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Photography in the Third Reich

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Christopher Webster

Myth

5. ‘Transmissions from an Extrasensory World’1

Ethnos and Mysticism in the Photographic Nexus

Christopher Webster

Volltext

  • 1 Erste Gesamtausstellung der Werke von Fidus zu seinem 60. Geburtstage (First complete exhibition of (...)
  • 2 From the frontispiece dedication to George Washington Green, in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ultima (...)

How far, since then, the ocean streams
Have swept us from that land of dreams,
That land of fiction and of truth,
The lost Atlantis of our youth!2

Introduction

  • 3 As noted in the introduction to this volume, I use ‘Ethnos’ as a summary term for this ethnically d (...)

1In contrast to the increasingly lurid scholarly research on the broader subject of the ‘Nazi Occult’ that has appeared since the end of the Second World War, the relationship to mythic occult currents and esoteric themes in the photography of Ethnos3 in National Socialist Germany has not been examined in any great depth. However, recent scholarship has confirmed that there were indeed powerful esoteric (as well as exoteric) occult currents that undoubtedly influenced the cultural mythos of National Socialist Germany. This influence included the photographic portfolios of Ethnos that were developed for propaganda and ideological purposes. Eric Kurlander’s definitive work Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (2017) explores this influence in Austria and Germany, arising as it did from a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century paranormal milieu, as well as how this influence continued to play a part in what Kurlander terms the ‘Supernatural Imaginary’ throughout the era of the Third Reich itself.

2As Kurlander explained:

  • 4 Eric Kurlander, Hitler’s Monsters, A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (New Haven: Yale Unive (...)

From cosmopolitan Berlin to Catholic Munich, from Saxony to Schleswig-Holstein thousands of Germans flooded to seances, astrologers, tarot readers, parapsychological experiments, occult bookstores and even esoteric schools and university courses… the sheer size and diversity of the occult marketplace in Germany and Austria suggests that it tapped into a mass consumer culture that was unique in depth and breadth when compared to other countries. Berlin and Munich alone were home to thousands of spiritualists, mediums and astrologers who appealed to tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of consumers.4

  • 5 See Joscelyn Godwin’s Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival (London: Thame (...)
  • 6 Eric Kurlander, ‘The orientalist roots of National Socialism?’, in Eric Kurlander, Joanne Miyang Ch (...)

3Kurlander’s intelligent work builds upon a slim but significant corpus of scholarly works that have dealt with this topic and its influence (or otherwise) on the origins and direction of National Socialism itself.5 Kurlander, who has written the preface to this volume, described how this influence in National Socialist Germany, this ‘Supernatural Imaginary’, was ‘… a space in which a range of popular esoteric, pseudo-scientific, folklorist, and mythological tropes might be exploited in the building of ideological consensus across a diverse Nazi Party and all the more eclectic German population’.6

4This chapter explores how the influence of nineteenth-century völkisch and occult currents on National Socialism percolated the mass-reproduced photographic images of Ethnos, with its framing of the German as ‘other’, and how the National Socialist syncretisation of myth, the occult, science, and art found a nexus in these photographic images. Additionally, as will be seen, the work of influential (if controversial) scholars such as Herman Wirth, and the powerful influence of political institutions such as Heinrich Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, also played a direct role in forming this visual manifestation of a race apart, with a divine origin in a mythical Urheimat in the ‘ultimate north’. The allusion to an occult myth of divine forebears in these photographically staged portrayals of the ‘Aryan’ added to and extended the celebration of a racial type in line with ‘race science’. Photographers of Ethnos, such as Erich Retzlaff or Hans Saebens, often incorporated typological approaches that included a metaphysical and esoteric basis. They used the machine-generated optical and chemical processes of photography to make work that was breaking the bounds of its empirical realm, in a kind of nationalist ‘staged’ photography, just as cinema did in the interwar period.

Occult Currents

5In his 1961 essay ‘The Mystical Origins of National Socialism’, George L. Mosse explored a ‘revolt against positivism’ that had formed part of the cultural and semi-religious prelude to the advent of the Third Reich. Part of the powerful attraction of this resistance to aspects of modernity was its setting against the backdrop of a struggle or searching for a national identity in opposition to an emergent globalism. The mysticism evident in the photography of Ethnos was effectively a manifestation in silver of a tradition arising from this ‘revolt against positivism’, with its emphasis on racial uniqueness. As Mosse further explains:

  • 7 George L. Mosse, ‘The Mystical Origins of National Socialism’, Journal of the History of Ideas 22: (...)

This German reaction to positivism became intimately bound up with a belief in nature’s cosmic life force, a dark force whose mysteries could be understood, not through science, but through the occult. An ideology based on such premises was fused with the glories of an Aryan past, and in turn, that past received a thoroughly romantic and mystical interpretation.7

  • 8 Mosse, ‘The Mystical Origins of National Socialism’ (1961), 84.
  • 9 The theory of a single origin of modern humanity from Africa (a monogenesis) had become the firmly (...)
  • 10 A dolmen is a single-chamber megalithic tomb.

6And when ariosophists like Guido von List had adopted this notion, they had further cemented the idea that: ‘Nature… the great divine guide and from her flowed the life-force. Whatever was closest to Nature would therefore be closest to the truth… the Aryan past was the most “genuine” manifestation of this inner force.’8 Not only was the Aryan hypothesised as being racially purer and culturally less ‘tainted’, it was very often intimated (and sometimes even overtly asserted) that these historically grounded people were even godlike, descendants of a Hyperborean homeland — a case of Ex Septentrione Lux — or the light from the North. This idea had been vociferously posited by racialist and völkisch thinkers in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in opposition to the Classical idea that all knowledge was Ex oriente lux (out of the east, light). Citing a polygenetic origin of humanity, that is, that humankind did not originate from a single common ancestral stock (such as the modern ‘Out of Africa’ theory),9 some publications in which this photography of Ethnos appeared insinuated that, in addition to the presentation of these country people as exemplars of their nation with ‘superior’ qualities, that they were in fact a race apart, having a divine origin in the ‘ultimate north, ’ a celestial Herrenrasse, a polar ‘Master Race’. For example, in the book Deutsches Volk — Deutsche Heimat (German People — German Homeland) (1935), produced by the NS-Lehrerbundes (the National Socialist teachers association), the image of a dolmen10

Fig. 5.1 Wilhelm Carl-Mardorf, reproduced in Deutsches Volk — Deutsche Heimat (German People — German Homeland) (Bayreuth: Gauverlag Bayerische Ostmark G.m.b.h., 1935), p. 32). Public domain.

Fig. 5.1 Wilhelm Carl-Mardorf, reproduced in Deutsches Volk — Deutsche Heimat (German People — German Homeland) (Bayreuth: Gauverlag Bayerische Ostmark G.m.b.h., 1935), p. 32). Public domain.
  • 11 ‘Ihr ursprüngliches Siedlungsgebiet waren die offenen küstengebiete an Ostsee und Nordsee. Hier tre (...)

7is reproduced with a text entitled ‘Das Werden des Volkes’ (The Becoming of the People/Folk). This use of Werden suggests, in the Nietzschean sense, the struggle of ‘becoming’. There are no visible links to modernity; rather the timeless presence of the stones, imposed against the sky, are presented to act as reminder of the great age and history of the German people. The burial chamber’s imposing presence is reinforced by the photographer’s use of a simple implied triangle composition. The accompanying text states: ‘Their original settlements were the open coastal areas of the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. Even today we encounter visible relics of their huge stone memorials. By the beginning of our own era, their settlements had advanced along the Rhine and Danube and reached far into the east of Europe.’11 Here, it is intimated, lie the first signs, the relics of the Urvolk (Germanic Ancestors), following their postdiluvian arrival on the shores of northern Europe at the start of their long journey east and south into their hinterland to ‘become’ the Germanic Volk.

  • 12 The earliest account of the history of ‘Atlantis’ is Plato’s late dialogue Critias (4th century BC) (...)
  • 13 Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, Secret Aryan Cults and their influence on Naz (...)
  • 14 Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism (1992), p. 209. Also, according to Goodrick-Clarke (p.  (...)
  • 15 Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism (1992), p. 13.

8The Atlantean myth12 had been particularly influential on, and was further popularised by, nineteenth-century occultists such as Helena Blavatsky. Blavatsky was a mystic, writer, and the co-founder of the Theosophical Society in 1875. Her two-volume work, The Secret Doctrine (1888), explored the origins of mankind; it linked to new scientific ideas such as evolution, but melded these ideas with mysticism. In particular, her occult exploration of ‘Root races’, the development of the Aryan race and the links to an Atlantean homeland are significant. Importantly for this discussion, these ideas filtered through to the völkisch pan-German mystics and occultists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who would create their own racial and spiritual philosophy, namely, Ariosophy (the wisdom of the Aryans). Ariosophists such as Guido von List and Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels adapted ideas from a broad range of influences, including Blavatsky’s Theosophy, and notions of Aryan racial history as espoused by figures such as Arthur de Gobineau, who had pronounced on the theory of the Aryan master race in his essay The Inequality of the Human Races (1855). In the Ariosophic musings of Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, for example, it was postulated that certain ‘pure’ lines, ‘… were the closest living descendants of the former god-men’13 whose earliest recorded ancestors ‘were the Atlanteans who had lived on a continent situated in the northern part of the Atlantic Ocean… ’ and that, ‘They were […] descended from the original divine Theozoa with electromagnetic sensory organs and superhuman powers.’14 Effectively, as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke has pointed out, the Social-Darwinian concept of a coming biological struggle for survival of the fittest was accepted and amalgamated with the notion of the inevitable dawn of a mystical and supreme root-race, the Aryan.15 Such occult, Ariosophist ideas bled into nationalist political thinking and were nurtured by the fratricidal apocalypse of the First World War.

9In his book Atlantis and the Cycles of Time, Joscelyn Godwin suggested that:

  • 16 Joscelyn Godwin, Atlantis and the Cycles of Time, Prophecies, Traditions, and Occult Revelations (R (...)

After the First World War Germany was in need of myths that would excuse its defeat and give its people hope for the future. Ariosophy lay readily to hand with its enticing myth of a Nordic-Aryan-Atlantean origin for the German folk… The recent war had proved how the inferior races, with whom the Aryans unwisely interbred, had become their enemies both from within, by polluting their blood, and from without.16

  • 17 Himmler’s belief in a celestial origin of the Aryan race had been confided to Zoologist and Ahnener (...)

10As curious as this notion of an alternative and even mystical origin of the ‘Aryan’ (or, as it came to be alternatively named, the Nordic-Atlantean) may seem, it was variously endorsed by figures at the highest levels of the NSDAP. The Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had himself stated ‘That the Nordic race did not evolve, but came directly down from heaven to settle the Atlantic continent’.17

  • 18 Herman Felix Wirth, Der Aufgang der Menschheit: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Religion, Symboli (...)
  • 19 Many scholars rejected the book as a forgery as it challenged historical orthodoxy, but the debate (...)

11Himmler’s interest in a Northern origin had been partly inspired by the research of the pre-historian Herman Wirth. Wirth was an eclectic and eccentric Dutch scholar whose research had led him to conclude that the Nordic race had originated on a now lost northern Atlantic continent. His 1928 book Der Aufgang der Menschheit: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Religion, Symbolik und Schrift der atlantisch-nordischen Rasse18 (Ascent of Mankind: Studies on the History of Religion, Symbolism and Texts of the Nordic-Atlantean Race) presented the notion that these so-called Nordic-Atlanteans had been the bearers of language, text, and civilisation to the world after a great cataclysm or climatic change had forced them to leave their northern homeland and migrate across the globe. When Wirth encountered the Oera Linda Book in 1922 he seemed to have discovered a treatise that confirmed his ideas. The Oera Linda Book was a supposedly ancient Frisian text whose assertions linked with Wirth’s notion of the Nordic-Atlantean origins of the Germanic peoples. Cornelis Over de Linden had revealed the manuscript in 1867, when he presented it for translation and publication in Dutch. The book chronicled the history of a Nordic-Atlantean people whose nation, Atland or Aldland (read: Atlantis), had been destroyed and who had subsequently settled in Frisia. This Nordic Urrasse had comprehensively influenced the historical and cultural development of Europe and had even been the originators of the Phoenician and Greek alphabets.19

12Wirth’s theory of a Nordic-Atlantean race was regarded as controversial even in its day, but his outputs were often very positively received. In a 1929 book review of Der Aufgang der Menschheit written for the journal the American Anthropologist, John M. Cooper explained:

  • 20 John M. Cooper, American Anthropologist 36: 4 (October-December 1934), 600–01. ‘the bearer of the h (...)

The writer’s general thesis is that pretty nearly everything worth while in the higher spiritual culture of the Occident harks back originally to blond, longheaded Nordics. Our historic Nordic race is the offspring of the arktisch-nordische or vor-nordische Urrasse that first appeared in the Tertiary on the then vast warm Arctic continent. These Proto-Nordics, with the coming of the glacial epoch, wandered perforce southward, into North America, “Atlantis,” and Asia…
… The whole work is planned to be issued in two parts… They may be cordially recommended to all the faithful who believe with Wirth that the Nordic race is ‘die Trägerin der höchsten Geistesveranlagung und die Urheberin der höchsten Geisteskultur.’20

13A 1933 article in the Dutch newspaper the Telegraaf explained Wirth’s Nordic-Atlantean hypothesis as an alternative (and potentially engaging) pagan belief system for the modern era. Under the banner ‘Actual Primordial Religion of the Aryans’, the subtitle dramatically states, ‘Polar region regarded the birthplace of the noble Nordic race’:

  • 21 ‘Prof. Wirth’s Heilbrenger, ’ Telegraaf (The Telegraph) 14 May 1933. Translation and source courtes (...)

In Germany, a daily increasing movement of people can be observed, that turns away from Christianity and wants to return to the original Germanic and Aryan gods. This movement had been moderate, since many felt uncomfortable worshiping Wodan again. But now, Wirth has come with his “Hailbringer” and it is under this banner, that the anti-Christian Germans can somewhat decently unite if they want…21

  • 22 Wirth produced a beautifully bound German translation in 1933: Die Ura Linda Chronik (The Oera Lond (...)
  • 23 Despite being largely derided as unreadable, Rosenberg’s 1930 book, Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahr (...)

14Although he came to vociferously reject the full conclusions of Wirth’s hypotheses — especially in light of Wirth’s endorsement of the Oera Linda Book,22 and Wirth’s ongoing patronage by Heinrich Himmler — Alfred Rosenberg, who considered himself to be the chief philosopher of the NSDAP, had also explicitly referred to an alternative origin of the Aryan race as Nordic-Atlanteans.23

  • 24 Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the 20th Century) (1934 edition), p. (...)

15Rosenberg himself had, like the Ariosophic mystic Lanz von Liebenfels, been inspired by reading Karl Georg Zschätzsch’s 1922 book Atlantis, die Urheimat der Arier (Atlantis, the Original Homeland of the Aryans). Consequently, in his book Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the Twentieth Century) Rosenberg speculated that: ‘… the ancient legend of Atlantis… appear [s] in a new light. It seems not impossible that where the waves of the Atlantic Ocean now crash and erode giant icebergs, once a blossoming continent rose out of the water, on which a creative race raised a mighty, wide-ranging culture, and sent its children out into the world as seafarers and warriors’.24

  • 25 Herrmann published a book to this effect, titled Unsere Ahnen und Atlantis: Nordische Seeherrschaft (...)

16Although the entire Atlantean hypothesis was still largely dismissed within academia, and amongst Nordicists generally (and Rosenberg certainly did not continue to espouse this view publicly, at least), Himmler did continue to entertain the idea and to consider the Atlantean hypothesis as a more than plausible one. Indeed, Himmler maintained a correspondence with one of the few academics to defend the thesis, the archaeologist and professor of the University of Berlin, Albert Herrmann.25 Furthermore, in a speech made to senior officials and SS officers on the occasion of Reinhard Heydrich’s funeral in 1942, the need for a mystical racial faith to replace Christianity was affirmed once more when Himmler referred directly to the ‘ancient one’ of the Oera Linda Book, Wralda:

  • 26 Heinrich Himmler, ‘Gedenkrede für Reinhard Heydrich, ’ English translation in Jeremy Noakes and Geo (...)

Today at Heydrich’s funeral I intentionally expressed in my oration from my deepest conviction a belief in God, a belief in fate, in the ancient one as I called him — that is the old Germanic word: Wralda. We shall once again have to find a new scale of values for our people: the scale of the macrocosm and the microcosm, the starry sky above us and the world in us, the world that we see in the microscope. The essence of these megalomaniacs, these Christians who talk of men ruling this world, must stop and be put back in its proper proportion… By rooting our people in a deep ideological awareness of ancestors and grandchildren we must once more persuade them that they must have sons… That is our mission as a nation on this earth. For thousands of years it has been the mission of this blond race to rule the earth and again and again to bring it happiness and culture.26

  • 27 Its full title eventually became the Forschungs und Lehrgemeinschaft des Ahnenerbe (the Research an (...)
  • 28 By 1937 the controversial and financially extravagant Wirth had effectively been ‘retired’ as it wa (...)
  • 29 As well as exploring pre-history and archaeology, other areas of research included (but were not li (...)
  • 30 For a scholarly examination of Himmler and his interest in the occult see, Stephen Flowers and Mich (...)
  • 31 For more on the seeming paradox between the National Socialist state’s efforts to determine what wa (...)

17In 1934, on Himmler’s invitation and in collaboration with Reichsbauernführer (Reich Peasant Leader) Richard Walther Darré, Wirth had been instrumental in the founding of the SS research institute known as the Ahnenerbe.27 Himmler’s Ahnenerbe was initially perceived as a research society of pre-history, and the intent was that it would pursue scholarly research into discovering the history, cultural foundations, and myths of the Germanic peoples. The Ahnenerbe’s remit expanded rapidly and after 1937 (when Wirth was effectively frozen out)28 became less of a völkisch research group and much more (ostensibly) rigorously academic under the guiding hand of Walther Wüst.29 However, with Himmler’s interests in esoterica and the occult seemingly unquenchable,30 and as he was an attentive and micromanaging chief, areas most academics considered pseudo-science continued to play a part in the broader programme of Himmler’s institute. Some areas that were examined included: ‘radiesthesia (‘pendulum dowsing’), cosmobiology, and biodynamic agriculture.’31 These were but a few of the areas of esoteric sciences often keenly endorsed and explored. Such interests extended to photographic propaganda, and fragmentary evidence exists that the Ahnenerbe supported (both ideologically and financially) the work of photographers engaged with these studies of a mythic Ethnos. An implicit framing of the ‘Germanic’ peasant in ‘supernatural’ terms, and often with links to an occultic Nordic-Atlantean hypothesis, demonstrably continued.

Urbild des Gottmenschen (Archetype of the God-Man)

  • 32 Erika Meyer, ‘Der blonde Junge, ’ (The Blond Youth) NS-Frauen-Warte 4 (1935–1936), 106 (author’s tr (...)

18The portrait of a young farmer by Erich Retzlaff, was reproduced in a 1935 issue of the NS-Frauen-Warte to accompany an article entitled ‘Der blonde Junge’ (The Blond Youth) by Erika Meyer. The closely cropped three-quarter profile of the blond youth accentuates a face that is both solemn and stoically resilient, with its intense out-of-the-frame stare. That intensity is intended to point to a deep passion and strength of belief. And Retzlaff’s image of youth accords with Meyer’s textual narrative accompanying the image: ‘Yes, my Heimat, my soil, my work! The blond boy feels it every day, that’s why his forehead is so solemnly serious. That’s why he speaks so little, that’s why his eyes have the brightness of joy and happiness: my Heimat — my work.’32

  • 33 For more on the peasant motif in German art and photography see Christian Weikop, ‘August Sander’s (...)

19As Figure 5.2 suggests, central to the photographic interpretation of a ‘mysticism’ in the photography of Ethnos was the figure of the farmer, the Bauer. In völkisch terms, the people of the countryside were regarded as exemplars of the nation as a whole, untainted by that perception of a cosmopolitan degeneracy and alienation postulated as being inherent to life in the city. This notion was central too to National Socialism, reviving as it did an old tradition of representations of the peasant where the peasant motif was presented as an anchor to blood-and-soil conceptions.33 In contrast to a metropolitan ethnic diversity and the supposed cultural corruption of the cities, the simple country folk, surviving with their traditions into the twentieth century, were presented as important representatives of a long tradition that stretched back into the mists of time and as such were the guardians of the purest spirit and blood of the race, with (notionally at least) a photographically framed aspect of holiness. In this photograph by Hans Saebens, for example, the young North Frisian girls from Föhr are pictured in their traditional communion costumes (see Fig. 5.3).

Fig. 5.2 Erich Retzlaff, Bauer aus der Marsch (A Farmer from the Fens) reproduced in NS-Frauen-Warte 4 (1935–1936), 106. Public domain.

Fig. 5.2 Erich Retzlaff, Bauer aus der Marsch (A Farmer from the Fens) reproduced in NS-Frauen-Warte 4 (1935–1936), 106. Public domain.

20Saebens has used a soft, flattering filter to create a diffused glow of light around the two subjects. The girls are both in profile with their mouths slightly open as if they have been captured in song or in prayer. The whole is framed like a Wagnerian, operatic motif of a hallowed interaction between ritual, history and tradition. In this framing of a the ‘supernatural imaginary, ’ it is irrelevant that the service is a Christian one; rather, the selection and framing suggests that these girls are seen as emanations of light, representatives of an ancient and mystical bloodline that bears the spark of both the divine and the eternal.

21As an example of this characterisation, the National Socialist Indo-Europeanist Walther Wüst elucidated in 1936:

  • 34 This was a speech Wüst gave to the opening of Pflegstätte für Germanenkunde (Promotional Centre for (...)

We are, as we can assert with pride based on the most recent, careful, racial research, ‘the oldest people on the earth.’ Our forefathers were farmers, established farmers in the noblest meaning of the word, who, even four thousand years prior to recorded history, had known how to plow and had managed highly developed animal husbandry and agriculture. Their lives took fullest expression in the cleared arable landscape surrounded by forests. That was their world, not the nerve-splitting, immoral city.34

  • 35 Respectively: Erich Retzlaff and Jakob Kneip, Das Antlitz des Alters (The Face of Age) (Düsseldorf: (...)

22Erich Retzlaff’s first series of physiognomic portraits of rural Germans was published in three volumes, beginning in 1930 with his Das Antlitz des Alters (The Face of Age), followed by the two-volume Deutsche Menschen (German People) in 1931.35 As ‘examples’ they were widely reproduced — for example, in the August 1932 picture-magazine Atlantis, these images were reproduced in full-page format and bore the caption: ‘from different regions of Germany, they show the German face still undistorted by urban civilization’.

Fig. 5.3 Hans Saebens, Konfirmandinnen aus Föhr (Confirmants from Föhr), vintage silver gelatin print, c.1936. Courtesy of Aberystwyth University, School of Art Museum and Galleries.

Fig. 5.3 Hans Saebens, Konfirmandinnen aus Föhr (Confirmants from Föhr), vintage silver gelatin print, c.1936. Courtesy of Aberystwyth University, School of Art Museum and Galleries.

Fig. 5.4 Erich Retzlaff, Hafenarbeiter aus Emden & Friesischer Fischer (Harbour Worker from Emden & Frisian Fishermen) reproduced in ‘Atlantis’, Heft 8, August 1932, pp. 486–87. Public domain.

Fig. 5.4 Erich Retzlaff, Hafenarbeiter aus Emden & Friesischer Fischer (Harbour Worker from Emden & Frisian Fishermen) reproduced in ‘Atlantis’, Heft 8, August 1932, pp. 486–87. Public domain.
  • 36 Remco Ensel, ‘Photography, Race and Nationalism in the Netherlands’, in Paul Puschmann and Tim Risw (...)

23In the post-1933 era, these collections of the physiognomic peasant type proliferated. Retzlaff, Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, and others produced further volumes of racial-physiognomic studies throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Received favourably by the National Socialists, these aestheticised photographic portfolios framed the subjects in these books in a different manner to that of the ‘scientific’ quantitative route of racial photography so typical of anthropological studies. According to the Dutch scholar Remco Ensel, when discussing correlating Dutch Heimat photographs from the same period, this ‘folksy’ photography differed from anthropological racial photography in that it ‘specialized in a semiotic interpretation of signs. A people’s character had to be read, not measured or calculated’.36 This was a science of looking and evaluating transmuted into art through the photographer’s lens, which was ultimately intended to underline a readable racial characteristic that was also representative of the Volksgeist or spirit of the nation.

  • 37 Van Heemskerck Düker worked for the Dutch Volksche Werkgemeenschap (People’s Working Community), a (...)
  • 38 Rolf Sachsse has suggested that it is likely that Retzlaff benefited from his relationship with his (...)

24An example of Himmler’s ideological and political involvement in the work of these photographers of Ethnos is evident from the fact that Erich Retzlaff had been offered support by Himmler’s Ahnenerbe. The support followed the development of a 1942 collaborative project proposed by Retzlaff and the Dutch photographer Willem F. van Heemskerck Düker37 with the Metzner Verlag.38 The proposal outlined a project centred on picturing the inhabitants of the ‘Germanic Netherlands’. Not only was strengthening links with other ‘Germanic’ nations considered important politically, especially if they were now an occupied territory, but there was also a view that, ideologically, the Nordic characteristics of the lower German region, and Scandinavia in particular, were indicative of a purer racial quality that was inherited from that mystical, progenitor race of beings who had, in Himmler’s view, come ‘down from heaven’.

  • 39 Machteld Nachenius was a photographer herself and her work had been included in Hamer publications (...)
  • 40 Dr Wilhelm Unverzagt was a member of the NSDAP and an Ahnenerbe researcher. He was responsible for (...)

25The 1942 meetings between Retzlaff and van Heemskerck Düker in Berlin were outlined in a report by Machteld Nachenius, van Heemskerck Düker’s secretary-assistant.39 Although the report is brief, it contains clues as to the supposed significance of the inhabitants of the northwestern ‘Germanic’ shoreline, as well as confirming further Ahnenerbe involvement with the consultation of the pre-historian, eminent archaeologist and Ahnenerbe associate Professor Wilhelm Unverzagt.40

26The patchy notes further outline the meetings with the publishers and Unverzagt, and the intentions of the project, especially with regards to the regions to be studied and the emphasis to be placed on those photographed:

Friday 10th April: We agreed in principle to have VHD write the text and to collaborate on the pictures. R. mentioned several locations in Sl. [Schleswig] Holstein and in Northern Friesland that were worth a visit…
Saturday 11th April: Meeting with Prof. Dr. Unverzagt, on which occasion more locations for Sl Holstein were discussed.

  • 41 Like van Heemskerck Düker, de Haas was a member of the SS and part of the Dutch Volksche Werkgemeen (...)
  • 42 Henk Feldmeijer was a Dutch National Socialist and leading member of the Volksche Werkgemeenschap ((...)
  • 43 The Stichting Uitgeverij Hamer (Hamer Publishing Foundation) was a proponent of the Greater German (...)

27Van Heemskerck Düker was already familiar with Retzlaff’s work before being invited to work with Retzlaff on this Ahnenerbe-supported project. The two photographers had already both featured in a text written and edited by Van Heemskerck Düker himself. That book was titled Friesland-Friezenland (Frisia-Frisia) and was published in 1942, so their working acquaintance was still fresh when the new project was suggested that same year. As well as the work of Erich Retzlaff, Friesland-Friezenland featured the work of the Germans Hans Retzlaff and Hans Saebens, as well as a range of Dutch photographers of Ethnos such as Nico de Haas and van Heemskerck Düker himself.41 Van Heemskerck Düker was, by 1942, also an SS-Onderstormleider (SS — Junior Assault Unit Leader) in the Dutch SS and, as part of the ‘Feldmeijer group’,42 he was involved in publications and promotional materials designed to reinforce the notion of a Greater Germany and a shared destiny. With its exploration of Dutch and German Friesland, Friesland-Friezenland photographically ‘demonstrated’ the racial, cultural, and chimerical links between the two nations and thus underlined the notion that the ‘Germanic’ was a concept that superseded modern political boundaries and, moreover, linked the two peoples to a ‘superior’ historical and mythic past. These earlier publications and projects were Ahnenerbe-funded via the Dutch National Socialist publisher the Hamer Uitgeverij.43

Fig. 5.5 Van eenen bloede: jongens uit Oost- en Westfriesland (Of One Blood: Youths from East and West Friesland) double page spread in W. F. van Heemskerck Düker, Friesland-Friezenland (Frisia-Frisia) (Den Haag: Hamer, 1942), pp. 156–57. Public domain.

Fig. 5.5 Van eenen bloede: jongens uit Oost- en Westfriesland (Of One Blood: Youths from East and West Friesland) double page spread in W. F. van Heemskerck Düker, Friesland-Friezenland (Frisia-Frisia) (Den Haag: Hamer, 1942), pp. 156–57. Public domain.

28The references to an occulted Nordic-Atlantean origin are even more marked in these Dutch Hamer publications with which van Heemskerck Düker was involved, both as an editor and as a photographer. The layout and content of the text further reinforces this concept. For example, despite having lost his position of honorary president in the Ahnenerbe by 1939, the Dutch Herman Wirth was still being lauded in these Dutch National Socialist photographic publications and his theories of the origins of the ‘Aryan’ in a northern Atlantis presented as axiomatic. In one such photographically illustrated text, Zinnebeelden in Nederland (Symbols in the Netherlands) (1940), it is stated:

  • 44 W. F. van Heemskerck Düker and H. J. van Houten, Zinnebeelden in Nederland (Symbols of the Netherla (...)

Professor Herman Wirth […] has emphatically and repeatedly pointed out, that we are wrong to assume that our race, with which the runes are so closely connected, is of Eastern origin. In his opinion, a Northern cultural origin is most probable and this would additionally explain the specific use of the solar cycle in the runes.44

  • 45 Eric Kurlander, Hitler’s Monsters (2017), p. 172.

29These photographs were signs of a racial consubstantiality that could be identified with, to create a national unity where, as Kurlander observed, ‘the individual considers himself part of an overreaching, godly essence that is seeking to unfold itself’.45

  • 46 Knut Hamsun, Growth of the Soil (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1917), Book 2, chapter 12, p. 252.

30The people whom these photographers selected to be fixed in place in picture-books, exhibitions, and illustrated magazines exemplified the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun’s peasant type, that is, someone who was ‘A tiller of the ground, body and soul; a worker on the land without respite. A ghost risen out of the past to point to the future, a man from the earliest days of cultivation, a settler in the wilds, nine-hundred years old, and, withal, a man of the day.’46 The figure of the autochthonous peasant, framed as an archetype, is not presented as an individual but rather as a representation of something primordial from the National Myth. The people are offered to the viewer without being named, rather, as in the physiognomic paradigm of the era, they are titled with their occupation and location. These photo-stories, these series of images collected together in the new medium of the photo-book, were designed to be encountered, identified with and read; presenting an idealised entry point to this National Myth.

31For example, SS-Obersturmbannführer (SS-Senior Assault Unit Leader) Dr Franz Riedweg wrote in the concluding note to Lendvai-Dircksen’s book Flandern (1942):

  • 47 Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, Das Germanische Volksgesicht, Flandern (The German Face, Flanders) (Bayreuth (...)

We turn to man, not, as in the past, as a physiological organism, as an intellectual carrier or as a creature burdened with guilt, but to man as a creature related to God and the founder of eternal values. His face is for us the mirror of his being. From the gaze, from the smile, from the play of his movements comes the divinity of thought and the power of mind. From the clarity of the forehead shines the light of reason.
In this series we look at the face of the people, that is, we turn to those people in whom the ancient currents of race, blood and national traditions are unbroken and visibly alive.47

  • 48 Carl Gustav Jung, ‘Essay on Wotan’ [First published as ‘Wotan’], Neue Schweizer Rundschau (New Swis (...)
  • 49 Quoted in James A. Hall, Jungian Dream Interpretation: A Handbook of Theory and Practice (Toronto: (...)

32These images of Ethnos produced in the National Socialist state were a visual representation of a time when, according to the eminent psychologist Carl Jung, the spirit of Wotan was awakening: ‘a god has taken possession of the Germans and their house is filled with a “mighty rushing wind.”’48 When navigating this contentious web of identity, history, and belonging, Jung, a close contemporary of the photographers who made this work, elucidated on the milieu and spirit of Germany in the 1930s that relates to this manifestation of a mythic photography of Ethnos. According to Jung, archetypal images (or primordial images) occur as ‘… universal patterns or motifs which come from the collective unconscious… the basic content of religions, mythologies, legends and fairy tales.’49 Jung’s exposition on the role of the archetype is relevant to this photography, in which the figures that were photographed as those most ‘ordinary folk’ are transformed and representative of archetypal imprints, which represented the reawakening of the German to a lineal thread that extended back into the dim past. Although illustrative of a variety of ages, occupations, and regions, these images often depicted a range of what are clearly intended to be representations of archetypal figures. There is the Volk mother, the traditional representation of the childbearing, working woman who is perhaps one of the most powerful of these archetypes and which was a representation of the literal future of the nation.

Fig. 5.6 Hans Saebens, Schaumburg Lippe Bückerburgerinnen (Bückerburg Woman from Schaumburg Lippe) vintage silver gelatin print, c.1936. Courtesy of Aberystwyth University, School of Art Museum and Galleries.

Fig. 5.6 Hans Saebens, Schaumburg Lippe Bückerburgerinnen (Bückerburg Woman from Schaumburg Lippe) vintage silver gelatin print, c.1936. Courtesy of Aberystwyth University, School of Art Museum and Galleries.

Fig. 5.7 Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, Ostpreußische Frauen (East-Prussian Women) reproduced in ‘NS-Frauen-Warte’, Heft 1, 1 Juli, 1939, pp. 14–15. Public domain.

Fig. 5.7 Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, Ostpreußische Frauen (East-Prussian Women) reproduced in ‘NS-Frauen-Warte’, Heft 1, 1 Juli, 1939, pp. 14–15. Public domain.
  • 50 Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, Ostpreußische Frauen (East-Prussian Women), NS-Frauen-Warte, 1 (July 1939), (...)

33Along with this pagan, fertile representation of the Madonna and child, females of different ages are also widely represented. Figure 5.7, for example, is a double page spread from a 1939 edition of the journal NS-Frauen-Warte featuring the work of the photographer Erna Lendvai-Dircksen. It contains several images of elderly women (the crone archetype) and a young girl (the maiden) to illustrate the point. As was often the case, significant quotations were placed alongside the images (in this case a traditional lullaby) all in a Fraktur script. Thus, the modernity of this glossy, photographically illustrated magazine is fused with the traditions of the past, just as the ‘modern’ photographs represent ‘traditional’ female roles. In the accompanying text, Lendvai-Dircksen suggests that the faces of these women might be read as indicative of humour, struggle, and hardship and that these faces are ‘a poem of the nature of the tribe’.50 So past, present, and future are joined together in a linked chain of a traditional femininity.

34Visual representations of the male were treated similarly and included the hero, the youth, and the wise old man. As in the NS-Frauen-Warte pages, the images and text in an example from the journal Volk und Rasse (see Fig. 5.8) represent the ‘warrior’, two images of Waffen-SS soldiers ‘in the field’.

  • 51 Otto Kolar, Waffen-SS im felde (Waffen-SS in the Field), Volk und Rasse, 2 (February 1942), unpagin (...)

35Like the NS-Frauen-Warte examples, the journal Volk und Rasse provided archaism — with its fraktur text — accentuated alongside the modernity of its photographic reproductions and magazine format. Similarly, these soldiers are presented as archetypal warriors or knights; one holds the harness of a horse and no modern weaponry is evident. The men are reproduced in dramatic profile, their physiognomic traits evident, situated on the page above two happy children who play in glowing sunshine. The legend reads: ‘The goal of all struggle is to secure a living space for our children’.51

36But these journals would go even further in attempting to anchor the sense of a mythic tribal consciousness. In a 1939 NS-Frauen-Warte article (see Fig. 5.9), the historical legacy of the Germanic peoples is once more extolled in a modern context. Entitled Vorgeschichte und Gegenwart or ‘pre-history and the present’, the article is filled with quotes from the Edda and illustrated with photographs of modern Germans dressed in the ‘attire’ of the bronze-age German.

  • 52 Joachim Benecke, ‘Vorgeschichte und Gegenwart’ (Pre-history and the Present), NS-Frauen-Warte 15 (J (...)

37The text describes the historic and ongoing legacy of the Nordic race and how National Socialism had reawakened their power to grasp a future that awaited them, whilst reminding the Volk of their ancestral legacy.52 These modern Germans were posed in historic costumes as having transcended time and as representative of perfect modern replicas of an ancient current — as their racial heritage was ‘untainted’. So, modernity and the new political consensus were melded perfectly and linked to an ongoing tradition of community, history, and myth.

38These photographic motifs, played out as they were in these popular and easily received formats such as magazines, were intended to elicit a recognition of a flowing collective unconscious that, once realised, would stream through and unite the Volk in a primeval joining and elicit a powerful national awakening. National Socialist ideologues and propagandists, like their predecessors in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century völkisch mise-en-scène, recognised the unifying power of myth as well as the powerful influence of occult thinking on contemporary Germans, and thus promoted (and exploited) it as part of their overarching cultural programme.

Fig. 5.8 Otto Kolar, Waffen-SS im felde (Waffen-SS in the Field) reproduced in Volk und Rasse, Heft 2 February 1942, frontispiece. Public domain.

Fig. 5.8 Otto Kolar, Waffen-SS im felde (Waffen-SS in the Field) reproduced in Volk und Rasse, Heft 2 February 1942, frontispiece. Public domain.

Fig. 5.9 Joachim Benecke, Vorgeschichte und Gegenwart (Pre-History and the Present), ‘NS-Frauen-Warte’, Heft 15 January 1939, pp. 458–59. Public domain.

Fig. 5.9 Joachim Benecke, Vorgeschichte und Gegenwart (Pre-History and the Present), ‘NS-Frauen-Warte’, Heft 15 January 1939, pp. 458–59. Public domain.
  • 53 In a later (post-war) correspondence, Jung further commented on the desirability of the racial arch (...)
  • 54 Pepper Stetler, Stop Reading! Look! Modern Vision and the Weimar Photographic Book (Ann Arbor: Univ (...)

39The photographic portfolios of the likes of Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, Erich Retzlaff, and others, present motifs infused with a mytho-spiritual edge, an echo of Jung’s suggestion of Wotan’s awakening.53 Unlike the ‘unfixed physiognomy of the sitters’ in Helmar Lerski’s Weimar-era Köpfe des Alltags (Everyday Heads), these collections provide a mythification that will ‘shape the sitters as heroic icons of an imagined German identity.’54 Such photographic constructs, therefore, also provided a marker of exclusion for those who fell outside of this narrative.

Conclusion

  • 55 Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Straus & Giroux, 1980), pp. 86–87. Sontag’s essay (...)
  • 56 Carolyn Emerick, ‘Cultural Mythos & the Return of the Ethnikos, ’ Arktos Journal (posted online 29  (...)

40In 1974, Susan Sontag wrote a critique of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1973 photographic book The Last of the Nuba (German title Die Nuba). Sontag’s essay ‘Fascinating Fascism’ posited Riefenstahl’s post-war volume as representative of, as she termed it, a ‘Fascist aesthetic’. According to Sontag, Riefenstahl ‘interprets the Nuba as a mystical people with an extraordinarily developed artistic sense… [overcoming] the challenge and ordeal of the elemental, the primitive… epics of achieved community, in which triumph over everyday reality is achieved by ecstatic self-control and submission.’55 However, it is certainly this element of the mystical, the notion of the ‘uncorrupted’ (by modernity), something that links tradition and the present, a striving for perfection and a danger of immersion in a globalizing world that links Riefenstahl’s post-war project with her innovative (and now notorious) film work during National Socialism, as well as being characteristic of the work of her pre-1945 German contemporaries who were photographing the autochthonous peasant. Indeed, such notions also continue to be expounded by those considered to be of the European New Right and of the neo-folk and racial pagan scene today. As folklorist Carolyn Emerick recently suggested, ‘We can see that mythos and ethnos had always gone hand in hand as part of one holistic whole state of being before universalist ideology began working to sever the “ethnikos” from their folk identity.’56

41Modern forms of communication, such as photography, were masterfully manipulated to promote the image and ideas of National Socialism through visual propaganda, such as the photography under discussion here. Photography was just one element in that larger picture, but it was a significant one. Many photographers were employed in building up a picture of an energetic and healthy nation steeped in tradition and this mystical Ethnos, which stood outside of ‘scientific’ typological studies. These photographers set about to manifest visually a spirit of optimism and change running through their country, a visual story of a revolution in living and being, but contextualised in relation to tradition, to a half-glimpsed (but ever present) occultic myth and to the ‘Heimat’. It was in sharp contrast to the representative and utilitarian lot of the ‘revealed’ individual framed in much of the physiognomic work of the Weimar era. Lerski’s Köpfe des Alltags had exposed (according to Pepper Stetler),

  • 57 Stetler, Stop Reading! Look! (2015), p. 181.

… the melancholic fate of the individual under this system of modern vision. Ultimately, it articulates the unsettling death of the individual in the face of Weimar’s desperate craze for visual legibility and a fixed system of identity. Rather than providing such a system, the ephemeral faces of Köpfe des Alltags uncannily remind us of what was lost in the heady alliance of modernity and physiognomy during the Weimar Republic.57

42The dramatic pictorial constructions of physiognomic Ethnos that were presented in the Third Reich era attempted to showcase this supposed newfound ‘health and vitality’ and reverse the ‘unsettling death’ by visually formalising a link between Volk and myth, a metaphysical, occultic convergence through photography. The physically strong peasants labouring on the land, the close observation of the face and body, the traditional costume or activity, all staged a picture of a healthy, vibrant culture, of a seemingly unified national body. Photography became a decisive part of this narrative of a nation renewed. The photographers of Ethnos who were making these images (for example, Hans Retzlaff, Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, Erich Retzlaff, Otto Kolar, Hemke-Winterer, Friedrich Franz Bauer, etc.) honed their approach to show a people who were healthy and vital. What’s more, these images were often imbued with a romantic mysticism, a closeness to the earth, to the soil of the progenitor ‘ancestors’. These atavistic pictures are a photographic theatre. Although the people in the photographs are ordinary people, farmers and people (in the main) of the countryside, they are also actors on the photographer’s stage. This was not an uncommon practice in the 1930s as the genre of documentary photography evolved. The ‘story’ was often told using ‘real’ actors.

  • 58 Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (New York (...)

43These were spaces where the supernatural might be framed and thus suggested, in a ‘real-world’ setting, like the metaphorical and staged creative photography associated with modernism. These German photographers, were using their medium as a catalyst, as a visual philosopher’s stone, to create an imaginative transmutation in the mind of the viewer and introduce ‘a mythicized Germany… sacralised, restored as homeland, re-rooted, founded on a new order, united within a single community, healed of sickness, and purged of pollution.’58 Whether or not all of these photographers themselves fully believed in the myth that they were framing is unknown.

  • 59 Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (Ne (...)

44The notion of a mythic Nordic-Atlantean progenitor race also presented Germany’s Reichsführer-SS with an opportunity of seizing upon and proclaiming, a radical and a unique racial foundation for the Germanic peoples. This photography formed part of a corpus of visual evidence of a para-historical provenance of those ‘purer-blooded’ Germanic peoples, coloured as such readings were, with völkisch, occult notions of the Aryan as ‘god-man’. With the financial and material support from Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, even ‘lowly’ photography came to play a part in this process of alluding to a crypto-history of the Germans as descendants of a ‘holy’ progenitor race from a Nordic Atlantis. As the historian and specialist in Western Esotericism Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke has stated, this foundational myth of an Aryan descent from a Nordic Atlantis; ‘… reflected a utopian imperialism for those who bewailed the impotence and demoralization of the Weimar republic. Pessimists and opponents of the present were drawn to [the] idea that a revival of this Thuata-Atlantean culture would signal the rebirth of the Germanic race’.59

45To look upon these völkisch photographic folios, therefore, is to be presented with a performative, cataphoric mirror of silver, framed within an occult mythos. The intended audience of the illustrated books and magazines was expected to identify with the photographs, to recognise that they were linked: it is an identitarian process. The aim was to reinforce a sense of connectedness to an organic society, to recognise a cultural and racial unity against the growing power of the forces of globalism (and the approaching struggle for existence). National Socialist ideologues, like their nationalist predecessors in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century völkisch mise-en-scène, exploited the power of an occult myth and thus integrated it into the overarching cultural programme of the regime. The mythlore, the crypto-history, embedded in these photographs, suggested that the origin of those people in the photographs (and by extension the reader or viewer who identified with them) had an alternative, ‘holy’, and unique origin in a primordial homeland distinct from all the other races of man. For those sympathetically nationalist photographers, their interpretation of these mystical ideas was coloured by such a völkisch interpretation, particularly in their photographs of the Bauer. Whilst employing the supposedly objective eye of the camera to produce the racial-physiognomic photograph, these portrayals also attempted to point to something beyond classification, and beyond these social and cultural conditions of the time. Their portraits of the peasant were certainly ideological in that they framed their sitters as representatives of an idealised and unsullied Germanic blood stock, but simultaneously they are meant to be suggestive of the spiritual. They attempt to point to the numinous. The mythos of these photographs was that this ‘singular’ race had come from Ultima Thule, Atlantis, Hyperborea… and as such they carried a divine spark unique to their blood. This suggestion was intended to be liberating, so that even the lowliest worker was framed as an aristocrat of humankind, the much vaunted Übermensch (Superman) with the earthly world as his deserved prize.

Anmerkungen

1 Erste Gesamtausstellung der Werke von Fidus zu seinem 60. Geburtstage (First complete exhibition of the works of Fidus for his 60th birthday) (Woltersdorf bei Erkner: Fidus-Verlag, 1928), p. 9.

2 From the frontispiece dedication to George Washington Green, in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ultima Thule (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1880).

3 As noted in the introduction to this volume, I use ‘Ethnos’ as a summary term for this ethnically driven approach to (in particular) the autochthonous peasant and other ‘people of the soil’.

4 Eric Kurlander, Hitler’s Monsters, A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 14.

5 See Joscelyn Godwin’s Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), Thomas Hakl’s Unknown Sources: National Socialism and the Occult (Sequim: Holmes Publishing Group, 2005) and the classic work of Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany, 1890–1935 (New York: New York University Press, 1992). In addition, there have been, over the last two decades, a growth of scholarly studies focussed on esoterica in toto in academia, as well as academically grounded research societies such as the European Society for Studies in Western Esotericism, the American Association for the Study of Esotericism, and the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Esotericism, amongst others. Added to these are the growing number of postgraduate study courses and academic chairs related to Western and Eastern esotericism (for example at the University of Amsterdam, the École pratique des hautes études, Rice University Houston, the University of Groningen and, until 2014, the Essex Centre for the Study of Western Esotericism, led by the late Goodrick-Clarke).

6 Eric Kurlander, ‘The orientalist roots of National Socialism?’, in Eric Kurlander, Joanne Miyang Cho, Douglas T. McGetchin, eds, Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 164–65.

7 George L. Mosse, ‘The Mystical Origins of National Socialism’, Journal of the History of Ideas 22: 1 (January-March, 1961), 81.

8 Mosse, ‘The Mystical Origins of National Socialism’ (1961), 84.

9 The theory of a single origin of modern humanity from Africa (a monogenesis) had become the firmly accepted scientific hypothesis by the mid-2000s. It was, however, quite quickly challenged, especially as more and more sophisticated DNA evidence emerged. Some scientists now conclude that humankind’s origins are much more complex and, speculatively at least, perhaps do indeed derive from separate emergences in different regions. See for example, Nikhil Swaminathan ‘Is the Out of Africa Theory Out?’ Scientific American, 8 August, 2007, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-out-of-africa-theory-out/

10 A dolmen is a single-chamber megalithic tomb.

11 ‘Ihr ursprüngliches Siedlungsgebiet waren die offenen küstengebiete an Ostsee und Nordsee. Hier treffen wir noch heute als äusserlich sichtbare Zeugen ihrer gewaltigen steinernen Grabdenkmäler. Bis zum Beginn unserer Zeitrechnung waren ihre Siedlungen bis an Rhein und Donau vorgedrungen und reichten weit hinein in den europäischen Osten.’ Reichsamtsleitung des NS-Lehrerbundes, Deutsches Volk — Deutsches Heimat (Bayreuth: Gauverlag Bayerische Ostmark G.m.b.h., 1935), p. 32.

12 The earliest account of the history of ‘Atlantis’ is Plato’s late dialogue Critias (4th century BC) in which the philosopher discusses the location, history, and power of the Atlantean island.

13 Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, Secret Aryan Cults and their influence on Nazi Ideology (New York: New York University Press, 1992), p. 97.

14 Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism (1992), p. 209. Also, according to Goodrick-Clarke (p. 262), Lanz von Liebenfels’ belief in the Atlantean origin had been inspired by the works of two specific post-WW1 books: Karl Georg Zschätzsch, Atlantis, die Urheimat der Arier (Atlantis the Original Homeland of the Aryans) (Berlin: Arier-Verlag, 1922) and Hermann Wieland, Atlantis, Edda und Bibel (Atlantis, Edda and Bible) (Weissenburg: Gross-deutscher Verlag, 1925).

15 Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism (1992), p. 13.

16 Joscelyn Godwin, Atlantis and the Cycles of Time, Prophecies, Traditions, and Occult Revelations (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2011), p. 124.

17 Himmler’s belief in a celestial origin of the Aryan race had been confided to Zoologist and Ahnenerbe expedition leader Dr Ernst Schäfer, who revealed the details of this discussion with Himmler when Schäfer was interrogated after the war. ‘The Activities of Dr. Ernst Schäfer, Tibet Explorer and Scientist with SS-sponsored Scientific Institutes’, Headquarters United States Forces European Theater, Military Intelligence Service Centre, 12.02.1946, NARA, RG238, M1270/27 (quoted in Heather Pringle, The Master Plan, Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust (New York: Hyperion, 2006), p. 150).

18 Herman Felix Wirth, Der Aufgang der Menschheit: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Religion, Symbolik und Schrift der atlantisch-nordischen Rasse (Ascent of Mankind: Studies on the History of Religion, Symbolism and Texts of the Nordic-Atlantean Race) (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1928).

19 Many scholars rejected the book as a forgery as it challenged historical orthodoxy, but the debate still rages, and the modern proponents of its veracity continue to make the case for a thorough re-examination. For more information about the ongoing translation and research into this document see the blog: Saved From the Flood — Oera Linda Studies, http://fryskednis.blogspot.com/

20 John M. Cooper, American Anthropologist 36: 4 (October-December 1934), 600–01. ‘the bearer of the highest spiritual predisposition and the creator of the highest spiritual culture.’

21 ‘Prof. Wirth’s Heilbrenger, ’ Telegraaf (The Telegraph) 14 May 1933. Translation and source courtesy of Jan Ott, Saved From the Flood — Oera Linda Studies, 14 February 2016, https://fryskednis.blogspot.com/2016/02/

22 Wirth produced a beautifully bound German translation in 1933: Die Ura Linda Chronik (The Oera Londa Chronicle) (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang GMBH, 1933).

23 Despite being largely derided as unreadable, Rosenberg’s 1930 book, Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (Myth of the Twentieth Century) had a significant reach, with the book selling well over a million copies and consequently having a broad influence: Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts. Eine Wertung der seelisch-geistigen Gestaltenkämpfe unserer Zeit (The Myth of the 20th Century. A Maluation of the Mental-Spiritual Struggles of Our Time) München: Hoheneichen-Verlag, 1930).

24 Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the 20th Century) (1934 edition), p. 24.

25 Herrmann published a book to this effect, titled Unsere Ahnen und Atlantis: Nordische Seeherrschaft von Skandinavien bis Nordafrika (Our Ancestors and Atlantis: Nordic Maritime Domination from Scandinavia to North Africa) (Berlin: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1934). For more on the alternative origins of the Germans and the National Socialist academic position see Johann Chapoutot, Greeks, Romans, Germans: How the Nazis Usurped Europe’s Classical Past (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2017).

26 Heinrich Himmler, ‘Gedenkrede für Reinhard Heydrich, ’ English translation in Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds, Nazism, 1919–1945, Vol. 2, State, Economy and Society 1933–1939 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), p. 304. Original German: ‘Rede vor den Oberabschnittsführern und Hauptamtschefs im Haus der Flieger in Berlin am 9. 6. 1942 (Gedenkrede für Reinhard Heydrich) (Speech to the upper section leaders and chief officers in the House of Airmen in Berlin on June 9, 1942, memorial speech for Reinhard Heydrich), ’ U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD, T-175, Roll 90, Frames 2664–2685; reproduced in Bradley F. Smith and Agnes F. Peterson, eds, Heinrich Himmler: Geheimreden 1933 bis 1945 und andere Ansprachen (Heinrich Himmler: Secret speeches 1933 to 1945 and other speeches) (Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen, 1974), pp. 159–61.

27 Its full title eventually became the Forschungs und Lehrgemeinschaft des Ahnenerbe (the Research and Teaching Community of the Ancestral Heritage).

28 By 1937 the controversial and financially extravagant Wirth had effectively been ‘retired’ as it was felt that the Ahnenerbe needed to become (ostensibly at least) more academically grounded and ‘scientific’.

29 As well as exploring pre-history and archaeology, other areas of research included (but were not limited to) anthropology, meteorology, philology, nuclear science, musicology, and folklore.

30 For a scholarly examination of Himmler and his interest in the occult see, Stephen Flowers and Michael Moynihan, The Secret King: The Myth and Reality of Nazi Occultism (Los Angeles & Waterbury Center, VT: Feral House & Dominion Press, 2007).

31 For more on the seeming paradox between the National Socialist state’s efforts to determine what was (useful) ‘scientific occultism’ and what was ‘occult charlatanry’ (and therefore repressed), and the strange mélange explored by Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, see Eric Kurlander, ‘The Nazi Magicians’ Controversy: Enlightenment, “Border Science,” and Occultism in the Third Reich, ’ Central European History 48: 4 (December, 2015).

32 Erika Meyer, ‘Der blonde Junge, ’ (The Blond Youth) NS-Frauen-Warte 4 (1935–1936), 106 (author’s translation).

33 For more on the peasant motif in German art and photography see Christian Weikop, ‘August Sander’s Der Bauer and the Pervasiveness of the Peasant Tradition’, Tate Papers 19 (Spring 2013), https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/19/august-sanders-der-bauer-and-the-pervasiveness-of-the-peasant-tradition

34 This was a speech Wüst gave to the opening of Pflegstätte für Germanenkunde (Promotional Centre for German Studies) in 1936, quoted in Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 191.

35 Respectively: Erich Retzlaff and Jakob Kneip, Das Antlitz des Alters (The Face of Age) (Düsseldorf: Pädagogischer Verlag g.m.b.h., 1930); Erich Retzlaff, Die von der Scholle (Those of the Earth) (Göttingen: Verlag der Deuerlichschen Buchhandlung o.J., 1931), and Erich Retzlaff, Menschen am Werk (People and Work) (Göttingen: Verlag der Deuerlichschen Buchhandlung o.J., 1931).

36 Remco Ensel, ‘Photography, Race and Nationalism in the Netherlands’, in Paul Puschmann and Tim Riswick, eds, Building Bridges. Scholars, History and Historical Demography. A Festschrift in Honor of Professor Theo Engelen (Nijmegen: Valkhof Pers, 2018), p. 254.

37 Van Heemskerck Düker worked for the Dutch Volksche Werkgemeenschap (People’s Working Community), a cultural department of the SS and the Dutch arm of the Ahnenerbe.

38 Rolf Sachsse has suggested that it is likely that Retzlaff benefited from his relationship with his lover Regina Dorsch (Verlag Otto Beyer) who made use of her influence in publishing to secure valuable contracts for Retzlaff with the Metzner Verlag. Certainly, Retzlaff was involved with at least three book projects with the Metzner Verlag between 1943 and 1944 (Rolf Sachsse, personal communication, August 2014).

39 Machteld Nachenius was a photographer herself and her work had been included in Hamer publications such as Friesland-Friezenland (Frisia-Frisia) (Willem Frederik van Heemskerck Düker and Sytse Jan van der Molen, Friesland-Friezenland (Frisia-Frisia) (Den Haag: Hamer, 1942)). As Machteld noted, ‘The Ahnenerbe offers 100 Isopan F, colour film and a Leica model IIIa.’ These notes (translated from the Dutch) are from a 1942 report by Machteld Nachenius the secretary of van Heemskerck Düker, they were made on their journey to Berlin (7–12 April 1942) and are provided here courtesy of Dr Remco Ensel (personal communication, 12 August 2013).

40 Dr Wilhelm Unverzagt was a member of the NSDAP and an Ahnenerbe researcher. He was responsible for a number of archaeological digs in the Balkans under the supervision of the Ahnenerbe managing director Wolfram Sievers and Ahnenerbe archaeologist Herbert Jankuhn, in a project Himmler termed Totalerforschung (complete research). Retzlaff was demonstrably active in the Balkans at the time Unverzagt and Jankuhn were there, and Retzlaff certainly made physiognomic studies of Caucasus peoples, some of which I have recently viewed and the negatives of which I was able to add to the archive of Aberystwyth University’s School of Art Gallery and Museum in 2015. I have yet to establish whether or not Retzlaff was directly involved in the Ahnenerbe project in the Caucasus. However, given the difficulty of civilians travelling during the war, and with his confirmed previous Ahnenerbe sponsorship, it does seem exceedingly likely.

41 Like van Heemskerck Düker, de Haas was a member of the SS and part of the Dutch Volksche Werkgemeenschap (People’s Working Community). Notably, de Haas was one of only a very few Dutch nationals who personally received the highly prized SS honour ring from Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.

42 Henk Feldmeijer was a Dutch National Socialist and leading member of the Volksche Werkgemeenschap (People’s Working Community).

43 The Stichting Uitgeverij Hamer (Hamer Publishing Foundation) was a proponent of the Greater German Reich and the publishing house was set up with a contributory donation by Himmler himself.

44 W. F. van Heemskerck Düker and H. J. van Houten, Zinnebeelden in Nederland (Symbols of the Netherlands) (Den Haag: Hamer, 1940), p. 14.

45 Eric Kurlander, Hitler’s Monsters (2017), p. 172.

46 Knut Hamsun, Growth of the Soil (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1917), Book 2, chapter 12, p. 252.

47 Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, Das Germanische Volksgesicht, Flandern (The German Face, Flanders) (Bayreuth: Gauverlag Bayreuth, 1942).

48 Carl Gustav Jung, ‘Essay on Wotan’ [First published as ‘Wotan’], Neue Schweizer Rundschau (New Swiss Review), n.s. III (March 1936), 657–69. English translation by Barbara Hannah in Essays on Contemporary Events (London: Kegan Paul, 1947), pp. 1–16, http://www.philosopher.eu/others-writings/essay-on-wotan-w-nietzsche-c-g-jung/

49 Quoted in James A. Hall, Jungian Dream Interpretation: A Handbook of Theory and Practice (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1983), p. 120.

50 Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, Ostpreußische Frauen (East-Prussian Women), NS-Frauen-Warte, 1 (July 1939), 14–15.

51 Otto Kolar, Waffen-SS im felde (Waffen-SS in the Field), Volk und Rasse, 2 (February 1942), unpaginated frontispiece.

52 Joachim Benecke, ‘Vorgeschichte und Gegenwart’ (Pre-history and the Present), NS-Frauen-Warte 15 (January 1939), pp. 456–59.

53 In a later (post-war) correspondence, Jung further commented on the desirability of the racial archetype when discussing the problems facing Western man in the globalist era. Jung wrote, ‘He can only discover himself when he is deeply and unconditionally related to some, and generally related to a great many, individuals with whom he has a chance to compare, and from whom he is able to discriminate himself.’ C. G. Jung to Miguel Serrano, Zurich, 14 September 1960; in M. Serrano, Jung & Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 84.

54 Pepper Stetler, Stop Reading! Look! Modern Vision and the Weimar Photographic Book (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), p. 165.

55 Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Straus & Giroux, 1980), pp. 86–87. Sontag’s essay goes on to ‘position’ Riefenstahl’s work as an extension of the work that Riefenstahl created during the Third Reich. Riefenstahl’s post-war re-imagining of her creative career as being that of an artist whose work was ‘used’ by the state and over which she had no control is critiqued by Sontag.

56 Carolyn Emerick, ‘Cultural Mythos & the Return of the Ethnikos, ’ Arktos Journal (posted online 29 October 2018), https://arktos.com/2018/10/29/cultural

57 Stetler, Stop Reading! Look! (2015), p. 181.

58 Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 140.

59 Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2003), p. 130.

Abbildungsverzeichnis

Titel Fig. 5.1 Wilhelm Carl-Mardorf, reproduced in Deutsches Volk — Deutsche Heimat (German People — German Homeland) (Bayreuth: Gauverlag Bayerische Ostmark G.m.b.h., 1935), p. 32). Public domain.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/18418/img-1.jpg
Datei image/jpeg, 66k
Titel Fig. 5.2 Erich Retzlaff, Bauer aus der Marsch (A Farmer from the Fens) reproduced in NS-Frauen-Warte 4 (1935–1936), 106. Public domain.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/18418/img-2.jpg
Datei image/jpeg, 137k
Titel Fig. 5.3 Hans Saebens, Konfirmandinnen aus Föhr (Confirmants from Föhr), vintage silver gelatin print, c.1936. Courtesy of Aberystwyth University, School of Art Museum and Galleries.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/18418/img-3.jpg
Datei image/jpeg, 36k
Titel Fig. 5.4 Erich Retzlaff, Hafenarbeiter aus Emden & Friesischer Fischer (Harbour Worker from Emden & Frisian Fishermen) reproduced in ‘Atlantis’, Heft 8, August 1932, pp. 486–87. Public domain.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/18418/img-4.jpg
Datei image/jpeg, 40k
Titel Fig. 5.5 Van eenen bloede: jongens uit Oost- en Westfriesland (Of One Blood: Youths from East and West Friesland) double page spread in W. F. van Heemskerck Düker, Friesland-Friezenland (Frisia-Frisia) (Den Haag: Hamer, 1942), pp. 156–57. Public domain.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/18418/img-5.jpg
Datei image/jpeg, 30k
Titel Fig. 5.6 Hans Saebens, Schaumburg Lippe Bückerburgerinnen (Bückerburg Woman from Schaumburg Lippe) vintage silver gelatin print, c.1936. Courtesy of Aberystwyth University, School of Art Museum and Galleries.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/18418/img-6.jpg
Datei image/jpeg, 68k
Titel Fig. 5.7 Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, Ostpreußische Frauen (East-Prussian Women) reproduced in ‘NS-Frauen-Warte’, Heft 1, 1 Juli, 1939, pp. 14–15. Public domain.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/18418/img-7.jpg
Datei image/jpeg, 51k
Titel Fig. 5.8 Otto Kolar, Waffen-SS im felde (Waffen-SS in the Field) reproduced in Volk und Rasse, Heft 2 February 1942, frontispiece. Public domain.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/18418/img-8.jpg
Datei image/jpeg, 57k
Titel Fig. 5.9 Joachim Benecke, Vorgeschichte und Gegenwart (Pre-History and the Present), ‘NS-Frauen-Warte’, Heft 15 January 1939, pp. 458–59. Public domain.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/18418/img-9.jpg
Datei image/jpeg, 59k

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