The Master Plan
PRAISE
"'Beware," Churchill warned, "lest the Stone Age return on the gleaming wings of science.' In The Master Plan, Heather Pringle gives a gripping account of Nazi perversions of science in support of the myth of Aryanism. A small army of scholars did the state’s bidding, precipitating all-out barbarism. The Master Plan provides an awful warning against binding scholarship too closely to the state."
- John Polanyi, Nobel Laureate
"This is an exceptional piece of work, for those with a very deep interest in the intellectual structures of tyranny, in Heinrich Himmler, in how monsters work. Dictators always have theories, and always find scholars to prove them. The Master Plan is the detailed history of one such effort, but it sheds abundant light on all of them."
- Alan Furst, author of Dark Star and Night Soldiers
"I am hugely impressed by The Master Plan. Besides adding to knowledge of Himmler's motivation and elements in his character, it demonstrates in hideous detail how highly educated men can lose all intellectual and moral restraints and descend to barbaric levels of criminality in pursuit of their goal. I rate this work alongside Robert Jay Lifton's The Nazi Doctors as an indictment of the particular class of educated Germans who made the Nazi state possible and, by extension, of all who are content to pursue human 'progress' at the expense of others"
- Peter Padfield, author of Himmler: Reichsführer-SS and Dönitz:The Last Führer.
"A phenomenal book. Just when we thought we had learned all we could about these monsters comes another tale as sinister as any yet uncovered. Heather Pringle belongs in the company of Barbara Tuchman and Hannah Arendt."
- Larry Kramer
"Heather Pringle throws fresh and revealing light on the Nazi obsession with crank ethnography, employed with sinister effect to justify genocide."
- Karl E. Meyer, co-author Tournament of Shadows, author of The Plundered Past, and editor of World Policy Journal