Now Hellboy is more about folklore and B.P.R.D. is all about Ogdru Hem and the end of the world, but those Nazis are still hanging around and they will play a role in what’s to come. But before I talk too much about the future, let’s go back to where it all began, to the Sonnenrad Society.
Don’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of this of this particular organisation before. Though it is its official name, it’s the one least likely to be used. The Sonnenrad Society is more commonly known as the Nazi Occult Bureau, the organisation founded by Heinrich Himmler in 1935.
The Nazi Occult Bureau had an interest in all things supernatural, and hunted across the globe for various artifacts. They even tried to find Atlantis, which resulted in a Nazi submarine entering the Hollow Earth through an undersea tunnel in the Arctic (see B.P.R.D.: Hollow Earth).
Of particular interest to them was what they called “the Secret Masters” and the energy source known as Vril. The shaman Shonchin has shown up in Hell Notes on more than one occasion before. He is most certainly a Secret Master. And I’ve written a whole article about Vril. In 1937, Professor Kyriakos Gallaragos found a way to harness Vril energy using a device he called Anum’s Fork. This led to the development of the Vril Energy Suit prototype, also known as Prometheus. His work drew the attention of many unsavoury characters, including the Nazis. They were never able to get Anum’s Fork, but they did manage to salvage the helmet of the V.E.S. prototype. However, thanks to the intervention of a mysterious man calling himself “the Lobster,” the Nazis never made it back to Germany with it. Their submarine was blown up in the Hudson River.
This week’s Sledgehammer 44: Lightning War #1 shows that in 1944 the Nazis are still very interested in Vril, and the new V.E.S., Epimetheus (y’know, Sledgehammer). If you read my review, you already know I’m really excited to see where that one goes.
Besides hunting down supernatural relics and such, the Sonnenrad Society also had teams of scientists dedicated to learning more about the occult and using that knowledge to further various Nazi doomsday projects. Operation Himmel-Macht was the Third Reich’s attempt to tap the “divine infinite” to win the war using the Robe of Christ and the Lance of Longinus. A young physicist named Gunter Eiss would be the one to eventually see it to completion, though it would take him over half a century. He was originally recruited in 1939 following the deaths of the Nazi scientists involved in the space program.Continued below
Operation Himmel-Macht was going well, but their were factions within the Sonnenrad Society and in 1944 Hitler chose to push forward with Project Ragna Rok and not Operation Himmel-Macht. After the war, the robe and the lance were transferred to an American facility in Colorado, along with many other supernatural relics recovered from the Nazis. Like many other Nazi scientists, Dr Eiss defected to work for the U.S. government. He became involved in a project continuing the work of Professor Gallaragos on Vril energy, but the project was far beyond him or his colleagues. However, the new Vril project was based in the Colorado facility, and while there he managed to track down Christ’s Robe and Longinus’s Lance. He continued Operation Himmel-Macht in secret in the fourth subbasement level until 1958 when he was discovered by his fellow scientists. They attempted to stop Dr Eiss, but tampering with his device led to a time-space anomaly. Not knowing how to deal with it, the basement was bricked up.
But Gunter Eiss survived. He lived off of mushrooms and spiders until 2004 when the Colorado facility was being transformed into the new B.P.R.D. headquarters. Finally free of the basement, Gunter finished the project and activated it, turning himself into a living portal to “the Kingdom of Heaven,” although considering what came through, the Heaven part is debatable.
The seraphim, or whatever the hell that thing was, was eliminated thanks to Johann and the ghosts of the scientists that died in the anomaly in 1958, and just to make sure the living portal stayed closed, Captain Daimio put an end to Eiss.
Physicist Ernst Oeming was the scientist of the Third Reich, so much so that he was referred to as “the Nazi Einstein.” He came very close to giving Hitler the atomic bomb. Fortunately, he was assassinated on New Year’s Day, 1939. And that was when he got involved with the Nazi Space Program, along with various astronomers, astrologers, and mystics.
It was a rather unconventional space program to say the least.
On March 20, 1939 the Nazi Space Program came to an abrupt end when their launch was interrupted by American troops. The roof failed to open during the launch, and everyone was killed, save for one Nazi scientist. Herman von Klempt, the head in a jar.
Project Vampir Sturm
This project was a bad idea right from the beginning. It was an attempt to create an army of vampires. No good could possibly come of this.
By 1939, Germany had executed all of its mentally ill, all except for three hundred patients at a single institution outside of Berlin. These patients were experimented on, and now that the Nazis had vampire blood, they began to test what they could do with it. As Hitler had said, the creatures were uncontrollable, but when the Nazis began to lose the war, that became less of a concern. They injected 120 patients with vampire blood and froze them before they could properly change. The plan was to release them if the Nazis lost the war.
A week before the Nazi surrender, Hitler gave the order to release the vampires, but the General who was given the order could not carry it out. He saw it as a madness, and bricked up the frozen vampires in the institution.
In 1946 a joint investigation by the B.P.R.D. and the Russian Special Sciences Service uncovered the secret chamber in the institution, but there were only 20 cryo-tanks containing the vampire subjects. 100 were missing. It turns out Herman von Klempt had got there first and had decided to revive the Nazi space program to launch a rocket full of vampires into America. The B.P.R.D. and the S.S.S. had to band together to fight a pair of von Klempt’s kriegaffen (“war apes,” machine hybrids) and blow up a rocket full of vampires. Professor Bruttenholm, Varvara, and Herman von Klempt were the only survivors. Everything considered though, things could have gone a lot worse.
After the vampire rocket thing von Klempt hid in Brazil with several of his allies and continued his experiments, making more kriegaffen and other monstrosities. In 1959 Hellboy was called in to investigate a possible vampire incident only to find von Klempt had been extracting spinal fluid from the locals. This encounter ended with Hellboy blowing up his lab.
Von Klempt, however, survived. That’s kind of his thing. If there’s an explosion, he survived it. He was dormant inside his jar until he was found by a Zinco employee in 1997, had a bit of a reunion with some of his Nazi friends, then there was an explosion. You’ll get the details in the next section, but I’m pretty sure you can guess who survived.
Afterwards, von Klempt returned to Brazil to find all his inventions had been ruined. He was all alone with nothing left. Then the ghost of the monk Rasputin appeared before him, though he thought it to be the Angel of Death. From Rasputin he learned the true purpose of the Nazi Space Program. Von Klempt made radio contact with Nazi the capsule containing the body of Dr Oeming, calling it back to Earth. He knew what he was doing would release a monster with an insatiable hunger that would destroy the world, and he was content to watch it happen.
Even though he was an insane head in a jar, I still miss him. No one could do a crazy rant quite like Herman von Klempt.
Project Ragna Rok
This is the big one. December 23, 1944, the young Hellboy was summoned to Earth in a ruined church in East Bromwich. On that same night, off the coast of Scotland on Tarmagant Island, the monk Rasputin activated the Ragna Rok engine and with it summoned to Earth the key to unlocking the Ogdru Jahad (Hellboy’s stone right hand).
Heinrich Himmler had sought out Grigori Rasputin seven years earlier in 1937 and convinced him to join the Sonnenrad Society. From within Himmler’s Bureau, Rasputin gained the loyalty of three scientists; Ilsa Haupstein, Leopold Kurtz, and Professor Doctor Karl Ruprect Kroenen. Though Herman von Klempt’s genius was undeniable, Rasputin did not invite him into his inner circle, something Dr Kroenen saw as a mistake.
Fifty years later, May, 1994, Rasputin was killed by B.P.R.D. agents Abe Sapien, Liz Sherman, and Hellboy during the Cavendish Hall incident (see Hellboy: Seed of Destruction). Upon his death, Ilsa, Leopold, and Dr Kroenen awoke and began working, turning corpses into cyborgs, building an army that would eventually number three hundred and sixty-nine strong.
Two years later, March, 1996, Roderick Zinco, head of Zinco Industries, had a vision of Rasputin, which led him to seek out the Nazi sanctuary and the remaining members of Project Ragna Rok. Zinco offered them all the resources at his disposal, which greatly hastened the building of their army.
By March, 1997, Ilsa Haupstein had grown restless and left the sanctuary for Soho, New York City. There she tracked down a Mr Howard Steinman, the owner of a wax museum, and murdered him. In actual fact he was Hans Ubler, the former owner of a freakshow-themed nightclub frequented by Heinrich Himmler and the members of his inner circle. He had managed to smuggle the remains of the vampire, Vladimir Giurescu, out of Nazi Germany during the final months of the War, and it was these remains for which Ilsa had come looking (You can read more about Giurescu here).
Ilsa willingly stepped inside the iron maiden and was pierced through with spikes. Not long after, the Maiden of Joo was claimed by the spirit of the goddess Hecate. Whether Ilsa’s spirit survived or not is unknown. It’s possible she is trapped inside the Maiden of Joo, or that she became a part of Hecate, or even that her spirit was destroyed by the goddess. Whatever happened, the powerful weapon Rasputin had created was lost to him. It was a great blow to him.
That March was a pretty bad month for Rasputin all round. While things seemed to be going smoothly back at the Nazi sanctuary in Norway, they wouldn’t stay that way for long. The Ragna Rok army had been completed, and was ready for the next phase. Then Roderick Zinco reported one of his employees had recovered a head in a jar from Brazil. The head, Herman von Klempt, was attended to by Dr Kroenen, and when he awoke, the doctor told him all about Project Ragna Rok, urging his friend to join them in this work. However, von Klempt was too much of a pragmatist and did not see the point of destroying the world to make way for a new one where everyone could be “happy and naked in paradise” (von Klempt’s words, not mine). He wanted to rule this world, not the next, and wanted to use the Ragna Rok army to make it happen.
Continued belowThat’s where Project Ragna Rok should have ended. All of Rasputin’s disciples were dead.
Russia was roughly a decade after the events of Wake the Devil, and by this point many of the key points required for the second phase of Project Ragna Rok had already come to pass or were unfolding. There was famine, there was plague, there was death, and the dragon had begun to stir in his prison. All that remained was for Rasputin’s spirit to be summoned into a body of their creation so that he might finally shatter the Ogdru Jahad’s prison. From Russia to The Return of the Master these two worked tirelessly on Rasputin’s new body, except that they were no longer the ones calling the shots. Roderick Zinco had been their humble servant, but now Zinco Industries was run by Mr Marsten and it was clear he was in charge of them and not the other way around. Over time Leopold and Kroenen have had to face the reality that they are but cogs in a machine, not the cornerstones of a new church that they were promised.
And all the while they were trying to bring back their master, Rasputin, Marsten was secretly working to bring back his own master, the former head of Zinco Industries, Mr Landis Pope. However, when they finally brought a soul back from the Ogdru Jahad, it was another master altogether…
The Black Flame
…You’ll have to wait until January, I’m afraid. He demands an entire Hell Notes all of his own.
So that’s it for now. I had planned on talking about the Steel Hawk and the Crimson Lotus as well, but other than his name I know very little about the Steel Hawk, and the Crimson Lotus is a character I plan to talk about at a later date in connection with a certain scarred Captain and his wendigo companion. There’s a lot of Nazi stuff in these books, and I swear I’ve probably missed heaps of stuff. Hopefully I’ve hit all the key points though.