HELP WANTED: Lodge Furniture and Vintage German Language U.S. Ritual

by Christopher Hodapp

I've been contacted by brethren from two Indiana lodges in need of some specialized items. If you're able to help with either of these requests, contact me directly ay hodapp@aol.com and I'll connect you with the appropriate brothers:

Fraternal Lodge Room Furniture Needed

If anyone knows of a Masonic lodge that is closing or consolidating, an Indianapolis lodge is moving to a new location later this year and is in need of a (hopefully matching) set of lodge room furniture. According to one of their Past Masters who dropped by our Museum, they are wanting to acquire an altar, the Master's and Wardens' pedestals, and all officers' chairs.

They'd also consider Secretary and Treasurer's desks if they match the rest of the pieces, and the J & B columns, if you have them. They do NOT need sideline seats.

He didn't give me a time frame, but they haven't broken ground on the new building yet, so it's not an immediate need. But they expect to be moved in before December. Obviously, the closer to Indiana, the simpler it will be to arrange transportation. I suspect they'd love to find something that can be reached within a day's drive from Indianapolis – but I'll let others sort that out.

German Language U.S. Ritual Material

Like many states in the midwest, early Indiana was settled by a large contingent of German, Swiss and Dutch immigrants, and we had a small handful of Masonic lodges here that performed their degree ceremonies and monthly work in the German language. (I think we had four or five such lodges at one time.) Lessing Lodge 464 in Evansville was the last chartered Indiana lodge that had official permission from the Grand Lodge to do their work in German — they ceased the practice in the 1960s, as I recall.

Lessing Lodge is now wanting to exemplify the degrees in German as a demonstration project — they believe they have enough German-speaking members and interested participants in the area to pull this off. But they haven't been able to find any sort of existing, German-language printed material of American Preston-Webb ritual. 

Any sort of material like this that may have existed at their lodge 60 years ago has disappeared long ago. As far as I've been able to find, we don't have anything in our Library/Museum. And it's entirely probable that there WAS no such printed material in the days when the German language lodges were active here — mouth-to-ear ritual instruction was the proper way of the Masonic world, regardless of language, up until the 21st century when we all got lazy and isolated. 

Obviously, Pennsylvania had a large German-speaking population, and I believe they still have some lodges today that do their degrees that way. But Pennsylvania's Blue Lodge degrees are so COMPLETELY different from the rest of the country that any German version of their work isn't really going to be appropriate in any other state (although, for demonstration purposes, maybe that's okay).

Another possibility might be material from a lodge in the American-Canadian Grand Lodge of Germany, although I don't know how closely their ritual tracks U.S. Webb Work.

It's certainly possible to scan Indiana ritual, feed it through translation software, and spend days trying to laboriously clean up the inevitable mistakes made by machine translations ("Welcome to the very Great Large Box of Indiana!"). But if anyone has already existing material, that would be extremely helpful. 

Again, contact me directly at hodapp@aol.com and I'll put you in touch with the appropriate brother.

2021 World Conference of Regular Masonic Grand Lodges Opens Today in Berlin

by Christopher Hodapp

The World Conference of Regular Grand Lodges is opening today in Berlin. This four-day gathering of Masons from all over the world is being sponsored this year by the five United Grand Lodges of Germany.

The agenda includes:

Main Keynote Presentations:

Christoph Bosbach: Freemasonry needs future – future needs freemasonry?

Karl-Heinz Land: Stagnation as an accelerator – Covid-19 as a necessary creative destruction? 

Ranko Vujacic: Freemasonry and the 21^st century

A. Kabèlè Camara: Freemasonry – an alternative to understand the world

Arthur Bill Beardmore: To Do or not to Be – Adapting to Life in a Changing Society

Iskren Yotov: The perspectives of Freemasonry in Eastern Europe

Radu Balanescu: The importance of maintaining and respecting the old landmarks of freemasonry in the context of a dynamic development of technology and the increasing needs of communication

Antje Hansen: Reflections by a free woman on the tradition and future of Freemasonry

Translations will be done in the main needed languages.

BreakOut Sessions:

Deadlock & Stagnancy as Catalyst & Accelerator --> Covid 19 as necessary & creative Disruption

Digitalization in Freemasonry --> Future of a virtual Freemasonry?

Adapting to Life in a Changing Society

The global Future: Do we need new Ethics?

Opening up to Society --> Where is the line?

The Conference will conclude on Saturday night. On Sunday, November 21st, the official installation of the Grand Master and officers will take place.

For more information, see the event website in both German and English at: https://www.freimaurer.org/wcrmgl

Germany's Masonic governing structure is unique in the fraternity. More than 16,500 German Freemasons are organized into five different grand lodges that cooperate under the banner of the United Grand Lodges of Germany. In total, there are currently around 500 craft lodges in Germany that are chartered by these five grand lodges.

• Ancient Free and Accepted Masons of Germany (GL AFuAMvD)

• Grand National Mother Lodge "To the Three Globes" (GNML 3WK)

• Grand Lodge of the Freemasons of Germany / Order of Freemasons (GLLFvD / FO)

• American Canadian Grand Lodge (ACGL)

• Grand Lodge of British Freemasons in Germany (GL BFG)

Nazi 'Buried Treasure' Diary Found in Masonic Lodge

There's a curious story today in the Daily Mail, and I'm hoping a blog reader actually living in Germany can fill in some missing details. The story claims that the Masonic lodge in the German town of Quedlinburg has been in posession of a former Nazi SS officer's private diary, and it has been donated to a local foundation for safekeeping and publicizing its contents. 

In it, SS standartenführer Egon Ollenhauer recounted purported plans of officers of the Waffen SS to hide 250 truckloads of stolen gold and artwork in eleven different locations in lower Silesia as Red Army troops advanced near the war's end. One location is said to contain 28 tons of gold from a branch of the Reichsbank in what was then Breslau, now the Polish city of Wroclaw.

The diary also says one cache contains 47 works of art thought to be stolen from collections in France, including works by Botticelli, Rubens, Cezanne, Carravagio, Monet, Dürer, Raffael and Rembrandt.

And another stash is said to contain religious objects stolen from around the world in an attempt to find evidence for Hitler's racial theories.

It is the Daily Mail, after all. They can't go for a month without printing a 'hidden Nazi treasure' story. They're a staple of cable TV channels, too. But the Masonic lodge's connection adds a different twist.

The original story actually appears in thefirstnews.com, reported by Stewart Dowell: 

As the Red Army started to bear down on ethnically German territory, Hitler’s SS undertook a large-scale operation involving around 260 trucks to hide Nazi gold, valuables held by the local population and treasures looted from throughout Nazi-German occupied Europe. Ollenhauer was the link between senior SS officers and local aristocrats who wanted help to protect their property from the Soviets.

The diary offers detailed lists of each of the eleven treasure caches. One is said to contain 28 tonnes of gold from the Breslau branch of the Reichsbank. Others contain gold coins, medals, jewellery and other valuables deposited by wealthy people in Wrocław to the local Nazi police for safekeeping.

The diary describes one cache as containing 47 works of art of international importance, believed to be stolen from collections in France, including works by Botticelli, Rubens, Cezanne, Carravagio, Monet, Dürer, Raffael and Rembrandt.

Yet another treasure stash is supposed to contain religious objects gathered by Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, which hoovered up sacral items from around the world in an attempt to find evidence for Hitler’s racial theories.

The diary is in the possession of the foundation Schlesische Brücke (Silesian Bridge), which was set up by a businessman, Darius Franz Dziewiatek, from the Silesian city of Opole. Dziewiatek says that he received the war diary from a 1,100-year-old [sic] Christian lodge from Quedlinburger, Germany...

The original Logenhaus of Zur Goldenen Waage

Obviously, the lodge isn't 1,100 years old. It is Zur Beständigen Freiheit N. 987 ("Of Perennial Freedom") in Quedlinburg, part of the United Grand Lodges of Germany. According to the lodge's history on its website, the current lodge was actually not chartered until April 1991, which makes enormous sense. Quedlinburg had been behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and Masonic lodges were forbidden.

Its much earlier pre-war precursor had been Zur Goldenen Waage ("Golden Scales") chartered June 6, 1846. Like the rest of the Masonic lodges in Germany, it was forced to disband under the Nazi's anti-Masonic laws in 1935, and their building became the county library. It was demolished in 2009, but the Masonic temple portion of that original building survives and the room preserved as a display for the public.

The lodge room of Zur Goldenen Waage survives
and has been opened as a public display

The new lodge has been rebuilding a much older cottage nearby in Quedlinburg's Old Town, which escaped damage during World War II. I am presuming that this SS officer's diary was discovered at this location during their renovation.

Renovation of Zur Beständigen Freiheit N. 987's Logenhaus in Quedlinburg's Old Town

Roman Furmaniak, who represents the foundation told TFN: “About ten years ago, after many discussions, the Quedlinburger lodge decided to hand the diary to the foundation.

“We are releasing information about the diary now as we wanted to wait until all persons who could be connected to the events and the diary had passed away, particularly officers of the Waffen SS. This was the wish of the Quedlinburger lodge.”

The foundation claims that the authenticity of the diary has been checked by five institutions in Germany, including the Department of Art History at the University of Göttingen, and these tests show that the diary is real.

In October last year, the foundation informed the Polish authorities of what they had.

Furmaniak said: “We wanted to release the information to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Poland regaining its independence and also the 1,100th anniversary of the establishment of the lodge in Quedlinburger.”

[SNIP]

And if any of the treasures listed in the diary are ever unearthed? Furmaniak says, “It is the wish of the lodge that possessions found are reunited with their heirs if this is possible.

“However, this probably won’t be possible in every case. But it is our intention that the property is returned to its rightful owners.”

A very real cache of Nazi gold, buried in a salt mine and
discovered by Allied Forces after the war.

The reason why Nazi buried loot stories are so tantalizing is because Hitler's various military, security and intelligence agencies really did confiscate such treasures in astonishing amounts. They really did bury it, especially near the end, to hide it from advancing Russian troops. Some of it really has been found over the years. The Nazis were meticulous about their accounting for everything movable and immovable, with obsessive record keeping. And most of all, so much of what was stolen has never been found to this day.

In this particular case, the Masonic connection seems to be purely accidental. But I am reaching out to area Masons there to get some clarity over this purported 1,100 year claim, along with perhaps more detail about this story.

---

Freemasons For Dummies 
(Freimaurer für Dummies) 
is available in German from Amazon.de

Huge Stash of Nazi-Confiscated Masonic and Occult Books Discovered

The grand lodge building of the Norwegian Order of Freemasons in Oslo.

A collection of 13,000 books on occult subjects, including Freemasonry, were amassed by Nazi SS-Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler's forces during Germany's wartime occupation of Norway. The collection was stolen, in part, from the Norwegian Order of Freemasons' grand lodge library in Oslo. 

Shortly after the war ended, the collection was put into a storage building near Prague, Czechoslovakia.  In 1948, the Communists took power, and as part of the Warsaw Pact nations, they were effectively lost behind the Iron Curtain for many years.  Even after Czechoslovakia's opening to the West, they remained hidden away without any record since the 1950s.

These were just a small part of an enormous library of works on Masonic, occult, esoteric and witchcraft subjects that were confiscated throughout occupied Europe by a division of the Nazi SS.

From a story on the Prague Post website:

Books on witchcraft and the occult collected by SS chief Heinrich Himmler were found in a storage depot near Prague used by the Czech National Library.

The depot has not been accessed since the 1950s, according to UK tabloid the Daily Mail, which cited Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang. 

Bjørn Helge Horrisland, a Norwegian Freemason historian, told Verdens Gang he was involved in identifying some of the books. “Many of them belonged to the central Norwegian Order of Freemasons library in Oslo,” he said.

The collection of books totals some 13,000 volumes, some 6,000 of which allegedly came from a library of books owned by the Norwegian Order of Freemasons. The Masonic library [was] seized by Nazis when Norway was occupied during World War II.

Himmler began amassing the collection in 1935 and had a strong interest in the occult, He had a special unit within the SS to collect and manage information on witchcraft.

Many of the books deal with witchcraft trials in Germany, and Himmler reportedly believed that the trials were part of historical plot to weaken the Germans. He also claimed to be descended from a witch that was executed.

 Himmler also believed that knowledge of the occult could be used to benefit the Third Reich.

The books were not meant for Prague but for Wewelsburg Castle in Germany. Himmler intended to make that castle a modern-day Camelot with a round table of SS officers in the place of knights. Himmler signed a 100-year lease on the triangular castle in 1934. The building is now a museum.

The books will now be examined by scholars, and a Norwegian TV company is planning a documentary.

The project to recover the library of books received European Economic Area funds from Norway and is a result of a cooperation between Stiftelsen Arkivet, the National Library of Norway and the Czech National Library, according to Norwegian new server TheLocal.no.

Himmler's interest in collecting occult items has been well-documented and has inspired works of fiction including the 1981 film 'Raiders of the Lost Ark.'

Himmler was captured May 21, 1945. He committed suicide with a cyanide capsule May 23 and was buried in an unmarked grave near near Lüneburg, Germany. The exact location is not known.

In 1935, Himmler founded the Ahnenerbe Forschungs-und Lehrgemeinschaft (the Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society), to use the methods of science to bend history and archeology enough to back up the Nazis’ racial and cultural policies. (In the film Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Nazi group looking for the Ark of the Covenant is supposed to be a contingent of Ahnenerbe archeologists.)

The tales of Himmler's alleged fascination with the occult have waxed and waned over the years. The Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) was formed in 1939 as part of the SS, combined with the SD, and was subordinate to Himmler.  It's purpose was to fight all enemies of the Reich both inside and outside of Germany.  It eventually grew to become a massive bureaucracy with close to one hundred sub-sections, divided into seven main divisions. Amt II was headed up by SS-Brigadefuhrer Professor Franz Albert Six, and was dedicated to "Ideological Investigation." 

Not long afterwards, Amt II was reorganized and split off as Amt VII for "Ideological Research and Evaluation," again headed by Franz Six (and after 1943 by SS-Obersturmbannführer Paul Dittel.) Their mission was partially to create anti-semetic and anti-Masonic propaganda, as well as surveying occupied Nazi population's public opinion.

Modern scholarship has dug into captured Nazi documents long held by Warsaw Pact countries, which have revealed Amt VII's other activities, including the collection of stolen  esoteric libraries. They also, allegedly, created an extensive card catalog on publications and other resources regarding witchcraft, a special interest of Himmler's (it was long whispered that a relative of his had been burned at the stake for being a witch). 

After the Soviets took parts of Berlin, and Germany was divided into East and West after the war, many of the records and books from their confiscation of occult, esoteric and Masonic libraries eventually wound up in Russia, the Silesia region of Poland, and Czechoslovakia, and were not researched until the 1990's.

In 2002, 750 crates of Masonic objects and papers stolen from occupied lodges and Grand Lodges across Europe and held by the Russian Military State Archive were delivered to the Museum of Freemasonry of the Grand Orient of France in Paris. These included membership lists that were used to help round up Freemasons to be sent to concentration camps. (The entire library of the Grand Orient of France was confiscated when the Nazis occupied Paris, and the books were taken to Berlin and subsequently burned.) 

A lengthy work, Restitution of Confiscated Art Works - Wish Or Reality?, was published in Czechoslovakia in 2008 as a collection of presentations from a conference in the city of Liberec. Buried in it are several references to the RSHA Amt VII unit's activities in assembling a vast library on the occult, witchcraft, esoteric, and Masonic books, eventually estimated to be in excess of 160,000 volumes:

Most of the books that traversed Sudeten crossroads had been held before August 1943 as part of the RSHA Amt VII (Seventh Office) library in Berlin, seized by the SD Main Office (Hauptamt) and the Gestapo starting in 1936. With the merger of the security services in late 1939, most of the collected books and archives preserved by the SD Main Office came under control of the newly formed RSHA Amt II (Second Office), headed by SS-Brigadeführer Franz Alfred Six, charged with investigation of political opponents (Gegnerforschung).

Starting in December 1941, Six organized the Seventh Office (Amt VII), specially for “Ideological Research and Evaluation” (Welt- anschauliche Forschung und Auswertung), split off from the other more  operational offices. Having inherited most of the SD/RSHA library and archival loot, Amt VII was responsible for organizing the RSHA library and archival centers, although some of the books went to other RSHA units. Most of the Amt VII staff, which Six headed until 1943, were members of the SS. Most of the books and archives were held in the buildings of two liquidated Masonic lodges the Gestapo had commandeered (Emserstrasse 12/13, and Eisenacherstasse 11/13), although some were stored in other depots in Berlin. From the spring of 1943, SS-Obersturmbannführer Paul Dittel, who from the start had been particularly involved with the collected Masonic materials, was the last head of Amt VII. Yet his title remained “acting,” indicative of the reduced importance and “mysterious twilight” of that unit towards the end of the war, as he made clear to his British interrogators afterwards.

During the Cold War, little was known about Amt VII, because its major surviving records were not publicly accessible. The Soviets found many SD Main Office administrative files among the massive RSHA-plundered archives they captured in Silesia (Wölfelsdorf), along with those of later Amt VII operations, and they seized a few more in the bombed-out RSHA Eisenacherstasse building in Berlin. Some of those files they passed on to the Stasi in the 1950s, and those are now being processed with other Stasi RSHA holdings by the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. Others were captured in Silesia by the Poles, came out of hiding in 1989, and were traded to the Bundesarchiv in 1997. However, many important SD Main Office and subsequent RSHA Amt VII files remain in Moscow, not all of them open for research. Combining clues from documents now in Moscow and Berlin provides hitherto unknown revelations about RSHA library operations, especially those in the Sudeten castles.

[SNIP]

Alleged occult elements in the Nazi ideology and Himmler’s interest in neo-paganism and Masonic rituals have aroused widespread interest since the defeat of the National Socialist regime. Even the History TV Channel produced a documentary on“Hitler and the Occult,”suggesting what would seemingly be a sensationalist theme. The popular internet Wikipedia suggests that ‘Nazism and Occultism’ is usually “a topic for sensational authors in pursuit of strong sales,” but it prominently cites Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, and his serious Oxford doctoral thesis on the Austrian Arisophists. Other important scholarly studies have analyzed occult themes in Nazi circles, especially under Heinrich Himmler, and the Masonic Library, confiscated from one of the alleged ‘enemies of the regime,’ was one of the most important components in the RSHA Amt VII holdings. Himmler’s interest in witchcraft and the supernatural was highlighted in Amt VII’s special unit devoted to Witchcraft (C 3), Sonderauftrag H, and Himmler’s card file on witches (Hexenkartothek), all of which are well documented. Reportedly, the materials gathered for the Witchcraft unit were sent to Schlesiersee [in Poland] with the Masonic collections, rather than the Sudeten castles, and that unit had ceased to function by the time of evacuation.

In the Sudeten castles, on the other hand, we find Amt VII SS specialists busily sorting and cataloguing occult literature, which the SD Main Office and Amt VII library had been collecting. Suddenly, that section of the library assumed a major prominence, and a top- secret project was launched on its basis—another important example of Nazi preoccupation with the occult. 

Himmler saw the SS as a kind of reimagining of the of the chivalric Teutonic Order, who were originally founded  in 1190, much like the Templars, to protect crusading pilgrims to the Holy Land.

Wewelsburg castle in Germany

He came to the town of Buren in the Westphalia region of western Germany in 1934, and took over the imposing castle of Wewelsburg. The castle was to become the center of a college for new SS officers and Himmler’s own elite Knightly Order. The castle became the place of initiation of his new order and the new spiritual center of the Nazi paganism that was based on Germanic legends. Ahnenerbe’s headquarters were based in Wewelsburg Castle.

Himmler planned very big. His goal was to make the surrounding village a complete SS colony, only for members of the SS and their families. In 1939, a concentration camp was established to provide 3,900 prisoners to work on the project. More than 1,200 were worked or starved to death building Himmler’s dream.

Himmler saw Wewelsburg as his own private Camelot which, of course, needed a Round Table for its knights. In the north tower, a round chamber was constructed, with a sunken area in the floor and a round, oak table.

There were just twelve seats around it, for the top dozen officers of the SS. In the domed ceiling a stylized, golden swastika set in stone can still be seen today, modified with the symbol of the SS at each corner. A different subterranean round chamber immediately below it was to be a crypt for the ashes of all dead SS members, complete with an eternal flame. Another one of Himmler’s goals was to find the Holy Grail, and a special room in the castle was set aside for the Grail when it was found.

The Nazis went to great lengths to engineer an elaborate explanation that Jesus was descended from Jacob, who, they said, was not Jewish at all, but an Aryan. Another part of Ahnenerbe’s mission was to prove the origin of the Aryans, and they even sent archeological expeditions to India, Tibet to seek evidence of the earliest appearance of their “Master Race”.

As a footnote to this post, I came across a brief account of Freemasonry in Norway under the Occupation, and especially about the grand lodge building in Oslo. From Freemasonry Under The Nazis by David Lewis, published in 2012:

When Norway was invaded in 1940 the Masonic temple in Oslo was converted to an army barracks and the order dissolved. Major Vidkun Quisling, the Nazi collaborator, had Freemasonry as point no. 1 for action on his agenda and emptied Masonic buildings and destroyed some of them. The main Temple in Oslo was converted to officers’ quarters but, according to one brother who visited it recently, amazingly it was not vandalised -- the only one in Europe known to have been left untouched by the Nazis. A number of masons were murdered. When he was tried after the war his trial, ironically, took place in a former Masonic temple before he was convicted and shot. 

“I was personally involved in identifying some of the books. Many of them belonged to the central Norwegian Order of Freemasons library in Oslo,” Bjørn Helge Horrisland, a Norwegian Freemason historian, told VG.