Investigation

Anyone who undertakes the study of the intellectual underpinnings of Nazi Germany (1933-1945) will soon notice that at least some members of the regime were doing things that are not covered by the typical survey course in political theory. Researchers who attempt to investigate these anomalies will dig through a swamp of popular and crank literature about the Third Reich’s connection to the occult underground, some of it coincident with conspiracy theory and some of it (often the most coherent works) purely fictional. Nonetheless, a sober study of primary sources will reveal that not all the fantastic rumors were made up out of whole cloth.

Berlin between the wars was a city known throughout Europe for its bohemian subculture of young intellectuals.  Amongst the personalities who hotly debated the many modernist “isms” that were fracturing the old ideological certainties that had glued together the 19th century, few individuals were more colorful or conspicuous than a febrile dark-haired, green-eyed young man called Otto Wilhelm Rahn.

 Rahn was welcomed in the cafes and nightclubs of 1930’s Berlin because he was a hyper-intense intellectual – a brilliant talker with a great deal to say but he was also a conspicuous outsider in that he was unfashionably dismissive of the emergent modernism that so excited his peers. Moreover, he had even less empathy with the cynicism and decadence that colored there lifestyle. Rather, like that of most Germans outside of Berlin, Rahn’s sensibility had been molded by influences wholly incompatible with the café society avante-garde.

The Secret Glory film is inside
DISC THREE: The Secret Glory
 The third disc in this set contains The Secret Glory, which is Richard Stanley's 2001 documentary that details SS Officer Otto Rahn's bizarre quest to find the Holy Grail. With a ninety minute running time, this feature length documentary proves to be a fascinating look into a part of the Second World War that isn't really touched on much in the history books or the standard History Channel style documentaries. It begins with Stanley's narration explaining how Lucifer was cast out of Heaven, then the origins of the Holy Grail. We get some history of the artifact that explains its significance and from there we learn about how the Nazi's came to be interested in finding the grail, specifically how Otto Rahn obsessed over it.