The German Fascists held onto a presupposition that closely resembles one that many white supremacists share today. Quoting Mein Kampf:

All the human culture, all the results of art, science and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan. This very fact admits of the not unfounded inference that he alone was the founder of all higher humanity, therefore representing the prototype of all that we understand by the word “man.”

He is the Prometheus of mankind from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has sprung at all times, forever kindling anew that fire of knowledge which illumined the night of silent mysteries and thus caused man to climb the path to mastery over the other beings of this earth […] It was he who laid the foundations and erected the walls of every great structure in human culture.

Nevertheless, there was one problem: this claim had no evidence to support it. Rather than collecting the evidence first and then drawing a conclusion from it (like any competent scientist would), the German Fascists started with a conclusion and had to find evidence to support it. Hence, they created the Ahnenerbe Institute in 1935. The German Fascists bestowed these (pseudo)scientists with the goal of scouring the earth for proof that the German man invented all that is good and worthwhile in the world.

The Chancellor was unimpressed with the Ahnenerbe’s early efforts. Quoting his reaction in Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich, pages 94–5:

Why do we call the whole world’s attention to the fact that we have no past? It isn’t enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is starting to dig up these villages of mud huts and enthusing over every potsherd and stone axe [that] he finds. All we prove by that is that we were still throwing stone hatches and crouching around open fires when Greece and Rome had already reached the highest stage of culture.

We really should do our best to keep quiet about this past. Instead Himmler makes a great fuss about it all. The present‐day Romans [read: the Italian Fascists] must be having a laugh at these revelations.

While this reaction disappointed Himmler, he did not give up so easily. There remained one hope that could still prove the claim to ‘Aryan superiority’: the lost continent of Atlantis. Fascist intellectuals such as Alfred Rosenberg and so on postdicted that the ‘Aryan race’ originated from this mythic continent and went all over the world spreading its civilization before Atlantis sunk into the drink. If the German Fascists found evidence for this, it would give them the breakthrough that they needed for their white supremacist philosophy and would be a massive propaganda victory.

Although this documentary is titled Nazi Quest for the Holy Grail, it actually covers a variety of the Third Reich’s expeditions, including its most celebrated one: the Tibet expedition, wherein Fascist intellectuals measured the natives’ external anatomy to find traces of the ‘Aryan race’ and therefore proof that some ‘Aryans’ settled there before assimilating into the allegedly ‘inferior’ native population.

Sounds like trivia night fodder, but the Ahnenerbe had a rôle in history that was much more serious than this.

In 1942 they were engaged to help Himmler solve a problem at the heart of the [extermination]. In spite of their obsession with race, the [Fascists] had failed to find the racial characteristics that defined who was a Jew and who was not.

Himmler was very much aware of the strong degree of arbitrariness involved in the definition of races and Himmler thought that there must be better ways of doing this; a more scientific basis for it, and he was, of course, the man who was charged with organizing and implementing the extermination of the Jewish people, and as a rather pedantic, precise man, he wanted more precise definitions.

The documents reveal that the Ahnenerbe was charged with finding these definitions, definitions that would ultimately determine who should live and who should die. The project was assigned to an infamous medical doctor by the name of August Hirt.

August Hirt was already a member of the SS. He was eager to get ahead in the organization. For this reason he was particularly open‐minded.

Doctor Hirt had already turned his back on medical ethics conducting a series of horrific experiments on live prisoners at Natzweiler concentration camp. In 1942 he turned his attention to discovering the one universal measurement of Jewishness. He decided [that] he would require the services of a physical anthropologist, and the Ahnenerbe provided none other than Bruno Beger the scientist who led the anatomical measurements in Tibet.

I’ll leave the details in the documentary. Suffice to say, Christopher Hale—although he admittedly oversimplified the matter somewhat—derived an important lesson from all of this:

Their story is a warning from history that science can be corrupted. There are consequences to ideas, there are consequences to mythologies, and those consequences, at that time, was… the annihilation of millions of people.

Sound familiar at all?

Further reading: The Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust

Himmler’s Crusade: The Nazi Expedition to Find the Origins of the Aryan Race

Digging for Hitler: The Nazi Archaeologists Search for an Aryan Past