The Spies and Professors Who Saved Ancient Athens from Nazi Plunder
“The American School of Spies” is an engaging tale of how anti-fascist Greeks hid their antiquities with help from Allied agents
Beyond a thirst for global domination, ambitious strongmen share a desperate need to manipulate history to bolster their legitimacy. This obsession with the past is at the heart of Stephan Talty’s compelling new book, The American School of Spies, The Archaeologists Who Fought the Nazis and Saved the Treasures of Ancient Greece.
As the Wehrmacht swept across Europe during World War II, Adolf Hitler obsessed over a fantasy: that his “Aryan” race had its true roots with the gods of ancient Greece. This unfounded belief was the cornerstone of “Germania,” a colossal reimagining of Berlin intended to be the capital of a Thousand-Year Reich, a city of classical-themed statues, arches and monuments—a despot’s plan for a permanent memorial to himself.
When his onslaught across Europe reached Athens in April 1941, Hitler dispatched teams of German archaeologists across the Greek archipelago to search for proof of their Aryan soul. (“Aryan” is an ancient Sanskrit term meaning “noble,” or “civilized,” which became popular among white 19th-century European racial theorists.)
“The Nazi classicists,” writes Talty, “set to work, digging their pickaxes into the Greek soil in order to finally prove that ancient Greece had been founded by Aryan people.”
