Why Was Hitler So Obsessed With The Spear Of Destiny? | Myth Hunters

In 1938, Adolf Hitler seized what legend said was history's most powerful weapon. If you hold it, you're invincible. It was said to be the spear which pierced the side of Christ. Military leaders became almost besotted with the idea of possessing it. And with the spear in his grasp, Hitler unleashed terror upon the world. But in the chaos of war, this most valuable of Europe's treasures simply vanished. This was an emblem of war twisted by the Nazis to become symbols of the Third Reich. But one man, Walter Horn, would uncover the mystery of what had happened to the Spear of Destiny. And one of America's finest generals, obsessed with the spear, would launch a mission to find it. 1933. Adolf Hitler is elected Chancellor of Germany. Hitler was by no means a normal person to be leading a country in the middle of Europe in the middle of the 20th century, and especially one the size of Germany. He was a very embittered, lonely, twisted, abnormal individual who had an enormous amount of drive and this famous will to power. And that's what really spurred him on. He is desperate to be the all-powerful leader of the German people and create a new Germanic empire. The trouble is, he had won less than half of the popular vote. His grip on power was nothing like as strong as many people think. I mean, after all, most people hadn't voted for Hitler. The country is divided, and to realise his dreams, he will need to unite it. Germany was, until just a few years before in real terms, just a collection of very, very small states. You've got people all the way up near the Danish border, and you've got people all the way down near Munich, and as far east into what would now be part of Poland. So, how do you unify these people? Hitler encourages the Germans to look to what he says is their past. He wants to portray himself as a man who will restore Germany to a time when it ruled Europe. And he wants to extend its borders to those of the greatest German empire in history. The Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire was first created by Charlemagne, Charles the Great, the Germanic king of the Franks in 800 AD. Its purpose? To spread Christianity through all of Europe. For a thousand years, it dominated the continent. At its height, stretching from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, and ruling over what is now Germany, and much of Austria, Poland, Italy and France. Now, Hitler wanted to create an even greater empire in his own image. The thousand-year Nazi Reich, with himself at its head. He wasn't the type of person who would like to cut deals and engage in the art of statesmanship or diplomacy. This is a man who just wanted to drive things forward the way he saw the world should be in his eyes. But Hitler's difficulty is that there is nothing imperial about him. As the son of a working-class Austrian civil servant, it is not enough to simply proclaim himself the German Führer. He needs to look like one. He needed to try and assimilate some of the trappings of power and the type of trappings that would be suitable for someone who is ruling a kingdom in the middle of Europe. And, of course, what's he going to do? He's going to look back to history to find these things. He decided that to be an emperor, he would need the possessions of an emperor. Hitler was looking for an emblem that would underpin his claim to be leading the German people back to a new era. What do we need? Ah, well, we need various items that are associated with other people in power. The Holy Roman Emperors had held crown jewels as symbols of their authority. An imperial crown, a scepter and an orb. But of all these symbols of past German glory, one is more important than all the others. It looks like a simple Roman spearhead. It is the Spear of Destiny. The Spear of Destiny was said to be none other than the spear that had pierced the side of Jesus Christ as he hung on the cross. The myth said that it was wielded by a Roman centurion called Longinus. As the legend is told, Longinus was a Roman centurion who'd served Pilate faithfully and he got cataracts. He was going blind and Pilate pulled him out of the ranks because he was no longer of service as a fighter and gave him relative easy duty at Mount Calvary. Making sure the crucifixions went off as planned. It didn't require a lot of fighting, didn't require great eyesight. The Bible says that this centurion, when inspecting the crucified men, was unsure if Jesus had died. So he thrust his spear into Christ's side. Blood allegedly dripped down the side of the spear into Longinus' eyes. He was cured of cataracts, he was cured of his blindness. He had a vision of the future, he had a vision of Jesus as the Messiah. Longinus was converted instantly. As Christianity spreads throughout the world, Longinus' spear, touched by the Son of God, became a revered holy relic. The spear was passed down, first through a succession of Roman emperors and then to Charlemagne. Charlemagne carries it into battle, he's invincible as long as it's in his hands. It becomes known as a talisman for conquerors, for military force. It is a military image that it has of vanquishing foes. Such was its mystique that every holy Roman emperor after Charlemagne wanted to possess it. It became a symbol of their authority. The spear, at a very early point in history, is a reflection of power, of strength. Legend says that whoever held the spear would be undefeated in battle. So, not only do you get a sense of whoever has this is the true world monarch because he has it, but if you hold it, you're invincible. It was clear why Hitler wanted it, but he didn't have it. In fact, it was in Vienna, the capital of neighbouring Austria. When the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806, its heirs, the Habsburgs, moved the spear to Austria, where it ended up on display in the Hofburg Palace. And it was here in 1908 that Adolf Hitler, then a struggling Austrian painter, had first seen the spear and begun to covet it. According to one version of the story, Hitler had actually seen the spear in the museum there. And apparently he may have had some sort of moment of epiphany in which he realised that this was an incredibly important object and he had been sort of touched by it. Whether that's true or not doesn't really matter. The point was it was regarded as being important. Hitler had long known where it was. And now he was German Führer, all he had to do was take it. On March the 12th, 1938, German troops crossed the border into Austria. The world watched as the Austrian government collapsed. Hitler was killing two birds with one stone. He was reclaiming lands once held by the Roman Empire. And was now on the brink of seizing the spear of destiny. You've got to realise that Austria and Germany are, in Hitler's eyes, indivisible. And indeed, they should never have been defined in the first place. With Austria in his grasp, Hitler now activated the second part of his plan. To seize the spear. As the story is told, as the panzers were driving across the border into Austria, Hitler had an SS officer in civilian garb already planted in the museum. When he was alerted that the border had been crossed, he changed into his uniform, pulled out his gun and stood guard over those crown jewels. Nobody was to touch them until Hitler arrived. Hitler arrived in Vienna just two days after the invasion. One of the very first things he does is to go to the Habsburg museum, go to the display case where the spear and the crown jewels are, and opens it and takes possession of the spear. He took hold of the spear on March the 15th. It was not a date picked by accident. He took the spear of destiny on St. Longinus Day. That's when the centurion who allegedly carried it at the crucifixion is honored. Hitler took the spear to the southern German city of Nuremberg, which had been its home for centuries during the reign of the Holy Roman Emperors. There was absolutely no question where Hitler was going to take the spear once he absconded with it from Austria. He was going to take it back to Nuremberg, back to its spiritual home, what was to be the spiritual headquarters, the spiritual capital of Nazism, of the thousand-year Reich. Taking his lead from the Holy Roman Empire, Hitler had decided to place Nuremberg at the center of his new Nazi Reich. Berlin is the brain, Nuremberg is the heart. Here he had built vast parade grounds holding hundreds of thousands of spectators. He staged enormous rallies showcasing German military might. Extravagant displays presented the German people with an image of the future based on his vision of the past. We see newsreels today of the parades going through the streets in Nuremberg of soldiers dressed as medieval knights with mock-ups of the chests of the crown jewels symbolic of being returned to the homeland. The thousand-year Reich begins. By displaying the spear and the crown jewels, his message could not have been any clearer. A free German people in a strong German Reich! He was the heir to the Holy Roman Emperors. It was as if King Arthur had finally gotten Excalibur and was marching through town with it. And in a triumphal parade, I got it. With the Spear of Destiny in his possession, Hitler was convinced he would be unstoppable in his aim to conquer the rest of Europe. But of course, it didn't turn out that way. By the beginning of 1945, five years of war has devastated Europe. The spear has failed to bring Hitler the victory he had dreamed of. His ambitions lie in tatters. His empire on the brink of collapse. And in the chaos, the Spear of Destiny, one of the great treasures of Europe, has disappeared. But on an American army base in Belgium, pure luck will allow one man to track it down. Walter Horn is a lieutenant in the US Third Army. His mission? To interrogate German prisoners of war. Horn is no ordinary American GI. For one thing, he's German. And ten years earlier, he had narrowly escaped the clutches of the SS. In the 1930s, Horn was at university in Heidelberg, southwest Germany. His passion? Art history. His specialty was the relics of the Holy Roman Empire. He was an art history major who just had the misfortune to get his doctoral degree in 1933, just as Adolf Hitler had come to power. As a historian, Horn found himself being sucked into Hitler's obsession with proving the superiority of the German race. He was invited to join a special unit of the SS created specifically for this purpose, the Arnernerbe. Promising academics were press-ganged into the Arnernerbe. Their job? To prove at any cost that German culture was superior to every culture in the world. And who better for the Arnernerbe to recruit than the impressive young academic and PhD, Walter Horn. Walter was perfect Nazi material. He had been a javelin contender for the Olympics. He came from fifth generation Germanic Aryan stock. You know, he was young, he was good-looking, he was well-travelled. This was the kind of man the Nazis were looking for. But Horn could see exactly where Nazi control of German academic life was leading. The Arnernerbe can't just be seen as a kind of harmless bunch of corrupted academics who were just sucking up to the Nazis. Because what they were proving was helping to create a worldview that was in essence evil. All of these theories are directly related to the idea of race. And we all know what happens when you apply these theories to a regime that is as murderous as the Nazis are. It leads directly to the gates of Auschwitz. Horn wanted no part of it. So in 1934, he decided to flee Germany. He didn't want to give up his homeland, but he saw no option around it. All he could do was he had to get out of Germany. You know, the storm is coming down. This is no place to be. But as he began his flight to freedom, Horn learned that the SS were after him. He was very concerned. He hated the Nazis. He didn't know if it was because of remarks that he had made about the Nazis. To his horror, one SS officer had managed to track him down. The SS officer had his pistol, and I'm sure Walter was thinking that the end had come. But Horn was in for yet another surprise. The SS officer essentially told him, yes, we're looking for people like you, but good luck. Just don't come back. Walter Horn eventually managed to escape via Italy and then Cuba to America, where he became a naturalized American citizen. And that is how, as a fluent German speaker, he ended up in Belgium interrogating POWs at the tail end of the war. As the Allied armies work their way into Germany, behind the front lines you've got units doing various sort of ancillary roles that are nevertheless vitally important. One of these, of course, is to hunt for criminals. I mean, straight manhunts. And what these people are doing, these war crimes units, is to hunt for evidence, you know, which hasn't been burnt by the Gestapo. For months, Horn had been uncovering very little. But one afternoon, a harmless-looking POW changed all that. Quite late in the day, a relative old man. He was taken out of the prisoner pen to be interrogated. Private Fritz Huber. Fritz Huber has nothing really to contribute, or so it seems. Private Huber said, I'm sorry, I can't tell you any information, because I really, I don't know any information. All I've been doing is, you know, slogging gun cases around. Walter felt sorry for him, offered him a cigarette, offered him a cup of coffee, and they just sat and chatted. Then, Huber revealed something that would blow Walter Horn's mind. Huber said, I do know of a special treasure. A hidden treasure. Are you at all interested in art history? Little could Huber have known, the man he was talking to had a doctorate in art history. There wasn't anything in the world Walter wanted to hear more about, you know, than art and antiques. Huber began to tell Horn about a Nazi treasure trove hidden beneath Nuremberg Castle. One which supposedly contained any number of priceless pieces of art. Horn listened intently as Huber listed the sort of items that any imaginary pirate hoard might contain. Huber was describing various treasures, which could have been any kind of depositories, because we know the Nazis looted, you know, major museums. But this, this collection was different. He described a scepter. He described a crown. He described a golden orb, what they call, you know, the world orb of Christianity. And then he said, it's a spear. It's a spearhead, a Roman spearhead. And of course, Walter knew instantly the collection. There was no question what it was. He was describing, you know, the crown jewels of the Holy Roman Empire. And the Spear of Destiny. Horn pushed Huber for every detail and was amazed to find out the lengths that the Nazis had gone to to protect the Spear of Destiny. Huber said his father had been hired by the head of the Nazi SS, Heinrich Himmler, to install a ventilation system in a hidden vault beneath Nuremberg Castle. And, oh, by the way, my mother goes in once a week to check on the treasures that are kept in this vault. She has to check the humidity, you know, check against insects. My mother's got to wear white gloves. And as Huber is telling this story, Walter's getting more and more interested. Huber described a network of tunnels beneath the castle which led out to a secret entrance on the streets below. It looked like an active, ongoing antique shop and it had two doors for bringing items in and out. But, of course, it was Nazis who were going the in and out. Aware that he had possibly just uncovered the location of one of the world's great treasures, Horn immediately began to write up a report for his superiors. But fearing the American high command wouldn't understand the importance of the spear, Horn made sure to write in detail, even drawing a map of the city to show where the vault could be found. Walter Horn sat at a borrowed typewriter and he typed up an intelligence report. And, of course, being an art historian, I'm sure it... well, it reads more like an art history paper than a military intelligence report. Horn worked quickly. He knew the advancing Allied forces were planning a huge offensive on Nuremberg. And he feared that in the battle, the spear could be destroyed. He mailed it off fully thinking that this would be dismissed as... as tangential to the fighting going on there. That what military commander would possibly conceive the Holy Roman Empire, crown, jewels and the spear of destiny to be a military objective? But in another amazing stroke of luck, Horn's report eventually landed on the desk of the one man who had both the power and the will to save the spear. General George S. Patton, also known as Old Blood and Guts. Was in command of the US Third Army in Europe. And was one of the generals overseeing the invasion of Germany. A flamboyant man, often pictured with two silver revolvers, he was a brilliant tank commander and tactician. A Catholic convert, Patton saw himself as a Christian warrior. But more than that, he too was obsessed with the legend of the spear of destiny. He had even written a poem about what it must have felt like to plunge the spear into the side of Christ. I cannot name my battles, for the visions are not clear. Yet I see the twisted faces, and I feel the rending spear. Perhaps I stabbed our saviour in his sacred helpless side. Yet I have called his name in blessing, when after times I died. As US troops battled their way across Europe, Patton had been attempting to track the spear's movements. His fear was that the spear, if not found, might be used as a talisman to inspire a Nazi resurgence. But so far he had no idea where the spear was. Until Walter Horn's report landed on his desk. Lo and behold, that's exactly what Patton was looking for, and he found it. In that intelligence report, a light bulb went off. This was a military objective for Patton. On the eve of the assault on Nuremberg, Patton took an amazing decision. He ensured that a crack team of soldiers was sent to locate the secret vault. But it would be no easy task. Nuremberg had suffered a series of massive bombing raids. Thousands had died, hundreds of thousands displaced. They talk about the devastation in Dresden, but the devastation in Dresden essentially came from a fire that started, that spread. In Nuremberg, it was literally from the tons and tons of bombs. And now the Allies intended to send Hitler a message. They planned to capture Nuremberg on April 20th, the Fuhrer's birthday. Hitler was adamant that his spiritual capital would not fall. His instructions are that the defenders of Nuremberg will fight to the last bullet, and that they're the last man, and even the last young child. On April 16th, the U.S. Army began a fight to the death for the city. Patton's special unit, sent to locate the spear, was soon caught in the thick of the fighting. It was narrow, medieval streets, big battlements. It was almost essentially hand-to-hand combat, almost like taking one street after another, and it was very dangerous kind of fighting. Children were actually being used as scouts. The Germans fought right down, virtually, you know, to the last man standing. In the chaos of the battle, Patton's unit, armed with Horn's men, embarked on their dangerous mission to locate the secret vault. That unit lost many men to work their way to where the vault was. When they got there, they couldn't even find it. There'd been such devastation, so many bombings, and they weren't even sure that they'd gotten to the location. But then they made a discovery. One of them found a crevice, a sort of tunnel-like thing, and they dropped in. At the end of a long, dark underground tunnel, they found something staggering. Set into thick concrete, the steel vault door, eight feet high and 12 inches thick. But there was a problem. The giant vault doors were locked shut. The door itself was impenetrable at that point. One of the munitions men was literally about to, you know, plug dynamite in the sides of this giant vault door. But just moments before the charges were detonated, a German civilian came forward and stopped the munitions man. Luckily, he was stopped at the last minute because, you know, God knows what might have happened to the contents inside. A German who was a representative of the mayor of Nuremberg gave the Allies the combination of this vault. He said, please, please, don't blow this up. Very special things here, and they opened the vault. Behind the giant door, the G.I.s discovered a vast and incredibly sophisticated underground complex. This had to be the vault that the prisoner Huber had described. But it was on a scale beyond anything they had imagined. Commissioned by Heinrich Himmler, it was an enormous expansion of old beer cellars beneath the Nuremberg castle. Himmler secretly sent in teams of architect, teams of builders to reconfigure this beer cellar into a high-tech vault. And I don't use that term, high-tech. Loosely, foot-thick reinforced steel, special locking mechanisms. The walls were lined with various materials to keep the moisture out. Air purification system, its own generator system. It had water, it had showers, it had baths, it had a kitchen. It had its own little escape hatch. You could have a team of people living in there for months at a time. The G.I.s could hardly believe what they had found. But unsure of exactly what they had discovered, a message was sent for Horn to come to Nuremberg to identify the contents of the vault. When Horn arrived, he was shocked by the state of this once beautiful medieval city. Picture a moonscape, picture churches missing their roofs, bodies strewn about. Horn was led to the vault. Even though the contents had been described to him by Huber, Horn was stunned by what the vaults contained. There is just this fantastic room full of Europe's treasure which can rival anything you'll see in the Louvre or the British Museum. And it really is a real treasure trove. And the guys who went in there realised, my God, how much had the Nazis taken? Every box was just full of something more and more incredible. Horn was shown a small wooden crate. In it, unmistakable to Horn's expert eyes, was the Spear of Destiny. Horn became a hero when he recovered the Spear of Destiny. Now the question was, what were they to do with it? May 1945. The Allies declare victory over Hitler's Nazi regime. Six years of war draws to a close. Hitler had committed suicide in his Berlin bunker. The Allies uncovered millions of dollars' worth of Europe's finest treasures stolen by the Nazis. We know the Nazis looted major museums. Major collections were brought wholesale in by train. Now began the task of returning these treasures to their rightful owners. Walter Horn had assumed the Spear would be returned to Austria. The Spear of Destiny come from the Hofburg in a museum in Vienna. This is where he expected, he fully thought, they would be returned to. Patton had other ideas. It seemed that Patton too had become bewitched by the power of the Spear of Destiny. Patton said, and openly declared, that these relics, this Spear of Destiny, are not artwork. These are emblems of war, twisted by the Nazis to become symbols of the Third Reich. Patton was the type of man who very much would have liked the idea of the Spear of Destiny in his back pocket and wanted to take it back to the United States. Perhaps he believed, as did Hitler, that whoever possessed the Spear would be invincible. So adamant was Patton on having the Spear that Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of all Allied troops in Europe, had to intervene. A huge argument broke out between these two iconic figures. But before it could be resolved, tragedy struck. His car was hit by a lorry. He's virtually paralysed. He's in hospital for a short period and then he dies. With Patton died the last obstacle to the Spear returning home to Vienna. A special plane was dispatched under a very heavy armed guard because these are considered the most valuable treasures that the Nazis had ever looted. There was a special return ceremony in Austria and today they're back in the museum, essentially in the same room, in the same part of the museum, where they were when Hitler took them. But there remains one outstanding question. What was this item that Walter Horn had recovered and that so many people had fought and died for? Could it really be the Spear that Charlemagne held? The very Spear that pierced Christ's side? Robert Feather, a trained metallurgist, was the first person in 40 years to be allowed to examine the Spear scientifically. I was called in to examine the Spear because I'd had previous experience of metallurgical work on ancient artefacts. I trained as a metallurgist and I've done a lot of work in ancient metals and materials. One of the first tests he did was to see if there were traces of blood on the Spear. If it were Christ's blood, it would be the most staggering discovery of all time. I took swabs of the Spear just in case there was any biological material. If it's a Spear, it could have had some blood on it somewhere and the remotest chance that some of it might be Jesus' blood just occurred, so I thought I'd better do it just in case someone's going to say, why didn't you? But no traces of blood could be found. Next, he did a series of non-destructive tests to uncover the age of the Spear. We did XRF, which is X-ray fluorescent tests. We did microscopic analysis. We did full high-powered X-ray and microscopic analysis. These tests finally gave an approximate date to the Spear itself. The 7th or 8th century AD. To say that it was a Spear that went into the side of Jesus I think is rather difficult, if not virtually impossible. It's impossible really to have had much contact with someone who had supposedly died 8 centuries before it was made. Science had proven that the Vienna Lance was not the Spear that had pierced the side of Christ. So does this mean it is worthless? Had thousands of lives been risked in pursuit of nothing more than a medieval forgery? After all, one uncomfortable fact even for Hitler was that it wasn't the only Spear claiming to be the Spear of Destiny. The problem with the Spear is that there are quite a few of them. I mean, I think there are at least four. There are competitor Spears in different places to the Vienna Spear. There's one in Etzmiad in Armenia. It doesn't look very much like a Spear and it's more rather like a Roman bannerhead. But nevertheless, they revere it. And there's another one in Poland which is almost certainly a later middle-aged reproduction. There's another one in St. Peter's, in the Basilica of St. Peter's which is said to be part of the Spear that pierced the side of Jesus. But it seems that the Spear Hitler coveted had a value that none of the others had. We know more about the early history of the Vienna Spear than any of the others. And we can trace it certainly in written record back to the 8th century. That date is extremely significant. It was when Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor, was rising to power. This Spear may not have been the Spear which pierced Christ's side but it was the Spear held by the Holy Roman Emperors. There's no question that that Spear was the one carried by the Holy Roman Emperors and that this was the one passed on throughout history through tradition and was the one that Hitler took. And Hitler had understood something else. It doesn't matter what something is. What matters is what people believe it to be. For centuries the Spear had been revered by the most powerful rulers of Europe and that, for Hitler, was enough to make it something worth having. It doesn't really matter whether this was the Spear that was shoved into the side of Jesus. It doesn't matter. It's what people think is what matters. It's what people choose to believe. The fact that it doesn't date back to the crucifixion doesn't make it, to my mind, any less valuable because what it represents in the larger sense is what's important. Even though it's very easy today to look at it as all being part of mumbo-jumbo, it's kind of junk history, it's kind of mythology, it's superstition, it's important.