Ahnenerbe

Ahnenerbe

Emblem
Formation	July 1, 1935
Founder	Heinrich Himmler
Legal status	Eingetragener Verein
Purpose	political propaganda, pseudo-scientific research
Official language	German

The Ahnenerbe was an institute in Nazi Germany purposed to research the archaeological and cultural history of the Aryan race. Founded on July 1, 1935, by Heinrich Himmler, Herman Wirth, and Richard Walther Darré, the Ahnenerbe later conducted experiments and launched expeditions in an attempt to prove that mythological Nordic populations had once ruled the world.

The name Ahnenerbe (pronounced [ˈaːnənˌɛʁbə]) means "inheritance from the ancestors." Originally, the official mission of the Ahnenerbe was to find new evidence of the racial heritage of the Germanic people; however, due to Himmler's obsession with occultism it quickly became his own occult tool and started using pseudoscience. The group was formerly called the Study Society for Primordial Intellectual history, German Ancestral Heritage (Studiengesellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte‚ Deutsches Ahnenerbe), but it was renamed in 1937 as the Research and Teaching Community of the Ancestral Heritage (Forschungs- und Lehrgemeinschaft des Ahnenerbe).

In January 1929, Heinrich Himmler was appointed the leader of the fledgling Schutzstaffel (SS). He launched a massive recruitment campaign that expanded the SS from fewer than 300 members in 1929 to 10,000 in 1931. Once the SS had grown, Himmler began its transformation into a "racial elite" of young Nordic males. This was to be accomplished by a new bureaucracy, the Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt-SS (Race and Settlement Office of the SS), known as RuSHA. Himmler appointed SS-Obergruppenführer Richard Walther Darré to lead the organisation, which determined if applicants were racially fit to be in the SS. This brought about a campaign meant to educate new applicants about their Nordic past through weekly classes taught by senior RuSHA graduates using the periodical SS-Leitheft.