According to Elizabeth Wiskemann, “Himmler really believed that he could breed better Germans and arrange for all the sub-humans (Untermenschen) to die out or rot away or, in plain language, be murdered” to produce his mythical superior race.40 The pure German race Himmler envisioned “was tall, blond, and blue-eyed,” an ideal many Germans, including Himmler Himself, did not measure up to. Himmler was so blinded by his ideology that he believed Germany would eventually win the war against the far more numerous Slavic masses because the Slavic people were evolutionarily inferior.41 Germany had to win the war because, Himmler believed, the law of survival of the fittest will always prevail.
Himmler enjoyed major support for his racial programmes from German academics, including the German Society for Racial Hygiene, which had 1,300 members by 1933, many of which were academics.42 The Society even published a peer reviewed academic journal, Archiv fur Rassen and Gesellschaftsbiologie. The most important institute involved in this movement was the highly respected Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Heredity and Eugenics. When the Nazis came to power, German universities began to train students in “racial studies and eugenics,” which ensured the growth of a class of educated scientists that supported the Nazi racial programmes.43
In 1935, Himmler founded the Ahnenerbe, a well-funded research organization of scholars, both reputable and those less so, to find evidence that Aryans played a critical role in history. Himmler and other Aryan scholars believed that the Aryans evolved in the icy barrens of the Arctic where they ruled as the invincible master race.44 The identification of the true Aryans and the eradiation of all other races became the
Cornerstone of the Nazi agenda.45 The evidence for this theory, the scholars felt, would help to scientifically justify Germany’s war and genocidal behaviour. They found little evidence for their theory in spite of long, expensive expeditions by researchers to various lands in the Arctic Circle.
World History
