Völkisch Occult Cosmology

‘There is a Nordic and National Socialist Science which is opposed to Judaeo-Liberal

Science.'

Adolf Hitler

In creating - or re-creating - civilisation anew the völkisch occultists were not content with re-defining art, culture, politics and philosophy - their ambition also reached out to cosmology - and the creator of this new cosmology was Hanns Hörbiger.
Hanns Hörbiger (29 November 1860, Atzgersdorf – 11 October 1931, Mauer) was an Austrian engineer from Vienna with roots in Tyrol.
He took part in the construction of the Budapest subway and in 1894 invented a new type of valve essential for compressors still in widespread use today.
Hörbiger's cosmology is known as the Welteislehre (World Ice Theory), - also known as Glazial-Kosmogonie (Glacial Cosmogony).
Hörbiger did not arrive at his theory through research, but said that he had received it in a "vision" in 1894.

According to his theory, ice was the basic substance of all cosmic processes, and ice moons, ice planets, and the "global ether" (also made of ice) had determined the entire development of the universe.


By his own account, Hörbiger was observing the Moon when he was struck by the notion that the brightness and roughness of its surface was due to ice.
Shortly after, he experienced a dream in which he was floating in space watching the swinging of a pendulum which grew longer and longer until it broke."I knew that Newton had been wrong and that the sun's gravitational pull ceases to exist at three times the distance of Neptune," he concluded.

The earth, Hörbiger stated, is a meeting-point between ice and fire: Horbiger taught that it had already attracted three moons, and that the one we see at present is the fourth, which, of course, is made of ice.
Like its predecessors, this moon will eventually collide with our planet, and then it will be the turn of Mars.
All of earth's history is the result of the forces exerted by its successive moons, and can be divided into four distinct geological epochs:. at the end of each epoch, the cosmic forces are at their strongest, due to the closeness of the moon, and the result has been beings of gigantic size.

The first epoch culminated in the age of giant vegetation and insects: the second in the dinosaurs, the giant mammals, and the first human beings, a race of giants, as mentioned in Genesis 6.4, who ruled the earth some 15,000,000 years ago: the third was the mythical Golden Age, that of Lemuria, Atlantis and Thule, destroyed by the cataclysm of the third moon falling on the Earth 150,000 years ago; the fourth age is our own.
According to Horbiger, the beginning of this age was marked by battles between the giants who had survived the third, and the men of the fourth, as recorded in mythologies.
Other giants taught men to found the ancient civilisations of South America, Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China.
Eventually the giants died out, and man declined into the drabness of Judaeo-Christian civilisation, where he forgot his glorious heritage.
But this is only temporary.
Affected by the cosmic rays of a moon which is spiralling imperceptibly closer, man will awaken to a realisation of his place in a living universe, mutations will transform his existence, and demi-gods and giants will again arise in our midst.
Horbiger averred that an 'uprush of fire' was imminent, that great initiates would co-operate once more with the cosmos and its struggle between ice and fire, that Supermen would once more walk the earth's surface, and that before them the slave-men would tremble and obey.

These doctrines conformed with the legends of primitive peoples and the mythologies of the
ancients, with the visions of Nietzsche and of Wagner.
They had many similarities too with the teachings of Gurdjieff (see right) and Madame Blavatsky (see left).
A cameo of Hitler's remarks, drawn from his 'Table Talk', displays his agreement with the teachings of Horbiger:

‘I'm quite inclined to accept the cosmic theories of Horbiger.
It's not impossible, in fact, that 10,000 years before our era there was a clash between the earth and the moon that gave the moon its present orbit.
It's also possible that the earth attracted to itself the atmosphere of the moon and that this radically altered the conditions of life on our planet ... It seems to me that these questions will be capable of solution on the day when a man will intuitively establish the connection between these facts, thus teaching exact science the path to follow.....
... It was a great step forward in the days of Ptolemy to say that the earth was a sphere and
that the stars circulated around it.
Since then there has been continual progress ... Copernicus first.
Copernicus, in his turn, has been largely left behind and things will always be so. In our time, Horbiger has made another step forward ...
The real question is whether the earth came from the sun or whether it has a tendency to approach it.
For me there is no doubt that planetary satellites are attracted by the planets, just as the latter are attracted by a fixed point, the sun.
Since there is no such thing as a vacuum it is possible that the planets' speed of rotation and movement may grow slower.
Thus it is not impossible, for example, that Mars may become one day- a satellite of earth ... I shall construct ... an observatory in which will be represented the three great cosmological conceptions of history'  – those of Ptolemy, Copernicus and Horbiger.'

Horbiger's theories taken with those of a commentator, Edgar Daque, confirmed Hitler's own
belief in the imminence of the transformation of man.

Hörbiger worked out his theory in collaboration with the astronomer and schoolteacher Philipp Fauth (see right), who he met in 1898, and published it as Glazial-Kosmogonie in 1912.

Fauth had previously produced a large lunar map and had a considerable following, which lent Hörbiger's theory some respectability.

It did not receive a great deal of attention at the time, but following World War I Hörbiger decided to change his strategy by promoting the new "cosmic truth" not only to people at universities and academies, but also to the general public.

Hörbiger thought that if "the masses" accepted his ideas then they might put enough pressure on the academic establishment to force his theory into the mainstream.

No effort was spared in popularising the theory: "cosmotechnical" societies were founded, which offered public lectures that attracted large audiences, there were cosmic ice movies and radio programs, and even cosmic ice journals and novels.

The followers of the theory exerted a great deal of public pressure on behalf of the theory.

The movement published posters, pamphlets, and books, and even a newspaper, 'The Key to World Events'.
A company owned by an adherent would only hire people who declared themselves convinced of the theory's truth.

Some followers even attended astronomical meetings to heckle, shouting, "Out with astronomical orthodoxy! Give us Hörbiger!"

During this period, the name was changed from the Graeco-Latin Glazial-Kosmogonie to the more Germanic Welteislehre ("World ice doctrine").

One of the early supporters of Hörbiger's theories was Houston Stewart Chamberlain (see right), the leading theorist behind the early development of the National Socialist Party in Germany in 1923.


However, Chamberlain was also a gifted amateur astronomer, with a full size observatory built on the top floor of his house in Bayreuth (see left), and as such he lent his weight to the growing support for Hörbiger's theory.

Two organizations were set up in Vienna concerned with the theory, the Kosmotechnische Gesellschaft and the Hörbiger Institute.

The first was formed in 1921 by a group of enthusiastic adherents of the Theory, which included engineers, physicians, civil servants, and businessmen.

Most had been personally acquainted with Hörbiger, and had attended his many lectures.

Among Hörbiger's followers was Viennese author Egon Friedell, who explained the World Ice Theory in his 1930 'Cultural History of the Modern Age'.

After Hörbiger’s death in 1931, the followers of the Welteislehre came to the conclusion that given the changing political situation in Germany, aligning the theory with National Socialism would eventually lead to its acceptance; the Welteislehre had already been heavily and successfully promoted as the "German antithesis" of the "Jewish" theory of relativity in the late 1920s.

And so the movement became more and more pro-Nazi, with the Welteislehre supporters saying things like: "Our Nordic ancestors grew strong in ice and snow; belief in the Cosmic Ice is consequently the natural heritage of Nordic Man.", - "Just as it needed a child of Austrian culture - Hitler! - to put the Jewish politicians in their place, so it needed an Austrian to cleanse the world of Jewish science.".

Heinrich Himmler, one of the most powerful Nazi leaders, became a strong proponent of the theory and he stated that if it were corrected and adjusted with new scientific findings it could very well be accepted as scientific work.

Adolf Hitler, an enthusiastic follower of the the 'Welteislehre' theory, adopted it as the Nazi party's official cosmology.

He claimed that Hörbiger was not accepted by the scientific establishment because "the fact is, men do not wish to know."

'The World Ice Theory' was intended to form part of a planetarium Hitler planned to build on Linz's Mount Pöstling.

According to the structure's plans, the ground floor was to centre around Ptolemey's universe, the middle floor Copernicus' theory, and the top floor, Hörbiger's theory.

It has been said that the real reason both Hitler and Himmler favored the theory was to counterbalance the perceived Jewish influence on the sciences, similar to the 'Deutsche Physik' movement.

Hörbiger's theory was for instance opposed to Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.

Dozens of scientific journals, books, and even novels were published on this topic.

Hörbiger's theories became generally accepted among the population of Nazi Germany and a German Hörbiger Organization had thousands of members.

The Nazis also considered the 'World Ice Theory' valuable because of its supposed value in weather forecasting.

The 1938 'Zur Welteismeteorologie' ("On World Ice Meteorology") by Dr. E. Dinies, published by the Reichs Office for Weather Service quotes from Hörbiger's Glazial-Kosmogonie and provided tables of data comparing ice and air temperatures for relative humidity values.

A growing group of 'believing scientists' expanded the theory during the last years of World War II.

Following the Anschluss of March 1938, the Kosmotechnische Gesellschaft was liquidated by the Nazis and its funds seized.

The Hörbiger Institute, which was a small association which collected funds for research, was left in possession of all Hörbiger's scientific material, including a library and a large collection of valuable drawings covering astronomy, meteorology, and geology as they related to the Hörbiger Theory.

The National Socialists wanted to close the Institute down as well, but Hörbiger's son Alfred and the Chairman avoided this by having a Nationalist Socialist Commission appointed.

They also managed to prevent the archives being taken to Berlin and absorbed in Himmler’s Ahnenerbe organization, and established that the Institute was the private property of Hörbiger's sons.

Despite the outbreak of World War II, Alfred Hörbiger managed to continue publishing the Institute's Proceedings, in spite of being cut off from all foreign publications and correspondents.

In February 1945 the Hörbiger engineering works were destroyed, and in March the Institute's premises were hit and were boarded up just before Soviet troops arrived.

Alfred Hörbiger died in August 1945 but the Institute hoped to restart publication of its Proceedings by 1949.

THE  WELTEISLEHRE


According to the theory, the solar system had its origin in a gigantic star into which a smaller, dead, waterlogged star fell.

This impact caused a huge explosion which flung fragments of the smaller star out into interstellar space where the water condensed and froze into giant blocks of ice.

A ring of such blocks formed, which we now call the Milky Way, as well as a number of solar systems among which was our own, but with many more planets than currently exist.

Interplanetary space is filled with traces of hydrogen gas, which cause the planets to slowly spiral inwards, along with ice blocks.

The outer planets are large mainly because they have swallowed a large number of ice blocks, but the inner planets have not swallowed nearly as many.

One can see ice blocks on the move in the form of meteors, and when one collides with the Earth, it produces hailstorms over an area of many square kilometers, while when one falls into the Sun, it produces a sunspot and gets vaporized, making "fine ice," which covers the innermost planets.

It was also claimed that the Earth had had several satellites before it acquired the Moon; they began as planets in orbits of their own, but over long spans of time were captured one by one and slowly spiralled in towards the Earth until it disintegrated and its debris became part of the Earth's structure.

One can supposedly identify the rock strata of several geological eras with the impacts of these satellites.

The last such impact, of the "Tertiary" or "Cenozoic Moon" and the capture of our present Moon, is supposedly remembered through myths and legends.

This was worked out in detail by Hörbiger's English follower Hans Schindler Bellamy; Bellamy recounted how as a child he would often dream about a large moon that would spiral closer and closer in until it burst, making the ground beneath roll and pitch, awakening him and giving him a very sick feeling.

When he looked at the Moon's surface through a telescope, he found its surface looking troublingly familiar.
When he learned of Hörbiger's theory in 1921, he found it a description of his dream.

He explained the mythological support he found in such books as 'Moons, Myths, and Man', 'In the Beginning God', and 'The Book of Revelation is History'.

It was believed that our current Moon was the sixth since the Earth began and that a new collision was inevitable.

Believers argued that the great flood described in the Bible and the destruction of Atlantis were caused by the fall of previous moons.

Although Hörbiger's theories have much in common with those of Immanuel Velikovsky (parallels between the two were drawn by Martin Gardner in Chapter Three of his Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science), the scientific community had a much calmer reaction to Hörbiger's theories than to Velikovsky's, and his publisher was never boycotted.


THE HOHLWELTLEHRE

The Hohlweltlehre is a cosmological theory that claims that we live on the inside of the earth, and that stellar and planetary objects are illusory.
The Thule Society reported much about Tibetan myths of openings into the Earth.

There is even some evidence that Hitler ordered a research journey for such an opening in Antarctica based on a speech of Admiral Dönitz in front of a German submarine in 1944, when he claimed "The German submarine fleet is proud of having built an invisible fortification for the Führer, anywhere in the world."

During the Nuremberg Trials, Dönitz spoke of "an invisible fortification, in midst of the eternal ice."A German pilot named Peter Bender came across several copies of the Koreshan’s Flaming Sword in a stack of American magazines in a French prisoner-of-war camp during World War I. Bender was won over by Teed’s geocosmos.

William Reed Teed

In 1906, William Reed Teed published "The Phantom of the Poles," which explains why the poles were not located: just because they do not exist. In his opinion, the generic name of "poly" refers, in fact, the entries inside the Earth.

Marshall B. Gardner 

Another author, Marshall B. Gardner published a book entitled "A journey inside the Earth," during which push this belief to the extreme:

The Hollow Earth

"I have found that previous theories are somehow right direction but as an addition, I think Earth's interior is illuminated by a sun that is about 600 miles in diameter, and holes at the poles are certainly more than 1,000 miles in diameter." 
The subject was not new.
Before him Teed in 1897 claimed: "We actually live inside Earth's interior beneath the surface crust. Inside the hole are the sun, moon, stars, planets and comets. There is absolutely nothing outside. The interior is everything." The idea may seem aberrant at least for modern astronomers who discover new and new galaxies millions of light years away. However, in the 1940s in Germany were many followers of the theory.

After the war, Bender returned to Germany where he developed and promoted the idea, which he dubbed the hohlweltlehre (“hollow Earth doctrine,” sometimes also referred to as hohlwelttheorie).

He abandoned the religious aspects of Koreshenity and simplified Teed’s byzantine labyrinth of concepts and ideas to a simpler, though still bizarre, mechanism to reconcile observed nature with the concave conception of Earth.

Rocket Launch

Bender’s Hohlweltlehre like other hollow-Earth theories before and since, attracted its share of supporters, though none from within the ranks of mainstream astronomers or Earth scientists. He was, however, able to muster enough political support to manage two tests of his theory. The first of these was an attempt, in 1933, to build a rocket and launch it straight up into the sky.
If Bender’s hollow-earth idea was correct, the rocket should have crashed into the opposite side of the planet.

Instead, it failed to launch, and crashed a few hundred meters from its launch pad.

German Advanced Radar

The second test came about through Bender’s connection (dating to his World War I pilot days) with Hermann Göring and the interests of a group of German Naval Research Institute officers who sought methods for locating enemy ships based on fringe ideas such as pendulum swinging and the hohlweltlehre.

These officers gained approval to send an expedition to Rügen Island (in the Baltic Sea) to try and detect British ships using powerful telescopic cameras pointed upwards across Earth’s concavity.

Bender claimed that the apparent convexity of Earth’s surface is due to the refraction of visible light passing through the atmosphere.

If Earth’s surface were concave, the officers reasoned, photographs taken using infra-red filters (infra-red radiation is not refracted by the atmosphere) should show parts of the North Atlantic and Baltic, and the positions of British ships in those waters could be known.

The failure of the Rügen Island experiment proved embarrassing to the Nazi High Command, and Bender, his wife, and some of his followers were imprisoned as a result.

HORST WESSEL

One of the most prominent supporters of the Welteislehre (World Ice Theory) or Glazial-Kosmogonie (Glacial Cosmogony) was Horst Wessel.
Horst Ludwig Wessel (October 9, 1907 – February 23, 1930) was a German Nazi activist who was made a posthumous hero of the Nazi movement following his violent death in 1930.
He was the author of the lyrics to the song "Die Fahne hoch" ("The Flag On High"), usually known as Horst-Wessel-Lied ("the Horst Wessel Song"), which became the Nazi Party anthem and, de facto, Germany's co-national anthem from 1933 to 1945.

click below for more information about

Horst Wessel

and the Horst Wessel Lied