Thursday, July 08, 2010

Hitler's Holy Relics




Hitler, the gift that keeps on giving. It seems there is always one more way to package this guy. Most fo them are pure crap, such as the stuff shown on the History Channel, or people that claim he was an occult master.

I've read some scholarly stuff looking into the whole Hilter occult matter, and its actualyl really interesting as its seems good old Adolf was not as wacked in this way as some cvlaim, but was really doing some interesting things to psychologically manipluate people, and form a base to built the legends of Germany on.

So I picked up this book, Hitler's Holy Relics, more as a joke, as I like to read all the junky Hitler and occult/flying saucers/antarctica bases etc.

Minor note. I blew my 4.0 GPA in my history program when the prof got mad at me for for making an obvious joking mention of Hitler developing atomic zombies in a secret antarctica base. Seriously. He gave me a bad grade even though the rest of the work was really good, as he felt I did not take the paper seriously enough. Yeah, I came back with a "but how can you prove he wasn't? I can cite numerous books saying he was."

Anyway, this book was a good surprise. It is easy to read, and I detected very few thigns that made me feel the guy had not done his homework. It had a good ring of truth.

It covers the investigation of on of the US Army Art people trackig down the missing relics of the Holy Roman Emperor that vanished from a Nuremburg vault just before the town was captured. It dies a good portrayal of what the immediate post war period was like, and brings up some reaqlly intereting possibilities for some of the things Hitler had in mind to confirm his grasp on Europe- like have himself corronated the Holy Roman Emperor, and also convnce people that Jessu was actually born in a different Bethlehem where the population was of aryan (not jewish) stock.

I would love to hear what some serious experts have to say on all this, but just the story of dealing with all the ex-nazi's ( who now were no longer nazi's) trying to get jobs in postwar Germany is interesting by itelf. I take some of the claims with a grain of salt, but yeah, I enjoyed it.

1 comment:

Jon said...

I forgot to mention that this book centers on an Officer (a German born art historian who had become an American citizen) sent to Europe to help protect historic sites and art.

The funy thing is the mission he did AFTER this one, was to recover a rare gold coin collection of some 2,000 coins taken from a monestary that the Allies thought were being used to help pay for ex-nazi's to flee to South America.

That story, apparently only very slightly modified by some minor personal details, is told in the 'novel' The Nazi's wife.

So after you read about him finding the relics for Nuremburg, you can go read a novelization of his next mission looking for gold coins. And I have to say its not a bad book except for some military flubs which seem to be a British author screwing up American terms.