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RARE HEAVILY ILLUSTRATED 1943 NAZI AHNENERBE BOOK WITH A PREFACE BY REICHSFÜHRER-SS HEINRICH HIMMLER

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This USMBOOKS web page depicts and describes a very rare, very well-illustrated Third Reich book, Holzgerät und Holzform (Wooden Tools and Designs of Wood) by German artist and art historian Professor Dr. Walter Dexel, who worked at the Braunschweig Institute. In 1941 he began his cooperation with the SS-Ahnenerbe.

The book contains a preface by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and was published by the Ahnenerbe Stiftung, a Nazi foundation in Berlin-Dahlem. The Ahnenerbe was the National Socialist Research Association for German Ancestral Heritage. It was a German Registered Society and a research foundation established in July 1935 by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, Richard Walther Darré (Reichsbauernführer and head of the Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt-SS or the Race and Settlement Main Office of the SS), and Professor Hermann Wirth.

The Ahnenerbe organization also had a large and sophisticated Verlag or publishing department which published books and magazines designed to educate the German people about the importance of race, genealogy, Germanic and ancestral history, etc. Holzgerät und Holzform by Walter Dexel, the book we offer for sale here, is a rare and beautiful example of their publishing work.

This fine 1943 hardcover First Edition example of Holzgerät und Holzform measures 8-1/4 x 11-1/4 inches and has 188 pages, 120 of which are high-quality glossy picture pages. Its sub-title translates as “the meaning of wooden implements for the German Equipment Culture of pre-historic times and the Middle Ages”.

The development and changes through the ages are all documented in very clear black & white photos on glossy paper and show historic baptism tubs and basins, spoons and forks, bowls, canteens, dishes, buckets, vases, cups, baking molds, small and large barrels, etc. The items photographed are all attributed to museums and private collections and carefully dated and indexed.

The main goal of the Ahnenerbe Stiftung was to permanently document and establish the cultural history of the aryan race. In the foreground of its work were archeology, anthropology and historical research, and the Ahnenerbe financed many archeology digs such as the famous one in Quedlinburg for the bones of Heinrich I.

This 80+ year old example of Holzgerät und Holzform by Walter Dexel is in very nice, little-used condition. It has a clear plastic dust jacket which was added decades ago in Germany by a previous owner to protect this rare SS-Ahnenerbe book. Tight spine, no odor.

The illustrations and photos in this book show the development and the uses of wood. Early archeological finds of wooden bowls, spoons, barrels, buckets and pails, but also depictions of wooden implements on tapestries (the famous 11th century Bayeux Tapestry, for example), paintings, and in architecture. The eventual substitution of metals, glass and stone for wood is also shown. Wooden candlesticks and buckets morphed into sturdier bronze ones through the ages. Wooden flasks and powder horns were replaced with metal ones, and wooden bowls became glass or stoneware ones after the Middle Ages.