Here we take a look into a torture chamber. The executioner's assistant is in the midst of hoisting a woman up on the torture rope, her arms pulled back, lifted upwards. To the left sits her daughter. On the ground lie a rod, torture stones, and a rope.
We have a report from 1577 concerning this case, which helps us better understand this image from the same era. It reads:
"The mother steadfastly declared her innocence and that of her daughter under torture, to the extent that they both perished and passed away at the hands of the torture rope."
Thus, this courageous woman did not admit to being a witch, nor did she admit her daughter, who was also accused of witchcraft, was one. It was against the law to carry out torture to the point of death, but the judge did so nonetheless. Then it was the daughter's turn, and she was lifted up on the torture rope in the same gruesome manner. After witnessing and experiencing everything she did, she lacked the strength her mother had shown and confessed that she and her mother had practiced witchcraft. Consequently, she was burned at the stake.
The report is brief, one among thousands, a common occurrence in the centuries when Germanic peoples had come to believe in witches, when Germanic judges permitted the torture of Germanic women and children based on foolish rumors.
Like an illness, like a spiritual epidemic, it seized them. How many did not believe, we don't know. It was perilous not to believe, and the enterprise was even profitable for magistrate and church, as estates were confiscated. But there were those who did not believe, who knew that many witches were innocently tortured and burned, that is certain. The driving force was the church. Will we ever forgive a church that not only tolerated these things but introduced and propagated them, never having the courage to admit that this was a cruel superstition?
Many believe that belief in witches originated in pagan times, that the church had inherited this superstition and eventually overcame it. But that is not the history!
We know society from pre-Christian times only partially. Only from Iceland do we have extensive reports. Whatever superstitions there may have been, belief in witches as the church believed and formulated it was unknown to the Germanic peoples, and never do we hear of anything comparable to witch trials. Scholars agree — as far as they are unbiased — that this was imported from the South. The focal point of all witchcraft has always been "whoring with the devil." Now we know that the pagan Germanic peoples did not know the devil and certainly did not believe in a devil who maintained unseemly habits with "witches." This devil, too, was imported from the South, just as the command to convert by force, the duty to make heathens into Christians, and to eradicate everything associated with pagan practices.
The imported devil, however, "whored" with Germanic women, which was proof enough of how pagan they truly were. Therefore, the church was fully within its rights to instruct the secular authorities to extract confessions of witchcraft through torture, to roast them, and burn them, during which events the choir boys would come to sing in honor of God.
You will say that all of this is long past. Certainly, the Germanic people have recovered from this spiritual epidemic and no longer believe in witches.
But let us remember that the church does believe in them. Even in this century, there are dignitaries who believe that torture was abolished far too soon, and there are devout textbooks for children — also in this century — that teach them that there is a "holy inquisition" that rightly fought disbelief with torture methods.
Belief in witches and inquisition are un-Germanic, so un-Germanic that we cannot believe that there are people who believe in them; that there can be a church that does not brand them and teach abhorrence. We believe that these are outdated notions because we, as healthy Germanics, have overcome them, but we forget too easily that there is a church that introduced them here and still covers the actions of the inquisition.
Our women were never witches; we never believed in them ourselves, but we learned to believe in them, and we do not count it as a virtue that this was possible.
However, it shows us how dangerous such spiritual epidemics can become, how they can intoxicate entire peoples, and lead them to the craziest things, even to suicide and self-destruction. Because it was nothing but suicide.
There were villages where hardly any women remained; no one was safe from this mad possession, and those who possessed us were not ourselves, but representations of a foreign race and culture, which did not fit our nature and led to phenomena that we would now consider impossible if history did not prove that it was possible and could indeed happen.
It is necessary for us, as men of the SS, to know such things. Firstly, we must know that all this witchcraft superstition was not Germanic pagan belief but was introduced here by the church, and secondly, we must know that the church still covers these things up and does not admit that it failed here.
Are we therefore enemies of religion? — Does all this horror and madness have something to do with religion after all? Or can these things not be called by their name without cries of "atheists"? This has nothing to do with religion or trust in God; it is superstition and lack of trust, it is foreign to us and arouses our disgust.
J. C. Nachenius in SS Vormingsbladen, February 1944
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