Books & Poetry

There are few intellectual pursuits so harmless that malice cannot turn them into the stuff of nightmares. Heather Pringle’s new book explains in detail how antiquarianism, paganism, the collection of folk songs and Fortean wackiness became part of the mix that led to the Holocaust. The connection is, of course, Heinrich Himmler, who spent half his days being a ruthless and competent bureaucrat, and the other half indulging his rich fantasy life. Not everyone is innocent when they dream.

‘The Master Plan’ is the story of the Ahnenerbe, the bureau Himmler set up to provide an underpinning for his fantasy of a blonde, blue-eyed master race, and of the cranks and timeservers he sent out into the world to collect data, pagan rituals, spearheads and perfectly shaped Aryan skulls. This is, essentially, the story of the men and women who act as the bad guys in the Indiana Jones films, except that none of them got zapped by the Ark of the Covenant or he Holy Grail. They got ousted by more competent colleagues, or hanged at Nuremburg, or lived to happy old ages in tenured academia.

If there is a weakness here, it is that Pringle is so rational that she tends to ignore the roots of some of the craziness. Himmler was obsessed with sending people to Tibet not just to provide a vantage point for attacks on the British in India, but because belief that the Lamas were in touch with Secret Masters hidden beneath the Earth had been part of the stock-in-trade of occultists ever since Madame Blavatsky. She neglects the extent to which Himmler’s obsessions were variations on themes common on the German Right – believers in racial superiority are fertile ground for ideas like the Hollow Earth or Atlantis.

Most terrifying, though, is the story of the ambitious young men who played along with the crankery from careerism, and ended up supervising the boiling of the skulls of murdered Jews, so that Himmler could stock his museums.