IN JANUARY 1929, ADOLF Hitler appointed one of his most energetic and zealous young followers, Heinrich Himmler, as the head of the Schutzstaffel or Security Squad, better known as the SS. Hitler had created the organization nearly four years earlier as an elite force of personal bodyguards to ward off attacks and foil assassination attempts, but it had never really lived up to his expectations. Party recruits with an appetite for violence tended to ignore the SS, gravitating instead to the brown-shirted Sturmabteilung, the Storm Detachment or SA, the political combat troops whose work it was to break bones in the streets. By the beginning of 1929, the SS was a pale shadow of an organization. It counted fewer than three hundred members, and its most visible public role was as a sales force, hawking advertising space in the Nazi party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter.1
Heinrich Himmler was determined to transform the motley organization into the pride of the Nazi party. During a sixteen-month stint as the deputy leader of the SS, he had already begun quietly imposing his own sense of discipline and order. Gone were the chaotic group meetings, where members merely lounged about, smoking and telling war stories and boasting about the communist heads they had smashed. Now, thanks to Himmler’s new rules, members paraded in a brisk military drill before each meeting. They sang SS songs. They listened attentively to the political speeches that consumed most of the meetings. And on Himmler’s instructions, they gathered and reported intelligence on prominent Jews, Freemasons, and leaders of rival political movements.2
The newfound sense of purpose in the SS did not pass unnoticed by Hitler. That was why he decided to put Himmler in charge. Perhaps to others in the party it seemed a modest appointment for a minor party official, but the newly minted Reichsführer-SS did not see things that way. He had important plans. He intended to transform the SS into a racial showplace of lanky, golden-haired, blue-eyed men. With this select gene pool, he intended to breed pure Aryans for the new nobility of the Third Reich. And with all the powerful resources of the SS at his command, he intended to ransack the German past, searching for the ancient lore of the Reich’s ancestors—lore that could be used to educate the new Aryan lords to assume their place in history.
FIRST, HOWEVER, HIMMLER had to build up the SS and demonstrate its worth to the party. So in 1929, he embarked on a major recruitment campaign. He drew up advertising posters and crisscrossed Germany on recruitment drives, giving speeches in village halls and town centers. He chose a striking new design for the SS logo and brought order to the SS records. He put in long hours at his desk in the Nazi party headquarters, located behind a photographic studio on Schellingstrasse in central Munich, just a few blocks from his childhood home.3 It was exactly the kind of work—meticulous, grinding organization—he excelled at. The new Reichsführer-SS was devoted to the force he was creating, and at home in Waldtrudering, just outside Munich, his new wife fretted with loneliness.
Himmler had met his future wife while walking into a hotel lobby in 1926. He nearly crashed into her, then compounded his awkwardness by drenching her with melting snow from his hat as he hastened to introduce himself. His eye settled approvingly on her glossy blond hair. Margarete Boden was the daughter of a West Prussian landowner. Eight years older than Himmler, Marga was a divorcée who owned a small clinic in Berlin specializing in homeopathic medicine and other forms of natural healing.4 A large, rather humorless woman with a noticeable facial tic, she lacked both charm and beauty and did not make friends easily. But she knew how to wrap Himmler around her finger. She was apparently the first woman ever to take a serious interest in him.
After the initial sparks flew, Himmler seems to have been unclear about what to do next. At age twenty-six, he had very little, if any, sexual experience, and he was very prudish.5 According to one party associate who knew Himmler at the time, Marga, a domineering, take-charge kind of woman, was forced to do all the seducing.6 Swept off his feet, the young party official proposed marriage in 1927, but he was deathly afraid to take his fiancee home to meet his father, who was sure to disapprove of his marriage to an older Protestant divorcée. Himmler dreaded the forthcoming battle. “I would rather clear a hall of a thousand communists singlehanded,” he confided to his brother Gebhard.7 But the family storm soon passed, and the young couple married on July 3, 1928.
They immediately took up country life. As a trained agriculturalist, Himmler had high hopes of starting a poultry farm, and with proceeds from the sale of Marga’s clinic, the couple bought a small parcel of land in Waldtrudering, on the western outskirts of Munich. Like many other young Nazis of the day, Himmler reveled in the idea of returning to the countryside and taking up the simple life of Germany’s forefathers. “The yeoman on his own acre,” he once observed rather piously, “is the backbone of the German people’s strength and character.”8
It seemed an innocent enough idea, but in Germany of the 1920s, the back-to-the-land movement was steeped in ultranationalist politics. In 1924, for example, right-wing activists had founded a society known as Artamanen, which was ostensibly devoted to sending groups of city kids to work on rural estates where they could hoe beets, dig potatoes, and bale hay while living in what resembled miniature military training camps. The founders of Artamanen enthused a great deal about the “joy in healthy work” and were fond of portraying their activities as an agricultural education for Germany’s deprived urban youth. But their real goal was far more subversive: to school a future generation of ultranationalists.9
Artamanen’s leaders and supporters dreamed of expelling all Polish migrant workers from the German countryside. Moreover, they envisioned their young members as a future fighting force of Wehrbauern, or “defense farmers,” that could be mobilized to guard Germany’s eastern border from Slavic attacks.10 To prepare the students for this future work, they gave classes on the importance of racial purity and the Nordic race. They also harped at length on the corrupting influence of cosmopolitan urbanism and city-dwelling Jews, thereby incubating a new generation of virulent anti-Semites. They were very persuasive. By 1927, nearly 80 percent of the society’s members had joined the Nazi party.11
Himmler had followed the society’s activities closely since his early days as a Nazi party organizer. He was particularly impressed by one of Artamanen’s notable supporters, Richard Walther Darré. Darré was an agriculturalist by training, a specialist in the genetics of animal breeding, and in 1929, he had published a book entitled Das Bauerntum als Lebensquell der Nordischen Rasse, or “Farming as a Source of Life for the Nordic Race,” which received glowing reviews in Nazi circles.12 Darré was convinced that the road to a stronger Germany lay in turning back the clock and returning to the country’s ancient agricultural roots. The old German farming traditions, he observed, had refined and biologically honed the Nordic race. In times past, each farmer had picked just one son—the strongest, toughest, and most courageous—to inherit his land.13 As a result, only the very fittest had farmed the fields over generations, creating a superior human bloodline, or so Darré liked to think.
Germany had eventually abandoned this tradition of land ownership, however, swayed by the fervor of the French Revolution and other foreign movements. Its rulers had written new inheritance laws that permitted estate owners to divide their land equitably among all their heirs.14 This, Darré claimed, imperiled the Nordic race, undoing all the good of generations of selective breeding. If Germany wished to grow strong once again, he claimed, it had to return to its agricultural traditions. And it had to take serious measures to restore racial purity to the Nordic race. Darré, the animal breeder, did not shy away from spelling out these measures. Germany, he explained, had to exterminate the sick and impure in human society.15 And it had to encourage members of the Nordic race to use scientific knowledge to select their mates and produce the best human stock.16
Himmler found these ideas immensely appealing. His own plan to return back to the land, however, was a dismal failure. The hens on his poultry farm produced few eggs, creating financial problems for the young couple. As Marga confided in one letter to her husband in 1929, “I worry so much about what we’re going to live on and how we’re going to save for Whitsun [the seventh Sunday after Easter]. Something’s always going wrong.”17 The truth was that Himmler no longer cared much for mucking about on the farm himself. Instead he dreamed of applying Darré’s ideas to others, particularly in the breeding of SS men.
IN THE EARLY 1920s, the racial writer Hans F. K. Günther had attempted to estimate just how many Germans belonged to the Nordic race, as he had defined it. He pored over anthropological studies on height and head shape, hair color and skin hue of his fellow Germans, and published the results of this study in 1925. In Günther’s opinion, just 50 to 55 percent of Germans possessed any trace of Nordic blood, a rather bleak situation in his view.18 In later years, he refined this statistic further. Only 6 to 8 percent of Germans, he claimed, were Nordic purebreds, while another 45 to 50 percent traced part of their lineage to Nordic ancestors. The remaining Germans were members of inferior races.19
By the end of 1931, the SS had swollen in size, with ten thousand members and stacks of new applications flooding in daily. To Himmler, the time seemed ripe to begin transforming the force into a racial elite by accepting only young males of Nordic blood. To select these individuals in a way that appeared scientific, Himmler created a new bureaucracy in the SS. This came to be known as the Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS, the Race and Settlement Office of the SS, or simply RuSHA. The head of the new department was none other than Richard Walther Darré.
RuSHA advisors developed a racial grading system and approached their work, as Himmler later noted, “like a nursery gardener trying to reproduce a good old strain which has been adulterated and debased; we started from the principles of plant selection and then proceeded quite unashamedly to weed out the men whom we did not think we could use for the buildup of the SS.”20 The examiners required applicants to take a medical examination and submit both a detailed genealogy chart and a set of photographs of themselves. In the SS offices in Munich, the examiners pored over the photographs, searching for supposed Nordic traits—long head, narrow face, flat forehead, narrow nose, angular chin, thin lips, tall slender body, blue eyes, fair hair. They rated the bodies of the applicants on a scale of one to nine, then graded them on a five-point scale from “pure Nordic” to “suspected non-European blood components.”21 They also scanned through the applicants’ family medical histories, searching for congenital illness. Finally they arrived at a decision. A green card meant “SS suited”; red marked rejection.22
The examiners were well aware that the Reichsführer-SS was not exactly green-card material, with his small, pigeon-chested body, round face, sallow skin, dark hair, and receding chin. Indeed, one racial advisor noted with detachment after the war that Himmler was “an unassimilated half-breed and unfit for the SS.”23 But very few people dared say such things to their leader’s face. At a social event one evening, however, the wife of a high-ranking SS officer, Dr. Werner Best, broached the problem with Himmler. She observed that the Nazi party would instantly lose its entire leadership—“The Führer, you Herr Himmler, Dr. Goebbels …”—if the principles of racial selection were strictly applied.24 Himmler was not the least disturbed by this remark, however. He brushed off the criticism, replying that while he did not appear Nordic, he certainly possessed a Nordic brain.
Those accepted into the SS were encouraged to think of themselves as a new genetic aristocracy. While most Germans of the day traveled on the country’s system of urban trains, for example, a fleet of drivers in private cars chauffeured SS officers around to their appointments. And Himmler made certain that SS men looked elegant. The German firm Hugo Boss supplied SS uniforms.25 And in contrast to the scruffy brown uniforms of the SA, Himmler’s men were decked out impressively in black with silver collar flashes. On their hats, they wore a silver death’s-head, an ominous touch that supposedly symbolized “duty until death.”26 Such sartorial splendor clearly served a dual purpose. It intimidated victims and it added to the men’s sexual appeal, boosting the chances of “success with the girls,” as Himmler once remarked to a potential recruit.27
Himmler, after all, was particularly keen on making his men as attractive as possible to women, but like any careful breeder, he did not want his prize stock to mate with just any partner. Potential wives had to undergo racial screening themselves after December 21, 1931, submitting medical reports, genealogy charts, and photographs to RuSHA examiners.28 If the examiners found fault with the racial quality of a woman, Himmler would deny his permission for the couple to marry. Only in this way, Himmler believed, could the SS breed a pure Nordic nobility: Germany’s future depended on this. “Should we succeed in establishing this Nordic race again from and around Germany,” he later observed in a speech to SS leaders, “and inducing them to become farmers and from this seedbed produce a race of 200 million, then the world will belong to us.”29
IT WAS ONE thing to breed a handsome-looking new master race. However, it was quite another to teach this valuable Aryan stock to think like the masters of old and to wean them away from the softness and depravity of modern German cities. Himmler dreamed of turning back the clock, transforming Germany from a heavily industrialized nation into a largely agricultural one. In particular, he yearned to settle the SS back on the land in farm colonies. With each passing generation, however, Germans had forgotten more and more of the old peasant ways that had once made them strong, and few historical records remained of the ancient principles, ideas, and beliefs that once illuminated the lives of Germany’s ancient forefathers.
Still, Himmler was not without hope. Ever since he was a boy combing musty ruins and grassy battlefields for old coins and broken pots with his father, he had seen how archaeology and other related sciences could shed light on vanished time. If SS researchers could recapture the minute details of primeval Aryan life, if they could peer into shrouded time to recover the lost thoughts and ideals and deeds of the ancient Nordic conquerors, then Himmler would have the exact blueprint he needed to indoctrinate the young men of the SS. Such men, he truly believed, would be unstoppable.
In the summer of 1932, Nazi candidates won 230 seats in the parliamentary election, the largest number held by any of the parties. Six months later, the aging German president Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler as the new chancellor, ushering the Nazi party into power, and on February 28, 1933, the Nazi leader managed to manipulate von Hindenburg into declaring a state of emergency in Germany, suspending all guarantees of civil liberties. It was a moment Himmler had been preparing for. The SS Sicherheitsdienst, or Security Service, widely known as the SD, had created a card index of the party’s political opponents, and as the newly appointed police chief of Munich, Himmler began ordering the arrest of those he deemed the greatest threats: journalists, labor organizers, Jewish leaders, communists, socialists. He then saw to it that many were incarcerated in a new prison facility: Dachau concentration camp.30
Hitler greatly approved of these strongarm tactics and the plans for a network of concentration camps. The German leader needed someone ruthless, capable, and trustworthy to carry out the party’s dirty work, and Himmler seemed the most logical candidate. The young Bavarian was bright, well organized, and most important of all, he worshipped Hitler. On occasion, he had described the German leader to others as “the greatest brain of all time.”31 Hitler, as it happened, reveled in such adulation. So over the next thirteen months, he permitted the young SS chief to seize control of the political police of all German states. These Himmler ruled from Berlin.
Tucked away in his new headquarters, surrounded by tall blond men in black and silver and doted upon by a pool of secretaries with plaited hair and soft Bavarian accents, Himmler spent his days poring over reports, fretting over security arrangements for Hitler, and presiding over the minute details of the rapidly burgeoning system of concentration camps. But despite all the endless paperwork and phone calls and meetings, Himmler took time to draw up plans for educating and indoctrinating the new SS elite in the Nazi version of history. He called these plans the “education offensive” and put RuSHA, which was responsible for all ideological questions in the SS, in charge.32
The resulting offensive incorporated Himmler’s pet theories on the German past, which closely mirrored those of Hitler, except in one key area. In speeches and private remarks, Hitler tended to avoid all mention of the early Germanic tribes. The ancient Romans had considered these tribes barbarians, and Hitler himself regarded them as an embarrassment. Indeed, he had developed a rather bizarre theory to account for their simple style of life in the northern European forests. He blamed the climate. The Aryan spirit, he claimed, required a sunnier land in which to flourish. Northern Europe was simply too foul and damp for the early germination of the Aryan genius.33
In Hitler’s view, the Aryans began to achieve their full potential only when they reached the Mediterranean. “It was in Greece and Italy,” he explained loftily to his dinner guests one night, “that the Germanic spirit found the first terrain favorable to its blossoming.”34 And this bizarre conviction deeply colored Hitler’s perceptions of archaeology. He was fascinated by classical Rome and Greece and bored to tears by digs at home. “People make a tremendous fuss about the excavations carried out in districts inhabited by our forebears of the pre-Christian era,” he declared. “I am afraid that I cannot share their enthusiasm, for I cannot help remembering that, while our ancestors were making these vessels of stone and clay, over which our archaeologists rave, the Greeks had already built an Acropolis.”35
Himmler was well aware of these views, but he did not share them. He was besotted by old accounts of the fierceness and valor of the Germanic tribes. And he defined these tribes in a loose way to include any who had spoken one of the Germanic languages—Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faeroese, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, Gothic, and, of course, English.36 He wanted SS educators to concentrate their energies on these tribes. He could not ignore the “Nordic” civilizations of Greece and Rome that Hitler so loved, but it was his own interpretation of the past that became the nucleus of his SS “education offensive.”
The frontline troops in the battle were the Schulungsleiter, or school leaders—young, racially acceptable men between the ages of twenty-four and forty-five. To ensure that these educators received a thorough grounding themselves in the party line, RuSHA sent them to a political boot camp. Graduates were then assigned to an SS company, where they taught weekly classes and continually impressed upon the men the Nazi point of view.37 The school leaders posted photographs of Nordic-looking men and women in their offices, and on direct orders from Darré, they gave particular emphasis to “German early history” in their work.38
The classes and conversations were only the first salvo, however. The Nazi version of the past had to be underscored by something tangible and real. So RuSHA officials dispatched junior SS officers to Berlin’s famous Museum for Pre and Early History, which lay next door to Himmler’s headquarters. The museum possessed a rich collection of ancient German weapons, ceramics, and jewels, as well as the famous gold that Heinrich Schliemann unearthed at Troy, and museum officials took very good care of the SS officers. On at least one occasion, director Wilhelm Unverzagt gave a personal lecture to the officers, then led a guided tour of the exhibits.39 RuSHA officials expected the school leaders to arrange similar outings for the enlisted men. One SS teacher in Munich, for example, planned a series of such events for February 1937—“a celebration hour (theme: Germany), a museum visit and a hike to an archaeological excavation with a comradely evening.”40
To assist the school leaders, RuSHA developed elaborate slide shows on the origins of the Nordic race and the ingenuity of primeval Germanic farmers and warriors, complete with illustrated booklets apparently edited by Himmler himself.41 Each month, the department sent school leaders SS-Leitheft, a training guide whose articles were to be read aloud at company meetings on Himmler’s express orders.42 SS-Leitheft was one of the more bizarre creations of the SS. It blended dime-store pulp, hard-core political doctrine, photos of pretty young blond Fräulein in revealing swimsuits and low-cut dirndls, quotations from Mein Kampf, and a kind of Dear Abby column offering tips to SS men for picking suitably Aryan brides.43 Sprinkled heavily among these features were historical articles on a vast range of subjects—the migrations of the early Germanic tribes, the ancient sayings of the Aryans, the sagas of the Norse bards, the wooden ships of the Vikings, the ancient sun worship of the Aryans.
The articles were short and pithy, and there was no missing the authors’ intent. “The more we know our ancestors,” noted one writer brightly, “the more proudly we can call on them.…”44
FOR HIS SENIOR officers, Himmler planned a more exclusive education. In 1933, soon after the Nazi seizure of power, Himmler began drawing up plans for a new “Nordic academy,” a cross between a monastic retreat and a finishing school for the upper echelons of the SS.45 He intended, as one newspaper reporter pointed out, to create a place “of quiet contemplation and intellectual stimulation for the leading accountable men of the Fatherland.”46 Himmler’s academy would not only be physically impressive, but it would also be a rather magical place—an old castle intimately linked with a potent German legend or myth. But where to find such a spot?
To narrow down the range of possibilities, he called upon the assistance of a new confidant. This was sixty-seven-year-old Karl-Maria Wiligut, a grizzled former colonel in the Austrian Imperial Army. Wiligut was something of a mystic in ultranationalist circles. He traced his pedigree back to the Norse god Thor and claimed as an ancestor Arminius, a German tribal chief who slaughtered three Roman legions near Teutoberg Forest in A.D. 9. His family, he sometimes explained, had guarded the sacred knowledge of the old German tribes for millennia. “My grandfather K. Wiligut taught me the ancient rune studies of our family,” he noted on one official SS record. “My father entrusted our family history to me when I turned twenty-four.”47
Wiligut’s real biography was somewhat less colorful. Born in Vienna in 1866, the son of a mentally deranged army officer, he had seen active service on both the Russian and the Italian fronts during the First World War.48 When peace was negotiated, he joined one of the right-wing paramilitary organizations in Austria. By then, he had become a violent, unpredictable alcoholic.49 He carried a loaded revolver about with him, and frequently beat and threatened to kill his wife.50 His behavior toward their two young daughters was equally worrying. His sister-in-law confided to a local government official that “he kisses the children so often to the point of senselessness that one must consider sexual undertones. As a result his wife has locked the children’s doors.”51
Eventually, Wiligut’s wife mustered her courage and committed her husband to a mental hospital in Salzburg. Physicians there described his condition as a “psychosis” and declared that he was “not in the position to care for himself.”52 Over the next two years at the hospital, he lived up to their assessment. He boasted that he alone had prevented a communist takeover in Germany after the war, and informed his fellow inmates that the Ku Klux Klan was preparing to rescue him from the asylum. Most notably, however, he obsessively pocketed pebbles and stones from a nearby gravel pit. He washed and polished them, arranging nearly one thousand on virtually every surface in his hospital room. “He sees round, flat pebbles as amulets and parts of grave sites,” observed one physician in his medical history. “A longish stone is a phallus, another stone is part of a throne seat, and another still is an eagle with a snake, symbolic of the fight between light and darkness, and, in a figurative sense, between life and death.”53 Wiligut boasted to his fellow inmates that he could sell the collection for 60,000 marks.
The hospital released him in 1927 under the care of a guardian. By then, Wiligut was eager to share his revelations with the rest of the world. Over the next six years, he became a savant to the more gullible ultranationalists in Germany. With a new name, Weisthor, meaning Wise Thor, in reference to the Norse god, he claimed to channel the ancient knowledge of his forebears, sometimes by entering seizurelike trances, on other occasions by reciting a collection of primeval sayings he claimed to have received from his ancestors. His devoted followers treasured every word. They regarded him as a living encyclopedia of the sacred traditions of the Germanic tribes as far back as creation.54
Himmler met Wiligut for the first time in 1933 at a conference of the Nordic Society. He was greatly impressed by the old soldier and at some point he asked for Wiligut’s help in locating a suitable castle for the new Nordic academy. Himmler had read a popular romantic poem entitled “At the Birch Tree,” which was based on an old German prophecy of a mighty battle that would one day pit the West against East, turning the Rhine red with blood.55 The legendary battleground sounded to Himmler like an ideal spot for an SS stronghold. But the prophecy supplied few clues to its location. Wiligut promised his assistance.
He arrived one day in Himmler’s office with a stack of old books and large manuscripts bound in pig leather, their pages yellowed and greasestained.56 By combing such sources, or perhaps by reciting the sayings taught by his father, he had discovered, he announced, that the prophesied battle would take place in the twentieth century. Moreover he had pinpointed its location. Himmler was delighted by this news, proudly announcing to his chief of staff, “We know, we have learned now where the battle will be—in Westphalia and, more precisely still, near the old road of the German heroes that leads from Paderborn via Soest in a westerly direction.”57 Conveniently, this lay close to the old battlefield where the Germanic chieftain Arminius and his troops had slaughtered invading Roman legions—sacred ground for many German ultranationalists.58 So Himmler set out to find to find an old fortress in the region suitable for conversion into an SS academy.
In early November 1933, Himmler paid a visit to Wewelsburg, a seventeenth-century stone keep situated not far from Paderborn. The castle’s heavy, brooding walls loomed over the rolling green Westphalian countryside, a picturesque land of little ravines and forests, small dairy farms and old stone houses. Himmler liked what he saw of the local farmers and their families. He believed them to be blessed with much “original German” blood.59 He also admired the architecture of the old castle: he considered himself something of a connoisseur in such matters, and he noticed that Wewelsburg possessed an unusual north-south orientation and a triangular-shaped footprint that he deemed a rarity.60 He immediately decided to lease the castle for the SS. Before long, ominous notices appeared on the sides of buildings in the sleepy little village that lay next to the fortress. They read: “Jew, you have been recognized.”61
Impressed by his new advisor, Himmler brought Wiligut into the SS. He promoted him first to the rank of SS-Standartenführer and later to SS-Brigadeführer. He also gave him an office in RuSHA and a private villa in Berlin. Wiligut traveled back and forth to Wewelsburg to offer his unique brand of channeling and ancestral wisdom to Hermann Bartels, the architect assigned to transform the stately old castle into a sprawling new SS complex.62 Bartels had his work cut out for him. Himmler’s plans for the complex kept evolving into something ever grander and more magnificent. So they required a succession of designs—each more complex than the last. To see them through, Himmler eventually ordered the construction of a special concentration camp nearby to supply sufficient quantities of slave labor.63
As the construction proceeded, runic designs and strange bits of old lore began to pop up all over the castle. One of the chambers, for example, was renovated and renamed the Grail Room. The castle’s staff outfitted it with a large rock crystal displayed on a wooden pedestal and illuminated from below with electrical lights.64 This strange display was intended to represent the Holy Grail. One of Wiligut’s associates, Otto Rahn, had studied medieval legends of the grail. He believed these stories to be of Aryan origin and concluded that the grail was a magical “stone of light” that had fallen from the diadem of an ancient sun god. All those who looked upon the stone would live forever.65
Among the other renovations, Himmler wanted a private museum at Wewelsburg—a kind of ancestor room for his senior officers. He found an eager young SS archaeologist and artist, Wilhelm Jordan, to take charge.66 Jordan was a tall, dark-blond beanpole, a former SA man who swiftly fell into the spirit of Wewelsburg. He conducted a series of excavations in the countryside around the castle, digging ancient grave mounds and old village sites and collecting hundreds of artifacts, from Germanic urns and human skulls to iron knives, Roman coins, and Bronze Age needles. In his spare time, Jordan prospected local cliffs and construction sites for fossils of ancient sea life, designed dioramas, and pieced together ancient pots from shattered shards. To round out the Wewelsburg collection, he purchased some spectacular finds, including the complete fossil of an ancient marine reptile, a three-meter-long ichthyosaur.
The museum was located in the castle’s western wing, down a few stone stairs from the courtyard. Upon entering, visitors were greeted by the sight of sleek steel-and-glass showcases and cabinets brimming with ancient Germanic artifacts. Several splendid dioramas decorated the walls. Perhaps the most important of these portrayed the simple bucolic life of a Germanic tribal family during the Roman era. For this, Jordan lovingly crafted a miniature German farmhouse complete with straw roof, similar in style to one excavated “in Oerlinghausen near Detmold.”67 For the farmyard, he created miniature models of men and women in rustic clothes and a small furnace for smelting iron ore. In the green fields beyond, tiny horses and sheep grazed contentedly on the grasses.
The diorama was clearly intended as a glimpse of paradise lost for those who visited the museum, an idyll of ancient Germanic simplicity. And in a “Nordic academy” devoted to contemplation and thought, it served as a template for an Aryan future that Himmler fondly envisioned for the Reich.
IF THE “EDUCATION OFFENSIVE” was truly to succeed, however, it needed a well-stocked arsenal of new ideological weapons. To re-create the lost world of the Nordic race, to capture primordial ways of thinking and beliefs, the SS had to push the boundaries of prehistoric research. Symbol experts had to find and decode the earliest written messages of the Nordic race. Experts in the ancient sagas and legends had to reconstruct the lost history and religion of the Aryans. Musicologists had to restore their music. Archaeologists had to dig their tombs and study their ancient treasures. Botanists had to rebreed their ancient seeds. In other words, the SS required an entire institute of elite researchers dedicated to reconstructing the lost golden age of the ancient Nordic past.
On July 1, 1935, in a spacious, sunlit office in the SS headquarters in Berlin, Himmler convened a meeting to discuss the new organization. Around the table sat five racial experts representing the interests of Darré, who had recently added the post of Reich minister for nutrition and agriculture to his duties as the head of RuSHA. Darré shared Himmler’s enthusiasm for the new research institute. And the two men had agreed on inviting another party to the table, an elfin-looking scholar who spoke with a strong Dutch accent—Dr. Herman Wirth, one of the most famous prehistorians in all of Germany.
Those in attendance discussed at considerable length the structure of the organization, and at the end of their deliberations they agreed to found a brain trust that would, in effect, form a new department in RuSHA.68 This organization was to be called “Deutsches Ahnenerbe” Studienge-sellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte, or “German Ancestral Heritage,” the Society for the Study of the History of Primeval Ideas—a hopeless mouthful that soon came to be shortened to the Ahnenerbe. Wirth assumed the position of president. Himmler, however, retained much power for himself, taking the title of superintendent and assuming control of the organization’s board of trustees. The formally stated goal of the Ahnenerbe was “to promote the science of ancient intellectual history.”69