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Otto Rahn was a historian and archeologist whose work for the SS made him a possible inspiration for the villains of the Indian Jones series
Otto Rahn was born in 1904 at Michelstadt, Germany. While in university he studied Albigensian (Catharism) sects. The Albigensians lived in France in the 12 and 13th centuries and were something of a group of heretics by the Catholic Church. The movement was eventually persecuted and a crusade launched against them which cumulated in the siege and massacre at Béziers. These heretics were believed by some to possess the Holy Grail. Rahn left Germany in 1928 to conduct research into the Albigensians in France, Spain and Switzerland. He spent a great deal of time in research in the caves near Montsegur. His research and theories he complied in a book he entitled Kreuzzug gegen den Gral ("Crusade against the Grail") in 1933. This book was read and passed among various neo-Teutonic cultists in Germany. One of these readers was SS leader Henirich Himmler, a former pig farmer and occultist who in 1934 was named head of the Gestapo. Himmler extended an invitation to Rahn to join the Deutsche Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage Society), a group of occultist thinkers inside the SS. In 1936 he was officially made a military member of the Allgemeine-SS (member 276 208) and given the rank of SS-Unterscharfuhrer. That summer he undertook twenty five man archeological expedition to Iceland funded by the SS to search for Aryan links there. On his return he wrote the book Luzifers Hofgesind Eine Reise zu denguten Gelstern Europa (Lucifer's Court in Europe). Rahn was involved in an incident in 1937 in which evidence of his homosexuality halted his career. He spent the last month of that year assigned to the guard regiment at Dachau as punishment. He continued to write but was disillusioned with the Nazis. In February 1939 he wrote a note of resignation to the organization in which he stated, "Unfortunately, I must ask for my immediate discharge from the SS. The reasons that have led me to this resolution, this decision, are of so grave a nature that I can only explain them to you orally". Shortly afterward he disappeared and was later found on a mountainside near Söll in Austria, only fifty miles from Hitler’s retreat at the Bertisgarden. His death was listed as natural due to exposure. It is believed by many that Rahn's life and that of his american counterpart was a basis for the popular Indiana Jones franchise although the creators have never stated that. SourcesGraddon, Nigel Otto Rahn and the Quest for the Holy Grail: the Amazing Life of the Real Indiana Jones Flowers, Stephen E and Moynihan Michael The Secret King. Karl Maria Wiligut - Himmler's Lord of the Runes - The Real Documents of Nazi Occultism,
The copyright of the article Nazi SS Archeologist in Military History is owned by Christopher Eger. Permission to republish Nazi SS Archeologist in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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