ABSTRACT
Kossinna was explicit about the nationalistic and racist overtones in his work, speaking of German racial and cultural superiority over others (Wijworra 1996:174). He declared German archaeology ‘a pre-eminently national discipline’ in the title to one of his popular books, dedicating it, in the post-World War I edition, ‘To the German people, as a building block in the reconstruction of the externally as well as internally disintegrated fatherland’ (Kossinna 1921 [1914]: dedication, cited in Arnold 1990:465). Moreover, Kossinna, along with other archaeologists, was actively involved in the production of propaganda during World War I and, following German defeat, he attempted to use the results of archaeological research to argue that areas of Poland had been part of the territory of the Germanic peoples since the Iron Age (see Arnold 1990:467; Wijworra 1996:176). However, it was after Kossinna’s death, with the rise of National Socialism in Germany that his work was elevated to a position of dogma in support of the myth of the Aryan master race. Archaeology held an important position in the ideology of the Third Reich; it received considerable prestige and institutional support, and was appropriated by key Nazi figures such as Alfred Rosenberg and Heinrich Himmler, although Adolf Hitler himself was ambivalent towards their efforts (see Arnold 1990:469). To obtain ‘scientific’ support for his ideas, Himmler founded the SS organization, Deutches Ahnenerbe (German Ancestral Inheritance), which organized archaeological investigations carried out by SS officers, and involved the obligatory use of Kossinna’s ‘settlement
archaeology’ method. Archaeological remains identified as ‘Germanic’ were prioritized over others, and the Ahnenerbe, along with other archaeologists, were particularly concerned to ‘demonstrate’ Germanic expansion in pre-and proto-history, for instance, eastwards into Poland, South Russia and the Caucasus (McCann 1990:83-4; see Figure 1.1). A further example of the way in which archaeological research was implicated in the actions of the Nazi regime is provided by Himmler’s attempts to link the physiology of the Venus figurines from the Dolní Vestonice excavations with that of Jewish women, and supposedly primitive ‘races’ such as the Hottentots (McCann 1990:85-6). However, whilst a number of German archaeologists, such as Hans Reinerth and Herman Wirth, were actively involved in producing representations of the past in keeping with Nazi ideology, others did not lend explicit support to such representations. Indeed, many archaeologists, like other German citizens, remained passive bystanders (Mitlaufer) under the totalitarian regime, ultimately sanctioning the National Socialist Party by default, whilst a small minority expressed direct opposition, largely through critiques of Kossinna’s work (see Arnold 1990:472-3; Veit 1989:40-1).
