Otto Rahn, Hidden Master or Madman

Otto Rahn, Hidden Master or Madman

By Jack Heart & Orage

“Rahn must have discovered something which caused him to espouse a strange theory. He came to the conclusion that the Emerald Cup was only one Holy Grail, while in fact there was another… The second Grail, according to Rahn, was a Stone, or more specifically, a collection of stone tablets… on which was written the wisdom of the ages or the ultimate truth, but in a language that no one could decipher…”

The passage is taken from Col. Howard Buechner’s 1991 book Emerald Cup - Ark of Gold: The Quest of SS Lt. Otto Rahn of the Third Reich. During Americas triumphant liberation of Dachau; Buechner as the chief medical officer oversaw the arbitrary and unauthorized executions of, according to General Dwight Eisenhower, three hundred SS soldiers who had been rotated back to guard duty from the eastern front due to wounds and fatigue. Others put the number of murdered victims at five hundred and twenty.

The men were butchered on the whim of a blood crazed Indian named Jack Bushyhead whom Buechner writes paeans too in his smugly poetic account of how the Jews were avenged at Dachau. “One might ask if Col. Buechner, a medical doctor and an educated man, knew that the SS men, who were allegedly executed on the orders of 1st Lt. Bushyhead, were soldiers who had recently been fighting at the front, and that they had not committed any atrocities in the concentration camp. Did he know the difference between the Waffen-SS and the concentration camp guards? The answer is Yes.”1 In fact the slain were photographed still wearing combat fatigues...

There can be little doubt that systematically executing so many SS soldiers, as they begged for their lives, made Buechner privy to information that intelligence operatives adhering to the Geneva Convention or even human decency were never going to gain but one really must question his character and his book. We have transcribed here much of the dialogue of Richard Stanley’s critically acclaimed 2001 documentary The Secret Glory; a film “made with the help of the European Media Development Fund” and “The cooperation of more than thirty archives in eight different countries.”2 These are eyewitness accounts given by those who either knew Otto Rahn personally or are the surviving descendants of those that did. Buechner’s “work” has no place in what will follow...
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The Secret Glory part 1

Ingeborg Roehmer –Rahn, a psychiatrist and Rahn’s niece, “Otto’s father was a very religious man. I’m not saying he was a churchgoer. At old age yes but not before. He was looking for religion in nature. When there was a single tree he would say “this is god, it reflects itself in everything. Very early on he introduced this world to me which I already had within me but hadn’t lived consciously. From then on I lived it. I think this must have been a special talent he passed on to his children. Otto’s father was a man of few words. He expressed himself more by feeling. In the end when he was eighty years old he became blind. But he still went to the woods each day. He felt it. He often gave me his hand at that was all. He didn’t say anything but I understood him. I think, I hope he did the same with his children but I don’t know for sure. He told me “the angels are a reality, those seraphim, they exist! You only have to close your eyes and take my hand and you can sense it. Then he gave me his hand and it was like a flash of light. I had to take a deep breath. I didn’t know what it was. He said “you see? This feeling that is heaven!” That was an experience I had when I was six years old. This strengthened my relationship with my grandfather very much. My Grandmother I only turned to when I needed shoes. She was a little dictatorial. She had a good nature but it rarely came to the surface.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1prqhIq4uc

 

The Secret Glory part 2

Professor Paul Ladame, Geneva University, “I knew Otto Rahn during my first visit to Berlin in 1929. I had just finished high school and I wanted to learn a trade with my hands to become a painter. Berlin was a marvelous city very poor but very gay. We were very young, dancing a lot, loving the girls and music and everything enjoying life ten years after the end of World War I and ten years before the start of the Second World War. One night, I received a telephone call from one of my pals who told me that he had the flu and couldn’t go the next morning at five to play in a film with Pabst somewhere on the border between Germany and Poland. Would I be kind enough to replace him? I said yes I’ll go there and I played there in the first film of Pabst; Die Vier von der Infantrie. And we were a group of about thirty young men in French uniforms of the war of Verdun playing war games against the Germans. One of my little pals came from Switzerland too and one of his great friends was German about four years older than we were who came to visit us and he was Otto Rahn. Why did he look at me and talk to me? For the simple reason that I taught French to him and he had with me a good exercise, I don’t see more than that in the beginning. At the time I met Otto Rahn I looked at him with awe and interest. I said that’s a chap who has ideas about things I couldn’t dream of.”
         
Reich Historian Hans Jurgen Lange; “Throughout his life Rahn travelled without means but he was never a tourist. He knew everybody and was very well educated. His literary talent and charm enabled him to come into contact with the upper classes.”

Professor Paul Ladame, Geneva University, “He comes for the first time to Paris and has the chance to meet a man who is a Frenchman from the South, with the accent of the South who shares the enthusiasm of Rahn, and this is Magre, Maurice Magre who has already written books Le Sang de Toulouse, The Blood of Toulouse telling about the Crusade, about the suffering of the South, about the Inquisitors like one of the Inquisitors of Rahn’s hometown; Marbourg, who had been a terrible man in the middle ages, who had burnt people in the street because they didn’t interpret the bible like he did and he finds that such a thing happened also in France. And this idea of the young Rahn is to discover that France, about those who had been crushed, about the minorities, about the Cathari, about the quest for the Grail, the search for the wisdom of past centuries when Germany was a great and noble country and he imagines that this time may one day come back. And so came the idea of Otto Rahn. One day Germany and France must be united and united with England, united with Italy and united with all of Europe, to make a United Europe. I happened to be a witness to one of these talks between Otto Rahn and Maurice Magre at Leila in Montmartre in Paris. So I can tell you this; Rahn was fascinating when he talked and I believe that more people were fascinated than I was, especially maybe woman.”

Reich Historian Hans Jurgen Lange; “These Parisian contacts which led him to the Pyrenees acquainted him with a countess who lived there; Countess de Pujol Murat. It is assumed that this contact was made through Magre. The Countess thought of herself as the reincarnation of Esclarmonde do Foix, a historical figure who Rahn refers to in his first book as the guardian of the grail. It is also known that the Countess was a member of an esoteric circle, the so called Polaires. One can’t refer to them as a secret society, rather as an esoteric circle that concerned itself with Hans Horbigers World Ice Theory and speculation over the Atlantean and Aryan forefathers as well as the mysterious tribe of Hyperborean’s who were supposed to have lived at the pole in ancient times.”   
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4MfOpfywSI 

The Secret Glory part 3

Suzanne Nelli, Centre d’Etude Cathari, “the Countess de Pujol Murat was a spiritualist who claimed she was channeling the spirit of Esclarmonde. One day she took Otto Rahn for a drive and on passing Montsegur she said “there, that is the castle of the Grail!””

Professor Paul Ladame, Geneva University, “and then Rahn asked me if I would accompany him because I knew something as a Swiss person, something about mountain climbing. I said alright I’ll gladly come with you if I have not to pay for it and it’s not too long...”
 
Christian Bernadac, Investigative journalist, “the history of the Cathars wasn’t at all well known then, was that in 1928 and 1929 several international secret societies sent special envoys to the region. The first, it seems, was an Italian who wrote many books under the name of Zam Bhotiva and who founded the society of the Polaires in Paris.”

“Many saw in the treasure of the Cathars, not a monetary treasure but rather a horde of books that might hold the answers to the questions that men ask. Therefore in the same place you had within 5 or 6 kilometers of each other during that period around 1930 the secret society of Polaires, the secret society of White Eagle and the secret society of Thule. We already know at that time the secret services of these countries, which were already funding pro-Fascist, were funding this.”

Suzanne Nelli, Centre d’Etude Cathari, “the Countess de Pujol Murat united friends and sympathizers with interests in archeology, religion, the Grail and spiritualism. Otto Rahn arrived into this environment. He came here with a mission which was perhaps supported by the politics of his time, even then in 1930. Otto Rahn, its clear, was very happy in this environment especially since all these people were saying that the inhabitants of Ariege had Germanic origins. This pleased him a great deal because he was interested in the legends of Germany, in the origins of his nation which was Aryan. In this way a bond formed.”  
  
Emilie Couquet, Hotelier, “this house has been in my family since 1928 when it was first established as an inn and it was around 1930 when I was very young that my parents received M Otto Rahn. His room has been kept as it was then and people often ask to see the room where Otto Rahn lived.”

Marius Mounie, former mayor of Montsegur, “Otto Rahn was a man I knew when I was ten. He lodged at the Hotel Couquet. When he went about town in the street he made an impressive silhouette dressed all in black with a walking stick and long legs. It was because of the fact that he was German that he made this an impression especially as he wished to buy a field from my father in order to build a house with a view of Montsegur overlooking the castle. My father, a veteran of World War I, was more than a little reticent. There was no question of selling to Monsieur Otto Rahn. He was honest in his love for France. And he was very very sorry that the French did not return his love.”

Emilie Couquet, Hotelier, “Otto Rahn never manifested any ideological ideas on Aryanism. While he was here he was very kind. He was never any trouble to my parents. He stayed here until he obtained a grant to finish his book.”

Suzanne Nelli, Centre d’Etude Cathari, “We could question whether Otto Rahn was really a Nazi. I think I was alone in understanding Otto Rahn’s sensitive side. He was probably a member of the National Socialist Party from the beginning but above all he was a poet. It is certain that he attended a wedding in the Pyrenees, at Montsegur and discovered the castle of Montsalvatch there, which possessed all the phantasmagoria of the Round Table, haunted his imagination. Sometimes in his poetic descriptions we can hear the voice of the old German romantics. Like them he lived in legends with mythic hermetic characters and it was often with a chimerical imagination that he saw Occitania.”    
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBvR1wc_h-M
 

The Secret Glory part 4

Professor Paul Ladame, Geneva University; “he wanted to be admired. He admired himself most certainly. But who could take him seriously? Who could take seriously a man writing the books that he wrote? But I met then, a very strange man; Mister Gadal who was he director of tourism, and Gadal was the guru, the master of Otto Rahn.”

Christian Koenig, Museum Curator. “Antonin Gadal was born in 1877. He was a teacher who was interested in the history of Occitania and Catharism. During his youth in Tarascon he lived near Mister Adolf Garigou who was a great historian from Ariege. Thus we can speak of an oral tradition which was transmitted from Adolf Garigou to Antonin Gadal. In the rites of Catharism it’s said the tradition comes from the apostles and has been transmitted from bonhomme to bonhomme down through the ages to this very day. Gadal talks of a patriarch when it comes to Mister Garigou and Gadal himself became famous as a patriarch of the Cathars. I think on his journey through life he received a certain illumination and at the end of the road he found that through the caves. The caves played an important role in the initiation and formation of the Cathar spirit. The silence that reigns here is favorable to the opening of the mind. Gadal said “there are places where whispers the spirit.””

Christian Bernadac, Investigative journalist; “The relationship between Otto Rahn and Antonin Gadal is easy to understand as Gadal was the owner of all the caves in the region or so he claimed. The commune at that time had signed a contract giving over proprietorship for ninety-nine years. It was discovered only ten years ago that it wasn’t true and Gadal was not the owner. This was Gadal’s first lie. When Otto Rahn in the course of his research had to enter the caves he went and knocked at Gadal’s door. Gadal opened the door and little by little I believe he became a true friend of Otto Rahn. What is certain is that in Gadal he found a patron, a patron and a financer. Because we mustn’t forget Otto Rahn arrived in Ussat without any money whatsoever. My grandfather had, by an extraordinary chance, the only car in the region at that time. Obviously since Otto Rahn wanted to move about and since he was with Antonin Gadal who had been involved in Grail research for years they came to see my grandfather about the car, which was a Renault, a B14 I think. In this car they visited the places that were important for Catharism which for Otto Rahn meant Montsegur, Lordat, Foix, and the region of Albi and the cave of Bouiche, where my father acted as a boatman as the cave was only accessible by river in a dugout with a paddle. Otto Rahn admitted that he owed everything to Antonin Gadal and he told him “you are the key” and key in German is Dietrich. Dietrich was the man who, in the cabinet or headquarters of Heinrich Himmler, the patron and creator of the SS, was responsible for sending money to Otto Rahn as well as to another man Karl Wolf, who was here in the same period. This cabinet was made up of very few people, just seven or eight people amongst whom featured Dietrich, Karl Wolf and of course Otto Rahn who was on the payroll and long before the creation of the SS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXIK79oqPdI

The Secret Glory part 5

That is to say in 1931 and 1932 wore a pullover knitted by his mother that bore the sign of the SS.”

Ingeborg Roehmer –Rahn, a psychiatrist and Rahn’s niece, “That pullover was given to me as a gift when I was a child. It was a white pullover with matching white skiing gloves and white socks. My grandmother gave them to me not because I wanted to go skiing but as a gift. Children wouldn’t feel the same about wearing their uncle’s clothes but I thought it was an honor to inherit these things. And perhaps it will make you laugh but I made a pair of play trousers for my first son with this pullover.”

Christian Bernadac, Investigative journalist; “There begins one of the first mysteries. The SS existed for Otto Rahn two years before its creation, simply because these two barred S’s, these two barred lightning bolts were one of the signs of the Thule Society. It is probable even certain that Otto Rahn was sent to the area as an envoy of the Thule Society.”

Christian Koenig, Museum Curator; “Some say he was a spy. I think that if he was a spy he would have had more money. He would have had more money to live on when in fact he didn’t even have the money to buy himself a pair of shoes.

Christian Bernadac, Investigative journalist; “if Dietrich was sending him money then it was a miserly amount because Himmler wasn’t, at that time, the most powerful person in Germany as he was to become. So with regard to money equating it with a modern sum today that might be two or three thousand francs per month. It was obviously not enough to live or get around, to buy pickaxes for digging, cameras, a typewriter, things like that. It was really a small sum for someone who had no money at all, like Otto Rahn. It was a lot of money all the same. When he came to negotiate the deposit for the hotel Des Marronniers in Ussat-les-Bains, it is certain that Gadal put forward the money.”

Reich Historian Hans Jurgen Lange; “As Rahn’s research took a long time he had an idea of leasing a small hotel in Ussat. But Rahn was anything but a business man. Otto Rahn quartered himself in Ussat-les-Bains on the national highway to Andorra, in order to be close to the caves of the Lombrive where he pursued his daily investigations. In these caves he believed lay hidden the so called treasure of the Cathars.”

Christian Bernadac, Investigative journalist; “Gadal showed Otto Rahn one of the most important caves which is a fortified cave close to Ussat-les-Bains. It is the fortified cave of Bouiche. It is certain that Otto Rahn felt there was a mystery about it. This cave is quite mysterious with its slits and battlements. It is a closed cave, a veritable castle in a cave. It is without doubt that Gadal explained to him that this is where the Cathars had hidden their treasure. For Gadal the treasure was not monetary. It was perhaps a collection of books but might also have been the Sangraal. For Gadal the Grail was a stone that had fallen from the moon, from the sky. The ancients called it Lapis Excoris which was essentially a kind of meteorite and this area of the Arierge is very rich in meteorites. There is something quite extraordinary about these meteorites in that they consist of a form of hematite, lapis extraordinaire a mineral from outer space that is extremely pure iron, up to 99.99% pure. It is an absolutely pure mineral that doesn’t rust. It is very smooth, very beautiful and it is certain since prehistory, these stones, fallen from the sky have possessed a genuinely mysterious property, that if you take two of these stones and rub one stone against the other drops of blood fall from them. Why do these stones weep blood? Simply because they are made of iron oxide and when you add liquid to iron oxide which is red one can believe it is the blood of Christ.

Extract from Rahn’s correspondence; “Gadal has given me the key. I found what mankind had lost for seven centuries...”

Christian Koenig, Museum Curator; “in fact it was found in a hollow stalagmite carved out with a chisel. Me, I always knew of this vase that held the meteorite. It was exhibited in the Gadal room of the Tarascon museum. It was a very dense stone with magnetic properties. Gadal described it has the object of a cult and even spoke of the Sangraal, the blood of Christ. It’s curious if we look closer we see that in the manuscript of Wolfram von Eschenbach who was a troubadour, in his text the Grail was a stone and it is said that one who sees that stone will have eternal life and will be healed. In his text there are many interesting things such as this Grail being called the Pyrenean Grail by Gadal. The stone from the sky symbolized the fall of man the fall of matter and the fall of Satan.   

Narration (?), “The density of matter and hence the position of an element on the periodic table is determined by the local conditions prevalent at the time of the big bang. On earth the heaviest available element is uranium which can be artificially enriched to form plutonium although far heavier stable metals exist in deep space some of them dense enough to bend the fabric of space time itself, each one with the energy of the big bang, the original light still trapped within it.”

Professor Paul Ladame, Geneva University, “But to be very frank I was not mobilized with the enthusiasm of my friend Rahn. He was in heaven and I thought all the time I have a girl waiting for me in Paris. So I didn’t make it too long.”

Christian Bernadac, Investigative journalist; “The first time that Otto Rahn came to Montsegur he was sent which implies that he already had contacts very close to Himmler, in particular the man known as Colonel Weisthor. The true rise of Himmler didn’t come till 1935 or 36 but already everything was ready, the SS were ready, the concentration camps were ready, the concentration camps rather than the extermination camps like Auschwitz. In the formation of the symbolism of the SS and the master race Otto Rahn played a role. It is certain that he did not describe this role to his friend Paul Ladame, it was a secret, not just a mystery. It was a true secret and if one betrayed such secrets at that time one could be killed.”       
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t6mLjzj6dQ
  

The Secret Glory part 6

Reich Historian Hans Jurgen Lange; “Rahn had written the Court of Lucifer in Homberg and was invited to a wedding where SS uniforms appeared. He was very hurt that he was seated with the other young people whilst an ordinary Whermacht officer was seated higher up at the table. During the festivities he intentionally started a fight and attacked the officer.”

“Professor Frise writes about different events. Rahn would often walk through Berlin at night and when he came across a drunken SS man in a nightclub or in the company of loose woman he would salute him and shout “you are besmirching our Honor!”     
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAqcV9CwSWs
 

The Secret Glory part 7

Albert Von Haller, Publisher; “My relationship with Rahn came to an end when he tried to blackmail me politically. He was always in financial difficulties. This was certainly the case the year in which his book was published [1933]. I had told him in advance that he would not earn a lot of money from the book. Rahn phoned me one day and said he had to speak to me urgently. He said he was in trouble and asked me to meet him at a coffee shop in Alexanderplatz, a very well known literary café frequented by authors. I went and to my surprise I found Rahn sitting with three high ranking SS officers. They were colonels or squad leaders of the highest order surrounding Himmler. This was of course suspicious to me. Now Rahn came out with his request and said that he urgently needed money. He claimed that his book was a personal favorite of Reich’s leader Himmler. He felt that I should give him an advance. He urgently needed a few thousand marks. I then looked at the officers who told me they thought I should pay him...”

Christian Bernadac, Investigative journalist; “the problem of Otto Rahn is very complicated. He is surrounded by mysteries. The only certainty is that Otto Rahn was a National Socialist. It is unimaginable that in Himmler’s cabinet someone could be pretending...”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlIXPhu1kJU
 

The Secret Glory part 8

Ingeborg Roehmer–Rahn, a psychiatrist and Rahn’s niece, “Otto was sent to Dachau at the end of 1937...

Reich Historian Hans Jurgen Lange; “Dachau was relatively new at the time and couldn’t yet be called a concentration camp, nor did it have the characteristics. This was only after Kristalnacht. Rahn had nothing to do with the guard troops but was trained with the SS utility group. Commander Eickels assessments from this time say Rahn found it difficult for purely physical reasons to go through the exercises. It shows again and again that the Nazi’s were interested in hardening Rahn...”

Professor Paul Ladame, Geneva University; “I had planned to take a flight to Leningrad or Moscow. I went to take a visa and then my aunt told me ‘your friend Rahn has called several times.’ So I ring back and he gives me the order ‘Paul come as quickly as you can to meet me!’ And I took the car of my uncle, drove through Berlin to his flat and discovered Rahn in uniform. And he was quite a bit drunk. He had a flask of French Cognac.  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OvThdqoQ2s
 

The Secret Glory part 9

And he said ‘Paul you have been at the Russian Embassy at ten minutes to twelve. You have been out ten minutes later on, proof that you are a spy! I have been asked to follow you every day and report who you might meet, who you see, what telephone calls you get, what mail you get. Paul I can only give you one advice. Get out of Germany as quickly as you can.’”

Ingeborg Roehmer–Rahn, a psychiatrist and Rahn’s niece, ‘and then in the spring of 1938 he was advised to either with the help of a good friend return to service at the concentration camps or commit suicide. This is how I know it. I don’t know about any evidence. This is internal.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8V8mfF--Qk

 

The Secret Glory part 10

Professor Paul Ladame, Geneva University; “And that was the day that Otto Rahn had to take the decision, when the war broke out, to commit suicide.”

Reich Historian Hans Jurgen Lange; “He travelled via Kufstein to Sol. He got off the bus and went into the forest, close to Wilde Kaiser Mountain. Deep in the forest lived a farmer and his children he arrived there late in the afternoon and the children saw him. He asked them for the time and they had the opportunity to talk a little. After dark the children started to wonder about the stranger’s whereabouts. They started to search for him which was pretty easy as the snow was one meter deep. But finding no footprints they could only wonder.”

“After the snow melted in the spring while playing in the bushes only a few hundred meters from the house they found the corpse of Otto Rahn. Next to his body were two bottles containing tablets, one empty, the other half empty. They called the police and now it was clear why they hadn’t seen the footprints. He had walked upstream along the river bed and lay down beneath the fir tree to take his pills. He didn’t die because of the sleeping pills. He froze to death...”

Christian Bernadac, Investigative journalist; “From this moment it would have been easy to give him a second or third identity. There were many examples in WW II that the British and Germans declared false bodies. It would be necessary to dig to reconstruct and exhume the skeleton of Otto Rahn to see if it corresponds with his teeth, his height, his bones, maybe his hair. It’s the ABC, the most well known ploy of the intelligence services..."
  
Suzanne Nelli, Centre d’Etude Cathari; “There were a few faithful of Montsegur who decided to celebrate the 700th anniversary of the fall of Montsegur. They could have been thrown in prison or even sent to Germany. They did it all the same. Seven or eight of them went up. It was cold. Well it was the 16th of March. Someone read a poem after that a plane was heard overhead. It is here that the myths and legends start. This plane certainly came. Maybe it was the command at Tours that sent the fighter plane to see if a crowd was gathering in Montsegur to start a revolution, that sort of thing. Around this myths started to accrue. It is said there was someone German who was behind the pilot, maybe Himmler, I don’t know. Someone who saw the plane said it circled above making Celtic crosses. Why a Celtic cross because the origins of the Germans are Celtic. The proof is that when the plane was sighted they came down they took the car and they went to eat a hearty dish of beans at then Couquets, that’s a detail that proves it’s true.”         
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmGf70So2r0

The Secret Glory part 11

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Citations 

1 - "Col. Howard A. Buechner's account of the execution of Waffen-SS soldiers at Dachau." Dachau Scrapbook. 30 Nov 2007. Web. 25 Mar 2018. https://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/DachauLiberation/BuechnerAccount.html

2 - Stanly, Richard, director. The Secret Glory. Shadow Theatre Films in conjunction with the BBC, 2001. www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1prqhIq4uc.

 

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