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The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust
By Heather Pringle
Viking Canada, 458 pages, $35

A few years ago, when Heather Pringle, a Vancouver science journalist, was working on a book about mummies and the people who have studied them, she came across an account of the famous cadavers preserved for nearly two millennia in some of northern Europe's peat bogs. Among the many people who had taken an interest in them since their discovery was Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, who told a closed meeting of his staff in 1937 that the bodies, many of which bore signs of ritual violence, belonged to homosexuals whom tribal society had cast out and executed.

There was not the slightest evidence for this supposition, which reflected Himmler's own paranoid hatred of homosexuals rather than anything else. Still, it got Pringle interested in Himmler's strange obsession with the distant past. She quickly found out that the main vehicle for his interest was the so-called Ahnenerbe, roughly translatable as "ancestral heritage," a scientific or rather pseudo-scientific institute set up within the SS to pursue research into arcane areas of the history, as Himmler conceived it, of the racial development of humankind.

Beginning in 2001, Pringle learned German and, with a team of research assistants, scoured the archives of Germany, including the voluminous papers of the Ahnenerbe itself. They interviewed surviving members of the institution and many others who had been caught up in its activities in one way or another. Four and a half years on, the result is this book, a highly readable study full of extraordinary characters and events. The activities she chronicles were impressive in their variety, in a deranged sort of way. The Ahnenerbe mounted expeditions to Scandinavia, Greece, Libya and Iraq in search of prehistoric remains. Two scholars plowed their way through a variety of sites in the Middle East, sending back reports to German intelligence as they went.

Most remarkably of all, Ahnenerbe staffers Ernst Schäfer and Bruno Beger led an SS expedition to remote Tibet, where they photographed some 2,000 of the inhabitants, measured 376 individuals and took plastic casts of 17 Tibetan faces. Arriving in Lhasa early in 1939, at a time when the 14th (and present) Dalai Lama had only just been identified as a young boy in a remote mountain village, and had not yet arrived in the capital, the team established cordial relations with the ruling clique, and filmed the New Year dances and parades. Only the looming threat of European war forced them to return, which they did to a triumphal reception by Himmler in August, 1939.

This was not the last German expedition to Tibet: The young mountaineer Heinrich Harrer, whose death was reported this Jan. 7, achieved greater posthumous fame by being marooned in the country on the outbreak of war and, after the conflict was over, writing a bestselling account of his experiences that was later turned into the film Seven Years in Tibet, starring Brad Pitt.

But the Ahnenerbe expedition, if not the last, was certainly the most curious, designed, as were similar expeditions, to identify the wellsprings of what the Nazis called the Aryan race. Such theories were by no means the strangest hypotheses that did the rounds in the Ahnenerbe offices. A particular favourite of Himmler's was the World Ice Doctrine, which explained the absence of any convincing evidence for an ancient Aryan civilization by reference to a series of vast explosions caused by five of Earth's supposed original six moons.

Drawn one after another ever closer to the planet, the moons had allegedly pulled the seas toward the equator, leaving most of the rest of the world covered in a thick layer of ice. As each moon exploded under the strain, vast environmental catastrophes had ensued, releasing the equatorial waters across the earth in a series of vast tsunamis and obliterating all traces of early Aryan civilization. Conventional scientists repudiated this nonsensical theory from the start. But the Ahnenerbe took it seriously despite the fact that it lacked all foundation.

Pringle's main aim is not to recount the eccentric theories of the Ahnenerbe scientists, however, but to expose these men's complicity during the war in some of Nazism's worst crimes. As soon as German forces occupied Poland, Ahnenerbe scholars arrived in Warsaw to ransack the city's museums for prehistoric artifacts of supposedly Germanic origin. Encountering problems in identifying who was Jewish and who was not in the ethnically and culturally mixed regions of the Crimea and the Caucasus, Himmler dispatched Schäfer and Beger to the area to try and sort things out so that the Jews could be separated out and killed.

Before long, Beger was engrossed in a large-scale study of supposedly Jewish racial characteristics. Unable to continue his work in the Crimea and the Caucasus because of the advance of the Red Army in 1943, he relocated to Auschwitz, where he selected and measured Jewish prisoners and took casts of their faces, in full knowledge of their impending fate. Then he moved on to the concentration camp at Natzweiler. Here he was assisted by the ghoulish anatomist August Hirt, whose face had been grotesquely disfigured by a wound to his upper and lower jaw during the First World War. At Natzweiler, the two men started a collection of Jewish skulls, first taking X-rays of selected inmates, then, after having them gassed, macerating their bodies in a chemical solution before adding the skeletal remains to the Ahnenerbe archive at Mittersill castle. These activities were only brought to an end by the arrival of the advancing Allied armies.

Mittersill eventually became an up-market sporting club, where stories of the large collection of skulls found on the original owners' return after the war inspired one of the guests, Ian Fleming, to fictionalize it as the Alpine headquarters of master spy James Bond's arch-enemy, Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Many of the most important Ahnenerbe officials survived the war more or less unscathed: Schäfer became curator of a museum in Hanover and died in 1992, while Beger lived long enough to be interviewed, unrepentant, by Heather Pringle 10 years later. His only regret was at having had to serve a brief prison sentence imposed for his wartime activities by a German court in the 1970s.

Pringle has written a fascinating and disturbing story that raises serious questions about the relationship of science and genocide in the 20th century. It will be of absorbing interest to many readers. But it is unlikely to satisfy scholars, who will still turn to the Canadian historian Michael Kater's pioneering study, published (alas, only in German) more than 30 years ago.

By focusing primarily on exposing and identifying the bizarre ideas and gruesome crimes of the main protagonists, perhaps in the interests of readability, Pringle leaves herself with no room to locate the Ahnenerbe in the overall institutional and ideological structures of the scientific world of Nazi Germany. Many other institutions and many other scholars were involved in similar kinds of work, and it is impossible from reading this volume to get any idea of how important the Ahnenerbe was in comparison to, say, university-based historians engaged in "Eastern research," or major scientific institutes and funding bodies like the Kaiser Wilhelm Society.

Nor do we really learn in the end how the strange doctrines that circulated in the Ahnenerbe fitted in with Himmler's wider concerns or the overall pattern of Nazi ideology. One suspects that, for all the initial absurdity and eventual horror of its activities, it was not all that important in the end.

Richard J. Evans is professor of modern history at Cambridge University. His latest book is The Third Reich in Power, the second volume of what is to be a trilogy about the Nazis .