Ahnenerbe

Ahnenerbe

Emblem
Formation	July 1, 1935
Founder	Heinrich Himmler
Dissolved	1947
Legal status	Registered association under Schutzstaffel control
Purpose	Propaganda Pseudoscientific research
Official language	German

This article is part of a series about Heinrich Himmler
Personal Early life Family Margarete Himmler (wife) Gudrun Burwitz (daughter) Hedwig Potthast (mistress) Gebhard Ludwig (brother) Ernst (brother) Katrin Himmler (great-niece) Heinz Kokott (brother-in-law) Richard Wendler (brother-in-law) Posen speeches 4th Reichsführer-SS SS ideology Staff Wewelsburg Operation Himmler 1940 Spain visit The Holocaust Final Solution Operation Reinhard Generalplan Ost Kersten Agreement Army Group Upper Rhine 20 July plot Army Group Vistula Operation Nordwind Organizations Schutzstaffel Gestapo Ahnenerbe Lebensborn Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion Legacy Nazi occultism Papers Wartime diaries
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The Ahnenerbe (German: [ˈaːnənˌʔɛʁbə], "Ancestral Heritage") was a pseudoscientific organization founded by the Schutzstaffel in Nazi Germany in 1935. Established by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler in July 1, 1935 as an SS appendage devoted to promoting racial theories espoused by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, the Ahnenerbe consisted of academics and scientists from a broad range of academic disciplines who fostered the idea that Germans descended from an Aryan race which was racially superior to other racial groups.

Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and transformed the country into a one-party state governed as a dictatorship. He claimed that Germans were descended from an Aryan race which, in contrast to established academic understandings, had invented most major developments in human history, such as agriculture, art, and writing. Most of the world's scholars did not accept this, and the Nazis established the Ahnenerbe in order to provide evidence for their racial theories and to promote them to the German public. Ahnenerbe scholars interpreted evidence to fit Hitler's beliefs, and many consciously fabricated evidence to do so. The organisation sent expeditions to various parts of the world to find evidence to support their theories.

The government of Nazi Germany used the organization's research to justify many of their policies, including the Holocaust. Nazi propaganda also cited Ahnenerbe claims that archaeological evidence indicated that the Aryan race had historically resided in eastern Europe to justify German expansion there. In 1937, the Ahnenerbe became an official branch of the SS and was renamed the Research and Teaching Community in Ancestral Heritage (Forschungs und Lehrgemeinschaft das Ahnenerbe). Much of their research was placed on hold after the outbreak of World War II in 1939, though they continued to carry out new research in areas under German occupation after Operation Barbarossa began in 1941.

During the end of World War II in Europe in 1945, Ahnenerbe members destroyed much of the organization's paperwork to avoid being incriminated in forthcoming war crimes trials. Numerous members escaped Allied denazification policies and remained active in West Germany's archaeological establishment in the postwar era, which stifled scholarly research into the Ahnenerbe until German reunification in 1990. Ideas promoted by the organization have retained an appeal for some neo-Nazi and far-right circles and have also influenced later pseudoarchaeologists.