All language subtitles for Secret.Nazi.Expeditions.S01E05.Cro.Magnon.720p.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.H.264-squalor

(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)