Swear to God every time I turn around these days I find myself discovering something just…amazing…in the story of Gay people.  The Telegraph sensationalizes this guy as the "inspiration" for Lucas and Spielberg’s Indiana Jones.  I strongly doubt it…but his story is interesting all the same…

The original Indiana Jones: Otto Rahn and the temple of doom

Very little is certain in the short life of Otto Rahn. But one of the few things one can with any confidence say about him is that he looked nothing like Harrison Ford. Yet Rahn, small and weasel-faced, with a hesitant, toothy smile and hair like a neatly contoured oil slick, undoubtedly served as inspiration for Ford’s most famous role, Indiana Jones.

Like Jones, Rahn was an archaeologist, like him he fell foul of the Nazis and like him he was obsessed with finding the Holy Grail – the cup reputedly used to catch Christ’s blood when he was crucified. But whereas Jones rode the Grail-train to box-office glory, Rahn’s obsession ended up costing him his life.

However, Rahn is such a strange figure, and his story so bizarre, that simply seeing him as the unlikely progenitor of Indiana Jones is to do him a disservice. Here was a man who entered into a terrible Faustian pact: he was given every resource imaginable to realise his dream. There was just one catch: in return, he had to find something that – if it ever existed – had not been seen for almost 2,000 years.

Well he didn’t find it, obviously, or there wouldn’t still be documentaries being made today about the search for the Holy Grail.  What he did find, like a lot of Germans did to their horror back then, was when you give someone who promises to make heads roll absolute power, don’t be surprised when one of those heads is yours.

According to Jeremy Morgan, whose uncle, Herman Kirchmeir, was a friend of Rahn’s, the two men shared an interest in Parsifal and the Grail. ‘They used to go climbing together, exploring caves and so forth. I used to hear about him as a child. The feeling in my family was that Rahn was an honourable man who had got himself into this terrible bind. He wasn’t anti-Semitic, but he’d taken the SS’s money because he needed funding for his archaeological projects. Then, having done so, he couldn’t get out.’

What gives Rahn’s dilemma peculiar piquancy is that there’s evidence to suggest that he was Jewish himself – although it’s not clear if he was aware of it. He was also gay. Bravely, if naively, Rahn began to move in anti-Nazi circles. Nigel Graddon, author of a new biography of Rahn, Otto Rahn and the Quest for the Holy Grail: the Amazing Life of the Real Indiana Jones, believes that Himmler’s disenchantment with Rahn was a result of his failure to find the Grail.

‘Basically, he came back empty-handed,’ he says. ‘That was his biggest offence. It’s true that Rahn did voice anti-Nazi sentiments, but he was always pretty discreet about it. What would have been far more of a problem to Himmler was that Rahn was openly homosexual. In the early days, Himmler had been prepared to turn a blind eye to it. But as time went on, his tolerance wore thin.’

In 1937, Rahn was punished for a drunken homosexual scrape by being assigned to a three-month tour of duty as a guard at Dachau concentration camp. What he saw there appalled him. Clearly in a state of anguish he wrote to a friend, ‘I have much sorrow in my country… impossible for a tolerant, liberal man like me to live in a nation that my native country has become.’

He also wrote to Himmler resigning from the SS. This, too, was as naive as it was brave – the SS being the sort of organisation you only resigned from feet-first. Although Himmler accepted Rahn’s resignation, he had no intention of letting him escape. What happened next is unclear. There are stories that Rahn was threatened with having his homosexuality exposed, also that he had links with British Intelligence.

Told that SS hitmen were out to get him, Rahn was apparently offered the option of committing suicide. One evening in March 1939, he climbed up a snow-covered slope in the Tyrol mountains and lay down to die. He is believed to have swallowed poison, although no cause of death was ever given. The following day Rahn’s body was found, frozen solid. He was 34.

‘I always understood that he had chosen his favourite spot to die in,’ says Morgan. ‘He was lying down looking up at the mountains, rather as if this might lead his soul to some Arthurian heaven.’

You know…this guy was a romantic in the worst sort of way, not the best.  The quest for the Holy Grail is one of those things only eccentric boobs go on, like the Fountain Of Youth or the Lost Dutchman’s Mine.  He was smart, he was persistent, he could have lent his passion to serious archeology and added a few lines to the book of knowledge in the process.  Instead he let himself wander off into an enchantment.  But you really have to admire someone who had the nerve to write Heinrich Himmler a letter of resignation.  That wasn’t naivety, it was that guilelessness which in the fire separates the human from the thug.  The oppressor finds its tool isn’t so pliant after all.  Humans have a conscience.  They also dream…

And there the story might have ended – except that Hollywood has conferred a strange kind of immortality on Otto Rahn. But it’s not only Hollywood; on the internet, his memory continues to be bathed in a richly speculative glow, fanned by ever more outlandish theories about his fate.

Predictably, there are stories that Rahn was murdered, or that he didn’t die at all in the Tyrol – this was just a clever bluff to fool the Nazis. Instead, he apparently survived, changed his first name to Rudolf and went on to become the German ambassador in Italy. Graddon believes that, ‘There is too much fog swirling around his headstone. We simply don’t know what happened to him, and as a result all kinds of rumours have sprung up.’

As for the Grail, that too lives on, with claimants and contenders continuing to turn up in the most unlikely places. The most recent sighting was in 2004 when it was supposed to have been found in the late Lord Lichfield’s back-garden in Staffordshire. As the estate manager said at the time, ‘The Grail is like Everest: you climb it because it’s there.’ Or not there, of course.

Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and it is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai "Ngaje Ngai," the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude…