Dr.

Prier

Lecture:
German Mythology and Aryan Myth
 Introductory Disclaimer

 This presentation is meant to convey general and explicit ideas

consistent with the manner in which they would be discussed in a
traditional classroom setting
 Some ideas and slides were lifted without change or attribution
from other presentations and material from the web
 Since it is not meant to be disseminated or used outside of the
intended purposes for this class, ideas and actual slides used in
this presentation (and those that may be used throughout this
course) are not cited as to their original sources or presentations
 Political Socialization
 Political socialization refers specifically to the
transmission of political values and attitudes from
one group to another
 Sometimes we use the verb "civilize", as in the
expression, "to civilize the savages"

 Political socialization not only preserves existing

culture but is an important tool in the preservation
of existing social relationships
 Political Socialization
 Preservation of existing social relationships is
recognized by nearly everyone
 Conservatives - respect existing political traditions
 Revolutionaries - transform society and its members

 Socialization is also a useful tool for establishing

and perpetuating exploitive relationship
 INNOCENCE OF
IDEOLOGY THESIS
 Were Germans “innocent of ideology”: did they
fail to make use of the larger and more abstract
political ideas that make up ideologies like
liberalism and conservatism in organizing their
political responses after World War I?

 If so, it is likely that that most Germans could not take

part in the discussion of political choices in the terms
that the people who make these choices (political
elites) evaluate and debate them
 INNOCENCE OF
IDEOLOGY THESIS
 Now may seem self-evident that how people work
their way through a political choice hinges on
their level of political information or
sophistication
 This leads to two hypotheses that can be distinguished
- WEAK versus STRONG sophistication interaction
 The weak sophistication interaction hypothesis
(SIH) holds that the belief systems of the
politically aware are more organized than those of
the less politically aware
 INNOCENCE OF
IDEOLOGY THESIS
 The strong SIH holds that the belief systems of the
less aware are not only less - but also differently
organized than those of the more politically aware
 This leads us to conclude that it is plain that any
effort to characterize the mass public as a whole will
be systematically misleading
 It will misrepresent the thinking of the more politically
aware, or of the less aware, or both
 There cannot be just one portrait of the public - there
is more than one pattern
 SOPHISTICATION
INTERACTION HYPOTHESIS

 Thus ideology may play a differentially important

role depending on individual’s levels of
conceptualization

 Moreover, the complexity of political reasoning - as

indexed by levels of conceptualization - cannot be
reduced to individual differences in formal education
 SOPHISTICATION
INTERACTION HYPOTHESIS
 Let’s make a distinction between
 Schematics - those who are expert or at any rate
knowledgeable about politics, and
 Aschematics - those who are neither expert or
knowledgable

 We find that cognitive ability (as assessed by

education and a vocabulary and abstract symbols
test) is powerfully associated with ideological
sophistication
 SOPHISTICATION
INTERACTION HYPOTHESIS

 Political experience (as assessed by political

interest, media usage, and political activity) tends
to have low association with ideological
sophistication

 These findings tend to confirm the weak version of the

sophistication hypothesis that says belief systems of
the politically aware are more organized than those of
the less politically aware
 SOPHISTICATION
INTERACTION HYPOTHESIS
Applying the strong version of the sophistication
hypothesis - consider the positions of Germans’ take
on Jews during World War II
 Several considerations may lie behind decision to
support or oppose what happened leading up to
and through WWII
 Feelings of efficacy;
 Their propensity to favor or oppose governmental
action in general; and
 Their feelings toward Jews
 SOPHISTICATION
INTERACTION HYPOTHESIS
This is complicated so closely follow here
 It is probable that more liberal Germans would
have approved of an array of positions that would
preclude the Holocaust but the more they disliked
Jews, the less likely they would have been to
intervene against the state
 This view at a distance is correct - except it
obscures a crucial detail
 The importance of the interaction of ideology and
affect toward Jews
 SOPHISTICATION
INTERACTION HYPOTHESIS
 The importance of ideology and affect toward
Jews as factors fixing positions on issues of race
was likely to vary systematically
 The better educated Germans were, the larger the role
of ideology and the less consequential that of affect
toward Jews
• Remember: cognitive ability (as assessed by education and
a vocabulary and abstract symbols test) is powerfully
associated with ideological sophistication
 Conversely, the less educated, the larger the role of
affect and the less consequential that of ideology
 COMPETING HYPOTHESES
 So which hypothesis was correct?
 The weak or the strong?
 We don’t know

 The innocence of ideology can be misspecified

and thus it may be misleading to declare that mass
publics (Germans during the War) were “innocent
of ideology,” because it is systematically
misleading to characterize the political reasoning
of mass publics en bloc
 Values
 A fully-formed belief system is two-tiered
 The bottom consisting of specific opinions covering an
array of issues
 The top is made up of an abstract, superordinate
concept - usually, but not necessarily, liberalism-
conservatism
 People have multiple values - they care about
many things simultaneously and possess sincere
values (and policies) that clash
 One can care for both liberty and order, for both
economic security and social welfare
 WORLD WAR I:
THE AFTERMATH
 Burdensome reparations imposed after World
War I, coupled with a general inflationary period
in Europe in the 1920s—another direct result of a
materially catastrophic war—caused spiraling
hyperinflation of the German Reichsmark by
1923
 This hyperinflationary period combined with the
effects of the Great Depression (beginning in 1929) to
seriously undermine the stability of the German
economy, wiping out the personal savings of the
middle class and spurring massive unemployment
 WORLD WAR I:
THE AFTERMATH

 This economic chaos led to social unrest,

destabilizing the fragile Weimar Republic

 Efforts of the western European powers to

marginalize Germany undermined and isolated its
democratic leaders and underscored the need to
restore German prestige through remilitarization
and expansion
 WORLD WAR I:
THE AFTERMATH
 A destabilized post-World War I Weimar
Germany's fledgling democracy gave rise to
radical right wing parties
 In response to the harsh provisions of Versailles was
the rampant conviction among many in the general
population that Germany had been "stabbed in the
back" by the "November criminals"— those who had
helped to form the new Weimar government and
broker the peace which Germans had so desperately
wanted, but which had ended so disastrously in the
Versailles Treaty
 WORLD WAR I:
THE AFTERMATH
 Many Germans forgot that they had:
 Applauded the fall of the Kaiser
 Initially welcomed parliamentary democratic reform
 Rejoiced at the armistice

 They recalled only that the German Left —

Socialists, Communists, and Jews, in common
imagination — had surrendered German honor to
a disgraceful peace when no foreign armies had
even set foot on German soil
 WORLD WAR I:
THE AFTERMATH
 This Dolchstosslegende (stab-in-the-back legend)
was initiated and fanned by retired German
wartime military leaders
 These same leaders
• Were well aware in 1918 that Germany could no longer
wage war and
• Had advised the Kaiser to sue for peace
 The legend helped to further discredit German socialist
and liberal circles who felt most committed to maintain
Germany's fragile democratic experiment
 WORLD WAR I:
THE AFTERMATH
 The promises of the German nationalist Right to
revise the Versailles Treaty through force if
necessary increasingly gained inroads in
respectable circle
 Meanwhile the specter of an imminent Communist
threat, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution in
Russia and of short-lived Communist revolutions or
coups in Hungary (Bela Kun) and in Germany itself
(e.g., the Sparticist Uprising), shifted German political
sentiment decidedly toward right-wing causes
 WORLD WAR I:
THE AFTERMATH
 Agitators from the political left served heavy prison
sentences for inspiring political unrest
 On the other hand, radical rightwing activists like
Adolf Hitler, whose Nazi Party had attempted to
depose the government of Bavaria and commence a
"national revolution" in the November 1923 Beer
Hall Putsch, served only nine months of a five year
prison sentence for treason — which was a capital
offense
 During the prison sentence he wrote his political manifesto,
Mein Kampf (My Struggle)
 WORLD WAR I:
THE AFTERMATH
In Summary
 The difficulties imposed by social and economic
unrest in the wake of World War I and its onerous
peace terms and the raw fear of the potential for a
Communist takeover in the German middle
classes worked to undermine pluralistic
democratic solutions in Weimar Germany
 These difficulties also increased public longing for
more authoritarian direction, a kind of leadership
which German voters ultimately and unfortunately
found in Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist Party
 WORLD WAR I:
THE AFTERMATH
In Summary

 Similar conditions benefited rightwing

authoritarian and totalitarian systems in eastern
Europe as well, beginning with the losers of
World War I
 Eventually this raised levels of intolerance and
acquiescence to violent antisemitism and
discrimination against national minorities throughout
the region
 WORLD WAR I:
THE AFTERMATH
In Summary

 The destruction and catastrophic loss of life

during World War I led to a cultural despair in
many former combatant nations
 Disillusionment with international and national politics
and a sense of distrust in political leaders and
government officials permeated the consciousness of a
public which had witnessed the ravages of a
devastating four-year conflict
 WORLD WAR I:
THE AFTERMATH
In Summary
 Most European countries had lost virtually a
generation of their young men
 The vivid and realistic account of trench warfare
portrayed in Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 masterpiece
All Quiet on the Western Front captured the experience
of frontline troops and expressed the alienation of the
"lost generation" who returned from war and found
themselves unable to adapt to peacetime and tragically
misunderstood by a home front population who had not
seen the horrors of war firsthand
 Nazi Party Program
 Recall the Nazi Party Program
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei

Photo sources: Wikipedia

 German Nation-State
 The unification of Germany into a politically and
administratively integrated nation state officially
occurred on January 18, 1871
 Signed into being at the Versailles Palace in the Hall of
Mirrors

 Princes of the German states gathered there to

proclaim Wilhelm I of Prussia as German
Emperor after the French capitulation in the
Franco-Prussian War
German Nation-State

Photo source:
Wikipedia
 German Fantasy Heritage
and the Aryan Myth

 Following defeat in World War I, many Germans

were desperate for national pride and a common
heritage in which to believe
 Germany lacked an ancient heritage nor heroic history
 Germany was unified for under 38 years (since 1871)

 Post World War I had a middle class believing in

mythic Aryan occultist claims
 Theosophy and
the Aryan Myth

 Theosophy (from Greek literally "God's

wisdom") refers to systems of esoteric philosophy
concerning, or seeking direct knowledge of,
presumed mysteries of being and nature,
particularly concerning the nature of divinity
 Theosophy and
the Aryan Myth
 Theosophy is considered a part of the broader
field of esotericism, referring to hidden
knowledge
 Christian Gnosticism is along these lines

 The theosopher seeks to understand the mysteries

of the universe and the bonds that unite the
universe, humanity, and the divine
 Social Darwinism and
Eugenics
 Germany in the late 19th century had a strong
movement toward understanding forms of
philosophical or religious insights into racial
differences based on a mystical or divine natural
basis – this was also tied to evolutionary theories
that led to Social Darwinism (evolutionary
argument about the biological basis of human
differences) in the 1870s and also fed into the
eugenics movement
 Social Darwinism and
Eugenics

 The word "eugenics" was coined in 1883 by the

English scientist Francis Galton, a cousin of
Charles Darwin, to promote the ideal of
perfecting the human race by, as he put it, getting
rid of its "undesirables" while multiplying its
"desirables"
 Social Darwinism
 Herbert Spencer, a 19th century philosopher,
promoted the idea of Social Darwinism

 Social Darwinism is an application of the theory

of natural selection to social, political, and
economic issues
 In its simplest form, Social Darwinism follows the
mantra of "the strong survive," including human issues
 Social Darwinism
 Often used to promote the idea that the white
European race was superior to others
 Superiority presumed a destiny to rule over inferiors
 Persons, groups, and races are subject to the same
Dariwinan laws of natural selection

 Popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – it

was claimed that the weak were diminished and their
cultures delimited, while the strong grew in power and
in cultural influence over the weak
 Social Darwinism

 The strong form of Social Darwinism holds

that all human (and social) interaction consists
of a struggle between the weaker and the
stronger

 This allows survival of the fittest and human

progress
 German Fantasy Heritage
and the Aryan Myth
 There was a flourishing Ariosophical movement
in the late 1920s and 1930s
 Otherwise known as Armanism, this incoherent mish-
mash maintained an esoteric (weak) ideology
 Created by Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von
Liebenfels respectively, in Austria between 1890 and
1930
 The term 'Ariosophy‘ means wisdom concerning the
Aryans
 German Fantasy Heritage
and the Aryan Myth

 Many Nazis believed in Ariosophy

 Heinrich Himmler was heavily influenced by it

and anchored the symbolism and rituals of the SS
 Thule Society
 The Thule Society ("Study Group for Germanic
Antiquity"), was a German occultist and völkisch
group in Munich
 Named after a mythical northern country from Greek
legend
 The Society is notable chiefly as the organization
that sponsored the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
(DAP), which was later reorganized by Adolf
Hitler into the National Socialist German
Workers' Party (NSDAP or Nazi Party)
 Thule Society
 The organization's "membership list... reads like a
Who's Who of early Nazi sympathizers and
leading figures in Munich" including

 Rudolf Hess
 Appointed Deputy Führer to Adolf Hitler in 1933, he
served in this position until 1941, when he flew solo to
Scotland in an attempt to negotiate peace with the
United Kingdom during World War II – died in
Spandau Prison
 Thule Society
 Alfred Rosenberg
 Influential ideologue of the Nazi Party and one of the
main authors of key National Socialist ideological
creeds, including its racial theory, persecution of the
Jews, Lebensraum, abrogation of the Treaty of
Versailles, and opposition to degenerate modern art –
died by hanging
 Dietrich Eckart
 Radical anti-semite and Hitler’s closest personal friend
until death shortly after the 1923 Munich Beer Hall
Putsch
 Guido von List
 Born October 5, 1848 – Died May 17, 1919
 Ariosophy (Armanism) was a romantic blend of
ideas and interest in
 natural living;
 Vegetarianism;
 anti-industrialism;
 an appreciation of prehistoric monuments and the
wisdom of those who built them;
 a feeling for astrology;
 earth energies; and natural cycles
 Guido von List

 Von List's ideas were also embraced by many

völkisch groups in Germany
 He helped shape the runic theories used by the Nazis in
formulating their myths – no matter how historically
wrong they were
 Vril Society

 Not much documentation about this group

 Vril was understood as a potent force/energy that

potentially could be translatable into political and
economic power

 Watch the first 10 minutes of this video at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDFEwIXlrss
 Blavatsky's
The Secret Doctrine
 Helena Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine, the
Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy,
was an influential book originally published as
two volumes in 1888
 The first volume is Cosmogenesis and the second
is Anthropogenesis

 It was an influential example of the revival of

interest in esoteric and occult ideas in the modern
age
 Blavatsky's
The Secret Doctrine

 Blavatsky claimed that The Secret Doctrine had

been revealed to her by spiritual leaders who had
retained knowledge of humanity's spiritual history

 She also connects physical race with spiritual

attributes constantly throughout her works
 The Secret Doctrine
Volume I - Cosmogenesis

 The first volume explains the origin and evolution

of the universe itself, in terms derived from the
Hindu concept of cyclical development

 The world and everything in it is said to alternate

between periods of activity and periods of
passivity
 The Secret Doctrine
Volume I - Cosmogenesis
 Blavatsky attempted to demonstrate that the
discoveries of "materialist" science had been
anticipated in the writings of ancient sages and
that materialism would be proven wrong
 Materialism holds that matter is the fundamental
substance in nature and its motions as constituting the
universe
 All phenomena, including those of mind, are due to
material agencies
 Closely related to physicalism (the view that all
that exists is ultimately physical)
 The Secret Doctrine
Volume II - Anthropogenesis
 Volume II describes the origins of humanity
through an account of "Root Races" said to date
back millions of years

 The first root race was, according to her,

"ethereal";

 The second root had more physical bodies and

lived in Hyperborea
 The Secret Doctrine
Volume II - Anthropogenesis

 The third root race, the first to be truly human, is

said to have existed on the lost continent of
Lemuria

 The fourth root race is said to have developed

in Atlantis

 The fifth root race is approximately one million

years old
 The Secret Doctrine
Volume II - Anthropogenesis

 Blavatsky explained that, "by 'Man' the divine

Monad is meant, and not the thinking Entity,
much less his physical body"

 "Occultism rejects the idea that Nature developed

man from the ape, or even from an ancestor
common to both, but traces, on the contrary, some
of the most anthropoid species to the Third Race
man"
 The Secret Doctrine
Volume II - Anthropogenesis

 In other words, "the 'ancestor' of the present

anthropoid animal, the ape, is the direct
production of the yet mindless Man, who
desecrated his human dignity by putting himself
physically on the level of an animal"
 The Secret Doctrine
Volume II - Anthropogenesis
Three Fundamental Propositions

1) The first proposition is that there is one

underlying, unconditioned, indivisible Truth,
variously called "the Absolute", "the Unknown
Root", "the One Reality"
 It is causeless and timeless, and therefore unknowable
and non-describable: "It is 'Be-ness' rather than Being"
 The Secret Doctrine
Volume II - Anthropogenesis
Proposition 1

1) Thus manifest existence is a "change of

condition" and therefore neither the result
of creation nor a random event
 In other words, everything in the universe is informed
by the potentialities present in the "Unknown Root,"
and manifest with different degrees of Life (or energy),
Consciousness, and Matter
 The Secret Doctrine
Volume II - Anthropogenesis
Proposition 2
2) There is "the absolute universality of that law of
periodicity, of flux and reflux, ebb and flow"
 Manifest existence is an eternally re-occurring event on
a "boundless plane": "'the playground of numberless
Universes incessantly manifesting and
disappearing,'" each one "standing in the relation of an
effect as regards its predecessor, and being a cause as
regards its successor", doing so over vast but finite
periods of time
 The Secret Doctrine
Volume II - Anthropogenesis
Proposition 3
3) "The fundamental identity of all Souls with the
Universal Over-Soul... and the obligatory
pilgrimage for every Soul—a spark of the
former—through the Cycle of Incarnation (or
'Necessity') in accordance with Cyclic and
Karmic law, during the whole term"
 The individual souls are seen as units of consciousness
(Monads) that are intrinsic parts of a universal
oversoul, just as different sparks are parts of a fire
 The Secret Doctrine
Volume II - Anthropogenesis
Proposition 3
 These Monads undergo a process of evolution
where consciousness unfolds and matter develops
 This evolution is not random, but informed by
intelligence and with a purpose
 Evolution follows distinct paths in accord with certain
immutable laws, aspects of which are perceivable on
the physical level
• One such law is the law of periodicity and cyclicity; another
is the law of karma or cause and effect
 The Secret Doctrine
Volume II - Anthropogenesis
Theories on Human Evolution and Race in Volume II
 Blavatsky presents a theory of the gradual
evolution of physical humanity over a timespan of
millions of years
 Remember - the steps in this evolution are
called rootraces

 There are numerous passages and footnotes that

claim some peoples to be less fully human or
spiritual than the "Aryans"
 The Secret Doctrine
Volume II - Anthropogenesis
Two Examples of Inferior/Superior Peoples
 "Mankind is obviously divided into god-informed men and lower human
creatures. The intellectual difference between the Aryan and other civilized
nations and such savages as the South Sea Islanders, is inexplicable on any
other grounds. No amount of culture, nor generations of training amid
civilization, could raise such human specimens as the Bushmen, the
Veddhas of Ceylon, and some African tribes, to the same intellectual level
as the Aryans, the Semites, and the Turanians so called. The 'sacred spark'
is missing in them and it is they who are the only inferior races on the
globe, now happily -- owing to the wise adjustment of nature which ever
works in that direction -- fast dying out. Verily mankind is 'of one blood,'
but not of the same essence." (The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2, p. 421)
 Blavatsky's
The Secret Doctrine
 Blavatsky also asserts that

"the occult doctrine admits of no such divisions as the

Aryan and the Semite, accepting even the Turanian with
ample reservations. Semites, especially the Arabs, are
later Aryans — degenerate in spirituality and perfected in
materiality" (The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2, p 200)
 Ahnenerbe
(SS Science Group)
 Recall that the Thule Society promoted the
superiority of the Aryan race
 These ideas formed the basis of Nazi racial philosophy
 When the Nazi Party took power, Himmler sought
to create an Aryan knighthood in the shape of the
SS
 Originally founded as Hitler's bodyguards, the SS had
grown rapidly (300,000 strong by 1939)
 SS became the standard bearer of “racial purity” within
Germany and in the campaign directed especially
against the peoples in the East
 Ahnenerbe
(SS Science Group)
 Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, was the chief
driving force in developing the nationalist and
racist myths advanced by the Nazis
 He was able to recruit broad layers of leading
academics in pursuit of this aim
 When Himmler joined the Nazi Party in 1925, he was
already a member of the Thule society
 Thule Society relied upon Roman historian Tacitus’
single reference to German tribes the year 9 AD, when
the Teutonic tribes defeated the Roman army (Germans
were tall, fair-haired, strong, and blue-eyed)
 Wewelsburg castle
 The center of this new order of knights, an
"aristocracy of soul and blood", was the
 This was Himmler's “Camelot” with SS commanders
cast as the Knights of the Round Table
 Rooms were dedicated to figures of Nordic
history and mythology like King Arthur
 Himmler's room was dedicated to King Heinrich I,
founder of the first German Reich (empire)
 Himmler believed himself to be the reincarnation
of Heinrich
 Himmler’s Proto-Science
 Himmler maintained that many sacred symbols
had been stolen from a more ancient Aryan
religion and set out to restore them
 One such symbol was the Holy Grail
 Himmler saw the potential of archaeology as a
political tool to provide an identity for his SS
 Himmler also believed that archaeology had a certain
pseudo-religious content
 There were excavations; there were myths and
legends, a feeling of superiority
 Ahnenerbe
 In 1935, Himmler established a new arm of the
SS, Das Ahnenerbe (the Ancestral Heritage
Society)
 It was staffed by high-profile academics and
headed by the Nazi Wolfram Sievers
 Of the 46 heads of departments, 19 were
professors and another 19 held doctorates
 Amongst them were such eminent figures as Walter
Wust, a leading expert on India; Ernst Schaefer, a
veteran explorer; and Walter Jankuhn, an archaeologist
 Ahnenerbe During WW II

 Through these academics the Nazis sought to lend

their propaganda the status of objective truth
 The Ahnenerbe organized expeditions into many
parts of the world
 To Iceland in search of the Grail
 To Iran to find evidence of ancient kings of pure Aryan
blood
 To the Canary Islands to seek proof of Atlantis
 Ahnenerbe and the
Mythical Lies
 An important figure was Assien Bohmers
 He was a Dutch Nazi geologist in the SS who
examined the Mauern Caves in Bavaria
 He argued that Cro-Magnons not only evolved
and developed in Germany (making them the
forefathers of modern Germans), but they also
exterminated the Neanderthals
 This became a major justification for the holocaust
 So the constructed myth became a justification for
conquering the world
 Ahnenerbe During WW II
 In April 1938 the SS undertook its biggest and
most ambitious expedition to Tibet, led by
Schaefer and the anthropologist Bruno Beger
 Film shot during the expedition shows Beger and
others measuring the bodies of the Tibetan people and
producing facemasks
 Beger believed that the proportions of the human
body were vital indicators of race and that one
could determine the moral and intellectual
capacities through the shape of the skull
 Ahnenerbe During WW II

 On March 10, 1937, SS officers gathered in

Munich to listen to a lecture by Professor Wust,
with the title " Mein Kampf as the mirror of the
Aryan worldview”
 In it, Wust claimed a “similarity between the
words of the Führer and those of that other great
Aryan personality, the Buddha ... the basic idea of
racial identity and the sacred concept of ancestral
heritage”
 Role of the Ahnenerbe
 With the beginning of the war, the role played by
the Ahnenerbe became more sinister
 It took on a grandiose scale
 Entire contents of museums, scientific collections,
libraries and archaeological finds were looted and
shipped to Berlin or the Wewelsburg

 Professors, doctors and scholars were now

directly integrated into the Nazi murder machine
 Role of the Ahnenerbe
 In October 1941 Sievers brought Ernst Schaefer
to Dachau to photograph experiments on inmates
carried out by a Luftwaffe medical officer

 The interrogation of Sievers at Nuremberg – when

asked about his role in the collection of skeletons
for Professor Hirt at Strasbourg University – told
how Jews were held in Dachau concentration
camp and were selected while still alive to
provide specimens
 Ahnenerbe During WW II
 The activities of the Ahnenerbe in Dachau and
Auschwitz show the direct connection between their
racial theories and fascist atrocities
 Scholars involved in the Ahnenerbe research claimed that
their sole interest was the development of their specific
field of study
 But evidence shows they knew of, and were complicit in,
the Nazis' crimes against humanity
 They were SS officers in uniform and participated in close
discussions within the council of Ahnenerbe, while
scientists who would not go along with the Nazis were
ostracized and victimized
 Questions
 Is it acceptable for historians, archaeologists,
anthropologists or any scientists to utilize similar
opportunities in order to further their scientific
research?
 What about medical experiments like those at
Tuskegee, Alabama?

 If anything is learned from inhumane

experimentation, can it be ethically used or should
it be totally ignored?
 THEORIES OF
RACIAL SUPERIORITY
 Theories of racial superiority served the interests
of the ruling class in obtaining control of
territories and markets, especially in the East, to
overcome the restrictions laid on Germany after
its defeat in the First World War
 The years of the Weimar regime were periods of
riot and alarm
 Historians, economists, and philosophers were lost in
guesswork as to which of the contending explanations
was right
 THEORIES OF
RACIAL SUPERIORITY

 Interestingly, archaeologists and anthropologists -

at the end of the Second World War - didn't sort
out the issues of ethnicity

 Consider that in all spheres of life within the post-

war German state system, there was no real
reckoning with former Nazi stooges
 Questions
Given that professors, judges, high ranking
policemen, army officers, doctors, psychiatrists
and politicians all assumed leading and respected
positions in the state apparatus of the Federal
Republic of Germany and, on a smaller scale, the
German Democratic Republic:

 Was justice served by the Nuremberg trials?

 Ahnenerbe Redux - German Fantasy
Heritage and the Aryan Myth
 Lebensraum and the stolen children from
occupied territories

Estimates of Lebensborn children as high as

200,000 babies

SS ancestry test – no Jews in family since 1725

 The Holocaust

 Estimated that 11 million people died in German

concentration camps during World War II
 The Holocaust –
Concentration Camps

 Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany

established about 20,000 camps to imprison its
many millions of victims
 These camps were used for a range of purposes
including forced-labor camps, transit camps which
served as temporary way stations, and killing centers
built primarily or exclusively for mass murder
 The Holocaust – Timeline

 http://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/before-1933
 http://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1933-1938
 http://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1939-1941
 http://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1942-1945
 http://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/after-1945
 The Holocaust –
Killing Centers
 The Nazis established killing centers for efficient
mass murder
 Unlike concentration camps, which served
primarily as detention and labor centers, killing
centers (also referred to as "extermination camps"
or "death camps") were almost exclusively "death
factories"
 German SS and police murdered nearly 2,700,000
Jews in the killing centers either by asphyxiation
with poison gas or by shooting
 CHELMNO, BELZEC,
SOBIBOR, AND TREBLINKA
 To facilitate the "Final Solution" (the genocide or
mass destruction of the Jews), the Nazis
established killing centers in Poland, the country
with the largest Jewish population
 The killing centers were designed for efficient
mass murder
 Chelmno, the first killing center, opened in
December 1941
 Jews and Roma were gassed in mobile gas vans there
 CHELMNO, BELZEC,
SOBIBOR, AND TREBLINKA

 In 1942, the Nazis opened the Belzec, Sobibor,

and Treblinka killing centers to systematically
murder the Jews of the Generalgouvernement (the
territory in the interior of occupied Poland)
 CHELMNO, BELZEC,
SOBIBOR, AND TREBLINKA
 The Nazis constructed gas chambers
 These were rooms that filled with poison gas to kill
those inside
 They were designed to increase killing efficiency and
to make the process more impersonal for the
perpetrators
 At the Auschwitz camp complex, the Birkenau
killing center had four gas chambers
 During the height of deportations to the camp, up to
6,000 Jews were gassed there each day
 CHELMNO, BELZEC,
SOBIBOR, AND TREBLINKA

 Jews in Nazi-occupied lands often were first

deported to transit camps such as Westerbork in
the Netherlands, or Drancy in France, en route to
the killing centers in occupied Poland

 The transit camps were usually the last stop before

deportation to a killing center
 CHELMNO, BELZEC,
SOBIBOR, AND TREBLINKA

 Millions of people were imprisoned and abused in

the various types of Nazi camps

 Under SS management, the Germans and their

collaborators murdered more than three million
Jews in the killing centers alone
 Only a small fraction of those imprisoned in Nazi
camps survived
 CHELMNO, BELZEC,
SOBIBOR, AND TREBLINKA
 The first killing center was Chelmno, which
opened in the Warthegau (part of Poland annexed
to Germany) in December 1941
 Mostly Jews, but also Roma (Gypsies), were gassed in
mobile gas vans there
 In 1942, in the Generalgouvernement (a territory
in the interior of occupied Poland), the Nazis
opened the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka killing
centers (known collectively as the Operation
Reinhard camps) to systematically murder the
Jews of Poland
 CHELMNO, BELZEC,
SOBIBOR, AND TREBLINKA

 In the Operation Reinhard killing centers, the SS

and their auxiliaries killed approximately
1,526,500 Jews between March 1942 and
November 1943
 The Holocaust –
Concentration Camps
EARLY CAMPS
 From its rise to power in 1933, the Nazi regime
built a series of detention facilities to imprison
and eliminate so-called "enemies of the state“

 Most prisoners in the early concentration camps

were German Communists, Socialists, Social
Democrats, Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah's
Witnesses, homosexuals, and persons accused of
"asocial" or socially deviant behavior
 The Holocaust –
Concentration Camps
EARLY CAMPS

 These facilities were called “concentration

camps” because those imprisoned there were
physically “concentrated” in one location
 The Holocaust –
Concentration Camps
 After Germany's annexation of Austria in March
1938, the Nazis arrested German and Austrian
Jews and imprisoned them in the Dachau,
Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen concentration
camps, all located in Germany

 After the violent Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken

Glass") pogroms in November 1938, the Nazis
conducted mass arrests of adult male Jews and
incarcerated them in camps for brief periods
 The Holocaust –
Concentration Camps
FORCED-LABOR AND PRISONER-OF-WAR CAMPS
 Following the German invasion of Poland in
September 1939, the Nazis opened forced-labor
camps where thousands of prisoners died from
exhaustion, starvation, and exposure
 SS units guarded the camps
 During World War II, the Nazi camp system expanded
rapidly
 In some camps, Nazi doctors performed medical
experiments on prisoners
 The Holocaust –
Concentration Camps
FORCED-LABOR AND PRISONER-OF-WAR CAMPS

 Following the June 1941 German invasion of the

Soviet Union, the Nazis increased the number of
prisoner-of-war (POW) camps

 Some new camps were built at existing concentration

camp complexes (such as Auschwitz) in occupied
Poland
 The Holocaust –
Concentration Camps
FORCED-LABOR AND PRISONER-OF-WAR CAMPS

 The camp at Lublin, later known as Majdanek,

was established in the autumn of 1941 as a POW
camp and became a concentration camp in 1943

 Thousands of Soviet POWs were shot or gassed there

 The Holocaust –
AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU
 Almost all of the deportees who arrived at the
camps were sent immediately to death in the gas
chambers
 An exception was a very small numbers chosen for
special work teams known as Sonderkommandos

 The largest killing center was Auschwitz-

Birkenau, which by spring 1943 had four gas
chambers (using Zyklon B poison gas) in
operation
 The Holocaust –
AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

 At the height of the deportations, up to 6,000 Jews

were gassed each day at Auschwitz-Birkenau in
Poland

 Over a million Jews and tens of thousands of

Roma, Poles, and Soviet prisoners of war were
killed there by November 1944
 The Holocaust –
MAJDANEK

 Though many scholars have traditionally counted

the Majdanek camp as a sixth killing center,
recent research had shed more light on the
functions and operations at Lublin/Majdanek

 Within the framework of Operation Reinhard,

Majdanek primarily served to concentrate Jews
whom the Germans spared temporarily for forced
labor
 The Holocaust –
MAJDANEK

 Majdanek occasionally functioned as a killing site

to murder victims who could not be killed at the
Operation Reinhard killing centers: Belzec,
Sobibor, and Treblinka II

 Majdanek also contained a storage depot for

property and valuables taken from the Jewish
victims at the killing centers
 The Holocaust –
The Killing Centers
 The SS considered the killing centers top secret

 To obliterate all traces of gassing operations,

special prisoner units (the Sonderkommandos)
were forced to remove corpses from the gas
chambers and cremate them

 The grounds of some killing centers were

landscaped or camouflaged to disguise the murder
of millions