The Nazis were not just evil but barmy
The Nazi’s crazy archaeological missions to find Atlantis and the Holy Grail, described in a new documentary, are sinister stuff, says Benji Wilson
By Benji Wilson
11:00AM GMT 20 Nov 2013
With its overtones of Indiana Jones and Monty Python, Nazi Quest for the Holy Grail is a documentary whose very title invites a little sniggering. The film draws on a huge cache of documents discovered by the Americans in a cave in central Germany at the end of the Second World War, which suggest that the Nazis, and specifically Heinrich Himmler, were not just evil but barmy with it. Amongst other things, Himmler had sanctioned projects to find the lost city of Atlantis, the Holy Grail and an expedition to find the origins of a supposed Aryan master race in Tibet. All of this came under a broader ideological goal – a metaphorical Holy Grail – of wanting to write into history an ancient civilisation from which the Nazis believed they had descended.
As Christopher Hale, author of the book Himmler’s Crusade and a contributor to the film says, “Himmler had a wide range of what we would now call New Age, or plain wacky interests. One could say his tastes in scientific investigations were Catholic ones – very broad ranging. But nevertheless there were scientists who found refuge within the SS, who were given support by it.”
That support began in 1935 when Himmler founded an organisation called the Ahnenerbe (“Ancestral Heritage”) whose claimed goal was to discover “new evidence of the accomplishments and deeds of Germanic ancestors using exact scientific methods”.
“You could imagine it like a grant funding body,” says Hale. “So you had a bunch of people going to the Ahnenerbe saying, ‘Look, I think Atlantis was in Bolivia.’ This was one of the expeditions that never got off the ground but there was a famous site in Bolivia called Tiwanaku and there was a German archaeologist who believed that this was Atlantis. With an idea like that he’d get support from the Ahnenerbe. So you probably got people tailoring their ideas to what they understood to be Himmler’s interest. And Himmler was certainly interested in very odd ideas. Not only did he believe in Atlantis but he thought that the Nordic or Aryan people came to earth in a shower of ice.” :shock:
In spite of its title, Nazi Quest for the Holy Grail is a laudable film with a serious message – it shows how any idea that Himmler’s various quests were merely derisory follies needs to be tempered with the ideology they were designed to promote.
“For the Tibet mission in 1939 some of it was pretty normal science,” says Hale. “There was a geophysicist who was measuring magnetic forces in the earth’s crust in the Himalayas; there was an entomologist who collected butterflies. But the key figure was the anthropologist Bruno Beger. He was looking for biological traces of Aryans or Nordic people among the Asian peoples in Tibet.”
What Beger was hoping to find was evidence of a lost civilisation of Nordic people that extended from Europe to Asia – or as his paymaster Himmler would see it, an Aryan master race. It was retroactive science designed to support racial prejudice. And Himmler had built the machinery to help him bolster those beliefs.
“There was a scientific culture at the time – we would now say that it was a pseudo-scientific culture but I think one has to bear in mind that people like Beger thought they were genuine scientists – that was supported by the SS. One of the things that’s forgotten about the SS is that it was an elite. Himmler promoted academies. He promoted the careers of academics that he favoured within universities.”
Scratchy footage of five German scientists gamely heading off to Lhasa in the documentary all seems rather innocent but it was founded on a malevolent theoretical cocktail – the idea that there was a hierarchy of races combined with a horror of interaction between races.
“You just have to go a little bit deeper into what Beger was doing and you come up against the kind of ideas that were generating mass murder,” says Hale.
As if to prove his point Beger’s next port of call after the Tibetan expedition was Auschwitz, where he continued his experiments. (He was put on trial in the Sixties as an accessory to murder.) Far from being a group of cranks and mad scientists with Himmler as patron, the Nazi quest for the Holy Grail led to something much more sinister.
“These people were promoting the racial ideas that led to the Holocaust,” says Hale. “So although one can overplay Himmler’s interests and make him look like a comic figure, he was not. This was someone who ran an enormous organisation – he turned the SS in to a state within a state from a starting point of 26 yobbos who guarded Nazi party meetings. So you have to set his eccentric ideas alongside his horribly efficient management of the SS. After Hitler he was the most powerful member of the regime towards the end of the war. He enacted some of these ideas through concentration camps and mass shootings. I would always come back to that point.”
Tonight:
Nazi Quest for the Holy Grail is on Channel 5 on Wednesday, 20 November at 9.00pm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvan ... barmy.html
