Nazi Occultism 4: The Indiana Jones Stuff | European History | Extra History

Edmund Kiss enters the office, his briefcase full of maps and his head full of ideas. For soon, he will embark on a monumental archaeological endeavor funded by the Nazis. Just over a decade ago, he'd personally financed an expedition to the Bolivian Andes. That mission was to see whether settlers from Thule, the supposed ancient Atlantis of Nordic supermen, had crossed the ocean and constructed buildings erroneously attributed to the Inca. There, at Tiwanaku, he'd marveled at the Gateway of the Sun and its symbols. So much like Stonehenge. So much like Ruse. And determined it included a European-style 12-month calendar. But the academic world laughed at his theories. They mocked the historical fiction novels he'd written based on his research, where muscular German demigods in the ancient past battled lesser races to defend Atlantis. They're not gonna laugh anymore. Kiss is going back. The SS has agreed to fund his year-long expedition with 20 experts, who will chart the site with aerial and underwater photography. A dig that will finally prove that he is not the idiot everyone says he is. Except it won't. Because this meeting is to tell him that Germany has invaded Poland and his expedition has been cancelled. Thanks so much to Nebula for helping to make this episode possible. And once you've finished here, you can check out our final episode in this series entitled Thor's Hammer, which is live right now over on Nebula before anywhere else. And you can see it at Nebula.tv slash Extra History. If you've seen the Indiana Jones films, then you've come across the idea of Nazis racing across the world from Nepal to the Middle East, excavating sites and trying to grab artifacts. Which is true. Sort of. See, Nazi archaeology projects were all about prestige and less about precision. Because, and I know this is going to sound nuts, Nazis really wanted to be liked. The idea of respect, legitimacy, and image was super important to them, especially internationally. Which, as you can imagine, created a bit of a problem. Because a central claim of their ethos was that Germans were genetically superior and special. That they had invented writing, architecture, and all world culture. And, depending on who you asked, were the descendants of supermen who dispersed across the world from their Atlantean homeland of Thule, which then sank. And these ideas were not exactly supported by mainstream archaeology, history, or science. In fact, most academics, both within Germany and internationally, called these ideas idiotic. Which was part of why, in 1935, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, founded the AhnenEwa. Its mission? To find proof of this glorious past, validate National Socialist theories, and communicate it all to the German people through publications, lectures, and films. Though this wasn't the first historical research group associated with the SS. The organization already had a section called the, quote, Race and Settlement Office. That focused on vetting the genealogy of SS members' potential spouses to ensure they had no Jewish ancestry. And even in the early 1930s, Himmler was handing out positions in that office to scholars and border science figures who espoused his blood and soil idea. A lot of them crackpots and weirdos. And, in fact, probably the best way to look at the extremely broad work of the AhnenEwa is through a tour of these crackpots and weirdos. Taking a look at what they believed and the official support that they garnered. First up is Karl Maria Willigut, an Austrian occultist and former soldier who Himmler encountered in 1933. Willigut claimed to be a descendant of a long line of mystics dating back to the primordial times described in Nordic myths, where giants and dwarves walked the earth. In his writing, he supposedly remembered lore passed down from his grandfather, unveiling survivals of a pre-Christian German paganism stamped out by the Catholic Church. A legacy, he said, allowed him to read mimes and see visions. Willigut supposedly recommended the SS Wivalsburg Castle as its training center, where Himmler assembled a personal collection of German artifacts sourced from museums. He also advised Himmler on what symbols and runes to use in its interior decorations, as well as those used on German military graves. He claimed to have discovered new runes in a vision, but actually stole them from another occultist. Who'd have thought? He even designed the rings Himmler gave out to favored subordinates and made expeditions to help uncover surviving aspects of his claimed proto-Germanic religion. At least he did until 1938, when Himmler learned that Willigut had spent several years involuntarily committed to a mental health facility. As a result, Himmler quietly retired Willigut to put his focus on more serious scholars. For example, the Witch Division, a group that attempted to reconstruct pre-Christian paganism by a close reading of Roman accounts, witch trials, and medieval persecutions for heresy. Alongside him here was Otto Hrung, who was obsessed with tying the concept of the Holy Grail to pre-Christian stories of a sun god, while claiming it also tied into survivals of ancient Aryan beliefs in Tibetan Buddhism, which also has ritual cups! Boom! Mic drop, Buddha confirmed German, case closed. Meaning, basically, that Indiana Jones had the whole thing slightly skewed. Work conducted under the Race and Settlement Office and later the Ahnenerbe was not focused on grabbing Judeo-Christian religious artifacts. Rather, it all came back to world ice theory and resurrecting an imagined pre-Christian religion. The Third Reich's archaeological, linguistic, historical, geological, anthropological, and even musicological investigations under the Ahnenerbe were all about trying to use scientific means to prove Aryans had started world culture by dispersing from Thule, again the Aryan Atlantis. And they spent a huge effort on this. In the first expedition in 1935, Ahnenerbe investigators entered a remote area of northern Finland to interview the residents filming folk rituals and songs, which was interesting ethnographically, but the team's claims that they'd found evidence of pre-Christian survivals was total nonsense. The next year, the head of the Ahnenerbe studied prehistoric petroglyphs in Sweden, making similar illogical claims that they were the first language. Another expedition essentially used organizational funds to tour sites in Eurasia and the Middle East, probably as cover for espionage. Its geologists also accompanied the third Nazi Antarctic expedition to photograph and map the Scandinavian Antarctic, while other scholars visited museums across Europe, to study artifacts the Ahnenerbe would later loot during the war. Many of these studies were linguistic in nature, studying petroglyphs in hope of proving that writing had been invented in northern Europe rather than Mesopotamia. Yet the most prominent effort was the 1938 Tibet expedition, led by the 27-year-old ornithologist Ernst Schäfer. Though exactly how much the Ahnenerbe sponsored it is up for debate. See, Schäfer was a real zoologist and had conducted two other expeditions to the region. Fearing for his scientific reputation, he accepted Himmler's patronage, but not Ahnenerbe funds, which were exhausted by this time anyway, and rejected any involvement from the infamous crackpot we mentioned at the beginning of this episode, Edmund Kiss. However, he did accept Himmler's conditions that all expedition members would join the SS, that he met with Willigut before the expedition, who claimed to read Schäfer's mind, and agreed to investigate Nazi theories about Aryan survival groups in the Himalayas. One team member was an anthropologist, Bruno Biaga, who specialized in, quote, race science. Additionally, the whole thing would be documented on film and produced as a propaganda documentary. Also, they came by invitation from the government of Tibet, who were frightened by the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and were looking for allies. But then again, Schäfer's team weren't exactly politically neutral either. While conducting geological surveys and collecting samples of plants, animals, and grain, they also scoped out routes they could use into British India should war break out. Meanwhile, Bruno Biaga surveyed the Tibetans themselves, taking skull measurements via calipers and tape measures, making handprints and taking facial casts, hoping to discover some similar genetic subtypes that would suggest a common ancestor with modern Germans. The expedition met with government officials and observed Buddhist ceremonies, buying up mandala paintings and even human skulls to transport back as part of their research. Schäfer did his work and accepted its use by the SS in propaganda and research. Other digs were initiated or existing digs funded within Germany itself. After all, a few mainstream archaeologists were only too happy to take advantage of this new interest in their field. And while some of these did yield results, they were, well, normal archaeological results and not proof of Aryan supermen. Himmler, however, always ready to make a mountain out of a molehill, touted them all as revolutionary. So much so that he actually gave Hitler a leather-bound copy of Ahnenerbe research for his birthday. Hitler was unimpressed. How could he take pleasure in the fact that Germanic people were turning clay pots, he remarked, when the Greeks were building the Acropolis? Other expeditions were planned to Iceland, the Canary Islands, Iran, and Kiss's Bolivian venture, but were cancelled at the outbreak of war. Though the war itself would not stop all the Ahnenerbe activities. Because with the invasion of Poland and the expansionism of Operation Barbarossa, a new and horrifying chapter of the organization began. For Himmler had very specific plans for those grain samples Schaefer had brought back from Tibet. They were supposed to be the basis of hardy new grain fields that would be planted across Crimea and the Ukraine that, once wrested from the Soviet Union, would be resettled with German agricultural communities using esoteric farming. And Ahnenerbe archaeological research would not only prove, he thought, that those lands were not only part of the ancient Aryan dominion. His, quote, racial experts would determine which of the people living there would be resettled and which would be exterminated. Once again, thank you so much to Nebula for supporting us in our creation of this series. We know all too well that sometimes when you make YouTube stuff and it has its policy of maximizing advertiser-friendly content, it can make it challenging to show you guys videos that deal with difficult yet important moments in history. So when we spend months on research, writing, recording, and animating our shows, we are incredibly thankful that we can guarantee you'll always get to see them in their entirety on our independent creator-owned streaming service. 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