Ahnenerbe
The Ahnenerbe was a pseudoscientific organization founded by the Schutzstaffel in Nazi Germany in 1935. Established by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler on July 1, 1935 as an SS appendage devoted to promoting racial theories espoused by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, the Ahnenerbe consisted of academics and scientists from a broad range of academic disciplines who fostered the idea that Germans descended from an Aryan race which was racially superior to other racial groups.
Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and transformed the country into a one-party state governed as a dictatorship. He claimed that Germans were descended from an Aryan race which, in contrast to established academic understandings, had invented most major developments in human history, such as agriculture, art, and writing. Most of the world's scholars did not accept this, and the Nazis established the Ahnenerbe in order to provide evidence for their racial theories and to promote them to the German public. Ahnenerbe scholars interpreted evidence to fit Hitler's beliefs, and many consciously fabricated evidence to do so. The organisation sent expeditions to various parts of the world to find evidence to support their theories.
The government of Nazi Germany used the organization's research to justify many of their policies, including the Holocaust. Nazi propaganda also cited Ahnenerbe claims that archaeological evidence indicated that the Aryan race had historically resided in eastern Europe to justify German expansion there. In 1937, the Ahnenerbe became an official branch of the SS and was renamed the Research and Teaching Community in Ancestral Heritage. Much of their research was placed on hold after the outbreak of World War II in 1939, though they continued to carry out new research in areas under German occupation after Operation Barbarossa began in 1941.
During the end of World War II in Europe in 1945, Ahnenerbe members destroyed much of the organization's paperwork to avoid being incriminated in forthcoming war crimes trials. Numerous members escaped Allied denazification policies and remained active in West Germany's archaeological establishment in the postwar era, which stifled scholarly research into the Ahnenerbe until German reunification in 1990. Ideas promoted by the organization have retained an appeal for some neo-Nazi and far-right circles and have also influenced later pseudoarchaeologists.
Background
believed that one could divide humanity into three groups: "the founders of culture, the bearers of culture, the destroyers of culture". The founders of culture, in Hitler's view, were a biologically distinct Aryan race who had been tall, blond, and originating in Northern Europe. He believed that in prehistory, the Aryan race had been responsible for all significant developments in human culture, including agriculture, architecture, music, literature, and the visual arts. He believed that most modern Germans were the descendants of these Aryans and had genetically inherited the Aryans' biological superiority to other races. The destroyers of culture, in Hitler's view, were the Jews, whom he regarded not as a genetically diverse population sharing certain ethno-cultural and religious traits—as they were then widely recognized—but as a unified, biologically distinct race. He believed that wherever Jews went, they damaged and ultimately destroyed the cultures surrounding them.Hitler had promoted his ideas about the greatness of Germany's ancestors in his 1925 book, Mein Kampf. Outside Germany, most scholars and scientists regarded Hitler's ideas about human evolution and prehistory as nonsense, in part due to the absence of any evidence that North European communities had ever originated major developments in prehistory, such as the development of agriculture and writing, all of which first appeared in the Near East and in Asia.
In January 1929 Hitler appointed Nazi Party member Heinrich Himmler to head the Schutzstaffel, a paramilitary group founded in 1925 to serve as personal bodyguards to Hitler and other Nazis. Himmler set out to re-organise the SS, introducing a better system of organisation, and gathering intelligence on prominent Jews and Freemasons, as well as on rival political groups. In 1929, Himmler launched an SS recruitment campaign, and by the end of 1931 the group had 10,000 members. Himmler aimed to ensure that this membership was as racially Nordic as possible, establishing the SS Race and Settlement Main Office to screen both applicants and the women whom SS members proposed to marry. In believing in the existence of a "Nordic" racial type which was the purest survival of the ancient Aryans, Himmler was influenced by the Nordicist ideas of Hans F. K. Günther, which had been popular in German nationalist circles over the preceding decades.
Himmler had an abiding interest in the past, and in how it could provide a blueprint for the future. However, his views of the ancient Germanic peoples differed from Hitler's in certain areas. Hitler was perplexed as to why ancient societies in southern Europe had developed more advanced technology and architecture than their contemporaries in northern Europe. Hitler stated that "People make a tremendous fuss about the excavations carried out in districts inhabited by our forebears of the pre-Christian era. I am afraid that I cannot share their enthusiasm, for I cannot help remembering that, while our ancestors were making these vessels out of stone and clay, over which our archaeologists rave, the Greeks had already built the Acropolis." Hitler explained this by claiming that the Aryans must also have inhabited the south of the continent and that they were responsible for establishing the societies of ancient Greece and Rome. Specifically, he believed that it was the warmer climates of the south that enabled these Aryans to develop in ways that those living further north, in colder and wetter climates, did not. Himmler was aware of these views but, unlike Hitler, admired what he believed was the fierceness and valour of the Germanic tribes of northern Europe. He was particularly interested in Tacitus's Germania, an ethnographic and historical account of the Iron-Age Germanic tribes written by the Roman historian at the end of the first century CE.
Nazi Party takes power
In 1933, following the Nazi seizure of power, Heinrich Himmler initiated plans to establish a "Nordic Academy" to assist the instruction of the SS upper ranks. He was assisted in this by Karl Maria Wiligut, an occultist who was popular in German ultra-nationalist circles. Himmler brought Wiligut into the SS—where he eventually rose to the rank of Brigadeführer—and gave him a private villa in Berlin. Using Wiligut's prophecies as his guide, Himmler selected Wewelsburg castle in Westphalia to serve as a base for many SS operations. The architect Hermann Bartels was employed to oversee renovations to the castle to make it fit for the SS's use. As part of these alterations, one of the rooms in the building became known as "the Grail Room" with a rock crystal representing the Holy Grail being placed in a central position. Himmler also established a private museum at the castle, employing the young archaeologist Wilhelm Jordan to manage it.In 1934, Himmler met the Dutch prehistorian Herman Wirth, who was then living in Germany, at the home of Johann von Leers, a Nazi propagandist. Wirth was one of the most controversial prehistorians in Germany. After examining symbols found in rural Frisian folk art, he became convinced that they represented the survival of an ancient script used by a prehistoric Nordic civilisation. This script, Wirth believed, was the world's oldest written language and had been the basis for all other ancient scripts. Wirth also believed that if he could decipher it, he could then learn the nature of the ancient religion of the Aryan race. This belief conflicted with established scholarly understandings of the past; by the 1930s, scholars were aware that the world's two oldest scripts were those of Mesopotamia and Egypt, and that northern Europe only developed its own form of literacy, that of the runes, under the influence of Etruscan alphabet between 400 BCE to 50 CE. Attempting to explain the lack of any archaeological or historical evidence for an ancient advanced Nordic civilisation, Wirth claimed that the Aryans had evolved in an Arctic homeland two million years ago, before establishing their advanced society on a land in the North Atlantic, which had since sunken into the sea, giving rise to the stories about Atlantis.
Wirth's ideas were rejected and ridiculed by the German archaeological establishment, although they had gained the support of several wealthy backers, which assisted him in promoting them. Himmler was among those who liked Wirth's ideas. Himmler was interested in the pre-Christian religions of northern Europe, believing that a modern Pagan religion modelled on them could replace Christianity as the primary religion of the German people. Himmler disliked Christianity because of its Semitic origins, its presentation of Jesus as a Jew, and its advocacy of charity and compassion. Later, Himmler privately told his personal physician that after the Second World War, "the old Germanic gods will be restored".
History
Formation
On July 1, 1935, Himmler organised a meeting at the Berlin headquarters of the SS where he discussed his desire to launch a prehistoric research institute. Both Wirth and the agriculturalist Richard Walther Darré were present, and both responded with enthusiasm to the idea. The group was launched as a department of RuSHA. Wirth became the group's president, while Himmler took the role of superintendent, a position entailing considerable control by placing him in charge of its board of trustees. Its formal goal was "to promote the science of ancient intellectual history".The organisation was initially named the "Deutsches Ahnenerbe Studiengesellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte", but this was soon shortened to Ahnenerbe. This was a German term for "something inherited from the forefathers". The Ahnenerbe's first premises were at number 29 and 30 of the Brüderstrasse, a thirteenth-century street in Berlin. These corner buildings were rented from the city's department store magnate Rudolf Herdzog. Initially, it employed seven members of staff. Reflecting Wirth's fixation on the idea of an ancient Aryan script, the organisation's early focus was upon what Wirth called "script and symbol studies". One of its researchers, Yrjö von Grönhagen, was for instance tasked with collecting the Finnish wooden calendars which were engraved with various symbols.
Starting in 1934, Himmler began financially supporting and visiting excavations in Germany. This brought him into contact with archaeologists like, Hans Schleif, and Wilhelm Unverzagt, director of the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte in Berlin. Initially, there were two departments within the SS engaged in archaeology: the Abteilung Ausgrabungen of the Persönlicher Stab des Reichsführers der SS and the Abteilung für Vor- und Frühgeschichte at the RuSHA. The latter was established in 1934 and was supposed to serve as a "general staff" for all SS activities related to prehistory. It was responsible for archaeological research and related propaganda and led by Rolf Höhne, a geologist. Höhne was eventually replaced by Peter Paulsen, an archaeologist, in October 1937. The department did not conduct any excavations itself, but was intended to extend the influence of the SS over other institutions, especially those responsible for education/research and monument preservation. In fact, Langsdorff did this in Himmler's personal staff. The department also tried to make use of pre-history in the training and indoctrination of SS members. When the RuSHA was restructured, the department was dissolved with its responsibilities passing to the Ahnenerbe. The Abteilung Ausgrabung in Himmler's personal staff was established in 1935 on the initiative of Langsdorff. In March 1937, Höhne joined the leadership of this department. By 1937, it was responsible for SS excavations and maintained its own personnel for this activity.
The organization's official mission was twofold. Its first purpose was to reveal new evidence for the accomplishments of the ancestors of the modern Germans "using exact scientific methods". Its second purpose was to convey its findings to the German public through magazine articles, books, museum exhibits, and scholarly conferences.
According to Pringle, it was however "in the business of myth-making", repeatedly "distorting the truth and churning out carefully tailored evidence to support the racial ideas of Adolf Hitler." Some members of the Ahnenerbe consciously altered their evidence and interpretations to match Hitler's beliefs; others appear to have been unaware of how their adherence to Nazi doctrine was shaping their interpretations.
Himmler regarded the Ahnenerbe as an elite think tank which would sweep away previous scholarship on the development of humanity and reveal that Hitler's ideas on the subject were true. Himmler also believed that the group's investigations might reveal ancient secrets about agriculture, medicine, and warfare which would benefit Nazi Germany. It employed scholars from a wide range of academic fields, including archaeology, anthropology, ethnology, folkloristics, runology, Classics, history, musicology, philology, biology, zoology, botany, astronomy, and medicine. Himmler believed that scholars active in all of these different fields would piece together a view of the past that would revolutionise established interpretations; in his words, it would represent "hundreds of thousands of little mosaic stones, which portray the true picture of the origins of the world."
On July 1, 1935, at SS headquarters in Berlin, Himmler met with five "racial experts" representing Darré and with Wirth. Together they established an organization called the "German Ancestral Heritage—Society for the Study of the History of Primeval Ideas", shortened to its better-known form in 1937. At the meeting they designated its official goal, “to promote the science of ancient intellectual history,” and appointed Himmler as its superintendent, with Wirth serving as its president. Himmler appointed Wolfram Sievers Generalsekretär of the Ahnenerbe.
Through 1937, the Ahnenerbe was essentially engaged in amateur völkisch research. Financial and academic pressure caused Himmler to start looking for an alternative to Wirth as early as the spring of 1936. In September, Hitler negatively referred to Wirth's beliefs regarding Atlantis and their influence on "Böttcherstrasse architecture" in a speech at the Reichsparteitag.
In March 1937, the Ahnenerbe was given a new statute, implementing the Führerprinzip and giving Himmler extensive powers. Wirth was deposed as president and appointed honorary president, a powerless position. Himmler's position as Kurator was given more power.
Walther Wüst was appointed the new president of the Ahnenerbe. Wüst was an expert on India and a dean at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, working on the side as a Glossary of the Weimar Republic for the Sicherheitsdienst. Referred to as The Orientalist by Wolfram Sievers, Wüst had been recruited by him in May 1936 because of his ability to simplify science for the common man. After being appointed president, Wüst began improving the Ahnenerbe, moving the offices to a new headquarters that cost in the Dahlem neighborhood of Berlin. He also worked to limit the influence of “those he deemed scholarly upstarts,” which included cutting communication with the RuSHA office of Karl Maria Wiligut.
The Generalsekretariat led by Sievers was turned into the institution's Reichsgeschäftsführung. The Ahnenerbe was renamed Forschungs- und Lehrgemeinschaft Das Ahnenerbe e.V.. It was moved from the RuSHA to Himmlers's personal staff.
Wirth and Wilhelm Teudt lost their departments in Ahnenerbe in 1938. In 1939, the statutes were changed again and Wirth was deposed as honorary president. Himmler's and Wüsts' titles were switched with Himmler now the president. Next to Wüst, the academic with most influence in the institution after 1939 was Herbert Jankuhn, who in 1937 still had categorically rejected cooperation with the "unscientific" Ahnenerbe.
Ahnenerbe was a mix between an SS department and an Eingetragener Verein. Membership was open to all natural and legal persons. Its staff were SS members, many also working in other SS positions, and thus subject to SS jurisdiction.
In late 1936, Ahnenerbe took over the publication of Teudt's magazine Germanien, first in cooperation with Teudt, then without him. The monthly now became the official voice of Ahnenerbe and was aimed at a wider audience. From December 1936, the magazine was distributed free of charge to all SS leaders.
Cooperation with other SS departments was initially limited, but improved after 1937. Contacts with the SD-HA and the editorial team of the SS weekly Das schwarze Korps intensified. Ahnenerbe eventually had the scientific responsibility for the SS-Leithefte and in conjunction with the SS-HA, Ahnenerbe established Germanische Leitstelle and Germanischer Wissenschaftseinsatz.
In 1939, the Ahnenerbe held its first independent annual convention, at Kiel. The event's success contributed to the trend that archaeologists were increasingly turning to the Ahnenerbe and away from Alfred Rosenberg's rival.
In fiscal year 1938–1939, the budget for the excavations department was, about 12% of the Ahnenerbe's total budget. More than a third of that went to the Haithabu activities. Under Jankuhn's direction four more archaeological departments were set up: in April 1938 the Forschungsstätte für naturwissenschaftliche Vorgeschichte was established at Dahlem under the leadership of. The Forschungsstätte für Wurtenforschung at Wilhelmshaven led by, the Forschungsstätte für germanisches Bauwesen led by Martin Rudolph and the Forschungsstätte für Urgeschichte directed by followed in 1939.
As a gift for Hitler's fiftieth birthday, among the presents which Himmler procured for him was a set of leather bound books, one of which was on the subject of the Ahnenerbe's research.
The Ahnenerbe sought to cultivate an air of professional integrity. The Ahnenerbe became an integral part of the SS. By 1939, the Ahnenerbe employed 137 scholars and scientists, as well as 82 support workers, including artists, photographers, laboratory technicians, librarians, accountants, and secretaries.