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GODS AND BEASTS -- THE NAZIS AND THE OCCULT |
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CHAPTER 8: Atlantis, the Home of the Master Race
Science hasn't yet been able to give us a completely satisfactory answer to the question of how the universe came to be. The occultists are much bolder. From time to time, they have advanced different theories -- always colorful -- about the origin of the world and of human beings. The Nazis favored the occult cosmology of an Austrian named Hans Hoerbiger. Born in 1860 to a poor family in Carinthia, Hoerbiger became a blacksmith's apprentice as a youth, and when he scraped together enough money, studied mechanics in Vienna. Eventually, he became a mechanical engineer and inventor. As a boy, he was fond of lying out of doors at night and gazing up at the sky, and the intuition came to him that the moon was an ocean of ice. He extended the vision as a young engineer, in the instant when he saw molten steel poured onto snow and the ground explode violently. He took this as a microcosm for the kind of cataclysm that might have given birth to the universe. In the next two decades, he explored the tension between cosmic ice and fire, which culminated in the publication of a 772-page book, Glazial-kosmogonie, in 1913. The "world-ice theory" (Welteislehre) is that the universe came into existence when a gigantic chunk of cosmic ice collided with the sun, causing an explosion whose continuing aftermath explains the Great Deluge, the Ice Age, and the differentiation of races. This glacial cosmology went so far as to offer an entirely new theory about the origin of the moon -- one which bears a striking similarity to Gurdjieff's. The moon, said Hoerbiger, was originally an independent planet, circling the sun in an independent orbit. It eventually trespassed on the earth's orbit, becoming earth's satellite. The present moon, Hoerbiger continued, was not the first to be captured by the earth; primary, secondary, and tertiary moons had already collided with our planet, and the present moon, captured about thirteen thousand years ago, will eventually crash into the earth too, billions of years hence. Hoerbiger's ideas were happily pounced upon by occultists, with good reason. He believed that on the three previous occasions when the moon had collided with the earth, the catastrophes which resulted were recorded in the legends about the Flood, about the lost continent of Atlantis, and about the Twilight of the Gods. Atlantis has always been the favorite place of all occultists. According to ancient tradition, it was a large island in the Atlantic Ocean. Plato, in Timaeus, described it as larger than Libya and Asia Minor combined. In Critias, he spoke of it glowingly as a powerful nation which later was completely engulfed by the sea. Whether the continent of Atlantis ever really existed or was the product of human imagination, it has provided ample occasion for speculation. To occultists, it became associated with man's search for hidden wisdom. The supposed Atlanteans, like the Vril people, presumably developed supernormal powers. They were the models upon which esoteric groups patterned themselves, usually according to a blueprint envisioned by their masters in a trancelike state. Atlantis provided these groups with many hours of lectures and workshops, and thousands of books have been written about it -- amazing, when you consider that the only original references to it occur in the two works of Plato, Timaeus and Critias. In neither of these works, moreover, does Plato claim to have firsthand information. One of his characters merely quotes the Athenian jurist Solon. We are never sure whether this is an accurate account of Solon's belief or merely a literary convention.
The latest theory, of course -- and this, too, has been disputed -- holds that Plato's Atlantis may have been confused with the real Aegean island of Thera, devastated by a tremendous volcanic explosion in about 1500 B.C. Enthusiasts have sought Atlantis in all sorts of unlikely places. The German volkisch occult groups placed it in Thule, the northernmost part of the earth, and made it the original home of the Aryan master race. They were delighted to have Hoerbiger explain why that home had disappeared. The glaciers caused by the last falling moon, when they melted, engulfed the whole Atlantean civilization in a deluge, memories of which exist in the legends of all people. This was the fall of man; from this period he degenerated. The occult tradition teaches that some wise and powerful members of the highly developed race went underground and saved themselves from the Great Flood. Disciples of Hoerbiger also were pleased to point out that the age of giants, set forth in myth and legend, was fully explained by his theory. When a satellite approaches nearer to the earth, the gravitational pull of the earth becomes greater, tides become stronger, and, as Peter Kolisimo explains in Timeless Earth,
Hoerbiger believed that cosmic events recur. The Ice Age, which seemed to him to recur in cycles of six thousand years, was about to come again. Only this time, supermen who had learned to control cosmic fire and ice would have the option to stop the cycle and make their civilization immortal. But Hoerbiger was not all cosmic ice and fire. Indeed, his metaphysics also took in the view that there was a world apart from this one, where the laws of cosmic ice were not operable. The Judea-Christian notion of primitive man slowly inching his way up to civilization did not accord well with the volkisch Hoerbigerians. To them, it was precisely the other way round: Moons ago, Aryan men had created a marvelous civilization which had been destroyed by the Ice Age; we had yet to approach their splendor. Traces of the lost paradise existed, for those who had eyes to see, in ancient giant monuments, statues, and complex mathematical and engineering constructions. Hoerbiger was one of many in the scientific community who aligned themselves with the Nazis. After World War I, Jewish scientists and scholars were more readily accepted into the universities, since the republic no longer allowed them to be arbitrarily excluded. The increase in Jewish participation in major universities, along with the anti-Semitic propaganda, accounted for the push among German scholars and scientists to "purge" the Jews and thus advance their own careers. Some, of course, were not just opportunistic, but really believed the volkisch arguments. Hans Hoerbiger was at the height of his fame in 1925 when he issued a declaration to Austrian and German scientists:
At sixty-five, Hoerbiger had pitted himself against orthodox astronomy. His appeal, obviously, was to emotion rather than reason. With his white flowing beard, very much like that of his fellow Viennese, Guido von List, Hoerbiger, too, played the role of mystical prophet, warning that "objective science is a pernicious invention, a totem of decadence." He sought to replace it with an inspired piercing of the mysteries. Illumination would come intuitively with the development of "higher" consciousness. In the post-World War I period, Albert Einstein was the most famous scientist in Germany. Hostility toward him increased in direct proportion to his growing fame. German scientists were made acutely aware that he was a Jew, a pacifist, and a radical. His theories posed a threat to some experimental physicists, who saw in them the eventual ascendancy of theoretical physics. His theories were labeled "meaningless" or "unverifiable abstractions," or else he was accused of not being original. Men who championed the National Socialist cause concentrated on him as their chief scapegoat. Hoerbiger was one of these men. His success as an engineer had set him up well financially, and he started what amounted to a political campaign, trumpeting his visionary theories like a revolutionary agitator. He wanted to wean people away from the "uselessness" of mathematics and to replace it with an enlightened "knowing." His propaganda spread through mass media, tracts, posters, meetings, and lectures. A monthly periodical, The Key to World Events, went to German and Austrian Hoerbigerians. His organization published many books, articles, and pamphlets. Hoerbiger was greatly helped in disseminating his propaganda by Nazi Storm Troopers. Dietrich Eckart introduced Hitler to Hoerbiger's ideas, and it was a meeting of like minds. Both men knew the importance of mythology in the lives of the masses. The Storm Troopers among Hoerbiger's followers used the same tactics as Hitler in disseminating their fantasies. Other astronomers' meetings were invaded with cries of "Down with the orthodox scientists!" Rivals were proselytized in the streets, handed leaflets which threatened: "When we have won, you and your like will be begging in the gutter." Hoerbiger admonished industrialists: "Either you will learn to believe in me, or you will be treated as an enemy." They were told to have prospective employees sign a statement reading: "I swear that I believe in the theory of eternal ice." Other scientists, at first, stood their ground and attacked Hoerbiger's theories. Gradually, as Hitler's strongmen helped to swell his pseudoscience into a popular movement, they were silenced. The system meshed well with the temper of the times and was perfectly tailored to Nazi mythology. Hoerbiger died in 1931, before he could see some of the consequences of his dogma. Hitler Youth were recruited to spread the word. In 1935, Heinrich Himmler, an admirer, established the Ahnenerbe ("Ancestral Research") branch of the SS for the purpose of subsidizing researches into occult theories of ancestral origins of Aryanism. He sent the German playwright Edmund Kiss to Abyssinia, to look for supporting evidence for Hoerbiger's theories, and made another Hoerbiger disciple, Dr. Hans Robert Scultetus, head of the Ahnenerbe branch which was to concentrate on weather forecasts resting on the world-ice cosmology. Literature about this cosmology was handed out freely to high-ranking Nazis. A German expedition to Tibet tried to find fossilized remains of giants. Anyone who attacked Hoerbiger was promptly suppressed by the Ahnenerbe. In 1936, despite rumors that he was a Freemason and a Roman Catholic, Hoerbiger's son, Hans Robert Hoerbiger, was appointed cosmic-ice Fuhrer by Himmler, who insisted that if the theory were shorn of its fantastic elements, which might hurt his flawless reputation, it would be "scientific" enough to constitute a "really Aryan intellectual treasure." A Nazi pamphlet announced that cosmic ice stood in the same relation to Einstein's theory of relativity as the Edda did to the Talmud. No one was in a position to do more for Hoerbiger's cosmology than Hitler. He promised that when he built his ideal city in Linz, he would dedicate an observatory to Hoerbiger. After Hitler came to power, a number of celebrated engineers and scientists succumbed to the cosmic-ice theory. One tract drew attention to the natural affinity between the two self-made Austrians:
The few times that these two Messianic leaders met, Hoerbiger actually outtalked Hitler in his harangue against modern science, which not only did not understand the why of anything but had managed to separate man from the spirit. Jews like Einstein and Freud distinguished themselves in their fields and at the same time helped to destroy the belief in magic. They were pacifists in the bargain. Einstein had called World War I "a fateful misunderstanding ... an incomprehensible deception," and Freud went so far as to claim that all war was a mass regression to a primitive state, writing: "Never has any event been destructive of so much that is valuable in the commonwealth of humanity, nor so debasing to the highest that we know." With Hoerbiger, on the other hand, Hitler was comfortably in the realm of Wagner and Nietzsche. The magic of myth would be reestablished in Germany, with its giants and dwarfs, masters and slaves, transgressions, sacrifices, and punishments. Hitler took great pride in being the enemy of "Jewish, liberal" science. He confessed to Rauschning:
He often expounded on cosmic catastrophe at the dinner table, holding that "we shall never raise the veil between our present world and that which preceded us" unless intuition teaches exact science the path to follow. Hoerbiger, said Hitler, ranked with Ptolemy and Copernicus. His theory that water "is in reality melted ice (instead of ice's being frozen water) ... amounted to a revolution, and everybody rebelled against" him, proving once again that science grappled "with the spirit of routine." Hoerbiger was not accepted by the scientific establishment because "the fact is," said Hitler, "men do not wish to know." Hitler based some important decisions on Hoerbigerian premises. For example, cosmic ice experts caused delays, because they were concerned about the delicate balance between fire and ice. They feared a rocket in space might cause a global disaster. (The military head of the first German rocket tests, Walter Dornberger, also relates that the work was delayed for months at a time because Hitler dreamed that no V-2 rocket would reach England. As an occultist, Hitler took his dreams quite literally.) Hoerbiger's was not the only occult cosmological theory in which the Nazis believed. There was also the theory of the hollow earth, which received support in Germany after World War I. A leading proponent, Karl Neupert, held that the earth was a spherical bubble, with humanity on the inside, not, as commonly supposed, on the outside. In World War II, certain German naval circles tried to apply the hollow-earth theory. According to an article in Popular Astronomy in June 1946, entitled "German Astronomy During the War":
The experiment did not work. Nor did an earlier one, called the Magdeburg Project, in which an engineer who was connected with the municipal government of that city devised a way of testing the hollow-earth theory by sending up a rocket. As Willy Ley writes in Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space, "it began like a story by Jules Verne. A mentally decrepit 'philosopher' had written a badly printed pamphlet about the true shape of the universe, in which he insisted that the earth is the universe, that we live inside a hollow globe of the dimensions of the earth, that there is nothing outside that globe, and that the universe of the astronomers is only an optical illusion." If the rocket crashed at the opposite end of the earth, that would prove people lived inside a hollow globe. The rocket cost 25,000 marks, and another 15,000 were spent on a city holiday. Several tests ended in disaster. Either the rocket did not get off the ground, or it smashed, or it flew away, never to be seen again. After the war, Dr. Fischer protested that the Nazis had forced him "to do crazy things," which had taken him away from more fruitful research, such as he was able to engage in later when he helped America to develop the H-bomb. Teutonic mythology speaks of the end of all things, the twilight of gods and men, when the world will be consumed in flames because the age of evil has come. Winter will follow winter, in a world chained in ice, and then a new age will come, with a regenerating race. The apocalyptic vision within the occult tradition is similar. The Fall, and the accompanying Flood, are punishments for man's transgressions, and will purge him of sin. After the Deluge, a Second Coming. Hoerbiger and Hitler believed in this mystique. Modern man, in the twentieth century, had a chance to redeem the species. Hoerbiger and Hitler would point the way. By spring 1944, the Nazis grew desperate. Hitler must have had grave doubts about man's redemption. The turning point had come for them in the Russian campaign of 1941. Advised by Hoerbigerians to expect a mild winter, Hitler did not even provide his troops with adequate warm clothing. The icy winds did not blow away his mystical faith that he could win. The Russian winter was Germany's most serious military crisis, and Hitler would never admit that he had been wrong. The Russian campaign mystified everyone else. Hitler had promised, in his early days, that Germany would never surrender again. If she could not conquer her enemies, she would drag them down to destruction with her. Once Hitler was convinced that Germany could not be saved, he made good his promise. When the American and Russian troops were outside of Berlin, Hitler ordered all food and clothing stores, all bridges and dams, all military, industrial, transportation, and communication facilities in the whole country destroyed. Any Germans who stood in the way were to be killed. Albert Speer, nonmystical, one of the few Nazi leaders who could still communicate with Hitler, was horrified at the order. He tried to argue Hitler out of it by appealing to a concern for the future. After all, many of those bridges, highways, and buildings were Speer's own creations, as the chief architect of the Third Reich:
The Germans had proved themselves not to be ready yet to become the master race. Hitler's leadership had been wasted on them. They deserved to perish. Hitler himself committed suicide on April 30, 1945, a deliberately chosen day, according to J. H. Brennan:
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