PAGAN RITES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 185, 7 August 1935, Page 13

PAGAN RITES.

NAZI CEREMONIES.

CELEBRATING THE SOLSTICE

HEIDELBERG (Germany), June 30. Another festival has been added to the Nazi calendar. Hundreds of thousands of young persons and Brown Shirt rulers joined in the ancient pagan ceremonial of honouring the summer

solstice. The Minister of Culture and Education, Dr. Bernhard Rust, declared he would "refuse to answer" those who consider such a festival essentiallyheathen. For the increasingly active Neo-Pagans in Germany, however, it has a strictly religious significance as one of the two great Germanic religious events of the year. Goebbels in Ceremony. The solstice festival reached Hα high point when Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, dedicated the new "Holy Place" (Heiligenburg) above Heidelberg. Heiligenburg originally was dedicated to Wotan and was a place of pilgrimage for pre-Christian Germans. That the solstice festival and the "Holy Place" ceremonials, despite their pagan origin, have come to stay in the Xazi calendar is indicated by a party communique issued by the Government news service under the heading "Holy Place as a Cultural Expression of Nazi Faith." The communique says:— "The object of all such festivals must be to bring to the people national Socialist faith and purpose." Throughout the country the summer solstice ceremonies have been essentially the same. Patriotic airs are sung, speeches made, and finally a fire is lighted. Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, official party educator, who presided at the festival at the scene of the pagan Widikund's defeat by Charlemagne, ordered a threeminute eilence after the fire had been lighted—for contemplation of the pagan Saxons' sufferings and heroism.