Patterns of Prejudice

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Nazi archaeology abroad: German prehistorians

and the international dynamics of collaboration

J. Laurence Hare

To cite this article: J. Laurence Hare (2014) Nazi archaeology abroad: German prehistorians
and the international dynamics of collaboration, Patterns of Prejudice, 48:1, 1-24, DOI:
10.1080/0031322X.2013.875249

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2013.875249

Published online: 05 Feb 2014.

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Patterns of Prejudice, 2014
Vol. 48, No. 1, 1–24, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2013.875249

Nazi archaeology abroad: German prehistorians

and the international dynamics of collaboration

J. LAURENCE HARE

ABSTRACT Examining the work of German prehistoric archaeologists during the

Third Reich reveals the importance of international scholarship in understanding how
and why professional academics collaborated with the Nazi regime. Hare’s article
focuses on a specific cohort of German prehistorians at the University of Kiel and the
Schleswig-Holstein Museum of Antiquities whose work was especially valued by
Nazi ideologues. Through a study of their correspondence with colleagues at home
and abroad, it identifies four key ways in which the international academic sphere
informed collaboration at home, including the demands of foreign networks, the
politics of cross-border projects and conferences, concerns about the reputation of
German academia and the involvement of German archaeologists in occupied
countries during the Second World War. Ultimately, this case study of Kiel
archaeologists working during the 1930s and 1940s shows that engagement on the
international level led both German and foreign scholars to make accommodations
with the regime, but also at times led away from Nazi goals and provided a
foundation for rebuilding the discipline after 1945.

KEYWORDS archaeology, Herbert Jankuhn, history of archaeology, Kiel, National

Socialism, prehistorians, SS-Ahnenerbe

P rehistoric archaeology was an especially significant pursuit in the Third

Reich.1 Studies of ancient remains aided in the appropriation of symbols
and themes from the distant past, which Nazi propagandists used to affirm
the character of the German people (Volk) and the greatness of the Germanic
race (Rasse). During the Second World War, interpretations of artefacts and

1 General studies of German archaeology during the Nazi era began with Günter Smolla,
‘Das Kossinna-Syndrome’, Fundberichte aus Hessen, vol. 19/20, 1979/80, 1–9. Since the
1990s, a number of works have appeared that treat the role of German prehistorians in
the Third Reich, including Marion Bertram, ‘Zur Situation der deutschen Ur- und
Frühgeschichtsforschung während der Zeit der Faschistischen Diktatur’, Forschungen
und Berichte, vol. 31, 1991, 23–42; Heiko Steuer (ed.), Eine hervorragend nationale
Wissenschaft: Deutsche Prähistoriker zwischen 1900 und 1995 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter
2001); Achim Leube (ed.), Prähistorie und Nationalsozialismus: Die mittel- und osteur-
opäische Ur- und Frühgeschichtsforschung in den Jahren 1933–1945 (Heidelberg: Synchron
2002); and, most recently, Jean-Pierre Legendre, Laurent Olivier and Bernadette
Schnitzler (eds), L’Archéologie nazie en Europe de l’Ouest (Paris: Infolio 2007).
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
2 Patterns of Prejudice

sites helped justify Nazi conquests and informed German policies in zones of
occupation. Finally, prehistoric archaeology catered to the private interests of
such party leaders as Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg, whose
fascination with German prehistory led them to fund research on texts and
artefacts and to act as patrons for prominent excavation projects.2
Such an emphasis on ancient Germanic peoples might naturally imply a
focus on research within the nation’s borders. As such, we might be tempted
to see it as part of a tradition of insularity within German prehistoric
archaeology, which in the nineteenth century yielded a staunch opposition in
some quarters to such outside innovations as the Three-Age System.3
Moreover, it might lead us to connect archaeology in the 1930s to a general
hostility to ‘internationalism’ in Nazi science policy, which generally placed
greater value on ‘German’ research from ‘Aryan’ scholars.4 Yet, as it turns out,
‘Nazi archaeology’ was a decidedly international affair. Indeed, the image of
the dilettante antiquarian doubling as Nazi agent abroad has been a
prominent theme of post-war popular culture. It has featured most famously
in the blockbuster Indiana Jones films, in which the eponymous American
archaeologist races to exotic locales to thwart the sinister machinations of
fascist plunderers. Beyond the silver screen, popular histories have chronicled
the expeditions of real-life charlatans who embarked on outlandish missions
to find lost Utopias or to uncover the hidden meanings of ancient symbols.5

2 See Reinhard Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg und seine Gegner: Zum Machtkampf im
nationalsozialistischen Herrschaftssystem (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt 1970); and
Michael Kater, Das ‘Ahnenerbe’ der SS, 1935–1945: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturpolitik des
Dritten Reiches, 2nd edn (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag 1997). Regarding ancient texts,
scholars have emphasized the Nazi fascination with Germania, written by the Roman
historian Tacitus in the first century CE. See Allan A. Lund, Germanenideologie und
Nationalsozialismus: Zur Rezeption der ‘Germania’ des Tacitus im ‘Dritten Reich’ (Heidel-
berg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter 1995); and, more recently, Christopher B. Krebs, A
Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (New
York: W. W. Norton 2011).
3 Karel Sklenář, Archaeology in Central Europe: The First 500 Years, trans. from the Czech
by Iris Lewitová (Leicester: Leicester University Press 1983), 88, 119. Sklenář mentions
in particular the archaeologist Ludwig Lindenschmit (1809–93), who was the founder
of the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum (Romano-Germanic Central Museum)
in Mainz and a sceptic of the Three-Age System postulated by the Danish
archaeologists C. J. Thomsen (1788–1865) and J. J. A. Worsaae (1821–85), which
divides the prehistoric era into Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages.
4 Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German
Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1987), 29–30. See also Michael
Grüttner, ‘Wissenschaftspolitik im Nationalsozialismus’, in Doris Kaufmann (ed.),
Geschichte der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft im Nationalsozialismus: Bestandsaufnahme und
Perspektiven der Forschung, 2 vols (Göttingen: Wallstein 2000), II, 557–85.
5 Some of these expeditions are recounted in Heather Pringle, The Master Plan: Himmler’s
Scholars and the Holocaust (New York: Hyperion 2006). The Tibetan expedition of Ernst
Schäfer is covered in more detail in Christopher Hale, Himmler’s Crusade: The Nazi
Expedition to Find the Origins of the Aryan Race (New York: Wiley 2003).
 J. LAURENCE HARE 3

But this image of the ‘Nazi archaeologist’ does not tell the whole story. In
fact, much of the regime’s yearning for the past was satisfied not by amateurs
but by reputable, well-trained professionals. Far from the fanciful figures of
popular culture, these were university professors, museum curators and
provincial heritage managers who worked in tandem with Nazi ideologues to
establish a link with a distant Germanic past and create a reference point for a
presumed glorious future. Their value lay in their scholarly credibility that
legitimized the regime’s appropriation of Germanic antiquity. They supported
the state’s propaganda needs by presenting their research in school curricula,
popular magazines and films.6 They also provided an important symbolic
reservoir for the Nazi Party and supported narratives of ancestors who had
once been brave, honest and diligent precisely because they had been racially
pure.7 Such a portrayal of the nation’s prehistory thus appealed to what
Claudia Koonz has called ‘ethnic fundamentalism’, which describes how the
Nazis promoted the virtues of the Volk and promised to ‘defend an ancient
spiritual heritage against the corrosive values of industrialized, urban
society’.8 German archaeologists also played a role during the Second World
War, as they seized artefacts from occupied zones and rationalized the war by
connecting it to prehistoric narratives of Germanic expansion and by framing
Nazi conquests as part of a process of reclaiming lost territory.
Thus, even if the popular post-war image of Nazi archaeology wrongly
stresses its rank amateurism, it correctly emphasizes its foreign proclivities.
Historians, however, have only partly considered the international character
of humanities and social sciences during this period. In the case of
archaeology, scholars such as Stephen Dyson, Katharina Ulmschneider and
Sally Crawford have discussed the ways in which classical archaeologists in
particular managed to carry on their international work in spite of the
diminished circumstances before and during the Second World War.9 Others,
like Martijn Eickhoff, have examined the records of individual scholars

6 On archaeology and propaganda, see Bettina Arnold, ‘The past as propaganda:

totalitarian archaeology in Nazi Germany’, Antiquity, vol. 64, no. 244, 1990, 464–78; and
Norbert Franck and Gesine Asmus (eds), Heil Hitler, Herr Lehrer: Volksschule 1933–1945:
Das Beispiel Berlin (Reinbek: Rowohlt 1983), 107–11.
7 For an example of the symbolic use of archaeology, see Rainer Stommer, Die inzenierte
Volksgemeinschaft: Die ‘Thing-Bewegung’ im Dritten Reich (Marburg: Jonas 1985).
8 Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University
Press 2003), 13.
9 Stephen L. Dyson, In Pursuit of Ancient Pasts: A History of Classical Archaeology in the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press
2006), 196–213; Katharina Ulmschneider and Sally Crawford, ‘Writing and experien-
cing internment: rethinking Paul Jacobsthal’s internment in light of new discoveries’, in
Harold Mytum and Gilly Carr (eds), Prisoners of War: Archaeology, Memory, and Heritage
of 19th and 20th Century Mass Internment (New York: Springer 2013), 223–36.
Ulmschneider and Crawford use new sources to attempt to explain Jacobsthal’s
ongoing correspondence with colleagues in Germany, which occurred in spite of his
removal from his professorship at Marburg and eventual internment in the Isle of Man.
4 Patterns of Prejudice

outside Germany to consider their connections to pro-Nazi colleagues.10

Finally, studies from Anja Heuss and Heather Pringle have documented the
ways in which German prehistorians participated in the crimes of the regime,
most notably by looting artefacts in eastern Europe.11 Yet, when answering
the larger question of why archaeologists, or for that matter any academic
professionals, would place their research at the service of the regime in the
first place, most historians have focused on events at home. They have
considered the role of domestic political and institutional pressure, and
highlighted the susceptibility of specific disciplines to collaboration. As
Geoffrey Cocks has shown for psychoanalysts, for example, Nazi support
was especially welcome within fledgling academic fields.12 This same logic
applied to the relatively young field of prehistoric archaeology, leading
Bettina Arnold and Henning Haßmann to describe the ‘Faustian bargain’ by
which archaeologists advanced their discipline and their own careers through
collaboration with the regime.13 Uta Halle, meanwhile, has portrayed the
competition among Nazi organizations to recruit scholarly talent as a ‘double
chance’ for archaeologists to pursue their personal interests.14 Finally,
Hermann Beck has added a wrinkle by situating professional scholars within
the broader milieu of the educated Bildungsbürgertum. Beck is sceptical of
traditional explanations for professional cooperation, writing: ‘Opportunism
alone did not seem to explain the wholehearted (and often unsolicited)
enthusiasm with which the “National Revolution” was welcomed. In the
fever accompanying the Nazi successes after 30 January [1933], the conver-
sion of many Bildungsbürger appeared to be genuine.’15 Such studies offer
valid and important explanations, but their limited horizons preserve an
image of the international domain that appears much as it does in the Indiana
Jones films, as a space in which scholars crossed borders to commit bad deeds
in the name of thoroughly unscientific goals. If this scenario fits well with the

10 Martijn Eickhoff, ‘De Nederlandse prehistoricus F. C. Bursch en zijn SS-expeditie naar

de Oekraïne: grafheuvelonderzoek achter het Oostfront’, Nederlandse Archaologische
Rapporten, vol. 32, 2006, 73–84.
11 Anja Heuss, Kunst- und Kulturgutraub: Eine vergleichende Studie zur Besatzungspolitik der
Nationalsozialisten in Frankreich und der Sowjetunion (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C.
Winter 2000); Pringle, Master Plan.
12 Geoffrey Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute, 2nd edn (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction 1997), 2–3.
13 Bettina Arnold and Henning Haßmann, ‘Archaeology in Nazi Germany: the legacy of
the Faustian bargain’, in Philip L. Kohl and Clare Fawcett (eds), Nationalism, Politics,
and the Practice of Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995), 70–
81 (72).
14 Uta Halle, ‘Die Externsteine sind bis auf weiteres germanisch!’ Prähistorische Archäologie im
Dritten Reich (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte 2002).
15 Hermann Beck, The Fateful Alliance: German Conservatives and Nazis in 1933: The
Machtergreifung in a New Light (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books 2008), xiii.
 J. LAURENCE HARE 5

experience of other ‘ordinary’ perpetrators of Nazi war crimes,16 it remains

unsatisfactory in the case of academic professionals, and particularly
archaeologists, because it neglects the ways in which they operated
transnationally even before the rise of Adolf Hitler.
For this reason, I would like to make a case for a different understanding of
‘Nazi archaeology’ that takes into account the discipline’s international
character. In part, my approach responds to Kiran Klaus Patel’s call for a
‘transnational historicization’ of the Nazi era that seeks to ‘overcome the
dominating isolationist premise’ inherent in traditional approaches to the
German past and to place the history of Nazism in a ‘Europeanized’ context.17
While doing so promises a more complete picture of the Nazi era, it also
allows us to revisit the question of how and why scholars would compromise
professional identity and practice by politicizing their work to serve Nazi
goals. A new explanation warrants a fuller consideration of the norms of the
discipline that were rooted in scholarly ties, institutional affiliations and
academic concerns that extended beyond the German border. Such an
enquiry also demands a time frame that considers foreign activities both in
the Second World War and during the 1930s. Lastly, it leads us to fresh
sources, moving away from the files of the Nazi Party and state organizations,
and to the archives of academic institutions that contain the correspondence
that allow us to reconstruct professional networks. I would argue that such an
approach tells us much about archaeology but also holds implications for
understanding the place of collaboration within other professional disciplines.

The prehistorians at Kiel and the German archaeological tradition

In this essay, I would like to focus on one particularly significant community

of scholars affiliated with the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (Uni-
versity of Kiel), which was home to the Schleswig-Holsteinisches Museum
vorgeschichtlicher Altertümer (Schleswig-Holstein Museum of Prehistoric
Antiquities) and which generally exhibited strong support for National
Socialism.18 Among the prehistorians at Kiel were a number of rising stars

16 See Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final
Solution in Poland (New York: HarperPerennial 1992).
17 Kiran Klaus Patel, ‘In search of a transnational historicization: National Socialism and
its place in history’, in Konrad H. Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger (eds), Conflicted
Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories (New York and Oxford: Berghahn
Books 2007), 96–116 (110).
18 Manfred Jessen-Klingenberg, Standpunkte zur neueren Geschichte Schleswig-Holsteins, ed.
Reimer Hansen and Jörn-Peter Leppien (Malente: Schleswig-Holsteinischer Geschichts-
verlag 1998), 133–8. Regarding the attitude of the university faculty as a whole, Jessen-
Klingenberg notes: ‘One cannot … say that the majority of the Kiel University
instructors were already National Socialist in 1933, but they shared a set of
fundamental principles with the National Socialists’ (135). All translations from the
German, unless otherwise stated, are by the author.
6 Patterns of Prejudice

in the field, many of them students of Gustav Schwantes (1881–1960), who

was director of the antiquities museum and a well-known expert on
Mesolithic cultures in northern Europe. These included Peter Paulsen
(1902–85), an art historian and Viking specialist, Karl Kersten (1909–92), a
budding specialist on the European Bronze Age, and, perhaps most notably,
Herbert Jankuhn (1905–90), renowned as the excavator of the nearby Viking
village site at Haithabu and a high-ranking member of the Ahnenerbe
(ancestral heritage) branch of Heinrich Himmler’s SS. Jankuhn has attracted
much interest over the years because of his strong reputation as an
archaeologist and his visible presence in the SS, which made him, in Henning
Haßmann’s words, ‘one of the most influential prehistorians of the Third
Reich’.19 Taken together, Jankuhn and his colleagues comprised an important
cohort due to their singular expertise in Germanic and Nordic prehistory, and
because their work attracted so much attention from racist thinkers within the
Nazi movement.
The Kiel archaeologists were also significant through their position in the
field of prehistoric archaeology. As with other academic disciplines, theirs
operated within a set of internal boundaries, forming what the sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu has described as an ‘intellectual field’. In Bourdieu’s terms,
the value of this group’s research was determined in part by its relative
position within a constellation of other interpretations.20 Beyond interpreta-
tion, of course, was practice and, as Herbert Mehrtens has argued, reputa-
tions, patterns of behaviour and even ethical norms were also defined within
the narrow confines of the discipline.21 For prehistory, these parameters had
formed around a commitment to objectivity but they also had deep roots in
nationalism. Indeed, this had been a central paradox since the early
nineteenth century, when amateur antiquarians collected ancient artefacts in
part to discover an authentic ‘German’ heritage.22 As the discipline

19 Henning Haßmann and Detlef Jantzen, ‘“Die deutsche Vorgeschichte—eine nationale

Wissenschaft”: Das Kieler Museum vorgeschichtlicher Altertümer im Dritten Reich’,
Offa, vol. 51, 1994, 9–23 (20). On Jankuhn, see also Heiko Steuer, ‘Herbert Jankuhn: SS-
Karriere und Ur- und Frühgeschichte’, in Hartmut Lehmann and Otto Gerhard Oexle
(eds), Nationalsozialismus in den Kulturwissenschaften, 2 vols (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht 2004), I, 447–529; Dirk Mahsarski, Herbert Jankuhn (1905–1990): Ein deutscher
Prähistoriker zwischen nationalsozialistischer Ideologie und wissenschaftlicher Objektivität
(Rahden, Westphalia: VML Verlag Marie Leidorf 2011).
20 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Intellectual field and creative project’, Social Science Information, vol. 8,
no. 2, 1969, 89–119.
21 Herbert Mehrtens, ‘Verantwortungslose Reinheit: Thesen zur politischen und mor-
alischen Struktur mathematischer Wissenschaften am Beispiel des NS-Staates’, in
Georges Fülgraff and Annegret Falter (eds), Wissenschaft in der Verantwortung:
Möglichkeiten der institutionellen Steuerung (Frankfurt-on-Main and New York: Campus
1990), 37–54 (47–52).
22 In this sense, prehistory developed along a very different trajectory from classical
archaeology, which had dominated the academy in nineteenth- and twentieth-century
Germany. See Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism
in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1996), 153–4.
 J. LAURENCE HARE 7

professionalized, budding prehistorians sought to maintain a scientific

orientation (such as through reliance on empirical methods and aspirations
to rigid objectivity) even as they pursued critical questions about the shape
and character of the nation.23 At the turn of the century, these trends
coalesced in the work of the Berlin archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna (1858–
1931), whose ‘settlement archaeology’ (Siedlungsarchäologie) linked artefact
typologies to specific racial or ethnic groups, and used them to trace the
presumed earliest origins of the German Volk.24 Although Kossinna’s methods
provoked much debate, their underlying assumptions about the potential of
archaeology to identify the roots of national groups with ancient peoples
often went unchallenged.25 By 1933, the widespread use of ethnic approaches
meant that, in theory, archaeologists could easily align their work to the goals
of the Nazi Party without substantially altering their methods or conclusions.
Although the archaeologists at Kiel were ambivalent about Kossinna’s
approach, they, too, stressed the value of their work for the modern nation.
Yet neither their nationalist orientation nor their later Nazi ties precluded a
relationship with the international academic community. Rather, the ‘intel-
lectual field’ to which they belonged extended well beyond Germany, both
because the interpretation of prehistoric cultures depended on sites and
artefacts scattered across northern and central Europe, and because its
practitioners relied on the theories and interpretations of foreign colleagues.
For these reasons, prehistoric archaeology developed from its earliest days as
both a transnational enterprise and as a handmaiden to nationalist projects.
The result was a deep tension within the scholarly community that erupted at
moments of conflict among the respective nations. The Kiel cohort formed a
special node in the ‘intellectual field’ in a region in which the balance between
national and transnational scholarship was especially delicate. Due to their
proximity to the shifting border with Denmark, both the university and its
antiquities museum maintained close ties to Scandinavia. Indeed, the
museum had been founded in the 1830s with the assistance of C. J. Thomsen
(1788–1865), director of the Danish Nationalmuseet (National Museum).26
Kiel had later become an important conduit for introducing Scandinavian
theories of prehistory into Germany. At the same time, its antiquarian
institutions were deeply embroiled in the longstanding dispute over the

23 Sklenář, Archaeology in Central Europe, 101; Brent Maner, ‘The Search for a Buried
Nation: Prehistoric Archaeology in Central Europe, 1750–1945’, PhD dissertation,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, 2000, 163–74.
24 See Gustaf Kossinna, Die Herkunft der Germanen: Zur Methode der Siedlungsarchäologie,
2nd edn (Leipzig: Kabitzsch 1920); Heinz Grünert, Gustaf Kossinna (1858–1931): Vom
Germanisten zum Prähistoriker: Ein Wissenschaftler im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer
Republik (Rahden, Westphalia: VML Verlag Marie Leidorf 2002), 47–9.
25 Ulrich Veit, ‘Gustaf Kossinna and his concept of national archaeology,’ in Heinrich
Härke (ed.), Archaeology, Ideology and Society: The German Experience (Frankfurt-on-
Main: Peter Lang 2000), 40–64 (54–7).
26 Jørgen Jensen, Thomsens Museum: Historien om Nationalmuseet (Copenhagen: Gyldendal
1992), 17–21.
8 Patterns of Prejudice

border. During the two German-Danish wars of 1848–51 and 1864, archae-
ologists used prehistoric finds to lay claims to territory, effectively labelling
artefacts as ‘German’ or ‘Danish’ for political ends.27 After the unification of
Germany in 1871, however, cooperation resumed, as scholars on both sides
recognized that they needed each other’s research in order to derive a
complete picture of regional antiquity. In short, a century of open conflicts
and lingering acrimony had never sundered the relationship between German
and Scandinavian prehistorians. Only when Nazi organizations began to
court Germanic specialists in the 1930s did the two sides seek a new sort of
accommodation.
With its prominent place at home and longstanding ties abroad, the
archaeological community at Kiel thus affords a fresh perspective on the
discipline’s turn to Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s. As was the case in other
academic fields, the creation of ‘Nazi archaeology’, both at home and abroad,
did not occur spontaneously with Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933.28 Rather,
its development was the result of a process that did not fully mature until the
early 1940s. Along the way, it was punctuated by moments of intense
pressure, through controversies that surmounted the inertia of existing
institutional norms and defined the shape of future cooperation. Each halting
step bore the imprint of transnational forces that coloured or even generated
the discipline’s internal crises. For the archaeologists at Kiel, four such
incidents were particularly significant. Taken together, they reveal the
international dynamics that shaped the choices of German academics.

International conferences and the ‘Haus und Hof’ controversy

The first controversy erupted in 1936 in the context of a disciplinary power

struggle between the prehistorians at Kiel and the archaeologist Hans
Reinerth (1900–90), who was head of the Nazi-affiliated Reichsbund für
deutsche Vorgeschichte (Reich League for German Prehistory). This conflict is
relatively well known, and historians have rightly interpreted it as a reflection
of the larger struggle between Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg over
control of archaeological institutions. Yet what is less well understood is the
international dimension of the rivalry. As head of the Reichsbund, Reinerth
was eager to solicit foreign support for his views on Germanic and Nordic

27 Stine Wiell, Flensborgsamlingen 1852–1864 og dens skæbne (Flensburg: Udgivet af

Studieafdelingen ved Dansk Centralbibliotek for Sydslesvig 1997), 175–86; J. Laurence
Hare, ‘“When the Germans ran wild in Denmark”: the discovery of prehistory and the
German-Danish wars, 1848–1865’, in Florence Feiereisen and Kyle Frackman (eds),
From Weimar to Christiania: German and Scandinavian Studies in Context (Newcastle:
Cambridge Scholars 2007), 8–22; Peter Rowley-Conwy, From Genesis to Prehistory: The
Three-Age System and Its Contested Reception in Denmark, Britain, and Ireland (Oxford:
Oxford University Press 2007), 77–81.
28 Konrad H. Jarausch, The Conundrum of Complicity: German Professionals and the Final
Solution (Washington, D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2001), 16.
 J. LAURENCE HARE 9

archaeology, and in 1936 had already sponsored a lecture in Berlin by the

highly regarded Dutch prehistorian A. E. van Giffen (1884–1973).29 That
summer, however, Reinerth’s attempt to reach out to Scandinavian colleagues
drew the ire of Herbert Jankuhn. The episode began when Reinerth organized
an academic conference in Lübeck on the topic of ‘Haus und Hof im
Nordischen Raum’ (House and Home in the Nordic Region). Sponsoring the
conference was the so-called Nordische Gesellschaft (Nordic Society) in
Lübeck, whose members saw the Nazi revolution as the fulfilment of their
ambitions for the ‘Nordic’ (which was often conflated with ‘Germanic’) race.30
The purpose of the gathering was to bring together scholars from across
Germany and Scandinavia to share the latest research on the ancient home
construction techniques of Germanic and Nordic peoples. Of the fifty-five
participants, twelve hailed from Scandinavia, including Holger Arbman
(1904–68) of the Statens historiska museet (State Historical Museum) in
Stockholm, and Johannes Brøndsted (1890–1965) of the Danish National
Museum in Copenhagen.31
Many of the participants attended in a spirit of mutual academic interest,
but they could hardly ignore the meeting’s ideological overtones. In the
conference proceedings, Reinerth framed the contributions from both German
and foreign scholars as evidence of a common racial community that
extended across national borders and reached deep into the past. He
explained: ‘We know that we have not only arisen from the same blood,
but that the culture of our lands experienced its growth on the same
foundation and from reciprocal fertilization (wechselseitige Befruchtung).’32
Such thinking fit well with the ‘blood and soil’ ideology espoused by German
agriculture minister Walther Darré (1895–1953), who viewed ancient Scan-
dinavia as a model for the future rural life of a restored German nation.33
These ideas did not have the same purchase among Scandinavians, who were
not averse to interpreting remains through their own nationalist lenses, but
were generally wary of Nazism. Brøndsted in particular faced criticism from
colleagues at home, many of whom objected less to Reinerth’s ethnic
assumptions and more to the political implications of the conference.34

29 Martijn Eickhoff, ‘German archaeology and National Socialism: some historiographical

remarks’, Archaeological Dialogues, vol. 12, no. 1, 2005, 73–90 (77).
30 Hans-Jürgen Lutzhöft, Der Nordische Gedanken in Deutschland, 1920–1940 (Stuttgart:
Klett 1971), 303–11.
31 Steffen Stumann Hansen, ‘The wandering congress: the Sixth Nordic Archaeological
Meeting in Denmark 1937’, Acta Archaeologica, vol. 74, no. 1, 2003, 293–305 (294).
32 Hans Reinerth, ‘Haus und Hof im vorgeschichtlichen Norden: Weg, Stand und
Aufgabe der Forschung’, in Alexander Funkenberg (ed.), Haus und Hof im Nordischen
Raum, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Kabitzsch 1937), 1–20 (1).
33 Richard Walther Darré, Das Bauerntum als Lebensquell der nordischen Rasse (Munich:
Lehmann 1933), 277–308.
34 Hansen, ‘The wandering congress’, 294–5.
10 Patterns of Prejudice

Closer to home, the ‘Haus und Hof’ conference ignited controversy because
it brought foreign scholars into the midst of the emerging domestic fight over
the influence of Nazi professional organizations. Until that year, German
archaeologists had enjoyed unprecedented support while experiencing
relatively little pressure from the regime. As early as 1933, the Prussian
education ministry encouraged the inclusion of prehistory topics in school
curricula, which created fresh demand for teaching and research.35 At the
universities, the numbers of graduate students more than doubled during the
1930s.36 Prehistorians at the University of Kiel welcomed the attention and
responded by making their work available to more mainstream audiences.37
But there was little evidence of a shift in either rhetoric or interpretation that
suggested an overt politicization.
Only after 1936 did the pressure become more acute. Not long before, Hans
Reinerth had established the Reichsbund für deutsche Vorgeschichte on the
foundation of Gustaf Kossinna’s older Verein für deutsche Vorgeschichte
(Association for German Prehistory), and brought it under the aegis of Alfred
Rosenberg’s Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (Fighting League for German
Culture).38 Reinerth had a poor reputation as an archaeologist, but the Nazis
offered him a chance to reignite his flagging career by aiding their efforts to
bring the discipline into the process of Gleichschaltung and thus into the orbit
of the Nazi state.39 Among archaeologists, however, Reinerth’s initiative
created tension because it threatened the status of more established scholars
and of older associations such as the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut
(German Archaeological Institute) and the Römisch-Germanische Kommis-
sion (Roman-German Commission).40 Because his group promised to raise
the profile of prehistory, Kiel archaeologists at times cooperated with
Reinerth, as when Jankuhn led a Reichsbund group on a tour of the Haithabu
site in 1935.41 But they were divided over whether to become members
themselves. In the end, Peter Paulsen remained a member but Jankuhn and
Gustav Schwantes declined after being asked to attack other colleagues,
including Jankuhn’s mentor, the Berlin archaeologist Carl Schuchhardt (1859–

35 Henning Haßmann, ‘Archäologie und Jugend im “Dritten Reich”: Ur- und Früh-
geschichte als Mittel der politisch-ideologischen Indoktrination von Kindern und
Jugendlichen’, in Leube (ed.), Prähistorie und Nationalsozialismus, 107–46 (110–16).
36 Haßmann, ‘Archaeology in the “Third Reich”’, in Härke (ed.), Archaeology, Ideology and
Society, 65–139 (86–9).
37 For example, a number of prominent archaeologists at Kiel collaborated on a special
issue of the Schleswig-Holsteinische Schulzeitung of 23 September 1933 devoted to
prehistory topics.
38 Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg und seine Gegner, 171–5.
39 Gunter Schöbel, ‘Hans Reinerth: Forscher—NS-Funktionär—Museumsleiter’, in Leube
(ed.), Prähistorie und Nationalsozialismus, 321–96 (332–6).
40 Marchand, Down from Olympus, 346–8.
41 Letter from Jankuhn to Hans Reinerth, 10 September 1935: Archäologisches Land-
esmuseum Schleswig-Holstein, Schleswig (hereafter ALM), Nachlass Herbert Jankuhn,
GB 21.
 J. LAURENCE HARE 11

1943).42 Schuchhardt was one of Germany’s leading prehistorians, and had

been a long-time critic of Gustaf Kossinna’s theories. Even if Jankuhn was
more ambivalent in his theoretical allegiances, he was unwilling to speak
against his mentor. But there was a price to pay for their lack of cooperation,
and Jankuhn, Schwantes and Kersten later alleged that Peter Paulsen had
started a whispering campaign accusing them of communist sympathies.43
Reinerth’s ‘Haus und Hof’ conference exacerbated these tensions. By
appealing to his Nordic colleagues, Reinerth hoped first to validate his
politicized interpretation of Germanic prehistory through the participation,
and thereby the tacit approval, of Scandinavian experts. Second, he hoped to
advance his own career by establishing the very connections abroad that had
previously eluded him. The problem was that the Kiel archaeologists viewed
Reinerth’s project as an overt attempt to take control of the German-
Scandinavian relationship, and place Nordic scholarship under the purview
of the Reichsbund. They were especially alarmed when Reinerth invited the
participants to tour the Haithabu site with Alfred Tode (1900–96), a former
site assistant who had been fired for allegedly misappropriating funds.44 In
November 1936 Reinerth invited Jankuhn to give a presentation at a second
conference, but Jankuhn refused and expressed his dismay:

To your request … allow me to inform you that I am not in a position to hold

this lecture. The incidents that occurred immediately following the Lübeck
conference Haus und Hof make it impossible … First, it has had an alienating
effect in Scandinavia that both of the German institutes which have laid their
chief focus on researching Nordic house construction, namely the Stettin
Museum through its excavations in Wollin and our museum through the
investigations in Haithabu, Stellerburg and Hodorf, were omitted. A very
unfortunate situation arose through the excursion to Haithabu itself…. The
numerous Scandinavian experts who through personal experience are much
better oriented with the state of our work than many German colleagues, were

42 Jankuhn recorded his position on the Reichsbund in notes he made regarding a

meeting with the Rector of the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, which
presumably took place in early 1936: ALM, Nachlass Jankuhn, GB 21.
43 Letter from Jankuhn to the Rector of the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, 30
March 1936: ALM, Nachlass Jankuhn, GB 21. Paulsen also allegedly held a grudge
because he had been turned down as supervisor of the Haithabu project.
44 Haßmann and Jantzen reported the incident as a power struggle between Schwantes
and Tode. See Haßmann and Jantzen, ‘“Die deutsche Vorgeschichte—eine nationale
Wissenschaft”’, 14. Jankuhn discussed the allegation in a letter to the NS-Dozenten-
bund, 10 April 1937: ALM, Nachlass Jankuhn, GB 21. According to Jankuhn,
Schwantes had dismissed Tode for embezzling 5,067 RM in 1931. Tode, however, later
continued his archaeological career at the Braunschweig Landesmuseum with the
support of the Reichsbund. See Alfred Tode, ‘Aufgabe und Gestaltung eines
Vorgeschichtsmuseums’, Germanen-Erbe, vol. 7/8, July/August 1943, 94–104.
12 Patterns of Prejudice

simply not able to understand that a man [Tode] was speaking here who
clearly had no information about the results of our own investigations …45
In this letter, Jankuhn took a stand not simply against Reinerth’s attempt to
usurp his own prerogatives as project supervisor, but also against perceived
violations to the normal practice of scholarship. Above all, he framed his
objections around a concern that the Reichsbund would permanently damage
the reputation of German archaeology in the eyes of the Scandinavian
academic community.46 In this way, the entire incident was more than a
product of the personal rivalry between Jankuhn and Reinerth. It highlighted
the potential for political engagement to transform the dynamics of power,
prestige and practice within the field. At the same time, it was a clear signal
that the internal fighting would encompass a much larger, international
space.
The next year, a second controversy emerged over the issue of German
participation in foreign conferences. In May 1937, Erich Pieper, a Kiel archae-
ology student studying in Denmark, reported that Johannes Brøndsted had
barred Reinerth and the pro-Nazi historian Otto Scheel (1876–1954) from
attending the Sixth Nordic Archaeological Congress in Copenhagen.47 Pieper
claimed that the rejection had directly resulted from the ‘Haus und Hof’
debacle, although he worried that all German archaeologists might be affec-
ted. ‘It would be desirable …’, he wrote to Jankuhn, ‘if we could put a stop to
such incidents, since otherwise the … excellent ties of some German
researchers to the North would be endangered’.48 The following month,
these concerns grew when Jankuhn and Paulsen applied to a planned Baltic
historical congress scheduled to take place in Riga in August 1937. At the end
of June, the two received a memo from Rosenberg’s office ordering them not
to participate in the conference due to ‘known measures against Germandom
in the Baltic by the Latvian government’.49 Later, however, they discovered
that Rosenberg had permitted Otto Scheel to lead a separate Reichsbund
delegation. Jankuhn complained bitterly to the education ministry that crucial
academic matters were being determined by the personal whim of Rosenberg,
rather than through established procedures, and would render German
research abroad, in his words, ‘completely impossible’.50 The appeal seems to

45 Letter from Jankuhn to Reinerth, 3 December 1936: ALM, Nachlass Jankuhn, GB 21.
46 Jankuhn expressed these fears in a letter to Freiherr Bolko von Richthofen (1899–1983),
president of the Berufsvereinigung deutscher Vorgeschichtsforscher (Professional
Association of German Prehistorians), 18 March 1938: ALM, Nachlass Jankuhn, GB 21.
47 Letter from Erich Pieper to Jankuhn, 28 May 1937: ALM, Nachlass Jankuhn, GB 21;
Hansen, ‘The wandering congress’, 296.
48 Letter from Pieper to Jankuhn, 8 June 1937: ALM, Nachlass Jankuhn, GB 21.
49 ‘Beauftragte des Führers für die gesamte geistige und weltanschauliche Erziehung der
NSDAP to the Gaubeauftragten für Vorgeschichte und Landesleiter des Reichsbundes
für Deutsche Vorgeschichte’, letter dated 9 June 1937: ALM, Nachlass Jankuhn, GB 21.
50 Letter from Jankuhn to the Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbil-
dung, 16 June 1937: ALM, Nachlass Jankuhn, GB 21.
 J. LAURENCE HARE 13

have worked, at least in part. In July, the ministry replied by allowing

Jankuhn and Paulsen to participate, but only as part of Scheel’s delegation.51
The outcome was telling. Once again, an international event had become
the arena for a power struggle at home. This time, Jankuhn showed himself to
be a shrewd navigator of the nebulous power channels evolving within the
regime. He capitalized on the gap between a new pro-Nazi organization and
a more established political ministry to check Reinerth’s ambitions. In his
partial victory, however, Jankuhn must have recognized the limits of
traditional political and academic institutions. It is likely that the incident
affirmed how tenuous his position had become, and underscored the need for
similar organizational backing, even if these affiliations were the cause of
concern across the border.

Collaborative fieldwork at the Haithabu site

The dilemma ultimately informed a third episode involving a prospective

German-Scandinavian joint field excavation at the Haithabu site. For decades,
the Haithabu project had depended on cross-border work, and it had even
been the Danish prehistorian Sophus Müller (1846–1934) whose comparative
approach had helped identify the remains of the lost Viking village.52 After
years of financial hardship and lost digging seasons, the time was ripe for a
new round of discovery. Only now the growing relationship between Kiel
archaeologists and the SS cast a shadow over the project. Since 1934 Heinrich
Himmler had supported research at the site and, as his Ahnenerbe research
organization evolved, so too did his interest in formalizing his patronage of
the Haithabu project. At the beginning of 1937, Himmler installed Walther
Wüst (1901–93) as the group’s new president. Wüst, who was a well-known
indologist and professor at the University of Munich, immediately embarked
on a campaign to attract respectable scholars to the group and to support
serious research.53 The Haithabu project, which had languished for decades,
seemed a perfect place to begin. On 16 March 1937, Himmler signalled his
growing interest with an official tour of the Haithabu excavation site.54 The
following May, Jankuhn officially joined the Nazi Party.55

51 Letter from the Reichs- und Preußische Minister für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und
Volksbildung to Jankuhn, 14 July 1937: ALM, Nachlass Jankuhn, GB 21; letter from the
Minister für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung to the Rector of the Christian-
Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, 2 August 1937: ALM, Nachlass Jankuhn, GB 21.
52 Joachim Stark, Haithabu-Schleswig-Danewerk: Aspekte einer Forschungsgeschichte mittelal-
terlicher Anlagen in Schleswig-Holstein (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports 1988),
9–13.
53 Kater, Das ‘Ahnenerbe’ der SS, 56–65; Pringle, The Master Plan, 91–2.
54 Heiko Steuer, ‘Herbert Jankuhn und seine Darstellungen zur Germanen- und
Wikingerzeit’, in Steuer (ed.), Eine hervorragend nationale Wissenschaft, 417–73 (421).
55 Jankuhn, response to questionnaire from the Allied Military Government of Germany,
[late 1940s]: ALM, Nachlass Jankuhn, unnumbered.
14 Patterns of Prejudice

These developments coincided with negotiations among Gustav

Schwantes, Johannes Brøndsted, and Mouritz Mackeprang (1869–1959),
director of the Danish National Museum, for a proposed international
excavation at Haithabu. By this time, the ‘Haus und Hof’ controversy had
begun to reverberate across the Scandinavian archaeological community. As
Brøndsted explained in a letter to a Finnish colleague, the Danes had
reservations about cooperating at Haithabu due to general concerns about
the objectivity and quality of German scholarship. He wrote: ‘Dr Mackeprang
had his concerns with reference to [the possibility] that Schwantes is indeed
not independent and that one cannot know what for example Alfred
Rosenberg would undertake or order undertaken.’56 For his part, Brøndsted
shared Mackeprang’s reluctance, but he was mindful of the long history of
cooperation with the Schleswig-Holstein museum. He added: ‘I find it ill
advised to say no to an outstretched hand from Kiel, precisely when the
Swedes also come along.’57
To resolve the dilemma, Mackeprang and Brøndsted convened a meeting at
the National Museum in October 1937 that included representatives from
Sweden and Norway along with Gustav Schwantes and Herbert Jankuhn. By
this time, the Scandinavians must have known about Jankuhn’s dealings with
Himmler, since they expressed reservations about his participation.58 The
meeting nevertheless produced an agreement designed to preserve the
cooperative element of the project without directly including Scandinavian
institutions.59 Specifically, the plan called for a visiting team consisting of
young scholars, including Holger Arbman from Sweden, Roar Skovmand
(1908–87) from Denmark and Helmer Salmo (1903–73) from Finland.
According to Schwantes, the Norwegians elected not to participate, since
their research interests were directed more firmly to settlements in western
Europe.60 The Germans may have been disappointed but the Danes expressed
approval, with Mackeprang declaring: ‘I am personally against [Norwegian
involvement], both because their connections to Haithabu are even less than
those of the Finns, and also because the entire enterprise can be viewed as a
link in the Germans’ ongoing fraternal tendency (Verbrüderungstendenz).’61
The subsequent excavations proved important for Jankuhn’s career. It was,
after all, only one month after the October meeting that he joined the SS.
While it is unclear how the Scandinavians responded to Jankuhn’s member-
ship, the meeting itself appears to have played a role in the timing of

56 Letter from Johannes Brøndsted to C. A. Nordmann, 1 May 1937: Nationalmuseet,

Copenhagen (hereafter NM), Afdeling 1 426/37.
57 Ibid.
58 Letter from Mackeprang to Brøndsted, 8 October 1937: NM, Afdeling 1 426/37.
59 Report on a meeting of 26 October 1937 in the National Museum, Copenhagen: NM,
Afdeling 1 426/37.
60 Gustav Schwantes, ‘Die Entwicklung der vorgeschichtlichen Forschung in Schleswig-
Holstein vom Jahre 1929–1939’, Kieler Blätter, vol. 3, 1939, 340.
61 Letter from Mackeprang to Brøndsted, 8 October 1937: NM, Afdeling 1 426/37.
 J. LAURENCE HARE 15

Jankuhn’s closer engagement with Himmler’s organization. The ability of all

sides to maintain scholarly ties, in spite of their political concerns, removed an
important obstacle to navigating the relationship with the Reich. For the
Scandinavians, the ultimate decision to participate in a project closely tied to
Heinrich Himmler did not by any means signal a pattern of foreign
collaboration with the Nazi state, but rather demonstrated a willingness to
make accommodations in the interests of scholarship, and to overlook their
colleagues’ unsavoury political connections in the hope of continued good
academic relations.
The October meeting allowed Kiel archaeologists to negotiate the pressures
at home and abroad, but the balance remained a delicate one. On the one
hand, the end of the Haithabu controversy preceded a noticeable shift in the
rhetorical representation of the ancient past. To mark his entry into the NS-
Dozentenbund (National Socialist Association of University Teachers), for
example, Jankuhn delivered a lecture in April 1938 endorsing a prehistoric
narrative in which ‘northern Germanic’ groups gradually expanded and
subjugated the lands to the south and east.62 Jankuhn thus embraced an
ethnohistorical account of territorial expansion, beginning with the prehis-
toric era and leading first to the Völkerwanderungszeit (Migration Period) of the
fifth century CE and later to the Viking raids of the early Middle Ages. Such a
view of eastern Europe as ancient German ‘colonial lands’,63 even if never
explicitly connected to the present, nevertheless fit well with the expansionist
impulse that lay at the heart of National Socialism.64 The change in the
writings of Gustav Schwantes was even more striking. His 1939 Munich
address to the NS-Dozentenbund, in which he set the modern German
nation-state as the capstone of a trajectory that began in ancient times,65 stood
in stark contrast to his work in 1926 in which he had asked rhetorically: ‘How

62 The lecture was published as Herbert Jankuhn, ‘Gemeinschaftsform und Herrschafts-

bildung in frühgermanischer Zeit’, Kieler Blätter, vol. 1, 1938, 270–81.
63 Ibid., 278.
64 On the centrality of expansion in Nazi ideology, see Aristotle Kallis, Fascist Ideology:
Territory and Expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922–1945 (London and New York:
Routledge 2000), esp. 38–48, 52–6; Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘The birth of the Ostland out of the
spirit of colonialism: a postcolonial perspective on the Nazi policy of conquest and
extermination’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 39, no. 2, 2005, 197–219, in which Zimmerer
argues for a direct link between spatiality and colonial expansionism in Nazi thought;
and Shelley Baranowski, ‘Against “human diversity as such”: Lebensraum and genocide
in the Third Reich’, in Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama (eds), German
Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany (New York: Columbia University
Press 2011), 51–71, in which Baranowski emphasizes eastern Europe as a crucial link
between older notions of colonialism and the distinctive racial violence of Nazism.
65 Published as Gustav Schwantes, ‘Der Einfluß der Vorgeschichte auf das Geschichtsbild
unserer Zeit’, Kieler Blätter, vol. 2, 1939, 131-45.
16 Patterns of Prejudice

far back does the German Volk allow itself to be traced beyond written history
into primitive times?’66
On the other hand, these same archaeologists also erected boundaries
between academic and political writing. Even if Jankuhn insisted in his letters
that he maintained a ‘positive orientation’ towards National Socialism,67 he
was reluctant to allow ideology to inform all of his interpretations. The
distinction, as Nils Vollertsen has argued, often depended on the audience. At
the August 1937 Congress of Baltic Historians in Riga, for example, Jankuhn
depicted Haithabu as a critical site for the introduction of Christianity into
northern Europe. By contrast, his conclusions in the German archaeological
journal Offa focused on the role of the village in the expansion of ‘northern
Germanic’ power to the East.68 Jankuhn counted on his scholarly peers to turn
a blind eye to one set of conclusions while expecting his Nazi patrons to
ignore the other. He thus managed two scholarly identities, preserved his
academic reputation abroad and enjoyed a meteoric rise within the SS-
Ahnenerbe. It was in this way that Jankuhn became, in Michael Kater’s words,
an academic ‘parade horse’ for the Reich. At the same time, the University of
Kiel became a centre of Nazi research through state largesse, hosting in the
late spring of 1939 a conference with over 450 participants designed to
showcase the scientific pursuits of the SS-Ahnenerbe.69

Academic networks and the Nazi conquest

The fourth and final international episode involved the activities of archae-
ologists during the Second World War. As Wehrmacht victories spread
German power across the continent, archaeologists from Kiel joined scholars
from a number of humanities and social science disciplines in preparing for
German hegemony at the end of the conflict.70 Between 1939 and 1943,
prehistorians contributed to the war effort in at least two key ways. First, they

66 Gustav Schwantes, ‘Die Germanen’, Volk und Rasse: Illustrierte Vierteljahrsschrift für
deutsches Volkstum, vol. 1, no. 2, 1926, 69–84, 153–70 (73).
67 Letter from Jankuhn to the Rector of the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, 30
March 1936: ALM, Nachlass Jankuhn, GB 21.
68 Herbert Jankuhn, ‘Die Ausgrabungen in Haithabu 1935/36’, Offa, vol. 1, 1936, 96–140.
See also Nils Vollertsen, ‘Herbert Jankuhn, hedeby-forskningen og det tyske samfund
1934–1976’, Fortid og Nutid, vol. 36, no. 4, 1989, 235–51 (238–9).
69 Kater, Das ‘Ahnenerbe’ der SS, 113–19. On the results of the conference, see Herbert
Jankuhn (ed.), Jahrestagungen: Bericht über die Kieler Tagung 1939 (Neumünster:
Wachholtz 1944).
70 This issue was first raised in Max Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in
Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People (New York: Yiddish Scientific Institute-YIVO
1946), 67–74. For the Eastern Front, see especially Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns
Eastward: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press 1988), 10–12, 155–86. On the role of academic institutions,
see Robert P. Ericksen, Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi
Germany (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2012), 158–60.
 J. LAURENCE HARE 17

used their research to justify Nazi conquests. After the defeat of Poland in
1939, Jankuhn published ‘Zur Entstehung des polnischen Staates’ (On the
Origin of the Polish State). Here, he drew on his research into early mediaeval
fortifications to argue, first, that the Poles were latecomers to their purported
homeland and, second, that the genealogies of its leaders were rooted in the
German race. ‘The region’, he wrote, ‘in which the Polish Kingdom confronts
us in the middle of the 10th century belonged … to the settlement zone of
Germanic tribes’.71 The blend of historical and archaeological evidence thus
undermined the historical claim that Poles laid to their own country, while
naturalizing future German plans to settle the conquered land. Furthermore,
prehistorians journeyed to the front to procure noteworthy artefacts and texts
from the occupied zones. After the Battle of France in 1940, Jankuhn travelled
to the occupation zone first to survey megalithic graves in Brittany and then,
in July 1941, to examine the famous Bayeux Tapestry in Normandy. Both
projects were designed to explore Germanic and Viking culture in western
France, and might have been intended as a propaganda move on the eve of a
planned German invasion of Great Britain.72 The following summer, in the
midst of the southern offensive on the Eastern Front, he and Karl Kersten
journeyed to the Ukraine, where they conducted research on the culture of the
ancient Goths in the newly captured Crimea.73
Systematic looting was a persistent feature of these expeditions. In the wake
of the Germans’ early conquests, Himmler and Rosenberg joined Hermann
Göring in sending teams of scholars into occupied areas to inventory artistic
and cultural goods, and prepare them for shipment to Germany. In Poland,
Peter Paulsen was involved in the large-scale theft of art and artefacts from
museums and churches around Cracow, some of which found their way into
the hands of Nazi functionaries. Jankuhn and Kersten, meanwhile, sent
dozens of crates back to Germany from the Ukraine containing artefacts from
Crimean museums in Rostov, Kerch and Sevastopol.74 In each case, a different
set of motives seems to have been at work. The thefts in Poland, for example,
served the private interests of Nazi officials. Kersten’s shipments from the
Ukraine were intended to keep artefacts out of the hands of Rosenberg’s
Einsatzstab (Special Task Force), making his thefts an act of inter-organiza-
tional rivalry. Jankuhn’s work, meanwhile, suggested a mix of scholarly and
political motives. In France, he stressed the importance of the Bayeux
Tapestry’s images for understanding material culture in mediaeval Europe.75

71 Herbert Jankuhn, ‘Zur Entstehung des polnischen Staates’, Kieler Blätter, vol. 3, 1940,
67–84 (73). Jankuhn’s writing was in step with a general trend of propaganda justifying
the conquest after the fact. See Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, The German Myth of the East:
1800 to the Present (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2009), 186–7.
72 Carola Hicks, The Bayeux Tapestry: The Life Story of a Masterpiece (London: Chatto and
Windus 2006), 213–20; Heuss, Kunst- und Kulturgutraub, 221–4.
73 Heuss, Kunst- und Kulturgutraub, 237–8.
74 Pringle, The Master Plan, 195–207, 221–6; Heuss, Kunst- und Kulturgutraub, 230–6.
75 Heuss, Kunst- und Kulturgutraub, 220–2, 234.
18 Patterns of Prejudice

In the Crimea, however, his research on the links between the ancient Goths
and the Germanic migrations appears to have gone beyond archaeological
concerns. Among the items he brought back from his expedition were
photographs, including one of a young Ukrainian girl with a note reading
‘Nina. Blond-haired and blue-eyed girl’.76 Apparently, Jankuhn entertained
questions about the racial ancestry of the ancient Germans in a land
designated by Himmler as a future German colony.77
These acts of plunder marked the apex of German prehistoric archaeolo-
gists’ collaboration with the regime, and showed the extent to which their
wartime work had become an international enterprise. Establishing the facts
of these activities, however, has proved easier than interpreting them, and
historians continue to question the level of agency of archaeologists and other
scholars during the war. What is clear is that they were no mere lackeys
responding to the wishes of Nazi leaders. They may at times have travelled at
the behest of their patrons, as Paulsen did in Poland, but, more often, the
impetus for projects came directly from the archaeologists themselves.
Indeed, Anja Heuss has shown that Jankuhn and his colleagues proposed
the Crimean expedition a full month before the Russian invasion in 1941.78
Once in the field, archaeologists retained the same freedom to set their own
research agendas. The war did not completely diminish their ability to
balance their work with the needs of the state. This means that a more
paradoxical characterization, one of archaeologists imposing their own
research agendas on captured territories, seems more plausible. The disrup-
tion of the war meant that the nationalist undercurrents of German
archaeology were allowed to run unchecked. Rather than cooperating with
foreign colleagues, German scholars were able to bypass weak local
institutions and civil authorities to carry out pet projects outside German
borders.
Other cases, however, demand a more nuanced appraisal. Above all, the
work of Kiel archaeologists in Scandinavia reveals moments in which the
exercise of power abroad diverged from regime goals. While they acted with
little regard for regional institutions in France and the Soviet Union, Jankuhn
and Kersten behaved very differently in occupied Norway and Denmark.
Most current studies overlook these two countries, perhaps because there are
fewer indications of looting.79 But the two men were active there in 1940 and
1941, and both had close contact with Scandinavian archaeologists. Indeed,
when the region is mentioned in modern histories, it is typically to repeat two

76 The photos are included with Jankuhn’s papers at the ALM.

77 Himmler envisioned a settlement colony of farmers that would recapture the spirit of
the Goths. The name of the colony was to be Gotengau. See Pringle, The Master Plan,
218–19.
78 Heuss, Kunst- und Kulturgutraub, 228.
79 Two notable exceptions are Jorunn Sem Fure, ‘Heinrich Himmler som humanistisk
prosjektleder’, Fortid, no. 2, 2007, 76–81; and Charlotte Blindheim, ‘De fem lange år på
Universitets Oldsaksamling’, Viking, vol. 48, 1984, 27–43.
 J. LAURENCE HARE 19

accusations against Jankuhn: first, that he wrote a critical report about Poul
Nørlund (1888–1951) of the Danish National Museum and, second, that he
was involved in the arrest of the archaeologist A.W. Brøgger (1884–1951) of
the University of Oslo.80 These examples would fit the pattern seen elsewhere
in Europe but there are reasons to question their accuracy. After the war,
Jankuhn was particularly vocal in denying involvement in Brøgger’s arrest,
and a letter from 1949 indicates that Brøgger supported Jankuhn’s version of
events and placed the blame for his arrest on Quisling supporters.81 The
accusations made against Nørlund were more reliable, but were apparently
made to prevent any possible affiliation with Rosenberg’s Einsatzstab.82 There
is consequently little evidence that Jankuhn and his colleagues sought to
undermine archaeologists in Scandinavia as they did elsewhere.
What seems more likely is that the Kiel archaeologists, while remaining
committed to the German war effort, were concerned with protecting the sites
on which their work depended, and with preserving collegial ties to their
Nordic counterparts. Shortly after the invasion, both Jankuhn and Kersten
submitted proposals to travel respectively to Norway and Denmark. Neither,
however, indicated a desire to carry out a major project. Rather, they
portrayed their prospective mission as one of site preservation.83 Moreover,
both engaged in protracted struggles with occupation authorities not only
over the fate of regional sites but also over the right of regional scholars to
supervise their preservation. In May 1940, Jankuhn, hoping to earn the good
will of his colleagues in Oslo, went outside the local chain of command to ask
Himmler to support a Norwegian excavation at the Raknehaugen grave hill in

80 Brøgger was allegedly arrested for resistance activities and for refusing to turn over to
Heinrich Himmler the famed Sword of Snartemo from the Norwegian collection. This
accusation is repeated in several publications. It was first mentioned in Anders Hagen,
‘Arkeologi og politikk’, Viking, vol. 49, 1985/6, 269–78 (270). At the time, Hagen could
not say definitively that Jankuhn was responsible. The charge was repeated in Arnold
and Haßmann, ‘Archaeology in Nazi Germany’, 76, with a qualification, but without
qualification in Barbara Scott, ‘Archaeology and national identity: the Norwegian
example’, Scandinavian Studies, vol. 68, no. 3, 1996, 321–42, and later in Pringle, The
Master Plan, 311–13, and Fure, ‘Heinrich Himmler som humanistisk prosjektleder’, 79.
Mahsarski, Herbert Jankuhn, 210, has determined that Jankuhn was not in Norway at
the time, but that he was possibly involved in the arrest of other Olso scholars.
81 Letter from A. W. Brøgger to Jankuhn, 24 March 1949: ALM, Nachlass Jankuhn,
unnumbered.
82 Heuss, Kunst- und Kulturgutraub, 213.
83 Letter from Wolfram Sievers to Franz Walter Stahlecker, 24 April 1940: Bundesarchiv
Berlin (hereafter BAB), NS 21/59; Karl Kersten, ‘Bericht über eine Reise durch
Dänemark zum Schutz der vorgeschichtlichen Denkmäler im Auftrage des Reich-
sführers SS in der Zeit von 23. Oktober bis zum 5. November 1940’ (report): BAB, NS
21/86.
20 Patterns of Prejudice

southeastern Norway.84 In Denmark, Kersten faced a similar struggle with the

German Luftwaffe, who wished to build airstrips in Jutland that threatened a
number of prehistoric grave mounds. Kersten reached out to Johannes
Brøndsted at the National Museum to help with emergency digs even as he
sought to forestall the military’s plans.85
As in Germany, prehistory had a strong connection to nationalism in
Denmark and Norway. This was especially the case during the war, when ties
to the ancient past helped preserve a sense of distinctiveness under
occupation. For this reason, the Germans’ conciliatory attitudes elicited a
range of reactions. Norwegians accepted Jankuhn’s support, but his inter-
vention, however well intentioned, left a legacy of bitterness after the war.86
The Danes, meanwhile, saw preservation work as an act of patriotism and
independence, although they found themselves forced to turn to Kersten to
facilitate arrangements with the German military. Even so, they insisted on
using only Danish labourers, and managed to excavate at a number of sites
without German aid, including sixteen grave hill sites at Esbjerg in 1940.87 In
contrast with their counterparts in Norway, the Danes later remembered
Kersten’s assistance fondly. As Poul Nørlund recalled: ‘I will gladly here
express my appreciation for the tactful manner in which he tended his task,
all the more so as I was not all effusively friendly towards him in the time that
he worked [in Denmark].’88
Given the Scandinavians’ apparent ambivalence, it is not surprising that
historians might also struggle to interpret the acts of German archaeologists
in the Nordic countries. One might simply account for the differences by
linking them to the more passive occupation strategy in Denmark and
Norway, which was in part a product of Nazi racial ideology that stressed the
kinship between ‘Germanic’ and ‘Nordic’ peoples. For this reason, German
occupation authorities in Scandinavia relied much more on cooperation with
locals and on the use of cultural propaganda, which included the creation of
the Deutsche Wissenschaftliche Institut (German Scientific Institute) in
Copenhagen designed to promote common scholarship. This might explain
not only the attitude of German archaeologists in the region, but also
Himmler’s willingness to support Jankuhn’s Raknehaugen proposal, to which

84 Notes from conference with Dr Franz Walter Stahlecker, head of the Sipo and SD, 11
May 1940, and a letter from Wolfram Sievers to Himmler, 9 May 1940: BAB, NS 21/59.
Dirk Mahsarski has argued that Jankuhn believed in vain that Himmler’s support for
the digs might win over Brøgger to the Nazi cause (Mahsarski, Herbert Jankuhn,
208–10).
85 Kersten, ‘Bericht über eine Reise durch Dänemark zum Schutz der vorgeschichtlichen
Denkmäler im Auftrage des Reichsführers SS’.
86 Hagen, ‘Arkeologi og politikk’, 270.
87 Kersten, ‘Bericht über eine Reise durch Dänemark zum Schutz der vorgeschichtlichen
Denkmäler im Auftrage des Reichsführers SS’.
88 Poul Nørlund, ‘Nationalmuseet i de onde Aar’, Nationalmuseets Arbejdsmark, 1946, 5–15
(9–10).
 J. LAURENCE HARE 21

he committed 12,000 RM.89 This explanation, however, is deceptively simple.

The Germans, after all, did not always treat the Scandinavians with a light
touch, and the strife between the Ahnenerbe and occupation authorities
suggests that there was little coordination when it came to cultural politics.
Even more systematic efforts like the German institute did not materialize
until later, and did so in a surprisingly haphazard way.90 This line of
reasoning also neglects the independence that German archaeologists enjoyed
while working abroad, and overlooks incidents in which they struggled
against their own government. Jankuhn and Kersten may well have behaved
like academic imperialists, but they were not one-dimensional agents of the
state.
A better interpretation must therefore also consider the importance that the
archaeologists placed on maintaining the integrity of their academic
community. Above all, what distinguished Scandinavia from the rest of
Europe was its place in the discipline’s intellectual field. For the Kiel
prehistorians, Scandinavians were their most important foreign colleagues,
and at times more significant than scholars from other parts of Germany.
Even at this moment of radical collaboration with the Reich, Jankuhn and
Kersten proved unwilling to sacrifice fully the norms of their profession.
Cultural politics may have played a role in their activities, but it also served as
a convenient rationale for preserving the relationships that Germans and
Scandinavians enjoyed in the past and presumably would again at the end of
the war.

International scholars and the post-war legacy

The war, of course, ended very differently than the Germans imagined in
1940. As the tide turned, Kersten returned home to a destroyed museum, and
he and Schwantes spent the final months of the war desperately seeking safe
shelter for their artefacts.91 During this time, they were removed from the
fighting, and their less prominent role in Himmler’s organization meant that
they were able to re-establish themselves fairly quickly after the surrender.92

89 Letter from Himmler to Wolfram Sievers, 29 May 1940: BAB, NS 21/59.

90 Manfred Jakubowski-Tiessen, ‘Kulturpolitik im besetzten Land: Das deutsche
Wissenschaftliche Institut in Kopenhagen 1941 bis 1945’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswis-
senschaft, vol. 42, no. 2, 1994, 129–37. The greatest mistake, according to Jakubowski-
Tiessen, was assigning the directorship to Otto Scheel, whose well-known support for
the German annexation of Danish North Schleswig made him an instantly unpopular
figure.
91 Schwantes, personal memoir, 10 September 1946: ALM, Registratur-Akten 1.1.1. For a
description of the destruction of the Schleswig-Holstein museum in 1944, see Søren
Telling, 25 Aar paa Danevirke (Holbæk: Norden 1965), 26–30.
92 Schwantes retired soon after the war, but Kersten became director of the Schleswig-
Holstein museum and Extraordinary Professor of pre- and early history at the
University of Kiel in 1951. See Friedrich Volbehr and Richard Weyl, Professoren und
22 Patterns of Prejudice

The transition process was much harder for Herbert Jankuhn, who spent the
final months of the war serving as an intelligence officer with the IV. SS-
Panzerkorps before he was captured, and served three years in an American
POW camp. After he was released, he spent the next decade slowly rebuilding
his career before securing a new professorship at the University of Göttingen
in 1956.93 Even he was more fortunate than scholars like Hans Reinerth, who
saw their careers wither once the Nazis had been defeated.94
Much like the creation of Nazi archaeology in the 1930s, its dismantling
after the war proved to be a complex process. In this, too, the international
academic community played a role. It did so first in re-establishing German
institutions. Immediately after the war, Karl Kersten and Gustav Schwantes
worked feverishly to rebuild the museum in Schleswig-Holstein. At the end of
the decade, they chose a new home for it in Gottorf Castle, ancestral home of
the dukes of Schleswig. Located near the Danish border, the castle played a
prominent role in both German and Danish history, and proved significant in
healing the recent wounds of the war. Indeed, Kersten and Schwantes might
never have succeeded without Scandinavian support. After the war, many
Danes called for the return of borderland artefacts, arguing that the Germans
could no longer care for them properly.95 But when the new Schleswig-
Holstein Archäologisches Landesmuseum opened in 1950, representatives
from the Danish National Museum wrote glowing reports of the German
efforts, which put the controversy to rest and helped ease a century of
animosity over the borderland.96
International concerns also played a role in the reinvention of shattered
reputations. During the 1960s, for example, Herbert Jankuhn faced a barrage
of fresh questions about his Nazi past. In 1963 an East German journal
accused him of looting libraries in Warsaw.97 Five years later, Norwegian
archaeologists, still blaming him for the mistreatment of A. W. Brøgger,

Dozenten der Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, 1665–1954 (Kiel: Ferdinand Hirt

1956), 200.
93 Haßmann, ‘Archaeology in the “Third Reich”’, 119–20.
94 Schöbel, ‘Hans Reinerth’, 358–61. The denazification proceedings against Reinerth did
not conclude until 1953, when the ministry of justice in Baden-Württemberg over-
turned an earlier judgement of his guilt. Reinerth ultimately secured a post as director
of the privately owned Pfahlbaumuseum in Unteruhldingen, but he was never able to
find a place in mainstream academia.
95 Letter from Karl Kersten to the Minister-President of Schleswig-Holstein, 24 February
1947: ALM, Ortsakten Nydam 60.
96 ‘Slesvig bliver Europas fornemste Haßmann Museumsby’, Jyllands-Posten, 21 August
1949; Poul Nørlund, ‘Schloss Gottorf: Erfüllung meines Lebenstraumes’, Kieler
Nachrichten, 22 September 1950; ‘Prof. Brøndsted in Schleswig Anerkennung für
Gottorp Museum’, Schleswiger Nachrichten, 12 April 1951.
97 Günter Heidorn, Horst Hoffmann and Rosemarie Hoffmann, ‘Zur Hochschulpolitik
der Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschlands 1946 bis 1949/50’, Das Hochschulwesen,
vol. 11, no. 9, 1963, 803–16.
 J. LAURENCE HARE 23

denied him an invitation to speak at the University of Bergen.98 At the same

time, new research by Rolf Seeliger and Michael Kater forced him to abandon
decades of silence and explain himself once again.99 With his career at stake,
Jankuhn wrote a letter to Seeliger in which he offered a stunning explanation
for his wartime activities. ‘My entry into the SS’, he wrote, ‘occurred among
other things at the direct request of Swedish colleagues, who said that only
through such a step could the scholarly integrity of [my] excavations be
assured’.100 Jankuhn did not name his alleged supporters, and there is no
documentation to support his account. It is unlikely that any Scandinavians
gave Jankuhn such advice, but Jankuhn’s claim speaks to the importance of
the international sphere during the Nazi era, and stands as an example of the
ways that foreign concerns had evolved from motivation to rationale in the
years after 1945.
Such shifting recollections informed a larger post-war narrative that
separated ‘good’ archaeologists from ‘Nazi’ archaeologists. As this story
goes, ‘Nazi archaeologists’ put their fascist politics before their commitments
to scholarship. By contrast, the ‘good’ archaeologists may have worked with
the German government but had always been motivated by their professional
responsibilities and remained true to their academic obligations. In reality, of
course, the differences were illusory. It now seems clear that almost the entire
field of German prehistory willingly, and often enthusiastically, cooperated
with the Nazi state. In some fashion, nearly all were implicated in ‘Nazi
archaeology’. It was a collaboration that international norms of scholarship
and the concerns of foreign colleagues failed to prevent.
Rejecting this narrative, however, does not mean that we should see Nazi
archaeology as something created solely within the crucible of Hitler’s
Germany. In fact, even if the nationalist bent of prehistoric study facilitated
cooperation, transnational forces shaped each stage of the relationship
between scholars and the Reich. In Kiel, the links to Scandinavia meant
that scholars in Denmark, Norway and Sweden were especially significant.
Furthermore, strategies of accommodation crossed borders. Most Nordic
archaeologists were by no means supporters of the Nazis, nor blind to the
manipulation at work in their treatment of German scholarship. Yet they
continued to seek ways to pursue cooperative research, and thereby enabled
German archaeologists to negotiate the political pressures at home. When,
finally, the war created unprecedented stress on transnational ties, Kiel
archaeologists maintained their commitments to Scandinavian colleagues,
even when it meant working against the policies of the government they
served. As their wartime activities have shown, the intellectual field in which

98 Pringle, The Master Plan, 311–13.

99 Kater interviewed Jankuhn in 1968 for his book Das ‘Ahnenerbe’ der SS, while Jankuhn
contacted Seeliger regarding Rolf Seeliger (ed.), Braune Universität: Deutsche
Hochschullehrer gestern und heute. Dokumentation mit Stellungsnahmen, 3 vols (Munich:
Verlag Rolf Seeliger 1966–8).
100 Letter from Jankuhn to Rolf Seeliger, 27 May 1968: ALM, Nachlass Jankuhn, GB 15.
24 Patterns of Prejudice

these scholars operated did not simply mark the boundaries of knowledge
production, but also prescribed a set of behaviours governing the way that
scholars dealt with one another. Thus, the extreme radicalization of
the archaeologists’ mission in the Second World War may have threatened
these relationships, but it did not wholly sever them. After the war, it was
these very ties that proved essential to restoring the discipline and unmaking
Nazi archaeology in post-war Germany.
The new image that we derive of archaeology during the 1930s and 1940s
thus illustrates some of the benefits of a ‘transnational historicization’. It
certainly does not answer all questions. We still need to know more about the
other side of the transnational relationship; future research might enquire
more deeply into the attitudes and responses of foreign scholars. Nor does it
completely rewrite the narrative. Domestic politics and institutions remain
important factors. But a consideration of the international domain adds an
indispensable layer and moves beyond a focus on the function of Nazi
organizations or a fixation on the wartime crimes that have been so carefully
studied in the last two decades. Instead, it allows us to assess the convergence
of politics, ideology and scholarship under National Socialism and to
understand the complex interplay of motivations both at home and abroad
that informed scholars’ choices. Finally, it points the way forward for the
historical study of other social sciences and humanities. Certainly, archae-
ology was not alone in collaborating beyond the nation’s borders both before
and during the Second World War. While many other disciplines may not
have entailed the same sorts of methods that sent archaeologists far afield,
very few could function without foreign ties or without regard for outside
opinion. The same dynamics at work in this case—international conferences,
cross-border collaborations, concern for foreign reputations and cooperation
with Nazi occupation goals—were at work in a number of other fields.
Consequently, even if archaeology was uniquely suited to a marriage of
ideology and scholarship, its experience raises questions for any discipline
whose members balanced their professional practices with the exceptional
demands of the Third Reich.

J. Laurence Hare is Assistant Professor of History at the University of

Arkansas. He is the author of Excavating Nations: Archaeology, Museums, and
the German-Danish Borderlands (forthcoming from University of Toronto
Press). Email: lhare@uark.edu