About Hitler and the Aryans.

The Aryan Invasion Myth

One of the most interesting puzzles in archaeology, and one that hasn't been completely solved yet, concerns the story of the supposed Aryan invasion of the Indian subcontinent. The story goes like this: The Aryans were a tribe of Indo-European-speaking, horse-riding nomads living in the arid steppes of Eurasia. Sometime around 1700 BC, the Aryans invaded the ancient urban civilizations of the Indus Valley, and destroyed that culture. The Indus Valley civilizations were far more civilized than any horse-back nomad, having had a written language, farming capabilities, and led a truly urban existence. Some 1,200 years after the supposed invasion, the descendants of the Aryans, so they say, wrote the classic Indian literature called the Vedic manuscripts.

Adolph Hitler and the Aryan/Dravidian Myth

Adolph Hitler twisted the theories of Gustaf Kossinna (1858-1931), to put forward the Aryans as a master race of Indo-Europeans, who were supposed to be Nordic in appearance and directly ancestral to the Germans. These Nordic invaders were defined as directly opposite to native south Asian peoples, called Dravidians, who were supposed to have been darker-skinned.

The problem is, most if not all of this story--"Aryans" as a cultural group, invasion from the arid steppes, Nordic appearance, the Indus Civilization being destroyed, and, certainly not least, the Germans being descended from them--may not be true at all.

Racism and Science

Born from a colonial mentality, corrupted by a Nazi propaganda machine, the Aryan invasion theory is finally undergoing radical reassessment by south Asian archaeologists and their colleagues, using the Vedic documents themselves, additional linguistic studies, and physical evidence revealed through archaeological excavations. The Indus valley cultural history is an ancient and complex one. Only time will teach us what role if any an Indo-European invasion took in the history; but it seems clear that a collapse of the Indus civilization did not occur.