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Antarctica - the Ice Reich

Nazi UFOs and Antarctica


Following their appearance in he early postwar years, flying saucers swiftly established themselves as a major cultural icon in popular mythology. These futuristic discoid aircraft, capable of amazing speeds and maneuvers, initially impinged on public awareness following an incident on 24 June 1947.

Kenneth Arnold, flying his private plane through the Cascade Mountains in Washington State, saw a formation of nine objects in flight at about 9,000 feet.

He estimated their speed at 1,700 miles per hour—an incredible figure before ultrasonic flight—and described the strange craft flipping up and down “like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water".

Arnold’s sighting was not the first, as nearly forty had been recorded earlier that year.

However, this was the incident that sparked a major wave of journalism on flying saucers, and further reports from forty-eight states were received that summer alone.

American fears of communism and Russian aggression —the Cold War was just gearing up with the establishment of communist regimes in Eastern Europe— fueled interest and anxiety.

As the number of saucer sightings mounted all over the Western world, it was realized that the saucers’ performance far surpassed all known technology and human endurance. Belief in the extraterrestrial origin of the flying saucers soon became widespread.

Public fear of Soviet superweapons or extra-terrestrial visits clearly necessitated an official response.

The US government notably took an ambivalent view of the saucers, seeking to debunk them if at all possible while strenuously denying any possibility of their origin on earth.

Founded in December 1947, a monitoring investigation called Project Sign examined 237 sightings under the direction of Allen Hynek, then professor of astronomy at Northwestern University.


In February 1949, Project Grudge was commenced by the United States Air Force, renamed Project Blue Book in March 1952, and advised by Hynek.

this project represented the official U.S. investigation of the UFO phenomenon [“Unidentified Flying Object” was by then the preferred technical and more neutral term] until its closure in 1969.

Meanwhile, civilian investigation groups were founded in America, Britain and Europe. Waves of sightings continued unabated. Science fiction magazines and films, a fast growing genre in America and Europe during the 1950s, reinforced the imagery of flying saucers and the likelihood of alien visitation.


A new dimension was added once direct meetings with extra-terrestrial aliens were claimed.

A new contactee literature developed after George Adamski’s story of his encounter with an alien in the Californian desert in November 1952.

Fifty years of the UFO phenomenon have turned into a global mythology transcending national frontiers.

Stephen Spielberg’s film, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" [1977] initiated a wide spread belief in government cover-up and conspiracy regarding its knowledge of UFOs and aliens.

A veritable UFO industry flourishes today. Hundreds of books are published each year covering sightings, abductions, crash retrievals and even alien autopsies.

Scores of specialist magazines minutely analyze data and evaluate rumors, claims, photographs and eyewitness accounts.

 

The film "Independence Day" [1996], of an alien invasion on earth with the Roswell, New Mexico, crash story of July 1947 in the background, and the television series "The X-Files", highlighting the paranormal investigation, generated vast profits and huge interest in UFOs - a mythology involving extra-terrestrial life, apocalyptic expectations, religious hopes and government conspiracy against the people.

Posters, T-shirts, and other merchandise, together with advertising and visual references in popular media, have created a discourse on UFOs and aliens accessible to everybody. Esoteric Nazism has found its own niche within this powerful and universal mythology.

As early as the 1950s, rumors began to circulate among certain German nationalist circles that the post-war flying saucers were in fact German super weapons that had already been under development and tested during the Third Reich.

At the time of Germany’s surrender in May 1945, this technology was supposedly shipped to safety in the Arctic, South America and Antarctica.

The abundance of UFO sightings was thus attributed to a hidden Nazi presence in remote and inaccessible regions of the world.

By the late 1970s, neo-Nazi writers were claiming that the “Last Battalion,” a massive Nazi military force of highly advanced UFOs, was in possession of a vast tract of Antarctica.

At any moment, this fleet of Nazi UFOs could sally forth to deliver the benighted world from the yoke of the two superpowers as well as the post-war ills of democracy and liberalism.

From the early 1990s these myths of advanced Nazi technology were conflated with alternative energy sources and alliances with an extra-terrestrial civilization in the remote solar system of Aldebaran.

Jan van Helsing, the notorious German conspiracy theorist and anti-Semite, now uses these myths, together with the Black Sun, in his best-selling books on secret societies and their power in the twentieth century.

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.

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.

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current 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. 


 

During the 1980s the mythos was elaborated by further neo-Nazi publications on miracle weapons, Nazi UFOs and secret German bases in Antarctica. by the Hugin-Gesellschaft and Teut-Verlag in the small town of Wetter in the Ruhr.

D. H. Haarmann’s three-volume "Geheime Wunderwaffen" [Secret Miracle Weapons] in 1983–85, dilated on the by now familiar topics of the Ritscher expedition, the “phantom convoy” and Operation Highjump.

Further Allied Antarctic invasions had been mounted in 1955–56 and again under cover of the International Geophysical Year in 1958, when atomic weapons were used in vain against the hidden German enemy.

Haarmann saw the Antarctic Treaty of December 1959 as a ploy of the United Nations Organisation, conceived in 1942 to achieve Allied war aims against the Axis Powers as well as a nefarious world conspiracy.42 His subsequent volumes took up the themes of worldwide saucer sightings in the 1950s, especially the [historical] incident when seven disks flew over the White House in Washington on 20 July 1952, interpreted by Haarmann as a show of German capabilities, and Reinhold Schmidt’s encounter with a German-speaking saucer crew in November 1957.

Haarmann also linked UFO cover-ups and the extra-terrestrial hypothesis with a “secret government” conspiracy of invisible elites such as the Council on Foreign Relations. This conspiracy not only concerned a blackout on Nazi resurgence but on alternative energy technology.

How else could the modern saucers execute such astonishing feats of speed, acceleration, rapid changes of direction with soundless flight and the complete absence of exhaust?

Here, the wartime work of Viktor Schauberger, the Viennese inventor, on electro-magnetic flying saucers is cited as the prototype of antigravitational power. Evidently, the secret German saucer industry is using free "implosive" energy from the earth’s gravitational and magnetic fields rather than the "explosive" technology of fossil fuels with all their harmful ecological consequences. Knowledge of the Nazi saucers and their free energy power is thus being suppressed by a [Jewish] conspiracy of banks, oil and automobile industries in the postwar world economy.

Haarmann even considers the mystical sources of such “implosive” technology, citing Miguel Serrano’s speculation that the SS found the Cathar Grail treasure in southern France, an idea that connects with Erich Halik’s thoughts on “Manisolas” and Julius Evola’s idea of the Grail as an Aryan-Nordic mystery tradition.

Such a world conspiracy against alternative energy would become a major theme of New Age literature in the 1990s.

Richard Schepmann, the publisher of Teut-Verlag, is the son of the former SA staff officer Wilhelm Schepmann. In 1983 he was sentenced to a six-month suspended sentence and heavy fine for inciting racial hatred. The HuginGesellschaft and Teut-Verlag continued to present revanchist German nationalism in an esoteric context, introducing the first volume of Miguel Serrano’s "Esoteric Hitlerism" trilogy to a German readership in 1987.

Serrano had ready access to Spanish-language literature in South America bearing on the Hitler survival myth and Nazi OVNIs [UFOs] cultivated by neo-Nazi groups in Chile. Through Serrano, the Nazi UFO subculture was also able to extend its esoteric references to the history of secret societies, the Grail, Templars and Rosicrucians.

Hugin’s program also included other Nazi UFO publications, such as the two-volume work "Deutsche Flugscheiben und U-Boote überwachen die Weltmeere" [1988–89] by O. Bergmann and a complete dossier of press cuttings on UFO sightings from the 1950s to the present.

Conceptual art of Neu Schwabenland high-tech U-Boat 

Type XXVI was a high-seas U-Boat propelled by the Walther Propulsion System.

They would have had a crew of 3 officers and 30 men, with ten torpedo tubes, 4 at the bow and 6 in a so-called Schnee organ, and no deck guns.

100 contracts were initially awarded to the Blohm & Voss yard in Hamburg [U-4501 through U-4600] and sections were under construction for U-4501 through U-4504 when the war ended.

The other contracts had been cancelled.


The millennial nationalist ideology behind all publications was evident from an announcement in large print:

“German Volk awake! You are at the threshold of an incomparable golden age, not at the end of your long history”.

 Nazi UFO mythology has a serial character, whereby earlier details are constantly elaborated into new concepts and ideas.

In the early 1990s, the Austrians Norbert Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ralf Ettl developed new Nazi UFO myths involving ancient Babylon, Vril energy and extraterrestrial civilization in the solar system of Aldebaran. These colorful ideas are integral elements of a dualist Marcionite religion propagated by Ralf Ettl through his Tempelhofgesellschaft [Temple Society] in Vienna, identified as a secret successor to the historic Templars, who had absorbed Gnostic and heretical ideas in the Levant.

Marcion established his own religious community in Rome in the second century A.D. whereupon sister churches spread through the east and west of the empire. Marcion’s theology was dualistic. In the gospel he found a God who is goodness and love, and who desires faith and love from men.

In the Old Testament, he saw a just, stern, jealous and wrathful God who requires obedience, fear and righteous conduct from his servants.

Marcion taught that man was created out of matter by the just and wrathful god and fell under the curse of the Demiurge, until a higher God took pity on the wretched race of mankind and sent his Son down to earth to redeem men. This strict distinction between the Christian God of the gospel and the Jewish God of the Old Testament was the basis of Marcion’s doctrine. Marcion championed Paul, who alone was supposed to understand the gospel. Paul opposed the original apostles with their Judaistic doctrines.

Marcion followed in Paul’s footsteps, setting aside the spurious gospels, purging the Gospel of Luke from judaizing interpolations, and restoring the Pauline epistles. Marcion taught that all should put their trust in the good God and renounce their allegiance to the Demiurge. The true Christian should shun all things sensual and perishable, which are the works of the evil Demiurge. God redeems only the spirit of man, as all matter perishes [n influence from contemporary Gnosticism] 

The Marcionite churches enjoyed a golden age between a.d. 150 and 250, when they represented a vital challenge to the Church.

Thereafter, they declined, with many Marcionites going over to the Manichaeans in the east and providing impulses for the Gnostic Paulicians, Bogomils and ultimately the Cathars in the west. By identifying the Jews as evil antagonists in a dualist cosmology, modern Marcionites are typically anti-Semitic. Jürgen Ratthofer and Ralf Ettl claim that Rudolf von Rudolf von Sebottendorff discovered old texts or oral traditions on his travels in the Middle East relating to this dualist rejection of El Shaddai [Jahve]  the god of the Old Testament, whom Jesus identified as the devil [John 8:44].

Sebottendorff also allegedly found Persian and Babylonian references to a millennial battle between good and evil, which inspired his [spurious] book "Der interkosmische Weltenkampf" [1919]. Sebottendorff was supposed to be acquainted with the prophecy of the “Third Sargon” by the Babylonian seeress Sajaha [c. 650 B.C.], which told of terrible woes and the inversion of all values until the avenging emperor would arrive from the north [Midnight] and destroy all evil by fire. Recalling that Christ told the Jews that the Kingdom of God would be taken from them and given to a people who would produce its fruit [Matthew 21:43], Sebottendorff learned that Jesus later told Germans serving in a Roman legion that they were the chosen people.

In Jürgen-Ratthofer’s fictional account, Sebottendorff was the first individual to understand that this cosmic battle between the forces of darkness and light would reach its climax in the twentieth century with the advent of the Age of Aquarius.  

In August 1917, according to Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl, Rudolf von Sebottendorff, Karl Haushofer, the medium Maria Orsic from Zagreb and the pilot Lothar Waiz held a meeting with the old prelate Gernot of the "Societas Templi Marcioni" at a café in Vienna.

Their discussions turned on astrology and apocalyptic predictions in Indian, German and Babylonian traditions.

Gernot was highly impressed and invited Sebottendorff to visit the secret estate of his Templar order known as the “Die Herren vom Schwarzen Stein” [Lords of the Black Stone] at Marktschellenberg in Bavaria.

The DHvSS was supposedly founded by the Knight Commander Hubertus Koch in 1221 as a Marcionite Templar order.

Its dualist and Gnostic “Babylonian” doctrine told of the dominion of evil on earth and the battle between light and El Shaddai based on the revelations of the goddess Ishtar.

The Black Sun is the divine source of energy accessible to initiates through a hierarchy of spiritual intermediaries.

Through the DHvSS, Sebottendorff understood that Marcionite anti-Judaist teachings ultimately came from the much older Babylonian doctrine common to all Aryan peoples.

The cosmic challenge of the age demanded the defeat of El Shaddai and the Jews.

Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl next latched onto the Vril references in the occult Nazi mythology of Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. These go back to Willy Ley’s report of a Vril Society in Berlin. German researchers have recently established that such a group did exist in association with the astrological publisher Wilhelm Becker.

This wholly obscure “Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft ‘Das Kommende Deutschland’” published a short brochure "Vril: Die kosmische Urkraft" [1930], which described the Atlanteans as possessors of a spiritual “dynamo-technology” superior to the mechanistic notions of modern science.

Based on Vril energy, this technology also enabled the Egyptians and Aztecs to build their pyramids.

The brochure claims that this knowledge of the ancients should now be applied for the benefit of modern mankind.

The group’s second brochure, "Weltdynamismus" [1930], rejected explosive technology and spoke of the release of free energy.

A chapter headed 'The World Apple' described a bisected apple as a map of the universal free energy field.

It is quite probable that Willy Ley’s record of the Vril group recalled this very detail as a meditational object. 

In Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl’s account, this group of esotericists concerned with Atlantis and free energy becomes a powerful UFO research agency. Between 1917 and 1919, Sebottendorff built up the Germanenorden and the Thule Society as true to secret Aryan-Babylonian doctrine.

When the Thule was involved in the Bavarian revolution of May 1919, a separate section for spiritual and esoteric studies was founded as the Vril Society.

In December 1919 an inner group of the Thule and Vril held a joint meeting at Ramsau near Berchtesgaden, where the medium Maria Orsic presented transcripts in an old Templar script of communications she had received telepathically.

These proved to be written in Sumerian, the language of the founders of the oldest Babylonian culture. These channeled communications allegedly came from the planet Sumi-Er in the solar system of Aldebaran, the brightest star in the constellation of Taurus, sixty-eight light years away from earth.

Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl claim that the DHvSS and its modern successor, the Vril Society, received mediumistic confirmation that the Sumerians were a colony of superior beings sent from Aldebaran to earth 500 million years ago.

The Aldebaran language not only resembled Sumerian but also German, since both peoples shared the same Aldebaran ancestry.

With mounting excitement, the Vril Society was supposed to have examined the old archives of the DHvSS and concluded that Hubertus Koch and his followers had established esoteric contact with the Aldebaran people back in the Middle Ages. The apparition of the Babylonian goddess Isais was possibly even a visit by an Aldebaran woman. The grand seal of the DHvSS showing a winged bull clearly reflected Aldebaran’s location in Taurus, while Isais was the Aldebaran empress.

All the Aldebaran traditions indicated "a kind of National Socialism on a theocratic basis". The Vril Society concluded that this exclusive contact between the German Marcionite order, themselves and Aldebaran signified that the Aldebaran people were "the Germans in the sign of Taurus" and thus allies in the great cosmic battle against the Jewish forces of darkness. 

In fulfillment of this esoteric alliance across the galaxy, Maria Orsic next received channeled instructions for the construction of a time travel machine. A leading member of the Vril, Dr. W. O. Schumann, pioneered the development of electro-magnetic fields through rotating disks, and a prototype was constructed near Munich in 1922. 

Artistic Interpretations of the Jensetsflugmachine [JFM]

Thereafter, the Thule Society took a hand by establishing the SS Development Department E-IV for advanced saucer technology.

These larger and much more powerful craft took the series name “Haunebu.”

Driven by a “Thule-Tachyonator,” the Haunebu I had a 25-meter diameter, a speed of 4,800 kilometers/hour, a range of eighteen hours and carried a crew of nine men.

Developed in November 1943, the Haunebu II was slightly larger and could travel at 6,000 kilometers/hour for fifty-five hours.

The massive Haunebu III had a diameter of 71 meters and could reach a speed of 40,000 kilometers/hour with a range of eight weeks, carrying a crew of thirty-two men.

The Schumann group produced two smaller saucers, Vril-1 and 2, as fighters.

Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl reproduce detailed technical drawings, ostensibly from the SS department E-IV and Schumann’s Vril group.

Over the following decade, this research and development led to an entire range of German flying saucers based on the principle of anti-gravitational levitation.

In June 1934 Lothar Waiz flew the first RFZ 1 [[Rundflugzeug] at Brandenburg.

The stimulus of military innovation quickly led to highly advanced craft. 

A Generic RFZ-Type German Disc takes to the skies in this artistic representation

Apparently seven craft of the Haunebu II type were built, one each of the other Haunebu types, and seventeen Vril-1 craft. 

In late 1944, the SS E-IV also designed the Andromeda vessel, 139 meters in length and 30 meters high.

Powered by four “Thule-Tachyonators” and four “Schumann-Levitators” this long-distance spaceship could transport a Haunebu II and two Vril 1 saucers in its internal hangars.

This huge cigar-shaped mother ship and its accompanying saucers were supposed to be responsible for George Adamski’s famous sighting in California in 1952.

Through their elaborate mythology of Sumero-Aldebaran links, Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl attribute German flying saucer technology to semi-divine guidance from extraterrestrial civilization. They also claim that National Socialism and anti-Semitism are closely bound up with channeled communications from a highly advanced society ethnically related to the Germans and following a political model similar to the Third Reich.

Ratthofer and Ettl also articulate a sci-fi millenarianism, whereby the Nazis are supposed to have sent flying saucer missions to seek extra-terrestrial support for the Axis against the Allies, even years after the latter’s victory.

On Christmas 1943, the Vril and Thule held a major conference at the Baltic resort of Kolberg [now Kolobrzeg], where desperate military measures were discussed. Vril staffs were now working on a space ship that could switch into another dimension and thus reach Aldebaran, sixty-eight light-years away. After discussions with Hitler and Himmler, the Vril group launched an advanced Vril-Odin [Vril-7 or Vril-8] saucer in early 1945 into the "trans-dimensional canal" which enables travel at 900,000 kilometers/second [three times the speed of light].

After a voyage lasting only several weeks, Vril-Odin is supposed to have reached the Aldebaran solar system in 1967.

The Aldebaran regime then dispatched an enormous inter-stellar armada consisting of 280 battle cruisers of various classes, ranging from 1.5 to 6 kilometers in length and capable of carrying between 4 and 810 flying saucers apiece. Depending on its speed after emerging from the “trans-dimensional canal” in the asteroid belt, this armada is to arrive on earth sometime between 1992 and 2005 to resume the Second World War. 

Two Nazi-UFO videos are widely circulated in the neo-Nazi and New Age milieus today.

"UFO—Das Dritte Reich schlägt zurück?" [UFO—The Third Reich Strikes Back?] tells the story of the Black Sun, illustrated with reliefs and statues from ancient Babylon. The film also shows impressive images of recent sightings of UFOs with German markings, compared with technical drawings of Haunebu and Habermohl-Schriever saucer designs. It ends with a pathetic account of the joint German-Japanese last-ditch mission in April 1945 to seek military aid from Mars. After an eight and a half month voyage, the Haunebu III lands on Mars in January 1946, only to find the deserted pyramid city and “Face,” signs of a bygone higher civilization.

"What disappointment must these men have felt, when they realized that all was in vain!"

The other video, also written by Jürgen-Ratthofer, "UFO— Geheimnisse des Dritten Reichs" [UFO—Secrets of the Third Reich], covers the Thule-Vril story with its background in Sebottendorff’s meeting with the Marcionite Templars. The Thule created the secret society of the Black Sun within the SS.

Actors stage the mediumistic séances, the young Hitler is shown studying in a library and American UFO experts are interviewed. The line between archival sources and fiction is constantly blurred, giving the impression of a documentary.

Where did the German saucers go at the end of the war? One solution, we learn, is that they traveled back in time through the "transdimensional canal" to safety in ancient Babylon, where the German crews were feted as "white gods" from another world. 

Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl’s books were first published by Michael Dämbock, who edits the magazine "Pen Tuisko - Letters for German Pagans" as a mixture of Germanic mythology, runelore and astrology. Jürgen-Ratthofer has published further books on time machines and the Aldebaran galactic empire. His most important recent book is "Lichtreiche auf Erden [The Empres of Light on Earth], in which he speculates on an alliance between Iraq and the Greater German Reich during the 1991 Gulf War.

As Iraq lies in Mesopotamia, its elite are also descended from the Sumerians and thus related to the Germans.

As German territory was a nuclear hostage to the Allies after 1945, the Nazi UFOs could only pursue a limited clandestine war against selected targets. Meanwhile, the Cold War and the Strategic Defense Initiative [SDI] can only be understood as the post-war Allied response to this threat. Nevertheless, only the Nazi UFOs, the "Empires of Light" have prevented an atomic war being fought in Europe as well as in Korea, Vietnam, the Falklands and the Persian Gulf

The Nazi UFO books of Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl are widely distributed by the Andromeda mail-order bookshop in Nuremberg, which issues monthly catalogs in which similar material is listed alongside the literature of conspiracy theory, channeling, New Age spirituality and redemption.

In the mid-1990s this quasi-ariosophical lore of Aldebaran-German linkage penetrated the international UFO scene.

The best-selling books of the leading German conspiracy theorist, Jan van Helsing, recapitulated the imaginary history of Vril flying saucers, the settlement of Aldebaran colonists in Sumeria, and the German mission to Aldebaran. Through UFO conferences, Helsing’s revelations have encouraged a new wave of Aldebaran channels.

Anglo-American contributions to Nazi UFO mythology also exist: witness the success of W. A. Harbinson’s thrillers in the "Projekt Saucer" series.

In June 1977, the U.K. independent television company Anglia broadcast a spoof television program "Alternative 3" about colonies on Mars erected to avoid ecological catastrophe on earth.

Nearly twenty years on, Jim Keith, the veteran U.S. conspiracy theorist, elaborated a complex account of how German scientists and industrialists, brought to America under Operation Paperclip after World War II, may have already established secret bases on Mars pending the evacuation of elites from a polluted and congested earth. [The secret nature of this scenario recalls the clandestine Nazi buildup in Antarctica].

Although carried out under U.S. auspices, this project represents the perpetuation and eventual realization of Third Reich policy for the acquisition of German Lebensraum [living space]. Recalling post-war German involvement in varied forms of totalitarian control such as Intelligence, security, psychiatry and genetic engineering, Keith wonders whether the Nazis are still implementing schemes for their final triumph "by constructing bases on Mars or the moon to carry the ancient Grail of Aryan racial purity away from what they conceive as a cataclysm-doomed Earth".

Actual Anglo-American identification with the manifest German mission of the Nazi UFOs is rarer. The German Research Project at Gorman, California, directed by Henry Stevens has published excellent documentation on Nazi UFOs, but eulogies of the SS, references to the Dark Power [Jews], the New World Order and the sham of democracy indicate a sympathy for the Third Reich.

The Nazi UFO myth has also found support in the British far right.

For example, Tim Hepple joined the "Political Soldier" faction of the National Front in 1984, before moving on to the British National Party in 1986.

Although a university music student with a middle-class background, Hepple was a hardened street fighter and organized the Dewsbury race riot in June 1989. In 1992 he changed his name to Matthews and began to infiltrate the British Ufology scene.

After initially taking the prevailing line that UFOs were extra-terrestrial in origin, he supported the thesis of man-made UFOs with a paean to the pioneering achievements of the Third Reich. Here Matthews cited the delta wing designs of Alexander Lippisch, the "black triangles" [prototypes of "stealth" aircraft] of Reimar and Walter Horten, “foo fighters,” and the flying disks of Schriever, Habermohl and Miethe. Matthews’s enthusiasm for the Nazi origins of flying saucers suggests an ideological allegiance beyond technical admiration.

Flying saucers are ambiguous.

C. G. Jung interpreted their mandala form as a symbol of the self and absolute wholeness. But radiant steel surfaces and lightning speeds also suggest an aesthetic of armored, invincible identity. This image of the flying saucers may reflect deep-seated fascist notions of technology, gender and sexuality.

Fascination with technology was a key element in Italian futurism, whose founder, F. T. Marinetti, looked forward to the melding of man and machine in a world of speed, violence and contempt for woman.

"The Futurist hero was the man of iron, the aviator and the engineer".

 After the First World War, Ernst Jünger celebrated a sleek aesthetic of the machine, military technology and efficiency through his literary works and photo essays. Shells, tanks and aircraft—metallic, armored and high velocity—are threatening projections of symmetrical order upon a sensual, vegetative natural world.

Nazi flying saucer mythology certainly shares in this symbolism, reflected by the glittering, lifeless, icy wastes of Antarctica, where all-male military communities labor in saucer silos to reconquer the world. Armed with this symbolism, Nazi UFO mythology always identifies the Germans as the master race.

In its first period, 1950 to 1970, chief emphasis was laid on the myth of Nazi survival, German technical prowess and the construction of miracle craft and secret bases in Antarctica and South America. These tales served a consoling function for the defeat of the Third Reich and division of post-war Germany while promising a revanchist Nazi millennium.

But the UFOs are also vehicles for a futuristic Aryan cult. In the period 1970–85, Wilhelm Landig and Ernst Zündel embroider the technical scenario with Gnostic Thulean-Jewish struggles and the Black Sun mythos.

By the 1990s, Miguel Serrano, Norbert Jürgen-Ratthofer, Ralf Ettl and Jan van Helsing present Nazi UFOs within a new Ariosophy of semi-divine Aryan origins,along with channeling, conspiracy theories and New Age beliefs. Sumerian and Templar secrets, wise extraterrestrial guides, spiritual purity and the dazzling perfection of spinning luminous saucers offer positive archetypal symbols. These not only erase the cruel memory of the Third Reich, but suggest that the Nazis were interesting, spiritual people. Such is the power of UFO mythology to reconfigure Nazism for the twenty-first century.

In fact Hitler had sent Captain Alfred Rischter to claim Queen Maud Land for the Germans in 1938, and throughout the War German raiders did harry shipping in the region.

Possibly there may have been some ideological purpose behind this annexation, perhaps even to find a suitably Arctic environment for the new Nazi civilisation. On the other hand, it may well have more obvious aims as part of the general scramble for the continent among countries as diverse as Argentina, Chile, America, Australia, Norway, Sweden, South Africa, France and Britain, who all claimed parts of the continent between 1902 and 1942.

During the War the activities of the Germans seems to have been to disrupt Allied shipping through the strategically important Drake's Passage.

There is a genuine mystery as to what precisely Captain Heinz Schäffer was doing for those four months in 1945 after his U-Boat left its Baltic base and ended up in the Argentine port of Mar del Plata. Schäffer maintained, however, that fearing harsh treatment by the victorious Allies, he was merely escaping to Argentina with his crew.

In answer to the rumours that he had ferried Hitler or Bormann out of Germany, Schäffer denied that anyone of "political importance" had been aboard the ship, despite lengthy interrogation by British and American officers.

As for Operation Highj ump - that was merely the last in a series of four expeditions made by Rear-Admiral Byrd to the Antarctic between 1929 and 1947.

It is possible that he may have been looking for a Nazi base in the .t\ntarctic in 1947, but that does not mean that one was actually there.

More likely he was simply using the men and materiel recently released from the War to assert American claims on the Continent against the new force of Stalin's Russia. Such an expedition would show that American power now reached from pole to pole, thus impressing a potentially aggressive Soviet Union . lt also had the advantage of occupying the time and energies of potentially restless conscripts awaiting demobilisation, thus averting possible disorder in the ranks.

As for Nazi bases in the continent, W.A. Harbinson draws parallels between such a base and the construction of massive underground complexes such as Peenemünde and the Russian installation at Semipalatinsk to demonstrate that such a thing is entirely possible for a totalitarian society which can call on ample reserves of slave labour.

What is forgotten, however, is that these installations were created and sustained by the infrastructure of the Nazi and Soviet states, which continued to supply them with food and materials. It's hard to imagine these places surviving once the support of the state had been removed and the base isolated, which any hypothetical Nazi base in Antarctica would have been after the end of the War.

Peenemünde and Semipalatinsk, although impressive installations, are not self-sufficient, and so when Nazi Germany fell, so did Peenemünde.

If a Nazi base had been buit, then it would have survived only as long as its stores of food held out before either succumbing to starvation, or, more likely, surrendering to the Allies or seeing its personnel make their escape to South America.

The idea of Nazi bases in the Antarctic really only appeared with Ernst Zündel's Nazi fantasies UFO: "Nazi Secret Weapons" and "Secret Nazi Polar Expeditions", written under his pseudonyms of Mattern and Christ of Friedrich.

Zündel is a neo-Nazi who runs runs the Samizdat organisation, specialising in Nazi merchandising, from Canada. Zündel in turn got his ideas from the Nazi SF novel "Götzen Gegen Thule" [ Idols Against Thule] of Wilhelm Landig, who located his secret Nazi UFO base in Point 103 in the Canadian Arctic.

lt would appear that recent settlements and development of the Arctic make it unconvincing as the site of feared Aryan warriors, and so the N azis need to place their fantasies elsewhere, in the still largely unexplored wilderness of Antarctica, to give t hem verisimilitude.

Landig's novel only appeared in 1971, so it's hardly an old story, something which also suggests that the mythology of Nazi polar bases is actually a recent invention, rather than old fact.

The frequent statements that the saucers were built in Breslau, now Wrocklaw, in Poland, and Czechoslovak ia. are, on the other hand, quite plausible Before the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Czechoslovakia was treated relatively lightly because of the importance of the mineral resources of the Kutna Hora and the Skoda armaments works.

The country was strategically importance because it was too distant to be reached by Allied bombers. Thus the Nazis did site a number of industries there.