"The swastika and similar symbols were employed by the ancestors of the modern-day Germans. With the Nazi seizure of power, studies of such ideographs became directly supported by the state. The Science of the Swastika is the first theoretically informed study of the relationship between an academic discipline and what the Nazis termed their Weltanschauung. It surveys the fate of Old Germanic studies under the Nazis, a discipline of especial interest to the forces of German reaction. German swastika studies also gave rise to the SS-Ahnenerbe, the antiquarian research organization through which medical experiments were later to be performed on the inmates of concentration camps. The Old Germanic studies of the Nazi period proved to be a creative foil to the almost overwhelmingly destructive side of National Socialism. "--BOOK JACKET.