‘Your aunt Heidi,’ Jack murmured. ‘Wasn’t she a scientist?’
Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘A toxicologist. She’d been a biochemistry student when the Nazis came to power, and then worked as a medical researcher in a hospital in Berlin until her son Hans was born. I know that she gave herself up to the British near Plön, where she was hiding with Hans. She was evidently seen as a good catch, and was given a succession of research positions in England, where she remained until retiring back to Germany in the 1970s.’
‘Her son was the one who joined the Baader–
Meinhof gang?’
‘He died in an explosion in 1972. He’d been a bril iant student, but had been seduced by the anarchists. Aunt Heidi once told me she saw it as part of the legacy of the Nazis, the damage wrought on the next generation. I don’t think she’s ever got over it, especial y after losing her husband too, in the war.’
‘The Stuka pilot? I remember you talking about him.’
Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘Ernst Hoffman. One of the top tank-busters of the war. Knight’s Grand Cross with oak leaves and swords. He was grounded after being wounded on the Russian front, and was posted as some kind of attaché in Berlin. Aunt Heidi said he disappeared like so many others in the final Soviet onslaught, presumed kil ed.’
‘So why does Heidi want us to meet here now?’
Hiebermeyer paused. ‘I’m not sure. But there was a connection with Himmler, something that dogged Ernst right to the end. Heidi told me that as a boy, he’d seen a newsreel of an Ahnenerbe expedition to Tibet showing biplanes flying over the Himalayas, and had written to Himmler to volunteer as a pilot. After that, Himmler took an undue interest in his Luftwaffe exploits, and arranged his final posting to Berlin, where Ernst was feted as a war hero. Several years before that, it was Himmler who had organized the party where Ernst had first met Heidi. Himmler brought his favourites to Wewelsburg, and maybe Ernst and Heidi came with him. There must be something here she wants us to see.’ He looked at his watch, and stood up. ‘It’s a quarter to eleven. We’d better be on time.’
Fifteen minutes later Jack and Hiebermeyer stood at the entrance to the Obergruppenführersaal, the SS
Generals’ Hal , on the ground floor of the north tower of the castle. It was a stark room, devoid of furniture or wal hangings, focusing the eye entirely on the architecture and the pattern in the floor. Surrounding the open central space of the chamber were twelve columns joined by a groin vault, and between them lay deeply recessed apses with tal windows. The daylight coming through the windows il uminated the symbol in the centre of the floor, a green marble Sonnenrad sunwheel with a central axis of gold. Jack knew that this had been the epicentre of Himmler’s vision for Wewelsburg, the place where he had summoned his twelve top SS generals for ideological preparation before Operation Barbarossa in 1941.
He heard a low electric hum, and a wheelchair appeared from one of the window niches. Sitting in it was an elegant woman wearing a flowery dress, her white hair done in the fashion of the 1930s. She had a striking face, with high cheekbones and startlingly blue eyes. She waved at Hiebermeyer, who bounded over and kissed her forehead. ‘Heidi,’ he said, holding her hand. ‘ Meine liebe Tante.’
Her bright eyes caught Jack’s and he quickly proffered his hand. ‘Frau Dr Hoffman. Pleased to meet you at last.’
‘Cal me Heidi,’ she said in beautiful y precise English, with the clipped accent of the 1930s. ‘You must be Jack Howard. It is such a pleasure to meet you. Maurice used to tel me about you when he visited during his school holidays, but by then I’d moved back to Germany and he never did bring you along. I was delighted when Maurice phoned to tel me you would be joining us. Ever since reading your Atlantis book, I’ve wanted to bring you here to show you some symbols. My son Hans sketched them once, but I can’t find his drawings now.’ She took a tissue out of her sleeve and dabbed one eye. Jack saw that her hands were shaking. He glanced across at Hiebermeyer. So that was it. Some symbols. The place was fil ed with symbols, every kind of device the Nazis had come across, including at least three different runic sequences that Jack could see. Some were genuine transcriptions of medieval runes; others clearly were made up. There were bound to be a few that looked like those they had discovered five years ago in Atlantis. For a moment Jack wondered if he was about to be sucked into the world of fringe archaeology, of so-cal ed evidence col ated by Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, picked from disparate sources and then arranged together in an apparently convincing whole. For al of the reality of their discovery in the Black Sea, he knew there would always be those who preferred to inhabit this paral el world, where the dream of Atlantis would remain just beyond reach.
‘Tante Heidi,’ Hiebermeyer said, glancing again at Jack. ‘When did you come here before? When Hans was a boy?’
She put away her tissue. ‘Once, when he was a high-school student, to try to interest him in a mystery.
But of course I had been here before, when I first came to this chamber and the vault below and saw what I am going to show you now. Have you told Dr Howard about Ernst?’
‘He knows as much as I know.’
She took a deep breath, shuddering slightly, then composed herself. ‘Himmler brought us here on a celebratory tour after Ernst had been awarded the oak leaves and swords cluster to his Knight’s Cross.
We were the perfect image of the Nazi couple, the war hero and his blonde Aryan wife, heavily pregnant.
Only it was a charade, of course. We were taken first to this chamber, where Ernst was anointed an honorary knight. I thought Himmler was about to induct him into the SS, which would have been the worst horror for Ernst. Fortunately, Himmler said it was more important for the time being that he remain a shining star of the Luftwaffe.’
‘You always told me he only thought of the men in his squadron, Aunt Heidi,’ Hiebermeyer said quietly.
‘That was where his loyalty lay, and to you and Hans.’
Her eyes fil ed with tears again, and she wiped them. ‘It seems just like yesterday. I feel as if I could walk out of this wheelchair into the sun of the courtyard, see little Hans and hold Ernst by the hand.
They were days of happiness, but it was a time of horror. In truth I cannot go back to them, even in my mind’s eye. When I shut my eyes, I only see again the horrors that I myself witnessed.’
She shuddered again, then held her hands tight on the armrests of the chair. ‘Now, we must go down the stairs, to the vault below.’ She raised herself with a walking stick that had been leaning on her wheelchair.
The two men quickly took an arm each, and walked alongside her as she moved slowly to the spiral staircase, where Hiebermeyer led, with Jack taking up the rear. In a few minutes they had reached the bottom. They were in a gloomy beehive-shaped chamber, about eight metres high, positioned directly below the SS Generals’ Room and dug into the bedrock. Heidi pointed up to the vault with her stick.
‘There’s a swastika in the apex, directly below the Sonnenrad sun symbol in the floor above,’ she said.
‘The vault’s based on the shape of a Mycenaean Greek tomb, the so-cal ed Treasury of Atreus at the ancient site of Mycenae. Himmler was obsessed with warrior kings of the ancient past. This vault is real y a shrine to Agamemnon, the king of the Greeks who attacked Troy, the hero of another war between West and East.’ She brought down her cane and tapped on a marble slab in the centre of the floor. ‘If you look under this, you’l see why.’
She sat down abruptly on a wooden bench beside the wal . Jack stared at the floor, but saw nothing in the closely fitted marble slabs to suggest an opening.
Hiebermeyer knelt down and put his hand on the slab she had tapped. ‘How do you know anything’s here, Aunt Heidi?’
‘Because Himmler showed it to me. Ernst regarded al of Himmler’s archaeology as occult, and found a ready excuse that day to avoid the tour by volunteering to fly Nazi officials who accompanied us over the site of the castle to see Himmler’s grandiose construction scheme from
the air. Himmler brought me down here alone. I never told Ernst what I saw; he would have scoffed at it. Himmler was very proud of this chamber. It was meant to be a kind of holy of holies, and a burial vault for the ashes of the greatest SS heroes. His top SS officers were meant to come and swear al egiance over the object buried below.
But only a select few knew what it was.’
‘Is it stil here?’
‘You can see where it rested.’ She tapped her stick against the wal behind her, then tapped it again, as if trying the find the right spot. The second tap produced a hol ow sound, and where Hiebermeyer had been looking, an octagonal slab of marble about the size of a large dinner plate rose a few inches out of the floor.
‘There,’ she said. ‘I’m probably the only one left who knows how to do that. Even the curators of this place don’t know this is here. Go on, Maurice, pul it out.’
Hiebermeyer got down on al fours, grasping the block by two recessed handles on either side. He lifted it up and set it down beside the hole. Jack took out a Mini Maglite and knelt beside him. About six inches below was a ring of symbols, surrounding a hol ow shape cut into the rock. Jack peered closely at the shape, panning his torch over it, then looked at Hiebermeyer. ‘Is that what I think it is?’
Hiebermeyer was staring at it. ‘Incredible.’
Jack’s mind raced. A reverse swastika. It was the same as the shape in the bunker laboratory door. And it was the shape he had seen six months before in the strongbox he and Costas had retrieved from deep inside the mine in Poland, the shape of an object that Saumerre had so coveted but which had remained elusive.
‘It was for the ancient Trojan pal adion,’ Heidi said.
‘At first I thought the pal adion must be another fake, but I came to believe it was genuine. We al knew the swastika was an ancient shape, and had been found decorating pottery at Troy. Himmler told me that Heinrich Schliemann had discovered the pal adion in the Tomb of Agamemnon at Mycenae, where it had been looted from a temple at Troy. It was the most sacred Trojan object, dating back thousands of years before the fal of Troy, supposedly a gift from the sky god. It was meteoritic on one side, gold on the other.
It’s gone now, though I don’t know where. But I brought you here to see the symbols around the edge of the hol ow.’
Jack peered more closely. There were two circular rings of symbols, the first one close to the lip of the hole, the second inside and below the first ring, obscured in shadow. The symbols on the upper ring were similar to the ones they had seen in the hal above. ‘They’re runes,’ he murmured. ‘Eight of them altogether. Some look like the Futhark, the Scandinavian runes of the Middle Ages. But there are other symbols too, presumably Nazi additions. I can see two swastikas.’
Heidi pointed with her stick. ‘They’re the creation of
Karl Maria Wiligut, Himmler’s occult guru. He retained some of the original Scandinavian runes, but added some with no historical precedent as runes but based on other ancient symbols. As wel as the swastikas, you can see those two symbols of a crossed ring, derived from the Phoenician symbol t th.’
Hiebermeyer looked at Heidi. ‘These SS runes have Roman letter equivalents, don’t they?’
She nodded. ‘Entirely made up by Wiligut, but applied consistently. The t th symbol means T, and the Hakenkreuz, the swastika, means A. And you can see the Sig rune for the letter S, familiar enough from the SS insignia. The other three symbols are the Heilszeichen rune for L, the Odal rune for N and the Leben rune for I.’
Jack stared again, panning his torch from symbol to symbol, then running over it again. ‘Good God,’ he said under his breath. ‘They spel out ATLANTIS.’
‘Now look at the second ring of symbols,’ she said.
Jack panned his torch deeper into the hole and stared, his heart pounding. ‘It’s incredible,’ he whispered.
‘What is it?’ Hiebermeyer said.
Jack sat back, his mind racing. ‘The symbols Costas’ ROV photographed two days ago on that cave wal in Atlantis, the ones that Katya is working on intepreting.’ He took out his iPhone, pressed a few keys and passed it to Hiebermeyer, who stared at the image on the screen and then squatted down, looking at the rock-cut symbols in the marble and then at the screen again. ‘There are twenty-six symbols on your screen. Each one of the eight symbols here in the rock is represented. They’re the same.’
‘You recognize them?’
Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘It’s the Stone Age code.’ He looked at Heidi. ‘These symbols are found on cave paintings of the Upper Palaeolithic, most extensively in the famous caves in France and Spain. What does seem incredible is that they are virtual y identical across the world.’ He showed her the screen, pointing. ‘The zigzag lines, the clusters of dots, the paral el lines are al found in rock art in North and South America, Europe, South Africa, Australia.
Some scholars have tried to argue that these are just common jottings that the artists could have invented independently, but that doesn’t wash with me.’
‘You think these symbols could have spread around the world from one origin?’ she murmured.
Hiebermeyer nodded emphatical y. ‘We know people moved huge distances in the Ice Age: across the Bering Strait and to South America at least twenty thousand years ago, and from Asia to Australia at least thirty thousand years before that. Armchair scholars who dispute the idea look at maps and see apparently insurmountable barriers in the seas and deserts and mountain ranges, whereas those like Jack who’ve tried to retrace the routes realize that the sea especial y is often an aid rather than a hindrance to long-distance travel.’
‘What’s the date range of the symbols?’ she asked.
‘Towards the end of the last Ice Age, from about twenty-five thousand to twelve thousand years ago.
But they could have survived as relic symbols after the Ice Age, maybe in rituals.’
‘At least until 6000 BC,’ Jack said quietly, getting down on his knees and shining his Maglite at the far side of the recess. He took his iPhone back from Hiebermeyer, stared at it and then shone the torch again. ‘Wel I’l be damned.’
He
straightened
up
and
smiled
broadly.
Hiebermeyer pushed up his little round glasses and peered back. ‘I’ve seen that look before.’
‘I’ve just seen one I recognize above al others. It’s astonishing.’
Hiebermeyer fol owed his gaze. The torch lit up a symbol like a garden rake, a single slash with four lines coming off it at right angles. ‘Is this what I think it is?’
Jack scrol ed down his screen. ‘It’s symbol number twenty-three in the Stone Age alphabet, what they cal
“pectiform”, from the Latin for comb-shaped, with short lines extending off a single line. According to Katya’s email to me summarizing the code, it’s quite rare, only occurring at five per cent of the cave sites.
But it first occurs in the oldest groups, twenty-five thousand years ago.’ He tapped the screen again, and showed it to Heidi. ‘That’s why I’m so excited.’
The screen showed the cover of Jack’s monograph publication on Atlantis, based on their discovery of the site five years before. In the centre was the symbol they had first seen on the papyrus that Hiebermeyer had discovered in the Egyptian desert, the account by the ancient Greek travel er Solon of his visit to the Egyptian high priest who had told him the story of Atlantis. It was the symbol that Jack and Costas had found on the golden disc from the Bronze Age shipwreck, a disc they realized had been created in Atlantis more than five thousand years earlier, before the citadel had been drowned by the rising waters of the Black Sea. Heidi peered at it, then at Jack. ‘The symbol here is a mirror image of the Stone Age symbol. It’s as if that pectiform symbol had been flipped over.’
Jack nodded. ‘You won’t believe it, but my col eague Costas and I saw this very symbol underwater at Atlantis during our dive, on a stone pil ar at the entrance to a tunne
l into the site. We cal it the Atlantis symbol. We believe it was shaped like that in the form of two wings, and was meant to represent an eagle or a vulture, a sacred bird. And it also served as a map, like a labyrinth. Five years ago, we were able to fol ow the shape of the symbol in the tunnels and gal eries in the rock of the volcano that formed the summit of the citadel, until we reached the holy of holies.’
‘The place you and Costas revisited a few days ago,’ Hiebermeyer said.
Jack nodded. ‘Unfortunately the volcano decided to heat up just as we were about to enter the chamber.
But we did manage to photograph a section of the wal containing these other symbols, clearly much older. I believe that this older Stone Age code and the newer Atlantis script were the preserve of priests and shamans, rather than a widespread writing system.
That these two scripts should exist side by side fits in with some extraordinary ideas we’ve been developing about the dawn of civilization. On the one hand, the Atlanteans would have retained something of the rituals and beliefs of their Ice Age ancestors, particularly shamanistic rituals involving animals and the hunt. That’s what we see in the Palaeolithic cave art, where the symbols first appear. On the other hand, early farmers were developing new belief systems. The old animal gods of the spirit world were being eclipsed by anthropomorphic gods, created when people were beginning to see that they could determine their own destiny. The new script, its sacred meaning, may have been tied up with that. The period when Atlantis was destroyed may have been a time of tension and even bloody conflict between the two belief systems, between shamans of the old ways and priests of the new. When we went back to Atlantis, I wanted to find out who those new gods were.’
Hiebermeyer pointed to the symbols in the floor.
‘And now the big mystery. How on earth did these Stone Age symbols get here?’
Jack paused. ‘I’ve just been thinking about that. The Palaeolithic cave art of France and the Pyrenees, at famous sites such as Lascaux, was known by the 1930s. Given the Ahnenerbe obsession with runes and symbols, it makes sense that they would have cast their net that wide. They would have known about the great antiquity of the caves, and might have associated the symbols with the fantasy of Aryan origins. It would have been fitting to reproduce those symbols in this secret place, this Nazi holy of holies, real y a kind of sacred cave too.’
Gods of Atlantis Page 31