ON MARCH 15, 1938, Adolf Hitler strode out upon the balcony of the old imperial palace in Vienna, surveying with satisfaction the restless, swarming host at his feet. In the late-winter sunlight, some two hundred and fifty thousand bystanders stood in Heldenplatz, chatting comfortably with their companions and craning their necks toward the old palace, the seat of the Habsburg dynasty for nearly six centuries. Glimpsing Hitler’s familiar figure at the railing, they let out a loud, resounding cheer. Just three days earlier, the Gestapo had seized control of the Vienna airport and German Panzer divisions had pushed across the Austrian border, followed by convoys of security police. Overnight, Austria as a nation had disappeared from the map, absorbed into the Third Reich. Vienna, the gilded capital of Franz Schubert and Gustav Klimt, Johann Strauss and Sigmund Freud, had become little more than a provincial German city.
Far from resenting this news, however, many Viennese rejoiced. Church bells pealed joyously, while bands of brown-uniformed storm troopers, barely old enough to shave, roamed through once peaceful city quarters, belting out “Sieg Heil” and “Heil Hitler” at the top of their lungs.1 Jeering mobs attacked Jewish men and women on the street, beating them viciously or forcing them to their knees to scrub sidewalks with buckets of soap and cold water. In the Heldenplatz, the crowd strained for a glimpse of the man many had worshipped from afar. Dressed in military uniform, Hitler announced publicly what most in the square below longed to hear. “As the Führer and chancellor of the German nation and the Reich, I now declare before history the incorporation of my native land into the German Reich.”2 A deafening cheer followed.
To prepare for this triumph, Himmler had departed Berlin two days earlier with a large entourage and an entire SS company in two Junkers Ju-52 transports. As the leader of the SS and the Gestapo, Himmler was responsible for eliminating all opposition to the new Nazi regime in Austria. To assist in this grim work, he called upon one of his most trusted officers, thirty-three-year-old Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the SS Security Service or SD. Heydrich, a tall, raptorial-looking man with pale blue eyes preternaturally alert to the world, but dead to most emotion, was a great admirer of the British secret intelligence service, MI6. He believed, without any foundation, that the entire English aristocracy served pro bono as secret agents for it. So he had set out to emulate MI6 in the early 1930s, personally recruiting university professors, business leaders, and government officials to work as unpaid SS agents.3 From each he had demanded exact and, in some cases, exhaustive information on opponents to the Nazi party—details of their business affairs, finances, lovers, family secrets, character flaws, and daily habits, as well as up-to-date photographs, addresses, and telephone numbers, and the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of their friends and relatives.4 His staff stored all this information on cards, then filed them away in an index in one of several categories, from Jews and Freemasons to “Political Catholics,” “Bourgeois Conservatives,” and “Nobility hostile to National Socialism.”5 Often they classified individuals according to their future fates in a Nazi regime. Some opposition members were destined clearly for arrest and execution; others were slated for intimidation in order to terrify them into submission.6
Heydrich and his officials had been slaving away feverishly for weeks on their Austrian card index in anticipation of the Anschluss, or union with Austria.7 Soon after German tanks crossed the frontier, they drew up lists and dispatched special police task forces to make the desired arrests. Armed with the SD information, the squads had little difficulty locating their targets. They arrested and frequently murdered leading opposition figures before they had time to find hiding places.8 The newly deposed chancellor of Austria, Kurt von Schuschnigg, for example, received a knock at the door just a few hours after his forced resignation. He was bundled into a car and taken off to a prison cell on the fifth floor of the Hotel Metropol, the new Gestapo headquarters in Vienna.9 There, for nearly seventeen months, Gestapo officers starved Schuschnigg and forced him to clean their toilets with his own wash towel, before finally dispatching the emaciated former statesman to a concentration camp. He did not see freedom again until the end of the war.
Satisfied that they had crushed the most serious Austrian opposition, Himmler and Heydrich returned to Berlin. It must have been obvious to Himmler, however, that the homeland of the Habsburgs was only a trial run. Hitler intended to unite all ethnic Germans in Europe under the flag of the Reich. Czechoslovakia, with its large German population in Sudetenland, was next on his lengthy list of desirable real estate, and it was conceivable that such aggression could push the Western democracies, wavering as they were, to war. In order for Germany to triumph, a wide range of intelligence was needed. It was time to recruit yet more agents and cast a broader net of espionage across Europe and as far away as the Middle East.
The Ahnenerbe, with its bright young staff and its expeditions and research trips to foreign lands, was an obvious place for Himmler to look for potential spies. A few of its researchers undoubtedly possessed the necessary resourcefulness, intelligence, and discretion for a good agent.
FOUR MONTHS AFTER the Anschluss, Himmler read a promising letter from Wolfram Sievers. The Ahnenerbe had received a proposal from two German researchers for a major new trip to the far borders of the old Roman Empire in the Middle East. Wüst had given the proposal his scholarly approval and passed it on to Sievers, who requested financing for it.10 The researchers in question were a prominent classical scholar, Dr. Franz Altheim, and his collaborator Mrs. Erika Trautmann. Together they proposed a two- to three-month-long journey by train and car, from Eastern Europe all the way to the Middle East—Beirut, Baghdad, and Damascus.
Altheim was an expert on the origins of Roman religion and the history of the Latin language. At the age of thirty-nine, he had already built a major international career as a classical scholar, counting the German historian Oswald Spengler and other prominent intellectuals among his friends. Clever and irreverent, Altheim chafed at conventional armchair research. For years he had spent his summers wandering Italy’s classical ruins in search of weathered inscriptions and worn statuary that others had over-looked. He now wanted to extend his studies to the far frontiers of the Roman Empire.
Trautmann, a rock-art researcher, was Altheim’s lover. The daughter of a once wealthy estate owner in eastern Prussia, she had impeccable Nazi connections. Hermann Göring had attended cadet school with her older brothers, and according to one story, he had fallen in love with her as a young woman and asked to marry her, a proposal she declined.11 Be that as it may, Göring never forgot his friends’ little sister. Two decades later, as the portly Reich minister for aviation, he took her under his wing, inviting her to sit in his box at the theater and introducing her to his prominent Nazi colleagues.12 His second wife, Emmy, looked a great deal like Trautmann, with her blond hair, oval face, high cheekbones, and thin lips.
The two researchers’ proposed itinerary to the Middle East took them through several strategically important areas. The Third Reich was keenly interested in Eastern Europe and the gulf states, particularly in their oil fields. Germany possessed very little crude of its own, relying for much of its supply on the Ploesti fields in Romania.13 “Without Romania,” Göring is reported to have declared in 1937, “we cannot start a campaign.”14 Romanian oil producers made a tidy fortune from their exports to Germany, but the political situation in Bucharest had become unstable with the emergence of a new ultranationalist movement. Turmoil in Romania needed careful watching. Nothing could be allowed to disrupt German oil supplies.
Other major European powers were even more dependent on foreign reserves. Great Britain, for example, had turned Iraq into what amounted to a British colony after the First World War and helped develop its vast reserves. In 1934, Iraq joined the ranks of the world’s major oil producers, shipping its black crude by a new pipeline to the Syrian port of Tripoli on the Mediterranean. From there, tankers ferried much of the production to Britain. It was a long, tenuous supply line, particularly in the event of a war in Europe. If German forces could seize control of the oil fields near Kirkuk or sabotage the pipeline, then they could sever one of Britain’s vital arteries.
A couple as clever and charming as Altheim and Trautmann, with their easy entrée into academic and government circles, could be extremely valuable intelligence assets. The two could readily locate and befriend Nazi sympathizers, individuals who could later be recruited as local SD agents. In trains and restaurants, hotels and museums, the witty scholar and the statuesque blonde could easily glean useful bits of intelligence from casual conversations with foreign nationals and local inhabitants. Moreover, they might even succeed in contacting Bedouin leaders on the excursions they planned into the deserts of Iraq and Syria, gathering valuable information on their predisposition toward Germany.
All in all, Himmler and the members of his staff must have taken a keen interest in recruiting the pair. But they must also have devoted some thought to Altheim’s reaction to such a proposal. The scholar was not a member of the SS. Nor had he ever taken out a membership in the Nazi party or in any other of a multitude of Nazi organizations. He had never expressed the slightest desire to awaken Germany to some glorious future or resuscitate some mythical Aryan past. He was a leading European intellectual, a member of the café society that thrived on ideas and took matters such as science and scholarship seriously. He was perfectly capable of seeing through the web of Nazi deceit. Worse still, Altheim was one of the least conventional of men.
The scholar had inherited his bohemian ways from his father, Wilhelm Altheim, a talented artist whose sketches and paintings of country life earned much critical acclaim. The elder Altheim liked nothing better than to shock the local bourgeoisie. He dressed, as the mood took him, in cow-boy gear or a hussar’s uniform and kept a menagerie of animals about the house—dogs, donkeys, monkeys, and even a bear. Inordinately fond of weapons, he shot holes through the curtains in the house and fired sling-shots at his neighbors as they gardened. He turned up for galas in Frankfurt dressed in an expensive suit and riding a donkey. As one biographer later noted, he was “an eloquent, imaginative jokester.”15 When he sold his paintings, he often disappeared on drinking binges, sometimes for weeks at a time. Despairing of all this, Altheim’s mother eventually left her husband and the artist sunk into depression, finally shooting himself on Christmas Day 1914.16 His son could never again bear to celebrate the holiday.17
The young Altheim joined the German army in 1917 and was dispatched to a school for translators, then posted to Turkey.18 He seems to have been fascinated by his first experience of Asia. After Germany’s defeat in the war, he began casting about for a career. He had hoped to follow in his father’s footsteps, becoming a sculptor, but he lacked artistic talent. So he went to university, majoring in classical philology, archaeology, and linguistics, and worked in a bank to support his studies. Each year, he journeyed to Italy with grants from the German government, soaking up all he could of the classical world. “His intellect was restless and his thirst for knowledge was … immeasurable,” recalled one writer.19
Never handsome, he was by then a short, slim man with a round, doughy face, a shiny shaven pate and a wry sense of irony and humor. Despite his physical shortcomings, he had a definite way with women. He had married a fellow classicist, a teacher of Latin and Greek, but the marriage quickly soured and he soon moved on to other conquests.20 “All women loved him,” observed one of his closest companions and lovers half-jokingly later. “It was terrible.”21
His professor, historian Walter Otto, recommended him for a post as a private lecturer at the University of Frankfurt in 1928. To supplement his income, Altheim began dealing in art on the side. He had an eye for beautiful things and a talent for buying low and selling high.22 As Altheim settled into teaching, Otto introduced him to Leo Frobenius, one of the most celebrated European anthropologists of the day. Frobenius, a tall, bluff man who peered out at the world through a fussy monocle, was an Africanist who specialized in the study of ancient art and who had traveled the world studying it. The two men became fast friends, and it was likely Frobenius who brought Altheim to the attention of the deposed German kaiser, Wilhelm II. Once a year, Wilhelm invited a select group of archaeologists, historians, and art collectors to his home in the Netherlands to dine royally, drink prodigiously, and present papers on a variety of scholarly subjects. Wilhelm asked Altheim to join them. The young classicist loved these occasions and apparently bragged about them to friends, showing off an engraved silver trophy Wilhelm had given him.23
Socializing with royalty, spending summers in Italy, and cultivating a circle of influential international scholars, Altheim seems to have paid little attention to the rapid spread of Nazi ideas among the students and faculty of German universities. He shrugged off suggestions that he join the party and avoided serious political discussions. Many of his colleagues had no idea where he stood politically. They struggled to define his views in official reports, using phrases such as “no Homo politicus,” “focused on scientific and aesthetic fields,” or more simply “impenetrable.”24 When pressed for an expert opinion on Altheim’s reliability, a certain Dr. Cordes, head of the lecturers’ organization, was forced to take a stab in the dark. “In the political respect,” he reported, “[Altheim] has not been very active before or after 1933. His whole political attitude is probably impeccable, not very active and certainly harmless.”25
Increasingly, however, such indifference to politics carried a price in academic circles. In 1935, an influential colleague wrote a damning letter about Altheim to the Ministry of Education, which was considering promoting him to a much-coveted post as professor in Frankfurt. The poisonous letter took firm aim at Altheim’s reluctance to incorporate Nazi doctrine into his work. “He belongs,” noted the writer disdainfully, “to those intellectuals who still try to write ancient history as if the problems of ‘race’ did not exist. This pale aestheticism will not do in a field where there are especially great tasks for research in a National Socialist spirit.”26 After a year of cautious deliberation, the ministry decided to overlook Altheim’s political shortcomings and appointed him professor.
It must have dawned on Altheim, however, that his academic future hung by a thread: little pressure would be needed to snap it. A growing number of Nazi students took their seats in the classrooms, recording their professors’ comments and judging lectures on the basis of their political content. In addition, secret SD informants attended faculty meetings, taking note of any untoward remarks of their colleagues. When Altheim delivered a lecture in London in 1936, for example, he chose to speak in English, rather than German. This was observed disapprovingly by an informant and duly recorded as a black mark in his file at the Ministry of Education.27
By 1936, Altheim could no longer shun politics if he wanted to travel abroad and conduct his research unhindered. He needed to join the Nazi fray or find a solid connection to influential Nazis: quite likely he had to do both. And it was right about this time that he began his love affair with Erika Trautmann, a very unconventional woman with superb Nazi contacts.
TO A GOOD NAZI, the most important part of a woman’s anatomy was not her brain, but her womb. “The mission of woman is to be beautiful and to bring children into the world,” explained future propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in 1929. “This is not at all as rude and antiquated as it sounds. The female bird pretties herself for her mate and hatches the eggs for him. In exchange, the mate takes care of gathering the food, and stands guard and wards off the enemy.”28 By these Nazi standards, Erika Trautmann was a failure. In 1936, she was thirty-nine years old and childless. She had little apparent interest in prettying herself for her mate and even less in staying home, accompanying as she did scientific expeditions to France and Spain each summer.
She had been born into a wealthy family, the Nehrings, just outside Konitz, in what was then a province of Germany known as Posen. Her father was a descendant of Johann von Nehring, a celebrated seventeenth-century Prussian architect who designed part of Charlottenburg Castle in Berlin, as well as nearly three hundred other buildings.29 Trautmann grew up on the family’s 538-acre country estate with five brothers and one sister.30 Her older brothers were away a good deal at cadet school, and Trautmann and her younger sister received their lessons from a governess and a local minister. It was “a dreamy, lonely but quite intense life and experience,” recalled her sister later.31 Even so, the Nehrings were a large and sociable family: the two girls spent their summers visiting back and forth with relatives.
The Great War shattered this rather idyllic childhood. Two of Trautmann’s older brothers died at the front; a third was taken prisoner and sent to Siberia.32 In December 1918, her mother died, possibly a victim of the influenza epidemic, and when the Weimar government reluctantly handed Posen back to Poland, the Polish government confiscated the family estate. Trautmann and her father and sister fled to Germany. She moved in for a while with an older brother, a physician in Magdeburg, but eventually she escaped to Berlin to attend a women’s school, the Lettehaus.33 In her mid-twenties, she was “a very striking blond woman with whom you could have an intelligent conversation,” recalled her cousin Walther Nehring, who became a general in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War.34
Trautmann possessed a talent for sketching and enrolled in the state arts and crafts school in Berlin.35 It was the height of the Jazz Age. The school, located in a bright, airy building at 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse—the very place that was to become Himmler’s headquarters nearly a decade later—bubbled with laughter, gaiety, and high-spirited escapades. The students delighted in throwing costume balls and masquerades, transforming the school’s corridors into Arab harems and Turkish minarets, bars and buffets, all pulsing as a band pumped out the latest music.36 Trautmann spent a year and a half at the school. She took classes in life drawing and fashion design, studying under one of Berlin’s best-known couturiers, Otto Ludwig Haas-Heye.37
She stayed until the spring of 1924, struggling no doubt to pay her tuition in a time of rampant inflation. A year later, she married a young German civil engineer, Bernhard Trautmann.38 The couple moved to Frankfurt. After the Pernod-laced gaiety of art school, however, the subdued life of a bourgeois matron seems to have held little appeal for Trautmann. “Her deep interest in the intellect,” noted her sister in later years, “as well as an amazingly strong artistic sense spanning all eras, defined Erika’s life.”39 In 1933, she landed a job as a scientific illustrator for the Research Institute for Cultural Morphology, founded and directed by Leo Frobenius. Trautmann was one of half a dozen or so women employed in this work.40
Housed in one of the loveliest old buildings in Frankfurt, near the elegant Thurn und Taxis Palace, the institute specialized in the study of ancient art. It brimmed with colorful, eccentric people who were quite willing to pack their bags one day for Timbuktu, the next for Khartoum. As part of the institute’s extensive research program, it regularly dispatched small teams of brilliant young artists and scholars to far-flung corners of Africa and Europe. Often living out of tents and traveling rough, the teams recorded on film and in watercolor the mysterious cave paintings and rock carvings of ancient human cultures. One prominent expedition member, Count László Almásy, guided team members through the deserts of Libya in 1933 and later entered modern popular culture as the tragic hero of Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient.41
Frobenius chose Trautmann for the institute’s 1934 expedition to the famous Paleolithic caves of France and Spain.42 As a country girl raised amid the freedom of a great estate, Trautmann seems to have reveled in the experience. She went about the work with an intensity that one of her companions still recalled nearly seventy years later.43 And she blended seamlessly into expedition life. The team spent the summer crawling on their bellies one by one, down narrow subterranean passageways, and painting by the flickering light of kerosene lanterns. They bathed in goat stables and lounged on the stone seats of the Roman amphitheater in Nimes. They attended a bullfight in Barcelona and chatted late into the night over wine and dinner.44
Trautmann had a fine, observant eye for detail and a knack for discovery. Frobenius made her a regular on the summer expeditions. In August 1936, he dispatched her and two other artists to Val Camonica in northern Italy under the direction of a classical scholar whom he had befriended and recruited for the institute—Altheim.45 Italian researchers had made a major discovery at Val Camonica. Beneath thick layers of moss and sod lay large sprawling panels of antique rock carvings dating back to the Bronze Age, if not earlier. Frobenius hoped to display detailed paintings of the new finds in a forthcoming exhibition. In all likelihood, Altheim hoped for a new glimpse into the ancient cultic practices of Rome’s ancestors.
Sprawled side by side together on the sun-warmed rock, Trautmann and Altheim spent weeks tracing the outlines of the weathered carvings. Far from her engineer husband and her conventional life in Frankfurt, the artist fell under the spell of the restless scholar, with his bohemian ways and seductive charm. Late at night, as they dined out in the little country restaurants, she listened in delight as Altheim talked of the ancient world with an eloquence and wry humor that she had never encountered before.
A few months after her return, Trautmann obtained an official separation from her husband. Many of her Nehring relatives were scandalized by her behavior. They disowned her, refusing to speak to her or of her for decades.46
RELUCTANT TO RETURN to her old life, Trautmann began skillfully campaigning to advance her lover’s career. There was one clear avenue of opportunity. Prominent Nazis, who fanatically touted all things German, had long struggled mightily to explain why it was that Romans, not Germans, had colonized and conquered much of the known world, forging a magnificent empire that commanded awe even two millennia later. Despite all the reverential talk in Germany of ancient Teutonic valor and manliness and bloodlust, many Nazis envied the Italians the glory of their ancestors.
The only acceptable way of explaining Roman civilization for German extremists was to furnish it with a Nordic pedigree.47 The grandeur of Rome, they claimed, could be traced back through distant time to blond-haired migrants from the north.48 Italian scholars loathed such talk, bristling, quite naturally, at any suggestion that Rome was at heart a Teutonic civilization.49 But German researchers, particularly those eager for advancement in the Third Reich, didn’t care whose feathers they ruffled. They kept an alert eye open for any scientific evidence that might support such contentions. At Val Camonica, Altheim and Trautmann thought they had discovered something that would help clinch this theory—carvings of deer, chariots, carts, warriors in battle, and sacred rituals that looked similar to the Bronze Age engravings Wirth had studied in Sweden.50
Together, the pair published a paper on the Val Camonica art in a German historical journal.51 Trautmann, well aware of the importance of such an article, passed it on to Göring, who proceeded to introduce the couple to Himmler.52 The SS chief was delighted with the pair’s research, particularly with its connection to the Swedish rock art that Wirth had studied. He agreed to finance another season of fieldwork, and in the summer of 1937, Altheim and Trautmann departed for Italy and the Adriatic coast of Dalmatia in what is now Croatia to find more evidence of Nordic migrants.53 They dispatched regular reports from the field, outlining their new finds. On their return, Himmler instructed Sievers to contact the couple and recruit them for the Ahnenerbe.54 Any concerns Sievers may have had about Altheim’s commitment to the Nazi cause were soon set aside. The couple readily agreed to join the SS organization.55
Increasingly, Altheim began to take on the coloration of a German ultranationalist. In March 1938, for example, he wrote to a German colleague who had been highly critical of his work, and insisted that he had mended his ways politically. “The completed work [at Val Camonica] shows that the topic, ‘The Nordic race and its migration to Italy and South-East Europe,’ is at the heart of my work.”56 He also found a way of injecting the subject of race into a major new research project he was planning along the frontiers of the Roman Empire.
For some time, Altheim had felt restless in his work. He worried that he was merely following the same deeply worn ruts as his colleagues, who concentrated exclusively on the political, social, and economic factors at work within the Roman Empire, rarely looking at the influences which came from beyond. Altheim dreamed of taking a radically different approach.57 At Rome’s height, the law of the Caesars stretched all the way from the rocky shores of the Atlantic in Spain to the deserts of the Persian Gulf. Altheim desperately wanted to investigate the complex relations between Rome and the various civilizations and tribes of Asia and Africa. To examine physical evidence of their interplay, he yearned to travel to the empire’s most remote frontiers, examining the distant caravansaries, entrepôts, outposts, and battlefields where Rome had greedily sought to expand its might.
He was particularly keen to journey to the old imperial frontiers in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, taking Trautmann along as a collaborator and photographer. But such a research trip would be costly and require significant sums of foreign currency—something in very short supply in the Reich.58 After the seizure of power, the Nazi government had forced many factories and mills to turn their production toward manufacturing armaments. As a result, German exports had shrunk dramatically, bringing in only tiny dribbles of foreign exchange—too little to pay for the vital raw materials the Reich imported.59
In search of foreign currency, Trautmann chose to first approach her old friend Göring, rather than her new associates at the Ahnenerbe. Hitler had placed Göring in charge of the Reich’s Four-Year Plan in 1936, a position in which he wielded enormous economic clout in Germany. But the former aviator—an astonishingly rapacious man who was in the process of renovating his country home to include an old-style beer hall, a bowling alley, a lion kennel, a fifty-seat cinema, a personal museum, and a large gallery hung with Old Masters and fine Gobelin tapestries—was prepared to part with only 4,000 reichsmarks in foreign exchange, the equivalent of some $20,900 today.60 So in late June 1938, Altheim and Trautmann wrote to the Ahnenerbe, requesting another 4,000 reichsmarks for the trip.61
Altheim carefully cast the project in racial terms. The purpose of the trip, he explained, was to examine evidence for a great power struggle that wracked the racially diverse Roman Empire during the third century A.D. This struggle pitted “Indogermanic peoples of the North” against “the Semites of the Orient” for control of the empire.62 Such an examination, he added, would break important new scholarly ground. American and British scholars had viewed this tumultuous period largely from a Marxist point of view, focusing on class warfare within the empire.63 Altheim, however, favored a very different approach. He and Trautmann proposed to study the conflict “between peoples and races” and determine how it was that the Nordic race triumphed in the struggle for power over the empire.64 This, they promised, would be a significant contribution. “Here we have a great opportunity to present the meaning of race in the writing of history.”65
Wüst read the proposal with great interest, noting at the top of his copy, “Agree very much.”66 It was precisely the kind of research that he wanted to encourage in the Ahnenerbe. And quite possibly it was Wüst—an SD informer himself—who first hit upon the idea of putting Altheim and Trautmann to work gathering intelligence on their travels. European scholars, after all, had proven remarkably adept agents in the Middle East. Nearly a quarter of a century earlier, a young Oxford graduate, T. E. Lawrence, joined a crew of British archaeologists at the famous site of Carchemish in Syria.67 The lanky young scholar appeared to be little more than a keen student of the past, joining the excavators with enthusiasm. But in reality the future Lawrence of Arabia was working for a British intelligence agency, maintaining surveillance on a German railroad line under construction from Berlin to Baghdad.
As attracted as Altheim may have been to intelligence work in the Middle East—and indeed he later spoke with great admiration of Lawrence of Arabia68—he could not have been blind to the moral corruptness of the Nazi regime. Altheim, for all his scholarly preoccupation, must have noticed the repressiveness of the Nazi state and the increasingly brutal treatment accorded to Jews. Two and a half years earlier, the Nazi government had summarily stripped all Jews of their citizenship and prohibited them from working in any public office. Since then, Nazi officials had greatly stepped up the pace of persecutions, barring Jews from tutoring Aryan children, studying medicine, practicing medicine (except upon Jewish patients), receiving university degrees, playing music by Beethoven or Mozart at Jewish cultural events, or even bathing with Aryans in public baths and spas.
Altheim and Trautmann, however, overcame any qualms they may have had about collaborating with Himmler and his scholars. Outfitted with the right official documents, signed and stamped by the proper authorities, and equipped with the necessary sum of foreign currency, neatly arranged by the Ahnenerbe, they headed east.
A WAVE OF INTENSE dry heat greeted the couple as they stepped out of the central train station in Bucharest in August 1938. Along the city’s spacious tree-lined streets, young women in elegantly tailored summer dresses strolled arm in arm, eyeing the colorful bouquets of flower sellers. Young officers in gold-braided uniforms ambled past old men in suits shiny with wear. Along rows of haberdasheries and bookshops and furniture makers, peasant men in high straw hats and colorfully embroidered chemises laid out plump melons in baskets on the sidewalks, urging passersby to stop and buy.69 The two travelers, dusty and weary from their train trip, searched for their hotel.
For the last few days, Altheim and Trautmann had tramped the remote forested hills of northern and southwestern Transylvania with Romanian scholars, searching out the moss-covered ruins of Dacian kings.70 The ancient Dacians, whom Altheim regarded as a warlike Nordic people, had founded a magnificent kingdom with a capital near the modern village of Hunedoara. Finally defeated by the Romans in the early second century, the Dacians had been absorbed into the Roman Empire. Altheim had been eager to see their fallen fortresses. But as he and Trautmann journeyed by car along the rutted country roads of Transylvania, some little more than cart tracks, they could not help but notice how preoccupied their Romanian hosts were with the political events of the day. Indeed, turmoil seethed in nearly every village and town, stirred by the feverish supporters of a Romanian paramilitary organization known as the Iron Guard. “Everything,” noted Trautmann and Altheim in a later report, stamped SECRET, “was over-shadowed by the events regarding the Iron Guard and the government.”71
The paramilitary group was the creation of a certain Corneliu Codreanu, a handsome, charismatic Romanian lawyer whose hatred of Jews—a major segment of the country’s population—rivaled that of Hitler.72 Codreanu had first encountered the Nazi party in 1922 while he was pursuing his studies in Berlin. He admired Hitler’s anti-Semitic platform. On his return to Romania, he set out to build a strong nationalist movement. He dressed in a white peasant costume and rode a snowy white horse through the countryside, preaching a bizarre blend of Christian mysticism and rabid nationalism, all wrapped in a vicious form of Jew-hating.73 He urged his followers to dig earth from the former battlefields of Romania—where the country’s heroes had shed their blood—and tuck it inside little cloth bags around their necks. His speeches stirred the hearts of Romanian peasants, some of the poorest in all Europe, who came to regard Codreanu as an emissary of the Archangel Michael.74
Indeed, so successful was the former lawyer in rallying the countryside that he and his followers began to alarm Romania’s king. Carol II was a grandson of Queen Victoria, an imperious playboy far more interested in seducing beautiful women and perfecting his bridge game than he was in the tedious business of governing the impoverished country he had inherited.75 He was venal and greedy and he broke his promises with gay abandon. All this, however, Romanians may have been willing to overlook. But they could not forgive his choice in mistresses. They hated his favorite—Helen Wolff, popularly known as Madame Lupescu, lupescu being the Romanian word for wolf. She interfered terribly in political affairs, but her chief crime was something beyond her control. She was Jewish.76
In the spring of 1938, Carol had seized dictatorial powers for himself, and soon after he ordered the arrest of his charismatic rival Codreanu and other key members of the Iron Guard. The countryside blazed with unrest. In the old historic capital of Transylvania, Altheim and Trautmann learned that two prominent scholars, Professor Dumitrescu and Professor Christescu, had mysteriously disappeared. “Their ‘whereabouts were unknown,’ i.e. they had been arrested,” noted Altheim and Trautmann in their report.77 But the couple had met someone whom they considered potentially useful to the Reich—Constantin Daicoviciu. Daicoviciu was the director of the Institute of Classical Studies in Cluj-Napoca. As one of Romania’s leading classical scholars, he had kindly taken the Germans on a personal tour of one of his Dacian excavations. They had found him “an impressive personality.”78 He was not a fascist. Indeed, as they noted in their report, “his political position is neutral. However, he is a former reserve officer in the Austrian-Hungarian empire, has an encompassing grasp of German scholarship and possesses one of the most capable minds.”79
After thanking Daicoviciu for his help, the pair journeyed on to the Romanian capital. Rising up from the dusty Wallachian plains, Bucharest was a surprisingly worldly city that looked more to the West than to the East. Wealthy city fathers had spent a fortune hiring French architects to bring a note of Parisian elegance to the city. They had laid out leafy parks and broad boulevards and streets of opulently decorated buildings that would not have looked at all out of place in the 16th arondissement. They had opened chic cafés and decadent nightclubs with names like the Alhambra. Indeed, so deep was the love of all things French in Bucharest, that architects had even built a plaster replica of the Arc de Triomphe, complete with a Romanian version of the Champs-Elysées. By the late 1930s, travelers had begun to refer to Bucharest as the “Little Paris of the Balkans.”80
Rested and refreshed, Altheim and Trautmann began their official work in the city, poring over museum collections of old Roman inscriptions and texts, and chatting with high-ranking museum officials. They took a keen interest in the aristocratic director of the Municipal Museum. Grigore Florescu was a member of Romania’s privileged class, the boyar; his wife’s kin included two prominent leaders of the Iron Guard, General Cantacuzene and Prince Cantacuzene. Altheim and Trautmann found him fascinating. “We learned an excellent series of facts from Florescu,” they noted later in their report. “He described the adventurous flight of the two Cantacuzene in disguise. He told us of the battle between the Iron Guard and the role of the Jewish Madame Lupescu. Not only does she possess the ‘heart’ of the king (many have followed after her), but she still has an inexplicable hold on him and determines his political actions. The position of the large Jewish banks in Bucharest is more powerful than ever.”81
The two scholars then went on to evaluate Florescu’s future usefulness to the Reich. “Mr. Florescu speaks fluent German, is related to almost all the big Romanian families (Bratianu, Bibescu, Ghika, Cantacuzene, etc.), and because of this and his access to the court and other high positions, he is full of information. Should his position become endangered, then he would like to flee to Germany, where he owns land because of his German relatives. We would like to point out that through him, we could win 1.) a supporter of the Iron Guard, 2.) a friend of Germany, 3.) a sharp and well-informed mind.”82
Already Altheim and Trautmann had slipped smoothly into their assignment as spies.
DURING THE SWELTER of late summer, Altheim and Trautmann journeyed by train from Bucharest to Istanbul and Athens, then boarded a steamer bound for the Middle East. In Beirut, where men passed their evenings languidly smoking nargilehs and drinking cups of bitter Turkish coffee, they eased themselves into the Middle East. Alert to their political assignment, they quickly cultivated a helpful friend, a businessman from Northern Ireland who was clearly no stranger to German politics. “A constant companion and loyal helper,” they reported, “especially in the first days, was the Irishman JAMES H. JACQUES, (Belfast, Ireland, 35 HADDINGTONS GARDENS). He is an enthusiastic supporter of the NSDAP, knows Mein Kampf and the most important publications and has them constantly with him. He arranges for these works to be distributed in his home, Ireland, and on his worldwide trips.”83
Perhaps it was Jacques who helped them make arrangements for the next stage of their trip to Damascus. In the Syrian capital, where Roman administrators had once plucked fruit from local fig and pistachio trees, muezzins chanted and sang, calling the faithful to prayer. Citified Arabs, tribal Bedouins, Kurds, Turks, Circassians, and Armenians crowded the narrow passageways of the souks. Beneath the noisy bustle, however, the atmosphere was tense. Syria’s largely Muslim population chafed under the colonial-style rule of the French. Moreover, recent events in neighboring Palestine had added to their discontent. With the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, European Jews had begun flooding into Jerusalem, eager to escape further persecution. This had incensed Palestine’s Muslims. To keep the peace, the British proposed dividing Palestine into two states—one Jewish, one Arab—a prospect which enraged much of the Middle East.
All the Arab unrest had alarmed French officials in Syria. They suspected German designs on the region, and according to Altheim and Trautmann’s secret report, the local police kept a watchful eye on the pair. “The constant surveillance of the ‘Sûreté Général’ limited our movement,” reported the couple later. “We did not make any connections with French scholars.”84 Ordinary Syrians, however, offered the two Germans an effusive welcome: many seemed to think of Hitler as a natural ally against the Jews, something that the two Germans found intriguing. “The conflict in Palestine resulted in a deeply felt reaction, and each word of the Führer on this subject made a great impact, reaching from Syria into the deepest corners of Iraq. A flyer was given to us by a Mr. GEORGE I. SAAD (Firma IBRAHIM I. SAAD & Fils, Beirut, POSTAL BOX 66) with ten commandments against the Jews written on it. He brought it back from Iran, where thousands of examples are distributed. (We will be sending an original one in the next few days.) Herr Saad and his wife (a Belarussian) are, like all Syrians, strongly anti-French and anti-Jewish.”85
From the intrigues of Damascus, the pair headed south and east. As their train car clattered and clanked over the rails, they listened to the unfamiliar cadence of Arabic among their fellow passengers, and gazed out the window at the tiny mud-brick villages and the herds of woolly sheep grazing on little more than sand and the swaying figures of camel riders in the distance. After crossing hundreds of miles of sand and dune, sparse oases and plantations of date palms, they arrived at last in Baghdad, a city of some four hundred thousand. In the scorching heat of midday, men in fezzes and long white cotton thoubs ambled down the main thoroughfare, past an odd mélange of small flat-roofed shops and British colonial buildings. No one seemed in much of a hurry.
After centuries under the thumb of the Ottoman Turks and more than a decade of British rule, Iraq had become fully sovereign in 1932. Germany was keen to cultivate it as an ally. The German envoy to Baghdad, Dr. Fritz Grobba, worked diligently to spread Nazism to the Middle East. His office in Baghdad produced a daily newspaper, the Al-Alim al-Arabi, which had, among other things, published an Arabic translation of Mein Kampf. His staff handed out Nazi pamphlets and organized showings of anti-Semitic films.86 Grobba himself did his best to capitalize on a growing interest in fascism in Iraq. He arranged for the head of Hitler Youth, Baldur von Schirach, and fifteen assistants to visit Baghdad in 1937 to lend their assistance to a new fascist-style youth organization, Al-Futuwwa.87 The following year, Grobba arranged for the leaders of Al-Futuwwa to travel to Nuremberg to attend the annual Nazi party rally.88
Grobba was delighted to see the two German researchers. He introduced them to his wife and his circle of friends in Baghdad, which included Dr. Julius Jordan, a prominent German archaeologist who had founded a local branch of the Nazi party.89 And with Grobba’s assistance, Altheim and Trautmann hired a driver and car and set off to photograph and study southern Iraq’s historic ruins. Motoring along the eastern bank of the Tigris, they stopped at Ctesiphon, the ancient winter capital first of Parthian kings and later of Persian monarchs, whom many German scholars of the day considered to be Nordic.90 Roman armies had attacked the city five times in the second and third century A.D., racking up four victories. Only in the final battle did the Persian forces defeat them. While Altheim mused over the reasons for this victory, Trautmann photographed Ctesiphon’s famous towering arch. Then the two pushed on to Babylon.
After considerable wandering, they returned briefly to Baghdad, then headed north with a car and private driver. At Assur, they met someone very important in the Arab world. Sheikh Adjil el Yawar was a leader of the Shammar, the most prominent Bedouin tribe in northern Iraq and Syria. He was an astute statesman and a fine soldier who commanded the northern Camel Corps. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, he had skillfully represented the interests of the Shammar during international deliberations over the formation of the new Arab states, greatly impressing one knowledgeable European. “From the first moment I saw him,” noted British advisor and intelligence agent Gertrude Bell in a private letter in 1921, “I reckoned him foremost of the Shammar sheikhs in character and influence. He is 6 ft. 4 in. odd, a powerful magnificent creature; not an ounce of spare flesh on him, hands you would like to model, not too small but exquisitely shaped. Under his red kerchief, four thick plaits of black hair fall to his breast.”91
El Yawar had helped shape the boundaries of Iraq, but like many other Arabs in the Middle East, he had grown restive under British and French rule. He was searching for new allies. In 1937, noted Altheim and Trautmann in their report, the Bedouin leader had traveled to Berlin at the invitation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which had given him a warm welcome.92 In Assur, he insisted that the two researchers stay as his guests. The German scholars and the elegant sheikh clearly hit it off. They dined leisurely and talked through an interpreter for two days about politics. “We had to tell him continuously about Germany and the Führer,” observed Altheim in his report. “For him, it was enough to hear from us that the Führer would never allow for a Jewish state in Palestine.”93
Almost certainly, Altheim made no mention of certain Nazi racial theories that classified the Arabs as a Semite people, greatly inferior to the Aryan race. Nor did he likely make any mention of the stated goals of his own research—namely to study the great battles of the northern Indo-Germanic people and the inferior peoples of the Orient. Instead he paid close attention to his host’s political views and aspirations. The Shammar sheikh, he noted, seemed very keen on following the example of Saudi Arabia’s new Bedouin king, Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud. With only a small force of men, Ibn Saud had captured Riyadh, uniting the entire country under his kingship. The Shammar sheikh hinted at doing the same in Iraq—but as the couple pointed out, he needed foreign support. “The Sheikh is partially independent and receives money from the Iraq government. We estimate the Sheikh’s army to be around 4,000–6,000 warriors: they suffer from older weapons (German guns from the World War) and insufficient ammunition. The example of Ibn Saud is in their minds; from our point of view, we think that he hopes for a European war, which will allow him to declare independence. He identifies with Germany and sets his hopes on it.”94 Indeed, the Bedouin leader asked the two researchers to send him literature on the Nazi government, preferably in picture form.
To ensure the safety of his honored guests, the Iraqi sheikh arranged for an armed guard to accompany them on the next leg of their trip—a desert trek to the ancient ruins of Hatra. His brother Sheikh Mesch’an agreed to serve as their guide. Before the pair departed, however, the Bedouin leader conferred on Altheim the title of honorary sheikh of the Shammar—a mark of distinction that the scholar later included proudly on his business cards.95 Thus suitably feted, Altheim and Trautmann bid farewell to their host and set off by car across the rolling desert for Hatra.
With their Bedouin escort, the two German scholars explored the sprawling ruins of Hatra. Lying along an ancient boundary between the Roman and Persian Empires, Hatra had blended both the East and the West into its distinctive religion and culture. Along its honey-colored stone walls, Altheim admired what remained of the ancient statuary, spying with delight a carved mask of the Greek goddess Artemis. To commemorate their visit, the two researchers posed for a series of photographs in front of the toppled walls, wearing borrowed Arab headdresses and robes. Trautmann gamely attempted to clamber atop one of the gentler Bedouin camels, and Altheim later joked that the Sheikh Mesch’an was so enamored with his companion that he offered to pay fifty camels for her.96
When they had finished their explorations, the two German researchers returned to Baghdad and from there headed west. They stopped at the ancient city of Palmyra, a spectacular place, and chatted to the local people, gleaning what snippets of political information they could. “The Bedouins,” they concluded in a later report, “are always ready to attack at any opportunity. They told us that in the event of a European conflict, things would immediately erupt. In addition to IBN SAUD, they speak the names ‘Hitler’ and ‘Mussolini’ as if they are holy.… The routes of the oil pipelines are hidden but every Arab and Bedouin knows exactly where they are. Time and time again we were told that the PIPELINE ran here or over there.”97
BACK AT HOME in Germany, Altheim and Trautmann diligently wrote a long secret report by hand, appending several personal recommendations to the end. Among these was a proposal to strengthen their blossoming friendship with el Yawar by a follow-up trip to Iraq. “The connection to Sheikh Adjil will thereby be maintained,” they observed. “He himself has urgently invited us. We recommend sending an SS officer along also. There are many possibilities for scholarly studies, as our recent results have shown. A present of a hunting gun and sufficient ammunition would serve to deepen the friendship.”98 In addition to this, they advised sending the sheikh the requested propaganda material.
Sievers sent the report to be typed and promptly passed it on to Himmler, who in turn forwarded it to the staff of the SS Security Service.99 On May 12, 1939, two intelligence officers from the service met with Sievers to examine the report’s recommendations.100 The two officers were clearly impressed by the information that Altheim and Trautmann had gleaned, particularly in Iraq; contacts with the restive Bedouins would prove very helpful down the line if Germany needed to cut off British oil supplies in the Middle East. To further this strategy, the two intelligence officers agreed to the couple’s plan to cultivate el Yawar, and they approved Altheim’s request to return to Iraq. They also arranged to dispatch the requested Nazi propaganda to Baghdad by diplomatic pouch, so that it would not be intercepted.
Sievers relayed the substance of this meeting to Altheim, who was at work on a new book, The Soldier Emperors, which drew on the new Middle Eastern research and described the clashing empires of East and West that had made the third century such an important turning point in history. The scholar was delighted by the prospect of a return trip to Iraq. Again, he and Trautmann did not hesitate to volunteer their services as agents of the Reich. “We plan on keeping a diary for the trip to Iraq and central Arabia that will include not only scientific results, but also everything that is important in the ethnological, economic and political respect,” they noted in a later letter to the Ahnenerbe. “The talks with Sheikh Adjil el Yawar shall be recorded in his characteristic wording as much as possible.”101