by Bill Yenne
Very much in his element, Karl Maria Wiligut leads a tour to the Externsteine, the ancient Irminsul rock formations in the Teutoburgerwald. He is in the center, barely visible in the midst of the pack of SS dignitaries to whom he is lecturing. On the rock face above is the twelfth-century Christian bas relief of Christ being taken from the cross, as the Irminsul is trampled beneath. It was actually Wolfram Sievers, rather than Wiligut, who headed up the Ahnenerbe’s Externsteine Stiftung (Externsteine Foundation), which conducted ongoing studies of the ancient site. Heinrich Himmler is on the right, next to the unidentified woman. Sievers may be in the group as well. U.S. National Archives
On their Nordic trip, the Ahnenerbe men did make contact with the legendary seer—often called a witch—Miron-Aku. There was talk that she, like Karl Maria Wiligut, could communicate with the spirits of past civilizations. The Ahnenerbe are known to have photographed her for the first, and possibly the last, time. Aside from this chance meeting, little was ever documented of the enigmatic oracle.
Himmler’s interest in runes was the catalyst for the other Ahnenerbe archeology boondoggle of 1936. Hermann Wirth had shown Himmler some slides of ancient petroglyphs that he had taken on an earlier trip to the Bohuslän area of southwestern Sweden, just below the Norwegian border. In August, Himmler sent Sievers and Wirth to check out these petroglyphs and investigate other sites, including the German island of Rügen, in the Baltic Sea.
By the time that he returned from the Bohuslän junket, Wirth’s tenure at the helm of the Ahnenerbe was running out. Himmler was bothered by his budget overruns, accusations of his having faked certain artifacts from Bohuslän, and especially by his being more of a hobbyist than a scholar. Like a schoolboy who snubs a former friend after entering a higher cliche, Himmler bounced the nonacademic Wirth from the Ahnenerbe in 1937. Wirth’s being fired by Heinrich Himmler was like Lanz von Liebenfels being ignored by Adolf Hitler. Once upon a time, both Wirth and Lanz had been the man of the hour, but the momentum of the Third Reich had moved past and left them in its wake.
The Externsteine was a favorite destination for SS ritualistic field trips. Heinrich Himmler (center) liked having his SS men get in touch with their pagan ancestors. He often visited Wilhelm Teudt, the archeologist in residence here, who had the gift of channeling the spirits of ancient Germans. As Teudt put it, he could feel their vibrations. Author’s collection
Replacing Wirth in Himmler’s favor was the Dr. Walther Wüst of Ludwig Maximilians Universität (Ludwig Maximilian University) in Munich, which today is still the second largest university in Germany. According to U.S. Army Occupation Headquarters documents (National Archives Record Group 260), Wüst was “the dean of the philosophical faculty and later rector” of the university. He became president and curator of the Ahnenerbe, though “for all practical purposes, Sievers was the acting head of the organization.”
The ideal Ahnenerbe figurehead, Wüst was a heavily credentialed academic insider whose claim to fame was that he was a respected orientalist. He had studied and lectured on Middle Eastern and Indian cultures, but he also was a believer in the notion of the Aryan race being the master race for Indo-European ethnicity and civilization. It also didn’t hurt that, before being named to head the Ahnenerbe, he had been a low-level consultant to the SS. Not long after being named president of the Ahnenerbe, Wüst was promoted to SS Hauptsturmführer.
A Partial List of Scientific Research Organizations and Institutions Set up in Germany Under the Umbrella of the Ahnenerbe
Alte Geschichte (Ancient History)
Angewandte Geologie (Applied Geology)
Astronomie (Astronomy)
Ausgrabungen (Excavations)
Biologie (Biology)
Botanik (Botany)
Darstellende und Angewandte Naturkunde (Descriptive and Applied Natural History)
Deutsche Volksforschung und Volkskunde (German Ethnic Research and Folklore)
Entomologie (Entomology)
Externsteine Stiftung (Externsteine Foundation)
Forschungsstatte für Innersasien und Expeditionen (Research Institute for Intra-Asia and Expeditions)
Geologische Zeitmessung (Geochronology)
Geophysik (Geophysics)
Germanisch-deutsch Volkskunde (Germanic-German Folklore)
Germanische Kulturwissenschaft und Landschaftskunde (Germanic Cultural Studies and Landscape Science)
Germanische Sprachwissenschaft und Landschaftskunde (Germanic Linguistics and Landscape Science)
Germanisches Bauwesen (Germanic Architecture)
Gesamte Naturwissenschaft (Natural Science)
Griechische Philologie (Greek Philology)
Hausmarken und Sippenzeichen (House Brands and Family Marks)
Sven Hedin Institut für Innerasien Forshung (Sven Hedin Institute for Intra-Asian Research)
Indogermanisch-arische Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft (Indogermanic-Aryan Language and Cultural Studies)
Indogermanisch-Deutsche Musik (Indogermanic-German Music)
Indogermanische Glaubengeshichte (Indogermanic Faith History)
Indogermanische Rechtsgeschichte (Indogermanic Historical Jurisprudence)
Indogermanisch-Finnische Kulturbeziehungen (Indogermanic-Finnish cultural relations)
Indogermanisch-Germanische Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft (Indogermanic-Germanic Language and Cultural Studies)
Karst und Höhlenkunde (Speleology)
Keltische Volksforschung (Celtic Ethnic Research)
Kernphysik (Nuclear Physics)
Klassische Altertumswissenschaft (Classical Antiquity)
Klassische Archäologie (Classic Archaeology)
Lateinische Philologie (Latin Philology)
Mittellatein (Medieval Latin)
Mittlere und Neuere Geschichte (Middle and Modern History)
Naturwissenschaftliche Vorgeschichte (Scientific Prehistory)
Nordwestafrikanische Kulturwissenschaft (Northwest African Cultural Studies)
Orientalistische Indologie (Oriental Indology)
Ortung und Landschaftssinnbilder (Location and Landscape of Symbols)
Ostasien-Institut (East Asian Institute)
Osteologie (Science of Bone Structure)
Pferdezucht (Horse Breeding)
Pflanzengenetik (Plant Genetics)
Philosophie (Philosophy)
Runen, Schrift und Sinnbildkunde (Runes, Alphabets, and Symbols)
Tiergeographie und Tiergeschichte (Animal Geography and Animal History)
Ueberprüfung der Sogenannten Geheimwissenschaften (Survey of Alleged Secret Sciences)
Urgeschichte (Prehistory)
Volkserzählung, Märchen und Sagenkunde (Folktales, Fairytales and Myths)
Volksmedizin (Folk Medicine)
Vorderer Orient (Near East)
Wehrwissenschaftliche Zweckforschung (Institute for Military Scientific Research)
Wurtenforschung (Dwelling Mound Research)
Wüst revamped the image of the Ahnenerbe, giving it the academic legs that Himmler desired and providing it with the appearance of an important institute doing important work. A foundation was created, and fundraisers brought in corporate contributions to perpetuate this important work. The board members of BMW, Daimler-Benz, and Deutsche Bank all chipped in. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to say nein to the Reichsführer SS. Though small by comparison to Himmler’s other dominions—the SS and the Gestapo, for instance—the Ahnenerbe was his dream come true, his happy place. As Himmler had always known, the past and future are inexorably linked through the present. As he had always believed, he who interprets the past shapes the future.
CHAPTER 11
Archaeologists in Black
AS PART OF HEINRICH HIMMLER’S interest in firmly establishing a foundation for Nazi mythology, the Ahnenerbe sponsored numerous archeological expeditions aimed at “discovering” the ancient roots of the Aryan race. In the planning of such expeditions, the inspiration was Heinrich Schliemann, the German archeolog
ist who had discovered the city of Troy.
Schliemann had discovered something that literally was not supposed to exist. In the eighth century BC, Homer had written in his epic poem, the Iliad, about the Trojan War, a monumental event in Greek history. Subsequent ancient historians had discussed it as fact, but by the nineteenth century, more rational and scientifically “enlightened” historians had written the Trojan War off as mere legend. Conventional wisdom held that it was all a big myth. To shorten a long and complicated story to its essentials, in the 1870s, Schliemann, a self-taught, amateur archeologist, excavated a site in Turkey called Hisarlik—and he found Troy.
Heinrich Himmler and his Ahnenerbe archaeologists went after the ancient roots of the Aryan race as the master race, just as Schliemann had gone after Troy. They “knew” they were right, so it was just a matter getting their hands on some tangible artifacts to support their beliefs.
If Schliemann inspired the fathers of the Ahnenerbe, the Ahnenerbe itself would serve as an inspiration to future generations of fiction writers and filmmakers. Nothing stirs the imagination more than truth that is literally stranger than fiction. Many people consider the Nazi archaeologists who served as foils for Indiana Jones in the popular Stephen Speilberg films to have been an interesting, if unrealistic, plot device. In fact, the idea of Nazi archaeologists, specifically Ahnenerbe archaeologists, racing around the world in quest of the Holy Grail was not far fetched, but true.
Though the roster of the Ahnenerbe is filled with the names of myriad archaeologists and pseudoarchaeologists, the man whom pop culture had anointed as a possible prototype for the Indiana Jones fiction is a man from Michelstadt named Otto Rahn. He grew up a fan of Wagnerian opera and thrilled to the Nibelunglied. He devoured Wolfram von Eschenbach, fantasizing about Parzival and his obsession with the Holy Grail.
According to John Preston, writing in the May 22, 2008, issue of the London daily, The Telegraph, Rahn was “small and weasel-faced, with a hesitant, toothy smile and hair like a neatly contoured oil slick.”
While at the University of Giessen, Rahn developed an interest in the Cathars, the breakaway Christian sect with roots in the Black Sea rim and which was centered in the Languedoc region of western France between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. The Cathars believed in the dualism of two powerful gods, a physical one who embodied violence and evil, and a spiritual god who personified goodness and peace. The Cathars rejected the divinity of Jesus Christ because in order to have embodied goodness, he could not have been made flesh. The Catholic Church labeled the Cathars as heretics and launched a Crusade to crush them. This culminated in a massacre of Cathars in 1244 at their last stronghold, the mountaintop castle at Montségur.
Rahn theorized that the Cathars had found and hidden the Holy Grail, as it was linked to the physical Christ. Rather than leaving his ideas as campus coffee-house chatter, Rahn decided to go look for the Holy Grail in a place where he was sure he could find it: at Montségur.
He arrived in 1931. He searched the castle, and he quested high and low, on mountains and in caves, all across the Pyrenees. Though he did not find the Holy Grail, he did accumulate the material for a book, Kreuzzug gegen den Gral (Crusade Against the Grail), which was first published in 1933.
As Preston writes, “One day in 1933 he received a mysterious telegram offering him 1,000 reichsmarks a month to write the sequel to Crusade Against the Grail. The telegram was unsigned, but he was instructed to go to an address in Berlin—Prinz Albrechtstrasse. When he arrived, he was understandably surprised to be greeted by the grinning figure of Heinrich Himmler…. Not only had Himmler read Crusade Against the Grail; he’d virtually committed the thing to memory. For the first time in his life Rahn met someone even more obsessed with finding the Grail than he was.”
Within a few weeks by Preston’s reckoning, or a couple years according to other sources, Rahn was in the black uniform of an SS Sturmbannführer. He continued his search for the Holy Grail under the Reichsführer’s patronage, traveling to various sites throughout Europe. Again, he came up empty-handed so far as the Grail is concerned, but he did accumulate the material for a second book. In Luzifers Hofgesind (Lucifer’s Court), originally published in 1937, Rahn wrote “My ancient forbears were heathens, and my ancestors were heretics. For their exoneration I collect the pieces that Rome left over.” It was a sentiment straight out of the canons of Guido von List or Karl Maria Wiligut.
Gradually, Rahn lost favor in the Reichsführer’s court, partly for his apparent indifference to Nazism, partly for being too openly gay, but mainly for promising too much in his search for the Holy Grail. “He came back empty-handed,” wrote Nigel Graddon, Rahn’s biographer. “That was his biggest offence.”
Himmler was interested in tangible artifacts.
In March 1939, Rahn went hiking near Soll in the Austrian Tyrol and never came back. When his frozen corpse was found, the formal ruling was suicide. The man was dead, but the conspiracy theories lived on. There were stories of an SS hit squad and of his having made contact with British intelligence. There were even rumors that the body was a ringer, and Rahn was still alive. Preston writes, “Hollywood has conferred a strange kind of immortality on Otto Rahn. But it’s not only Hollywood; on the Internet, his memory continues to be bathed in a richly speculative glow, fanned by ever more outlandish theories about his fate.”
Heinrich Himmler, his SS dagger prominent at his side, greets a young German skier around the time of the 1936 Winter Olympics, which were held in Bavaria. Fit, young mountaineers and outsdoorsmen were characteristic of Himmler’s ideal Nordic type—and of the cadre of archaeologists he sent on expeditions to Tibet and other far-flung places in search of the cold, icy origins of the Aryan race. Author’s collection
Still waiting for a very well deserved Hollywood moment is the legacy of the tireless husband and wife team of Dr. Franz Altheim and Erika Trautmann. The son of a Frankfurt sculptor who committed suicide on Christmas Day in 1914, Altheim joined the Imperial German Army during World War I and was stationed in Turkey. During this time, he took an interest in history and archeology, which he pursued academically after the war, eventually serving as a professor at the University of Halle. Erika Trautmann was a photographer who had once spurned the romantic advances of Hermann Göring.
The German island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea was the objective of a 1936 archeological expedition involving both Wolfram Sievers and Hermann Wirth. Heinrich Himmler sent them to scour these cliffs, as well as a site in the area of Bohuslän in southwestern Sweden, looking for petroglyphs that might have been related to ancient runic lore. Author’s collection
Having vacationed in northern Italy, Altheim was intrigued by the vast number of prehistoric petroglyphs that exist in the Valcamonica region of Lombardy. The valley stretches for nearly sixty miles from Tonale Pass to Corna Trentapassi near Lake Iseo, and contains one of the largest concentrations of petroglyphs in the world. Designated in 1979 as the first UNESCO World Heritage site in Italy, Valcamonica was then thought to encompass 140,000 carved pictographs, although current estimates exceed double that number.
In 1937, by showing parallels between the rock art and the runes that Himmler and friends loved so much, Altheim was able to convince the Ahnenerbe to send him and his then-girlfriend to Italy. They also made a convincing argument that many of these glyphs were carved by ancient Nordic alpine dwellers.
In the quest for academic credibility, the Ahnenerbe apparently got its money’s worth. Altheim and Trautmann actually made some scientifically important discoveries, and they got published. Die Welt als Geschichte (The World as History) published their Forshungsbericht zur Romischen Geschichte: Von den Anfanggen bis zum Tode des Pyrrhos (Research Report to Roman History: From the Beginning to the Death of the Pyrrhos) in 1936, and Nordische und Italische Felsbildkunst (Nordic and Italian Rock Picture Art) in 1937. Neue Felsbilder aus der Valcamonica: Die Sonne im Kult und Mythos (New Petroglyphs from Valcamonica: The Sun in Cult and
Myth) was published in 1938 by Worter und Sachen. Not only were Altheim and Trautmann published in contemporary journals, but their work is also still being quoted in the academic media today.
In 1938, the couple submitted an even more ambitious proposal to the Ahnenerbe. While Guido von List had held true to conventional historic thinking when he waxed romantically about the struggle between ancient Rome and the Germanic people, Altheim and Trautmann picked up a theory that the Romans were successful precisely because they were a Nordic people. The thesis was that there had been a struggle in the Middle East between Nordic, Indo-European people and Semitic populations. Altheim wanted to go to the Middle East and prove it.
Altheim was preaching to a choir predisposed to believe that Aryans were pioneers in the Middle East. Ahnenerbe boss Walther Wüst imagined the Aryan race to have been the originator of all Indo-European civilization, and men such as Alfred Rosenberg believed that Aryan paganism was the mother religion of the Middle East’s oldest religions. Then, too, there was Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s idea that Jesus Christ was a member of the Nordic community in the Middle East that was at war with the Jews. Trautmann’s old friend Hermann Göring was so excited by the project that he reportedly put up 4,000 reichsmarks to fund it. Not to be outdone, the Ahnenerbe matched his offer.
The well-financed expedition passed though Romania, a future ally of Germany in World War II, where the archaeologists looked briefly at sites connected with the ancient Indo-European people called Dacians, who lived in the region before the Romans—the namesake of Romania—arrived in the first century. From here, the couple traveled across Turkey to Iraq, with which Germany was then angling for a political alliance to counter British influence elsewhere in the Middle East. Against the backdrop of the political intrigue, Altheim and Trautmann were treated by Iraqi archaeologists to tours of various archeological sites in the country in scenes that could easily have been outtakes from an Indiana Jones film. They visited Babylon and drove out to Hatra (now al-Hadr), an ancient city founded in the third century BC under the Seleucid Empire, a fragment of the former empire of Alexander the Great.
