Not actual Nazis. That’s absurd. But how much were they like Nazis? Were they authoritarian? Violent? A force that invaded from the outside and subjugated the indigenous people using threats of atrocities?

Asking this question demands a shift in the meaning of “Anasazi.” Just because the Nazis occupied France until 1944 did not make French people Nazis.

Perhaps the Four Corners natives forced to grow food, erect great stone buildings, and serve the occupiers were victims of the Anasazi, but not Anasazi themselves.

What known characteristics of the Anasazi have a whiff of Nazi to them?

Quite a lot.

The Anasazi ruled by Nazi-like terror

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Until recently, archaeologists saw Chaco as an orderly, peaceful civilization dominated by astronomer-priests, tradesmen, and governors…. In a fashion perhaps comparable to the gory Aztec rites witnessed by Cortés [he conquered Aztec Mexico in 1519], Chaco rulers may have intimidated potentially rebellious chiefs by forcing them to look on as they sacrificed and cannibalized chosen victims. Terror may have been the glue that held the Chaco culture together. —Roberts/Old Ones p. 161

This is hard to take for some people. Modern Puebloans are so egalitarian and nonviolent, we want to project that back to their Anasazi roots.

But it may very well be that modern Puebloans are so egalitarian and nonviolent as an opposing reaction to the hyper-violent world of the Anasazi.

Like Nazis, invading and occupying Anasazi may have conquered the scattered (but increasingly productive) farmers in the region by threatening them with unspeakable things. Not concentration camps for oppressed clans and religions, but violence against entire villages and families so extreme and sudden that no one could resist.

Sounds like Anasazi Nazis to me.

Puebloan oral histories contain stories of state-sponsored religious violence

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Despite [the] secretiveness [of modern Puebloans], ethnographers over the years have uncovered plenty of evidence that warfare and violence played a central role in Pueblo life. [The] governor of Zuni…told John Gregory Bourke in 1881: “In the days of long ago all the Pueblos…had the religion of human sacrifice at the time of the Feast of Fire, when the days are shortest. The victim had his throat cut and his breast opened, and his heart taken out by one of the [priests]; this was their religion, their method of asking good fortune.” —Roberts/Old Ones p. 156

While the Nazis worshipped the altar of the war machine, Puebloans even after the fall of the Anasazi tortured and killed victims on the altars of their gods.

The class of Nazis who controlled the war machine became overlords of their own people and the people they conquered and tried to eliminate. The class of Anasazi who controlled the priests who chose and murdered the sacrificial victims became overlords of the bureaucracy that supported them and the scattered farmers who fed them.

Again, this points to something like Anasazi Nazis.

Villagers tried to defend themselves from Anasazi Nazis

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“Around 1250,” [says Bruce Bradley of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center], “you see an incredible change. Everybody’s moving into the canons, building cliff dwellings. At Sand Canyon, seventy-five percent of the community lived within a defensive wall that surrounded the pueblo. All through southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, southwestern Colorado, the same thing’s happening. Suddenly, at 1250, the trade ware goes to zero. Before that, you had plenty of far-traded pottery, turquoise, shells, jewelry.” —Roberts/Old Ones p. 150

Who were they defending themselves against?

Just as every country that faced invasion and attack from the Third Reich hastily constructed defenses, people of the Four Corners tried, ultimately unsuccessfully, to defend themselves against the violence of the Anasazi.

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Most construction in the canyon itself stopped between 1116 and 1120, and some older great houses such as Chetro Ketl were actually being abandoned. But at others, as at Pueblo Bonito, new walls and room blocks were built to close off old courtyards and limit access. More tower kivas, such as El Faro on the Great North Road, were built and appear to have been used as watchtowers…. —Stuart/Anasazi America p. 121

This can cut two ways. The good guys could have been in the Chaco Canyon center, and the bad guys are invading.

Or the bad guys are in the canyon center, and they think someone is going to invade.

More likely, some Anasazi Nazi “general” got too big for his britches and decided he could kick over the boss. Like a big generations-long mafia war, turf changing all the time, with giant leftover stone buildings that drive the rest of us crazy trying to figure out.

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Large religious gatherings did not take place in Chaco Canyon after 1100. —Stuart/Anasazi America p. 143

Did their gods desert them? Or did the people simply stop coming? They had enough and just walked away. Sometimes, looking at the sites and the evidence, that’s what it feels like happened. They walked away because they wouldn’t take the murderous rants of the High Priest anymore.

How many people wish the populace of Germany had done that to Hitler?

The rise and fall of the Second Reich in ancient Mexico: Toltecs, pre-Anasazi Nazis

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Toltecs…have been implicated for Chaco, and that timing works. There may indeed be historical connections—but probably not…direct string pulling. If Toltec notions reached the Southwest, they probably came indirectly. —Lekson p. 113

A radical splinter group could have broken away from the collapsing Toltecs (in Mexico) and made their way north to try and build a new and improved Toltec world.

The Toltecs were some of the most violent people on Earth at the time, sacrificing long lines of the lower class in the name of appeasing their celestial gods. They began to collapse in the 900s, and finally flamed out in 1170.

That’s why Lekson says the timing works. The meteoric rise of the Anasazi comes during the Toltec nation’s death throes.

The flamboyant political adventures of the Anasazi Nazi movement

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The events of 1150 to 1300 [spelled] the end of Tula [Toltecs] and consequent regional reorganization marked by audacious long-distance trade and flamboyant political adventures. —Lekson p. 144

This is tantalizing more than education. What audacious and flamboyant political adventures?

I can certainly imagine. That’s what I do. But before I spin off into fantastical daydreams, I like to know what people who study the Anasazi for a living think. And all we know here is that audacious, flamboyant things happened. Which, taken with nothing more, definitely has a Nazi flare to it.

I take this to mean a couple of things. First, leaders of the early Anasazi modeled themselves on the Toltec city-states to the south, which included the equivalent of kings who retained power by sacrificing members of the lower class to their gods. Second, splinter groups from the collapsing Toltecs made audacious and flamboyant forays into the Four Corners and tried to recreate the glory of what they had back home.

The Anasazi Nazis had a central government supported by the use of force

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Chaco…had a central government, however diffuse or non-Western…. It’s likely that Chaco had a regional economy. And perhaps Chaco and its successor, Aztec Ruins [in northern New Mexico], had the use of force; witness the brutality of apparently socially sanctioned events of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. —Lekson p. 223

Oppression takes many forms, from religious persecution to slavery to mass murder to state-sponsored terrorism. Most require the use of physical force directed by a centralized leadership.

The exception may be religion. All kinds of human atrocities have been justified and carried out in the name of God or gods.

The Nazis preferred the disproportionate use of force to the coercive powers of religion. The Anasazi Nazis likely used both.

The Rise and Fall of the First Reich in Ancient Mexico: Teotihuacán, pre-Toltec Anasazi Nazi roots

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The fall of Teotihuacán [thirty miles northeast of modern-day Mexico City] (about 550) sent tsunamis of political power outward, rulers looking for places to rule. In the following decades, displaced, dispersing elites transformed cities and towns throughout Mesoamerica.…Petty chiefs and Big House leaders [of the Four Corners]…were tempted to emulate southern kings. —Lekson p. 231

Prior to the rise and fall of the Second Reich of the Toltecs was the stratified and violent Teotihuacán culture.

The first seeds of an oppressive and centralized government in the Anasazi Nazi capital of Chaco Canyon may have come from splinter groups from the fall of Teotihuacán.

The native farmers of the Four Corners may have suffered wave after wave of carpetbaggers from the South who kept trying to remake them into an echo of the glories of the homeland.

The Anasazi Nazis built a stable society—for a time

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Many things came to Chaco and stayed there, in the service of the kings. Maize moved into and through the canyon, from places that had plenty to places that had none. Consequently, violence and raiding almost ceased. Its success, from 900 to 1000, allowed Chaco’s leaders to expand their horizons. Its influence soon reached far beyond its original domain…. Local leaders almost everywhere on the Plateau joined with or deferred to Chaco…. From 900 to 1200, Chaco kept the peace, promoted the general welfare, enhanced its own glory, and got things done. —Lekson p. 235

Before the German Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Nazi Germany thrived in spite of global economic recession.

The Anasazi created the Great North Road. The Nazis created the German Autobahn

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In the midst of the Great Depression, the Nazis restored economic stability and ended mass unemployment using heavy military spending and a mixed economy. Extensive public works were undertaken, including the construction of Autobahns (high speed highways). The return to economic stability boosted the regime’s popularity. —Wikipedia/Nazi

Before totalitarianism reaches the tipping point of the maniacal quest for global domination, it can reduce chaos and bring stability, which can make it look pretty good to the soon-to-be-violently-subjugated populace.

But when the fall comes, as it must, it is a long, hard ride for everyone.

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All of this evidence of violence dates to the 1100s. —Stuart/Anasazi America p. 121

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The two centuries following the decline of the Chacoan society were the most violent and tragic in the Southwest’s entire human history up to that time. —Stuart/Anasazi America p. 142

That’s when the hard ride down started for the Anasazi Nazis: the 1100s.

Mass executions by the Anasazi Nazis

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To enforce its failing rule, Aztec [the Anasazi site in northern New Mexico unrelated to the true Aztecs—it’s a really bad name for the place] unleashed lethal force. At farmsteads, squads of warriors fell upon families failing in their duties, old and young. They were executed to intimidate other villages that might be thinking of slipping Aztec’s yoke. Men, women, and children were brutally and publicly killed and left to rot, unburied, in the ruins of their homes. These horrible scenes replayed a score or more times, but even terror could not hold Aztec’s failing polity together. —Lekson p. 239

As a totalitarian regime tries to expand its grip—or retain it in the face of opposition and crumbling fortunes—it tends to line people up and kill them.

Most of the 11 million victims of the Holocaust were killed after the United States entered the war against Hitler’s Nazis. (Source: Holocaust Timeline on HistoryPlace.com)

Was there an Anasazi Nazi Hitler Youth Organization?

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Young people brought up in Aztec’s reign of terror were perhaps inured to and inclined toward violence. —Lekson p. 240

The Hitler Youth, the organization of the Nazi Party before and during World War II to enlist boys aged fourteen to eighteen into paramilitary service and indoctrinate them into Nazi philosophy. They contributed heavily to the ranks of the Nazi military and military police, organizations inclined in the extreme toward violence.

As Lekson says, similar things must have happened in the reign of the Anasazi, as in all such disproportionately powerful human organizations.

The fall of the Toltecs energized the rise of the Anasazi Nazis

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Tula [Toltecs] fell about 1150. [W]ith Tula’s end, the Post-Classic pattern came into focus in vibrant clarity: expansive politics, long-distance dynamics, power plays and upheavals, and a swirling world of migrations, invasions, expulsions, and fragmentation. —Lekson p. 242

Since the beginning of the Chaco culture of Anasazis, the leaders were highly aware of the advanced city-state culture of the Toltecs to the south in Mexico. They emulated them in more than Chacoan architecture. The entire Chaco culture was a long-distance mirror of the Toltecs.

So when the Toltec structure began to crumble and fall, it must have sent the Anasazi leaders into a frenzy of worry.

Just as when Poland fell so easily to the Nazis in 1939, it spread shockwaves throughout Europe that preceded all-out war.

Were there Anasazi Nazi warriors?

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No evidence of a large, armed warrior class has been found. The “warrior” burials at Pueblo Bonito…date roughly to A.D. 1100. —Stuart/Anasazi America p. 118

Now this is curious. There was plenty of evidence of the Nazi armies.

If the Anasazi were as aggressively militaristic as the Nazis, where were the warriors?

It’s important to remember that the absence of evidence for something in no way rules it out.

But wouldn’t masses of Anasazi warriors have left some archaeological evidence?

Maybe not. Maybe they were dispersed in small groups or patrols throughout the Anasazi empire. Maybe they trained masses of new recruits far away in a place archaeologists haven’t discovered or recognized yet. Maybe the warrior class was only part time, like rural volunteer fire departments. In a thousand years, will there be archaeological evidence for volunteer fire departments?

The violence was so widespread, there must have been a force directing or causing that violence. That’s the evidence for a warrior class. The fact that they left behind evidence of victims.

The Anasazi as Tito’s Yugoslavia

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As Chacoan society blossomed in the A.D. 900s and early 1000s, it probably incorporate several once-isolated tribal groups speaking different languages…. As Chacoan society came undone, those ancient linguistic, social, and religious differences would have been rich fodder for ethnic and tribal hatreds acted out in the uplands…[just as] Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s threw off…Tito’s nation and returned to medieval society. —Stuart/Anasazi America p. 143

Josip Broz Tito, the chief architect of Yugoslavia organized as a socialist federation. He was regarded as a benevolent dictator. He wasn’t a Nazi, but he did exert iron-fisted control over the many cultural groups that comprised Yugoslavia, which collapsed into civil and racial war in the early 1990s.

Imagine if, rather than exterminated Jews and Christians and other groups, Hitler had successfully coerced them all to live together under the Nazi regime. That’s the kind of boiling cauldron of emotions and tensions Tito kept under lid—until it blew.

The Anasazi would have faced very similar circumstances.

The source of Anasazi Nazi violence: blame the Toltecs

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[D]uring this protracted period of Toltec cultural strife, between roughly A.D. 800 and 1000, waves of diverse Mexican traits were carried into the American Southwest by cultists, priests, warriors, pilgrims, traders, miners, farmers, and others fleeing or displaced by the widespread unrest and civil war in central Mexico. —Turner/Man Corn p. 463

From a new source, physical anthropologist Christy G. Turner III, we have corollary evidence and interpretation of evidence that the wave of Anasazi Nazis that invaded the Four Corners came from the collapsing Toltec nation centered near present-day Mexico City.

The ancient bones Turner examines tell a story of extreme violence that would have been a Four Corners Holocaust a thousand years ago.

Violence as social control: a Hitler method

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We propose that in the Chaco area, some such group of Mexican [immigrants] was able to use these practices for social control, terrorizing the local populace into submission and developing the hierarchical social system we see reflected in the region’s architecture. —Turner/Man Corn p. 463

The architecture certainly does tell a story of extreme social stratification, centralized authority, and Toltec influence from the south.

If Hitler had more time before he over-reached with his war machine, he may well have built enormous grotesque structures that would stand today as testament to authority and hierarchy gone wrong.

The “intrusive terrorism” of the Anasazi Nazis

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[T]he Chaco phenomenon suggests something that might be called “intrusive terrorism”: enter a place uninvited, often by force, and coerce by use of systematic violence and intimidation. —Turner/Man Corn p. 482

This essentially describes the Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland and France and other places before and during World War II.

Tactics change. But the strategy of the extreme use of violent force is perennial among humans.

How did the Anasazi Nazis remake the Four Corners?

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We propose that these southerners [from Mexico, mainly the Toltecs]…entered the San Juan basin around A.D. 900 and found a suspicious but pliant population whom they terrorized into reproducing the theocratic lifestyle they had previously known in Mesoamerica. This involved heavy payments of tribute, constructing the Chaco system of great houses and roads, and providing victims for ceremonial sacrifice. The Mexicans achieved their objectives through the use of warfare, violent example, and terrifying cult ceremonies that included human sacrifice and cannibalism. —Turner/Man Corn pp. 482-483

There’s that “c-word,” cannibalism, again. It keeps cropping up in any deep inquiry into the Anasazi.

The Nazis didn’t eat their victims, insofar as I know.

But the Anasazi did.

Maybe the Anasazi were worse than Nazis. If, that is, there’s a moral scale that can be applied to terrorism, mass murder, ceremonial human sacrifice, and cannibalism.

Anasazi Nazi swastika: it’s mere coincidence

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Far older than Germany’s Nazi regime, this [swastika-motif] icon of the Anasazi (or ancestral Hopi) had been considered sacred rather than malevolent. Specifically, it represented the center of Hopi land. —David/Hopi Swastika

The swastika is such a basic symbol, I believe if you give a hundred kids crayons and wait long enough, all one hundred will eventually draw a swastika.

And if there’s one who doesn’t? We should probably elevate them to High Priest.

Conclusion

The Anasazi-Nazi match is not perfect by any means. But the similarities are, from what I see, undeniable.

This is a difficult topic. We don’t want to think of any nature-loving Native American culture as being anything like the modern evil Nazis.

But they were.

This is background research for…

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Clik here to view.The Next Skywatcher: Prequel to The Last Skywatcher Triple Trilogy Series

Warning! This story contains graphic violence including cannibalism.

“I really enjoyed it. It was well-written.” —Thomas Windes, thirty-seven-year veteran Anasazi archaeologist with the National Park Service.

Raised by his beloved Sky Chief grandfather and a mysterious albino woman, Tuwa expects to become the next skywatcher.

When a strange star appears in the sky, so bright it shines during the day, the High Priest, backed by ultraviolent warriors from the South, demands blood sacrifice.

Tuwa’s grandfather, a vocal opponent of the foreigners, is murdered in a public ceremony, cooked, and served to the stunned crowd. Next in line are Tuwa’s adopted mother and the girl he loves, Chumana.

Unable to watch, Tuwa flees in a blind panic into dark wilderness where he’s rescued by a long-distance trader who collects orphans to protect him and carry his goods.

Three years later, Tuwa returns with his hardened band of orphans intent upon revenge—only to discover that the stakes are much higher than he had imagined.

Mere revenge may not be enough.

Jeff Posey writes novels inspired by the Anasazi culture of the American Southwest a thousand years ago.

“Cultures that have dramatically collapsed,” he says, “should at least compel us to dream up stories about how such things can happen.”

He does not, under any circumstances, advocate cannibalism.