THE TRIALS AT NUREMBERG riveted the world with their gruesome testimony of slave-labor factories, mobile gas chambers, forced deportations, and massacres in the East. They resulted in the convictions of several hundred senior Nazi officials and succeeded in exposing some of the most repellant crimes of the Nazi regime. But as dramatic as the trials were, they failed to convince many Germans of the great error of Nazism. Some 40 percent still looked favorably in 1951 upon the “Hitler period of German history.”1 The Allies’ great goal of rooting out Nazi culture remained little more than a lofty ideal. Many of the guilty went free.
In the months following the German surrender, Allied forces had attempted arresting all leading party and government officials. In the American zone, the new military government passed a law requiring each public-office holder or each person aspiring to public office to fill out an extensive questionnaire concerning his or her past Nazi party involvement.2 On the strength of the answers, American troops broadened their net, arresting tens of thousands of party officials and members of the SS, the Gestapo, and other suspicious organizations and imprisoning them in internment camps.3 In Bavaria alone, American authorities fired or arrested one hundred thousand employees, leaving schools without teachers, telephone exchanges without operators, and post offices without postal workers.4 Life quickly ground to a halt, while the internment camps bulged at the seams.
Thinking better of this approach, the new military governments established local denazification tribunals across Germany to sift through the vast numbers of suspects and identify the most dangerous Nazis. The local tribunals in turn hired nearly twenty-two thousand people to assess the information from the questionnaires and classify those who had filled them out into one of five categories, depending on the degree of their involvement in the former regime—from “exonerated” and “fellow traveller,” to “lesser activist,” “activist,” and “major offender.” For the three most serious categories, the tribunals were free to impose penalties ranging from modest fines all the way up to ten years’ imprisonment in a work camp and the seizure of all personal property.5
The new system, however, was riddled with holes that allowed the great majority of senior Nazi officials to wriggle free. Some falsified their questionnaires, knowing that many government records had gone up in flames during the bombing attacks.6 Or they offered discreet bribes—a few pounds of butter or a burlap sack filled with flour—to tribunal members known to accept such things.7 Often they traded favors or cash for the support of witnesses willing to testify that they had once helped a member of a resistance group or a Jewish family evade arrest—a practice so common that cynical Germans soon coined a new word, Persilscheine, or “whitewashing certificates,” for such statements.8 Faced with such ploys, tribunal members exonerated both war criminals and those who had fostered and intensified the poisonous atmosphere of racism in Nazi Germany. The tribunals themselves became known as Mitläuferfabriken, factories for mass-producing “fellow travellers.”9
Moreover, with the onset of the Cold War, the western Allies lost much of their fervor for finding and prosecuting Nazi war criminals, focusing their attentions instead on the new Communist threat behind the Iron Curtain. As a result, many important Nazis escaped virtually unscathed from denazification. They resumed their former jobs and picked up the pieces of their lives again, as if nothing had ever happened.
At the end of the war, this is precisely what most of the Ahnenerbe’s senior researchers attempted to do.
SOON AFTER AMERICAN troops captured the city of Marburg, an eccentric, sixty-year-old savant began besieging American authorities with petitions for their assistance. Dr. Herman Wirth, who had helped Himmler create the Ahnenerbe in the mid-1930s and who publicly claimed to have discovered the cradle of a superior Aryan civilization in the high Arctic, was frantic to recover a large library of books and hundreds of plaster casts he had made of the Swedish rock art.10 Wirth had been forced to leave them behind in the Ahnenerbe headquarters in Berlin after he was ousted as the research organization’s first president, and he desperately wanted them back. He planned on resuming his research on ancient Aryan writings.
American officials in Marburg had no idea who Wirth was. They were unaware that he had once lectured widely in northern Europe, spreading the myth of Aryan supremacy to anyone willing to listen. They politely agreed to search for the material. Eventually, however, a neighbor denounced him and American intelligence officers clapped him in an internment camp while they decided what to do with him.11 Wirth became a barracks leader there. He changed his last name to Wirth-Roeper Bosch and reinvented his Nazi past. He told authorities that he had fiercely opposed Nazism and the SS and had even been dismissed from his professorship at the University of Berlin because of it.12 He neglected, however, to mention that he had repeatedly pleaded during the war for permission to give propaganda lectures in the Netherlands and Sweden—only to be turned down. “Cultural propaganda,” wrote Sievers, “is a delicate matter which Wirth is not capable of performing in a skilful way.”13
Wirth’s disavowal of his Nazi past was masterful, however. American authorities classified him as a “political victim of the Third Reich and displaced person” and released him from internment in 1947.14 Free again, he bundled up his wife and children and set off first to the Netherlands, the country of his birth, then to Sweden, the land of the rock art that so enchanted him. There he changed his name twice more—to Felix Bosch and later to Heinrich Bosch—and found work briefly at a private photographic institute in Lund.15 But despite his change of address, name, and employment, he was still the same old Herman Wirth. One visitor to his home in Lund reported that a large oil painting of Wirth dressed in an SS uniform hung in the family’s private library.16
Eager to be reunited with his large circle of admirers, he moved back to Germany with his wife in the 1950s.17 But he continued to study and make casts of the rock art of Bohuslän. His bumbling fieldwork infuriated Swedish officials. In 1964, they accused Wirth and his assistants of permanently damaging two of the country’s most important petroglyph sites.18 They contemplated levying a fine of 5,000 Swedish crowns for damages, but eventually settled on officially banning the seventy-nine-year-old Wirth from cleaning, drawing, casting, “or in any other manner altering the conditions of the rock art of Bohuslän or any other place in all of Sweden.”19
Wirth, however, was not so easily deterred. He continued to stage exhibitions and lectures, attracting a large group of followers who avidly lapped up his theories about an ancient Ice Age civilization in the far north.20 With the backing of powerful supporters, he drew up plans in the late 1970s for a new museum to showcase his collection of rock-art casts and so charmed officials in Rhineland-Palatinate that they agreed to put up 1.1 million marks for the project, which was to be installed in a castle in the small town of Thallichtenberg.21 In 1980, at the age of ninety-five, Wirth was poised on the brink of a remarkable resurrection, but just at this moment of triumph, a Spiegel reporter came snooping around. The resulting article exposed Wirth’s Nazi past and ridiculed his befuddled ideas, dashing any chance of success.22
Wirth died a year later, with hardly a penny to his name.23 His admirers, however, stubbornly refused to let his ideas die. German publishers continued to produce pseudo-scholarly books on ancient symbol research, and some German documentary filmmakers touted the notion of a primeval high civilization in northern Europe, even going so far as to borrow footage from old Nazi films to illustrate these ideas. And a former Ahnenerbe colleague acquired part of Wirth’s collection for a rock-art museum tucked away in the small Austrian town of Spital am Pyhrn.24 Today, fourteen of Wirth’s large casts hang in a bright, well-lit room there. The exhibition makes no mention of Wirth or his dark past. Even so, the casts remain a shrine to Wirth’s ideas and, as one Austrian scholar notes, “a clandestine Nazi memorial.”25
IN THE SUMMER of 1946, a distinguished-looking Finnish nobleman paced the floor of a cell in Åkershus Prison in Oslo. Yrjö von Grönhagen, the scholar who recorded the magical spells of Finnish sorcerers for Himmler, and sought to bring Finland and Nazi Germany closer together during the war, insisted he was guilty of no crime. At the start of the war, he had joined the Finnish army, eager to defeat the invading Soviet forces, and when his homeland sued for peace in 1940, he returned to Berlin. There, as he later explained to his son, he worked for a time as an “extraordinary representative” of the Finnish foreign ministry, furthering “German-Finnish cultural exchange.”26 As part of this mission, he wrote a series of books on Finland for German readers; produced a German radio program on Viipuri, the old capital of Karelia; and finished a German propaganda film entitled Freedom for Finland.27 All stressed the strong cultural links that bound the two countries together.
When the war ended, the Finnish foreign ministry transferred Grönhagen to Oslo, where he began repatriating prisoners of war.28 In the midst of this work, however, the Finnish Security Police began investigating the diplomat for his political activities. They arranged for him to be arrested and detained in Åkershus Prison, where the British Security Service held those suspected of collaborating with the Nazis. The British, however, uncovered nothing damaging against Grönhagen: “He appears to have no connection with the Finnish or German SS,” wrote one British officer blithely.29 The Finnish Security Police were much more suspicious. When Grönhagen returned to Helsinki, the investigation continued. Finally in early 1947, the courts set him free.30
Grönhagen had hoped to return to his studies of Karelia and its rich folklore after the war. He was still keenly interested in the ancient songs of The Kalevala, although he seems to have lost the valuable sound recordings he had made in Karelia.31 To his dismay, leading folklorists in Finland shunned him.32 They were quick to snub a man who had accepted the tenets of Nazi Rassenkunde and alleged that the Finns were Aryans. And many were horrified by his close relationship to Himmler and the Ahnenerbe.33 One prominent Finnish scholar, Dr. Kustaa Vilkuna, publicly accused Grönhagen of being a German spy who merely masqueraded as a folklorist.34 One by one, the doors to Finnish academic life closed.
For a time, Grönhagen worked as a Russian interpreter in a dockyard; then he purchased a tourist hotel in Lapland.35 In 1964, he became the general secretary of the Order of St. Constantine the Great, a Christian ecumenical organization dedicated to keeping alive the intellectual heritage of the ancient Greek and Byzantine civilizations. The former folklorist spent his summers in Lapland and his winters in Greece for more than thirty years, then finally returned to Helsinki in 2000. He lived quietly there until his death in 2003 at the age of ninety-two.
DR. FRANZ ALTHEIM, the charming classical historian whose mistress Erika Trautmann was a close personal friend of Goring, was on the faculty of the University of Halle when the Soviet army arrived in the city. After the troops had established control, intelligence officers led the university’s faculty and staff down into a basement for interrogation.36 During questioning, someone seems to have mentioned that Altheim was closely associated with the Ahnenerbe and that some of his books even bore a preface written by Himmler himself. For battle-hardened Soviet officers who would as soon string up an SS officer as look at him, this would have been a damning bit of news.
Altheim, however, stuck firmly to the story that he was just a scholar. He said nothing of his work as an intelligence agent both before and during the war.37 In 1938, he and Trautmann had gathered intelligence for Himmler in Romania and Iraq, two countries possessing oil reserves that would prove of critical importance during the war. And they had continued to collect and pass on secret information during the war.38 Before the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, for example, they had submitted a detailed report outlining three routes for smuggling weapons to pro-Nazi supporters in Iraq.39 In addition, they also seem to have analyzed political, economic, and social conditions in Iran, supplying intelligence useful for a possible German invasion.40
Altheim made no mention of this work to the Soviets. He did, however, confess to straying into the political realm on two important occasions, mixing a little truth into his lies.41 Once, he declared, he had used his Ahnenerbe connections to try to free the president of Oslo University from a German concentration camp; another time he had tried to win the release of a woman prisoner of mixed Jewish ancestry, the daughter of one of his closest friends.42 Both of these assertions were true, and they seem to have swung the balance in his favor. The Soviets arrested two of the university staff and deported them to Siberia. But they gave Altheim a clean bill.43
The historian returned gratefully to his teaching. But he was not ready to settle back into the life he had previously known with Trautmann. He seems to have found her too old to be desirable, and it may have occurred to him that a mistress with high Nazi party connections was more of a liability than an asset to a man with a past to hide.44 As it happened, he had met someone else. At Halle he had discovered a beautiful young student, Ruth Stiehl, with flowing red hair and a brilliant gift for languages and classical history. He fell in love with her, and when he escaped to the West in 1949 at the age of fifty-one to take up a professorship at the Free University in Berlin, Stiehl accompanied him.45
Even so, Altheim did not abandon Trautmann. He found a house on a quiet street in Grunewald forest in Berlin, a lovely spot tucked away in the woods. There, in one part of the house, he lived with his new young mistress, collaborating on books and academic publications, just as he had once done with Trautmann. In the other part, Trautmann lived quietly, doing photography work for her former lover and cooking dinners and keeping house for him and his new mistress.46 It was a curious ménage à trois, one that puzzled Altheim’s friends and students. But the historian undoubtedly had his reasons. He loved to shock bourgeois sensibilities.47 And Trautmann was likely the only person alive who knew about his past as a Nazi intelligence agent.
Altheim went on to a brilliant career at the Free University, and an equally brilliant retirement in Münster. He authored or coauthored more than 250 publications, on subjects as diverse as Asian feudalism, the Arab world before Muhammad, and the history of the Huns.48 He dazzled students with his wit and the vast sweep of his knowledge, and he rose to the top of his profession, becoming, as one obituary writer later recorded, “one of the best known scholars of German antiquity studies.”49 Even in his final years, he was a legendary figure. He drove to the University of Münster each day in a white Mercedes 220 S coupe with Stiehl, a beautiful woman dressed in a leopard-skin coat and cradling a Pekinese in her arms. “They looked like two mythical beings,” recalled a former student with a laugh.50
Trautmann died in October 1968 and Altheim bought her an old Germanic style gravestone, in keeping with her last wishes.51 He died eight years later of cancer. Neither his friends nor his former students had any inkling of his past as an intelligence agent. As fond as Altheim was of attracting attention, he had never breathed a word of his clandestine activities. He filled the walls of his study with photographs of famous people he had known during his career. But there were no photographs of Himmler or Göring or colleagues from the Ahnenerbe. “That was a cleansed picture,” noted one of his former students. “He wanted to wipe it away, I think.”52
IN HIS LABORATORY at the University of Groningen, Dr. Assien Bohmers continued to pore over the strange stone spearheads of Mauern during the late 1940s. The scholar who had sought the origins of the “Cro-Magnon race” in Germany and who had promoted Nazism along the northeastern Dutch coast, in hopes of one day becoming the Gauleiter of a Nazi Friesland, had landed neatly on his feet. He had convinced his Allied captors to release him from prison after just nine months of internment by brazenly claiming to have been part of the same resistance group as Sievers.53 He had then managed to land a position as a research worker at the renowned Biological-Archaeological Institute at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, where he had taught as a lecturer during the war.
Just how Bohmers managed to finagle his way into a teaching position in a country that reviled the Nazis is very unclear. “Bohmers,” explains one Dutch scholar who met the archaeologist after the war, “was a very enigmatic man, and I think even his nearest colleagues didn’t know him well.”54 But a former colleague of Bohmers who has examined his case closely believes the prehistorian may have blackmailed the head of the institute, Dr. Albert van Giffen.55 During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Bohmers persuaded van Giffen, one of the country’s foremost archaeologists, to remove his signature from a petition opposing the dismissal of Jewish university professors, and it seems likely that he threatened to expose van Giffen’s action and portray him as an anti-Semite.56
At Groningen, Bohmers went about his archaeological work with suitable professionalism, but his personal behavior grew increasingly furtive and erratic. During the saber-rattling of the Cold War, he became obsessed with the idea that the Soviet Union would invade the Netherlands. He was particularly worried about being captured. He sold his house and bought a large seaworthy yacht so that he could sail to Scandinavia should the Soviet Army suddenly arrive.57 He stocked the yacht with a bristling arsenal of firearms, all purchased illegally from an assistant who was stealing artifacts from the institute. After a police investigation, the University of Groningen suspended Bohmers, and in January 1965, the archaeologist asked to be dismissed.
He then turned his energies to marketing the crafts of traditional Dutch wood-carvers. In 1972 he gave a talk to a group of Frisian university students about his years in the Ahnenerbe. By that time, he had reinvented the entire history of the research organization. “According to Dr. Bohmers,” one of the audience members later recalled, “there was a group, a core in the Ahnenerbe, of highly qualified scholars who formed a kind of secret society opposed to National Socialism, or maybe [more accurately], to Hitler and his ideas.”58 Throughout the presentation, Bohmers spoke of a certain “Heini” with admiration. At first audience members had no idea who he was talking about, but they eventually realized he was referring to Himmler. “I was shocked to meet a man who had been so near to Heinrich Himmler,” explains one of the audience members, Dr. Oebele Vries, today.59
Disenchanted with life in the Netherlands, Bohmers moved to Sweden, and died in Gothenburg in 1988. Since then, his professional reputation has sunk lower still in the eyes of Dutch archaeologists. A prominent Groningen scientist, Dr. Tjalling Waterbolk, who once headed the Biological-Archaeological Institute, has since completed an extensive investigation of an archaeological forgery ring that tried to pawn off fake stone hand axes as Middle Paleolithic treasures in the mid-1960s. He concluded that Bohmers was most likely the ringleader.
DR. ERNST SCHÄFER departed for the cloud forests of Venezuela in 1950, eager to return to his old life as a hunter and naturalist. He had served Himmler faithfully, searching for Aryans in the mountains of Tibet and touring occupied Europe during the war as one of the exemplars of Nazi science. He had put concentration-camp prisoners to work at Mittersill and accepted the command of the Caucasus mission, which was designed in part to racially diagnose the Mountain Jews prior to their liquidation. One knowledgeable witness, Walther Wüst, even declared after the war that Schäfer had sat on the board of trustees for the Institute for Military Scientific Research, which had presided over the Ahnenerbe’s medical experiments.60
But in the final days of the war, Schäfer had erased the official record of his deeds as thoroughly as he could. He carefully burned incriminating documents at Mittersill and destroyed other key pieces of evidence, including Gabel’s plaster casts of the Auschwitz prisoners, which could have been used to identify the victims.61 During his denazification hearing, his attorney presented affidavits from more than forty witnesses who stated that Schäfer had cooperated with resistance groups and assisted Jews and Polish scientists persecuted by the Nazis. On the strength of this evidence, the local denazification tribunal cleared him in June 1949, awarding him an “exonerated” classification.62
By then, Schäfer was anxious to put Germany far behind him. Through a friend, he lined up a job as the director of Rancho Grande, a biological research station in Venezuela, and flew there with his wife and three children.63 The station amounted to little more than a bizarre-looking concrete bunker set at the top of a windy hairpin road in the middle of dense forest, but Schäfer was enchanted. The forest and the lowlands that surrounded it teemed with life—howler monkeys, fer-de-lance, coral snakes, tapirs, pumas, giant anteaters, and more than five hundred species of birds. Ornithologists had yet to study or describe many of these species, so Schäfer spent the next few years observing the birds in their natural habitat and hunting specimens for the station’s research collection.
From time to time, foreign ornithologists dropped in at the station, keen to see the forest’s rich fauna, and it was on one of these visits that Schäfer met the former Belgian king, Leopold. Leopold had been forced to abdicate the throne after his swift surrender to the Wehrmacht during the war; many Belgians thought him a traitor. To fill his empty hours, the former king had taken up ornithology and natural history. At Rancho Grande, he and Schäfer became fast friends, and he insisted that the German zoologist come to work as his scientific advisor in Belgium. Schäfer accepted the offer. He wanted to educate his children in Europe.
Leopold lodged the family in luxury and gave Schäfer a big workspace in Castle Villers-sur-Lesse. He then commissioned him to make a film to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Belgium’s annexation of the Congo. Leopold had raised sixty million Belgian francs—the equivalent of $7.59 million today—to make it.64 Schäfer jumped at the chance. He roamed the Congo for months with a large film crew, shooting The Lords of the Ancient Forest. From time to time, Leopold and his wife Lillianne flew in to see how things were going, and together they planned a grand premiere. Just before the film opened, however, veterans of the Belgium resistance announced that the director was a former Himmler man. The bombshell sparked a furor in Brussels. Leopold asked the Schäfers to leave the country quietly. He feared the scandal would bring down the royal house. Schäfer, however, countered with a lawsuit, eventually accepting a reported settlement of two million Belgian francs, the equivalent today of some $252,800.65
In Hannover, Schäfer landed a position as a curator at a prominent museum. He was immensely happy to be back on German soil, but during his lengthy absence, strange stories had begun circulating in high society about his wartime activities at Mittersill. Mittersill’s owners had restored the property to its previous grandeur and opened it again as a sport and shooting club where the old European nobility could mingle happily with the likes of Clark Gable and Gina Lollobrigida.66 But according to one popular story, the castle’s owners had found on their return “thousands of skulls from Tibet, India and China eerily stored on new constructed shelves in all of the rooms.”67 The tale aroused much comment and particularly intrigued one Mittersill guest, Ian Fleming.68 After hearing the story, the creator of James Bond transformed Mittersill into the fictional scientific research station of Piz Gloria, the Alpine lair of Bond’s archenemy Ernst Blofeld.
Schäfer, however, paid no attention to these tales. He continually reshaped his past to suit the times, editing out any parts that cast him in an unflattering light. He retired to the quiet spa town of Bad Bevensen in Lower Saxony, and remained an avid birder and naturalist until the end of his days. He died on July 21, 1992, at the age of eighty-two.
EDMUND KISS NEVER did lead a great scientific expedition to the Bolivian Andes. The architect who searched for proof of an ancient Aryan high civilization at Tiwanaku and who penned fantasy and adventure novels to popularize Hitler’s racial theories, remained in active military service throughout the war, first as an officer and later as the commander of an antitank gun division in Norway, East Prussia, and Poland. Near the end, he assumed command of the SS men at Wolfschanze, guarding the dank bunker complex where Hitler had once mesmerized his dinner guests with table talk about the Crimea.69
Arrested and interned, Kiss entertained his fellow prisoners with stories of his travels in Bolivia and Libya. By the end of the war, however, the fifty-nine-year-old officer was suffering severely from diabetes, so American authorities released him from Darmstadt camp in June 1947.70 Under the terms of his discharge, he was not allowed to take any form of work, except menial manual labor, and the denazification tribunal proposed classifying him as a “major offender,” noting that Kiss was a member of Himmler’s personal staff and had received an honorary SS dagger. Alarmed by this, Kiss hired an expensive lawyer and countered the charge, pointing out that he had never taken out membership in the Nazi party.71
At his denazification hearing in 1948, Kiss tried to present himself as a reformed man. He explained, for example, that he had developed serious doubts about the World Ice Theory. Colleagues in England and the United States had mocked the theory, regarding him as “the complete idiot from Germany.”72 Moreover, the “new nuclear theory” had given him pause for thought: he was revising his ideas accordingly73 But Kiss refused to completely renounce other Nazi notions. On the stand, he declared his belief in Rassenkunde, stating “there is something to racial theory, no question about it.”74
The tribunal obligingly reclassified Kiss as a “fellow traveller” and fined him 501 marks.75 Kiss paid in full. Then, with the hearing behind him, he retired as a writer. In December 1960, he died. His fantasy novels of Tiwanaku and Atlantis were almost immediately forgotten, gathering dust on the storage shelves of libraries. But his research on the World Ice Theory and his crackpot theories on the sun gate of Tiwanaku stubbornly lived on. In the 1950s and ‘60s popular authors such as H. S. Bellamy and Denis Saurat published Kiss’s ideas in a series of books. These in turn gave birth to a new generation of fabulists, whose numbers include such modern writers as Graham Hancock. One of Hancock’s most popular books, Fingerprints of the Gods, devoted three chapters to wild speculations on the origins of Tiwanaku, selling more than three million copies after its publication in 1995.
ART EXPERTS ATTACHED to the staffs of the Allied military commanders hunted determinedly after the war for the treasures plundered from Poland and other European nations. They questioned German museum directors, combed government records, and searched thousands of possible hiding places, from remote salt mines and barns to dusty medieval cellars. They inventoried rooms brimming with loot—Old Masters, ancient gold coins, classical Chinese bronzes, ancient Scythian jewels—and dispatched their contents to Allied collection points so that they could be returned to their rightful owners. They became sleuths on a very grand scale; the war years had seen the largest plundering of artworks in history.76
Dr. Peter Paulsen, the archaeologist who stole the Veit Stoss altar from Krakow and orchestrated the looting of Poland’s archaeological treasures, did his best to bury his past. When the war ended, he spent three years in internment, then took a series of teaching jobs. In 1961, he landed a prestigious position as a medieval expert at the provincial museum in Württemberg.77 He became an expert on the Allamanni, an ancient German tribe, and reestablished his scholarly reputation. “He was well-regarded,” recalled prominent German archaeologist Achim Leube. Indeed Paulsen remained active in archaeology until he developed eye problems in his old age. He died in 1985, at the age of eighty-three. His obituary, like so many others of the time, skipped lightly over his wartime activities. It made no mention of his work for the SS and the Ahnenerbe.78
Paulsen’s colleague in the plunder, the Austrian museum director Eduard Tratz, enjoyed an even smoother ride back to respectability. During the war, Tratz had personally ransacked the Natural History Museum in Warsaw, stealing specimens to mount Nazi racial exhibits in the museum he founded, Haus der Natur. A department head in the Ahnenerbe and a major supporter of the Nazi regime in Salzburg, Tratz thought it important to educate the Austrian public in the theories of Rassenkunde. After the war, he spent two years in internment, receiving the “lesser activist” classification.79 It amounted to no more than a slap on the wrist, for by 1949 he had resumed his old job as director of the Haus der Natur.80
Allied investigators forced the museum to return many of its looted artifacts and zoological specimens, but they could not induce Tratz or his successors to discard all the museum’s Nazi exhibits. As late as the 1990s, the Haus der Natur exhibited racial casts of the supposed Nordic and Jewish races.81 And even today, tours of schoolchildren gaze unknowingly at Tibetan mannequins created from the head casts made by Bruno Beger, one of the collaborators in the Jewish Skeleton Collection.
Tratz, a highly respected member of Salzburg society, died in 1977. A bronze bust of the zoologist now adorns the museum’s main foyer.
DR. HERBERT JANKUHN, the Ahnenerbe archaeologist who fraternized with leaders of Einsatzgruppe 11 in the northern Caucasus, and who sought evidence of a Gothic empire in the Crimea to bolster Nazi claims to the future Gotengau, spent the last years of the war as an intelligence officer with Viking Division on the eastern front. Like most German soldiers, he dreaded capture by the Soviet army, and was much relieved when his commanding officer decided in the dying days of the war to lead the Viking Division on a hurried retreat westward. In this way, Jankuhn and his fellow Viking Division officers managed to surrender to American troops entering Bavaria.82
The archaeology professor was interned in Allied camps for three years. When he was released, his eleven-year-old son did not know who he was. He was a bitter man. His family possessed little money for the Persilscheine needed to win a lighter sentence. As a result, the local denazification tribunal barred him for several years from holding a university teaching position, and Jankuhn was forced to hustle for work.83 He sought out and received annual scientific research grants to continue his excavations at the old Viking site at Haithabu, near the Danish border, one of the most important sites in Germany.84 In the winter, he analyzed the data, published his findings, and gave guest lectures at Hamburg and Kiel.85
By such means, he supported his family and managed to advance his scientific reputation. In 1956, the University of Göttingen offered him a teaching position, which Jankuhn gratefully accepted.86 His career at the university was meteoric. Ten years after his appointment, the university named Jankuhn the dean of the philosophy faculty.87 While a few of his students and colleagues knew of his SS background, most at Göttingen were unaware of his work in the Ahnenerbe and of the influence he once wielded as the most powerful archaeologist in Nazi Europe.88
Scholars elsewhere, however, were a good deal more knowledgeable and far less forgiving. In 1968, for example, Jankuhn planned a trip to Norway and offered to give a public lecture at the University of Bergen. The university turned the suggestion down cold, for faculty members still remembered his imperious manner as an SS archaeologist in Oslo during the war, and the way he had once denounced a Norwegian archaeologist, Anton Brøgger. “Jankuhn was not welcome,” recalls another Norwegian archaeologist, Anders Hagen, who was then on faculty at Bergen. “He was a really intelligent man, but he couldn’t understand these things.”89
Jankuhn later told his sons that he could not explain his behavior during the Nazi years, even to himself, but he never apologized. Indeed, he staunchly defended his old comrades. During an interview with historian Michael Kater in 1963, he declared that the SS was largely innocent of genocide. Only SS concentration-camp guards, he stated, had truly persecuted Jews. It was an immensely cynical attempt at whitewashing—given his association with the leaders of Einsatzgruppe 11 in the Caucasus.90 Moreover, he never abandoned his ideas about German territorial claims in the East. In later life, he told his son Dieter that “the world doesn’t stop at the Iron Curtain. And anyway, these parts have been the settlements of our ancestors.”91
Jankuhn died in 1990, honored, respected, and eulogized as one of the deans of German archaeology.
WALTHER WÜST, THE Aryan studies expert who led the Ahnenerbe for eight years, from 1937 to 1945, and whom the Völkischer Beobachter once described as “among the most loyal and dependable men to the Führer,” was interned for forty months at the end of the war.92 During this time, American intelligence officials attempted to build a case against him for trial at Nuremberg, but they found it extremely difficult going. Wüst had been very cautious in his handling of the Institute for Military Scientific Research, delegating operational responsibility for the medical experiments to Sievers. Adding to the difficulty of the case was the fact that investigators lacked Wüst’s own correspondence files from the Ahnenerbe bureau in Munich. The office had been hit in an aerial attack near the end of the war and the files seem to have been destroyed or lost in the rubble.93
Under interrogation, Wüst claimed to know nothing at all about the human experiments or the skeleton collection, and insisted stubbornly that the Institute for Military Scientific Research was completely separate from the Ahnenerbe, although this was patently false.94 Moreover, he repeatedly claimed that the Ahnenerbe was merely a conventional research organization, devoted to the scholarly pursuit of truth and knowledge. He stuck firmly to this story, much to the frustration of investigators, who made note of his “pathological attempts to whitewash himself of his clearly established responsibilities.”95 In the end, prosecutors at Nuremberg chose not to put him on trial.
The local denazification tribunal classified Wüst in 1950 as a “fellow traveller,” and the University of Munich took him back as a professor-in-reserve, paying him a monthly salary of 494 marks.96 But Wüst did not return to the classroom or the administration. He found work instead at the Bavarian State Library in Munich, where he could often be seen in the 1950s, a small man working on slips of paper for what he hoped would be his magnum opus, a dictionary of Old Indoaryan. Many of his former colleagues were baffled by his apparent inability to reconstruct his academic career, when so many other Nazi scholars were slipping back effortlessly into their former posts. “It is as if the earth had swallowed you and the ‘research society,’” marveled one colleague, Gustav Freytag, who hoped that the “disinfection” would soon be over and that Wüst would find a position suitable to his “great skills.”97 But Wüst’s isolation and the withdrawal from academic life may have been self-imposed. Some former colleagues thought that the scholar had gone a little “funny” after the war, working on strange new ideas, such as the role of bears in Paleolithic societies.98
In 1958, the German federal states founded a new agency, the Zentrale Stelle, or Central Office, in Ludwigsburg, for investigating Nazi war crimes committed in concentration camps, Jewish ghettos, and other places that had no relation to military activities. The new agency had its hands full of crimes to examine, mounting nearly four hundred major investigations in the first year of its operation.99 But from the start, its staff took a keen interest in the Ahnenerbe and its former head, Walther Wüst. Document experts sifted through all available records of Wüst’s activities during the Nazi regime. Among the Ahnenerbe papers, they found the office diaries of Sievers. These delineated Wüst’s responsibility for the Institute for Military Scientific Research, and revealed that the scholar had even attended official meetings with Himmler concerning the institute’s medical experiments.100
But investigators from the Central Office were unable to find a smoking gun to link Wüst clearly and directly to the crimes.101 In 1972, the prosecuting attorney was forced to suspend the investigation.102 Current archival research, however, reveals that Wüst was well aware of the nature of at least some of the medical experiments, while they were under way. In 1944, for example, as Hirt continued to subject concentration-camp prisoners to lethal mustard-gas experiments, Wüst recommended that the anatomist be promoted to the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer, referring specifically to his work on “secret experiments on poison gases, etc.”103 In this letter, Wüst observed that “Hirt has taken on this task with selflessness and diligence, in such a manner that it has badly compromised the condition of his health, not the least of which is due to the use of poison during the experiments.”
To the end of his life, however, Wüst proclaimed his innocence. He died on March 21, 1993, at the age of ninety-two, never having finished his Indoaryan dictionary.
AMERICAN FORCES CAPTURED Bruno Beger in Italy at the end of April 1945. The anthropologist who had collaborated with August Hirt and selected and measured Jewish prisoners for the Ahnenerbe’s skeleton collection, had spent the last part of the war conducting racial research on a Muslim division of the Waffen-SS.104 He mulled over his future in a series of Italian and German prisoner-of-war camps, then was interned at Darmstadt for fourteen months.105 Intelligence officers interrogated him several times. In February 1948, a local denazification tribunal classified the anthropologist as “exonerated,” unaware it seems of his exact role in the skeleton conspiracy.106 Beger returned home to his wife and five children a free man.
He had few job prospects, however. His academic specialty—Rassenkunde—had disappeared from university syllabuses across Germany, and research grants for the moribund field had completely dried up. Beger was forced to look for another line of work. He and an old friend, Dr. Ludwig-Ferdinand Clauss, another racial researcher, found positions at a publishing house in Oberursel specializing in educational books.107 After that, Beger became a sales representative for a large paper company and went into the paper business.108
All the time, however, he seems to have yearned to return to scientific studies. He traveled on a private research expedition in 1954 to Algeria and Morocco with Dr. Volkmar Vareschi, an old colleague from the Ahnenerbe institute at Mittersill, and on a second trip to the Middle East in 1958 and 1959 with Clauss.109 A year later, he tried publishing a serialized version of his Tibetan diaries in a local Frankfurt newspaper, the Nordwest Spiegel. Less than a third of the diary appeared, however. Reader complaints seem to have forced the editors to cancel the rest. “Not only did I have to defend myself against unjustified reproaches,” complained Beger later, “I had to concentrate on the earning of money and my worries about my large family.”110
In 1960, the Central Office in Ludwigsburg began a preliminary investigation of all those involved in the skeleton collection conspiracy. The staff carefully pored through archival records and attempted to track down witnesses who knew about the collection or had observed the events that took place at Auschwitz, Natzweiler, or Strassburg. On March 30, 1960, the police took Beger into custody. Four months later, he was released. Nevertheless, investigators continued to amass thick folders of evidence on Beger and two colleagues—Dr. Hans Fleischhacker, the anthropologist who had assisted Beger in performing the measurements at Auschwitz; and Wolf-Dietrich Wolff, the SS officer who had worked for Sievers. Eight years later, the Central Office had gathered sufficient evidence to press charges. So it handed over its files to prosecuting attorneys in Frankfurt, where Beger then lived.111
The trial opened on October 27, 1970. Throughout the proceedings, Beger insisted that Sievers and Hirt had kept him in the dark about the ultimate fate of the selected Jews until after he left Auschwitz. When he had learned the truth, he claimed, he was horrified and had journeyed to Natzweiler with the intention of confronting Hirt and dissuading him from killing the prisoners. Witnesses and surviving Ahnenerbe documents, however, poked holes in this story. Evidence from Sievers’s diary showed that the racial specialist had discussed a Jewish skull collection as early as 1941, two years before the murders. Moreover, Sievers’s former personal secretary and mistress, Gisela Schmitz, testified that it was Beger, rather than Hirt, who had written most of the notorious letter proposing that a Jewish skull collection be made from the heads of “Jewish-Bolshevik commissars.” More damaging was the official expense claim that Beger submitted for the trip to Natzweiler. On it, he had noted that the purpose of the trip to the French concentration camp was to perform blood tests and take X-rays of the prisoners.112 To refute this damaging evidence, the defense presented testimony from several old associates and friends of Beger, who recalled that the anthropologist had been disturbed by conditions he had observed in the camp.
It was a long and complex trial, but it did not rouse the public furor that might have been expected. By the early 1970s, many Germans had wearied of newspaper articles about war-crimes trials and Nazi atrocities. Moreover, a surprising number of Germans still sympathized with the Nazi cause. Indeed, one 1971 German survey showed that 50 percent of the population still held that “National Socialism was fundamentally a good idea which was merely badly carried out.”113
In early March 1971, the Frankfurt court dismissed the charges against Fleischhacker. The prosecution was unable to prove that he had known ahead of time about the plan to murder the prisoners.114 A month later, it suspended the charges against Wolff, noting that the former administrative assistant was guilty of little more than naïveté.115 But the prosecuting attorney claimed a victory in the case against Beger. On April 6, the court in Frankfurt convicted the anthropologist of being an accomplice in the murder of eighty-six Jews in the gas chamber at Natzweiler.116
The judge then proceeded to deliberate on a suitable sentence.117 He observed that the anthropologist had fallen as a youth under the influence of Nazi party doctrine, which had clouded his critical judgment. He noted that Beger had performed the research at Natzweiler against his will, convinced that he could not prevent the slaughter. He also recalled that Beger had written a letter to Sievers after his trip to Auschwitz, favorably mentioning four prisoner-assistants by name. This, the judge stated, demonstrated that the anthropologist felt compassion for those imprisoned in the camp, although it is highly unlikely that any of the four listed prisoner-assistants was Jewish.118 Finally the judge noted that Beger had been forced to wait ten years for the trial, which had placed him under significant psychological stress, and had already endured internment after the war and four months in custody in 1960. On the strength of these factors, the court was inclined to clemency. It sentenced him to a three-year prison term and ordered that he pay the costs of the trial.119
Beger’s friends were much disturbed by this sentence. They thought it unduly harsh and wrote letters of protest to the local newspapers, pointing out that the former SS officer was guilty merely of following orders. Beger’s lawyer filed an appeal.
In 1974, a German appellate court reduced his sentence to three years on probation.120