the cup of Christ?

Is it for his glory, or your own?

You can turn back now, or learn the stuff

they don't want you to know.

Hello, thanks for tuning in, that is Matt,

I'm Ben, this is stuff they don't want

you to know.

We're back from a vacation which is why we

had just classic episodes last week.

Now, some of you, who might be Indiana Jones

fans probably recognize the quotation at the top.

It comes from Matt and I's favorite

Indiana Jones film, the last crusade.

In that film there's a really weird thing that

happens and this faction of the Nazi party is

questing around the middle east looking for

the holy grail, the cup of christ.

Weirdly enough, that sort of based on a real event.

As we know, the real life Nazi party tried

a lot of weird things, we're not even talking about

the depraved, horrible things,

we're talking about just weird things.

And to be fair, all world governments have

done and probably are doing things that

sound pretty weird.

Our government, the government of wherever you're

watching this, but what are three really strange

things that Nazi party did?

Here's number one, expeditions, yes.

The Nazi party did have expeditions to Tibet, to

Mongolia, to parts of India, Greenland,

eastern Europe, Finland, the list goes on,

and why?

They were looking for mythological or lost

civilizations.

They were looking to create their own myths.

Now remember that, because we're gonna

come back to that later.

So back to grail.

Specifically, Heinrich Himmler,

pretty high up in the Nazi hierarchy,

pretty high up in some occult hierarchies,

at least according to his self-reported beliefs.

Heinrich Himmler actually traveled to

Barcelona, Spain to look for the physical

holy grail.

Why?

He thought it would give him super powers.

That is true.

He thought it was, A, real, and B, possibly

capable of giving him powers beyond those

of mortal men.

Did he find the grail?

As far as we know, he did not.

He also believed, there was an author that

he was a big fan of, who said that the grail

might be in France.

Again, in either case we don't think he found it.

We have no proof that he did.

And speaking of Himmler, that leads to number two

on our list, occult rituals.

Now we've all seen the films and the movies

like, Dead Snow, where there are these cursed

Nazi zombies and where people high up

in the nazi hieracrchy are practicing dark magic.

Himmler actual believed in a lot of this stuff,

or at least the symbolism and that's why the

SS actually did have this mandate to practice

occult rituals.

Basically, Pagan holidays.

Maybe you think about it, a holiday is pretty much

a ritual and from the outside looking in,

it seems pretty occult.

So, what we know about this is that in the

mid 1930s, I believe 1936, Himmler actually

sent out a memo detailing the Pagan holidays

and ceremonies that the SS should celebrate

instead of the Christian holidays,

because he was trying to ween the German people

as a whole away from Christianity.

This is not the third thing,

this is just something that we think is interesting,

did the Nazi party discover nuclear power,

did they make nuclear weaponry?

Well, there's a big question about that

that goes into something called

Operation Epsilon, which Matt and I are going

to be exploring in an audio podcast coming up,

and maybe a video; it's a story for another day.

Sorry for the fake-out.

Number three.

Number three weird thing that

the Nazi's did actively.

They sought to recreate history.

Or, depending on how they saw it,

they sought to correct history.

Which had already been distorted and they

sought to do this with a department called

the Ahnenerbe.

Ahnenerbe.

I'm mispronouncing it, but this department

was very real.

Imagine a folklore department at your local

university, given billions of dollars of funding,

with skies-the-limit ideas as long as

they made certain preconceived notions

appear to be true.

Like the idea of an Arryan master race, the idea

of a law civilization that fell apart due to

some weird cataclysm, or the idea that at some

level, magic is real.

So, what Matt and I found out about this

institution, which a lot of people,

surprisingly, were unaware of, we knew

it had to be the subject of our next video.

So if you would like to learn more about

the Nazi quest around the world

to reconstruct history, then please,

stay tuned for the upcoming video in this series.

As always, thank you so much for watching,

find us on Facebook, you can find us

on Twitter, too.

And of course, we have an audio podcast where

your messages, tweets, and emails might just make

it on the air.

"Oh! But wait, if I wanna email you,"

you're saying, "well, how do I do that?"

Great question.

Our address is conspiracy@howstuffworks.com