Beccar Harmonicas – Google Docs
The Beccar Harmonicas
So-called for their reappearance during a raid on a collector living in Beccar (a suburb of Bueno Aires that once boasted residents like Mengele and Eichmann) that revealed the existence of not only the harmonicas, but a veritable treasure-trove of Nazi memorabilia. Which was actually mostly kitsch. Deliberately so, in fact: hiding the existence of the harmonicas was the crucial objective, and what better way to hide them than to mix them in with horribly tacky busts and geegaws?
The Beccar Harmonicas were constructed based on research data collected by the 1938-39 Schafer Expedition to Tibet. Now, it is true that particular field expedition is used by excitable occultists as the wellspring for every Nazi-era conspiracy theory that has — or can be forced to have — an even vague link to Eastern mysticism; but in this particular case there’s a real link there. It turns out that expedition members had come across a particular half destroyed ritual song that could be used to summon a demon. However, the part of the spell that told how to control and dismiss the demon was lost to history, which is one reason why the ritual had fallen into obscurity. The other reason? Well, the demons being summoned were apparently not that powerful anyway. Vicious, nasty, and capable of terrorizing a town — but not war-winners.
The details of all of this were duly brought back to the SS, where it was promptly filed away in an Ahnenerbe filing cabinet, and forgotten until late 1943. By then, the combination of the Allied landings in Italy and the disastrous (to the Germans) Battle of Kursk convinced key SS personnel in the Ahnenerbe that the war was in genuine danger of being lost. There were several study groups hastily formed to explore various scenarios resulting from the situation, and at least one of those groups was tasked with finding ways to ensure that if the Reich fell it would take large hunks of Europe with it.
Hence, the harmonicas. The song was easy enough to transpose to harmonica — a very specially constructed, treated, and ritually prepared harmonica — and the lack of a banishing ritual was considered to be a feature, not a flaw. The plan was to make thousands of the Beccar Harmonicas, complete with a songsheet and ‘National Socialist Exhortation,’ then distribute them to Hitler Youth members as postwar ‘morale builders.’ That this would invariably mean the death of the inadvertent summoner (and probably everyone else in the vicinity) was part of the plan. Fear, terror, fanged death from the East. Excellent practice for Gotterdammerung, in other words.
What stopped it? Ironically, the July 20th Plot. The various occult working groups inside the SS were so secret that they had no defense against being abruptly reassigned to go arrest Wehrmacht officers; and by the time that the external situation was resolved, it was impossible to get a production run of Beccar Harmonicas even started, let alone finished. The five SS officers involved in planning the operation failed to survive World War II: at least one was assassinated by the military’s American anti-occult program, two died in the Fall of Berlin, one was shot by a Soviet T-34, and the last one apparently decided to escape the Third Reich by repeatedly trying to jam himself through a toilet drain. Suffice it to say, it didn’t quite work.
And thus the Beccar Harmonicas faded into obscurity: only five were ever made, and they still reside in their open display case. Complete with the original instruction sheets, of course. Hopefully nobody will think to try to actually pick out the tune found on that paper, using one of those harmonicas.
That could be bad.