Nazi Quest for the Holy Grail - History Documentary

in the final days of the second world war american troops discovered a vast horde of secret nazi files hidden in a cave in central germany [Music] the documents reveal one of the third reich's most shadowy projects the hunt to discover the last aryan civilization from which the nazis believed they had descended drawing on previously unseen photographs and archive film this is the extraordinary story of a global search for the lost island of atlantis an expedition to find traces of the master race in tibet and an astonishing nazi quest for the holy grail [Music] at the

end of 1938 the world stood on the very brink of war at the height of its power hitler's germany was preparing for action but even as the battle lines were being drawn in europe the thoughts of one of the most senior nazis heinrich himmler were focused thousands of miles to the east on a small band of german adventurers picking their way up an isolated himalayan pass were five of the third reich's best and brightest young scientists on an expedition that himmler hoped would rewrite the history of the world on the evening of the 22nd of

december these five ss officers made camp miles from civilization on the shores of a deserted lake gathered round the fire they celebrated the winter solstice and toasted their imminent success against all the odds they had reached the borders of the ancient kingdom of tibet tibet had been the land of mystery for centuries it's a far away place it's very difficult to travel into they're heading for lhasa the holy city the legendary mythical city of tibet no german expedition has ever succeeded in getting to lasa before but himmler harbored altogether more sinister ambitions for the mission

his true purpose was to find the proof for one of the nazi's most fundamental and dangerous [Music] beliefs hitler saw world history in terms of the struggle between races for the survival of the fittest and he thought that races were distinct so there's an absolute distinction between the aryan race by which he basically means the germans and the other different races all of which were inferior in one way or another the aryan race were a master race hitler's belief in a historical aryan master race was unshakable since the early 1920s he had made his belief

in the hierarchy of racism one of the central pillars of nazism but he had a problem this ancient master race had left behind no archaeological trace no artifacts or ruined temples this missing evidence was a particular concern to one of hitler's most loyal servants heinrich himmler who made it his personal mission to find it shimla's father was a school master famous for his pedantic and authoritarian manner and himmer i think imbibed some of that extreme almost parody of the schoolmaster character he was extremely pedantic he was very very meticulous in everything he did himmler was

determined to prove the existence of an ancient aryan master race so when in 1936 he was invited to a presentation at the home of an eccentric historian he hoped he was finally on the verge of a breakthrough the scholar's name was hermann that and that night he proposed an archaeological expedition which he promised would deliver irrefutable evidence of an ancient aryan civilization it was a trip that was the culmination of years of research that had studied ancient symbols carved into caves and rock faces from all over the world and found repeating patterns although the traditional

view was that they had been made by different cultures at different times that proposed that something truly momentous had been missed he believed that the symbols from different countries thousands of miles apart were too similar to be explained away as simple coincidence they must come from one shared source a lost civilization scouring the history books he found a story that he believed fitted in every detail the lost civilization must have originated on the mythical island of atlantis the legend was true weird located atlantis as an owned continent west of portugal and southwest of great britain

island people lived there in peace and harmony it was a kind of ideal life it was his paradise but this paradise had not lasted [Applause] [Music] there to believe that atlantis had met its end in a devastating global catastrophe the seas had risen and drowned the island it had sunk out of memory and into myth but that contended a few brave atlanteans did survive and set sail for the high places of the world they wandered onto both sides of the atlantic and they took with them their culture [Music] there to argued that these displaced atlanteans

had ceded great civilizations all over the globe that's vision of a drowned atlantis captivated himmler it provided the perfect solution to the problem of the missing aryan archaeology now all himmler needed was the physical proof and that would help him find it together himmler and vert formed a new department of the ss dedicated to researching their germanic heritage and writing the aryans into history it was known as the anonymous it would launch expeditions all over the world from the frozen forests of finland to the desert temples of iraq and the very first project himmler agreed

to fund was vert's own mission to catalogue a lost aryan script a script he hoped would become the foundation of a new nazi religion in 1945 the files of an ss research institute known as the anna nearby were discovered in a cave in central germany amongst the many expedition reports were the details of one of heinrich himmler's strangest obsessions a project to replace christianity with a new nazi religion he despises christianity he thinks christianity weakens people above all according to himmler christianity was essentially jewish to help replace this jewish faith with a true religion the

ananer launched an expedition in the summer of 1936 led by one of germany's most controversial archaeologists hermann vert a team of ss men traveled to a remote region of sweden to examine a series of mysterious rock carvings that summer the expedition made over a hundred plaster cast and shipped them back to germany where himmler eagerly awaited that conclusions were categorical these carvings were not simply the etchings of prehistoric people but were in fact part of the sacred religious texts of the lost aryans of atlantis this text was what himmler had been waiting for a vital

weapon in his mission to replace christianity with a new nazi religion himmler wanted to press forward with the idea of a germanic religion involving things like sun worship worship of the old gods he thought he was genuinely researching an archaic germanic religion he began his religious project in miniature inside the ranks of his beloved ss heinrich himmler had immense ambitions for the ss it wasn't simply a police force he wanted it to be the model for a future germany himmler established ss weddings and a naming ceremony to replace christenings and he even instigated pagan-like rituals

at each of the solstices by going back to the old germanic religion and infusing the ss with its spirit he would of course strengthen their will so himmler certainly did want the ss to become a kind of a cult himmler enshrined into his ss the myth of their own racial superiority they were his new aryan aristocracy [Music] the spiritual headquarters of this new knighthood was the medieval castle of weevilsberg with its strange ceremonial halls and its walls adorned with ancient artifacts it had been transformed into a cathedral for himmler's new cult [Music] it was into

this dark fairy tale world that another german scholar was drawn in 1936 his name was otto brown and he offered himmler the possibility of securing the most powerful ancient reddick of all the holy grail [Music] for me otto ran was the original man in black the spook the black fedora had black coat the shadow out of history trying to penetrate who ran really was is certainly a tricky one [Music] as a boy rahn had been obsessed with the legends of king arthur and the story of a knight called passival who had searched his whole life

for the holy grail [Music] at some point after leaving school otto seems to have become increasingly determined to find the grail itself a mythical object which will really make one whole again which will heal the wounded and heal the world's pain the lost link between man and god for ron the grill wasn't just a literary subject it was a real physical object and he was looking for anything that might have clues to that ron had found inspiration in the work of a 19th century german archaeologist heinrich schliemann who in 1873 had discovered the real lost

city of troy a place once dismissed as purely mythical at the time schliemann's discovery was an international sensation and his method was revolutionary [Music] he'd found the legendary city by following clues locked away in the text of homer's the iliad turning fiction into historical fact [Music] when ron came across this he got very excited because he thought well if schliemann can do that with uh with the odyssey and the iliad and homer's works then i might be able to do that with parsifal [Music] passivade is the story of a night's quest for the holy grail

culminating in its discovery at the mythical castle of munselbash high on a lonely mountain like schliemann ron searched the text for clues to the location of the legendary grail castle [Music] his quest took him to france in 1931 and he traveled south to an area of the french pyrenees locally known as grail country a region that still entices grail hunters to this day there high in the mountains he caught his first glimpse of the ancient fortress of monsiger could this isolated ruin really be passive al's munson the home of the holy grail its impregnable location

certainly matched the text but there was another more significant clue one not based on myth but on hard historical fact in the 13th century at around the time the passive our legend was written down monsigur had been the scene of the last stand of a dissident religious order known as the cathars the legendary keepers of the grail [Music] the cathodes were the biggest threat the medieval church faced and were dubbed the great heresy as a result they were a fully independent counter church totally opposed to the church of rome but rome would not stand for

their heresy and in 1209 the pope ordered a bloody crusade against the catholics this crusade saw the slaughter of over a hundred thousand people making it one of the bloodiest events in european history the genocide of an entire faith the papal legates is said to have issued the notorious command kill them all god will know his own [Music] it was a pretty bloodthirsty period there was general rape pillage and losing mass burnings and executions whole towns being put to the sword the one major place that the cathars was still holed up and the one major

castle that hadn't fallen was mont sigur [Music] the castle was besieged for months until eventually the few hundred remaining qatars had no option but surrender but something did survive the inquisition's flames in 1931 more than 700 years later otto ran unearthed a local legend about a mysterious cathart treasure one of the legends that's grown up around the cathars is they possessed a treasure during the siege four cathars are said to have scaled down the side of montsegar in the middle of the night with something the cathar treasure history stops when those four men went down

the side of montsegar into the night and vanished this legend was the clue that ron had been searching for the cathar treasure must be the grail and it had remained hidden ever since therefore [Music] acting on local folklore rounds spent many months crawling through the hundreds of miles of subterranean passages that riddle the mountains surrounding monsigur [Music] as he dug deeper he began to believe that these ancient heretics were not christians at all but believers in something far older a lost religion finally out of money ron was forced to abandon his quest and wrote a

book about the persecuted cathars their ancient religion on what he believed to be the truth about the grail otto iran published in 1933 a book called the crusade against the grail although it got some good reviews in germany and sold modestly he certainly wasn't a successful author at the time but one of ron's readers was utterly captivated by the book and was eager to meet with the young rail hunter in person he's said to have received a telegram in 1934 saying your book's very interesting i'd like to talk to you could you please come to

berlin so he went back to berlin and went to the address given on the telegram and the man who sent the telegram was none other than heinrich himmler and he later said what was i supposed to do turn himmler down [Music] himmler wanted power and he wanted power more than anything i mean hitler was superstitious but himmler was obsessed with the occult and the esoteric for him the grail represented that it represented power for himmler the grail was an extremely seductive prospect it was the ultimate religious keystone and he believed its true power was not

christian but aryan and ron had brought it within reach i think we can clearly imagine that initially otto iran and heinrich himmler were very much on the same page i think they both dreamed of overthrowing christianity as we know it and creating a new european religion something which drew on the myths of their ancestors and of a return of the old gods himmler offered ran a thousand reich marks a month to continue his research with the only condition being that he must join the ss during 1935 and 36 round travelled incessantly often accompanied by a

small troop of ss men he traveled through italy france and spain as well as venturing north through scotland as far as iceland his reports were marked top secret and were for the eyes of himmler and his closest advisors alone he recorded his journeys in his second book an enigmatic travel diary that contained little information about the true purpose of his many trips but was full of chilling nazi rhetoric [Music] otta iran published a second book called lucifer's court in 1937 and there's definitely an anti-semitic thread where the cathars are seen as effectively good aryans fighting

the evil judaic menace of the church of rome we are the people of nordic blood who call ourselves the catholics our heaven speaks only to the pure ones not to the base of mixed race creatures but to irians the noble and lordly we did not pray to jehovah because his divinity was a god for the jews only the jews have the arrogance to claim themselves divine as god chosen people critics are divided as to whether how much of this was ron's own belief or how much of iran was putting in there just to please himmler

and to basically keep his own head in germany the whole of european history was being nazified just as words atlanteans had become the ancient aryans so too had ron's beloved cathars but time was running out for otto ran he still hadn't found the grail and he had even bigger problems the truth of the matter was that ron had jewish blood through his mother and a second problem was that otto was gay ron had done a deal with the devil and he was about to realize the price he would need to pay [Music] in 1937 having

failed to deliver the grail and possibly his punishment for his homosexuality ron was assigned to guard duty in himmler's new network of concentration camps here he was finally confronted with the true terror of the third reich the ss in many ways embodies all the things that ron most feared they're not the spiritual inheritors of the catholic tradition they're the spiritual inheritance of the crusaders and the inquisitors in february 1939 ron resigned from the ss effectively signing his own death warrant [Music] he traveled to austria and walked alone dressed in black into the alps it's thought

that he sat down and raised the tree and took steeping poles and simply fell asleep underneath the tree and froze to death [Music] right up until his death otto ron believed that the grail remained safely hidden in the countryside surrounding monsigur he wrote it lies in a cave in the taber forest a massive stone block protects the cave's entrance from intruders and the treasure itself is guarded by hundreds of wipers but ron's failure was not going to stand in himmler's way he remained determined to re-establish his fictitious aryan culture and he was about to launch

his most ambitious mission yet seeking the master race in the most unlikely of places amongst the buried files of the ana nearby were hints that during 1937 a change was taking place inside himmler's private research institute the search for the evidence of the master race was becoming more urgent hermann that the man who had helped link the aryans to the lost island of atlantis had been fired and sent back into academic obscurity [Music] but himmler's faith in the power of the mythical aryans remained utterly unshakable in the files is a letter from himmler that demonstrates

the depth of his bizarre beliefs have the following researched find all places in the northern germanic aryan cultural world where an understanding of the lightning bolt the thunderbolt or thor's hammer exists i'm convinced that this is not based on natural thunder and lightning but rather that it is an early highly developed form of war weapon of our forefathers hitler himmler's attempt to find his very own hammer of the gods was perhaps unsurprisingly a failure and yet however far-fetched his projects may seem today his appropriation of history was becoming accepted fact inside germany himless sponsorship of

the 1938 tibetan expedition was also inspired in part by his fantasy of a master race and he hoped the five ss men camped high in the himalayas would help prove his strangest aryan theory of all he had never forgotten herman vert's ideas and believed that after the great flood that sunk the island of atlantis a few survivors had sought refuge in the high places of the world [Music] some of these intrepid areas had arrived in ancient tibet and amongst the snow-capped peaks founded a great civilization and now himmler hoped to find the proof but no

longer in the form of carvings or lost retics but in real flesh and blood [Music] the truth is even darker i think the reason i say that is to do with bruno bager and the reason he was on the expedition [Music] bruna bager was one of the five scientists sent to tibet his particular field of expertise was the study of people known as physical anthropology a discipline that had become an important science inside nazi germany physical anthropology was an academic discipline that was quite well developed by the 1930s himmler and his physical anthropologists thought that

by measuring people's heads you could tell what race they were by 1938 nazi anthropologists had established a checklist of physical features that defined every racial type including the aryans amongst the expedition's other scientific aims bager was sent to catalogue the racial makeup of the tibetan people a project himmler hoped would unearth traces of aryanism in the secluded people of tibet he was looking for the biological traces that would have been left in the living peoples of central asia the investigation he carried out was meticulous it's a kind of mathematics of race if you like what

makes it sinister is that the gathering of data was being driven by an ideology this ideology is founded on the idea of there being separate races and a racial hierarchy and at the top of the hierarchy of course are the nordic or aryan people in beggar's final report there is a reference to small traces of the nordic race present in the anthropology of the people of tibet no doubt to himmler this was the remnant of the master race that he had been expecting to find if aryan blood did survive in tibet then the entire fantasy

of atlantis a lost religion and a once great people must be true but for him tibet's fallen aryans were ultimately a moral lesson from history an example of what happens if the racially superior interbreed with inferior races over time these superior nordic peoples mixed with the lesser peoples that they ruled and as a result they themselves decayed as a culture the empire fell and the implication of that was that miscegenation mixing with inferior races was very dangerous your own superior race would be brought low by the lesser peoples that surrounded you racial mixing from their

point of view is the road to catastrophe kimler and the rest of the nazi elite were determined that no such catastrophe would befall their third reich inferior races had to be controlled [Music] of all the many quests that himmler helped launch the tibetan expedition was the most celebrated when they arrive at munich airport they're met by himmler personally on the runway and they're treated like celebrities like heroes they've done what no german expedition has ever done before which is to get to lhasa it was a fantastic propaganda coup for himmler the head of the ss

only a month after the return of the expedition the nazis invaded poland the second world war had begun as the war tore its way across europe the nazi obsession with race triggered one of the most appalling crimes in human history the systematic extermination of six million jewish people and the nazi leader responsible for delivering the final solution was none other than the man who had been so committed to finding the mythical aryans heinrich himmler all the ridiculous theories and corrupted science had ultimately served a fiction a fiction of the master race a fiction that had

been used to help justify the holocaust it is a kind of camouflage you are committing a grotesque atrocity but you are camouflaging it anti-humanism by dressing it up as a scientific necessity the ideas that they subscribe to pave the way for the possibility of people imagining that it is morally necessary to liquidate an entire race but the ana nebu's role in the holocaust was far from over in 1942 they were engaged to help himmler solve a problem at the heart of the genocide in spite of their obsession with race the nazis had failed to find

the racial characteristics that defined who was a jew and who was not himmler was very much aware of the strong degree of arbitrariness involved in the definition of races and himmler thought that there must be better ways of doing this more scientific basis for it and he was of course the man who was charged with organizing and implementing the extermination of the jewish people and as a rather pedantic precise man he wanted more precise definitions [Music] the documents reveal that they are nanbe was charged with finding these definitions definitions that would ultimately determine who should

live and who should die the project was assigned to an infamous medical doctor by the name of august here [Music] for this reason he was particularly open-minded doctor here had already turned his back on medical ethics conducting a series of horrific experiments on live prisoners at natsville concentration camp in 1942 he turned his attention to discovering the one universal measurement of jewishness he decided he would require the services of a physical anthropologist and the anna nebe provided none other than bruna bega the scientist who led the anatomical measurements in tibet in the summer of 1943

baker and a small team were dispatched to ajvis signaling the beginning of one of the nazi's most infamous war crimes [Music] arrived in auschwitz in the beginning of june [Music] he wanted to select a cross section of all the jews present not long after beggar arrived at the camp elizabeth klein a 42 year old viennese jewish woman was ordered to line up in front of the infirmary along with 150 other prisoners she was to be measured by bigger and his team [Music] he used the caliper rule he had tables in which he recorded the eyes

he recorded the color of the eyes the distance between the eyes the distance between the ears the size of the ears the shape of the forehead and so forth having measured elizabeth bager read her prisoner number aloud and it was added to a list elizabeth have been chosen to be part of one of the nazi's most macabre war crimes the jewish skeleton collection [Music] on july the 30th 1943 at auschwitz concentration camp a small group of prisoners were loaded onto a transport their destination was another death camp known as knutsfider they were to become victims

of what is known as the jewish skeleton [Music] collection it was a project that put the ana nerve at the heart of the final solution and a medical doctor known as august herc was in charge of the operation he turned his attention to himmler's problem of how scientifically to identify jewishness and decided he was missing some key research material what was missing was a collection of anatomical materials that could be used to study and refine their knowledge of what it was to be a jew and this perception that there wasn't enough skeletal material had murderous

consequences in 1943 doctor dr hertz began creating his collection of jewish skeletons he was adamant that by measuring and tabulating a diverse sample of jewish bones he would at last discover the elusive scientific definition of the jewish race but first the prisoners would have to die on the 2nd of august 1943 86 of the jewish men and women bruner beggar had selected at ausfit arrived at knutsviller concentration camp at around 9 pm nine days later the female prisoners were taken to the camp's gas chamber where they were murdered among them was elizabeth klein but the

skeleton collection would never be completed before the bodies could be prepared the tide of war turned decisively against the nazis as allied troops advanced across europe faced with the imminent liberation and his own arrest dr hiet panicked [Music] knowing well that the dead bodies were the result of a crime he asked him what should i do with this collection should we keep it should we keep it partly or should we destroy it and fled back into germany a month later french troops discovered what remained of his victims in a ghoulish attempt to conceal his war

crime hurt had mutilated the bodies as the allied advance continued and the nazi state crumbled around him himmler began to systematically destroy the evidence of his bizarre and chilling projects the files of the ana nebe containing the details of his aryan quests and some of the pseudoscience behind the holocaust were hidden in the small cave in central germany it's estimated that perhaps 200 000 individual germans were involved in enacting the destruction of millions of lives so of course the question is why did they do it i think one answer to that is that the ground

had been prepared intellectually german state apparatuses fostered a racial science racial philosophy that made it possible to imagine that it was appropriate morally to liquidate a race in the days after the nazi surrender dr august hilt took his own life in 1974 bruno bega eventually stood trial for his part in the jewish skeleton collection and was convicted of being an accomplice to murder as the court ruled that he was unaware of what would happen to the prisoners after the measurements were taken [Music] himmler the driving force behind so much of the nazi corruption of science

and the man who delivered the final solution cheated justice and took his own life on may the 23rd 1945 whilst in british custody he is buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in the wilderness of luna bear keith in northern germany [Music] the victims of the jewish skeleton collection were eventually identified and are buried at the jewish cemetery in strasbourg their story is a warning from history that science can be corrupted there are consequences to ideas there are consequences to mythologies and those consequences at that time was the annihilation of millions of people [Music] you