The Knight´s Legacy

The North Tower

After a few minutes the one-armed SS reappeared, and silently led him to the refectory, informing him that after lunch he would return to his unit with the same motorcycle driver who had brought it. Horstmann had not doubt that the one-armed SS was unaware of the purpose of his coming to the Castle.

As he walked away from the SS fortress, Horstmann did not stop thinking about the unusual series of events that he had experienced that morning. What was the relationship between the spot on his neck, speleology and Antarctica? Actually, He knew that several Nazi leaders professed occultist ideas, which were at the very basis of their ideology, but this seemed to exceed the limit of normalcy, and somewhat offended the rational temperament of the Colonel.

While the motorcycle was climbing uphill and through a small clear between the trees on one side of the precipice Horstmann saw down below a sinister barbed wire rectangle, circling a few dirty huts in which spectral human figures in vertical stripes suits moved around. He took his binoculars and inspected them attentively. Also spotted at the door of the place a sign with the words Arbeit macht Frei. This gloomy vision never left him. He knew that he had just passed by a KonzentrationLager, whose inmates surely provided the labor for the construction on the Castle.

Joachim Levinson looked through the narrow window of the barrack of the concentration camp in order to breathe some air not contaminated with the putrid smell that emerged from countless sick and overcrowded bodies. He did this whenever he could because at the same time he dreamed of the freedom lost a year ago and open spaces precisely represented freedom for him. He remained there, if he could until the memories of his family stormed him once again, relatives that were kidnapped along with him and of whom he had no news.

As he lifted his eyes saw a column of dust on the road that descended from the gloomy Castle of Wewelsburg, for whose restoration he worked extracting stone from a nearby quarry. Perking his view he observed a motorcycle with side-car. It would obviously be a hierarch of the Nazi party or the SS he thought. At that moment brightness hurt his eyes; Levinson realized that from the side-car someone watched him and the barracks with binoculars. For a very short period of time the eyes of both men met

The construction of the castle of Wewelsburg was completed in 1609, on the initiative of the Prince of Paderborn. Since its inception its history was full of horrors and already in the course of the century XVII thousands of alleged witches have been executed in it.

In 1934 Heinrich Himmler rented it to the municipality of Paderborn by the nominal value of 1 Reich mark and for a period of one hundred years with the aim of creating in it a school for Nazi leaders. From 1935 in which it was put into operation the declared purpose of the so-called SS-Schule Haus Wewelsburg was to carry on "Germanic studies". In practice, it was dedicated to the development of the racial theories of Nazism and in particular to the training of the governing bodies of the SS.

To build a new castle around the North Tower, thousands of prisoners-slaves were Housed in a nearby concentration camp. It is estimated that more than one thousand two hundred prisoners were killed in it. In 1943 the camp was deactivated and the rest of the prisoners were transferred to other extermination camps.

The above mentioned North Tower supposedly stood in the center of the world so it was charged with a very special esoteric meaning. The main place, located on the ground floor of Tower is the so-called Obergruppenfuhrersaal or "Room of representation", surrounded by twelve columns, and specially prepared for the meetings of the twelve highest hierarchs of the SS, with certain reminiscences of the Knights of the round table.

The head and creator of the SS Himmler was considered a reincarnation of a former Teutonic Prince named Heinrich I, and he had apparently planned building a crypt for himself in the building complex. It is presumed that there were also sites intended to contain the ashes of the remaining leaders of the SS.

In the center of the room grey marble floor was carved the aforementioned dark solar wheel with a golden disc in the center in a beautiful but sinister artistic composition. All this design called Black Sun was dedicated to unknown but probably occult purposes.

The upper floors of the Tower, never completed, would presumably serve as meeting center for bodies of conduction of the SS. The nature and frequency of the rites conducted at this castle have obviously not been documented and there are only assumptions in this regard.

In April 1945, two days before the third U.S. infantry division occupied Wewelsburg Himmler gave the order to an elite group within the SS under the command of Heinz Macher to dynamite the castle to prevent it from  falling into the hands of the approaching Allied troops. Most of the buildings were destroyed and only the outside walls and the emblematic tower north were spared of that fate.

After World War II the castle was rebuilt by the German Government, ending the work in 1979.

While riding in an old Mercedes Benz to the submarine base located in the Eckernförder Bay, on the eastern coast of Schleswig-Holstein, Horstmann was reviewing the recent developments. Aside from the vertigo of the entire pre-war period they were living in that year, he had the strong feeling that his life had just had a spin that would definitely put an end to his career within the Wehrmacht for which he had prepared throughout his life.

Tying his fate to an intangible subject as investigations into the Aryan race made him feel uneasy and perplex, feeling which could not be diluted by the grandiose staging at the Wewelsburg Castle. Finally, he not could move away from his mind the vision of the neighboring concentration camp he had seen when leaving  the Castle. Horstmann decided to bury this entire internal struggle focusing on the preparations for the mission, but he knew beforehand that he could never easily master his conscience.