Hitler's Master of the Dark Arts

by Bill Yenne

  Just as Karl Maria Wiligut believed that there had once been several suns, Hörbiger believed that the earth once had several moons. One by one, they fell out of the sky, hitting the earth. The original humans, the master race, had descended to earth thusly, cloaked in “cosmic ice.” The ancient city of Atlantis had been a casualty of a subsequent impact, and Noah’s biblical flood had been the result of another.

  Hörbiger’s ideas initially attracted only scorn from the academic establishment. After World War I, however, as the Austro-German New Age opened up a floodgate of counterculture interest in alternative dogmas, Hörbiger’s name started cropping up a lot in coffee-house conversation. Glacial Cosmogony, now renamed Welteislehre, suddenly had a following. Even that old Völkisch racist Houston Stewart Chamberlain began singing Hörbiger’s praises. Glazial-Kosmogonie was particularly resonant with the Völkisch neo-pagans who believed that the Nordic origins of the Aryan race’s supermen had been in a world of ice. Naturally, Glazial-Kosmogonie coincided nicely with the idea of the primordial Thule.

  As often happens with such fads, a flurry of magazines and newspapers cropped up for devotees of one aspect of Glazial-Kosmogonie or another. There were even films and radio programs about it. In turn, these media probably inspired some early science fiction, as ice men and ice planets became pop-culture icons. (One is reminded of the later New Age hysteria that swept the counterculture in 1973 and 1974 as the icy Comet Kohoutek swept past the earth. As in the 1920s, magazines and radio programs devoted much space and time to Kohoutek’s mysterious portents. All but forgotten today are the proto–New Age gurus whose followers were led to believe Kohoutek heralded an imminent doomsday, which never happened. Then too, there was the Heaven’s Gate cult, whose members committed mass suicide in 1997 so that they could catch a ride on the ball of ice known as Comet Hale-Bopp.)

  As Guido von List had seen his followers form the Guido von List Gesellschaft in 1908, Hanns Hörbiger watched organizations being formed around his theory. There were the Kosmotechnische Gesellschaft and the Hörbiger Institute, both founded in postwar Vienna, the latter being headed by Alfred Hörbiger.

  Hanns Hörbiger (1860–1931) was the Austrian engineer who originated Glazial-Kosmogonie (Glacial Cosmogony), or Welteislehre (World Ice Theory). He believed that the first humans, the master race, came to earth cloaked in “cosmic ice.” His idea was right in line with many notions swirling around the German mystical counterculture, which linked icy worlds with ancient Aryan supermen. Author’s collection

  Hörbiger died in 1931, leaving his legacy and his Glazial-Kosmogonie to his fans and their world ice clubs. In turn, Hörbiger’s followers saw an opportunity in the rise of national socialism. The NSDAP and like-minded parties were keen on new scientific ideals that were independent from a scientific mainstream, which was perceived to be dominated by Jews.

  Though the Nazis appreciated Glazial-Kosmogonie for all the right, icy, Völkisch reasons, they abhorred the independence of the Kosmotechnische Gesellschaft and the Hörbiger Institute. As soon as Germany annexed Austria in 1938, the Kosmotechnische Gesellschaft was closed down, and the Hörbiger Institute—including Hörbiger’s library and his own extensive astronomical archives—was swallowed into Heinrich Himmler’s Ahnenerbe.

  At the same time that Ernst Schäfer and Bruno Beger were tramping through the ice and snow of Tibet in 1938 and 1939, another German expedition was making its way toward the ultimate land of ice and snow—Antarctica.

  The idea behind the Deutsche Antarktische expedition originated with Hermann Göring rather than with Heinrich Himmler and the Ahnenerbe. The idea, at least on the face of it, was another “scientific” expedition to promote German prestige. In the early years of the twentieth century, nationally sponsored polar expeditions were popular headline-grabbers. France and Norway had each sent teams to Antarctica, while the British sponsored eight teams between 1901 and 1937, during which men such as Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton became household names. The United States had sent Admiral Richard Byrd on an extended expedition from 1928 to 1930, during which he had flown over the South Pole and become a national folk hero.

  Germany had sent two expeditions to the Antarctic, but the last had returned in 1912. Göring felt that it was high time to go again. The stated objective of the new expedition was to survey a location for a whaling station. Germany was short of necessary oils for the production of cosmetics, soaps, and even margarine. Somehow, the Nazi economists had decided that harvesting whale oil in the Antarctic made more sense than buying it from the Norwegians, who controlled the market.

  Equipped with swastika flags to raise over polar ice, the team, under the command of Kriegsmarine captain Alfred Ritscher, departed from Hamburg in December 1938 aboard the research ship Schwabenland. The ship’s name was no coincidence as it was the intention of the Third Reich to claim sovereignty over a 230,000-square-mile slice of the ice continent and name it Neuschwabenland (New Swabia). (“Old” Swabia, or Schwabenland, is that part of Germany that roughly corresponds to the modern state of Baden-Württemberg.) This assertion raised diplomatic eyebrows, especially in Norway, because Ritscher and his crew staked out part of Norway’s previously claimed Queen Maud Land region.

  In the United States, the event was reported on page eleven of the New York Times on April 13, 1939, where the narrative read, “Judging from the claims advanced in the press, Great Germany has just staked out her first colony outside Europe and is proposing to take possession.”

  By the summer of 1939, the world was increasingly edgy about German territorial claims, and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt went so far as to order Admiral Byrd to take an American expedition south. The headline in the New York Times on July 8, 1939, read, “Germany’s Moves in Antarctica Spur Action to Validate Our Territorial Claims There … Admiral [Byrd] Says Area Is Rich in Natural Resources.” The article went on to say, “President Roosevelt moved today to prevent possible extension of Germany’s claims to Antarctic areas into the Western Hemisphere by directing Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd to leave early in October on another South Polar Expedition.”

  A week later, on July 14, the New York Times reported: “Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd, disclosing plans for his coming expedition in the Antarctic, said today that six army tanks and a unique 45,000-pound snow cruiser would be used for transport over the South Pole’s icy wastelands.” But because of World War II, Byrd’s expedition never happened.

  During the war, German naval activity in the South Atlantic and the Antarctic continued. Both U-boats and surface warships did battle with the British navy there, and Germans were also active in Australian waters. As Walter Sullivan wrote in an article on Antarctica in the New York Times on March 9, 1955, “Disguised German raiders attacked allied shipping there in World War II.”

  Rumors of a secret German base in Antarctica persisted after the war, and today there are a vast array of “Nazis in the Antarctic” stories alive on the world wide web. These stories range from interaction between the Germans and otherworldly beings to Hitler’s having taken up residence in Neuschwabenland after the war.

  Meanwhile, Himmler had approved an Ahnenerbe project aimed at seeking a lost Nordic civilization in the icy peaks of the Andes. In this case, the man with the theory was an author and amateur archeologist named Edmund Kiss. A devotee of Hanns Hörbiger and his Glazial-Kosmogonie, Kiss was also among those in the Völkisch New Age movement who believed that Thule had been a real place, a northern Atlantis. He discussed this theory at length in his book Die Letzte Königin von Atlantis (The Last Queen of Atlantis), explaining in detail how the people of Thule had traveled throughout the world.

  In 1928, after winning a great deal of money in a writing contest, Kiss made a trip to the Bolivian Andes. While there, he visited the ancient ruins of Tiahuanacu (also called Tiwanaku), a place that had been a major city long before the rise of the Inca civilization. The architecture of the ruins reminded him so much of ancient European architectu
re that he decided it was built by Aryans from Thule. While most mainstream archaeologists date the heyday of Tiahuanacu to around AD 500, Kiss was convinced that the Nordic Thuleans had built the place at least sixteen thousand years earlier. (Coincidentally, Kiss visited Bolivia at the same time that Heinrich Himmler’s old friend, Ernst Röhm, was living in the country. Late of the NSDAP’s SA paramilitary freikorps, Röhm was in the midst of a five-year stint as an adviser to the Bolivian army.)

  When Kiss returned to Germany, he spent the next decade telling his tale of Thuleans traveling to icy Bolivia to anyone who would listen. After the Nazis came to power and the Ahnenerbe was formed, Kiss finally found someone who would do more than listen. He told his story to Walther Wüst, and in 1939 pitched him on the idea of a year-long, full-scale expedition, involving a large team of field archaeologists and aerial surveys of the area. Wüst, and presumably Heinrich Himmler as well, were delighted by the idea and planning got underway. Unfortunately for Kiss, though, World War II began just as the expedition was packing its gear to embark. Had the project not been postponed indefinitely, Kiss’s aerial survey might have observed the mysterious Nazca Lines—manmade geoglyphs visible only from the air—that stretch across fifty miles of nearby Peru. The largest of these stylized animal and geometric shapes are over six hundred feet across. There’s no way of knowing what Kiss would have thought of them, but they would later be described by Swiss amateur archeologist Erich von Däniken as landing sites for spacecraft from another planet. Von Däniken’s controversial bestseller Chariots of the Gods?: Unsolved Mysteries of the Past was published in 1968, eight years after Kiss died. The icy, Thulean counterculture of the 1920s and 1930s had almost intersected with the spacy counterculture of the 1960s.

  CHAPTER 13

  Black Knights in an Army of Field Gray Pawns

  WHILE AMATEUR AND PROFESSIONAL Ahnenerbe archaeologists were scampering around the world in real-life precursors to the Indiana Jones saga, far more serious events were unfolding in Europe.

  Adolf Hitler was preparing the Third Reich for war. It had been the tidal wave of humiliation over the egregious Treaty of Versailles that had swept him to power, and he was not about to disappoint his fans. National pride and rearmament were his platform, and he was out to make good on it.

  When German president Paul von Hindenburg died on August 2, 1934, Reichskanzler Hitler assumed the office of president in addition to his current office of chancellor, becoming both the head of state as well as the head of government. As such, he became to the German Reich what he had been with the Nazi Party—der Führer.

  By assuming the office of president, Hitler became—under the provisions of the 1919 Weimar constitution—the legal commander in chief of the German armed forces. As stated in Article 47, “der Reichspräsident hat den Oberbefehl über die gesamte Wehrmacht des Reiches” (“the national president holds supreme command of all armed forces of the nation”). Every soldier, sailor, and airman now swore his allegiance directly to Hitler. In March 1935, Hitler reinstated conscription, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, and began rearming Germany, remaking the feeble Reichswehr into the robust Wehrmacht. The civilian ministry overseeing the armed forces was superseded by the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Armed Forces High Command), which coordinated the three branches of the armed forces: the Oberkommando des Heeres (Army High Command), Oberkommando der Marine (Navy High Command), and Oberkommando der Luftwaffe (Air Force High Command).

  Where within this chain of command was a place for the Black Knights of Heinrich Himmler’s SS?

  The answer was nowhere. The SS, specifically the SS subcomponent known as the Waffen SS (Armed SS), was destined to be an independent army of its own, not in the chain of Oberkommando der Wehrmacht command, but answerable directly to Himmler and, of course, ultimately answerable to the Führer. The Waffen SS has often been described as the fourth branch of the German armed forces. As befitting its image of itself, this Waffen SS was conceived as, and became, the elite of the German armed forces. It was a fight-to-the-death, take-no-prisoners outfit that was often disliked, distrusted, and feared by the regular Wehrmacht. The Waffen SS had its origins in the SS contingent that was named for Hitler himself.

  Reflecting on the brutal efficiency of Sepp Dietrich’s Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler on the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934, Himmler began to grow this organization from its initial status as a bodyguard for the Führer into a private army loyal to the Führer. Unlike the SA, it was not a freikorps of ill-bred thugs and goons, but a freikorps that embodied all the heavily ordered, disciplined, and pagan ideals of the SS. Himmler dreamed fondly of the Teutonic Knights of old and imagined his sacred pagan knighthood not merely as a secret society, but also as a warrior caste. It was to be a knighthood Heinrich I der Vogler would have been proud of.

  In September 1934, the Führer himself authorized Himmler to create his SS army. It was originally known as the SS Verfügungstruppe (Ordered Troops), as distinct from the regular or general SS, known as the Allgemeine SS, which included Reinhard Heydrich’s SD. Meanwhile, the SS concentration-camp guards were later organized into a third subcomponent of the SS, appropriately given the grisly designation Totenkopfverbände (Death’s Head Federation). The SS Verfügungstruppe then evolved into the Waffen SS, which came into existence in 1940 as the Kommandoamt (command office) der Waffen SS, an umbrella for a growing number of armed SS units. The core unit within this new army was the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler.

  To command the SS Verfügungstruppe, Himmler picked SS Brigadeführer Paul Hausser, a former general in the old imperial army and later in the Reichswehr. As he took his new job in October 1936, Hausser had orders from the Reichsführer SS to turn the SS Verfügungstruppe into an autonomous army second to none—including the Wehrmacht.

  Adolf Hitler’s favorite photographer, Heinrich Hoffman, took this picture of German troops marching into Imst, Austria, in March 1938. Germany annexed German-speaking Austria, incorporating its people into the greater German Reich. U.S. National Archives

  Practical military training for this pagan warrior caste took place at the SS Junkerschule (leadership schools) in Bad Tölz, as well as at other Junkerschulen in Braunschweig and Klagenfurt. (After World War II, the Bad Tölz site was the headquarters of the United States Third Army when it was commanded by General George Patton, and it remained a U.S. Army facility until 1991.) The emphasis at the Junkerschulen was on the practical, ranging from the traditional marching and presenting arms to physical-fitness and weapons training. Submachine guns took precedent over infantry rifles. The SS were to be Germany’s shock troops, as Hitler got the nation marching inexorably toward its next war.

  This march began in 1936, when the Wehrmacht occupied the German Rhineland, which had been demilitarized by the Treaty of Versailles. The world cried foul, but the lack of active opposition by Britain and France encouraged Hitler.

  In 1938, Hitler annexed Austria in a move that was called Anschluss, or “Connection.” This annexation fulfilled the Völkisch dreams of Germanic ethnocentrists in both countries who wished to see all German-speaking, or Völksdeutsche, people in a single Reich. (The term “Völksdeutsche,” which entered the lexicon early in the twentieth century, described ethnic Germans who were citizens of other, especially adjacent, countries. This contrasted with the Reichsdeutsch, who were ethic German citizens of Germany.) Before World War I, Austria had been the center of a multiethnic empire. After World War I, Austria was a sliver of the former empire, but populated mainly by people whom the Germanic ethnocentrists would call Völksdeutsche.

  There were also large numbers of such “Germans” in Czechoslovakia and Poland. Having absorbed the Völksdeutsche of Austria, Adolf Hitler next demanded that Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland region also be folded into his Third Reich.

  This contact strip included snapshots taken of an SS man enjoying himself with some local women during the 1941 push by German forces into the Balkans and Greece. U.S. Nati
onal Archives

  In September 1938, at the now infamous summit conference, Britain’s prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, and France’s president, Edouard Daladier, flew to Munich, the mother city of the NSDAP, to meet with Adolf Hitler. The Führer told them that the Sudetenland should properly be part of Germany, and he promised that this was the end of his territorial ambition. Czechoslovakia naturally complained, but Chamberlain and Daladier ignored the Czechs and acceded to the Führer’s demands. When Chamberlain flew home, he happily announced that he had helped to negotiate “peace for our time.”

  When the uniformed German troops marched into Austria and the Sudetenland, smiling to the cheers of German-speaking, pro-Hitler crowds, most but not all, were wearing the field gray (feldgrau) uniforms of the Wehrmacht. At the head of the column, as the troops entered Vienna, were the Black Knights of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. The SS Verfügungstruppe also contributed a symbolic contingent in the Sudetenland. In addition to these units, small SS/SD special operations task forces called Einsatzgruppen or Sonderkommandos were assigned to specific tasks such as securing government buildings.

  In March 1939, Hitler decided that he wanted the rest of Czechoslovakia. The price tag for “peace for our time” had gone up. Chamberlain and Daladier were willing to go to almost any lengths to appease Adolf Hitler and avoid war. Czechoslovakia had no choice. The poor country was chopped into bits. Slovakia was sliced off as a quasiautonomous satellite of Germany, while the remainder of Czechoslovakia became the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.