The SS Had an Institute for Studying Ancient Aryan History

It Began as a Society for the Ancestral Past

On 1 July 1935, Heinrich Himmler and the Dutch-German scholar Herman Wirth helped establish an organisation whose name translates approximately as Ancestral Heritage, or Ahnenerbe. Its original name was considerably longer, Deutsches Ahnenerbe, Studiengesellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte, a society devoted to what its founders regarded as the intellectual and spiritual prehistory of humanity.

The German Federal Archives preserve a substantial part of its surviving records under collection NS 21. Those records show an organisation that grew partly from Wirth’s earlier work on prehistoric symbols, folk traditions and supposed traces of ancient belief systems, but which was also connected from the beginning with the SS and Himmler’s interest in constructing a history of the peoples Nazi racial theory classified as Germanic, Nordic or Aryan.

The questions being asked were enormous. Where had the peoples described as Indo-Germanic or Aryan originated? Could their movements be reconstructed through archaeology, language and physical anthropology? Could ancient symbols, folk customs and religious traditions preserve traces of an earlier common culture?

The Ahnenerbe was created to search for answers, but the answers were never intended to remain confined to academic journals. Its work was expected to provide a historical foundation for the worldview of the SS.

Himmler Wanted a Usable Prehistory

The organisation’s 1937 statutes stated that it would investigate the territory, spirit and achievements of what it called Nordic Indo-Germanic peoples, communicate the results to the German population and encourage participation in that research.

At different stages the Ahnenerbe maintained research centres concerned with symbols, vocabulary, Germanic culture, Indo-Germanic and Finnish relationships, fairy tales and legends, archaeology, folk customs, family and clan markings, biology, cave research, pollen analysis, geography and Inner Asia. By the end of the war, the organisation had expanded to around 45 research departments or associated institutes.

Ancient objects could therefore be studied alongside songs, place names and family symbols. Archaeological sites could be compared with legends. Linguistic similarities might be used to reconstruct prehistoric migrations, while physical measurements of living populations could be interpreted as evidence of ancestry.

The underlying assumption was that fragments of a very old past might still survive in the modern world if researchers knew where to look.

Symbols Became Historical Evidence

Herman Wirth was particularly interested in symbols. He believed that prehistoric signs preserved traces of a very ancient northern civilisation and searched carvings, folk traditions and writing systems for connections between distant cultures.

Under that approach, a symbol found in Scandinavia, Germany or Central Asia could become more than a local design. It might be interpreted as evidence of cultural contact, migration or common ancestry.

This made runes, swastikas, spirals, crosses, traditional house markings and other recurring forms especially attractive. The same basic geometric shapes can appear independently in many cultures, but within the intellectual framework surrounding the Ahnenerbe, similarity itself could become the beginning of a historical argument.

That interest in symbols also helps explain why the organisation could move so easily between archaeology, mythology, folklore and racial theory. If an ancient cultural system had once existed across a wide area, then physical artefacts were only one possible trace of it.

Stories, ceremonies and symbols might preserve others.

Archaeologists Went Looking for Sacred Landscapes

The Ahnenerbe operated an archaeological department and became involved with prehistoric and supposedly prehistoric sites across Germany and later occupied Europe. One of the places that attracted particular attention was the Externsteine, a dramatic group of sandstone formations in northern Germany containing caves, carvings and structures altered by humans over many centuries.

The Externsteine had already inspired competing theories before the Nazis came to power. Some researchers and nationalist writers believed the site had been an important pre-Christian Germanic sanctuary, while others placed much of its surviving human modification in the medieval Christian period.

For people interested in recovering or reconstructing an ancestral Germanic religion, such locations offered an appealing possibility. If an ancient sacred landscape could be identified archaeologically, mythology might be given a physical location.

The same question appears repeatedly in Ahnenerbe projects: was research being used to discover what a place or object had once meant, or was the organisation searching for material that could support a historical picture already desired by the SS?

The surviving records allow the question to be asked, but the answer varies from project to project and researcher to researcher.

Then the Ahnenerbe Looked Beyond Germany

The organisation’s interests eventually extended across much of Europe and into Asia. After its reorganisation in 1937, its research programme increasingly referred to a wider Indo-Germanic cultural sphere, and one department became concerned specifically with Inner Asia and expeditions.

That places the German expedition to Tibet in 1938–39 within a broader institutional context.

Ernst Schäfer’s expedition collected zoological and botanical specimens, filmed Tibetan life and religious ceremonies, studied geography and established contacts with Tibetan officials. Anthropologist Bruno Beger also measured Tibetan bodies and skulls, photographed physical features and produced facial casts as part of racial-anthropological research.

The surviving footage and photographs show both sides of that expedition: extensive documentation of Tibetan society and scientific collecting on one hand, and physical anthropology shaped by contemporary racial theories on the other.

Tibet was therefore not merely a dramatic destination chosen because Himmler liked mysterious mountains. It sat within wider questions the Ahnenerbe was asking about population movements, language, ancestry and the supposed origins of Indo-European peoples.

Yet Tibet also carried religious and symbolic associations that made it particularly attractive to later writers interested in the more esoteric side of the SS.

Himmler Kept Expanding the Research Programme

One of the more revealing features of the Ahnenerbe is the variety of projects Himmler assigned to it.

The German Federal Archives describes investigations into subjects ranging from gold deposits in German rivers and ancient methods of birth control to traditional natural medicine and attempts to breed horses capable of surviving severe eastern winters. Other records concern Germanic forest symbolism, religious questions and unusual historical interpretations.

The organisation even contained a department connected with Hanns Hörbiger’s World Ice Theory, or Welteislehre. Hörbiger proposed that ice played a central role in cosmic history and that the Earth had experienced catastrophic encounters involving earlier moons. According to Federal Archive material, the Ahnenerbe’s geophysical research was expected in part to provide support for the theory.

This places conventional disciplines beside ideas that were already controversial among scientists at the time.

Archaeology, biology and linguistics could operate within the same institution as speculation about cosmic ice, ancestral symbolism and prehistoric racial migrations. The boundaries between academic research, ideology and personal fascination were therefore not stable across the organisation.

Was the Ahnenerbe an Occult Institute?

Modern descriptions frequently call the Ahnenerbe an occult research organisation. The surviving administrative records show something less easily contained by a single label.

Many of its departments worked in recognisable academic fields such as archaeology, linguistics, ethnography, biology and geography. At the same time, some research was driven by racial ideology, speculative theories about ancient symbols, folklore, alternative cosmology and Himmler’s own interests in Germanic religion and prehistory.

Later literature expanded this world still further by connecting the Ahnenerbe with Atlantis, Thule, Shambhala, the Holy Grail, hidden masters and lost technologies.

Some of those later stories can be traced back to actual people, expeditions or interests surrounding the SS. Others appear much more prominently in postwar literature than in surviving Ahnenerbe documentation.

The more interesting question may therefore be what “occult” would even mean inside an organisation prepared to place archaeology, mythology, racial anthropology, runes, fairy tales and an alternative theory of the cosmos inside neighbouring research programmes.

The Search for an Ancient Aryan World

The word “Aryan” itself had a complicated history long before the Nazis used it.

Nineteenth-century linguists had identified relationships among Sanskrit, Persian and many European languages, leading to the reconstruction of the Indo-European language family. The term Aryan was sometimes used historically in linguistic and cultural discussions, particularly in relation to Indo-Iranian peoples.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, racial theorists increasingly transformed linguistic relationships into biological claims.

The Ahnenerbe inherited that intellectual environment and placed it inside the political machinery of the SS.

This meant that archaeological finds, ancient languages and human populations could all be examined for evidence of a proposed ancestral racial history. Researchers searched for cultural connections stretching across Europe and Asia, while Nazi ideology supplied an expectation about what those connections were supposed to reveal.

That expectation helps explain why places as distant from Germany as Scandinavia, the Caucasus and Tibet could all become relevant to the same institutional project.

The Organisation Changed During the War

When war began, the Ahnenerbe did not remain simply a historical research society.

In 1940 it was formally integrated into Himmler’s personal SS staff. Two years later, an Institute for Military Scientific Research was established within its structure, with Ahnenerbe managing director Wolfram Sievers serving as director.

From this period survive documents concerning medical research involving concentration-camp prisoners.

Material later introduced at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial included correspondence and diary entries associated with high-altitude, freezing and other experiments. Harvard Law School’s Nuremberg archive preserves documents relating to Sievers and these wartime programmes.

The same organisational structure that had funded archaeological studies, folklore research and expeditions was therefore also connected during the war with medical projects using prisoners as experimental subjects.

Sievers was prosecuted in the Doctors’ Trial after the war, convicted and executed in 1948.

The change did not erase the Ahnenerbe’s earlier work. Instead, it added another layer to an organisation whose interests had already expanded far beyond its original study of ancestral culture.

Much of the Paperwork Survived

The Ahnenerbe disappeared in 1945, but a substantial documentary record remained.

The German Federal Archives holds surviving material from its central administration and individual research departments. The archive notes that the collection is incomplete, although what remains covers a large portion of the organisation’s activities in Germany and occupied Europe.

Some documents travelled much farther.

In 2009, students at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania discovered original Ahnenerbe papers within the archives of the Pennsylvania Folklife Society. The collection includes documents concerning folklore, Norway, Breton nationalism, dowsing and other research subjects, and the college believes part of the material may once have belonged to Sievers.

The scattered archives continue to make the organisation unusually accessible for something surrounded by so much mythology.

There are research proposals, correspondence, photographs, departmental reports and administrative records.

There are also gaps.

And wherever an organisation combines classified wartime activity, ideological research, unusual theories and incomplete records, later speculation tends to find exceptionally fertile soil.

What Was Himmler Actually Looking For?

The Ahnenerbe occupied a strange institutional position because it combined archaeology, folklore, linguistics, racial anthropology, mythology and SS ideology under one administrative roof. It funded expeditions, investigated ancient symbols and traditions, supported research into human populations and prehistory, and gave institutional space to speculative ideas about the structure of the cosmos.

Some researchers appear to have pursued recognisable academic questions while working inside an institution shaped by political expectations. Other projects were more directly connected with racial ideology, Himmler’s personal interests or the needs of the wartime SS.

The result was not one single search.

It was dozens of overlapping searches for ancestry, migration, symbols, sacred landscapes, biological inheritance, ancient religion and evidence of a prehistoric order that could be connected to the present.

That makes the familiar image of Himmler hunting for one secret relic almost too simple.

The surviving Ahnenerbe archive suggests a much larger ambition.

He had created an organisation capable of looking almost anywhere in the past and asking whether some fragment of it could be connected to the world the SS wanted to build.