Heinrich Himmler on Doing Archaeology Right

The one and only thing that matters to us, and the thing these people are paid for by the state, is to have ideas of history that strengthen our people in their necessary national pride. In all this troublesome business we are only interested in one thing--to project into the dim and distant past the picture of our nation as we envisage it for the future.

Every bit of Tacitus in his Germania is tendentious stuff. Our teaching of German origins has depended for centuries on falsification. We are entitled to impose one of our own at any time.

Heinrich Himmler, quoted in Bettina Arnold, The Past as Propaganda, Archaeology magazine July/August 1992:33