Ahnenerbe - History and Development

History and Development

In January 1929, Heinrich Himmler was appointed the leader of the fledgling Schutzstaffel (SS). He launched a massive recruitment campaign that took the SS from fewer than three hundred members in 1929 to ten thousand in 1931. Once the SS had grown, Himmler began its transformation into a "racial elite" of young Nordic males. This was to be accomplished by a new bureaucracy: The Race and Settlement Office of the SS (Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt-SS) known as RuSHA. Himmler named SS-Obergruppenführer Richard Walther Darré to lead the organisation, which determined if applicants were racially fit to be in the SS. This brought about a campaign meant to educate the new applicants about their Nordic past through weekly classes taught by senior RuSHA graduates using the periodical SS-Leitheft.

On July 1, 1935 at Berlin’s SS headquarters, Himmler met with five racial experts representing Darré and with Dr. Herman Wirth, one of Germany’s most famous pre-historians. Together they came up with an organization called “Deutsches Ahnenerbe—Studiengesellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte” ("German Ancestral Heritage—Society for the Study of the History of Primeval Ideas")—later shortened to its better-known form in 1937. At the meeting they designated the official goal “to promote the science of ancient intellectual history” and appointed Himmler as the superintendent with Wirth serving as the president. Himmler appointed Wolfram Sievers Reichsgeschäftsführer (General Secretary) of the Ahnenerbe.

Wirth left the project at the beginning of 1937. On February 1, Dr. Walther Wüst was appointed the new president of the Ahnenerbe. Wüst was an expert on India and a dean at Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, working on the side as a Vertrauensmann for the Sicherheitsdienst (SS Security Service). Referred to as The Orientalist by Sievers, Wüst had been recruited by him in May 1936 because of his ability to simplify science for the common man. After being appointed president, Wüst began improving the Ahnenerbe: moving the office to a new headquarters that cost 300,000 Reichsmark, in the Dahlem neighborhood of Berlin. He also worked to limit the influence of “those he deemed scholarly upstarts,” which included cutting communication with the RuSHA office of Karl Maria Wiligut. The organization was incorporated into the Allgemeine SS (General SS) in January 1939.