Journal of Contemporary History Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and

New Delhi, Vol 39(2), 255–270. ISSN 0022–0094.

DOI: 10.1177/0022009404042131

Bernard Mees
Hitler and Germanentum

If anything is unfolkish, it is this tossing around of old Germanic expressions which neither
fit into the present period nor represent anything definite. . . . I had to warn again and again
against those deutschvölkisch wandering scholars . . . [who] rave about old Germanic
heroism, about dim prehistory, stone axes, spear and shield.1

Late Wilhelmine Germany saw a surge of interest in old Germanic antiquity.

In reflection of the rising nationalist tide, the old Germanic past became of
increasing interest not just to the general book-reading public or to scholars
and students in the universities, but especially to many members of the radical
right. Under the influence of national antiquity-enthusing cultural figures such
as Richard Wagner and Felix Dahn, the medieval Nordic and ancient German
past became leading themes and motifs of journals of bodies such as Theodor
Fritsch’s Reich Hammer Federation,2 groups associated with the Pan-German
League3 and Ludwig Woltmann’s racialist Political-Anthropological Review.4
Symbols of Germanic antiquity such as the swastika and runes achieved an
emblematic status among what by Hitler’s day had already become the
old radical right. In Munich during the Great War, the Thule Society was
established to discuss old Germanic antiquity, race and how the nation had to
be saved from socialism and the pernicious influence of the Jew.5 Taking its
name from what appeared to be the classical designation for the old Germanic
North, the Thule Society played a fundamental role in the foundation of the
Nazi Party. Hess, Rosenberg, Feder, Eckhardt — all were associated with the
Thule before they were called to the drum of the new movement. The glorifi-

1 Adolf Hitler, trans. Ralph Mannheim, Mein Kampf (Boston 1943), 326–7.
2 Hammer: Parteilose Zeitschrift für nationales Leben/Blätter für deutschen Sinn (Leipzig
1901–1940), 1–39; cf. Michael Bonisch, ‘Die “Hammer”-Bewegung’ in Uwe Puschner, Walter
Schmitz and Justus H. Ulbricht (eds), Handbuch zur ‘Völkischen Bewegung’ 1871–1918 (Munich
1996), 341–65.
3 Heimdall: Zeitschrift für reines Deutschtum und All-Deutschtum/Monatsschrift für deutsche
Art (Berlin, then Zeitz, Stade i. H, Einsiedel, Leonberg 1897–1932), 1–37; Odin: Ein Kampfblatt
für die alldeutsche Bewegung/Kampfblatt für Alldeutschland (Munich 1899–1901), 1–3; cf. Uwe
Puschner, Die völkische Bewegung im wilhelminischen Kaiserreich (Darmstadt 2001), 31ff.
4 Politisch-Anthropologische Revue (Eisenach, then Berlin-Steglitz 1902–14), 1–13; continued
as Politisch-Anthropologische Monatsschrift für praktische Politik, für politische Bildung und
Erziehung auf biologischer Grundlage (Hamburg 1914–23), 13–21. On Woltmann see Peter Emil
Becker, Wege ins Dritte Reich (2 vols, Stuttgart 1988–90), II, 328ff.
5 Nicholas Goodrick-Clark, The Occult Roots of Nazism (Wellingborough 1985 [New York
1992]), 135ff.; Detlev Rose, Die Thule-Gesellschaft (Tübingen 1994); Hermann Gilbhard, Die
Thule-Gesellschaft (Munich 1994).

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cation of the old Germanic past was a leading feature of völkisch groups in the
giddy days, as the Thule Society’s Rudolf von Sebottendorff was later to style
them, ‘before Hitler came’.6
Despite the favouring of Germanistic trappings by many in the old radical
national movement, Hitler’s disdain for the ‘wandering scholars’ who had
become attached to this early manifestation of the völkisch enterprise seems
clear in the passage quoted above from Mein Kampf. Yet a comparative per-
spective to fascism calls us to look again at the use and understanding of the
old Germanic past in German fascism. Not only was romanità (Romanness) a
leading feature of the imagery of Italian fascism,7 the contemporary rise in
interest in Germanentum (Germanicness) in Germany was clearly supported
by senior members of the Nazi Party. Rosenberg8 and Himmler9 both had a
special and abiding interest in Germanic antiquity, as is most clearly symbol-
ized in the support for antiquarian Germanistic study shown by their respec-
tive educational institutions: Rosenberg’s Amt, which had evolved out of the
Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur in 193410 and the SS-Ahnenerbe, founded by
Himmler and Darré in 1935.11
Although the researchers accumulated by Rosenberg and Himmler in their
Party research bodies are often treated with scorn today, many were leading
university Germanists. This is especially true of Party-funded archaeology, and
although several mystics and many more antiquarian enthusiasts beside found
their way into the SS, respectable academics were equally amenable to the call
that the respected Indo-Europeanist Hermann Güntert (Dean of the Philo-
sophy Faculty at the University of Heidelberg and sometime editor of the
Ahnenerbe’s leading linguistics journal) described in 1938 as ‘service to our
people’.12
Hitler, too, evidently had some sensibility of the old Germanic past. He uses
the image of the Germanic on several occasions in Mein Kampf, most promi-
nently in his emphatic call at the end of the eleventh chapter ‘Volk and race’
for ‘a Germanic state of the German nation’.13 Previous discussions of Hitler’s
notion and use of the image of Germanic antiquity have often focused on his
dismissal of the ‘deutschvölkisch wandering scholars’, but have ignored, over-

6 Rudolf von Sebottendorff, Bevor Hitler kam (Munich 1933); Reginald H. Phelps, ‘ “Before
Hitler Came”: Thule Society and Germanen Orden’, Journal of Modern History, 35 (1963),
245–61.
7 Romke Visser, ‘Fascist Doctrine and the Cult of Romanità’, Journal of Contemporary History,
27, 1 (January 1992), 5–22.
8 Robert Cecil, The Myth of the Master Race (London 1972), 11f.
9 Joseph Ackermann, Heinrich Himmler als Ideologe (Göttingen 1970), 32ff.
10 Properly the ‘Beauftragen des Führers für die Überwachung der gesamten geistigen und
weltanschaulichen Schulung und Erziehung der NSDAP’; Reinhard Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg
und seine Gegner (Stuttgart 1970).
11 Michael H. Kater, Das ‘Ahnenerbe’ der SS 1935–1945 (Stuttgart 1974).
12 Hermann Güntert, ‘Neue Zeit — neues Ziel’, Wörter und Sachen, 19 [= NF 1] (1938), 11.
13 Hitler, trans. Mannheim, Mein Kampf, op. cit., 299.

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Mees: Hitler and Germanentum 257

simplified or even misrepresented his understanding of the importance of the

old Germanic past.14
In German today, as in Hitler’s time, there is a clear distinction between
the terms Germanic (germanisch) and German (deutsch) that is obfuscated by
near homonymy in contemporary English. Germanic and Germanicness are
to German and Germanness what (classical) Roman and Romanness are to
Italian and Italianness.15 The description germanisch is also used, however, in
modern German sometimes as a Latinate (i.e. grandiose) form of ‘German’,
e.g. the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, or more obviously in
Germanistik, university-level German studies. The term Germanentum was a
learned buzz word of the 1920s and 1930s; it is not found in Hitler’s recorded
speeches or writings.
In reflection of the general rise of interest in the old Germanic past in the
twilight years of the Kaiserreich, in the early years of the twentieth century
German academic understandings of antiquity had undergone a fundamental
change. Fields such as indigenous archaeology had thrown off their deep
dependence on Scandinavian antiquarian scholarship and ushered in a new age
in old Germanic studies. The entire antiquarian endeavour in Germany —
whether philological, archaeological, anthropological, folkloric or linguistic —
was transformed in the wake of new paradigms developed in Germanic
archaeology and philology at the time. The most outstanding figures in this
new movement in Germanic studies were both professors at the University of
Berlin, and both were overtly concerned with the study and promotion of
Germanicness. One of these figures, Gustaf Kossinna (1858–1931), who held
the inaugural Berlin chair in German archaeology, was a major producer of
Germanen-Bücher — those popularizations of the Germanic past that inspired
various radical right-wing groups.16 The other, Andreas Heusler (1865–1940),
son of the like-named Swiss legal historian, held the corresponding inaugural
chair in Nordic studies at Berlin. Heusler was the creator of the new concept of
Germanicness, and is often celebrated by philologists today as if he were the
third brother Grimm.17

14 Frank-Lothar Kroll, Utopie als Ideologie (Paderborn 1998), 72ff.

15 An older designation for Germanic in English is Teutonic (earlier still Gothonic), but under
the influence of linguistics, and in cognizance of the cheapened use of the term (similar to Gallic
for ‘French’), it is usually avoided by Anglophonic antiquarians today: hence Malcolm Todd, The
Early Germans (London 1992).
16 Rudolf Stampfuss, Gustaf Kossinna (Leipzig 1935); Hans-Jürgen Eggers, Einführung in die
Vorgeschichte (2nd edn, Munich 1974), 199ff.; Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus
(Princeton, NJ 1996), 180ff.; Ulrich Veit, ‘Gustaf Kossinna and his Concept of a National Ideo-
logy’ in Heinrich Härke (ed.), Archaeology, Ideology and Society (Frankfurt a. M. 2000), 40–64.
17 Heinrich Beck, ‘Andreas Heuslers Begriff des “Altgermanischen” ’ in idem (ed.), Germanen-
probleme in heutiger Sicht (Berlin 1986), 396–412; idem, ‘Andreas Heusler (1865–1940)’ in Helen
Damico (ed.), Medieval Scholarship II (New York 1998), 283–96; idem, ‘Heusler, Andreas’ in
Johannes Hoops, Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde XIV (2nd edn, Berlin 1999),
533–43.

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258 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 2

In 1938, a collaborative academic work on Germanic antiquity was pub-

lished that is held up by antiquarian Germanists today as a sober representa-
tive of the best of the Germanistic scholarship of the dictatorship.18 Its editor,
the philologist Hermann Schneider (the postwar rector of the University of
Tübingen) reflected in De Gruyter’s popularizing German academic journal,
Research and Progress, at the beginning of 1939:

The year 1933 witnessed the victory of an attitude towards the history of the culture of
Germany which gave the Germanic element of all that is German a significance previously
unthought of. ‘The best of what is German’, it was declared, ‘is Germanic and must be found
in purer form in early Germanic times.’19

Yet Germanophonic academics seemed to have recognized that ‘the best of

what is German is Germanic’ long before 1933. In 1926, for example, a simi-
lar survey was produced in Heidelberg under the editorship of Hermann
Nollau. Its title was Germanic Resurgence, it was published by the local (Carl
Winter’s) university press and it was subtitled ‘a work on the Germanic
foundations of our culture’.20 Clearly, with Nollau’s Resurgence the renewal-
istic or ‘palingenetic’21 aspect of völkisch thought had penetrated German
academia well before 1933.
These Germanistic scholars unabashedly worked in the spirit of Heusler and
Kossinna, and within the new concept of Germanicness. The term Germanen-
tum existed before their time, but previously it had been an irregular descrip-
tion used mainly in contrastive expressions. Mirroring the distinction between
Roman and Germanic elements stressed by German legal historians at the
time, Germanentum was seen as the non-Roman element of medieval
Germany for some nineteenth-century historians.22 Hence in 1870 the military
analyst Johann Woldemar Streubel used Germanentum to describe the non-
Hungarian forces in the Hapsburg empire.23 By the late 1870s the term was
being used in opposition to Jewishness by populist bigots like Wilhelm Marr.24

18 Hermann Schneider (ed.), Germanische Altertumskunde (Munich 1938 [1951]); Heinrich

Beck, ‘Germanen, Germania, Germanische Altertumskunde, V. Germanische Altertumskunde’ in
Johannes Hoops, Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, XI (2nd edn, Berlin 1998),
429f.
19 Hermann Schneider, ‘Die germanische Altertumskunde zwischen 1933 und 1938’,
Forschungen und Fortschritte, 15 (1939), 1 [= idem, ‘The Study of Germanic Antiquity in the Years
1933–1938’, Research and Progress, 5 (1939), 135].
20 Hermann Nollau (ed.), Germanische Wiedererstehung: Ein Werk über die germanischen
Grundlagen unserer Gesittung (Heidelberg 1926).
21 Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London 1991), 26; cf. idem, ‘The Primacy of Culture:
The Current Growth (or Manufacture) of Consensus within Fascist Studies’, Journal of Con-
temporary History, 37, 1 (January 2002), 21–43.
22 Heinz Gollwitzer, ‘Zum politischen Germanismus des 19. Jahrhunderts’ in Josef Flecken-
stein, Sabine Krüger and Rudolf Vierhaus (eds), Festschrift für Hermann Heimpel zum 70.
Geburtstag (3 vols, Göttingen 1971–72), I, 282–356.
23 Arkolay [Johann Woldemar Streubel], Das Germanenthum und Österreich (Darmstadt 1870).
24 Wilhelm Marr, Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum (Berlin 1879).

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Mees: Hitler and Germanentum 259

But it was not until Heusler rescued the term in the new century that it began
to feature more regularly in Germanistic or indeed general discourse.
In 1887 the literary Germanist Leo Berg had described the positive German
reception of the works of the Norwegian playwright Ibsen as deriving from a
shared spirit of Germanentum.25 Heusler, grappling for a term to describe the
cultural genius he saw in the Old Norse sagas, subsequently adopted the term
to apply to the heroic mentalité he saw exemplified in the Old Germanic past.
In 1908 in an address occasioning his induction into the Prussian Academy of
Sciences, Heusler spelled out precisely what he meant by Germanicness, and
soon the word spread throughout the academic antiquarian community.26
The launch of Heusler’s Germanicness signalled an explosion in publica-
tions on the old Germanic past. His own publications concentrated mainly on
interpretations of medieval literature and he soon became a significant figure
in popularizations of antiquarian Germanistic study, perhaps most promi-
nently in the Thule series of translations of medieval Scandinavian literature,
which by 1933 had sold some 98,000 copies.27 Kossinna and his students
quickly took up the new expression as part of their Germanomaniacal ‘settle-
ment archaeology’. Heusler’s wider influence did not end there, however. In
1934 a collection of his essays was published under the title Germanentum,
and quickly went through several editions.28 Reviewed widely, Heusler’s book
popularized the term so thoroughly that by the late 1930s Germanentum had
even come to feature as a category in nazi political literature. The concept of
Germanicness is clearly enunciated in official German educational literature
from the late 1930s and early 1940s, and its appearance was even remarked
upon by foreign critics of the educational policies of the nazi regime. For
example, Wilhelm Frick required that 15 basic points of German history were
to be stressed under the nazis. Of these points, cited disparagingly in 1944 in
an Allied survey of higher education in Germany, over half refer to the old
Germanic past.29 The compiler of this work, the English science historian
Abraham Wolf, also mentions an old Germanic chronicle, the Ura-Linda
Book (properly the Dutch/Frisian Oera Linda Book, a Germanomaniacal

25 Leo Berg, Henrik Ibsen und das Germanenthum in den modernen Literatur (Berlin 1887).
26 Andreas Heusler, ‘Antrittsrede in der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften’, Sitzungs-
berichte der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-Hist. Klasse (1908), 712–14 [=
Kleine Schriften, ed. Helga Reuschel and Stefan Sonderegger (2 vols, Berlin 1942–69), II, 14–15].
27 Felix Niedner (ed.), Thule (24 vols, Jena 1911–30); Gary D. Stark, Entrepreneurs of Ideology
(Chapel Hill, NC 1981), 94; cf. also Julia Zernack, Geschichten aus Thule (Berlin 1994); idem,
‘Anschauungen vom Norden im deutschen Kaiserreich’ in Puschner et al. (eds), Handbuch zur
‘Völkischen Bewegung’, op. cit., 504ff.
28 Andreas Heusler, Germanentum (Heidelberg 1934, 4th edn 1943).
29 Abraham Wolf, Higher Education in Nazi Germany (London 1944), 79–81. For a (pre-
Molotov–Ribbentrop pact) Soviet perspective see Evgenii Georgieviπ Kagarov, ‘Fal’sifikacja istorii
rannegermanskogo ob¢πestva fa¢istskimi lµeuπenymi’ in Filipp Iosifoviπ Notoviπ et al. (eds), Protiv
faåistskoj fal’sifikacii istorii (Moscow 1939), 83–103, a reference for which I am grateful to Neile
A. Kirk.

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260 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 2

forgery from the nineteenth century)30 in the same breath as the Protocols of
the Elders of Zion, the infamous antisemitic ‘warrant for genocide’ as it was
described by Norman Cohn.31 Indeed, 1937’s history primer for the Hitler
Youth (which was translated into English in 1938 by an American political
scientist), contains maps of the empires of the glorious old Germanic past that
are taken directly from the Germanen-Bücher of Kossinna and his students,
and similar maps also appeared in contemporary educational literature for
adults such as that published by the SS.32 The radical archaeology of Kossinna
and his pupils called for a reassessment of all Germanic civilization based on a
rejection of the classicism of the Kulturnation. In Kossinna’s works all sorts of
expressions linked in the past to Graeco-Roman influence or origin, from
building and artistic styles and even to the invention of writing, were reinter-
preted and recast in a Germanomaniacal mode. In 1944 the nazi political
scientist Friedrich Alfred Beck summarized the Germanentum consciousness
of his day in this manner: ‘German Germanicness is a metaphysical form of
character, derived from a Nordic racial essence, which reveals itself in a
creative power based on a heroic attitude located in the personality as the
unique representation of the völkisch organic existence.’33
Beck’s ‘Nordic racial essence’ is plainly that of Hans (Rassen-) Günther.34
Günther’s publisher, the Pan-Germanist entrepreneur Julius Lehmann, encour-
aged academic speculation on the role of racial questions in historical
problems, and in the 1920s academics such as Kossinna became involved in
many of the new radical racialist academic publications of the day.35 The
notion of a Nordic racial type had been wedded to Heusler’s Germanicness
by young Nordicists influenced by this neo-conservative meeting of minds,

30 Jan Geraldus Ottema (ed.), Thet Oera Linda Bok (Leeuwarden 1872) [= trans. William R.
Sandbach, The Oera Linda Book (London 1876)]; Herman F. Wirth (ed.), Die Ura Linda Chronik
(Leipzig 1933); Murk de Jong Hendrikszoon, Het Oera-Lind-Boek in Duitschland en hier
(Bolsward 1939); Wolf, Higher Education in Nazi Germany, op. cit., 81.
31 Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide (London 1967).
32 Anon., ‘Germanisches Schicksal durch die Jahrtausende: Volk ohne Raum’, Das schwarze
Korps, 2, 34 (28 August 1936), 18; B. Pätzke, ‘Die deutsche Wiederbesiedlung des Ostens’, SS-
Leitheft, 3, 8 (1937), 55–6; Fritz Brennecke, Handbuch für die Schulungsarbeit in der HJ: Vom
deutschen Volk und seinem Lebensraum (Munich 1937) [= trans. Harwood L. Childs, The Nazi
Primer (New York 1938)].
33 Friedrich Alfred Beck, Der Aufgang des germanischen Weltalters (Bochum 1944), 44–5 [=
trans. apud W.J. McCann, ‘ “Volk und Germanentum”: The Presentation of the Past in Nazi
Germany’ in Peter Gathercole and David Lowenthal (eds), The Politics of the Past (London 1990),
74]. On Beck see Léon Poliakov and Joseph Wulf (eds), Das Dritte Reich und seine Denker (Berlin
1959 [Frankfurt a. M. 1983]), 44.
34 Hans F.K. Günther, Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Munich 1922, 16th edn 1933);
Hans-Jürgen Lutzhöft, Der Nordische Gedanke in Deutschland 1920–1940 (Stuttgart 1971),
28ff.
35 E.g. Die Sonne: Volksdeutsche Monatsschrift (Monatsschrift für nordische Weltanschauung
und Lebensgestaltung/Monatsschrift für Rasse, Glauben und Volkstum), 1, 1–16, 4–6 (Weimar,
then Leipzig 1924–39); Volk und Rasse: Illustrierte Monatsschrift für Volkstum, Rassenkunde,
Rassenplege, 1, 1–19, 4–6 (Munich 1926–44).

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Mees: Hitler and Germanentum 261

probably most notably in the writings of the sometime Amt Rosenberg

Nordic-studies specialist Bernhard Kummer (a member of the SA since 1928
and later a professor of Old Norse at Jena).36 The old notion of Germanicness
as everything not Roman had been refashioned by a new heroic, Heuslerian,
often blatantly Germanomaniacal Germanentum that was theorized and
refined by nazi educationalists, antiquarian Germanists and even what now
passed for political scientists too.37
Party organs such as the SS also became involved in the new antiquity
enthusiasm. Himmler’s Ahnenerbe was founded to support amateur notions
of Germanicness, most obviously Detmold’s Extern Stones theorists (the
self-styled Freunde germanischer Vorgeschichte, led by the amateur ‘astro-
archaeologist’ Wilhelm Teudt)38 and the wild Atlantid39 runomania of the Berlin-
based folklorist and musicologist Herman Wirth.40 Himmler also encouraged
some outright fantasists, of course, most notably the unbalanced Austrian
obscurantist Karl Maria Wiligut/Weisthor.41 But serious scholars were as much
involved in SS antiquarianism as were the patent fantasists. For every Wirth or
Weisthor, there were two ‘respectable’ SS scholars, whether they be academic
archaeologists such as Hans Schleif or Herbert Jankuhn, Romanists like Franz
Altheim or Rudolf Till, or philologists and linguists such as Walter Wüst or
Wolfgang Krause. Moreover, the SS were concerned with promoting Germanic
antiquarianism, through their journals such as the Detmold Friends-founded
Germanien,42 archaeology exhibitions (often in collaboration with Rosenberg’s
prehistorians),43 the creation of ‘archaeology parks’ (e.g. for the Extern Stones,
or at Negova, Slovenia, where the earliest linguistically Germanic inscription

36 Bernhard Kummer, Midgards Untergang (Leipzig 1927); idem, Germanenkunde im Kultur-

kampf (Leipzig 1935); Wolfgang Schumann, ‘Die Universität Jena in der Zeit des deutschen
Faschismus (1933 bis 1945)’ in Max Steinmetz (ed.), Geschichte der Universität Jena 1548/58–
1958 (2 vols, Jena 1958), I, 615–70.
37 Johannes Bühler, ‘Germanentum und Deutschtum’, Geistige Arbeit, 1, 3 (1934), 7–8.
38 Wilhelm Teudt, Germanische Heiligtümer (Jena 1929); Rudolf Bünte (ed.), Wilhelm Teudt
im Kampf um Germanenehre: Auswahl von Teudts Schriften (Bielefeld 1940); John Michell, A
Little History of Astro-Archaeology (London 1977), 58–65; Martin Schmidt and Uta Halle, ‘On
the Folklore of the Externsteine: Or a Centre for Germanomaniacs’ in Amy Gazin-Schwartz and
Cornelius Holtorf (eds), Archaeology and Folklore (London 1999), 158–74.
39 For the development of the genre of Atlantid thought in Germany see Georg Biedenkapp,
Der Nordpol als Völkerheimat (Jena 1906); Karl Georg Zschaetzsch, Atlantis: Die Urheimat der
Arier (Berlin 1922, 4th edn 1937); Franz Wegener, Das atlantidische Weltbild (Gladbeck 2000).
40 Herman Wirth, Der Aufgang der Menschheit (Jena 1928); Ingo Wiwjorra, ‘Herman Wirth —
Ein gescheiterter Ideologe zwischen “Ahnenerbe” und Atlantis’ in Barbara Danckwott, Thorsten
Querg and Claudia Schöningh (eds), Historische Rassismusforschung (Hamburg 1995), 91–112.
41 Hans-Jürgen Lange, Weisthor (Engerd 1998).
42 Germanien: Blätter für Freunde germanischer Vorgeschichte, 1–4 (Bielefeld 1929–32); there-
after Germanien: Monatshefte für Vorgeschichte zur Erkenntnis deutschen Wesens (zur
Germanenkunde), 5–10 and 11–14 [= NF 1–4] (Leipzig 1933–43).
43 Kater, Das ‘Ahnenerbe’ der SS, op. cit., 80ff.; Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards
(Cambridge 1988), 242; Allan A. Lund, Germanenideologie und Nationalsozialismus (Tübingen
1995), 80f. (and fig. 9); Henning Haußmann, ‘Archaeology in the “Third Reich” ’ in Härke (ed.),
Archaeology, Ideology, and Society, op. cit., 101, 110f.

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262 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 2

was found)44 and ultimately the organized looting of Eastern European anti-
quarian collections by SS-Sonderkommando led by academic prehistorians with
archaeological shopping lists.45 Some of Himmler’s musings on archaeology,
such as his 1937 attack on Slavic scholars who (apparently) misrepresented and
covered over ancient Germanic remains, represent a sophisticated understand-
ing of an archaeological controversy that had been inaugurated by Kossinna in
1912 and continued by his students.46 Similarly, Darré’s wild theories on
German agriculture were clearly informed by antiquarian scholarship and not
just the obscurantistic, anti-Christian and racialized type which he encountered
in groups such as the Nordischer Ring.47 He and his followers cite learned
examinations of medieval Scandinavian law codes in their works, a link that is
epitomized in Odal, Darré’s politico-cultural journal which took its description
from a type of ancient Scandinavian legal tenure that also happened to be the
name of the runic letter o (X).48 Darré’s focus on the Old Germanic past also fed
straight into his conceptualization of Lebensraum — after all, Kossinna was not
the only academic to consider that ancient Germanic settlements in Eastern
Europe validated German claims for sovereignty over Slav-populated regions.49
Indeed, by the early 1940s ancient Germanic expansion in Eastern Europe was
being used in nazi literature to justify Hitler’s war aims of the (then) present day

44 T.L. Markey, ‘A Tale of Two Helmets: The Negau A and B Inscriptions’, Journal of Indo-
European Studies, 29 (2001), 76.
45 Kater, Das ‘Ahnenerbe’ der SS, op. cit., 147ff.; Haußmann, ‘Archaeology in the “Third
Reich” ’, op. cit., 107; Anja Heuss, Kunst- und Kulturgutraub (Heidelberg 2000). The activities of
Jankuhn, the archaeological looter of the Ukraine, are often still treated defensively by his former
students; see Heiko Steuer, ‘Herbert Jankuhn und seine Darstellung zur Germanen- und
Wikingerzeit’ in idem (ed.), Eine hervorragend nationale Wissenschaft (Berlin 2001), 417ff.
46 Gustaf Kossinna, ‘Zur älteren Bronzezeit Mitteleuropas’, Mannus, 4 (1912), 184; idem, Die
deutsche Ostmark (Kattowitz 1919); Józef Kostrzewski, Wielkopolska w czasach przedhisto-
rycznych (Poznan 1914); Heinrich Himmler, Document 1992(A)-PS, from ‘National Political
Studies for the Armed Forces’ (January 1937) in International Military Tribunal, Trial of the
Major War Criminals, XXIX (Nuremberg 1948), 225–6 [= trans. apud Benjamin C. Sax and
Dieter Kuntz (eds), Inside Hitler’s Germany (Lexington, MA 1992), 376]; Eggers, Einführung in
die Vorgeschichte, op. cit., 202ff.; Leo S. Klejn, ‘Kossinna im Abstand von vierzig Jahren’,
Jahresschrift für mitteldeutsche Vorgeschichte, 58 (1974), 29ff.; cf. Burleigh, Germany Turns
Eastwards, op. cit., 23f., 52, 241ff.
47 Anne Bramwell, Blood and Soil (Bourne End 1985), 46ff.
48 Deutsche Agrarpolitik: Monatsschrift für deutsches Bauerntum, 1, 1–2, 3 (Berlin 1932–33);
thereafter Odal: Monatsschrift für Blut und Boden 2, 4–11 (Berlin, then Goslar 1933–42); there-
after Deutsche Agrarpolitik, NF 1, 1–3, 12 (Berlin 1942–44); Knut Robberstad, Magnús Már
Lárusson and Gerhard Hafström, ‘Odelsrett’ in Johannes Brøndsted et al. (eds), Kulturhistorisk
leksikon for nordisk middelalder, XII (Copenhagen 1967), 493–503; Gabriele von Olberg, ‘Odal’
in Adalbert Erler and Ekkehard Kaufmann (eds), Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechts-
geschichte, II (Berlin 1982), 1178–84; Andrea d’Onofrio, Ruralismo e storia nel Terzo Reich: Il
caso ‘Odal’ (Naples 1997).
49 Kossinna, Die deutsche Ostmark, op. cit. and cf. Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards, op.
cit., 52, 242–3. This remarkable book, which was retitled Das Weichselland, ein uralter Heimat-
boden der Germanen in later editions, was especially written to attempt to influence the outcome
of the Versailles peace conference; see Eggers, Einführung in die Vorgeschichte, op. cit., 236; Veit,
‘Gustaf Kossinna and his Concept of a National Ideology’, op. cit., 47.

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Mees: Hitler and Germanentum 263

in a manner quite independent of contemporary German Ostforschung.50 It was

this fascination with antiquity that, no doubt, also led Himmler to bring an
SS-archaeologist (Alexander Langsdorff, then curator of the Berlin Museum
für Vor- und Frühgeschichte and ‘Kulturpolitischer Referant’ in Himmler’s
personal staff) with him to the Italian-German police-chiefs meeting in Rome in
October 1936.51
The antiquarian activities of the SS were even mirrored in the promotion of
folk culture by the Kraft durch Freude. The first leader of the KdF’s folk-
culture arm, the Reichsbund Volkstum und Heimat, was Werner Haverbeck, a
young folklorist protégé of Hess. The Reichsbund was a youth-oriented body
that organized folk festivals and performances of traditional songs. Yet by
1934 members of the Reichsbund had come under suspicion of being
Strasserites. After the Night of the Long Knives, the Reichsbund was purged
and eventually subsumed by Rosenberg’s folklore foundation; protected by
Hess, Haverbeck, a disciple of Wirth’s runomaniacal theories, instead found a
home within the SS.52 But it was clear that Haverbeck and similar academic
expressions such as the Wald und Baum project supported by Göring’s Reichs-
forstamt, whose remit was to study all manner of ‘Aryan-Germanic’ traditions
concerning woodlands, were inspired by the Germanicness consciousness that
had come to pervade understandings of German ethnology and folklore since
the 1920s.53
The promotion of Germanentum came to be seen as the creative, positive
foil to the otherwise almost overwhelming negativity of National Socialist
thought. The project of national rebirth had a negative and a positive facet. As
Haverbeck’s radical right-wing biographer has noted,54 the pessimism of a
neo-conservative Untergang des Abendlandes (Decline of the West)55 seemed
partnered by an optimistic, neo-romantic Aufgang der Menschheit (Rise of
Humanity).56 Virulent Party antisemites like Johann von Leers might take
at least as much time focusing their energies on investigations of the old
Germanic heritage as they did railing against Jewish perfidy.57 The demonizing

50 E.g. anon., ‘Und wieder reiten die Goten . . . Unser Kampf im Osten — unsere Pflicht vor
Geschichte und Reich’, SS-Leitheft, 7, 9 (1941), 1–2.
51 Anon., ‘Besuch in Rom’, Das schwarze Korps, 2, 44 (29 October 1936), 3; Helmut Heiber,
Walter Frank und sein Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands (Stuttgart 1966),
246; Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg, op. cit., 167ff.; Kater, Das ‘Ahnenerbe’ der SS, op. cit., 20ff.
52 Hannjost Lixfeld, Folklore and Fascism (Bloomington, IN 1994), 78; Andreas Ferch,
Viermal Deutschland in einem Menschenleben (Dresden 2000), 24ff.
53 Kater, Das ‘Ahnenerbe’ der SS, op. cit., 76ff.
54 Ferch, Viermal Deutschland in einem Menschenleben, op. cit., 21.
55 Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Munich 1923).
56 Wirth, Der Aufgang der Menschheit, op. cit.; cf. also Josef Strzygowski, Aufgang des
Nordens (Leipzig 1936).
57 Cf. e.g. Johann von Leers, Juden sehen dich an (Berlin-Schöneberg 1933, 6th edn 1936);
idem, Das alte Wissen und der neue Glaube (Hamburg 1935); idem, Odal (Goslar 1935, 3rd edn
1939); idem, Wie kam der Jude zum Geld? (Berlin 1939); idem, Die Verbrechernatur der Juden
(Berlin 1944).

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264 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 2

and extermination of Jewishness had almost come to be seen as concomitant

with the glorifying and nurturing of the rediscovered spirit of Germanentum.
Yet at the same time as Germanicness was being actively supported by
members of the Party élite, Hitler seemed to be working against them. When
Rosenberg had moved to co-ordinate all German archaeology in his Reich
Institute for German Prehistory (led by Hans Reinerth, a former student of
Kossinna), Hitler had at first sided with the classicist establishment of the
German Archaeological Institute whose crowning monument was Berlin’s
audacious Pergamon museum (Kossinna had dismissed the classicists as un-
patriotic Römlinge).58 In 1938 the dictator had publicly attacked those who
wanted to turn National Socialism into a (neo-pagan) cult, an admonishment
that was taken up by the Propaganda Ministry which subsequently moved to
suppress obscurantistic leanings in the press.59 Speer records Hitler criticizing
Himmler for promoting mysticism in the SS, though the dictator evidently was
not sufficiently concerned to move against his Reichsführer-SS.60 On the other
hand, Eugen Diederichs Verlag, the neo-romantic publishing house most obvi-
ously associated with the promotion of Germanentum consciousness, lost its
publishing licence in 1939, in stark contrast to other völkisch publishing firms
which generally continued operating unhampered — some were still publish-
ing as late as 1944. Moreover, many Germanicist obscurantists came under
attack in the late 1930s,61 including Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels and his Order of
the New Templars (Ordo Novi Templi), seemingly using as a scapegoat the
Viennese racial fantasist some have seen as ‘the man who gave Hitler his
ideas’.62
The Germanic past had been promoted by academic antiquarians as a
golden age of Germanic heroism. Much of the racialism of German fascism
was ultimately predicated, also, on the testimony of the chief antiquarian
source for Germany, the Roman historian Tacitus who (Germania 2 and 4)
had described the ancient Germans as racially ‘uncontaminated’ — unlike
most other European peoples.63 This image of the ancient Germans as the
racial saviours of Europe featured as a prominent theme in Chamberlain’s
Foundations. Hitler, however, did not grant such importance to the Jew-free
Germanic golden age as did those such as Rosenberg and Himmler. There was
clearly a continuum of identities in racialist thinking: from Germanness

58 Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg, op. cit., 162ff.

59 Rudolf Glunk, ‘Erfolg und Mißerfolg der nationalsozialistischen Sprachlenkung’, Zeitschrift
für deutsche Sprache, 26 (1970), 90–1; cf. Cornelia Berning, ‘Die Sprache des National-
sozialismus’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Wortforschung, 18 (1962), 166–7; Rainer Zitelmann, trans.
Helmut Bogler, Hitler (London 1999), 331ff.
60 Albert Speer, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, Inside the Third Reich (London 1971), 94.
61 Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, op. cit., 160–1; Stephen E. Flowers, ‘Intro-
duction’ in Guido von List, trans. Stephen E. Flowers, The Secret of the Runes (Rochester, VT
1988), 33–4.
62 Wilfred Daim, Der Mann der Hitler die Ideen gab (3rd edn Vienna 1994).
63 Léon Poliakov, trans. Edmund Howard, The Aryan Myth (London 1974), 20, 54, 80.

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Mees: Hitler and Germanentum 265

through Germanicness to Aryanness (or Indo-Germanicness). Yet Hitler

focused mostly on the Aryans — a racialist reification of the timeless notion of
European superiority, as much Graeco-Roman as it was Germanic — not the
ancient Germans and Germany of Arminius (Hermann), Wotan and the runes.
While Rassen-Günther was preparing his glorification of the Nordic race in
German, Germanic and Aryan times, and while these distinctions are clearly
evident in nazi educational literature of the late 1930s, Hitler seemed mostly
uninterested in the Germanic pedigree in Germanness.
There are some indications, however, that this was not always the case in
Hitler’s thinking, and that the absence of an explicit Germanentum conscious-
ness in his writings had a definable origin. Apart from the ‘Germanic nation of
the German people’, Hitler also wrote of ‘Germanic democracy’ — a ‘true’
German democratic ideal which is mentioned three times in most editions of
Mein Kampf.64 Yet a fourth is preserved in Mannheim’s translation from the
first edition, one that most later editions omit; and it may be no accident that
this ephemeral passage closely precedes Hitler’s denunciation of the ‘deutsch-
völkisch wandering scholars’.65 The passage was substantially altered after the
reorganization of the Party in 1928 in order to emphasize the control of
Munich’s Brown House over other branches and it appears that, given this
opportunity, the Germanic aspect to democracy on this occasion was ‘im-
proved’ away at the same time too.66
Although his description ‘Germanic state of the German nation’ is obviously
modelled on that of the Holy Roman Empire, Hitler had used the term
germanisch before his stint in the Landsberg prison in what was clearly a racial
formulation. Given that the chapter with which this quotation finishes deals
with the question of Volk and race, the term Germanic would seem to refer to
a racial identity. On New Year’s Day 1921 Hitler contrasted Germanic and
semitic in the same manner as he had contrasted German and Jewish in an
article in the Völkischer Beobachter: ‘. . . the entire inner structure of our state
is more semitic than Germanic . . . our entire commercial sector . . . is more
Jewish than it is German’.67 His notion of a Germanic state of the German
nation thus seems to refer to the oppositional, pre-Heuslerian definition of
Germanicness, one that had often been conceptualized as one of völkisch cul-
ture and racial essence in opposition to foreign influences: Roman, Hungarian
or Jewish.
Hitler’s notion of Germanic democracy, however, refers directly to an anti-
quarian practice: the old Germanic principle of election to kingship, one
referred to in Tacitus (Germania 7) as well as sundry early medieval sources. It
is also remarkable that Hitler uses the description Ger for ‘spear’ in the open-

64 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (44th edn, Munich 1933), 95, 99, 100.
65 Hitler, trans. Mannheim, Mein Kampf, op. cit., 312.
66 Werner Maser, trans. R.H. Barry, Hitler’s Mein Kampf (London 1970), 50, 54, 56–7.
67 Adolf Hitler, ‘Der völkische Gedanke und die Partei’, Völkischer Beobachter, 35, 1 (1
January 1921), 1 [= idem, Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905–1924, ed. Eberhard Jäckel with Axel
Kuhn (Stuttgart 1980), 279].

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266 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 2

ing passage quoted here from Mein Kampf, as Ger is a revived medieval
German term: the usual word for ‘spear’ in German is Speer — Ger signifies
the spear of the ancient Germanic tribes. Hence at the same time that he is
ridiculing antiquity enthusiasts among the old right, he is using their very
language. In contrast, when Hitler opined against Himmler and his enthusiasm
for archaeology in his table-talk, the dictator, although understanding the
essential Germanomania inherent in the new post-classicist archaeology, did
not use technical terms similar to Ger: ‘At a time when our forebears were
producing the stone troughs and clay vessels about which our archaeologists
have made such a to-do, the Greeks were building the Acropolis.’68 In fact,
his young friend Kubizek notes that Hitler had a fascination for Germanic
antiquity in his youth and his love for Wagner is well known.69 In a speech in
1934, Hitler is recorded saying that ‘a thousand years before Rome was
founded, the Germanic tribes had already reached a high cultural level’ — a
statement reminiscent of the Kossinna school-inspired deliberations of
Himmler70 — and like Himmler, Hitler visited archaeological digs such as
those at the Kyffhäuser.71 Indeed, by 1942 the dictator is recorded as having
formed an opinion on Detmold’s Extern Stones: he was willing to believe that
they were important to the ancient Germanic tribes, but despite the wild astro-
archaeological theories of Teudt and the similarly Germanomaniacal musings
of Himmler’s academic prehistorians, they were ‘clearly not a cultic site, but
rather a place of refuge’.72 Hitler certainly had a sensibility for antiquarian
concerns beyond his pronounced Graecophilia — he even seems to have react-
ed positively toward Wirth and his Germanomaniacal gnostic ‘Sinnbild-
forschung’.73 The dictator’s negative comments about those who wallowed in a
Germanomania more abject than his own require contextualization, given his
informed understanding of the old Germanic past.
Hitler’s attitude to Germanicness is explained by his dislike of Wotanists or
their latter-day racialist equivalents who styled themselves ‘Ariosophists’.
Hitler was such a myth-maker in matters such as antisemitism and equally

68 Hitler, 7 July 1942, apud Henry Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führer Hauptquartier
(3rd edn, Stuttgart 1976), 426 [= trans. apud Werner Maser, trans. Peter and Betty Ross, Hitler
(London 1973), 138–9]. Cf. also, Speer, Inside the Third Reich, op. cit., 94f.
69 Birgitte Hamann, trans. Thomas Thornton, Hitler’s Vienna (New York 1999), 210.
70 Hitler, 5 December 1934, apud Lund, Germanenideologie, op. cit., 103–4; cf. Himmler,
Document 1992(A)-PS, op. cit.
71 Haußmann, ‘Archaeology in the “Third Reich” ’, op. cit., 70 (with a photograph from Hitler’s
visit).
72 Hitler, 4 February 1942, apud Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche, op. cit., 101.
73 Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks (London 1939), 225; Rauschning is a controversial
source, but his recollection here appears to be independently supported by Wirth’s own state-
ments: see Poliakov and Wulf (eds), Das Dritte Reich und seine Denker, op. cit., 243 and Martin
Broszat, ‘Enthüllung? Die Rauschning Kontroverse’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 Sept-
ember 1985 [= idem, Nach Hitler, ed. Hermann Graml and Klaus-Dieter Henke (2nd edn, Munich
1987), 249–51]. In fact an inscribed copy of one of Wirth’s books (Was heißt deutsch? [Jena
1931]) is to be found in the remains of Hitler’s library in the Library of Congress, Washington (LC
CB213).

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Mees: Hitler and Germanentum 267

such an avid consumer of Wagner, that it would otherwise seem strange that
he did not make the idealizing of Germanic antiquity one of his concerns. But
he had little time for patent Germanomaniacal fantasies. Rauchning has Hitler
say in 1933: ‘These professors and mystery-men who want to found Nordic
religions merely get in my way.’74 So, similarly, in Mein Kampf Hitler attacks
‘so-called religious reformers’ who wanted to return German religiosity to ‘an
old Germanic basis’.75 This passage seems to be a reference directly aimed not
at the German Christianity of Lagarde, the Deutsche Christen and J. Wilhelm
Hauer’s Deutsche Glaubensbewegung, however, but at Ariosophists like Lanz
von Liebenfels and his German counterparts. The old Austrian radical-right
enjoyed a strong obscurantistic connection: Schönerer, for example, had been
a Wotanist and an associate of the Ariosophical founder Guido (von) List.76
The Thule Society, too, was dominated by Ariosophical concerns; its very
symbol — a burning swastika imposed on a Bronze Age dagger — fairly reeks
of the mystical. Brigitte Hamann’s linkage of Hitler with the writings of List
seems misinformed, however: her connection of List’s Secret of the Runes to
an illustrated book seen carried by Hitler in his youth seems a bad guess, as
List’s work has only one page of illustration.77 Hitler’s vegetarianism also
appears to be a reflection of his relationship to the gnostic far-right — like
Wagner, many of the old Viennese right had promoted this radical aspect of
life reform, as did several of the German obscurantists who had been drawn to
National Socialism.78 Mysticists in the 1920s certainly counted Hitler as one of
their number.79 But it is evident that the one-time drummer had little time for
the more extreme Germanicist religionists.
The only mention of Wotanists and Ariosophists in Mein Kampf is this brief
dismissal found immediately after Hitler’s similar attack on the ‘deutsch-
völkisch wandering scholars’. His ambivalence to Germanic antiquity seems to
stem from a rejection of the mystical nationalism of these groups as well as a
desire to mark out the ‘young movement’ from the failed, impotent, often
Germanomaniacal, antiquarian-enthusing old right. Where a member of the
pre-war radical-right might have stressed Germanicness, in Mein Kampf
instead we find Aryans.
Hitler’s repeated stress on the Aryan (and even the ‘German-Aryan’) seems

74 Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, op. cit., 59.

75 Hitler, trans. Mannheim, Mein Kampf, op. cit., 328.
76 Andrew G. Whiteside, The Socialism of Fools (Berkeley, CA 1975), 8ff.
77 Guido von List, Das Geheimnis der Runen (Gross Lichterfelde [1907]); Hamann, Hitler’s
Vienna, op. cit.
78 Hitler cited Wagner’s dietary ideal to justify his vegetarianism, but his doctors report that he
ascribed his herbivorous diet to positive effects on his bodily functions, ones which seem quite
unlike those typically experienced by vegetarians today. His complete conversion is often con-
nected with the death of his niece, Geli, but this is also obviously the time that he was introduced
to the ideas of vegetarian obscurantists such as Wirth. Robert G.L. Waite, The Psychopathic God
(New York 1979), 75–6; Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936: Hubris (London 1998), 703, n. 186.
79 Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, op. cit., 192ff.

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268 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 2

to indicate that he had come to reject the Germanicness consciousness of the

old radical-right and replaced the Germanic identity with another of even
greater German antiquity. By the 1910s, the Aryan, far from being merely an
anthropological formulation, was also being promoted as a cultural identity
by some German and Austrian writers. These academics, pseudo-scholarly
enthusiasts and even utter fantasists belonged to an Aryanist Grub Street —
outright mysticists like List and his followers were merely the most colourful
of these radical interpreters of antiquity.80 Much as with the racial Germanic-
ness of nineteenth-century historians, under the influence of philology the
Aryan described by anthropologists had been joined by a new cultural
construction. The cultural Aryan, ostensibly rooted in comparative Indo-
European studies, represented a marriage of traditional German cultural
Hellenism and the emergent Germanicism first hailed by figures like Wagner
and Dahn.81 Moreover, the Hellenic and the Germanic were symbolically
linked by the swastika, the ancient sun symbol first found in a Greek context
by Schliemann at Troy and since recognized also on all manner of northern
European archaeological finds.82 As Hitler opined in 1920: ‘We know that all
these peoples [of Nordic origin] had a symbol in common: the symbol of the
sun . . . the swastika’; and furthermore, reflecting the most extreme of the
propositions of the Aryanist Grub Street, that ‘Egypt reached its high cultural
level on account of the Aryans, as did Persia and Greece’.83 This Aryanism
subsumed and transcended both Germanicness and Hellenism, and could
embrace a significant part of the cultural genius of Egypt and Persia too.
Hitler’s repeated attacks on those who would overtly mystify ‘the move-
ment’ seem to represent his status as a sober man of facts. But given his accept-
ance even of many of the wildest delusions of antisemitism, his rejection of the
creative Germanentum-enthusing aspect of the discourse of the old right must
also be seen in light of his conceptualization of the Party as a ‘movement’ that
rejected the old conspiratorial approach epitomized by groups like the Thule
Society.84 In fact, Rauschning does not appear too far from the truth when he
has the dictator say (in reference to Darré’s rural anti-Christianity): ‘The old
beliefs will be brought back to honour again’, although ‘it will not be done in
the old way, running riot in colourful costumes and dreaming of a departed,
romantic age. The peasant will be told what the Church has destroyed for
him.’85 But Hitler had less need for a specifically Germanic identity as long as

80 Suzanne L. Marchand, ‘The Rhetoric of Artifacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism:
The Case of Josef Strzygowski’, History and Theory, suppl. 33 (1994), 106ff.
81 Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, op. cit., 255ff.; Marchand, Down from Olympus, op. cit., 348 et
seq.; cf. Puschner, Die völkische Bewegung, op. cit., 66ff.
82 Karlheinz Weißmann, Schwarze Fahnen, Runenzeichen (Düsseldorf 1991), 58–73; Malcolm
Quinn, The Swastika (London 1994), 22ff.
83 Hitler, 13 August 1920, apud Jäckel (ed.), Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen, op. cit., 186–7.
84 Cf. Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, op. cit., 151.
85 Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, op. cit., 62–3.

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Mees: Hitler and Germanentum 269

he could reconcile the emergent Germanicness consciousness and traditional

German Graecophilia within the new racial and cultural identity of the Aryan.
Hitler’s apparent ambivalence to Germanentum is explained by the often
unreliable, though still consistent evidence that he had once been influenced by
the more obscurantistic side of the völkisch movement, one that had developed
out of the Germanentum-conscious tradition of Goths, Rhine maidens and
runes, and evidence of his deliberate distancing of himself from that same
tradition. Although Lanz and List had both also been enthusiastic supporters
of the concept of the Aryan, the obvious obscurantism of the old Munich
radical-right was overtly bound up in an enthusiasm for Germanic antiquity.
Hitler ridiculed those ‘folkish comedians’ ‘who brandish scholarly imitations
of old German tin swords’.86 Relics of his movement away from the Germanic,
however, of his one-time regard for the Germanic link between German and
Aryan, can be found in his writings, speeches and the records of his conversa-
tions. Yet clearly, although Hitler himself gradually came to reject some
aspects of Germanentum, like romanità in Mussolini’s Italy the image of the
golden age of ancient Germany still became an important feature in German
fascism in the often, but not exclusively unofficial world that lay between
‘working toward the Führer’ and the revolution in the conceptualization of
what it was to be German itself.
The image of Germanentum refined and promoted by figures like Heusler
and Kossinna seemed substantial and sober when contrasted with the more
fantastic elements of völkisch thought. Based in archaeological and traditional
literary-philological studies, the discourse of Germanicness did not envision a
Teutonic messiah or millenarian Reich, less still a nihilistic Götterdämmerung
or even a pagan revival. Germanentum was a narrative that treasured and
hoped to revive the best of the legacy of ancient Germany, one which held that
a return to old Germanic values would renew a cultural Germany that had
been corrupted by the ills of modernity. Pared by academic Germanists of the
more gnostic aspects represented by both Wagner and List, it dovetailed only
too well with other emerging discourses of German reaction, perhaps most
evidently with the Nordic racialism of Rassen-Günther and the imperialistic
deliberations of the new experts on the East. The glorified picture of Germanic
antiquity promoted in academic theatres and halls, in the offerings of the
Aryan Grub Street, and after 1933, increasingly with the imprimatur of the
state as well, for some seemed to provide a legitimizing intellectual foundation
for many of the often grimmer discourses which grew up about the project of
völkisch renewal. Overtly supported by Rosenberg and Himmler, the memory
of the more ridiculous antics of the old radical right tempered Hitler’s enthu-
siasm for the revival of the spirit of Germanentum, much as some of the more
gnostic aspects of the völkisch tradition, in response to the Führer’s public
criticisms, were officially discouraged in the German racial state.

86 Hitler, trans. Mannheim, Mein Kampf, op. cit., 327, 328.

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270 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 2

Bernard Mees
is a Fellow in the History Department at the University of
Melbourne. He is the author of many articles on both old Germanic
philology and modern German history and is currently working on a
study of the influence of German exiles in the Middle East in the
1950s and 1960s.

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