By Horton-Insch Millie
The announcement this month that the 11th-century embroidered epic of William the Conqueror’s conquest of England in 1066, known as the Bayeux tapestry, would be displayed at the British Museum in 2026 caused a lot of excitement. But, to considerably less fanfare, the tapestry had already made headlines earlier this year.
It was announced in March that a piece of the Bayeux tapestry had been found in the state archives of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. We must go to a distressing and little-known incident in the history of the tapestry to comprehend how it got there:The Nazi Ahnenerbe, the SS regime’s legacy research organization, was in charge of the Sonderauftrag Bayeux (Special Operation Bayeux) project.
It has frequently been noted that the Nazis appear to have been too concerned with art. However, it is important to recognize that their exploitation of material and visual culture was fundamental to Hitler’s homicidal government and its attempts to gain worldwide dominance.
The Ahnenerbe was founded to create and distribute histories that bolstered the Nazi regime’s primary mythology—the superiority of the Aryan race—under the ultimate direction of Heinrich Himmler. To this goal, research that purported to employ indisputable scientific procedures was supervised by the Ahnenerbe.
It has long been recognized, meanwhile, that their initiatives purposefully falsified historical data in order to create false histories that would validate racist beliefs. Many research efforts were carried out in order to accomplish this. For these projects, researchers searched all over the world for artifacts that would serve as reminders of Aryan supremacist myths. One such effort was Sonderauftrag Bayeux.
Given that the Bayeux tapestry is seen as a representation of a singularly important period in British history, Nazi interest in it may come as a surprise to British citizens. But the Ahnenerbe were as tempted to use the tapestry as politicians in contemporary Britain have been to further their political goals.
The goal of Sonderauftrag Bayeux was to create a multi-volume analysis of the tapestry that would highlight its distinctively Scandinavian nature. Presenting the tapestry as evidence of the dominance of the early medieval Normans—whom the Ahnenerbe claimed were the forebears of contemporary German Aryans and descended from Viking northern Europeans—was the aim.
Work on Sonderauftrag Bayeux had started in earnest by June 1941. Karl Schlabow, a textile specialist and the director of the Germanic Costume Institute in Neum nster, Germany, was one of the team members dispatched to Normandy to examine the tapestry up close. After spending two weeks in Bayeux, Schlabow took a piece of the tapestry’s background fabric and brought it back to Germany at the end of his study trip.
It is more likely that Schlabow removed this portion in June 1941, while he and his fellow Sonderauftrag Bayeux members were stationed in Bayeux, even though early sources claimed that he did so when the Nazis later relocated the embroidery to Paris.
Herbert Jeschke, the artist hired to paint a replica of the tapestry on this visit, drew a sketch of himself crouched over the tapestry with Schlabow and Herbert Jankuhn, the project director. Die Tappiserie!, an exclamation of excitement at their exclusive viewing of this medieval masterwork, is followed by the sketch.
Schlabow, like other members of the Sonderauftrag Bayeux, was inducted into the SS in order to join the Ahnenerbe. He was an SS-Unterscharf hrer, which is about the same as a sergeant in the modern British army. Many Ahnenerbe members denied sympathizing with Nazi policies after World War II.
But according to records taken by US intelligence operatives at the end of World War II, certain people were refused membership to the Ahnenerbe if they had, for example, had Jewish connections or shown support for communist ideologies. Therefore, in order to be accepted into the Nazi party, they had to (at least publicly) seem to support it.
It’s unclear exactly what the Ahnenerbe project discovered—or even planned to discover—from this tapestry study. Creating an illustrated study and sending researchers to the original textile seems to have been sufficient to establish the piece as a testament to Germanic Aryan dominance. Although the project was not finished before to Germany’s capitulation at the end of the war, it is evident that the study’s conclusions were heavily influenced by the tapestry’s apparent Scandinavian influence.
After the war, Schlabow, like many other Ahnenerbe members, went back to work at the Schleswig-Holstein State Museum in Gottorf Castle, conducting research.
There is great excitement when even the smallest piece of this amazing medieval artifact is found. Its rehabilitation, though, needs to be firmly situated within the context of its removal. The dictatorship Schlabow worked for claimed the item as part of his heritage, his birthright as an Aryan German, therefore it should not be surprising that he felt entitled to steal this piece of the tapestry.
This discovery serves as a timely reminder that the past is not as far away as we think and that much more needs to be done to examine the lasting effects of past behaviors on the histories we inherit. Currently on display in Schleswig-Holstein, the found part will travel to the Mus e la Tapisserie de Bayeux in Normandy in time for the museum’s 2027 reopening, which will be the first time the two elements have been joined since 1941.
Millie Horton-Insch is a postdoctoral research fellow at Trinity College Dublin’s History of Art Department.
