Thread by @PattMeeples

Today in my pseudoarchaeology class we touched on a rather somber case study: The use and abuse of archaeological claims by the Nazi party and their predecessors in the early 20th century. The Nazi party directly used archaeology to justify many of their worst atrocities. 1/10

In 1935, Heinrich Himler founded a group called the Ahnenerbe explicitly focused on conducting archaeological work and related racist science tied to the goals of the party. The Ahnenerbe later became a wing of the SS showing how central to the party these activities were. 2/10

The Ahnenerbe conducted excavations in many parts of the world including, for example, Czechoslovakia with the goal of tracking "Germanic" culture to justify geopolitical moves like invasions as "retaking" land that belonged to their "Germanic" forebears. 3/10

They also sent expeditions to Iceland, the Canary Islands, Bolivia, Finland, Tibet, and many other locations with the goal of making claims about the history of heritage and race throughout the world to justify their political aspirations beyond the boundaries of Germany. 4/10

The Ahnenerbe also tied their work to broader mythic histories including Atlantis and the parallel story of Hyperborea in the north Atlantic. The Nazi party created a institute expressly for the study of Atlantis. 5/10

The Ahnenerbe was directly responsible for some of the worst atrocities during WWII. For example, Wolfram Sievers was an archaeologist with the Ahnenerbe who went on to supervise human medical experiments at Dachau. He was convicted of war crimes and executed in 1948. 6/10

This is to say that the Ahnenerbe were not scientists just "along for the ride" with the Nazi regime. They were active participants in the worst atrocities and knowingly (in many cases enthusiastically) created work that justified geopolitical aims of the Nazi party. 7/10

We ended our discussion today to talk about recent projects that are using archaeology to document the scope and specifics of Nazi atrocities using archaeological evidence. Ongoing work at Sobibór in Poland has helped to document the scale of extermination at this death camp 8/10

This work has also revealed very personal items connected to the Jewish people who were exterminated at Sobibór including a small pendant that was owned by young girl named Karoline Cohn who was killed there, likely in 1941. 9/10

This lecture is one of the toughest I do. Such events in the recent past are difficult to reflect on but I think it is important to not shy away and to reveal the active role that "scientists" like the Ahnenerbe archaeologists played in justifying and enacting atrocities. 10/10

As I should have noted, Bettina Arnold has published on the history of Nazi archaeology and I drew on heavily on her work in this lecture and my students read and discussed her pubs. researchgate.net/publication/24…