Hitler's Holy Relics by Sidney Kirkpatrick

Author:Sidney Kirkpatrick
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781849832083
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2011-08-06T18:30:15+00:00

CHAPTER 16

HITLER’S HOLY REICH

July 27–28, 1945

Later that night, Horn vented his frustration about what he had seen and heard in Nürnberg over a game of chess and a bottle of wine with Rosenthal in the library of their Camp Freising home. The Nazis who had helped to bring the Crown Jewels from Vienna to Nürnberg were the same as those who had conspired to remove them from the Blacksmith’s Alley vault. And to the shame of the American military, several of the key Nazi conspirators held the same or similar positions in the U.S.-appointed occupation government as they did during the Third Reich. Besides these revelations, all Horn had to show for his first week of investigation was what Rosenthal had said from the start. Himmler had ordered the five missing pieces of the Crown Jewels removed from the vault before the Allied invasion. It was still too great a leap, however, to suppose, as Rosenthal did, that Himmler’s courier had subsequently sunk them in a lake in Austria.

“No Teutonic Knight would do such a thing,” Horn said.

Rosenthal felt doubtful about Troche’s theory of a brotherhood of modern-day knights whose resistance mission was to protect the Crown Jewels. He couldn’t, however, dismiss the possibility that such a covert organization existed in the Third Reich or that there were links between the vault treasures and Himmler’s army of Aryan scholars. Nazis with textbooks, he readily admitted, could be just as dangerous as commandos with guns.

Like Horn, Rosenthal had heard stories and seen things that would have seemed far-fetched before the invasion. The medical experiments conducted at Dachau and Auschwitz were prime examples. Never in their wildest nightmare would they have believed that fellow Germans could be capable, for instance, of murdering inmates for the sole purpose of measuring unusually small or large body parts. But this was what G-2 intelligence had just reported.

Investigators had found what they identified as a “Jewish skull collection” in a German-operated French research lab. Along with the specimen collection were Jewish cadavers in various stages of decomposition and a special custom-made elevator that moved corpses from one floor to the next, where physicians using large tanks filled with chemicals removed hair, nails, tendons, cartilage, and other soft tissue to transform bodies into pristine skeletons. The program was dwarfed by the death camps and armament factories, but it couldn’t be dismissed as insignificant. It, too, had Reich funding and support from a hierarchy of bureaucrats that oversaw its functioning. And as Rosenthal informed Horn that evening, this program was sponsored by the Deutsches Ahnenerbe, the same team of Aryan scholars and scientists Troche had referred to. This alone was reason not to dismiss the museum curator’s theories of a Teutonic brotherhood, however fantastical they appeared.

“Nothing is off the table where the Nazis are involved,” Rosenthal said as he arranged the chess pieces. “The sooner we accept this and get down to the real business of studying Hitler and his henchmen, the better off we’ll all be.”

Rosenthal and

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