The roots of Nazi UFO mythology lie in the closely related Hitler survival myth.
Early myths of German revanche were linked with the idea that Adolf Hitler had escaped from the Berlin Bunker during the closing days of the war and made his way to safety abroad. Conflicting accounts of events in the Bunker, circumstantial evidence, and early Soviet suggestions that Hitler was alive created widespread speculation regarding his fate.
Stories of Hitler’s last-minute marriage to Eva Braun and their flight to a new life began to circulate in the international press during the summer of 1945.
On 16 July a sensational article in the "Chicago Times" had Hitler and Eva Braun landing in Argentina and living on a German-owned estate in Patagonia.
The story was reprinted by every major American and European paper, including the "New York Times", the "Baltimore Sun", The "Times of London", and "Le Monde".
The story was most likely prompted by the late surrender in early July of the German U530 submarine at the Argentine port of Mar del Plata.
Several Buenos Aires papers reported earlier clandestine landings by rubber boats along the coast.
However, on 17 July the newspaper "Critica" stated that the Führer and Eva Braun had landed from the U-530 in Antarctica, noting that the possible place of disembarkation was Queen Maud Land, the destination of a German Antarctic expedition in 1938–39.
The late surrender of German submarines in Argentina during the summer of 1945 played a key role in focusing press interest on Hitler’s escape to the Southern Hemisphere.
The U-530 had given itself up at Mar del Plata on 10 July with an excessively large crew of fifty-four men, considerable stocks of food and an odd cargo—more than five hundred large drums containing cigarettes.
On 17 August 1945, three months after the capitulation of the Third Reich, another German submarine, U-977, surrendered at Mar del Plata.
Captain Heinz Schäffer had only thirty-two men under his command on board. The logs of both submarines showed that both had left Kristiansund, Norway, on 2 May 1945. As in the case of the U-530, the crew were all exceptionally young and unmarried men.
A third submarine had meanwhile surrendered at Leixoes on the coast of Portugal on 5 June.
The mystery of the submarines’ long voyages, young crews, exceptional supplies and unknown whereabouts during the intervening months before their surrender fed speculation that the submarines had been involved in a “phantom convoy” bringing Hitler and other top Nazis with auxiliary forces to a secret hideout in Antarctica.
Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s massive international mission to Antarctica in 1946–47 offered another suggestive piece of evidence for the Allies’ concern.
On 2 December 1946 a United States fleet of thirteen ships, equipped with four thousand navy troops, amphibious tanks, helicopters and two hundred airplanes, sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, to join up with Anglo-Norwegian and Soviet task forces to monitor Antarctica, ostensibly for the purposes of scientific research and to establish territorial claims.
On arriving in Antarctica, the expedition quickly ran into difficulties. Byrd lost four airplanes and hastily withdrew, abandoning the whole operation.
A Chilean journalist, Lee Van Atta, quoted Byrd to the effect that he was concerned about the threat to US security from unidentified enemies in the polar region who could fly from in from either pole.
A Hungarian exile living in Argentina, Ladislao Szabó, authored a book, "Hitler esta vivo" [Hitler Is Alive] in 1947, which described the abortive U.S. Antarctic mission and the captured U-Boats in the context of Hitler’s escape to a secret Antarctic Nazi base. The book was immediately translated into French and sponsored a spate of sensational magazine stories from 1947 into the early 1950s.
The next stage in Nazi UFO mythology was the link between post-war saucer sightings and the revelation that German engineers had worked on flying disks during the Third Reich.
In March 1950, Flugkapitän Rudolf Schriever gave an interview to the German news magazine "Der Spiegel".
He described how he had begun pondering solutions for vertical takeoff while working as a chief pilot at Eger now Cheb] in 1942.
He designed a central domed cabin for the crew and controls that was surrounded by a circular plane of rotating turbine blades driven by three jets mounted below.
The whole disc had a diameter of 49 feet [14.4 meters]. The turbines could develop 1,650–1,800 rpm with a thrust of 100 meters/second.
Schriever calculated that his 3-tonne disc could achieve a flying speed of 4,200 kilometers/second with a range of 6,000 kilometers.
Once the Messerschmitt jet became available in 1942, the project began to be developed by him and his team at the BMW works at Prague.
Schriever stated here that he worked on his designs until 15 April 1945 but fled before the Russian advance into Czechoslovakia. Living with his parents-in-law at Bremerhaven-Lehe, he related how his workshop was burgled in August 1948, and his designs for the flying disc and a model were stolen. He was convinced that Czech engineers had since reconstructed his flying disk for a foreign power.
More details soon emerged. According to a later report, the Schriever flying dis was actually built and rolled out of the hangar for a test flight in April 1945:
“A fantastic creation of nearly 15 meters in diameter, in its center the plexiglass cupola of the control room glistening in the sunlight".
A slight technical fault and an air-raid warning postponed the flight indefinitely. The works shut down on 9 May in the midst of a Czech revolt.
Schriever and his colleagues blew up his flying disc and he escaped, driving his BMW to the Bavarian Forest in the American zone. Here he repaired agricultural machinery for a while, until his belongings, including the designs, were plundered.
In early 1953, the A. V. Roe Company in Canada announced its development of a circular jet aircraft with a speed of 1,500 mph.
Another German engineer, Georg Klein, former special commissioner in Albert Speer’s Ministry of Armaments and Munitions, claimed that such designs were already current in the Third Reich. He identified at least two classes of German flying disks. The first was developed at Breslau by Richard Miethe, a V-2 rocket engineer, and consisted of a non-rotating disk 42 meters in diameter. This disc fell into Russian hands, while Miethe fled via France to the United States, where he joined the A. V. Roe Company.
The other model was the disc of Rudolf Schriever and Klaus Habermohl built in Prague, consisting of a broad, flat ring of moving turbine blades around a fixed, globe-shaped pilot’s cabin.
Astonishingly, Klein recalled that he had been present at this disc’s first manned test flight on 14 February 1945, when the craft reached an altitude of 12,400 meters within three minutes and developed a maximum speed of 2,200 kilometers/hour in horizontal flight.
It was in the period 1951 to 1955 that the Swiss engineer Erich Halik, a member of Wilhelm Landig’s circle, published his articles in "Mensch und Schicksal". He was certain that post-war sightings of flying saucers related to German craft.
He devoted careful analysis to George Adamski’s account of a cigar-shaped mother ship, from which a saucer flew forth in November 1952.
Halik argued that the naive American, Adamski, could not interpret the “Black Sun” insignia nor recognize the Swastikas in an “Alien” inscription.
Halik concluded that German flying saucers were now operating from secret polar bases in the Arctic.
Halik’s publication in an Austrian esoteric magazine attracted little notice at the time, but here in outline was the kernel of the Nazi UFO mythos:
The flying disks were an important part of a German plan to create an extra-territorial state prior to a renewed attack on the Allied enemies after 1945.
Nazi Ufologists in the late 1980s would recycle Halik’s articles and match Adamski’s photographs with new “discoveries” of wartime SS designs.
In 1955, a book published in South Africa gave more details of the Miethe disc.
Known as the V-7, it had no rotating parts and was driven by twelve adjustable jets, five rearward for forward flight and the other seven for directional steering.
With a range of 13,000 miles, the V-7 was able to reach 1,500–2,000 miles per hour.
One of these craft was flown from the V-rocket base Peenemünde and crashed on Spitsbergen. Another fell into Russian hands at Breslau and was shipped, togther with two technicians, to a site in Siberia.
A flying disk with Russian inscriptions was reported to have landed in Pomerania in July 1953, while the motive power of the A.V. Roe design was based on the V-7.
Besides emphasizing the advanced German contribution to aeronautical engineering during the Second World War, these stories implied that foreign powers had seized this German technology and were now secretly developing flying disks—hence the wave of saucer sightings.
As the war receded into the past, more technical experts from Germany and Italy published substantial accounts of German secret weapons research and development during the Second World War.
In 1959 Major Rudolf Lusar, who had worked at the German Patent Office, wrote a lengthy account of the extra-ordinary variety of missiles, flying bombs and long-range rockets in operational use before the end of the war. He also discussed the flying discs of Schriever, Habermohl and Miethe, who were supported by an Italian physicist called Bellonzo [Belluzzo].
The Italian connection was strengthened by Renato Vesco, an Italian aircraft engineer, who had worked with the Germans at Fiat’s immense underground installations at Lake Garda, producing advanced aeronautical devices that were tested at the Hermann Göring Institute in Riva del Garda.
Vesco described an astonishing variety of advanced secret weapons in wartime Germany, including explosive gases, blower cannons, television-guided bombs, and pilotless fighter planes.
Foremost among these for subsequent UFO speculation was the Kugelblitz, an unmanned circular aircraft with gyroscopic stabilization, and the Feuerball ant-iradar device, a spherical armored shell that could follow enemy bombers. Its fiery halo overionized the atmosphere in the vicinity of the plane, disabling its radar and sometimes interfering with engine ignition.
Allied air crews had first become afraid of these huge fireballs pursuing them across the German night skies in the autumn of 1944. Invisible to radar themselves, the fireballs could fly in formation at high speeds, approach, disappear and regroup. In Vesco’s view, the Feuerball was an early antecedent of the flying saucers.
Vesco also documented the titanic industrial effort that the Third Reich made in 1944–45 in order not to succumb.
In August 1944 Hitler turned planning and construction of new weapons over to the SS, whereupon Himmler appointed SS-Gruppenführer Hans Kammler as director of secret war production. Besides its own private research and testing centers, the SS now had full access to other governmental sites.
As Allied strategic bombing intensified, huge underground installations were rapidly built, many with slave labor. These included the enormous underground complexes of Nordhausen and Kahla in the Harz-Thuringian Forest area. With two major tunnels a mile long connected by sixty-two transverse tunnels, the Mittelwerke factories at Dora near Nordhausen provided a total of twelve miles of underground installations. In February 1945 the famous V-weapons center at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast was partially evacuated to the neighboring village of Bleicherode Ost.
Shortly before the German surrender, the Dora complex had begun the large-scale manufacture of V-2 rockets and V-1 flying bombs, while the Bleicherode site developed the giant rocket-torpedo A-9/A-10 to bomb the United States.
The first connection between post-war flying saucers and Nazi fugitives in the Southern Hemisphere was made by Michael X. Barton in a couple of sensational books published in Los Angeles. His first book, "We Want You: Is Hitler Alive?" [1960], was based on the U-530 and U-977 stories in the "Police Gazette" articles of the early 1950s. Barton claimed that Hitler was in Argentina, where UFOs were being developed in secret underground installations by German scientists, and he also alluded to the existence of neo-Nazis in West Germany and Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party in the United States.
However, these UFOs were allegedly modeled on the silent “electro-magnetic” bell shaped flying saucers built of copper at Vienna by Viktor Schauberger, an Austrian inventor, in 1940.
Barton’s second book, "The German Saucer Story" [1968, described the Schriever-Habermohl and Bellonzo-Schriever-Miethe discs, concluding that German scientists were now busy assembling large-size flying disks in underground factories, comparable to the wartime facilities in Nordhausen and Bleicherode, in remote areas of South America, South Africa and possibly Antarctica.
During the 1970s, Wilhelm Landig and Ernst Zündel, both neo-Nazi publishers and authors, blended these stories, hints and suggestions into a powerful and elaborate myth of Nazi resurgence. In novels and non-fiction works they described how, during the war, the Third Reich had succeeded in establishing secret bases in the Arctic and Antarctica. Naval convoys had brought labor, expertise and material to the icy wastes of the polar regions, where huge underground factories were built to produce the flying saucers for continued hostilities in the event of a Nazi defeat in Europe.
The remoteness and inhospitality of the polar regions, surrounded by pack ice and stormy seas, is juxtaposed with a technocratic Utopia.
Here, throughout the post-war era, SS and Luftwaffe officers and soldiers live and work under strict discipline, while their ever more advanced saucers fly covert sorties across the world. The fearful nature of the Third Reich and the burden of its defeat are thus deflected in a science fiction vision of German technical and racial superiority as the huge saucers rise above the brilliant white snows of an icebound Shangri-La.
In 1971 Wilhelm Landig published "Götzen gegen Thule", the first novel in his Thule trilogy.
This epic adventure of three German servicemen across the world at the end of the war combines Aryan myths from the works of Julius Evola, Herman Wirth and Edmund Kiß with Nazi revanchism. Subtitling his book “A Romance Full of Realities”, Landig weaves Nazi UFOs into his narrative in an almost routine manner.
The men are flown in a V-7 disk to Point 103, the secret base in Arctic Canada established by the Black Sun division of the SS. There are references to similar disk construction projects in Prague and Breslau. The men also witness a “Manisola,” another kind of disc powered by metaphysical, anti-gravitational energy.
Equipped with extensive flood-lighting, workshops and living quarters, the secret base is a large site with rocket-launching pads and caves excavated from the surrounding mountain range to serve as hangars for advanced aircraft. The men then fly to Prague to evacuate Schriever, his colleagues and the disc from the BMW plant in the midst of a Czech uprising and Soviet tank advance.
Landig’s first novel only mentioned these late wartime discs and a major Arctic base, but it clearly served to inspire a much-expanded Nazi UFO mythology from Ernst Zündel. Zündel was well known as a German Canadian publisher in Toronto specializing in neo-Nazi literature for worldwide distribution, especially in West Germany. By the late 1970s, he was swamping the German Nazi underground with books, fliers, audiotapes and videos that glorified Hitler and the Third Reich, promoted Holocaust denial and drew attention to Allied war crimes.
Born in the Black Forest in 1939, Ernst Christof Friedrich Zündel had trained as a graphic artist in Germany and emigrated to Canada in 1958. In 1961 he befriended the veteran French Canadian fascist Adrien Arcand, under whose influence he became an ardent German nationalist concerned with rehabilitating the Third Reich.
He founded his own publishing house, Samisdat Publications in Toronto, to publish "The Auschwitz Lie" [1974], a translation of Thies Christophersen’s notorious essay on Holocaust denial published in Germany the preceding year. An immediate best-seller among far right and anti-Zionist groups, the book established Samisdat as a flourishing underground Nazi publishing concern. By the summer of 1979, more than 100,000 copies of the book had been sold in five languages.
Zündel now wanted to reach new audiences with a revamped and exciting image of Hitler and National Socialism.
In the economic recession following the rise in oil prices in 1973–74, hopes for left-wing revolution were giving way to “New Age” ideas of spiritual renewal, fantasy and the occult. This period notably witnessed the publishing peak in the modern mysteriosophy of Nazi occultism. At this time, the books of Erich von Däniken, Robert Charroux, Raymond Drake and others about gods, ancient astronauts and flying saucers were achieving huge worldwide sales in several languages.
The widespread UFO phenomenon was increasingly being co-opted by religious sects in the English-speaking world such as the Aetherius Society as evidence of divine instructors.
Zündel exploited this new mood for the purposes of neo-Nazi revisionism. The Hitler survival myth, UFOs and secret post-war Nazi bases in Antarctica provided fantastic and sensational topics for his next Samisdat books.
Eventually, in a powerful myth of national salvation and Hitler’s messianic world role, he would claim that the Nazis had extra-terrestrial origins or guidance.
His first offering was "UFOs: Unbekanntes Flugobjekt? - Letzte Geheimwaffe des Dritten Reiches" [1974], written by Willibald Mattern, a German émigré living in Santiago de Chile.
The book was an unashamed paean to the Third Reich with extensive quotes from Hitler’s "Mein Kampf" and denunciations of a Jewish world conspiracy. But the Reich was apparently not dead.
On 24 February 1945 Hitler had declared:
“In this war there will be neither victors nor vanquished, only the dead and the survivors, but the Last Battalion will be German!”
This post-war German battle force, active and ready to resume world combat, was directly linked to the post-war wave of flying saucers.
Recycling stories from the South American press, Ladislao Szabó’s "Hitler esta vivo" [1947], and Michael X.’s "We Want You: Is Hitler Alive?" [1960], Mattern dwelled at length on the two U-Boats that had surrendered at Mar del Plata months after the German surrender in the summer of 1945. Providing full crew lists, Mattern commented on the youth of the crew and on their lack of living relatives. U-530 and U-977 were supposedly just the stragglers of a ghost convoy of U-Boats that had carried Hitler and other top Nazi leaders from Norway to permanent UFO bases in Antarctica.
In 1975 Ernst Zündel next published an expanded English-language version of the Mattern text, followed by his own books on the German Antarctic theme, "Secret Nazi Polar Expeditions" [1978] and "Hitler am Südpol?" [Hitler at the South Pole?] in 1979.
The official German Antarctic Expedition of 1938–39 assumed a long-term strategic importance. Led by Captain Alfred Ritscher, a veteran Arctic explorer, this scientific expedition carried out extensive geographical, meteorological and zoological research in Queen Maud Land, which had formed part of the Norwegian territorial claim on Antarctica since 1930. Two large flying boats of the Dornier-Wal type flew daily from the expedition ship 'Schwabenland', taking over 11,000 photographs, occasionally landing, covering in all some 600,000 square kilometers and photomapping 350,000 square kilometers.
The discovery of high alpine peaks [Mühlig-Hofmann Mountains] and a group of warm-water oases [Schirrmacher Lakes] amid the frozen wastes was of particular interest as it suggested that there were hospitable micro-climates within the ice-bound continent. At regular intervals of 20 kilometers, the airplanes dropped thousands of metal marker flags bearing Swastikas to claim the newly surveyed territory for Germany, which was henceforth called Neuschwabenland.
Congratulatory messages from Hitler and Hermann Göring greeted the expedition on its return to Hamburg in April 1939.
Zündel and Mattern regarded this expedition as the first step in a far reaching German policy to develop the polar continent into both a future refuge and a power base from which the Nazis could wage war even after defeat in Europe.
More than this: the global phenomenon of flying saucer sightings, first noted in 1947, confirmed the presence of a Nazi colony with highly advanced technology in Antarctica.
As the saucer projects in Bohemia and Silesia progressed and the military situation in Europe deteriorated, evacuation plans were put in hand.
The saucer factories and test sites were dismantled and shipped to Antarctica by regular U-Boat convoys.
In this powerful myth of national resurrection, both authors hinted that the Germans had built up a gigantic yet secret complex of underground factories, saucer silos and armed garrisons in the warm oases of Neuschwabenland toward the end of the war.
After the fall of the Third Reich, the secret Nazi colony in Antarctica continued to develop the flying saucers in complete security deep below the three-mile-thick icecap.
With the advent of the world wide UFO phenomenon, consternation grew in the victorious Allied camp. Both Mattern and Zündel cite “Operation Highjump,” Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s Antarctic mission with combined American, British and Soviet forces in 1946–47, as compelling evidence of the threat posed by the Nazi “Last Battalion”.
Byrd himself was quoted that the intention was “to break the last desperate resistance of Adolf Hitler . . . in the Queen Maud Land region, or to destroy him.".
Bases were established, mapping missions flown and thousands of photographs taken. The German response was swift and deadly. In the vicinity of the secret Nazi base, American airplanes suffered instrumental failure. Within forty-eight hours, four aircraft had been lost. Byrd hastily aborted the operation, and the entire fleet returned to the United States. Since 1947, Antarctic Nazi power has remained inviolate.
Against a scenario of increasing racial chaos and economic catastrophe, thousands of Nazi UFOs will one day fly forth to restore German world power in an apocalyptic act of deliverance.
Like Landig’s first novel, the Samisdat titles quickly became hot tips among neo-Nazis in West Germany. Zündel also spiced his abridged English language version of the Mattern book with esoteric ideas, linking German millenarian myths with extra-terrestrial visitations.
Did the Nazis in Antarctica discover access to the “Inner Earth”, long ago described in Nordic legends and sagas and assiduously cultivated by the Thule Society? Had the Nazis discovered long-hidden secrets on their expeditions to the Himalayas and Tibet? Perhaps extra-terrestrials from other galaxies had assisted the Germans with the saucer projects, having recognized their receptiveness to the new technology. Perhaps this collaboration was based on some shared ancestral kinship.
He recalled Reinhold Schmidt’s UFO contactee account of a “Saturnian” spacecraft whose crew spoke German and behaved like German soldiers, and speculated whether the German nation was indeed a colony of Saturn, long since settled on Earth.
Why were the Germans so “different”? Could this explain why the Germans always excel as soldiers, engineers and technologists? Was Hitler planted on this planet to pull back Western civilization from the brink of degenerate self-extinction?
Back in Vienna, Landig swiftly elaborated these ideas in "Wolfszeit um Thule" [1980], the second action-packed novel in his Thule trilogy.
The book describes the voyage of a huge “phantom convoy” of German U-Boats from Norway to Antarctica in May 1945.
The earlier Arctic base, Point 103, is destroyed, and all the men and materiel are evacuated.
V-7 flying saucers accompany the convoy as it travels down into the South Atlantic.
From Bouvet Island, midway between the Cape of Good Hope and the Antarctic mainland, the German U-Boats proceed to Neuschwabenland, the 600,000 square kilometer German Antarctic territory claimed by the Ritscher expedition of 1938–39.33
Ssecret bases are concentrated in the area bounded by the Wohlthat Massif, the Conrad Mountains and the Ritscher Peak near the warm-water Schirrmacher Lakes.
This southern successor of Point 103, far larger and impregnable, will serve as the “last German Battalion” in a continuing standoff with the [temporarily] victorious Allies.
The new Antarctic bases remain veiled in mystery as Landig’s tale then follows the remaining German submarine to Argentina, where a small commando group is put ashore at night by rubber boat on the Rio de la Plata.
The historical record is matched by the surrender of U-530 in July 1945, followed by U-977, another straggler of the “phantom convoy".
The three men then travel from Buenos Aires in friendly Argentina to La Paz in Bolivia, then southward. to a large underground factory on the west side of the Andes in Chile.
This is known as Mime’s Smithy, located within the huge, prehistoric tunnel systems earlier discovered by Edmund Kiß.
Here, several hundred engineers and scientists under German command are developing the V-7 flying saucers, with which regular contact is maintained with Point 211, the Antarctic base.
Landig alludes to further secret German bases in Brazil, including one colony at the headwaters of the Rio Purus.
This was the remnant of a wartime Waffen-SS expeditionary force of two thousand men, who landed by U-Boats in 1942 with plans to seize the Panama Canal.
In early 1947 the colony at Mime’s Smithy exults in the rapid repulsion of Admiral Byrd’s military invasion by their comrades in Neuschwabenland.
The mythical power of these stories of German saucer bases in the Andes and Antarctica was wholly dependent on worldwide curiosity about UFOs throughout from the early 1950s through the 1970s.
During this period, thousands of UFO sightings over North and South America, Europe and Asia were reported.
Photographs of clearly recognizable saucer craft were published in magazines and books.
The Cold War, the superpower space race, and a plentiful supply of science fiction created a demand for such stories in the press.
recurrent scares of government cover-ups regarding the UFOs— did the authorities know much more than they were telling?—created a psychic space within which the UFO phenomenon could be linked with conspiracy theory.
In this view, both the Americans and Russians were anxious to deny that the UFOs were man-made craft operated by renegade German Nazi forces. Nazi UFOs linked with Antarctica supplied a powerful myth of German revanchism against the hegemony of the superpowers.
The idea of Nazi UFOs caught on fast.
he Belfast-born British author W. A. Harbinson wrote a best-selling novel, "Genesis" [1980], on the theme, which reprinted five times in three years.
An American aviation genius emigrates in 1935 to the Third Reich to profit from the resources of a totalitarian state.
Nazi slave labor working day and night hews out the huge underground factories of the Harz and Thuringia, where his amoral thirst for technical achievement knows no limits.
Backed by the SS, he constructs a huge saucer in the enormous rock tunnels at Kahla.
As the war closes in, trains daily transport slaves and materiel to Kiel, where they disappear to the "wilderness".
When the Third Reich finally collapses, the ruthless genius finally escapes with top SS fugitives Hans Kammler and Artur Nebe to their long-prepared fortress in Antarctica. As the postwar years pass, a New Order state arises, manned by “implanted” human robots, a secret scientific Utopia rid of all humanity.
The concentration camps, SS guards, whips and barking dogs lie far in the past; futuristic flying saucers flashing across the snowy peaks are a potent symbol of victorious fascist inhumanity.