Ahnenerbe-SS  

The Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society, or Ahnenerbe Forschungs-und Lehrgemeinschaft, was founded in July 1935 by Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Wirth (a Dutch historian obsessed with Atlantean mythology), and Richard Walter Darré (creator of the Nazi "blood and soil" ideology and head of the Race and Settlement Office). There is some evidence that the Ahnenerbe existed as early as 1928, when Wirth established the "Hermann Wirth Society" for teaching and spreading his theories. Another candidate for precursor of the Ahnenerbe was a research institute for "spiritual prehistory" created by the German state of Mecklenburg in 1932, when the state was governed by the NSDAP.

The Ahnenerbe was created as a registered club as a private and non-profit organization. Funding for the Ahnenerbe primarily came through Darré and his position within the German Ministry of Agriculture, but this association ended around 1936, leaving Himmler in total control of the Ahnenerbe. The Ahnenerbe was not incorporated into the SS until April 1940, though even before this, all but one member of the academic and medical staff of the Ahnenerbe were at least honorary members of the SS and many held significant rank. Wolfram Sievers was Reichsgeschäftsführer, or Reich Manager, of the Ahnenerbe from 1935, and held the rank of SS-Obersturmführer since 1937, rising to the rank of SS-Standartenführer by the end of the war. There was an obvious link between the SS and the Ahnenerbe long before it became official in 1940.

The Ahnenerbe was part of Himmler's greater plan for the systematic creation of a "Germanic" culture that would replace Christianity in the Greater Germany to exist after the war, a kind of SS-religion that would form the basis of the new world order. This new culture would be based on the völkisch beliefs of the Nazis, and it was the role of the Ahnenerbe to marshal scientific research in an interdisciplinary program to reject the "priggish line of high-school professors" and support the "development of the Germanic heritage". While the Ahnenerbe were fervent Nazis and most of their research was based on racist pseudoscience, they rejected the occult thinking of groups like the Thule Gesellschaft, preferring a pragmatic methodology based on Mendelian genetics, Darwinism, and biology. Fundamentally, the Ahnenerbe was a politically-motivated academic association, albeit with enough funding to go beyond mere lectures and publications to include wide-scale expeditions and experimental research.

Himmler himself served as the "chairman of the Kuratorium" of the Ahnenerbe, and held the real power within the Ahnenerbe. As Reich Manager of the Ahnenerbe, Wolfram Sievers was responsible for all administrative tasks, with day-to-day business matters handled by the deputy "Kurator" Dr. Herrman Reischle. Professor Walter Wüst joined the Ahnenerbe in 1937 and, as trustee and "Kurator" of the organization, replaced Hermann Wirth as its intellectual leader. Wüst had been dean of the University of Munich, and his presence brought a number of reputable academics into the Ahnenerbe. The Ahnenerbe was funded by the Ahnenerbe-Stiftung, the German Forschungsgemeinschaft, member fees, and "from funds of the Reich and from contributions of industry" (including a group of financiers called the Circle of Friends led by Wilhelm Keppler). The budget of the Ahnenerbe was as much as over one million German marks (400,000 American dollars).

Besides financial support, enlistment in the Ahnenerbe was attractive as it placed scholars in the academic elite of Nazi Germany, gaining them the patronage (and sometimes unwelcome attention) of the Reichsführer-SS himself. This academic status did not travel beyond the borders of Nazi-controlled territory, as the Ahnenerbe were considered, even at that time, as a sort of "intellectual criminals". The Ahnenerbe could also be attractive to those seeking to avoid military service, as its work was considered "war essential".

A central function of the Ahnenerbe was the publication of materials as part of the effort to investigate and "revive" Germanic traditions. Before the war, the Ahnenerbe set up its own publishing house in the academic suburb Berlin-Dahlem, and went on to produce a monthly magazine (Germanien), two journals on genealogy (Zeitschrift für Namenforschung and Das Sippenzeichen), and countless monographs.

The Ahnenerbe had fifty different research branches named "Institutes", which carried out more than one hundred extensive research projects. Some of the institutes, particularly those responsible for Tibetan research and archaeological expeditions, could be quite large, but most made do with less than a dozen personnel. For example, the staff for experiments to make sea-water drinkable consisted of a supervisor, three medical chemists, one female assistant, and three non-commissioned officers. The two-year musicology project to study folk music in South Tyrol consisted of one Ahnenerbe researcher and eight local collaborators.

Linguistic study was at the forefront of Ahnenerbe activity. The first institute to be established specialized in the study of Norse runes (the symbol of the Ahnenerbe was the life rune). This institute was under the command of Hermann Wirth until he left the Ahnenerbe in 1937. In 1936, Wirth's successor, Professor Wüst, headed up another institute for broader research in linguistics, where great attention was paid to Sanskrit (Wüst's area-of-expertise) and the connection of the language to the Aryans.

 

Runes are equivalent to the Roman, Greek, Cyrillic, or Hebrew alphabets. But they are much more than an alphabet. “Rune” means “secret”, “mystery”, or “hidden”, and is related to the German raunen, meaning “to whisper”, and the Irish run, meaning “a secret.” 

 

To a certain extent, even the Chinese hieroglyphs resemble the runic variations. The same applies to some characters of Turk written languages which were believed to have developed independently from European languages.

 

According to a theory, even the Cyrillic alphabet in its earlier form is a runic system. The art of the runes was in use up till the end of 19th century.

 

Germany was the first European country that started to restore the knowledge of the runes back in the 19th century. A number of secret societies emerged. For example, Hitler and Himmler were the members of the Thule Brotherhood. Later the two Nazi leaders set up a network of research institutions Ahnenerbe (“Heritage of the Ancestors”) for the study of magic. Swastika, a runic symbol of the Sun became the official emblem of the Nazi Party and the Third Reich.

 

The SS structure was originally formed as a magic order. Up until 1940, every SS commissioned officer was to take a special course in the runic magic. The emblem “SS” is a double rune Sigel which is well known as a victory symbol. The mystics say that it was the runic magic that paved the way for Nazism. But all the magi were sent into concentration camps in 1940. And Hitler was doomed from that time onward. One of the reasons being his choice of a swastika whose arms were bent at right angles in a uniformly counterclockwise direction as opposed to the symbol of Ahnenerbe – a swastika with arms bent in a clockwise direction.


Ahnenerbe

The Nazi Ahnenerbe Forschungs und Lehrgemeinschaft organization was founded by Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Wirth, and Richard Walter Darré in 1935 as a "research foundation". It was moved into the SS by Himmler in 1940. The name of the society literally means "ancestral heritage", and it was originally devoted to scientific and pseudo-scientific researches concerning the anthropological and cultural history of the German race. Their headquarters was at Wewelsburg castle.

Their initial aim was to prove Nazi theories of racial superiority through historical, anthropological, and archaeological research. During the war the organization looted scientific collections and libraries, archival material, archaeological artifacts, and miscellaneous works of art. Their pseudo-scientific medical research led to some of the greatest atrocities of the Nazi era.

Hunter and biologist Ernst Schäfer led the Ahnenerbe 1938 expedition to Tibet. He published his experiences with the expedition in 1950 with "Festival of the White Gauze Scarves: A research expedition through Tibet to Lhasa, the holy city of the god realm".

Occultism and pseudo-science

Many of their interests extended beyond pseudoscience into occultism. This led to Nazi scientists traveling around the world in search of Atlantis and the Holy Grail.

Atrocities

Later on an Institute for Functional Research in Military Science (Institut für Wehrwissenschaftliche Zweckforschung) was set up within the Ahnenerbe Society. Wolfram Sievers, the manager of the Ahnenerbe Society, became the director of the Institute for Functional Research in Military Science. Under his leadership, it was responsible for many of the horrific Nazi medical experiments, such as those conducted by Dr. Sigmund Rascher in Dachau concentration camp.

Sievers collected human skulls, many of which were those of people murdered directly for the purpose of collecting their skulls. Both Sievers and Rascher were sentenced to death for crimes against humanity in the Doctors' Trial and executed by hanging in 1948.

Fantasy vs. reality

Some of the activities of the Ahnenerbe border on the edge of fantasy, and are sometimes confused with related rumors and unconfirmed accounts. Some believe that the Ahnenerbe sought "portals" to God.

The Ahnenerbe organization appears to have been the basis for the Nazi archaeologist villains in Steven Spielberg's "Indiana Jones" films - Spielberg's fictional character Jones being their arch-nemesis. In the role-playing game Call of Cthulhu, Ahnenerbe is said to have spawned another organization, known as "Karotechia," which actually practiced magic. The video game Return to Castle Wolfenstein also portrays the Ahnenerbe as practicing occult rituals and magic.

Similar ideas have now become common in fantasy fiction, including comic books such as Hellboy, and the Ahnenerbe have now become part of the background of conspiracy theories.

Nevertheless, their existence, and their activities, are well-documented, although some of them are at first sight perhaps too implausible to believe.

The Institute for Germanic Archaeology was created in 1938. Archaeological excavations were conducted in Germany at Paderborn, Detmold, Haithabu, and at Externsteine. Haithabu, which is still recognized by archaeologists as an important site for medieval Norse artifacts, is in an area of northern Germany near the Danish border, and is very close to Detmold and Externsteine, the site of a much-reputed Aryan temple and which some legends connected with Yggdrasil, the "World-Ash" of Norse mythology. Externsteine is also close to Paderborn and Wewelsburg, and the entire sites compromised for the Ahnenerbe a mythological heartland where the Saxons resisted the Romans and their heirs, the Franks of Charlemagne. The area was also sympathetic to the ideology of the Ahnenerbe, as Detmold was one of the first German states to elect an NSDAP government, and Paderborn and Wewelsburg were strongholds of Prussian beliefs.

During the war, archaeological expeditions were sent to Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Poland, and Rumania with the collaboration of local authorities. The Ahnenerbe also conducted similar operations in occupied Russia and North Africa. They were also very active in the Far East, mostly in Tibet, but the Ahnenerbe did send an expedition to Kafiristan.

A significant amount of Ahnenerbe research involved Tibet, and was carried out by the Sven Hedin Institute for Inner Asian Research. The institute was named for the famous Swedish explorer whose memoirs My Life As An Explorer were popular worldwide for their tales of Hedin's travels throughout Tibet. Hedin's descriptions of hidden cities deep within the Himalayas were as much a source for Nazi interest in Tibet as Blavatsky's theosophical vision of the East. Though never an official member of the Ahnenerbe (the old explorer was in his seventies during the war), Hedin corresponded with the organization and was present when the Institute for Inner Asian Research was formally established in Munich on January 1943.

Hedin's closest contact in the Ahnenerbe was Ernst Schäfer, who commanded the Institute for Inner Asian Research and was eventually responsible for all scientific projects within the Ahnenerbe. Schäfer first visited Tibet in 1930, on an expedition organized by the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. In 1931, he returned to Tibet while a member of the American Brooke Dolan expedition that also visited Siberia and China (another Brooke Dolan expedition funded by the OSS travelled to Tibet in 1942, following in the footsteps of the 1939 SS-Tibet mission). He joined the Nazi Party after Hitler's rise to power in 1933, as well as the SS, rising to the rank of Sturmbannführer in 1942. Schäfer travelled throughout the East and Central Tibet from 1934 to 1936, and lead an ambitious Ahnenerbe-sponsored expedition into the Himalayas in 1939. In Tibet, the Ahnenerbe sought their own twisted brand of Shangri-La, a source of the Germanic superman and a repository of lost Aryan knowledge.

The SS-Tibet expedition led by Schäfer visited Tibet between April 1938 and August 1939. The purpose of the expedition was to acquire flora and fauna specimens, to perform an ethnological survey of the populace, and to gather cultural information on the Tibetans that included everything from their religious practices to the sexual positions used by older monks during homosexual relations with young adepts. There were rumors of secret tasks that included the SS making overtures to the Reting Regent to lay the groundwork for a German invasion of India through Tibet (if such a scheme had been formulated, Stalingrad stopped it cold). Schäfer was also rumored to be tasked with (dis)proving the "missing link" between apes and humans by collecting specimens that would prove his theory that the Abominable Snowman or Yeti was in fact nothing more than a species of bear that roamed between Nepal and Tibet. Schäfer failed to bag his "Yeti" bear, but the expedition did gather over fifty live animals that were sent back to Germany. Another interesting acquisition of the expedition was the 108-volume sacred document of the Tibetans, the Kangschur. Besides espionage and hunting for the Abominable Snowman, the SS-Tibet expedition may have also been involved in "geophysical" research to prove the "World Ice Theory", which may have included the search for fossilized remains of "giants" as part of the cosmology of the theory (more below).

The Ahnenerbe had an Institute to study the Eddas (considered by Himmler a sacred text) and Iceland itself, which the Ahnenerbe considered something of a holy land, like Tibet. Based on the ariosophical beliefs like those that gave rise to the Thule Gesellschaft, the Ahnenerbe saw Iceland as the last surviving connection with Thule, the mystical homeland of the pure Germanic race of prehistory. The Eddas contained secret knowledge for the Ahnenerbe, keys by which they could unlock their ancestral heritage. Besides study of the Eddas, the Ahnenerbe also wanted to study Icelandic artifacts, and, as they had in Tibet, perform "the recording of human images", using calipers to measure facial dimensions based on ethnological pseudoscience.

The Ahnenerbe succeeded in sending a mission to Iceland in 1938, but it was a thorough failure. On orders from Himmler himself, the expedition was to search for a hof, a place of worship of Norse gods such as Thor and Odin. The expedition ultimately failed as the Reichsbank lacked sufficient amounts of Icelandic kronur to fund their expenses, mainly due to German restrictions on foreign currency. The Icelandic officials also denied the Ahnenerbe permission to excavate in certain areas, and though the Ahnenerbe did find a cave they claimed to be Himmler's hof, it proved to have not been inhabited before the eighteenth century. The Ahnenerbe lost the opportunity for any further expeditions after Iceland was occupied by the US Marine Corps and British forces in mid-1941 to prevent its invasion by Germany.

Another Institute was devoted to musicology, collecting and analyzing everything from folk music to Gregorian chants (Himmler's pet project) to determine the essence of German music. Folk music was recorded during expeditions in Finland and the Faroe Islands, from ethnic Germans transported from occupied territories, and most significantly, in South Tyrol. The Ahenerbe made sound recordings, transcribed manuscripts and songbooks, and photographed and even made silent films of instrument use and folk dances. The lur, a Bronze Age musical instrument, became central to this research, which concluded that Germanic consonance was in direct conflict to Jewish atonalism. Connections in musical traditions was even used as evidence of a Germanic presence in occupied territories and thus another excuse for the military invasions that established "Greater Germany".

One of the stranger institutes of the Ahnenerbe researched the Welteislehre (World Ice Theory) of Hans Hörbiger, under the command of Dr. Hans Robert Scultetus. This truly odd theory was based on the Blavatsky thesis that there had been several moons in the past, that the approach of these moons results in a polar shift and a cataclysmic Ice Age, which are responsible for the fall and rise of the various root-races of Theosophy. According to the theory, the world itself was created when a giant chunk of ice collided with the sun. Hörbiger died in 1931, but his theory was adopted by some Theosophists, South American occultists who used it to prove the existence of Andean civilization with parallels to Atlantis and Thule (this may have been part of the reason behind Ahnenerbe expeditions to South America), and by Himmler and the Ahnenerbe, as "our Nordic ancestors grew strong amidst the ice and snow, and this is why a belief in a world of ice is the natural heritage of Nordic men". The Ahnenerbe were most concerned with practical applications of the World Ice Theory focused on meteorology, vital to military operations. Scultetus sent Edmund Kiß, a German playwright well-known for his novels on Atlantis, to Abyssinia to find evidence to support the World Ice Theory. German rocketry may have even been delayed because of fears based on Hörbiger's theory that a rocket released into space would initiate a global catastrophe.

The most infamous section of the Ahnenerbe was the Institute for Scientific Research for Military Purposes, which carried out experiments under "Secret" or "Top Secret" classification and was funded by the Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht. This "research" included hideous experiments on live human beings, prisoners procured by the Ahnenerbe from Dachau and other concentration camps. Over one hundred skeletons were collected by Professor August Hirt, several from live subjects, and he was assisted in his work by former ethnologists of the SS-Tibet expedition of 1939. Hirt was also involved in the feeding of mescaline to concentration camp inmates to determine its effects.

The most notorious among those who worked in the Institute for Scientific Research for Military Purposes was Dr. Sigmund Rascher, a Luftwaffe medical officer, a Hauptsturmführer in the SS, and a member of the Ahnenerbe. Rascher was in charge of the Institute's experiments at Dachau, and was the first to request "test subjects", who were frozen in low-pressure chambers and vats of icy water, and then experimented upon with attempts to rewarm them using sleeping bags, boiling water, and intercourse with incarcerated prostitutes from the Ravensbruck concentration camp. Those who survived the experiments were shot. Rascher also had the skulls of "test subjects" split open while conscious to examine their brains. He developed the standard form of cynanide capsules used by the SS, one of which would be used by Himmler to commit suicide. In 1945, Rascher was executed by the SS due to a plot with his wife to pass off kidnapped children as their own.

The Ahnenerbe also had institutes conducting Celtic studies, investigating popular traditions, and assisting in the creation of the SS-Order Castle at Wewelsburg. It was rumored that the foreign expeditions of the Ahnenerbe were a cover for German espionage, but there is no evidence of significant intelligence activity. The Ahnenerbe was also responsible for "cultural-political" (kulturpolitisch) missions in occupied "Germanic" countries (ie. Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands), spreading propaganda throughout the local population and recruiting for the volunteer divisions of the Waffen-SS. These missions worked with local pro-German political factions and academics to "revive" and promote Germanic culture and spread Nazi ideology. This was carried out through academic journals, popular magazines, exhibitions, and lectures which promoted the Ahnenerbe viewpoint, as well as censoring those academics that did not fall into line. Another wartime function of the Ahnenerbe was the acquisition of artifacts, as they seized and collected documents, paintings, sculpture, pottery and other items considered "Germanic" and "returned" them to Nazi Germany.

The interest of the Ahnenerbe in Germanic history and pre-history often put them at odds with others involved in such research. Chief among their rivals was Alfred Rosenberg, who was butting heads with Hermann Wirth even before the Ahnenerbe was created. Another rival of a sort was Karl Maria Wiligut, or "Weisthor", the head of the Department for Pre- and Early History in the RuSHA (Race and Settlement Office) and Himmler's personal Aryan mystic. The Ahnenerbe was forced to work with Wiligut due to the his close association with the Reichsführer-SS, though they considered Wiligut and his associates to be the "worst kind of fantasist". This attitude was typical of the academics in the Ahnenerbe, who bemoaned occult interest in the topics they studied, feeling that it impeded the "science" of their research. It is interesting to note that Wiligut fell from power in 1939, just one year before the Ahnenerbe was officially made a department of the SS.

Ahnenerbe
and the
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To avoid Allied bombing, the Ahnenerbe relocated to Waischenfeld in Franconia on August 1943. There they remained until American forces took the city in April 1945. The war ended before the Ahnenerbe found another permanent home, and, during the interim period, a great number of documents were destroyed. Had the Ahnenerbe survived the war, Himmler planned to use its members to staff an SS-University at Leyden in the Netherlands. Those that survived the war were either tried for war crimes, or faded back into academia under their own or false names.

Original content for this page is copyright 2003 Gil Trevizo and Dirk R. Festus Festerling and may be freely copied, posted on other websites, or used in other media in whole or in part with the following mandatory conditions imposed on usage: (1) any usage must respect and protect copyrights on all material, and specifically must obey restrictions placed on use by Pagan Publishing on its copyrighted material, and (2) regardless of alterations or additions, Gil Trevizo and Dirk R. Festus Festerling must be credited as author of parts © Gil Trevizo and Dirk R. Festus Festerling.

Nazism and the myth of the "master-race"

Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, was the chief driving force in developing the nationalist and racist myths advanced by the Nazis.

 

When Himmler joined the Nazi Party in 1925, he was already a member of the Thule society, which believed in the greatness of German history, reaching back to the year 9AD, when the Teutonic tribes defeated the Roman army. It promoted the superiority of the Aryan race, an ancient northern European people.These ideas formed the basis of Nazi racial philosophy that was to have such an impact on history.

 

When the Nazi Party took power, Himmler sought to create an Aryan knighthood in the shape of the SS.

 

Originally founded as Hitler's bodyguards, the SS had grown rapidly. By 1939, it was 300,000 strong. Its members would run the concentration camps and take charge of the deportations of Jews. It became the standard bearer of “racial purity” within Germany and in the campaign directed especially against the peoples in the East.


The centre of this new order of knights, an "aristocracy of soul and blood", was the Wewelsburg castle. This was Himmler's “Camelot”, with SS commanders cast as the Knights of the Round Table. Rooms were dedicated to figures of Nordic history and mythology like King Arthur. Himmler's room was dedicated to King Heinrich I, founder of the first German Reich (empire). Himmler believed himself to be the reincarnation of Heinrich the Fowler. Another room was set aside to house the Holy Grail, which was to be searched for all over the world. Himmler's goal was to "create a focus point of all the aspirations he had towards religion, towards science, forming a new policy.

 

To this end, Himmler set out to re-establish an ancient Aryan religion within Germany in opposition to Christianity, as a basis for Nazi ideology. Himmler maintained that many sacred symbols had been stolen from a more ancient Aryan religion and set out to restore them. One such symbol was the Holy Grail. One leading academic recruited to the Nazi cause was Otto Rahn, the leading German authority on the Holy Grail. He was brought into the SS to lead the search for it the world over.

 

Himmler saw the potential of archaeology as a political tool. He needed archaeology to provide an identity for his SS. But Himmler also believed that archaeology had a certain pseudo-religious content. There were excavations; there were myths and legends, a feeling of superiority. They believed by drawing on the power of prehistory they would achieve success in the present day.

 

In 1935, Himmler established a new arm of the SS, Das Ahnenerbe (the Ancestral Heritage Society). It was staffed by high-profile academics and headed by the Nazi Wolfram Sievers. Of the 46 heads of departments, 19 were professors and another 19 held doctorates. Amongst them were such eminent figures as Walter Wust, a leading expert on India; Ernst Schäfer, a veteran explorer; and Walter Jankuhn, an archaeologist.


Through these academics the Nazis sought to lend their propaganda the status of objective truth. The Ahnenerbe organised expeditions into many parts of the world—to Iceland in search of the Grail, to Iran to find evidence of ancient kings of pure Aryan blood, to the Canary Islands to seek proof of Atlantis.


In April 1938 the SS undertook its biggest and most ambitious expedition to Tibet, led by Schäfer and the anthropologist Bruno Beger. Beger believed that the proportions of the human body were vital indicators of race and that "one could determine the moral and intellectual capacities through the shape of the skull.

 

On 10 March 1937, SS officers gathered in Munich to listen to a lecture by Professor Wust, with the title " Mein Kampf as the mirror of the Aryan worldview”. In it, Wust claims a “similarity between the words of the Führer and those of that other great Aryan personality, the Buddha ... the basic idea of racial identity and the sacred concept of ancestral heritage.”

 

With the beginning of the war, the role played by Ahnenerbe became more sinister. It took on a grandiose scale. Entire contents of museums, scientific collections, libraries and archaeological finds were looted and shipped to Berlin or the Wewelsburg. Himmler and Sievers created a special unit—the "Sonderkommando Jankuhn"—to supervise the plunder. Professors, doctors and scholars were now directly integrated into the Nazi murder machine.

 

In October 1941 Sievers bought Ernst Schäfer to Dachau to photograph experiments on inmates carried out by the Luftwaffe medical officer, Rascher. One witness at the Nuremberg trials described the content of these experiments. Prisoners would be exposed to extreme vacuum pressures until their lungs exploded or extreme pain made them tear out their hair, bang their heads against the wall or maim their faces with their fingernails. These experiments usually ended in death.


At Nuremberg. Sievers  was asked about his role in the collection of skeletons for Professor Hirt at Strasbourg University. Jews held in Dachau concentration camp were selected while still alive to provide specimens. In a letter from Sievers to Himmler's adjutant Dr. Brandt, he set out how a Jew's head was to be severed from his body after he was killed and placed in conserving fluid. This was then to be sent directly to Hirt. The activities of the Ahnenerbe in Dachau and Auschwitz show the direct connection between their racial theories and fascist atrocities.


Scholars involved in the Ahnenerbe research claimed that their sole interest was the development of their specific field of study. But evidence shows they knew of, and were complicit in, the Nazis' crimes against humanity. They were SS officers in uniform and participated in close discussions within the council of Ahnenerbe, while scientists who would not go along with the Nazis were ostracised and victimised.


Historians, archaeologists and anthropologists utilised  the opportunities they saw opened up during the Third Reich in order to further their scientific research. Hitler's nationalism and racism was aimed at assembling a social force that could be used as a battering ram against Germany's powerful socialist working class. At the same time, theories of racial superiority served the interests of the ruling class in obtaining control of territories and markets, especially in the East, to overcome the restrictions laid on Germany after its defeat in the First World War.

 

The Nazis were able to recruit substantial layers of academics to their cause. For the majority of the professoris, the years of the Weimar regime were periods of riot and alarm. Historians, economists, and philosophers were lost in guesswork as to which of the contending criteria of truth was right, that is, which camp would turn out in the end the master of the situation. The fascist dictatorship eliminates the doubts of the Fausts and the vacillation of the Hamlets of the university rostrums. Coming out of the twilight of parliamentary relativity, knowledge once again entered into the kingdom of absolutes.


What has to be laid at the door of archaeologists and anthropologists was that at the end of the Second World War, they didn't sort out the issues of ethnicity. The holocaust was so ghastly that they walked away from the issue and didn't analyse it carefully. That ethnicity, the notion of who a people is, is very much what a people wants to be and is not to be demonstrated or proved from something deep in prehistory.... Archaeologists were very late in saying this and have only been saying it very recently. Academics did not grasp the nettle with sufficient vigour.Most important from this standpoint is the re-emergence over the last period of theories that use ethnic criteria as a tool of historical analysis.

 

In all spheres of life within the post-war German state system, there was no real reckoning with former Nazis. Judges, high ranking policemen, army officers, doctors, psychiatrists and politicians all assumed leading and respected positions in the state apparatus of the Federal Republic of Germany and, on a smaller scale, the German Democratic Republic. Things were no different regarding members of the Ahnenerbe. All became important scholars in post-war Germany—with the exception of Sievers who was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials. Any trace of their role in the SS murder machine was basically expunged.

 

Although everybody knew about his past, Jankuhn,, who had supervised the Nazis' archaeological plunder, continued to enjoy the reputation and lifestyle of a well-respected academic. His book on the early medieval site at Hedeby, or Haithbu, in North Germany is still regarded as a standard work.

 


Many high-ranking members of the Nazi regime, including Hitler, held convoluted occult beliefs. Prompted by those beliefs, the Germans sent an official expedition to Tibet between 1938 and 1939 at the invitation of the Tibetan Government to attend the Losar (New Year) celebrations.


The Dalai Lama (worshipped by his followers as the “Ocean of Wisdom” because of his “omniscience”) claims not to have been informed about his Nazi friends’ past. One may well believe this, yet he has not distanced himself from them since their exposure. His statements about Adolf Hitler and the “final solution to the question of the Jews” also seem strange. Just like his brother, Gyalo Thondup, he sees the dictator as a more noble figure than the Chinese occupiers of Tibet:

In 1959, in Lhasa, the Chinese shot Tibetan families from aeroplanes with machine guns. Systematic destruction in the name of liberation against the tyranny of the Dalai Lama! Hu, Hu, Hu! In Hitler's case he was more honest. In concentration camps he made it clear he intended to exterminate the Jews. With the Chinese they called us their brothers! Big brother bullying little brother! Hu, Hu, Hu! It’s less honest, I think.

~Daily Telegraph, August 15, 1998.

Tibet had suffered a long history of Chinese attempts to annex it and British failure to prevent the aggression or to protect Tibet. Under Stalin, the Soviet Union was severely persecuting Buddhism, specifically the Tibetan form as practiced among the Mongols within its borders and in its satellite, the People’s Republic of Mongolia (Outer Mongolia). In contrast, Japan was upholding Tibetan Buddhism in Inner Mongolia, which it had annexed as part of Manchukuo, its puppet state in Manchuria. Claiming that Japan was Shambhala, the Imperial Government was trying to win the support of the Mongols under its rule for an invasion of Outer Mongolia and Siberia to create a pan-Mongol confederation under Japanese protection.

The Tibetan Government was exploring the possibility of also gaining protection from Japan in the face of the unstable situation. Japan and Germany had signed an Anti-Commintern Pact in 1936, declaring their mutual hostility toward the spread of international Communism. The invitation for the visit of an official delegation from Nazi Germany was extended in this context. In August 1939, shortly after the German expedition to Tibet, Hitler broke his pact with Japan and signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact. In September, the Soviets defeated the Japanese who had invaded Outer Mongolia in May. Subsequently, nothing ever materialized from the Japanese and German contacts with the Tibetan Government.

Several postwar writers on the Occult have asserted that Buddhism and the legend of Shambhala played a role in the German-Tibetan official contact.

 

 

 


Were there occult intentions behind the “SS Schäfer Expedition”?

In the neo-fascist literature these are considered a top secret mission of Himmler’s to make contact with the “adepts of Shambhala and Agarthi”. Authors from the scene like Wilhelm Landig, Miguel Serrano, Russell McCloud, etc., let their readers believe that through these expeditions a kind of metapolitical axis between Berlin and Lhasa was constructed. Dietrich Bronder knows that “Schäfer’s SS men were permitted to enter holy Lhasa, otherwise closed to Europeans and Christians, even the magnificent Lamaist temple that contains just one huge symbol, the holiest in the Mongolian world — the swastika” 

Although in recent years comprehensive research findings about the interests of leading Nazis in occult phenomena have been published, this is currently played down by pro-Lamaist intellectuals, especially as far as a occult Nazi — Tibet connection is concerned.  Ernst Schäfer and Bruno Beger, the two leaders of the undertaking (the SS Schäfer expedition), are depicted as sober natural scientists. Heinrich Himmler’ esoteric ambitions in Tibet were minimal, indeed probably did not exist”. Hitler himself appears as a decided anti-occultist. However, the suggestion that Hitler was interested in Eastern esotericism or even Tibet can not be ruled out.  With an appeal to the historian Goodrick-Clark, the pro-Lamaist authors also assess the occult currents within the early Nazi movement (the notorious Thule Society for example) as insignificant, and completely lacking in evidence for a particular interest in Tibet. Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorf (1875-1945), the founder of the Thule Society, is said to have explicitly spoken out against the suggestion that the light came from the highlands of Asia.

We do not see it as our primary task here to historically prove the interweaving of the relevant SS members (Hitler, Himmler, Harrer, etc.) in an occult Nazi — Tibet connection. Things were not as cleanly rationalist and scientifically correct as the pro-Lamaist intellectuals would have it among the SS. When for example, at the presentation of a gift to the Tibetan regent in Lhasa Ernst Schäfer declaims, “Since the swastika is also the supreme and most holy symbol for us Germans, the motto of our visit is: A meeting of the Western and Eastern swastikas in friendship and peace …” (quoted by Brauen, 2000), then an occult note in accord with the Zeitgeist of the time is present.

There are certainly also other, non-fascist, authors who create an occult correspondence between national socialism and Tibetan Buddhism via a esoteric interpretation of the “Hakenkreuz” (the swastika), a Buddhist symbol par excellence: “The rightward hooked cross [signifies] a prayer formula in Tibet”, writes Friedrich W. Doucet, “In its left-turned form — like the national socialist swastika — it designates the orthodox Yellow Hats ... it is the Yellow Hats who supervise the spiritual rules in the Tibetan ecclesiastical state and also exercise worldly power”.

It is also certain that Himmler’s spiritual advisor, Karl Maria Wiligut (“Himmler’s Rasputin”), saw the “SS Schäfer Expedition” as an extremely occult undertaking and at Himmler’s direction attempted to exert an appropriate influence on the participants in the expedition. The SS standard bearer Wiligut/Weisthor, who was one of Himmler’s personal staff, was accredited with mediumistic abilities and he himself was convinced he was in contact with transpersonal powers. Wiligut/Weisthor was considered to be the Schutz Staffel’s (SS’s) expert on runes and designed the legendary skull ring of the SS. His megalomaniac overestimation of himself (there are authenticated statements from him to the effect that he believed he was the “secret King of Germany”) and the fact that he was deprived of the right of decision by his family led Himmler to discharge Wiligut from the SS in 1939 (Lange 1998).

The German author Rüdiger Sunner quotes the report of a member of the “SS Schäfer Expedition” over a meeting with Wiligut. [3] During the encounter (in 1937 or 1938?), the latter was in a trance-like state and addressed his visitors in a guttural voice:

I telephoned my friends this evening … in Abyssinia and America, in Japan and Tibet ... with all who come from another world in order to construct a new empire. The occidental spirit is thoroughly corrupted, we have a major task before us. A new era will come, for creation is subject to just one grand law. One of the keys lies with the Dalai Lama [!] and in the Tibetan monasteries.

The visitor was not a little distressed, and goes on to report:

Then came the names of monasteries and their abbots, of localities in eastern Tibet which I alone knew about … Did he draw these out of my brain? Telepathy? To this day I do not know, I know only that I left the place in a hurry.

In the 80s the Chilean Miguel Serrano took up the speculation anew that the Dalai Lama plays a key role in the Nazi-Tibet connection. His “skill”, this author says of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, is “closely linked with that of Hitler’s Germany … on the basis of not yet discovered connections. A few years after Germany, Tibet also falls” 

Wiligut also believed that Lhasa would form a geomantic quadrilateral with Urga (Ulan Bator), the Egyptian pyramids, and Vienna. Miguel Seranno was later to expound similar ideas (in the seventies). Himmler too was interested in geomantic ideas and it cannot be excluded “that he hoped for more exact data about this from the Schäfer expedition”.

Otto Rahn, likewise a member of the SS, who in the 30s attempted to render the myth of the Holy Grail and the Cathar movement fruitful for the national socialist vision and the SS as some kind of “warrior monks”, assumed that the Cathars had been influenced by Tibetan Buddhism.

One of the Cathari symbols of the spirit that is god which was taken over from Buddhism was the mani, a glowing jewel that lit up the world and allowed all earthly wishes to be forgotten. The mani is the emblem of the Buddhist law that drives out the night of misconception. In Nepal and Tibet it is considered the symbol of the Dyanibodhisattva Avalokiteshvara or Padmapani, charity.

~Rahn, 1989.

The myth of the “black sun” which was able to win a central place in the neo-fascist movement and displays similarities with the Tibetan Rahu myth from the Kalachakra Tantra, can be traced to the inspiration of Wiligut and his milieu among others. In a commentary on Wiligut’s runic writings, a pupil, Emil Rüdiger, mentions an invisible dark planet, Santur by name, which is supposed to influence human history and to be able to be microcosmically linked with the energy body of an adept. Appropriate yogic exercises(rune gymnastics) are recommended for producing “high intelligence effects” .


Quest of the Nazis

 

In 1938, Himmler sent a team of SS scientists on a mystical expedition to Tibet. Their mission: to seek the origins of the Aryan race.



 

 


The Holy Grail is generally considered to be the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper and the one used by Joseph of Arimathea to catch his blood as he hung on the cross. This significance, however, was introduced into the Arthurian legends by Robert de Boron in his verse romance Joseph d'Arimathie (sometimes also called Le Roman de l'Estoire dou Graal), which was probably written in the last decade of the twelfth century or the first couple of years of the thirteenth.

 

In earlier sources and in some later ones, the grail is something very different. The term "grail" comes from the Latin gradale, which meant a dish brought to the table during various stages (Latin "gradus") or courses of a meal. In Chrétien and other early writers, such a plate is intended by the term "grail." Chrétien, for example, speaks of "un graal," a grail or platter and thus not a unique item. Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival presents the grail as a stone which provides sustenance and prevents anyone who beholds it from dying within the week. In medieval romance, the grail was said to have been brought to Glastonbury in Britain by Joseph of Arimathea and his followers.

 

In the time of Arthur, the quest for the Grail was the highest spiritual pursuit. For Chrétien, author of Perceval and his continuators (four works take up the task of completing the work that Chrétien left unfinished, two of which are anonymous, one is by Mannesier, and a fourth is by Gerbert de Montreuil), Perceval is the knight who must achieve the quest for the Grail. For other French authors, as for Malory, Galahad is the chief Grail knight, though others (Perceval and Bors in the Morte d'Arthur) do achieve the quest.

 

Tennyson is perhaps the author who has the greatest influence on the conception of the Grail quest for the modern English-speaking world through his Idylls and his short poem "Sir Galahad". However, James Russell Lowell's "The Vision of Sir Launfal", one of the most popular of nineteenth-century American poems gave to generations a democratized notion of the Grail quest as something achievable by anyone who is truly charitable. The notion that the Grail story originated in fertility myths was popularized by Jessie Weston in her book From Ritual to Romance, which was used by T. S. Eliot in the writing of The Waste Land. Eliot's poem, in turn, influenced many of the important novelists of his and succeeding generations, including Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

 


Otto Rahn - Otto Skorzeny
Raiders of the Found Ark?