Ahnenerbe

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Emblem

Founded by Heinrich Himmler, Herman Wirth, and Richard Walther Darré on July 1 1935, as Studiengesellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte‚ Deutsches Ahnenerbe´ e.V. ("Study society for primordial intellectual science "German Ancestral Heritage" (registered society)"), in 1937 renamed in Forschungs- und Lehrgemeinschaft das Ahnenerbe e.V. ("Research and Teaching Community the Ancestral Heritage (registered society)") was a Nazi-era government study group that billed itself as a "study society for Intellectual Ancient History".

It was developed to research the anthropological and cultural history of the Aryan race, and later lent itself to experimentation and voyages intent on proving that prehistoric and mythological Nordic populations had once ruled the world.

History and Development

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Chart of the hierarchies of the Ahnenerbe

In January 1929, Heinrich Himmler was appointed the leader of the fledgling Schutzstaffel (SS). He launched a massive recruitment campaign that took the SS from less than three hundred members in 1929 to ten thousand in 1931.

Once the SS had grown, Himmler began its transformation into a "racial elite" of young Nordic males. This was to be accomplished by a new bureaucracy in the SS, the Race and Settlement Office of the SS known as RuSHA. He named Richard Walther Darré to lead the organisation, which determined if applicants were racially fit to be in the SS.

This brought about a sudden campaign meant to educate the new applicants about their Nordic past through weekly classes taught by senior RuSHA graduates using the periodical SS-Leitheft.

On July 1, 1935 at Berlin’s SS headquarters, Himmler met with five racial experts representing Darré and with Dr. Herman Wirth, one of Germany’s most famous pre-historians. Together they came up with an organization called “Deutsches Ahnenerbe--Studiengesellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte” (German Ancestral Heritage--Society for the Study of the History of Primeval Ideas) - later shortened to its better-known form in 1937.

At the meeting they designated the official goal “to promote the science of ancient intellectual history” and appointed Himmler as the superintendent with Wirth serving as the president.

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A class studying runes

Wirth left the project at the beginning of 1937. On February 1 of that year, Dr. Walther Wüst was appointed the new president of the Ahnenerbe. Wüst was an expert on India and a dean at Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, working on the side as a Vertrauensmann for the SS Security Service. Referred to as “The Orientalist” by 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 office to a new headquarters that had cost 300,000 Reichsmark, 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 organization was incorporated into the larger SS in January 1939.

Expeditions

Bohuslän

Scan from Wirth's 1931 book Was Heisst Deutsch?

After a slide show on February 19, 1936 of his trip to Bohuslän, a region in southwestern Sweden, Wirth convinced Himmler to launch an expedition to the region, the first official expedition financed by the Ahnenerbe. Bohuslän was known for its massive quantity of petroglyph rock carvings, which Wirth believed were part of an ancient writing system, predating all other known systems. Himmler appointed Wolfram Sievers to be the managing director of the expedition, likely because of Wirth’s earlier troubles balancing finances.

On August 4, 1936 the expedition set off on a three month trip starting with the German island of Rügen then continuing to Backa, Sweden, the first recorded rock-art site in Sweden. Despite scenes showing warriors, animals and ships, Wirth focused on the lines and circles he thought made up a prehistoric alphabet.

While his studies were largely based on personal belief, rather than objective scientific research, Wirth made interpretations about the meaning of ideograms carved in the rock, such as a circle bisected by a vertical line representing a year and a man standing with raised arms representing what Wirth called “the Son of God.” His team proceeded to make casts of what Wirth deemed the most important carvings and then carried the casts to camp where they were crated and sent back to Germany. Once satisfied with their work in Sweden, the team set out on a trek through Sweden, eventually reaching the Norwegian island of Rødøya.

Middle East

In 1938, Dr. Franz Altheim and his research partner Erika Trautmann requested the Ahnenerbe sponsor their Middle East trek to study an internal power struggle of the Roman Empire, which they believed was fought between the Nordic and Semitic peoples. Eager to credit the vast success of the Roman Empire to a Nordic background, the Ahnenerbe agreed to match the 4,000RM put forward by Hermann Göring, an old friend of Trautmann who led the Reich’s Four-Year Plan.

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Altheim and Trautmann in 1936.

In August 1938, after spending a few days traveling through remote hills searching for ruins of Dacian kingdoms, the two researchers arrived at their first major stop in Bucharest, the capital of Romania. Here Grigore Florescu, the director of the Municipal Museum, met with them and discussed both history and the politics of the day, including the activity of the Iron Guard, a fascist and anti-Semitic group.

After traveling through Istanbul and Athens, the researchers went to Damascus. Here they were not welcomed by the French (who ruled over Syria as a colony at the time), but they were by the Syrian people, who saw Hitler as an ally to help combat the Jews who were flooding into their country, many fleeing persecution in Germany.

The newly-sovereign Iraq was being courted for an alliance with Germany, and Fritz Grobba, the German envoy to Baghdad, arranged for Altheim and Trautmann to meet with local researchers and be driven to Parthian and Persian ruins in southern Iraq, as well as Babylon.

Through Baghdad the team went north to Assur where they met Sheikh Adjil el Yawar, a leader of the Shammar Bedouin tribe, and commander of the northern Camel Corps. He discussed German politics and his desire to duplicate the success of Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud who had recently ascended to power in Saudi Arabia. With his support, the team traveled to their final major stop--the ruins of Hatra on the border of the Roman and Persian empires.

Grönhagen in his youth.

Karelia

In 1935, Himmler contacted author Yrjö von Grönhagen, after seeing one of his articles about the Kalevala folklore, published in a Frankfurt newspaper. Grönhagen agreed to lead a voyage through the Karelia region of Finland, to record pagan sorcerers and witches. Because there was uncertainty about whether the Karelians would allow photography, Finnish illustrator Ola Forsell also accompanied the team. Musicologist Fritz Bose brought along a magnetophone hoping to record the pagan chants. Fritz Bose in unrelated to Amar Bose (1929- ), a Bengali-American who founded the Bose Corporation in 1964.

The team departed for their expedition in June 1936. The team’s first success was with a traditional singer, Timo Lipitsä, who knew a song closely resembling one in the Kalevala although he was unaware of the book. Later, in Tolvajärvi, the team photographed and recorded Hannes Vornanen playing a traditional Finnish kantele.

One of the trip’s final successes was in finding Miron-Aku, a soothsayer believed to be a witch by locals. Upon meeting the group, she claimed to have foreseen their arrival. The team persuaded her to perform a ritual for the camera and tape recorder in which she could summon the spirits of ancestors and “divine future events.”

The team also recorded information on Finnish saunas.

Germany

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Current-day image of burial mounds No. 17

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Gustav Riek at the excavation

Murg Valley

In 1936, Wiligut and Gunther Kirchhoff undertook a study of the Murg Valley in the Black Forest, where there was a settlement described as consisting of old half-timbered houses, architectural ornament, crosses, inscriptions, and natural and man-made rock formations in the forest, which they theorized showed it to be an ancient Krist settlement. In 1937 and 1938, Gustav Riek led an excavation of the Grosse Heuneberg, where an ancient fortress had been discovered much earlier. They also studied the nearby Tumulus burial mounds, which continue to be excavated today.

Mauern

Quite likely the Ahnenerbe’s greatest discovery in Germany was in the southern Jura mountains of Bavaria. During an excavation of the Mauern caves, R.R. Schmidt had discovered red ochre, a common pigment for cave paintings made by the Cro-Magnon.

In fall 1937, Dr. Assien Bohmers, a Frisian nationalist who applied to the SS Excavations Department earlier that year, took over the excavation. His team proceeded to find artifacts such as burins, ivory pendants, and a woolly mammoth skeleton. They also discovered Neandertal remains buried with what appeared to be throwing spears and javelins, a technology thought to have been developed by the Cro-Magnons.

Bohmers interpreted this to mean Cro-Magnons had left these stones in the caves over seventy thousand years before and this was therefore the oldest Cro-Magnon site in the world. To validate his claims, Bohmers travelled Europe speaking with colleagues and visiting exhibitions through the Netherlands, Belgium and France.

France

At the Parisian Institute for Human Paleontology, Bohmers met with Abbé Henri Breuil, an expert on cave art. Breuil arranged for Bohmers to visit Les Trois-Frères, a site whose owners only allowed a small number of people to visit. First, however, Bohmers took a quick trip to London, followed by a tour of several other French points of interest: La Fond de Gaume (a site featuring Cro-Magnon cave paintings), Teyat, La Mouthe and the caves of Dordogne. Then Bohmers moved on to Les Trois-Frères, “where Himmler and where so many other Nazis had long dreamed of standing--in the shrine of the ancient dead, in the dark embrace of the ancestors.”

Bayeux Tapestry

The Ahnenerbe took great interest in the 900-year-old Bayeux Tapestry, reportedly since it contained images of the Germanic Franks solidly defeating their enemies. In June of 1941, they oversaw the transport of the tapestry from its home in the Bayeux Cathedral, to an abbey at Juaye-Mondaye, and finally to the Chateau de Sourches. In August of 1944, after Paris was liberated by the Allies, two members of the SS were dispatched to Paris to retrieve the tapestry which had been moved into the basement of the Louvre. Contrary to Himmler’s orders, however, they chose not to attempt to enter the Louvre, most likely because of the strong presence of the French Resistance in the historic area.

Tibet

In 1937 Himmler decided he could increase the Ahnenerbe’s visibility by investigating Hans F. K. Günther’s claims that early Aryans had conquered much of Asia, including attacks against China and Japan in approximately 2000 BC, and that Gautama Buddha was himself an Aryan offspring of the Nordic race. Walther Wüst would later expand upon this, stating in a public speech that Adolf Hitler’s ideologies corresponded with those of Buddha, since the two shared a common heritage.

Members

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Schäfer (left) and Beger(right)

Ernst Schäfer was a member of the SS when he showed up at the German consulate in Chung-King in 1935. Schäfer had just returned from a trip through parts of Asia, mainly India and China, in which the other two heads of the expedition had abandoned him in fear of native tribes. Schäfer turned the expedition from a complete failure into a great success, and the SS took note, sending him a letter informing him of a promotion to SS-Untersturmführer and summoning him back to Germany from Philadelphia where he was organizing the collection from his voyage. In June 1936, Schäfer met with Himmler, who consequently informed Sievers and Galke to start organizing an expedition to Tibet.

Schäfer recruited young, fit men who would be well suited for an arduous journey. At age 24, Karl Wienert (an assistant of Wilhelm Filchner, a famous explorer) was the team’s geologist. Also age 24, Edmund Geer was selected as the technical leader to organize the expedition. A relatively old teammate at the age of 38 was Ernst Krause (not to be confused with the German biologist of the same name) was to double as a filmmaker and entomologist. Bruno Beger was a 26 year old Rassekunde expert and student of Günther who was to be the team’s anthropologist.

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The entire 3rd expedition

Expedition details

The first problem to come up for the Tibetan expedition occurred during a duck hunting accident on November 9, 1937 when Schäfer, his wife of four months, and two servants were in a rowboat. A sudden wave caused Schäfer to drop his gun which broke in two and discharged, mortally wounding his wife. Despite subsequent emotional problems, Schäfer was back to work on the expedition in eight weeks.

In July 1937 the team suffered another setback when Japan invaded China, ruining Schäfer’s plans to use the Yangtze River to reach Tibet. Schäfer flew to London to seek permission to travel through India, but was turned down by the British government who feared an imminent war with Germany.

In a move that lost the Ahnenerbe’s support, Schäfer asked Himmler for permission to just show up in India and try to barge his way into Tibet. Himmler willingly accepted, even helping Schäfer by contacting influential people, including Germany’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. On April 21, 1938 the team departed from Genoa, Italy on their way to Ceylon where they would then travel to Calcutta, India.

The day before the team left Europe the Völkischer Beobachter ran an article on the expedition, alerting British officials of their intentions. Schäfer and Himmler were both enraged: Schäfer complained to the SS headquarters and Himmler in turn wrote to Admiral Barry Domvile. Domvile was a Nazi supporter and former head of British naval intelligence who gave the letter to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who allowed the SS team permission to enter Sikkim, a region bordering Tibet.

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Photograph of the expedition

In Sikkim’s capital of Gangtok, the team assembled a 50-mule caravan and searched for porters and Tibetan interpreters. Here, the British official, Sir Basil Gould observed them, describing Schäfer as “interesting, forceful, volatile, scholarly, vain to the point of childishness, disregardful of social convention,” and noted that he was determined to enter Tibet regardless of permission.

The team began their journey June 21, 1938, traveling through the Teesta River valley and then heading north. Krause worked light traps to capture insects, Wienert toured the hills making measurements, Geer collected bird species and Beger offered locals medical help in exchange for allowing him to take measurements of them.

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Video still

In August 1938, a high official of the Rajah Tering, a member of the Sikkimese royal family living in Tibet, entered the team’s camp. Although Beger wished to ask the guest’s permission to measure him, he was dissuaded by the Tibetan porters who encouraged to wait for Schäfer to return from a hunting trip. Schäfer met with the official, and presented him with mule-loads of gifts.

In December 1938 the Tibetan council of ministers invited Schäfer and his team to Tibet, although forbid them from killing any animals during their stay, citing religious concerns. After a supply trip back to Gangtok, where Schäfer learned he had been promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer, and the rest of the team had been promoted to SS-Obersturmführer.

During the trip to Tibet’s highlands, Beger began making facial casts of local people, including his personal servant, a Nepalese Sherpa named Passang. During the first casting, paste got into one of Passang’s nostrils and he panicked, tearing at the mask. Schäfer threatened the employment of the porters who had seen the incident, if they told anyone. However, most of the Tibetians had a much more friendly and light-hearted attitude, and a solid amount of photographic and film footage remains of smiling and laughing Tibetians undergoing facial and skull feature measurements.

On January 19, 1939, the team reached Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. Schäfer proceeded to pay his respects to the Tibetan ministers and a nobleman. He also gave out Nazi pennants, explaining the shared symbol’s reverence in Germany. His permission to remain in Lhasa was extended, and he was permitted to photograph and film the region. The team spent two months in Lhasa, collecting information on agriculture, culture, and religion, even receiving a copy of the 108-volume encyclopedia of Lamaism (only three copies of which had been given to Europeans and had never been translated).

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A peak of the Himalayas, possibly Annapurna

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Video still of an unknown, believed to be Beger in the foreground

After leaving Lhasa, the team traveled to the Yarlung Valley--a region British officials had been denied entry into. The team observed the valley and the ancient stronghold of Yumbulagang, but the approaching war threatened their research, and they began preparing plans to return via a flight from Calcutta to Baghdad, and eventually back to Germany. Their final inventory included nearly 2,000 photographs, 17 head casts and the measurements of 376 people, as well as having sent back specimens of three breeds of Tibetan dogs, rare feline species, wolves, badgers, foxes, animal and bird skins, and the seeds for 1,600 types of barley, 700 varieties of wheat, 700 varieties of oats and hundreds of other types of seeds. In addition, the team had been given a Tibetan mastiff, a gold coin and the robe of a lama (believed by Schäfer to have been worn by the Dalai Lama) to be gifted to Adolf Hitler.

Schäfer arrived in Munich on August 4, 1939, and was greeted personally by Himmler, who presented him a Totenkopfring. Because of the war, Schäfer’s writings about the trip were not published until 1950, under the title Festival of the White Gauze Scarves: A research expedition through Tibet to Lhasa, the holy city of the god realm.

Poland

The altar of Wit Stwosz

After the invasion of Poland, Sievers wrote to Himmler about the need to appropriate exhibits from numerous museums.

The Reich Main Security Administration’s Standartenführer Franz Six oversaw SS-Untersturmführer Peter Paulsen, who was commanding a small team’s foray into Kraków, with the intent of obtaining the 15th century Veit Stoss altar.

Because the Poles had foreseen the German interest in the altar, they had disassembled it into 32 pieces which were shipped to different locations--however Paulsen was able to locate each piece, and on October 14 1939, he returned to Berlin with the altar in three small trucks, and had it stored in the locked treasury of the Reichsbank. After conferring with Hitler, who had not initially been told of the operation to capture it, it was decided to send the altar to an underground vault in Nuremberg, for safety.

Reinhard Heydrich, then head of RSHA, sent Paulsen back to Kraków in order to seize additional museum collections. But Göring had already sent a team of his own men, commanded by SS-Sturmbannführer Kajetan Mühlmann, to loot the museums. Mühlmann agreed to let Paulsen take the scientific items back to the Ahnenerbe, while keeping the artwork for Göring.

During the looting however, Hans Frank--leader of the German-controlled Polish General Government--issued a November 22, 1939 order prohibiting the “unapproved export” of Polish items. Paulsen obeyed the order, but his colleague Hans Schleif arranged for five freightcars of loot from the Warsaw Archaeological Museum to be shipped to Poznań,which was outside Frank’s control. In return, Schleif was appointed as a trustee for Wartheland. Paulsen later tried to take credit for the freightcars contents in his report to RSHA, but was reassigned.

Crimea

After the German army conquered the Crimea in early July 1942, Himmler sent Dr. Herbert Jankuhn, as well as Karl Kersten and Baron Wolf von Seefeld, to the region in search of artifacts to follow up the recent displaying of the Kerch “Gothic crown of the Crimea” in Berlin.

Jankuhn met with senior officers of Einsatzkommando 11, part of Einsatzgruppe D while waiting at the field headquarters of the 5th SS Panzer Division. Commander Otto Ohlendorf gave Jankuhn information about the Crimean museums.

Traveling with the 5th SS Panzer, Jankuhn’s team eventually reached Maikop, where they received a message from Sievers that Himmler wanted an investigation of Manhup-Kale, an ancient mountain fortress. Jankuhn sent Kersten to follow up on Manhup-Kale, while the rest of the team continued trying to secure artifacts that hadn’t already been taken by the Red Army. Einsatzkommando 11b’s commander Werner Braune aided the team in their efforts.

Jankuhn was ultimately unable to find Gothic artifacts denoting a German ancestry, even after receiving intelligence about a shipment of seventy-two crates or artifacts shipped to a medical warehouse. Unfortunately, the area had been ravaged by the time the team arrived, and only twenty crates remained--but they contained Greek and stone-age artifacts, rather than Gothic.

Ukraine

In June 1943, 27-year-old Untersturmführer Heinz Brücher, who held a PhD from Tübingen in botany, was tasked with an expedition to the Ukraine and Crimea. Hauptsturmführer Konrad von Rauch and an interpreter identified as “Steinbrecher” were also involved in the expedition.

In February of 1945, Brücher was ordered to destroy the 18 research facilities that were being studied, to avoid their capture by advancing Soviet forces. He refused, and after the war continued his work as a botanist in Argentina and Trinidad.

Cancelled expeditions

Bolivia

The Gateway to the Sun in Tiwanaku.

After winning 20,000 Reichsmark in a writing contest, Edmund Kiss traveled to Bolivia in 1928 to study the ruins of temples in the Andes mountains. He claimed their similarity to ancient European construction indicated they were designed by Nordic migrants, millions of years earlier.

He also claimed that his findings supported the World Ice Theory, which claimed the universe originated from a cataclysmic clash between gigantic balls of ice and glowing mass. Arthur Posnansky had been studying a local site called Tiwanaku, which he also believed supported the theory.

After contacting Posnansky, Kiss approached Wüst for help planning an expedition to excavate Tiwanaku and a nearby site, Siminake. The team would consist of twenty scientists and would excavate for a year as well as explore Lake Titicaca, take aerial photographs of ancient Incan roads they believed had Nordic roots. By late August 1939, the expedition was nearly set to embark, however the September first invasion of Poland saw the trip postponed indefinitely.

Behistun

In 1938, Ahnenerbe president Walther Wüst proposed a trip to Iran to study the Behistun Inscription, which had been created by order of the Achaemenid Shah Darius I--who Wüst believed to have been of Nordic origin. The inscriptions were recorded atop steep cliffs using scaffolding that was removed after the inscriptions were made. Unable to afford the cost of erecting new scaffolds, Wüst proposed that he, his wife, an amanuensis, an Iranian student, a photographer, and an experienced mountaineer be sent with a balloon-mounted camera. The onset of the war however, saw the trip postponed indefinitely.

Canary Islands

Early travelers to the Canary Islands had described the Guanche natives as having golden-blond hair and white skin, and mummies had been found with blond tresses--facts which Wirth believed indicated that the islands had once been inhabited by Nordics. His colleague Dr. Otto Huth proposed a Fall 1939 expedition to study the ancient Islanders’ racial origins, artifacts and religious rites, their racial origins and artifacts. At the time, the Canary Islands were under the control of Franco’s Spain. Because Franco refused to side with the Axis when the war started however, the trip was cancelled.

Iceland

Dr. Bruno Schweizer had already traveled to Iceland three times in 1938 when he proposed an Ahnenerbe expedition with seven others to the country in order to learn about their ancient farming practices and architecture, record folksongs and dances, and also collect soil samples for pollen analysis.

The first setback for the expedition was the ridicule of the Scandinavian press, publishing stories in February of 1939 claiming the expedition was based on false ideas about Icelandic heritage and sought old church records which did not even exist. An enraged Himmler publicly shut down the trip completely, but after calming down he allowed the planning of the trip to be secretly continued. The final setback occurred when Himmler’s personal staff was unable to get enough Icelandic crowns--Iceland’s currency. Not being able to quickly solve this problem, the trip was rescheduled for the summer of 1940. In May 1940, the British invaded neutral Iceland, but when the war had started the expedition had already been shelved.

When Britain occupied neutral Iceland it not only broke international law, but it also interned Dr. Bruno Kress, a German researcher who was in the country at the time. Kress was sent to Ramsey Camp, but was still allowed to correspond with Sievers through letters.[1] After the war in 1955 his studies were published in East Germany.

Other Ahnenerbe activities

Master Plan East

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Himmler inspects a cotton crop in the Crimea.

After being appointed Commissioner for the Strengthening of the German Race, Himmler set to work with Konrad Meyer on developing a plan for three large German colonies in the eastern occupied territories. Leningrad, northern Poland and the Crimea would be the focal points of these colonies intended to spread the Aryan race. The Crimean colony was called Gotengau, or “Goth district” in honor of the Goths who had settled there and were believed to be Aryan ancestors of Germans.

Himmler estimated Aryanization of the region would take twenty years, first expelling all the undesirable populations, then re-distributing the territory to appropriate Aryan populations. In addition to changing the demographics of the region, Himmler also intended to plant oak and beech trees to replicate traditional German forests, as well as plant new crops brought back from Tibet. To achieve the latter end, Himmler ordered a new institution set up by the Ahnenerbe and headed by Schäfer. A station was then set up near the Austrian town of Graz where Schäfer set to work with seven other scientists to develop new crops for the Reich.

The final piece of the puzzle fell in place after Hitler read work by Alfred Frauenfeld which suggested resettling inhabitants of South Tyrol, believed by some to be descendants of the Goths, to the Crimea. In 1939 the people of South Tyrol were allowed by Hitler and Benito Mussolini to vote on whether they remain in Italy and accept assimilation or alternatively emigrate to Germany or its new territories. Most chose the latter. Himmler presented Master Plan East to Hitler and received approval in July, 1942. War would have priority over it, but a small colony was to be founded around Himmler’s field headquarters at Hegewald, near Kiev.

Starting on October 10, 1942, Himmler’s troops deported 10,623 Ukrainians from the area in cattle cars before bringing in trains of ethnic Germans from northern Ukraine. The SS authorities gave families needed supplies as well as land of their own, but also informed them of quotas of food they needed to produce for the SS.

Failed seizure of Tacitus' writings

The Ahnenerbe had tried to gain possession of one of the best-known copies of Tacitus' Germania, since it was an early description of the German people, and favourably described them as a modern and moral society. Although Mussolini had originally promised it as a gift in 1936, it remained in an aristocratic library outside Ancona, where the Ahnenerbe tried to obtain it after Mussolini was deposed.

Headquarters relocation

On July 29 1943, the Royal Air Force's firebombing of Hamburg led Himmler to order the immediate evacuation of the main Ahnenerbe headquarters in Berlin. The extensive library was moved to a castle in Ulm while the staff was moved to the tiny village of Waischenfeld near Bayreuth, Bavaria. The building selected was the 17th century Steinhaus. While much of the staff was not ecstatic about the primitive conditions, Sievers seems to have embraced the isolation.

Financing

Originally funded with modest grants from the German Research Foundation and the Reich Agricultural Organization, the Ahnenerbe began needing more resources. To meet this end, they created the Ahnenerbe Foundation, which sought out private donations to help fund the research. One of the largest donations, approximately 50,000 Reichsmark, came from Deutsche Bank boardmember Emil Georg von Strauss’ associates, including BMW and Daimler-Benz.

In 1936, the SS formed a joint company with Anton Loibl, a machinist and driving instructor. The SS had heard about reflector pedals for bicycles, that Loibl and others had been developing. Assuring that Loibl got the patent himself, Himmler then used his political weight to ensure the passing of a 1939 law requiring the use of the new reflective pedals--of which the Ahnenerbe received a share of the profits, 77,740 Reichsmark in 1938.

Medical experiments

Dachau

Dr. Sigmund Rascher, one of the Ahnenerbe’s senior researchers, was tasked with helping the Luftwaffe determine what was safe for their pilots--because aircraft were being built to fly higher than ever before, Rascher received permission from Himmler to requisition camp prisoners to place in vacuum chambers to simulate the high altitude conditions that pilots might face.

Rascher was also tasked with discovering how long German airmen would be able to survive if shot down above freezing water--so he placed subjects in watertanks and measured their pulse and internal temperature through a series of electrodes. He also experimented with ways of reviving those exposed to the freezing water, including traditional methods such as hot baths and heated sleeping bags, to less conventional methods such as placing the subject in bed with women who would try to sexually stimulate him.

Rascher also experimented with the effects of Polygal, a substance made from beets and apple pectin, on coagulating blood flow to help with gunshot wounds. Subjects were given a Polygal tablet, and shot--then their wounds were watched for clotting.

Similar experiments were conducted from July to September 1944, as the Ahnenerbe provided space and materials to doctors at Dachau to undertake “Seawater experiments,” chiefly through Sievers. Sievers is known to have visited Dachau on July 20th, to speak with Ploetner and the non-Ahnenerbe Wilhelm Beiglboeck, who ultimately carried out the experiments.

Skulls

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August Hirt dissecting a corpse

Walter Greite rose to leadership of the Ahnenerbe’s Applied Nature Studies division in January 1939, and began taking detailed measurements of 2,000 Jews at the Vienna emigration office--but scientists were unable to use the data. On December 10 1941, Beger met with Sievers and convinced him of the need for 120 Jewish skulls. During the later Nuremberg Trials, Dr. Friedrich Hielscher testified that Sievers had initially been repulsed at the idea of expanding the Ahnenerbe to human experimentation, and that he had “no desire whatsoever to participate in these.” (v:II pg:37)

Beger collaborated with Dr. August Hirt, from the Reich University of Strassburg, in creating a Jewish bone collection for research. The bodies of 79 Jewish men, 30 Jewish women, 2 Poles, and 4 Asians were ultimately collected and macerated.

Institute for Military Scientific Research

Created in the late summer of 1942, the Institute for Military Scientific Research was an organization within the Ahnenerbe to oversee medical experiments being performed on concentration camp prisoners. Sievers had founded the organization on the orders of Himmler, who had appointed him director with two divisions headed by Rascher and Hirt, funded by the Waffen-SS.

Post-World War Two

Trials

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Sievers at trial (lower-right corner)

• Wolfram Sievers: In Waischenfeld American troops captured a slew of documents that would be used in the case against Sievers which would be a part of the Doctors' Trial. Sievers was charged for aiding in the skeleton collection and human medical experiments at Dachau and Natzweiler. In his defense, Sievers claimed he had helped a resistance group since 1929, which was supported by testimony from Dr. Friedrich Hielscher on April 15, 1947. Sievers was nevertheless found guilty on all four counts on August 21, 1947 and sentenced to death. He was hanged on June 2, 1948 at Landsberg Prison. A Tibetan chant was performed upon his corpse.
• Richard Walther Darré: An Ahnenerbe founder, Darré was tried in the Ministries Trial. He received seven years imprisonment after being found not guilty on more serious charges.
• Edmund Kiss: His Bolivia trip having been cancelled, Kiss would serve in the armed forces the rest of the war, taking command of SS men at Wolfschanze near the end. While interned in the Darmstadt camp after the war, he was released in June 1947 due to severe diabetes but classified as a “major offender”--a classification which allowed him to only take a manual labor job. Following this decision, Kiss hired a lawyer to protest this decision, a major component of his case being he had never been a member of the Nazi party. After somewhat renouncing his past, Kiss was reclassified as a “fellow traveler” in 1948 and fined 501 DM.
• Walther Wüst: Although the president of the Ahnenerbe from 1937 until the end of the war, Wüst’s claims that he was unaware of any medical experiments were acknowledged, and in 1950 he was classified as a “fellow traveler” and released, returning to the University of Munich as a professor-in-reserve.

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Beger (right) at trial.

• Bruno Beger: In February 1948, Beger was classified as “exonerated” by a denazification tribunal unaware of his role in the skeleton collection. In 1960, an investigation in Ludwigsburg began investigating the collection, and Beger was taken into custody on March 30, 1960. He was released four months later, but the investigation continued until coming to trial on October 27, 1970. Beger claimed that he was unaware the Auschwitz prisoners he measured were to be killed. While two others indicted in the trial were released, Beger was convicted on April 6, 1971, and sentenced to three years in prison for being an accomplice in the murder of 86 Jews. Upon appeal however, his sentence was reduced to three years of probation.

Report of mass grave

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A worker holds a German skull

In 2002, Ukraine announced the discovery of a mass-grave containing dozens of Nazi soldiers in the southern region of the country. Some had been trepanned, others had their spinal cords sawn lengthwise, or were missing their skulls. Pravda reported it to be the aftermath of an Ahnenerbe experiment, although no further information was given.[2] (And it should be pointed out that Pravda has run several incorrect stories about the Ahnenerbe before, and the article contained factual errors about the origin of the organization.)

Fantasy vs. reality

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Thule member Prof. Kroenen, from the 2004 Hellboy

One of the most in-depth analyses of Ahnenerbe was historian Michael Wood's Channel 4 (UK) documentary Hitler's Search for the Holy Grail, part of its Secret History series, broadcast in August 1999. However, inaccurate depictions of the Ahnenerbe are common in fantasy fiction, and have become part of the background of conspiracy theories, largely because of confusion between themselves and the Thule Society, or even the Vril.

• • The Ahnenerbe organization was the basis for the Nazi archaeologist villains in Steven Spielberg’s “Indiana Jones” films.
  • The Hellboy series of comics’ main antagonists are Project Ragna Rok, a fictionalized version of Ahnererbe who were focused on bringing demonic aid to change the course of World War II.
  • The Delta Green sourcebook for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game claims the Ahnenerbe spawned another organization, “Karotechia,” which practiced ritual magic.
  • The video game Return to Castle Wolfenstein portrays an organization (SS Paranormal Division) based on the Ahnenerbe practicing occult rituals and magic.
  • Charles Stross features fictional Ahnenerbe activities in his novel The Atrocity Archives.
  • The Ahnenerbe, led by Sievers, and former Grand Master of the Thule Society, Rudolf von Sebottendorf, are portrayed as the driving force behind a secret holocaust of vampires in Nazi death camps in Juan Miguel de la Torre's novel Las Increíbles Aventuras de Rex Stark y el Holocausto Secreto.
  • The Ahnenerbe was portrayed as the Nazi organization behind the development of the "1st SS Nazi Vampire Brigade Ostmark" in the Fantasy/Horror Short The Golden Nazi Vampire Of Absam 2.

See also

• Nazi mysticism
• Reich Research Council
• Thule Society

External links

• "Das Ahnenerbe" at Deutsches Historisches Museum, Lebendiges Museum Online (LeMO) (in German)
• Das Ahnenerbe in Greece Article on the Ahnenerbe activities in Greece]
• Article on the Ahnenerbe from Archaologist