Wewelsburg — the SS castle and the myths made for it

OVERVIEW

Wewelsburg is a Renaissance castle with a triangular plan and three round towers, in a village of the same name in the town of Büren, district of Paderborn. It was built in its present form in 1603–1609 as a secondary residence of the prince-bishops of Paderborn. Two witch trials were held there in 1631; there was an interrogation room in the basement next to the east tower.

HISTORY

Razed by Swedish troops in 1646 and rebuilt with baroque domes, the castle passed to Prussia in 1802 and to the district of Büren in 1924. Himmler decided to take it on his first visit on 3 November 1933; a 100-year lease at a symbolic 1 Reichsmark a year was agreed in 1934 for an SS leadership school, which turned to pseudo-scientific research in Germanic prehistory, folklore and genealogy. From 1935 visits needed his permission, and from 1939 publishing anything about the castle was forbidden. Between 1939 and 1943 prisoners from Sachsenhausen and from the Niederhagen camp outside the walls did much of the building: of the 3,900 held there — many of them Jehovah's Witnesses and Soviet prisoners of war — 1,285 died of typhus and 56 were executed. After Kristallnacht in 1938, 17 Jews from Salzkotten were held in the castle's dungeon before deportation to Buchenwald. On 31 March 1945 an SS detachment tried to blow up the castle on Himmler's order but ran out of explosives.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

In the North Tower the SS built the 'Obergruppenführersaal', with twelve columns and a dark green sun wheel inlaid in the floor, and below it a domed vault modelled on Mycenaean tombs with twelve pedestals and a gas pipe for an eternal flame. Nothing is known of whether or how either room was used. The floor ornament has been called the 'Black Sun' only since the 1990s, and linked to the esoteric neo-Nazi idea only after 1991. Claims that Himmler meant the vault as a crypt for Henry the Fowler, whose reincarnation he reportedly believed himself to be, or for the 11,500 death's-head rings he had ordered returned in 1938, are unproven; the rings' whereabouts are unknown. Karl Wolff called the twelve niches 'mystic-confused things with which Himmler liked to play' — a Round Table for the twelve SS main-department heads. Rooms were named 'Grail' and 'King Arthur', but no proof exists that Himmler wanted a Grail castle. Some speculate that the occultist Karl Maria Wiligut persuaded Himmler to make the castle a cult site.

VISITING

The Wewelsburg 1933–1945 Memorial Museum, 'Ideology and Terror of the SS', is in the former SS guardhouse in the forecourt; the Historical Museum of the Prince-Bishopric of Paderborn is in the south and east wings, and a 218-bed youth hostel in the west wing. A memorial to the Niederhagen prisoners was built in 2000.