The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

justifying genocide 105
accounts like those of Edmund Kiß, whose novels about the rise, fall, and ultimate
triumphant rebirth of the “lost” civilization of Atlantis (supposedly originating
somewhere in the Arctic Circle) tie ideas of Germanic racial superiority to pseudoscientific
concepts like Hans Hörbiger’s Glazial-Kosmogony (Glacial Cosmogony)
(Hermand 1992:193–98). Such amalgams of fiction, mythology, and selectively chosen
archaeological evidence (archaeologist Hans Reinerth, a high-ranking official
in the Rosenberg Office, was sent to Greece in the 1940s to search for evidence of
a Nordic-Germanic invasion of the Mediterranean in the Neolithic, partly in response
to Kiß’s notions of a post-Atlantis diaspora) set the tone for at least some of
the research conducted within organizations like Himmler’s SS-Ahnenerbe (Ancestor
Heritage Society) (Arnold 1990).
The national Socialist archaeo-mythology about Atlantis and Nordic migrations
south and east might be dismissed by some as harmless, if disturbing, lunacy. The
subtext is anything but harmless, however, and it demonstrates how readily such
notions of ethnoparthenogenesis can be used to underwrite genocide. According
to Kiß and others who exploited or supported the Atlantis myth, the “sons of the
Sun” (read “Asa/Aryans/supermen”), whose superior bloodlines guaranteed their
supremacy over all inferior (read “non-Aryan”) peoples, were repeatedly threatened
by miscegenation in their postcatastrophic wanderings around the globe. Ströbel’s
references to Mischvölker in Figure 4.1, and his reference to a Kampfzeit, is
an example of the pervasiveness of this idea. Kiß’s novels were also avidly read and
praised by top Nazi officials, including Hitler (Hermand 1992:193). The eventual
return to the Nordic homeland (with the Arctic Atlantis no longer habitable, northern
Europe became a stand-in) and periodic recourse to “racial hygiene” practices
(read: the genocidal extermination of undesirable elements in the gene pool) were
necessary elements in the survival and maintenance of Nordic-Germanic racial
and cultural supremacy, according to Kiß and his supporters. There are frequent
references to metallurgy in descriptions of this cultural and genetic “refining”
process (the terms “tempering” and “steel” appear repeatedly [ibid.:194]), and the
motifs of the warrior-hero and the northern Forest Primeval as the ultimate testing
ground are interwoven with concepts of purification and elimination.
The folkloric foundations of National Socialism have been extensively discussed
elsewhere (ibid.; Dow and Lixfeld 1994; Lixfeld 1994; among others). A few elements
can be linked to archaeological research in instructive ways. The Forest Primeval theme
is perhaps one of the most pervasive (Schama 1995:75–134). It appears in the shortlived
National Socialist attempt to create a neo-pagan state religion, centered on openair
theaters known as Thing-Stätten (Arnold 1992; Lurz 1975). These were constructed
in carefully controlled “wild” settings with archaeological links to the Germanic past,
either real, fabricated, or “enhanced.” Morality plays and educational dramas were
enacted at these open-air theaters, which incorporated the National Socialist metanarrative
in their plot lines: the noble, courageous German warrior-hero, the longsuffering,
patient German mother (she is always a mother, never “just” a woman), and
the evil, cunning Jewish antihero, locked in an eternal, three-cornered struggle.