Herman Wirth
World War I broke out in 1914, and Wirth volunteered for military service in the German army, where he was assigned to monitor the Flemish separatists in German-occupied Belgium.
[2] From October 1932, he attempted to set up a research institute - the Forschungsinstitut für Urgeschichte - in Bad Doberan, associated with a professorship at Rostock university, supported by the NSDAP state government of Mecklenburg-Schwerin.
In early summer 1933, friends within the NSDAP helped Wirth to be appointed to an extraordinary professorship without teaching responsibilities at the theological faculty of Berlin University.
Wirth also re-founded his organization as Gesellschaft für germanische Ur- und Vorgeschichte, with assistance from the journalist and Nazi functionary Johann von Leers and the industrialist Ludwig Roselius.
[3] The free-thinking neo-pagans founded a supporting group in July 1933; they included Wirth, Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, and (until 1934) Ernst Bergmann and numerous ex-Communists.
Although he continued to defend Nazi principles, Wirth's teachings about "Urkulturen" (original cultures) found resonance in the evolving alternative scene, and in the 1970s gained support from North American native groups.
In the late 1970s, politicians in Rhineland-Palatinate, including the state government and delegates from Kusel, supported a project to set up a museum to exhibit Wirth's ethnographic collection in the tithe barn of Lichtenberg Castle.
Since then, due to the publications of Serrano and of the Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, the idea of a lost major manuscript has gained cult status in extreme right-wing circles.
Its inhabitants supposedly were pure Aryans, influencing the cultures not just of Europeans but also of the natives of North America and the wider "Old World" beyond Europe.
[1] Wirth's ideas about the origin of the "Aryan (white) race" from the Arctic were borrowed by the Italian esoteric and neo-fascist ideologue Julius Evola.
According to the scholar of religion Roman Shizhensky, in the early 1990s, the dissident Alexey Dobrovolsky ("volkhv" Dobroslav), one of the founders of Russian neopaganism, borrowed the idea of the swastika[10] from Wirth’s work "The Chronicle of Oera Linda" ("Die Ura-Linda-Chronik", 1933).
[11] In 1996, Dobrovolsky declared a modified swastika, the eight-rayed "Kolovrat", supposedly a pagan sign of the Sun, as the symbol of the uncompromising "national liberation struggle" against the "Zhyd yoke".
