Forbidden History - Nazi Secret Societies

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

Hitler and his key officers of the Nazi High Command were all members of three main secret societies. They had a strong belief in the occult, ancient mysticism, and even alien contact, which fuelled their desire to rule as a genetically pure race...   Cast List: Andrew Gough: Writer, presenter and editor of The Heretic Magazine  Lynn Picknett: Historian and researcher specialising in exposing historical conspiracies. She is also the co-author of several notable works Alice Von Kannon: Author & Researcher Theo Paijmans: Researcher & Historian  Michael Fitzgerald: Author, Hitler’s Occult War Gisela Heidenreich: Lebensborn Child Ross Andrews: Historian & Author  Eric Meyers: Narrator  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. The Nazis and the occult. The hidden influences that sparked Adolf Hitler's lust for power are now revealed. The Nazis had built for themselves an entire universe of beliefs. Some of it factual, some of it semi-factual, some of it from planet Mars.

And the more you study the Nazis, the more it's like science fiction. What were the mysterious occult Nazi societies at the heart of the Third Reich? Key members of the Nazi Party, in particular Himmler and Hitler, were not just a little into the occult. They were absolutely obsessed by it. What's incredible is how influential the secret societies were on the creation of the Third Reich. These ideas of occultism, spirit, Ritualism and racism made for a toxic blend. Is it true that the Nazis had a top-secret program to build flying saucers and UFOs?

Did the Nazis take the blueprints to build these round flying machines? We have UFOs, rocket-launching factories built underground. There appears to have been one successful, slumming, short, Short, not very far, but still a successful test flight. And were there plans to build a genetically pure white super race? The Nazis stole babies, and they were brought up in the hands of people who would Germanicize them. That was the master plan. This is crazy stuff. It's way ahead of its time.

It's because world domination is the goal, and it's just a shame. it was driven by evil. The Nazis were a powerful dominant force across Europe and North Africa in the mid-20th century. Led by the charismatic Adolf Hitler, they rampaged through country after country, leading to the greatest conflict this world has ever known, the Second World War. But behind the rallies, parades, and overwhelming military power, there lay a strong belief in ancient mysticism, magic, and the occult. There were two secret societies at the core of these esoteric beliefs, whose members were at the very top of the German High Command.

Among them was Heinrich Himmler, the Fuhrer's right-hand man. So Himmler had a vision of having a center where men could come and become true Germans, really the sort of Aryan race that he had envisioned. It was melded to the idea that this was the idea that this was the German, you know, their destiny, tied up with the old Germanic gods demanding that they do this. This was a monument to the Volkish beliefs that founded the SS. This just wasn't textbook stuff. They were meditating. They were having seances. This is where they learned how to be the Germans of the past and the Germans of the future.

The chosen place for Himmler's secret Nazi project was a castle in northeastern Germany, originally built in the 10th century. It was added to and adapted over the centuries before the infamous SS moved in during the 1930s and turned it into the stronghold that still stands today. The plans for Vellelsberg Castle was for it to be the center of the Germanic ideology for hundreds of years into the future. Kimmer spent a good couple of years with the help of concentration camp workers, building Vvelsburg into his vision,

adding ritual crypts beneath the North Tower in the design of a beehive hut that they felt was symbolic for all sorts of reasons. Theo Pymans is a Dutch researcher and historian, who is an expert on Nazi secret societies. He believes that Velsberg was at the heart of the Nazis' esoteric and occult. cult beliefs. Himmler and his generals needed places for the development of the own esoterical philosophies. The SS had a number of castles and they called them Ordensburgen. Translation of that is Castles of the Order and each castle would have a specific function in order

to train the generals and the high officers of the SS. But this castle was the premier Ordensburg, the primary castle of the Order. And only a select few would come here. The Nazis used Vévelsburg as a training center for elite members of the SS. Around a dozen or so high-ranking officers spent time here taking part in secret rituals, pagan worship, and paying homage to the sacred northern gods. Vibblesburg Castle was the home of the ultimate secret society. The SS was the ultimate secret society.

very simple. A lot of people think it's just a fashionable design for SS. It's a ruin. They took classes in ruins. They took classes in these beliefs. This is where you would come if you were in the upper echelon of the Nazi party and you were being groomed for bigger and better things. This is where the rituals would take place. I mean, this is not a place they created. This is a place they modified. Everything about Vvelsburg is symbolic and is designed for. for the elite of German society. All of the rituals in Wellsburg Castle was basically to instill this military regimented ideas

into their heads that they bade orders, they bade the Fuhrer, they had no thoughts or feelings of their own. They were in themselves each the perfect Aryan warrior. We have one eyewitness account of a person who is inside this castle, who stumbles upon a room, who inadvertently opens the door and sees there, 12 of his SS generals sitting there in strict silence and meditation. It's one of those rare glimpses that we see what Himmler really was about.

So these people were thought leaders, but they were also really into ritual, and that ritual included things like seances, and included different ways of communing, whether that be drugs or just ordinary ritual, rituals to try to access information from other realms. Heinrich Himmler was an active occultist and took an intense and very personal interest in what went on at Velsberg. He visited the castle at every opportunity. Himmler would arrive across the gate. He would enter with the car and his generals. The car would stop here. Himmler would enter, leave the car. There would be an orchestra, there would be

his generals, there would be soldiers, there would be a soldiers, there would be a ceremony. Himmra would have been greeted and then he probably would have gone through that door inside the main hall where there is a very important and secret symbol which is still here today. The inner core of the SS was always very secretive about what it did here in this hall in the castle of Evelsburg and even today we don't know for sure what it was that they did here. We have a slight inkling and that has to do with the symbolism of the number 12. There are 12 pillars and there are 12 Zieg rooms.

So we may assume that the group that got it here would be 12, including Himmler, making it 13, the unholy number 13. The most sacred symbol to the SS was the Black Sun, which they worshipped at Vevilsburg. The Black Sun comes from the idea of the hollow Earth. Within the hollow Earth it was a power source because without an external sun, you can't grow crops, you can't survive. Some see the swastika as a symbol of the black sun, the energy, this black energy.

It's the antithesis of the sun. So the mindset of the people in Germany around the start of the 20th century, when these societies were being formed, is really no different than it was anywhere else in Europe. For about 50, 100 years now, there's been a slow buildup of interest in the occult and interest in the people who can talk to other realms. and that information was actually quite credible. Downstairs under the main chamber is a crypt personally designed by Himmler himself to his specifications.

It was here it's believed that the most intimate and powerful secret society ceremonies took place. This space is the crypt beneath the North Tower and Weaelsberg, and this was to be Himmler's center of the world. Now, had the Nazis won the war, we could only imagine what kind of rituals they might, have held here. This was built before and during the Second World War. Construction stopped in 1943 because of the defeat of the Nazis at Stalingrad. Now we don't know what the script may have been used for but we could imagine certain things. And one of the things that people say is that highly ranked SS generals would be cremated

here and the urns with our ashes would be standing alongside the wall. So this was to be Himmler's, well, center of the world where he would keep his most trusted and loyal SS generals, even after death. At the end of the war, Himmler gave instructions to blow up and destroy Vvelsburg Castle so that the Allies would never discover its secrets. But the team tasked to do this simply did not have enough explosives to do the job. So the castle was spared, only to be sacked and pillaged by local people after Germany surrendered. Germany surrendered.

Coming up after the break, an elite Nazi secret society based on an ancient underground race, high-level meetings, and rituals at the Four Seasons Hotel Munich, and the Nazis' plans to build operational UFOs to win the war. The Nazis were deep into all sorts of ancient beliefs and occult rituals. They even restored a medieval castle, Vettelsberg, in northern Germany, to house the holy relics that they were searching for across the world, like the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail. Himmler and others saw themselves as descendants of the Great White Knights, whose destiny was to rule the world.

Michael Fitzgerald is an author and historian who is an expert on Nazi occult activities. He spent decades investigating and researching the activities of one very powerful group, the Tula Society. The Thule Society was occult overtones, but they were always primarily politically orientated. They wanted to make their racist and nationalist dreams come true through using occult methods, among other things. There was all this foment of a strange romantic mixture of medieval, grail stories, you know, Germanic folklore and bits of science fiction, all melded together with politics and with this huge desire to pull themselves out of this morass of, well, kind of stagnation and despair that the German

people were in, behind somebody who would be a focus. You're walking a fine line here in terms of occult beliefs and occult societies and hidden and secret societies. When you're talking about societies like Thule, are they secret societies yet? Are they occult societies? Are they esoteric? Well, that depends on the society. That depends on what their purpose for existence is. The Tall Society visualized their enemies as dead, and they used this technique to considerable extent.

That was their primary thing that they tried to do. Obviously, they also used physical means to try and encourage that, and they did do a great number. did do a great number of murders themselves. The Tula Society members were made up of the ruling elite of the Nazi party at the time, including well-known philosophers Alfred Rosenberg and Dietrich Eckhart. Eckhart believed that the material world was evil and it was our duty to escape from it, so he and Rosenberg were very much on that wavelength.

They believed in a higher spiritual realm that it was our duty to aspire towards. Their perception of that world was very bizarre, because they thought human suffering on this realm was unimportant. This was the realm of illusion. The realm of reality was up there. They believed that their ancestors lived underground and were ruling the world from underneath the ground. Now when the time is right, they would come back and make their rightful claim to society

and rule the world above ground once more. once more. The Four Seasons Hotel in Munich was one of the main meeting places for another important Nazi secret society, known as the Vrille. Like the Tula Society, their members were the leading lights in the Nazi party. Around a dozen men would secretly meet together to implement the dark agenda of the society. In the late 1930s, this included plans to take over and rule the world. The term Vrille actually came from, you know, a novel written in the 19th century by

novelist Lord Lytton called The Coming Race. He had this concept of underground dwellers who lived beneath the earth and they have this power called Vrille. This ancient culture, very advanced technological culture, is displaced by a cataclysm and is forced to flee the surface of the earth and creates a world within. the earth powered by a black sun. People believe that there was a doorway into this hidden world in the North and South Pole. That it was possible to get into this great subterranean cities.

That attracted these guys who actually literally believed that Vril existed and was a real power that could be manifested and used to achieve dominion. over people and even domination over the material world. It's all there. It's all there in his books that were admired by these high Nazi leaders, Vril as a power, as a life source. They totally bought into this. The idea of this extraordinary force that was sort of almost occult, it was mysterious, but it was very real in its outcome.

It appealed to the German people and certain thinkers in particular. Andrew Goff has uncovered evidence of a top-secret Vrille society meeting that took place outside Munich before the war. What occurred was truly bizarre. So imagine the scene deep in the Bavarian forest, in a country house. Here, the event that would serve as the genesis for the formation of the most evil society in modern, times would be a seance. In attendance are representatives of the elite from Munich, but more importantly, all the secret societies are there, Thule, Verrill, brothers of the Blackstone, and the Black Sun, which is sort of the elite of the Thule Society. The atmosphere of the night would have been tense. The

ambiance would have been full of anticipation. Just who was going to be this mysterious guest. Who is this? Who is this woman in the black veil? She would reveal that she has been in contact with a planet called Alder Baran, which is 64 light years away in the constellation of Taurus. And she's already channeled information in two different languages,

one of which appears to be a German Templar script. But the other is ancient Sumerian. And what they present to the group is that they have been given a blueprint for an advanced spacecraft that uses free energy. They would call it virile energy. According to records, documents, and declassified footage from the time, the Nazis took this connection to UFOs very seriously, even going so far as trying to build their own.

But from 1933 onwards, they gave huge priority to unconventional types of aircraft machine. The Germans were leading the world in rocketry. They were leading the world in unconventional anti-gravity research, and they were leading the world in unconventional propulsion systems. There were certainly prototypes, there were plenty of blueprints, and there appears to one successful flight short and not very far, but still a successful test flight. First of all, nobody else had a UFO program, only Germany, it would appear. And at first, as you might expect, it didn't really succeed, but there's a count of

of spherical craft, UFO-looking crafts, launching into the air, but only a few feet and only for a brief period of time. But later in World War II, there's all kinds of accounts of these foo fighters, a generic term given to these spherical devices that were approaching allied planes and just causing a distraction, but also aggressively behaving and many instances attacking the allied planes. Did the Nazis take the blueprints to build these round flying machines? And did they make them? And did they fly them to

their secret bases in Antarctica. It was so secret that very few people, even within the Third Reich, knew about it. It was top secret research. I mean, only certain engineers were involved. And the actual designers of this particular flying saucer went on to work in America and Canada. Coming up, contact with aliens. with aliens and building real-life UFOs, a set of unique Nazi documents exposes their twisted and far-fetched plans and beliefs, and the top-secret female mediums used by Nazi high

command and the Nazi obsession with creating a white super race. The highly secretive Nazi Vrille Society used female mediums to contact ancient races, and was rumored they even contacted extraterrestrial lifeform. It's believed that this led to the Nazis' development of real-life UFOs, which they hoped would win them the war. Researcher and historian Theo Pymans has collected a number of original Vrille Society documents, which somehow escaped destruction at the end of the war, and which shed light on some of their secret activities.

There's a huge amount of mythology surrounding the Vrille Society, and I've been researching this topic for more than 25 years after having first read it. And if you look upon the Ville Society, you see that there's various kinds of stories, there's a huge amount of tales. In fact, what I found out was that their main focus and their main trust was the development

of a new kind of technology. And after many, many years of research, I finally was able to find some documentary evidence. Reading these texts, what became immediately clear that the technology that they described is a mixture of avant-garde technology, but also esoteric thought, which is very interesting. It is as if these people discovered something so new

and so different from everything there was before that they could only resort to certain esoteric phrases in order to describe what they had found. Now, and the key element of this technology was they only would be needing one machine in order to give the whole world this form of technology. But it wasn't just technology and spacecraft at the heart of the Vril Society.

It was said that there were female mediums who claimed to channel messages from extraterrestrials to the Nazis. They had what was now known simply as the Vril Women. Apparently there was a kind of inner circle of mediumistic women. There was one called Mariah Orsec. There was one just known as Segrun and they were supposed to be rather beautiful. They had incredibly long hair, which they believed that this long hair actually actually as antennae for them to be in touch with these aliens. Now people might wonder, okay, why did such an organization

or such a secretive group like the Phil Society exist in Germany and not say in other parts of the world? Well, we must understand that there's a couple of factors involved. In the 1920s, 1930s, Germany was at the forefront of new discoveries. We must understand that even people like Albert Einstein originally came from the German language areas. There's also the fact that German engineering was at at the peak of what it was able to do.

Although most of Nazi Germany was destroyed during the war, some important locations survived. One of them was a beer hall in Munich, where Hitler, Himmler, and other top Nazi officials met as part of a secret society. The man in charge was Dietrich Eckhart. Eckhart was one of the hugest, absolutely devastating influences on Hitler's thoughts.

He was the man that not only introduced into these things, but he got into take part in various rituals and to develop willpower and to develop the art of magnetism on not simply the ordinary level in which people can be magnetic, but to take it to another level. He believed that he was in touch with the secret chiefs, these kind of beings that were, according to various theories, they might be fallen angels, they might be living underground,

they could be even extraterrestrials in some interpretations, although at the very least they were seen as a kind of superior species above human beings. As a result of these techniques, if you want to call them that, that he was taught, he developed a far greater degrees of concentration, the greater of willpower. He developed the ability to make people change their minds, but not through using rational arguments.

He would kind of use a kind of force of not just a force of personality, but he genuinely believed it was a kind of external force that he could control. One constant theme that emerged from all of the Nazi secret societies, societies was a total and almost manic belief in a white or Aryan super race. While the terrible Nazi's persecution of the Jews and other racial minorities has long been exposed, few are aware that its origins lay in highly esoteric meetings that took place behind closed doors in Germany. In the eyes of Himmler and Hitler, the pure German was tall, blonde hair, blue eyes, racially

pure. This is the foundation of what became the Holocaust. This was the ancient Aryan archetype that they associate with their society that goes back hundreds of thousands of years and goes back to the lost civilization of Atlantis. That's how they were thinking of themselves. They believed the Aryan race probably went back 10,000 years, that they had soiled themselves by sleeping with lesser races,

by joining with them, joining their blood with them, scattering throughout the world and that they had to come back together again and that the best place to do that the place where you found the most of them was Germany they are so ambitious and they see that fertility rates are going down the population is declining but they want to do all this stuff they want to dominate the world so they create a program the Liebenz board program that's all about rapidly developing a racially pure Germany. The Leibonsborn program was founded in 1935 and was one of Nazi Germany's most secretive projects.

The plan was audacious and simple to create a white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed master race that would take over the world. Giesela Heidenreich is a product of this genetic engineering. Her father was a Nazi SS officer, and he agreed to be part of the world. of the experiment, which is believed to have created more than 8,000 Aryan children. The mothers who wanted to give birth to their child, they had to have special attributes, they had to have a special height. They should be at least dark blonde. They should have blue eyes. And they should claim the father of their children, even if they were not married,

that he was also kind of an Aryan race. As many of the father, actually were SS officers, so it was very simple. Because the SS officers, they would, even if they were not married to those women, they would give them a kind of certification. That they said, I am the father of this child, which would be given birth to now. It was some of a special society from the very beginning.

So I think even people who had not known knowledge about, about it. They would say, well, something is very sinister about these homes, but it was just like a program for the ideal of the Aryan race. There was certainly an understanding with Leibbonsborn. They didn't think that it was going to die in 1945. These people thought in terms of a thousand-year Reich. It didn't stop there. The Leibonsbourne program also stole babies. They stole the thousands of them, mostly from neighboring countries to the north that they viewed were ethnically pure. When they went to Poland, found that many of these children were Aryan-looking. They were taken

from their parents, and they were put in internment homes for a while, and they were placed with German families so that they could be Aryanized. It was all the same program. It was all called Leibonsborn. They still had a stringent selection criteria. The parents, the father, the mother, they couldn't have any non-caucasian blood tracing back three generations. They couldn't have any Jewish blood. These children were taken away, just robbed from their parents and brought into houses that were developed in many different countries that the Germans were controlling, and they were brought up in the hands of people who would Germanicize them.

That was the master plan. Ross Andrews is a historian, author, and an expert on the Nazi's occult plans. He says that Himmler and Hitler were obsessed with the Knights Templar and their quest to find both the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail. He believes it's possible that the Templars buried these holy treasures in a cave under the village of Royston in Hertfordshire before moving them to other sites, which included Roslyn Chapel in Scotland. Himmler was obsessed with the occults, like a lot of the top brass of the Nazi party,

but he in particular wanted to appropriate pretty much all religion into his German religion that he was building. He wanted to get hold of as many relics as he possibly could get hold. They'd already had the spear of destiny. They were after anything else that could possibly have been had by the Templars. So if the Templars had had the Ark, if they'd had the Holy Grail, he wanted hold of it. If we look at the castle that he built, he built a chamber very, very similar to this. It was a circular room, it was a recessed floor as well, for initiation purposes. So it's like he possibly wanted this room in his castle as well.

Royston Cave was rediscovered in the 17th century. It was thought to be a ritualistic space for the Templars, as well as a storage facility, and perhaps a strong room for the holy relics, that they brought back from Jerusalem. Ross is certain that Himmler sent agents to check out the cave using local contacts, either before or during World War II, but they found the empty chamber we know today.

Himmler spent a fortune, and as archaeology goes, no one in the history of ever spent anywhere near as much as he did. He was obsessed with finding the ark, he was obsessed with finding as many holy relics as he possibly could. They paid millions in today's money to send a group out to Tibet. They went down into Africa. They travelled the world searching for these things. Now, he also knew a lot of the legends and mysteries that the Templars talked of.

So he had a belief that the Templars possibly had found the Holy Grail. He had a belief that they had found the Ark of the Covenant. He wanted to get to a place like this where he may have been able to pick up a few more clues and hopefully have found the things he needed. Himmler himself was very steeped in the occult and wanted to recreate the Teutonic Knights. The uniforms, the design, the entire look, the runic symbols, the SS of runes, which were classes of mystical language that could be used for divination and that created words of power. And there was a lot around power, the idea that they were chasing holy relics like the spirit

of longiness and the Holy Grail. These are like any religious relics. They're items that supposedly hold power. So it's this quest for power, this desperate need to find power in any form. Templars were massive relic hunters. They dug things up out of Jerusalem. They went into Africa, into Ethiopia.

They possibly, possibly got hold of the Ark of the Covenant. They possibly got hold of the Holy Grail. Now, if those things ended up in this country, there's a distinct possibility they were of come from the south coast, heading up north, heading towards Scotland, for example. This would have been the perfect place to have stored it on its journey as it headed north. What's also fascinating about this location is its similarity to the castle in Vellelsberg, where the Nazis also built an initiatory crypt for their ceremonies, but on a much larger scale.

This is an octagonal floor, which is unlike any kind of religious building you would normally have in this country, you normally have a cross-shaped. Now it meant that if you had an altar in here, it didn't have to be east-west. This may have been some form of copy of the original temples they built at the Temple Mount, which meant they didn't have to face towards Jerusalem. They were the center of the world, which kind of leads us to think that this is some form of initiation or ritual building that Templars would have come in to perform some form of ritual within their religion. In all of this purity, there's something very nationalistic, there's a national identity that they're trying to protect, this ideal of

almost the medieval German Teutonic knight, and they felt that there was a pure Germanic blood that had to be protected. Yeah, Himmler obviously studied all the mysteries, studied the legends, and to him, he had seen this group of knights. They were strong, they were white, which is one of the most important things that the Aryan beliefs could have had. And he'd seen these people throughout history doing the things that he wanted. He wanted these treasures, he wanted these relics, and to him he almost wanted to be one of

the Templars. Now if the Templars managed to get hold of the Ark of the Covenant, if they got hold of the Holy Grail or something that they thought was that, some form of holy relic, it's a distinct probability that it would have ended up here. And it would have been placed in this lower area and they would have been down here worshipping it. We don't have proof of that, we haven't got photographs, we haven't got CCTV from the Middle Ages down here, but just by using logic, that's the kind of thing that they obviously would have done down here. By the time World War II broke out in 1939, the Nazi party and its leaders were already firm believers in the powers of the occult.

Heinrich Himmler, second in command only to the furor, was intent on turning Vellelsberg into his own vision of a Grail castle, built to house the greatest whole relics of history, including the Ark of the Covenant, the Spear of Destiny, and the Holy Grail itself. Himmler and to some extent Hitler, ardently believed that if they could possess these great relics, then the world would fall at their feet, and they'd be able to rule as a white super-race, like modern-day Knights Templar. Their secret societies, such as the Tula and the Vrille, were wholly focused on that objective, as they studied ancient texts and performed occult rituals. The Nazis were far more than bloodthirsty murderers. All these ideas as crazy as they sound, and there's no justifying them, mind you,

but they're the product of almost 100 years of gradual sort of obsession about the occult, and combine obsession with the occult with growing nationalistic pride, and this is what you get. It's a really twisted result from what was originally just an interesting idea about how the world is structured. I don't think those secret societies would have understood how distorted their view was.

Their idea of purity and correctness was in fact evil in a way, pure evil. So many of these societies existed for the sole purpose. of proving what was termed ariosophy, what was termed the ideal of the Aryan race, and proving that what all those other scientists said was nonsense, that we, the German people, we do go back to Atlantis, we do go back 10 or 15,000 years, and we can prove it.

So that is how the occultism, the Aryanism, it all began to play together. It was all playing the same long playing record. Well, the Nazis found a lot of stuff and stole it. So they've got artwork, statues, relics from all over the world. I think if they'd found something as important as the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, that would have been announced straight away. And it would have been such a morale boost for the German public,

but more importantly, the morale of the people they were fighting would have just suddenly disappeared. Because how can you beat somebody that has the Ark of the Covenant? This is pure science fiction. I mean, just look at what we have. We have UFOs. We have rocket-launching factories built underground. We have stormtroopers. I mean, this is crazy stuff.

It's way ahead of its time. It's because world domination is the goal. And it's just a shame. It was driven by evil. Behind the huge rallies and military might, Nazi Germany and its leadership were firm if secret believers in the occult and its powers. They dedicated huge resources to tracking down holy relics and immersed its leaders in rituals and ceremonies to try and unleash supernatural forces to help its aim in taking over the world.

It was a plan that came to a spectacular end in 1945.