My review of:
Hitler’s Holy Relics: A True Story Of Nazi Plunder And The Race To Recover The Crown Jewels Of The Holy Roman Empire
by Sidney Fitzpatrick,
Simon & Schuster, London, 2010, 318pp, £7.99.
However sensational the tag-line may sounds, when considering this book the reader should first pay careful attention to the author’s note:
“The true story that follows is based on military records, correspondence, diaries, interviews, archival materials, and the unpublished World War II oral memoirs of University of California, Berkeley, art professor Walter Horn.”
Sidney Kirkpatrick, a New York historical writer, has authored several books with some similar elements to this new work: one about pre-Inca tombs in Peru, another on an unsolved murder case and a third involving a professor’s conflict with a drug cartel. I suspect that writing these previous works has served him very well in constructing skilfully this book, not least in realising the full potential of its rich subject-matter.
Although written almost as if it were a historical novel, with dialogue reconstructed from the author’s extensive research, the book entirely avoids sensationalism. This true story is naturally thrilling and therefore sensationalism would simply have debased the telling of it. It is therefore particularly unfortunate that the back-cover blurb promotes the book with unwarranted exaggeration. I fear that some more serious-minded or academic readers will take one look at the back-cover and return the volume to the shop-shelf. I also fear that the book will appear unfairly in the “Esoterica” or (non-fiction) “Mystery” sections of some bookshops. That would be singularly unfortunate, as this work is actually a corrective to two older works on the same subject which the author criticises for their deficits in credibility.
Walter Horn, the story’s protagonist, was born in Heidelberg, Germany in 1919 and qualified as a promising art expert. After escaping Nazi Germany via Italy before the war, he received tenure as an art professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Appalled at how the Nazis had suffocated his homeland, he volunteered for the US Army in 1943 and served in western Europe after D-Day. His native and expert knowledge of Germany and the historico-political significance of its art and architecture proved invaluable to the US army at the war’s end. The army even had a Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) section to which Horn was transferred.
Starting with intelligence gained from the interrogation of German prisoners-of-war, Horn was assigned to track-down the missing crown jewels of the Holy Roman Empire. Hitler had moved the jewels to Nuremberg from Vienna in 1938 following the Anschluss. As a young man and failed artist in Vienna, Hitler had viewed the jewels at the Kunsthistorisches Museum there. Although Hitler and the Nazis were anti-monarchist revolutionaries (what the Horst Wessel Lied called “Reaktion”), the jewels were for them a totem of German power past and present, the First and Third Reichs. Leading Nazis shared a mystical fear that the Third Reich would not last a 1,000 years unless it possessed the sacred objects of the thousand-year First Reich.
Of particular significance to the Nazis – especially to Heinrich Himmler and his SS – was the Holy Lance or Spear of Destiny, believed to be the lance which had pierced Christ’s side. The Tyr rune, a vertical arrow symbol of German paganism, featured on some Nazi uniforms and regalia, and was regarded as synonymous with the Holy Lance. Such interpretations were part of a Nazi attempt to reinvent Christianity as an adjunct to a cult of Aryanism. We have seen all too realistically in Anders Behring Breivik how other neo-pagan esoteric fantasists intent on mass murder have also used and abused Europe’s Christian heritage.
A concrete concern for the US Army occupying Nuremberg was balancing the need to prevent a post-war Nazi resistance, using the jewels as a seal of state for a fourth Reich, with the need to work with ex-Nazi officials to reestablish law and order. Some years later the western Allies concluded that their stringent approach to denazification was counter-productive. The corruption, ignorance or indifference of some US army personnel was another complicating factor. Horn’s work almost foundered in this environment.
In later life Horn became a leading international expert on medieval buildings, including the churches of Florence, the Swiss Abbey of St Gall, Bealieu Abbey in Hampshire and the Skelling Michael hermitage off the Kerry coast. Although he was the son of a Lutheran minister, he was not religious. The book mentions his racy early life in Germany and wartime marital problems. A handsome man, Horn and his jewels-quest would be worthy inspirations for another Indiana Jones screenplay.
Kirkpatrick’s account of Horn’s investigation is interposed with compactly-detailed descriptions and images of the various archaeological and religious sites and objects and their deeper meanings. My only criticism is that at one point Kirkpatrick falls into the common modern myth that:
“during medieval times, holy relics were produced on demand. Every church and cathedral had them.”
No reference is given for this claim. I once heard a BBC reporter repeat the old canard that there are enough relics of the True Cross to build a warship. In fact, it was proved scientifically in the 19th century that the splinters of the True Cross amount to a fraction of the volume of ancient Roman crosses. Interestingly, Kirkpatrick does note that Blessed Anne Katherine Emmerich, the German mystic upon whose visions the film The Passion of Christ was based, confirmed that the Holy Lance was genuine.
So much has been written about the history of Nazi history that both authors and readers may doubt whether anything new or interesting can be said about it. Kirkpatrick has dispelled those doubts efficiently. Hitler’s Holy Relics is fascinating, highly-readable and well-balanced. Its smooth narrative, deep research and human drama make it a joy to read.
Sign-up for email alerts to my blog: