The Rhine River

Nazi Occult

David over at Barista has an excellent post about the Thule Society, an occult group to which Himmler belonged, and Nazi interest in exploring far flung "ancestors":

It was named after the mythical land of Hyperborea-Thule, which some of the society's devotees identified with Iceland and Greenland, said by them to be the remnants of the lost kingdom of Atlantis. Others claimed that the people of Thule had survived to become a subterranean super-race ...

The SS had another arm, the Ahnenerbe Forschungs und Lehrgemeinschaft ... . Founded in 1935 with Hitler's blessing, Himmler merged it with the SS two years later. The Ahnenerbe's overriding task was to provide scientific, anthropological and archaeological evidence to support the theories of the Thule Society and, in so doing, determine the origins of the 'Aryan' race ...

Research into Germanic peoples was not always so far flung. The Nazis used Westforschung (the cross-border study of the region west of the Rhine into Belgium, Netherlands, and northeastern France) to locate people who might be ethnically sympathetic to the Nazi cause. Only a handful of people they discovered were could collaborators.

posted by Nathanael @ 9:14 AM