A Bit More Detail

Heather Pringle's 2006 The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust is the sort of book that makes one want to laugh in horror. Pringle's pleasant if conventional journalistic style does nothing at all to disguise the horror that she feels on discovering the full extent of the activities of the Ahnenerbe, the SS' occult research ministry. Starting off from the theosophy and kindred New Age movements which were popular in early 20th century Germany, Pringle demonstrates convincingly that the Ahnenerbe went on to take these theories, rooted in beliefs of deeply-hidden conspiracies and long-forgotten similarities and secret bloodlines, and make them the central justifications for major Nazi goals including the Holocaust and the planned colonization of central and eastern Europe.

The intellectual speciousness of the Ahnenerbe's arguments--arguing by deduction and by inference whenever it pleased them, or simply making up theories wholesale like (say) an ancient populous Gothic empire in Crimea--is astounding. It's difficult to believe that a modern state was willing to support research institutions which claimed, among other things, that Germans were the last pure descendants of Aryan Atlantis, that Tiahaunaco in South America was an ancient German city, and that the entire universe was made out of ice and that we were on our seventh Moon, the previous six having crashed into the Earth and melted into the oceans. But then, when I read translated memoranda which happily say that, with Operation Barbarossa, Nazi phrenologists will be at last able to overcome the shortage of Jewish skulls that bedevilled them, and how some researchers hoped to use human sacrifice to tap ancient mystic energies for great weapons like Thor's lightning bolts, I stopped disbelieving. Among other things, it turns out that the Nazis were criminally stupid and credulous besides being prototypical pulp science-fiction villains. That, and the willingness to use any specious reasoning and no specious reasoning at all, explains their entire ideology.

The Master Plan deserves to be widely read. It astonishes me that more hasn't been generally known of the Ahnenerbe. One reason why that story hasn't resonated before now might, perhaps, lie in the prevalence of all those same root sources of Nazi ideology in our own culture, in the popularity of books like The Da Vinci Code which purport to explain the modern world as product of vast ancient conspiracies and in the revolts against reason and science and rational behaviour. Often there's even a direct link between the 1920s and our time, as in Graham Hancock's writings. Can you see a potential problem here, too?