Heinrich Himmler : A Life (49 page)

Himmler listed a whole series of virtues in Henry that he considered exemplary. At his election in 919 he refused to be anointed by the church, and thus testified to the fact that, astutely acknowledging the prevailing circumstances, he was unwilling to tolerate the church’s intervention in political matters in Germany under his rule. Himmler continued: ‘He reintroduced the old and yet ever new Germanic principle of the loyalty of the duke to his liegeman, in sharpest contrast to the Carolingian methods of ruling based on church and Christianity.’ In addition, according to Himmler, Henry was an advocate of ‘open discussion among men’. Above all, ‘he never forgot for a moment that the strength of the German nation lies in the purity of its blood and the ancient Germanic traditional rootedness in one’s own soil’. He was owed heartfelt thanks ‘for never making the mistake that Germans and also European statesmen have made for centuries up to the present day: that of seeing his goal as lying outside the living-space [
Lebensraum
]—today we would say geopolitical space—of his nation’.

Unfortunately, Himmler was forced to concede, the celebrations had one blemish: ‘The earthly remains of the great German leader no longer rest in their burial-place. We do not know where they are.’
⁸¹
This ‘source of shame for the whole German nation’, as Himmler called it elsewhere,
⁸²
gave him no rest. He instituted a thorough search for Henry’s bones, which met with the desired success the following year. As
Das Schwarze Korps
promptly reported on the occasion of the King Henry celebrations, ‘scientific evidence has established that the remains discovered during excavations in the crypt of Quedlinburg cathedral are in fact those of Henry I’.
⁸³
‘Himmler has dug up the bones of Henry I’, as Propaganda Minister Goebbels noted laconically in his diary.
⁸⁴

In the years that followed Himmler appeared annually in Quedlinburg to commemorate the dead king in a solemn ceremony in the crypt of the cathedral, the interior of which was festooned with a huge cloth bearing the SS runes.
⁸⁵
During the war the commemoration went ahead without Himmler, however, and apparently in his absence the accustomed solemnity was somewhat lacking. At any rate, in 1944 Himmler’s adjutant complained that after the most recent commemoration far too much alcohol had been consumed.
⁸⁶

If Himmler celebrated Henry I as the actual founder of the Reich and as one whose attitude to Christianity was distant, the rule of the Hohenstaufens in the High Middle Ages was for him an era in which ‘the Reich at its height attained and radiated a power that outshone the rest of the world’. Emperor Frederick II and his contemporary Henry the Lion held pride of place on his roll-call of German heroes.
⁸⁷

Another model he drew from the Middle Ages was the order of Teutonic Knights. In 1939 the SS took over the headquarters of the order in Vienna, which had been requisitioned. Himmler exploited the occasion to expatiate on history. The order had, he said, been founded

very early [ . . . ] in the so-called [
sic
] Holy Land, when, led astray by the Christian church, the powerful forces of Germanic expansion bled to death in the far, far east. This order of knights then made the bold move to East Prussia and there became the order of Teutonic Knights. It founded the state, the order’s own state of East Prussia, in accordance with its strict, soldierly code and Christian outlook. [ . . .] It is my firm intention to appropriate from it all that was good about this order: bravery, extraordinary loyalty to a revered idea, sound organization, riding out into far countries, riding out to the east.
⁸⁸

In recent German history, however, Himmler found relatively few points of contact for his Germanic view of history. In the second half of the war he referred variously to Prussia and Prussian virtues and to the Prussian king Frederick II, the Prussian reforms, and Bismarck’s founding of the Kaiserreich,
⁸⁹
but that was as far as it went. His historical borrowings were thus basically concerned with appropriating the supposed Germanic heritage from the Dark Ages. The establishment of a cult of the Teutons within the SS was, as already indicated, entirely in accord with Himmler’s youthful passion for Germanic heroes and virtues. Yet the veneration of the Teutons as practised by the SS cannot be explained merely as the influence of an individual quirk of the Reichsführer-SS. Rather, Himmler’s intention was to secure for the SS a lasting role at the ideological heart of National Socialism as preserver of the Germanic heritage and its interpretation. In a system so profoundly rooted in ideology as National Socialism such a position held out the promise of considerably enhanced prestige and power.

The fact that the zeal with which many National Socialists emphasized the Germanic heritage in the first years of the Third Reich had since the mid-1930s been losing impetus did not discourage the Reichsführer-SS. Even the fact that in his public statements Hitler used only non-specific set phrases in comments on the Germanic past, and in private indicated clearly that he was not particularly interested in the Germanic heritage and considered any intensive engagement with this topic, of the kind Himmler went in for, as slightly bizarre,
⁹⁰
did not reduce the latter’s commitment. For, by contrast with Hitler, Himmler’s concern with this matter was not primarily linked to effective mass propaganda, but rather he saw in it the way to underpin an identity specific to the SS.

He therefore went to considerable lengths not only to conjure up the existence of a Germanic empire and the continuation of Germanic features in the German people, but also to support these with scientific proof. He was not, however, alone in seeking to do this. The official head of NS ideology, the ‘Führer’s commisioner in charge of all intellectual and ideological training and education in the NSDAP’, Alfred Rosenberg, had since 1933 been pursuing the plan of centralizing all prehistory in a ‘Reich Institute for Pre-History and Early History’
⁹¹
—for Himmler, an additional spur to speed up research into the Germanic heritage through his own academic organization.

Himmler’s encounter with Hermann Wirth in October 1934 clearly provided the first impetus for the founding of this society. He met the private scholar and researcher into prehistory, who was universally rejected by the scholarly community in his subject, at a private soirée, also attended by Darré.
⁹²
Commissioned by Himmler and Darré, in the spring of 1935 Wirth began work; first of all he prepared two exhibitions, the purpose of which was to present Germanic customs from a Nazi perspective.
⁹³

On 1 July 1935 Himmler founded the society for the study of intellectual prehistory, German Ancestral Heritage (Deutsches Ahnenerbe), which was set up entirely with Wirth’s activities in mind.
⁹⁴
Wirth became president of the society and Wolfram Sievers, Wirth’s former private secretary, was appointed general secretary.
⁹⁵
At first the Ahnenerbe was part of the work of the Race and Settlement Main Office and thus very much under Darré’s influence.
⁹⁶

Soon, however, Himmler began to fear that the development of the institute could be adversely affected by the fact that Wirth was not regarded as a serious academic.
⁹⁷
In addition, Wirth used the funds at his disposal in a very headstrong and lavish manner.
⁹⁸
For these reasons, in the course of 1936 Himmler engineered a parting of the ways with Wirth, who, while retaining the honorary presidency and without in the process breaking with Himmler personally, was finally dismissed from the service of the Ahnenerbe in 1938.
⁹⁹
The Indo-Germanic expert and Munich university professor Walter Wüst, who since the autumn of 1936 had been in charge of a newly created Ahnenerbe department for lexicology, became Wirth’s successor.
¹⁰⁰
(Wüst demonstrated his particular gratitude by, among other things, presenting Himmler, on the latter’s thirty-seventh birthday, with a replica, made by the Allach factory, of a ‘beautifully shaped, Lower Saxon bossed urn’—according to Wüst, a greeting ‘across more than one-and-a-half millennia and full of profound meanings’.
¹⁰¹
)

Before 1939 Himmler removed the Ahnenerbe in stages from the influence of the Race and Settlement Main Office and finally transformed this academic organization into an office of the SS, attached to his Personal Staff.
¹⁰²
At the beginning of 1939 he introduced a new set of rules in which he made himself president, while Wüst, who was de facto director
of the organization, became ‘curator’ and Sievers remained administrative head.
¹⁰³

From the start the main task of the Ahnenerbe was to support the SS’s ideological indoctrination programmes with publications on Germanic prehistory and in the field of genealogy. Thus, Himmler demanded from members of the SS not only certificates of descent but in addition wanted SS leaders to display coats of arms. To this end he commissioned research into the ‘clan emblems’ and ‘family crests’ of their forebears and those of other prominent Nazis.
¹⁰⁴

The Ahnenerbe expanded rapidly. From 1936 onwards branches emerged all over the Reich. In the main they were working in isolation and were charged with the most diverse tasks. In 1939 the Ahnenerbe finally had around two-dozen research institutions at its disposal, mostly in the fields of prehistory, linguistics, and folklore but to a lesser extent also in other humanities disciplines, as well as, and increasingly, in the field of the natural sciences.
¹⁰⁵
For example, in addition to Wüst’s department of lexicology, in 1936 the Ahnenerbe had incorporated the Centre for Germanic Studies in Detmold (which immediately assumed responsibility for the Externsteine
*
). In 1937 the centres for Indogermanic–Finnish cultural relations
¹⁰⁶
and for family and clan emblems were added,
¹⁰⁷
as was the Centre for Folk Tales and Sagas a little later. In 1938 the Ahnenerbe set up a department of ethnic research and folklore in Frankfurt am Main
¹⁰⁸
and a department of classical philology and archaeology.
¹⁰⁹

In 1938 Himmler decreed that all SS archaeological excavations should be concentrated in the new Ahnenerbe Centre for Excavations. Several such excavations already existed: alongside projects, such as the ultimately ‘successful’ search for the remains of Henry I, that were controversial in the academic world there were serious ones such as the excavation, which from 1937 enjoyed Himmler’s personal patronage, of the early medieval trading settlement of Haithabu (Hedeby) near Schleswig, led by the famous archaeologist Hubert Jankuhn. In addition, the SS supported prehistoric excavations at the fortification of Erdenburg near Bensberg, at Altchristburg in East Prussia, and on the Hohenmichele, a prehistoric burial-site near Sigmaringen.
¹¹⁰
Further departments and research centres grew up: for Indogermanic religious history, for the Near East, for Germanic buildings, and for
medieval and modern history.
¹¹¹
Finally, there was the research centre headed by the Tibet scholar Ernst Schäfer for Central Asia and expeditions, which was refounded in 1943 as the Sven Hedin Institute.
¹¹²

Himmler’s interest in scientific research was originally aimed entirely at finding proof of the Cosmic Ice Theory (or World Ice Theory), which will be treated in detail later. To this end he had already founded a centre for meteorology, later for geophysics, under the directorship of the meteorologist Hans Robert Scultetus in Berlin in 1937. The research centre for astronomy at the Grünwald observatory near Munich was established for the same purpose.
¹¹³
In the following years Himmler extended almost at will the scientific and/or pseudo-scientific research activities of the Ahnenerbe. Amongst other things, he created a department of dowsing; a centre for geology and mineralogy, among the activities of which was prospecting for gold in Upper Bavarian rivers; a research centre for botany; and a department for the study of karst and caves.
¹¹⁴
In addition, a department of animal geography and animal history were planned, as well as one devoted to the investigation of the so-called occult sciences.
¹¹⁵

The Ahnenerbe even developed an active line in journalism. From 1936 it had been contributing to the popular science journal
Germania
, described in its subtitle as ‘a Germanic-lore monthly to promote things essentially German’, and gradually brought it under its control. Himmler always followed the publications with great interest. In addition, the Ahnenerbe had since the end of 1936 been financing the strongly anticlerical journal
Nordland
, an ‘organ of ideological struggle’, and was joint editor of a number of specialist academic journals. Apart from these, a series called ‘Deutsches Ahnenerbe’ had existed since 1935. The year 1939 saw the start of elaborate conferences.
¹¹⁶

The Ahnenerbe was, however, much more than a learned society. Staff of the Ahnenerbe acted as ‘inquisitor, censor, and confiscator’, in particular in the wake of a robust acquisitions policy.
¹¹⁷
Wüst himself made the self-critical observation in 1938 that the Ahnenerbe seized ‘important objects and institutions’ without going on to take appropriate care of them.
¹¹⁸
As in the case of many other SS projects, on more than one occasion the Gestapo gave the Ahnenerbe’s activities the muscle they needed: for example, in 1938 the Ahnenerbe took over from the Munich Gestapo the valuable library confiscated from the author Lion Feuchtwanger, and the same year it used the Gestapo to seize part of the wealth of the Salzburg University Club and the whole of its library.
¹¹⁹