As THE DUTCH SYMBOLS expert and his team tossed in the stormy water off western Norway, a second Ahnenerbe researcher was putting the finishing touches on a very different research mission in the secluded forests of eastern Finland. Yrjö von Grönhagen had set out from Helsinki in June at Himmler’s request to study the legendary sorcery of Karelia, a remote wilderness straddling the Russian-Finnish border. For weeks, Grönhagen and his two companions had journeyed to rustic log cabins, taperecording elderly men and women as they chanted magical incantations, communicated with the dead, and sang songs of ancient wizards. Karelia, as one team member later observed admiringly, is a “land of witches and sorcerers.”1
Certainly, Karelia clung stubbornly to the old ways. Blanketed by dense forest and threaded with dark bogs and cold lakes, the region was buried beneath thick drifts of snow for much of the year. And for many centuries, the extreme winter cold, the summer clouds of mosquitoes, and the rugged terrain had tended to discourage economic enterprise and other contact with the outside world. But in the late nineteenth century, forestry companies arrived to size up Karelia’s timber. Loggers followed, thinning some of the dense stands of spruce and fir, while railway lines from the east and west began slicing through the taiga, transforming small towns into small cities. But modern life had yet to invade all corners of the remote fishing villages along the larger lakes. And in these isolated hamlets, some elders still passed the long winter nights singing songs of enchantment and casting ancient magic spells.
Grönhagen was a handsome young Finnish nobleman new to scientific research. He had become fascinated by Karelia after reading one of the most famous of all Finnish books, The Kalevala. The Kalevala was the work of a nineteenth-century country doctor, Elias Lönnrot, who believed that the old songs of Karelia were actually fragments of a lost northern epic that dated back thousands of years.2 So Lönnrot set about collecting these songs, journeying across Karelia by boat and sled, writing down the words and knitting them together with snatches of his own writing, into a flowing narrative. This he first published in February 1835.
While a few Finnish intellectuals complained about the liberties that Lönnrot had taken, most Finns loved The Kalevala. And they particularly adored the hero of this boreal epic, a great sorcerer named Wäinämöinen.3 In The Kalevala, Wäinämöinen and his assistant magically transform a treeless northern land into a vast verdant forest. And with his many enchantments, the sorcerer warms the sun and cleanses the land of pestilence by awakening the magical heat of a sauna. Indeed, at nearly every twist and turn of the plot, Wäinämöinen and his fellow characters rise above adversity with the help of their powerful spells. As one nineteenth-century English translator of The Kalevala observed, “Here, as in the legends of no other people, do the heroes and demigods accomplish nearly everything by magic.”4
In 1935, Grönhagen published an article about The Kalevala—whose title literally means “The Land of Heroes”—in a Frankfurt newspaper. This act of patriotism had a very unforeseen consequence. In his office at the heart of the SS empire, Himmler picked up the article and read it with deep curiosity. He believed that the old legends and myths of Europe brimmed with clues to the primeval religion and technology of the Aryans. They needed merely to be studied and deciphered. Could the old songs of Karelia, he wondered, contain further valuable leads?
HIMMLER WAS NOT alone in this fascination with old legends. Many German ultranationalists were entranced by ancient epics such as The Nibelungenlied, with its tale of Prince Siegfried who slew a dragon and bathed in its blood to become invincible in battle. And they absolutely adored a famous collection of ancient Norse songs, the Edda.5 First recorded on paper in Iceland during the thirteenth century, the Edda portrays an icy realm of gods and goddesses, kings and thanes, dwarves and wizards, sword-maidens and lordly heroes, magnificent beings who wield strange magical powers and fight to the death for their clan, their land, and their honor. Indeed, its tales had inspired J. R. R. Tolkien when he wrote The Lord of the Rings.6
But many German extremists considered these ancient myths to be much more than stories—an idea that a Munich newspaper editor named Rudolf John Gorsleben had done much to spread.7 Gorsleben was closely connected to the Nazi party in the early 1920s and was fascinated with the history of the supposed Aryan race. The more he reflected on the Edda, the more he saw it, as one historian has noted, as “a distillation of Aryan religion.”8 According to Gorsleben, Aryan men and women had once possessed superhuman abilities and these were revealed in the Edda. He also believed that the Aryan race could regain its purported supremacy on the world stage if it could somehow activate these latent powers once again. Gorsleben was immensely concerned with the question of how to turn the switch back on. In 1925, he founded a study group, the Edda Society, to examine this matter. He described the Edda as “the richest source of Aryan intellectual history.”9
Gorsleben published many of these ideas in a weekly right-wing newspaper he owned in Munich, Deutsche Freiheit, and they created something of a stir. Hitler himself seems to have incorporated some into his own thinking. At dinner one night in January 1942, for example, Hitler observed that “legend cannot be extracted from the void, it couldn’t be a purely gratuitous figment. Nothing prevents us from supposing—and I believe, even that it would be to our interest to do so—that mythology is a reflection of things that have existed and of which humanity has retained a vague memory. In all the human traditions, whether oral or written, one finds mention of a huge cosmic disaster … In the Nordic legend we read of a struggle between giants and gods. In my view, the thing is explicable only by the hypothesis of a disaster that completely destroyed a humanity that already possessed a high degree of civilization.”10
Himmler seems to have taken Gorsleben’s ideas more seriously still. As a child, Himmler had listened enthralled to his father and mother reading aloud from the German and Norse legends, and he had returned to these tales as an adult. In October 1923, just two months after he joined the Nazi party, he picked up a copy of The Nibelungenlied and read it from cover to cover, gushing later in his long-kept booklist about its “incomparable eternal beauty in language, depth and all things German.”11 Three years later, he gave a copy of the Edda as a present to a friend.12
Himmler cultivated the friendship of a man revered by the Edda Society, Karl-Maria Wiligut, the former psychiatric patient who helped locate Wewelsburg castle for the SS academy.13 The two men frequently dined together and chatted for hours, and in time Himmler came to take a particularly literal view of the Edda and other ancient legends.14 He believed they comprised a history, greatly fragmented but still intelligible, of northern Europe as it once was, before the arrival of Christianity. More important, he believed that the Aesir, the old gods of Norse legend—such as Odin, Thor, and Loki—were in fact beings of pure, undiluted Nordic essence, the earliest Aryans. As such, they were the possessors of superior knowledge, or so Himmler supposed.
With the help of Ahnenerbe scholars, Himmler hoped to recover the lost Aryan lore of the Edda, which seemed to span everything from superior weaponry to potent medicines.15 He was particularly intrigued by stories of Thor and his lightninglike throwing hammer, Mjollnir, described as the strongest and most accurate weapon in the world. In a surviving letter to the Ahnenerbe, Himmler spelled out his particular interest in Thor and his hammer, without a touch of embarrassment or self-consciousness, as if it were a rational scholarly pursuit:
Have the following researched: Find all places in the northern Germanic Aryan cultural world where an understanding of the lightning bolt, the thunderbolt, Thor’s hammer, or the flying or thrown hammer exists, in addition to all the sculptures of the god depicted with a small hand axe emitting lightning. Please collect all of the pictorial, sculptural, written and mythological evidence of this. I am convinced that this is not based on natural thunder and lightning, but rather that it is an early, highly developed form of war weapon of our forefathers, which was only, of course, possessed by the Aesir, the gods, and that it implies an unheard of knowledge of electricity.16
If this advanced knowledge of electricity could be pieced together again from the old sagas, then German scientists could use it to develop a weapon capable of smashing the enemies of the Reich.
Moreover, there was no telling what other pearls of Aryan wisdom might lie buried in the Edda, The Nibelungenlied, or other ancient legends of northern Europe. Himmler was keen to find them and if possible put them to use in the Reich, and it was for this reason that he contacted Grönhagen, the author of the article on The Kalevala, in the autumn of 1935.
GRÖNHAGEN WAS A romantic idealist. He was born on October 3, 1911, in St. Petersburg, during a time when Finland was a grand duchy of the Russian Empire. His mother, Zina von Holtzmann, was a doctor of jurisprudence who traced her ancestry to the Finnish and Russian nobility.17 His father, Karl von Grönhagen, was a Finnish officer and journalist whose family origins extended back to the Swedish, German, and Dutch aristocracy. Grönhagen grew up during a turbulent period in Finnish history. When the Russian Revolution began in 1917, Finnish patriots seized the moment and declared Finland’s independence, unleashing bitter political rivalries. A bloody civil war followed, pitting Finnish communists and socialists against conservatives in the Finnish upper and middle classes. Grönhagen’s family sided firmly with the conservatives. His older half brother fought as an officer in the White forces in Russia and was captured and executed in Moscow in 1920. All this made a lasting impression on Grönhagen. He grew up loathing communism and despising the Soviet Union.18
By his late teens, Grönhagen was a handsome lad of five feet seven inches, with delicate, even features, a pair of luminous eyes, a mop of thick dark hair, and a ready grin. He possessed fine manners and an aristocratic air. On leaving school, he landed a position as a trainee at the Finnish consulate in Paris, but he aspired to a career in the cinema.19 According to a report submitted in 1937 to the Finnish Security Police, a French movie director offered him a role as a singer in a new film. Grönhagen accepted and signed the contract, but eventually turned the part down after the director made unwanted sexual advances.20 Disillusioned, he enrolled in the Sorbonne in 1933. He dreamed of conducting anthropological fieldwork in India. But one of his professors suggested that Europe would be a better place for such research and Grönhagen heeded the advice.21
In the spring of 1935, he hatched a plan to travel by foot from Paris to Helsinki, studying “practical sociology” on the road.22 He bought a journal so that people he encountered could write something they fancied in it—an old proverb perhaps, or a poem. He departed on June 27, crossing eastern France and trekking across the rolling hills and valleys of Belgium. He entered the Third Reich on August 1, and felt at home at once.23 He had learned German as a child and was favorably disposed toward the Nazi government, which seemed to loathe communism and Bolsheviks almost as much as he did. The first person to sign his journal in Germany was a leader of a Hitler Youth group.
Soon after, Grönhagen met the editor of a Frankfurt newspaper, who agreed to publish his article on The Kalevala.24 On October 1, not long after the Nazi government passed the Nuremberg racial laws prohibiting Jews from marrying German citizens or engaging in extramarital sexual relations with Germans, the young Finn sat down in a meeting with Himmler. The two men had an amicable discussion. Afterward, Himmler wrote an entry in Grönhagen’s journal. It read: “Germans and Finns shall never forget that they once had the same fathers.”25 It was signed “H. Himmler.”
From the beginning, Himmler took a personal interest in the affable young anthropologist, with his refined manners and his German pedigree. Moreover, Himmler obviously relished a conversation that he had had with Grönhagen on the ancestry of the Finns. For many years, European scholars had puzzled over the origins of the Finnish people. The Finnish tongue bore few similarities to German, English, French, or any other member of the Indo-European language group. Indeed, linguists had placed it, along with Hungarian, Estonian, Sami, and a group of lesser-known languages from Russia and Siberia, into a separate linguistic family—the Finno-Ugric languages.26
This linguistic classification raised a large red flag in the minds of many nationalist Germans. If the Finns didn’t speak an Indo-European tongue, how could they possibly be Aryans? Some scholars suggested that they descended from the ancestors of the Hungarians; others speculated wildly that they sprang from the loins of Mongol invaders.27 The short, round skulls of Finns, they observed, resembled those of Asians, and the reserved, reticent character of Finns seemed more Eastern than Western.28 And they were fond of linking the Finns to an enigmatic tribe described by the Roman historian Tacitus—the Fenni, who had once lived somewhere in the northeast Baltic region.29 The Fenni, noted Tacitus, lived in “unparalleled filth and poverty.”30
But Grönhagen did not believe for a moment that he or his countrymen were of Mongol origins or that they were in any way members of an inferior race—quite the opposite. He was convinced, as he later wrote, that the primeval Finns arose from a vast wild land that stretched from Scandinavia in the north to the Black Sea in the south.31 He had also persuaded himself that the Finns were blood brothers to the Aryans and therefore shared a common ancestry—a suggestion that would have shocked and dismayed most Finnish scholars of the day.32 And Grönhagen wasn’t above offering his own racial observations as evidence. “Even the outer appearance of the Finnish person is telling,” he noted later. “Blond and tall, on average taller than the Germans, with mostly blue eyes or gray eyes, they belong racially to western or northern Europe.”33
Himmler also relished what Grönhagen had to say on the subject of The Kalevala. As Grönhagen pointed out, the people of Karelia, whose songs were immortalized in The Kalevala, still preserved many of their ancient customs and religious beliefs.34 Indeed, as Finnish folklorists had discovered, the remote territory was a refuge of paganism, a land where traditionalists still practiced a primeval form of shamanism. In Karelia, seers still recited magical spells to call upon spirits and gods, who in turn might help divine the future, cure chronic diseases, assist in childbirth, and protect families from harm. Many rural Karelians still revered and feared these magicians. “The entire life of the peasants is still filled with pagan customs, the use of magic and chants,” observed Grönhagen later. “It is especially the power of the healing knowledge—which is full of secret chants—that is ingrained in the beliefs of the people.”35
So impressed was Himmler by these ideas that he sent the young Finn to see Karl-Maria Wiligut, who was working in an office in RuSHA and whose relationship with Himmler had by then become the subject of much talk in the SS. One story going the rounds described an outing that Wiligut had taken with the Reichsführer-SS in his private car, a vehicle that bore, incidentally, the vanity plate of SS 1. As the two men were talking, Wiligut suddenly slumped in the leather seat, foaming at the mouth. Himmler immediately ordered his driver to stop. As the car screeched to a halt, Wiligut bolted from the seat and ran headlong into a field, his arms stretched out like wings. Himmler followed. Eventually, the old man dropped to his knees in the wet barley, instructing Himmler to dig at his feet. Himmler purportedly obeyed, dispatching a team of excavators to the site: they were said to have discovered an early historical settlement there.36
Himmler seems to have wanted Wiligut to assess the young Finn and his intriguing claims. So the two men—one paunchy, puffy-faced, and prone to psychosis, the other alert, curious, and eager to make a good impression—met several times.37 Wiligut obligingly channeled memories and tales from his ancient ancestors and recited what he claimed were Gothic proverbs from the Black Sea region handed down in his family for centuries. Grönhagen listened attentively. After one such session, he reportedly told Wiligut, “Oh, I know this, too. I learned the same thing from my father.”38
Grönhagen passed muster, and soon after Himmler offered him a job with the Ahnenerbe. The young anthropologist started work on November 1, 1935.39 His first assignment was to return to Finland to conduct research in the folklore archives of the Finnish Literature Society in Helsinki, which held the original field notes of Elias Lönnrot as well as the manuscripts of many other prominent folklorists and experts on The Kalevala.40 This research, Himmler and Wiligut seem to have hoped, would serve several purposes. It would prepare Grönhagen for future fieldwork in Karelia, collecting and recording ancient myths and magical chants. And it would also assist Wiligut in researching ancient Aryan religious ceremonies for the SS.
Himmler was immensely keen to replace Christian rites with rituals he deemed more Aryan. He believed—as Herman Wirth did—that the sun played a central part in the primordial religion of the Nordic race. In keeping with this idea, he wanted to create an SS summer solstice festival to celebrate life and a winter solstice festival to remember the dead and honor the ancestors.41 He asked Wiligut and Professor Karl Diebitsch, a cultural advisor in the SS, to research and draw up suitable rituals.42 Already, the two men had developed an SS naming ceremony to replace the traditional christening ceremony for a baby.
From Finland, Grönhagen corresponded with both Himmler and Wiligut, keeping them posted on his work.43 The two men sometimes passed his letters back and forth and discussed his progress. On April 19, 1936, Himmler wrote a chatty letter to the young anthropologist, inquiring solicitously after his health—Grönhagen had recently suffered a bout of jaundice—and instructed him to extend his stay in Helsinki until the summer.44 As soon as weather permitted, he wanted Grönhagen to take a journey through Karelia to photograph the sorcerers and witches and record their songs and incantations for study.
Grönhagen must have been delighted, but he could see potential problems. He was uncertain whether the elderly Karelians would agree to pose for their pictures, so he proposed to recruit a Finnish illustrator, Ola Forsell, for the journey.45 A more serious problem lay in Grönhagen’s lack of musical training. The fieldwork really required an ethnomusicologist familiar with diverse folk-music traditions in Europe and abroad. For this, Wiligut recommended Dr. Fritz Bose, a musicologist from the University of Berlin.46 Bose was a member of the Nazi party and a self-described expert on music and race.47 He firmly believed that the world’s diverse musical styles reflected racial traits, rather than cultural influences.48 It was a theory that appealed greatly to the new Nazi regime, and Bose capitalized on it whenever he could. In 1934, at the age of twenty-eight, he had become head of the Berlin Acoustics Institute, after his mentor was sacked for being Jewish.49
Himmler must have hoped that Bose, with all his theories on race and music, could determine whether the ancient chants and incantations of Karelia were Aryan or something very similar. And Bose, for his part, seems to have been delighted with the assignment. He joined the SS, where he was assigned to RuSHA and to Himmler’s personal staff.50 He then set about preparing for the trip, searching for suitable sound recording equipment. While other scholars of the day generally employed disc cutters, a device that captured sound on acetate-coated metal discs, Bose hunted for more sophisticated equipment. He chose a piece of audio gear that had debuted only a few months earlier at the Berlin Radio Fair.51 It was the magnetophone, a prototype of the modern tape recorder.52
IN JUNE 1936, Grönhagen, Bose, and Forsell set out from Helsinki by rented car to Viipuri, the principal city of Karelia.53 Viipuri was a busy cosmopolitan port on the Gulf of Finland, a place that comfortably mixed old medieval stone churches and a thirteenth-century castle with modern theaters and cafés. It was a far cry from the northern wilderness that Grönhagen yearned to explore, so he and his companions soon set off to the east. Along the north shore of Lake Ladoga, they found a land of dark fens and gentle ridges topped by pine forests, and there, among scatterings of small log cottages, they began scouting out sorcerers and witches to record and photograph.
It was so close to midsummer that the sun hardly set, and they often worked late into the evening. One day, in the woods that stretched beyond the small village of Suistamo, they visited Timo Lipitsä, a traditional singer well known among Finnish folklorists.54 On their arrival, they saw an elderly man dressed in a snowy white tunic and dark work pants. Lipitsä’s hair was white and his eyes, as Grönhagen later wrote, gleamed with “a far away look.”55 He had never attended school. He could neither read nor write, and he had never so much as laid eyes on a train. Grönhagen was delighted. Lipitsä, he later recalled, “knows nothing of civilization or technology.”56
Grönhagen introduced himself and his teammates, explaining that he was collecting material for a department of Finnish folklore he planned to establish in Germany.57 Then, after gaining the old man’s confidence, he asked if he would sing some verses from The Kalevala. This rather confused Lipitsä, for he did not know what The Kalevala was, but he offered to sing for his visitors just the same. He called over his son, and the two men sat across from each other by the hearth. Holding each other’s hands so that the “power becomes stronger,” they began to rock back and forth.58 As they moved, they sang an old story about the creation of the world, a story that closely resembled one published in The Kalevala. This amazed Grönhagen. “They sing the language of The Kalevala without even suspecting the existence of a scientific collection of song.”59
Bose diligently recorded the songs, fussing over the dials to get the best sound.60 He was fascinated by the performance. The old man, he later noted, seemed to enter a trance state. “His focus is fixed out into the beyond and he no longer senses his environs. It is almost impossible to interrupt him. He does not take kindly to any attempt to halt his sacred singing which is also an enormous and difficult artistic effort.”61 Finally, at the end of the recording session, Grönhagen asked the elderly singer to pose for a photograph in the bright sunlight outside his cabin. Lipitsä graciously obliged, squinting into the light.
The trio resumed their travels. In the small village of Tolvajärvi, they photographed and recorded a prominent Karelian musician, Hannes Vornanen.62 Vornanen was a master of the kantele, a traditional Finnish string instrument made from birch wood. The kantele and its murky origins interested Bose greatly. Some scholars of the day speculated that the kantele traced its roots to Asia. They observed that it had originally possessed just five strings and bore a resemblance to an old Chinese zither known as the guqin. Intriguingly, the guqin was also reputed to possess magical powers—making snow fall in summer and flowers blossom in the cold and darkness of winter.63
Bose, however, discounted the Asian theory, pointing to a myth in The Kalevela. According to one ancient song, the wizard Wäinämöinen had created the first kantele from the jawbone of a common species of fish in Finland—the pike. Other clues, he noted, pointed to the Finnish origin of the instrument. The kantele shared a tonal system with the songs of The Kalevala, which suggested that their histories were intertwined. Morever, Bose believed the kantele was far older than its Asian counterpart. Its tonal system was more primitive and its overall construction was much simpler, lacking as it did the arched cover of the guqin.64 Based on this, Bose concluded that the kantele was a thoroughly European instrument—a scholarly opinion that must have pleased Grönhagen, who was anxious to refute any suggestion that the Finns were of Asian origins.65
As they continued their travels, the team learned of an elderly sooth-sayer living in the woods near Salmi. The local people called her a witch and advised Grönhagen against visiting her, but the warnings merely whetted his curiosity. He went off to find her. When he arrived at her hut, it was empty. He waited for her to return. In the distance, he heard someone talking. It was ninety-two-year-old Miron-Aku. She was picking mushrooms. She looked up at him and stared into his eyes. Grönhagen was riveted by her first words. She told him that she had dreamed about him three days earlier. “You came to me in my sleep and wanted to take away my secrets. Since then I have been sick and will die soon. What do you want of me?”66
Grönhagen tried to befriend her: he wanted to learn more about her reputed ability to see into the future. He paid her several visits. She brewed him a bitter drink from local plant roots and talked of an old god that people in the region had once worshipped before they embraced Christianity. She also described how the spirits of her ancestors resided with her in her hut.67 By summoning them ritually, she could divine future events. This information fascinated Grönhagen and Bose. After a long negotiation, they persuaded her to perform the ritual for the camera and tape recorder.68 She reluctantly gave them the demonstration, but she was terribly dismayed when Bose later played back the tape. She told him that “she would never be able to practice magic again,” because she had committed a sacrilege when she performed a spell simply to satisfy others’ curiosity.69 Worse still, this error in judgment was now preserved on the tape.
The team moved on to the next village, and as the summer stretched on, they broadened their research. Grönhagen diligently recorded all the folklore he could concerning an ancient Finnish tradition—the sauna. Karelian healers believed that the sauna’s combination of water and fire-warmed rock generated a powerful force capable of warding off many forms of sickness.70 To better avail themselves of the mystical powers of steam, healers often took the sick into their own saunas, where they performed sacred ceremonies.
Bose, for his part, kept adding to the collection of tapes. He recorded old Karelian dance songs with titles like “Boys Travelling” and “Children on a Cliff.”71 He recorded ancient lullabies, work songs, and patriotic tunes. He also recorded women’s songs of lamentation, which impressed him greatly. “As a kind of magical priestess,” he observed later, “the mourning singer helps the souls of the dying and the dead to cross from this side to another.”72
In all, the team taped more than one hundred songs, chants, and instrumentals, and by the end of the summer, Bose was convinced that he had successfully adduced the racial origins of the otherworldly songs that made up The Kalevala. The improvised nature of the lyrics suggested to Bose that these songs were very old, much older in fact than the earliest relics of Nordic poetry. The Kalevala, he suggested, “must be a very early Nordic cultural level,” possibly even dating back to pre-Aryan times.73
BACK IN BERLIN, Grönhagen sent Himmler a note about the trip and a copy of the photograph he took of Timo Lipitsä, the old man who had sung about the creation of the world. He then set to work writing a short article for Germanien, a monthly archaeological and anthropological magazine partially owned by the Ahnenerbe.74 As his subject, Grönhagen chose Karelian magic chants. He described with journalistic flair the age-old rituals that Karelian women performed to fend off evil spirits in cemeteries and to heal the sick in the cleansing heat of the saunas. The editors of Germanien quickly published the piece, listing the author as Georg von Grönhagen.75 The change of name made the young Finn sound more German and hence a good deal more acceptable to the magazine’s nationalistic audience.
In Helsinki, Finnish researchers were growing suspicious of the Ahnenerbe team. Grönhagen had met several important folklorists the previous winter in the Finnish capital, and some, such as Martti Haavio, had received reports about his field activities from Karelian friends.76 Haavio, the director of the folklore archives at the Finnish Literature Society, was greatly concerned about the use that Grönhagen’s work might be put to.77 He was loath to see Finnish folklore falsified or manipulated in some fashion in order to advance the Nazi cause. So in the fall of 1936, he advised at least one of his trusted Karelian sources against cooperating any further with Grönhagen.78
Grönhagen seems to have been oblivious, however, to the controversy he was stirring in his homeland. On January 27, 1937, he and Bose attended a private meeting at Himmler’s home in Berlin.79 The two researchers were ushered into a study, and as they glanced around, they were startled to see their photo of Timo Lipitsä hanging like a treasured icon above Himmler’s desk.80 They had arrived bearing other mementos of their travels—an album of Karelian photographs and a kantele they had acquired—which made quite an impression. Himmler and his wife Marga flipped through the photographs together, then Bose produced the kantele and gave Himmler a short impromptu lesson on it. Himmler was so delighted with the instrument that the two researchers ended up giving it to him. He immediately placed an order for ten more for the SS.
The SS leader was keen to hear Bose’s tape recordings and he wanted to know how old the Karelian songs were and whether they were related to music of the ancient Germanic tribes. After listening intently to Bose’s replies, he mentioned the possibility of a grant for further research on these subjects. He and Wiligut, it transpired, were planning to use ancient Nordic musical instruments in SS solstice ceremonies, and they hoped to find examples of authentic ancient Nordic music.81 Bose’s ideas on the origins of European music so impressed Himmler that he later asked the scholar to help cast replicas of another ancient Scandinavian instrument: the lur.82 Bronze Age artists had depicted this wind instrument in their rock carvings in Sweden.
Grönhagen also shone that evening with his colorful stories of Timo Lipitsä and the old seer, Miron-Aku.83 Less than a month later, Himmler named the young anthropologist head of the Ahnenerbe’s brand-new department of Indo-Germanic-Finnish studies, a prestigious appointment for a young Finn of twenty-six who did not possess a graduate degree.84 The mission of the new department was to search for parallels between the Aryans and the Finns in order “to establish their shared origins.”85 The top two priorities were studies on the metaphysical meaning of The Kalevala and research on magic, witches, and rune singers.
Himmler intended to make use of this Finnish lore, too. Grönhagen’s description of the mystical healing powers of the sauna, with its combination of fire and water, had particularly aroused his interest. He suggested to Dr. Ernst-Robert von Grawitz, the chief physician of the SS, that SS men would benefit from using traditional Aryan methods of body cleansing. So Grawitz’s staff dutifully launched a joint study with the Ahnenerbe on “Germanic bathing” in 1937.86 As part of this project, Sievers instructed Grönhagen to share his research on Finnish saunas with the SS medical staff.