Nordic Ideology in the SS and the SS Ahnenerbe
The conceptual framework of the so called historiography of the church struggle has shaped the scholarly occupation with the religious development in the Third Reich to a large extent. Two fallacious equations in particular affected the post war debate even within secular historical scholarship. The first was the identification of National Socialism with National Socialist Paganism. In the continuation of the former quarrels between church and state over the impact of a number of measures taken against church interests, the Na2i regime appeared from a certain perspective as political fulfilment of the worst of an anti Christian heathendom aiming to annihilate Christianity in Germany as a whole. Secondly, many if not most studies written in the context of the church struggle supported the opinion that Christianity, its doctrines and essential meaning, had been the only relevant counterforce in that battle between the forces of light and darkness. This widespread idea of a deadly combat between two antagonistic worldviews entailed a fairly distorted picture of the German history of religions after 1933. Its simplistic bipolarity disregarded important overlaps and eliminated intermediary elements from the great many bilateral relations that were in place. Any potential ideological permeability between Christianity and National Socialism was contested and common features between both them and between Christianity and Paganism were belitded or categorically denied. While the church struggle paradigm has been largely abandoned with regard to Protestantism and Catholicism consider just the works of Manfred Gailus and Doris Bergen for the Protestant and the ones of Olaf Blaschke and Kevin Spicer for the Catholic side1 it is in full force when it comes to Paganism. With very little factual evidence, much guessing and conjecturing prevail over earnest studies on Pagan groups and individuals, on their beliefs and rites. An overview of the fragmented field of organised and non organised Paganism is still far beyond reach. With the exception of three dissertations by Ulrich Nanko, Hiroshi Kubota and Schaul Baumann, no one has undertaken comparable efforts to shed light on the