The master plan: Himmler's scholars and the Holocaust

Description

This edition does not include illustrations. Acclaimed science writer Heather Pringle uncovers the true story of the scientists and archaeologists Heinrich Himmler deployed to find proof for his theories of a prehistoric Aryan master race. What happens when science falls prey to a political agenda? Pre-history, according to Heinrich Himmler, must be re-written. Himmler, the chief of the SS and architect of the Nazi network of death camps, was obsessed with re-writing history. He was convinced that archaeologists had long ignored the great accomplishments of ancient Germanic peoples. Himmler believed that Germany's ancestors – the tall, blue-eyed, blond-haired Aryans – had evolved not in the savannahs of Africa with the rest of humanity, but in the icy barrens of the Arctic. There, refined and distilled by natural selection in a bitter land, they had become an invincible master race. But some 12,000 years ago, theorized Himmler, a natural...