by Nick Thacker
Nazi Research and the Rascher Legacy
Sigmund Rascher was a real person, and his name has a deserving place in The Aryan Agenda as a WWII-era villain. Rascher, 1905-1945, was a German SS doctor who worked for Heinrich Himmler. He got his big break when Himmler took his side on the debate whether to use rats or humans in cancer research trials, and shortly thereafter Rascher set up shop testing on humans at a place called Dachau.
During his stint as a dungeon master, he led or participated in such experiments as testing how long a human body could survive submersion in extremely cold water and subject to high altitudes — how were they tested? Naturally, by throwing their prisoners outside for 14 hours while naked, or by holding them for three hours in a tank of ice water.
To make things worse (if they could possibly be worse), Rascher was found guilty of stealing a baby. While creating propaganda that claimed he could considerably extend the female childbearing age past 48 years (his wife’s age at the time), he used pictures of his family, including their three children.
The problem was that Rascher didn’t have three children… of his own. He was accused of purchasing or kidnapping the three children after his wife was found trying to steal their fourth child (so Rachel Rascher isn’t a real-life descendent of Sigmund Rascher, because he tried to steal his children to further his career and reputation).
He was caught, by the way. Turns out he killed his lab partner and committed some sort of financial and scientific fraud. Himmler was pissed in only the way a Nazi can be pissed, and both Rascher and his baby-stealing wife were condemned to Buchenwald, then Dachau, where he was executed just before the camp was liberated in 1945.
Haplogroup X (mtDNA)…
When I was researching The Aryan Agenda, I was reading up on the history of genetics and gene sequencing. I waded through papers on Nazi-era eugenics, the grisly American side of the same sort of research, and plenty of other horrendous experiments and projects that history has done its best to forget.
While I got lots of ideas for future books from that stuff, I didn’t feel like drowning The Aryan Agenda in dark, evil, top-secret experiments would make for light, easy reading. Instead, I focused on some of the good things that have come from continued genetic research and anthropological history.
One of the most fascinating elements of that research ended up in The Aryan Agenda with hardly any adjustments from me — and since I’m no geneticist, that’s a good thing.
Haplogroups are, in fact, groups of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) that give us a record of the march of human progress over the millennia. By collating mtDNA data and mapping their existence around the globe, we can get a general picture of where (and when) people came from.
Haplogroup X is one of those groups of mtDNA, and the map that Alex uses to explain his research is accurate — the Haplogroup X group seems to have begun in the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern areas of the world, then small pockets show up on the chains of islands that include the present-day United Kingdom, Iceland, Greenland, and northeastern Canada. Finally, concentrations of the Haplogroup X genes appear around the Great Lakes region.
… And the Early American Settlers
More striking is the complete lack of existence of any Haplogroup X-wielding peoples that migrated over the Bering Strait. Since the Bering Strait migration is supposed to be the singular way early American Indian ancestors arrived in the Americas, it’s easy enough to believe that the nomadic tribes of people started walking from somewhere in Russia and ended up somewhere in Canada — and eventually throughout the Americas. But there’s a hitch: the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets blocked any southern routes, covering Southern Alaska and the Yukon Territory. There was no way for human settlement to occur until these sheets melted and revealed an ice-free corridor. And those sheets melted around 13,000 years ago.
So we’ve got people stuck in present-day Canada until they were able to move south after 13,000 years ago. But excavations and archeological discoveries prove that humans were hanging out in Chile about 15,000 years ago, and feasting on mammoth in present-day Florida 14,500 years ago.
Where did they come from?
My theory? They sailed. Specifically, they sailed from the Mediterranean Sea up and around the northern islands, then ended up in eastern Canada and the United States. When did all this happen?
A study of the Haplogroup X movements show that there was some sort of massive migration taking place, spreading the genes around the world, about 21,000 years ago!
Santorini and the Cyclades Plateau
There is great appeal in placing Atlantis on a tiny island in the middle of the Aegean Sea. And when I began research for The Aryan Agenda and came across the theory of Santorini-as-Atlantis, I thought I was on to something spectacular. I even thought I had stumbled upon some long-lost research, and that I’d become one of the only members of a top-secret club of adventurers who knew the ‘real truth.’
Imagine my surprise when, picking out a toy with my kids in Target, I came across a game called Santorini (“…a strategy-based board game that's exhilarating and intellectually challenging! Play together and make family game night even more fun!” — Amazon.com)
Seriously? My top-secret discovery was now so mainstream it was a mass-marketed kids game?
Oh, well. Time to put my experience as a fiction writer to the test: I began to dig up more and more information about Santorini and the surrounding area. History, archeology, oceanic water levels and crustal displacement theories. All of it.
So, while Santorini is still probably a wonderful place to visit (and probably a wonderful kid’s game), I don’t think there are going to be any Atlantean discoveries awaiting excavation there.
But there’s a lot of area to search just north of Santorini: the Cyclades Islands are the last remains of what Plato refers to as ‘a larger body’ — the Cyclades Plateau, or Cyclades Island. It’s a massive (continent-sized?) island that sunk beneath the waves ‘in a day and a night’ (a common expression in Ancient Greece meaning ‘it happened quickly, at some point in the past’), leaving nothing but the tops of its mountain peaks poking above the surface, creating the many smaller islands that dot the region today.
Atlantis and Plato’s Dialogues
I claim that Atlantis was real — I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it seems that in order to be part of the Fiction Writer’s Club (stop Googling — it’s not a real thing), we have to believe in Atlantis.
And while I was inspired by such seminal works as Disney’s Atlantis, I didn’t want to go the tried-and-true ‘Atlantis is full of mermaids and has magical spells’ route.
So I started digging. Thanks to the internet, I found out about a theory of Atlantis that made a lot of sense — namely, Christos Djonis’ work on piecing together the exact details of Plato’s description of Atlantis. It turns out that Plato does seem to be describing an actual place:
“...an island comprising mostly of mountains in the northern portions and along the shore, and encompassing a great plain of an oblong shape in the south extending in one direction three thousand stadia (about 555km 2), but across the center island it was two thousand stadia (about 370km 2). Fifty stadia (9km) from the coast was a mountain that was low on all sides…broke it off all round about…the central island itself was five stades in diameter (about 0.92km).” — Plato
Djonis, Christos. Uchronia?: Atlantis Revealed: Who We Are, Where Do We Come from, Are We Alone. Page Publishing, Inc., 2014.
Whether it’s a mythical futuristic city full of flying cars and advanced humans is still up for debate, but I believe it was at least a civilization capable of great architecture, advanced shipbuilding and sailing, and a militaristic government that often threatened its neighbors (Crete, Athens, Egypt) with war.
I believe it existed right where the CSO team found it: on the Cyclades Plateau, now sunken beneath the waters of the Aegean Sea. Any excavations that could take place would have an enormous cost, if even possib
le.
So to me the myth is still a myth: a legendary island full of an advanced race of people who conquered, settled, and explored, long before history became a memory.
Also by Nick Thacker
Mason Dixon Thrillers
Mark for Blood (Mason Dixon Thrillers, Book 1)
Death Mark (Mason Dixon Thrillers, Book 2)
Harvey Bennett Thrillers
The Enigma Strain (Harvey Bennett Thrillers, Book 1)
The Amazon Code (Harvey Bennett Thrillers, Book 2)
The Ice Chasm (Harvey Bennett Thrillers, Book 3)
The Jefferson Legacy (Harvey Bennett Thrillers, Book 4)
The Paradise Key (Harvey Bennett Thrillers, Book 5)
The Aryan Agenda (Harvey Bennett Thrillers, Book 6)
Harvey Bennett Thrillers - Books 1-3
Gareth Red Thrillers
Seeing Red
Chasing Red
Relics
Relics: One
Relics: Two
Relics: Three
Relics: Omnibus
The Lucid
The Lucid: Episode One (written with Kevin Tumlinson)
The Lucid: Episode Two (written with Kevin Tumlinson)
The Lucid: Episode Three (written with Kevin Tumlinson
Standalone Thrillers
The Golden Crystal
The Depths
The Atlantis Deception (A.G. Riddle’s The Origins Mystery series)
Killer Thrillers (3-Book Box Set)
Short Stories
I, Sergeant
Instinct
The Gray Picture of Dorian
Uncanny Divide
Nonfiction:
Welcome Home: The Author's Guide to Building A Marketing Home Base
Expert Blogging: Building A Blog for Readers
The Dead-Simple Guide to Guest Posts
The Dead-Simple Guide to Amazing Headlines
The Dead-Simple Guide to Pillar Content
About the Author
Nick Thacker is an author from Texas who lives in a cabin on a mountain in Colorado, because Colorado has mountains, microbreweries, and fantastic weather. In his free time, he enjoys reading, skiing, whiskey, and hanging out with his beautiful wife, tortoise, two dogs, and two daughters.
In addition to his fiction work, Nick is the founder and lead of Sonata & Scribe, the only music studio focused on producing “soundtracks” for books and series. Find out more at SonataAndScribe.com.
For more information, visit Nick online:
www.nickthacker.com
[email protected]