WW2 historians: Question about Heinrich Himmler and the SS racial ideology

Hello historians.

This may sound dumb but i was watching something on tv about the SS and it got me thinking. The SS were extremely strict that people had to look a certain way, tall, blonde hair, blue eyes etc. But Himmler himself who was the leader of the SS didn't have any of these so called "master race" qualities.

It just seems kinda weird. Did they make an exception for Himmler or was there something else going on?
(Or perhaps im just missing something obvious)

 

Blonde hair, blue eyes, etc. are fantasies from Hollywood movies.
The basic requirements were height (5′4″ in 1938), good body proportions, and racial purity. Those people were as ugly as everybody else.

 

First welcome to the forum.

Very few of the senior Nazi party leadership would have been 'poster' material for the Aryan superman, Goebbles had a club foot, Borman and Goring was obese, Hitler was part Jewish as was Heydritch, although he at least looked the part.

In part it was part do as I say, not as I do and a candid admission that Nazi's claimed the genetic 'aryan' code had been 'diluted' by lesser races and the whole purpose was to rejuvenate the gene pool. It was composed of just enough real science to be dangerous. A 'pure' breed might be aesthetically pleasant to look upon to some, it often incorporates flaws and defects that shorten a life or push unwanted traits to the fore.

 

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....Himmler's Black Order 1923-1945 by Robin Lumsden page 64 regarding Himmler's Jan 1935 address about '''good blood...Nordic blood ..'' to senior Wehrmacht officers:
...

...page 65:

= a lot of the verbiage in the section about The Racial Elite, talks about '''blood''
---in 1929, Richard Walther wrote a book titled Blood and Soil:

..there's not much in the section about hair or eye color

 

There is no such thing as the "Ayran" race in the way the Nazis described it. The actual Aryan race were the original people of the Indo-Iranian region. The term also comes from a group of languages with similarities from the ancient world. The German occultists came up with the word Ayran as derived from the German word for honorable- "Ehre." The "Ayran" race were supposedly the people that were from the lost continent of Atlantis that descended directly from heaven.

When Atlantis disappeared, the myth is that they ended up around the world founding all of the great historical civilizations of the ancient world, and that their appearance was that of a Nordic European originally because Atlantis was supposedly in the North Atlantic. There was also another island named Thule, which was also supposedly in the North Atlantic, which was an occult society in Germany, where these "Ayran" people came from. Ironically, when ancient Greece and ancient Rome were at their respective heights, the actual Germanic people were nomads living in the woods with no distinct characteristics of a great ancient civilization.

There were some Nazi thinkers that did think the "Ayran" race had some roots in India, and Himmler and other occult Nazis were fascinated with ancient Indian culture.

 

Religious history was very important.
Enlisted men had to prove no Jews back to 1750.
Officers had to prove no Jews back to 1700.
Baptismal records provided the "evidence".
Minimum height was 170 cm.

 

Of course, all this fell to the wayside as the SS struggled to find replacements as the war went on.

 

Shows how utterly insane it all was if Hitler and many of the senior members of the Nazi party could not even meet their own criteria for the Aryan race.

 

And they let others also do the dirty work...

 

Himmler believed that he was the reincarnation of Henry I (Henry the Fowler) of Germany 876 – 936 and as the first King of Germany he was beyond reproach. He also believed that the Aryan race originated in northern India (possibly as far North as Tibet) and that the Irish were one of the lost tribes of Israel and therefore fundamentally Jewish. That's the extent of his nuttiness (and more than enough). I would be interested to see the evidence that he and his fellow head jobs believed in Atlantis etc etc. As part of his Irish theory he had plans to have them deported to Madagascar in the event of a successful German invasion of the British Isles (he did not include the Scots Irish of the North). When some of his tame anthropologists came up with evidence that Gypsies originated in N India this gave him little pause as he claimed that they were indeed Ayran but that they had allowed themselves to become polluted.

 

In July 1936 Himmler placed a wreath on the tomb of Henry I and declared it a place of pilgrimage for all Germans as part of 3rd Reich Day. As he considered himself the reincarnation of Henry he was in effect placing himself in a Germanic pantheon. He was not alone amongst the Nazi leadership in such egotheism, Goring once predicted that in the future every German household would have a little statue of himself amongst its hearth gods.

Himmler considered Henry the Fowler as the exemplar of kingly nobility - a sort of Germanic King Arthur - hence an attempt to create a sort of Camelot around the SS order

 

With all due respect, the claims are arguable on Hitlers ancestry. I can see it though, given the chance, but the statement is hard to prove.

 

Agreed it can not be proven with absolute clarity, but the disappearing of relevant documents shortly after the Anschluss with his native Austria is telling.

 

What is the source for this please?

 

Very true...there can be a clear inference made from those facts

 

Was it the people in Nepal who Himmler thought were from Atlantis and Aryan. At least he sent scientists to check about this.