FOR MANY GERMANS, STORIES of exotic lamas and romantic Himalayan lands were a welcome relief from the grim invective occupying the pages of most German dailies in late August 1939. For weeks, German newspapers had railed viciously against the Poles, reporting murderous attacks on the German community in Danzig. The increasingly shrill accounts of foreign persecution—part of a massive propaganda campaign orchestrated by the staff of Josef Goebbels—were clearly a prelude to a new German invasion. Poland was next on the list, and many Germans worried whether Hitler wasn’t biting off more than he could chew. Would the government of Neville Chamberlain meekly back away from its vow to defend Polish independence? Would Stalin seize the moment and attack? German officials were bracing for the worst. At the end of July, they instructed Berliners to begin practicing air-raid drills.1 A few weeks later, they began handing out ration cards for meat and such luxuries as jam, sugar, and coffee.
But on the morning of Thursday, August 24, the German government announced a dazzling coup. Hitler, it seemed, had fooled everyone, signing a major non-aggression treaty with Germany’s greatest enemy, the Soviet Union. With one stroke of the pen, the German leader had turned one of Nazi Germany’s most formidable foes into an ally, eliminating the danger of a bloody war along the eastern borders of the Reich. It was a masterful stroke. The new pact seemed to all but guarantee that the British would now step aside and allow the German Wehrmacht to begin carving up Poland. Germans were elated. In Berlin, they took to the streets in celebration.2
In his elegant office in Dahlem, Wolfram Sievers welcomed the news. He had grown accustomed to the privileged life of a high-ranking Nazi official, riding through Grunewald each morning and attending important receptions in an expensive new dress-suit in the evenings.3 It was all much preferable to crawling through enemy fire. Sievers, moreover, had important work to do. While Schäfer and his colleagues were roaming Inner Asia, measuring the crumbling glory of ancient Tibetan strongholds, the senior scientists and scholars of the Ahnenerbe had been busy at their desks. Some had planned major new expeditions to remote corners of the world, from Bolivia to the Canary Islands. Others had proposed projects on medieval village life to help organize the future SS settlements. And a few were clinically accumulating racial data for the day when the SS would uproot all Jews and their “mixed-race” descendants from the Reich.
It was up to Sievers to orchestrate all this research, to cut through the flimsy excuses of Nazi officialdom, to slash away the endless rolls of red tape, to prod the unwilling, flatter the important, cajole the incompetent—anything to get the job done. In his spare hours, Sievers was a musician. He played the harpsichord, organ, and piano, and he particularly loved the music of Bach, in all its rich textured complexity. But Sievers reserved his greatest dexterity for his work in the sprawling villa in Dahlem. There he spent his days on the telephone, in meetings, and at his desk arranging financing, foreign currency, steamship company tickets, passports, balloon-mounted cameras, aerial surveillance aircraft—indeed, almost anything that Ahnenerbe researchers needed for their important work. Sievers seemed to be everywhere and anywhere, on top of every file. Without him, everything in the Ahnenerbe would grind to a halt.
BY FAR THE most urgent problem on his desk was the massive expedition of Edmund Kiss. Kiss, an architect and writer by profession, was mounting the Ahnenerbe’s largest and most expensive expedition yet. Its destination was the Bolivian Andes. During an earlier trip to the region, Kiss claimed to have located the stone ruins of an ancient Nordic colony in the New World. Bolivians called the site Tiwanaku. Kiss declared that the elaborately carved temples of Tiwanaku dated back more than one million years. This was at least eight hundred thousand years before the evolution of modern humans.4 And as if all that were not wildly exorbitant enough, Kiss also alleged to have found crucial new geological proof of something known as the World Ice Theory, a crackpot paradigm that many influential National Socialists adored.
Kiss was exactly the kind of man with whom Himmler enjoyed socializing. At fifty-three, he was a commanding presence, standing six foot three and tipping the scales at 224 pounds.5 He possessed a broad, sturdy face, ears that splayed out from his head, wire-rimmed spectacles that curled around them, and a determined stamp to his mouth.6 He spoke bluntly, kept his word faithfully, conducted his affairs with a gentleman’s sense of honor, and was, judging from the testimonies of his friends and co-workers after the war, kindness itself toward his subordinates.7 He also possessed a distinguished military record. He not only survived two gunshot wounds, a serious case of malaria, and four years of mucking in the trenches in the First World War, but also won two Iron Crosses, one of them a first class.8
After the war, Kiss took his examinations as a building contractor and settled in Münster, where he began to study the World Ice Theory. The bizarre theory tossed out most conventional scientific ideas about the universe. In their place, it offered a new explanation for just about everything—the origins of the solar system, sunspots, the appearance of the Milky Way, the creation of the human race, the sinking of Atlantis, and some of the more obscure passages of ancient Icelandic creation stories. The theory was the brainchild of an Austrian engineer, Hans Hörbiger, who prided himself on the fact that he never performed calculations and who firmly believed that mathematics was “deceptive.”9 His ideas greatly appealed to right-wing extremists who were always looking for ways of Germanizing science and junking anything that smacked of “Jewish” science. The Nazis regarded Hörbiger as a genius.10 They intended to consign Albert Einstein to oblivion.
Kiss was fascinated by Hörbiger, who likened the universe to a giant steam engine filled with hydrogen and water vapor. In the distant past, Hörbiger suggested, small stars thickly clad in ice had collided with steaming hot giant stars, spewing stellar material into space. This material then condensed into planets of varying sizes that spiraled around the sun. As the smaller planets edged closer toward the larger ones, they were ensnared by gravity and captured as moons. Hörbiger believed that Earth had known six of these satellites. The serial destruction of the first five, he suggested, had led to vast, almost unimaginable environmental catastrophes on Earth. As each had spiraled downward into the atmosphere, it had revolved faster and faster, creating an immense gravitational pull. This force had then yanked the Earth’s waters toward the equator, forming an immense tide resembling a giant spare tire around Earth’s girth; beyond the perimeters of this towering wall of water, the land surface froze beneath thick glacial ice. Only in certain mountain refuges—the Bolivian Andes, the Tibetan Himalayas, the Ethiopian highlands—had flora and fauna survived. Each of the plummeting moons had then exploded in turn in the atmosphere, releasing oceans and seas to flow back over the Earth. The last of these celestial explosions, claimed Hörbiger, had taken place more than eleven thousand years ago.11
This theory was pure, unadulterated nonsense, condemned in the strongest terms by German astronomers and other serious scientists in the 1930s. The World Ice Theory, noted one prominent mathematician, combined “the tyranny of an Asiatic despot [and] the presumption of a mathematical illiterate who, with childish innocence, strides up to things about which he knows nothing and ventures to substitute a caricature for a scientific picture of the universe.”12 But Kiss and many other Nazis were deaf to such criticism. Hörbiger’s talk of giant tides and vast sheets of glacial ice provided a neat explanation for scientists’ inability to find any trace of an ancient Aryan civilization in the far north. No less an eminence than Hitler himself had latched onto these outlandish ideas. “I’m quite well inclined to accept the cosmic theories of Hörbiger,” he noted one night over dinner, before launching into a muddled description of the engineer’s ideas.13
What Hörbiger’s supporters desperately needed, however, was proof of the primeval cataclysms that Hörbiger had described. Kiss was acutely conscious of this. So in 1927, he began searching about for evidence. He wrote to a silver-haired Austrian expatriate, Arthur Posnansky, in Bolivia. Posnansky had begun a detailed study of ancient stone ruins in the Bolivian Andes—one of the places that the World Ice Theory predicated as a mountain refuge. He had published and lectured extensively on Tiwanaku. Situated just south of Lake Titicaca, the prehistoric capital had once ruled a mighty empire whose power extended all the way from the Bolivian rain forest to the northern coast of Chile and northwestern Argentina. By the twentieth century, however, Tiwanaku lay in scattered pieces. Looters had plundered most of its wealth, leaving only huge inscribed tablets and immense doorways carved with jaguars and strange mythological characters. Some blocks weighed more than four hundred tons.
Most professional archaeologists of the day knew that an indigenous Andean people—forerunners of the Inca—had designed and built Tiwanaku. But Posnansky strongly disagreed. He suggested that a mysterious group of immigrants from the far west designed the great capital and put Andeans to work building it. He also asserted that construction on at least one of Tiwanaku’s great temples began seventeen thousand years ago, an erroneous contention based on his own calculations of certain astronomical alignments of the walls.14 Lastly, Posnansky believed he had discovered an ancient calendar of some sort carved into the stone above a Tiwanaku portal.15
Kiss sponged up these ideas, convinced that the mysterious architects were none other than the Aryans. So fascinated was he, indeed, that he journeyed to South America in 1928, subsidized by a 20,000-mark prize he had won in a writing contest. For months, Kiss studied Tiwanaku’s ruins, sketching their floor plans and their inscriptions. He was particularly struck by an ancient sculpture of a man’s head unearthed from one of its ruins. “It is immediately clear,” he noted later, “that this man is not Indian nor does he have Mongolian characteristics, but rather pure Nordic ones.”16 Moreover, he continually jotted down notes about what he thought were European touches in the stone monuments—“the doors are framed as they were in the Baroque period,” he observed, and “the construction of the eastern facade shows a series of cross symbols underneath an entablature that is easily identified as Greek.”17
He brusquely dismissed any suggestion that ancient Andeans had designed the splendid temples. “The works of art and the architectural style of the prehistoric city are certainly not of Indian origin,” he wrote later. “Rather they are probably the creations of Nordic men who arrived in the Andean highlands as representatives of a special civilization.”18 The big question in Kiss’s mind was when this migration had happened. He peered and squinted at the massive inscribed relief on the ruin known today as Gateway to the Sun. Was it truly a calendar? Kiss thought it very likely and he became convinced he could decipher it.19 He felt certain he could see symbols for twelve months of the year, each possessing either twenty-four or twenty-five days. He also thought it certain that each of the days had thirty hours, and each hour twenty-two minutes.
Kiss regarded the inscription as compelling proof of Hörbiger’s theory. The Tiwanaku inscription, he concluded, was a calendar reflecting the primordial conditions on Earth when an earlier moon rapidly orbited the planet. He had no means of determining when this had happened, but this did not stop him from leaping to a wild conclusion. “One thing we do know—and it would be extremely hard to convince us otherwise—even if the age of Tiwanaku cannot even be guessed, it must be at least millions of years old!”20
Back in Germany, Kiss began determinedly popularizing his ideas, first in a series of fantasy novels set in Atlantis and South America, and then in a more scientific-sounding book entitled The Sun Gate of Tiwanaku. He illustrated the latter with his own architectural drawings of massive Nazi-style monumental temples and tall, slim inhabitants dressed in a strange futuristic fashion. The editors of Nazi party newspapers and magazines were delighted. Both SA Mann and Die Hitler Jugend, the official magazine of Hitler Youth, ran popular articles on Kiss’s research, illustrated by the architect’s drawings. These pieces extolled the beauty of the lordly Nordic colony of Tiwanaku, and described, as if it were now proven scientific fact, how the ancient Andean capital had collapsed during the cataclysms triggered by a falling moon.21 Himmler was so pleased with the book that he ordered a copy to be expensively bound in leather as a Christmas gift for Hitler.22
But Kiss longed to expand his field research. He yearned to return to Bolivia with a large interdisciplinary team of scientists to search for fossil evidence of ancient flooding and to conduct extensive excavations at both Tiwanaku and nearby Siminake. He hoped to unearth compelling new evidence of the ancient master race in the Americas and requested backing from the Ahnenerbe. Himmler and Wüst were both wildly enthusiastic. “One can now quite certainly expect results which might have a revolutionary importance for the history of mankind,” opined Wüst.23
Kiss drew up meticulous plans and relayed his needs to Sievers. Over the next year and a half, the two men worked together on the project, interrupted only when Himmler dispatched Kiss on a brief research trip to Libya to scour the Mediterranean coast for fossil evidence of the World Ice Theory.24 By late August of 1939, the mushrooming plans called for a team of twenty—archaeologists, geologists, zoologists, botanists, meteorologists, pilots, and underwater experts—to toil on the project for a year.25 In addition to the archaeological digs, Kiss planned to explore the deep waters of Lake Titicaca by underwater camera. He also proposed flying across the Andes so that film crews could shoot footage of the famous Inca roads, which Kiss believed were the work of Nordic lords.26 Last but certainly not least, he also intended to conduct extensive geological fieldwork from Colombia to Peru to find evidence of ancient celestial cataclysms.
Sievers estimated that the salaries of the team members alone would cost 100,000 reichsmarks, or some $520,000 today, taking inflation into account.27 But Himmler did not flinch at the cost, and by late August 1939, Sievers was deeply immersed in the final arrangements for the trip—booking the team’s passage to South America, locating a pilot experienced enough to undertake aerial photography in the high Andes, and organizing payment of all the team members’ salaries. It was a mammoth task greatly complicated by the plodding bureaucracy of the Nazi state and the pressing nature of Sievers’s other duties.
IN MUNICH, WALTHER Wüst was planning a small expedition to the gray and forbidding mountains of western Iran.28 The Ahnenerbe’s superintendent had never traveled to Asia, but since arriving at the Ahnenerbe he had succumbed to expedition fever. In 1938, he proposed leading a group of researchers to study and record the famous Bisitun inscription in Iran. The inscription preserved the autobiography of Darius I, one of the greatest kings of ancient Persia.29 In the sixth century B.C., Darius had seized the throne by murdering a rival. He had then successfully extended the borders of his realm as far east as the Indus Valley, before launching an ill-fated invasion of Greece.
Wüst considered Darius to be a great Aryan monarch. Moreover, he thought his story particularly relevant to the Reich of the 1930s.30 Darius had usurped a throne, ruthlessly extinguished other contenders, stamped out rebellions, and forged a vast empire of diverse peoples. This sounded like the blueprint for Hitler’s career. Wüst also believed that empire building was an integral part of the Nordic psyche, a trait that characterized all major Nordic leaders through time. “In all places on earth where the Indo-Germanic peoples turn up,” he wrote, “they enter into history because of their creation of states and empires, whether it be the empire of Darius I, Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, or the empire of Charlemagne. Each introduced the Germanic form of empire to the Occident.”31 Such claims were patently false, but they greatly appealed to Himmler, suggesting as they did that Hitler was following his destiny as a Nordic leader by founding the Third Reich.
If Wüst was to popularize the story of Darius and curate an important museum show about him, the Ahnenerbe had to acquire an exact copy of the inscription. This would be no easy matter. Darius had ordered his sculptors and scribes not only to inscribe the story of his victories at Bisitun, but to preserve the account for posterity. So his servants had constructed a high stairway up a steep cliff at Bisitun. Perched precariously upon a narrow ledge one hundred feet in the air, they carved Darius’s words in three languages and delicately sculpted a large relief of Darius standing majestically in front of a long line of his vanquished foes.32 When they were finished, they destroyed the wooden stairs up the cliff, placing Darius’s words beyond the reach of most vandals. Some twenty-five hundred years later, a young British linguist learned of the mysterious carving. In a feat of great daring and athleticism, Henry Rawlinson scaled the crumbling cliff and copied by hand almost two-thirds of the inscription for scholarly research. His young Kurdish assistant then recorded most of what remained by applying damp pulp to the surface of the inscriptions and pressing it against the indentations to make exact casts.33 With these copies, Rawlinson and other scholars deciphered three dead languages—Old Persian; Elamite, the administrative tongue of the Persian empire; and Akkadian, the language of Babylon—and opened a lost door to the early civilizations of the Middle East.
Rawlinson had copied the inscription with marvelous accuracy, but he had erred somewhat in his interpretations of badly weathered and nearly illegible passages. Moreover, neither Rawlinson nor his assistant had been able to reach or copy a small portion of the text. So Wüst proposed to journey to Bisitun to create a new scientific recording of the inscription “in accordance with the will of the RF-SS and head of the German police, Heinrich Himmler.”34
At thirty-seven, Wüst was a bulky, deskbound scholar plagued by knee problems.35 He was incapable of climbing his way up a sheer cliff, and he could see that building a large scaffold would take too much time and manpower. So Wüst intended to rely upon a new technology devised by an American archaeologist—suspending a camera from a tethered balloon and floating the device alongside the cliff face at Bisitun.36 With a long cable-release to activate the shutter, Wüst and his colleagues could snap photographs of the inscription. Already SS archaeologists had enjoyed some success with the technique, employing it to take aerial photographs of an excavation at Tilsit in eastern Prussia.37
Wüst planned to travel to Bisitun with his wife and a team of four—a scientific amanuensis; an Iranian student who would be responsible for dealing with the local inhabitants; a photographer to take care of the imaging; and a mountain climber to clamber up and down the cliffs to guide the balloon-mounted camera to the right spot.38 Wüst was convinced that there was no time to lose. “The inscription itself,” he noted in one letter, “is situated on a steep cliff wall, and with each passing year it is more and more in danger of being damaged or even destroyed in the most important parts by a strong torrent.”39
Wüst had already approached the German Research Foundation for financing.40 But it was Sievers’s job to take care of other logistical matters—from locating a suitable photographer for the team to persuading officials at the Reich Aviation Ministry to provide the Ahnenerbe with the necessary balloons.
AS SIEVERS CONTEMPLATED solutions to these problems, he also labored on the arrangements for two other expeditions. The first was a relatively small affair—a field trip to the Canary Islands led by Dr. Otto Huth. Huth worked in the Ahnenerbe offices in Dahlem as an expert in “religious science,” specializing in ancient Aryan spiritual beliefs.41 He had read nearly everything ever written on the aboriginal inhabitants of the Canary Islands—a small archipelago located off the coast of northwest Africa—and had arrived at a novel conclusion. Huth believed that the original Canarians were in fact members of a pure, undiluted line of the Nordic race, who had preserved ancient Aryan religious practices well into the fifteenth century.
Huth was a former protégé of Herman Wirth. A fine-boned man, with a long face, sharp nose, heavy glasses, and a thin cupid’s-bow mouth frequently drawn into a self-satisfied smile, he spoke seven languages—including Hebrew—and was a fervent Nazi. He had become politically active as a teenager, joining an ultranationalist group in the Rhineland that was later absorbed into the Nazi party. At twenty-two, Huth took out membership in the SA, the party’s political combat troops, and for a time he worked as a reader for the Official Party Department to Protect Nazi Writing, the agency that dispatched the Gestapo to seize books failing to conform to Nazi doctrine.42
Huth seems to have acquired his passionate interest in the Canary Islands from Wirth. The older scholar firmly believed that the islands once formed the southern edge of a vast primeval Aryan homeland, Atlantis, and had somehow escaped devastation.43 Intrigued by this notion, Huth had sopped up historical accounts of the ancient Canarians, a tribal society of prosperous farmers and herders. The Canarians, he learned, had shaved with stone knives; painted their bodies green, yellow, and red; dressed in dyed goatskins; and mummified the bodies of their leaders. On islands scattered some sixty miles off the coast of northwestern Africa, they had long lived in relative isolation.
During the thirteenth century, however, European navigators began to frequent their ports, carrying news of the islanders back to Europe. Eventually Spanish ships arrived to begin baptizing the Canarians by the sword. The inhabitants fought tooth and nail, but they could not long resist European muskets and European germs.44 By the early sixteenth century, only a few of the aboriginal Canarians remained. They had little choice but to marry into the families of European settlers. It was a story that appalled Huth, who was no lover of Christianity. “This conquering of the Canary Islands by the Christian Spaniards,” he observed in one article, “is a shocking tragedy and one of the most appalling examples of the poisonous effects of Jewish-Christianity on the soul of European people.”45
Huth’s sense of this tragedy was considerably compounded by his particular concept of the Canarians. He noted with delight that some early European chroniclers had observed islanders with golden locks, rosy cheeks, and white skin. He was also fascinated by the accounts of later travelers who found Canarian mummies with blond tresses. But Huth was a very selective reader. He deliberately ignored the warning of a contemporary, the prominent American anthropologist Earnest Hooton, who had written a major book on the ancient Canarians. As Hooton pointed out, the chemical nature of the preservatives and time itself often had “a bleaching effect” upon the mummies’ hair.46 Huth, however, saw only what he wanted to see. “Separated from the disturbances of European world history,” he cooed later in print, “the ancient Nordic civilization blossomed undisturbed on the happy islands until it was destroyed.”47
Huth was anxious to study the religious practices of the ancient Canarians, certain that they would shed valuable new light on the beliefs of the primordial Aryans. First, however, he had to clinch the racial origins of the Canarians.48 For his expedition, he planned on taking a racial scientist to perform detailed measurements on both the living and the dead.49 He also intended to take an archaeologist to sift through collections of Canarian pottery shards and stone tools in hopes of detecting similarities to those of ancient Nordic peoples. This, he firmly believed, would give “numerous results.”50
Huth planned to depart for the Canary Islands in the fall of 1939, and was bubbling with enthusiasm for the venture. “We have a headstart in the source material,” he wrote to Wüst, “and now we have to obtain a headstart in the fieldwork, thereby securing the best Canary research for the Ahnenerbe.”51
IN ADDITION TO completing the arrangements for Huth’s trip, Sievers also had to find a way of salvaging an important Ahnenerbe field trip to Iceland. The leader of the trip, Dr. Bruno Schweizer, was an old classmate of Himmler.52 He was also one of the Ahnenerbe’s most senior researchers. An expert on Germany’s complex maze of dialects, Schweizer headed the Ahnenerbe’s Research Center for Germanic Studies in Detmold. There he supervised a wide range of projects—deciphering rune stones, translating ancient Germanic documents, compiling old Germanic place-names, and offering public tours of Externsteine, a site that many Nazi scholars deemed to be a primeval Germanic shrine. Even so, Schweizer had still found time to plan a major Ahnenerbe expedition to Iceland.
Nazi scholars took a peculiar view of Iceland. Many saw its rocky lands as a kind of racial icebox, a place that preserved some of the purest strains of Nordic blood and the richest legacy of ancient Germanic tradition. In reality, however, Iceland’s inhabitants traced their roots largely to Scandinavian ancestors. In A.D. 874, an adventuresome Norse chieftain, Ingólfur Arnason, had crammed his family and his retainers and thralls into large wooden ships and sailed westward to Iceland, which was inhabited at the time by a few Irish hermits. Arnason settled in what is now Reykjavík; the hermits promptly left.
Other Scandinavians soon followed, and along the coast they cut down forests, raised timber halls, slept in warm sod houses, and tended their livestock. Many followed the old pagan religion of Scandinavia, and the most stubborn of their descendants clung to these beliefs long after Iceland formally recognized Christianity in the year 1000. As a result, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the old bards of Iceland still sang and wrote of heathen gods, committing their beliefs to paper in the sagas.
Nazi scholars, however, stubbornly insisted on seeing the founders of Iceland as their German forefathers.53 As one SS researcher noted in a letter to the German Research Foundation in 1935, “Nowhere can the primeval history of our people be recognized in a more thorough and true way than in Iceland, where it has been maintained free from foreign influences on race, customs and language—due to its historical development and geographical position. The new knowledge about old Germanic traits will not be collected from the sagas, because there are already good translations of them, but rather from the study of family records, state records, and traditional customs.… Iceland gives an untainted Germanic picture, free of Roman ideas, even in places where people have embraced baptism.”54
Schweizer strongly subscribed to these beliefs. He had already journeyed three times to Iceland, and had brought back an Icelandic wife for himself—“of old farmer stock”—as well as a fine pair of Icelandic horses.55 He installed the horses in the SS nature reserve near Externsteine, where guides showed them to visitors “as living continuations of the ancient Germanic horse race.”56 Schweizer believed that this hardy Icelandic breed could be of great value to future SS colonists. They “are raised half wild and are only brought into the stalls in the winter,” he observed in a short article for the SS Kalender. “In three days, they can travel around 200 kilometers, only needing grass at the rest stops for their food.”57
Schweizer was convinced that Iceland held many other treasures of value to the SS. In 1938, he proposed a major Ahnenerbe expedition to the island. He wanted to excavate an ancient farm and a heathen temple to learn more about ancient Germanic agricultural and spiritual practices.58 He was also keen on making a detailed inventory of the old assembly places, the Things; examining the architecture of ancient Icelandic sod houses; photographing artifacts in Iceland’s national museum in Reykjavík; and gathering soil samples for pollen analysis. The latter would supply data on Iceland’s paleoclimate. Last but not least, he hoped to record old Icelandic songs in the countryside and in Reykjavík, and film the renowned ballad dances of the Faroe Islands, en route to Iceland.
Himmler lent his full support to the project.59 Like Schweizer, he regarded Iceland as an invaluable archive of ancient Germanic lore, and he relished the data that Schweizer’s research would bring.60 New details on the Things, the architecture of medieval sod houses, old agricultural tools and customs, as well as traditional Icelandic songs and dances would all greatly assist SS planners in arranging and regulating practices in future SS colonies in the East.61
Schweizer initially proposed departing around the summer solstice, and picked a team of seven young scholars—from an expert on ancient German buildings to the prominent Ahnenerbe archaeologist Herbert Jankuhn, whose research on bog bodies seems to have inspired Himmler’s justification for the arrest, imprisonment, and brutal abuse of gay men. But the entire expedition fell seriously off the rails in late February 1939, when the German embassy in Copenhagen forwarded to Berlin a series of scathing press reports. Scandinavian reporters had learned, much to their amusement, that a German expedition was heading to Iceland.62 They regarded the entire project as ludicrous, and did not hesitate to point out its faulty logic to their readers:
Today a private telegram from Berlin arrived at [the newspaper] Politiken, announcing that the head of [the secret state police], Heinrich Himmler, wants to outfit a comprehensive ‘ancestry-research expedition’ to Iceland in order to find his ancestors. A large number of genealogists have received the order to travel along in order to ‘excavate the ancestors.’ At the same time, they intend to attempt to establish the degree to which the Third Reich can be traced back to the Icelandic Vikings. We showed the telegram to the genealogist Director Th. Hauch-Fausböll, who had the following comment: ‘I must assume that there is a misunderstanding because in my opinion this is pure nonsense. No genealogical connection can be made between Germany and Iceland and the German genealogists who are to be sent will have a hard time with it. It is well known that there aren’t any church records dating back to the Vikings, so I cannot understand how they will prove the suspected relationship. Everything that we know about the Vikings regarding families and tribes is taken directly from the Icelandic sagas. Herr Himmler doesn’t really have to mount an expedition to get acquainted with this source, as it is readily available in every bookstore, presumably including in Berlin.’63
Himmler loathed being the object of ridicule. He was furious that news of the SS expedition had leaked out in such a “careless” way.64 He forbade any further work on the trip and prohibited all direct contact between the Ahnenerbe and Iceland. SS investigators immediately set to work searching for the informant, but they never found the leak.65 After Himmler’s initial rage abated, he permitted planning for the expedition to proceed and Schweizer and Sievers quietly picked up where they had left off.66 But a few months later, a second major problem surfaced. Himmler’s personal staff was unable to lay hands upon sufficient Icelandic crowns to finance this trip.67
There was no immediate solution for it, so once again, Sievers rescheduled the team’s departure—this time for the summer of 1940.
THE TOWERING STACKS of paper that crossed Sievers’s desk daily would have overwhelmed most other officials, but Sievers sorted through them effortlessly, navigating the labyrinthine channels of the Nazi government with ease. Indeed, the young administrator even found time to oversee other key projects for the SS. At the beginning of 1939, for example, Himmler had instructed the Ahnenerbe to mount a major new research project on Jews.68 Sievers was only too happy to lend a hand with the arrangements.
Rassenkunde specialists in the Reich had failed to come up with any quick, absolute way of physically identifying men and women of the “Jewish race.” Most of these researchers believed Jews to be an elusive blend of many purported races—the Hither Asiatic and the Oriental, the Hamitic and the Inner Asiatic, the Negro and the Nordic—a blend that shifted and changed from group to group, country to country.69 As a result, they found it nearly impossible to put their finger squarely on the essential physical trait—the biological bar code—that set Jewish men, women, and children infallibly apart from their neighbors.70 There seemed to be no defining measurement—such as the cephalic index they used for the supposed Nordic race—to neatly separate Jews from others.
For a man such as Himmler, who planned in one way or another to dispose of all Jews, including the elusive Mischlinge, or individuals of “mixed Jewish blood,” this was a serious problem.71 He intended to eradicate every trace of Jewish “vermin” from the Reich, so that there would be no chance of introducing Jewish blood into the new SS colonies. So he ordered his own SS research organization, the Ahnenerbe, to look into the matter. Perhaps they could devise some new index of Jewishness.
Sievers and Wüst found a thirty-one-year-old SS researcher, Dr. Walter Greite, to take charge of the project. Greite was a biologist by training.72 He had studied the pigmentation of bird feathers as a student at the University of Göttingen, but his attraction to Nazi politics greatly influenced the direction of his research. He began delving into Rassenkunde, eventually becoming a lecturer on racial matters for a teacher-training school in Frankfurt and a racial researcher for the Reich Health Office. Like many German Rassenkunde specialists (and unlike many of their superiors, including Himmler and Hitler himself), Greite looked like a walking bill-board for the mythical Nordic race, with his golden hair, blue eyes, and long, narrow face.
Sievers arranged for Greite to conduct measurements on Jewish men, women, and children who flocked each day to the Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna. The office was the purview of another efficient SS official, Adolf Eichmann.73 It was located in a newly “Aryanized” palace that had until recently belonged to the Baron Louis de Rothschild. Each morning, hundreds of desperate Jews lined up outside its black gates, quietly waiting to enter so that they might apply for the papers they needed to flee Nazi Austria. The SS guards saw to it that this was a terrifying experience, accompanied by much shouting, cursing, and brutality.74 Only after the applicants had handed over their assets and life savings could they obtain the necessary papers. Greite and his research assistants added considerably to the humiliation, requiring applicants to submit to racial measurements—a cold, dehumanizing experience.
By the summer of 1939, Greite and his team had completed measurements of nearly two thousand Jewish men, women, and children, a sufficient number for the project, and they had begun analyzing the data, making use of photographs and film footage taken at the examinations.75 Sievers—a fervent anti-Semite who had often heard his father-in-law, a physician, speak on the perils of racial mixing—awaited the results with interest.76 He knew that Himmler was counting on something of value turning up. Privately, he found this new line of research on Jews full of possibilities. Already Germany’s leading racial experts were beginning to court his favor at official receptions, hoping to ally themselves with an increasingly influential research organization.77