Ahnenerbe

The Ahnenerbe (German: [ˈaːnənˌʔɛʁbə], "Ancestral Heritage") was a pseudoscientific organization founded by the Schutzstaffel in Nazi Germany in 1935. Established by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler on July 1, 1935 as an SS appendage devoted to promoting racial theories espoused by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, the Ahnenerbe consisted of academics and scientists from a broad range of academic disciplines who fostered the idea that 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. He claimed that Germans were descended from an Aryan race which, in contrast to established academic understandings, had invented most major developments in human history, such as agriculture, art and writing. Most of the world's scholars did not accept this, and the Nazis established the Ahnenerbe in order to provide evidence for their racial theories and to promote them to the German public. Ahnenerbe scholars interpreted evidence to fit Hitler's beliefs, and many consciously fabricated evidence to do so. The organisation sent expeditions to various parts of the world to find evidence to support their theories. 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 there. In 1937, the Ahnenerbe became an official branch of the SS and was renamed the Research and Teaching Community in Ancestral Heritage (Institute der Forschungsgemeinschaft Deutsches Ahnenerbe). Much of their research was 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 began in 1941. During...