Victims of a Nazi human sacrifice: Five skeletons discovered under Goering's house at the Wolf's Lair, buried naked surrounded by ancient talismans and missing their hands and feet are feared to have met a most terrible fate

As the monster who was responsible for creating the Gestapo and building the first Nazi concentration camps, Hermann Goering was one of Hitler's most ruthless henchmen.

Yet nothing could have prepared a team of amateur archaeologists for what they were about to find in the basement of his former home in the Wolf's Lair — the Nazis' headquarters in what is now north-eastern Poland.

Set in dense forest, with barbed wire, guard towers and minefields all around, the once-impregnable complex of some 200 houses, bunkers and other buildings was where Hitler and senior Nazis planned the barbarities of the Holocaust and military campaigns such as Operation Barbarossa, their invasion of the Soviet Union.

They destroyed much of the base before fleeing the Red Army in January 1945 and today the mossy ruins are a tourist attraction drawing more than 200,000 visitors a year — among them a Gdansk-based team of German and Polish history buffs.

For years the archeological researchers have been unearthing ordinary items such as crockery and tools. But this month they revealed how, back in February, they entered the ruins of Goering's once-imposing brick home and noticed a concrete ledge which had at one time supported a wooden floor. While digging for the nails which might have held it together, they found a human skull.

Adolf Hitler makes an address at the Reichstag in April 1939 where he answered US president Franklin D. Roosevelt's appeal to avoid war

They called the police, who disinterred five skeletons in all — among them the tiny skull of a newborn baby, nestling between an adult's shin-bones. Thought to have been a family — three adults, a teenager and the baby — all had been buried naked. They were also missing their hands and feet.

Yet even that was not the most chilling detail. Scattered around the bodies were so-called 'thunderstones' — the bullet-shaped fossils of extinct squid-like creatures called belemnoids.

In ancient times, it was believed that the Gods hurled these down from the heavens during thunderstorms and they became revered as talismans, divinely appointed means of securing victories in battle and other good fortune.

According to traditional Germanic belief, keeping thunderstones at home could even protect against lightning.

Oktavian Bartoszewski, one of the team who discovered the remains, suggests that the bodies may have been placed in the foundations to ensure the success and prosperity of those who lived in the building.

'Goering and other Nazis believed in the occult, so perhaps these people were sacrificed,' he said. 'A find like this gives you goosebumps.'

While an investigation continues into who the victims were – and how and when they were killed – the theory that they might have been offered up in some kind of sadistic black magic ritual is not as far-fetched as it might seem. After all, the Nazis were obsessed with all things supernatural.

In this, they took their lead from Hitler himself. Among the most heavily annotated books in the Fuhrer's personal library was Magic: History, Theory, Practice, penned by Ernst Schertel, an eccentric sadomasochist and nudist.

In his signed copy of the 1924 volume, Hitler underlined sentences such as 'Satan is the fertilising, destroying-constructing warrior' and 'he who does not carry demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world'. 

One of the skulls recently found under Hermann Goering's house

Scattered around the bodies were so-called 'thunderstones' — the bullet-shaped fossils of extinct squid-like creatures called belemnoids

Hitler was also a firm believer in 'world ice theory', a bizarre explanation of the origins of life which had come to an Austrian engineer in a dream at the turn of the century.

This suggested that the universe was created when moons made of ice crashed into each other, eventually resulting in biological mutations which produced races of both superhumans and monstrous humanoids — the latter, in Hitler's mind, being the Jews and anyone else who did not fit in with his crazed ideas of Aryan superiority.

While this sounds like the stuff of comic books, Hitler took it so seriously that by the mid-1930s it had taken hold as the uniquely German alternative to Einstein's theory of relativity — the writings of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist being among the many Jewish works that went up in flames during the Nazi book burnings of 1933.

In the huge intellectual gap left by this wanton destruction, it mattered not whether there was scientific proof behind a particular idea. All that counted was whether it might be twisted to support Nazi ideology, as with the special Witch Division set up by SS chief Heinrich Himmler in 1935.

Himmler was convinced that witches had really existed in eastern Europe, and the job of the division's 17 employees was to scour through thousands of execution records and prove that these 'wise women' of 'pure German blood' had been hunted to death by a Jewish-Catholic conspiracy.

Claiming at a conference in Stuttgart in 1938 that some 500,000 such 'witches' had been burned 'after terrible torments', Himmler amassed a 13,000-volume library on the occult — the most complete collection of books on witchcraft ever compiled.

The basement of Goering's former home in the Wolf's Lair — the Nazis' headquarters in what is now north-eastern Poland. The complex of some 200 houses, bunkers and other buildings was where Hitler and senior Nazis planned the barbarities of the Holocaust

Had Germany not lost the war, he would have housed it in Wewelsburg Castle, a forbidding Renaissance fortress 300 miles west of Berlin. After Himmler acquired the lease in 1934, he used slave labour from a nearby concentration camp to convert it into a grotesque Nazi Hogwarts — a place of supposedly mystical power where future leaders of the SS would be indoctrinated in his mishmash of crackpot beliefs.

In Himmler's mind, the SS was an elite organisation in the tradition of King Arthur and the 12 Knights of the Round Table.

Viewing himself as the reincarnation of the castle's first occupant, the medieval King Heinrich, the former chicken farmer demanded that SS members address him as such and appointed 12 of them as his 'knights'. They met in a shadowy, candlelit crypt with 12 pillars, each guarded by a sacred flame. There, under a domed ceiling featuring a Swastika, they performed occult rites in celebration of the Third Reich.

Within another chamber, there was a crystal representing the Holy Grail — the cup that Christians believe Jesus drank from at the Last Supper and the object sought by the knights of Arthurian legend.

So convinced was Himmler that this fabled treasure could help Germany win the war that he even used an official visit to Franco's Spain in October 1940 as a cover for conducting a fruitless search in the mountains of Catalonia where the Grail was rumoured to have been hidden.

Like Hitler and many other senior Nazis, he also believed that the Aryan 'master humans' had once lived in the lost city of Atlantis, but fled to the Himalayas after their mythical island was sunk by a divine thunderbolt.

The fact that Atlantis was entirely imaginary, dreamt up by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, had not stopped Himmler dispatching an expedition to Tibet shortly before the war began, apparently to find traces of this vanished civilisation.

In all this arrant nonsense he was encouraged by his 'personal astrologer' Wilhelm Wulff, who quickly learned to give only those readings which would please Himmler, telling him that he was 'positive and forceful' and had doubtless been 'a lord or knight from remote times'.

The Fuhrer was also known to be interested in astrology.

Wewelsburg Castle, a forbidding Renaissance fortress 300 miles west of Berlin, where Goering would have housed his 13,000-volume library on the occult had Germany not lost the war

Goering, Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler wear military uniform as they are pictured smiling at each other

As early as 1923 he had taken heed of an earlier prediction that a man with his birth date would sweep to power, although his attempt to overthrow the German government in the notorious Beer Hall Putsch in Munich later that year ended in imprisonment.

He subsequently retained the services of Karl Krafft, a Swiss astrologer who had warned of 'dark powers' at work in November 1939. Hitler ignored the warning and attended an anniversary celebration of the putsch in the beer hall – leaving just before a bomb exploded, killing seven people. Among his supporters in the original putsch was Rudolf Hess who went on to become Deputy Fuhrer, but piloted himself to Britain in a stolen fighter plane in 1941, apparently to broker a peace deal.

The timing of his flight was decided with his astrologer Ernst Schulte Strathaus, who advised him that a rare alignment of planets and celestial bodies would make the night of May 10 an auspicious time to fly.

It proved anything but, with Hess being arrested after running out of fuel and being forced to bail out over a Scottish farm.

Denouncing him as a traitor, a furious Hitler believed that other senior Nazis might be similarly persuaded that the heavenly constellations were in favour of their defection, so he immediately ordered a mass arrest of German astrologers, fortune-tellers and other occultists. Hess's astrologer would spend the rest of the war in a concentration camp.

Yet, despite this crackdown, the Nazi regime continued to place extraordinary reliance on practitioners of the dark arts and dowsing — the practice of using forked rods or pendulums to divine for hidden substances such as water or minerals — in particular.

When the British began to turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic in the summer of 1942, it did not seem to occur to the German Navy that this might be down to the use of radar and sonar, along with more sophisticated code-breaking.

Instead, they listened to a U‑boat captain named Hans Roeder who was a dowser in his spare time and suggested that the enemy must be using such unconventional methods to detect German ships.

He was given permission to set up a special 'institute' to do the same. At its headquarters in Berlin, a large map of the Atlantic was spread out and a pendulum, made of a metal cube attached to a short string, was swung above a model battleship as it was moved around.

As American historian Eric Kurlander explains in his book Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History Of The Third Reich, if the pendulum 'reacted' at any point, that was seen as a sign that there was a battleship at the real location.

'Day after day dowsers were forced by the SS to stand with their arms stretched out across the nautical charts just in case the pendulum made the slightest movement,' wrote Kurlander.

'In order to increase their likelihood of making predictions there were a number of clairvoyants constantly in a trance.'

Compared to this pseudoscientific bilge, the reverence of propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels for the prophecies of the 16th-century French seer Nostradamus seems almost sensible.

Goebbels' diary for November 23, 1939, nearly three months into the war, reports that he went early to bed and 'spent a long time reading. Nostradamus's prophecies. Very interesting for those of us today. Hopefully the daring commentary is right. Then England will have nothing to laugh about.

'I tell [Hitler] about the prophecies. Given the times we're in, they're astounding. The Fuhrer is very interested.'

By the end of the war, Goebbels was more interested in horoscopes. Hiding in the Berlin bunker in the final days before the city fell to the Red Army, he sent for copies of Hitler's birth chart and pointed out to the Fuhrer that although it showed both the outbreak of war and their current disastrous situation, it also claimed an inevitable victory for the Nazis and peace by August 1945.

According to Goebbels, it was all just a matter of waiting for planetary change — yet another example of the deluded beliefs which convinced the Nazis that unseen forces were on their side, but which also, thankfully, helped lose them the war.

It remains to be seen whether the unfortunate family whose skeletons were recently unearthed at the Wolf's Lair were the victims of some ghoulish sacrifice, or whether their demise had a more prosaic cause.

But whatever the truth, they offer a chilling new glimpse into the Nazis' characteristic mix of pseudo-science with profound, inhuman evil.