Nordic Indo-Germanic People

[2] The idea of the Indian origins of the peoples of Western Europe was rapidly gaining ground across the European continent, and more specifically in German-speaking countries strongly marked by a long French military and political presence.

Parallel to this hypothesis, Nazi anthropologists and politicians such as Alfred Rosenberg, Richard Darré and Wilhelm Frick developed a number of theories on the history of Indo-Germanic populations, which may or may not have been included in school textbooks of the period.

[N 2][14] Richard Darré, the völkisch author of Peasantry as the Source of Life of the Nordic Race, takes up the thesis of a sedentary population settled on lands conquered through successive migrations and wars.

Indeed, they believed that it was the duty of a population to multiply, and, to cope with this demographic surplus, to expand the territories under their control, most often firstly through agrarian colonization, and then, secondly, through the establishment of societies sensitive to the arts, creating masterpieces destined to endure through the centuries.

School and university textbooks of the period, aimed at young people destined to take part in the Second World War, took up the historical reconstructions of National Socialist intellectuals and painted a striking picture of the supposed history of the Indo-Germans.

[24] Nazi researchers, directly inspired by Gustaf Kossinna's[25] vision, assumed that the Indo-Germanic Nordic society was profoundly unequal,[26] as would seem to be confirmed by the discovery of "royal tombs" in central Germany.

[39] Others, notably Hermann Wirth, were interested in the representations left on the stones of burial mounds in France, such as those at Glozel and Gravinis, or the megaliths of Brittany, and tried to deduce the nature of the religion of the original Indo-Germanic-Nordic peoples.

Richard Walther Darré, one of the promoters of Generalplan Ost, in his book The Peasantry as the Source of Life for the Nordic Race, presents this ritual as a means of recruiting settlers to found another city, who had been vowed, in grave circumstances, to the god Mars.

According to Darré, the Roman rite of ver sacrum would have taken place in spring, from March to May, the ideal period for emigration to the original cradle of Indo-Germanic populations, southern Sweden, the other months of the year being those of winter dormancy or summer agricultural activity.

According to Darré, this temporal cooincidence between the Roman ver sacrum and the period of migration to southern Sweden demonstrates the Nordic and Indo-Germanic origins of the Italic populations who founded Rome.

[64] Just as Cato called for the racial destruction of Carthage, Lucius Iunius Brutus, by establishing the Republic in late 500s BC, would have put an end to the Etruscan presence in Rome, the cause of the physical and moral depravity of the Roman population.

[65] The school textbooks published in the Reich in 1938 emphasized this racial vision of Roman history, and offered a racist and anti-Semitic reading of the Eastern conflicts in which Rome was involved from the beginning of the first century BC.

Goebbels' later arguments echoed his earlier conclusions: all Nazi scholars and politicians agreed that the wars waged by Vespasian and Titus marked a turning point in the Indo-Germans' struggle against the Semites.

The historian Ferdinand Fried similarly offers a racial and anti-Semitic reading of the Book of Esther, describing the Persian massacres as "Aryan pogroms", and declaring that Asian peoples refused to submit to the established order.

One entitled Der Untermensch (The Subhuman) featured an illustration inspired by the Apocalypse: three horsemen, a graphic synthesis of depictions of the cruel and ugly Huns, Tatars and Hungarians, charging women and children.

In order to emphasize this alleged filiation, Hitler and those close to him, insisting on the Jewish origins of Paul and Marx, developed the idea that Bolshevism, like Christianity, was intended to be internationalist and egalitarian.

In the 1920s, for example, Hans Günther challenged the thesis of the Oriental origins of the Germans, ensuring the success of his ideas thanks to the support of part of the NSDAP and his widely distributed didactic publications.

Merkenschlager, a member of the NSDAP and SA since 1920[78] and promoter of the "dynamic race" concept, quickly emerged as the main opponent of Hans Günther's Nordicist theories, hence his nickname of "anti-Günther".

[79] Following Merkenschlager's lead, Karl Saller, an anthropologist and physician, doubted the validity of the Nordic race theory, and proposed that the party adopt the concept of the people-race;[80] in support of his theses, he published a pamphlet, Biology of the Body of the German People.

[81] The Night of the Long Knives temporarily put an end to the debate in favor of the SS, the ideological domain and active supporter of Günther, whose theses were taken up and popularized in the newspaper Das Schwarze Korps.

[14] From the earliest days of writing Mein Kampf, Hitler, and the Nazi thinkers who followed him, were not concerned with separating the truth from the falsehood in their worldview: so, once in power, they had the means to impose a vision of history in line with their ideas.

Originally dedicated to the search for proof of the superiority of the Aryan race, the Ahnenerbe proposed, at Himmler's request, interpretations in line with the Nordicist vulgate of material unearthed during excavation campaigns.

In fact, this civilization of peasants left vestiges, essentially clay pottery decorated with cord markings, on a continuous territory stretching from European Russia to Switzerland, including the Scandinavian countries.

His rival for control of archaeology in the Reich, Alfred Rosenberg, ordered the examination of bone remains preserved in French and Belgian museums to establish the fossils' racial affiliation.

The victory of 1940 opened them up once again to German colonization: Hitler defined a border on June 18, 1940, the Verdun-Toul-Belfort line,[107] and later, for ethnic reasons, fixed it to that of the kingdom of France at the time of Charles V.[111] Others, like Franz Petri, were more ambitious, freeing themselves from the traditional methods of archaeology and using linguistics, philology and ancient texts.

The latter's research led him to work on proven "Germanic" sites, enabling him to establish the racial frontier on the lower reaches of the Seine and the bend in the Loire, where the prehistoric and protohistoric waves of Indo-Germanic migration would have stopped.

[117] Those furthest from the original cradle of the Nordic Indo-Germanic populations would have undergone a racial mixing, a denordification,[118] which would have caused them to lose, with their white skin, their superiority,[119] and their ability to erect and maintain extensive and long-lasting empires.

This territorial expansion resulted in the establishment of a social structure characterized by a warrior aristocracy, breeding equines, waging war on horse-drawn chariots and wielding bronze implements.

Hauer, wishing to regenerate a paganism of Germanic essence, attempted to organize private celebrations - weddings, baptisms, births - according to an Indo-Germanic ritual: Based on Hauer's ideas, Rosenberg proposed rites designed to revive a secular Nordic tradition, the Lebensfeiern,[126] as substitutes for Christian ceremonies;[N 4] Himmler thus intended to give rhythm to his men's lives, offering them supposedly Nordic utensils; at the same time, he frequently intervened in all these ceremonies.

[57] Following in Leonidas' footsteps, the German troops sought to carry out a form of racial Anschluss, aiming to resurrect the presence of Aryan, Indo-Germanic Nordic blood in Athens.

William Jones notes the linguistic proximity between Sanskrit and European languages, enabling the development of Indo-European studies.
In 1819, Friedrich Schlegel developed the term " Aryans " from Sanskrit .
Jean-Sylvain Bailly was the first to defend the thesis of the Nordic origin of Germanic populations.
In his writings, Alfred Rosenberg developed a personal vision of the history of the Indogermans.
Richard Darré asserts that the Indo-Germanic Nordic populations were sedentary farmers, moving in search of new lands.
The Athenian Pericles is a Nordic model, according to theorist Fritz Schachermeyr .
Jakob Wilhelm Hauer describes the religion of the Indo-Germanic people as contemplative.
According to Alfred Rosenberg, the capture of Carthage by the Romans was a partial victory of the Indo-Germans over the Asians.
Die Hunnenschlacht (" The Battle of the Huns "), a painting by Wilhelm von Kaulbach , presents the battle of the Catalaunic Fields as a gigantomachy.
Hans Günther , nicknamed by the SS Hans Rassengünther ("Race Günther"), promoter of the Nordicist hypothesis of the origins of the Indogermans.
On Heinrich Himmler's orders, the Ahnenerbe , the SS research center, led excavation campaigns focusing on the archaeological remains left behind by the Indogermans.
The memories of Arminius were used by the Nazis to justify research in occupied France.
Research in the vicinity of Mont Sainte-Odile to justify the Reich's new western border
According to Hermann Wirth, the motifs depicted inside the Gavrinis tumulus are close to original Indo-Germanic representations.
According to Nazi researchers, the Manio burial site in Carnac is close to the princely burial mounds of central Germany.
The Belfort Gap, south of Alsace , was a passageway for Germanic populations, according to proponents of the Indo-Germans.
The memory of the Spartan Leonidas at Thermopylae , portrayed here by David , remains vivid for German scholars promoting the thesis of the existence of the Indo-Germanic people.