The Past as Propaganda: Totalitarian Archaeology in Nazi Germany (1990)

To understand events in German prehistoric archaeology under the National Socialists, it is necessary to look at the discipline well before Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and the beginning of the Umbruch period of radical change. Archaeology in Central Europe on the eve of the First World War was marked by a return of the ethno-historic approach to theory; in German-speaking regions there was a new name for the discipline to go with its new orientation. The term Vorgeschichte (prehistory) was rejected as a survival of anthropological thinking: Urgeschichte (early history) was preferred as better emphasizing the continuity of prehistory with documentary history (Sklenár 1983: 132). The writings of the nineteenth-century French racial philosopher Gobineau provided a doctrine of the inequality of different races (Daniel and Renfrew 1988: 104–6). Journals and publications dealing with the subject of race and genetic engineering increasingly appeared in Germany in the early twentieth century, among them Volk und Rasse, which was founded in 1926, and Fortschritte der Erbpathologie und Rassenhygiene, founded in 1929. Neither publication survived the Second World War. The linguist Gustaf Kossinna (1858–1932), a late convert to prehistory, laid the groundwork for an ethnocentric German prehistory. Kossinna proposed cultural diffusion as a process whereby influences, ideas, and models were passed on by more advanced peoples to the less advanced with which they came into contact. This concept, wedded to Kossinna’s Kulturkreis theory, the identification of geographical regions with specific ethnic groups on the basis of material culture, lent theoretical support to the expansionist policies of Nazi Germany. ‘Distribution maps of archaeological types became a convincing argument for expansionist aims: wherever a single find of a type designated as Germanic was found, the land was declared ancient German territory’ (Sklenár 1983: 151; Fig. 7.2). Alfred Rosenberg, the NS party’s ideologist, codified this ethnocentric and xenophobic perspective: ‘an individual to whom the tradition of his people (Volkstum) and the honor of his people (Volksehre) is not a supreme value, has forfeited the right to be protected by that people’ (Germanenerbe 1938: 105).