by Bill Yenne
Rascher also studied ways by which these nearly frozen people could be successfully warmed up. One such method, well known in the popular folklore of Nazi brutality, was to throw the subject into bed with a small group of naked prostitutes. Like Ilsa Koch at Buchenwald, Rascher was a sadist who couldn’t resist cruel sexual exploitation in the dreadful final moments in the lives of his subjects—and at the expense of some obviously terrified women. The “lucky” few who survived the cold hand of Dr. Rascher were subsequently executed.
Rascher also designed cyanide capsules that would produce almost instant death if placed in the mouth and bitten.
Another of the SS doctors to “work” with human subjects from Dachau was Dr. August Hirt of the University of Strasbourg in Alsace (which was known as the Reichsuniversität Strassburg under the German occupation between 1940 and 1944). By 1942, one of his principal subordinates was Bruno Beger, the SS Ahnenerbe anthropologist who had, calipers in hand, accompanied Ernst Schäfer to Tibet. By 1942, Beger had turned his rulers and calipers from jovial living Tibetans to the skulls of deceased individuals, mainly individuals that were referred to in the paper trail of documentation as “Jewish Bolshevik commissars.” Beginning around 1940, Beger had also been using X-rays to study human body types and to categorize the physical parameters of Aryan perfection versus untermensch imperfection. It was as though he had ripped a page straight from Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels’s 1905 book, Theozoologie oder die Kunde von den Sodoms-Äfflingen und dem Götter-Elektron (Theozoology or the account of the Sodomite Apelings and the Divine Electron), which linked the concept of Aryan Gottmenschen (god-men) with unseen electronic rays. Later, Beger and Hirt took to removing flesh from skulls in order to get more perfect caliper readings.
The prosecution exhibits from the postwar International Military Tribunal tell much of the ghoulish tale of Beger and Hirt’s work in the form of correspondence between Sievers, SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, and SS Sturmbannführer Rudolf Brandt, Himmler’s personal aide.
On February 9, 1942, Sievers wrote to Brandt complaining of a shortage of specimens for the research at the Reichsuniversität Strassburg:
There exist extensive collections of skulls of almost all races and peoples. Of the Jewish race, however, only so very few specimens of skulls are at the disposal of science that a study of them does not permit precise conclusions. The war in the East now presents us with the opportunity to remedy this shortage. By procuring the skulls of the Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars, who personify a repulsive yet characteristic subhumanity, we have the opportunity of obtaining tangible scientific evidence. The actual obtaining and collecting of these skulls without difficulty could be best accomplished by a directive issued to the Wehrmacht in the future to immediately turn over alive all Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars.
He then calmly added that a “special deputy, commissioned with the collection of the material [a junior physician attached to the Wehrmacht, the police, or a medical student equipped with car and driver], is to take a prescribed series of photographs and anthropological measurements, and is to ascertain, insofar as is possible, the origin, date of birth, and other personal data of the prisoner. Following the subsequently induced death of the Jew, whose head must not be damaged, he will separate the head from the torso and will forward it to its point of destination in a preserving fluid in a well-sealed tin container especially made for this purpose.”
On November 2, 1942, Sievers wrote to Brandt reminding him, “As you know, [Himmler personally ordered] that SS Hauptsturmführer Prof. Dr. Hirt should be provided with all necessary material for his research work. I have already reported to the Reichsführer SS that for some anthropological studies 150 skeletons of inmates or Jews are needed and should be provided by the Auschwitz concentration camp.”
Four days later, Brandt sent a memo from Himmler’s field command post to Eichmann, explaining that Himmler had previously issued “a directive to the effect that SS-Hauptsturmfuehrer Prof. Dr. Hirt, who is the director of the Anatomical Institute at Strassburg and the head of a department of the institute for Military Science Research in the Ahnenerbe Society, be furnished with everything he needs for his research work. By order of the Reichsführer SS, therefore, I ask you to make possible the establishment of the planned collection. SS-Obersturmbannfuehrer Sievers will get in touch with you with regard to straightening out the details.”
Apparently the details were straightened out, though it took more time than Hirt may have wished. Indeed, the rampant spread of diseases, including typhus, that propagated in the squalor of Auschwitz made it difficult for the SS men to find inmates healthy enough to murder. Bruno Beger himself would travel to Auschwitz on a skeleton-collecting mission, wrapping up his work on June 15, 1943.
On June 21, Sievers wrote to Eichmann, sending copies of the letter to Beger, Brandt, and Hirt himself. In that letter he said, “A total of 115 persons were worked on, 79 of whom were Jews, 2 Poles, 4 Asiatics, and 30 Jewesses. At present, these prisoners are separated according to sex and each group is accommodated in a hospital building of the Auschwitz concentration camp and are in quarantine. For further processing of the selected persons an immediate transfer to the Natzweiler concentration camp is now imperative; this must be accelerated in view of the danger of infectious diseases in Auschwitz.”
The bodies did reach the Reichsuniversität Strassburg and the laboratory of Hirt and Beger. As it turned out, the men moved very slowly in their dissections. After all of the urgency of acquiring the bodies, Hirt got around to relatively few dissections and reduced even fewer of the bodies to skeletons.
Meanwhile, Ernst Schäfer, Beger’s old Tibet colleague, was still on the Ahnenerbe payroll, where for a time, he had headed the important-sounding Ahnenerbe Forschungsstatte für Innersasien und Expeditionen (Research Institute for Intra-Asia and Expeditions). Despite the appellation, the institute never sent an expedition back to inner Asia. That was all in the past.
Early in 1943, Schäfer was reunited with Sven Hedin, the seventy-eight-year-old geographer and explorer from neutral Sweden, whose numerous expeditions into Central Asia and Tibet between 1894 and 1935 had been groundbreaking scientifically and an inspiration to men such as Schäfer. In his later years, Hedin had become a convert to Nazism and was in regular contact with Adolf Hitler. In fact, Hitler had brought him to Germany to award him the Verdienstorden vom Deutschen Adler (Order of the German Eagle) medal. At one point, Schäfer stopped by Strassburg to pay a visit to Hirt and Beger. Hirt proudly showed him a dissected brain. What a strange step into the shadows that had to have been for Schäfer, whose time was then being spent in the details of the release of Geheimnis Tibet (Secret Tibet), the film shot only three years earlier on the other side of the world.
CHAPTER 21
Weird Science
THE FACT THAT the doctrines used to justify the Final Solution were promulgated so officially, and that they were accepted so broadly, clearly illustrates that under the Third Reich, Germany sank into a moral and scientific dark age.
Paradoxically, these were years of significant technological advancement in Germany. We recall that when Hermann Wirth and Wolfram Sievers sent the Ahnenerbe to remote Finland in search of the obscure northern Völkisch race who lived where the Kalevala originated, they took with them state-of-the-art, German-made reel-to-reel tape-recording technology that was among the best in the world. Likewise, it is well known that in aeronautics, jet propulsion, and rocket technology, Germany continued to be a global leader until the final months of World War II. Also well known is that it was Wernher von Braun, the father of Germany’s V2 ballistic missile, was also the father of NASA’s Saturn 5, which took Americans to the moon a quarter century later.
Indeed, the sophistication of German technology made possible the horrible hardware that killed so many in the death camps. The deaths of those six million would not have been possible without the massive, and massively efficient, killing machines—ovens and gas chambers—that were
built for the death camps.
Despite the obsession by Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler with the lines of inquiry pursued by the pseudoscientists of the Ahnenerbe, prewar Germany had not been a scientific backwater—far from it. Between 1901 and 1939, the country’s legitimate scientists had won thirty-nine Nobel prizes for chemistry, physics, or medicine. However, many of the laureates were an embarrassment to the Third Reich. Many of these science Nobels, such as Albert Einstein’s for physics in 1921, were awarded to Jews.
When the Nazis took power in 1933, a rift naturally formed in the German scientific community. Under the Nuremberg Laws, the Jewish scientists began to lose their jobs. Their theories, including those for which their Nobels were awarded, were first questioned and next discredited.
The man who put a name to the ostracism of Jewish scientists in Germany was Dr. Philipp Eduard Anion von Lenard, a Hungarian-born German physicist. He himself had won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1905 for his work in the field of cathode rays, which led to the practical development of the cathode-ray tubes that made twentieth-century television sets possible. Strangely, 1905 was the same time that electronic rays were also playing a role in Ariosophic metaphysics. Indeed, it was the same year that Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels published Theozoologie oder die Kunde von den Sodoms-Äfflingen und dem Götter-Elektron (Theozoology or the Account of the Sodomite Apelings and the Divine Electron), in which the subtext to his hatred of apelings was the unrelated supposition that electronic rays were connected with supernatural mysticism.
It was Lenard’s own book, published in 1933, the year that the Nazis took power in Germany, which framed the scientific legitimacy of the Third Reich’s version of Ariosophy. In his massive, four-volume Great Men in Science, a History of Scientific Progress, Lenard coined the term Deutsche Physik, which literally means “German Physics,” but which was extrapolated by him to mean “Aryan Physics,” or science formulated and perpetuated by Germanic or Nordic scientists. He also coined the term Jüdische Physik, which translates as “Jewish Physics,” but which he used to mean the scientific work done by the inferior beings whom Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg were now characterizing as untermenschen. Though the book purports to be about the contributions of “great men in science,” Lenard specifically excluded Albert Einstein, still recognized as the towering figure in twentieth-century science. Lenard wrote him off as “the Jewish fraud.”
Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels was still around in 1933, but there is no record of what he may have thought of the prince of cathode rays agreeing with his characterizations of the “apelings.” We do know what Adolf Hitler thought of Lenard and his scientific theories, for he made the Nobel laureate his chief of Deutsche Physik. Together with fellow Nazi Johannes Stark, who won the 1919 Nobel Prize in Physics, Lenard reorganized the German scientific community, bringing it into line with the party line of the Third Reich.
As for Albert Einstein, he was one of the lucky ones among his Jewish countrymen; he got out of Germany before the hammer came down. An avowed anti-Nazi, he emigrated to the United States in 1933 as soon as Hitler took power.
The ironic thing about Lenard’s Jüdische Physik is that it may have saved the world. Because Einstein was a leader in the field of nuclear physics, Hitler was so skeptical of atomic energy that he denied the necessary support that would have been required for the Third Reich to develop nuclear weapons. Such a program did exist in Germany during World War II, but Hitler refused to allow it to be fast-tracked because the still-unproven theory behind the nuclear chain reaction was “tainted” by the hands of practitioners of Jüdische Physik.
As we know, that same Jüdische Physik did help the United States develop nuclear weapons by 1945. It was on August 2, 1939, that Albert Einstein and fellow Jewish physicist, Leó Szilárd, mailed their famous letter to President Franklin Roosevelt, telling him that Nazi Germany was capable of building nuclear weapons and the United States should not allow Germany to be the first to have such terrible weapons. Roosevelt initiated the steps that led the United States becoming the first nuclear power. Many of the scientists on the project were Jewish.
However, Deutsch Physik allowed for theories far stranger than nuclear weapons—indeed, far stranger than fiction—to develop and receive official sanction within the Third Reich. Certainly the Welteislehre or Glazial-Kozmogonie of Hanns Hörbiger is an example of a very unconventional idea that was taken seriously. In this case, it was a matter of Nazi leaders wanting to believe in an improbable idea because of their Völkisch notion of the Aryans originating in the ice.
Some of the oddest theories to receive official interest in Germany during the Third Reich concerned the physical configuration of the earth itself. During the nineteenth century, many people had read Jules Verne’s 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth. Just as conventional wisdom once held that the world was flat, during the nineteenth century, many people were convinced that Verne’s version of the world’s hollow center might just be true. Indeed, such a thing is mentioned in many pre-nineteenth century religious texts; the Greek idea of Hades and the Christian idea of hell, for example, both involved underworlds. Within the scientific community, there were many who thought a hollow earth was possible. Even the seventeenth-century astronomer Edmond Halley, who discovered the famous periodic comet that bears his name, wrote of a hollow earth.
By the twentieth century, scientific theory migrated toward the now-accepted notion of the earth having a molten core. Nevertheless, hollow-earth enthusiasts continue to hold to their belief even in the twenty-first century. For example, various religious sects, such as Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s Church Universal and Triumphant, believe that a race of superbeings travels in and out of the hollow earth by way of a portal on California’s Mount Shasta.
Among others still clinging to Jules Verne’s vision are those who believe that Adolf Hitler himself escaped into the hollow earth after World War II. While this notion is at the far outer limits of the possible (never say never), Hitler did, in fact, have an open mind to the Hohlweltlehre, or Hollow Earth Theory. The Hohlweltlehre was mentioned in the literature of the Thule Gesellshaft, whose members were certainly aware of Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. Indeed, the novel could easily have been written about the Thuleans. As the book begins, the German main character, Professor Otto Lidenbrock, lives in Hamburg. He learns of the secret entrance to the earth’s interior while deciphering an ancient runic manuscript of an Icelandic saga. These runes were penned by none other than Snorri Sturluson, the twelfth-century Icelandic historian who wrote down the Younger Edda, the prose version of the ancient Nordic scriptures that were so thoroughly devoured by the Armanen and by Heinrich Himmler.
Verne’s fictitious entrance to the inner world is located in Iceland, which had to have delighted members of the Thule Gesellshaft. As they and other Hohlweltlehre devotees contemplated the Hohlweltlehre, which they took to be fact, they studied numerous ancient texts, from Nordic to Buddhist, searching for clues that might lead them to locate the actual entrance. Assuming that it must be located in a place cold and icy, many early twentieth-century counterculturists picked up on suggestions in various pieces of literature saying it might be located either in Tibet or Antarctica. Perhaps the most well-known of these were by the creator of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs, who set a series of seven novels in the land of Pellucidar inside a hollow earth with openings at the poles. The first five had been published by 1937. It is interesting to note that the Third Reich sent expeditions to both Tibet and Antarctica in 1938 and 1939.
In the case of Tibet, there is no evidence that Ernst Schäfer, Bruno Beger, and their team ever looked for a doorway to a “middle earth.” (As a practical matter, if such a doorway did exist in Tibet, one would have had to descend four miles just to get to sea level, never mind the center of the earth!) Nor is there any widely disclosed evidence that Captain Alfred Ritscher’s German Antarctic expedition looked for such an entrance. Within today’s online world of
conspiracy theory, however, there is still much speculation.
While the belief in a hollow earth is unconventional, perhaps the strangest of all theories concerning the physical configuration of the earth is that the world is not spherical, flat, or hollow, but concave! This idea was advanced, perhaps for the first time, by Dr. Cyrus Reed Teed, a nineteenth-century American physician turned self-styled messiah from upstate New York. Teed reported that he had “confirmed” his concave-world theory, which he called “Cellular Cosmogony” through surveys that he did in Florida in the 1890s.
According to various sources, including Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier in their 1960 book The Morning of the Magicians, both Hitler and Himmler were convinced by concave-earth theorists active in Germany in the 1930s that the surface of our planet is actually the concave inside surface of a spherical bubble surrounded by an infinite mass of solid rock. This theory holds that the sky is actually a cloud of blue gas in the center of the sphere that is illuminated by the sun, which is much smaller than conventional astronomers insist that it is. This strange conviction is discussed further in such books as In the Name of Science (1946) by Gerard S. Kuiper and Pseudo-Sciences Under the Nazi Regime (1947) by Willy Ley, which were published close to the time that this idea was alive and well in the Third Reich’s halls of power.
Hitler and Himmler came under the influence of theorists who believed that the surface of the earth is actually the concave inner surface of a spherical bubble surrounded by solid rock, and the sky is a cloud of blue gas in the center of the sphere. In 1942, Hitler sent radar and infrared radiation experts to the Baltic Sea island of Rügen to scan the skies for the British fleet. Author’s collection
As the story goes, Hitler was so convinced of this theory that he sent Dr. Heinz Fisher, supposedly one of Germany’s leading experts in radar and infrared radiation, to the Baltic Sea island of Rügen in April 1942. Fisher was told to undertake a long-distance search for the British fleet. Because, under the theory, the universe is inside the bubble, he had only to direct his radar straight up to detect China. Thus, using a less than forty-five-degree angle, he ought to have been able to “see” the British fleet in the North Atlantic. A great deal of rare, high-technology equipment is alleged to have been devoted to the project. Needless to say, Fisher’s attempt to locate Hitler’s military adversary proved futile. In spite of such “technological setbacks,” some members of the Oberkommando Wehrmacht are reported to have continued to believe in the theory of a concave earth. After the war, Fisher came to the United States to work on advanced weapons projects. As late as 1957, according to Pauwels and Bergier, he was working on the American hydrogen bomb program.