"Hitler's a nut on the subject. . . . "

[Joe Brody]

Look what just shot to the top of my reading list:

From Publishers Weekly summary/review of The Master Plan by Heather Pringle, Hyperion $24.95 (cut and pasted from Amazon):

Considering the thousands of volumes covering every aspect of the Nazis, it's becoming increasingly difficult to say anything new about their dreadful era. Nevertheless, Pringle (The Mummy Congress), a contributing editor to Discover magazine, gamely steps up to the plate—and has produced a fascinating volume detailing the Nazis' crackpot theories about prehistory and the Indiana Jones–style lengths they went to prove them. Employing a team of researchers, Pringle investigates Heinrich Himmler's private think tank, the Ahnenerbe, which dispatched scholars to the most inhospitable and distant parts of the world to discover evidence of ancient Aryan conquests and the Germans' racial superiority. Some believed their own bizarre garbage; others perverted the facts for personal advancement or prostituted their reputations for the greater glory of Hitler. While it would be otherwise easy to laugh off the Ahnenerbe's ludicrous theories, Pringle argues that the institute provided the "academic" justification for the Holocaust and assembles a powerful body of evidence to that effect. Though one may wonder just how central the Ahnenerbe actually was to Hitler's thinking, when Pringle meets one of the most sinister of Himmler's scholars, his pride about the institute's "research" is distinctly disquieting. This is first-rate popular history—supported by an immense amount of scholarly apparatus in a range of languages. (Feb. 15)

I daresay this fan-fiction writer is gonna get some insight into Toht and Co.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/078...Fencoding=UTF8

[As an aside, this background on the Ahnenerbe is a little different than the backstory being served up on the official site.]

[greyfalcon]

There is no evidence that the leader of the Nazis, Adolf Hitler, was particularly interested in the occult movements of the time, although he undoubtedly has known persons from these circles, whose political ideas in many ways were similar to his. Neither in Hitler's book collection or in his papers are traces of this. Furthermore, there is nothing that indicates that fantasies of a grandiose Germanic ancient kingdom have had any major place in his world view. On the contrary, we have clear evidence that he was not interested in archeaology, and that he viewed it as a waste of time, when romantic souls travelled around the world to track down glimpses of glory of yore. Hitler's driving force was primarily personal ambitions and a disdain for the existing society and a hatred of those parts of the population which he blamed for the miserable conditions in the 1920's in Germany. Romantic dreams were probably far from Hitler's mind.

All in all, there seems to be only one in the Nazi top who were interested in the occult, namely Heinrich Himmler.

[roundshort]

Originally Posted by Joe Brody

Look what just shot to the top of my reading list:

From Publishers Weekly summary/review of The Master Plan by Heather Pringle, Hyperion $24.95 (cut and pasted from Amazon):



I daresay this fan-fiction writer is gonna get some insight into Toht and Co.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/078...Fencoding=UTF8

[As an aside, this background on the Ahnenerbe is a little different than the backstory being served up on the official site.]

nice joe, don't know how I missed that, I have been away, I might have to pick that up, and Jay, do you know this grey falcon