Himmler, after all, was particularly keen on making his men as attractive as possible to women. But like any careful breeder, he did not want his prize stock to mate with just any partner. Potential wives had to undergo racial screening themselves after December 21, 1931, submitting medical reports, genealogy charts and photographs to SS racial examiners. If they found fault with the racial quality of a woman, Himmler would deny his permission for the couple to marry. Only in this way, Himmler believed, could the SS breed a new master race; Germany’s future depended on this. “Should we succeed in establishing this Nordic race again from and around Germany,” he later observed in a speech to SS leaders, “and inducing them to become farmers and from this seedbed produce a race of 200 million, then the world will belong to us.”

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Even so, it was not enough to rebreed a racial elite in Himmler’s view. He wanted SS recruits to think and live as their ancestors had. So on July 1, 1935, Himmler founded a new SS research institute to reconstruct all aspects of primeval German culture. Officially, the organization was known as the “Deutsche Ahnenerbe” Studiengesellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte—meaning “German Ancestral Heritage” Society for the Study of the History of Primeval Ideas. But most soon began calling it the “Ahnenerbe.”

In 1939 Himmler relocated the headquarters of the rapidly growing institute into a grand villa in one of Berlin’s wealthiest neighborhoods and secured for it ample funding. He equipped it with laboratories, libraries and museum workshops, and he personally supervised its operations. At its peak before the war, the Ahnenerbe counted 137 German scholars and scientists on its payroll, many of whom possessed doctorates and taught at German universities.

At Himmler’s urging, the staff studied a broad range of subjects, from ancient Germanic building styles to old “Nordic” horse breeds and primeval musical instruments. Himmler even asked the Ahnenerbe researchers to study the sexual practices of ancient Germanic tribes—presumably so he could develop guidelines for SS men on the most propitious times for having sexual relations.

Like other senior Nazis, Himmler believed the future master race needed to be weaned from the moral decay of the cities and restored to the rustic lives of their forefathers. One of Himmler’s close colleagues, Richard Walther Darré, had argued in 1929 in a book titled Farming as a Source of Life for the Nordic Race that it was the old agricultural traditions that had refined and honed Nordic men and women into a superior race. In times past, suggested Darré, each farmer had picked just one son—the strongest, toughest and most courageous—to inherit his land. As a result, only the very fittest had farmed the fields over generations, creating a superior human bloodline. Himmler agreed with this analysis. “The yeoman on his own acre,” he once observed piously, “is the backbone of the German people’s strength and character.”

As the leader of the SS, Himmler resolved to settle as many of his men and officers as possible in special farm communities in Germany. He ordered senior SS officials to prepare plans for those settlements, drawing on Ahnenerbe research. The communities were to take a standard, cookie-cutter form. At the heart of each was an outdoor amphitheater known in Nazi parlance as a Thingplatz. The idea was borrowed from the old Scandinavian Thing, an assembly of free men who met in a field or village common to elect chieftains and resolve disputes. The SS Thingplatz, however, was far less democratic. Himmler envisioned it as a place where SS families would hold torchlight rallies, stage SS solstice celebrations and present their own propaganda plays.

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