The Himmler's SS (27 page)

Himmler delivering a eulogy on Heinrich I in Quedlinburg Cathedral, 2 July 1936. Behind him, from left to right, stand Frick, Daluege, Bouhler, Darré and Heydrich.

The following year, however, differences of opinion appeared between Himmler, who saw the German as a nomadic warrior ever in search of new lands, and Darré, who saw him as sedentary and firmly rooted to his own soil. This conceptual argument was to have a profound effect on Ahnenerbe. In November 1936 it was integrated into the Abteilung für Kulturelle Forschung (Section for Cultural Research) of the Persönlicher Stab RfSS, and a few months later, when the split between Himmler and Darré reached breaking point, the Reichsführer appointed SS-Stand-artenführer Bruno Galke as a special representative to the Society to undermine Darré's influence. One of Galke's first measures was totally to discredit Wirth, who was Darré's eyes and ears in the Society. Wirth was subsequently dismissed and replaced as President of Ahnenerbe by Prof. Dr Walther Wüst, Dean of Munich University, who occupied the Chair of Aryan Culture and Linguistics and who had a much larger audience in academic circles. He was also an SS-Oberführer, whose first loyalty was to Himmler.

After his speech (see p. 120) the Reichsführer laid a wreath on the King's tomb.

With Wirth gone and Darré's power over Ahnenerbe cancelled out, the Reichsführer-SS proceeded to restructure the Society during the summer of 1937, establishing its new and independent headquarters at 16 Pücklerstrasse, Berlin-Dahlem. Himmler reserved overall control for himself, with the title of Curator, but the day-to-day management was carried out by Wüst, Galke and SS-Standartenführer Wolfram Sievers of the Persönlicher Stab RfSS. Wüst was responsible for the direction of scientific activity, Galke was the Treasurer, and Sievers took charge of general organisational matters. The latter was one of the most talented administrators in the Reich, and had many influential contacts among financiers and industrialists as well as access to the Sipo and SD. He soon established a foundation of companies which were prepared to make massive monetary contributions to the Society. Other funds were found from the coffers of the Sicherheitsdienst, thanks to Sievers' friendship with SS-Oberführer Prof. Dr Franz Six, who was responsible to the SD for overseeing university policies.

Himmler salutes ‘The Fowler' after the wreath-laying ceremony depicted on p. 121, with Karl Wolff, Gauleiter Rudolf Jordan and Reinhard Heydrich behind. The blank collar patch worn by the SS officer on the left indicates in this case not membership of the SD, as often erroneously assumed, but his attachment to the Reichsführer's Personal Staff.

At the end of 1937, Himmler defined the purpose of the reconstituted Ahnenerbe. It was to carry out research into ancient history by studying facts from a scientific and ideological point of view, in an objective manner and without falsification. It was also to be responsible for the setting up in each SS Oberabschnitt of educational and cultural centres devoted to German greatness and the Germanic past. The first such centre was duly established at Sachsenhain by Verden, with the reconstruction of a prehistoric Saxon village which included in its displays a 5,000-year-old plough and runic inscriptions carved in stone. The whole idea was to show every German that the wealth of his land and culture were the makings of his own ancestors, not things which had been brought in by the Romans or other outsiders.

All of Germany's archaeological excavations were soon put into the hands of the Society. Their overall direction was entrusted first to SS-Obersturmbannführer Dr Rolf Höhne, who was personally responsible for researches at Quedlinburg to find the remains of Henry The Fowler, then to Obersturmbannführer Prof. Dr Hans Schleif, who organised digs in the Teutoburg Forest where the Germans of Arminius (or Hermann) had crushed the Roman legions of Quintus Varus in
AD
9. Schleif later teamed up with Obersturmbannführer Prof. Dr Herbert Jankuhn to excavate the Viking site of Haithabu in Schleswig, a wall built by King Godfred in the ninth century to defend the Danes against the incursions of the Carolingian Franks. In time, Ahnenerbe organised similar excavations in Austria, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Poland, Serbia and southern Russia, and sponsored associated expeditions to the Near East and Tibet to look for signs of an ancient Nordic presence in these areas.

From 1939, the remit of Ahnenerbe was considerably enlarged. Himmler was no longer content to be restricted to Dark Age history and Middle Age heraldry. He now hoped to prove by scientific means the racial hypothesis of National Socialism. In conjunction with the SD, the Society would also look into other matters, such as astronomy, control of the weather, the extraction of petrol from coal, the occult and herbal remedies (Himmler's wife being a qualified homoeopath). Ahnenerbe expanded to include more than fifty departments, employing over thirty university professors. The Reichsführer showed evidence of quite a surprising amount of liberalism in their appointment, and drew a fairly vague line between research ability on the one hand and political reliability on the other. However, the contract he required his academics to sign stipulated that their findings could never be published if they turned out to be contrary to SS ideology.

Willrich print showing SS-Mann Hans Brütt, a peasant farmer from Grethof. The frontal style of this drawing is intentionally reminiscent of medieval Viking and Norman sculpture. Note also the pseudo-runic caption to the portrait.

One of the most controversial figures among the new researchers was SS-Sturmbannführer Dr August Hirt, Professor of Anatomy at the University of Strasbourg, where SS students were particularly numerous. With Himmler's support, it was Hirt who collected thousands of human skulls at Auschwitz for the purpose of making comparative anthropomorphic measurements. He later toured various battlefronts where the Wehrmacht's foreign volunteers were deployed, to study the performance and behaviour of combatants as a function of their racial categories. Other anatomical specialists from Ahnenerbe occupied themselves by examining body parts of different races, while SS-Sturmbannführer Dr Ernst Schäfer was commissioned to develop a special breed of horse on the Russian steppes for military use in extremely cold weather.

In July 1938, an SS-sponsored parade celebrating ‘2000 Years of German Culture' was held in Munich. Pseudo-medieval and Nazi symbolism mingled on an awesome scale throughout the event.

The war's principal sector of scientific research, that of secret weapons, fell under the authority of Ahnenerbe in 1944. Up to the middle of that year, the V1 and V2 rocket development programmes at Peenemünde had been directed by Prof. Dr Wernher Freiherr von Braun, who was loyal first and foremost to the Wehrmacht even though he was an SS-Sturmbannführer on the staff of Oberabschnitt Ostsee. Himmler knew that the Reich was by then laying all its hopes on secret weapons, and after the army plot to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944 he took personal control of the Peenemünde operation from von Braun and placed it under SS-Gruppenführer Dr Hans Kammler. The V1 and V2 programmes fully occupied the best minds of Ahnenerbe for the remainder of the war.

Towards the end of the war, when Himmler was overwhelmed by his military and police responsibilities, he said that reading Ahnenerbe reports was his only real pleasure and his only relaxation. He revelled in the discourses on ancestral tombs, Germanic customs and marriage ceremonies. In a long and critical letter to Wüst and Sievers dated 17 August 1944, he referred to the tradition of newly married couples copulating on the tombs of their ancestors at the time of the new moon, and suggested that research on wild animals might prove whether or not the new moon was particularly favourable to fertility. Himmler wrote:

A series of plastic badges sold for the benefit of the Nazi Charities Campaign, organised by SS-Gruppenführer Erich Hilgenfeldt. They reproduce finds from SS archaeological digs in Germany, Rome and Greece, and portray the use and development of the swastika in antiquity. Such projects were dear to Himmler's heart.

No good blood must be allowed to die without having been fruitful. Our SS must be sufficiently strong and vigorous so that each generation can, without argument, offer up two or three sons per family on the field of battle without exhausting the torrent of Germanic blood. We are going to create the chance for the Germanic people and for Europe as a whole, directed by the Germanic people, to build an Order which will, for generations, be able to fight victoriously against all Asiatic aggression. Woe to us if the Germanic people cannot win this battle. It will be the end of beauty, of culture and of creative thought on this earth. We struggle for that future only so that we can maintain the heritage of our most noble ancestors. I consider it necessary for the life of our people to teach all this to our grandsons, so that they may understand the difficulties of their ancestors and willingly enter into the SS way of life.