I have previously debunked the myth that Otto Rahn – a member of Heinrich Himmler’s personal staff and also associated with the SS’s famous ancestral research department; the Ahnenerbe – was ‘secretly anti-Nazi’. (1)
However, I have repeatedly seen the claim made that Rahn was ‘part-jewish’ or ‘of jewish ancestry’ naturally little evidence is provided of such claims with Shahan Russell incoherently claiming in 2016 that:
‘Rahn was also openly gay, more discreetly anti-Nazi, and probably Jewish (though he may not have been aware of it). Despite this, he joined the Schutzstaffel (SS), Hitler’s paramilitary organization, and became the inspiration for Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark.’ (2)
This is complete nonsense, and I will note I had have debunked the claim that Rahn was ‘discreetly anti-Nazi’ in detail, (3) but I will address the claim that Rahn was of ‘part jewish descent’ here and the additional claim that Rahn was a homosexual (openly or otherwise) in a separate article.
The basis of this claim in the Anglophone world appears to be Christopher Jones’ error-ridden and highly partisan prologue to the 2008 edition of Rahn’s book ‘Lucifer’s Court’ that was published by Inner Traditions, which makes this claim without evidence or reference to some kind of evidence (4) but with the very obvious agenda of trying to rehabilitate Rahn to a modern ‘occultist’/conspiracy theorist audience (Inner Tradition’s market segment) audience by making him a jewish homosexual and a secret anti-Nazi (and thus a kind of anti-hero).
This claim has been regularly repeated and features in Richard Stanley’s recently published book ‘Otto Rahn, Grail Hunter’ (2025) with his publisher also being Inner Traditions; I haven’t read Stanley’s book as of yet – the claims are both featured in the publisher’s blurb about it hence why I know what he argues before reading it - but I doubt it will add anything substantive evidence-wise to debate around Otto Rahn other than make the author money and give me – and others – who are more factually-inclined more nonsense to debunk.
However, I doubt his argument is any better – although it may (hopefully) be more detailed - than the website ‘Otto-Rahn.com’ makes for his partial-jewishness since they claim that:
‘Current critical opinion (certainly in France) is that it is incontestable that Rahn was a Nazi. However, there is still a lot of conjecture about Rahn's supposed Jewishness. The writer E. Mila says that Rahn's Jewish status is irrefutable. Rahn's mother was Clara Margaret Hamburger and his grandfather was Simeon Hamburger, a name form frequently used by central European Jews. His maternal grandmother, Lea Cucer, was equally Jewish. Cucer comes from Cocer, a name of profession widely used by Jews of central Europe. If he was Jewish, Rahn was far from being the only Jew in National Socialism eg Frederic Heilscher and Martin Buber; also the Ahnenerbe chief Wolfram Sievers.’ (5)
Let’s deconstruct the claim about Rahn: shall we?
Rahn was born on 18th February 1904 in the town of Michelstadt in the German state of Hesse to Karl Rahn and Clara Hamburger. Now there are no claims I know of that Rahn’s father Karl had any jewish ancestry; so, the claim focuses on his maternal line.
The problem as we can see from the argument ‘Otto-Rahn.com’ makes is that they don’t have any actual evidence but rather poorly reasoned unevidenced surmise based primarily on his maternal grandfather’s first name ‘Simeon’.
The taking of Old Testament form first names was not an uncommon phenomenon in Europe from the seventeenth and the nineteenth century especially among Low Church Protestants of which there were many in Germany; much as they were among the Puritans in England. (6) It was designed to mark out the Low Church Protestant faithful as being apart from the mainstream and to signal with their use of such naming conventions that they clung to the characters of the Bible (especially the Old Testament) and were a people apart from your average European Christian. (7)
Further the surname ‘Hamburger’ literally just means ‘From Hamburg’ which isn’t remotely jewish although it has occasionally been adopted by jews. (8)
Thus the ‘evidence’ that Otto Rahn’s mother Clara Hamburger was of jewish ancestry via her grandfather Simeon Hamburger is actually evidence of the opposite: Rahn’s German ancestry.
But what of Rahn’s maternal grandmother Lea Cucer?
Well, the claim ‘Otto-Rahn.com’ makes is that her surname ‘Cucer’ comes from ‘Cocer’ and that this is a ‘name of profession widely used by Jews of central Europe’; the problem is that ‘Cocer’ isn’t ‘name of profession widely used by Jews of central Europe’ as it doesn’t even appear as a surname in any searches I conducted on it to check this claim let alone be a ‘widely used jewish surname in central Europe’.
What ‘Otto-Rahn.com’ is almost certainly thinking of is the surname ‘Cucer’ itself which does refer to a profession and is a variant of the Czech and Polish surname ‘Kocer’ (lit. ‘Coachman’) which is itself a slavicization of the German surname ‘Kutscher’ (also lit. ‘Coachman’) and derives from the Hungarian word for coach: ‘Kocsi’. (9)
The surname ‘Kutscher’ has indeed been adopted by some jews but is primarily a German surname (10) while ‘Kocer’ is similar but appears to be even less associated with jews than ‘Kutscher’. (11)
In other words: there is no evidence whatsoever the surname ‘Cucer’ is distinctly jewish and no ancillary evidence has been presented to suggest as such.
Lea Cucer’s first name ‘Lea’ might also be suggested as ‘evidence’ but the same applies to Rahn’s other known maternal grandparent Simeon Hamburger in that you can be given an Old Testament first name without of jewish ancestry, but in truth all the first name ‘Lea’ means is ‘Leah’ but in the form used in France. (12)
What this shows is that there is zero actual evidence that Rahn was jewish based on his known ancestry.
Positive evidence for the claim that Rahn was not jewish in terms of ancestry is however easy to come by in the form of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office (the ‘Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS’ aka RuSHA) which checked the ancestry of all SS officers – of which Rahn was one – back to 1750 using the extensive genealogical documentation that had generated by the compulsory recording of all births, deaths and marriages in the German states – and found no jewish ancestry whatsoever.
Now the immediate cry from those who claim that Otto Rahn had jewish ancestry will likely be the RuSHA ‘covered this up’, but the problem with that is the RuSHA was notoriously unafraid to expose their discoveries even when it was impolitic to do so.
For example, it was the RuSHA who exposed the fact that Emil Maurice – Adolf Hitler’s friend, former bodyguard, chauffeur and the first leader of the SS – in fact had a jewish great-grandfather called Charles Maurice Schwartzenberger in 1935, (13) which pitted Himmler directly against Hitler and Himmler lost although not for want of angrily protesting. (14)
It is also worth pointing out as an aside – since it always gets claimed – that Maurice was actually dismissed from his positions by Hitler in 1928 as the result of Maurice beginning a love affair with Hitler’s niece Geli Raubal in late 1927 but had allowed to remain a – largely honorary - SS officer since then. (15)
If Himmler was willing to go against Hitler directly over a part-jewish officer in the SS in 1935 and wanted to throw him out of the SS entirely; then isn’t it rather silly to claim – as Jones and others do - that Rahn was ‘exposed as part-jewish’ in circa 1937 by the RuSHA and Himmler did absolutely nothing about it.
Himmler was notorious for his hard-line approach to such matters, and there is no evidence – let alone any suggestion – he would have been lenient with Rahn had the RuSHA uncovered any jewish ancestry during Rahn’s SS membership between 1936 and 1939.
However, within this there is also the potential counterargument that Rahn wasn’t actually a commissioned as an SS officer since Rahn was only made an NCO in the SS – an SS-Unterscharfuhrer (basically a Corporal) to be precise – in April 1936 and so therefore the enhanced ancestry checks by RuSHA weren’t carried out and Rahn only had to prove his Aryan ancestry back to 1800.
The problem with this argument is that Rahn’s alleged jewish ancestry according to ‘Otto-Rahn.com’ comes into full view by - at latest - the 1850s so it would have been picked up the RuSHA even in this scenario; since if modern researchers can allegedly find it in the extensive genealogical documentation in Germany back to 1750s then the full-time professionals of the RuSHA certainly would have!
In addition, Rahn did undergo the enhanced ancestry check by the RuSHA precisely because he’d been made an SS-Obersturmfuhrer (roughly 1st Lieutenant) on 11th September 1938 and his promotion to SS-Untersturmfuhrer (roughly 2nd Lieutenant) alone on 20th April 1937 would have triggered the enhanced ancestry check by the RuSHA back to 1750.
We can see this in his official obituary published by the SS in the ‘Volkischer Beobachter’ on 18th May 1939 which lists his rank as SS-Obersturmfuhrer:
Proponents that Rahn had jewish ancestry point to the 29th February 1938 letter from Karl Wolff to the RuSHA stating that Rahn had been unable to provide the required Großer Ariernachweis (lit. ‘Greater Aryan Certificate’/‘Greater Aryan Passport’) to the RuSHA and has been given a month’s extension to do so.
They then go on to point out that there is no evidence that Rahn ever provided one, which is not quite true: we simply don’t have any records as to whether he provided one or not.
The fact that Rahn continued to be a officer in the SS for nearly a year after Wolff’s deadline of 29th March 1938 for him to provide his Großer Ariernachweis to the RuSHA goes to suggest that he did provide the required documentation in some form; since we have no further correspondence from Wolff or anyone else on the lack of it.
The proponents of the claim that Rahn had jewish ancestry are trying here to set up no evidence as positive evidence for jewish ancestry - in fact Rahn could have had say Romani (gypsy) ancestry on the same logic and would have achieved the same effect but they only ever want to mention their hypothetical jewish ancestry rather than other possibilities like the Romani - when in fact, because we only know about the lack of Rahn’s Großer Ariernachweis from the Wolff letter of 29th February 1937 not from other records; it therefore suggests that the evidence should read the other way around.
This reading would tell us that Rahn didn’t provide his Großer Ariernachweis promptly - for reasons that are unknown but probably benign given Rahn’s rather erratic character - and was scolded by Wolff (who also then wrote to the RuSHA updating them on the matter [the 29th February 1938 letter from Wolff to the RuSHA]) whereupon Rahn seems to have satisfied both Wolff and the RuSHA in some way (presumably by supplying his Großer Ariernachweis or possibly by providing the less potent Ahnenpaß [lit. ‘Ancestry Passport’] and/or Ahnentafel [lit. ‘Ancestry Table’] using which the RuSHA could do the rest) between February and March 1938.
This would then explain why there is no further communication on the matter in Rahn’s SS file without resorting to silly assumptions about undocumented ‘jewish ancestry’ and is far more reasonable than the other flights of fancy.
So, in summary: there is absolutely no reason RuSHA wouldn’t have detected any jewish ancestry that Otto Rahn had and that Himmler wouldn’t have immediately thrown Rahn out of the SS much as he tried to do with Maurice in 1935 when it was discovered he had a jewish ancestor.
References
(1) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/otto-rahn-the-ss-ahnenerbe-and-the
(2) https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/otto-rahn.html
(3) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/otto-rahn-the-ss-ahnenerbe-and-the
(4) Otto Rahn, Christopher Jones (Trans.), 2008, ‘Lucifer’s Court’, 1st Edition, Inner Traditions: Rochester, p. viii
(5) https://web.archive.org/web/20120404031307/http://otto-rahn.com/otto-rahn-biography
(6) Cf. John Corkery, 2001, ‘Methods of naming: the impact of religious affiliation, gender, family tradition and social status on the giving of forenames between the Reformation and the early nineteenth century, with particular reference to Kingston-upon-Thames and Northwest Surrey’, Published Masters Theses: King’s College, especially pp. 81-87
(7) Idem.
(8) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburger_(surname); https://forebears.io/surnames/hamburger
(9) https://www.familysearch.org/en/surname?surname=KUTSCHER; https://www.familysearch.org/en/surname?surname=kocer; it could also be a Turkish name meaning ‘Brave Man’ but as there is no suggested link to Turkey, I have discounted this possibility.
(10) https://www.familysearch.org/en/surname?surname=KUTSCHER
(11) https://www.familysearch.org/en/surname?surname=kocer
(12) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lea_(given_name)
(13) Lothar Machtan, 2001, ‘The Hidden Hitler’, 1st Edition, Perseus Press: Oxford, p. 164
(14) Idem.
(15) Ian Kershaw, 1998, ‘Hitler: Hubris 1889-1936’, 1st Edition, Penguin: New York, pp. 353; 485