The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust [Hardcover]

Heather Pringle (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 15, 2006

A groundbreaking history of the Nazi research institute whose work helped lead to the extermination of millions

In 1935, Heinrich Himmler established a Nazi research institute called The Ahnenerbe, whose mission was to send teams of scholars around the world to search for proof of Ancient Aryan conquests. But history was not their most important focus. Rather, the Ahnenerbe was an essential part of Himmler’s master plan for the Final Solution. The findings of the institute were used to convince armies of SS men that they were entitled to slaughter Jews and other groups. And Himmler also hoped to use the research as a blueprint for the breeding of a new Europe in a racially purer mold.

The Master Plan is a groundbreaking exposé of the work of German scientists and scholars who allowed their research to be warped to justify extermination, and who directly participated in the slaughter -- many of whom resumed their academic positions at war’s end. It is based on Heather Pringle’s extensive original research, including previously ignored archival material and unpublished photographs, and interviews with living members of the institute and their survivors. A sweeping history told with the drama of fiction, The Master Plan is at once horrifying, transfixing, and monumentally important to our comprehension of how something as unimaginable as the Holocaust could have progressed from fantasy to reality.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Considering the thousands of volumes covering every aspect of the Nazis, it's becoming increasingly difficult to say anything new about their dreadful era. Nevertheless, Pringle (The Mummy Congress), a contributing editor to Discover magazine, gamely steps up to the plate—and has produced a fascinating volume detailing the Nazis' crackpot theories about prehistory and the Indiana Jones–style lengths they went to prove them. Employing a team of researchers, Pringle investigates Heinrich Himmler's private think tank, the Ahnenerbe, which dispatched scholars to the most inhospitable and distant parts of the world to discover evidence of ancient Aryan conquests and the Germans' racial superiority. Some believed their own bizarre garbage; others perverted the facts for personal advancement or prostituted their reputations for the greater glory of Hitler. While it would be otherwise easy to laugh off the Ahnenerbe's ludicrous theories, Pringle argues that the institute provided the "academic" justification for the Holocaust and assembles a powerful body of evidence to that effect. Though one may wonder just how central the Ahnenerbe actually was to Hitler's thinking, when Pringle meets one of the most sinister of Himmler's scholars, his pride about the institute's "research" is distinctly disquieting. This is first-rate popular history—supported by an immense amount of scholarly apparatus in a range of languages. (Feb. 15)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

As Pringle relates, in 1935 Heinrich Himmler and a small group of associates founded an elite Nazi research institute, the Ahnenerbe. Its purpose was to unearth evidence of the accomplishments of Germany's ancestors as far back as the Stone Age and to convey these findings to the German public through magazine articles, books, museum shows, and scientific conferences. In reality, Pringle points out, the organization "was in the business of myth-making," distorting the truth and churning out carefully tailored evidence to support the ideas of Adolf Hitler. Himmler, head of the Gestapo and the SS, housed the institute in one of Berlin's grand villas and equipped it with laboratories, libraries, and workshops. Pringle examined the microfilm collection of captured German documents at the National Archives and Records Administration in Maryland, the original Ahnenerbe files in Berlin, and 27 other German archives, as well as archives in Norway, Finland, Sweden, Poland, and Britain, and library collections in Iceland and Russia. The result of this copious research is another almost unbelievable chapter in the sordid history of the Holocaust. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Hyperion (February 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786868864
• ISBN-13: 978-0786868865
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,150,498 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read this one, July 7, 2006

By 

S. M. Klauber "a history lover" (New Zealand) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust (Hardcover)

There are two recent books that touch on this subject. Ms. Pringle's and Christpher Hale's "Himmler's Crusade". Hale's book is about the expedition to Tibet, which also occupies a large part of this book. Even so, go with this one. Ms. Pringle is an excellent researcher and writes very well. She avoids veering off and making mistakes about military affairs, a major weakness in Hale's book. In addition, this book goes beyond the Tibet expedition (a fascinating subject) and takes up additional matters regarding the group set up by the SS to examine racial-biological-political issues. If you have an interest in Himmler or the SS, you won't be sorry you read this book.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Real-Life Nazis out of Indiana Jones Movies, June 13, 2006

By 

Ken McCormick "kmccormick12" (Waverly, IA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust (Hardcover)

Heather Pringle has done the world a service by producing a well-written account of the "science" produced by scholars working for the SS. The book is fascinating. Like all good history, it contains lessons for the modern world: 1. It is dangerous to mix politics and science, and 2. Even "smart" people can convince themselves of almost anything, especially if it will win them credit with powerful people. Unfortunately, as one looks around the world, the same willingness to ignore facts for the sake of ideology is still rampant. I wish more people would read Ms. Pringle's book.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended, April 25, 2006

By 

N. Perz (St. Louis) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust (Hardcover)

While everyone knows something of the Nazi medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners, I did not appreciate the extent to which other areas of science were twisted and corrupted to serve Nazi ideology. It's sad to see the extent to which presumably intelligent people, professionals in their field, abandoned all the rigors of logic and the scientific method to satisfy their own preconceptions. "The Master Plan" is a fresh perspective on the Nazi abuse of science (especially archeology) in the furtherance of their favored (and, for the most part, bizarre) racial and historical theories. This is the only study of the Ahnenerbe (the elite Nazi research institute created by Himmler) that I've ever seen. The writing is a touch dry but the subject matter is compelling. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in the Nazi period.