His name was Otto Rahn, a scholar of the Christian sect of the Cathars, and he was convinced that the Grail was not the cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper but a set of tablets hidden in southern France. The failure of the search commissioned by the Germans, his fall from grace, and the hypotheses about his end
The morning of March 13, 1939Two hikers were climbing a mountainside near the town of Söll in the Austrian Tyrol when they came across the frozen body of a relatively young man. He was lying face down, and next to him were two bottles of pills, one empty and the other half-full, with no labels identifying their contents.
The local police recovered the body, which showed no signs of violence, but contrary to custom, no one ordered an autopsy to determine the cause of death. The case attracted attention because that same afternoon a car arrived in the town, manned by a driver and two SS officers who supervised how the necessary paperwork was done for his burial.
They already knew who the dead man on the mountain was: his name was Otto Rahn, 35 years old, and had been a member of that special force of Adolf Hitler until a few months before, when without giving any written explanation, he requested the discharge of the man who commanded it, Heinrich Himmler.
The only Jew in the SS
He was buried in Kufstein in a private ceremony, and a death certificate was never issued. The SS statement, signed by Karl Wolf, a senior officer in the force, said: “In the midst of a mountain snowstorm this March, the SS. Obersturmfuhrer Otto Rahn, passed away tragically. We mourn the passing of our comrade, a decent SS man and writer of notable works of historical research.”
When describing the deceased, the official text did not lie when describing his profession, but avoided saying that his specialty was esotericism. Nor did it say what distinguished Rahn from the rest of the SS members: his Jewishness, which was not unknown to Hitler or Himmler.
Beyond the official information, they soon began to spread in very low voices two versions of Rahn's death. One of them—not without mystery—claimed that he had committed suicide by imitating a ritual of an ancient Catholic sect. The other, more sinister, claimed that a group of SS officers had taken him to the mountain and forced him to commit suicide by swallowing those pills, which no one bothered to identify.
It was known, because he had made it clear in his works, that Rahn had dedicated a large part of his life to searching for the Holy Grail, the cup that Jesus Christ used at the Last Supper, a task that he began on his own and continued doing later on the orders of Heinrich Himmler, who, upon giving him the commission and in order to be able to officially pay him a salary, made him the only Jew to wear the black uniform of the fearsome SS.
Because if you find it The Holy Grail was Rahn's obsession, as it was of the Nazi leaders. -among whom was Adolf Hitler- who drew on esoteric legends that justified the supposed existence of a superior race destined to dominate the world: the Aryans. This uneven and explosive partnership to achieve the same goal had ended in the only possible way: in a resounding failure and in the foreseeable death of Rahn, who, not finding what everyone was looking for, lost the favor of his leaders.
Specialist in heretics
Otto Wilhelm Rahn He was born in Michelstadt, Germany, on February 18, 1904, and grew up in a middle-class German-Jewish family. The son of a judge at the Mainz courts, his family's destiny was law, a subject he studied between 1922 and 1926 at the faculties of Giessen, Freiburg, and Heidelberg. He did not neglect his studies, but devoted his free time to lectures on German philology and history. It was there that he also began to take an interest in an esoteric view of history, supported by the lectures of Baron de Gail, an expert in medieval legends such as Parsifal, the Circle of Arthur, and, of course, the Holy Grail.
From those classes and from his own readings, what most attracted him was the Cathar culture—a heretical sect of Christianity—so much so that he dedicated his doctoral thesis to the Albigensian-Cathar heresy, for which he traveled through France, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland between 1928 and 1932. The Cathars were a religious sect that spread throughout Europe between the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries and openly challenged the authority of the Catholic Church. In their creed, they rejected the idea that the temptations of the flesh were the work of evil, denied the divinity of Christ because of his human condition, and believed that human beings were immortal souls trapped in a physical body by the work of the devil. It was also said that they had held in their hands—and hidden from the world—the cup that Jesus had used at the Last Supper.
To carry out their research, Rahn also spent several months in the village of Lavelanet, in Languedoc, France., where he explored the ruins of Montesegur and the caves in the surrounding mountains, two sites deeply linked to the development of Catharism and its resistance to papal attacks. Using the information he gathered, he wrote a book, "Crusade Against the Grail," which was highly regarded by many German experts on medieval esotericism and, above all, by defenders of Germanic mysticism of the National Socialist persuasion, such as Nigel Pennik.
Among his most passionate readers was also a German politician whose name was beginning to be heard within Nazism, Heinrich Himmler.
The Cathars and the Grail
In his works, Rahn argued that the cup used by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper could be buried among the ruins of Monstsegur, the walled town where the Cathars mounted their last stand of resistance against the Crusader troops that Pope Innocent III sent to France to finish them off.
The Cathars were dualists and believed in the existence of two opposing principles: good and evil. For some Cathar theologians, both principles existed from the beginning, but others considered the evil principle a secondary creation, the product of the evil desire of one of the creatures of the one good God: the fallen angel. For them, The material world had not been created by God but by Satan.
The devil, unable to create life, had built a man out of clay and asked God to place a soul inside him, but when the soul entered the man, it refused to stay. To prevent it from leaving, Satan kept it prisoner.
These postulates meant an open questioning of official Catholic theology, so, at the beginning of the 13th century, Pope Innocent III, the most important pontiff of the Middle Ages, decided to exterminate them as a "plague" that had settled in the very heart of Christianity. To achieve this, he gave precise instructions to the Christian princes who joined the crusade: "If anyone receives, defends, or favors heretics, he must immediately be considered infamous, and may not be admitted to public office nor receive any inheritance. If he were a judge, his sentences will be considered null; if a cleric, he will be immediately demoted and lose all office and benefit, and, In any case, the heretic's assets will be confiscated," he ordered them.
Ultimately, the Cathars were defeated, but the Grail—which Rahn assumed was among the "property" to be confiscated—was hidden to save it from the clutches of the papal forces. To support this hypothesis, the Jewish esotericist He bet on the authenticity of the legend that claimed the Cathars had buried a fabulous treasure in Montsegur, the most important piece of which was "a stone fallen from the sky," which he identified with the Grail that Parsifal, a knight of King Arthur, had found in a castle in Montsalvat. He added a disturbing element to his theory: for him, the Grail was not a cup but a set of tablets with runic inscriptions, engraved on wood or stone, on which all existing hermetic knowledge was collected, a kind of Emerald Tablet.
Rahn not only defended his theory wherever he went to give lectures, but he was also obsessed with finding those tablets, a source of wisdom capable of providing a power unknown to ordinary people. To search for them, he needed money he didn't have. He was held back and almost without hope.
A Jew in the SS
What Rahn didn't know was that one of the highest ranking Nazis in power had read his “Crusade against the Grail” and he was determined to undertake his own search for this sacred piece, supposedly hidden in the south of France. Nor did he imagine it when, in mid-1935, he received an unsigned telegram offering him 1.000 Reichsmarks a month if he would undertake the search for the relic. If he accepted, he had to report to a specific address. When he arrived at the location in Berlin, he was in for a major surprise when he immediately recognized the face of the man who had received it. He was Heinrich Himmler, one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich. Thus began an uneven, if mutually convenient, alliance.
Like every Jew in Germany, Otto Rahn had no sympathy for the Nazis. On the contrary, he feared them, but when the opportunity arose to undertake the search without worrying about money, the temptation was stronger than his fear. At that time, he frequented anti-Nazi circles, which earned him much criticism from his friends for accepting the offer. His response is recorded in a letter he sent to one of them: "A man needs to eat. What did you expect me to do? Say no to Himmler?" he wrote.
For his part, the SS chief had not only read the esotericist's books but had thoroughly investigated the man before making his offer. He not only knew he was Jewish, but that he was also homosexual. These were two compelling reasons for him to despise him, but he was still using him as an instrument. Rahn's association with Himmler began with two significant concessions that the Cathar scholar had to make. The first was to write another book, "The Court of Lucifer," in which The esotericist had to “Germanize” his theory about the Grail to bring it into line with Nazi ideology. In this second work, he postulated that the Cathars did not consider Lucifer to be evil, but rather identified him as Luzbel, the bearer of Light, and assimilated him with the North, unlike Satan, the evil one, identified with the South. Aside from the public edition, Himmler commissioned a small, deluxe print run of the new work and gave a copy to Hitler for his birthday.
The second concession was even more serious, and made Rahn the only recognized Jew to wear the SS uniform. That way, he could collect the 1.000 Reichsmarks Himmler had offered him: the salary of a lieutenant in the Nazis' most feared force. To fulfill his mission, throughout 1936 he traveled to France, Italy, and Iceland, where he conducted archaeological excavations on behalf of the Third Reich to find the coveted Holy Grail. He had high hopes, but all those searches ended in just as many failures. An inglorious end.
After a year without any results or clues that would suggest Rahn could succeed in his search for the Grail, Himmler began to tire of the expert he had both admired and despised. But dismissing him was also a way of admitting his own failure, and that was a price the Nazi leader wasn't willing to pay, because it would expose him to Hitler.
The end of Otto Rahn
Then Rahn handed him the opportunity on a silver platter. In late 1936, he was accused of participating in a confusing drunken episode, for which he was forced to swear to abstain from alcohol and sent as a simple guard to the Dachau extermination camp, where he witnessed the atrocities committed in the name of ideological and racial purity. He was also forced to commit in writing not to drink alcohol and to marry to conceal his homosexuality.
It was too much for him: he couldn't bear it and resigned. In his letter requesting his discharge, he wrote to Himmler that he was doing so “for reasons so serious that they can only be communicated orally.” The head of the SS refused to hear his reasons and replied with a one-word telegram: “Yes.” Out of work and ostracized, he began to prepare a plan to leave Germany, assuming he would have to do so clandestinely because they would never grant him permission. “It is no longer possible to live in the country that has become my homeland. I can no longer sleep or eat. It is as if a nightmare were descending upon me,” he wrote to one of his few remaining friends.
It was never known whether Otto Rahn He traveled by his own means to Söll, in Austria annexed by the Third Reich, or if he was taken there by force and taken up the mountain so that his body would not appear on German territory. No one bothered to find out if he had stayed in Sóll or nearby in the days before his death, and no letter was found among his clothes that would explain the reasons for his alleged suicide.
This is the first time I've found an article that describes Otto Rahn as Jewish. Much of the rest of what is said in the article is easier to find in texts published on the Internet. Catharism was a medieval European religion, it had little to do with Catholicism or Christianity, for some unknown reason the German Nazis became fond of Catharism influenced by Otto Rahn, whom the Nazis hired as one of their greatest experts in occultism, he was the one who instilled in them the wonders of Catharism, until the Nazis got fed up with him, and murdered him, although it is easier to find the version in which one day he went naked to the icy peak of a mountain, to reflect in the Cathar style, and there he stayed, and still no one has found him turned into an ice cube. In the Middle Ages, the Cathars were exterminated by the Catholic Church as heretics, although they closely resembled the Catholics of the time, or the most primitive Catholicism or that prevailing in the Middle Ages. For example, they preached salvation through asceticism and the strict rejection of the material world, which the Cathars perceived as the work of the devil. In this religion they were very sexually abstinent, as medieval Catholics did, or for example from these Cathar customs also derives one that neo-Nazis copy the most, that of only eating vegetables, although at least the Cathars also ate fish, including fish was also copied from what the Catholic Church instilled throughout Europe, because in the Middle Ages everyone believed that fish were not food for the Devil just because they were like vegetables, because they did not fornicate, just for this detail they were no longer food for the Devil. It is because of this religion that neo-Nazis, who also exist among the Spanish, can believe that their much-admired Hitler was a kind of Cathar saint, because he was a vegetarian and no sex is known about him, or no sex is known that was normal enough to present to the public. Although the above is more of a deduction, there is no shortage of neo-Nazis who have these customs more typical of environmental communists, including the protection of animals, also copying their beloved leader Hitler along with his dog Blondie ("Rubita" in Spanish) and some initial laws for the protection of some animals that Nazi Germany passed. So much so that, even though Spain is one of the countries least committed to ecology because that's what the right-wing and fascists want, along with their very interested friends, the Spanish businessmen, a small group of neo-Nazis has even been seen demonstrating alongside animal rights communists against bullfighting, with bullfights and many other popular festivals involving bulls being a taboo subject among the right-wing and Spanish fascists.
Himmler was particularly disturbed by these occult or esoteric matters, due to the widespread interest in these matters in those years. Apparently, since he was a child, Himmler couldn't stop hearing a cousin tell a family story about a distant relative who was burned as a witch. They later based the Nazis' racist ideology on stories that mixed fantasies taken as historical facts with superstitions and occult beliefs. For example, the Nazis, perhaps thanks to Himmler, considered witches to be of the Aryan race, women with expertise or powers from beyond the grave, and that's why the Catholic Church and other Christian sects would have murdered them. In other words, once again, the Nazis were doing and believing everything the opposite of what is most normal. The Nazis swindled like-minded Germans by posing as exemplary Christians, only to seize power and eliminate their opponents, and then introduce their new invented religion based on their racist and occult nonsense—or at least that was the religion for the Nazi SS, of whom there were quite a few. These new beliefs were in no way based on traditional Christian values; not even in sex were they as traditional as they made out to be. For example, the SA of the homosexual leader Ernst Rohm was where many homosexual Nazis ended up. According to some testimonies, Hitler was apparently a sadomasochist who liked young girls to beat him and urinate on him. This is perhaps another reason why there are so many homosexual or lesbian European far-rightists today, except in Spain, or perhaps also Italy, which are the exception that proves the rule. The Nazis searched the world for the fanciful origin of the Aryan race and for religious objects that they believed to have occult significance. In October 1940, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler visited the monastery of Montserrat to find the Holy Grail, following the research of Otto Rahn, seeking eternal power in this mystical relic. They searched for it in Montserrat because they might have confused it, or had been confused, with the medieval Cathar castle of Montesegur; the names are very similar. They also found other possible clues that coincided with the Spanish site, just as many clues would surely coincide if you look for any spot on the map that a monkey points to.
The Nazi searches in Spain didn't end there. First, they looked for signs of Aryan similarities among the Basques. They went to the Basque Country or Euskadi to film a report to show what the Basques were like and how they lived in Germany. Some right-wing and fascist gossips in Spain claim that during the Civil War, the then Basque nationalist or separatist government attempted a military agreement with Nazi Germany, supposedly taking advantage of the camaraderie they saw in the Nazis who visited them or because they were fellow citizens. With recent DNA analysis, that is, with science not with stories or magic, the Basques have turned out to be the Spanish, although most Basques do not like to be told that they are Spanish, with the DNA that is considered the most European standard, perhaps together with that of England or, in general, with the most Western part of Europe, that is, these Europeans are the ones who have the highest percentage of male DNA or Y Chromosome R1b, which was inherited some 4.500 years ago by the Yamna or Yamnaya invaders from the steppes of present-day Ukraine-Russia, while in the feminine part or mitochondrial DNA of the European ideal, the ancient European DNA mostly remained, with inheritances from the many previous invasions or immigrants from Anatolia and the Middle East, which were mixed with what can be considered the most native European, that of the Paleolithic who were black or very dark skinned and black and somewhat curly hair. On the other hand, the Spaniards that the fascists and Nazis considered the most "Aryan Spaniards", who are the Galicians and surrounding regions, Asturias, León and western Castilla La Vieja, are the ones who have the highest percentage of Moorish and Jewish DNA. It is believed that when Spain was al-Andalus they took refuge in the northwest and especially in Portugal because in the rest of Spain the Spanish Catholics were too overexcited killing Jews and Moors.
The Nazis also went to the Canary Islands to search for the superior Aryan race, one of their backup plans in case Tibet failed or if the Aryan race had fled from Tibet to other places. In the Canary Islands there is also another curiosity according to recent discoveries with DNA analysis, many of the Spaniards from the Canary Islands are those who have much higher percentages of "bad" DNA, more than even the Galicians, currently by the female part of the DNA the Canarians of some of the islands are up to 70-80% sub-Saharan, which is practically pure black DNA, or sub-Saharan as it is said to not look bad, is that even the DNA of the current Canarian Spaniards is such a sub-Saharan or pure Moorish Berber DNA, which will help clarify the evolution of the DNA of the current Moors, among other things because the Moors mixed a lot, also with DNA from the Yamana or Yamnaya invasions of the Russian steppes, and they also have a deep-rooted racism against the Berbers, they do not want to know anything about the Berbers although the majority are Berbers or have close Berber relatives. Although the local inhabitants of the Canary Islands were sub-Saharan, as is logical due to their geographical proximity, when the Spanish invaded they set to work on whitening, and apparently there were many Spanish macho men, just macho men without women, who did to the native women the same thing that the Yamna or Yamnaya supposedly did throughout Europe, which is why the feminine part of the Canarian DNA retains a lot of sub-Saharan DNA and the masculine is the average male DNA in Spaniards, although it is easy for them to show more of the Canarian women with lighter skin or even platinum blondes on television. Surely, everyone knows, some disturbed Nazi said something like the original Aryans arrived flying on a magic carpet from Shangri-La in Tibet, or also right now the Canary Islands are one of the world's centers of UFO sightings, disturbed people from all over the world believe that it is a very probable landing base of the various ones that extraterrestrials have spread around the planet Earth, apart from that it has a great importance for other magics, this is why some of the most disturbed sects from all over the world come to the Canary Islands.
The Nazis' interest in the Basques stemmed from their discovery of similarities, such as the use of the swastika, one of the primitive symbols of Basque culture, which is not found in Spain. "But figures such as Werner Best, SS Obergruppenführer and personal aide to Reinhard Heydrich, also tried to convince his superiors of the need to find common ground between the two cultures. The closest contact was with Eugéne Goyheneche, born in Ustariz (in the French Basque Country) and a member of the PNV (Basque Nationalist Party). He met with Best to discuss the next steps. He sent Best a memorandum, 'Euskadi and the Europe of the Future,' in which he "praises the figure of Adolf Hitler and presents the Basques as potential allies of the Germans." But in Germany, Goyheneche's report was largely mocked. According to what has been published in recent years, among the documents declassified by the French government, according to "a two-and-a-half-page report dated July 8, 1945, by MA217, alias Cano, 'a very good paid agent' of the French counterintelligence service in Madrid, the Basque Nationalist Party made three attempts to approach high-ranking officers of the Wehrmacht and the SS during the Nazi occupation of part of the French Basque Country in the midst of World War II to establish and unify the Basque provinces into an autonomous zone." This is what so excites the Spanish right-wing and fascists now in democracy, among other things because it would prove them right in their usual accusations against Basque separatists that they are Nazis and racists, or because they happen to be democrats and opposed to traditional Nazism. On the other hand, all Basques, like any moderately educated democratic Spaniard, keep the Nazi bombing of Guernica very much in mind. However, not all Basque nationalists thought this way during World War II, and according to a recent documentary, "many believed that German support could help overthrow Franco. That's why members of the PNV agreed to establish contacts with the Nazi Party to test the situation and see what kind of agreement could be reached if they emerged victorious. It was the Germans who took the first step, and despite these meetings, an agreement never materialized. What's more, when they came to light, they were disavowed by the leadership of the Basque Nationalist Party. What's not covered in the documentary is that other nationalists outside of Spain did sign pacts with the Nazis."
“All of this connects with the ideas of Werner Best, an SS officer and leader of the so-called Final Solution to the Holocaust, who believed that states were artificial creations without any power. For him, European ethnic groups were natural, and he wanted to build a Europe based on their unity. The criterion would be racial purity, and so he proposed granting autonomy to the Scots, Flemish, Galicians, Basques, and Catalans. As the film's director comments, "they wanted to build a new Europe in which the borders would be marked by racial purity."
Nothing new under the sun for anyone with even a modicum of knowledge about the Nazis, with the exception that proves the rule, also in this respect, that of the Spanish fascists and neo-Nazis, who only serve to further confuse the reader when it comes to understanding, even minimally, these crazy and rather confusing extremist ideologies. Since their intellectual guarantor, none other than the philosopher Nietzsche, alias "the Prophet," although we must not forget that he was an atheist and nihilist, was not a nationalist, nor was he anti-Semitic, or at least only on an intellectual level. This would be another tall tale or a manipulation due to the reinterpretations the Nazis gave him based on the manipulated books that his despicable sister Elisabeth Nietzsche allowed the Nazis to publish, including a highly manipulated biography that the Nazis take as genuine, writings and books rewritten by her and by the Nazis who seized the so-called "Nietzsche Archive." For Nietzsche, states were artificially delimited borders that would only serve to facilitate the appropriate conditions for their "supermen" to develop, but only intellectual supermen, not the violent, military, bodybuilding, or anything similar that the fascists and Nazis have manipulated.