Original subtitles

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] In the early part of the 20th century,

the Nazis rose to power on a dark platform.

Till this day, their racist ideology is overshadowed

only by their ambition for power.

But behind the battles lie more secrets than we know.

Their most elite and evil force, the SS,

plotted far beyond conquest.

They mounted global expeditions,

hunting for ancient relics of power

and long forgotten remnants of ancient civilization,

hell bent on proving a mythical heritage.

Now secrets are revealed.

A new light is shed on dark schemes

and desperate adventures.

[dramatic music]

Desperate to cement their Thousand Year Reich,

the Nazis mounted global expeditions

to hunt for ancient artifacts,

lost customs and symbols

that would imbue them with mystical powers

and prove that the so-called Aryans

were the master race.

The Nazis set their sights on ancient runic symbols,

which were part of an early Germanic writing system

and were thought to possess otherworldly properties.

In this quest,

the Nazis traveled to far-flung corners of the globe

to hunt for these mystical runes,

which could possess the very powers

needed to secure victory in the Second World War.

- They're looking for objects or symbols of power.

- We do have evidence the runic characters

could be used for purposes we don't quite understand.

They might've been magical purposes,

either as amulets to ward off bad luck

or perhaps to perform some kind of curse or spell.

- The idea of taking a writing system

and turning it into a source of magic and divination.

The idea has its roots in what the Roman historian Tacitus

documents about the ancient Germans,

that they did use runes for divination, fortune-telling,

or for guiding them.

And there was this belief that the runes had

some kind of spiritual power.

- [Narrator] For the Nazis,

the existence of runes and distant lands

are seen as evidence

of a glorious mythological Germanic past.

- Knowledge of the runic writing system disappeared

fairly early in the medieval period

because the Latin alphabet was rather easier to write in

and had a better correspondence

between sound and letter, I think.

- Runes or runic symbols were experiencing

a kind of Renaissance of interest

in the late 19th century when Romantic era thinkers

who wanted to recover pre-Christian Germanic civilization

thought that looking at Gothic runes

and Celtic and otherwise around Europe

would help them do that if they could decipher them.

- In Germany, in Nazi Germany, and Austria at the time,

they come with this kind of racial twist.

In that the runic alphabet

is supposed to be a German alphabet

before the era of Christendom.

It's supposed to be uniquely German.

And so it gets co-opted by these various groups and people

to not only profess some sort of belief in magic,

but also solidify this idea of racial supremacy

and racial heritage.

- [Narrator] The Nazis sent teams of archeologists

across Europe and the Middle East to find ancient runes

with a goal to awaken Germany

and restore it to greatness again.

- Germany is unified in 1871,

but before that unification,

what you have is, in the Middle Ages,

hundreds of different principalities.

And even up until the time of Napoleon

who's often credited with unifying

some of these German regions,

you still have multiple regions with their own culture.

A Bavarian was somebody different

than somebody who is in Berlin.

And when they unify in 1871,

there is kind of this attempt

to find something that can unite all regions of Germany

into the shared past.

The power of the runes is not just their magical properties,

but also the power to potentially unite Germans

under this shared history.

- [Narrator] But this Nazi dream of a glorious German past

would become a haunting nightmare for millions.

- The runes were gonna be central

to construct a post-Christian,

post-Jewish Germanic religion.

It will be the alphabet

as it were, of the new Nazi religion.

- [Narrator] Prominent German thinkers

began looking at runes,

along with Norse sagas and old German fairytales

as the roots to unite the German people, known as Volk.

- The Völkisch movement is to return to the idea

of the way things were done in German history.

That there is a unity running through this nation,

and all of that has been lost

under the pressures of modernity,

under the pressures of Christianity,

under the pressures of, according to the Nazis,

Jewish influence.

And so the Volk have to be revived.

- [Narrator] The search for a universal German culture

took a strange turn. [suspenseful music]

In the 19th century,

there was an eruption of interest

in the occult and mysticism.

One of the most influential players

in the German-speaking world was Guido von List.

- Guido von List is an Austrian.

He's born to a fairly wealthy middle-class family.

He becomes a journalist

and he's raised in that post-German Austria.

And he falls into favors of the various nationalist groups

who definitely want to see Austria as a part of Germany.

- [Narrator] In 1906, List created a series of 18 runes,

called the Armanen runes.

- List becomes famous for the publication

of the Armanen runes, which are 18 runic symbols,

which he claimed were passed down

by a group of priest kings who worshiped Wotan,

the god of sun,

and who fell out of favor from Christendom

and who were suppressed

and ultimately disappeared in the face of Christianity.

- You know, Von List with this idea of Wotanism,

was trying to recreate this idea of a Germanic civilization

that existed long ago with the idea, of course,

that it should exist again.

[suspenseful music]

- [Narrator] List's work would become extremely influential

on another Austrian occultist, Lanz von Liebenfels.

- What people like von Liebenfels do

is they kinda nationalized these ideas

claiming that the Germans were the ancestors

of this great Aryan-Nordic race.

And that, through selective breeding

and through association with various symbols

and their magical properties,

they could recreate another super race.

- Lanz von Liebenfels was, from the outset, a racist.

- [Narrator] Liebenfels shared his ideas with the masses,

producing the infamous magazine known as "Ostara."

- "Ostara" is an Austrian publication.

It's for a German-speaking audience.

Significant because we know that later prominent Nazis

in particular, the Fuhrer himself

were exposed to these ideas in "Ostara."

[suspenseful music]

- [Narrator] In the 1920s,

the ideas in the pages of Liebenfels's "Ostara"

found a home in a new extremist political party,

the National Socialist Workers' Party of Germany,

better known as the Nazis.

In "Ostara" and other occultic works,

the Nazis found the spiritual justification

for their murderous doctrines.

One of the strongest proponents of these occultic ideas

was a rising star in the Nazi party, Heinrich Himmler.

- Himmler's attraction to runes is set in the idea

that he can garner power by using these runes.

These runes somehow can bring forward abilities

that perhaps they invoke.

So one of the runes, Tyr,

the God of War, was used quite frequently

within the SS party because Himmler believed that

this rune would give them the ultimate power as warriors.

- The Nazis choose the swastika as their logo,

but there's many groups that are using the swastika.

Various theosophists believe that the swastika

was a runic symbol or that it had magical properties.

- [Narrator] By 1936, the Nazis had almost complete control

of German society. [suspenseful music]

With the SS as the party's vicious enforcers,

now Himmler would use his office as a leader of the SS

to try and find truth to prove his theories.

- Himmler founds the Ahnenerbe,

which means ancestral heritage,

as the research arm of the SS to prove some of these ideas

that are floating around

in various occult and mystical circles.

- [Narrator] The Ahnenerbe was a pseudo-academic

SS think tank devoted

to promoting Nazi party racial doctrines.

Through the use of archeology and other disciplines,

they wanted to prove that modern Germans descended

from an ancient Aryan race

seen as biologically superior to other racial groups.

- He wants it to have real founding

within the universities and the scholarly community.

He's looking for a uniquely German scholarship,

uniquely German science,

one that's going to prove his ideological beliefs.

The initial leader is a man named Herman Wirth,

and he is a pseudo-ethnologist and a pseudo-archeologist.

- [Narrator] The first on Ahnenerbe expedition

was to Bohuslan, Sweden.

There, they found a discovery

that would set fire to Himmler's imagination.

- So the idea of their expeditions to Bohuslan

to look at these early pictographs

was to find the cradle of the Aryan race.

- [Narrator] The Ahnenerbe expedition

found a wealth of ancient stone carvings.

The team believed these glyphs

were an ancient Germanic language,

the key to unlocking the glorious ancient past

of the Aryan race. [suspenseful music]

- And they believed that these pictographs

projected the story of the beginnings of the Aryan people

in this area within Sweden.

And this fed into the propaganda of the beginnings

of these perfect people.

- It's designed to, again,

prove the existence of a master race

that existed in the Baltic region and in Scandinavia.

And there are runes there.

It doesn't necessarily mean

that they were written by Germans

or that it means a particular thing.

These are widely disputed by experts

in the field outside of Germany.

It's designed for consumption of a German people

that's unaware of truth and not really interested in facts.

- [Narrator] While the Nazis believed the markings found

in Bohuslan are evidence of an ancient runic language,

the truth is much different.

- But if you thought with the idea that the runes,

which are probably the most recent

of all the alphabets that we find in Europe,

were actually the oldest

then you can trace resemblances through the other alphabets.

And if you're going to argue

that the runes were the original alphabet

and everything is simply an imitation of that,

it's getting history completely the wrong way round.

- It's not the precision.

Nobody cares about the facts.

It's this assumption that there was a great Germany before

and here are people prepared to defend it.

People with credentials and reputations.

That becomes what the Nazis want.

- [Narrator] To the Ahnenerbe,

these were proto runes,

hiding deep in magical, secret places from the past.

In reality, they were beautiful petroglyphs

from a Bronze Age culture

that lived in the region thousands of years ago.

Despite these facts,

the Nazis believed that the Bohuslan findings

would unlock ancient mystical powers

that had been lost to time.

But not everyone was thrilled by the expedition's findings.

The Ahnenerbes' fantastical ideas

about the glorious ancient history of the Germanic people

were met with some scorn

from the very top of the Nazi party, Adolf Hitler.

At the 1937 Nuremberg rally,

Hitler criticized the Ahnenerbes' lack

of scholarly seriousness.

- Not even all the SS liked this stuff.

Many Nazis did not embrace it.

Now, they were careful for two reasons about dismissing it.

One, they didn't wanna anger, Himmler.

And two, they recognized that it worked

among a certain lower middle-class

white male Protestant demographic

that was their bread and butter.

- [Narrator] For a man that presented an unwavering belief

in the German people to the public,

Hitler was embarrassed about their ancient past.

In private, he would often lament

that while the Greeks were building the Acropolis,

the ancient Germans were making goods out of stone and clay.

Hitler also had another concern, a political one.

He was concerned about these ideas destabilizing

the delicate political balance

between his rising Nazi state and the Christian churches.

- Hitler was much more of a politician.

He understood that he needed to work with the church

if he was to control Europe.

Himmler's pretensions and grand projects were not realistic

because this would have created a direct rift,

because now what would Himmler be saying?

He'd saying we have no more use for Christianity.

And a significant percentage

of the German population was Christian.

- [Narrator] While Hitler eventually

wanted to do away with Christianity,

he felt it was too soon

and the churches were still too powerful in German society.

While the rebuke from his idol stung,

Himmler was determined to be proven right.

- Himmler would need to be very cautious

because you don't want to overstep your bounds.

And he, under no circumstances,

wanted to challenge his leader.

So he would keep it under wraps,

in the sense he could not discuss it

as openly as perhaps he would have wanted to.

- [Narrator] Himmler was determined to prove his point

that the Germanic peoples did have a glorious

and lost history.

To accomplish this, he needed to ramp up the Ahnenerbe.

Himmler shook up the leadership

and brought in Dr. Walther Wust to lead the organization.

- Himmler was aware that now he had to get

people who were not objects of ridicule

in the academic community.

And Wust was an Indologist.

He specialized in ancient Sanskrit literature.

Respectable scholars brought more credibility

to the so-called academic or intellectual projects

of the Ahnenerbe.

We know that the assumption there

was that all these racist beliefs and xenophobic beliefs

and antisemitism is true.

That was the basic assumption that these guys were making,

but they still could participate in academic exchanges

with scholars around the world and so forth,

which someone of Herman Wirth's temperament could not.

- [Narrator] Wust is a keen administrator and organizer

and took to his new office with zeal.

The Ahnenerbe needed more serious scholars like Wust,

academics like Franz Altheim.

Altheim was a celebrated European intellectual

and archeologist who had hit a roadblock in his career.

He had never taken out a membership in the Nazi party,

but that was going to change. [suspenseful music]

- Membership with the Nazis or having Nazi ties

could often be a marriage of convenience.

Especially after the Nazi seizure of power,

membership within the Nazi party

or close affiliation with the Nazi party meant opportunity.

The Ahnenerbe is, throughout its career,

plagued by this tension between those who are serious

and those who wanna do real scholarship

and those who are looking

to kinda prove certain fantastical nonsense.

- [Narrator] In a mountain valley

at the base of the Italian Alps sits Val Camonica,

a site where archeologists found ancient markings.

Franz Altheim was sent to the site to study these markings.

At Val Camonica, Franz Altheim journeys into the cave

where these markings had been found.

After analyzing these symbols,

he comes to the conclusion that these are, in fact, runes

and must be evidence

of an ancient Germanic-Nordic settlement in Italy.

The Val Camonica cave drawings

were made during the Neolithic period,

dating back between 5500 and 3300 BC.

It would have been older than the cave drawings

found in Bohuslan, Sweden,

which were made during the Bronze Age

between 1800 to 500 BC.

However, Altheim incorrectly dates the Val Camonica glyphs

to be newer than the markings found in Sweden.

This mistake allows him to entertain the idea

that Bronze Age Germans and Nordics

migrated from the north to the south.

- The efforts of Altheim to draw connections

between completely unrelated petroglyphs

in Northern Europe and Southern Europe

had to be, on their part,

an effort to curry favor with Himmler.

It's unlikely they themselves actually believed

that those were part of the same

pre-historic Indo-Aryan civilization.

And it's just perfect example of the way

that ideology trumped science.

- The Ahnenerbe is not a place

where you're free to think what you want

or free to say that I did not make any discoveries.

They wanted results.

So if Bronze Age art could be made to look like runes,

or it could be presented as runes, why not?

- [Narrator] With the help of his assistant

and lover, Erika Trautmann,

Altheim documents these new findings.

Erika Trautmann was not your typical academic assistant.

The photographer and artist

came from an upper-crust Bavarian family

and had deep ties to the Nazi party

and Hermann Goring himself.

Goring had been a crucial member of the Nazi party,

helping create the Gestapos,

as well as being Commander in Chief

of Germany's air force, the Luftwaffe.

- Trautmann's influence does begin to skew the viewpoints

on what these glyphs represent.

- [Narrator] Trautmann understood the importance

of the glyphs at Val Camonica

and how important this was for the Ahnenerbe.

If played right,

these markings could change her and Altheim's careers

in a big way.

With Trautmann's assistance,

Altheim writes about the findings at Val Camonica

to the Ahnenerbe office.

His report states that the Val Camonica

and the Bohuslan glyphs

are of the same ancient proto-runic language.

- What they found was interpreted in a particular way

which served their cause.

So it's not that these people were not competent,

most of them were compromised from the get-go.

[suspenseful music]

- [Narrator] To Wust and the Ahnenerbe,

this is a bombshell discovery,

evidence that Germans were in Italy much earlier

than previously thought.

For the Ahnenerbe, this means that ancient Germanic people

had migrated from Sweden to Italy

and become part of the Roman Empire.

Thus, the ancient Romans were, in fact, a Germanic people.

The Val Camonica glyphs were used by the Nazis

to promote the idea that the Aryans created

the glorious ancient civilizations of the past.

The real facts don't matter.

The Ahnenerbe believed they have the evidence

to fit their narrative.

Altheim and Trautmann planned an expedition

across Eastern Europe and the Middle East

on a mission to prove that Germans, Nordics, and Romans

were locked in a struggle against the Semitic East.

- The struggle with the Semites

or the struggle with the Jews,

the Semitic people, this is an ongoing struggle.

This is a historical enemy of Germany.

This is the idea which is being pushed

so that people take their antisemitism

a little bit more seriously.

You cannot be a casual antisemite in Nazi Germany.

You have to be a committed one.

- [Narrator] Altheim believed

that the ancient Roman wars of conquest

were actually wars between Aryan-Germanic peoples

against Eastern Semitic peoples.

For the scholarly community,

reframing the ancient past to line up

with the current German political situation

was poor scholarly research.

But it was good for Altheim's career.

- They saw this as a way to get money and travel

and test their theories.

And they were perfectly willing to do it

on behalf of the Ahnenerbe.

- [Narrator] Altheim and Trautmann

must now address a common problem for scholars,

finding funding. [suspenseful music]

- If you are looking at for funding at that time,

Himmler's the place to go.

Especially if you can package your research project

as somehow contributing to Himmler's quest

for a new religion.

It's gold.

- [Narrator] Altheim, the eccentric professor

is an apolitical Bohemian.

On the other hand,

Trautmann has connections to the top of the Nazi party,

her old friend, Hermann Goring.

Using Trautmann's connections to Goring,

they're able to secure part of the funding

for their expedition to Eastern Europe and the Middle East

on the hunt for more runes and glyphs

and evidence of the Aryan character of the Roman Empire.

But Goring isn't the only high ranking Nazi

that makes contact with Altheim and Trautmann.

Reinhard Heydrich,

who is chief of the Reich Security Main Office,

saw the benefit of Altheim and Trautmann's travel

for one of his organizations,

the Security Service, also referred to as the SD.

Heydrich and the SD have an ulterior motive

for scholars like Altheim and Trautmann

espionage. [suspenseful music]

- I think one reason that Hitler and the Foreign Office,

which was much more sober

in terms of its awareness of reality than maybe Himmler was,

would help sponsor or facilitate these missions

is that Himmler would usually be willing to include

a geopolitical or practical economic benefit.

- Using these expeditions to plant spies

is actually kind of an ingenious way

to get people into foreign countries.

If you say it's for academic or scholarly purposes,

but really it's for political or espionage purposes,

it actually makes sense.

- One of the most important things about Nazi Germany

and its military strategies in particular

is that it's critically dependent upon foreign oil reserves.

- [Narrator] Oil is the lifeblood of any modern military

and the couples travels will take them

to many oil-rich nations,

the first being Romania. [suspenseful music]

- If they can get control of the oil-rich countries,

they can cut off the rest of the world

in so many ways.

- [Narrator] The once apolitical Altheim

becomes a member of the SS and a spy for the Reich.

- And when Heydrich asked you to do something,

you didn't ignore it

because he was as much of a person to be feared

as Himmler was.

- [Narrator] In the spring of 1938,

Altheim and Trautmann traveled to Romania

on the hunt for clues around the Germanic nature

of the ancient Dacian people.

The Dacians were an ancient Thracian people

that lived in what is today Romania, Moldova,

and parts of the Ukraine.

The Dacians were conquered by the Romans

in the 1st century AD.

Altheim believed the Dacians were a Germanic people

and wished to find evidence of this fact

at archeological dig sites.

As the couple begin their research at the ruins

of an ancient Dacian hill fort,

they're confronted by locals.

The couple are warned about the political chaos

and troubles that have recently erupted in the area

and to be on the lookout for both rebels

and the ultra-fascist Iron Guard,

led by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu.

- Romania has actually one of the most virulent,

racist fascist movements of the era

known as the Iron Guard.

And the Iron Guard are led by a young charismatic figure,

much like Hitler,

but they're also unique in that they are Christian.

But Romania is besmirched by these fascist uprisings

and these fascist activities

leading up to the Second World War.

And Hitler, although they have

the kind of ideological companionship,

Hitler actually ends up backing

authoritarian military regime over these fascists,

because they really do upset the landscape

in Romania at the time.

So this is a dangerous time to be heading out in Romania

to do research.

- [Narrator] As the political situation worsens,

Altheim and Trautmann leave Romania

and make their way to Beirut via a steam ship from Athens.

Altheim and Trautmann arrive in Beirut.

The couple then plot their next move.

They wish to travel to French-controlled Syria

to study ancient runes in their quest to find proof

of a Germanic-Roman empire.

- The runes were very good evidence

of the presence of Germanic people.

If they were genuine runes and not art,

or some other glyphs being turned into runes,

or being presented as runes.

So it would have made a world of difference

if they had found Germanic runes in that part of the world.

And this is what teaches us

that we should believe historians and archeologists

more than crackpot theorists

is because no such runes were found.

- [Narrator] Nazi sympathizers

helped to get Trautmann and Altheim to Damascus,

the ancient capital of Syria.

- So the regions around Syria and Damascus

are believed to be the cradle of civilization.

So if you are looking for proof

that your ancestral heritage goes back

all the way to the beginning of civilization,

then this is a good place to start.

- [Narrator] Damascus is one of the oldest

continuously inhabited cities in the world.

Founded about 4,000 years ago,

it has seen the rise and fall

of some of history's greatest civilizations,

including the Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians,

Greeks, and Romans.

- They believe that when they hit Damascus,

they're really gonna be able to peel back

those layers of time and find the origins of runes.

- [Narrator] As they arrive in Damascus,

French authorities begin to tail Altheim and Trautmann.

The French had good reason to be wary

of the German scholars.

French and German relations were getting heated by 1938,.

Only two years prior,

the German Army had moved into the Rhineland.

After the First World War,

the Rhineland had been a demilitarized parcel

of German land bordering on France.

Hitler moving troops into this area

was in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles

and put France on high alert for further acts of aggression.

- So 1938 is probably one of the most tense years in Europe.

It comes after the Abyssinian Crisis,

when the Italians had already sparked

a potential global conflict.

There is fears of another war.

If you're making plans,

especially international plans,

a lot of that gets canceled and disrupted at this time

because there are so many moving pieces

and they're moving quickly.

- [Narrator] Two German archeologists poking around

was exactly the kind of thing the French authorities

would be on high alert for.

Altheim and Trautmann decide

to leave French-controlled Syria

and head for the independent state of Iraq.

The couple are passed over by the officials

and the train leaves Damascus en route to Baghdad.

On the train, they make a list

of the ancient sites they wish to visit,

Ctesiphon, Babylon, Assur, Hatra and Palmyra.

At these sites, they hoped to find runes

that will prove once and for all their theory

that Rome had Germanic-Aryan roots

and was in struggle against the peoples of the East.

There is another sinister purpose for this expedition.

For Nazi Germany,

any sign of ancient Germanic culture in another land

would be grounds for seizure of the territory.

This ideology dates back to Gustaf Kossinna,

who was an extremely influential German archeologist.

Previously a professor at the University of Berlin,

he developed a theory that the material found

at an archeology site was tied to the ethnicity

of the people who lived there.

Kossinna's ideas were championed by German scholars

like archeologist Hans Reinerth,

whose ideas became Kossinna's law.

- The idea of Kossinna's law,

that archeological evidence

where people could justify seizure of land,

there's definitely imperialist elements there.

But it's also useful for the Nazis

because the Nazis emphasize the collective,

not the individual.

It was what was good for the Volk.

And so it wasn't about individual property.

It was about property that belonged to the race.

This is the ideology that's inherently driving Hitler.

It legitimizes the expansion of the Nazi Reich

into Eastern Europe.

And it can also therefore be kind of twisted

into the archeological or occult aspects of Nazism,

which are therefore kind of propping claim

into various lands through archeological discoveries.

- [Narrator] The Nazis would use Kossinna's law

as an excuse for the annexation of Czechoslovakia.

If Altheim and Trautmann could find the markings

like the so-called proto-runes of Val Camonica

in the Middle East, [suspenseful music]

this would mean the entire region was German land,

ripe for future conquest.

- But they're really far reaching

in how they're trying to pull everything together.

They're looking at cultures that have writing,

the ability to write.

And therefore, if you have the ability to write,

you must have a connection to the Aryan race of people.

- [Narrator] As Altheim and Trautmann arrive

in the ancient city of Baghdad,

they find support for their expedition.

They make contact with powerful Nazi sympathizers in Iraq

and meet with the German envoy to Baghdad,

Dr. Fritz Grobba.

- He is not just a Nazi sympathizer,

he's an actual Nazi.

And he has transplanted himself into the Middle East.

It seems like a very odd place.

However, if we look at the bigger picture here,

we know that the Nazis are looking at oil-rich countries,

and this is a perfect place to set up shop.

[suspenseful music]

- [Narrator] With help from Grobba,

Altheim and Trautmann are now on the road to Assur

to see if they can find any information on oil pipelines.

During their travels,

the couple meets Sheik Adjil el Yawar,

a powerful Bedouin war chief.

- The Bedouin are the nomadic people in the area.

And they are a culture that goes back

thousands and thousands of years.

Original people who live off the land.

They know all the secrets.

- [Narrator] The Sheik is a powerful Bedouin leader

looking for German support for a revolt

against the colonial powers.

They also learned that all the Bedouin locals

know exactly where the oil pipelines lay,

the exact information Heydrich and the SD are looking for.

After spending some time with Sheik Adjil,

Altheim and Trautmann make their way back to Germany

with their wealth of research and secret reports.

The SD was very happy with Altheim and Trautmann's work.

They were very excited about potential alliances

with the Bedouins and the information about oil pipelines.

- Any alliance which would allow them access

to this very valuable resource

to move their heavily oil-dependent army

into the steppes of Russia

is something which would have been very valuable to them.

- [Narrator] The archeological side of their expedition

does not find the evidence of runes and glyphs,

but the Ahnenerbe is very excited

about possible future expeditions to the East.

But these plans are put on hold.

On September 1st, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland,

triggering the Second World War.

When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939,

part of the justification was the fact

that there were Germans living in Poland

and that German culture was present in the country.

This is Kossinna's law in practice.

It would have devastating effects on the entire world.

Despite the dangers of the front,

the Ahnenerbe had a mission to find evidence

of Germanic civilization in their newly conquered lands,

such as runes and other artifacts.

- It is, to some degree, a kind of free for all

to grab what kind of cultural artifacts you can

from places of interest and then try to abuse them,

try to create a narrative that's totally without fact,

or without any reasonable evidence

to support the ideas of a Germanic peoples

that go back into antiquity and or the supremacy

of the Aryan race.

It depends on your particular point of view.

- [Narrator] To execute that mission,

they chose a rising star in German academia,

archeologist Herbert Jankuhn.

- Jankuhn was one of the chief archeologists

that worked with the Ahnenerbe.

These archeologists would be sent out to find evidence

in paleolithic sites of Germanic civilization.

And so Jankuhn was very keen on that.

They also looked for things like spearheads

and other kinds of weapons and armor.

But among the evidence they were seeking

were runic alphabets.

- [Narrator] Herbert Jankuhn was one

of the most respected archeologists in Germany.

At 26, Jankuhn became the director

of one of the most important excavations in Germany,

Hedeby, a Viking trading post

located just south of the Danish border.

The Hedeby stones are four large runic stones

found at Hedeby in the 19th century.

Stones like these triggered the Nazi imagination.

Jankuhn wanted to find more relics from the past,

like the stones, to prove the existence

of a vast Nordic empire of ancient history.

The Nazis wanted to connect Germans

to their newly-conquered lands.

Kossinna's law,

which allows for the seizure of lands

where signs of ancient Germanic peoples have been found,

would be applied to all of Eastern Europe

and the Soviet Union.

But the Ahnenerbe needed to find evidence

to help the Nazi case.

German scholars believe the ancient Goths were the link

they were searching for.

- Goths hold a place in German mythology

and German popular culture at the time,

precisely because they were the ones who sacked Rome

and defeated the Roman Empire.

And so if you believe

in kind of these cyclical theories of history,

the Goths were the ones that took down

the Roman civilization once it had become corrupted

and heralded this great new era of history.

- [Narrator] In 1942, the German Army

was pushing deeper and deeper into the USSR's Crimea region.

Many German scholars at the time believed

this region was the homeland of an ancient German empire.

- The East is at the very center of Hitler's ideology,

Eastern Europe.

He believes that Germany,

if it is going to survive and it is going to reign supreme,

that it has to expand into the eastern lands.

Into Poland, into the Soviet Union.

So this is always at the back of his mind,

even when he's invading France,

even when he's attacking Britain,

he believes that Germany's destiny is in Eastern Europe

and that those are currently in possession

of the racially inferior Slavic people.

And so anything that somewhere like Crimea

is actually a place of German heritage,

maybe even one of the homelands

of this great German Aryan civilization,

then that fits well with not only the Fuhrer's ideology,

but also what comes later,

which is, of course, the war of extermination

that takes place in Russia. [suspenseful music]

- We need to always come back to this idea

of what the Nazis were,

which is an ideologically driven collection of madmen.

- [Narrator] To Himmler, the facts did not matter.

He saw Crimea as the perfect soil for his deranged plans

to spring forth.

With its mild and sunny climate,

Himmler believed Crimea would be the perfect place

for a German settlement.

Hitler himself thought warmer climates

were more agreeable to Aryans.

Of ancient Rome and Greece,

Hitler said the Germanic spirit

found the first terrain favorable to its blossoming.

Himmler wanted to turn as much of Eastern Europe

into an SS feudal state.

And because he believed Crimea was once Germanic land,

this region would be perfect for German resettlement.

But first he wanted evidence to strengthen his claims

In the summer of 1942, Himmler dispatched Jankuhn

and two colleagues to the Black Sea region

to search for the treasures of the Goths.

- These are not scholarly arguments to be made.

These are not academic ventures.

These are all about the aggrandizement of the German state.

- [Narrator] Himmler considered this work

to be of prime importance and asked

that Jankuhn's reports be forwarded directly to him.

Around the same time,

Jankuhn is ordered to the Eastern Front

to find runic evidence and Gothic treasure.

- This entire effort was circular.

They already knew what they were supposed to find

and whatever they found would be interpreted

along those lines and presented accordingly.

- [Narrator] Jankuhn tells his team to pack light

and bring a steel helmet.

They are going to the Eastern Front.

Their mission: to find relics

and evidence of the ancient Crimean Gothic empire.

For protection, this small archeology team

is paired with the 5th SS Panzer Division.

Plunged into the heart of the war,

Herbert Jankuhn and his team

are searching for evidence of an ancient Gothic empire

that was based out of Crimea.

Much of the speculation about this Gothic empire

was sparked by the findings

of the so-called Gothic crown of the Crimea.

This jewel encrusted crown was found

in an ancient burial site near Kerch

and was put on display in a Berlin museum.

Jankuhn's team was nearing Kerch

where he hoped to find the fabled Gothic treasure.

He learns from SS officers that they suspect

that the nearby Maikop Museum

could be the home of Gothic artifacts.

The group trudged through the war zone

to get to important Gothic sites

before Russia's Red Army

can remove the artifacts

or before they are destroyed by war.

- The Nazis detest the Red Army.

In between these searches for Nazi treasure

and the war itself,

it becomes a war over history

embroiled in the literal theater of war.

- [Narrator] But because of heavy fighting on the front,

they are unable to proceed with their mission.

Jankuhn butted heads with the Wiking division leader,

SS Gruppenfuhrer Felix Steiner.

Steiner was in the middle of a war.

To him, Jankuhn was a distraction.

But Jankuhn had a trump card up his sleeve

and was sent on this mission by Himmler himself.

Steiner gave in eventually,

but warned Jankuhn of the dangers of the front.

Warnings he ignored.

And so Jankuhn and his team followed

a detachment of the 5th Panzer Division

as they headed towards Maikop.

Through the battle-raged streets of Maikop,

Jankuhn and his team find the museum.

Inside, they are thankful to find

that the artifacts are still there and intact.

- And when he gets into the museums,

he starts to see a lot of things

that don't really connect with this.

He starts to see Greek artifacts.

Phoenician.

And all of these different Mediterranean cultures

that are on display in this museum.

Now, of course in Crimea, that makes sense.

That's something that people

in that district may have an interest in.

It's different from their own artifacts.

And, of course,

even though they haven't found what they're looking for,

they're going to confiscate these artifacts anyways

and bring them back.

- [Narrator] Jankuhn believes he's close

to making the discovery of Gothic artifacts

and wants to press on.

His team learn that there's the possibility

that the Gothic treasure they seek

is being held at a medical warehouse nearby.

They race towards the warehouse on a hunt

to find the treasure. [suspenseful music]

Given a military truck for his team,

they ride through the bombed-out Crimean countryside

on their way to the railroad junction town of Armavir,

where they hope to find the Gothic treasure as they seek.

- We would have to think to ourselves,

why would it be there?

This does not seem like a place

that we should be keeping Gothic treasure.

But we have to remember that, at this time,

museums were packing up very precious artifacts

and putting them in locations that they felt were safe.

So inside this medical warehouse might've been a location

that perhaps they did not think the Nazis would raid.

- [Narrator] As Jankuhn and his team reach

the medical warehouse,

they are horrified to find

that it has been reduced to rubble

thanks to the recent fighting in the area.

Despite this setback,

Jankuhn is now obsessed with finding proof

of the Gothic treasure and continues his search

on the extremely dangerous Eastern Front.

His plans for further archeological work are cut short

when there is an increase in Russian partisan attacks

in the area. [suspenseful music]

The situation becomes too dangerous to continue his work

and Jankuhn spends the rest of the war

attached to the 5th Panzer SS as an intelligence officer.

And as the Nazi war effort begins to crumble,

Jankuhn and the 5th Panzer SS retreat

further and further west.

April 30th, 1945.

As the Red Army storms Berlin,

Adolf Hitler commits suicide.

Less than a month later,

the captured chief of the criminal SS, Heinrich Himmler,

also takes his own life.

Himmler's archeologist, Jankuhn,

and the rest of the 5th Panzer Wiking Division

surrendered to American forces in Bavaria in 1945.

- I think they were serious archeologists

who made a deal with the devil.

And when you make a deal with the devil,

you play on his terms.

- [Narrator] Jankuhn was placed

in an internment camp in Germany

for three years before he was released.

While the Red Army stormed across Eastern Germany,

they captured Dr. Franz Altheim at the University of Halle.

Altheim is able to charm his way out

of taking a Red Army bullet

by lying about his time with the SS.

He makes his way back to Western Germany,

where he slowly integrates back

into German academic society.

After the war, Altheim became a respected academic

in West Germany, teaching at the famous Berlin Free School.

Altheim leaves Trautmann.

They never speak of their work for the SS again.

After release from the internment camp,

Jankuhn was shunned by German academia.

He toiled away at Viking historical sites

until he was finally allowed to lecture again

at the University of Gothenburg.

As for the runes,

no runes were found

outside of previously known Nordic countries.

In the end, Altheim, Trautmann and Jankuhn's efforts

in the field of intelligence were much more fruitful

to the Nazis than their work as archeologists.

- This ridiculous idea

that the Germanic people invented writing

when history documents that's certainly not true.

How can we say that these people were interested

in the scientific goals alone?

Or even committed to the discovery of truth?

They were committed to confirming

what they already believed.

It is the legacy of runology in 20th-century Germany

which has corrupted the mystical component of the runes.

[suspenseful music]

[suspenseful music]