Jesus was GERMAN: Shock claim emerges in secret documents

Wiligut joined the SS in 1933 and rose to become an Oberfuhrer (Lieutenant Brigadier).

He also had a special hotline to SS boss Heinrich Himmler, who was a big fan of nutty occult theories.

Wiligut persuaded Himmler that Christ was just a plagiarised version of the Germanic god Krist.

The Austrian, who was allowed to set up a Department of Pre-History, believed Krist was the founder an ancient German religion, Irminism.

He also believed the Bible was originally written in...Germanic.

Wiligut claimed the German people arrived in Europe in 228,000 BC from the lost continent of Atlantis, via Iceland.

He claimed the Bible was written thousands of years BEFORE Jesus and the events in the New Testament had taken place in Germany and not Palestine.

Himmler was so inspired by these crazy theories that he sent expeditions to find Atlantis and the Holy Grail.

Sir Richard Evans, a historian at Cambridge University, says: "The belief that Jesus was Aryan was central to the mainstream 'German Christians', who dominated the Protestant Church in the 1930s."

Wiligut believed the Irminists were driven into the wilderness of northern Europe in 1,200 BC by rival pagans.

Hitler was not quite as sold on the occult and Himmler was hugely embarrassed when – perhaps not surprisingly – Wiligut went mad in 1938 and was committed to an asylum.

Wiligut spent the war in obscurity and died quietly in January 1946 – 70 years ago – in Hesse.

His gravestone reads: Our Life Passes Away Like Idle Chatter.

Earlier this month the Daily Star Online reported how secret FBI files suggesting Hitler had survived the war and sneaked off to Tenerife.

(dailystar.co.uk)