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Hell Notes: Nazis!

By | November 29th, 2013
Posted in Annotations | 5 Comments
Logo by Tim Daniel

Please note, this column contains minor spoilers for those that have not yet read up to and including Sledgehammer 44: Lightning War #1.

When Adolf Hilter himself makes an appearance in a Mignolaverse title, how could I not write an article about Nazis? In the early years of the comic many readers thought Nazis were Hellboy’s go-to foes. Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, Wake the Devil, Conqueror Worm, all major foundations for the budding series and all include Nazis in prominent roles.

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 Sonnenrad
Whenever Nazis are involved, the line between fact and fiction can become a little blurry. There was no real Sonnenrad Society, though it does seem to be drawing from the very real SS (the Schutzstaffel). The name Sonnenrad is German for “sun wheel,” the name of an occult symbol, more frequently known as the Black Sun. This occult symbol has strong ties with the SS. It can be found in the design of a floor mosaic in Wewelsburg Castle, the former SS Generals’ Hall. During the Third Reich Wewelsburg Castle was the ideological centre of The Order of the SS. The design is meant to mimic King Arthur’s round table, with each spoke of the sun wheel representing one knight or officer of the inner SS. To a certain extent, the Schutzstaffel and the Sonnenrad Society could be considered cognate.

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.

Dr Gunter Eiss, 1958
Operation Himmel-Macht
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.

Dr Ernst Oeming
The Nazi Space Program
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.

Radio heads
The corpse of Dr Ernst Oeming was specially prepared, made ready as a vessel for Ogdru Hem spirits in space. Normally communication with these beings was something that could only be achieved by someone with rare sensitivity, but the Nazis found a way around that as you can see to the left.

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.

Von Klempt is my favourite Nazi (My favourite Nazi, there’s a phrase I never thought I’d use). He was originally injured in an accident in 1936 while trying to create an army of human/machine hybrids. His colleagues, Dr Kroenen and Leopold Kurtz, were able to save his head with a combination of science and magic. The loss of his body did not deter him though, and he continued work on human/machine and ape/machine hybrids for a very long time, but more on that later.

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.

Giurescu and Hitler talk Project Vampir Sturm
In 1944, Ilsa Haupstein was tasked with convincing the known vampire Vladimir Giurescu and his six wives to participate in this project. She succeeded, but in the process she was seduced by Giurescu. Ilsa would not speak of it to her comrades, but they were aware that something was going on. In December Giurescu met with Hitler at Wewelsburg Castle. After the meeting, Hitler wrote to Himmler that an army of such creatures would be absolutely uncontrollable.

Hitler had Giurescu and his wives impaled, decapitated, and burned. Their ashes were sent to him afterwards. But the weakest of Giurescu’s wives endured another torture first. She was drained completely of her blood, which was kept and studied.

Continued below

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.

100 cryo-tanks of vampires

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.

...Do you see why I love von Klempt so much?

The Nazi Space Program – Part 2
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.

He used his own granddaughter as a pawn, letting her draw out Hellboy and Roger into the open. He even allowed her to be turned into a frog monster later, for there would be no survivors of the Conqueror Worm. But von Klempt hadn’t counted on Roger and Hellboy working together with an alien and the ghost of the Lobster (an evil genius should always consider such things). In one of Roger’s finest moments, he grabbed von Klempt’s jar and hurled himself over a cliff. The jar was dashed on the rocks, but the head was never recovered. However, the Lobster did say that he was dead, and since he was a ghost, I’m assuming he would know.

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).

Continued below

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.

Kroenen, Leopold, and Ilsa
When nothing appeared to have happened after the summoning on Tarmagant Island, the project was called a failure, but Rasputin assured his followers that he had set in motion events that would destroy the world and make it anew. He named those three the cornerstones of his church and confided in them the fall of Hilter and his Reich in a mere five months, and had them prepare for the future. They travelled to Northern Norway, to a hidden Nazi sanctuary where they had themselves cryogenically frozen.

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).

While at Castle Giurescu in Romania, the Ghost of Rasputin appeared to Ilsa, urging her to let go of her affection for Giurescu, and instead to love the Ogdru Jahad, to love chaos, to love him. He convinced her to let go of her mortal life, to die a little so that she could become immortal and embrace the dragon and become an agent of destruction. Her new body was to be the Maiden of Joo, a torture device that once belonged to the Countess Elizabeth Bathory and kept her in perpetual youth. For Ilsa it was a body beyond flesh, something strong enough to weather the storms of Ragna Rok.

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 below

Leopold overheard von Klempt’s scheming and determined to put an end to it in his typically subtle fashion by beating him to death with a giant wrench. While trying to defend von Klempt, Kroenen fatally stabbed Leopold in the heart. Though Kroenen immediately felt remorse for what he had done, it could not be undone. When the ghost of Rasputin learned of what had transpired, he set loose his rage on Roderick Zinco, blinding him as vengeance for bringing von Klempt into the Sanctuary. In panic, Zinco staggered about until he bumped a large red button that destroyed the Sanctuary. The loss further weakened Rasputin, and he went to the Baba Yaga for solace. She pointed out that he was no god or king, he was but a dead man.

That’s where Project Ragna Rok should have ended. All of Rasputin’s disciples were dead.

Except that they weren’t. In the final issue of B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: Russia, Leopold and Kroenen returned, sitting in a Zinco board meeting as if they’d never been gone. How they came to be alive I don’t know. I can’t even guess when they were revived. Their return is still a major mystery, so if you’ve any theories, please share ’em.

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 Return of the Master

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.


//TAGS | Hell Notes | Mignolaversity

Mark Tweedale

Mark writes Haunted Trails, The Harrow County Observer, The Damned Speakeasy, and a bunch of stuff for Mignolaversity. An animator and an eternal Tintin fan, he spends his free time reading comics, listening to film scores, watching far too many video essays, and consuming the finest dark chocolates. You can find him on BlueSky.

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