title: Salisbury

text: Salisbury power station supplied electricity to Salisbury and the surrounding area from 1898 to 1970. The power station was at Town Mill and was owned and operated by Salisbury Electric Light and Supply Company Limited prior to the nationalisation of the British electricity supply industry in 1948. The coal-fired power station was redeveloped several times to incorporate new plant including a water driven turbine.


title: Salisbury

text: From the Middle Ages to the start of the 20th century, Salisbury was noted for its cutlery industry. Early motor cars were manufactured in the city from 1902 by Dean and Burden Brothers, using the Scout Motors brand. In 1907 the company moved to a larger factory at Churchfields; each car took six to eight weeks to build, mostly using bodies made elsewhere by coachbuilders. By 1912, 150 men were employed and the company was also making small commercial vehicles and 20-seater buses, some of which were later used by the newly established Wilts & Dorset operator. The Scout company failed in 1921 after wartime disruption and competition from larger makers.


title: Salisbury

text: Shopping centres include The Old George Mall, The Maltings, Winchester Street, and the Crosskeys precinct. Major employers include Salisbury District Hospital. Closure of the Friends Life office, the second largest employer, was announced in 2015.


title: Salisbury

text: Salisbury was an important centre for music in the 18th century. The grammarian James Harris, a friend of Handel, directed concerts at the Assembly Rooms for almost 50 years up to his death in 1780. Many of the most famous musicians and singers of the day performed there.


title: Salisbury

text: Salisbury holds an annual St George's Day pageant, the origins of which are claimed to go back to the 13th century.


title: Salisbury

text: Salisbury has a strong artistic community, with galleries situated in the city centre, including one in the public library. In the 18th century, John Constable made a number of celebrated landscape paintings featuring the cathedral's spire and the surrounding countryside. Salisbury's annual International Arts Festival, started in 1973, and held in late May to early June, provides a programme of theatre, live music, dance, public sculpture, street performance and art exhibitions. Salisbury also houses a producing theatre, Salisbury Playhouse, which produces between eight and ten plays a year, as well as welcoming touring productions.


title: Salisbury

text: The Salisbury Museum is housed in the King's House, a Grade I listed building whose history dates back to the 13th century, opposite the west front of the cathedral.


title: Salisbury

text: The permanent Stonehenge exhibition gallery has interactive displays about Stonehenge and the archaeology of south Wiltshire, and its collections include the skeleton of the Amesbury Archer, which is on display.


title: Salisbury

text: The costume gallery showcases costume and textiles from the area, with costumes for children to try on while imagining themselves as characters from Salisbury's past.


title: Salisbury

text: Salisbury has been twinned with Saintes, France, since 1990 and with Xanten, Germany, since 2005. Salisbury is also a sister city of Salisbury, North Carolina and Salisbury, Maryland, both of which are in the United States.


title: Salisbury

text: There are several schools in and around Salisbury. The city has the only grammar schools in Wiltshire, South Wilts Grammar School for girls and Bishop Wordsworth's School for boys; since September 2020, both have mixed sixth forms. Other schools in or near the city include Salisbury Cathedral School, Chafyn Grove School, Leehurst Swan School, the Godolphin senior and prep schools, Sarum Academy, St Joseph's Catholic School and Wyvern St Edmund's.


title: Salisbury

text: Sixth form education is offered by Salisbury Sixth Form College, while the Salisbury campus of Wiltshire College offers a range of further education courses, as well as some higher education courses in association with Bournemouth University. Sarum College is a Christian theological college, within the Cathedral close.


title: Salisbury

text: The main transport links for the city are the roads. Salisbury lies on the intersection of the A30, the A36 and the A338 and is at the end of the A343, A345, A354 and A360. Car parks around the periphery of the city are linked to the city centre by a park and ride scheme (see details in the bus section below). The A36 forms an almost complete ring road around the city centre. The A3094 comprises the southwestern quadrant of the ring road, passing through the city's outer suburbs.


title: Salisbury

text: The lack of adequate roads is a cause of concern to the people of Salisbury as there are no motorway links to the ports of Southampton and Bristol. The closest motorway access is at junction 2 of the M27 at Southampton, and at junction 8 of the M3 near Basingstoke. Traffic passes around the city centre on the A36 to Bath.


title: Salisbury

text: There are bus links to Southampton, Bournemouth, Andover, Devizes and Swindon, with limited services on Sundays. Salisbury Reds, a brand of Go South Coast, is the main local operator. Wheelers Travel provide services to Shaftesbury and Andover, as well as intermediate-distance services. Other operators include Stagecoach (Amesbury, Tidworth, Andover); Beeline (Warminster); and First (Warminster, Trowbridge, Bath).


title: Salisbury

text: Salisbury has a Park and Ride bus scheme with five sites around the city. The scheme attempts to relieve pressure on the city centre, but as of 2010, ran at an annual loss of £1 million.


title: Salisbury

text: Salisbury bus station, which opened in 1939, closed in January 2014 due to high operating costs and low usage. Situated in Endless Street, on the northeastern edge of the city centre, the site was later developed into retirement homes, which opened in February 2018.


title: Salisbury

text: Salisbury railway station is the crossing point of the West of England Main Line, from to , and the Wessex Main Line from to . The station is operated by South Western Railway. Great Western Railway hourly trains call from , Bristol Temple Meads, to Southampton Central and .


title: Salisbury

text: The city has a football team, Salisbury F.C., who play in the and are based at the Raymond McEnhill Stadium, on the northern edge of the city. Non-league clubs are Bemerton Heath Harlequins F.C. and Laverstock & Ford F.C.


title: Salisbury

text: Salisbury Rugby Club, which is based at Castle Road, play in Southern Counties South. South Wilts Cricket Club is based at the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Sports Club and play in the Southern Premier Cricket League. Salisbury Hockey Club is also based at the Salisbury and South Wilts Sports Club.


title: Salisbury

text: The Five Rivers Leisure Centre and Swimming Pool, which was opened in 2002, is just outside the ring road. Salisbury Racecourse is a flat racing course to the south-west of the city. Five Rivers Indoor Bowls Club and Salisbury Snooker Club share a building on Tollgate Road, behind the College.


title: Salisbury

text: Old Sarum Airfield, north of the city centre, is home to a variety of aviation-based businesses, including flying schools and the APT Charitable Trust for disabled flyers.


title: Salisbury

text: The city's theatre is the Salisbury Playhouse. The City Hall is an entertainment venue and hosts comedy, musical performances (including those by the resident Musical Theatre Salisbury) as well as seminars and conventions. Salisbury Arts Centre, housed in a redundant church, has exhibitions and workshops.


title: Salisbury

text: Salisbury is well-supplied with pubs. The "Haunch of Venison", overlooking the Poultry Cross, operates from a 14th-century building; one of its attractions is a cast of a mummified hand, supposedly severed during a game of cards. The "Rai d’Or" has original deeds dating from 1292. It was the home of Agnes Bottenham, who used the profits of the tavern to found Trinity Hospital next door in circa 1380.


title: Salisbury

text: BBC Radio Wiltshire is the BBC Local Radio public service station for the county, which sometimes broadcasts from or about the city. Salisbury used to have its own local radio station, Spire FM, which was purchased by Bauer Radio in 2019. Its frequency now transmits Greatest Hits Radio Salisbury, which broadcasts national and regional music programmes with local news bulletins.


title: Salisbury

text: Regional television services are provided by BBC South and ITV Meridian, and a local television channel "That's Salisbury" is provided by That's TV.


title: Salisbury

text: The "Salisbury Journal" is the local paid-for weekly newspaper, which is available in shops every Thursday. The local free weekly newspaper from the same publisher is the "Avon Advertiser", which is delivered to houses in Salisbury and the surrounding area.


title: Salisbury

text: The two names for the city, "Salisbury" and "Sarum", are humorously alluded to in a 1928 limerick from "Punch":


title: Salisbury

text: The ambiguous pronunciation was also used in the following limerick, which also alludes to 'Hants', the shortened form of Hampshire:


title: Salisbury

text: Salisbury experiences an oceanic climate (Köppen climate classification "Cfb") similar to almost all of the United Kingdom. The nearest Met Office weather station to Salisbury is Boscombe Down, about 6 miles to the north of the city centre. In terms of the local climate, Salisbury is among the sunniest of inland areas in the UK, averaging over 1650 hours of sunshine in a typical year. Temperature extremes since 1960 have ranged from in January 1963


title: The Jesus Rolls

text: The Jesus Rolls is a 2020 American crime comedy film written by, directed by, and starring John Turturro. It doubles as a remake of the 1974 French film "Going Places" by Bertrand Blier, and as a spin-off to the 1998 cult film "The Big Lebowski" by the Coen brothers. Turturro reprises his "Lebowski" role of Jesus Quintana.


title: The Jesus Rolls

text: It was filmed in 2016 and premiered at the Rome Film Festival on October 16, 2019. It was released on February 28, 2020, by Screen Media Films. It was a box office bomb and received generally negative reviews from critics.


title: The Jesus Rolls

text: Jesus Quintana is released from prison, warned by the warden that one more "strike" will get him locked up permanently; the warden also thanks him for winning bowling tournaments for the prison. As he leaves prison, Quintana finds that friend Petey is waiting for him outside.


title: The Jesus Rolls

text: Quintana drives them to his mother's house, where he discovers her having sex with a man, whom Quintana kicks out. He gives his mother some money, and they have dinner. Petey and Quintana then return the car to where it was parked, and the owner confronts them, pulling out a gun. (However, the owner's girlfriend, Marie, recognizes Quintana.) Petey attempts to run away but is shot in the testicles, and Quintana beats up the owner. Petey, Quintana, and Marie take off in the car, then exchange it at a chop shop for another.


title: The Jesus Rolls

text: Quintana takes Petey to a doctor to get the bullet fragment extracted, and they learn it pierced only his scrotum. They decide to rob the doctor—while Marie stays behind and cuts the chop shop mechanic's hair. Petey and Quintana return, and have the mechanic damage the muscle car's brakes and structural integrity. The three then take off in the other car.


title: The Jesus Rolls

text: The trio stop at a store and buy some things before heading to a restaurant to eat, but Petey and Quintana flee, after seeing police nearby. They steal two bicycles, and are chased by farmers. Marie then leaves the restaurant, but is chased since she had not paid the bill. Petey and Quintana steal another car, driving to train tracks and boarding a train. As they get off the train, they watch a woman breast feed her infant at the train station.


title: The Jesus Rolls

text: Marie finds them there, and angrily confronts them for deserting her, before boarding a "another" train. They find a house to stay at, and Quintana washes Petey. Marie tells the two that Paul, the owner of the car, has sold it. Petey then has intercourse with Marie—while Quintana watches, cheering them on. She explains to them that she makes love indiscriminately, and has done so with thousands but she lies there looking uninvolved because, it turns out that... she has never had an orgasm.


title: The Jesus Rolls

text: The next day, the three break into Paul's beauty salon, stealing the money there. Marie suddenly loses control, and attacks the other two; they decide to tie her up, leaving her at the salon—and going bowling. At the bowling alley, Quintana dances with a woman, but she yells at him, and leaves.Jesus takes Petey to wait outside the women's prison facility and they follow a red haired woman and offer her a lift. Jesus gives her some money and they drive her to a boutique so she can buy a new dress, stockings, shoes and a coat, then they take her out to lunch at a high class restaurant. She...("7327" or "Jean"?)then goes with them to a Motel where they all enjoy a "menage a trois" in bed together. (Jean) then wakes up, leaves the guys lying in the bed, gets dressed and climbs on to the empty double bed in the adjoining room where she sits and smiles at the new dawn. We hear a gunshot which wakes Jesus and Petey who run to the doorway... and see that jean has shot herself.Petey and Jesus run out of the Motel while getting dressed and get the hell out of there.


title: The Jesus Rolls

text: They discover that Jean has a son, Jack, who is getting out of prison the next day; Petey and Quintana pick him up. The three of them go to a cabin in the woods where Marie is waiting, and they have breakfast together. Jack then engages in sex with Marie, while Quintana and Petey go fishing.


title: The Jesus Rolls

text: Marie says they need more money so Jack asks for a gun so he can rob someone. Jack, Jesus and Petey go to a nearby house where his prison corrections officer lives, we hear a gunshot and then see Petey and Jesus running down the road.decide go to rob someone Jack knows; they steal another car and leave the city. At a gas station, Petey and Quintana read in a newspaper that they are wanted in the shooting of the officer; they steal a Smart car, and eventually pull over, for Marie to pee by a lake. At the side of the road, they find a muscle car belonging to some people who are on a boat at the lake. Quintana, Petey, and Marie steal the muscle, leaving the Smart behind. Later, the car loses control as the foundation comes loose. Despite Quintana's attempts to stop it, the brakes jam, and they crash, after which they realize that this was earlier Paul's but car, with a new paint- and body-job. (The story "eventually" reveals that the car had crashed because of the damage that had been inflicted upon it, earlier, at the chop shop.) With no options left—as the film ends—the trio start hitchhiking.


title: The Jesus Rolls

text: The Coen brothers, who wrote, directed, and produced "The Big Lebowski", stated on several occasions that they would never make a "Lebowski" sequel. However, John Turturro expressed keen interest in reprising his role as Jesus at least since 2002. Most of the development of the Jesus character came from Turturro as an actor, which led the Coens to give him a bigger place in the film. In 2014, Turturro announced that he had requested permission from the Coens to use the character.


title: The Jesus Rolls

text: In August 2016, it was announced that Turturro had been granted the right to use the character of Jesus by the Coens (who were not involved in the production), and had already started filming the spin-off, which he would wrote and directed. Filming locations included New York City and Los Angeles. The film was a remake of the 1974 French film "Going Places" directed by Bertrand Blier, which was based on Blier's own novel "Les valseuses". The working titles were "100 Minutes with Jesus" and then "Going Places". The film was completed in 2017 and with its acquisition by Screen Media Films, the title was changed to "The Jesus Rolls".


title: The Jesus Rolls

text: The film was produced by Sidney Kimmel, John Penotti, Fernando Sulichin, Paul-Dominique Vacharsinthu, and Robert Salerno.


title: The Jesus Rolls

text: Its world premiere was at the Rome Film Festival on October 16, 2019. It was theatrically released in Italy on October 17, 2019, and in the United States on February 28, 2020, by Screen Media Films.


title: The Jesus Rolls

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of , based on reviews, with an average rating of . The website's critics consensus reads: ""The Jesus Rolls" limply into the gutter in its misguided attempt to belatedly explore the saga of a supporting character better left on the margins." On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 44 out of 100, based on reviews from 13 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".


title: The Jesus Rolls

text: Deborah Young of "The Hollywood Reporter" wrote: "Though Turturro turned this small part into a memorable character for the Coens, Quintana is not so reliably funny here, especially headlining a whole film of very intermittent charm."


title: The Jesus Rolls

text: Peter Debruge of "Variety" wrote: "In the end, the project doesn't really work. The Coen brothers have a touch for the absurd, and a gift for dialogue, that's lacking here, and without those two qualities, Jesus wears out his welcome relatively early in the journey."


title: Scum's Wish

text: High school student Hanabi Yasuraoka has been in love with Narumi Kanai, her older childhood friend who is now her homeroom teacher. But from the look in Narumi's eyes when he sees the new music teacher Akane Minagawa, Hanabi realizes that he is in love with Akane and not her. Hanabi meets Mugi Awaya, another student who is in love with Akane, who was his tutor when he was in middle school. Hanabi and Mugi make a pact and begin a fake relationship to satisfy each other's loneliness from their respective unrequited loves, both sexually and emotionally. They agree to not fall in love with each other and end the relationship if their love is returned from the people they are in love with.


title: Scum's Wish

text: "Scum's Wish", written and illustrated by Mengo Yokoyari began in Square Enix's "Big Gangan" magazine on September 25, 2012, and finished on March 25, 2017. That same day Square Enix simultaneously released the eighth and final tankōbon in a regular and a limited first edition.


title: Scum's Wish

text: A spin-off manga titled "Kuzu no Honkai décor" ran in "Big Gangan" from November 25, 2017 to May 25, 2018. It was collected into one volume.


title: Scum's Wish

text: Volume 7.5, a fan book titled "Ambivalent", covering the manga and the anime, was released by Square Enix on December 24, 2016.


title: Scum's Wish

text: An anime television series adaptation was announced in March 2016 to air on Fuji TV's Noitamina block beginning on January 12 and concluded on March 30, 2017. It was streamed exclusively by Amazon Prime Video in Japan and worldwide. The series is directed by Masaomi Andō and is animated at the studio Lerche with series composition by Makoto Uezu, character designs by Keiko Kurosawa and music by Masaru Yokoyama. The series ran for 12 episodes released across six Blu-ray/DVD volumes. The opening song is titled and is sung by 96neko (who later voiced Anne Faulkner in "Paradox Live"). The ending theme titled is sung by Sayuri. The anime has been licensed by Sentai Filmworks for digital and home video release. Madman Entertainment released the series on home video in Australia and New Zealand. MVM Entertainment acquired the series for home video in the United Kingdom and Ireland.


title: Scum's Wish

text: A live-action TV series adaptation was announced in December 2016 and aired in twelve episodes on Fuji TV between January 18 and April 5, 2017.


title: John B. Watson

text: John Broadus Watson (January 9, 1878 – September 25, 1958) was an American psychologist who popularized the scientific theory of behaviorism, establishing it as a psychological school. Watson advanced this change in the psychological discipline through his 1913 address at Columbia University, titled "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It". Through his behaviorist approach, Watson conducted research on animal behavior, child rearing, and advertising, as well as conducting the controversial "Little Albert" experiment and the Kerplunk experiment. He was also the editor of "Psychological Review" from 1910 to 1915. A "Review of General Psychology" survey, published in 2002, ranked Watson as the 17th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.


title: John B. Watson

text: Watson was born in South Carolina on January 9, 1878. His father, Pickens Butler Watson, was an alcoholic and left the family to live with two Indian women when John was 13 years old—a transgression which he never forgave. His mother, Emma Kesiah Watson (née Roe), was a very religious woman who adhered to prohibitions against drinking, smoking, and dancing, naming her son John after a prominent Baptist minister in hopes that it would help him receive the call to preach the Gospel. In bringing him up, she subjected Watson to harsh religious training that later led him to develop a lifelong antipathy toward all forms of religion and to become an atheist.


title: John B. Watson

text: In an attempt to escape poverty, Watson's mother sold their farm and brought Watson to Greenville, South Carolina, to provide him a better opportunity for success. Moving from an isolated, rural location to the large urbanity of Greenville proved to be important for Watson, providing him the opportunity to experience a variety of different types of people, which he used to cultivate his theories on psychology. However, the initial transition would be a struggle for Watson, as result of weak social skills.


title: John B. Watson

text: Watson married Mary Ickes, sister of politician Harold L. Ickes, while he was in graduate school. They had two children, also named John and Mary Ickes Watson, the latter of whom attempted suicide later in life.


title: John B. Watson

text: Young Mary and her husband, Paul Hartley, had a daughter, Mariette Hartley, who suffered from psychological issues that she attributed to her being raised with her grandfather's theories.


title: John B. Watson

text: Watson's wife later sought divorce due to his ongoing affair with his student, Rosalie Rayner (1898–1935). In searching Rayner's bedroom, Mary discovered love letters Watson had written to his paramour. The affair became front-page news during divorce proceedings in the Baltimore newspapers. The publicity would result in Johns Hopkins University asking Watson to leave his faculty position in October 1920.


title: John B. Watson

text: In 1920, following the finalization of the divorce, Watson and Rayner married in New Jersey, parenting two sons, William Rayner Watson (1921) and James Broadus Watson (1924), who were raised with the behaviorist principles that John espoused throughout his career. The couple remained together until Rayner's death at age 36 in 1935. Just like their half-sister, both sons also later attempted suicide, with William killing himself in 1954.


title: John B. Watson

text: Except for a set of reprints of his academic works, Watson burned his very large collection of letters and personal papers, thus depriving historians of a valuable resource for understanding the early history of behaviorism and of Watson himself.


title: John B. Watson

text: Historian John Burnham interviewed Watson late in life, presenting him as a man of strong opinions and some bitterness towards his detractors. In 1957, shortly before his death, Watson received a Gold Medal from the American Psychological Association for his contributions to psychology.


title: John B. Watson

text: Watson lived on his farm until his death in 1958 at age 80. He was buried at Willowbrook Cemetery, Westport, Connecticut.


title: John B. Watson

text: Watson understood that college was important to his success as an individual: "I know now that I can never amount to anything in the educational world unless I have better preparation at a real university." Despite his poor academic performance and having been arrested twice during high school—first for fighting, then for discharging firearms within city limits—Watson was able to use his mother's connections to gain admission to Greenville's Furman University at the age of 16. There, he would complete a few psychology courses, though never excelling. He would also consider himself to be a poor student, holding a few jobs on campus to pay for his college expenses. Others thought him as quiet, lazy, and insubordinate, and, as such, he continued to see himself as "unsocial," making few friends. Nevertheless, being a precocious student, Watson would leave Furman with a master's degree at the age of 21.


title: John B. Watson

text: After graduating, Watson spent a year at Batesburg Institute, the name he gave to a one-room school in Greenville, at which he was principal, janitor, and handyman. Watson entered the University of Chicago after petitioning the University President. The successful petition would be central to his ascent into the psychology world, as his college experience introduced him to professors and colleagues who would be integral to his success in developing psychology into a credible field of study. Watson began studying philosophy under John Dewey on the recommendation of Furman professor, Gordon Moore. The combined influence of Dewey, James Rowland Angell, Henry Herbert Donaldson, and Jacques Loeb, led Watson to develop a highly descriptive, objective approach to the analysis of behavior, an approach he would later call "behaviorism". Wanting to make psychology more scientifically acceptable, Watson thought of the approach as a declaration of faith, based on the idea that a methodology could transform psychology into a scientific discipline. Later, Watson became interested in the work of Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), and eventually included a highly simplified version of Pavlov's principles in his popular works.


title: John B. Watson

text: Watson earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1903. In his dissertation, "Animal Education", he described the relationship between brain myelination and learning ability in rats at different ages. Watson showed that the degree of myelinization was largely related to learning ability. Watson stayed at the University of Chicago for five years doing research on the relationship between sensory input and learning. He discovered that the kinesthetic sense controlled the behavior of rats running in mazes. In 1908, Watson was offered and accepted a faculty position at Johns Hopkins University and was immediately promoted to chair of the psychology department.


title: John B. Watson

text: In 1913, Watson published the article "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" (also called "The Behaviorist Manifesto"). In the "Manifesto", Watson outlines the major features of his new philosophy of psychology, "behaviorism", with the first paragraph of the article concisely describing Watson's behaviorist position:Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness. The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute. The behavior of man, with all of its refinement and complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist's total scheme of investigation.In 1913, Watson viewed Ivan Pavlov's conditioned reflex as primarily a physiological mechanism controlling glandular secretions. He had already rejected Edward L. Thorndike's 'law of effect' (a precursor to B. F. Skinner's principle of reinforcement) due to what Watson believed were unnecessary subjective elements. It was not until 1916 that he would recognize the more general significance of Pavlov's formulation, after which Watson would make such the subject of his presidential address to the American Psychological Association. The article is also notable for its strong defense of the objective scientific status of applied psychology, which at the time was considered to be much inferior to the established structuralist experimental psychology.


title: John B. Watson

text: With his notion of "behaviorism", Watson put the emphasis on external behavior of people and their reactions on given situations, rather than the internal, mental state of those people. In his opinion, the analysis of behaviors and reactions was the only objective method to get insight in the human actions. This outlook—combined with the complementary ideas of determinism, evolutionary continuism, and empiricism—has contributed to what is sometimes called Methodological Behaviorism (not to be confused with the Radical Behaviorism of B. F. Skinner). It was this new perspective that Watson claimed would lead psychology into a new era. He claimed that prior to Wilhelm Wundt, there was no psychology, and that after Wundt there was only confusion and anarchy. It was Watson's new behaviorism that would pave the way for further advancements in psychology.


title: John B. Watson

text: Watson's behaviorism rejected the studying of consciousness. He was convinced that it could not be studied, and that past attempts to do so have only been hindering the advancement of psychological theories. He felt that introspection was faulty at best and awarded researchers nothing but more issues. He pushed for psychology to no longer be considered the science of the 'mind'. Instead, he stated that psychology should focus on the 'behavior' of the individual, not their consciousness.


title: John B. Watson

text: Meanwhile, Watson served as the President of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology in 1915.


title: John B. Watson

text: Watson argued that mental activity could not be observed. In his book, "Behaviorism" (1924), Watson discussed his thoughts on what language really is, which leads to a discussion of what words really are, and finally to an explanation of what memory is. They are all manual devices used by humans that result in "thinking". By using anecdotes that illustrate the behaviors and activities of mammals, Watson outlined his behaviorist views on these topics.


title: John B. Watson

text: Watson refers to "language" as a "manipulative habit," because when we speak language, the sound originates in our larynx, which is a body instrument that we manipulate every time we talk in order to hear our "voice." As we change our throat shape and tongue position, different sounds are made. Watson explains that when a baby first cries, or first says "da" or "ma," that it is learning language. To further his theory, Watson and his wife conducted an experiment in which they conditioned a baby to say "da-da" when he wanted his bottle. Although the baby was conditioned and was a success for a short while, the conditioning was eventually lost. Watson argues, however, that as the child got older, he would imitate Watson as a result of Watson imitating him. By three years old, the child needed no help developing his vocabulary because he was learning from others. Thus, language is imitative.


title: John B. Watson

text: Watson goes on to claim that, "words are but substitutes for objects and situations." In his earlier baby experiment, the baby learned to say "da" when he wanted a bottle, or "mama" when he wanted his mom, or "shoe-da" when he pointed to his father's shoe. Watson then argues that "we watch our chances and build upon these," meaning human babies have to form their language by applying sounds they have already formed. This, Watson says, is why babies point to an object but call it a different word. Lastly, Watson explains how a child learns to read words: a mom points at each word and reads in a patterned manner, and eventually, because the child recognizes the word with the sound, he or she learns to read it back.


title: John B. Watson

text: This, according to Watson, is the start of memory. All of the ideas previously mentioned are what Watson says make up our memory, and that we carry the memory we develop throughout our lives. Watson tells the tale of Mr. Addison Sims and his friend in order to illustrate these ideas. A friend of Mr. Sims' sees Mr. Sims on a street sidewalk and exclaims: "Upon my life! Addison Sims of Seattle! I haven’t seen you since the World’s Fair in Chicago. Do you remember the gay parties we used to have in the old Windermere Hotel?" Even after all of this, Mr. Sims cannot remember the man's name, although they were old friends who used to encounter many of the same people, places, and experiences together. Watson argued that if the two men were to do some of their old shared activities and go to some of the old same places (the stimuli), then the response (or memory) would occur.


title: John B. Watson

text: Watson was interested in the conditioning of emotions. Of course behaviorism putting an emphasis on people's external behaviors, emotions were considered as mere physical responses. Watson thought that, at birth, there are three unlearned emotional reactions:


title: John B. Watson

text: One might consider the experiment Watson and his assistant Rosalie Rayner carried out in 1920 to be one of the most controversial in psychology. It has become immortalized in introductory psychology textbooks as the Little Albert experiment. The goal of the experiment was to show how principles of, at the time recently discovered, classical conditioning could be applied to condition fear of a white rat into "Little Albert", a 9-month-old boy. Watson and Rayner conditioned "Little Albert" by clanging an iron rod when a white rat was presented. First, they presented to the boy a white rat and observed that he was not afraid of it. Second, they presented him with a white rat and then clanged an iron rod. "Little Albert" responded by crying. This second presentation was repeated several times. Finally, Watson and Rayner presented the white rat by itself and the boy showed fear. Later, in an attempt to see if the fear transferred to other objects, Watson presented Albert with a rabbit, a dog, and a fur coat. He cried at the sight of all of them. This study demonstrated how emotions could become conditioned responses. As the story of "Little Albert" has made the rounds, inaccuracies and inconsistencies have crept in, some of them even due to Watson himself. Analyses of Watson's film footage of Albert suggest that the infant was mentally and developmentally disabled. An ethical problem of this study is that Watson and Rayner did not uncondition "Little Albert".


title: John B. Watson

text: In 2009, Beck and Levinson found records of a child, Douglas Merritte, who seemed to have been Little Albert. They found that he had died from congenital hydrocephalus at the age of 6. Thus, it cannot be concluded to what extent this study had an effect on Little Albert's life. On January 25, 2012, Tom Bartlett of "The Chronicle of Higher Education" published a report that questions whether John Watson knew of cognitive abnormalities in Little Albert that would greatly skew the results of the experiment. In 2014, however, the journals that initially endorsed Beck and Fridlund's claims about Albert and Watson (the "American Psychologist" and "History of Psychology") published articles debunking those claims.


title: John B. Watson

text: Because "Little Albert" was taken out of town, Watson did not have the time to decondition the child. This obviously has ethical implications, but Watson did put in place a method for deconditioning fears. He worked with a colleague, Mary Cover Jones, on a set of procedures aimed at eliminating the fears of another little boy, Peter. Peter seemed to fear white rats and rabbits. Watson and Jones put Peter in his highchair and gave him a nice afternoon snack. At the same time a white rabbit in a cage was put in a distance that did not seem to disturb the child. The next day the rabbit was put slightly closer until Peter showed signs of slight disturbance. This treatment was repeated days after days until Peter could serenely eat his snack with the rabbit being right next to him. Peter was even able to play with the rabbit afterwards. This form of behavior modification is a technique today called systematic desensitization.


title: John B. Watson

text: The conditioning paradigm has certain limitations. Researchers have had a hard time conditioning infants that are just a few months old. This might be because they have not yet developed what Piaget calls "primary circular reactions". Because they cannot coordinate sensory motor actions they cannot learn to make different associations between their motoric behaviors and the environment. Another limitation concerns the kind of conditioned stimuli humans can learn. When researchers attempt to condition children to fear things such as curtains or wooden blocks they have had great difficulty. Humans may be "innately disposed to fear certain stimuli."


title: John B. Watson

text: The 20th century marked the formation of qualitative distinctions between children and adults. In 1928, Watson wrote the book "Psychological Care of Infant and Child" with help from Rosalie Rayner, his assistant and wife. In it, Watson explains that behaviorists were starting to believe psychological care and analysis were required for infants and children. All of Watson's exclamations were due to his belief that children should be treated as a young adult. As such, he warns against the inevitable dangers of a mother providing too much love and affection, because love—along with everything else understood by the behaviorist perspective—Watson argues, is conditioned. He uses invalidism to support his warning, contending that, since society does not overly comfort children as they become young adults in the real world, parents should not set up these unrealistic expectations. Moreover, he disapproves of thumb sucking, masturbation, homosexuality, and encourages parents to be honest with their children about sex. He would reason such views by saying that "all of the weaknesses, reserves, fears, cautions, and inferiorities of our parents are stamped into us with sledge hammer blows," inferring that emotional disabilities were the result of personal treatment, not inheritance.


title: John B. Watson

text: Watson deemed his slogan to be ""not more babies but better brought up babies"," in support of the 'nurture' side of the 'nature vs nurture' debate, claiming that the world would benefit from extinguishing pregnancies for 20 years while enough data was gathered to ensure an efficient child-rearing process. Further emphasizing nurture, Watson argued that nothing is instinctual, but rather everything is built into a child through the interaction with their environment. Parents, therefore, hold complete responsibility as they choose what environment to allow their child to develop in.


title: John B. Watson

text: Though having researched many topics throughout career, child-rearing became Watson's most prized interest. His book would be extremely popular, having sold 100,000 copies after just a few months of release. Many critics were surprised to see even his contemporaries come to accept his views. His emphasis on child development started to become a new phenomenon and would influence some of his successors, though the field had already been delved into by psychologists prior to Warson. G. Stanley Hall, for instance, became very well known for his 1904 book "Adolescence". Hall's beliefs differed from Watson's behaviorism, as the former believed that one's behavior is mostly shaped by heredity and genetically predetermined factors, especially during childhood. His most famous concept, the "storm and stress theory", normalized adolescents’ tendency to act out with conflicting mood swings.


title: John B. Watson

text: Although he wrote extensively on child-rearing, including in "Psychological Care of Infant and Child", as well as in many popular magazines, Watson later regretted having written in the area altogether, conceding that he "did not know enough" to do a good job.


title: John B. Watson

text: Critics determined that Watson's ideas mainly stemmed from his beliefs. How much Rosalie Rayner agreed with her husband's child-rearing ideas has also been an important question, as she later penned an article entitled "I am a Mother of Behaviorist Sons", in which she wrote about the future of their family.


title: John B. Watson

text: R. Dale Nance (1970) worried that Watson's personal indiscretions and difficult upbringings could have affected his views while writing his book. This would include having been raised on a poor farm in South Carolina and having various family troubles, such as abandonment by his father. Suzanne Houk (2000) shared similar concerns while analyzing Watson's hope for a businesslike and casual relationship between a mother and her child. Houk points out that Watson only shifted his focus to child-rearing when he was fired from Johns Hopkins University due to his affair with Rayner. Laura E. Berk (2008) similarly examines the roots of the beliefs that Watson came to honor, noting the Little Albert experiment as the inspiration of Watson's emphasis on environmental factors. Little Albert did not fear the rat and white rabbit until he was conditioned to do so. From this experiment, Watson concluded that parents can shape a child's behavior and development simply by a scheming control of all stimulus-response associations.


title: John B. Watson

text: Watson's advice to treat children with respect but relative emotional detachment, has been strongly criticized. J. M. O’Donnell (1985) deems Watson's views as radical calculations. This discontent stems partly from Watsons’ description of a 'happy child', whereby a child can only cry when in physical pain, can occupy himself through his problem-solving abilities, and whereby the child strays from asking questions. Other critics were more wary of Watson's new interest and success in child psychology.


title: John B. Watson

text: Watson has been misquoted in regards to the following passage, which is often presented out of context and with the last sentence omitted, making his position appear more radical than it actually was:


title: John B. Watson

text: In Watson's "Behaviorism", the sentence is provided in the context of an extended argument against eugenics. That Watson did not hold a radical environmentalist position may be seen in his earlier writing in which his "starting point" for a science of behavior was "the observable fact that organisms, man and animal alike, do adjust themselves to their environment by means of hereditary and habit equipments." Nevertheless, Watson recognized the importance of nurture in the nature versus nurture discussion which was often neglected by his eugenic contemporaries.


title: John B. Watson

text: Thanks to contacts provided by E. B. Titchener, an academic colleague, Watson subsequently began working late in 1920 for U.S. advertising agency J. Walter Thompson. He learned the advertising business' many facets at ground level, including a stint working as a shoe salesman in an upscale department store. Despite this modest start, in less than two years Watson had risen to a vice-presidency at Thompson. His executive's salary, plus bonuses from various successful ad campaigns, resulted in an income many times higher than his academic salary. Watson headed a number of high-profile advertising campaigns, particularly for Ponds cold cream and other personal-care products. In addition, he is credited with popularizing the "coffee break" during an ad campaign for Maxwell House coffee. He has been widely but erroneously credited with re-introducing the "testimonial" advertisement after the tool had fallen out of favor (due to its association with ineffective and dangerous patent medicines). However, testimonial advertisements had been in use for years before Watson entered advertising.


title: John B. Watson

text: An example of Watson's use of testimonials was with the campaign he developed for Pebeco Toothpaste. The ad featured a seductively dressed woman, and coaxed women to smoke, as long as they used Pebeco toothpaste. The toothpaste was not a means to benefit health or hygiene, but as a way to heighten the sexual attraction of the consumer. Watson stated that he was not making original contributions, but was just doing what was normal practice in advertising. Watson stopped writing for popular audiences in 1936, and retired from advertising at about age 65.


title: Amphibious transport dock

text: An amphibious transport dock, also called a landing platform dock (LPD), is an amphibious warfare ship, a warship that embarks, transports, and lands elements of a landing force for expeditionary warfare missions. Several navies currently operate this kind of ship. The ships are generally designed to transport troops into a war zone by sea, primarily using landing craft, although invariably they also have the capability to operate transport helicopters.


title: Amphibious transport dock

text: Amphibious transport docks perform the mission of amphibious transports, amphibious cargo ships, and the older dock landing ships (LSD) by incorporating both a flight deck and a well deck that can be ballasted and deballasted to support landing craft or amphibious vehicles. The main difference between LSDs and LPDs is that while both have helicopter landing decks, the LPD also has hangar facilities for protection and maintenance. In the United States Navy, the newer class of LPD has succeeded the older classes of LSDs, and both the Navy and United States Marine Corps are looking to the LPD to be the basis of their new LX(R) program to replace their LSDs.


title: Eiger

text: The Eiger () is a mountain of the Bernese Alps, overlooking Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen in the Bernese Oberland of Switzerland, just north of the main watershed and border with Valais. It is the easternmost peak of a ridge crest that extends across the Mönch to the Jungfrau at , constituting one of the most emblematic sights of the Swiss Alps. While the northern side of the mountain rises more than 3,000 m (10,000 ft) above the two valleys of Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen, the southern side faces the large glaciers of the Jungfrau-Aletsch area, the most glaciated region in the Alps. The most notable feature of the Eiger is its nearly north face of rock and ice, named "Eiger-Nordwand", "Eigerwand" or just "Nordwand", which is the biggest north face in the Alps. This huge face towers over the resort of Kleine Scheidegg at its base, on the eponymous pass connecting the two valleys.


title: Eiger

text: The first ascent of the Eiger was made by Swiss guides Christian Almer and Peter Bohren and Irishman Charles Barrington, who climbed the west flank on August 11, 1858. The north face, the "last problem" of the Alps, considered amongst the most challenging and dangerous ascents, was first climbed in 1938 by an Austrian-German expedition. The Eiger has been highly publicized for the many tragedies involving climbing expeditions. Since 1935, at least sixty-four climbers have died attempting the north face, earning it the German nickname "Mordwand", literally "murder(ous) wall"—a pun on its correct title of Nordwand (North Wall).


title: Eiger

text: Although the summit of the Eiger can be reached by experienced climbers only, a railway tunnel runs inside the mountain, and two internal stations provide easy access to viewing-windows carved into the rock face. They are both part of the Jungfrau Railway line, running from Kleine Scheidegg to the Jungfraujoch, between the Mönch and the Jungfrau, at the highest railway station in Europe. The two stations within the Eiger are Eigerwand (behind the north face) and Eismeer (behind the south face), at around 3,000 metres. Since 2016 the Eigerwand station is not regularly served any more.


title: Eiger

text: The first mention of Eiger, appearing as "mons Egere", was found in a property sale document of 1252, but there is no clear indication of how exactly the peak gained its name. The three mountains of the ridge are commonly referred to as the Virgin (German: "Jungfrau" – translates to "virgin" or "maiden"), the Monk ("Mönch"), and the Ogre ("Eiger"; the standard German word for ogre is "Oger"). The name has been linked to the Latin term "acer", meaning "sharp" or "pointed".


title: Eiger

text: The Eiger is located above the Lauterbrunnen Valley to the west and Grindelwald to the north in the Bernese Oberland region of the canton of Bern. It forms a renowned mountain range of the Bernese Alps together with its two companions: the Jungfrau () about southwest of it and the Mönch () about in the middle of them. The nearest settlements are Grindelwald, Lauterbrunnen () and Wengen (). The Eiger has three faces: north (or more precisely NNW), east (or more precisely ESE), and west (or more precisely WSW). The northeastern ridge from the summit to the Ostegg (lit.: "eastern corner", ), called "Mittellegi", is the longest on the Eiger. The north face overlooks the gently rising Alpine meadow between Grindelwald () and Kleine Scheidegg (), a mountain railways junction and a pass, which can be reached from both sides, Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen/Wengen – by foot or train.


title: Eiger

text: Politically, the Eiger (and its summit) belongs to the Bernese municipalities of Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen. The Kleine Scheidegg (literally, "the small parting corner") connects the Männlichen-Tschuggen range with the western ridge of the Eiger. The Eiger does not properly form part of the main chain of the Bernese Alps, which borders the canton of Valais and forms the watershed between the Rhine and the Rhône, but constitutes a huge limestone buttress, projecting from the crystalline basement of the Mönch across the Eigerjoch. Consequently, all sides of the Eiger feed finally the same river, namely the Lütschine.


title: Eiger

text: Eiger's water is connected through the "Weisse Lütschine" (the white one) in the Lauterbrunnen Valley on the west side (southwestern face of the Eiger), and through the "Schwarze Lütschine" (the black one) running through Grindelwald (northwestern face), which meet each other in Zweilütschinen (lit.: "the two Lütschinen") where they form the proper Lütschine. The east face is covered by the glacier called Ischmeer, (Bernese German for "Ice Sea"), which forms one upper part of the fast-retreating Lower Grindelwald Glacier. These glaciers' water forms a short creek, which is also confusingly called the "Weisse Lütschine", but enters the black one already in Grindelwald together with the water from the Upper Grindelwald Glacier. Therefore, all the water running down the Eiger converges at the northern foot of the Männlichen () in Zweilütschinen (), about northwest of the summit, where the Lütschine begins its northern course to Lake Brienz and the Aare ().


title: Eiger

text: Although the north face of the Eiger is almost free of ice, significant glaciers lie at the other sides of the mountain. The Eiger Glacier flows on the southwestern side of the Eiger, from the crest connecting it to the Mönch down to , south of Eigergletscher railway station, and feeds the Weisse Lütschine through the Trümmelbach. On the east side, the Ischmeer–well visible from the windows of Eismeer railway station–flows eastwards from the same crest then turns to the north below the impressive wide "Fiescherwand", the north face of the Fiescherhörner triple summit () down to about of the Lower Grindelwald Glacier system.


title: Eiger

text: The massive composition of the Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau constitutes an emblematic sight of the Swiss Alps and is visible from many places on the Swiss Plateau and the Jura Mountains in the northwest. The higher Finsteraarhorn () and Aletschhorn (), which are located about to the south, are generally less visible and situated in the middle of glaciers in less accessible areas. As opposed to the north side, the south and east sides of the range consist of large valley glaciers extending for up to , the largest (beyond the Eiger drainage basin) being those of Grand Aletsch, Fiesch, and Aar Glaciers, and is thus uninhabited. The whole area, the Jungfrau-Aletsch protected area, comprising the highest summits and largest glaciers of the Bernese Alps, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001.


title: Eiger

text: In July 2006, a piece of the Eiger, amounting to approximately 700,000 cubic metres of rock, fell from the east face. As it had been noticeably cleaving for several weeks and fell into an uninhabited area, there were no injuries and no buildings were hit.


title: Eiger

text: The "Nordwand", German for "north wall" or "north face," is the north face of the Eiger (also known as the "Eigernordwand": "Eiger north wall" or "Eigerwand"). It is one of the three great north faces of the Alps, along with the north faces of the Matterhorn and the Grandes Jorasses (known as 'the Trilogy') and also one of the biggest sheer faces in Europe, between 1,600 m and 1,800 m (over a mile) high. The face overlooks Kleine Scheidegg and the valley of Grindelwald. At 2,866 metres inside the mountain lies the Eigerwand railway station. The station is connected to the north face by a tunnel opening at the face, which has sometimes been used to rescue climbers. The Eiger Trail, at the base of the north face, runs from Eigergletscher to Alpiglen railway stations. The approach hike to the base of the face takes less than an hour from Eigergletscher.


title: Eiger

text: Some of the notable features on the north face are (from the bottom): First Pillar, Eigerwand Station, First Ice-field, Hinterstoisser Traverse, Swallow's Nest, Ice Hose, Second Ice-field, Death Bivouac, Ramp, Traverse of the Gods, Spider and Exit Cracks.


title: Eiger

text: In 1938, "Alpine Journal" editor Edward Lisle Strutt calls the face "an obsession for the mentally deranged" and "the most imbecile variant since mountaineering first began." In the same year, however, the north face was finally climbed on 24 July by Andreas Heckmair, Ludwig Vörg, Heinrich Harrer and Fritz Kasparek, a German–Austrian group.


title: Eiger

text: A portion of the upper face is called "The White Spider", as snow-filled cracks radiating from an ice-field resemble the legs of a spider. Harrer used this name for the title of his book about his successful climb, "Die Weisse Spinne" (translated into English as ""). During the first successful ascent, the four men were caught in an avalanche as they climbed the Spider, but all had enough strength to resist being swept off the face.


title: Eiger

text: Since then, the north face has been climbed many times. Today it is regarded as a formidable challenge, not only because of its technical difficulties, exceeding those of some of the 8,000 m peaks in the Himalaya and Karakoram, but also because of the increased rockfall and diminishing ice-fields. Climbers are increasingly electing to challenge the Eiger in winter, when the crumbling face is strengthened by ice.


title: Eiger

text: Since 1935, at least sixty-four climbers have died attempting the north face, earning it the German nickname, "Mordwand", or "murderous wall", a play on the face's German name "Nordwand".


title: Eiger

text: While the summit was reached without much difficulty in 1858 by a complex route on the west flank, the battle to climb the north face has captivated the interest of climbers and non-climbers alike. Before it was successfully climbed, most of the attempts on the face ended tragically and the Bernese authorities even banned climbing it and threatened to fine any party that should attempt it again. But the enthusiasm which animated the young talented climbers from Austria and Germany finally vanquished its reputation of unclimbability when a party of four climbers successfully reached the summit in 1938 by what is known as the "1938" or "Heckmair" route.


title: Eiger

text: The climbers that attempted the north face could be easily watched through the telescopes from the Kleine Scheidegg, a pass between Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen, connected by rail. The contrast between the comfort and civilization of the railway station and the agonies of the young men slowly dying a short yet uncrossable distance away led to intensive coverage by the international media.


title: Eiger

text: After World War II, the north face was climbed twice in 1947, first by a party of two French guides, Louis Lachenal and Lionel Terray, then by a Swiss party consisting of H. Germann, with Hans and Karl Schlunegger.


title: Eiger

text: In 1857, a first recorded attempt was made by Christian Almer, Christian Kaufmann, Ulrich Kaufmann guiding the Austrian alpinist Sigismund Porges. They did manage the first ascent of neighboring Mönch instead. Porges, however, successfully made the second ascent of the Eiger in July 1861 with the guides Christian Michel, Hans and Peter Baumann.


title: Eiger

text: The first ascent was made by the western flank on August 11, 1858 by Charles Barrington with guides Christian Almer and Peter Bohren. On the previous afternoon, the party walked up to the Wengernalp hotel. From there they started the ascent of the Eiger at 3:30 a.m. Barrington describes the route much as it is followed today, staying close to the edge of the north face much of the way. They reached the summit at about noon, planted a flag, stayed for some 10 minutes and descended in about four hours. Barrington describes the reaching of the top, saying, "the two guides kindly gave me the place of first man up." After the descent, the party was escorted to the Kleine Scheidegg hotel, where their ascent was confirmed by observation of the flag left on the summit. The owner of the hotel then fired a cannon to celebrate the first ascent. According to Harrer's "The White Spider", Barrington was originally planning to make the first ascent of the Matterhorn, but his finances did not allow him to travel there as he was already staying in the Eiger region.


title: Eiger

text: Although the Mittellegi ridge had already been descended by climbers (since 1885) with the use of ropes in the difficult sections, it remained unclimbed until 1921. On the 10th of September of that year, Japanese climber Yuko Maki, along with Swiss guides Fritz Amatter, Samuel Brawand and Fritz Steuri made the first successful ascent of the ridge. The previous day, the party approached the ridge from the Eismeer railway station of the Jungfrau Railway and bivouacked for the night. They started the climb at about 6:00 a.m. and reached the summit of the Eiger at about 7:15 p.m., after an over 13 hours gruelling ascent. Shortly after, they descended the west flank. They finally reached Eigergletscher railway station at about 3:00 a.m. the next day.


title: Eiger

text: In 1935, two young German climbers from Bavaria, Karl Mehringer and Max Sedlmeyer, arrived at Grindelwald to attempt the ascent of the north face. After waiting some time for the weather to improve, they set off, reaching the height of the Eigerwand station before stopping for their first bivouac. The following day, facing greater difficulties, they gained little height. On the third day, they made hardly any vertical gain. That night, the weather deteriorated, bringing snow and low cloud that shrouded the mountain from the observers below. Avalanches began to sweep the face. Two days later, the weather briefly cleared, and the two men were glimpsed a little higher and about to bivouac for the fifth night, before clouds descended again. A few days later, the weather finally cleared, revealing a completely white north face. Weeks later, the German World War I ace Ernst Udet went searching for the missing men with his aircraft, eventually spotting one of them frozen to death in what became known as the "Death Bivouac". Sedlmeyer's body was found at the foot of the face the following year by his brothers Heinrich and Martin Meier, who were part of a group looking for the victims of the 1936 climbing disaster. Mehringer's remains were found in 1962 by Swiss climbers below the "Flat Iron" ("Bügeleisen") at the lefthand end of the second ice field.


title: Eiger

text: The next year ten young climbers from Austria and Germany came to Grindelwald and camped at the foot of the mountain. Before their attempts started one of them was killed during a training climb, and the weather was so bad during that summer that, after waiting for a change and seeing none on the way, several members of the party gave up. Of the four that remained, two were Bavarians, Andreas Hinterstoisser and Toni Kurz, and two were Austrians, Willy Angerer and Edi Rainer. When the weather improved they made a preliminary exploration of the lowest part of the face. Hinterstoisser fell but was not injured. A few days later the four men finally began the ascent of the face. They climbed quickly, but on the next day, after their first bivouac, the weather changed; clouds came down and hid the group to the observers. They did not resume the climb until the following day, when, during a break, the party was seen descending, but the climbers could be seen only intermittently from the ground. The group had no choice but to retreat, since Angerer had suffered serious injuries from falling rock. The party became stuck on the face when they could not recross the difficult Hinterstoisser Traverse, from which they had taken the rope they had first used to climb it. The weather then deteriorated for two days. They were ultimately swept away by an avalanche, which only Kurz survived, hanging on a rope. Three guides started on an extremely perilous rescue attempt. They failed to reach him but came within shouting distance and learned what had happened. Kurz explained the fate of his companions: one had fallen down the face, another was frozen above him, and the third had fractured his skull in falling and was hanging dead on the rope.


title: Eiger

text: In the morning the three guides came back, traversing the face from a hole near the Eigerwand station and risking their lives under incessant avalanches. Toni Kurz was still alive but almost helpless, with one hand and one arm completely frozen. Kurz hauled himself off the cliff after cutting loose the rope that bound him to his dead teammate below and climbed back onto the face. The guides were not able to pass an unclimbable overhang that separated them from Kurz. They managed to give him a rope long enough to reach them by tying two ropes together. While descending, Kurz could not get the knot to pass through his carabiner. He tried for hours to reach his rescuers who were only a few metres below him. Then he began to lose consciousness. One of the guides, climbing on another's shoulders, was able to touch the tip of Kurz's crampons with his ice-axe but could not reach higher. Kurz was unable to descend further and, completely exhausted, died slowly.


title: Eiger

text: An attempt was made in 1937 by and Ludwig Vörg. Although the attempt was unsuccessful, they were nonetheless the first climbers who returned alive from a serious attempt on the face. They started the climb on 11 August and reached a high point of a few rope lengths above Death Bivouac. A storm then broke and after three days on the wall they had to retreat. This was the first successful withdrawal from a significant height on the wall.


title: Eiger

text: The north face was first climbed on July 24, 1938 by Anderl Heckmair, Ludwig Vörg, Heinrich Harrer and Fritz Kasparek in a German–Austrian party. The party had originally consisted of two independent teams: Harrer (who did not have a pair of crampons on the climb) and Kasparek were joined on the face by Heckmair and Vörg, who had started their ascent a day later and had been helped by the fixed rope that the lead team had left across the Hinterstoisser Traverse. The two groups, led by the experienced Heckmair, decided to join their forces and roped together as a single group of four. Heckmair later wrote: "We, the sons of the older Reich, united with our companions from the Eastern Border to march together to victory."


title: Eiger

text: The expedition was constantly threatened by snow avalanches and climbed as quickly as possible between the falls. On the third day a storm broke and the cold was intense. The four men were caught in an avalanche as they climbed "the Spider," the snow-filled cracks radiating from an ice-field on the upper face, but all possessed sufficient strength to resist being swept off the face. The members successfully reached the summit at four o'clock in the afternoon. They were so exhausted that they only just had the strength to descend by the normal route through a raging blizzard.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: The Ahnenerbe (, "ancestral heritage") operated as a think tank in Nazi Germany between 1935 and 1945. Heinrich Himmler, the "Reichsführer-SS" from 1929 onwards, established it in July 1935 as an SS appendage devoted to the task of promoting the racial doctrines espoused by Adolf Hitler and by his governing Nazi Party. The Ahnenerbe specifically fostered the idea that the modern Germans descended from an ancient Aryan race seen as biologically superior to other racial groups. The group comprised scholars and scientists from a broad range of academic disciplines.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and turned the country into a one-party state under the control of the Nazi Party and governed by his personal dictatorship. He espoused the idea that modern Germans descended from the ancient Aryans, who he claimed—in contrast to established academic understandings of prehistory—had invented most major developments in human history, such as agriculture, art, and writing. The majority of the world's scholarly community did not accept Hitler's racial theories and claims about prehistory, and the Nazis decided to give such theories greater scholarly backing, establishing the Ahnenerbe with the purpose of providing evidence for Nazi racial doctrine and to promote these ideas to the German public through books, articles, exhibits, and conferences. Ahnenerbe scholars interpreted evidence to fit Hitler's beliefs, and some consciously fabricated evidence in order to do so. The organisation sent out various expeditions to other parts of the world, intent on finding evidence of ancient Aryan expansion.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: The Nazi government used the Ahnenerbe's research to justify many of their policies. For instance, German propaganda cited the think tank's claim that archaeological evidence indicated that the ancient Aryans lived across eastern Europe in justification of German military expansion into that region. Ahnenerbe research was also cited in justification of the Holocaust, of the genocide of Jews and other groups—including Roma and homosexuals—through extermination camps and other methods. In 1937 the Ahnenerbe undertaking became an official SS body, renamed the "Research and Teaching Community 'Ancestral Heritage'" ("Forschungs- und Lehrgemeinschaft 'Das Ahnenerbe"').


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Some of the group's investigations were placed on hold after the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Towards the end of the war, Ahnenerbe members destroyed much of the organisation's paperwork to avoid it incriminating them in forthcoming war-crimes tribunals.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Many Ahnenerbe members escaped the de-Nazification policies in West Germany and remained active in the country's archaeological establishment throughout the post-war decades. This stifled scholarly research into the Ahnenerbe, which intensified only after German reunification in 1990. The Ahnenerbe's ideas have retained an appeal for some neo-Nazi and far-right circles and have also influenced later pseudo-archaeologists.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Adolf Hitler believed that one could divide humanity into three groups: "the founders of culture, the bearers of culture, the destroyers of culture". The founders of culture, in Hitler's view, were a biologically distinct Aryan race who (he believed) had been tall, blond, and originating in Northern Europe. He believed that in prehistory, the Aryan race had been responsible for all significant developments in human culture, including agriculture, architecture, music, literature, and the visual arts. He believed that most modern Germans were the descendants of these Aryans and had genetically inherited the Aryans' biological superiority to other races. The destroyers of culture, in Hitler's view, were the Jews, whom he regarded not as a genetically diverse population sharing certain ethno-cultural and religious traits—as they were then widely recognized—but as a unified, biologically distinct race. He believed that wherever Jews went, they damaged and ultimately destroyed the cultures surrounding them.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Hitler had promoted his ideas about the greatness of Germany's ancestors in his 1925 book, "Mein Kampf". Outside Germany, most scholars and scientists regarded Hitler's ideas about human evolution and prehistory as nonsense, in part due to the absence of any evidence that North European communities had ever originated major developments in prehistory, such as the development of agriculture and writing, all of which first appeared in the Near East and in Asia.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: In January 1929 Hitler appointed Nazi Party member Heinrich Himmler to head the "Schutzstaffel" (SS), a paramilitary group founded in 1925 to serve as personal bodyguards to Hitler and other Nazis. Himmler set out to re-organise the SS, introducing a better system of organisation, and gathering intelligence on prominent Jews and Freemasons, as well as on rival political groups. In 1929, Himmler launched an SS recruitment campaign, and by the end of 1931 the group had 10,000 members. Himmler aimed to ensure that this membership was as racially Nordic as possible, establishing the SS Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA) to screen both applicants and the women whom SS members proposed to marry. In believing in the existence of a "Nordic" racial type which was the purest survival of the ancient Aryans, Himmler was influenced by the Nordicist ideas of Hans F. K. Günther (1891–1968), which had been popular in German nationalist circles over the preceding decades.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Himmler had an abiding interest in the past, and in how it could provide a blueprint for the future. However, his views of the ancient Germanic peoples differed from Hitler's in certain areas. Hitler was perplexed as to why ancient societies in southern Europe had developed more advanced technology and architecture than their contemporaries in northern Europe. Hitler stated that "People make a tremendous fuss about the excavations carried out in districts inhabited by our forebears of the pre-Christian era. I am afraid that I cannot share their enthusiasm, for I cannot help remembering that, while our ancestors were making these vessels out of stone and clay, over which our archaeologists rave, the Greeks had already built the Acropolis." Hitler explained this by claiming that the Aryans must also have inhabited the south of the continent and that they were responsible for establishing the societies of ancient Greece and Rome. Specifically, he believed that it was the warmer climates of the south that enabled these Aryans to develop in ways that those living further north, in colder and wetter climates, did not. Himmler was aware of these views but, unlike Hitler, admired what he believed was the fierceness and valour of the Germanic tribes of northern Europe. He was particularly interested in Tacitus's "Germania", an ethnographic and historical account of the Iron-Age Germanic tribes written by the Roman historian at the end of the first century CE.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: In the 1932 federal election, the Nazis secured 230 seats in the Reichstag, making them the largest single party but without a controlling majority. Six months later, President Paul von Hindenburg invited Hitler to become Chancellor, after which the latter cemented Nazi dominance over the government. In February 1933, Hitler convinced von Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree, legally suspending civil liberties. Himmler, who was newly appointed as the police chief of Munich, ordered the arrests of those he regarded as a threat to the Nazis—including journalists, labour organisers, Jewish community leaders, socialists, and communists—and their incarceration in Dachau concentration camp. Hitler approved of Himmler's tactics and appointed him head of the political police across Germany.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: In 1933, Himmler initiated plans to establish a "Nordic Academy" to assist the instruction of the SS upper ranks. He was assisted in this by Karl Maria Wiligut, an occultist who was popular in German ultra-nationalist circles. Himmler brought Wiligut into the SS—where he eventually rose to the rank of Brigadeführer—and gave him a private villa in Berlin.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Using Wiligut's prophecies as his guide, Himmler selected Wewelsburg castle in Westphalia to serve as a base for many SS operations. The architect Hermann Bartels was employed to oversee renovations to the castle to make it fit for the SS's use. As part of these alterations, one of the rooms in the building became known as "the Grail Room" with a rock crystal representing the Holy Grail being placed in a central position. Himmler also established a private museum at the castle, employing the young archaeologist Wilhelm Jordan to manage it.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: In 1934, Himmler met the Dutch prehistorian Herman Wirth, who was then living in Germany, at the home of Johann von Leers, a Nazi propagandist.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Wirth was one of the most controversial prehistorians in Germany. After examining symbols found in rural Frisian folk art, he became convinced that they represented the survival of an ancient script used by a prehistoric Nordic civilisation. This script, Wirth believed, was the world's oldest written language and had been the basis for all other ancient scripts. Wirth also believed that if he could decipher it, he could then learn the nature of the ancient religion of the Aryan race. This belief conflicted with established scholarly understandings of the past; by the 1930s, scholars were aware that the world's two oldest scripts were those of Mesopotamia and Egypt, and that northern Europe only developed its own form of literacy, that of the runes, under the influence of Etruscan script between 400 BCE to 50 CE. Attempting to explain the lack of any archaeological or historical evidence for an ancient advanced Nordic civilisation, Wirth claimed that the Aryans had evolved in an Arctic homeland two million years ago, before establishing their advanced society on a land in the North Atlantic, which had since sunken into the sea, giving rise to the stories about Atlantis.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Wirth's ideas were rejected and ridiculed by the German archaeological establishment, although they had gained the support of several wealthy backers, which assisted him in promoting them. Himmler was among those who liked Wirth's ideas. Himmler was interested in the pre-Christian religions of northern Europe, believing that a modern Pagan religion modelled on them could replace Christianity as the primary religion of the German people. Himmler disliked Christianity because of its Semitic origins, its presentation of Jesus of Nazareth as a Jew, and its advocacy of charity and compassion. Later, Himmler privately told his personal physician that after the Second World War, "the old Germanic gods will be restored".


title: Ahnenerbe

text: On July 1, 1935, Himmler organised a meeting at the Berlin headquarters of the SS where he discussed his desire to launch a prehistoric research institute. Both Wirth and the agriculturalist Richard Walther Darré were present, and both responded with enthusiasm to the idea. The group was launched as a department of RuSHA. Wirth became the group's president, while Himmler took the role of superintendent, a position entailing considerable control by placing him in charge of its board of trustees. Its formal goal was "to promote the science of ancient intellectual history".


title: Ahnenerbe

text: The organisation was initially named the "Deutsches Ahnenerbe Studiengesellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte" ("Society for the Study of the History of Primeval Ideas"), but this was soon shortened to Ahnenerbe. This was a German term for "something inherited from the forefathers". The Ahnenerbe's first premises were at number 29 and 30 of the Brüderstrasse, a thirteenth-century street in Berlin. These corner buildings were rented from the city's department store magnate Rudolf Herzog. Initially, it employed seven members of staff. Reflecting Wirth's fixation on the idea of an ancient Aryan script, the organisation's early focus was upon what Wirth called "script and symbol studies". One of its researchers, Yrjö von Grönhagen, was for instance tasked with collecting the Finnish wooden calendars which were engraved with various symbols.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Starting in 1934, Himmler began financially supporting and visiting excavations in Germany. This brought him into contact with archaeologists like , Hans Schleif, and Wilhelm Unverzagt, director of the "Staatliches Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte" in Berlin. Initially, there were two departments within the SS engaged in archaeology: the "Abteilung Ausgrabungen" of the "Persönlicher Stab des Reichsführers der SS" and the "Abteilung für Vor- und Frühgeschichte" at the RuSHA. The latter ("RA IIIB") was established in 1934 and was supposed to serve as a "general staff" for all SS activities related to prehistory. It was responsible for archaeological research and related propaganda and led by Rolf Höhne, a geologist. Höhne was eventually replaced by Peter Paulsen, an archaeologist, in October 1937. The department did not conduct any excavations itself, but was intended to extend the influence of the SS over other institutions, especially those responsible for education/research and monument preservation. In fact, Langsdorff did this in Himmler's personal staff. The department also tried to make use of pre-history in the training and indoctrination of SS members. When the RuSHA was restructured, the department was dissolved with its responsibilities passing to the "Ahnenerbe". The "Abteilung Ausgrabung" in Himmler's personal staff was established in 1935 on the initiative of Langsdorff. In March 1937, Höhne joined the leadership of this department. By 1937, it was responsible for SS excavations and maintained its own personnel for this activity.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Its official mission as twofold. Its first purpose was to reveal new evidence for the accomplishments of the ancestors of the modern Germans "using exact scientific methods". Its second purpose was to convey its findings to the German public through magazine articles, books, museum exhibits, and scholarly conferences.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: According to Pringle, it was however "in the business of myth-making", repeatedly "distorting the truth and churning out carefully tailored evidence to support the racial ideas of Adolf Hitler." Some members of the Ahnenerbe consciously altered their evidence and interpretations to match Hitler's beliefs; others appear to have been unaware of how their adherence to Nazi doctrine was shaping their interpretations.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Himmler regarded the Ahnenerbe as an elite think tank which would sweep away previous scholarship on the development of humanity and reveal that Hitler's ideas on the subject were true.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Himmler also believed that the group's investigations might reveal ancient secrets about agriculture, medicine, and warfare which would benefit Nazi Germany.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: It employed scholars from a wide range of academic fields, including archaeology, anthropology, ethnology, folkloristics, runology, Classics, history, musicology, philology, biology, zoology, botany, astronomy, and medicine. Himmler believed that scholars active in all of these different fields would piece together a view of the past that would revolutionise established interpretations; in his words, it would represent "hundreds of thousands of little mosaic stones, which portray the true picture of the origins of the world


title: Ahnenerbe

text: On July 1, 1935, at SS headquarters in Berlin, Himmler met with five "racial experts" representing Darré and with Wirth. Together they established an organization called the "German Ancestral Heritage—Society for the Study of the History of Primeval Ideas" ("Deutsches Ahnenerbe—Studiengesellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte"), shortened to its better-known form in 1937. At the meeting they designated its official goal, “to promote the science of ancient intellectual history,” and appointed Himmler as its superintendent, with Wirth serving as its president. Himmler appointed Wolfram Sievers "Generalsekretär" (General Secretary) of the Ahnenerbe.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Through 1937, the Ahnenerbe was essentially engaged in amateur "völkisch" research. Financial and academic pressure caused Himmler to start looking for an alternative to Wirth as early as the spring of 1936. In September, Hitler negatively referred to Wirth's beliefs regarding Atlantis and their influence on "Böttcherstrasse architecture" in a speech at the Reichsparteitag.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: In March 1937, the Ahnenerbe was given a new statute, implementing the "Führerprinzip" (leader principle) and giving Himmler extensive powers. Wirth was deposed as president and appointed honorary president, a powerless position. Himmler's position as "Kurator" was given more power.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Walther Wüst was appointed the new president of the Ahnenerbe. Wüst was an expert on India and a dean at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, working on the side as a Vertrauensmann for the "Sicherheitsdienst" (SD, Security Service). Referred to as "The Orientalist" by Wolfram Sievers, Wüst had been recruited by him in May 1936 because of his ability to simplify science for the common man. After being appointed president, Wüst began improving the Ahnenerbe, moving the offices to a new headquarters that cost in the Dahlem neighborhood of Berlin. He also worked to limit the influence of “those he deemed scholarly upstarts,” which included cutting communication with the RuSHA office of Karl Maria Wiligut.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: The "Generalsekretariat" led by Sievers was turned into the institution's "Reichsgeschäftsführung". The Ahnenerbe was renamed "Forschungs- und Lehrgemeinschaft Das Ahnenerbe e.V.". It was moved from the RuSHA to Himmlers's personal staff.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Wirth and Wilhelm Teudt lost their departments in Ahnenerbe in 1938. In 1939, the statutes were changed again and Wirth was deposed as honorary president. Himmler's and Wüsts' titles were switched with Himmler now the president. Next to Wüst, the academic with most influence in the institution after 1939 was Herbert Jankuhn, who in 1937 still had categorically rejected cooperation with the "unscientific" Ahnenerbe.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Ahnenerbe was a mix between an SS department and an "Eingetragener Verein". Membership was open to all natural and legal persons. Its staff were SS members, many also working in other SS positions, and thus subject to SS jurisdiction.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: In late 1936, Ahnenerbe took over the publication of Teudt's magazine "Germanien", first in cooperation with Teudt, then without him. The monthly now became the official voice of Ahnenerbe and was aimed at a wider audience. From December 1936, the magazine was distributed free of charge to all SS leaders.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Cooperation with other SS departments was initially limited, but improved after 1937. Contacts with the SD-HA and the editorial team of the SS weekly "Das schwarze Korps" intensified. Ahnenerbe eventually had the scientific responsibility for the "SS-Leithefte" and in conjunction with the SS-HA, Ahnenerbe established "Germanische Leitstelle" and "Germanischer Wissenschaftseinsatz".


title: Ahnenerbe

text: In 1939, the Ahnenerbe held its first independent annual convention, at Kiel. The event's success contributed to the trend that archaeologists were increasingly turning to the Ahnenerbe and away from Alfred Rosenberg's rival "".


title: Ahnenerbe

text: In fiscal year 1938–1939, the budget for the excavations department was , about 12% of the Ahnenerbe's total budget. More than a third of that went to the Haithabu activities. Under Jankuhn's direction four more archaeological departments were set up: in April 1938 the "Forschungsstätte für naturwissenschaftliche Vorgeschichte" (a laboratory for analyzing pollen) was established at Dahlem under the leadership of . The "Forschungsstätte für Wurtenforschung" at Wilhelmshaven led by , the "Forschungsstätte für germanisches Bauwesen" led by Martin Rudolph and the "Forschungsstätte für Urgeschichte" directed by followed in 1939.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: As a gift for Hitler's fiftieth birthday, among the presents which Himmler procured for him was a set of leather bound books, one of which was on the subject of the Ahnenerbe's research.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: The Ahnenerbe sought to cultivate an air of professional integrity. The Ahnenerbe became an integral part of the SS.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: By 1939, the Ahnenerbe employed 137 scholars and scientists, as well as 82 support workers, including artists, photographers, laboratory technicians, librarians, accountants, and secretaries.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Himmler used the Ahnenerbe's research to fuel and justify the Holocaust. In a 1937 speech at Bad Tölz, Himmler announced that the bog bodies of northwestern Europe, which testified to an Iron Age tradition in which individuals were deliberately killed and deposited in bogs, must have represented the eradication of homosexuals. This was an idea that he had adopted from Ahnenerbe archaeologist Herbert Jankuhn. His adoption of this suggestion was linked to his homophobic fear that male homosexuality was transmittable and that it could spread within the ranks of the SS and other spaces of male bonding unless strong measures were implemented to prevent it. Himmler then claimed this alleged ancient tradition as legitimation for the extermination of homosexuals within his own society. As many as 15,000 gay men were rounded up and imprisoned in concentration camps, where up to 60 percent died.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Amid the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the Ahnenerbe sent a team into Warsaw to remove any items from its museums which they believed to be German in origin. In 1939, the Ahnenerbe's further four planned expeditions—to Iran, the Canary Islands, the Andes, and Iceland—were indefinitely postponed. At the end of the war in Europe, members of the Ahnenerbe destroyed much of the organisation's paperwork lest it incriminate them during future war crime tribunals.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: The Ahnenerbe had several different institutes or sections for its departments of research. Most of these were archeological but others included the Pflegestätte für Wetterkunde (Meteorology Section) headed by Obersturmführer Dr Hans Robert Scultetus, founded on the basis that Hanns Hörbiger's "Welteislehre" could be used to provide accurate long-range weather forecasts, and a section devoted to musicology, whose aim was to determine "the essence" of German music. It recorded folk music on expeditions to Finland and the Faroe Islands, from ethnic Germans of the occupied territories, and in South Tyrol. The section made sound recordings, transcribed manuscripts and songbooks, and photographed and filmed instrument use and folk dances. The lur, a Bronze Age musical instrument, became central to this research, which concluded that Germanic consonance was in direct conflict to Jewish atonalism.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: In 1935, Himmler contacted a Finnish nobleman and author, Yrjö von Grönhagen, after seeing one of his articles about the Kalevala folklore in a Frankfurt newspaper. Grönhagen agreed to lead an expedition through the Karelia region of Finland to record pagan sorcerers and witches. Because there was uncertainty about whether the Karelians would allow photography, the Finnish illustrator Ola Forsell also accompanied the team. Musicologist brought along a magnetophon, hoping to record pagan chants.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: The team departed on their expedition in June 1936. Their first success was with a traditional singer, , who knew a song closely resembling one in the Kalevala although he was unaware of the book. Later, in Tolvajärvi, the team photographed and recorded Hannes Vornanen playing a traditional Finnish kantele.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: One of the team's final successes was in finding Miron-Aku, a soothsayer believed to be a witch by locals. Upon meeting the group, she claimed to have foreseen their arrival. The team persuaded her to perform a ritual for the camera and tape recorder in which she summoned the spirits of ancestors and "divine[d] future events." The team also recorded information on Finnish saunas.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: After a slide show on February 19, 1936 of his trip to Bohuslän, a region in southwestern Sweden, Wirth convinced Himmler to launch an expedition to the region, the first official expedition financed by the Ahnenerbe. Bohuslän was known for its massive quantity of petroglyph rock carvings, which Wirth believed were evidence of an ancient writing system predating all known systems. Himmler appointed Wolfram Sievers to be the managing director of the expedition, likely because of Wirth's earlier troubles balancing finances.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: On August 4, 1936, the expedition set off on a three-month trip, starting at the German island of Rügen, then continuing to Backa, the first recorded rock-art site in Sweden. Despite the existence of scenes showing warriors, animals and ships, Wirth focused on the lines and circles that he thought made up a prehistoric alphabet. While his studies were largely based on personal belief, rather than objective scientific research, Wirth made interpretations of the meanings of ideograms carved in the rock, such as a circle bisected by a vertical line representing a year and a man standing with raised arms representing what Wirth called "the Son of God." His team proceeded to make casts of what Wirth deemed the most important carvings and then carried the casts to camp, where they were crated and sent back to Germany. Once satisfied with their work at the site, the team set out on a trek through Sweden, eventually reaching the Norwegian island of Lauvøylandet.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: In 1937, the Ahnenerbe sent the archaeologist Franz Altheim and his wife, the photographer Erika Trautmann, to Val Camonica, to study prehistoric rock inscriptions. The two returned to Germany claiming that they had found traces of Nordic runes on the rocks, supposedly confirming that ancient Rome was founded by Nordic incomers.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Also, an expedition to Sardinia was planned in the 1930s, but the reasons for it still remain unknown.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: In 1938, Franz Altheim and his research partner Erika Trautmann requested the Ahnenerbe sponsor their expedition from Central Europe through Western Asia to study an internal power struggle of the Roman Empire, which they believed was fought between the Nordic and Semitic peoples. Eager to credit the vast success of the Roman Empire to people of a Nordic background, the Ahnenerbe agreed to match the put forward by Hermann Göring, an old friend of Trautmann's.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: In August 1938, after spending a few days traveling through remote hills searching for ruins of Dacian kingdoms, the two researchers arrived at their first major stop in Bucharest, the capital of Romania. There Grigore Florescu, the director of the Municipal Museum, met with them, and discussed both history and the politics of the day, including the activities of the Iron Guard.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: After traveling through Istanbul, Athens, and Lebanon, the researchers went to Damascus. They were not welcomed by the French, who ruled Syria as a colony at the time. The newly-sovereign Kingdom of Iraq was being courted for an alliance with Germany, and Fritz Grobba, the German envoy to Baghdad, arranged for Altheim and Trautmann to meet with local researchers and be driven to Parthian and Persian ruins in southern Iraq, as well as Babylon.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Through Baghdad, the team went north to Assur where they met Sheikh Adjil el Yawar, a leader of the Shammar Bedouin tribe and commander of the northern Camel Corps. He discussed German politics and his desire to duplicate the success of Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud who had recently ascended to power in Saudi Arabia. With his support, the team traveled to their final major stop, the ruins of Hatra on the former border between the Roman and Persian empires.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: The third German Antarctic Expedition took place between 1938 and 1939. It was led by Alfred Ritscher (1879–1963).


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Excavations that had been ongoing at Hedeby since 1930 were formally put under the aegis of Ahnenerbe in 1938 by Jankuhn.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: In 1937–1938, Gustav Riek led an excavation at the "Heuneburg" on the Danube in Baden-Württemberg, where an ancient fortress had been discovered much earlier. The Ahnenerbe thus won out over Hans Reinerth of the " who had competed for the excavation. Riek focused on the burial mound known as where he found the main burial chamber to have been plundered in antiquity. In its direct vicinity another grave was discovered, however, that included rich grave furnishings. Due to the outbreak of war in 1939 the excavations were discontinued.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: A private expedition by Richard Anders and Wiligut into the Murg Valley of northwestern Baden-Württemberg had nothing to do with the Ahnenerbe.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: The Ahnenerbe also was active in the " (Mauern caves) in the Franconian Jura. R.R. Schmidt discovered red ochre, a common pigment for cave paintings made by the Cro-Magnon.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: In autumn 1937, , a Frisian nationalist who had applied to the SS Excavations Department earlier that year, took over the excavation. His team proceeded to find artifacts such as burins, ivory pendants, and a woolly mammoth skeleton. They also discovered Neanderthal remains buried with what appeared to be throwing spears and javelins, a technology thought to have been developed by the Cro-Magnons.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: Bohmers interpreted this to mean that Cro-Magnons had left these stones in the caves over 70,000 years before, and this was therefore the oldest Cro-Magnon site in the world. To validate his claims, Bohmers traveled around Europe speaking with colleagues and organizing exhibitions, notably in the Netherlands, Belgium and France.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: At the Parisian Institute for Human Paleontology, Bohmers met with Abbé Henri Breuil, an expert on cave art. Breuil arranged for Bohmers to visit Trois Frères, a site whose owners allowed only a small number of visitors. First, however, Bohmers took a quick trip to London, followed by a tour of several other French points of interest: Font-de-Gaume (a site featuring Cro-Magnon cave paintings), Teyat, La Mouthe and the caves of Dordogne. Then Bohmers moved on to Les Trois-Frères.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: The Ahnenerbe took great interest in the 900-year-old Bayeux Tapestry. In June 1941, its staff oversaw the transport of the tapestry from its home in Bayeux Cathedral to an abbey at Juaye-Mondaye, and finally to the Château de Sourches. In August 1944, after Paris was liberated by the Allies, two members of the SS were dispatched to Paris to retrieve the tapestry, which had been moved into the basement of the Louvre. Contrary to Himmler's orders, however, they chose not to attempt to enter the Louvre, most likely because of the strong presence of the French Resistance in the historic area.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: In 1937, Himmler decided that he could increase the Ahnenerbe's visibility by investigating Hans F. K. Günther’s claims that early Aryans had conquered much of Asia, including attacks against China and Japan in approximately 2000 BC, and that Gautama Buddha was himself an Aryan offshoot of the Nordic race. Walther Wüst later expanded on this theory, stating in a public speech that Adolf Hitler's ideology corresponded with that of the Buddha, since the two shared a common heritage. However, according to contemporary research Hitler himself was not interested in Buddhism or Tibet.


title: Ahnenerbe

text: After the invasion of Poland in September 1939, Wolfram Sievers wrote to Himmler stressing the need to appropriate exhibits from numerous museums. Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) "Standartenführer" Franz Six oversaw SS-"Untersturmführer" , who was commanding a small team that entered Kraków to obtain the 15th-century Veit Stoss altar. Because the Poles had foreseen the German interest in the altar, they had disassembled it into 32 pieces, which were shipped to different locations, but Paulsen located each piece, and on October 14, 1939, he returned to Berlin with the altar in three small trucks and had it stored in the locked treasury of the Reichsbank. After conferring with Hitler, who had not initially been told of the operation to capture it, it was decided to send the altar to an underground vault in Nuremberg, for safety.