Olly's Field Dispatches

Having watched and studied the Indiana Jones films in some depth, I never thought the Nazi connection to the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail or even secret SS expeditions to the Himalayas were even remotely plausible. Like many times before, I got it wrong, but this time alarmingly so. I have never felt so shocked about how little I knew about a period of history with such unspeakable horror.

The Evil Twins
It's no secret that Hitler and Himmler had a twisted historical world view which divided humanity into three groups: Founders of Culture (Aryans), Bearers of Culture and Destroyers of Culture (vermin). They also believed there was once a mighty tribe of original Atlanteans, a master race of Aryans that once ruled the world. Typically, they had Nordic traits including long head, narrow face, flat forehead, narrow nose, angular chin, thin lips, tall slender body, blue eyes and blond hair. Probably to their great embarrassment, neither Hitler nor Himmler fitted this description. Himmler was once appropriately described as looking like a "half-starved shrew" and when challenged on this point his defense was pathetic at best: "I may not look Nordic, but I possess a Nordic brain." Hitler was known to quote the contemporary racial theorist Hermann Gauch whose bizarre reasoning led to inane precepts like, "the reason why birds can be taught better than other animals is explained by the fact that their mouths are Nordic in structure."

Hitler believed his nation had become weak, corrupted by an infusion of degenerate elements. In his mind, society had to be cleansed and then rebuilt on strong, racially pure blood-lines. But to inflict this horrific vision upon the world, he and Himmler first felt the need to prove the existence of a superior Aryan race that could justify the racial profiling required by their cruel policies.

Sinister Fantasies, Far-Fetched Research
Himmler took the lead and set up the official, scholarly sounding Ahnenerbe, or Ancestral Heritage Society. Its formal role was to promote "the science of ancient intellectual history... unearth new accomplishments and deeds of Germany's ancestors... and communicate the findings to the public." The group possessed a public veneer of being an elite think tank with over a hundred academic specialists. They cultivated an air of solid professional integrity, disguising all their ideas as science and scholarship when, in fact, they were devoted to myth-making, distorting the truth and churning out tailored evidence to support Hitler's and Himmler's demented interpretations of history and race.

The Ahnenerbe was a wholly SS operation with the academics made senior officers, and various SS offices providing logistical and manpower support. In order to give pseudo-legitimacy to their ideas of Aryan supremacy or appear to retrieve some sort of ancient Aryan knowledge, expeditions were sent out to the four corners of the world: to Iceland to search for the Holy Grail (I kid you not!), to Iran searching for evidence of ancient kings of pure Aryan blood, to Finland to record and film ancient magical rites (the sound man was named BOSE &mdash any connection?), to Croatia, Serbia and Iraq to study the role of the Aryans in the Roman Empire and even to Tibet to measure the skulls of the Tibetans who they believed were the ancient immigrants and survivors from Atlantis. The expedition leader actually wrote in his report that "there is great similarity between the words of the Fuhrer and those of that other great Aryan personality, Buddha." There you have it! That's what we're dealing with here &mdash people who believed Buddha was an Aryan racist!

The Butcher's Bill
But the Ahnenerbe was more than just a cult of gullible scientists and historians &mdash its members willingly sought to provide justification for racial policies that led to the persecution and slaughter of millions. Some of the files of the Ahnenerbe were presented during the Nuremburg trials and a few were charged with war crimes varying from the plundering of museums and private art collections, to the cold brutality of human experimentation including exploring new ways to freeze, poison, and sterilize people and even creating a human skeleton collection. The Ahnenerbe's director went to the gallows in 1948; after the execution, a Tibetan chant was said over his corpse.

Here we have a precedent of unspeakable horror, but this type of inhumanity, could and has happened again &mdash in East Timor, Kosovo, West Papua, Rwanda, Darfur to name but a few. I can't phantom how these lessons could ever be forgotten, and how this horror and cruelty has ever been allowed to happen again. But as history repeats itself, so will it likely happen again. What can we do? Of course, I don't have a lasting solution, but we can start with burdening our consciences, taking responsibility, speaking out, and never claiming we know nothing or we too are guilty.