Ahnenerbe founded
An SS institute hunts for proof of 'Aryan' superiority
On 1 July 1935 Heinrich Himmler founded the Ahnenerbe ('Ancestral Heritage') within the SS to give Nazi racial theory a scholarly veneer; its first president, Herman Wirth, traced the Aryans to a sunken northern Atlantis. It sent expeditions as far as Tibet; its scholars bent findings to fit Hitler's ideas or simply faked them.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 17 years earlier
- 1939–1945 World War II — 4 years later
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 12 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 13 years later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 14 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1929–1933 Collectivization in the Soviet Union — 6 years earlier
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 1 year later
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 6 years later
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 7 years later
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 10 years later
Middle East
- 1915–1917 Armenian genocide — 20 years earlier
- 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement — 19 years earlier
- 1923 Treaty of Lausanne — 12 years earlier
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 3 years earlier
- 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran — 6 years later
Africa
- 1922 Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb — 13 years earlier
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — same year
- 1948 Apartheid begins in South Africa — 13 years later
- 1952 Egyptian revolution of 1952 — 17 years later
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 21 years later
Asia
- 1931 China floods — 4 years earlier
- 1934–1935 Long March — 1 year earlier
- 1937–1938 Nanjing Massacre — 2 years later
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 10 years later
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 18 years later
Americas
- 1914 Opening of the Panama Canal — 21 years earlier
- 1929 Wall Street Crash — 6 years earlier
- c. 1930–1936 Dust Bowl — 5 years earlier
- 1933–1939 New Deal — 2 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 10 years later
Oceania
- 1912 The death of Scott's polar party — 23 years earlier
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 1 year later
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 6 years later
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 7 years later
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 19 years later
Alive at the time
- Nikola Tesla (aged 79)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 66)
- Ernest Rutherford (aged 64)
- Winston Churchill (aged 61)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 57)
- Albert Einstein (aged 56)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 54)
- Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (aged 54)
- Adolf Hitler (aged 46)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 46)