1. The location
At almost equidistance from the German cities Hamm and Paderborn the Wewelsburg is situated. This Burg is not as old as German castles go; in its present shape it dates from the Renaissance period, while some parts of it are built even later. The Burg never became a touristic attraction. It is neither large nor powerful; it had been decaying for a long time. The last occupants left the castle already during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648); new residents never arrived. The castle has the shape of a triangle. A round tower stands at the top, a lineal descendant of the early-medieval donjon; from this tower two wings stretch southward, connected at the basis by a third wing. In consequence the inner court also has the form of a triangle.
The castle stands at the northern end of the flat top of a low but steep hill. The plateau contains two other buildings, the Roman Catholic church and also another, smaller building that belongs to the castle. The village of Wewelsburg is situated at the foot of the hill; it then had nine hundred inhabitants, almost all of them Catholics. The church on the hill was their parish church. The village had always been served by a monk of a nearby monastery, but about 1700 the abbot had decided to no longer put one of his monks at the disposal of the villagers. Therefore, the bishop of Paderborn resolved to give them an ordinary parish priest. Because the village had never had a parish priest, there was no vicarage. When the first parish priest arrived, he took up his residence in the southern wing of the castle. He had his church straight before his windows.
2. Himmler
This peaceful situation remained unchanged for more than two centuries. However, shortly after Hitler had come into power in January 1933, the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, nicknamed Reichsheini, became interested in the Wewelsburg. We have become accustomed to view the SS as a gigantic military and paramilitary organization, with its twelve divisions Waffen-SS and its Allgemeine SS, the men in the black uniforms. Yet in 1933 the SS was still only small. and Himmler had not yet become one of the highest in the Nazi hierarchy. The important organization was then the SA, under the leadership of Roehm, the strong-armed gangs of the party, the hard-fisted brutes who had done so much to intimidate Hitler’s opponents. However, the SA was becoming too powerful in Hitler’s eyes and its leaders too ambitious. In `the night of the long knives’, in June 1934, Hitler himself made a radical end to all real or supposed strivings to power by the SA.
This was Himmler’s great chance and he took it. He and his men helped Hitler energetically in these horrible and bloody days. From then on the star of the SS began to rise. Himmler finally became one of the most powerful and influential potentates of the Third Reich, but he always avoided making the mistake of Roehm. He never became dangerous to the Füher; quite the contrary, he always remained one of his most loyal servants.
In the course of 1934 Himmler wanted to give his SS more adherence; the best means to achieve this, he found, was an attractive ideology. This man differed in this from other ambitious and cynical Nazi-leaders that he had a mystical trait in his character; a quasi-religious ideology was of essential importance to this originally evangelical Christian. It must be stated in advance that Hitler took no interest in SS-mystics which he found poppycock. What Himmler wanted was a religious centre, something like St.Peter’s in Rome or the Temple of Jerusalem.
3. The discovery of the Wewelsburg
In 1934 Himmler dispatched scouts with the to find an appropriate Burg that would bring him into contact with Germany’s heroic and romantic past. The task of the scouts was not an easy one: many castles were in a bad state, others were in the possession of families or institutions not willing to sell them, still others were too expensive. In the summer of 1934, however, somebody brought the Wewelsburg to Himmler’s attention. He was immediately enthusiastic. What appealed most to him was the fact that the axis of the castle, the perpendicular line of the triangle, runs exactly north-south. In Christian times the east-west line had always been the world’s basis line; churches had always been built with their absis to the east, where Christ had suffered and had risen and from where comes the light of the world. Himmler, however, wanted his SS-men make acquainted with another direction, at right angles to the traditional one.
Another advantage was that, according to the prophecies of the German poet Ferdinand Freiligrath (1810-1876), the final struggle between east and west, between the armies of civilization and those of the barbarian hordes, would, within one hundred and fifty years, took place in the immediate vicinity. Himmler, a superstitious and credulous person, accepted this straightaway. In his opinion the Wewelsburg stood exactly in the centre of the world, even of the coming world.
4. Practical problems
There were some practical problems. First of all, the parish priest lived in the southern wing of the castle. With a combination of promises and threats the SS succeeded in forcing the bishop of Paderborn to make the parish priest evacuate his house; the man got another house in the village. A second obstacle was the church. The SS would have preferred to have the entire hilltop to itself, but demolishing the building and erecting a new one for the parish somewhere else proved impossible, also for financial reasons. The result was that the SS-garrison of the castle could every Sunday enjoy the Gregorian chant coming from the church just opposite.
A third problem was of a financial nature. The building itself, dilapidated as it was, was not expensive, but it must be thoroughly rebuilt and renovated. Himmler had to proceed very carefully; his friends were few and he had many enemies who were jealous of his growing power. Hitler did not feel inclined to help him with his financial problems. Only when Himmler declared the work to be the restoration of a valuable cultural possession and that the castle would become the home of a SS-educational centre, he got the necessary funds. Thus the Wewelsburg officially became a SS-Ordensburg, where, as in other Ordensburge, training courses for SS-officers would be given. In reality a course of this kind was never given in the Wewelsburg.
Himmler had yet another means to help himself out of his financial problems. The SS controlled the concentration camps; therefore, the Reichsführer could establish a small KZ just behind the hill. By putting its Häftlinge to work at the renovation of the castle, he had the disposal of a cheap working-force; he could do without the help of loquacious and curious workmen hired in the villages in the neighbourhood. This concentration camp remained virtually unknown, but it was one of the worst. Its regime was harsh, there was much beating, punishments were exceptionally cruel. In the last months of 1934 a small SS-detachment arrived and made the castle its abode.
5. Problems with the villagers
Himmler would have preferred to have the entire village in his possession, in order to transform it into a SS-settlement. He succeeded in convincing two peasants to sell their farms to him, in exchange for farms in Silesia. When this became known, the villagers were terrified. Luckily for them there was not enough money to buy more farms. Himmler went out of his way to placate the villagers. The SS-men in the castle had the strictest orders to avoid even the slightest incident with the villagers; a social centre was built for the village community, opened by Himmler in person.
Yet soon enough the relations began to deteriorate. The Roman Catholic population did not like this special branch of SS-ideology and had no understanding for it. What they understood was that it was profoundly anti-Christian. There were rumours, and more than that, of what was done to Jews in the villages and towns of Westphalia; and although it was forbidden to the villagers to come near the KZ, it nevertheless did not remain unknown how the inmates were treated. All this did not make the SS-men beloved by the villagers. And then, they could not keep their hands off the village girls.
In 1938 it literally came to blows. There was a quarrel between a villager and a SS-man in the course of which the former was hit so hard that his jaw was broken. Himmler was furious, when he heard this; the unfortunate man was brought to a hospital in Dortmund, where he was nursed for six months at the expense of the SS. Yet, somewhat later, during a harvest festival, it came again to words and from words to deeds. This time a SS-NCO was kicked in the belly so hard that he became unconscious; the frightened villagers fled to their houses and the festival was immediately over.
The commander of the garrison panicked and sent a telegram to Paderborn: "Rebellion in Wewelsburg, need heavy assistance immediately". The SS-command in Paderborn dispatched some units. When, in the early morning of the next day, a column of cars approached the village, its heavily armed occupants were in an abysmally bad temper, because they had had to get out of bed in the middle of the night. They expected to have to storm the barricades, manned by armed villagers, but there was not the slightest sign of resistance and everybody was asleep. Nonetheless, some people were arrested, who had to spend some months in SS-prisons. This time Himmler was still more furious; he fired the incompetent commander. This man immediately defected to Himmler’s arch-enemy, Walther Darré, the head of the Nazi agrarian organization; from this safe hiding-place he started a venomous campaign against his former chief.
6. Secrecy
In 1935, when the work was making good headway, Himmler decreed that everything concerning his pet project should be kept strictly secret: no visits, no guided tours, no publications. Even SS-men were not admitted. Men who were not members of the small garrison and who had a reason to visit the castle, needed a permit signed by the Reichsführer personally. For ten years the Wewelsburg disappeared behind a curtain of silence. This silence was so complete that American tank crews who stood within shooting distance of the castle in April 1945, had not the slightest idea of what kind of castle it was. Even the allied secret services knew nothing at all. The reason was not so much that Himmler feared ironical commentaries from his Nazi comrades but rather that secrecy is well-known trait of esoteric societies like the SS; they are all exceptionally secretive and do not feel any need to defile their ideas by communicating them to the profanum vulgus.
The renovation of the castle was never completed in fact; in the years 1935-1945 it did not serve as a SS-temple, as was the intention. Only once there was an assembly of high SS-officers. There never was enough money, and when the war broke out, even Himmler had other priorities. He was the commander-in-chief of twelve SS-divisions that were fighting on several fronts, but also the management of the always growing concentration camps; the Endlősung der Judenfrage was also a responsibility of the SS. On the southern slope of the hill the visitor can still see the majestic but only half finished staircase on which the SS-high priests would ascend the hill in order to solemnly enter the temple.
7. Destruction and restoration of the temple
When the end of the war was nearing, in April 1945, Himmler, who then had his headquarters in Hamburg, knew that all was lost; he therefore decided to destroy his pet project. He ordered a twenty-six-year-old SS-officer, whom he knew as courageous and ruthless, to take the destruction of the Wewelsburg upon himself.
In the evening of Holy Saturday the officer departed with four half-trucks loaded with explosives and a demolition squad of fifteen SS-men. They drove the whole night without meeting resistance. In the early morning of Easter Sunday they arrived in the vicinity of the Wewelsburg, but could not reach it directly, because an American tank unit had taken up a position there. The officer succeeded in disengaging his group and retired for a mile. There they found a dug-in Wehrmacht battalion. One of the sergeants was a local; he volunteered to bring the SS-commando to the castle. Along narrow country roads they arrived late on Easter morning on the hilltop. At half a mile distance American tanks stood firing. The SS-officer was lord and master of the Wewelsburg for four hours. First he ordered to take away the white flags that hung out of all the windows of the castle. Then the explosive charges were brought into the castle; soon there were loud explosions. The SS-temple was no more! The officer returned to Hamburg safely; a few days later he was, together with his chief, made prisoner by British troops.
Once again deep silence descended on the Wewelsburg. But after thirty years the German Federal Republic became interested; a few years later the renovation works began. It is highly intriguing that the castle has not been rebuilt as the Renaissance castle it once was, but as the SS-temple. It is obvious that the German government does not fear that this would make the German people feel nostalgic. This monument from an already distant past makes the same impression on the visitors an Inca temple would make. The entries in the visitors’ book have, in the very great majority, an anti-fascist tendency.
7. The SS-temple
The great round tower at the northern end of the hill has been very ably restored. One descends a stone staircase and enters the inner hall through a small door. The interior is mathematically circular. Himmler had the tower restored after the model of a Mycenean dome-shaped tomb he once visited. Accoustically the tower is the exact opposite of a whispering gallery. One must press oneself to the wall in order to understand a speaker in the middle of the hall. One step forward, and one hears nothing at all because of the reverberation and the echoes. In the top of the cupola one sees a swastika with the SS-runes at the four ends. As far as I know Nazi symbolism this is a unique emblem; everywhere else it is either the swastika or the runes. In any case this proves convincingly that this is not a Nazi monument but a specific SS-sanctuary. The tower is now popularly known as the Valhalla.
Perpendicularly under the SS-swastika, in the exact middle of the circle, stands a table in the form of a dish. In this dish a flame can burn, symbol of the eternal fire in the heart of the earth. High in the walls there are four windows. They have been designed as light shafts through which the sunbeams radiate into the interior. The four sunbeams cross each other just above the dish. The place of the dish indicates the exact centre of the earth. The navel of the earth is not found in Jerusalem or in Rome or in Delphi, but in Westphalia. The table with the round dish stands in a lowered part of the floor; one reaches it along some steps. There are three concentric circles: the table and the dish, the lowered part of the floor, and the wall of the tower. These circles enclose the whole `Nordic’ world, the – in SS-ideology – only authentic world. Elsewhere in the castle there is another great circular hall with twelve pillars against the wall and a great solar disc with twelve beams in the form of runes.