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    The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust (Text Only)
    Unavailable
    The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust (Text Only)
    Unavailable
    The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust (Text Only)
    Ebook698 pages14 hours

    The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust (Text Only)

    By Heather Pringle

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    About this ebook

    This edition does not include illustrations.

    Acclaimed science writer Heather Pringle uncovers the true story of the scientists and archaeologists Heinrich Himmler deployed to find proof for his theories of a prehistoric Aryan master race.

    What happens when science falls prey to a political agenda?

    Pre-history, according to Heinrich Himmler, must be re-written. Himmler, the chief of the SS and architect of the Nazi network of death camps, was obsessed with re-writing history. He was convinced that archaeologists had long ignored the great accomplishments of ancient Germanic peoples. Himmler believed that Germany's ancestors – the tall, blue-eyed, blond-haired Aryans – had evolved not in the savannahs of Africa with the rest of humanity, but in the icy barrens of the Arctic. There, refined and distilled by natural selection in a bitter land, they had become an invincible master race. But some 12,000 years ago, theorized Himmler, a natural cataclysm shook the earth, decimating the scattered Aryan colonies and now, only in select parts of the world – most notably northern Europe – did some true Aryan blood remain.

    Himmler's history was pure fiction, but his conviction was unshakable. In 1935 he founded the 'Ahnenerbe' – a research institute to manufacture archaeological evidence for political purposes – appointed himself president, and set about recruiting a bizarre mix of adventurers, mystics, careerists and reputable archaeologists to help write a new chapter in the ancient history of the Aryan race. Expeditions went sent out to Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Greenland and beyond, each backed by the power of the Third Reich to realize this bizarre scientific dream.

    ‘The Master Plan’ is also an expose of the German scientists and scholars who allowed their research to be used to justify extermination – many of whom resumed their academic positions at war's end.

    Intensely compelling and comprehensively researched, ‘The Master Plan’ is a story of delusion and excess; of scientific and political abuse on a global scale. It has all the energy of an adventure, but also the chilling truth of a terrifying episode in twentieth century history.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateFeb 6, 2014
    ISBN9780007383887
    Unavailable
    The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust (Text Only)
    Author

    Heather Pringle

    Heather Pringle is a journalist and author who has written on archaeology and ancient cultures in numerous magazines including Discover, National Geographic Traveler, New Scientist, Science and Geo. In January 2002, she won the American Association for the Advancement of Science award for Magazine Journalism. She is the author of three books, including ‘The Mummy Congress’. She lives in Vancouver, Canada.

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    • 4/5
      A semi-popular account of Himmler’s racialist think tank, the Ahnenerbe, what the book does well is to link Himmler’s own cultural and racial obsessions to the course of myth-making (one hates to dignify the whole fraudulent enterprise as research) conducted by the agency. This is particularly in regards to the pre-war period when the Ahnenerbe looked nothing so much as a deranged mirror image of the National Geographic.Somewhat less satisfactory is Pringle's accounting of the wartime activities conducted, when there was less emphasis on collecting supposed lost Aryan wisdom (though such activities never totally ceased) and more on providing intelligence for the SS killing teams out in the field. Though one imagines this is due to key documentation being lost or destroyed, not to mention that while there were participants who still tried to justify their pre-war activities as real science, activities such as the collection of human specimens and lethal lab experiments were of course hushed-up. It’s probably amazing that we know as much about these atrocities as we do.As for the denouement of it all, in the process of examining the post-war fates of the participants Pringle wonders why so many of the actual scientists who were sucked into Himmler’s racialist enterprise didn’t recoil. This seems to be a particular reaction to Pringle’s encounter with Bruno Beger, the resident anthropologist on the 1939 expedition to Tibet, and a largely unrepentant believer in the racialist thinking of the Ahnenerbe.Part of the answer, as Michael Allen observed in "The Business of Genocide," is that there may well be a moral blind spot in the disinterested pose often found in the scientific and technological endeavor, which can slide into amorality. When combined with the ideological commitment that held the Nazi party together (and which Pringle probably doesn’t play up enough) and the sheer selfish ambition of so many who joined the SS, it’s not a surprise one wound up with such a lethal combination.
    • 4/5
      A duty read - a witness to evil. The book details some of the history of the Ahnenerbe, a Nazi-SS organization for "scientific" research. The first half of the book looks at some hilarious stuff the organization did; it could be lifted from the screen of an Indiana Jones movie. They looked for evidence of ancient Aryan empires in Tibet and in the centre of Scandinavia, all in an effort to prove that Aryans, who effectively never existed, were the smarter-than-the-average bear race destined to dominate the world. The Ahnenerbe looked for ways to define "Aryaness" and "Jewishness". The place was overrun with bozos, judging by the book. In the second half of the book, the humour ends. These same bozos subjected Jewish victims to medical experiments with chemicals, cold, and disease, killing most of their victims, usually in agony. Some eighty Jews were killed so that their bones could be studied to define Jewishness. Many of the "scientists" of the Ahnenerbe reached high SS rank, as they were favourites of Himmler. Sadly, virtually none of these murders and their assistants were brought to justice after the war. Some prospered. The memories of the National Socialist regime of Hitler have dimmed. We should never forget the evils that were perpetrated in his name, and by tens-hundreds of thousands of willing Germans and Austrians. This book is a little bit of their witness.It could, however, have been better written. It is very loose in structure and tends to drift off every now and then until the author is seized with indignation at the evil of the Ahnenerbe staffers.
    • 4/5
      Exhaustively researched, this study of the German Ahnenerbe, Himmler's think tank created to support some of the more ludicrous Nazi ideology with archaeological or sociological study is a fascinating look at science gone wrong. Imagine what these scholars could have accomplished had they sought to advance learning rather than bend it to political ends.