The Occult History of the Third Reich: March 2014

The Ahnenerbe was a scientific institute in the Third Reich dedicated to research the archaeological and cultural history of the Aryan Race.
Founded on July 1, 1935, by Heinrich Himmler, Herman Wirth, and Richard Walther Darré, the Ahnenerbe later conducted experiments and launched expeditions in an attempt to prove that Aryan Nordic populations had once ruled the world.
Its name came from an obscure German word, 'Ahnenerbe', meaning "inherited from the forefathers."
The official mission of the Ahnenerbe was to find new evidence of the racial superiority of the Germanic people through historical, anthropological, and archaeological research.
Formally, the group was called the Studiengesellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte‚ Deutsches Ahnenerbe - 'Study Society for Primordial Intellectual history, German Ancestral Heritage', but it was renamed in 1937 as the Forschungs- und Lehrgemeinschaft das Ahnenerbe - (Research and Teaching Community of the Ancestral Heritage).
Many of their interests extended beyond science into occultism.

Hermann Wirth

Richard Walter Darré

This led to German scientists travelling around the world in search of Atlantis and the Holy Grail, and it is reported that the Ahnenerbe sought "portals" to God.
Growing out of the Ahnenerbe-SS, the Thule Gesellschaft and the general Nazi interest in the occult, was 'Karotechia' (see below) - a secret organization dedicated to the research and use of occult forces for the Third Reich.

Hermann Wirth (see left) was a Dutch historian obsessed with Atlantean mythology, and Richard Walter Darré (see right) was the creator of National Socialist 'Blut und Boden' (blood and soil) ideology, and was head of the Race and Settlement Office).

BLUT UND BODEN

Blut und Boden refers to an ideology that focuses on ethnicity based on two factors, descent (Blood of a Volk) and Heimat (Homeland - Soil).
It celebrates the relationship of a people to the land they occupy and cultivate, and it places a high value on the virtues of rural living.
The German expression was coined in the late 19th century, in tracts espousing racialism and national romanticism.
It produced a regionalist literature, with some social criticism.
This romantic attachment was widespread prior to the rise of National Socialism.
Ultranationalists, predating National Socialism, often supported 'country living' as more healthy, with the 'Artaman League' sending urban children to the countryside to work in part in hopes of transforming them into 'Wehrbaueren' (Soldier-farmers).

Richard Walther Darré popularized the phrase at the time of the rise of National Socialism in Germany; he wrote a book called 'Neuadel aus Blut und Boden' (A New Aristocracy Based On Blood And Soil) in 1930, which proposed a systemic eugenics program, arguing for breeding as a cure-all for all the problems plaguing the state.
Darré was an influential member of the National Socialist party, and a noted race theorist who assisted the party greatly in gaining support among common Germans outside the cities.
Prior to their ascension to power, the National Socialists called for a return from the cities to the countryside.
This agrarian sentiment allowed opposition to both the middle class and the aristocracy, and presented the farmer as a superior figure beside the moral swamp of the city.

Zurück in das Land

The doctrine not only called for a "back to the land" approach and re-adoption of rural values; it held that German land was bound, perhaps mystically, to German blood.
Peasants were the Völkisch cultural heroes, who held charge of German racial stock and German history -- as when a memorial of a medieval peasant uprising was the occasion for a speech by Darré praising them as force and purifier of German history.
This would also lead them to understand the natural order better, and in the end, only the man who worked the land really possessed it.
It contributed to the National Socialist ideal of a woman: a sturdy peasant, who worked the land and bore strong children, contributing to praise for athletic women tanned by outdoor work.
That country women gave birth to more children than city ones also was a factor in the support.
It was also argued that a people would develop laws appropriate to its "blood and soil" because authenticity required loyalty to the Volk over abstract universals.
The SS and the Ahnenerbe, under Heinrich Himmler, in general supported and encouraged the 'Blut und Boden' ideology.

ORIGINS of the AHNENERBE

There is some evidence that the Ahnenerbe existed as early as 1928, when Wirth established the "Hermann Wirth Society" for teaching and spreading his theories.
Another candidate for precursor of the Ahnenerbe was a research institute for "spiritual prehistory" created by the German state of Mecklenburg in 1932, when the state was governed by the NSDAP.

Formally, the group was called 'Studiengesellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte‚ Deutsches Ahnenerbe e.V.' ("Study society for primordial intellectual history, German Ancestral Heritage, registered society"), and was renamed in 1937, as 'Forschungs- und Lehrgemeinschaft das Ahnenerbe e.V.' ("Research and Teaching Community the Ancestral Heritage, registered society").

The emblem chosen for the Ahnenerbe was the 'Irminsul' (see left below).

Irmin was an aspect, Avatar or epithet of Wodan (Odin).

Irmin might also have been an epithet of the god Ziu (Tyr) in early Germanic times, only later transferred to Odin.

The Old Norse form of Irmin is Jörmunr, which just like Yggr was one of the names of Odin.

Yggdrasil ("Yggr's horse") was the yew or ash tree from which Odin sacrificed himself, and which connected the nine worlds. Jakob Grimm connects the name Irmin with Old Norse terms like iörmungrund ("great ground", i.e. the Earth) or iörmungandr ("great snake", i.e. the Midgard serpent).

It is thus often conjectured that the Irminsul was a 'World Tree', the equivalent of 'Yggdrasil' among the Saxon tribes of Germany.

The linguistic connection between Irmin- and iörmun/jörmun- is generally accepted, but the terms simply mean "great/mighty" or "rising high".

It is easy to see how "The great one" or "The exalted one" could become a by-name of Odin, and become known as "great pillar" instead of "Irmin's pillar" or "Odin's pillar".

The Ahnenerbe was created as a registered club as a private and non-profit organization. Funding for the Ahnenerbe primarily came through Darré and his position within the German Ministry of Agriculture, but this association ended around 1936, leaving Himmler in total control of the Ahnenerbe.

The Ahnenerbe was not incorporated into the SS until April 1940, though even before this, all but one member of the academic staff of the Ahnenerbe were at least honorary members of the SS, and many held significant rank.

Wolfram Sievers was Reichsgeschäftsführer, or Reich Manager, of the Ahnenerbe from 1935, and held the rank of SS-Obersturmführer since 1937, rising to the rank of SS-Standartenführer by the end of the war.

There was an obvious link between the SS and the Ahnenerbe long before it became official in 1940.

Sievers & Wüst

Wolfram Sievers

Wolfram Sievers (see right) was appointed Reichsgeschäftsführer, or General Secretary, of the Ahnenerbe, by Himmler.
Sievers was born in 1905 in Hildesheim in the Province of Hanover (now in Lower Saxony), the son of a Protestant church musician.
He was musically gifted, in that he played the harpsichord, organ, and piano, and loved German baroque music.

Externsteine

He was expelled from school for being active in the 'Deutschvölkischer Schutz und Trutzbund', and went on to study history, philosophy, and religious studies at Stuttgart's Technical University, while working as a salesman.

The Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund - (German Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation) was the largest, most active, and most influential anti-Semitic federation in Germany after the First World War, and one of the largest and most important organization of the German völkisch movement during the Weimar Republic, whose democratic-parliamentary system it unilaterally rejected. Its publishing arm put out some of the books that greatly influenced the opinions of those who later organized the National Socialist Party, such as Heinrich Himmler, and after it folded many of its members eventually joined the NSDAP. The bund's symbols were a blue cornflower and a swastika, and its motto was 'Deutschland den Deutschen' ("Germany for the Germans").

Artamanen-Gesellschaft
© Copyright Peter Crawford 2017

A member of the Bündische Jugend, he became active in the Artamanen-Gesellschaft ("Artaman League"), a nationalist back-to-the-land movement.

Sievers joined the NSDAP in 1929.
In 1933 he headed the Externsteine-Stiftung ("Externsteine Foundation"), which had been founded by Heinrich Himmler to study the Externsteine in the Teutoburger Wald.
In 1935, having joined the SS that year, Sievers was appointed Reichsgeschäftsführer, or General Secretary, of the Ahnenerbe, by Himmler.
He was the actual director of Ahnenerbe operations, and was to rise to the rank of SS-Standartenführer by the end of the war.

Dr. Walther Wüst

On February 1 of that year, Dr. Walther Wüst (see left) was appointed the president of the Ahnenerbe.

Wüst was an expert on India, and a dean at Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, working on the side as a Vertrauensmann for the SS Security Service.

Referred to as “The Orientalist” by Sievers, Wüst had been recruited by him in May 1936 because of his ability to simplify science for the common man.

After being appointed president, Wüst began improving the Ahnenerbe: moving the office to a new headquarters that had cost 300,000 Reichsmark, in the Dahlem neighborhood of Berlin.

Walther Wüst (7 May 1901, Kaiserslautern – 21 March 1993) was a German Indo-Europeanist and Vedicist in the first half of the 20th century who served as Rector of the University of Munich from 1941 to 1945. Wüst was a committed Nazi, joining the SS in 1936 and being appointed President of the Research Institute of the Ahnenerbe SS in 1937. He eventually attained the rank of Oberführer.

Karl Maria Wiligut

He also worked to limit the influence of “those he deemed scholarly upstarts,” which included cutting communication with the RuSHA office of Karl Maria Wiligut (see left).

The organization was incorporated into the larger SS in January 1939.

The Ahnenerbe had several different institutions or sections for its departments of research.

Most of these were archeological but others included the Pflegestätte für Wetterkunde (Meteorology Section) headed by Obersturmführer Dr. Hans Robert Scultetus, founded on the basis that Hans Hörbiger's "Welteislehre" could be used to provide accurate long-range weather forecasts, and a section devoted to musicology, whose aim was to determine "the essence" of German music.
It recorded folk music in expeditions to Finland and the Faroe Islands, from ethnic Germans of the occupied territories, and in South Tyrol.
The section made sound recordings, transcribed manuscripts and songbooks, and photographed and filmed instrument use and folk dances.
The lur, a Bronze Age musical instrument, became central to this research, which concluded that Germanic consonance was in direct conflict to Jewish atonalism.
The Ahnenerbe was part of Himmler's greater plan for the systematic creation of a "Germanic" culture that would replace Christianity in the Greater Germany to exist after the war, - a kind of SS-religion that would form the basis of the new world order.
This new culture would be based on the völkisch beliefs of the NSDAP, and it was the role of the Ahnenerbe to marshal scientific research in an interdisciplinary program to support the "development of the Germanic heritage".

Management & Finance of the Ahnenerbe

Himmler himself served as the "chairman of the Kuratorium" of the Ahnenerbe, and held the real power within the Ahnenerbe.

As Reich Manager of the Ahnenerbe, Wolfram Sievers was responsible for all administrative tasks, with day-to-day business matters handled by the deputy "Kurator" Dr. Herrman Reischle.
Professor Walter Wüst joined the Ahnenerbe in 1937 and, as trustee and "Kurator" of the organization, replaced Hermann Wirth as its intellectual leader.

Wüst had been dean of the University of Munich, and his presence brought a number of reputable academics into the Ahnenerbe.

The Ahnenerbe was funded by the Ahnenerbe-Stiftung, the German Forschungsgemeinschaft, member fees, and "from funds of the Reich and from contributions of industry" (including a group of financiers called the 'Circle of Friends' led by Wilhelm Keppler).

The budget of the Ahnenerbe was as much as over one million German marks (400,000 American dollars).

Besides financial support, enlistment in the Ahnenerbe was attractive as it placed scholars in the academic elite of Nazi Germany, gaining them the patronage of the Reichsführer-SS himself.

A central function of the Ahnenerbe was the publication of materials as part of the effort to investigate and "revive" Germanic traditions.

Before the war, the Ahnenerbe set up its own publishing house in the academic suburb Berlin-Dahlem, and went on to produce a monthly magazine ('Germanien'), two journals on genealogy ('Zeitschrift für Namenforschung' and 'Das Sippenzeichen'), and countless monographs.

The Ahnenerbe had fifty different research branches, named "Institutes", which carried out more than one hundred extensive research projects.

Some of the institutes, particularly those responsible for Tibetan research and archaeological expeditions, could be quite large, but most made do with less than a dozen personnel.

Linguistic study was at the forefront of Ahnenerbe activity, and the Ahnenerbe was the first institute to be established to specialize in the study of Norse runes (the symbol of the Ahnenerbe was the life rune).

This institute was under the command of Hermann Wirth (see left) until he left the Ahnenerbe in 1937.

In 1936, Wirth's successor, Professor Wüst, headed up another institute for broader research in linguistics, where great attention was paid to Sanskrit (Wüst's area-of-expertise) and the connection of the language to the Aryans.

Runes are equivalent to the Roman, Greek, Cyrillic, or Hebrew alphabets. But they are much more than an alphabet. “Rune” means “secret”, “mystery”, or “hidden”, and is related to the German raunen, meaning “to whisper”, and the Irish run, meaning “a secret.”

The Ahnenerbe had an Institute to study the Eddas (considered by Himmler a sacred text) and Iceland itself (see right), which the Ahnenerbe considered something of a holy land, like Tibet.

Based on the ariosophical beliefs like those that gave rise to the Thule Gesellschaft, the Ahnenerbe saw Iceland as the last surviving connection with Thule, the mystical homeland of the pure Germanic race of prehistory.

The Eddas contained secret knowledge for the Ahnenerbe, keys by which they could unlock their ancestral heritage.

Besides study of the Eddas, the Ahnenerbe also wanted to study Icelandic artefacts, and, as they had in Tibet, perform "the recording of human images", using calipers to measure facial dimensions based on ethnological science.

The Ahnenerbe succeeded in sending a mission to Iceland in 1938.

On orders from Himmler himself, the expedition was to search for a hof, a place of worship of Norse gods such as Thor and Odin.

Hans Hörbiger

The Ahnenerbe also had a department to research the 'Welteislehre' (World Ice Theory) of Hans Hörbiger (see right), under the command of Dr. Hans Robert Scultetus.

This theory was based on the Blavatsky thesis that there had been several moons in the past, that the approach of these moons results in a polar shift and a cataclysmic Ice Age, which are responsible for the fall and rise of the various root-races of Theosophy.
According to the theory, the world itself was created when a giant chunk of ice collided with the sun.

'Welteislehre'

Hörbiger died in 1931, but his theory was adopted by some Theosophists, who used it to prove the existence of Andean civilization with parallels to Atlantis and Thule (this may have been part of the reason behind Ahnenerbe expeditions to South America), and by Himmler and the Ahnenerbe, as "our Nordic ancestors grew strong amidst the ice and snow, and this is why a belief in a world of ice is the natural heritage of Nordic men".

The Ahnenerbe were most concerned with practical applications of the 'World Ice Theory' focused on meteorology, vital to military operations.

Scultetus sent Edmund Kiß, a German playwright well-known for his novels on Atlantis, to Abyssinia to find evidence to support the 'World Ice Theory'.

German rocketry may have even been delayed because of fears based on Hörbiger's theory that a rocket released into space would initiate a global catastrophe.

Archaeology

The Institut für Germanistik Archäologie - (Institute for Germanic Archaeology) was created in 1938.

Himmler saw the potential of archaeology as a political tool.

He needed archaeology to provide an identity for the SS, but Himmler also believed that archaeology had a certain religious content.

Externsteine

There were excavations; there were myths and legends, a feeling of superiority.

He believed by drawing on the power of prehistory one would achieve success in the present day.

Archaeological excavations were conducted in Germany at Paderborn, Detmold, Haithabu, and at Externsteine (see left).

Haithabu, which is still recognized by archaeologists as an important site for medieval Norse artifacts, is in an area of northern Germany near the Danish border, and is very close to Detmold and Externsteine, the site of a much-reputed Aryan temple and which some legends connected with Yggdrasil, the "World-Ash" (see right) of Norse mythology.

Externsteine is also close to Paderborn and Wewelsburg, and the entire sites compromised for the Ahnenerbe a mythological heartland where the Saxons resisted the Romans and their heirs, the Franks of Charlemagne.

The area was also sympathetic to the ideology of the Ahnenerbe, as Detmold was one of the first German states to elect an NSDAP government, and Paderborn and Wewelsburg were strongholds of Prussian beliefs.

During the war, archaeological expeditions were sent to Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Poland, and Rumania with the collaboration of local authorities.

The Ahnenerbe also conducted similar operations in occupied Russia and North Africa.

They were also very active in the Far East, mostly in Tibet (see below), but the Ahnenerbe did send an expedition to Kafiristan.

__________________________________________

Himmler deployed 'Sondereinheit H' to discover any traces of old Germanic magic that survived the witch-hunts, while Archive Department 7 administered book stocks, archived the confiscated materials, and then assessed their value.

'Sondereinheit H' would eventually acquire more than 140,000 books on the subject of the occult from libraries across Europe, and among the manuscripts they found was a copy of von Juntzt´s 'Unaussprechlichen Kulten' and a version of the 'Necronomicon' (see below) written in ancient Gothic.

These books told of a race much older than mankind: the 'Ancient Ones'.

The Geheimnisvolle Korps (Occult Corps) was soon established as the Paranormal Division of SS-Hauptsturmführer Wolfram Sievers' Ancestral Inheritence Office (Ahnenerbe).

Vril Emblem
© Copyright Peter Crawford 2017

OTO Lamen
© Copyright Peter Crawford 2017

The Geheimnisvolle Korps incorporated into one organization the Thule Society, the Vril Society and the German branch of Crowley's OTO.

Despite her possibly Slavic blood, Madame Helena Blavatsky's granddaughter Marianna Blavatsky was then recruited. (It appears that the Ahnernerbe traced the Blavatsky roots back to the Rhos - Scandanavian [Germanic] Vikings that had come into contact with the Slavs in 860 A.D.)

From Archiv Abteilung 7's stolen texts Marianna learned that violence begot a form of 'orgone energy' which, if properly seized, could be forged into magical effects.

Henri Bergson

Wilhelm Reich

Orgone energy is a hypothetical universal life force originally proposed in the 1930s by Wilhelm Reich. In its final conception, Orgone was conceived as the anti-entropic principle of the universe, a creative substratum in all of nature comparable to the Odic force of Carl Reichenbach and Henri Bergson's élan vital. Orgone was seen as a massless, omnipresent substance, similar to luminiferous aether, but more closely associated with living energy than inert matter. It could coalesce to create organization on all scales, from the smallest microscopic units - called bions - to macroscopic structures like organisms, clouds, or even galaxies.

Many died to help Marianna and her 'Meta-Psychic' operatives in the Bio-Energie Psi-Erweiterung Abteilung better understand and control the new 'blood magic' they had discovered.

Now under the direction of the 'SS Paranormale Abteilung', Sondereinheit H continued to comb German-occupied territories in search of more arcane knowledge and magical artifacts.
Archaeological expeditions were sent to the bottom of the Baltic Sea hoping to find some lost artifacts or magical items of Ultima Thule.

The Spear of Destiny, the weapon that was allegedly used to pierce the side of Jesus while he was nailed to the cross, was brought from Vienna in 1938, but early attempts to recover the Ark of the Covenant in 1936 and the Holy Grail in 1938, however, were less successful.
The original base of operations for the Occult Corps was the Wewelsburg in Westphalia, which Himmler bought as a ruin and rebuilt over the next 11 years at a cost of 13 million marks.
The central banqueting hall contained a vast round table with throne-like seats to accommodate Himmler and 12 of his favorite officers, making his modern-day 'Orden der Schwarzen Ritter' - a covenant of 13.
Beneath the Wewelsburg was the Halle der Toten (Hall of the Dead), where plinths stood around a stone table and the covenant could practice their occult magic in secret.

The roots of the Karotechia are deep and varied.

When the unit was officially created within the Ahnenerbe in 1939, it drew its members from within the Ahnenerbe, the disbanded Thule Gesellschaft, and a little known section of Archive Department VII of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA, Reich Security Central Office) called Sonderkommando-H.
Occult research had been conducted by various arms of the SS for quite some time before the creation of the Karotechia.
In the Ahnenerbe, the Abteilung zur Überprüfung der Sogenannten Geheimwissenschaften (literally, Department for the Examination of Secret Sciences) had analyzed the occult since 1933.

Karl Maria Wiligut

Also since 1933, Karl Maria Wiligut and his Department for Pre- and Early History had been Himmler’s premier occultist, a position that was undermined soon after the creation of the Karotechia.

Thule Gesellschaft
© Copyright Peter Crawford 2017

Suitable members of these organizations were drawn to the Karotechia, as were former members of the Thule Gesellschaft and scholars from Nazi-allied regimes and occupied countries.
Kabbalists and Gypsy practitioners were even forcibly recruited out of concentration camps, as well as those occultists rounded up through Aktion Hess.
More so than any other group researching the paranormal for their government during the Second World War, the Karotechia sought to exploit the occult to its fullest.
With the full backing of the SS and the Government of the Third Reich, they raided the libraries and museums of Europe in an insatiable search for arcane power.
No avenue of study was left unexplored, no matter how unlikely it might seem to the more established academics of the Ahnenerbe.
The Karotechia was shielded from inquiry within and without by direct patronage of Himmler, who passed certain information on to Hitler.
Members of the Karotechia were known by their initials in SS documents, and by their rune-names in internal correspondence, the names given upon induction into the unit.

Karotechia Sonnenrad
© Copyright Peter Crawford 2017

They were identified by the red 'sonnenrad' rune worn on the lapels of their black Allgemeine-SS uniforms.
This insignia and the men that wore it were equally feared and respected throughout the SS.

Created in 1935 under direct orders from Heinrich Himmler, Sonderkommando-H (for Hexen, German for witches) collected records of the Catholic Inquisition against witchcraft from libraries in Germany and Austria.

These records were collated into the Hexenkartothek, a catalog of over 33,000 index cards, each providing the details of a victim of the witch trials.

While most of the Hexenkartothek concentrated on witch trials in Germany, Sonderkommando-H researched cases from as far away as India and Mexico.

The research of Sonderkommando-H was meant to provide propaganda that would justify an SS crackdown on the Catholic Church, as well as discover the ancient Germanic religion that Himmler believed had been eradicated by the Inquisition.

The SS officers that collected the Hexenkartothek came to informally refer to themselves as the "Kartothekia," and what they discovered were arcane formulae and necromantic rituals.

Enough was learned by Sonderkommando-H to create what some one hundred and fifty known witches, warlocks, and alchemists termed 'the resuscitating of ye vital saylts'.

This formula, it has been claimed, was first successfully put to effect by SS-Hauptscharführer Dieter Scheel when his team resurrected 17th century sorceror Jurgen Tess.

It was this incident that created a new department within the Ahnenerbe to exploit the occult in service to the Reich: the Karotechia (Card filers).

Occult research had been conducted by various arms of the SS for quite some time before the creation of the Karotechia.

In the Ahnenerbe, the Abteilung zur Überprüfung der Sogenannten Geheimwissenschaften (literally, Department for the Examination of Secret Sciences) had analysed the occult since 1933.

Also since 1933, Karl Maria Wiligut and his 'Department for Pre- and Early History' had been Himmler's premier occultist, a position that was undermined soon after the creation of the Karotechia.

More so than any other group researching the paranormal for their government during the Second World War, the Karotechia sought to exploit the occult to its fullest.

With the full backing of the SS and the Third Reich, they searched the libraries and museums of Europe for arcane power.

No avenue of study was left unexplored.

The Karotechia was shielded from inquiry within and without by direct patronage of Himmler, who passed certain information on to Hitler.

Members of the Karotechia were known by their initials in SS documents, and by their rune-names in internal correspondence, the names given upon induction into the unit.

'Necronomicon'
('Al Azif')

Sonnenrad and Runes
© Copyright Peter Crawford 2017

The Karotechia never had a central headquarters, as each project maintained its own base of operations, reporting directly to Himmler.

When the Karotechia was required to perform some ancient Germanic ritual for Himmler, they were called to the SS-order castle at Wewelsburg.

'Necronomicon'
('Al Azif')

However, the isolation and provincial boredom of the place meant that the Karotechia officers preferred to conduct their operations elsewhere.

This also allowed them to operate with great independence.

Never as successful as their reputation belied, the Karotechia did score a number impressive victories during the war.

In particular was the discovery of a Gothic version of the supposedly fictitious 'Necronomicon' ('Al Azif') in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, in Paris, in the spring of 1944, which opened up several new projects to exploit its potential.

Burg Hohnstein

Most of these projects ended in failure, causing great destruction, such as the incident at Burg Hohnstein near Nordhausen (often erroneously refered to as Naudabaum) in early 1945, where seven Karotechia officers and seventy-three support personnel were killed, and the castle destroyed during an abortive attempt to summon an extraterrestrial being called Azathoth.

Burg Hohnstein is a one of the largest and best-preserved castle ruins in Germany and is located near Neustadt in the vicinity of Nordhausen in Thuringia. The castle is located on a high, rocky spur which today is covered in woods, about 1 km northeast of the village of Neustadt on the southern edge of the Harz mountains.

This disaster lead to the final Karotechia operation of the war: 'Aktion Götterdämmerung', the attempt by the Karotechia to re-enact the Nordhausen disaster without aborting the sequence to summon Azathoth.

'Aktion Götterdämmerung', however, failed.

Azathoth is the god of magic, arcane knowledge, balance, and foresight.

Azathoth
© Copyright Peter Crawford 2017

He is known as the 'Uncaring', the 'Lord of All Magic', and the 'Archmage of the Deities'.

All times and places are open to him, and he has visited many alternate realities and planes unknown to the wisest of sages, places even the Elder Evils avoid.

His symbol is an eye in a pentagram or the arcane triad; usually this is worn as an amulet.

Azathoth is usually portrayed as a middle aged man with white hair who wears purple robes decorated with golden runes.

He is described as carrying the very first staff of the magi with him at all times.

In addition, he knows every spell ever created and can travel to any time and dimension.

He is the possessor of the only magical library that contains a copy of every potion, spell, and magic item in existence.

Azathoth is honored with magical research and experimentation, with the burning of incense, the reading from books of arcane lore.

Each creation of a new spell or magic item is celebrated (usually once a year, in the holiday known as Great Discovery).

High-level followers of Azathoth make pilgrimages to other planes of existence.

Prayers to Azathoth utilize florid and elaborate language, signifying great erudition, labored formality, and a robust vocabulary.

Raumflug and Aliens

After a crashed spacecraft was discovered in the Black Forest (Schwarzwald), near Freiburg in 1936, the Occult Corps built the Institute for Science and Mysticism (Das Institut für Wissenschaft und Mystizismus), also known as "Walhalla" which was designated an 'X Lab, to examine the wreck.

In fact, the Institute’s "X-Labs" acquired so much science and technology far beyond mankind’s current knowledge base that soon various X-Labs were constructed in several other locations throughout Germany as well, including Castle Erlangen, Castle Heidenheim, Castle Höllenhammer, Castle Naudabaum, Castle Nuremburg, Castle Wolfenstein.

The crashed spacecraft was significant bcause the Vril Society, which had been incorprated into the Ahnenerbe believed that Aryans were a creation of the Black Sun - which is a form of Swastika, and had originated close to the Pliades, from a planet orbiting the star الدبران Aldaberan (which translates literally as "the follower" presumably because this bright star appears to follow the

Pleiades, or "Seven Sisters" star cluster in the night sky).

The upshot of this belief was that the Aryans were originally aliens.

And this information came from Maria Orsitsch (see right), in cooperation with the occultist Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorf, the Gurdjeff disciple Karl Haushofer, the engineer and ace pilot Lothar Waiz, Prelate Gernot of the secret "Societas Templi Marcioni" (The Inheritors of the Knights Templar).

Maria Orsitsch was born in Vienna.

Her father was a Croatian and her mother was a German from Vienna.

Maria Orsitsch was the head of the Alldeutsche Gesellschaft für Metaphysik (The All German Society for Metaphysics) founded in the early 20th century as a female circle of mediums who were involved in extraterrestrial telepathic contact.

The society was later renamed the ‘Society of Vrilerinnen Women’.

In 1917 Maria Orsitsch is said to have made contact with extraterrestrials from Aldebaran with her female Vril circle.

In December 1919 a small circle of persons from the Thule Gesellschaft, the Vril Society and the DHvSS - Die Herren vom Schwarzen Stein met in a specially rented forester’s lodge near Berchtesgaden, close to the home of Dietrich Eckart.

They were accompanied by the medium Maria Orsic and another medium only known as Sigrun. Maria had mediumistically received transmission in a secret Templar script – a language unknown to her – with the technical data for the construction of a flying machine (see right).

According to Vril documents these telepathic messages also came from the solar system Aldebaran, which is sixty-four light-years away in the constellation Taurus.

The Vril Society not only taught concentration exercises designed to awaken the forces of Vril, their main goal was to achieve Raumflug (Spaceflight) (see left), and the creation of a 'Jenseitsflugmaschine' to reach Aldebaran.

To achieve this, the Vril Society, the Thule Gesellschaft and the DHvSS Die Herren des schwarzen Steins were incorperated into the SS Ahnenerbe as part of an ambitious program to develop an inter-dimensional flight machine based on psychic revelations from the Aldebaran aliens.

During this early phase of alternative science Dr. W. O. Schumann (see right) of the Technical University in Munich, both a Thule and a Vril member, made a speech, a section of which is reproduced here:

'In everything we recognize two principles that determine events: light and darkness, good and evil, creation and destruction - as in electricity we have positive and negative. It is always either/or.

These two principles - the creative and the destructive - also determine our technical means...

Everything destructive is of Satanic origin, everything creative is divine... Every technology based upon explosion or combustion has thus to be called Satanic. The coming new age will be an age of a new, positive, divine technology...'

(from the German SS secret archives).

At the same time the scientist Viktor Schauberger (see right) worked on a similar project.

Johannes Kepler (see left), whose ideas Schauberger followed, had knowledge of the secret teachings of Pythagoras that had been adopted and kept secret by the Knights Templar.

It was the knowledge of implosion (in this case the utilization of the potential of the inner worlds in the outer world).

Hitler knew - as did the Thule and Vril people - that the divine principle was always constructive.

A technology that is based on explosion, however, and is therefore destructive runs against the divine principle.

Thus they wanted to create a technology based on implosion.

Schauberger's theory of oscillation (principle of the overtone sequence, the monochord) takes up the knowledge of implosion.

To put it simply: implosion instead of explosion.

Following the energy paths of the monochord and implosion technology one reaches the realm of antimatter and thus the cancellation of gravity.

click here for 'UFOs - Mystery and Meaning'

a study of the UFO and alien abduction phenomena

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A significant amount of Ahnenerbe research involved Tibet, and was carried out by the Sven Hedin Institute for Inner Asian Research.

The institute was named for the famous Swedish explorer whose memoirs 'My Life As An Explorer' were popular worldwide for their tales of Hedin's travels throughout Tibet.

Hedin's descriptions of hidden cities deep within the Himalayas were as much a source for Nazi interest in Tibet as Blavatsky's theosophical vision of the East.

Though never an official member of the Ahnenerbe (the old explorer was in his seventies during the war), Hedin corresponded with the organization and was present when the Institute for Inner Asian Research was formally established in Munich on January 1943.

Hedin's closest contact in the Ahnenerbe was Ernst Schäfer, who commanded the Institute for Inner Asian Research and was eventually responsible for all scientific projects within the Ahnenerbe.

Under the influence of Haushofer and the Thule Society, the Ahnenerbe sent annual expeditions to Tibet from 1926 to 1943.

Their mission was first to find and then to maintain contact with the Aryan forefathers in Shambhala and Agharti, hidden subterranean cities beneath the Himalayas.

Adepts there were the guardians of secret occult powers, especially vril, and the missions sought their aid in harnessing those powers for creating an Aryan master race.

Shambhala, however, refused any assistance, but Agharti agreed.

Subsequently, from 1929, groups of Tibetans came to Germany and started lodges known as the Society of Green Men.

In connection with the Green Dragon Society in Japan, through the intermediary of Haushofer, they supposedly helped the Nazi cause with their occult powers. Himmler was attracted to these groups of Tibetan-Agharti adepts and as a result encouraged the study of Eastern Occultism within the SS.

In 1937, Himmler decided he could increase the Ahnenerbe’s visibility by sending a large scale expedition to Tibet under the leadership of Ernst Schäfer.

There were rumors of secret tasks that included the SS making overtures to the Reting Regent to lay the groundwork for a German invasion of India through Tibet.

Tibet expedition was also involved in "geophysical" research to prove the Hanns Hörbiger's "World Ice Theory", which may have included the search for fossilized remains of "giants" as part of the cosmology of the theory.

The final inventory from the expedition included 20,000 black-and-white photographs, 2,000 colour photographs, 17 head casts and the measurements of 376 people, as well as having sent back specimens of three breeds of Tibetan dogs, rare feline species, wolves, badgers, foxes, animal and bird skins, and the seeds for 1,600 types of barley, 700 varieties of wheat, 700 varieties of oats and hundreds of other types of seeds. In addition, the team had been given a Tibetan mastiff, a gold coin and the robe of a lama (believed by Schäfer to have been worn by the Dalai Lama) to be gifted to Adolf Hitler.

Another interesting acquisition of the expedition was the 108-volume sacred document of the Tibetans, the 'Kangschur'.

Schäfer arrived in Munich on August 4, 1939, and was greeted personally by Himmler, who presented him with the SS skull ring and dagger of honour.

Because of the war, Schäfer’s writings about the trip were not published until 1950, under the title 'Festival of the White Gauze Scarves: A research expedition through Tibet to Lhasa, the holy city of the god realm'.

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The idea of a fabulous and mysterious homeland of the Aryan people, lying hidden somewhere in the far northern latitudes had a rich provenance not only in the tradition of Western occultism, but also in the burgeoning science of anthropology.

(Indeed, the very concept of an Aryan Race owed its existence as much to philology as any other branch of enquiry.)

The German Romantics were greatly attracted to Oriental philosophy and mysticism, in particular the Zend-Avesta, the sacred text of the ancient Persians.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Nietzsche

Thinkers of the calibre of Goethe, Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner found in the Orient a system of philosophy and historiography that allowed them to abandon the unsatisfactory world view of Judeo- Christianity.

Richard Wagner

Allied with this admiration for the Orient was a rediscovery of the German Volk, the pre-Christian Teutonic tribes whose descendants, the Goths, had brought about the final destruction of the decadent Roman Empire.

The problem faced by the German Romantics was how to forge a historical connection between themselves and the Orient, which they considered to be the cradle of humanity and the origin of the highest human ideals.

Friedrich von Schlegel

Instrumental in the forging of this link was the classical scholar Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829), who attempted to establish a historical and cultural contact between the Indians and the Scandinavians through which the Scandinavian languages could have been influenced by the Indian. Schlegel solved this problem by stating that the ancient Aryans had travelled to the far north, as a result of their veneration for the sacred mountain, Meru, which they believed to constitute the spiritual centre of the world.

It was actually Schlegel who coined the term Aryan in 1819, to denote a distinct racial group.

Schlegel took the word Aryan, which had already been derived from the ancient Greek historian Herodotus.

At that point, the word Aryan came to denote the highest, purest and most honourable racial group.

This historical scheme was added to by other thinkers such as Christian Lassen, who stated that the Indo- Germans were inherently biologically superior to the Semites.

According to the historian Leon Poliakov, by 1860 cultivated Europeans had come to accept that there was a fundamental division between Aryans and Semites.

In this scheme, Nordic Europeans were of the Aryan Race, an this race had come from the high plateaus of Asia (hence the Ahnenerbe's interest in Tibet - see above).

There had dwelt together the ancestors of the Indians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Germans, and Celts, before setting off to populate Europe.

The Polar Paradise

Thule - The Polar Paradise

In the desire to rediscover the ultimate mythical and cultural roots of the master race, the Ahnenerbe turned away from the heat of the biblical Mesopotamian Eden, and looked instead to the cool and pristine fastness of the Far North.

The eighteenth-century polymath Jean-Sylvain Bailly (1736-1793) had already done much of the groundwork for a radical re-interpretation of humanity's origin with his highly original combination of Eastern mysticism and astronomy.

According to Bailly, the ancient cultures of Egypt and Chaldea, and India were actually the heirs of a far older body of knowledge, possessed in the distant past by a long-lost superior culture living in the antediluvian North.

Bailly believed that it was this ancient culture that invented the zodiac in around 4600 BC.

Members of this civilisation had then moved from northern Asia to India.

For Bailly, this assertion was supported by the similarity of certain legends in later cultures living far from each other: for example, the legend of the Phoenix, which is found both in Egypt and in the Scandinavian Eddas.

Annual Disappearance of the Sun

Bailly equated the details of the Phoenix's death and rebirth with the annual disappearance of the Sun for 65 days at 71Â° North latitude.

He went on to compare the Phoenix with the Roman god Janus, the god of time, who is represented with the number 300 in his right hand, and the number 65 in his left (corresponding, of course, with the 300 days of daylight and 65 days of darkness each year in the far northern latitudes).

Legend of Adonis

Bailly thus concluded that Janus was actually a northern god, who had moved south with his original worshippers in the distant past.

In support of his theory, Bailly also cited the legend of Adonis, who was required by Jupiter to spend one third of each year on Mount Olympus, one third with Venus and one third in Hades with Persephone.

Bailly connected this legend with conditions in the geographical area at 79° North latitude, where the Sun disappears for four months (one third) of the year.

To Bailly, this strongly suggested the preservation of the ancient knowledge of a Nordic civilisation, which had been encoded in numerous legends passed down to subsequent cultures.

Ice Age

Researchers at the Ahnenerbe speculated that the date for the first appearance of the Aryans in the polar regions at 25,628 BC, was during the Interglacial Age.

The Aryans were forced to leave their homeland as the environment grew steadily colder and more hostile.

The advent of the Ice Age that scattered the Aryans from their pleasant homeland was just one of a number of global catastrophes that proved the downfall of at least three other ancient civilisations: Atlantis, Lemuria and the culture occupying what is now the Gobi Desert.

From that point the Aryan tradition influenced the great civilisations of Egypt, Sumer and Babylon.

From Hyperborea to Atlantis

The Legend of Hyperborea

The great Russian occultist Helena Blavatsky, had considerable information to divulge on the nature of the lost civilisations whose philosophy and knowledge were passed down, in frequently garbled form, to the great civilisations of the Middle and Far East.

'Stanzas of Dzyan'

According to Blavatsky, who had consulted a fantastically old document entitled the 'Stanzas of Dzyan' while in Tibet, our remote ancestors occupied a number of lost continents, the first of which she describes as 'The Imperishable Sacred Land', an eternal place unencumbered by the sometimes violent fates reserved for other continents, that was the home of the first human and also of 'the last divine mortals'.

Hyperborea

The Second Continent was Hyperborea, the land which stretched out its promontories southward and westward from the North Pole to receive the Second Race, and comprised the whole of what is now known as Northern Asia.

The 'Second Race' refers to one of the Root Races.

Blavatsky continues:

'The land of the Hyperboreans, the country that extended beyond Boreas, the frozen-hearted god of snows and hurricanes, who loved to slumber heavily on the chain of Mount Riphaeus, was neither an ideal country, as surmised by the mythologists, nor yet a land in the neighbourhood of Scythia and the Danube. It was a real continent, a bond-fide land which knew no winter in those early days, nor have its remains more than one night and day during the year, even now. The nocturnal shadows never fall upon it, said the Greeks; for it is the land of the Gods, the favourite abode of Apollo, the god of light, and its inhabitants are his beloved priests and servants. This may be regarded as poetised fiction now; but it was poetised truth then.'

The Third Continent was Lemuria (so called by the zoologist P. L. Sclater in reference to a hypothetical sunken continent extending from Madagascar to Sri Lanka and Sumatra).

The Fourth Continent was Atlantis.

'It would be the first historical land, were the traditions of the ancients to receive more attention than they have hitherto. The famous island of Plato of that name was but a fragment of this great Continent.'

In her description of the Fifth Continent, Blavatsky evokes images of cataclysmic seismic shifts in the land mass of the Earth:

The Fifth Continent is Europe and Asia Minor.

The 'Secret Doctrine' takes no account of islands and peninsulas, nor does it follow the modern geographical distribution of land and sea.

Since the day of its earliest teachings and the destruction of the great Atlantis, the face of the earth has changed more than once.

There was a time when the delta of Egypt and Northern Africa belonged to Europe, before the formation of the Straits of Gibraltar, and a further upheaval of the continent, changed entirely the face of the map of Europe.

The last serious change occurred some 12,000 years ago, and was followed by the submersion of Plato's little Atlantic island, which he calls 'Atlantis' after its parent continent.

Blavatsky read in the 'Stanzas of Dzyan' that the Earth contained seven great continents, 'four of which have already lived their day, the fifth still exists, and two are to appear in the future.'

Aside from the Stanzas of Dzyan, Blavatsky drew on a huge number of religious texts, including the Hindu Puranas, which speak of a land called Svita-Dvipa (Hyperborea), or the White Island,

at the centre of which is Mount Meru, the spiritual centre of the world

If we accept the attributes given to Mount Meru in the sacred texts of the Hindus - it must be conceded that the mountain does not exist anywhere on the physical Earth.

This has led Orientalists to speculate that the White Island and Mount Meru are situated in another dimension occupying that same apparent space as Earth, and which is visible (and reachable) to beings possessing a sufficiently advanced spirituality.

The legendary realm of 'Hyperborea' also formed a centrepiece in the writings of the French occultist Rene Guenon (1886-1951) who, like Blavatsky, claimed to have received his information from hidden Oriental sources.

Guenon's Hyperborea is very similar to Blavatsky's.

Along with the later Atlantean civilisation, Hyperborea was the origin of all religious and spiritual tradition in our own modern world.

Guenon also wrote of Mount Meru, although in symbolic terms.

It seems from his essays on symbology that Guenon did not regard Meru as an actual mountain situated at the North Pole, but rather as a symbol of the earth's axis that passes through the pole and points to the Arktoi, the constellations of the Great and Little Bears.

At this point, we should pause to consider a question that may have occurred to the reader: assuming the existence of the prehistoric Root Races of humanity, why have none of their remains ever been discovered and excavated by archaeologists and palaeontologists? Apart from the obvious but not particularly satisfactory answer that the vast majority of the Earth's fossil record has yet to be discovered, it should be remembered that, according to Guenon, Blavatsky and the other Theosophists, the early Earth and its fabulous primordial inhabitants were not solid, corporeal entities, but were composed of a rarefied spiritual substance that only later descended into the material state. It is for this reason that their remains have never been discovered.

It is easy to see how the central tenets of Theosophy - the ancient civilisations, the origins of the Aryan race, and that race's position of high nobility - were attractive to the German occultists and nationalists, who so hated the modern world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Modernism in general was seen as being largely an urban, sophisticated, Jewish phenomenon, and this included certain aspects of science, technology, the Industrial Revolution, and of course capitalism.

The doctrines of the Theosophists successfully fused science and mysticism, taking Darwin's theories regarding natural selection, and the survival of the fittest, and applying them to the concept of a spiritual struggle between the races of Earth (resulting in the Aryan race), which was a necessary component in the evolution of the spirit.

It should be remembered that Blavatsky's works appear to be the result of prodigious scholarship and were extremely convincing.

The rationale behind many later völkisch projects can be traced back - through the writings of von List, von Sebottendorff, and von Liebenfels - to ideas first popularized by Blavatsky.

A caste system of races, the importance of ancient alphabets (notably the runes), the superiority of the Aryans (a white race with its origins in the Himalayas), an version of astrology and astronomy, the cosmic truths coded within pagan myths ... all of these and more can be found both in Blavatsky and in National Socialism itself, specifically in the ideology of the SS and the Ahnenerbe.

It was, after all, Blavatsky who pointed out the supreme occult significance of the Hakenkreuz (swastika).

Iceland and Antarctica

It is a matter of historical record that the Ahenerbe mounted expeditions to Iceland, Antarctica and Tibet (for Tibet see above).

The true reasons for these expeditions, however, have been the subject of considerable debate throughout the decades since the end of the war.

The völkisch concept of Thule can be traced to Guido von List, Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels and Rudolf von Sebottendorff, who conceived of it as the ancient homeland of the Aryan race.

Iceland

The völkisch fascination with the Scandinavian Eddas led von Sebottendorff to conclude that the supposedly long-vanished land of Thule was actually Iceland.

This link with the lost Aryan homeland prompted an intense interest in the possibility of discovering further clues to their remote history, indeed, to their very origin, among the caves and prehistoric monuments of the island.

An organisation called the 'Nordic Society' was established at Lubeck by Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1945), the völkisch mystic, philosopher, and editor of the 'Volkischer Beobachter'.

Iceland

The society counted among its members representatives from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland, who were drawn together in order to defend the Nordic nations against the Soviet, Jewish and Masonic threat.

Rosenberg explained his Thulean mythology in his book 'Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts' (The Myth of the Twentieth Century), published in 1930, which was a massive best-seller in Germany.

In the first chapter of the book, Rosenberg explains the basis of his belief in an ancient Aryan homeland in the north:

'The geologists show us a continent between North America and Europe, whose remains we can see today in Greenland and Iceland. They tell us that islands on the other side of the Far North (Novaia Zemlya) display former tide marks over 100 metres higher than today's; they make it probable that the North Pole has wandered, and that a much milder climate once reigned in the present Arctic. All this allows the ancient legend of Atlantis to appear in a new light. It seems not impossible that where the waves of the Atlantic Ocean now crash and pull off giant icebergs, once a blooming continent rose out of the water, on which a creative race raised a mighty, wide- ranging culture, and sent its children out into the world as seafarers and warriors. But even if this Atlantean hypothesis is not thought tenable, one has to assume that there was a prehistoric northern center of culture.'

The expeditions were authorised by Heinrich Himmler under the auspices of the Ahnenerbe.

German interest in Antarctic exploration goes back to 1873, when Eduard Dallman mounted an expedition in his steamship Gronland on behalf of the newly founded German Society of Polar Research.

Wilhelm Filchner

Less than 60 years later, the Swiss explorer Wilhelm Filchner, who had already led an expedition to Tibet in 1903-05, planned to lead two expeditions to Antarctica with the intention of determining if the continent was a single piece of land.

Filchner's plans called for two ships, one to enter the Weddell Sea and one to enter the Ross Sea.

Two groups would then embark on a land journey and attempt to meet at the centre of the continent.

The 'Deutschland'

This plan, however, proved too expensive, and so a single ship, the 'Deutschland', was used. The 'Deutschland' was a Norwegian ship specifically designed for work in polar regions, and was acquired with the help of Ernest Shackleton, Otto Nordenskjold and Fridtjof Nansen.

The expedition reached the Weddell Sea in December 1911.

Another expedition was mounted in 1925 with the polar expedition ship 'Meteor' under the command of Dr Albert Merz.

Prior to World War II German scientists were obsessed with Antarctica.

Far from finding a desolate wasteland covered with ice, the Germans discovered ice-free areas, warm water lakes and cavern systems.

The Germans also got interested in Queen Maud land (or "Neuschwabenland" as referred to by the Germans - Germany was called "Schwabenland" before it was called Germany - so Neuschwabenland means "New Germany").

Neuschwabenland is dominated by the giant shelf of ice, flowing slowly from King Haakon VII - plateau over the South Pole, down to the ocean.

This area is called "Fenriskjeften" after the mouth of the giant Devil-wolf in Norse mythology. According to this mythology Fenris' (the wolf) teeth were very sharp, and they would kill all people on Earth during Ragnarok - the end of the world.

Most of the mountains in Fenriskjeften have names with analogies to teeth, or to other parts of the Norse.

The use of wolf symbology is interesting as it touches upon a theme in völkisch symbology which used the wolf as a totem of the hunter: Hitler's retreat in Berchtesgaden, Bavaria was nicknamed "Wolf's Lair", and the tactic used by German U-Boats to defeat convoys during the War was called "Wolfpack."

Hitler, of course, also used the alias 'Wolf' or 'Herr Wolf'

In the years running up to the Second World War, Germany wanted a foothold in Antarctica, both for the propaganda value of demonstrating the power of the Third Reich and also because of the territory's strategic significance in the South Atlantic.

On 17 December 1938, an expedition was despatched under the command of Captain Alfred Ritscher to the South Atlantic coast of Antarctica and arrived there on 19 January 1939.

Aircraft Carrier 'Schwabenland'

The expedition's ship was the 'Schwabenland', an aircraft carrier that had been used since 1934 for transatlantic mail delivery.

The 'Schwabenland', which had been prepared for the expedition in the Hamburg shipyards at a cost of one million Reichsmarks, was equipped with two Dornier seaplanes, the 'Passat' and the 'Boreas', which were launched from its flight deck by steam catapults and which made fifteen flights over the territory which Norwegian explorers had named 'Queen Maud Land'.

The aircraft covered approximately 600,000 square kilometres, took more than 11,000 photographs of the 'Princess Astrid' and 'Princess Martha' coasts of western 'Queen Maud Land', and dropped several thousand drop-flags (metal poles with swastikas).

The area was claimed for the Third Reich, and was renamed 'Neu Schwabenland'.

Perhaps the most surprising discovery made by this expedition was a number of large, ice-free areas, containing lakes and sparse vegetation.

The expedition geologists suggested that this might have been due to underground heat sources.

In mid-February 1939, the 'Schwabenland' left Antarctica and returned to Hamburg.

The secret expedition had 33 members plus the Schwabenland's crew of 24.

On 19 January 1939 the ship arrived at the Princess Martha Coast and began charting the region.

German flags were placed on the sea ice along the coast.

Ahnenerbe Expedition to Neu Schwabenland

Naming the area 'Neu-Schwabenland' after the ship, the expedition established a base, and in the following weeks teams walked along the coast recording claim reservations on hills and other significant landmarks.

Seven photographic survey flights were made by the ship’s two Dornier Wal seaplanes named Passat and Boreas.

The Dornier Do J Wal ("whale") was a twin-engine German flying boat of the 1920s designed by Dornier Flugzeugwerke. The Do J was designated the Do 16 by the Reich Air Ministry (RLM) under its aircraft designation system of 1933.

About a dozen 1.2 meter-long aluminum arrows, with 30 centimeter steel cones and three upper stabilizer wings embossed with swastikas, were air dropped onto the ice at turning points of the flight polygons (these arrows had been tested on the Pasterze glacier in Austria before the expedition).

Eight more flights were made to areas of keen interest, and on these trips some of the photos were taken with colour film.

Altogether they flew over hundreds of thousands of square kilometres, and took more than 16,000 aerial photographs, some of which were published after the war by Ritscher.

On its return trip to Germany the expedition made oceanographic studies near Bouvet Island and Fernando de Noronha, arriving back in Hamburg on 11 April 1939.

Ritscher was surprised at the findings of the expedition, particularly the ice-free areas, and immediately began to plan another journey upon his arrival home.

These plans, however, were apparently abandoned with the outbreak of war.

Large, Cargo Carrying Submarines - Type XXI - Elektroboot

It has been suggested, however, that the 1938-39 expedition had been to look for a suitable ice-free region on the continent that could be used for a secret base after the war.

Großadmiral Karl Dönitz

There is evidence that throughout the war, the Third Reich sent ships, (an in particular large, cargo carrying submarines), and aircraft to 'Neu Schwabenland' with enough equipment and manpower to build massive complexes under the ice, or in well-hidden ice-free areas, and at the close of the war selected scientists and SS troops left Europe and went to Antarctica.

As Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz stated in 1943:

"Germany's submarine fleet is proud that it created an unassailable fortress for the Führer on the other end of the world."

Advanced Aircraft Technology.

Rumours began to circulate that, whilst Germany had been defeated, a selection of military personnel, Hitler Youth and scientists had left the fatherland, as allied troops swept across mainland Europe, and had established themselves at a secret base on the Antarctic continent, from where they continued to develop their advanced aircraft technology.

Furthermore, it is interesting to note that at the end of the war, the allies determined that there were 250,000 Germans unaccounted for - even taking into account casualties and deaths.

In addition, until today more than 100 submarines of the German fleet are missing.

Among those are many of the highly technological XXI class equipped with the so-called 'Walterschnorkel', a special designed and coated Schnorkel enabling submarines in combination with their new developed engines to dive for many thousand miles.

A 'trip' to the base without recognition becomes more than possible with this technology.

Could Neu Schwabenland have been a permanently manned German base at that time ?

The brackish water of the warm (30 degrees) lakes virtually confirmed that all had an outlet to the sea and would thus have been a haven for U-boats. The two ice-free mountain ranges in Neu Schwabenland presented no worse an underground tunneling project for Organization Todt than anything they had encountered and overcome in Norway, and the Germans were the world's experts at building and inhabiting underground metropolis.

At the end of the war the United States gave anything concerning Ohrdruf a top secret classification for 100 years upwards. The fact that there had been substantial underground workings there, and Ohrdruf was the location of the last Redoubt, was concealed absolutely. Fortunately for researchers, in 1962 the DDR had taken sworn depositions from all local residents during an investigation into wartime Ohrdruf, and upon the reunification of the two Germanys in 1989, these documents became available to all and sundry at Arnstadt municipal archive.

From the Arnstadt documents it is clear that the Charite Anlage unit operated in a three-story underground bunker with floors 70 by 20 meters.

When working, the device emitted some kind of energy field which shut down all electrical equipment and non-diesel engines within a range of about eight miles.

For this reason, even though Ohrdruf was crawling with SS, it was never photographed from the air nor bombed.

Declassified USAF documents dated early 1945 admit the existence of an unknown energy field over Frankfurt/Main "and other locations" which were able to "interfere with our aircraft engines at 30,000 feet."

Ohrdruf, rebuilt below Neu Schwabenland during the last two years of the war, would not have been difficult, and since Charite Anlage had the highest priority of anything in the Third Reich, it seems likely that it must have been.

Such a base would have been impregnable, for the suggestion is that the force-field worked in various ways favourable to the occupants.

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T H E E N D O F T H E A H N E N E R B E

To avoid Allied bombing, the Ahnenerbe relocated to Waischenfeld in Franconia on August 1943.

There they remained until American forces took the city in April 1945.

The war ended before the Ahnenerbe found another permanent home, and, during the interim period, a great number of documents were destroyed.

Had the Ahnenerbe survived the war, Himmler planned to use its members to staff an SS-University at Leyden in the Netherlands.

Those that survived the war faded back into academia under their own or false names.

DEPARTMENTS AND INSTITUTES OF THE AHNENERBE

Social Sciences

Indogermanisch-arische Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft (Indogermanic-aryan Language and Cultural Studies)
Indogermanisch-germanische Sprach- und Kullturwissenschaft (Indogermanic-Germanic Language and Cultural Studies)
Germanische Kulturwissenschaft und Landschaftskunde (Germanic Cultural Studies and Landscape Science)
Germanische Sprachwissenschaft und Landschaftskunde (Germanic Linguistics and Landscape Science)
Indogermanische Glaubensgeschichte (Indogermanic Faith history)
Indogermanische Rechtsgeschichte (Indogermanic Historical jurisprudence)
Indogermanisch-deutsche Musik (Indogermanic-German Music)
Germanisch-deutsche Volkskunde (Germanic-German Folklore)
Deutsche Volksforschung und Volkskunde (German Ethnic Research and Folklore)
Volkserzählung, Märchen und Sagenkunde (Folktales, Fairytales and Myths)
Runen, Schrift und Sinnbildkunde (Runes, Alphabets, and Symbols)
Hausmarken und Sippenzeichen (House Brands and Family Marks)
Ortung und Landschaftssinnbilder (Location and Landscape symbols)
Ausgrabungen (Excavations)
Germanisches Bauwesen (Germanic Architecture)
Wurtenforschung (Dwelling Mound Research)
Urgeschichte (Prehistory)
Keltische Volksforschung (Celtic ethnic research)
Indogermanisch-finnische Kulturbeziehungen (Indogermanic-Finnish cultural relations)
Klassische Archäologie (Classic Archaeology)
Klassische Altertumswissenschaft (Classical Antiquity)
Alte Geschichte (Ancient History)
Mittlere und Neuere Geschichte (Middle and Modern History)
Griechische Philologie (Greek Philology)
Lateinische Philologie (Latin Philology)
Mittellatein (Medieval Latin)
Innerasien und Expeditionen (Inner Asia and Expeditions)
Vorderer Orient (Near East)
Ostasien-Institut (East Asian Institute)
Orientalistische Indologie (Oriental Indology)
Nordwestafrikanische Kulturwissenschaft (Northwest African Cultural Studies
Philosophie (Philosophy)

Natural Sciences

Gesamte Naturwissenschaft ("Natural Science")
Darstellende und angewandte Naturkunde ("Descriptive and Applied Natural History")
Biologie ("Biology")
Entomologie ("Entomology")
Astronomie ("Astronomy")
Pferdezucht ("Horse Breeding")
Botanik ("Botany")
Pflanzengenetik ("Plant Genetics")
Karst- und Höhlenkunde ("Speleology")
Naturwissenschaftliche Vorgeschichte ("Scientific History")
Tiergeographie und Tiergeschichte ("Zoogeography and Animal History")
Angewandte Geologie ("Applied Geology")
Geologische Zeitmessung ("Geochronology")
Geophysik ("Geophysics")
Kernphysik ("Nuclear Physics")
Volksmedizin ("Folk Medicine")
Osteologie ("Osteology")
Überprüfung der sogenannten Geheimwissenschaften ("Survey of the so-called occult sciences")
Wehrwissenschaftliche Zweckforschung ("Military Scientific Research")

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Die Deutsche Ahnenerbe