The National Socialist Party: The Role Of Archaeology And Prehistory In Germany

In school, nearly every American child learns about the Adolf Hitler, the National Socialist Party (the “Nazis”), and the horrors they committed during the Holocaust. What many children do not learn about, however, is the Nazi Party’s strong affinity for archaeology and prehistory. The National Socialist Party, while in power in Germany in the mid-twentieth century, used archaeology and prehistory to support its political agenda and to attempt to prove German superiority. Substantiating this racist ideology often required misrepresentation and even fabrication of archaeological findings. However, many professional archaeologists and prehistorians did not object to these falsities for the sake of the development of their disciplines, which
Following its crushing defeat in the first World War, Germany was a weakened and unsettled country. This period of instability helped give rise to the development of German-centric prehistory as a prominent academic discipline (Arnold [1990] 465). Politicians began to take an interest in prehistoric archaeology during this time because it could support nationalist ideas that they wanted to promote in order to “rehabilitat[e] German self-respect” (Arnold [1990] 465). Thus, the discipline of prehistory was notably intertwined with political ideologies from its origin. Another contributing factor was the work of Gustaf Kossinna, a linguist who helped to lay the foundation for German prehistory in the 1920s with his theories of cultural diffusion and Kulturkreis (Arnold [1990] 464). Nazi leaders and archaeologists would later frequently refer to these two theories to justify their work. His explanation of cultural diffusion detailed a process in which an advanced civilization passes down ideas and information to less advanced civilizations (Arnold [1990] 464). Nazi leaders claimed that Germanic people constituted the advanced civilization in this scenario, thus
Firstly, as previously mentioned, Nazi leaders wanted to rebuild Germany’s national identity following the country’s loss in World War I, and recognized that archaeology could help them accomplish this. Heinrich Himmler, a leading member of the Party, said “The one and only thing that matters to us … is to have ideas of history to strengthen our people in their necessary national pride. In all this troublesome business, we are only interested in one thing—to project onto the dim and distant past the picture of our nation as we envisage it for the future” (as quoted in Arnold [1992] 33). Here he explains that the Nazis hoped to use prehistory and archaeology to instill a sense of patriotism and pride in the German people to recover from the damages of the first World War. Secondly, they used archaeology to justify expansion into neighboring countries. As previously mentioned, Nazi archaeologists used Kossinna’s theory of Kulturkreis, in which they used the finding of ‘Germanic’ artifacts in a territory to justify conquests in that area (Hare 17). For example, Nazi archaeologists claimed that Germanic tribes had been settled in Poland prior to the arrival of the Polish, thereby “undermin[ing] the historical claim Poles lay to their own country,” and attempting