Heinrich Himmler founded the Ahnenerbe as an SS research institute charged with proving, through archaeology, folklore, and racial science, that Germans descended from a superior Aryan bloodline. This film traces the organization from its early expeditions, including a mission to Tibet in search of the mythical Aryan homeland, through its wartime transformation into an instrument of atrocity. Archival photographs and documents show how its scholars, dressed in SS black, moved from fringe scholarship into directing medical experiments on prisoners at camps including Natzweiler-Struthof, where inmates were used to test poisons and mustard gas. Historians and researchers walk through the institute's internal records and the biographies of the men who ran it, showing how academic credentials and pseudo-scientific method were used to justify torture and murder. The film keeps its focus on documentation rather than dramatization, using newly available archives to lay out the chain of command connecting Himmler's ideology to the doctors and researchers who carried out the killing.