THROUGHOUT THE EARLY SPRING of 1937, Himmler mused with pleasure upon the new research from Finland. It conjured up for him visions of a simpler, more radiant Europe, a land of powerful gods and magic, a countryside undimmed by the modern evils of racial mixing and industrialization. Moreover, it seemed to open up new possibilities for strengthening the SS and preparing its men for life in the agricultural settlements of the future. But as delighted as Himmler was with Grönhagen and Bose, as content as he was to listen to the sound of the kantele and gaze at the portrait of the old Finnish singer that hung over his desk at home, he fretted over the future of the Ahnenerbe. He had yet to convince Hitler of the importance of the research institute or the value of its studies—quite the contrary. When Hitler finally deigned to take public notice of the Ahnenerbe, it was only to tear a strip off the institute and its wayward president, Herman Wirth.
Hitler had delivered this rebuke during one of the most important events in the annual Nazi calendar—the great party rally in Nuremberg. Amid all the goose-stepping and saluting, all the spectacle and speeches in September 1936, Hitler had given a stirring address on the state of German culture. As thousands of adoring faces gazed up at him, Hitler had expressed his views with customary forcefulness, then issued a kind of fatwa against two prominent heretics. The first was Ludwig Roselius, the coffee merchant who had built a spectacular lecture hall for Wirth along Böttcherstrasse, a major urban development project in Bremen. The second was Wirth himself. “We have nothing to do,” Hitler thundered, “with those elements who only understand National Socialism in terms of hearsay and sagas, and who therefore confuse it too easily with vague Nordic phrases and who are now beginning their research based on motifs from some mythical Atlantean culture. National Socialism sharply dismisses this sort of Böttcherstrasse culture.”1
Hitler had clearly taken great exception to the modernist architecture of the Böttcherstrasse and had finally lost all patience with Wirth. The two had first met at Nuremberg in 1928, and over the years Wirth’s grandiose talk of reawakening German society had come to irritate Hitler.2 More recently, the scholar’s rabid attacks on Christianity had added to Hitler’s exasperation. While Hitler dreamed of exterminating Christianity from the Reich, he was not yet ready to take on the Catholic and Protestant churches, and he did not want a loose cannon like Wirth complicating matters.3 Furthermore, Hitler despised Wirth’s vision of ancient Nordic civilization as a matriarchy ruled by priestesses and female seers. It was a far cry from the Nazi notion of German women as compliant baby factories. Hitler had no objection to twisting and distorting the past—indeed he encouraged it, provided that the results fit with his own political agenda. The last thing Hitler wanted was a new feminist world order.
His denunciation of Wirth at the party rally presented a serious problem for Himmler. The SS leader was inordinately fond of Wirth and his eloquently expressed theories of the past.4 But he could not ignore Hitler’s scathing criticism, particularly if he wanted to salvage the Ahnenerbe. Moreover, he had come to realize that Wirth was entirely the wrong man to direct the affairs of the institute and build it into a strong arm of the SS. Wirth was incapable of managing his own life, much less taking charge of others. So Himmler decided to remove him from his prominent post as the Ahnenerbe’s president. He demoted him to the position of a department head, and then proceeded to silence him publicly by prohibiting any further books or lectures.5
WIRTH, WHO WAS in Norway at the time of the Nuremberg rally, had little idea of the storm brewing back in Berlin. On arriving home, he was stunned to discover doors closing to him everywhere. He could not quite grasp that he was finished as a public figure in the Reich. His mind still percolated with expensive plans for a new open-air exhibition of his casts and a series of public lectures. He even wrote to Himmler asking for yet more money to help him through a difficult patch.6 Himmler exploded. As Reichsführer-SS, he ordered his trusted aide Galke to impress upon the prodigal scholar his precarious position. “I will not participate in politically foolish things which will also bring us to financial ruin,” he wrote to Galke. “It should be made very clear to Prof. Wirth that without the financial settlement of his affairs by the SS, which today is unwished for but a fact, he would be sitting in jail, if not in the penitentiary, because of his serious disregard for the law in several matters.”7
Himmler had no intention, however, of putting a halt to the studies of sagas and myths that had so exasperated Hitler. As deeply as Himmler admired and respected the Nazi leader, he regarded the Ahnenerbe and its studies as far too essential to his plans to be jettisoned: the future of the SS in his view depended on a thorough understanding of the past. But the incident at Nuremberg convinced Himmler of the wisdom of putting the Ahnenerbe on a firm academic footing, where it could deflect all criticism. This meant finding the right person to take charge of the institute, someone with impeccable academic credentials and a comprehensive understanding of Nazi doctrine.
Already, Himmler had met someone ideally qualified for the job. Dr. Walther Wüst was an authority on the ancient literature and religions of India, with a particular research interest in the migrations of the Nordic race. Small and solidly built, with hooded eyes, dark hair, and a round face adept at concealing his innermost thoughts, Wüst was a dean at one of Germany’s most prominent academic institutions, Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich. Just thirty-six years old, the scholar was an admirer of Adolf Hitler and a member of the Nazi party.
In nearly every imaginable respect, Wüst was the polar opposite of Wirth. He was cautious and calculating, calm and orderly, discreet and circumspect. He was polite but not pleasant, reserved but not shy, admired but not particularly liked. He was financially solvent and meticulously organized, and accustomed to keeping his own counsel. Those who thought they knew him, did not really know him at all. He was and had been for some time a Vertrauensmann—informer and spy—for the SS Security Service.8
On February 1, 1937, Himmler appointed Wüst the new president of the Ahnenerbe.
WÜST WAS A very unconventional kind of Nazi. He was born on May 7, 1901, in the Palatinate city of Kaiserslautern, the son of a city official who was, as Wüst later observed, “of pure Aryan background.”9 At the age of nineteen, the young Wüst enrolled at Ludwig-Maximilian University, and over the next five years, he studied broadly, covering subjects as diverse as comparative religion, anthropological geography, and the origins and distribution of races in Asia. Under the tutelage of a prominent Indologist, Wilhelm Geiger, he learned to read Sanskrit and puzzle over the meanings of the Vedas, the ancient scriptures of Brahman priests. He was fascinated by the connections he saw between the old songs and legends of Europe and the ancient literature of the East.
After completing his studies, he found a teaching position at Ludwig-Maximilian University, first as a private lecturer in Sanskrit in 1926 and later as a professor. He had a dull, pedantic manner in the classroom, as one student later recalled, and his seminars tended to attract few students.10 But his research on Sanskrit and Old Persian philology was well received, and he began to make a mark at the university. In 1927, he married a young Munich woman, Bertha Schmid. She had apparently given birth two months earlier to a daughter, and in conservative Catholic Bavaria, this likely gave rise to some tongue-wagging and gossip.11 Wüst seems to have ignored this, however: he did not have much use for Christianity.12
Like many of his Nazi colleagues at the university in the early 1930s, Wüst had developed a strong research interest in the Nordic race, but he was in no rush to join the hoi polloi by taking out a membership in the party.13 In 1933, however, after the Nazi seizure of power, he changed his mind. It had become plain to many German professionals that party membership was a necessary stepping-stone for future advancement.14 Hundreds of thousands applied for memberships, swamping the party offices. Wüst was one of them. He received membership number 3,208,696 on May 1, just squeaking in before the party closed its membership rolls.15 To some old party comrades, this made Wüst suspect as an opportunist.16 As a means of erasing their doubts, he agreed to spy on his university colleagues and students for the SS Security Service.17
It was Wolfram Sievers, the Ahnenerbe’s astute managing director, who first brought Wüst to Himmler’s attention. Sievers had met the scholar in the offices of Bruckmann Verlag, a prominent Munich publishing house with important connections to the Nazi party.18 He was deeply impressed by the breadth of Wüst’s research interests, his soothing manner, and his apparent grasp of ancient history. A visit to Wüst’s office, he declared to a colleague, was like spending time in “a German cathedral where one gains insight and reflection.”19 So in May 1936, when SS officials were scouting for new staff for the Ahnenerbe, Sievers approached Wüst and persuaded him to join the organization as a corresponding member.
A few weeks later, Sievers wrote to Himmler requesting that he take the time to meet Wüst in person. The Orientalist, he declared, “understands how to make the most incomprehensible scientific research findings understandable to the simplest man, as his lectures before the district [Nazi] party group and the National Socialist Teachers’ Association have demonstrated. A short speech by Professor Wüst with the theme, ‘The Führer’s Mein Kampf as a Mirror of Aryan Worldview’ in the large auditorium at the University of Munich resulted in fifteen minutes of applause.”20 All this intrigued Himmler greatly. Although he was deeply mired in work—restructuring most of the police forces in Germany, stamping out political opposition, and developing the network of concentration camps—he took time out from his pressing duties to meet Wüst. Indeed, he invited the scholar down to his alpine chalet in Gmund, a small town on Tegernsee, one of the most beautiful lakes in Bavaria. Wüst arrived for the meeting carrying a copy of one of his favorite books, the Rig Veda.21
The Rig Veda is the oldest of the Sanskrit scriptures. Composed around thirty-five hundred years ago, it consists of hymns addressed to the gods, and as such it marks the starting point of recorded Hinduism. Wüst, however, saw the Rig Veda as considerably more than a Hindu holy book. He believed it was also an important document of the Nordic race. Indeed, he had persuaded himself that members of the Nordic race had written it as they swept eastward out of Europe and colonized the deserts of Iran, the high mountain valleys of Afghanistan, and the rich river plains of India.22 He also believed the Rig Veda contained clear traces of an ancient sun religion from Europe—the same religion that Wirth talked about when he described the rock art from Bohuslän.23 Wüst brought the Rig Veda with him to Gmund in order to share these thoughts with Himmler. In the quiet of his host’s study, he read aloud from its hymns, translating the passages into German.24
Himmler listened attentively. He was impressed by the Orientalist’s erudition and eloquence. But he was riveted by Wüst’s theories on the racial significance of the Rig Veda. Other extremist German scholars had speculated at length about primeval Nordic migrations to the east, but Himmler had never paid much attention to them. Indeed he had shown little real interest in Asia or Asian religion.25 But Wüst’s recitation from the Rig Veda and his earnest talk of an ancient blond-haired, blue-eyed ruling class in the Far East seems to have electrified Himmler, giving birth to a strange new passion for Asian religion.26
As the two men talked after the reading, Himmler considered other possible advantages to hiring Wüst. The SS was beginning to extend its tentacles into many diverse sectors of German life, creating what many historians and writers would eventually call “a state within the State.”27 Himmler intended to add Germany’s universities to his empire. By placing SS officers in key academic positions, he planned to obtain control one day over everything taught in university classrooms. In this way, the Nazi version of history, prehistory, literature, genetics, and biology would replace authentic scholarship.28 Sitting in his study at Gmund, it must have occurred to him that Wüst, a dean at one of Germany’s most important universities, would make a fine new SS bridgehead.
Wüst, for his part, soaked up Himmler’s admiration. For a pedantic Sanskrit professor accustomed to dispensing wisdom to a few bored students each year, the opportunity to mould the minds of many thousands of SS men must have seemed irresistible. And he felt genuine excitement about the Ahnenerbe’s commitment to fieldwork. He had never traveled himself to India or Iran—indeed he had never set foot out of central Europe.29 But he had avidly followed the results of German expeditions to Central Asia since 1929 and he felt certain that fieldwork in the region would yield new and important insights into the Nordic race.30 A German researcher working in the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan, for example, claimed to have discovered a high percentage of people with blond hair and blue eyes: Wüst considered them to be “people of our own blood.”31
So Wüst did not hesitate to accept the new post at the Ahnenerbe. He explained to Himmler, however, that he wanted to remain in Munich so that he could continue his work at Ludwig-Maximilian University. Far from being offended, Himmler was delighted by this prospect. He agreed to furnish Wüst with an office and two assistants.
WITH HIMMLER’S STRONG backing, Wüst began taking charge of the Ahnenerbe, reading through the thick stacks of correspondence and documents that Sievers regularly dispatched from Berlin and familiarizing himself with its operations. By the fall of 1937, the Ahnenerbe boasted thirty-eight workers, eleven of whom were senior researchers, mostly folklorists and symbols scholars hired to assist Wirth with various aspects of his studies.32 Wüst intended to expand the scope of the Ahnenerbe’s research and greatly polish its scholarly and scientific reputation. The first step was to distance the organization from any out-and-out crackpots. One obvious target was Wiligut. Wüst thought him a crank, and saw to it that there was little further direct cooperation between the Ahnenerbe and Wiligut’s office in RuSHA.33
Wüst also intended to weed out those he deemed scholarly upstarts. To do this, however, he needed to take the measure of his new staff, so on October 25, 1937, he convened a meeting of the senior researchers at the new Ahnenerbe offices in the exclusive neighborhood of Dahlem in Berlin. The brain trust—along with Wirth’s mammoth collection of rock-art casts from Scandinavia—had outgrown its quarters on historic Brüderstrasse. So members of Himmler’s personal staff had located temporary digs just a few blocks away from where Himmler himself lived.
Sievers called the meeting to order, while a secretary began recording the minutes. The staff had already heard a great deal about their important new head, and Wüst did his best to reassure them that he had merely called them together in order to become better acquainted with their research. The purpose of the meeting, he explained, was “to discuss concerns, experiences and successes with each other. Each co-worker in the Ahnenerbe was to consider himself to be in a close working relationship with his colleagues, and their guiding principle had to be achievement.”34 He then asked each researcher in turn to give a short report on his work.
Yrjö von Grönhagen took the floor first. The handsome young Finn had just returned from a second summer of fieldwork in Karelia. He had spent nearly five months shooting film footage of things that fascinated Himmler—Karelians taking part in traditional midsummer celebrations, sorcerers performing magical spells, seers conjuring up spirits, mourners conducting old heathen rituals for the dead in graveyards.35 In addition, Grönhagen had purchased nearly two hundred books on Finnish culture for the Ahnenerbe library. But his sense of satisfaction with the summer’s work was rather short-lived.
In the space of just ten minutes, from 9:50 to 10:00 in the morning, the young Finn traveled the humiliating public arc from golden boy to hasbeen. In the process, Wüst let everyone know who was now in charge. He listened to Grönhagen’s short report about his research, then proceeded to grill him mercilessly in front of the others on arcane linguistic connections between the Finns and the Aryans. Grönhagen could not answer a single one of his questions.
When the meeting was over, Wüst sat down and wrote a letter to Himmler, informing him of what had taken place. Grönhagen, he observed, “has shown that he does not unfortunately possess the necessary knowledge required of a department head. He does not recognize important parts of his study area, and he was unable to answer questions I had on fundamental publications that have recently appeared on Finnish-Indogermanic cultural connections.”36 The only solution for the problem, in Wüst’s opinion, was to send him back to the classroom.
Himmler’s new craving for academic respectability outweighed his fondness for the young Finn. Just as he had dumped Wirth as the Ahnenerbe president when it had been expedient to do so, he now agreed to Wüst’s plan. A few days later, the Orientalist delivered the bad news to Grönhagen: he would be stripped of his new position as department head, reduced to the position of researcher, and sent back to the classroom. The young Finn was furious, throwing the entire Ahnenerbe offices into an uproar.37 But he gradually accepted Wüst’s verdict, particularly after the Ahnenerbe agreed to subsidize his university tuition.38 In the end, Grönhagen continued to perform Finnish research for the Ahnenerbe, but his days of intimate meetings with Himmler had ended.
It was the beginning of a new era in the Ahnenerbe. Henceforth, Wüst intended to recruit scholars who would be much like him—bright, ambitious, and highly regarded in their respective fields. They would be scientists and scholars who would not mind bending the truth to fit the new political realities of the Reich. And they would be individuals who could be called upon reliably to perform a variety of important services for the SS, from indoctrinating recruits to conducting human experiments and secretly gathering intelligence for the Reich.