Racial Discrimination, European Theater - World War II - Axis, German Armed Forces - Biography, Eugenics, Holocaust - General & Miscellaneous, Germany - Historical Biography, General & Miscellaneous German History, National Socialism, German History - 193

The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust

Name: The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust
Author: Heather Pringle
ISBN: 9780786868865

by Heather Pringle

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Overview

A groundbreaking history of the Nazi research institute whose work helped lead to the extermination of millions

In 1935, Heinrich Himmler established a Nazi research institute called The Ahnenerbe, whose mission was to send teams of scholars around the world to search for proof of Ancient Aryan conquests. But history was not their most important focus. Rather, the Ahnenerbe was an essential part of Himmler's master plan for the Final Solution. The findings of the institute were used to convince armies of SS men that they were entitled to slaughter Jews and other groups. And Himmler also hoped to use the research as a blueprint for the breeding of a new Europe in a racially purer mold.

The Master Plan is a groundbreaking expos of the work of German scientists and scholars who allowed their research to be warped to justify extermination, and who directly participated in the slaughter -- many of whom resumed their academic positions at war's end. It is based on Heather Pringle's extensive original research, including previously ignored archival material and unpublished photographs, and interviews with living members of the institute and their survivors. A sweeping history told with the drama of fiction, The Master Plan is at once horrifying, transfixing, and monumentally important to our comprehension of how something as unimaginable as the Holocaust could have progressed from fantasy to reality.

Synopsis

Now in paperback, the groundbreaking history of the Nazi research institute whose work helped lead to the extermination of millions

For those who thought the zealous Nazi archaeologists in Raiders of the Lost Ark were a screenwriter's fabrication, journalist Heather Pringle has the chilling, real story. In 1935, Heinrich Himmler -- chief of the SS and architect of the death camps -- founded the Ahnenerbe, a research institute that manufactured archaeological evidence to support the notion of Aryan superiority. His team of adventurers, mystics, and reputable scholars was charged with traveling the globe to compile "proof" that a race of blond-haired, blue-eyed conquerors had dominated the world in prehistoric times. The identification of their descendants and the eradication of all others became the cornerstone of the Nazi agenda.

Drawing on Pringle's extensive original research, including interviews with surviving members of the Ahnenerbe, The Master Plan is a page-turning story of delusion and excess, of scientific and political abuse on a global scale.

Heather Pringle is the author of The Mummy Congress. Her writing has appeared in Science, Geo, New Scientist, and Discover, where she is currently a contributing editor. She lives in British Columbia.

Publishers Weekly

Considering the thousands of volumes covering every aspect of the Nazis, it's becoming increasingly difficult to say anything new about their dreadful era. Nevertheless, Pringle (The Mummy Congress), a contributing editor to Discover magazine, gamely steps up to the plate-and has produced a fascinating volume detailing the Nazis' crackpot theories about prehistory and the Indiana Jones-style lengths they went to prove them. Employing a team of researchers, Pringle investigates Heinrich Himmler's private think tank, the Ahnenerbe, which dispatched scholars to the most inhospitable and distant parts of the world to discover evidence of ancient Aryan conquests and the Germans' racial superiority. Some believed their own bizarre garbage; others perverted the facts for personal advancement or prostituted their reputations for the greater glory of Hitler. While it would be otherwise easy to laugh off the Ahnenerbe's ludicrous theories, Pringle argues that the institute provided the "academic" justification for the Holocaust and assembles a powerful body of evidence to that effect. Though one may wonder just how central the Ahnenerbe actually was to Hitler's thinking, when Pringle meets one of the most sinister of Himmler's scholars, his pride about the institute's "research" is distinctly disquieting. This is first-rate popular history-supported by an immense amount of scholarly apparatus in a range of languages. (Feb. 15) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

Science writer Heather Pringle recounts the fascinating story of the Ahnenerbe, the secretive Nazi think tank commissioned by Heinrich Himmler to investigate the anthropological and cultural history of the German race. Employed as the research arm of the SS, the Ahnenerbe trumped up scholarly "evidence" of Aryan supremacy that was subsequently used to justify the Final Solution. Based on extensive research and interviews with surviving members of this pseudoscientific enclave, Pringle's chilling account sheds new light on a dark and sinister chapter in history.

Publishers Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

A tale of scholarly detection illuminating a little-explored corner of Third Reich history: the use of pseudoscience in the service of ideology. Weedy and weak, a schoolyard snitch with a fanatical devotion to record-keeping, Heinrich Himmler seemed an unlikely choice to command the elite praetorian guard called the SS. Yet, writes Canadian scholar Pringle (The Mummy Congress, 2001), he was also fanatically devoted to Hitler. Moreover, he had a knack for shoring up fragments of Nazi ideology with fragments of half-learning that seemed self-evident to true believers. Thus, Himmler established a think tank that he called the Ahnenerbe (a "rather obscure German word . . . meaning 'something inherited from the forefathers' "). In time, the institute would employ more than 130 historians, linguists, geographers, agronomists, folklorists and classicists with an eye to producing evidence that the so-called Aryan peoples were the font of civilization. Like Himmler, the Ahnenerbe faculty members had their own agendas, self-preservation high among them, but in the end, their body of learning was meant to be put to one collective end: to provide a kind of "Aryan education" for future generations of SS soldiers, who would use it to settle on the fertile steppes of Eurasia and there produce prodigious crops and a perfect race of latter-day Aryans. Ominously, the Ahnenerbe also provided scholarly justification, of a kind, for the elimination of the peoples who already happened to occupy that land. As Raiders of the Lost Ark had it, Ahnenerbe scholars mounted or planned to mount archaeological and scientific expeditions to the Arctic, Tibet, Africa and South America before the war confined them toGerman territories. Amazingly, most of those who survived the war "escaped virtually unscathed from denazification," and the postwar Allied occupation government even branded one of the institute's most virulent and vocal racists a "political victim of the Third Reich."A highly readable contribution to the literature of Nazism's intellectual history, such as it is.