A VISITOR ON OFFICIAL business in the late fall of 1935 would have found the new offices of the Ahnenerbe tucked away on one of the oldest streets in the most historic part of all Berlin. Brüderstrasse, as the street was known, dated back to the thirteenth century. It curved along a small island in the Spree, through a neighborhood that reminded some Berliners of old Amsterdam—what with its narrow four-story houses lining the waterfront and its working boats plying the river.1 But Brüderstrasse was a particularly German street. At its northern end rose a stately old castle, the Schloss, where the electors of Brandenburg and the kings of Prussia had ruled in gilded majesty for nearly five hundred years.2 And along Brüderstrasse’s two-block length stood several famous homes, including Nicolai House, where publisher Friedrich Nicolai entertained Georg Hegel and other leading German intellectuals in the late eighteenth century.
The Ahnenerbe offices lay in the middle of Brüderstrasse, at number 29/30. They occupied two floors in a corner building owned by a Berlin department store magnate, Rudolf Herzog.3 The floors were drafty and cold in the winter and the electrical wiring left a good deal to be desired. But the rent was modest and the space was large enough to accommodate the Ahnenerbe’s staff of seven.4 Inside, the offices were furnished with gleaming black Underwood typewriters and rows of filing cabinets, but there the similarity to most other offices in Berlin ended. Along the walls hung dozens of large framed photographs of strange symbols carved upon wooden staves. In the atelier, staff members consulted the plaster casts of ancient rune stones.
Nearly everyone who worked for the Ahnenerbe in late 1935 was involved, one way or another, in what the new Ahnenerbe president Herman Wirth fondly called script and symbol studies. At his behest, they took photographs of gravestones and church doors and the stenciled paintings that ornamented aging farmhouses. They collected baking molds, ceramic candleholders, and decorative wreaths, anything, in fact, that seemed to hold some ancient secret symbol or meaning. They wrote to museums scattered across Europe and the United States, offering to buy replicas of bone spoons, stone crosses, Mesopotamian cylinder seals, and carved boulders.5 A young Finnish scholar, Yrjö von Grönhagen, who was studying ancient religious rituals for the Ahnenerbe, was pressed into gathering examples of traditional Finnish wooden calendars, carved with symbols.6 All this immense effort was ostensibly devoted to preparing lectures and exhibitions for SS men and the staff of Darré’s Ministry of Nutrition and Agriculture.7 But in Wirth’s mind, it served just one purpose: to further popularize his own peculiar ideas about the past.8
Wirth had an amazing effect on people. He was affable, energetic, enormously well read, and regarded by all as charming. He could quote long Sanskrit hymns from memory and discourse for hours about the meaning of spirit masks among the Yupik in Alaska or the inscriptions on remote dolmens in Ireland, and do so in such an engaging way that his listeners were convinced they had just glimpsed the heart of a mystery.9 To his followers, Wirth seemed to combine enormous erudition with uncanny powers of perception. “Herman Wirth,” noted one admirer, “is the artist who makes stones speak, he is the psychologist who feels hearts beating across the millenniums, he is the Homo religiosus who senses the deep eternal bonds of mind and spirit running through the whole of the human race.”10 Even his enemies could hardly find it in their hearts to dislike him.11
At the age of fifty in 1935, Wirth was at the peak of his fame. He was one of the most controversial prehistorians in all of Germany and he believed he was on the verge of a momentous discovery. He was convinced he had found an ancient holy script invented by a lost Nordic civilization in the North Atlantic many thousands of years ago. It was, he claimed, the world’s earliest writing. He also believed that he could decipher this mysterious script, thereby unlocking the mysteries of ancient Aryan religion. And he was convinced that if he could recover the meaning of these primeval sacred texts, he could reawaken Germany from its unhappy slumber and restore it to greatness again.
Entering the offices of Herman Wirth in the late fall of 1935 was to enter a world of chaos and confusion, a world where reason and rational argument had given way to wishful thinking, a world where scholarship had been abandoned for fantasy and dreams of glory. It was a realm that Wirth had inhabited for most of his scholarly career.
IN ALL LIKELIHOOD, Himmler first met Wirth sometime in the late spring or early summer of 1934, at the home of Johann and Gesine von Leers.12 The von Leers were prominent in Nazi circles and took a keen interest in all things Aryan. Johann worked as a propagandist for the Nazi party, penning vicious anti-Semitic attacks in books with titles like Jews Look at You, as well as more theoretical writings on the Nordic race and German agriculture.13 Gesine was inclined more toward the occult. She believed she was the reincarnation of an ancient German priestess, and frequently donned Bronze Age-style jewelry for evenings she hosted among similarly minded friends.14
Gesine had known and admired Wirth for years, and she had invited him to her home to discuss the research of Karl-Maria Wiligut, another of her personal mentors. She had also arranged for Himmler and Darré to attend. At first, Wirth stubbornly declined to go. He thought Wiligut an out-right charlatan, and he seems to have feared him as a rival for the attention of Himmler and Darré.15 But Darré insisted that Wirth come. He called the scholar up personally, offering to send around his private car, and so mollified was Wirth by this mark of favor that he agreed to put in an appearance.
Wirth was in his element on such occasions, and he made a fine impression on Himmler. He was a diminutive man, standing just five feet four inches tall, but he possessed thick locks of blond hair, sparkling blue eyes, and a finely chiseled handsomeness, all of which helped him considerably in passing the racial test that Himmler silently administered to everyone he met.16 Wirth, moreover, was a polished showman who knew how to read and take command of an audience. It would not have taken him long to size up Himmler’s interests.
The Reichsführer-SS, like many other prominent Nazis, had begun casting about privately for a system of spiritual beliefs that could eventually take the place of Catholicism and Protestantism in the Reich.17 He found Christian doctrine immensely troublesome: It traced its origins to the deserts of the Middle East, rather than to forests of northern Europe. It presented the tribes of Israel, not the tribes of Germania, as the chosen people. It described Christ as a Jew. And it advocated charity, compassion for the weak, the brotherhood of men, and the equality of all in the eyes of God. All this, Himmler found abhorrent. He had attended Mass faithfully from childhood until his early twenties, but he had lost his faith at about the same time that he joined the Nazi party.18 And since then, he had openly avowed Nazism as his new creed. “Our business,” he explained to the readers of the party newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, “is to spread the knowledge of race in the life of our Völk and to impress it upon the hearts and heads of all, down to the very youngest, as our German gospel.”19
But Nazism needed a state religion. And it needed a god, or perhaps several gods, as well as suitable rituals to take the place of Mass and other Christian services. Himmler was strongly inclined to borrow these rituals, and he saw no better place to look for them than in the history of Germany’s ancestors—the Germanic tribes and their Aryan forebears. He believed that the old pagan gods would be capable of weaning SS men from their Christian faiths. Indeed, as he later confided to his personal physician, he intended to make every SS-Mann drop his traditional church affiliation. “After the war,” he explained, “the old Germanic gods will be restored.”20
The trouble was that scholars knew very little about these old gods. Germany’s tribes had left few written records of their sacred beliefs and practices before they converted to Christianity, and their Roman neighbors, who possessed a much earlier written tradition, took scant interest in the old Germanic religion. To recover its beliefs, Himmler realized that he needed to find new sources of information. Herman Wirth claimed to possess a rich trove of new details. The scholar believed he had discovered ancient sacred texts of the Nordic race, and through science, he intended to decipher them.
Wirth, moreover, was happy to yoke his research to the driving ambitions of the Nazis. Science, he believed, served a higher master than objectivity or truth. “The time is now past,” he once explained to a German audience, “when science believed its task was to search for the truth, such as it is. Now the task of science is to proceed with its prophecy, to awaken. Like the morning dawn, it will light a new day.”21
WIRTH HAD GRAVITATED naturally toward Nazi politics. Born in the Netherlands on May 6, 1885, he came from a background remarkably similar to that of Himmler. Wirth’s German father was a schoolteacher and university lecturer in Utrecht, and he took great pride in his Teutonic ancestry.22 At home, he drummed a love of German culture, history, and language into his children: Herman proved a particularly adept student. He pursued his father’s interests, taking Germanic studies, philology, history, and music theory at the university in Utrecht, before moving to the University of Leipzig. There Wirth absorbed the extreme German nationalism that permeated many of the classrooms.
He came to loathe what he saw as the corrosive influence of cosmopolitan urbanism. He believed such thinking was responsible for the destruction of age-old German and Dutch folk culture—a priceless repository, in his opinion, of ancient Nordic thought.23 In his Ph.D. dissertation, he lamented the disappearance of traditional folk songs in the northern Netherlands—portals, he believed, into the very soul of the ancient Nordic race.24
In 1909, Wirth landed a position as a lecturer in Dutch philology at the University of Berlin, but he craved a larger audience for his emerging ideas on folk music and the Nordic race. He turned performer, combining concerts of early Dutch music with lectures and magic-lantern shows. For these events, he dressed the part of a medieval musician, donning a flowing green velvet jacket. His fetching young lute player, Margarethe Schmitt, the daughter of a prominent German landscape painter, turned up at concerts in the robes of a fairy-tale princess, complete with a golden band in her hair.25 She worshipped Wirth and complained loudly when anyone dared to criticize him, or refused to recognize him, as one friend observed, “as the coming messiah.”26 The two eventually married.
When the First World War began in August 1914, Wirth left his university job and enlisted in the army of his adopted homeland. Rather than sending the Dutch scholar to the front, however, German authorities dispatched him to a civilian post in occupied Belgium. While working in Ghent, Wirth became enamored of the Flemish independence movement, raising funds in Germany on its behalf. When the full extent of his political activism came to light, he was relieved of his post.27
Disillusioned by the war, he concluded in the early 1920s that all Western civilization was teetering on the verge of collapse.28 The only hope for the future, as he saw it, lay in recovering the truths of the past. And it was at this time, while traveling through the northern Dutch province of Friesland, that he saw something that changed his life. On the gables of many old, neatly painted Frisian farmhouses, inhabitants displayed small wooden folk sculptures consisting of an assortment of carved shapes—curlicues, crescents, crosses, shamrocks, swan necks, stars, hearts, diamonds, and crowns.29 To most passersby, they seemed little more than folk art, but Wirth was forever looking with reckless enthusiasm for hidden, secret meanings in the world around him. During his studies of Dutch folk music, he had glimpsed what he thought was the intellectual spirit of the ancient Nordic race. Now in the Frisian countryside, he thought he saw further remnants of a primeval Nordic civilization.
This sparked a great leap of logic. He concluded that the farmers’ wooden carvings of hearts and diamonds and crowns were symbols from an ancient Aryan system of writing—a type of northern hieroglyphs.30 Their significance, he concluded, had been all but lost to time. Not even the folk artists of the Frisian countryside realized anymore what their carvings truly meant. More bizarrely still, he inferred that the different shapes were remnants of the earliest writing system in the world and were therefore the mother of all scripts, from the Egyptian hieroglyphs to the Phoenician alphabet.31
These ideas flouted Western science and scholarship. For more than a century, linguists had examined ancient stone inscriptions from around the world, deciphering scripts and delving into the origins of writing. By the 1930s, they had made substantial progress, tracing the earliest appearance of the written word to one of two regions in the world: ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia. Inscriptions in both places, noted the editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1938, went back to “an extremely early date; it is at present uncertain which is the earlier, but both show, before 3500 B.C. and possibly much earlier, a complete, organized system of writing which implies many centuries of development behind it.”32
By comparison, the inhabitants of northern Europe were late bloomers when it came to writing. They had developed letters for a system of writing known today as the runes.33 The runes were a type of script that blended letters of the Roman alphabet with several new inventions, and most experts in the 1930s agreed that the earliest runes had appeared around A.D. 250.34 None of this, however, sat very well with Wirth and other nationalist scholars. If Nordic men and women were truly superior to all others, then it stood to reason that they had founded the world’s first civilization in their ancient boreal homeland. It also stood to reason that they had invented the art of writing there. And since Nordic men and women were, in Wirth’s opinion, the world’s “intellectual sourdough starter,” they had to have carried their writing system with them on their great migrations to Africa and Asia, thereby passing on the idea of writing to others, who devised cuneiform scripts, hieroglyphs, and the alphabet.35
Researchers had failed, however, to detect any proof of a primeval Nordic civilization in the north, one predating ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. They had uncovered no ancient cities, no pyramids, no ziggurats of the north. “What are the facts?” asked prominent British scientist Julian Huxley in his famous book, We Europeans, in 1935. “The fundamental discoveries on which civilization is built are the art of writing, agriculture, the wheel and building in stone. All these appear to have originated in the near East, among peoples who by no stretch of imagination could be called Nordic.”36
So, in the absence of evidence, Wirth let his vivid imagination run loose. Perhaps, he imagined, the Nordic race had evolved in an arctic homeland some two million years ago, then founded a civilization on a lost continent in the North Atlantic.37 Perhaps strong Nordic women, who possessed “all-seeing capabilities,” had ruled this primeval empire as a matriarchy for thousands of years, until a great cataclysm drowned their lands, sending survivors fleeing to northern Europe and North America.38 And wasn’t it just possible that this splendid Nordic homeland was the lost Atlantis of legend?39
WIRTH REALIZED THAT other scholars would be loath to toss away decades of scholarship in favor of ideas that rudely challenged the entire foundations of world history. He needed evidence to anchor his ideas to earth. To pursue the matter, he moved his young family—Margarethe and three children—to Marburg, which had a good library and a university willing to give him a teaching position. Three years later, in 1925, he took out a membership in the Nazi party, which he soon allowed to lapse, and began collecting a coterie of attentive young assistants—artistic, idealistic young men fascinated by Wirth’s learned patter, his boundless enthusiasm, his knowledge of the ancient world, and his quest to revive ancient Nordic religion and culture.40 They modeled themselves after him, dressing in short pants as he often did, and addressed him affectionately as dear father and Margarethe as dear mother.41
Wirth was in his element. He preached his own brand of clean living to his followers—he had given up meat and eschewed tobacco—and praised country living, far from the foul, polluting influences of the city.42 A prophet of the past, he scorned universities and dreamed of founding a utopian community rather like the Artamanen, where young student scientists and farmers could live together and support themselves on their produce.43 He frequently invited his young disciples to stay for dinner, and it was not unusual for fifteen people to crowd around the family table.44 The meals could be strange and unpredictable. On one recorded occasion, Wirth’s wife arrived at the table with a medieval-looking golden band in her hair and spent the entire meal in silence, while Wirth claimed to read her thoughts by means of telepathic communication. He also announced to his startled guests that she possessed clairvoyant abilities, seeing things that others could not.45
In private, Wirth rifled through the scientific literature, determined to prove that the Nordic race had evolved in the Arctic. He was delighted to learn, for example, that a Danish geological expedition had discovered fossil plants—most likely leaves of grapelike vines and oaklike trees—in Greenland’s northern fjords. The finds were proof, he claimed, that the remotest parts of the Arctic had once been “a wonderful magical garden,” eminently suitable for human evolution.46 What he did not tell his readers, however, was that these plants had flourished in Greenland more than 50 million years before the first hominids walked the earth—a fact well known to contemporary geologists.47
He also pored over Plato’s legend of Atlantis. He believed it to be an accurate description of the fate of his imagined Nordic empire in the North Atlantic, and he set about trying to prove this theory.48 He combed through geological studies of the ocean floor in the North Atlantic, concluding confidently that the continent of Atlantis had occupied a region stretching all the way from Iceland to the Azores before it sank due to tectonic activity.49 Only a few scraps of the ancient continent, he insisted, remained above water—namely the Canary Islands and Cape Verde.50 But Wirth had little grasp of geological thinking. His ideas were based on antiquated, disproven theories scorned by contemporary geologists in the 1930s.51
All his talk of Atlantis and a lost Nordic civilization stirred a great deal of public interest, however. In the northern city of Bremen, Ludwig Roselius, the wealthy inventor of decaffeinated coffee, drew up plans for a stunning new building in honor of Wirth.52 The edifice, dubbed Haus Atlantis, was to be part of a major urban development project known as the Böttcherstrasse. Blending modern expressionist architecture with themes from old Germanic mythology, Haus Atlantis would take visitors on a metaphorical journey of rebirth, from the dark blue depths of the ocean—where Atlantis languished—to the soft glow of the Sky Hall on the top floor. As part of the original design, Roselius created a lecture hall and exhibition space for Wirth.53 He also displayed his own impressive collection of ancient artifacts—bronze swords, golden vessels, bronze musical instruments, fine jewelry, as well as casts of ancient rune stones.54
With the backing of such influential men, Wirth was propelled onto the national stage, much to the horror of many serious German scholars. His first major book in 1929—a huge rambling inchoate study of the origins of the Nordic race and their later migrations, all heavily larded with invented jargon—aroused intense criticism. “Only the feeling that the author has been taken by an almost holy insanity,” observed Gero von Merhart, a prominent German prehistorian, “and the fact that he inspected a considerable mass of literature with unusual eagerness and diligence to support his delusions, which he considers science, restrain me from responding to this book … with rudeness.”55 Others were considerably less charitable. Taking firm aim at Wirth’s risible powers of reasoning, another critic noted that the Dutch scholar “is unable to distinguish between probable, certain, possible and impossible.”56
Outside Germany, discerning archaeologists were quick to pick up the extremist political tenor in Wirth’s work. In Sweden, for example, archaeologist Nils Åberg published a warning about Wirth after attending one of his public performances in Germany. Wirth, he wrote, seemed harmless enough, but his visions of the murky past were intended to seduce unwitting Germans into dangerous dreams of racial superiority and national aggrandizement, dreams that could fan the flames of war in Europe. As such, his lectures were a thinly disguised call to action, in which Wirth “the magician, the Hitler of German scientists, captures his public.”57
THIS WAS THE man that Himmler had placed in charge of the Ahnenerbe in 1935 and made SS-Hauptsturmführer in RuSHA. And this was the man who set about mounting, with the blessing and financing of the SS, the brain trust’s first major expedition abroad. Wirth’s destination was the remote granite hills of Bohuslän in southwestern Sweden. Along the slopes of these hills lay tens of thousands of ancient engravings. These, Wirth believed, were the sacred texts of the ancient Nordic race.