Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust (Text Only)
    Unavailable
    The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust (Text Only)
    Unavailable
    The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust (Text Only)
    Ebook698 pages9 hours

    The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust (Text Only)

    By Heather Pringle

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateFeb 6, 2014
    ISBN9780007383887
    Unavailable
    The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust (Text Only)
    Author

    Heather Pringle

    Heather Pringle is a journalist and author who has written on archaeology and ancient cultures in numerous magazines including Discover, National Geographic Traveler, New Scientist, Science and Geo. In January 2002, she won the American Association for the Advancement of Science award for Magazine Journalism. She is the author of three books, including ‘The Mummy Congress’. She lives in Vancouver, Canada.

    Related to The Master Plan

    Related ebooks

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Occult-Nazi Fact And Fantasy

      Mar 23, 2023

      The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich Stephen E Flowers Inner Traditions 2022 Pb, 544pp, £26, ISBN 9781644115749 Everybody knows how deeply the Nazis were into the occult; between Indiana Jones, the Hellboy franchise, Ca

      3 min read

    • Article

      Otto the Strange

      Apr 14, 2017

      Otto the Strange
      9 min read

    • Article

      Jena-gadda-da-vida

      Sep 1, 2022

      For a few years at the turn of the 19th century, Jena, a small university town in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, was an intellectual Shangri-La. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Though its population was barely 4,500, Jena was for a while home to many of th

      4 min read

    • Article

      Mental Music

      Sep 1, 2021

      Mental Music
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Nürnberg Rallies

      Oct 30, 2020

      The Nürnberg Rallies
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Lost Piece of Trans History

      Jan 15, 2019

      A Lost Piece of Trans History
      7 min read

    • Article

      Temple Of Doom

      Oct 27, 2020

      Temple Of Doom
      11 min read

    • Article

      Pop Goes German Philosophy

      Aug 1, 2017

      With their TED Talks, TV shows, and runaway best-sellers, a new generation of celebrity philosophers has made German philosophy more popular than ever. But are they ruining it in the process?

      11 min read

    • Article

      Hitler’s Hangman

      Aug 31, 2023

      Hitler’s Hangman
      13 min read

    • Article

      Obsessed With The Occult

      Jul 14, 2020

      Obsessed With The Occult
      15 min read

    • Article

      Celebrated And Damned

      Aug 20, 2021

      Celebrated And Damned
      4 min read

    • Article

      Is It Possible A Project That involves Reading Novels By The Thousand, From All Over The World, May Reveal Links Between Current Events And What Disasters Are Likely To Happen In The Near Future? A Team In Germany Be Lieves We Can See Upcoming Cata Strophes In The Lines Of Contemporary Fiction

      Jul 2, 2021

      Is It Possible A Project That involves Reading Novels By The Thousand, From All Over The World, May Reveal Links Between Current Events And What Disasters Are Likely To Happen In The Near Future? A Team In Germany Be Lieves We Can See Upcoming Cata Strophes In The Lines Of Contemporary Fiction
      16 min read

    • Article

      Mein Kampf An Outline Of Evil

      Jun 3, 2022

      Mein Kampf An Outline Of Evil
      4 min read

    • Article

      Monuments To The Unthinkable

      Nov 14, 2022

      Monuments To The Unthinkable
      43 min read

    • Article

      The Broken Circle

      Dec 23, 2020

      THERE ARE FOUR AGES OF MODERN VIENNA. Before the First World War, it was cultured and rich; from 1918 until the Anschluss with Nazi Germany, it was cultured and poor; from 1938 to the end of the Allied occupation, it was just poor; and from 1955 to t

      11 min read

    • Article

      The Paradox Of Nazi Culture

      Nov 26, 2020

      HERMAN GOERING is famous for supposedly having said, “When I hear the word ‘culture’, I reach for my revolver.” In fact, the quote originated elsewhere. It would have been surprising if the case were otherwise, since the Nazis, being Germans, could h

      5 min read

    • Article

      Malicious Communications

      Jul 7, 2021

      Malicious Communications
      3 min read

    • Article

      Blue Bloods And Brownshirts

      Apr 29, 2021

      THE GERMAN ARISTOCRACY entered the twentieth century in several shapes and sizes. A whole slew of monarchs, grand dukes, mediatised princes and landgraves had survived Bismarck’s unification of the country. Prussian Protestant aristocrats remained lo

      5 min read

    • Article

      Writing Against Wrongs

      Jan 26, 2024

      Writing Against Wrongs
      2 min read

    • Article

      Classical Corner

      Feb 23, 2023

      Classical Corner
      5 min read

    • Article

      Les Monstres Among Us

      Jul 16, 2018

      Les Monstres Among Us
      6 min read

    • Article

      Q&A YOU ASK, WE ANSWER

      Mar 16, 2023

      Q&A YOU ASK, WE ANSWER
      6 min read

    Reviews for The Master Plan

    4/5

    34 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      A semi-popular account of Himmler’s racialist think tank, the Ahnenerbe, what the book does well is to link Himmler’s own cultural and racial obsessions to the course of myth-making (one hates to dignify the whole fraudulent enterprise as research) conducted by the agency. This is particularly in regards to the pre-war period when the Ahnenerbe looked nothing so much as a deranged mirror image of the National Geographic.Somewhat less satisfactory is Pringle's accounting of the wartime activities conducted, when there was less emphasis on collecting supposed lost Aryan wisdom (though such activities never totally ceased) and more on providing intelligence for the SS killing teams out in the field. Though one imagines this is due to key documentation being lost or destroyed, not to mention that while there were participants who still tried to justify their pre-war activities as real science, activities such as the collection of human specimens and lethal lab experiments were of course hushed-up. It’s probably amazing that we know as much about these atrocities as we do.As for the denouement of it all, in the process of examining the post-war fates of the participants Pringle wonders why so many of the actual scientists who were sucked into Himmler’s racialist enterprise didn’t recoil. This seems to be a particular reaction to Pringle’s encounter with Bruno Beger, the resident anthropologist on the 1939 expedition to Tibet, and a largely unrepentant believer in the racialist thinking of the Ahnenerbe.Part of the answer, as Michael Allen observed in "The Business of Genocide," is that there may well be a moral blind spot in the disinterested pose often found in the scientific and technological endeavor, which can slide into amorality. When combined with the ideological commitment that held the Nazi party together (and which Pringle probably doesn’t play up enough) and the sheer selfish ambition of so many who joined the SS, it’s not a surprise one wound up with such a lethal combination.
    • 4/5
      A duty read - a witness to evil. The book details some of the history of the Ahnenerbe, a Nazi-SS organization for "scientific" research. The first half of the book looks at some hilarious stuff the organization did; it could be lifted from the screen of an Indiana Jones movie. They looked for evidence of ancient Aryan empires in Tibet and in the centre of Scandinavia, all in an effort to prove that Aryans, who effectively never existed, were the smarter-than-the-average bear race destined to dominate the world. The Ahnenerbe looked for ways to define "Aryaness" and "Jewishness". The place was overrun with bozos, judging by the book. In the second half of the book, the humour ends. These same bozos subjected Jewish victims to medical experiments with chemicals, cold, and disease, killing most of their victims, usually in agony. Some eighty Jews were killed so that their bones could be studied to define Jewishness. Many of the "scientists" of the Ahnenerbe reached high SS rank, as they were favourites of Himmler. Sadly, virtually none of these murders and their assistants were brought to justice after the war. Some prospered. The memories of the National Socialist regime of Hitler have dimmed. We should never forget the evils that were perpetrated in his name, and by tens-hundreds of thousands of willing Germans and Austrians. This book is a little bit of their witness.It could, however, have been better written. It is very loose in structure and tends to drift off every now and then until the author is seized with indignation at the evil of the Ahnenerbe staffers.
    • 4/5
      Exhaustively researched, this study of the German Ahnenerbe, Himmler's think tank created to support some of the more ludicrous Nazi ideology with archaeological or sociological study is a fascinating look at science gone wrong. Imagine what these scholars could have accomplished had they sought to advance learning rather than bend it to political ends.