Herman Wirth

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. 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. 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.