Ahnenerbe-SS

The Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society, or Ahnenerbe Forschungs-und Lehrgemeinschaft, was founded in July 1935 by Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Wirth (a Dutch historian obsessed with Atlantean mythology), and Richard Walter Darré (creator of the Nazi "blood and soil" ideology and head of the Race and Settlement Office). There is some evidence that the Ahnenerbe existed as early as 1928, when Wirth established the "Hermann Wirth Society" for teaching and spreading his theories. Another candidate for precursor of the Ahnenerbe was a research institute for "spiritual prehistory" created by the German state of Mecklenburg in 1932, when the state was governed by the NSDAP.

The Ahnenerbe was created as a registered club as a private and non-profit organization. Funding for the Ahnenerbe primarily came through Darré and his position within the German Ministry of Agriculture, but this association ended around 1936, leaving Himmler in total control of the Ahnenerbe. The Ahnenerbe was not incorporated into the SS until April 1940, though even before this, all but one member of the academic and medical staff of the Ahnenerbe were at least honorary members of the SS and many held significant rank. Wolfram Sievers was Reichsgeschäftsführer, or Reich Manager, of the Ahnenerbe from 1935, and held the rank of SS-Obersturmführer since 1937, rising to the rank of SS-Standartenführer by the end of the war. There was an obvious link between the SS and the Ahnenerbe long before it became official in 1940.

The Ahnenerbe was part of Himmler's greater plan for the systematic creation of a "Germanic" culture that would replace Christianity in the Greater Germany to exist after the war, a kind of SS-religion that would form the basis of the new world order. This new culture would be based on the völkisch beliefs of the Nazis, and it was the role of the Ahnenerbe to marshal scientific research in an interdisciplinary program to reject the "priggish line of high-school professors" and support the "development of the Germanic heritage". While the Ahnenerbe were fervent Nazis and most of their research was based on racist pseudoscience, they rejected the occult thinking of groups like the Thule Gesellschaft, preferring a pragmatic methodology based on Mendelian genetics, Darwinism, and biology. Fundamentally, the Ahnenerbe was a politically-motivated academic association, albeit with enough funding to go beyond mere lectures and publications to include wide-scale expeditions and experimental research.

Himmler himself served as the "chairman of the Kuratorium" of the Ahnenerbe, and held the real power within the Ahnenerbe. As Reich Manager of the Ahnenerbe, Wolfram Sievers was responsible for all administrative tasks, with day-to-day business matters handled by the deputy "Kurator" Dr. Herrman Reischle. Professor Walter Wüst joined the Ahnenerbe in 1937 and, as trustee and "Kurator" of the organization, replaced Hermann Wirth as its intellectual leader. Wüst had been dean of the University of Munich, and his presence brought a number of reputable academics into the Ahnenerbe. The Ahnenerbe was funded by the Ahnenerbe-Stiftung, the German Forschungsgemeinschaft, member fees, and "from funds of the Reich and from contributions of industry" (including a group of financiers called the Circle of Friends led by Wilhelm Keppler). The budget of the Ahnenerbe was as much as over one million German marks (400,000 American dollars).

The Ahnenerbe had fifty different research branches named "Institutes", which carried out more than one hundred extensive research projects. Some of the institutes, particularly those responsible for Tibetan research and archaeological expeditions, could be quite large, but most made do with less than a dozen personnel. For example, the staff for experiments to make sea-water drinkable consisted of a supervisor, three medical chemists, one female assistant, and three non-commissioned officers.

Runes are equivalent to the Roman, Greek,Egyptian,Norse and Celtic alphabets. But they are much more than an alphabet. “Rune” means “secret”, “mystery”, or “hidden”, and is related to the German raunen, meaning “to whisper”, and the Irish run, meaning “a secret.”

To a certain extent, even the Chinese hieroglyphs resemble the runic variations. The same applies to some characters of other written languages which were believed to have developed independently from European languages.

Germany was the first European country that started to restore the knowledge of the runes back in the 19th century. A number of secret societies emerged. For example, Hitler and Himmler were the members of the Thule Brotherhood. Later the two Nazi leaders set up a network of research institutions Ahnenerbe (“Heritage of the Ancestors”) for the study of magic. Swastika, a runic symbol of the Sun became the official emblem of the Nazi Party and the Third Reich.

The SS structure was originally formed as a magic order. Up until 1940, every SS commissioned officer was to take a special course in the runic magic. The emblem “SS” is a double rune Sigel which is well known as a victory symbol. The mystics say that it was the runic magic that paved the way for Nazism. But all the magi were sent into concentration camps in 1940. And Hitler was doomed from that time onward. One of the reasons being his choice of a swastika whose arms were bent at right angles in a uniformly counterclockwise direction as opposed to the symbol of Ahnenerbe – a swastika with arms bent in a clockwise direction.