The Nazis’ obsession with the Holy Grail, the alleged relic of Jesus’ Last Supper, sought after around the world
Himmler traveled to Barcelona in 1940 convinced that the Abbey of Montserrat hid in its tunnels the chalice from which Christ drank at the Last Supper.
On Holy Thursday, the Catholic Church celebrates the establishment of the Eucharist at the Last Supper, where Jesus shared with his disciples the bread and wine, which became his body and blood. During that supper an object was used that over the centuries became legendary and whose search became an obsession for many: the Holy Grail.
According to the apocryphal gospels, Joseph of Arimathea kept the cup that Christ had used during the Last Supper and collected his blood with it after being crucified on Golgotha. Days later, Jesus appeared to him and said: “You will guard the Grail”. According to legend, Joseph founded the first church in the British Isles, where he took the relic, which became a central object around which much of the Arthurian Legend revolves.
The Holy Grail and Nazism
But the Holy Grail did not only fascinate medieval writers. Adolf Hitler, who was continuously obsessed with the esoteric, had a fascination with finding the Grail at all costs. Heinrich Himmler, as obsessed as his leader, was convinced that with it they would gain the power to kill their enemies and heal their own troops.
Himmler himself founded the ‘Ahnenerbe’ (‘Ancestral Heritage’). A Nazi institute that investigated the racial superiority of the Aryan race. They came to conclusions as far-fetched as that Jesus was not a Jew, but an Aryan, and that the Holy Grail, the spear of Longinus that pierced the cross of the crucified Christ and other mythical objects of the Judeo-Christian tradition could tilt the war in their favor.
Hitler’s Indiana Jones
That is why, after Nazism rose to power in Germany, they launched an unbridled search for all those objects in which Otto Willhelm Rahn, Hitler’s particular ‘Indiana Jones’, played a leading role. Rahn was a medievalist who had dedicated his life to studying the Grail. He wrote ‘Crusade against the Grail, trilogy of Catharism’ which had become Himmler’s bedside book. Himmler hired Rahn, gave him a high position in the Ahnenerbe, made him an SS officer without caring that he was Jewish and did not give a damn about Nazism, and gave him the order to find the Grail no matter what it cost.
Rahn was convinced that the last people to have the Grail in their possession were the Cathars, a split from Christianity that emerged in the Middle Ages and settled in southeastern France during the 12th century. He traveled twice to Montsegur (France), explored the ruins of the last Cathar stronghold and the nearby caves, but found nothing at all. He then came to the conclusion that, after exterminating the Cathars, the Catholic Church had hidden the grail in the abbey of Montserrat. And that was the beginning of Himmler’s trip to Spain to steal the Grail.
In search of the Grail in Montserrat
On October 23, 1940, in Hendaye, on the French-Spanish border, the famous meeting took place, in which Hitler failed to get Spanish dictator Franco to enter the war. But that same day there was another trip to Spain that for the Nazis was just as important and that ended in the same disappointing way: Himmler went to Barcelona to take the Holy Grail from the Abbey of Montserrat.
The official reason for the trip was the creation in Spain of a political police, but since the arrival in Barcelona the only thing that seemed to interest Himmler was to visit the Benedictine monastery accompanied by a curiously numerous retinue of SS officers. However, the monks did not make a very diplomatic reception to the Nazi retinue. The abbot, Antoni Maria Marcet, and the curate, Aureli Maria Escarré, excused themselves from receiving them on the grounds that they could not speak German. Instead, they sent a young monk, Andreu Ripol Noble, to give them a guided tour. During the tour, Himmler asked a stupefied Ripol again and again if the Holy Grail was kept in the abbey’s tunnels. “There is no Grail here,” was the phrase most repeated by the monk throughout the afternoon.
Reports of the visit state that Himmler left the abbey very angry and frustrated. And although the Ahnenerbe continued searching for the Grail throughout Europe during the war, he was unable to find it. However, along the way, quite a few museums were looted.
Fortunately, it did not occur to them to look for it in the cathedral of Santa Maria in Valencia, where since 1437 a chalcedony cup with Hebrew design, dated in the first century and contemporary to Herod the Great, which the Catholic Church itself recognizes as one of the most important relics of all Christianity, has been kept since 1437.
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