Heinrich Himmler : A Life (50 page)

The Ahnenerbe also attempted to gain a foothold in the universities by offering holders of chairs a headship of department or conferring on them a high rank in the SS. An SS presence in the universities not only held out the promise of influencing teaching and research, and thus of gaining prestige, but was designed to facilitate recruitment into the SS from the student body.
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On several occasions Himmler intervened successfully in chair appointments,
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especially as his influence in the Reich Education Ministry was growing. In April 1937 Heinrich Harmjanz, a member of the SS since 1930, took over the department for the humanities, and the chemist Rudolf Mentzel, in the SS since 1932, had been responsible since May 1939 for the science department; both were well disposed towards the Ahnenerbe. The Ahnenerbe returned the favour in autumn 1938 by setting up a department of ethnic research and folklore in Frankfurt am Main for Harmjanz, where he held a professorship alongside his position in the ministry. In spite of such initiatives, however, Himmler was never to succeed in developing a university and science policy.
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This lack of coherence characterizes the Ahnenerbe as a whole. A ‘policy of unplanned expansion, dependent on random factors’,
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and the proliferation—not to say dissipation—of its activities led to the Ahnenerbe assembling in its ranks not only acknowledged experts in their fields, but also laypeople from outside the academic world, as well as outright charlatans. Consistent scholarly standards were never established.

The war was to do nothing to change this. The focus of research shifted now to projects ‘important to the war effort’. As part of the resettlement projects organized by the SS the Ahnenerbe, for example, transferred cultural objects from the South Tyrol and the Baltic States, and in the occupied territories went in for cultural plunder on a grand scale.
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Under the banner ‘The Humanities’ War Effort’, numerous Ahnenerbe specialists were working on projects relevant to ideological conflicts with the enemy.
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At the same time the Ahnenerbe got involved in animal- and plant-breeding (for example, in breeding a horse that would withstand the winter of the steppes for the militarized peasants in the east); in developments in armaments, some of a fantastical kind; but also—as part of the work of the Institute of Applied Military Research—in human experiments with frequently fatal results.
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In summary one can say that, with regard to the original purpose of the Ahnenerbe—research into prehistory and early history—substantial results were achieved. However, without a consistent research strategy to provide
a framework for individual achievements, and the means of exploiting them ideologically to benefit the SS, these successes simply vanished. The fact that such a strategy never emerged is due to a whole series of factors; in essence, however, what did emerge was that science and scholarship were not capable of providing proof of Himmler’s notion of a lost, culturally preeminent Greater Germanic Reich.
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Reverence for the Teutons, a fundamentally anti-Christian standpoint, and the eternal opposition of ‘Germanic’ and ‘Asiatic’ forces describe only some facets of Himmler’s vision of the world, namely those the Reichsführer supported in public, if at times only in an attenuated form. Himmler linked these elements with a series of fantastical theories or myths that in the interwar period were very widespread to form a much more comprehensive vision, though one he, for the most part, kept to himself.

The Reichsführer was, for example, an enthusiastic supporter of the Austrian engineer Hanns Hörbiger’s Cosmic Ice Theory, mentioned above. Though unanimously rejected by contemporary science, this theory was extremely popular in the inter-war years. It assumed that what happens in the cosmos is determined by the antagonism between suns and ice planets, and that this can both explain global catastrophes in the recent history of the earth and also provide the key to myths, for example, the myth of the lost city of Atlantis.
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Unimpressed by the unequivocally negative reaction of scientists, in July 1936 Himmler not only committed leading supporters of the Cosmic Ice Theory in Bad Pyrmont to extending this theory under his patronage,
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but attempted in particular, as part of the activities of the Ahnenerbe, to prove that it was correct. Two Ahnenerbe institutions, the Centre for Meteorology headed by the meteorologist Hans Robert Scultetus and the Research Centre for Astronomy at the Grünwald observatory, had been set up specifically for this purpose. Himmler even thought about putting Werner Heisenberg (whom he considered ‘decent’, in spite of the fact that he had just been heavily criticized in
Das Schwarze Korps
) in touch with ‘our Cosmic Ice Theory people’.
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Himmler repeatedly approached the Ahnenerbe personally to have elements of the Cosmic Ice Theory checked. In December 1940, for example,
his adjutant Brandt enquired ‘whether the sun’s being obscured by fog in some places might lead to the mutation of genetic material’—a question raised by the Reichsführer-SS. The Ahnenerbe specialist responsible for the Cosmic Ice Theory, the senior civil servant Scultetus, was, however, forced to deny there was such an effect.
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In September 1941 Brandt sent, on Himmler’s behalf, an essay entitled ‘Butterflies Fly from South Africa to Iceland’ to the administrative head Sievers, and asked for comments on it from the perspective of the Cosmic Ice Theory.
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A few months later Himmler asked Sievers to pursue indications that frozen horses or mammoths had been found in Siberia, one of ‘the few tangible proofs of a catastrophe to affect the earth however many thousands of years ago that would correspond to the earth catastrophe of the last moon-capture and its consequences, as stated in the Cosmic Ice Theory’.
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Himmler was outraged by a negative response to the Cosmic Ice Theory sent to him by a civil servant in the Reich Education Ministry; yet his letter betrays a certain defensiveness, for the Reichsführer clearly felt compelled to make use of Hitler’s authority: ‘I am willing to defend freedom of research in all its forms, and therefore freedom of research into the Cosmic Ice Theory. I even intend to give the warmest support to free research and in this I am in the best of company, as even the Führer and Chancellor of the German Reich Adolf Hitler has for many years been a convinced supporter of this theory, though it is frowned upon by the journeymen of science.’
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Even so, as early as 1938 he gave the Ahnenerbe the instruction to keep the Cosmic Ice Theory ‘strictly under wraps’, in other words, ‘in no way to make it public’ and to subject it ‘to critical scrutiny from the point of view of very precise and limited fields of work’.
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The Berlin meteorological office promptly changed its name to Centre for Geophysics.

The effects of cosmic events on the earth and on human life aroused Himmler’s particular interest—in the mid-1920s he had already shown himself to be open-minded about astrology.
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At the beginning of 1945 he set up an investigation into what knowledge was available concerning the ‘influence of the weather on human beings’: ‘How far is there a connection with cosmic events. Is there an astrological way of calculating the weather?’ It was his intention after the war, according to Himmler, to give the astrologer Wilhelm Wulff, who in the second half of the war wrote astrological reports for him, and his Cosmic Ice Theory specialist Scultetus the joint task of answering this question.
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In addition, the Reichsführer-SS was convinced ‘that the Teutons had possessed a remarkable, religiously
based knowledge of the universe that even today has not been superseded’.
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After the end of the war he planned to set up an observatory at every SS location in order, as his adjutant explained in a letter, ‘to give the broadest range of people the opportunity of taking an interest in astronomy and by this means to discover a partial substitute for the Christianity we plan to transcend’.
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Himmler was also attracted by the myth of Tibet—the idea, that was widespread in a variety of versions, that in the mountains of Tibet an advanced civilization had once existed, possibly the product of an original, sophisticated race that had sought refuge there from a global catastrophe. In Himmler’s view it was clear that the civilization in question must have been connected to the legend of ‘Atlantis’, and that the stranded ruling class of Atlantis had spread out from there to Europe and East Asia. The conviction that Tibet was the ‘cradle of humanity’ accounts for Himmler’s speculations about the common roots of European (in particular Germanic), Asian, and other elites.
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In connection with this the Reichsführer showed particular interest in the Japanese samurai, whom he took to be distant relations. On 1 November 1935 Himmler expounded to Hitler his view ‘that the SS should become the German samurai’, and the Führer agreed.
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In 1937 he wrote a short foreword to Heinz Corazza’s book
The Samurai: Honourable and Loyal Imperial Knights
, an extended version of a series of articles published in
Das Schwarze Korps
.
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In the foreword Himmler explained to his readers that the history of the samurai demonstrated clearly ‘that in distant times this people in the Far East had the same code of honour as our fathers had long ago in a past all too soon destroyed’, and ‘that it is frequently minorities of the highest calibre who give a nation eternal life in earthly terms’. He wisely did not go into his Tibet theory, however.

Behind the scenes, nevertheless, Himmler pressed strongly for the discovery of proof of the central role of Tibet as the land of origin of Germanic and Asiatic elites. In 1935 the young zoologist Ernst Schäfer, who had already taken part in two expeditions to eastern Tibet, came to his notice. Himmler made Schäfer a member of the SS,
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and when the latter was preparing for a further expedition to Tibet these preparations were closely linked to the work of the Ahnenerbe. The cooperation collapsed, but Himmler nevertheless acted as patron to the expedition, which finally went ahead in 1939, paid for the participants’ hurried flight home in view of the strained international situation in August 1939, and
on their return made a point of welcoming them personally at the airport. One of the team was Bruno Beger, an employee of the Race and Settlement Main Office, who was conducting anthropological research primarily aimed at proving that the inhabitants had ‘Aryan racial elements’.
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Himmler had given Schäfer a special mission: along with thirty SS troops and a considerable arsenal of weapons he was to be smuggled into Tibet through the Soviet Union, in order to stir up unrest among the population against British forces stationed there.
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Although this mission came to nothing, the Reichsführer-SS had an Ahnenerbe ‘Research Centre for Inner Asia and Expeditions’ set up for Schäfer, which focused first of all on evaluating the materials from the expedition.
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Nevertheless, Himmler kept Schäfer on a short leash. At the end of 1939 he obstructed Schäfer’s plan for public showings of a film about the expedition,
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and in March 1940 made it clear ‘that nothing will appear in the newspapers about you, your work, your film, or about the expedition in general’.
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In 1943 he went a step further and tried to forbid the publication of Schäfer’s book
Secret Tibet
, as ‘the first part is written in such a German manner, so objective by comparison with the English’, while on the other hand the indigenous states and nations are presented ‘in a very amiable but also mocking manner. This might do us immense damage among the coloured nations.’ And in his typically opinionated manner he added: ‘The reservations I had about the public showing of the film were justified after all.’
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In fact, the real motive behind Himmler’s efforts, unsuccessful though they were, to suppress publication was most likely embarrassment about exposing in public his search for proof of his eccentric vision of the world.

This vision was not, it must be said, restricted to Tibet. In 1938–9 Himmler also worked on plans to send an expedition to Bolivia, Peru, and Chile. The private scholar Edmund Kiss was to lead the expedition.
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Himmler regarded him as particularly suitable because he had come to prominence by putting forward a theory which explained the mountains in the north of South America by means of the Cosmic Ice Theory.
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The outbreak of war put an end to this plan, however.

Himmler also preferred to keep from public gaze the fascination he had had since his student days for the occult. The significance he in fact attached to it is, however, suggested by his relationship with his closest adviser in this field, Karl Maria Wiligut, who from October 1934 was first of all director of the archive section of the Race and Settlement Main Office, and then from January 1936 in charge there of special commissions.
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