IN THE EARLY SPRING of 1939, the Ahnenerbe was blossoming like some strange hothouse flower, sending out twisting new shoots and twining tendrils into German academic life. It was becoming a place that courted bright young scholars and catered to their research, a place that advanced academic careers and arranged coveted university appointments, a place that financed dreams of foreign research, then sliced effortlessly through the hopeless tangle of red tape that restricted most travel outside the Reich. It was a place where the spirit of National Socialism, such as it was, ruled and where the Führerprinzip, or “leadership principle,” meaning absolute allegiance to those higher up in the pecking order, was put into practice daily. It was a place where SS commissions were doled out liberally. As such, the Ahnenerbe had little difficulty in hiring its pick of young Nazi scholars.
Indeed, since the beginning of 1937—when Walther Wüst assumed the presidency—the institute had more than doubled in size, from thirty-eight workers to more than one hundred.1 For its new headquarters in Berlin, the SS had acquired a sprawling mansion in Dahlem, a district of quiet leafy streets and tall hedges, wrought-iron gates and servants’ quarters. Dahlem was a neighborhood of choice for those who had profited from the corruption of the Nazi regime. Those who hadn’t sometimes called it by another name—Bonzopolis—after a popular English cartoon character famous for spineless greed.2 The new Ahnenerbe headquarters was set in a lovely green estate at 19 Pücklerstrasse. It stood just five minutes away from Grunewald, a former royal hunting preserve turned parkland with horseback trails and lakes and swimming beaches.3
Like many other properties in Dahlem, the mansion and its attendant buildings had recently been “Aryanized,” meaning that the Nazi government had succeeded in forcing its previous Jewish owners to flee the country and give up their spacious home at a bargain price.4 Certainly, the Ahnenerbe had profited handsomely from the situation. A real-estate appraiser valued the Pücklerstrasse estate in October 1938 at 675,000 reichsmarks, or some $3.5 million today, after inflation is taken into account.5 But the Ahnenerbe seems to have snapped up the property for less than half this price—300,000 reichsmarks.6 And almost certainly, the unfortunate Jewish owners received a good deal less than this, for the government customarily forced Jewish emigrants to pay 25 percent of their assets for the Reichsfluchtsteuer, or Reich flight tax, as well as additional amounts for other forms of official extortion.7
The newly acquired estate consisted of three buildings. The largest was built in 1910 of ivory-colored sandstone and an abundance of expensive wood paneling and stained glass. It boasted a conservatory, dining room, library, laboratory, microscopy room, photographic studio, darkroom, and some two dozen offices furnished with comfortable leather chairs, Persian rugs, antique-looking German paintings, and reproductions of Wirth’s rock-art casts.8 The second building housed a large workshop for the Ahnenerbe’s sculptors and other technical staff, while the third and smallest structure served as a private residence for Wolfram Sievers and his family, a convenient arrangement that allowed the young administrator to go horseback riding in Grunewald before starting work on summer mornings.9
Spacious as the complex was at 19 Pücklerstrasse, however, it merely served as the Ahnenerbe headquarters. Many of the staff, including Wüst himself, toiled in what were called teaching and research sites—smaller satellite institutes scattered across the Reich, from Munich to Vienna. These centers varied in size from one or two scholars to nearly a dozen researchers.10 Ahnenerbe officials planned to house the most important of these in select “Aryanized” properties, too.11 For Wüst and his department of Indo-Germanic-Aryan linguistics and culture, for example, they were planning to create a major bureau at an elegant address in Munich, somewhere close to the university. In January 1940, they scooped up a prize piece of “Aryanized” real estate at 35 Widenmayerstrasse, a lovely terrace house situated across the street from the tree-lined Isar River.12
All in all, the Ahnenerbe was rapidly becoming a rather large and lavish operation. Rather than order cost-cutting measures, however, Himmler encouraged further expansion. He regarded the Ahnenerbe’s research as essential to the future of the Reich—even if Hitler had yet to take much notice of it. To keep this large and expensive research organization afloat, the SS leadership was increasingly forced to resort to some rather unconventional sources of financing.
IN ITS EARLY days, the Ahnenerbe had received nearly all of its money from just two sources—the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, or German Research Foundation, the country’s preeminent scientific funding agency, and the Reich Agricultural Organization. The latter was a Nazi cartel responsible for planning and organizing Germany’s agricultural affairs in order to render the country self-sufficient. Germany’s heavy dependence on foreign food before the First World War had contributed to its defeat in 1918, and Hitler was determined to avoid that mistake.13 As a first step, he had appointed Richard Walther Darré, the Reich farmers’ leader, to take command of the Reich Agricultural Organization. Darré in turn had combined these appointments with his continuing work as head of RuSHA. So he had taken it upon himself to quietly funnel money from the agricultural cartel into the Ahnenerbe.
Such finagling certainly helped to pay the bills. But Himmler was eager to find new sources of tax-free money that were independent of any political rival. So he set up something called the Ahnenerbe Foundation, and under his direction, the SS leadership began searching for donors in private industry. They landed one big fish, Emil Georg von Strauss. Strauss sat on the supervisory board of the Deutsche Bank, as well as on the boards of several major German manufacturers. The prominent financier agreed to milk his business contacts for donations for the Ahnenerbe Foundation. In 1937, Strauss succeeded in rounding up 50,000 reichsmarks from a short list of corporate donors that included Daimler-Benz and Bayerische Motorwerke, better known in the English-language world today as BMW.14
Such piecemeal donations, however, would cover little of the Ahnenerbe’s operating expenses. So the SS leadership drew up a more ambitious scheme. This involved something that bore little relation to pre-history: a reflector pedal for bicycles. The pedal was the brainchild of one of Hitler’s former chauffeurs, Anton Loibl, an old party comrade. Loibl was a machinist and a driving instructor by profession.15 By avocation, however, he was an inventor. In his spare time, Loibl tinkered away in his shop in Berlin, designing new and improved mechanical devices, such as carburetors. While mulling over a way of making bicycles more visible at night on the road, he stumbled upon the idea of fastening small pieces of glass to the pedals in order to reflect headlights from approaching cars.
Eventually, word of these inventions reached the SS leadership, and in 1936, the SS formed a joint company with the machinist to market his inventions. Himmler intended to use part of the revenues to fund the Ahnenerbe. As it turned out, however, Loibl’s design was not nearly as original as it had first seemed. Indeed, another German inventor had devised a similar safety device and applied for a patent. But this competitor lacked something very important: the SS as a business partner. His patent application was buried. Loibl’s sailed through, and in 1938 Himmler used his supreme authority as the head of the German police to pass a new traffic law. This required all new German bicycles to be equipped with Loibl’s reflective pedal.16
German manufacturers suddenly had no choice but to use Loibl’s design and pay licensing fees to the company owned by the inventor and the SS. Those who initially refused to pay the fee soon saw the wisdom of doing so.17 Often it took no more than a single letter, signed by Himmler personally, to convince a reluctant manufacturer to obey the new law.18 And before long, the revenues were flowing into the Ahnenerbe Foundation. In 1938 alone, the foundation received a tidy 77,740 reichsmarks from the bicycle-pedal proceeds.19
The Loibl scheme was insufficient, however, to meet the Ahnenerbe’s growing stack of bills. So in the absence of other legal channels, SS aides began to indulge in some very shady accounting—a common practice in the offices of many senior Nazis.20 Although Himmler demanded the appearance of financial probity from his SS men, he encouraged fraud when it came to financing the SS itself. Senior officers on his staff juggled large sums of money from one secret account to another, deftly evading taxes and leaving behind a paper trail so tangled and snarled that no auditor could hope to unravel it.21 They also signed for massive bank loans that the SS had no intention of repaying. Himmler and his staff simply assumed, with good reason, that in due time the SS would become so powerful and fearsome that no bank director in his right mind would dare to call in one of its loans.22
SUCH FRAUDULENT FINANCIAL maneuvers permitted the Ahnenerbe to take on a much broader range of scientific and scholarly research, a plan that Himmler clearly endorsed. From the very beginning, he had regarded the Ahnenerbe as the source of a glorious new history of the Aryan race, a history that could be used to teach SS men and their progeny to act and truly think like Aryans. Moreover, he had long hoped that such knowledge of the ancestors could be used to convince SS men to turn their backs on the moral decay of Germany’s cities and return to the countryside to take up the simple life with their families in special SS farm colonies. Such colonies, he hoped, would give birth one day to a new golden age, replacing industrial Germany with an agricultural paradise and creating a fertile breeding ground for the Aryan race.
The SS command, however, had made little progress in achieving this rural utopia. Land, after all, was at a premium in Germany. SS officials had to first locate, then purchase large tracts that could be readily divided into settlement farms—an expensive proposition. In 1937, for example, SS officials decided to found a model farm colony at Mehrow, east of Berlin. For its land base, they bought part of a thirty-two-hundred-acre estate from the financially struggling daughter of a Berlin industrialist.23 The official sale price was reportedly 1,000,000 reichsmarks.24 SS authorities then proceeded to slice the property up among just twelve SS families. The largest block of land—some one hundred acres—was reserved for an SS doctor. Smaller parcels were then distributed to men of lower ranks.25
Drained by the cost of these purchases, officials founded only a handful of the colonies in Germany between 1937 and 1938. Himmler, however, was not discouraged. He held high hopes for the future, especially after Hitler engineered the Anschluss with Austria and the annexation of the Sudetenland. As German armies marched farther and farther east, he reasoned, the SS could easily scoop up confiscated country estates for its men. To prepare for this day, RuSHA officials drew up detailed plans for new SS settlements in the east.26
At the heart of each of these colonies would be a distinctive outdoor amphitheater known in Nazi parlance as a Thingplatz.27 The idea was borrowed from the old Scandinavian Thing, an assembly of free men who met in a field or village common to elect chieftains and resolve disputes. The Nazi Thingplatz, however, was considerably more contrived and far less democratic. Architecturally, it was intended to blend into a natural setting that possessed some prominent feature—a hill, perhaps, or a lake or an archaeological site—of legendary or historic importance.28 There SS families would be encouraged to hold torchlight rallies, stage SS solstice celebrations, or present their own propaganda plays.
In addition to the Thingplatz, each colony would possess other key features. It would have a shooting range where the men could sharpen their marksmanship and a distinctive graveyard where the living could suitably honor and remember the dead. It would have buildings to house local branches of the Nazi party, the SS, and Hitler Youth, as well as a variety of Nazi women’s organizations.29 And last but not least, it would have a Sportplatz, where young men and women in the community could receive physical training in a wide range of sports and gymnastics. Hitler himself had stressed the importance of such training. Sport, he had noted in Mein Kampf, would “make the individual strong, agile and bold” and “toughen him and teach him to bear hardships.”30 Such training, he further opined, would produce both defiant men and “women who are able to bring men into the world.”31
The colony’s farmhouses would be spacious and solidly built, as befitting homes of a master race. SS planners favored a primeval housing style known as Wohnstallhaus, which dated back to at least the Roman era in Germany—and possibly earlier.32 One basic design called for a long, narrow wooden building of nearly 9,500 square feet that combined both the family home and barn under one roof.33 The front half of the spacious building featured a downstairs parlor and a roomy kitchen, where several small children could run about freely, as well as a number of bedrooms upstairs. The back half housed the family’s stable, as well as a barn for chickens, pigs, and cattle. But the design was very flexible. SS men could add on more space as new babies arrived.
Each family in the settlement was expected to observe SS doctrine. Simply stated, this meant maintaining the purity of their Nordic bloodlines at all costs and producing as many children as possible. To prove the purity of its lineage, each family would keep a detailed genealogical chart of its ancestors, as well as a copy of its Sippenbuch, or clan history.34 Moreover, settlers would be encouraged to research and display their clan symbols and family coat of arms.35
Such was the cookie-cutter pattern that Himmler intended to stamp out across Eastern Europe, and he spread word of these plans among his men, knowing that the promise of free land and a spacious house in the country would motivate many to obey even the most odious order.36 The proposed SS settlements were a far cry from the cluttered urban apartments that many of Himmler’s subordinates called home.37 Moreover, these country estates were a world apart from the cold, disease-infected barracks that Himmler was creating in the concentration camps. These crowded miniature cities were the places that German and Austrian Jews were now increasingly being funneled into.
TO ASSIST FUTURE SS colonists, the Ahnenerbe greatly expanded its field of research. It assigned heraldry experts to pore over the history of clan symbols and scholars of comparative religion to retrieve details of ancient Aryan rites. It hired philologists to collect German place-names and folklorists to record German legends and fairy tales. It employed archaeologists to excavate primeval settlements, engineers to study ancient German building styles, and landscape specialists to uncover possible astronomical alignments of old villages. It also appointed botanists to search out potential new food plants and zoologists to chart the evolutionary history of the horse and other farm livestock, in order to help restore old “Germanic” breeds.38
In addition, Ahnenerbe researchers worked very hard to recover the lost history of the fictional Aryan race. Linguists studiously reconstructed words in the ancestral Aryan tongue, and classicists hunted for evidence of the Nordic founders of classical Greece and Rome, while Orientalists searched for proof of the Nordic roots of Near Eastern civilizations. Geologists mapped traces of prehistoric life in German caves, while biologists conducted racial studies on SS men and on Jews, and astronomers tested a popular Nazi theory on the origins of the solar system, a theory that neatly explained the supposed demise of the first great Aryan civilization.39
Research was only half the battle, however. The Ahnenerbe strongly encouraged staff to popularize their work. Some gave lectures to SS officers and officer trainees and wrote articles for the SS training magazine, SS-Leitheft, and the Nazi party newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter.40 Others organized scientific conferences that attracted reporters from the popular press.41 Most wrote for the Ahnenerbe’s own publications, thereby avoiding impartial peer review of their work. The institute possessed its own press, the Ahnenerbe-Stiftung Verlag, which produced both popular and scholarly books, as well as three journals on diverse subjects.
The best known of the journals was Germanien, a monthly magazine whose covers generally ran to German folk art and colorful historical paintings of Nordic farmers. The issues blended articles of interest to SS planners—”Around the Thingplatz,” “On Nordic Storage Buildings,” and “Wooden Construction and Farmhouses in Norway”—with more arcane pieces intended for historians of the Aryan race, such as “The Atlantis Problem” and “Nordic Runes and House Marks in Chinese Script.” In addition, the Ahnenerbe staff produced two other magazines of interest to SS officials—one devoted to research on German family names, the other to studies of clan symbols.42
Senior Ahnenerbe scientists also assisted in the making of SS training films on subjects ranging from the ancient symbols in Swedish rock art to traditional Finnish ceremonies for burying the dead. Other Ahnenerbe staff labored in the sculpture studio to create plaster reproductions of the cryptic rock art from Scandinavia.43 The Ahnenerbe intended to display these enigmatic inscriptions in new SS “celebratory sites and cemeteries,” as well as on “monuments and items of daily use.”44
And of course, the SS staff in Dahlem continued to labor over their towering stacks of paperwork, planning major expeditions abroad. Himmler had begun to fix his gaze to the east, far to the east, and at the beginning of 1939, he waited impatiently as one of his favorite researchers led a scientific team across the remote mountain kingdom of Tibet in search of lost Aryan tribes.