Hitler's Search for the Holy Grail

PBS ^ | 11/30/01 | PBS

[Aquinasfan]

Hitler's Search for the Holy Grail

When Steven Spielberg made a movie about an intrepid archaeologist’s fight to keep a precious and powerful artifact — the Holy Grail — out of the hands of the Nazis, it was not widely known that the tale was based on truth. There really was a Nazi archaeological unit and it did send teams across the world to try to find the Grail.

History meets Indiana Jones in HITLER’S SEARCH FOR THE HOLY GRAIL, a one-hour documentary airing on PBS Monday, November 27, 2000, 10:00 p.m. ET (check local listings). Host Michael Wood (IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT) explores how history was used as a political tool and how the theories of the Nazi historical department provided the ideology used by the SS (Schutzstaffel – "protection squadron") to justify genocide.

The program outlines how the racialist theories of the SS were drawn from archaeology, myth and legend, as well as selected history. Nazi ideas about "Aryans" and the "master race" came out of historical and ethnic fantasies in which legends such as the Holy Grail and the lost city of Atlantis — supposed to be a home of the Aryan race — played their part.

HITLER’S SEARCH FOR THE HOLY GRAIL contains rare and previously unseen footage, including

* color film of the Nazi expedition to Antarctica;
* film of the Nazi expeditions across the world, from the Baltic to Venezuela;
* footage of the 1938 expedition to Tibet, with the measuring of skulls of Tibetans;
* documentary evidence for expeditions to Peru, Iceland and Iran, and footage of SS chief Heinrich Himmler at archaeological sites.

The film conjures the eerie world that permeated the thoughts of key members of the Nazi leadership, especially Himmler, and shows how top scholars, some of them still alive, collaborated in this project.

HITLER’S SEARCH FOR THE HOLY GRAIL includes interviews with a former member of Himmler’s personal staff and the wife of a top SS commander, who give unique and unrepentant insight into the mentality of the Nazi inner circle. The program also includes a dramatic recording of the Nuremburg trial of Wolfram Sievers, the head of the SS Ahnenerbe ("Ancestral Heritage Society"), Himmler’s archaeological and historical unit. The Ahnenerbe’s task, according to Himmler, was "to restore the German people to the everlasting godly cycle of ancestors, the living and the descendants."

Himmler was a member of the Thule Society, an extreme nationalist group named after one of the mythical homes of the German people. It was the society’s almost mystical belief in the greatness of the German past — to which Himmler subscribed with fanatical devotion — that was to provide the intellectual ballast to Nazi belief in race and destiny.

The chief administrator of the Ahnenerbe, Dr. Wolfram Sievers, had been heavily involved in the criminal medical experiments that were carried out on Jews in concentration camps, all to prove racial differences and the superiority of the Aryan race. After Germany’s defeat in 1945, Sievers was brought before a war crimes tribunal, found guilty and sentenced to death. He was executed on June 2, 1948. The archaeological world of the Ahnenerbe died with Hitler, Himmler and Sievers; the Ahnenerbe, too, melted away. Many of its top archaeologists, however, returned, unpunished, to university life, only to re-emerge as leading academics in postwar Germany.

Day & time: check with your local station

Underwriters: Public Television Viewers and PBS. Producer: Maya Vision. Producer: Rebecca Dobbs. Director: Kevin Sim. Format: CC STEREO   TV Calendar PBS Previews PBS Picks Telstar/C-band Schedule Primestar, Dish Network & DirecTV Schedule PBS KIDS Channel PBS YOU Schedule    

[Aquinasfan]

Them Nazis were sooo crazy.

I see them more as evil than crazy. There is a perverse logic to evil.

[steve-b]

To all indications, Himmler was the big occultist in the Nazi inner circle. Hitler recognized the utility of the symbolism and ritual, but seems not to have been a true believer.

[Doctor Doom]

They were evil. That was a line from an old Warner Brothers cartoon. I'm just full of pop culture references today. :)

[Slainte]

Cicero did not choose wisely.

[Hemingway's Ghost]

LOL! Don't forget the Nazi comedy writing unit that came up with the joke that killed.

One of the funniest skits ever, but I forget the jokes---anyone remember them?

[Frances_Marion]

Those Indiana Jones movies get even better when you realize they're all written around factual history. Hitler really was interested in acquiring the Ark of the Covenant and the Grail, both of which he thought would make his armies invincible. IJ and the Temple of Doom's villains are the Cult of the Thuggee, a cult of Kali worshippers who were infesting India in the 19th/20th centuries before the British wiped them out.

[ibbryn]

Those Nazis are nuts!

[Fithal the Wise]

Although his sources have been questioned, Trevor Ravenscroft's "Spear of Destiny" is an interesting supplementary read.

[Former Proud Canadian]

...Cult of the Thuggee, a cult of Kali worshippers who were infesting India in the 19th/20th centuries...

Is that where we get the word, "thug"?

[gumbo]

Whatever he was looking for, he thought of as essentially a magical means to gain power, not as the goal of a religious quest.

Thank you. I was just about to ask, why would Hitler be interested in the Holy Grail, given that he clearly did not believe in the holiness of Christ. Then I found you'd already answered my question.

[Romulus]

Although King Arthur wasn't evil like Hitler...

Or totalitarian.

[#1CTYankee]

It was great!

I particularly liked the part when those French guys catapulted a cow on them.
Oh, and then they sent in the Trojan Rabbit, that was too funny.

One thing, I don't remember them dressing quite like that.

[freedomcrusader]

He weren't no popularly elected leader, neither!

[Doctor Doom]

Some watery tart did toss a scimitar at him, though.

[Heyworth]

There's a lot of wacky stuff when you start digging around in this occult Nazi lore. The problem is that a lot of the more extraordinary stuff is based on very thin evidence. I remember reading once that a whole bunch of Tibetan monks were found dead in the ruins of Berlin. There's another story floating around (no pun intended) that a scuba diver in a lake somewhere up in the Austrian Alps saw an entire SS unit, men and all, sitting on the bottom. There's a lot of stuff about Aghartha, the underground kingdom under the Himalayas. There's the whole Grail/Spear of Longinus stuff, the Thule Society and its connections to Aleister Crowley. The list goes on and on. If you want to read a mind-blower of a book (and one that will get the Fundamentalists wigging out), check out HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL, which manages to tie together, among other things, the divine bloodline of Jesus, the Merovingian Dynasty of 8th Century France, the Holy Roman Emperors, the Hapsburgs, the Nazi occultists, the Knights Templar, the Masons, and a shadowy bunch of Frenchman called the Priory of Sion who may be the real authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and an intriguing little mystery centered around a small town in Southern France and a mysterious fortune in the hands of the local priest. Great fun. Even more fun, just for parodying most of the above, is the ILLUMINATI TRILOGY by Robert Anton Wilson.

[Cu Roi]

Is that where we get the word, "thug"?

Kali (``Black Earth Mother'') was a goddess of destruction who was so feared that the other gods of the pantheon would allow her to lead them in battle. Her devotees were usually assassins aka ``thugs''.

From Websters:

Etymology: Hindi thag, literally, thief:
Date: 1810:
: a brutal ruffian or assassin : GANGSTER, KILLER

[Heyworth]

Oh, now we see the violence inherent in the system. Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I'm bein' repressed!

[Defiant]

a cult of Kali worshippers who were infesting India in the 19th/20th centuries before the British wiped them out

They weren't all wiped out. Many of them made it to the US, where they founded Kali-fornia as an enclave for their cult.