At the beginning of July, the announcement of the exhibition at the British Museum, in 2026, of the Bayeux tapestry – the spokeswalk of the XIe century representing the conquest of England by Guillaume the Conqueror in 1066 – aroused great enthusiasm. But the tapestry had already been talked about earlier this year, in relative indifference.
In March 2025, we learned that a fragment of the Bayeux tapestry was discovered in Germany, in the Land of Schleswig-Holstein archives (north of the country). To understand how this fragment was able to find your way around, you have to look at an episode as disturbing as unknown in the history of the tapestry: the special Bayeux operation (Bayeux (Bayeux (Proberaftrag bayeux), a project led by Ahnenerbe, the Institute of Historical Research attached to the SS.
It has often been noted that art occupied an excessive place in the concerns of the Nazis. Their manipulation of visual and material culture must be understood as an essential component of the genocidal regime of Adolf Hitler and its ambition of world domination.
“Aryan” mythologies
The Ahnenerbe, placed under the supreme authority of Heinrich Himmler, was responsible for developing and disseminating historical accounts supporting the central mythology of the Nazi regime: the superiority of the “Aryan race”. For this purpose, he supervised research pretending to rely on irrefutable scientific methods.
But it is long established that these projects deliberately manipulated historical sources, in order to build manufactured stories, used to justify racist ideologies. To do this, many scientific expeditions were organized. Researchers crossed the world in search of objects that can act as monuments to “Aryan” mythologies. The special Bayeux operation was part of this logic.
The interest of the Nazis in the Bayeux tapestry can surprise the British, for whom it symbolizes a founding moment of national history. However, in the same way as contemporary British political leaders did not hesitate to seize them to serve their agendas, the Ahnenerbe seizes it.
The alleged superiority of the Normans
The project Proberaftrag bayeux aimed to produce a study in several volumes which would present the tapestry as intrinsically Scandinavian. The objective was to brandish it as a proof of superiority of the Normans of the High Middle Ages, which the Ahnenerbe claimed as the ancestors of modern Germans, descendants of the Vikings of Northern Europe.
From June 1941, the project was launched seriously. Among the members sent to Normandy to study the tapestry on the spot, was archaeologist Karl Schlabow, textile expert and director of the Institute of German costume in Neumünster (Schleswig-Holstein), in northern Germany. He spent two weeks in Bayeux (Calvados) and, at the end of his stay, he took a fragment of the lining fabric in the tapestry in Germany.
Although first sources suggested that Karl Schlabow would have taken this fragment later, when the tapestry was transferred by the Nazis to Paris, it is more likely that he did it in June 1941, while he was still in Bayeux with the other members of the project.
In a sketch made during this visit by Herbert Jeschke – an artist responsible for producing a painted reproduction of the tapestry -, we see the latter, Karl Schlabow and the project director, Herbert Jankuhn, leaning over the tapestry. The drawing is accompanied by the enthusiastic title “Die tappisery!”like a cry of joy before the privilege of studying this medieval masterpiece so closely.
Film “Paris burns?” Extracts the Nazis & the #Tapisseriedebayeux at the Louvre http://t.co/16jnarwnhw @Liberezparis14 pic.twitter.com/fbydkfozbi
– Bayeux museum (@bayeuxmuseum) August 22, 2014
Ahnenerbe and Nazism
To integrate the Ahnenerbe, Karl Schlabow, like the other members of the project, was enlisted in the SS. He wore the rank of SS-UNTERSCHERFüHRERapproximate equivalent of sergeant in the French army. After the Second World War, many members of the Ahnenerbe denied any membership of Nazi ideas.
But documents seized by the American intelligence services at the end of the conflict show that the Ahnenerbe could be refused, for example if we had Jewish friends or expressed communist ideas. It was therefore necessary, at least, to display its membership in the principles of Nazism to be accepted in its ranks.
It remains difficult to know exactly what the members of the Ahnenerbe hoped to discover or prove through this study of the tapestry. It seems that the simple fact of organizing an illustrated study and sending researchers examining the original object was enough to symbolically appropriate the historical value, as a monument of the Aryan heritage. The supposed influence of Scandinavian styles in the patterns of the tapestry had to be at the heart of their conclusions, but the project was never completed due to the German defeat in 1945.
Like many Ahnenerbe members, Karl Schlabow resumed his research after the war, this time at the Schleswig-Holstein State Museum, at the Gottorf castle.
A symbolic fragment
The rediscovery – even of a tiny fragment – of such a medieval object remains an exceptional event. But it is essential to replace this find in the context of its sample. It is not surprising that Karl Schbow felt legitimate to steal this piece of tapestry. The regime to which he belonged considered this object as part of his inheritance, a birth right of “German Aryan”.
This discovery immediately reminds us that the past is closer than you think and that it still remains to be done to shed light on the gray areas left by the ideological practices of the past. The fragment found is currently exposed in the Schleswig-Holstein, but it will join the Bayeux tapestry museum in Normandy, when it reopens after work in 2027, where the two parties will be gathered for the first time since 1941.
