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| created | updated | title | tags | description | category | summary | start | end | location | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-07-23 | 2026-09-22 | Ahnenerbe |
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The Ahnenerbe was a Nazi German think tank that promoted itself as a research institute for the archaeological and cultural history of the Aryan race. | Foreign Government | The Ahnenerbe was a Nazi German organization founded by Heinrich Himmler in 1935, ostensibly to research the archaeological and cultural history of the Aryan race, that conducted pseudoscientific investigations including expeditions to Tibet and occult experiments. | 1935 | 1945 | Berlin, Germany |
The Ahnenerbe was a Nazi Germany think tank that operated as a research institute for the archaeological and cultural history of the Aryan race. It was founded by Heinrich Himmler, who served as its president and overlord.1
The Ahnenerbe's mission was to prove the superiority of the Nazi ideology by linking it to ancient Teutonic culture. To this end, it conducted a wide range of research, from archaeology and geology to more esoteric subjects like extrasensory perception, astrology, and map dowsing. The captured documents from the Ahnenerbe's research on these unusual subjects were, according to the writer Annie Jacobsen, a catalyst for the psychic arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States after World War II.1
Footnotes
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Jacobsen, Annie. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Little, Brown and Company, 2017. ↩︎