Dr. Franz Altheim (1898–1976) An urbane bohemian with a wry sense of humor, Altheim was an expert on the origins of Roman religion and the history of the Latin language. While teaching at the University of Frankfurt, he met Erika Trautmann, who became his mistress and who helped introduce him to Himmler. With financial assistance from the SS leader, the couple traveled to Italy and Dalmatia in 1937, searching for evidence of the Nordic origins of Roman civilization. A year later, with funding from the Ahnenerbe, the pair journeyed across Eastern Europe and the Middle East, arriving in Iraq. En route, they gathered intelligence on Iraqi pipelines and tribal leaders for the SS Security Service.
Dr. Bruno Beger (1911– ) A member of a prominent Heidelberg family, Beger was an expert in Rassenkunde, or racial studies, a growth industry in Nazi Germany. At the invitation of Ernst Schäfer, he joined the SS expedition to Tibet, serving as its anthropologist and racial expert. During the war, he was assigned as a racial expert to Schäfer’s Special Command K in the Caucasus. His mission was to racially diagnose tribal groups in the region—information that could be used by the SS command to slate Jewish groups for extermination. In 1942, Beger took part in a major war crime known as the Jewish Skeleton Collection.
Dr. Assien Bohmers (1912–1988) Born in the Netherlands, Bohmers was a renegade archaeologist fascinated by the German Nazi party and by Frisian politics. In 1937, he conducted excavations for the SS at the Cro-Magnon site of Mauern in Germany, claiming to have uncovered the origins of the Aryan race. His findings fascinated Himmler, and in 1938 Bohmers joined the staff of the Ahnenerbe. That fall, he journeyed across the Netherlands, Belgium, England, and France, searching for the earliest traces of Aryan art and culture.
Dr. Fritz Bose (1906–1975) A musicologist who theorized that the world’s richly varied musical styles were a reflection of innate racial traits rather than cultural differences, Bose became head of the Berlin Acoustics Institute in 1934, after his Jewish mentor was forced out. In 1936, Himmler sent Bose to Finland with Yrjö von Grönhagen to record the ancient songs of Finnish witches and sorcerers. After the war, he taught for a time at the Technical University in Berlin.
Richard Walther Darré (1895–1953) An agriculturalist specializing in animal breeding, Darré believed that Germany had to take serious measures to restore the purity of the Nordic race. He advocated exterminating the handicapped and using scientific knowledge to assist Germans in selecting their mates in order to produce superior human stock. In 1932, he became the head of the Race and Settlement Office of the SS, better known as RuSHA, a position he held until 1938. RuSHA examiners were responsible for the racial purity of the SS. In 1933, he became the minister of food and agriculture in Germany.
Yrjö von Grönhagen (1911–2003) A handsome young Finnish nobleman who loathed communism, Grönhagen met Himmler while trekking on foot from Paris to Helsinki. His knowledge of ancient Finnish myths and folklore so charmed Himmler that he put Grönhagen to work in the Ahnenerbe. In 1936, Himmler sent the young Finn and German musicologist Fritz Bose on a research trip to the Finnish province of Karelia. There they recorded ancient magical spells preserved by elderly wizards and recorded the primeval songs of the region.
Dr. Hans F. K. Günther (1891–1968) A German philologist and anthropologist who became one of the Third Reich’s foremost exponents of racial studies, Günther wrote a series of popular books on race that proved enormously influential in Nazi circles. Adolf Hitler greatly admired his work, and in 1930 Hitler attended Günther’s inaugural lecture at the University of Jena. After the Nazi seizure of power, Günther took up an important post at the University of Berlin.
Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) The son of a prominent Bavarian schoolmaster, Himmler joined the Nazi party in 1923 and soon rose to the position of Reichsführer-SS (1929–1945). Ruthless, intelligent, and utterly dependable, he became one of Hitler’s favorite henchmen, holding the posts of chief of the German Police (1936), minister of the interior (1943), commander in chief of the Replacement Army (1944), and commander in chief of the Rhine (1944) and Vistula armies (1945). As diligently as he performed Hitler’s bidding, however, Himmler always found time to oversee one of his fondest creations, the Ahnenerbe, even serving as its first superintendent (1935–1938). He committed suicide at a British interrogation center.
Dr. August Hirt (1898–1945) A talented anatomist who suffered a severe facial injury in the First World War, Hirt specialized in the study of the human nervous system. In 1933, while teaching at the University of Heidelberg, he joined the SS and there he met a young Bruno Beger. During the war, Hirt became a department head in the Ahnenerbe’s Institute for Military Scientific Research and conducted a series of notorious medical experiments on concentration-camp prisoners. In 1942 and 1943, he planned and directed a major war crime known as the Jewish Skeleton Collection.
Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) An Austrian drifter and artist turned politician, Hitler became Reich chancellor in January 1933 and Germany’s head of state a year later. He assumed the role of minister of defense in February 1938, and took on the responsibility of supreme commander in the field in December 1941. He committed suicide in a bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery on April 30, 1945.
Dr. Herbert Jankuhn (1905–1990) One of the brightest and most respected archaeologists in Germany, Jankuhn joined the Ahnenerbe in 1937, becoming the head of its department of archaeology three years later. In 1942, Jankuhn led a small unit of archaeologists to southern Russia and the Caucasus to search for the treasure of the Goths and find proof of a classical-era German empire along the Black Sea.
Dr. Karl Kersten (1909–1992) An expert on the northern European Bronze Age, Kersten was an old friend of Herbert Jankuhn. In 1942, he joined Jankuhn’s archaeological unit, and spent the early fall of that year surveying archaeological sites in the Crimea and preparing an itinerary for Himmler’s tour to the region.
Edmund Kiss (1886–1960) A much-decorated soldier in the First World War and an architect and writer by profession, Kiss claimed to have found the ruins of primordial Aryan palaces and temples in South America. In 1939, he planned to lead a team of twenty—the Ahnenerbe’s largest and most expensive expedition—to Tiwanaku in the Bolivian Andes.
Dr. Peter Paulsen (1902–1985) An archaeologist with an international reputation as a Viking expert, Paulsen headed a unit of scholars dispatched to Warsaw in 1939 to methodically loot the city’s most important museum collections of their archaeological treasures. Unable to fend off other Nazi thieves, he was reassigned in 1940 to a quiet teaching job at an SS officer-training school in Bad Tölz.
Dr. Ernst Schäfer (1910–1992) A headstrong zoologist with a volatile temper, Schäfer led an expedition to Tibet in 1938 to search for proof of an ancient Aryan conquest of the Himalayas. During the war, he lectured in occupied Europe as an exemplar of Nazi science, and in 1942 he accepted command of a military and scientific mission, Special Command K, in the Caucasus. One goal of the mission was to conduct a racial diagnosis of the Mountain Jews to determine whether they should be annihilated.
Wolfram Sievers (1905–1948) A high-school dropout who taught himself European prehistory, Sievers was a gifted administrator who became the Ahnenerbe’s managing director. During the war, Sievers headed the Ahnenerbe’s Institute for Military Scientific Research and orchestrated its notorious medical experiments on prisoners at Dachau and Natzweiler concentration camps.
Eduard Tratz (1888–1977) One of Salzburg’s most respected citizens, Tratz was the founder of the Haus der Natur, a major natural-history museum. An ardent supporter of Nazi policy and doctrine, Tratz joined Paulsen’s looting unit in 1939, personally plundering the State Zoological Museum in Warsaw.
Erika Trautmann (1897–1968) The daughter of a wealthy estate owner in East Prussia and a close friend of Hermann Göring, Trautmann was an illustrator and photographer by profession. While working for the world famous Research Institute for Cultural Morphology in Frankfurt, she met the classical historian Franz Altheim, who became her lover. In 1937, the couple conducted archaeological research in Italy and Dalmatia at Himmler’s behest, and soon after joined the Ahnenerbe. In 1938, they traveled to Romania and Iraq conducting research for the Ahnenerbe, and gathering intelligence for the SS Security Service.
Karl-Maria Wiligut (also known as Weisthor) (1866–1946) A former psychiatric patient and a self-described expert in runic script, Wiligut traced his pedigree back to the Norse god Thor. He claimed to guard the sacred knowledge of primeval German tribes. He met Himmler in 1933, and in the years that followed, the SS leader gave him an office in RuSHA and consulted him regularly on matters of ancient Germanic traditions.
Dr. Herman Wirth (1885–1981) An eccentric Dutch spendthrift with immense reserves of personal charm, Wirth was a philologist by training and a self-proclaimed expert in script and symbol studies. He became the first president of the Ahnenerbe (1935–1937), and led two expeditions to Scandinavia, where he believed he had found examples of the world’s oldest writing system: a lost Aryan script.
Dr. Walther Wüst (1901–1993) A cautious, reserved man, Wüst was an expert on Sanskrit and Old Persian, and a Nazi authority on the ancient Aryans. During his first meeting with Himmler, he read aloud from old Sanskrit scriptures, an experience that enthralled the SS leader. In 1937, Himmler appointed Wüst president of the Ahnenerbe, and later made him the institute’s superintendent (1939–1945).