00:00Nazi Germany almost found the Holy Grail.
00:04And the man who cracked the trail was a gay scholar who died alone,
00:08frozen on an Austrian mountain, with two empty bottles beside him.
00:13This is one of the strangest stories of the 20th century,
00:16a story about obsession, lies, and the price of truth.
00:21Our journey begins in 1930.
00:24A 20-year-old language prodigy named Otto Rahn was studying medieval epic poetry
00:29at university.
00:31While his classmates looked for jobs, Rahn looked for the Holy Grail.
00:36His professor told him a haunting piece of history,
00:39the story of the Cathars, a Christian sect that had been wiped out by the church.
00:44In 1244, the last Cathar stronghold, Montseger, fell to a crusade.
00:51But legend said that four men escaped the burning fortress carrying the Grail itself.
00:57Rahn became obsessed.
00:58He studied the medieval epic Parsifal and became convinced it was not fiction but a coded map.
01:06The mountain of the Grail in the poem, he believed, was Montseger.
01:10Its guardians
01:13were the Cathars.
01:14In 1931, Rahn traveled to southern France, into the valleys of the Pyrenees.
01:21Beneath the ruins of Montseger, he found hidden passages and caves.
01:27He never found the Grail, but he wrote a book about the crusade against it.
01:32And that book changed his life forever.
01:35The manuscript found its way to the SS office for race and settlement, and then straight into
01:41the hands of one man, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, a man obsessed since childhood
01:46with legends, mysticism, and a myth of Aryan origins.
01:51Himmler read Rahn's book and immediately sent a telegram,
01:59A friend later recalled his exact words, a man has to eat.
02:04What was I supposed to do, refuse Himmler.
02:07In 1936, Rahn officially joined the SS, Himmler funded his expeditions across France and Italy
02:15to hunt for the Grail.
02:17Rahn wrote a second book, Lucifer's Court, documenting his travels across Europe in search
02:23of the sacred.
02:25Relic.
02:26But there was a problem.
02:28Rahn was openly gay.
02:31In the Nazi system, that was a death sentence.
02:35Himmler knew, and for a while he looked the other way.
02:39But in 1937, a scandal erupted after Rahn got into trouble in a bar.
02:45Other SS officers demanded punishment.
02:49This time Himmler did not protect him.
02:52The order came down, Rahn was transferred to the Dachau concentration camp.
02:57On paper, it was a post as a guard.
03:01In reality, it was a punishment.
03:04Dachau was one of the earliest Nazi camps, and there Rahn witnessed hell on earth.
03:10He wrote to a friend, I am endlessly sad for my homeland.
03:14A liberal like me cannot go on living in the country my homeland has become.
03:19In February 1939, Rahn resigned from the SS, Himmler approved.
03:24One month later, on March 13, 1939, Rahn's body was found by local children in a valley
03:33in the Austrian Tyrol, two empty bottles beside him.
03:37The official verdict was death by freezing.
03:40Internal records.
03:43Said suicide.
03:45Otto Rahn was dead at 29.
03:47But Himmler's obsession was only beginning.
03:52Back in 1935, Himmler had created a secret institution called the Annanerbe, the Ancestral Heritage Society.
04:00Its official mission was to prove that the Aryan race was superior to all others.
04:05It gathered archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnologists, and even mystics who twisted history
04:12and forged evidence, all to provide a scientific excuse for genocide.
04:17This institution was the hidden engine behind five secret expeditions across four continents.
04:24The first expedition, we already know, the search for the grail, ending in Rahn's death.
04:30The second targeted Spain.
04:33On October 23, 1940, Himmler himself traveled with an SS team to the Monastery of Montserrat,
04:41near Barcelona, a thousand-year-old sanctuary in the mountains.
04:45He was convinced the grail was hidden there.
04:49The monks told him plainly, there is no grail here.
04:53Himmler demanded the files, grew furious, and refused the traditional visit to the Black Madonna.
04:59He left empty-handed, having donated money to repair local wells, a gesture meant to pull Franco's
05:08Spain toward the Axis powers.
05:10The grail was never found.
05:13The third expedition turned north, into the frozen wilderness of Finland, and its goal was
05:19stranger still, witches.
05:21In the summer of 1936, a Finnish nobleman led a team deep into the forests near the Russian border.
05:28With them went a Nazi musicologist and one of the most advanced tape recorders of the age.
05:35Himmler believed the folk traditions of Karelia preserved fragments of ancient Aryan knowledge.
05:41In a remote village, they found an old singer who had never seen a train.
05:46He sang a song of creation, ancient beyond imagining.
05:50But the real shock came in a small hut, where the team met a 92-year-old which named Myron
05:56Aku.
05:57Villagers warned them not to go near her.
06:00They went anyway.
06:02As they pushed open the door, the old woman looked up and said something chilling,
06:07Three days ago, I dreamed you were coming.
06:10I know you want to steal my secret.
06:14She performed a seance.
06:16And the team recorded it.
06:18But when they played the tape back, and she heard her own voice coming from the machine,
06:24she broke down.
06:25She believed her magic had been stolen.
06:29Over that summer, the expedition recorded more than a hundred sessions.
06:34The tapes were sent to Berlin, where SS leaders believed they held the code of Aryan origins.
06:40The fourth expedition was the largest, and the most infamous.
06:45Its target was Tibet.
06:47In January 1939, five white men in suits walked into the ancient city of Lassau.
06:54The leader was Ernst Schaefer, a German zoologist and SS officer.
07:00Schaefer was not interested in Nazi ideology, but he loved scientific exploration,
07:05and Himmler would pay, on one condition, every member of the team had to join the SS, Schaefer agreed.
07:12On the surface, it was a scientific mission to study Tibet's wildlife and customs.
07:18But secretly, an anthropologist had another task, to measure the skulls and facial features of Tibetans,
07:25and to make casts of their faces.
07:29The goal was to find a biological link between Tibetans and the so-called Aryan race.
07:36Nazi theorists believed the Tibetan highlands might preserve the purest Aryan bloodlines.
07:42The expedition also had a geopolitical aim, to draw Tibet into the Axis camp and threaten British India from behind.
07:50Over one year, the team collected 3,500 bird specimens, 7,000 seed samples, and shot 17,500 meters of
08:01film.
08:02They used the swastika as a symbol, a sign that in Tibet meant good fortune.
08:08Schaefer even carried back a letter from Tibetan officials to Hitler, a letter that was never delivered,
08:13and that now sits forgotten in a Bavarian archive.
08:17Himmler was delighted, and planned to send Schaefer back to Tibet in 1943.
08:23But the war made that impossible.
08:26After the war, Schaefer was implicated in 86 murders, having helped supply scientific justification for the Holocaust.
08:35The fifth expedition turned south, toward a new continent, South America,
08:40specifically the ruins of Tiwanaku in Bolivia.
08:44In
08:461928, a German architect named Edmund Kiss arrived at the ancient city in the High Andes.
08:52He was not an archaeologist, but a fanatical believer in pseudoscience.
08:58Tiwanaku is one of the most mysterious ruins in South America,
09:02its giant stone blocks weighing over 400 tons, its builders and methods still unknown.
09:09Kiss came to prove an absurd theory, the world ice theory, which claimed the earth once had six moons,
09:16and that their destruction caused a global flood and ice catastrophe.
09:20He found a stone head and declared its features clearly Nordic.
09:25He saw Baroque-style doorways and ancient symbols.
09:29His conclusion, Tiwanaku was not built by South Americans at all, but by Aryans descended from Atlantis.
09:37His findings were printed eagerly in Nazi newspapers, perfectly fitting the myth of racial superiority.
09:44The SS approved his return expedition in 1938, but the outbreak of World War II meant it never happened.
09:51Five expeditions, four continents, the grail, the witches, the skulls, the ancient stones.
10:02A regime spent the full force of a nation trying to prove a lie.
10:08In 1945, the Third Reich collapsed.
10:12Members of the Ananerb frantically burned their files to escape the Nuremberg trials.
10:17Many succeeded and were never punished.
10:21But history did not forget.
10:24The fake data, the twisted facts, the forged evidence, they still circulate online today.
10:31Neo-Nazis and conspiracy theorists quote these long-discredited studies,
10:36repackaging them as hidden truths the mainstream refuses to reveal.
10:40The Nazis never found the grail.
10:43They never proved Aryan superiority.
10:46They never found their master race in Tibet.
10:50They never uncovered Atlantis in Bolivia.
10:53But they left behind a lesson that still haunts us,
10:57when power decides the conclusions of science,
11:00when ideology kidnaps history, the first casualty is truth.
11:05And the price was paid in tens of millions of lives.
11:08Ananda, and the depois,ẻ vuš'rloj, svd, ansios.
11:12Ananda, ananerb.
11:15At the time for the evidence,
11:16It is always a miracle that took a long time to break down.
11:16The devil is a miracle that got a better period of 2018,
