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10 10 Bizarre Stories of Nazi Archaeology 19/7/2015 10 Bizarre Stories Of Nazi Archaeology - Listverse PREVIOUS WEIRD STUFF 10 Bizarre Stories Of Nazi Archaeology DAVID TORMSEN JULY 18, 2015 The National Socialists were obsessed with their bizarre racial theories and desperate to subvert the science of archaeology to support the notion of a pure race of ancient Aryan supermen. In the 1930s, the two main organizations devoted to Nazi pseudoarchaeology were the SS Ahnenerbe, dominated by Heinrich Himmler, and the Amt Rosenberg, an academic Nazi Party organization run by Alfred Rosenberg. They struggled for power, and the Ahnenerbe was eventually triumphant, but both organizations organized some loopy expeditions. We wrote recently about the bizarre expedition by the SS to Tibet to explore the history of the mythical Aryan race. Here are 10 more tales of archaeology gone badly wrong. Featured image credit: German Federal Archives Tiwanaku 10 Photo credit: Gestaltenohneverstand Photo via Wikipedia Photo credit: Pko http://listverse.com/2015/07/18/10-bizarre-stories-of-nazi-archaeology/ 1/26 19/7/2015 10 Bizarre Stories Of Nazi Archaeology - Listverse SS officer Edmund Kiss spent time in Bolivia in the 1920s, becoming friendly with Austrian adventurer and rubber maker Arthur Posnansky. Posnansky was involved with excavating the ancient city of Tiwanaku in the Altiplano region, characterized by its massive stone blacks and elaborate carvings, and he despised the local people. Also unwilling to believe that the ruins were built by the indigenous Aymara people, Kiss developed a wild theory that the city was actually built by wayward Nordic Atlanteans one million years ago; they subdued the local inhabitants before erecting the spectacular city. These ideas were supported by the European-descended Creole minority that dominated Bolivia politically and economically and depended on the exploitation of the Aymara and Quechua indigenous population. The Atlantis story gave the Creoles a mythos by which to justify their racial domination of the country. Kiss was partially inspired by the thought of Bolivian scholar Belisario Diaz Romero, who believed there were three human species—Homo niger which arose in Africa, Homo atlaicus which arose in Asia, and Homo atlanticus, a white Aryan race arising from Atlantis. For a year, Kiss wandered the ruins of Tiwanaku, studying the ancient Tiwanakans’ elongated crania and wondering if they were artificially deformed or evidence of a superior Aryan race. Back in Germany, Kiss’s ideas were reported in magazines as scientific fact. He also popularized his theories through a series of science-fiction novels. They described an ancient Nordic elite known as the Asen, led by a eugenicist leader named Baldur Wieborg of Thule and confronting a threatening Slavic underclass, who would relocate to the Andes http://listverse.com/2015/07/18/10-bizarre-stories-of-nazi-archaeology/ 2/26 19/7/2015 10 Bizarre Stories Of Nazi Archaeology - Listverse to enslave the local population and ultimately return in triumph to their Arctic homeland under blue and white swastika banners, before finally being forced by climate change to move to the Mediterranean and found the Hellenic civilization. Kiss’s ideas entranced Himmler, who invited him to contribute to Ahnenerbe-sponsored journals and gave support for a massive expedition to the Andes. Kiss spent 1938–39 putting together a team for the expedition, which was only ultimately forestalled by the outbreak of World War II. Captured after the war, Edmund Kiss was initially imprisoned as a war criminal and considered a “major offender” in denazification hearings. He was later reduced to “fellow traveler” due to his archaeological research. Grove Of The Saxons 9 http://listverse.com/2015/07/18/10-bizarre-stories-of-nazi-archaeology/ 3/26 19/7/2015 10 Bizarre Stories Of Nazi Archaeology - Listverse Heinrich Himmler didn’t only want to dig up legendary Aryan history; he sometimes sought to rebuild it. Himmler believed that the Grove of the Saxons, at the river Aller near Verden in Saxony, was the location of a massacre of 4,500 Saxons in AD 782 by Charlemagne, after they refused to convert to Christianity. There is some confusion over whether there was indeed a massacre or a translation error, depending on whether the Latin text reads delocare (“resettled”) or decolare (“beheaded”). Whatever the case, Himmler decided to commemorate the event, said to represent the noble sacrifice of the ancient Saxons, by laying out a thingstead, which is an ancient Germanic gathering place. It was designed by landscape architect Wilhelm Hubotter, who bought the land from seven local farmers and set to work designing the Grove. The Grove is a large, cleared oval surrounded by a 6-meter-wide (20 ft) walk and flanked by 4,500 irregular stones said to represent the fallen Saxons. Wild roses, alder, dogwood, and other indigenous shrubs were planted around the edges of the walkway, while the interior was grazing land. At the center is the supposed thingstead, with two “leader’s pulpits” flanked by beech trees, and a council ring, which is a campfire made of boulders. The area is a floodplain for the river Aller, which, in spite of damming attempts, has repeatedly flooded the Grove over the http://listverse.com/2015/07/18/10-bizarre-stories-of-nazi-archaeology/ 4/26 19/7/2015 10 Bizarre Stories Of Nazi Archaeology - Listverse years, seen by some as symbolic of the travails of Nazi Germany. The area lost ideological significance when Charlemagne was restored to historical greatness status by the Nazis for his role in founding an early Germanic Reich. Despite his association with Himmler, Hubotter would later help design the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp Memorial commemorating the victims of the Holocaust. Karelia 8 Yrjo von Gronhagen was a Finnish noble who was fascinated by the mysterious Karelia region located between Finland and Russia. He was first inspired by reading The Kalevala (The Land of Heroes), a 19th-century book by country doctor Elias Lonnrot, which speculated that the songs of Karelia were actually fragments of a lost northern epic from thousands of years ago. Lonnrot had spent years exploring the region on foot and by boat in an attempt to patch the supposed epic back together. Particularly popular for many readers was the hero character, WAinAmoinen, a powerful sorcerer who was able to transform the treeless land into a vast paradise, as well as warming the Sun, clearing http://listverse.com/2015/07/18/10-bizarre-stories-of-nazi-archaeology/ 5/26 19/7/2015 10 Bizarre Stories Of Nazi Archaeology - Listverse pestilence, and performing a variety of magical acts. When Gronhagen published an article about The Kalevala in a Frankfurt newspaper, he attracted the interest of Himmler, who was very interested in proving the superiority of the Aryan race through analysis of ancient German tales and Norse eddas. Gronhagen, for his part, was interested in disproving theories that the Finns were descended from Mongols or Hungarians, which were based on the fact the Finnish language is completely unrelated to the Germanic tongues. After organizing a meeting between the young Finn with an ancient-German-spirit-channeling madman named Karl-Maria Wiligut, Himmler offered Gronhagen a job with the Ahnenerbe. His duty was to conduct research into folklore at the Finnish Literature Society at Helsinki to prepare him for fieldwork and gain information on ancient Aryan religious rites that Himmler hoped to use to replace Christianity. In 1936, Himmler authorized Gronhagen to make an expedition to Karelia to photograph witches and sorcerers and record their songs and incantations. Gronhagen brought along an illustrator, fearing the elderly sorcerers would balk at being photographed, as well as Dr. Fritz Bose, a Nazi “expert” on music and race. Bose brought along a highly sophisticated piece of audio-recording equipment, the magnetophone, a precursor to the modern tape recorder. The motley crew of pseudoscientists spent the summer wandering from one Karelian village to the next, interviewing elderly people whom they believed to be magical and recording their songs and performances of the traditional kantele zither. In one village, a 92-year old witch named Miron-Aku was found picking mushrooms. She stared into Gronhagen’s eyes and said: “You came to me in my sleep and wanted to take away my secrets. Since then I have been sick and will die soon. What do you want of me?” Over several visits to her hut, she gave them a bitter-brewed tea made from local plants, talked about the old god worshiped before the coming of Christianity, and claimed to be able to summon spirits of ancestors to divine the future. She was dismayed when Bose played back a recording of her ritual, vowing never to practice magic again. In the end, the team assembled a collection of over 100 songs, including lullabies, work songs, patriotic tunes, and songs of lamentation, and compiled what they considered to be evidence of the mystical power of saunas. Himmler was delighted by the results, naming young Gronhagen head of the Ahnenerbe’s Indo-Germanic-Finnish Studies department. Meanwhile, back in Finland, he began to be considered a dangerous charlatan by intellectuals who saw his project as manipulation and falsification of Finnish folklore and history for the Nazi cause. http://listverse.com/2015/07/18/10-bizarre-stories-of-nazi-archaeology/ 6/26 19/7/2015 10 Bizarre Stories Of Nazi Archaeology - Listverse Crimea 7 During the occupation of Crimea, occupying German forces moved quickly to secure cultural relics, which turned out to be a rather simple task of either intimidation or bartering with the cowed local population. One SS officer reported to Himmler the successful purchase of antiques such as agate necklaces, bronze figures, and pearls from the widow of a deceased Soviet archaeologist for a mere 8 kilograms (18 lb) of millet.
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