"A remarkable book on the darkest chapter in German intellectual and scientific history."
-New Scientist"In
The Master Plan Heather Pringle gives a gripping account of Nazi perversions of science in support of the myth of Aryanism. A small army of scholars did the state's bidding, precipitating all-out barbarism.
The Master Plan provides an awful warning against binding scholarship too closely to the state."
-John Polanyi, Nobel Laureate
"This is an exceptional piece of work, for those with a very deep interest in the intellectual structures of tyranny, in Heinrich Himmler, in how monsters work. Dictators always have theories, and always find scholars to prove them.
The Master Plan is the detailed history of one such effort, but it sheds abundant light on all of them."
-Alan Furst, author of
Dark Star"A phenomenal book. Just when we thought we had learned all we could about these monsters comes another tale as sinister as any yet uncovered. Heather Pringle belongs in the company of Barbara Tuchman and Hannah Arendt."
-Larry Kramer
"I am hugely impressed by
The Master Plan. Besides adding to knowledge of Himmler's motivation and elements in his character, it demonstrates in hideous detail how highly educated men can lose all intellectual and moral restraints and descend to barbaric levels of criminality in pursuit of their goal. I rate this work alongside Robert Jay Lifton's
The Nazi Doctors."
-Peter Padfield, author of
Himmler: Reichsführer-SS
"Pringle combines exhaustive archival research and perceptive interviews with former participants in this provocative history of the Ahnenerbe. Founded in 1935 by Heinrich Himmler, its ostensible purpose was to revise scholarship along racist lines in order to recover primeval Aryan knowledge purportedly lost through racial mixing. The absurdity of the concept has encouraged dismissing the organization as an example of National Socialism¹s crackpot side. Pringle instead demonstrates that the Ahnenerbe, particularly through its little-known data-collecting expeditions across Europe and Asia, contributed significantly to establishing the intellectual underpinning not only of the Final Solution, but for the Reich¹s projected destruction of Europe¹s "inferior" peoples and their replacement with a rebred "pure Aryan" race."
-Dennis Showalter, professor of history at Colorado College, visiting professor and guest lecturer at West Point and former president of the Society for Military History.
"With Heather Pringle's publication of The Master Plan, we are presented with a novel, groundbreaking, and carefully researched work on the ideological and pseudo-scientific world of the imagined "German elite"- the SS. Her opinions are to the point; her presentation of the facts is concise, exciting, and logically built, making this fantastic piece of work a detailed source of history as well. Heather Pringle is to be warmly thanked for this extraordinarily important book."
-Achim Leube, editor of Prähistorie und Nationalsozialismus (Prehistory and National Socialism)
"Heather Pringle throws fresh and revealing light on the Nazi obsession with crank ethnography, employed with sinister effect to justify genocide."
-Karl E. Meyer, co-author Tournament of Shadows, author of The Plundered Past, and editor of World Policy Journal
