Free Top Nazi by Jochen von Lang

during Hitler’s reign.
    The religious Christian Wolff became a new pagan “Saul” in September 1936. He left the Protestant church and took his children with him. The fact that Himmler viewed Christianity as foreign and that he encouraged a kind of religious belief that Protestants and Catholics alike described as regressing to Germanic paganism, makes it very probable that Wolff turned his back on his family’s religion to advance his career. But this change of mind should not be interpreted as simply as that. It must be taken into consideration that shortly after 1933 the “church fight” began among the Protestants. The faction known as the “German Christians” made Jesus of Nazareth into a hero of the Nordic race while the followers of the “German Confessional Church” were opposed to the Aryanization of their beliefs and did not reject the Old Testament in the Bible, for example, as being Jewish. At the same time the National Socialist government tried to undermine the reputation of the Catholic church byuncovering sexual offences in the convents, which, at the behest of the ministry of propaganda, were to be fully exploited, as were the trials that followed. The foundation of Christian beliefs, as well as its organizations, became very suspicious in those days. Leaving the church out of conviction was increasingly taking place.
    The National Socialists did not want to get rid of God altogether; they had inveighed against the philosophical materialism of Karl Marx too loud and for too long. So, the SS and its prophets wound up with GOT, apparently an Old German word. They imagined a heavenly, superhuman, superior authority, both monotheistic as a higher being settled somewhere and nowhere at the same time, an omniscient and pantheistic spirit. They went back to the mystics of the Middle Ages, to Goethe, Schopenhauer and any critic of the Jewish origins of Christian beliefs. If the conversation between Himmler and his adjutant turned to anything of a divine nature, they spoke of “Age Old One,” as the Teutons addressed their God.
    When Wolff’s first son (after two daughters) was born in January 1936, the father was already an enthusiastic follower of Himmler’s homegrown religion. Because astrology also had a place in this religion, the birth announcement was decorated with a jumping ibex, the accepted sign of the zodiac for the time of birth. A family coat of arms, a “Wolfsangel,” that represented a rune from the time of the Teutons, appears for the first time on this card. Wolff’s son was named Thorisman, and therefore commended to the most argumentative and aggressive of the Teutonic deities. The additional names were given by the “name gods” or Goden, an Old German expression for godparents: Heinrich (for Himmler), Karl (for SS coat of arms creator Professor Diebitsch), and Reinhard (for Gruppenführer Heydrich, at the time chief of the SD security service and of the Gestapo). Another godfather was SS Brigadeführer Weisthor, a rather diminutive Teuton, but nevertheless knowledgeable about the religion, customs, and runes of the ancestors. He had developed the ritual for naming in the SS and thus assumed the role of high priest in the naming of Wolff’s son.
    The naming ceremony took place on January 4, 1937, when Thorisman was almost one year old. The event was recorded on a typewritten certificate. The content, language, and form are so typical of all that was sectarian in the SS that it should be reproduced here:
Temporarily: Land at Tegernsee
January 4, 1937
DOCUMENT:
    Today, on January 4, 1937, in his home at Schorn zu Rottach-Egern at the Tegernsee, SS Brigadeführer Karl Wolff, in the presence of his Reichsführer SS, made the following announcement:
    “Reichsführer SS: I hereby announce the birth of our third child, born of my wife Frieda, née von Römheld, as the first son born on January 14, 1936, at the end of the third year of the Third German Reich.”
    I replied:
    “I