Original subtitles

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] In the early part of the 20th century,

the Nazis rose to power on a dark platform.

Til this day,

their racist ideology is overshadowed

only by their ambition for power,

but behind the battles lie more secrets than we know.

Their most elite and evil force, the SS,

plotted far beyond conquest.

They mounted global expeditions,

hunting for ancient relics of power

and long-forgotten remnants of ancient civilization,

hellbent on proving a mythical heritage.

Now, secrets are revealed.

A new light is shed on dark schemes

and desperate adventures.

(dramatic music)

(tense music)

The whole truth behind human origins

is forever elusive and in dispute.

From the early days of archeological discoveries

to modern times,

we continuously hunt for the way we came to be

who we are today.

Over centuries,

scientists have made progress at uncovering

how modern-day humans emerged.

But to this day,

there are still fundamental questions that linger.

- With human evolution,

we tend to ask different questions than we do of, say,

the evolution of dinosaurs, or the evolution of snails,

or something like that.

We want to know, in really great detail,

exactly what happened.

- [Narrator] And it wasn't only

the scientific community that was searching for answers.

The Nazi Party, determined to prove their superiority,

sought to connect early humans to their own Aryan race.

- The Nazis rose to power on an alarming platform of racism,

hate, blind ambition,

and a belief in their own racial superiority.

But in order to feed that lie to the German people,

they had to concoct a mythical past

of a supposed godlike Aryan race who once ruled the Earth.

And as crazy as that sounds,

that's exactly what they tried to do.

- We do think of our evolution oversimplistically.

We still have this tendency towards a unilinear idea,

that you go from this, to this, to this, to this, to this,

and we know that it was much more complicated.

(mysterious music)

- [Narrator] In 1868,

in a cave near the town of Les Eyzies-de-Tayac,

in Southwestern France,

a major discovery brings us one step closer

to understanding where we come from.

- This was a really significant site

because these individuals were clearly very old

and also are clearly anatomically modern human.

- [Narrator] Ancient remains,

some of the first fossils to be recognized

as belonging to our own species,

Homo sapiens, are uncovered.

- They're really powerfully-built individuals,

they're fully modern.

- [Narrator] They are called Cro-Magnon

and have since been considered to be prehistoric humans.

- They still have a little bit of a brow ridge,

they still have relatively large jaws.

They were still impressive-looking

to the people who found them,

and they weren't a hundred-percent sure

exactly what they were looking at.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] Almost 70 years after this puzzling discovery,

a new entity takes keen interest in these skeletal remains,

and their motive is far from academic.

- Hitler wanted evidence to prove the superiority

of this imagined ancient race of blond, blue-eyed Aryans.

- [Narrator] And in order to fulfill

this twisted vision of racial superiority,

Heinrich Himmler, Reich leader within the Nazi Party,

has created his own team within the SS.

- One of the most alarming or terrifying is the Ahnenerbe,

which was a Nazi think tank

dedicated to what they referred to as ancestral heritage.

And the Ahnenerbe leaders were handpicked by Himmler

for their fanaticism and their belief in racial superiority

and an ancient, superior Aryan race.

And that became part of their mission,

to mount expeditions and seek scientific evidence

to prove that there was an ancient Aryan super race.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] In early 1936,

Himmler is becoming one of the most powerful men

in the Third Reich.

- He starts off as a mediocre man,

a man who wanted to kind of get Germany back on track.

He tapped into the belief that the Germans were superior,

that Germany is a divine, an incredible country

that he really wants to restore to power.

And by this,

we see Him gradually working his way

towards the top of the Nazi Party,

to a point where you could argue he is maybe number two.

- [Narrator] In June 1936,

Himmler is appointed Reich Fuhrer of the SS

and Chief of German Police.

- The SS starts as Hitler's bodyguard,

under Heinrich Himmler,

the SS grows to thousands of members, tens of thousands,

and by the start of the war,

hundreds of thousands of members.

The SS becomes a paramilitary institution,

an intelligence-gathering institution,

special forces, becomes a police state.

- There were not people who were content

to just run the country.

Their program was to transform Germany,

to give rise to the new Aryan homeland

and reinvent humanity.

- The SS is incorporated into every facet of German society

by the late 1930s,

which expands Heinrich Himmler's profile.

He's easily one of the single most powerful people

in Nazi Germany.

- [Narrator] Among other things,

he turns his focus to revamping the scientific reputation

of the Ahnenerbe think tank.

Despite their efforts,

its research was mostly regarded as pseudoscience

and attacked by the academic community.

He meets with Dr. Walther Wust,

a potential Ahnenerbe candidate.

- Dr. Walther Wust was a German professor

at the University of Munich.

His specialties were in ancient literature

and the religions of India.

However, after he joined the SS,

the Nazis elevated him

to dean of the faculty at the university,

and he was later put in charge

of overseeing a number of universities.

He also began researching the history of the Aryan people.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] At a cave accidentally discovered

nearly 60 years earlier in France,

a remarkable archeological discovery

may provide just what the Nazis are looking for.

- It contained several human-like skeletons.

Scientists later dubbed them Cro-Magnon,

for the cave and rock formation in which they were found.

- [Narrator] Until this was uncovered,

a discovery made in Germany's Neander Valley in 1856

was the earliest archeological find

revealing what scientists believed to be

ancient human remains, Neanderthals.

- So looking at the Neanderthal,

we're looking at a skull that is much more compact.

It's wider, it has a lower brow ridge,

it also has a much thicker jawline.

The teeth are aligned separately

and the bones of a Neanderthal are quite robust.

So we now have this skull and this bone structure

that doesn't really fit the narrative of the Neanderthal.

- [Narrator] Evidence has shown

that human evolution is far from linear.

Neanderthal seemed to have banished

for potentially many reasons,

but likely not from some ultimate clash with modern humans.

- The idea that modern humans came in

and were armed with this advanced cognition,

this ability to use symbolic language

and to communicate in sophisticated ways

that maybe Neanderthals couldn't,

and that's one of the reasons

why Neanderthals aren't around anymore but we still are.

So that would have been taken

as an indicator of clear superiority

of the individuals who were found at this site

versus people like Neanderthals

who were present at other sites

in similar areas in that region.

- [Narrator] The Nazis needed to create a clear lineage

between the great ancients and themselves

as rightful lords of the land.

And for that, the Cro-Magnon finds would prove useful.

- So it's not entirely out of left field to think, like,

oh, these modern humans came in

and they replaced Neanderthals,

and they vanquished all of the cave people,

and it was all over,

but where the dots aren't really connecting

in the context of the relationships

between these conquering modern humans

and modern people who live in the area

is that increasing archeological and genetic evidence

are making it really clear that those earlier modern humans

that you see in Western Eurasian or European contexts

are not actually ancestral to people who live there today.

- [Narrator] Until then,

a few German ultranationalists paid little attention

to the archeological era that preceded 5000 BC.

This all changed under Wust's leadership,

a member of the SS whose research

on the migrations of the Nordic race

fit perfectly with the Nazis' agenda.

- Himmler was fascinated by it,

and he elevated Wust

to be the president of the Ahnenerbe in 1937.

Himmler and the Nazis were also interested

in the research by Professor RR Schmidt.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] A German scholar,

RR Schmidt is beginning excavations

at a network of caves in Bavaria.

The site of Mauern lives in

the Southern parts of the Jura Mountains,

between two old Bavarian cities

of Ingolstadt and Donauworth.

- It contained carved figurines, ivory beads, red ochre,

and evidence of religious practices.

This was seen as rather advanced stuff

for prehistoric humans.

- When we try to determine when modern humanity originated,

that's a biological question,

it's when did our species originate?

One of the things that's considered

a hallmark of modern human behavior

is that we use symbolism to communicate.

So what we look for are indicators

of that kind of capability.

In other words,

were these individuals capable of making symbols?

And so, red ochre,

this red-colored pigment that's a natural mineral pigment

that you can use to color all sorts of things,

you could use it to paint an artifact,

you could use it to paint your body,

but there are very few applications

that you could think of for this pigment

that would not be potentially symbolic.

- [Narrator] If the connection could be made

between Cro-Magnon and the cave paintings,

this would be one more piece of evidence

to back up the Nazis' agenda

that only a superior race

could possess such advanced abilities.

So when the news of Schmidt's discovery at Mauern

reaches the SS,

it is met with much enthusiasm.

- This case of Cro-Magnon and the Neanderthal,

it's a singular example of where evidence is interpreted

in terms of ideology.

- In the context of human evolutionary studies,

in a Western context specifically,

this is something that has been with us

since the beginning of evolutionary studies altogether.

Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859,

and the first archaic people that were recognized

were the Neanderthals,

and they were recognized and discovered,

really, only in 1856.

When Charles Darwin made his grand argument,

that life on Earth could be explained through natural causes

and through a process of evolution,

he convinced a lot of biologists that that was true

for every other living thing on Earth,

but still a lot of biologists in much of society

had a really hard time believing

that humans could have evolved that way.

- [Narrator] Darwin defined evolution

as the idea that species change over time,

giving rise to new species that share a common ancestor.

By 1878,

racial scientists started to suggest

that Cro-Magnon human remains

represented diverse ancient races,

as opposed to species.

Since the differences between individuals of different races

and individuals of different species are similar in scope,

Hitler,

who believed that races and species were one in the same,

applied Darwin's theories to suit his own ideologies.

- Another critical year for Himmler,

the SS, and Nazi Germany,

and a fateful year for the world, was 1935.

This is the Nuremberg Race Laws,

which prohibits Jews and others

from holding positions in certain occupations.

Only someone who could trace Germanic blood,

or Germanic heritage, can be a full citizen in Nazi Germany.

Jews have the letter J stamped on their passports.

Hitler is testing the world

with the 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws.

It's also a critical year for Himmler,

'cause underpinning the race laws of 1935

is everything that Himmler has been doing

to prove racial superiority

and to prove that races are basically species

and that there's a hierarchy in the races.

- What I think was interesting

about what the Nazis were doing, however,

is that they appeared to be trying to apply

actual evolutionary explanations

to justify and uphold their practices.

(speaks in foreign language)

(crowd cheers)

- [Narrator] Hitler's ideologies would lay the foundation

for an oppressive regime

that would prosecute races that the Nazis deemed inferior,

in part through a network of concentration camps.

- Rounding up Jews and other people

that were seen to be aberrations

to the purity of the German race.

- [Narrator] Buchenwald Concentration Camp

opens on July 16th, 1937.

It is one of the first and largest concentration camps

of the 44,000 total incarceration sites

established by the Nazis before 1945.

- The SS is not just killing people, as horrid as that is,

they're also cultivating tremendous economic wealth

for their own purposes and for the state.

- [Narrator] The facilities are used for forced labor,

detainment, and mass murder.

Millions of people will suffer and die.

- The long-term plan for the Nazis was, of course,

to have national socialism stand as the pinnacle

of a national collective

that would bind all people together,

so anything that would compete with that has to go.

- [Narrator] Meanwhile, in 1937, at the caves in Mauern,

the SS Excavations Department turns their attention

to their ancestral past,

one that they are determined to prove

comes from early modern humans,

Cro-Magnon.

- The global scientific community

had completely rejected all elements

that the Nazis believe

that they were a racially-superior race.

So they wanted to find evidence themselves.

- [Narrator] Even though Schmidt's discovery

of red-ochre pigment in the caves at Mauern

seemed to back up those concepts,

as it was widely thought to have been used by Cro-Magnon,

he was an issue for the Nazis.

- Because he was not a loyal Nazi,

and because he was a serious scientist,

he was immediately replaced as supervisor

of the archeological dig by the Ahnenerbe.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] In August of that same year,

the SS Excavations Department takes control,

and the head of the department, Dr. Rolf Hohne,

becomes the site inspector.

He begins preparing the area for further excavations.

- Along with the skeletons,

paleontologists unearth evidence

of somewhat-sophisticated toolmaking.

Clothing, cave paintings, carvings,

and weapons for hunting.

From these findings,

it's now clear that these early humans

were not the simple brutes

that they're sometimes made out to be,

but that they were actually somewhat sophisticated.

The Nazis were going to prove

some mythical and superior Germanic ancestor

one way or the other.

- [Narrator] By the fall of 1937, under Wust,

the Ahnenerbe has grown to 38 workers,

11 of whom were senior researchers,

mostly folklorists And symbologists.

- One of the lead archeologists

and paleontologists in the SS

was a Dutch scholar named Assien Bohmers.

Bohmers was a serious scholar,

but it turns out that he was also a Frisian.

This is a Germanic ethnic group

along the coast of the Netherlands.

They were a people without a nation.

Bohmers was also interested in racial theories,

and he wanted Germany to expand its territories

to include a greater Germany

that occupied Dutch-controlled Frisia, his homeland.

- [Narrator] At Mauern,

realizing that he is in over his head,

Hohne decides a more experienced Paleolithic excavator

needs to take charge of the site.

- Bohmers was hired in the fall of 1937

to take over the Cro-Magnon excavation.

- [Narrator] He is hoping to find evidence

that would trace the origins of the Nordic race

all the way back to the Paleolithic era in Germany.

- This is German-centric in a lot of ways,

and certainly the Nazi movement is all about Germany,

in context, and in history, and in culture,

but it has innate appeal elsewhere,

particularly with this emphasis on Indo-Aryan supremacy

and the Aryan race as great gods of yesteryear.

- [Narrator] Around 1900,

one of the earliest attempts to classify Cro-Magnon

is made by a pair of racial anthropologists,

William Z Ripley and Joseph Deniker.

They characterize these Paleolithic humans

as tall and intelligent proto-Aryans

who descended from Scandinavia and Germany

and were superior to other races.

- When they are saying that they are looking

for the origins of the human race,

what they're really looking for

is something to fit their narrative.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] Bohmers,

now in control of the SS excavations in Mauern, dives in,

studying the lay of the land and examining the cave floor.

He orders the team to expand on Schmidt's excavation.

- Cro-Magnon is a site that dates to

maybe 25, 30,000 years ago,

so, relatively recent modern human.

That places Cro-Magnon squarely within

our heritage as a species,

but the difficulty is in tracing linear relationships

between ancient individuals,

like the Old Man of Deniker,

or Cro-Magnon 1, a specific specimen,

and people who live in that area now.

- All human skeletons from 40,000 years ago until,

really, about 12,000 years ago are,

generally speaking, bigger than we are.

You didn't need Cro-Magnon, you could have,

any skeleton before the Neolithic is gonna,

for the most part, be larger than us.

And you could use any of those skeletons

to promote a ridiculous ideology like that,

if you wanted to.

(speaks in foreign language) (crowd chants)

- [Narrator] Meanwhile, in Nazi Germany,

the campaign to demonize Jews

as an enemy of the Aryan people is ramping up.

- It is eugenics, it is that kind of thinking.

That was the whole investment,

was in legitimizing this theory,

that there is something corresponding to a pure Aryan type,

and every other ethnic group is physically-,

psychologically-, spiritually-distinct from this group,

and therefore lesser.

- [Narrator] The systematic takeover

of Jewish property has begun,

and in November, in Munich,

an exhibition of The Eternal Jew

depicts Jews as financial exploiters.

As the excavation at Mauern continues,

Bohmers' team dig deeper

into the sediment of the entrance to the middle cave,

not far from where Schmidt,

the German scholar who made the initial discovery,

had worked.

They strike more fossilized bone, ochre,

including the skull,

several vertebrae and ribs of a wooly mammoth.

Based on his findings,

along with the discovery of stone chisels

used for shaping and decorating bones and ivory,

Bohmers is convinced the area

is a Cro-Magnon Celtic site

and dates it to suit his agenda.

- One of the things that you find in Paleolithic studies

is a lot of the really famous sites,

a lot of the sort of hallmark Neanderthal sites

and other Upper Paleolithic sites,

like Cro-Magnon even, for example,

a lot of these older sites were not excavated

using what we would consider

rigorous modern methods of excavation.

- [Narrator] Due to the amateur nature

of these early excavations,

they could and did establish speculative theories

to support their agendas.

- In modern context,

we do everything that we can to preserve all of those data.

So that means that we excavate really slowly,

generally speaking,

we record the positions of everything that we find,

artifacts, bones,

sometimes natural things like rocks and stuff like that.

We record all of those in space.

You do this using digital means,

lasers, and GPS, and stuff like that,

so we know exactly where everything was.

If you have that kind of lack of data

that you have for many of these early sites,

then, to a certain extent,

you can say whatever you want to about that site

and no one is going to be able

to go back and double-check you

because the data that would be necessary to do that

no longer exist.

- [Narrator] By the 1930s,

some had begun to abandon the idea

that Cro-Magnon represented a superior Aryan race.

- Charles Darwin personally believed

that when we did find the earliest human ancestors,

they would be found in Africa,

because the most similar species to us now

are found in Africa.

So he reasoned that since our closest relatives

are in Africa, we also evolved there.

But this was an idea that was not palatable

to many Western scientists in much of Western society,

that wanted to believe that

all of these sort of great things that make us human

and different from all of those other primates

that are similar to us had to have evolved somewhere else.

- [Narrator] Determined to disprove Darwin's theory

that humans evolved from primates in Africa,

Bohmers digs deeper,

and buried in the excavated earth,

the young historian's team find something else,

something that will fit perfectly

into Hitler's evil vision for Aryan domination.

- There, they unearthed several stone spearheads, eureka.

Spears and flint-knapping

were advanced technologies for the time,

therefore, they saw this as the evidence they needed

to claim that Cro-Magnons were superior,

so they must have been the ancestors of today's Germanics.

- They automatically believe that this is, of course,

attached to Cro-Magnon,

and that Neanderthal could not possibly have

the capabilities or the mentality

to create such elaborate tools.

- [Narrator] Bohmers considers this to be

an immensely-significant discovery,

but to prove his theory, he needs more data.

- He wants to collect evidence

of the geographical surroundings.

- [Narrator] The results will allow him

to determine local vegetation cover and climate

at the time the Paleolithic clans had visited the caves.

- When we look at archeological sites,

there's a lot of information that you can find

that's not just limited to the artifacts themselves.

If you take soil samples, you can look at microfauna,

you can look at pollen samples, and things like that,

and all of those things tell you something

about the kinds of environments that the people

who contributed to the making of that site lived in.

In some cases, you can even look at soil samples from caves

and recover DNA from individuals or from animals

that were present in that cave during the Paleolithic,

using really sophisticated modern methods

that wouldn't have been available to scientists

in the 1930s and the 1940s.

- [Narrator] He compares these conditions

to well-documented environmental changes

that took place in Europe over the last three glacial ages,

as vast ice sheets advanced and retreated.

On the strength of this comparison,

he assigns rough dates to the cave's occupation,

a standard technique in an age before more accurate methods.

- There really weren't good ways to put a date on a site

before the advent of things like radiocarbon dating,

that rely on the decay of radioactive isotopes,

so that you can say

if I have this much of an isotope left in my sample,

then I know that the sample is this old.

And so if I can correlate that soil sample, or that bone,

or something with some other stuff in the site,

then I can say everything in this site is,

like, 28,000 years.

- But we did have enough intelligence and enough comparison

to understand that some of these elements could be dated.

- [Narrator] Thrilled with his results,

Bohmers dates the tapered leaf points

to more than 70,000 years ago,

to an ancient period between the last two glacial ages.

- Although scientists throughout Europe

completely dismissed the idea as bunk,

the Nazis concluded that Cro-Magnon was a superior human

who replaced other inferior human branches

in the human tree.

- [Narrator] Believing that only Cro-Magnon hunters

would have been intelligent enough

to invent leaf-point tools and throwing spears.

Ultimately,

the presence of these artifacts in the caves at Mauern

are proof that Cro-Magnon clans stopped there

more than 70,000 years ago,

making the site the earliest in the world

by tens of thousands of years.

- So looking at this time, of course,

Bohmers is trying to fit the agenda of the Nazis

and Himmler's idea of the Germanic people

being the cradle of civilization,

the beginning of the Aryan race.

So by having Cro-Magnon Homo sapien, and Neanderthal,

and Denisovan all existing at the same time

does not fit their agenda.

- There, really, in human history,

hasn't been an unwillingness, that we know of,

for one group of people to just totally not mate

with other groups of people.

Like, that's just something that happens everywhere.

People are extremely mobile,

they meet new people, they mate with them.

And this high level of gene flow

appears to have been characteristic of our species

going all the way back to even extreme-prehistoric time.

- [Narrator] This, however,

did not fit into Bohmers' theory,

and, ultimately, Himmler's agenda.

Confident that his discoveries proved that Cro-Magnon

was indeed the father of modern-day Aryans,

in July of 1938,

Bohmers proudly announces his results

in a handwritten letter to the Ahnenerbe,

which had just absorbed the SS Excavation Department.

- One thing is for certain,

that the Nazis were not about

letting information circulate freely.

It was about controlling the information,

controlling who controls the information.

So Himmler understood that if he was to be responsible

for the security of the Reich,

then he's gonna have to control the information.

- [Narrator] And controlling information

to serve their agenda was always a priority.

Bohmers' findings reached Himmler

amidst a massive anti-Jewish campaign.

Identity cards had just been introduced,

and medical certification for all Jewish physicians

had been revoked.

Seemingly on the cusp of solidifying their racial theories

of being a superior race, Himmler,

understanding that Bohmers' findings

could very well justify and legitimize their beliefs,

asks to read his papers before they are even published.

- So Heinrich Himmler needs the Ahnenerbe for credibility,

legitimacy.

He creates a think tank

that's charged with what he called ancestral heritage,

and he staffs it with a whole array

of scientists and archeologists.

And when they don't pan out,

he staffs it with fanatics who were loyal to him

and the Nazis who are willing to do anything it takes.

- [Narrator] In his relentless efforts

to find proof of this,

Bohmers is drawn to the work of Aime Rutot,

a Belgian geologist and archeologist

who had a large collection of flint tools

he had gathered through his research.

He contended that a very early genetic mutation

gave rise to a single person with an immensely-large brain,

an individual that was capable

of ounding the race of the strong.

- So he's not totally wrong in his thought process.

It's a little skewed,

but we know that when the ice age began to encroach,

that there was less and less food sources available.

And so the hominins,

or the humans that were existing at that time,

were in competition with each other,

and that the Neanderthal did die out,

the Denisovans did die out.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] These findings

were extremely appealing to Bohmers,

as it served to back up his belief

that Cro-Magnon evolved in Germany.

- Clearly, some sort of population turnover did happen.

Neanderthals are not around in that area anymore

in the way that they were before.

- Are they dying out because of lack of food?

Are they dying out because of location?

Are they dying out because they're warring with each other?

The Nazis love this.

They actually thought that the superior race,

the Cro-Magnon, the Homo sapien, were superior.

- [Narrator] And in their efforts

to prove Germanic racial superiority,

the Ahnenerbe also turn to prehistoric art.

(dramatic music)

In 1941, Himmler sees photos of Venus figurines

and is struck by their form.

- The Venuses were basically small figures,

they come in various sizes,

but they're found in so many Paleolithic sites.

- [Narrator] Assuming their figures to be proportionate

to the people who made them,

he likens them to what he calls tribes of savage people.

- It's true that many Venus figures

have exaggerated anatomical proportions,

whether it's breasts or buttocks.

Now, does that mean that the people

who were living at that time looked like that,

or is that a fantasy that the carver had?

We don't know.

- [Narrator] Himmler asked the Ahnenerbe research teams

to produce a distribution map of the figures

and find evidence that people of similar descent

had been made extinct by Cro-Magnon or later Nordic peoples.

- The fact that there's a superficial resemblance

between some of these Venus figures

and some individuals from Khoikhoi

and other populations from Southern Africa,

it is, to me, meaningless,

but I can certainly

see how people who are already

interested in a particular agenda

could make the connection.

- Himmler had decided that these Venus figurines

were not Germanic.

They were associated with the Neanderthals.

He basically charges his archeologists

to show or develop ideas of connections

between this type of anatomy

represented in these Neanderthal figures

and a Southern African Khoikhoi population.

There is no way we can answer,

in a way which satisfies our rationality,

how these people came up with these connections,

how these people were able

to be public about these connections,

and how scholars even took this seriously.

- [Narrator] Another example of prehistoric art

that Bohmers was pursuing were cave paintings.

And some of the first examples were Cro-Magnon.

- Most art is, pretty incontrovertibly,

associated with modern humans,

but there are some cases where there is some cave art

that has been attributed to Neanderthals.

Although this is controversial,

it's based on the dates of some of this art.

If the art is as old as it is thought,

by at least some researchers,

some of this art may be as old as 65,000 years old,

then it can't have been made by modern humans,

because modern humans weren't present

in the areas the art was found that long ago.

There is some evidence that Neanderthals

were engaging in artistic behavior and in symbolic behavior,

that we have pretty strong suggestions that that behavior

was not entirely exclusive to modern humans.

- [Narrator] In 1941,

Himmler's ideas surrounding the Venus figurines,

that the Jews and Khoikhoi,

also inappropriately referred to as Hottentots,

may be racially-related

to what he perceives as their similar shape.

And this is met with unease

for most of the archeologists on the Ahnenerbe staff,

except for one.

Bruno Beger is a racial anthropologist and ethnologist

who has been working for

the SS Race and Settlement Office since 1934.

- He is only 26 years old,

and he's coming into this

with a head filled with propaganda,

already, from Gunther.

- [Narrator] A racial theorist

and strong believer in eugenics,

Hans Gunther was a mentor to Bruno Beger.

- Gunther believes in, essentially, race eradication.

If you are not white, you have no value.

- The link was to show this connection with the Hottentots,

who were already identified

as a kind of a primitive people and so forth.

Now if the Jews could be connected to the Hottentots,

a connection could be shown in some vague way, right,

the point was made.

- [Narrator] By connecting Jews

to the people like the Khoikhoi,

believed to be represented by the Venus figurines,

Beger's determination is elevated even more,

so much so that he begins masterminding a sinister plan

for how to test his dark theory

and ultimately prove that the Jewish people

are an inferior race.

(dramatic music)

November 9th, 1938,

the Nazi Party enact Kristallnacht,

or Night of Broken Glass.

They burned synagogues, loot Jewish homes and businesses,

and kill at least 91 Jews.

The Gestapo, supported by local uniform police,

arrest approximately 30,000 Jewish men

and imprison them in concentration camps.

It's within these concentration camps

that Beger envisions his disturbing plan taking shape.

- Because Jews don't fall into

those five category of Gunther's of European populations,

they must be related to other populations elsewhere.

- [Narrator] Beger suggests that the bodies

of women in camps and in ghettos could be examined,

and the development of fatty deposits

be inspected and photographed.

If these body shapes can be linked

to the same hereditary traits as the Khoikhoi,

it will serve as one more piece of evidence

strengthening the narrative of Jews

as enemies of the Aryan people.

- Bruno Beger is a Gunther student,

and he has studied at the feet of the master

and has internalized all those racial ideas

and those racial classifications and subclassifications.

- [Narrator] Meanwhile, in September of 1938,

Germany, Italy, Great Britain,

and France sign the Munich Agreement,

annexing the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia to Germany.

In the months leading up to this agreement,

Hitler has his own violent unrest

through his demands for control.

Also, in the fall of 1938,

Bohmers arrives in Brussels

and heads directly to the Royal Museum of Natural History

to examine a large collection of flint tools and pebbles

gathered by Aime Rutot.

Rutot believed that ancient apelike humans

had fashioned simple stone tools in Europe

during the Tertiary age,

which spanned from the extinction of the dinosaurs

to the beginning of the great ice age,

some 1.8 million years ago.

While Bohmers thought Rutot's findings

were significant in nature,

many of his prized flint tools

would turn out to be little more

than the product of natural forces

worn out over time into leaf shapes.

Despite that,

Bohmers continues to present his findings from Mauern,

and at the Institute of Human Paleontology in Paris,

he finds one researcher

whose opinions hold particular weight.

- Abbe Breuil was a well-known scientist.

He was completely caught up

in this prehistoric world and his research.

He was not a Nazi by any stretch of the imagination.

And I think Bohmers would have been prudent enough

not to push the Nazi thing.

Otherwise he would have not received a favorable response.

- [Narrator] During their meeting,

Bohmers goes on to describe his findings at Mauern,

leaf points, red ochre, ivory beads, and mammoth bones.

Unaware of his Nazi ambitions, Breuil,

impressed by the young researcher,

presents Bohmers with an opportunity of a lifetime.

Breuil had discovered a wealth of ancient cave art

in France's Dordogne region.

On Bohmers' next return to France,

he had arranged access for Bohmers,

something only allowed to a rare few people each year.

The location was hugely significant to the Nazis,

who believed the Aryans

were the bringers and makers of culture,

with their ancestral home in Germany

now dating back to prehistoric times.

While this inspires Bohmers to take his research further,

he will never realize his dream

of running a Nazi Paleolithic Studies Institute,

but he would continue to pore over

the strange stone spearheads of Mauern into the late 1940s

and continue his Paleolithic studies.

Throughout the final months of 1938,

the elimination of Jewish rights came to a head.

Decrees were issued to prevent German Jews

from involvement in the economy.

They were prohibited from attending movies, concerts,

and other cultural performances.

Their children are expelled from German schools,

and the Nazis confiscated Jewish driver's licenses.

- So the year 1939 changes everything.

Expeditions are running, expeditions are being planned,

but on September 1st, 1939,

with a blitzkrieg operation, the Nazis invade Poland.

The world responds by declaring war, World War II begins,

and that is what puts the big crimp

in any further massive expeditions.

- [Narrator] Bruno Beger would perform

horrific experiments throughout the war,

his work culminating in the selection

of over 100 individuals from Auschwitz

to be murdered for their skeletons

and exhibited as the Jewish skeleton collection.

It is unclear if Beger ever made conclusions

regarding the ties between Jews and the Khoikhoi.

- Our best understanding today,

and the best explanation

for the biological diversity we have today,

is that it arises through branching.

So when you look at the diversity of life around you today,

all these different species

that look so different from each other,

and realize that if you go far enough back,

they're all related to each other,

then you realize that it's sort of like

a gigantic family tree.

So when you look at something like

the relationship between modern humans and Neanderthals,

there is very often this kind of misperception

that we've evolved from Neanderthals

in a sort of linear way,

or that we evolved directly from Homo erectus

in a sort of linear way,

and that's not really the way that evolution works.

- [Narrator] Science would go on to confirm

that the first modern humans evolved

from early-hominid predecessors

between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago,

long before the Germans claim them as their own.

- We will never know the whole picture,

but we'll know more and more.

This discovery of modern humans in Africa,

in Morocco, 300,000 years ago,

that's only less than 10 years old.

Before that,

we thought that modern humans were half that age

and they originated in South Africa,

that's where the earliest ones were.

So we're gonna learn more and more and more

as more things are discovered,

but we're never gonna know even close to the whole picture.

- [Narrator] Modern studies have also sought to clarify

the relationship between Europe's early modern humans

and Neanderthals.

In 2021,

scientists are working towards sequencing

the oldest Homo sapien's DNA on record,

and have so far shown that many of Europe's first humans

have Neanderthals in their family trees.

- We think of it in terms of branching,

where new things arise through branching events,

through speciation events,

where you have new lineages arising

that are distinct from original parental lineages,

or relative lineages,

and that you can look at different species,

different types of living things out there,

as being related to each other, to varying extents,

the same way that you're related

to your brother or your sister.

And that sort of branching

is how we conceptualize biological diversity today.

- [Narrator] But there are still many unanswered questions,

such as what exactly the encounters

between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals looked like,

whether they were peaceful or violent,

and to what degree the two species mixed.

- Those who were working for Himmler

and within the Nazi Party,

they had no other choice

other than to find the evidence that Himmler wanted.

Himmler was putting in big money, he wanted the results.

There was no other option than to turn up with an answer.

- [Narrator] And though we continue to move closer

with new prehistoric specimens being unearthed all the time,

the mysterious truth of how we came to be

will likely never be fully uncovered.

- Heinrich Himmler and the Nazis prioritized the effort

to somehow prove their racial superiority,

and they sent expeditions around the globe

to find evidence of some godlike Aryan ancestor.

When that failed, they just fabricated the evidence,

they made it up.

(dramatic music)