Concept
Ahnenerbe
Overview
The Ahnenerbe (German: [ˈaːnənˌʔɛʁbə], "Ancestral Heritage") was a pseudoscientific organization founded by the Schutzstaffel in Nazi Germany in 1935. Established by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler on July 1, 1935 as an SS appendage devoted to promoting racial theories espoused by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, the Ahnenerbe consisted of academics and scientists from a broad range of academic disciplines who fostered the idea that Germans descended from an Aryan race which was racially superior to other racial groups.
Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and transformed the country into a one-party state governed as a dictatorship. He claimed that Germans were descended from an Aryan race which, in contrast to established academic understandings, had invented most major developments in human history, such as agriculture, art and writing. Most of the world's scholars did not accept this, and the Nazis established the Ahnenerbe in order to provide evidence for their racial theories and to promote them to the German public. Ahnenerbe scholars interpreted evidence to fit Hitler's beliefs, and many consciously fabricated evidence to do so. The organisation sent expeditions to various parts of the world to find evidence to support their theories.
The government of Nazi Germany used the organization's research to justify many of their policies, including the Holocaust. Nazi propaganda also cited Ahnenerbe claims that archaeological evidence indicated that the Aryan race had historically resided in eastern Europe to justify German expansion there. In 1937, the Ahnenerbe became an official branch of the SS and was renamed the Research and Teaching Community in Ancestral Heritage (Institute der Forschungsgemeinschaft Deutsches Ahnenerbe). Much of their research was placed on hold after the outbreak of World War II in 1939, though they continued to carry out new research in areas under German occupation after Operation Barbarossa began in 1941.
During the end of World War II in Europe in 1945, Ahnenerbe members destroyed much of the organization's paperwork to avoid being incriminated in forthcoming war crimes trials. Numerous members escaped Allied denazification policies and remained active in West Germany's archaeological establishment in the postwar era, which stifled scholarly research into the Ahnenerbe until German reunification in 1990. Ideas promoted by the organization have retained an appeal for some neo-Nazi and far-right circles and have also influenced later pseudoarchaeologists.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Alas! reason, seriousness, mastery over the emotions, all these gloomy, dismal things which are called reflection, all these privileges and pageantries of humanity: how dear is the price that they have exacted! How much blood and cruelty is the foundation of all "good things"!
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals The Complete Works, Volume Thirteen, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy.
States what Ahnenerbe is.
MARCH 15th, 1852. Bohemia and Croatia (another disjected member of the Slavonic family, acted upon by the Hungarian, as Bohemia by the German) were the homes of what is called on the European continent "Panslavism." Neither Bohemia nor Croatia was strong enough to exist as a nation by herself. Their respective nationalities, gradually undermined by the action of historical causes that inevitably absorbs into a more…
Friedrich Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution
States what Ahnenerbe is.
None the less is it true that perverse ambition, once erected into theory, feels more at ease in working itself out to the end; a part of the responsibility will then be thrown upon logic. If the German race is the elect, it will be the only race which has an unconditional right to live; the others will be tolerated races, and this toleration will be precisely what is called "the state of peace." Let war come; the…
Henri Bergson, The Meaning of the War
States what Ahnenerbe is.
Philosophers who discussed Ahnenerbe
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Place in the tradition
Part of Philosophy of archaeology.