Original subtitles

-In the finaldays of the Second World War,

American troops discovered a vast hoard

of secret Nazi files hidden in a cave in central Germany.

The documents reveal

one of the Third Reich's most shadowy projects,

the hunt to discover the lost Aryan civilization

from which the Nazis believed they had descended.

Drawing on previously unseen photographs and archive film,

this is the extraordinary story

of a global search for the lost island of Atlantis,

an expedition to find traces of the master race in Tibet,

and an astonishing Nazi quest for the Holy Grail.

At the end of 1938,

the world stood on the very brink of war.

At the height of its power,

Hitler's Germany was preparing for action.

But even as the battle lines were being drawn in Europe,

the thoughts of one of the most senior Nazis,

Heinrich Himmler, were focused thousands of miles

to the east on a small band of German adventurers.

Picking their way up an isolated Himalayan pass

were five of the Third Reich's best and brightest

young scientists on an expedition that Himmler hoped

would rewrite the history of the world.

On the evening of the 22nd of December,

these five SS officers made camp

miles from civilization on the shores of a deserted lake.

Gathered 'round the fire,

they celebrated the winter solstice

and toasted their imminent success.

Against all the odds,

they had reached the borders

of the ancient kingdom of Tibet.

- Tibet had been the land of mystery for centuries.

It's a far-away place.

It's very difficult to travel into.

They're heading for Lhasa,

the holy city, the legendary mythical city of Tibet.

No German expedition has ever succeeded

in getting to Lhasa before.

- But Himmler harbored

altogether more sinister ambitions for the mission.

His true purpose was to find

the proof for one of the Nazis'

most fundamental and dangerous beliefs.

- Hitler saw world history in terms of the struggle

between races for the survival of the fittest.

And he thought that races were distinct.

So there's an absolute distinction between the Aryan race,

by which he basically means the Germans,

and the other different races,

all of which were inferior in one way or another.

The Aryan race were a master race.

- Hitler's belief in a historical

Aryan master race was unshakable.

Since the early 1920s,

he had made his belief in the hierarchy of races

one of the central pillars of Nazism.

But he had a problem.

This ancient master race

had left behind no archeological trace,

no artifacts or ruined temples.

This missing evidence was of particular concern

to one of Hitler's most loyal servants, Heinrich Himmler,

who made it his personal mission to find it.

- Heinrich Himmler's father was a schoolmaster,

famous for his pedantic and authoritarian manner,

and Himmler I think imbibed some of that extreme,

almost parody of the schoolmaster character.

He was extremely pedantic.

He was very, very meticulous in everything he did.

- Himmler was determined to prove

the existence of an ancient Aryan master race.

So when in 1936 he was invited to a presentation

at the home of an eccentric historian,

he hoped he was finally on the verge of a breakthrough.

The scholar's name was Herman Wirth,

and that night he proposed an archeological expedition,

which he promised would deliver irrefutable evidence

of an ancient Aryan civilization.

It was a trip that was the culmination of years of research.

Wirth had studied ancient symbols

carved into caves and rockfaces from all over the world

and found repeating patterns.

Although the traditional view was that they had been made

by different cultures at different times,

Wirth proposed that something

truly momentous had been missed.

He believed that the symbols from different countries

thousands of miles apart were too similar

to be explained away as simple coincidence.

They must come from one shared source,

a lost civilization.

Scouring the history books,

he found a story that he believed fitted in every detail.

The lost civilization must have originated

on the mythical island of Atlantis.

The legend was true.

- Wirth located Atlantis as an own continent

west of Portugal and southwest of Great Britain island.

People lived there in peace and harmony.

It was a kind of ideal life.

It was his paradise.

- But this paradise had not lasted.

Wirth believed that Atlantis had met its end

in a devastating global catastrophe.

The seas had risen and drowned the island.

It had sunk out of memory and into myth.

But Wirth contended a few brave Atlanteans did survive

and set sail for the high places of the world.

-They wandered onto both sides of the Atlantic,

and they took with them their culture.

- Wirth argued that these displaced Atlanteans

had seeded great civilizations all over the globe.

Wirth's vision of a drowned Atlantis captivated Himmler.

It provided the perfect solution

to the problem of the missing Aryan archeology.

Now all Himmler needed was the physical proof,

and Wirth would help him find it.

Together Himmler and Wirth formed a new department

of the SS dedicated to researching their Germanic heritage

and writing the Aryans into history.

It was known as the Ahnenerbe.

It would launch expeditions all over the world,

from the frozen forests of Finland

to the desert temples of Iraq.

And the very first project Himmler agreed to fund

was Wirth's own mission to catalog the lost Aryan script,

a script he hoped

would become the foundation of a new Nazi religion.

In 1945, the files of an SS research institute

known as the Ahnenerbe

were discovered in a cave in central Germany.

Amongst the many expedition reports were the details

of one of Heinrich Himmler's strangest obsessions,

a project to replace Christianity with a new Nazi religion.

- He despises Christianity.

He thinks Christianity weakens people.

Above all, according to Himmler,

Christianity was essentially Jewish.

- To help replace

this Jewish faith with a true religion,

the Ahnenerbe launched an expedition in the summer of 1936.

Led by one of Germany's most controversial archeologists,

Herman Wirth, a team of SS men traveled

to a remote region of Sweden

to examine a series of mysterious rock carvings.

That summer, the expedition made

over a hundred plaster casts

and shipped them back to Germany,

where Himmler eagerly awaited.

Wirth's conclusions were categorical.

These carvings were not simply

the etchings of prehistoric people,

but were in fact part of the sacred religious texts

of the lost Aryans of Atlantis.

This text was what Himmler had been waiting for,

a vital weapon in his mission

to replace Christianity with a new Nazi religion.

- Himmler wanted to press forward

with the idea of a Germanic religion

involving things like sun worship, worship of the old gods.

He thought he was genuinely researching

an archaic Germanic religion.

- He began his religious project in miniature,

inside the ranks of his beloved SS.

- Heinrich Himmler had immense ambitions for the SS.

It wasn't simply a police force.

He wanted it to be the model for a future Germany.

- Himmler established SS weddings

and a naming ceremony to replace christenings.

And he even instigated pagan-like rituals

at each of the solstices.

- By going back to the old Germanic religion

and infusing the SS with its spirit,

he would of course strengthen their will.

So Himmler certainly did want the SS

to become a kind of a cult.

- Himmler enshrined into his SS

the myth of their own racial superiority.

They were his new Aryan aristocracy.

The spiritual headquarters of this new knighthood

was the medieval castle of Wewelsburg.

With its strange ceremonial halls

and its walls adorned with ancient artifacts,

it had been transformed into a cathedral

for Himmler's new cult.

It was into this dark fairytale world

that another German scholar was drawn in 1936.

His name was Otto Rahn,

and he offered Himmler the possibility

of securing the most powerful ancient relic of all,

the Holy Grail.

- For me, Otto Rahn was the original man in black,

the spook in the black fedora and black coat,

the shadow out of history.

Trying to penetrate who Rahn really was

is certainly a tricky one.

- As a boy, Rahn had been obsessed

with the legends of King Arthur

and the story of a knight called Parsifal,

who had searched his whole life for the Holy Grail.

- At some point after leaving school,

Otto seems to have become increasingly determined

to find the Grail itself,

a mythical object which will really make one whole again,

which will heal the wounded and heal the world's pain,

the lost link between man and God.

- For Rahn, the Grail wasn't just a literary subject,

it was a real, physical object,

and he was looking for anything

that might have clues to that.

- Rahn had found inspiration

in the work of a 19th century German archeologist,

Heinrich Schliemann,

who in 1873 had discovered the real lost city of Troy,

a place once dismissed as purely mythical.

At the time, Schliemann's discovery

was an international sensation,

and his method was revolutionary.

He'd found the legendary city by following clues

locked away in the text of Homer's The Iliad,

turning fiction into historical fact.

- When Rahn came across this, he got very excited,

because he thought well, if Schliemann can do that

with The Odyssey and The Iliad in Homer's works,

then I might be able to do that with Parsifal.

- Parsifal is the story

of a knight's quest for the Holy Grail,

culminating in its discovery

at the mythical castle of Monsalvat,

high on a lonely mountain.

Like Schliemann, Rahn searched the text for clues

to the location of the legendary Grail Castle.

His quest took him to France in 1931,

and he traveled south to an area of the French Pyrenees

locally beknown as Grail country,

a region that still entices Grail hunters to this day.

There, high in the mountains,

he caught his first glimpse

of the ancient fortress of Montsegur.

Could this isolated ruin really be Parsifal's Monsalvat,

the home of the Holy Grail?

Its impregnable location certainly matched the text,

but there was another, more significant clue,

one not based on myth, but on hard historical fact.

In the 13th century,

at around the time that Parsifal legend was written down,

Montsegur had been the scene of the last stand

of a dissident religious order known as the Cathars,

the legendary keepers of the Grail.

- The Cathars were the biggest threat

the medieval Church faced

and were dubbed the great heresy as a result.

They were a fully independent counter-church,

totally opposed to the Church of Rome.

- But Rome would not stand for their heresy,

and in 1209 the Pope ordered

a bloody crusade against the Cathars.

This crusade saw the slaughter

of over a hundred thousand people,

making it one of the bloodiest events in European history,

the genocide of an entire faith.

- The papal legates is said

to have issued their notorious command

kill them all, God will know his own.

It was a pretty bloodthirsty period.

There was general rape, pillage, and looting,

mass burnings and executions,

whole towns being put to the sword.

The one major place that the Cathars were stilled holed up,

and the one major castle that hadn't fallen, was Montsegur.

- The castle was besieged for months,

until eventually the few hundred remaining Cathars

had no option but surrender.

But something did survive the Inquistion's flames.

In 1931, more than 700 years later,

Otto Rahn unearthed a local legend

about a mysterious Cathar treasure.

- One of the legends that's grown up around the Cathars

is that they possessed a treasure.

During the siege,

four Cathars are said to have scaled down the side

of Montsegur in the middle of the night with something,

the Cathar treasure.

History stops when those four men went down

the side of Montsegur into the night and vanished.

- This legend was the clue

that Rahn had been searching for.

The Cathar treasure must be the Grail,

and it had remained hidden ever since their fall.

Acting on local folklore,

Rahn spent many months crawling through

the hundreds of miles of subterranean passages

that riddle the mountains surrounding Montsegur.

As he dug deeper, he began to believe

that these ancient heretics were not Christians at all,

but believers in something far older, a lost religion.

Finally out of money,

Rahn was forced to abandon his quest and wrote a book

about the persecuted Cathars, their ancient religion,

and what he believed to be the truth about the Grail.

- Otto Rahn published in 1933 a book

called The Crusade Against the Grail.

Although it got some good reviews

in Germany and sold modestly,

he certainly wasn't a successful author at the time.

- But one of Rahn's readers

was utterly captivated by the book

and was eager to meet with the young Grail hunter in person.

- He's said to have received a telegram in 1934,

saying your book's very interesting,

I'd like to talk to you, could you please come to Berlin?

So he went back to Berlin

and went to the address given on the telegram,

and the man who sent the telegram

was none other than Heinrich Himmler.

And he later said

what was I supposed to do, turn Himmler down?

- Himmler wanted power,

and he wanted power more than anything.

Hitler was superstitious,

but Himmler was obsessed with the occult and the esoteric.

For him, the Grail represented that.

It represented power.

- For Himmler,

the Grail was an extremely seductive prospect.

It was the ultimate religious keystone,

and he believed its true power was not Christian, but Aryan.

And Rahn had brought it within reach.

- I think we can clearly imagine

that initially Otto Rahn and Heinrich Himmler

were very much on the same page.

I think they both dreamed of overthrowing

Christianity as we know it

and creating a new European religion,

something which drew on the myths of their ancestors

and of a return of the old gods.

- Himmler offered Rahn

a thousand Reichsmarks a month to continue his research,

with the only condition being that he must join the SS.

During 1935 and '36, Rahn traveled incessantly,

often accompanied by a small troop of SS men.

He traveled through Italy, France, and Spain,

as well as venturing north

through Scotland as far as Iceland.

His reports were marked top secret and were for the eyes

of Himmler and his closest advisors alone.

He recorded his journeys in his second book,

an enigmatic travel diary that contained little information

about the true purpose of his many trips

but was full of chilling Nazi rhetoric.

- Otto Rahn published a second book

called Lucifer's Court in 1937,

and there's definitely an anti-Semitic thread

where the Cathars are seen as effectively good Aryans

fighting the evil Judaic menace of the Church of Rome.

- We are the people of Nordic blood

who call ourself the Cathars.

Our heaven speaks only to the pure ones,

not to the base or mixed-race creatures,

but to Aryans, the noble, and lordly.

We did not pray to Jehova

because his divinity was a god for the Jews.

Only the Jews have the arrogance

to claim themselves divine as God's chosen people.

- Critics are divided as to how much of this

was Rahn's own belief or how much of it

Rahn was putting in there just to please Himmler

and to basically keep his own head.

- In Germany,

the whole of European history was being Nazified.

Just as Wirth's Atlanteans had become the ancient Aryans,

so too had Rahn's beloved Cathars.

But time was running out for Otto Rahn.

He still hadn't found the Grail,

and he had even bigger problems.

- The truth of the matter was that Rahn

had Jewish blood through his mother,

and a second problem was that Otto was gay.

- Rahn had done a deal with the devil,

and he was about to realize the price he would need to pay.

In 1937, having failed to deliver the Grail

and possibly as punishment for his homosexuality,

Rahn was assigned to guard duty

in Himmler's new network of concentration camps.

Here he was finally confronted

with the true terror of the Third Reich.

- The SS in many ways embodies

all the things that Rahn most feared.

They're not the spiritual inheritors

of the Cathar tradition,

they're the spiritual inheritors

of the Crusaders and the Inquisitors.

- In February 1939, Rahn resigned from the SS,

effectively signing his own death warrant.

He traveled to Austria and walked alone,

dressed in black, into the Alps.

- It's thought that he sat down underneath a tree

and took sleeping pills and simply fell asleep

underneath the tree and froze to death.

- Right up until his death,

Otto Rahn believed that the Grail remained

safely hidden in the countryside surrounding Montsegur.

He wrote,

- It lies in a cave in the Tabor Forest.

A massive stone block protects

the cave's entrance from intruders

and the treasure itself is guarded by hundreds of vipers.

- But Rahn's failure

was not going to stand in Himmler's way.

He remained determined to reestablish

his fictitious Aryan culture,

and he was about to launch his most ambitious mission yet,

seeking the master race in the most unlikely of places.

Amongst the buried files of the Ahnenerbe

were hints that during 1937 a change was taking place

inside Himmler's private research institute.

The search for the evidence of the master race

was becoming more urgent.

Herman Wirth, the man who had helped link

the Aryans to the lost island of Atlantis,

had been fired and sent back into academic obscurity.

But Himmler's faith in the power of the mythical Aryans

remained utterly unshakable.

Buried in the files is a letter from Himmler

that demonstrates the depth of his bizarre beliefs.

- Have the following researched.

Find all places in the northern Germanic Aryan

cultural world where understanding of the lightning bolt,

the thunderbolt, or Thor's hammer exists.

I am convinced that this is not based

on natural thunder and lighting,

but rather that it is an early highly developed form

of war weapon of our forefathers.

Heil Hitler.

- Himmler's attempt

to find his very own Hammer of the Gods

was perhaps unsurprisingly a failure.

And yet however farfetched his projects may seem today,

his appropriation of history

was becoming accepted fact inside Germany.

Himmler's sponsorship of the 1938 Tibetan expedition

was also inspired in part by his fantasy of a master race.

And he hoped that five SS men camped high in the Himalayas

would help prove his strangest Aryan theory of all.

He had never forgotten Herman Wirth's ideas

and believed that after the great flood

that had sunk the island of Atlantis,

a few survivors had sought refuge

in the high places of the world.

Some of these intrepid Aryans had arrived in ancient Tibet

and amongst the snow-capped peaks

founded a great civilization.

And now Himmler hoped to find the proof,

but no longer in the form of carvings or lost relics,

but in real flesh and blood.

- The truth is even darker, I think.

The reason I say that is to do with Bruno Beger

and the reason he was on the expedition.

- Bruno Beger

was one of the five scientists sent to Tibet.

His particular field of expertise was the study of people,

known as physical anthropology,

a discipline that had become

an important science inside Nazi Germany.

- Physical anthropology was an academic discipline

that was quite well developed by the 1930s.

Himmler and his physical anthropologists

thought that by measuring people's heads

you could tell what race they were.

- By 1938, Nazi anthropologists

had established a checklist of physical features

that defined every racial type, including the Aryans.

Amongst the expedition's other scientific aims,

Beger was sent to catalog

the racial makeup of the Tibetan people,

a project Himmler hoped would unearth

traces of Aryanism in the secluded people of Tibet.

- He was looking for the biological traces

that would have been left

in the living peoples of central Asia.

The investigation he carried out was meticulous.

It's a kind of mathematics of race, if you like.

What makes it sinister is that the gathering of data

was being driven by an ideology.

This ideology is founded on the idea

of there being separate races and a racial hierarchy.

And at the top of the hierarchy, of course,

are the Nordic or Aryan people.

- In Beger's final report,

there is a reference to small traces of the Nordic race

present in the anthropology of the people of Tibet.

No doubt to Himmler,

this was the remnant of the master race

that he had been expecting to find.

If Aryan blood did survive in Tibet,

then the entire fantasy of Atlantis,

a lost religion, and a once-great people must be true.

But for Himmler,

Tibet's fallen Aryans were ultimately

a moral lesson from history,

an example of what happens if the racially superior

interbreed with inferior races.

- Over time, these superior Nordic peoples

mixed with the lesser peoples that they ruled.

And as a result, they themselves decayed as a culture.

The empire fell.

And the implication of that was that miscegenation,

mixing with inferior races, was very dangerous.

Your own superior race would be brought low

by the lesser peoples that surrounded you.

Racial mixing, from their point of view,

is the road to catastrophe.

- Himmler and the rest of the Nazi elite

were determined that no such catastrophe

would befall their Third Reich.

Inferior races had to be controlled.

Of all the many quests that Himmler helped launch,

the Tibetan expedition was the most celebrated.

- When they arrived at the Munich airport,

they're met by Himmler personally on the runway,

and they're treated like celebrities, like heroes.

They have done what no German expedition

has ever done before,

which is to get to Lhasa.

It was a fantastic propaganda coup for Himmler,

the head of the SS.

- Only a month

after the return of the expedition,

the Nazis invaded Poland.

The Second World War had begun.

As the war tore its way across Europe,

the Nazi obsession with race

triggered one of the most appalling crimes in human history,

the systematic extermination of six million Jewish people.

And the Nazi leader responsible for delivering

the Final Solution was none other than the man

who had been so committed to finding the mythical Aryans,

Heinrich Himmler.

All the ridiculous theories and corrupted science

had ultimately served a fiction,

a fiction of the master race,

a fiction that had been used to help justify the Holocaust.

- It is a kind of camouflage.

You are committing a grotesque atrocity,

but you are camouflaging it, anti-humanism,

by dressing it up as a scientific necessity.

The ideas that they subscribed to

paved the way for the possibility of people imagining

that it is morally necessary to liquidate an entire race.

- But the Ahnenerbe's role

in the Holocaust was far from over.

In 1942, they were engaged to help Himmler solve a problem

at the heart of the genocide.

In spite of their obsession with race,

the Nazis had failed to find the racial characteristics

that defined who was a Jew and who was not.

- Himmler's very much aware of the strong degree

of arbitrariness involved in the definition of races,

and Himmler thought that there must be

better ways of doing this,

a more scientific basis for it,

and he was of course the man who was charged

with organizing and implementing

the extermination of the Jewish people.

And as a rather pedantic, precise man,

he wanted more precise definitions.

- The documents reveal that the Ahnenerbe

was charged with finding these definitions,

definitions that would ultimately determine

who should live and who should die.

The project was assigned to an infamous medical doctor

by the name of August Hirt.

- August Hirt was already a member of the SS.

And he was eager to get ahead in the organization.

For this reason, he was particularly open minded.

- Dr. Hirt

had already turned his back on medical ethics,

conducting a series of horrific experiments

on live prisoners at Natzweiler concentration camp.

In 1942, he turned his attention to discovering

the one universal measurement of Jewishness.

He decided he would require the services

of a physical anthropologist,

and the Ahnenerbe provided none other than Bruno Beger,

the scientist who led the anatomical measurements in Tibet.

In the summer of 1943,

Beger and a small team were dispatched to Auschwitz,

signaling the beginning of one

of the Nazis' most infamous war crimes.

- Beger arrived in Auschwitz

in the beginning of June,

and first of all he had the task of selecting 150 Jews,

men and women.

Beger came into the main camp,

and he took quarters in the hospital area,

and from there he did his investigation.

He thought about whom he should select.

He wanted to select a cross-section of all the Jews present.

- Not long after Beger arrived at the camp,

Elizabeth Klein, a 42-year-old Viennese Jewish woman,

was ordered to line up in front of the infirmary,

along with 150 other prisoners.

She was to be measured by Beger and his team.

- He used the caliper rule.

He had tables in which he recorded the eyes,

he recorded the color of the eyes,

the distance between the eyes,

the distance between the ears, the size of the ears,

the shape of the forehead, and so forth.

- Having measured Elizabeth,

Beger read her prisoner number aloud,

and it was added to a list.

Elizabeth had been chosen to be part

of one of the Nazis' most macabre war crimes,

the Jewish skeleton collection.

On July the 30th, 1943, at Auschwitz concentration camp,

a small group of prisoners were loaded onto a transport.

Their destination was another death camp

known as Natzweiler.

They were to become victims

of what is known as the Jewish skeleton collection.

It was a project that put the Ahnenerbe

at the heart of the final solution,

and a medical doctor known as August Hirt

was in charge of the operation.

He turned his attention to Himmler's problem

of how scientifically to identify Jewishness

and decided he was missing some key research material.

- What was missing was a collection of anatomical materials

that could be used to study and refine

their knowledge of what it was to be a Jew.

And this perception that there wasn't enough

skeletal material had murderous consequences.

- In 1943, Dr. Hirt began creating

his collection of Jewish skeletons.

He was adamant that by measuring and tabulating

a diverse sample of Jewish bones,

he would at last discover the elusive

scientific definition of the Jewish race.

But first the prisoners would have to die.

On the 2nd of August, 1943,

86 of the Jewish men and women

Bruno Beger had selected at Auschwitz

arrived at Natzweilier concentration camp.

At around 9 p.m. nine days later,

the female prisoners were taken to the camp's gas chamber,

where they were murdered.

Among them was Elizabeth Klein.

But the skeleton collection would never be completed.

(explosions detonating)

Before the bodies could be prepared,

the tide of war turned decisively against the Nazis

as Allied troops advanced across Europe.

Faced with the imminent liberation and his own arrest,

Dr. Hirt panicked.

- Knowing well that the dead bodies

were the result of a crime,

he asked Himmler, "What should I do with this collection?

"Should we keep it?

"Should we keep it partly?

"Or should we destroy it?"

Then the instruction came back from Berlin

to destroy the collection.

- Hirt abandoned his research

and fled back into Germany.

A month later French troops discovered

what remained of his victims.

In a ghoulish attempt to conceal his war crime,

Hirt had mutilated the bodies.

As the Allied advance continued

and the Nazi state crumbled around him,

Himmler began to systematically destroy

the evidence of his bizarre and chilling projects.

The files of the Ahnenerbe,

containing the details of his Aryan quests

and some of the pseudoscience behind the Holocaust,

were hidden in the small cave in central Germany.

- It's estimated that perhaps 200,000 individual Germans

were involved in enacting the destruction

of millions of lives.

So of course the question is why did they do it?

I think one answer to that

is that the ground had been prepared intellectually.

German state apparatuses fostered a racial science,

a racial philosophy that made it possible to imagine

that it was appropriate, morally, to liquidate a race.

- In the days after the Nazi surrender,

Dr. August Hirt took his own life.

In 1974, Bruno Beger eventually stood trial

for his part in the Jewish skeleton collection

and was convicted of being an accomplice to murder,

as the court ruled that he was unaware

of what would happen to the prisoners

after the measurements were taken.

Himmler, the driving force

behind so much of the Nazi corruption of science,

and the man who delivered the Final Solution,

cheated justice and took his own life

on May the 23rd, 1945, whilst in British custody.

He is buried in an unmarked grave somewhere

in the wilderness of Luneburg Heath in northern Germany.

The victims of the Jewish skeleton collection

were eventually identified and are buried

at the Jewish cemetery in Strasbourg.

- Their story is a warning from history

that science can be corrupted.

There are consequences to ideas.

There are consequences to mythologies.

And those consequences at that time was

the annihilation of millions of people.