That man’s name can still cause a shudder of unease when spoken today: Adolf Hitler. And it is his activities which provide the next, and perhaps even more extraordinary chapter, in our search for Agharti.
ADOLF HITLER AND THE ‘SUPER-RACE’
On the morning of 25 April 1945, a group of Russian soldiers cautiously picking their way through the rubble of war-torn Berlin made one of the most astonishing discoveries of the Second World War. The men who had surged into the devastated capital of Nazi Germany on the previous day and were now within days of bringing the terrible and bloody six-year conflict to an end were constantly on the lookout for the pathetic little pockets of resistance still being put up by groups of German soldiers, mostly old men and young boys, vainly trying to save Adolf Hitler’s ‘Thousand Year Reich’.
The Russians moved carefully from one shattered building to the next, methodically combing the rubble-filled rooms and cellars for any signs of life. They had to trust to their battle-sharpened instincts as they wormed their way through the bomb damage, and such was the destruction that it was impossible to tell where one street ended and another began. They could tell little other than that they were somewhere in the eastern sector of Berlin.
It was amidst the skeleton that had once been a three-story building that the soldiers made their discovery. For in one of the ground floor rooms they found the corpses of six men lying in a small circle. In the centre of the circle was another body, lying on its back, the hands clasped tightly, almost as if in prayer.
At first glance, the corpses looked little different to the many others that the Russians had come across in this ghastly city of death. But on closer examination, they proved to be very different indeed. For although the corpses were in faded and worn German military uniforms, their faces looked like those of Orientals. They were, in fact, Tibetans – as one of the Russian soldiers, a young man who came from the adjoining area of Mongolia, was not slow to point out. And it was he who also noticed that the figure in the centre of the circle of dead men was wearing a pair of bright green gloves on his clenched hands.
But what on earth were such people doing here, thousands of miles from their homeland, and in the midst of a battle in which their country was playing no part?
Although sudden gunfire from a short distance away quickly distracted the searching Russians, not one of the group was in any doubt that they had stumbled across something quite extraordinary. For apart from their appearance, there was every indication that the Tibetans had not been killed in action, but had probably taken part in some kind of ritual suicide, perhaps under the orders of the strange man in green gloves who lay in their midst.
Before the Russians linked up with the Allies striking into Berlin from the west, and the city fell on 2 May, the bodies of several hundred more Tibetans – some sources have suggested as many as a thousand – were found in similar circumstances. Quite a substantial number had also apparently committed suicide, but others had obviously died under the hail of bombs and gunfire which reduced the once magnificent city to smouldering ruins. The corpses provided a mystery that was some time in the solving – but when the facts about the dead men were painstakingly assembled they formed a quite amazing link with the underground kingdom of Agharti, Adolf Hitler, and Bulwer Lytton’s extraordinary book, The Coming Race. Indeed, it is true to say that the book had been to a degree responsible for both the presence of those men in the city, and to a lesser extent the very carnage that the Fuehrer of the Third Reich had inflicted on Europe and much of the world during the years from 1939 to 1945.
As I indicated in the previous chapter, there have been numbers of people who, over the years since the publication of The Coming Race in 1871, have believed it to be literally true – the description of an actual race of people living below the surface of the world. But of these believers, few were more passionate in their conviction than Adolf Hitler, the former house painter and army corporal who scarred half the nations of the globe with his terrible dream of world domination.
It remains an extraordinary fact that outside of the pages of The Coming Race, Bulwer Lytton has left us no clues about the exact nature of his enigmatic work. Is it just a novel or more fact than fiction? And if so, where did he get his information from? At the time of its publication the book was scarcely noticed: the few critics who reviewed it found it a minor work, and all of them echoed the anonymous writer in the London Times who hoped that ‘the author would return to the historical themes to which his talents are best suited’. Perhaps if the work had excited any sort of controversy, Bulwer Lytton might have been pressed for such details, but its reception was indifferent, and whatever emotions he may have felt about this, he disguised them by getting on with his next work. Of course he may even have hoped for such a reaction, for fear that he might have injudiciously revealed too much of his ‘secret knowledge’.
But leaving this conjecture aside, we can be in no doubt that Adolf Hitler believed the story to be true. Indeed, he not only based part of his philosophy on it, but actually dispatched expeditions across the length and breadth of Europe and Asia to find the way to the underground world. If we look briefly at the philosophy of the people in Bulwer Lytton’s book we can easily identify the influence it had on Hitler and how his plans for a Thousand Year Reich ruled by a master race of pure-blooded Aryans emerged.
For example, he tells us that the Vril-ya, the people of the underworld, were ‘descended from the same ancestors as the great Aryan family, from which in varied streams has flowed the dominant civilisation of the world’. They considered themselves a superior race looking on other nations ‘with more disdain than the citizens of New York regard the negroes’. They were believers in the survival of the fittest, the triumph of the weak over the strong, and the dominance of the Aryan race. The Vril-ya considered democracy, free institutions and a Republican type government as ‘one of the crude and ignorant experiments which belong to the infancy of political science’. They were led by a supreme ruler, the Tur, in whom all authority was vested, a man who possessed the secret of Vril Power, the mysterious force which could control all the forces of man and nature. And to all this could be added the subterranean people’s ultimate objective, ‘to attain to the purity of our species … and supplant all the inferior races now existing.’
To a man like Adolf Hitler, fascinated by mysticism and racial purity and obsessed with power, The Coming Race expressed his deepest desires.
It has become increasingly evident in recent years, that while there has been considerable study undertaken into Hitler and his rise to power, there has not been as much attention paid to the part played in it by his interest in mysticism and the occult as perhaps there should be. For Hitler was unquestionably a man fascinated with ancient Germanic lore and attracted to the powers of the supernatural. He was, of course, also gifted with almost hypnotic powers himself, as his biographer, Professor Alan Bullock, has observed in Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1953): ‘Hitler’s power to bewitch an audience has been likened to the occult arts of the African medicine-man or the Asiatic shaman; others have compared it to the sensitivity of a medium and the magnetism of a hypnotist.’
Although there is evidence that Hitler showed a certain interest in hypnotism when he was a young man – reading a number of the standard works on the subject – his fascination with the occult can be traced back to his association with a mysterious but undeniably sinister figure, Professor Karl Haushofer, who has been called the ‘Master Magician of the Nazi Party’. And the person who brought these two together was none other than Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, the man who made the abortive flight to England to try and halt the war between England and Germany, and who is, today, the sole surviving high-ranking member of the Nazi party.
Karl Haushofer was born in Bavaria in 1869, and appears fleetingly in most works about the life of Hitler – yet when their association is examined in detail it is plain to see that he was an important, if not major, influence on the demag
ogue-to-be. He was evidently a man of forceful intellect, deeply knowledgeable about Eastern mysticism, and obsessed with the origins and ultimate destiny of the German people.
Coming from a wealthy, military background, Haushofer, after being educated at Munich University, naturally enough entered upon a career in the German army. His obvious ability quickly earned him promotion, and his interest in the Far East – which he had begun to develop while still at university – led to a number of appointments in the Orient serving on the Staff Corps. His tour of duty took him to India, where he devoted all his spare time to the study of Indian mysticism and in particular the ancient traditions, while later he went to Japan. Of these years, Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier have written in The Morning of the Magicians:
He paid several visits to India and the Far East, and was sent to Japan, where he learned the language. He believed that the German people originated in Central Asia, and that it was the Indo-Germanic race that guaranteed the permanence, nobility and greatness of the world. While in Japan, Haushofer is said to have been initiated into one of the most important secret Buddhist societies and to have sworn, if he failed in his ‘mission’, to commit suicide in accordance with the time-honoured ceremonial.
At this time, Haushofer also began to demonstrate another remarkable talent – the ability of prophecy. And when, during the First World War, he put this skill to practical use by predicting the precise moment the enemy would attack and the actual locations where bombs and shells would fire – his predictions later being proved correct – his stature among his men and his superiors grew enormously. He became one of the youngest generals in the German army, and only the eventual defeat of his country prevented him reaching the most senior posts.
In the aftermath of war, Haushofer had no difficulty in finding another occupation for his varied talents. He returned to his earlier fascination with political geography and earned a doctorate at Munich University. Armed with this qualification he threw himself wholeheartedly into teaching the young people of his defeated nation that the war had merely been a setback in the ultimate ambitions of the German people. It was their destiny to one day rule Europe and Asia – the homeland of the Aryan people – and thereby exercise the world control which only they were fitted to administer.
Haushofer also took his campaign into print, writing several books and founding the Geo-Political Review, in which he endlessly expounded his beliefs about Aryan supremacy. He also made a number of interesting revelations about what he had learned during his time in India in the early years of the century. While travelling in Central Asia in 1905, he said, he had heard of a vast underground encampment under the Himalayas where dwelt a race of Supermen. The name of this place was Agharti, and its capital was called Shamballah.
According to Haushofer, Agharti was a ‘place of meditation, a hidden city of Goodness, a temple of non-participation in the things of the world’. Shamballah, though, was ‘a city of violence and power whose forces command the elements and the masses of humanity, and hasten the arrival of the human race at the “turning-point of time” ’. (It is interesting to note that Haushofer is the only writer on Shamballah to refer to it as a place of violence as well as power. It has been suggested, with some justification I think, that this was Haushofer’s own idea to substantiate his belief that world domination could only be achieved by force: he saw the support of the mighty inhabitants of the underground city as a way of ensuring this, and attributed to them powers that made an association with them all the more desirable.)
Haushofer believed Agharti to be at the centre of the ‘heartland’ from which the Aryan race had come, and that whoever controlled this ‘heartland’ – in conjunction with the all-powerful underground race, of course – would rule the world. As Trevor Ravenscroft has so splendidly summarized this philosophy in his The Spear of Destiny (1972):
He clothed geography in a veil of racial mysticism, providing a reason for the Germans to return to those areas in the hinterland of Asia from which it was generally believed the Aryan Race originated. In this subtle way he incited the German nation towards the conquest of the whole of Eastern Europe and beyond to the vast inner area of Asia which extends 2,500 miles from west to east between the Volga and the Yangtze rivers and includes in its most southerly aspect the mountains of Tibet. It was Haushofer’s opinion that whoever gained complete control of this heartland, developed its economic resources and organised its military defence, would achieve unassailable world supremacy.
Among the young men who eagerly accepted Professor Haushofer’s ideas, and devoured the philosophy extolled in the pages of his Review, was one Rudolf Hess, who for a time served as his assistant at the University of Munich. He was to prove the link between Haushofer and Adolf Hitler. In fact, we have Rudolf Hess to thank for a lot of what we know about Haushofer, for as Jack Fishman has reported in his The Seven Men of Spandau (1954), it was the former deputy Fuehrer who revealed that his one-time Professor had been ‘the secret “Master Magician of the Reich” – the power behind Hitler’. (Fishman also informs us that the ill-fated flight to England was undertaken because Haushofer had had a dream in which he saw Hess ‘striding through the tapestried halls of English castles, bringing peace between the two great Nordic nations’. And with Haushofer’s record as a prophet, it is not surprising that Hess obeyed the premonition exactly.)
The first meeting between the ageing Professor and the fanatical young revolutionary took place in Landsberg Prison in 1924 when Hitler was in prison there following the failure of the Munich Putsch. Hess arranged it from his own cell, where he was sharing imprisonment for his part in the conspiracy to overthrow the Bavarian government. He was convinced that the two men had much in common in their stated beliefs about the future of the German people. As Pauwels and Bergier tell us:
Introduced by Hess, General Karl Haushofer visited Hitler every day and spent hours with him expounding his theories and deducing from them every possible argument in favour of political conquest. Left alone with Hess, Hitler amalgamated, for the purposes of propaganda, the theories of Haushofer, as the basis of Mein Kampf.
The influence of the Munich professor on Hitler’s book has been further underlined by Edmund A. Walsh in his Total Power (1953), where he writes:
One can almost feel the presence of Haushofer, although the lines were written by Hess at the dictation of Hitler. What Haushofer did was to hand a sheathed sword of conquest from his arsenal of scholarly research. Hitler unsheathed the blade, sharpened the edge, and threw away the scabbard.
Among the books which Haushofer lent to his enthusiastic listener was Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race. The Professor explained that, like the author, he himself had been a member of a German lodge of the Rosicrucians, and that the book harboured many secrets from that order disguised as fiction. Haushofer said the work was specific in its descriptions of the underground super-race and corroborated much of the evidence he himself had gathered at first-hand in Asia about the world of Agharti.
To Haushofer, The Coming Race was merely one brick in his argument. To Hitler, when he came to read it, the book proved much more influential on his vision of the future. There seems little doubt that as he read through the pages of Bulwer Lytton’s strange story in the seclusion of his prison cell, he began to yearn for the day when he might establish for himself the actuality of the secret civilization beneath the snows of Tibet …
Although by this time Haushofer had sown the seeds of what became Hitler’s most driving obsession – the need for the emergence of the ‘superman’ to rule the world – his importance in our story is not quite at an end. For in the following year, 1925, three more important events occurred, all of which provide further threads in the rich tapestry.
Firstly, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf was published. Secondly, Ferdinand Ossendowski’s Beasts, Men and Gods appeared and made the public in general aware of the legends of Agharti and Shamballah. And, thirdly, a secret organization with the unlikely title of
‘The Luminous Lodge of the Vril Society’ was formed.
Haushofer, as we know, was influential on Hitler’s book, and naturally enough was fascinated by Ossendowski’s work, which again confirmed many facts he had himself gathered about the underground world in Asia. And as to the secret society, he was one of the people instrumental in setting it up.
Facts about this Society have remained elusive to this day, and the best information has come to us from Dr Willy Ley, the brilliant rocket scientist who was in Berlin at the time and later fled from Germany in 1933. In an essay published in 1947 called ‘Pseudo-Sciences Under the Nazi Regime’, he describes the carefully shrouded formation of the Society whose philosophy was based almost totally on Bulwer Lytton’s book, The Coming Race. Ley says the group invited specially selected members from all over the world to help further the research into, and creation of, an Aryan super-race. Among these members were a large contingent of Tibetan lamas summoned because of their association with Agharti.
Ley also reported that the members of the Lodge believed they had secret knowledge of the force Bulwer Lytton had called Vril (hence their name), and this they hoped would enable them to ultimately become the equals of the race hidden in the bowels of the earth. They had developed methods of concentration and a ‘whole system of internal gymnastics by which they could be transformed’, he said. Although Ley only expressed a general opinion as to what he thought this Vril Power might be, he was not far short of the truth (as we shall see later) when he described it as the inherent energy in our bodies of which we use only a minute proportion in our daily lives – leaving untouched and unexploited the greater proportion which has virtually unlimited powers if only we can find the key to its exploitation.
Investigation has been carried out into this weird society by Pauwels and Bergier, as well as by Trevor Ravenscroft, who writes in his The Spear of Destiny:
The Lost World of Agharti- the Mystery of Vril Power Page 11