Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life
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Germanic core of German history: it was the duty of National Socialism ,
he claimed, to lead the Germans back to their true Germanic identity. In
this Himmler’s thinking was not primaril y historical but racial: what
distinguished Germanic-German history in his eyes was the fact that it
was shaped by people with constant, genetically determined dispositions
and abilities and thus could be rega rded not as a historical conti nuum but as
a st able world.
68
In endeavouring to create a Germanic myth special to the SS Himmler
was above all concerned to reveal the pre-Christian world of the Teutons as
exemplary and their Christianization as a fatal mistake, indeed as a crime,
and so by stripping away the layers behind the fac¸ade of an imposed
Christianity to show the true Germanic core of medieval history. Admit-
tedly none of these topics was new: at the latest since the beginning of the
nineteenth century Germanic myth and enthusiasm for things Germanic
had been a widespread movement that found expression not only in
academic disciplines but also in popular forms. The radical anti-Christian
turn in Germanic ideology, like its development into a Germanic faith, had
already been relatively widespread in vo
¨
lkisch circles before 1914. Above all
in the turbulent years after the defeat of the First World War the mythology
of the Germanic hero was revived as a political force, plumped up with
racial doctrines and set up as an ideal in contrast to the ‘levelling-down’
practised by the western democracies.
69
As we have seen, Himmler too was
part of this world; his Germanic awakening had taken place in 1923–4 when
he read the novels of Werner Jansen.
Presumably in 1937 Himmler set down on paper the following thoughts:
We live in an era of the ultimate conflict with Christianity. It is part of the mission
of the SS to give the German people in the next half-century the non-Christian
ideological foundations on which to lead and shape their lives. This task does not
consist solely in overcoming an ideological opponent but must be accompanied at
every step by a positive impetus: in this case that means the reconstruction of the
Germanic heritage in the widest and most comprehensive sense.
70
On the basis of this premise Himmler developed a ‘work plan’. A research
group made up of subject specialists from among the SS was to begin a
collection of source material on the ‘Germanic heritage’ in some five
volumes, and as a second step investigate the ‘so-called Christian Middle
Ages in order to trace the various streams of Germanic heritage’. The results
were to serve first and foremost the ideological ‘direction’ of the SS.
270 ideology and religious cult
Himmler’s research organization Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage) was in
fact to embark on such studies in the years to come, if not in the concen-
trated form in which Himmler had imagined in 1937.
71
What he imagined the social order and the experience of the Teutons
actually to have been, and why this lost world should represent an ideal, is, it
must be said, hard to discover. His pronouncements on the Teutons of the
Dark Ages are decidedly sparse.
72
It was only in his ‘Schutzstaffel’ speech of
1935 that he went into this topic in greater detail. In it he praised Germanic
law as exemplary, in particular the principle, embedded in its belief in an all-
embracing divine order, that nature and animals are worthy of protection; in
addition, he praised the highly developed craftsmanship of the Teutons and
their alleged ability to develop a plough that was far superior to anything
comparable; their reverence for their ancestors, manifested in graves made
of giant stones; their bravery and strength; their knowledge of astronomy;
and finally their runes, the ‘mother of all written languages’.
As Himmler regarded their conversion to Christianity as the Teutons’
decisive original sin, preventing Germanic virtues from unfolding to their
full extent in the medieval empire,
73
the ‘missionary to the heathen’,
St Boniface, was the particular object of the SS leader’s anger. He refused
to forgive him for the felling in 723 of the Donar oak, revered by the
Teutons as holy, and even 1,214 years later in 1937 he still was indignant at
how ‘anyone could be such a swine as to chop down that tree’.
74
But in
Himmler’s view the Christianization of the Teutons was above all the fault
of ‘Charles the Frank’, that is, Charlemagne, whom he repeatedly accused
in public speeches of slaughtering the Saxons;
75
his son, Louis the Pious, was
for Himmler simply ‘infected with Jewishness’.
76
Himmler’s negat ive appraisal of Charlemagne made no impression on
Hitler, howeve r, w ho in his speech to the party conference in 1935
emphasized that in the process of forming the empire of the early Middle
Ages Christianity had been effective in creating communities, and dec-
lared Charlema gne the historic unifier of the Reich, a judgement he
backed up with comments in his private circl e.
77
Thereupon Himmler
reversed his opinion: in the SS Guidance Booklets there appe ared an article
by H. W. Scheidt, head of the indoctrination office of Alfred Rosenberg
(usually regar ded as Himmler’s main ideological competitor), in which the
latter declared that the ‘true reason for the conflicts with the Saxons and the
other methods of subjugation employed by Charlemagne was his thoroughly
Germanic will to power and his recognition that the centralized political
ideology and religious cult 271
power he enjoyed needed urgently to be extended’.
78
Himmler himself was
strikingly slow to comment. Only in 1944 did he concede that Charlemagne
was the ‘subject of much controversy, much revered and in the final analy-
sis—in spite of all the things we [ . . . ] don’t like about him and which we
must nevertheless understand as part of the power struggle involved in
forming an empire—a great man, because he founded the Reich’.
79
On the other hand, he took a quite different view of the German King
Henry I: reverence for him was probably the most powerful expression of
Himmler’s efforts to reveal anti-Christian roots in the Middle Ages. In 1936,
for the thousandth anniversary of the king’s birth, Himmler visited his
burial-place in Quedlinburg cathedral in order to inaugurate a new tradi-
tion. The annual ‘King Henry celebrations’ were to become a fixture of the
SS commemorative calendar. Himmler’s speech, published the same year,
on the anniversary of the king’s death
80
was designed to reveal parallels
between Henry and Hitler. As was clear from the speech, Henry came to
power at the same age as Hitler and, it was suggested, had to overcome
similar problems: ‘When, in 919, at the age of 43, Henry Duke of Saxony, a
member of the Liudolfing family of soil-based aristocracy, became the
German king, he came into the most dreadful inheritance. He became
king of a German empire that hardly existed even in name. The whole of
the eastern part of Germany had [ . . . ] been lost to the Slavs.’
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’.
272 ideology and religious cult
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 solemni-
ty was somewhat lacking. At any rate, in 1944 Himmler’s adjutant com-
plained 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 Hohenstau-
fens in the High Middle Ages was for him an era in which ‘the R eich 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 ord er 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
ideology and religious cult 273
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 Reichsfu
¨
hrer-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 interpre-
tation. 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 Reichsfu
¨
hrer-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 consid-
ered 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 ‘Fu
¨
hrer’s commisioner in charge of all intellectual and ideo-
logical 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.
274 ideology and religious cult
The Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage)
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 soire
´
e, also attended
by Darre
´
.
92
Commissioned by Himmler and Darre
´
, 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 Darre
´
’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 Ahnen-
erbe in 1938.
99
The Indo-Germanic expert and Munich university professor
Walter Wu
¨
st, who since the autumn of 1936 had been in charge of a newly
created Ahnenerbe department for lexicology, became Wirth’s successor.
100
(Wu
¨
st demonstrated his particular gratitude by, among other things, pre-
senting 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 Wu
¨
st, 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 Wu
¨
st, who was de facto director
ideology and religious cult 275
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 Wu
¨
st’s department of
lexicology, in 1936 the Ahnenerbe had incorporated the Centre for Ger-
manic 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 ‘suc-
cessful’ 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 archae-
ologist Hubert Jankuhn. In addition, the SS supported prehistoric excava-
tions at the fortification of Erdenburg near Bensberg, at Altchristburg in East
Prussia, and on the Hohenmichele, a prehistoric burial-site near Sigmarin-
gen.
110
Further departments and research centres grew up: for Indogerma-
nic religious history, for the Near East, for Germanic buildings, and for
* Translators’ note: A natural rock formation in the Teutoburg Forest (discussed later in this
chapter).
276 ideology and religious cult
medieval and modern history.
111
Finally, there was the research centre
headed by the Tibet scholar Ernst Scha
¨
fer 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 meteorolo-
gist Hans Robert Scultetus in Berlin in 1937. The research centre for
astronomy at the Gru
¨
nwald 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 Ahne-
nerbe. 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
Wu
¨
st 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
ideology and religious cult 277
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.
120
On several occasions Himmler intervened successfully in chair
appointments,
121
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 uni-
versity and science policy.
122
This lack of coherence characterizes the Ahnenerbe as a whole. A ‘policy
of unplanned expansion, dependent on random factors’,
123
and the prolif-
eration—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.
124
Under the banner ‘The Humanities’ War Effort’, numerous Ahnenerbe
specialists were working on projects relevant to ideological conflicts with
the enemy.
125
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 develop-
ments 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.
126
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
278 ideology and religious cult
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 pre-
eminent Greater Germanic Reich.
127
‘Under wraps’
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 Reichsfu
¨
hrer
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 inter-
war period were very widespread to form a much more comprehensive
vision, though one he, for the most part, kept to himself.
The Reichsfu
¨
hrer was, for example, an enthusiastic supporter of the
Austrian engineer Hanns Ho
¨
rbiger’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.
128
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,
129
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 Gru
¨
nwald 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’.
130
Himmler repeatedly approached the Ahnenerbe personally to have ele-
ments of the Cosmic Ice Theory checked. In December 1940, for example,
ideology and religious cult 279