Hans Werner Schlinck was born on February 1st 1911 in the Westphalian town of Hagen that marks the border between the industrial region of the Valley of the Ruhr and the rural Sauerland hills. Schlinck's father was an entrepreneur owning a couple of lumbermills along the river Lenne and a steelwork in the town of Schwerte near Dortmund. 

The Schlincks were a wealthy family and Hans-Werner was the youngest of nine children. His mother died while giving birth to him. His eldest brother Karl died in 1918, only three weeks before the end of the war, aged 21. His father Johannes, a devout protestant, who had already been shattered by the loss of his wife was finally broken by the loss of his beloved eldest son. His depression made him turn away from his faith. He became a cynic and an alcoholic. He died in 1920 in a freak accident in one of his lumbermills. Many claim that it wasn't an accident, but suicide.

Johannes' spinster sister then raised the younger Schlinck children. Ms. Schlinck was even more a strict protestant than her brother was, so she raised her stepchildren in a very strict and puritan manner. Hans-Werner, having lost his parents that early, was a very sad and serious, but highly intelligent child. The strict regime of his aunt made him flee into daydreams and books and he loved to wander the forests and hills of the Sauerland. One day, when he was just 16 and on one of his trips through the isolated forests of the Sauerland, he came across a clearance. In the middle of it was a huge black stone, a menhir like pillar, 30feet in height.

The stone was not right for the region and there were writings on it, but in letters unknown to Schlinck.

When he touched it, Schlinck changed forever. He was overcome by visons of an underground city of steel and concrete inhabited by dwarfish people and ruled by a king clad in tattered yellow robes.

He had heard the tales about dwarfs ( Zwerge ) himself, but the rural legends were a bit different to the visions he had. In these visions he had seen a modern city, an industrial city, but weird: Too huge and too monumental with giant building in even larger caves, some buildings built like human buildings, others hanging from the caves' ceilings.

The clearing with the pillar became both his secret and obsession. Schlinck started to read everything he could about legends of the Sauerland. He did not really get far, though the legend about the Yellow Count of Sundern ( Der Gelbe Graf aus Sundern ) and the tale of the Arnsberg dwarf hinted at the mystery. Everything changed when he turned 19 and inherited his uncle's book collection. Guenther Hoffmann was his mother's younger brother - the black sheep of his family, who had been a Jack of all trades: He had been a miner, a cook, a sailor, had travelled the world and fought in WWI on the British side. He had died in 1930 in Nottingham aged only 45 years. He had become a rich man, nobody knows how.

Schlinck had never met him but had heard of him, even though mostly in a hushed voice when "the Brother" was mentioned.

In the book collection Schlinck found a copy of Van Junzt's "Unausprechlichen Kulten".

This helped.

Schlinck could identify the Yellow Count of Sundern and the ruler of the city he saw as being the king in Yellow.

Reading the book caused a mild outbreak of insanity and Schlinck was sent to an expensive institution in Neuharlinger Siel a small fisher town at the North Sea coast. This helped for the first two weeks. Unfortunately he came across a branch of the Esoteric Order of Dagon while exploring a tiny hamlet not far from Neuharlingersiel.

After this experience everything he could think of was to collect knowledge about the mythos and to find the underground city of his dreams.

He became a student of the university of Hamburg in late 1930 and specialised on history and anthropology.

He got his doctor's degree in 1935 for his thesis "Der Zwerg in der europaeischen und insbesondere deutschen Mythology" ( "The Dwarf in European and especially German Mythology" ).

He was then hired by the university of Berlin as a Professor for German history. He was one of the youngest professors ever being hired there. It was then where he met members of the Ahnenerbe who saw the Mythos potential in some of his works.

He was no devoted Nazi, but he saw the possibilities of the funding by them. In 1937 he led an expedition to Hungary, exploring the Black stone, but unfortunately it had nothing to do with the stone in the clearing in theSauerland forests.

He became a steady member of Karotechia in 1940. His job was to investigate the mythos-relevance of German and European folklore. When another black pillar was found in Brittany/France near the town of Kerlouan in January 1941, Schlinck hoped that this might finally help him in finding out the position of the underground city. But it didn't. The Black Pillar of Kerlouan was a monument praising the magna mater, erected by one of King Arthur's men after a victory over the Romans.

Another black pillar was found in 1942 in the Serbian province of Voijvodina near the town of Sombor. But his pillar also did not provide any information about underground. Nonetheless it did provide Schlinck and the Karotechia with information about a cult of the magna mater in that region.

In February 1944 the discovery of yet another Black Pillar on an Island way off the Scottish coast led to Schlinck's first contact to Delta Green. He survived the battle badly wounded and spent the next months in a Karotechia-Hospital just outside Kassel.

When the war was over, he also fled to South America. He is now living in "La Estancia" and is doing what he did for the last 75years: He's looking for the underground city of Steel. He now knows quite a lot about Hastur and the KiY, so he isn't sure, wether the city really exists or if it is all a scheme to make him go mad. But it is his mission to find the city and to finally know everything about the Black Pillar in the Sauerland mountains.


Credits: E. Huelshoff