AT HIS DESK IN MUNICH, Wüst waded through thick stacks of Ahnenerbe letters and reports, doing all he could to put a new, more scholarly face on the organization. In between recruiting new staff and reining in the old, he fielded phone calls and letters from Himmler, who had a seemingly endless supply of new research projects for the Ahnenerbe. The SS leader wanted folklorists to search for references in ancient myths to the healing springs of Helgoland, a tiny German island in the North Sea.1 He desired saga experts to study the role of the human heel in early European tales and runologists to decode certain inscriptions he had come across on a sculpture in Florence’s archaeological museum.2 And he was eager to put Germanists to work studying the sexual practices of ancient Germanic tribes. He had read that in some tribes, men and women had engaged in lovemaking only at midsummer so that their children would be born in the early spring. Himmler wanted to verify this idea by research—presumably so he could develop guidelines for SS men on the most propitious times for sexual relations.3 But he offered no suggestion to Wüst as to how this study might be carried out.
As irrational and foolish as Himmler’s requests often were, Wüst diligently relayed them to his staff.4 He understood that a certain amount of compromising, of abandoning academic standards in favor of pursuing political ends, would be required of him and his staff. And he was prepared to make that sacrifice: he believed that he was serving a greater good, laying the building stones of a strong new future for Germany. And he was fascinated by his new proximity to the corridors of power. Since taking over the scientific leadership of the organization, he had managed to cultivate Himmler’s friendship.5 The two men shared a deep, unshakable belief in the majesty of the mythical Aryan race, and Himmler greatly relished conferring with Wüst on arcane points of research, talking as one scholar might to another. Some Ahnenerbe staff observed in private that Wüst was becoming Himmler’s “Father Confessor.”6
Indeed, so strong was Himmler’s confidence in Wüst that the Ahnenerbe had begun to mushroom in size, consuming its potential rivals. It made short work, for example, of something called the Excavations Department in the SS. Himmler had created the department in 1935 to sponsor or direct archaeological digs at major sites in Germany. He intended these excavations to be exemplars of German research, places where SS men could be trained in the science of recovering the ancient Germanic past from the ground.7 In three years, the department had mounted eighteen SS excavations, from an ancient hill fortress at Alt-Christburg to a major Viking trading post at Haithabu in northern Germany, not far from the Danish border.8 But in February 1938, Himmler transferred the department lock, stock, and barrel into the Ahnenerbe.
Before this transfer, the Ahnenerbe had largely confined its studies to poring over ancient written texts, rock engravings, and folklore. But the Excavations Department brought a new scientific acumen to the brain trust. Its staff consisted of dirt archaeologists trained in analyzing bits of ancient stone, bone, and ceramics and interpreting things such as pollen samples and geological layers. This new expertise in the natural and biological sciences, Himmler and Wüst hoped, would assist in reconstructing the lives of Germany’s ancestors before the first written histories and greatly extend knowledge of the mythical Nordic race.9
Few German ultranationalists had paid much attention to the era that preceded 5000 B.C. Indeed, some pointedly referred to this period as the Pre-Nordic Age.10 But the Ahnenerbe’s new scientific staff was by no means daunted by the task of proving the primacy of the imaginary Nordic race even at such a distant time. Indeed, one of its most ambitious young researchers claimed he could trace its origins all the way back to the Paleolithic era in Germany, when woolly mammoths and cave bears wandered the chill tundra.
DR. ASSIEN BOHMERS was a young Dutch national with a remarkable talent for dissembling, scheming, and self-advancement. According to documents he later supplied to the Ahnenerbe, he was born on January 16, 1912, into a Mennonite family in Zutphen, an old merchant town in the eastern Netherlands. He boasted that his father was the personnel director of the largest psychiatric hospital in the country and came from a proud line of sea captains based in the Frisian town of Harlingen.11 The truth was rather more modest, however. Bohmers’s father worked on the hospital wards as a psychiatric nurse and his Frisian lineage seems to have been limited to a Frisian grandmother.12
Nevertheless, Bohmers reveled in all things Frisian.13 As a boy he sopped up stories of the Frisians—farmers, fishermen, and seafarers who inhabited the coastal regions of the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark, as well as the Frisian Islands curling along those shores. In his youth, Bohmers learned to speak and write the Frisian language and he later made a personal study of “the symbols and customs in the area.”14 He took a keen interest in Frisian politics. The Frisians were a people without a nation, rather like the Basques. Over the centuries, some had nourished a bitter grievance against Holland’s wealthy nobility, coming to see themselves as an oppressed minority. By the 1930s, a few Frisians looked longingly toward the German Nazi party, with all its flattering talk of the racial superiority of peasant farmers. Bohmers sympathized with these Nazi converts. Indeed, he later claimed to be a leader of a small Frisian Nazi party, although it is doubtful that such a party ever existed.15
At the age of seventeen, Bohmers enrolled at the University of Amsterdam, studying geology, petrology, and paleontology. He became an expert on soil and sediment analysis and on interpreting the complex stratigraphy of caves. He also took a strong interest in racial research, conducting what he called “some pretty detailed studies” on the Nordic race.16 He traveled widely, doing geological and archaeological fieldwork in southern France and northern Spain, Sweden and Norway, and in 1936, at the age of twenty-four, he graduated with a doctorate degree. By then, he was an immensely confident man with a driving sense of ambition.
Superbly trained as a geologist, he had his pick of jobs in the European oil companies.17 But in April 1937, he decided to apply for a post as a Paleolithic archaeologist in the SS Excavations Department.18 Almost certainly his political views and his sense of opportunism influenced the decision. He dearly hoped that Hitler would unite all the former Frisian lands into one territory in the Greater Reich. If that day were to come, he wanted to be properly positioned to become the Gauleiter, or head of the new Nazi regional district of Friesland.19
Bohmers sent off his curriculum vitae, as well as a two-page description of his preferred excavation techniques and a small head-and-shoulders photograph.20 The latter, clearly intended to demonstrate his racial suitability, showed a young man with a thatch of blond hair, deep-set eyes, large ears that angled out conspicuously from his head, and the clear, ruddy good looks of someone who grew up with plenty of fresh air and wholesome food. Even into his mid-twenties, Bohmers could have passed as a farm boy fresh from the country.21
Bohmers’s application arrived at a rather opportune time in the SS headquarters in Berlin. A German scholar, R. R. Schmidt, had just begun excavations at Mauern caves in Bavaria.22 The site consisted of a network of five caverns, and near the eastern entrance of the middle cave, Schmidt and his diggers had found something very important—a bed of soil stained red with a mineral pigment known as ochre. Spread out along this red layer was the skeleton of a woolly mammoth blanketed with handmade ivory beads and beautifully fashioned stone weapons and tools.23
The ivory beads and the finely worked stone tools were the product of the Cro-Magnon, a Paleolithic people who hunted reindeer and other big game. The Cro-Magnon had often chosen red ochre as a pigment for their cave paintings and for the ceremonies they performed for the dead. In all likelihood, the mammoth skeleton at Mauern had been part of some ancient Cro-Magnon religious rite. This news seems to have excited local Nazis greatly, for one of most prominent racial researchers in Germany, Hans F.K. Günther, had declared that the Nordic race arose from the earlier “Cro-Magnon race,” based on physical similarities that the racial scholar somehow perceived in the two groups.24
In August 1937, the SS Excavations Department took control of the dig at Mauern. The head of the department, Dr. Rolf Höhne, became the site inspector and a unit of the Austrian SS—an underground organization at the time—began preparing the area for further excavations.25 By September, however, Höhne realized that he needed an experienced Paleolithic excavator to take charge of the ancient cave site, someone capable of retrieving every possible scrap of evidence concerning the “Cro-Magnon race.”
He offered the position to Bohmers.
SCIENCE FIRST LEARNED of the Cro-Magnon in 1868, when workmen laboring on a road near a railway line in the small French town of Les Eyzies-de-Tayac stumbled upon a grave in a rock-shelter, a huge horizontal groove in a cliff face that provided protection from the elements.26 The grave contained the skeletons of five humans laid to rest with various body parts of extinct Ice Age creatures such as the woolly mammoth, as well as an assortment of stone blades and knives and pierced seashells. These discoveries immediately stirred the attention of a curious French geologist and paleontologist, Louis Lartet. With great interest, Lartet proceeded to excavate what remained of the grave and reassembled the bones that the railway workers had badly disturbed.
The five skeletons looked very different from an ancient human unearthed in the Neander Valley in Germany twelve years earlier. The Neandertal man possessed a low, receding forehead, with a thick bony ridge looming above the eyes and a distinctive bony bulge jutting from the nape of the neck. The humans of Les Eyzies, by contrast, were clearly modern Homo sapiens, with rounded crania, steep foreheads, short faces, and jutting chins. But they had obviously died a very long time ago, buried as they were among the bones of long-extinct animals. Indeed, later studies showed that they had roamed the region in the midst of the Ice Age thirty thousand years ago, when dirty gray ice sheets sprawled over much of northern Europe. Scientists dubbed these modern humans the Cro-Magnon, after the rock-shelter where they were found, Abri Cro-Magnon.
Later excavations at a scattering of sites revealed much about the Cro-Magnon. They had descended into subterranean caves to paint achingly beautiful murals of horses and bulls, ibexes and mammoths. They had sat about hearths carving tiny bosomy Venus figurines from the ivory tusks of mammoths. They had bedecked themselves in clinking shell necklaces and soft fur robes and invented new and ever more lethal stone and bone weapons to bring down the game they hunted. They had also lived side by side with the Neandertal in Europe for several thousand years, until finally the Neandertal—who neither painted great murals nor carved beautiful figurines—disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The Cro-Magnon clans had then helped themselves to the sun-warmed rock-shelters and caves of their former Neandertal neighbors.
European researchers interested in questions of race soon turned their attention to these Paleolithic finds. In 1878, a pair of prominent French researchers, Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Breau and his assistant Ernest Jules Hamy, interpreted these finds according to then-popular ideas on the Aryans. The Neandertal, they claimed, were members of an ancient race vanquished in most of Europe by a superior immigrant race—the primordial Aryans.27 Their notion that fossil humans represented diverse ancient races, as opposed to diverse species, made a deep impression on some researchers, particularly in Germany. By the 1930s, scientists in England and America had abandoned this idea, but racial theorists in Germany stubbornly clung to it.28 Hans F. K. Günther, for example, insisted upon describing the Cro-Magnon as “the ruling race in central Europe,” a cold-loving people who handily conquered all of its contemporaries.29 In an effort to prove that they had spawned the Nordic race, he pointed to similarities in facial shape between the Cro-Magnon and some modern Scandinavians.30 Other German racial theorists attempted to prove that Cro-Magnon men and women were blond-haired.31
But while Nazi researchers happily claimed the artistic, inventive Cro-Magnon as their own, they were somewhat uneasy about the origins of this primeval “race.” Contemporary research suggested that the Cro-Magnon had arisen somewhere in Asia or even Africa, but these places were not terribly acceptable to German ultranationalists who posited that all important events in human history took place in northern Europe. In 1938, however, Dr. Assien Bohmers advanced a far more politically palatable theory for the origins of the Cro-Magnon, based on his finds at Mauern. He contended that these ancient clans had arisen directly from the barren tundra of Ice Age Germany.32
THE SITE OF Mauern lies in the southern part of the Jura Mountains, between the two old Bavarian cities of Ingolstadt and Donauwörth.33 Its caves have been hollowed out by nature on a high sloping valley wall and look down upon a pretty stretch of small farmhouses and fields. In the fall of 1937, Bohmers arrived at Mauern to take control of the SS excavations.34 He studied the lay of the land, examined the cave floors, and scrutinized the exposed stratigraphy. Then he ordered his team to expand upon Schmidt’s excavation. As the days grew shorter and cooler, the team dug deeper into the sediments near the entrance to the middle cave. Not far from where Schmidt had worked, they struck more fossilized bone and ochre. It was the skull and several vertebrae and ribs of a woolly mammoth.35
Bohmers pored over the osseous debris. Someone had broken off the mammoth’s long ivory tusks and scattered precious carved-ivory pendants and a collection of drilled animal teeth—fox, wolf, bear, and caribou—all ready to be hung on a necklace, near the mammoth bones.36 Then he or she had scattered red ochre nearby, and lit a fire, for the ground was littered with bits of charcoal. Close by, Bohmers and his team collected seventy burins—small stone chisels for shaping and decorating bone and ivory—as well as a rich assortment of other stone and bone tools. Bohmers was fascinated. He concluded that the area was a cultic site.37
To explore the site further, he divided his team, dispatching some men to a lower cave entrance, others to an upper. As the excavators dug down-ward, they encountered ancient hearths and the refuse of a different group of visitors: the Neandertal. In these layers, Bohmers’s team found hand axes, scrapers for cleaning animal skins, and spearheads suitable for hand-held spears wielded like bayonets. There was nothing terribly unusual or striking in any of this—except for one curious find. In the upper portion of these layers, Bohmers and his team unearthed thirty-three leaf-shaped points, tapered at both ends.38 These points resembled the streamlined spearhead of a technologically advanced weapon: the throwing spear or javelin favored by much later Cro-Magnon clans.39 Armed with this weapon, a human hunter could slaughter dangerous prey—animal or human—from afar rather than closing in and risking serious injury. Bohmers considered the discovery immensely significant.
He diligently collected soil samples from the dig and sent them out for pollen and mineral analyses. The results allowed him to visualize local vegetation cover and climate at the time the Paleolithic clans had visited the cave. Bohmers then compared these conditions to sweeping, well-documented environmental changes that had taken place in Europe over the last three glacial ages, as vast ice sheets advanced and retreated in a global minuet. On the strength of this comparison, he assigned rough dates to the cave’s occupation, a standard technique in an age before more accurate methods, such as radiocarbon dating, were invented. Bohmers was terribly excited by the results. According to his calculations, which later proved to be quite wrong, the curious tapered leaf points dated more than seventy thousand years ago, to a period between the last two glacial ages.40
The young researcher chose to interpret this finding in a very dramatic way that would appeal to the SS. Since he believed inherently in the superiority of the “Cro-Magnon race,” he assumed that only Cro-Magnon hunters were intelligent enough to invent leaf points and throwing spears. Therefore the presence of these projectile points in the stratified layers at Mauern proved that Cro-Magnon clans stopped in there more than seventy thousand years ago.41 By this reasoning, Mauern was the earliest Cro-Magnon site in the world—by tens of thousands of years.42 It was a very bold interpretation for a young prehistorian, for the business of dating cave floors was a particularly difficult one. Moreover, in hammering these ideas together, Bohmers had ignored another major possibility—namely that the “subhuman” Neandertal had created a superb new weapon.
Bohmers proudly announced his results in a handwritten letter to the Ahnenerbe, which had just absorbed the SS Excavations Department. “Your assignment,” he declared in July 1938, “has brought me face to face with a conclusion that is extremely important for all future Stone-Age research and especially for all areas of study which are concerned with the predecessors of the Germanic tribes—the so-called Cro-Magnon race. Until now almost every German, and without exception every foreign investigator, has assumed that the race migrated to Europe from somewhere in the East. The excavations at Mauern and Ranis [a second German site where excavators had noticed leaf points in early layers] have revealed for the first time the key that proves that the Cro-Magnon race must have developed in greater Germany.”43 This news, he knew, would please Himmler mightily, for it neatly eliminated another potential source of foreign blood in the pedigree of Germans’ ancestors. Moreover, it seemed to confirm another favorite boast of SS school leaders: that all important advances took place first in northern Europe.44
Bohmers did not describe in this letter how he envisioned this evolution to have taken place. But he had become interested in Aimé Rutot, a maverick Belgian geologist and archaeologist who contended that a very early genetic mutation gave rise to a single person with an immensely large brain.45 Such an individual, Rutot surmised, was capable of founding “a race of the strong.”46 Rutot also suggested that primeval climate change—such as the advent of an Ice Age—had triggered human evolution, sparking intense clashes among existing humans for food and shelter. From these pitched battles, a new, more advanced human race emerged.
Such ideas would surely have appealed to Bohmers. He believed that the Cro-Magnon evolved in Germany from the Neandertal populations just as the earth cooled, the forests died, and immense ice sheets in the north and in the Alps began advancing and gnawing away at the land.47 And he must have thought it natural that in such a hostile environment, the very first invention of the ur-Nordic race would be a new weapon, a javelin that could be heaved through the air to wipe out more slow-witted and primitive rivals for scarce supplies of food. Violence and progress marched apace in Nazi political doctrine, and now Bohmers thought he had discovered an important example of this in the Paleolithic world, too.
When word of the young prehistorian’s work at Mauern reached Himmler in late July 1938, he was fascinated. Although he was mired in work, engineering a major new anti-Jewish campaign in Germany and drawing up plans for covertly undermining the government of Czechoslovakia, he asked to read Bohmers’s papers even before they were published.48 Bohmers was well aware, however, that the European scientific community would be considerably less enthralled by these ideas. Indeed, his foreign colleagues would need serious convincing, for Bohmers knew that many European scholars scoffed at the science of the Third Reich. “Everywhere outside of Germany,” he noted in a letter to Sievers, “German science is seen as chauvinistic, without foundation.”49 To deflect such criticism, Bohmers wanted to talk with his foreign colleagues and examine their collections of early Cro-Magnon tools. He also wanted to tour the painted caves in France—one of the best surviving records of the Cro-Magnon and their religious rituals, a subject that clearly intrigued him.
New as he was to the staff of the Ahnenerbe, he did not hesitate to request funding for a research trip to the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and England. And the powers at the Ahnenerbe did not dawdle or drag their heels—as they often did with others—in approving his plans. But there seems to have been little interest in recruiting Bohmers as an intelligence agent. A few months earlier, in the spring, Sievers had warned the young archaeologist by letter to be more discreet while conducting research among the Frisians.50 Senior staff at the Ahnenerbe had discovered that Bohmers lacked judgment and circumspection when it came to political matters.
None of this, however, interfered with the plans for his trip. In mid-October 1938, as the field season at Mauern closed down, Bohmers packed his bags and papers. He caught a train for the old Frisian capital of Leeuwarden and then on to Groningen and its important archaeological department, before pushing on into Belgium.
AS ONE OF the great crossroads of Europe, Brussels was in an anxious mood. For weeks, the city’s residents had followed the intricate dance of promises and betrayals that had led to the Czechoslovakia crisis. Hitler had sown violent unrest among the Germans living in Sudetenland, then demanded that Czechoslovakia hand over the important territory to the Reich. Stunned by his rapaciousness, the Western democracies had searched for some face-saving way of abandoning Czechoslovakia in its hour of need. By the end of September, both France and Britain had capitulated to Hitler’s demands. The Sudetenland passed effortlessly into German hands. The immediate crisis was over, but those reading the newspapers in Brussels cafés suspected that Hitler was not done, and as Bohmers wandered the city streets, a certain sense of foreboding, of living on borrowed time, hung in the air. If the young Dutch researcher noticed this, however, he made no mention of it in his surviving reports to the Ahnenerbe. He was preoccupied by the work at hand.
He presented himself to the Royal Museum of Natural History, part of an ambitious complex of educational and research facilities grouped around Parc Leopold. The museum had won international renown for its collection of fossil iguanodons, large plant-eating dinosaurs that once waddled contentedly across the Belgian countryside. In 1878, Belgian coal miners struck a fossil layer of the creatures near the village of Bernissart, and researchers from Brussels had salvaged twenty-nine of their giant skeletons, reassembling them for public display in an immensely popular gallery.51
Bohmers almost certainly stopped to admire the giant skeletons—he had been trained, after all, as a geologist and paleontologist—but he was keen to get on with the study at hand. He had traveled to Brussels to examine the large collection of flint tools and pebbles gathered by Aimé Rutot.52 Among other things, Rutot had championed before his death a bizarre theory of human evolution. He believed that ancient apelike humans had fashioned simple stone tools in Europe during the Tertiary Age, which spanned a vast period of time, from the extinction of the dinosaurs to the beginning of the great Ice Age some 1.8 million years ago. This radical theory had initially attracted droves of converts, but Rutot had failed to win lasting scientific acceptance. Many of his prize flint tools turned out to be little more than the products of natural forces. Bohmers was eager, however, to check through Rutot’s collection, searching, it seems, for something that resembled the leaf points from Mauern.
When he was done, he moved on to Paris and the Institute of Human Paleontology on rue René Panhard, a short stroll from the Museum of Natural History and the laboratory where French researchers first discovered radioactivity in 1896.53 The Institute of Human Paleontology was housed in a formidable-looking building, a modern fortress in yellow brick and dull gray stone. Founded by the Prince of Monaco in 1920, the institute had become a mecca of Paleolithic studies, attracting researchers from around the world. Bohmers spent two weeks there, sifting through the institute’s collection of flint tools.54
In the hallways and offices, he introduced himself to the institute’s renowned staff. He chatted amicably with physical anthropologist Raymond Vaufrey and presented his findings from Mauern to seventy-seven-year-old Marcellin Boule, an authority on the Neandertal. He also paid his respects to a small, round-faced man in a worn black cassock, who always made time for young researchers. Abbé Henri Breuil was the world’s foremost expert on Paleolithic cave art.55
In 1901, Breuil and two companions had discovered a wealth of ancient cave paintings and engravings in France’s Dordogne region, and it was Breuil who helped convince European prehistorians that the cantering horses, charging bison, leaping stags, and lumbering cave bears were indeed the work of Paleolithic artists. Since then, the adventurous cleric had spent nearly forty years wriggling through narrow subterranean passageways and clambering up steep cavern walls. He showed no signs of slowing down or losing his enthusiasm. He had just returned from a month in the Pyrenees, copying “the frightful tangle of engravings” in the Sanctuary at Les Trois-Frères, as well as an assortment of other figures from the famous cave, work Breuil dearly hoped to finish before war brought cave-art research grinding to a halt.56
Despite these worries, however, Breuil took time to see Bohmers. Almost certainly the genial priest rolled and lit a crumbling cigarette—he was seldom to be seen without one—as Bohmers described the leaf points, red ochre, ivory beads, and mammoth bones of Mauern. Then Breuil, a generous-spirited man who could not possibly have guessed the extent of Bohmers’s Nazi ambitions, helped to arrange a rare honor for the young Dutch researcher—permission to enter one of the most important French caves, Les Trois-Frères. The ancient site lay on a private estate, closed to the public. The owners permitted just sixteen or so people a year—archaeologists for the most part—inside.57
Before availing himself of this honor, however, Bohmers made a quick trip across the English Channel. He toured museum collections in London and Cambridge, examining their fossil human remains and stone tools. “I am very happy with the success,” he reported to the Ahnenerbe. “I have been able to study all of the worthwhile collections for our study, and in England and France, I was able to talk to all the important researchers. They were all very enthusiastic about the finds and geological results from Mauern.”58 Bohmers, however, had clearly mistaken politeness for acceptance of his interpretations.
He returned to France at the end of the first week of November and traveled by train south to Les Eyzies, the little market town in the Dordogne where railway workers had discovered the first Cro-Magnon skeletons seventy years earlier. Since then, curious residents and researchers had combed the surrounding countryside, turning up dozens of painted caves and prehistoric rock-shelters in the neighboring limestone cliffs, and for decades journalists had publicized their finds. Les Eyzies had become synonymous with archaeology, and throngs of tourists in knickerbockers and boots and heavy woollen sweaters turned up at the railway station each year, ready to tour the caves. Bohmers checked into the Hotel des Glycines and almost certainly paid a visit to the local museum of archaeology, founded in 1910 to preserve the region’s Paleolithic treasures after a collector was found to be buying and shipping off artifacts to German museums.59
Bohmers had a clear idea what he wanted to see in the surrounding countryside.60 He squeezed down the long, narrow meandering gallery at Les Combarelles, past dank walls encrusted with stalactites and thick dollops of calcium-rich moon milk, and gazed in wonder at the vast Paleolithic bestiary on the walls—stags, mammoths, cave lions, bears, fallow deer, reindeer, ibex, wolves, and a profusion of horses, one often superimposed upon one or two others. All had been engraved by torchlight by ancient artists equipped with flint tools. Breuil had detected what he believed to be four ancient breeds of horses at Les Combarelles—Lybian, Celtic, Tarpan, and what he called the Nordic horse, “with an arched profile from ears to nostrils with a long saddle back.”61 Bohmers struggled to find them: such depictions, he later noted in a memorandum for the Ahnenerbe, could prove useful to science, giving “important information on the development of modern horses.”62
When he was done there, he toured another of the region’s great treasures, La Font de Gaume, less than a mile away across a patchwork of small tobacco fields and groves of walnut. Cro-Magnon artists had adorned the cave with spectacular paintings of Ice Age bison, oxen, and horses, many delicately colored in shades of red and brown and all observed with the acuity of the hunter’s eye. Their sheer beauty astonished Bohmers: it overshadowed, in his view, the artistic achievements of many of the Cro-Magnon’s successors. The engravings and paintings of the Dordogne caves, he later conceded, “are at an artistic level only seldom reached in the history of the Germanic tribes.”63 He then set off to lesser-known caves of the region, Teyat and La Mouthe.
From the caves of the Dordogne, he pressed on south to the rugged Pyrenees and the small French village of Montesquieu-Avantès, where one of the great mysteries of the ancient world, Les Trois-Frères, awaited him. The cave had haunted Breuil for years. The abbé believed that it had long served as a subterranean shrine, a place where generations of sorcerers and enchanters came to pray to their gods and perform their ancient magic. As a spiritual man, Breuil felt certain that only initiates were permitted to venture into its dangerous subterranean passages and enter the chamber he called the Sanctuary.
Even after a decade of meticulous study, Breuil still marveled at this innermost chamber. Along its walls, human hands had incised and painted a strange phantasm of creatures. In the darkness, a swirling maelstrom of superimposed bison, horses, ibex, rhinoceros, and three strange mythical or masked creatures, half-human, half-animal, capered and pranced. Some danced, others played what appeared to be an early musical instrument.64 A few gazed out mischievously toward the viewer. The Sanctuary teemed with life and vital energy, and above all this tumult, beyond all the charging, rearing, swaying, someone had engraved and painted the lord of the chamber: a tall antlered man with a stag’s ears and a horse’s or wolf’s tail. Breuil dubbed this surreal figure “The Sorcerer.” He theorized it was a primeval divinity of the Paleolithic world—the spirit that controlled the fertility of game and the success of the hunt.
As the light of his lanterns flickered across the walls of Les Trois-Frères, with their strange unearthly visions, Bohmers gazed at the tumult of engravings. He had arrived at the center of a mystery, at a place where Himmler and where so many other Nazis had long dreamed of standing—in the shrine of the ancient dead, in the dark embrace of the ancestors.
THAT WINTER, BOHMERS basked in the warmth of Himmler’s favor. The SS leader lapped up his theories, so much so in fact that he asked him to report on his findings at a conference of the SS-Gruppenführer, the major-generals who would faithfully carry out orders for the Holocaust.65 Himmler also found time to take Bohmers aside at a gathering to convey his personal views on the subject of human evolution. It must have been an instructive conversation. As Bohmers later reported, Himmler dismissed outright, for example, the current notion that the human race was closely related to primates. He was also outraged by an idea proposed by another German researcher that the Cro-Magnon arose from the Neandertal.66 To Himmler, both these hypotheses were “scientifically totally false.”67 They were also “quite insulting to humans.”68
Bohmers must have felt stunned. He, too, believed that the Cro-Magnon had evolved from the burly Neandertal, based on the finds from Mauern, and he was unaccustomed to taking scientific direction from amateurs. He had clearly reached a major turning point in his career. He could continue gathering up evidence for his ideas on evolution, pursuing his own lights and paying the inevitable price for his stubbornness: scholarly obscurity. Or he could quietly drop all talk of evolution and build an important career in Germany with the help of the Ahnenerbe. He chose the latter. He wrote to Sievers in March 1939 stating that he “always agreed with the Reichsführer’s and the Ahnenerbe’s position” on matters of human evolution.69
Bohmers had already discussed plans with Sievers to create a satellite Ahnenerbe research center for Paleolithic studies in Munich. He believed himself to be the natural choice for its head, and he confidently predicted to Sievers that the new center would soon outshine the Institute of Human Paleontology in Paris and “become the leading research site in the world.”70 For this, Bohmers needed a professional staff of four young German prehistorians, whose specialties would nicely complement his own. He also wanted a team of ten experienced excavators and his own anthropological journal, “where all our investigators are to be published.”71 This would help build an international reputation for the center. In addition, he requested editorial control over all articles on prehistory and anthropology that appeared in the Ahnenerbe journal, Germanien, and asked for funds for a new research trip to Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia.72
Indeed, his plans for the future seemed to be growing by the day, and they even encompassed something that would have astonished Abbé Breuil and his colleagues in Paris. Bohmers, it seems, dreamed of taking a leading role in French cave-art research. The ancient murals and reliefs, he noted in an official memorandum, could shed much light on subjects dear to the hearts of the Ahnenerbe staff, such as “symbol studies,” the “history of hunting methods, i.e., wild horse, bear and mammoth hunting,” and “knowledge about the magical customs of the Cro-Magnon race, i.e., hunting magic, initiation rites, etc.”73 The French, in his view, had shamefully neglected this priceless legacy. He thought their scientific publications on the caves scanty and inadequate, and their preservation methods a disgrace. He noted that both he and Erika Trautmann had observed during their visits “that the named caves are owned by farmers, or are managed by farmers, who don’t have the faintest idea about the cultural value of the rock art.”74 As a result, American and French tourists had swarmed in droves through the caverns and run amuck, scratching the walls with penknives.
To Bohmers, the solution was perfectly obvious. If the legacy of the ur-Nordic race was to be protected and preserved for future generations in Europe, then his new institute would have to take the lead in cave-art research. “The Ahnenerbe,” wrote Bohmers, “would serve the whole culture well if it were to succeed in preserving these valuable documents from their eventual destruction by photographing, drawing or creating casts for the future.”75
Bohmers, it seems, already dreamed of a day when the swastika would fly over France.