Himmler's master plan

PAT JOHNSON

The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust
By Heather Pringle
Viking Canada, Toronto, 2006. 463 pages. $35

The Nazis' misuse and abuse of science has been explored in many forms, but there is, alas, more to discover. Vancouver author Heather Pringle, an archeologist by training, analyzes the perverted research of the Ahnenerbe, a Nazi institute created by Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Final Solution, to provide historical justification for Aryan supremacists. Her book, The Master Plan, focuses on the work done at the institute and its impact on the Shoah and the course of the war.

Himmler founded the Ahnenerbe in 1935, with the intention of discovering "new evidence of the accomplishments and deeds of Germany's ancestors as far back as the Paleolithic or old stone age, if possible," according to Pringle, and to use this information as propaganda for a new Aryan society.

The Ahnenerbe, Pringle would discover, recruited scholars and scientists, including anthropologists, archeologists, classicists, ethnologists, Orientalists, biologists, musicologists, philologists, geologists, zoologists, botanists, linguists, folklorists, geneticists, astronomers, doctors and historians, to create what Himmler called "hundreds of thousands of little mosaic stones which portray the true picture of the origins of the world."

Pringle and her assistants waded through stacks of documents from the era, acknowledging that thousands more files had been destroyed by Ahnenerbe officials fearing postwar criminal trials.

The Ahnenerbe, in addition to providing a historical mythology of Aryan perfection, was the incubator for one of the Nazis' most elaborate racial master plans.

"With knowledge gleaned by Ahnenerbe scientists, [Himmler] intended to tutor SS men in ancient Germanic lore, religion and farming practices, teaching them to think as their ancestors had," writes Pringle. "When the time was ripe, he proposed to plant SS agricultural colonies in Germany, as well as in specific parts of the east – places where he believed Germany's ancient ancestors had particularly flourished. There he hoped they would reverse the decline of Western civilization and rescue humanity from its mire."

The Ahnenerbe's first president, Herman Wirth, was one of Germany's most controversial prehistorians.

"He was convinced he had found an ancient holy script invented by a lost Nordic civilization in the North Atlantic many thousands of years ago," Pringle writes. "It was, he claimed, the world's earliest writing. He also believed that he could decipher this mysterious script, thereby unlocking the mysteries of ancient Aryan religion."

The Ahnenerbe scholars had a particular fondness for a collection of ancient Norse songs known as the Edda.

"First recorded on paper in Iceland during the 13th century, the Edda portrays an icy realm of gods and goddesses, kings and thanes, dwarves and wizards, sword-maidens and lordly heroes, magnificent beings who wield strange magical powers and fight to the death for their clan, their land and their honor. Indeed, its tales had inspired J.R.R. Tolkein when he wrote The Lord of the Rings," Pringle said. "But many German extremists considered these ancient myths to be much more than stories...."

The "scholars" of the Ahnenerbe applied their ideology to a vast array of academic topics, appropriating other cultures without compunction. The Hindu holy book, the Rig Veda, the oldest example of Sanskrit scripture, was re-imagined as a product of a Nordic race who had allegedly written the book while colonizing Iran, Afghanistan and the rivers of India.

What Himmler and his academics believed, or convinced themselves of, was "that the elites of Asia – the Brahman priests, the Mongolian chiefs, the Japanese samurai – all descended from ancient European conquerors," says Pringle in The Master Plan.

The rewriting of history was a complex and varied discipline. Making the "facts" suit the ideology required deft creativity.

"Prominent Nazis who fanatically touted all things German, had long struggled mightily to explain why it was that Romans, not Germans, had colonized and conquered much of the known world, forging a magnificent empire that commanded awe even two millennia later. Despite all the reverential talk in Germany of ancient Teutonic valor and manliness and bloodlust, many Nazis envied the Italians the glory of their ancestors," according to Pringle. "The only acceptable way of explaining Roman civilization for German extremists was to furnish it with a Nordic pedigree. The grandeur of Rome, they claimed, could be traced back through distant time to blond-haired migrants from the north. Italian scholars loathed such talk, bristling, quite naturally, at any suggestion that Rome was, at heart, a Teutonic civilization. But German researchers, particularly those eager for advancement in the Third Reich, didn't care whose feathers they ruffled. They kept an alert eye open for any scientific evidence that might support such contentions."

An example of the abuse of science was the Ahnenerbe approach to early archeology. Cro-Magnon man, which archeologists had discovered in France in the mid-19th century, was an apparently fully developed homo sapiens, in contrast with the Neanderthal man, discovered a dozen years prior in Germany's Neander Valley. Cro-Magnon provided a more ideal ancestor for the Nazis' purposes and so, despite the evidence that Cro-Magnon had originated in Asia or Africa, a Nazi academic came up with "a far more palatable theory for the origins of the Cro-Magnon.... He contended that these ancient clans had arisen directly from the barren tundra of Ice Age Germany."

The Nazis were among history's greatest plunderers and the Ahnenerbe scholars were among the most active, following Nazi troops into Poland, seizing anything that could be used to bolster claims that the land being invaded was rightfully German, based on ancient claims. As one Nazi wrote smugly to another: "Quite a few works of art and libraries have lost their owner."

Pringle outlines the wide range of the bad science produced by the Ahnenerbe, delving at graphic length into the experimentation in concentration camps.

She also outlines the varied punishments that some of the Ahnenerbe "scholars" received. Their fate was mixed. Some were convicted as war criminals, while others got off lightly. And the Allies have their own demons with which to deal: history has recorded that Allied countries themselves benefitted from Nazi academics after the war.

Pringle is an excellent writer and an engaging storyteller. And while any book on this subject could easily fill a volume as dense as William L. Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich – and Pringle's book does come in at just under 500 pages – it is rarely verbose and always articulate.

Pat Johnson is editor of MVOX Multicultural Digest, www.mvox.ca.

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