We have most likely all seen the Indiana Jones movies, where a bright American scholar foils the plans of insanely evil Nazis. Normally, the Nazis are looking for some kid of religious relic, hoping to harness it’s power to destroy the world and/or smash freedom across the globe.
Sounds like total science-fiction crap, right?
Wrong!
There actually were evil Nazi scientists (like in the video game series Wolfenstein) and there were totally evil Nazi archaeologists (just like those guys in Indiana Jones or Hellboy). They were called the Ahnenerbe and they were the real deal. No foolin’.
On July the 1st, 1935, Heinrich Himmler founded the Ahnenerbe (which is German for “stuff we got from the family who were before us”, or something equally stupid) with the intention of proving that an Aryan empire once ruled the world, being diluted by local bloodstreams until it completely collapsed. These guys believed that Samurai warriors from Japan, Mongol chieftains from Mongolia and Brahmin from India, were all descended from one super-race of primordial Nazis who were themselves leftovers from an Aryan civilization from Atlantis.
I am not making this up.
Nazi archaeologists, botanists and linguists, along with lots of other guys, wanted to travel to the Canary Islands in the late 1930s, because it was said that the natives there had once had blonde hair and practiced Nordic style funeral and religious rites. That is, before their culture was destroyed by angry Spaniards in the 15th and 16th Century.
Among other places the Nazi science guys went or wanted to go were Bolivia, Tibet, Finland (where they researched witches and wizards, no foolin’) and Iceland. Luckily, World War 2 broke out and millions of people were killed instead.
By “luckily”, we mean “that’s pretty stink”.
These expeditions were funded by community minded groups such as BMW and Daimler-Benz. Other expeditions funded by Himmler, the SS and the people who still make our cars included missions to the Caucasus to decide whether or not a tribe of locals were in fact Jewish. To figure this out they killed a bunch of them, stripped all the meat off their bones and compared those skeletons to other skeletons. Pretty good science, all in all.
Even more ‘awesome’ was Himmler’s obsession with building Thor’s Hammer. He didn’t want to build the actual hammer held by the actual god Thor, but he wanted to use the concept. He believed that Thor’s Hammer was actually a super weapon which could control lightening. This would allow him to destroy the Allied and Russian armies which were closing in on Nazi-land. Needless to say, it didn’t work out, what with the idea being “bat shit insane” and all.
So why did the Nazis put all of this effort into digging up bits of stone and metal at the far ends of the earth?
Apparently, and we use the term loosely, it was to prove that Aryans had once ruled the world, furthering the Nazi belief in Aryan superiority. This would allow them to roll around the world, comfortable in the knowledge that they were just setting history back the way it was supposed to be.
Luckily for us, there were a lot of people who thought this was a stink idea and went out of their way to stop the Nazis.
The lesson to be learnt from this particular part of forgotten history is that if you start making up history for your own benefit, Russia, America and the Commonwealth will invade your lands and destroy your infrastructure. And you’ll probably kill yourself.