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Restored, Reassessed, Redeemed The SS Past at the Collegiate Church of St. Servatius in Quedlinburg Annah Kellogg-Krieg Situated at the foothills of the Harz Mountains along the Bode River, the town of Quedlinburg appears as a medieval time capsule, as if it had sidestepped the last six or seven centuries of advancements in building technology and urban planning. Crooked door jambs, crumbling clay shingles, and modern shop windows are the only indicators of the passage of time. Narrow cobblestone alleys named after various guilds lead to a market square encircled by half-timbered houses and a Gothic town hall. From this vantage point, the castle hill is barely visible. The hill lies to the south of the town center, inconspicuously rising from the fairy-tale skyline of red roofs and chimneys. King Heinrich I established his favorite imperial residence on the hill during his consolidation of the ‹rst German Reich in the early tenth century. He obtained valuable relics for the palatine chapel, including one of St. Servatius, the namesake of the convent founded by Queen Mathilde on the castle hill after Heinrich’s death in 936. Thus, Heinrich never stepped foot in the current church, the fourth sacred structure on the site, which was constructed in the years 1071–1129 after ‹re had destroyed the prior building.1 The charm of the Church of St. Servatius’s stocky Romanesque silhouette and the half-timbered town draw thousands of tourists, mainly Germans, to Quedlinburg each year. However, recent times have not been the ‹rst to witness mass pilgrimage to the site. The chief of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, was the most infamous visitor to St. Servatius in the twentieth century, as he sought to capitalize on Quedlinburg’s important role in early German history and its stunning architecture. King Heinrich and St. Servatius were not simply tools of propaganda for the leader of the SS however. Rather, Himmler developed a deeply personal link with Heinrich 209 and his reign. Himmler considered himself the reincarnation of Heinrich I and, within the SS, was frequently called “König Heinrich.”2 Himmler regarded the ‹rst German king as providing the historical underpinnings for his elitist SS ideology. He found Heinrich’s ruthless eastern military campaigns against “inferior people” (Untermenschen) to be particularly inspiring. The acquisition of land in the east for the virtuous German farmer in the tenth century vindicated the reconquest of this territory in the twentieth century. Although the uni‹cation of the German Volk in the tenth century was radically different from the uni‹ed nationstate of the nineteenth century, Himmler and the SS capitalized on the notion of King Heinrich I as the original uni‹er of the Germans. However dubious their conclusions may have been, the connections between Heinrich and the current reuni‹ers of Germany, Hitler and Himmler, wedded the ideology of the Third Reich to a glorious German history. Himmler instigated the transformation of Quedlinburg into an SS Camelot, with St. Servatius as the focal point for ceremonies and memorials dedicated to the ‹rst ruler who ostensibly uni‹ed the Germans, King Heinrich I. However, provincial Quedlinburg would never have become the center for one of the most powerful leaders of the Nazi regime had it not been for a fortuitous coincidence. In 1935, an SS of‹cial learned of the city government of Quedlinburg’s plans to celebrate in 1936 the thousandth anniversary of Heinrich’s death. A letter to Himmler from a certain Brigadenführer-SS Reischle, director of the Race Of‹ce, expressed the excitement within the SS about the promise of this event: “If Heinrich I must be emphasized by us as the ‹rst German king, then the propagandistic potential of the thousandth anniversary next year is virtually a gift from heaven.”3 Thus the thousandth anniversary of the death of the primogenitor of the original German Reich at St. Servatius on July 2, 1936, became a spectacle of SS pomp and propaganda. The SS transformed St. Servatius into a medieval king’s hall for the momentous occasion; the pews were removed, and royal blue velvet and the coats of arms from the regions of Heinrich’s empire adorned the walls of the nave.4 At the eastern end of the crossing, a long black cloth embellished with the SS insignia covered the fourteenth-century Gothic choir.5 The short-term decorations and rearrangements for the 1936 and 1937 Heinrich celebrations provided a temporary backdrop for SS rituals, but Himmler could...

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