The Nordic Indo-Germanic people is a mythological group, from which the Germanic peoples allegedly descended. The assumption of the existence of this primordial people was developed by nationalists in the German territories from the early 19th century onwards, and was the subject of intense research in both the 19th and 20th centuries. Nineteenth-century German philologists, ethnologists and historians initially focused their research on the Eastern origins of Germanic populations. Then, in a second phase, these researchers (or their followers) changed the focus of their work to demonstrate the Nordic origin of Germanic populations and civilization. These results were soon deliberately exploited in the debate on German identity that raged throughout the nineteenth century.
From the 1920s onwards, the results of research and speculation on this hypothetical people were used by the Pan-German extremists such as the Nazis in Germany to claim immense territories for the German nation, the nucleus of a future Greater German Reich. These territories, which the Third Reich claims to have been occupied in the past by Indo-Germanic populations, are intended to constitute the "living space" of the Greater Germanic people, gathered around its German core, and to support the policy of maintaining the Nordic-Aryan "race purity", through a systematic hunt for those possessing the "lost Germanic genes" so dear to Heinrich Himmler.
Indo-European and Indo-Germanic peoples
The birth and spread of Indo-European studies
In the 1780s, William Jones, an English civil servant stationed in India, became interested in the linguistic proximity between existing and "dead" Sanskrit and European languages, such as English, French, Latin or Greek, in the context of Europe's infatuation with India.
All these languages appear to be close to one another, and Sanskrit is the oldest of them all; it seems clear, first to William Jones, then to 19th-century linguists and philologists, that Sanskrit is the original language of all the languages spoken in Europe, and that it spread through the migrations of conquest of its speakers.
The idea of the Indian origins of the peoples of Western Europe was rapidly gaining ground across the European continent, and more specifically in German-speaking countries strongly marked by a long French military and political presence.
Lexical innovations
William Jones' hypotheses soon spread, forcing scientists to formulate his discoveries more precisely.
The term "Indo-Germanic" in the sense of "Indo-European" was invented by Conrad Malte-Brun, a geographer of Danish origin who worked in Paris and published in French. Used in his Précis de la géographie universelle (1810), it was intended to encompass the Indo-European languages in their geographical distribution on the Eurasian continent: with Indian as the most southeasterly language and Germanic (Icelandic) as the most northwesterly Indo-European language group,E.F.K. Koerner, Practicing linguistic historiography, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1989, . it designated the speakers of the original Indo-European language, giving it an ethnic dimension that it retained until the 1850s. It was then under the joint influence of Gustav Klemm, author of Histoire culturelle générale de l'Humanité, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau and Adolf Bastian that the concept acquired its racial dimension.
Popularized by Prussian-born orientalist Julius Klaproth, the term "Indo-Germain" is used to better describe the linguistic group previously known as "Scythian". The term first appeared in 1823 in Klaproth's Asia Polyglotta.George van Driem, The Diversity of the Tibeto-Burman Language Family and the Linguistic Ancestry of Chinese, Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 1.2: 211-270, 2007 The hypothesis of the Eastern origin of civilization was quickly adopted by the Germans: Hegel and Jacob Grimm, for example, proposed numerous variations.
In 1819, Friedrich Schlegel coined the term Aryans to designate the invaders from India, from the Sanskrit arya, translated as noble. However, this infatuation was largely due to the ignorance of the literati of the time, who favored an account of the myth of origins over a more or less loose weave of suppositions.
A northward shift
In the second half of the 19th century, the hypothesis of the Indian origin of Germanic populations was called into question, and a translation took place: from the Indian, the Aryan race became Nordic, with the North perceived as the second source of the Nordic Indo-Germanic race.
This thesis, developed in the late eighteenth century by Jean-Sylvain Bailly, was rapidly marginalized and considered unserious by the astronomer's contemporaries;At the time, Jean-Sylvain Bailly was a renowned astronomer. however, it was popularized in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s by Hans Günther, giving, according to Johann Chapoutot, academic visibility to the Nordic hypothesis of the origin of European civilization, in total opposition to the hypothesis of Asian origin that had prevailed until then.
The Indogermans, a National Socialist myth of origins
Alleged history and social organization
The academic visibility of the Nordicist thesis has encouraged its promoters to develop a vision of this hypothetical people, conducive to a wide range of scientific research.
As a group of people looking for a territory to develop, the Indogermans allegedly moved in waves. German archaeologists have identified fourteen such waves. Parallel to this hypothesis, Nazi anthropologists and politicians such as Alfred Rosenberg, Richard Darré and Wilhelm Frick developed a number of theories on the history of Indo-Germanic populations, which may or may not have been included in school textbooks of the period.
Thus, in 1937, in a speech delivered at the university of Lübeck, Alfred Rosenberg outlined the history of the northern Indo-Germanic peoples, while at the same time undermining the hypothesis of an Asian origin: in his view, the Aryans originated in northern Europe, more precisely in the Lübeck region, and spread their settlement area in waves throughout the Old World.While Rosenberg defends the Nordic origin hypothesis, he is unable to avoid mentioning research into a possible Atlantis origin of the Indo-Germanics. During the 1920s and 1930s, speculations on the Atlantis origin of Aryan populations abounded, encouraged by Himmler himself, with the Heligoland archipelago a recurring theme. However, this theory was quickly dismissed, despite the Reichsführer's insistence, and remained largely speculative, mainly due to a lack of evidence.The outbreak of war called into question the organization of underwater excavation campaigns.
A population of sedentary farmers
Richard Darré, the völkisch author of Peasantry as the Source of Life of the Nordic Race, takes up the thesis of a sedentary population settled on lands conquered through successive migrations and wars. As conquerors, they would have set out from southern Sweden or northern Germany to conquer the Mediterranean rim. Defining the Indogermans as both sedentary and agricultural, but in search of land to cultivate, Darré justifies this contradiction - sedentariness on the one hand, and migrations in search of land on the other - by proposing a personal interpretation of the ver sacrum ritual. The ver sacrum ritual, originally a simple offering of spring fruits, was originally a Roman migration ritual directly inherited from Nordic rites, as he deduces from a comparison of the Scandinavian and Roman agrarian calendars. Originally a population of farming warriors, the Indo-Germans would have become nomads out of necessity: in fact, constantly in search of land to develop through agriculture, the Indo-Germans would have stayed away from the cities, during the Dorian migrations, and then during the Germanic migrations of late Antiquity. The northern Indo-Germans, the Dorians and the Germans, would have preferred to settle in the countryside for the long term, leaving the cities to those already settled. As a corollary of the victorious ver sacrum, according to Darré, the taking of possession of the land went hand in hand with the enslavement of the native populations, following the Spartan model.
According to Hans Günther, nicknamed "Rassengünther" ("Race Günther") by the SS, the arrival of Indo-Germanic-Nordic populations in a given territory led to the coexistence of multiple artistic influences. Different forms of art coexisted: some noble ones, such as sculpture, were used by the conquerors to spread the Indo-Germanic-Nordic aesthetic canons, while other less noble ones, such as handicrafts and pottery, were practised on an ongoing basis by populations long settled in these territories and subjugated by the Nordic conquerors.
Conqueror people According to the ideas developed by racial ideologists, the Indo-Germanic Nordic people, by expanding their territory, are obeying the laws of humanity. Indeed, they believed that it was the duty of a population to multiply, and, to cope with this demographic surplus, to expand the territories under their control, most often firstly through agrarian colonization, and then, secondly, through the establishment of societies sensitive to the arts, creating masterpieces destined to endure through the centuries.
The Nazi Party intellectuals were not the only ones to propose a history of this mythical and hypothetical original Germanic population. School and university textbooks of the period, aimed at young people destined to take part in the Second World War, took up the historical reconstructions of National Socialist intellectuals and painted a striking picture of the supposed history of the Indo-Germans. During the Bronze Age, in the 5th millennium BC, the first waves of northern Indo-Germanic migration were allegedly recorded in Africa and Mesopotamia. According to Wilhelm Frick, the Medes, Persians and Hittites belonged to the Indo-Germanic branch, as did the Sumerians.
Ancient Greek and Roman history was the focus of attention for theorists of the existence of Indo-Germanic Nordic peoples. In 1935, for example, Wilhelm Sieglin, an anthropologist at the University of Berlin, asserted, in a work widely reprinted by the SS, that the Indo-Germanic race had conquered the world. According to Sieglin, the Greek territories experienced at least two waves of migration and settlement by Indo-Germanic populations, waves confirmed by numerous archaeological traces. The first corresponds to the settlement of the Achaeans on Greek territory, around 1800 BC, and the second to the migration of Dorian populations around 1200 BC. Sieglin also drew up an inventory of the hair attributes of Greek and Roman gods and historical figures, which he used to support his conclusion that ancient Greeks and Romans were of Nordic origin. Günther, too, wishing to propose an inventory of ancient characters, mythological or otherwise, and their Indo-Germanic origins, equates Penelope with the Valkyries, thus integrating the figure of the wife of the king of Ithaca, Ulysses, into Nordic mythology, and thus into the Nordic Indo-Germanic peoples.
An unequal society Nazi researchers, directly inspired by Gustaf Kossinna's vision, assumed that the Indo-Germanic Nordic society was profoundly unequal, as would seem to be confirmed by the discovery of "royal tombs" in central Germany. According to the Ahnenerbe researchers, this specific social organization may even have been the key to the presence of northern Indo-Germanic populations in all the territories they studied. According to these researchers, the social organization of Nordic populations, although clearly delineated, was not based on written law, as the norm came from the Volk.