Nazis filled this castle with symbols of hate. Now, those icons are finding new homes and new fans

Open this photo in gallery:

Marsha Lederman is a columnist for The Globe and Mail and author of Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: A video promoting Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who wants to be the Republican nominee for U.S. president, ended with his face, surrounded and ultimately replaced by a strange, circular spinning symbol. This motif, with its jagged rays emanating from the centre, is known as the Black Sun, or the Sonnenrad. It is a symbol important to and displayed by right-wing extremists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis.

While this emblem might not have been an instantly recognizable Nazi symbol for mainstream observers, I knew what it was immediately. I had just seen it in the flesh, in its original home: a German castle called Wewelsburg that was once a gathering place for the SS.

The image is embedded in the floor of a large, circular room in the castle tower, a testament to the creepiness of the place and the SS mission. SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler had big plans for Wewelsburg: to turn it into an SS haven – maybe even a spiritual centre – using slave labour from a concentration camp set up nearby for this purpose.

Seeing that twisted sun in situ, knowing it had been installed there by a Nazi architect at the behest of Himmler, knowing it had been viewed and perhaps even worshipped by the sadistic lowest of humanity, and that it continues to be co-opted by repugnant forces – well, what can I say? It was exceedingly distressing. Grotesque.

And it was not the only disturbing encounter I experienced that day, in that place.

I had come to Germany on a pilgrimage, of sorts. My two sisters and I were visiting places we had heard about our whole lives, sometimes only vaguely. Our parents were Polish Jews who had survived the Holocaust, toward the end in Germany, in what is now the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

With the help of a German researcher, we had located and planned visits to these landmarks of our parents’ wartime history. They included the meadow where our mother was liberated by U.S. soldiers during a Death March in 1945; the hospital where our parents met shortly thereafter; the little city where my eldest sister was born, officially a Displaced Person.

And the highlight: The farm where our father had hidden in plain sight for more than two years, pretending to be someone he wasn’t, thanks to forged documents he had obtained in Poland that provided him with a fake name, and turned him from Jewish prey into a Christian farm worker. Descendants of the same family still live there.

We were way off the tourist track, in small cities and villages that included Bielefeld, Gütersloh and Kaunitz. Spots even some Germans have never heard of.

In between our visit to Lippstadt – where our mother had been a slave labourer for a German company in 1944 and 1945 – and our visit to our father’s farm in a place called Holsen, we had a free day.

Our researcher, Andrea Tebart, suggested a visit to nearby Wewelsburg, a village that is home to a large, Renaissance castle, with a dark history. The residence, built in the 17th century in a striking triangular layout, was taken over by Himmler early in the Nazi reign with the intention of creating a training academy for high-ranking SS.

The SS, short for Schutzstaffel, was the most evil of the evil. The elite Nazi military wing, these were the monsters who ran the concentration camps and conducted mass executions. They were responsible for the so-called Final Solution to the Jewish Question.

Himmler, the most powerful Nazi after Hitler, was made Reichsführer of the SS in 1929 and grew the organization from 250 bodyguards to 52,000 members by the time the Nazis came to power in 1933 and tens of thousands more afterward. Himmler, whose titles included Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Ethnic Stock, was in charge of implementing the concentration camp system and thus was the chief architect of the Holocaust.

Using forced labour, Himmler began to transform the castle into what I’ve seen described as a Nazi Temple of Doom – refurbished to reflect SS aesthetics and ideology, including floors inscribed with runes. An SS Guard building was erected next to it.

A concentration camp was established on the outskirts of town for this purpose. The inmates were forced to deepen a moat and strip the exterior walls to enhance the castle’s medieval character. To accommodate Nazi motorcades, the main entrance was expanded and an old stone bridge was replaced with a wider concrete one. The slaves had to dig 4½ metres into the solid rock the castle sits on to create a crypt at the base of what has become the notorious North Tower.

Open this photo in gallery:

The architect Hermann Bartels was planning an even more elaborate SS complex, covering the entire village; the locals were to be displaced. The North Tower was to be its physical and ideological centre.

The concentration camp, known as Wewelsburg/Niederhagen, was initially populated primarily with Jehovah’s Witnesses. Other groups on the Nazis’ hit-list were later brought in, including Soviet prisoners of war – who were treated particularly harshly. At least 1,285 of the 3,900 camp prisoners died – nearly one-third – the result of performing punishing physical labour for 10 to 12 hours a day, while subsisting on only 600 to 900 calories daily. To deal with the high death rate, a crematorium was built on the site.

In June, 1941, what became an infamous top-secret gathering of high-level SS officers took place there. (Hitler never visited.) Widely rumoured but never proven, this meeting may have involved cultish mystical ceremonies. It never happened again. Shortly afterward, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. After Stalingrad, Nazi attentions were required elsewhere. The Wewelsburg reconstruction was not completed.

Today, this story is told on-site at the Wewelsburg 1933-1945 Memorial Museum and its core exhibition, Ideology and Terror of the SS, in the former Guard House.

It was a good thematic fit for my trip: a look inside the evil that had caused our parents’ displacements, the murders of their parents and siblings, and all the trauma that resulted – and has trickled down to my generation. For my sisters and me, this difficult visit was deeply personal. For most visitors – including many school groups – it is a lesson and a warning.

But for some, it is a pilgrimage.

There is no photography allowed in two places in Wewelsburg’s North Tower. Visitors are not allowed to take pictures in the creepy circular below-ground crypt with the swastika embedded into the ceiling, the one dug out of solid rock by the slaves.

And there are no pictures allowed in the circular room above it, the SS Obergruppenführer Hall (or Hall of the Supreme SS Leaders).

“We don’t want someone posing in front of it,” our guide Friederike Horgan explained.

“It” is the so-called Black Sun.

The design – which is, in fact, primarily dark green – is embedded into the marble floor of that hall. With its aggressive spikes emanating from the centre, the crooked sundial design – or Sonnenrad – is reminiscent of the swastika.

While its original meaning is ambiguous, the symbol has been adopted by right-wing extremists and used as a coded sign; a “badge of recognition” in these circles, as the book Myths of Wewelsburg Castle: Facts and Fiction, edited by Kirsten John-Stucke and Daniela Siepe, puts it. If you see this circular symbol anywhere, consider it a red flag.

Two recent instances where the Sonnenrad has shown up: on the manifesto posted by the perpetrator of the 2022 mass shooting at the Buffalo supermarket in a Black neighbourhood that killed 10 people. The symbol was also found on the bulletproof vest of the terrorist who killed 51 people in mass shootings at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.

Nobody knows where Heinrich Himmler was buried after he was captured by the British in May, 1945, and killed himself with a cyanide capsule. His grave was unmarked – like Hitler’s bunker (although the location of the bunker is known). The Allies did not want to create shrines for followers of these butchers.

But many right-wing extremists know about Wewelsburg, and where this Black Sun originates.

Open this photo in gallery:

Are you at all concerned that people might come here to pay tribute, I asked Ms. Horgan early in our tour. A PhD student in history at nearby Paderborn University, Ms. Horgan told us she would answer when we got to the room in question.

The infamous hall with its jagged floor emblem is furnished with colourful beanbag chairs tossed about – comfy resting spots for school groups, and a bright interruption to the dark drama of this place. (On neo-Nazi internet forums, there were furious reactions to the beanbag solution, according to Myths of Wewelsburg Castle.)

As we sat, Ms. Horgan addressed my question. Yes, she said, this place has become an attraction for some right-wing extremists. The museum estimates about 3 per cent of its visitors come for this sort of perverse pilgrimage. Museum staff are careful about who gets in. Visitors are prohibited from “uttering spoken, written or gesticulated extreme right-wing, racist, antisemitic and sexist remarks,” the website warns. Nor can you enter if you display any extreme right-wing symbols or markings – tattoos, T-shirts. Staff are trained to recognize such symbols; there is a catalogue listing the forbidden designs.

Sometimes people try to skirt the rules by skipping the museum and going directly to the North Tower, Ms. Horgan explained. They are not allowed to do this. Some get upset when they are barred entry; a couple of weeks earlier, the police had to be called, she told us.

As if we were in a movie, the big wooden door leading directly into the room from outside lurched open. A couple appeared. They were trying to get inside, but were blocked by an iron security gate.

They were heavily tattooed, but I could not see any details of their markings from my beanbag. I did see Ms. Horgan’s face as she told them they had to leave, now. If they wanted to see the museum, they had to go through the front desk.

“I knew there was something suspicious because our guide was very agitated and suddenly stopped talking, kept looking at them,” my sister Rachel Brass recalled after the fact. “It was very tense.”

Ms. Horgan, so kind, then turned to us.

“Obviously it’s sad in the sense that you still have these people coming here. You know they’re walking past the model of the concentration camp and still you know, they believe.”

When I asked Ms. Horgan later, by e-mail, what made her think the couple fell into the nefarious pilgrim category, she said she couldn’t say with absolute certainty that they were right-wing extremists, but she had a strong feeling. There were two clues: they headed straight for the North Tower, bypassing the museum. And they were heavily tattooed with what appeared to be rune symbols.

Earlier that day, I had noticed a solitary man perusing the SS history books in the gift shop, dressed head to toe in camo-gear. I later saw two other couples, also heavily tattooed; one of the men had a jacket carefully folded over his forearm. On that steaming hot July day, that heavy jacket never moved.

Of course tattoos are very common, as is camo-wear. But at this place, in this context, my gut was telling me something, even before our encounter in the SS Obergruppenführer Hall. I tried to tell myself that I was being crazy to think these visitors’ intentions were more sinister than ours. But our guide confirmed that it was possible.

“Especially in the summertime when the school holidays are on, they would come more often than in the autumn/winter months,” Ms. Horgan told us. “It happens, unfortunately. They do come here. We try to control it as best we can.”

The couple that had been barred from entering the North Tower reappeared later in the museum. As they tried to breeze by us in the gallery about the concentration camp, I stood in their way.

“You should have a look at this,” I said, pointing to a scale model of Wewelsburg/Niederhagen. They turned and looked, or pretended to. “That’s where the crematorium was,” I pointed. “Where they burned the bodies.”

They didn’t say a word. I don’t even know what language they spoke. After a few minutes, they silently made their way toward the exit.

“Here we are at Wewelsburg talking about Nazi ideology and it’s still around. There’s a growing spread of extremism from the far right,” my sister Doris Schulman said afterward. “And it really hit me when I saw those people: this is real.”

I wonder: were they really there to pay homage? And, if so, could they have had any idea, any inkling, that we were descendants of Himmler’s victims? That we were – deep breath – Jews?

Open this photo in gallery:

One of the horrible thoughts that had consumed my sisters and me as we travelled through that castle was how close it was to the farm where our father lived and worked, pretending to be Catholic, to save his life. He was just 20 kilometres away.

This spine-tingling proximity further fuelled my rage that people actually go to Wewelsburg as a pilgrimage. Do they see the other stuff there? The photos of the victims, so malnourished and overworked? The model of the crematorium? What do they think when they pass by the heavy mining cart those poor men had to push up and out of the quarry, filled with rocks? Do they know that sometimes those carts came tumbling down, killing the men?

Do they notice the tube of glue in the museum? The glue that starving prisoners would chew on in a desperate attempt to deal with the incessant, gnawing hunger?

Do they manage to ignore it? Or do they see it – and not mind it?

Open this photo in gallery:

Are they impressed with the SS uniform manufactured by Hugo Boss? With the skull-and-crossbone “honour rings” and swastika-embossed trinkets?

Do they know that Himmler not only oversaw the extermination camps, but visited? Do they know that millions died under his watch? And that sometimes he personally watched?

Does that impress them?

I left, despairing. Over a late lunch of ice cream – we deserved it – we ranted about the need for more Holocaust education.

Then, later that month, that DeSantis Black Sun campaign video came out. There is someone who worked – well, used to work – for the Florida Governor’s campaign who thought this would attract voters. This image from the SS castle. How’s that for a portent of dark times?

What are the chances of this strange encounter happening? Of three daughters of Holocaust survivors visiting this out-of-the-way museum, and running into these people?

For my sisters and me, this was part of an often difficult and disturbing memorial tour as we continue to piece together the tragedies that befell our parents and the grandparents we never met.

For others, the castle visit may be no less important. But for them, not difficult or disturbing. Rather, a tribute. A twisted triumph. And, incredibly, one which some in politics believe holds appeal.