The Dark Story of the Castle That Hid Hitler's Religion: Wewelsburg

The Dark Story of the Castle That Hid Hitler's Religion: Wewelsburg) In 1934, Heinrich Himmler signed a 100-year lease on a Renaissance castle in Westphalia for one reichsmark a year. Over the next eleven years, the SS rebuilt it from the ground up - not as a fortress, not as a residence, but as a temple. They built a domed crypt with twelve plinths to hold the urns of the future high dead of the Order. They laid a 9.5-metre sun wheel in the floor of the chamber above. They cut a vent through the dome so that the smoke of an eternal flame would always be visible from the surrounding hills. They drew up plans to surround the castle with three concentric rings of SS settlements and call the whole complex the Centre of the World. They built it with prisoners from a concentration camp they established in the village specifically to provide the labour. 1,285 of those prisoners died. This is the story of Wewelsburg Castle - the witch-burning bishop who built it in 1603, the architect Hermann Bartels who redesigned it for Himmler, the SS officer who ran out of explosives in March 1945 and left the temple standing, the German museum that spent forty years trying not to talk about it, and the neo-Nazi pilgrims who still arrive at the gate to stand in the chamber under the dome. Subscribe for more deep investigations into Europe's great castles and the stories buried in their foundations. Which castle or estate should we investigate next? Tell me in the comments. Sources: "Wewelsburg," Wikipedia - construction history, SS occupation, postwar use "Wewelsburg 1933-1945: A Cult and Terror Centre of the SS," Kreismuseum Wewelsburg permanent exhibition catalogue "Niederhagen Concentration Camp," United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (ushmm.org) "Heinrich Himmler: A Life," Peter Longerich, Oxford University Press "Himmler's Crusade: The Nazi Expedition to Find the Origins of the Aryan Race," Christopher Hale "The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust," Heather Pringle "Hermann Bartels," German Architectural Biographical Database "Dietrich von Furstenberg, Prince-Bishop of Paderborn," Catholic Encyclopaedia "Witch Trials in the Bishopric of Paderborn 1599-1631," Westfalische Zeitschrift "The Architecture of the SS Order Castles," Journal of Architectural History "Schwarze Sonne: The Symbol of the Sun Wheel at Wewelsburg," German Historical Institute Working Papers "The Niederhagen Memorial Site," Stiftung niedersachsische Gedenkstatten "Counter-Reformation Castle Architecture in Westphalia," Cambridge German History Series "Heinz Macher and the Final Days at Wewelsburg," Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte "Ideology and Terror of the SS," Permanent Exhibition Guide, Kreismuseum Wewelsburg, 2010 "Forced Labour at Niederhagen: Survivor Testimonies," Hamburg Institute for Social Research "The Black Sun Symbol in Postwar Neo-Nazi Networks," Anti-Defamation League research brief "Hochburg, Tempel, Modell-Stadt: Wewelsburg in der Planung der SS," Karl Hueser "The 1945 Demolition of Wewelsburg," German Federal Archives BArch NS 19/4017 "Religion and the SS," Bettina Stangneth, Beck Verlag