 Emblem | |
| Formation | July 1, 1935 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Heinrich Himmler |
| Dissolved | 1945 |
| Legal status | Registered association under Schutzstaffel control |
| Purpose | Propaganda Pseudoscientific research |
Official language | German |
The Ahnenerbe (German: [ˈaːnənˌʔɛʁbə], "Ancestral Heritage") was a Schutzstaffel (SS) pseudoscientific organization which was active in Nazi Germany between 1935 and 1945. It was established by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler in July 1935 as an SS appendage devoted to the task of promoting the racial doctrines espoused by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. The Ahnenerbe was composed of scholars and scientists from a broad range of academic disciplines and fostered the idea that the 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 under the control of the Nazi Party. He espoused the idea that the German people were descended from the Aryan race which, Hitler claimed in contrast to established academic understandings, had invented most major developments in human history, such as agriculture, art, and writing. The majority of the world's scholarly community did not accept this, and the Nazis established the Ahnenerbe in order to provide evidence for Nazi racial theories and to promote these ideas to the German public. Ahnenerbe scholars interpreted evidence to fit Hitler's beliefs, and some consciously fabricated evidence in order to do so. The organisation sent expeditions to other parts of the world, intent on finding evidence of historical Aryan expansion.
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 into the region. In 1937, the Ahnenerbe became an official branch of the SS and was renamed the "Research and Teaching Community in Ancestral Heritage" (Forschungs und Lehrgemeinschaft das Ahnenerbe). Many of their investigations were 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 was launched in 1941.
Towards the end of World War II in Europe, Ahnenerbe members destroyed much of the organisation'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. This stifled scholarly research into the Ahnenerbe, which only intensified after German reunification in 1990. Ideas promoted by the Ahnenerbe have retained an appeal for some neo-Nazi and far-right circles and have also influenced later pseudoarchaeologists.