Tales of the Knights Templar (20 page)

During the two years that followed, such councils quickly disposed of their prisoners, usually with notable leniency. Those who had made no confession, continuing to protest the innocence of the Order, were sentenced to life imprisonment, as were those who had confessed and then retracted their confessions. Those who had confessed and stood by their confessions were penanced, absolved, and released, some of them joining other orders that would take them.

But not de Molay and his officers. Denied a personal appeal to the pope, and forced to confirm their previous confessions before a tribunal of three cardinals, the four were then sentenced to life imprisonment. Furthermore, they would be required to repeat their confessions in public.

On March 14, 1314, in a spectacle calculated to convince the people that the persecution of the Order had been just, the four were brought to a specially constructed platform before the Cathedral of Notre Dame, garbed in their Templar robes for certain identification and laden with chains to underline their guilt. But instead of reciting the expected confession, the aged Grand Master, now well past seventy and physically broken by his ordeal, stepped forward and made the following statement, quoted in translation in John J. Robinson’s
Dungeon, Fire, and Sword,
pp. 467-8:

I think it only right that at so solemn a moment, when my life has so little time to run, I should reveal the deception which has been practiced and speak up for the truth. Before heaven and earth and all of you here as my witnesses, I admit that I am guilty of the grossest iniquity. But the iniquity is that I have lied in admitting the disgusting charges laid against the Order. I declare that the Order is innocent. Its purity and saintliness are beyond question. I have indeed confessed that the Order is guilty, but I have done so only to save myself from terrible tortures by saying what my enemies wished me to say. Other knights who have retracted their confessions have been led to the stake, yet the thought of dying is not so awful that I shall confess foul crimes which have never been committed. Life is offered to me, but at the price of infamy. At such a price, life is not worth having. I do not grieve that I must die if life can be bought only by piling one lie upon another.

De Molay’s declaration brought a roar of anger from the crowd, all but drowning out Geoffroi de Charney’s similar statement of retraction. Before the situation could get totally out of hand, the king’s officers hustled the four off the platform and ordered the crowd to disperse.

Later that very afternoon, de Molay and de Charney were brought back to the Îie de la Cité in the Seine, not far from Notre Dame Cathedral, where two stakes had been prepared. Stripped of their Templar robes, the pair were chained to the stakes, then surrounded with seasoned wood and charcoal selected to produce a slow, hot fire that would literally roast the victims alive before it consumed them.

As the fires were lit, both de Molay and de Charney continued to shout out their innocence and that of the Order, calling upon heaven for justice. Many citizens of Paris watched from tiny boats, now uncertain what to believe, for a man’s dying declaration carried considerable weight. It is said that de Molay, as the heat blistered and contorted his flesh, called both the pope and the king to appear with him before the Seat of God before the year was out. He is further said to have cursed the king and his family to the thirteenth generation.

Pope Clement V died the following month, in the early morning hours of April 20, of a sudden onslaught of dysentery. Philip le Bel was taken with a seizure while hunting, on November 29, and survived only long enough to be carried back to his palace to die. Whether from supernatural causes or from the actions of fugitive Templars or their sympathizers employing their knowledge of subtle poisons, de Molay’s curse was fulfilled.

Nor did it end with Philip’s death. His heart was cut out and sent to a monastery near Paris with the relic of the True Cross he had stolen from the Templars, but the curse extended at least into the next generation, for the direct Capetian royal line ended with Philip’s three sons, all of whom died without heirs—Louis X in 1316, Philip V in 1322, and Charles IV in 1328.

After that the French crown passed to the Valois line—for thirteen generations—and then to the ill-fated Bourbons. Legend has it that when the last Bourbon king, Louis XVI, was guillotined in 1793, a man leaped onto the platform (some say he was a Freemason), dipped his hand into the dead king’s blood, flicked it out over the crowd, and cried, “Jacques de Molay, thou art avenged!”

Almost certainly, this dramatic reference to the Templars reflects the preservation of Templar lore and tradition that had carried through the various Jacobite rebellions and then into the American and French Revolutions, much of it preserved alongside and within Freemasonry. The name Alexander Deuchar surfaces frequently in the decades that followed, especially in connection with various Templar factions that rose and fell, mostly in a Masonic or quasi-Masonic context, mostly in Scotland, though France and Germany had their share of others calling themselves Templars. Even princes and royal dukes came to be patrons and members of these reconstituted Templar organizations.

Whatever Deuchar’s legacy—and modern incarnations of the Order often are sharply divided in their opinions—tradition persisted that the Templars once had been guardians not only of temporal treasures but of secret and mystical knowledge and power, at least some of it somehow connected with the Temple of Solomon. The general occult revival that swept through late Victorian and Edwardian Europe brought to light such diverse phenomena as the Rosicrucians, Spiritualism, Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and the Order of the Golden Dawn. It also reawakened interest in the Temple. Germany of the 1920s and 1930s was to prove a breeding ground for investigation of these and other, even further-ranging esoteric subjects, many of which also attracted the interest of rising members of the National Socialist movement, including a failed painter called Adolph Hitler.

The extent of German interest in the occult is perhaps only slightly exaggerated in such popular films as Stephen Spielberg’s
Raiders of the Lost Ark
and its sequel,
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Such legendary items as the Holy Grail and the Spear of Longinus (said to have pierced Jesus’ side at the Crucifixion) were sought in deadly earnest by agents of the Third Reich, and organizations believed to have access to mystical powers—occult lodges, Freemasons, astrologers, Gypsies—were ruthlessly exterminated if they could not be turned to the service of the state.

It was only a matter of time before the Nazis sought out the Knights Templar, whom both Wolfram von Eschenbach and Richard Wagner had identified as Guardians of the Grail and possessors of mystical powers. Drawing inspiration from the discipline and focus of both the Templar and Jesuit Orders, Heinrich Himmler was to fashion his SS as a new order of black knighthood, basing it at Wewelsberg Castle near Paderborn. Meanwhile, if spiritual inheritors of the historical Knights Templar still existed, might their powers not be enlisted in the service of the Reich?

1941

Scott MacMillan

S
ans Becker stood comfortably at ease in the light mist that swirled around the courtyard in front of Wewelsburg Castle. Small droplets of water formed on the edge of the visor of his coal-scuttle helmet, and by tilting his head slightly forward he could peer through them at the sentry box that guarded the approach to the drawbridge. The droplets formed a string of transparent pearls that distorted and diffused the dark green of the oaks that formed a canopy over the road. The effect rendered the atmosphere of the afternoon even more surreal than it was.

But then,
Becker thought to himself,
any meeting with Reichsführer Himmler is a surreal experience.

Still, these last two days at the castle had been all Becker had hoped for, and more. He had spent three years in the SS, and only recently had managed to get himself assigned permanently to the assortment of crackpots who formed the Ahnenerbe, just before Himmler decided to commit the SS to the role of frontline troops. Although he had to put up with the petty insults of his so-called superiors at the Ahnenerbe, Becker at least had managed to place himself out of the line of fire.

Becker gave an inward smile. For all their smart uniforms and rigid, heel-clicking salutes, the SS weren’t as clever as they were cracked up to be. A second-rate assistant director in films, he had found it easy to insinuate his way into the officer corps of the SS, landing a cushy assignment with a film crew preparing a documentary on the search for the lost Ark of the Covenant. This had brought him into contact with Wilhelm Teudt, the chief of the Ahnenerbe. It was Teudt’s middle-aged secretary, besotted with Becker’s casting-couch athletics, who had contrived to have her boss secure Becker’s services on a permanent basis when the Ahnenerbe was absorbed into the SS in 1939.

The Ahnenerbe’s headquarters was in Berlin—which, given Becker’s social appetite, suited him just fine. The work—he snorted to himself when he thought of what the Ahnenerbe did—was classified, and small wonder. Under Himmler’s direction, the Ahnenerbe indulged Hitler’s fascination with the occult.

Astrology, voodoo, ESP—they all came in for study at the small gray office block in a quiet suburb of Berlin. Most of the SS officers assigned to the Ahnenerbe were retired university professors who were potty on one or another odd subject. Colorless individuals, they were totally lost in their studies, their books, and their quest for hidden knowledge. They tended to distrust Becker, who quite obviously enjoyed swanning around Berlin in his convertible BMW and pearl-gray SS uniform far more than he did sitting behind a desk wrapped in deep, esoteric studies. As a result, and given his lack of a university degree, Becker was relegated to two rather minor assignments: collecting information on Freemasons and compiling even more information on the Templars.

Considering that they were supposed to be a secret society, the Freemasons had been remarkably easy to track down. They held regular meetings in buildings plainly marked as FREEMASON’S HALL, and virtually anyone who cared to apply for membership was admitted to their ranks. To be sure, they went through a pretty bizarre initiation, but they were admitted nonetheless.

As far as secrecy was concerned, virtually the whole of their dogma was published, and available to anyone who might care to learn their secrets without having to go through the bother of being blindfolded, led into a room with a rope around one’s neck, and taking an oath of dubious antiquity. Their purpose was charitable: aid to widows, orphans, and distressed fellow Freemasons. Having spent the better part of a year sifting through all of the documents published by the Brethren, as they styled themselves, Becker decided that Freemasons were about as benign a group of individuals as anyone could hope to find.

Still, their ideas of universal equality of man, as well as their recognition of a higher natural law, did put them beyond the pale as far as the Nazi party was concerned. And since the party was the state, it was inevitable that the Freemasons would sooner or later have to be swept up by the Gestapo. According to rumors—and they could usually be relied upon—the Freemasons were due for the chop sometime early next year.

The Templars, on the other hand, had proved far more difficult to track down. Ostensibly they had been suppressed in 1307, and their hierarchy executed or imprisoned by 1314. Since that time they had sprung up time and time again, in so many places and under such odd circumstances that Becker had formed the view that, while King Philip le Bel might have cut the head from the serpent, he certainly hadn’t killed it. It was obvious that the Order of the Temple had survived and continued to exist right down to the present time.

Not, of course, that Becker’s superiors at the Ahnenerbe shared his views. Not that Becker cared. He had collected enough information in the past year to make a spectacular film about the Templars; in fact, for the past four months he had done little else other than work on the treatment for that film. The war wouldn’t last forever, and when it was over, he intended to produce and direct
The Secret of the Templars,
and he was counting on some mightily placed patronage to get the picture off the ground.

Becker allowed himself the luxury of a small grin as his thoughts tracked back to that moment four months ago when he had discovered a memo from the Reichsführer SS to one of his predecessors requesting a priority report on the Templars. The memo was nearly a year old, but Becker saw it as his golden opportunity.

Carefully he doctored his treatment, placing a copy of Himmler’s memo on top. Then—and he nearly chuckled at his own audacity—Becker had a special rubber stamp made up:

TOP SECRET
FOR REICHSFÜHRER SS
EYES ONLY

His film treatment carefully typed and bound, he had telephoned SS headquarters and requested an armed guard to come and deliver this “secret report” to Himmler’s office. Two days later his telephone rang, and within an hour he was on his way to his first meeting with Himmler.

Becker’s reminiscences were cut short by a sound drifting up to the castle. Far below, in the valley that Schloss Wewelsburg guarded, he could hear the whine of the supercharged Mercedes limousine as it made its way up the switchback road that led to the fortress. As the minutes dragged on, the phone in the guard box rang; Himmler’s car had passed the last checkpoint.

Knowing that the car would arrive within the next two or three minutes, Becker discarded his helmet for the steel-gray peaked cap of an SS officer; no point in giving Himmler any ideas about transfers to the Waffen-SS, he decided. He paused for a moment longer, then shrugged off the black vulcanized poncho that had kept his leather greatcoat from getting too wet, and stepped out from under the protective cover of the castle gates just as Himmler’s car halted at the foot of the drawbridge. An SS man in full dress uniform raced out of the guard room and stood to attention at the rear door of the big Mercedes, ready to open it the moment Himmler stepped onto the bridge.