was known that this city was where Charlemagne’s holy relics had been stored, and suspected that Eberhard Lutze, director of the German Museum, knew more than he was telling. He was taken for some rough interrogation at Ellingen where he told the Liebl cover story about the SS men removing the treasures. Spacil had told the same tale, but after listening to other SS prisoners the Intelligence men were not buying the story. Some had stated that Himmler planned use the Holy Roman relics as symbols of a new German resistance movement. This idea did not sit well with the Americans. SHAEF, (Supreme High Command Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force) had gathered together an impressive crew of art and monuments experts known as the MFAA (Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives), and they knew their business and what to look for.
It was at this point that Lieutenant Walter Horn arrived, a German speaking member of
So the much repeated story of Hitler dying on the day of the discovery is simply untrue. The Fuhrer had been dead almost two months when the Holy Lance was revealed again. And where was Patton’s Third Army in April 1945? Not beneath the streets in Nuremberg. They were miles away at Kronberg Castle in Frankfurt, where they had ordered the Hesse family, including Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Princess Margaret Hesse, to pack up and move out so that the castle could become a HQ and officer’s club. No doubt Patton, who had a great feeling for poetry and world history, eventually viewed the relics, and with regard to the spear, there is a curiously oblique reference in the first verse of one of his own poems entitled Through a Glass Darkly;
‘Perhaps I stabbed our Saviour
In His sacred helpless side.
Yet I’ve called His name in blessing
When in after times I died.’
So whilst the massed ranks of internet based paranormal/psychic/occult webmasters pass around the legend of the Holy Lance from site to site, complete with all its warts, you can make what you will of the main oracles of all this colourful mythology, Trevor Ravenscroft and his mentor, the psychic Dr. Stein. Without doubt, the true history of the Spear of Destiny is still bizarre and engrossing.
Christoph Lindenberg (1930-1999) was a lecturer at the University of Tuebingen and a prominent German writer and academic whose specialised work was his biography of Rudolf Steiner(1861 –1925). Steiner was a philosopher and social reformer who also spent a great deal of his life studying spiritualism and mysticism. When Trevor Ravenscroft’s The Spear of Destiny came out in 1973, it was natural that one of its main reviews would be by a German specialist, and Christoph Lindenburg gave the book all the scrutiny he could muster in the journal Die Drie.
One of Lindenberg’s main criticisms is that he doubts whether Dr. Johannes Stein met Hitler at all, and seems dubious about his relationship with Ravenscroft. Stein died in 1957, and The Spear of Destinydidn’t surface until 1973. Because of all the psychic/cosmic/higher consciousness stuff in the book, if you believe in such things, then we have to assume that at some time Stein was dictating to Ravenscroft from the grave. The main problem is that it is easy to believe that Ravenscroft really did intend his book to be simply a historical fantasy novel, yet it was promoted and issued as ‘real’ history, and a dyed in the wool academic like Lindenberg may not have grasped this. Lindenberg was an expert in the social, mystical and political scene in early 20thcentury Vienna, so it’s hardly surprising that he blows huge holes in Ravenscroft’s narrative about Hitler. Lindenberg really went to town on research for his review by scouring the Vienna Records office. Ravenscroft’s story, for example, features Adolf Hitler at the Vienna Opera House in the winter of 1910 – 1, naturally, to fit in with the ‘tramp’ image, in the ‘cheap seats’, sympathizing with the character Klingsor as he watches Wagner’s Parzifal. That might be fine for Quentin Tarantino, but Lindenberg reveals that it was impossible; the first performance of Wagner’s opera did not take place until January 14, 1914, three years later than Ravenscroft’s version. Although Ravenscroft/Stein even describe its proprietor in a suitably macabre way ‘a malevolent looking man with a bald pate, a partly hunched back and a toad-like figure’ there’s a problem with the bookshop run by Herr Ernst Pretszche. Lindenbergh combed Vienna’s police records and business directories covering the period 1892 to 1920 but found no such shop.
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| Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke is professor of Western Esotericism at the University of Exeter and author of several books including The Occult Roots of Nazism (1985). He also demolishes much of Ravenscroft’s work. For example: ‘The fictional nature of the whole episode surrounding the annotated copy of copy of Parzival is suggested by the similarity of Pretzsche’s obscure bookshop to the one described by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton in Zanoni, (1842), which probably served Ravenscroft as a literary model.’
Then there’s the image of the early Hitler. The media, past and present, has always loved rags to riches, impotent-to-powerful stories, and the thought of the pre-World War 1 Fuhrer as described by Stein as he sits by the window in Vienna’s Demel Café near the Hofburg Palace (it’s still in business today – great chocolate and fine coffee), reading Hitler’s scribbled notes in the copy of Parzival - ‘the footnotes of Satan’ - fits the bill. Stein glances through the window and sees ‘the most arrogant face and demonical eyes he had ever seen’. It was Hitler, clad in ‘a sleazy black overcoat, far too big for him’ a starving, ragged pavement artist, flogging post-card size watercolours, toes poking through his tattered shoes ‘beneath frayed trouser ends’.
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| Still g0ing strong: Cafe Demel, Vienna; Some yummy stuff available here. |
If we take on board the comments of the book’s erudite critics, then there appear to be more inaccuracies than you can shake a stick at. Ravenscroft has Stein going to search out Hitler in the ‘flophouse’ he’s living in on Vienna’s Meldemannstrasse, in August, 1912. But when he asks the hostelry’s manager, Herr Kanya, about Hitler’s whereabouts, Kanya informs Stein that Adolf had gone to Spittal-an-der-Drau where an aunt had left him a legacy. Thereafter, Hitler dressed well. But as Christoph Lindenberg points out in his review, whilst it’s true that Johanna Poelzl, Hitler’s aunt, did leave him a legacy, he’d collected in it March 1911, not August 1912.
The most thorough work on Hitler’s early years is by a German, Werner Maser (1922-2007) who in some detail collected all ascertained facts of Hitler’s youth. Among several works covering the period, his 1973 Hitler: Legend Myth and Reality offers many revelations, although other works on the Fuhrer by John Toland and Ian Kershaw are equally as absorbing. Maser’s research reveals that Hitler was not impoverished, and always had enough money. The so-called ‘flophouse’ on Meldenmannstrasse was more of a hotel than a Salvation Army hostel, and Hitler paid for a comparatively expensive room at 15 Kronen a month. He was also particular about his appearance. So the tragic image of a Chaplinesque gutter figure, trying to sell his pictures, is misleading. Yet as a myth to engender empathy with the destitute German proletariat years later, it was ideal.
The Holy Lance: More than one Destiny?
- Alan Baker, author of Invisible Eagle, The History of Nazi Occultism, thinks Hitler’s quest for the Hofburg loot was more about its cash value than its occult power.
- There are also those who insist that the real Holy Lance is not in the Hofburg today, but is in the possession of a secret German society who call themselves the Knights of the Holy Lance, and that a fake lance was constructed and returned to the museum.
- In Cracow, there’s another contender for the title Holy Lance, yet although it is alleged to have been there for eight centuries, its earlier history is unknown.
- Professor of medicine at Tulane and then Louisiana State University, Dr. Howard A. Buechner, M.D. served in World War II and is a retired colonel with the U.S. Army. He’s written extensively on the Spear. He claims he was contacted by a WW2 U-Boat commander, using the pseudonym ‘Capt. Wilhelm Bernhart.’ He also states that the Vienna lance is a fake. The ex-U-boat skipper maintains the genuine spear was sent with other Nazi treasures by Hitler to Antarctica on a mission commanded by a ‘Col. Maximilian Hartmann.’ In 1979 Hartmann allegedly recovered the treasures. Buechner received a logbook from Bernhart detailing this expedition with pictures of the objects recovered, claiming that after the Spear of Destiny was recovered, it was hidden by a Nazi secret society somewhere in Europe. Among others Buechner contacted to enquire about the alleged expedition was Hitler Youth Leader Artur Axmann. Buechener remains convinced that the story is true.
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| Das Birkenhead Boot: U 534 now a spooky Merseyside tourist attraction. |
- Another theory is that German U-boat U-534 was carrying the spear. Although Admiral Donitz had ordered all his U-boats to surrender as from 08.00 May 5th, 1945, on that same day U534 was underway heading north towards Norway in the Kattegat, north-west of Helsingor, Denmark when she was attacked by the RAF. She was commanded to stop, yet for some unknown reason U-534 refused to do so. She was badly damaged and began to sink by the stern. 49 of her 52 man crew survived including five who escaped via a torpedo hatch as she lay on the sea bed.Her commander, Kapitänleutnant Herbert Nollau, committed suicide in 1968.
In August 1993 the wreckage was raised from the seabed in the hope of finding hidden treasure on board – even perhaps the Holy Lance. Today you can visit her as a museum in the UK at Birkenhead. There were some advanced secret torpedoes on board, but no treasure, according to Danish businessman Karsten Ree who financed U-534’s salvage. No Spear of Destiny.
Vienna? Cracow? Antarctica? The Knights of the Holy Lance? We may never know, and that’s an essential factor in maintaining a truly engrossing mystery.
Those who have analysed the artefact state that the so-called Spear of Longinus is not the spear that pierced the side of Christ and has been dated to around the 13th century. But there is something about the nail, purported to be from the cross … just maybe …
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| 'Old Blood and Guts' General George Patton. |
As for the Spear of Destiny giving the owner ‘power over the world’, Austria was hardly a world power in 1938, nor is it today. The Third Reich was already powerful by the time Hitler got his hands on it. And if General Patton did get hold of it, with the atomic bomb under her belt, America was already powerful enough, although Patton didn’t last much longer than the Fuhrer. Aged 60, he died 12 days after a car crash in Germany of a pulmonary embolism in the afternoon of December 21, 1945. Sadly, not the kind of inglorious death ‘Old Blood and Guts’ had probably envisaged.
Just a couple of other myths about Der demonic Fuhrer. There’s a great line in the Mel Brooks movie, The Producers;‘Hitler! There was a painter – he could do a whole apartment, two coats, in one afternoon!’ Adolf was never a house painter. The jury may still be out on whether or not he only had one testicle, but the general academic consensus is that he had the full set.
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IF YOU ENJOY THIS KIND OF STUFF, THERE'S
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UNEXPLAINED PHENOMENA by Roy Bainton
from Constable & Robinson in the UK, or
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IF YOU ENJOY THIS KIND OF STUFF, THERE'S
STACKS MORE IN THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF
UNEXPLAINED PHENOMENA by Roy Bainton
from Constable & Robinson in the UK, or
The Running Press Inc., USA/Canada.
End of blatant commercial.