Herman Wirth (alternatively referred to as Herman Wirth Roeper Bosch or Herman Felix Wirth (also spelled Hermann); 6 May 1885 in Utrecht – 16 February 1981 in Kusel) was a Dutch-German historian, a Nazi and scholar of ancient religions and symbols. He co-founded the SS-organization Ahnenerbe but was later pushed out by Heinrich Himmler.
Biography
Born in Utrecht on 6 May 1885, Wirth studied Flemish Dutch philology, literature, history and musicology at Utrecht and Leipzig, receiving his doctorate in 1911 from the University of Basel with a dissertation on the demise of the Dutch folk song. He taught Dutch language at the University of Berlin from 1909 to 1914.
World War I broke out in 1914, and Wirth volunteered for military service in the German army, where he was assigned to monitor the Flemish separatists in German-occupied Belgium. In 1916 he was decorated, dismissed from service, and subsequently appointed by Kaiser Wilhelm II as a professor (Titularprofessor). In 1918 he became professor at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels. After the war ended in November 1918, he and his wife moved to the Netherlands, where they founded a nationalist Wandervogel-organization, dedicated to traditional folk-music. By then, Wirth had accepted a temporary job as a teacher at the gymnasium in Baarn.
In August 1922 he became an honorary professor in Marburg, Germany, but he took another job as a teacher in Sneek (Netherlands) until February 1924. This gave him the opportunity to research Frisian folk-culture and the history of the apparently age-old Oera Linda Book (actually a 19th-century hoax). In 1925 he joined the NSDAP. However, his membership was discontinued in 1926, apparently because he did not want to scare off Jewish sponsors.
Nazi pre-history
In 1928 Wirth published a book about the "Prehistory of the Atlantic Nordic race" (German: Der Aufgang der Menschheit: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Religion, Symbolik und Schrift der atlantisch-nordischen Rasse, Jena, 1928), which gained resonance in völkisch circles. From October 1932, he attempted to set up a research institute - the Forschungsinstitut für Urgeschichte - in Bad Doberan, associated with a professorship at Rostock university, supported by the NSDAP state government of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Headed by Wirth, the institute became extremely controversial in professional circles as well as among noted NSDAP intellectuals. Due to a lack of funds and Wirth's expensive way of life, the institute folded within a year. The Hermann-Wirth-Gesellschaft, founded in 1928, also suffered.
After the rise to power of the NSDAP in 1933, Wirth rejoined the party in 1934 and shortly thereafter became a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS membership number 258,776). He was re-awarded his former NSDAP number (20,151) personally by Adolf Hitler.
In early summer 1933, friends within the NSDAP helped Wirth to be appointed to an extraordinary professorship without teaching responsibilities at the theological faculty of Berlin University. He negotiated with the Prussian Ministry of Education about the establishment of an open-air museum (Deutsches Ahnenerbe) near Berlin. Wirth also re-founded his organization as Gesellschaft für germanische Ur- und Vorgeschichte, with assistance from the journalist and Nazi functionary Johann von Leers and the industrialist Ludwig Roselius. The latter had supported Wirth since the 1920s and paid for the publication of Der Aufgang der Menschheit.
Between 1933 and 1935 a major philosophical clash, encouraged by the Nazi party, pitted the churches against neo-paganism supported by völkisch theories. Wirth was among those who tried to reinterpret Christianity in terms of an ethnic Nordic origin of original monotheism. The free-thinking neo-pagans founded a supporting group in July 1933; they included Wirth, Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, and (until 1934) Ernst Bergmann and numerous ex-Communists.