The Ahnenerbe (German: [ˈaːnənˌʔɛʁbə], "Ancestral Heritage") was a pseudoscientific organization founded by the Schutzstaffel in Nazi Germany in 1935. Established by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler on July 1, 1935 as an SS appendage devoted to promoting racial theories espoused by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, the Ahnenerbe consisted of academics and scientists from a broad range of academic d Much misinformation about the Ahnenerbe has circulated, due in part to adaptations of the group in fiction, and historically dubious conspiracy theories that sometimes confuse the Ahnenerbe with the roughly contemporaneous Thule Society, or the historically unverified Vril society. The Ahnenerbe formed the basis for the depiction in the Indiana Jones franchise of Nazis searching for religious artifacts. "Das Ahnenerbe", Lebendiges Museum Online (in German), Deutsches Historisches Museum, archived from the original on October 2, 2013. Nazis, Archaeological Institute of America. Heyd, Emmanuel; Toledano, Raphael (2014), The Names of the 86 ("Le Nom des 86" in French) (in French, German, and English), dora films.

on Nazi esotericism Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich. According to reviewer Julian Strube, Kurlander "cites from the reservoir Die Glocke (German: [diː ˈɡlɔkə], 'The Bell') was a purported top-secret scientific technological device, wonder weapon, or Wunderwaffe developed in the 1940s in Nazi Germany. Rumors of this device have persisted for decades after WW2 and were used as a plot trope in the fiction novel Lightning by Dean Koontz (1988) and in the fiction television series 12 Monkeys (Season 4). First fully described Di… In…

This chapter looks at the regime's increasingly desperate, if futile, investment in ‘miracle weapons’, partisan warfare, and cataclysmic ‘twilight’ imagery during the final years of the war, providing a fitting corollary to the disintegration of the Third Reich. During the final months of the war, when defeat appeared inevitable, many Nazis and millions of ordinary Germans wanted to believe that death was not permanent, that fantasy was reality, and that a ‘magical priest’ might rescue them from annihilation. In this way, the regime's fanciful invocation of miracle weapons, of partisan werewolves and vampires, and of ritual self-immolation, functioned as a form of therapy for Germans suffering through material and psychological distress. However, if twilight imagery helped Germans reconcile themselves to everyday violence, criminality, and loss, it also augured the disintegration of the Third Reich and Germany's post-war rebirth.