Last year, when Crawling Chaos Pictures received an unsolicited tape in the mail, our interest was piqued. The video was in PAL format. A typed label on the side read "Experiment 17". A hand written note accompanying it explained the video had been dubbed from the original 16mm Heer document, shot in Laibach (now Ljubljana, Slovenia) on "23. Oktober 1943".

While much has been written of the Third Reich's occult connections (SS worship of The Black Sun, Nazi links to The Thule Society, etc.) no one has ever proven whether Hitler had truly obtained a copy of the Necronomicon when his troops ransacked the Bibliotheque Nationale. That is, until now.

We have decided to go public with our initial findings, as Crawling Chaos Pictures has just returned from a major fact-finding mission in Europe. From private collections in Reykjavik and Berlin to recently declassified Communist archives in the Czech Republic, we were able to gather up the few remaining pieces of this extraordinary puzzle. Please see below for a sampling of documentation.

Soon we hope to release a full account of the events leading up to "Experiment 17", as well as making the restored film itself available to the public on DVD. In the mean time you can watch the documentary online.

If you have further information concerning "Experiment 17" or would like to make a donation to help our research, please contact us at: experiment17@hotmail.com.

The Soldbuch of Helmut Koch, the key figure in the second set of Experiments (Experiments 12-17).

[Historical Archive, Berlin, Germany]

A document sent to Koch in 1941 before Experiment 1 was performed, showing his involvement even at that stage.

[U.S. Records, Freedom of Information Act, DJ file #146-7-51-1538]

Helmut Koch and his wife, Sophia, circa 1942. Little else is known about the civilian life of Koch or his family.

[Private collection, Wannsee, Germany]

Koch with three other soldiers, all of whom participated in Experiment 17.

[Private collection, Wannsee, Germany]

Photo of the looting of the Bibliotheque Nationale by Wehrmacht soldiers in 1941. The officer in the foreground holds the Necronomicon.

[Private collection, Reykjavik, Iceland]

Picture labeled "Experiment 9" of an unidentified Wehrmacht soldier holding the Necronomicon, found on the online auction site ePier.

Photo showing Wehrmacht officer Helmut Koch holding the Necronomicon, circa 1943. Note the addition of Nazi iconography to the book's cover.

[Private collection, Wannsee, Germany]

The actual container for the 16mm reel. The film languished in a warehouse in East Berlin unnoticed until after Reunification in 1989. The film was stumbled upon during a search for evidence of Stasi crimes against political dissidents in East Germany.

[Historical Archive, Berlin, Germany]

Photostat of a document showing Hitler's interest in the Necronomicon a year before the conquest of France. Given the date of the document, it is unclear whether the "X" next to "Necronomicon" was added later (once the book was aquired), or whether it has some other significance.

[Historical Archive, Prague, Czech Republic]