Wewelsburg

The rock spur above the Alme valley carried fortifications long before the present building. The chroniclers name a Wifilisburg here, held through the ninth and tenth centuries against Hungarian raiders whom local tradition remembered as Huns. Count Friedrich von Arnsberg raised another fortification on the site in 1123; when he died the following year, the villagers he had oppressed pulled it down. In 1301 Otto I of Waldeck sold the hill to the Prince-Bishop of Paderborn, the deed recording two fortress-like buildings standing on it. From 1384 the estate lay in pledge with the Lords of Brenken, and remained so until 1589.

Prince-Bishop Dietrich von Fürstenberg, who redeemed the estate in 1589, rebuilt the site between 1603 and 1609 as a hunting seat and secondary residence, working the masonry of both predecessors into the new walls. The narrow angle of the spur dictated the plan — a triangle with a tower at each corner, the largest at the northern point — and what went up was a fortified residence rather than a fortress.

The Thirty Years' War took the castle several times, and in 1646 Swedish troops under General Carl Gustav Wrangel occupied and then razed it. Rebuilding under Prince-Bishop Dietrich Adolf von der Recke and his successor Ferdinand von Fürstenberg was complete by 1660, and the towers exchanged their crenellations for baroque domes.

From 1589 to 1821 the most constant residents were the bursary stewards. The basement beside the east tower held an interrogation room and dungeon cells; two witch trials were conducted here in 1631, and by 1759 the cells held military prisoners, mostly deserters. Secularisation carried the castle to the Prussian state in 1802, and on 11 January 1815 lightning gutted the North Tower, leaving only its outer walls. The district of Büren took ownership in 1924 and made the place a cultural centre with a museum and youth hostel, though the North Tower proved unstable again and had to be braced through the winter of 1932/33.

Himmler had decided before the Nazi seizure of power that the SS should hold a castle "in the heartland of Hermann der Cherusker". When negotiations for Burg Schwalenberg failed, a local Nazi leader directed him to the Wewelsburg, and he resolved to take it on his first visit, on 3 November 1933. In June 1934 the NSDAP, acting for an SS that had no legal personality of its own, signed a hundred-year lease with the district of Büren at a symbolic rent of one Reichsmark a year, and the district handed the castle to Himmler personally on 22 September 1934. Renamed SS-Schule Haus Wewelsburg in 1935, it was closed to visitors without his permission and, from 1939, to publication of any kind. The architect Hermann Bartels' plans held no lecture rooms, only cell-like studies, and the work done there was pseudo-scientific research in prehistory, folklore and genealogy meant to underpin SS racial doctrine. After the Reichskristallnacht pogrom of 1938, seventeen Jews from Salzkotten, ten kilometres away, were held in the castle dungeon before being sent to Buchenwald.

Between 1938 and 1943 the SS cut two rooms into the North Tower: a ground-floor hall with twelve columns under a groined vault and a dark green sun wheel set into the floor, and beneath it a vault hewn into the rock on the model of Mycenaean domed tombs, with twelve pedestals round its wall. Neither room was finished, and nothing is known of whether or how either was used; the floor ornament acquired the name "Black Sun" only after 1991, and whether the SS called it anything at all is unknown. The one documented gathering of SS-Gruppenführer at the castle ran from 12 to 15 June 1941, a week before the invasion of the Soviet Union, its purpose the ideological preparation of the assembled officers for the campaign.

From 1941 the architects called the intended complex the "Centre of the World": a wall fifteen to eighteen metres high in a three-quarter circle 860 metres across, centred on the North Tower, with barracks, an SS village and an airport, budgeted at 250 million Reichsmarks. Had it been built, the village of Wewelsburg and its neighbours would have been demolished, the inhabitants resettled and the valley flooded. The labour was to come from prisoners. The camp at Niederhagen, named after the forest outside the castle, was begun on 17 June 1940; it opened with 480 prisoners from Sachsenhausen and grew to 1,200, chiefly Soviet prisoners of war and foreign labourers seized and shipped to Germany, and early on it was a collecting point for Jehovah's Witnesses, who made up a large proportion of those working on the castle. Of the 3,900 people held there, 1,285 died and 56 were executed. The camp was dissolved in 1943; a decree of 13 January that year stopped all construction not important to the war, the Wewelsburg among it.

With the US 3rd Armored Division closing on Paderborn, the commandant Siegfried Taubert fled on 30 March 1945, and Himmler ordered his adjutant, SS Major Heinz Macher, and fifteen men to destroy the castle the next day. Running short of explosives, they mined only the south-eastern tower, the guardhouse and the SS staff building, and set the castle on fire. Restored in 1948–49, it reopened on 29 June 1950 as a museum and youth hostel, the camp kitchen becoming the village fire station. By 1977 it had been decided to treat the whole site as a memorial: an exhibition on the SS cult and terror site opened in the former SS guardhouse on 20 March 1982, with several Niederhagen survivors present; a memorial to the prisoners who died at Niederhagen was raised in 2000; and in 2010 the contemporary-history department reopened as the Wewelsburg 1933–1945 Memorial Museum, placing what was done here within the history of the SS as a whole.