THE WORD “ACKNOWLEDGMENTS” SEEMS far too slight a term to describe the immense debt of gratitude that I owe to the many people whose generosity, kindness, ingenuity, curiosity, hard work, and passionate commitment made this book a reality. Writing a history on a subject as large and convoluted as that of the Ahnenerbe is a mammoth undertaking by any measure. Its successful completion depends upon so many complicated pursuits—investigating and tracking down reliable sources for interviews, locating important archival materials, searching out rare books from the period, and finding gifted archivists who can, for example, recall at the drop of a hat the exact contents of microfilms that they may have briefly scanned years earlier. In this case of this book, there was an additional challenge. When I first began this project in the summer of 2001, I did not read or speak a word of German.
Will Schwalbe at Hyperion had faith from the beginning that I could overcome all these hurdles. From our very first conversation about Nazi archaeologists, he strongly encouraged me to undertake the project and then arranged for generous financial support from Hyperion. I am eternally grateful to Will for his publishing acumen, his wonderful editorial eye, and his continuing friendship. I am also hugely grateful to my editor, Peternelle van Arsdale, who has been so supportive, patient, constructive, and discerning throughout this past four and a half years, never flinching once from the torrent of e-mails I sent her. She is truly a brick! I would also like to thank Christopher Potter and Cynthia Good as well as Catherine Heaney at Fourth Estate in London and Diane Turbide at Penguin Canada for their enthusiasm for this book. And I would be greatly remiss, too, if I did not mention all the help, encouragement, and sound advice that I have received from my superb agent Anne McDermid and her associate Jane Warren.
From the outset, I realized that I needed the assistance of a small band of linguistically talented researchers if I was to trace the activities of the Ahnenerbe across Europe, Asia, and South America. While scouting about for suitable people, I contacted Peter Stenberg, the head of the Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia. This was probably the single most important phone call that I made during this project, for it was in this way that I was introduced to the astonishingly gifted Stenberg clan. In the course of this project, every member of the family—polyglots all—jumped in to lend a hand. Peter and Rosa Stenberg brought me new German books hot off the press from their annual summer sojourns in Munich. They loaned me articles and other research materials; assisted with difficult translations; bought me lunches; introduced me to their friend, Auschwitz survivor Rudolf Vrba; invited me to Christmas Eve parties; and valiantly served as readers of the final manuscript, critiquing its contents and picking out many of my errors. I can’t thank them enough. Their youngest son, Josh, took time out from his studies of Mandarin and Russian at Harvard to dig out and photocopy rare German scientific books in the university’s library. Their oldest son, Erik, offered expert advice on matters to do with the war and the German military. Rachel and Anja greatly brightened my days by their visits to the office.
But the family’s greatest contribution to this book has come from Charlotte Stenberg. A wonderfully resourceful researcher blessed with an abundance of linguistic talent, Charlotte has labored full-time on this project since its inception. She immersed herself in Nazi German, a lexicon in its own right; translated thousands of pages of archival and court documents from German, Swedish, French, and Norwegian into English; doggedly tracked down photographs from archives across Europe and the United States; meticulously checked and double-checked the book’s notes for accuracy; presided over a bulging mini-archive of copied documents in our office; and rescued me more than once from the crashes of my recalcitrant iMac. It’s very difficult for me to imagine how I could have completed this book without her sunny temperament and the vast energy that she brought to her work.
It would also be difficult to adequately thank another superb researcher, Sabine Schmitt. A Berliner with a doctoral degree in modern German history, Sabine was of invaluable assistance with the German archival research. In addition, she helped us contact family members and friends of the Ahnenerbe researchers and accompanied me to nearly all the interviews that I did in Germany and Austria, sometimes at great personal and emotional cost. Despite these difficulties, she proved to be a wonderful travel companion and an astute guide to modern German life, kindly assisting me in finding apartments for my stays in Berlin, introducing me to everything from the complexities of German train schedules to the nuances of Turkish cuisine, and giving me impromptu primers on such diverse subjects as the spread of neo-Nazism in modern Germany.
In addition, I’d like to extend my gratitude to three other members of the research team. For more than a year, archaeologist Sibylle Günther combed the libraries of Berlin, searching out forgotten books written by Ahnenerbe researchers and poring over their texts, trying to make sense of them. It was from Sibylle that I first learned of the “poison closet,” a section in German libraries where hate-mongering literature is stowed for the use of serious researchers only. In the libraries of Reykjavík, a young Icelandic student, Haflidi Saevarsson, located some very valuable research for us on Himmler’s interest in Iceland, while in St. Petersburg, an old friend, Natasha Dobrynina, found and translated important Soviet sources on the Goths of the Crimea. Thanks are also due to Canadian cartographer Signy Fridriksson-Fick, who labored diligently to create the four original maps that grace this book, and to John Masters, Birgitt Bischof, and Peter Bennett for their patient labors on digital scans and other photographic matters.
A small army of archivists and librarians went out of their way to help us ferret out documents, microfilms, photographs, films, sound recordings, and obscure books from their collections. I would particularly like to thank James Kelling and Niels Cordes at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Michael Hollmann and Simone Langner at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin, Gregor Pickro at the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, Christoph Bachmann at the Staatsarchiv Munich, Editha Platte and Peter Steigerwald at the Frobenius-Institut Archiv in Frankfurt, Ulrike Talay and Dr. Klaus A. Lankheit at the Institute für Zeitgeschichte in Munich, Ms. Krug at the Deutsches Ärchaeologisches Institut in Berlin, Michael Maaser at the Universität Archiv in Frankfurt, Ms. Galonska at Bundesbeauftragte für Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdientes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, Gerhard Keiper at the Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amt in Berlin, Jürgen Mahrenholz at Humboldt University in Berlin, and David Smith at the New York Public Library. Mette Hide, the archivist at the Kulturhistorik Museum Archiv in Oslo, was especially warm and cordial, inviting me into her home to sample traditional Norwegian cuisine and dashing off frequent letters and postcards of encouragement while I was writing the book.
Many other people freely gave of their time and their expertise, making this a much better book than it would have been otherwise. Achim Leube at Humboldt University in Berlin was an unfailing source of leads and a wonderful guiding light, always finding time from his own numerous historical projects to answer my questions. Rudolf Vrba in Vancouver generously shared his insights on the operations at Auschwitz, while Hans-Joachim Lang in Tübingen kindly helped me piece together some of the more troubling details of the Ahnenerbe’s skeleton collection. And I will never forget the fabulous weekend I spent with Luitgard Löw and Camilla Olsson in Sweden, touring the famous rock art of Bohuslän and drinking German wine and talking late into the night in the little house by the sea at Grebbestad.
I could never adequately thank all the others who patiently answered so many questions and e-mails, correcting misconceptions and supplying much valuable new information. I am sure many groaned every time they saw yet another e-mail or fax or telephone message from our team, so I’d like to take this opportunity to extend my deepest appreciation to the following individuals: Andrej Angrick, Michael Balter, Achim Barsch, Margit Berner, David Braund, Anton Brøgger, Jan Brøgger, Frank M. Clover, John Peter Collett, Dee R. Eberhart, Martijn Eickhoff, Isrun Engelhardt, Frode Færøy, Dietmar Feldhaus, Jens Fleischer, Espen Grøgaard, Walther Habersetzer, Anders Hagen, Elmar Ham-merschmidt, Brian Hayden, Henry M. Hoenigswald, Niklas Holzberg, Mary Ison, Irma-Rütta Järvinen, Olav Sverre Johansen, Frederick H. Kasten, Hans Ewald Keßler, Stefan Klein, Serge Lebel, Sylvette Lemagnen, Freddy Litten, Katharina Lommel, Volker Losemann, Wendy Lower, Bob Martinson, Michael Meyer, Waldemar Nehring, Erle Nelson, Karl-Heinz Nickel, Javier Nuñez de Arco, Linda Owen, Taina Partanen, Werner Renz, Perry Rolfsen, Wijnand van der Sanden, Ina Schmidt, Eike Schmitz, Winfried Schultze, William E. Seidelman, Gerd Simon, Kurt Singer, Jiri Svoboda, Sid Tafler, Maria Teschler-Nicola, Claudia Theune-Vogt, Annette Timm, Bruce Trigger, Gretchen Vogel, Hector Williams, Ingo Wiwjorra, and Ingrid Zwerenz.
Moreover, I can’t thank enough those scholars who took time out from their busy research and teaching schedules to read parts of the manuscript: Victor H. Mair at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia; Juha Pentikäinen at the University of Helsinki; Alexander Gertsen at Taurian National University in Simferopol; Hannu E. Sinisalo from the University of Tampere in Finland; Guido Lombardo from Universidad Peruana Coyetano Heredio in Lima; Tjalling Waterbolk from the University of Groningen; Juhani von Grönhagen in Helsinki; Luitgard Löw in Gothenburg; Camilla Olsson in Trondheim; and Sabine Schmitt in Berlin. They saved me from the scourge of many an error: those mistakes still embedded in the text are entirely my own.
Last, but certainly not least, I would like to express my gratitude to my father for his personal recollections of the final days of the war and the bombing campaigns of the Royal Air Force, Kathleen Hodgson for her amiable concern during the grueling months I spent writing the darkest chapters of this book, and my brother Alex and sister-in-law Sheila, and their wonderful clan—Thomas, Anna, and Sarah—for their unflagging encouragement and curiosity about this book. I’m also indebted to John Masters and Andrew Nikiforuk for their research suggestions, unstinting friendship, and moral support.
Most of all, however, I want to thank my husband Geoff, who thought from the very beginning that a book on the Ahnenerbe was a great idea. He had no inkling that he would spend the next four and a half years listening to bizarre blow-by-blow accounts of the research, sitting through numerous German documentaries and films on the Nazi regime, and browsing through nearly all the books I brought home on Himmler, the SS, and the Second World War. But even if he had suspected all that he was in for, I feel certain he would have been game. Geoff is at heart a historian, and his immense fascination for the past has been a continuing source of delight and inspiration to me. I wrote this book with him in mind. I can think of no one else that I would rather share my life with.