The Gods of Atlantis

by David Gibbons

  Hoffman carefully calculated what he thought Himmler would want to hear, something he had become skilled at judging over the past few months around the Nazi inner circle in Berlin. ‘The atomic programme. The research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics.’

  Himmler’s eyes glinted. ‘Now that’s a weapon. But the programme was never close to actuality. Not enough uranium.’

  Hoffman watched the little eyes dart around his face, then fix squarely on him. He was playing Himmler’s guessing game. ‘Poison gas?’

  Himmler gave a high-pitched laugh, and slapped the table. ‘Good. The Spandau gas research facility. Sarin and Tabin nerve gas. But no. Those were Verzweiflungswaffen, weapons of despair. Lance Corporal Hitler had too many bad memories of the last war, when the gas our side released wafted back into our own trenches and blinded him. Anyway, gas is inefficient. You need lots of it, and lots of bombs and shells to disperse it.’

  Hoffman stared at Himmler, his mind racing. He had heard other rumours. A few months ago, a former professor of his had invited him for dinner in Heidelberg. After too much schnapps, he had told Hoffman of his secret work for the Ahnenerbe, the Department of Cultural Heritage. He had said that the search for Aryan roots, for precursor civilizations – for Atlantis – was not all that it seemed. And it was not just the sordid business of collecting craniological measurements to support racist theory. There had been another purpose, equally sinister and top secret. They had scoured the world for ancient medicines, for ancient cures: among primitive peoples, in mummies, under polar ice, deep underwater. But, the man had drunkenly whispered, it was not the cure they wanted. They wanted the disease. Hoffman had not been the only one the man had spoken to after too much drink, and the Gestapo had got wind of his indiscretions. He had disappeared soon after into Himmler’s House of Horrors. Hoffman pursed his lips and shook his head. It was time to allow Himmler his flourish. ‘Nothing, mein Führer. I can’t think.’

  Himmler slapped the table, then drew himself forward on his elbows, his face gleaming. ‘Well, I will let you in on a secret.’ He opened his arms expansively. ‘What went on in this room, here in the Zoo flak tower?’

  Hoffman looked straight at him. ‘It was a storage vault for the treasures of the Berlin museums, placed here in 1942 when the English terror-bombing began.’ He glanced at the crate to Himmler’s left, then instantly regretted it. Himmler’s eye had followed his. The man saw everything. Himmler reached over and put his hand on the crate inches from the order book Hoffman had used as a diary. He rubbed a smear of dust, saw the dirt on his hand and then wiped his fingers on the cover of the order book. Hoffman could barely breathe. Himmler sat back, pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his hand again, then inspected his fingernails. He gave Hoffman an amused look.

  ‘You think these crates contain some kind of Wunderwaffe? They are what they say they are. They contain Schliemann’s treasure from Troy. I blackmailed that cretin Bormann into leaving these three here, on pain of telling Hitler that Bormann was actually stealing the rest for himself. Adolf dreamed that all of these treasures were going to his fantasy Führermuseum in Linz, that absurd architect’s model he kept poring over in the bunker. Well, these three crates I kept for myself. I believe you have met Dr Unversagt, who was watching over them when you arrived? I had hoped to return for them once the Americans had joined us, but now they will be taken by the Russians. It is of no moment. My best treasures await me elsewhere, in another secret bunker, all of my greatest artefacts from Wewelsburg as well as the best of those from Troy, the ones the public never saw. I even have a small art collection of my own, including my favourite Raphael. You see, I am a far more discerning collector than Göring or Bormann. These men were merely gangsters.’ He jerked his head at the broken bust of Bismarck on the floor behind. ‘The Iron Chancellor was a friend of Schliemann’s, you know. Perhaps they talked of taking the world by storm, with the broken pieces of myth in these crates from Troy. You approve, Herr SS-Brigadeführer, of this talk of world domination?’

  ‘Mein Führer.’

  Himmler patted his pocket, took out a silver hip flask, shook it, and then grunted. One of the SS generals in the shadows behind Hoffman reached over with a flask of his own. Himmler unscrewed the lid, sniffed it, then offered it back to the man. ‘You first, Herr Obergruppenführer.’ The man clicked his heels and took the flask, and Hoffman heard the sound of trickling and swallowing. The man whipped out a handkerchief, wiped the flask and handed it back to Himmler, then stepped back into the shadows. Himmler swilled the flask around, then put it on the desk. ‘Perhaps not,’ he muttered, looking at the general and then eyeing Hoffman. ‘And certainly not for you, Herr SS-Brigadeführer. For what is to come, you need a clear head.’

  Himmler reached over for the swaddled package he had taken from his satchel. As he did so, Hoffman realized that something was different outside. The background vibration of exploding shells against the concrete of the gun platform had ceased. The Russian infantry must have taken the Zoo grounds, and would be too close for their heavy artillery to carry on targeting the bunker. Hoffman tensed. The flak tower was now in the eye of the storm; it could only be a matter of time before the Russian tanks began firing armour-piercing rounds point-blank at the steel window shutters, punching holes for the flame-throwers to shoot through. Hoffman saw that Himmler sensed the change too, that he knew their time was running out. He leaned forward, the crooked smile gone. ‘Listen to me, Hoffman, and listen well. You said you knew about the Spandau gas research laboratories. Well, the Zoo tower was not just for the storage of treasures. There is another chamber, deep below the water reservoir. The reservoir walls act as a barrier to prevent what is inside from escaping, from being released into the atmosphere. You understand me?’

  ‘Mein Führer.’

  ‘My Ahnenerbe men searched the world for ancient diseases, for ones long thought dormant, diseases against which people today would have little resistance. They scoured the ancient literature. A particularly fastidious young researcher in Heidelberg eventually found an account of what we wanted: an extraordinarily toxic waterborne bacterium that may have killed Alexander the Great. Under the pretence of searching for a lost civilization under the ice, my explorers and scientists went to the most extreme fresh-water environments in the world, to Iceland and Greenland, seeking the deadliest strain of the bacterium they could find. Eventually they discovered it, at a place that only the most courageous of my divers could reach. We had already embarked on another quest, for a particular virus. This time we did not need to look so far back in history. It was the Spanish influenza virus that killed twenty million people at the end of the First World War. A virus that Hitler saw as divine vengeance against the world for inflicting such humiliation on the German people. A virus that I saw as the tool of ultimate power. For years my scientists thought it could never be recovered. They exhumed body after body across Germany. But the Blitzkrieg and the conquest of Europe greatly expanded the search area. Eventually, in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, they found the well-preserved corpses of two influenza victims who had been buried in lead-lined coffins. They took them to a bunker laboratory deep in a forest in Upper Saxony, and they isolated the virus from the cadavers. I ordered a labour camp to be set up, disguised as a camp for forest workers. We brought in prisoners of all races, young men and women, strong, healthy, the backbone of any country. After many experiments with the virus, my scientists tested the most promising mutations on the prisoners. They added the bacterium to make it more potent. Gradually we improved it until all of the infected people died. Our work had produced a deadly weapon. A Wunderwaffe, yes?’

  Hoffman felt physically sick. ‘A Wunderwaffe, mein Führer.’

  Himmler reached over and pulled the swaddled package on the table towards him, clunking it on the planks. It sounded heavy, metallic. He looked at Hoffman intently. ‘My detractors think I am obsessed with the occult, with mystical symbols and rituals. They think it clouds my
reason, but that is what I wished them to think. In reality I use it to cloak my intentions. I needed an artifice to shroud my wonder-weapon in mystique, to convince those who would follow me that the plan to use the weapon was in the Nazi cause. What better than the ancient symbolism I myself had nurtured, and had placed at the heart of Nazi ideology?’ He waved his hand at the crates. ‘Schliemann’s greatest treasure was not found at Troy but at the Greek citadel of Mycenae, buried under the Mask of Agamemnon. It was a most astonishing discovery, and fell into my hands when we dug beneath Schliemann’s house in Athens after we had conquered Greece in 1941, to follow a rumour that he had concealed treasures there. We found it wrapped with a note by Schliemann’s wife Sophia about the discovery, placed there after his death. It was nothing less than the sacred palladion of the Trojans, brought back to Greece by the victorious Greek king Agamemnon. The Trojans thought the palladion had fallen from heaven, a divine gift to the founder of their city. In a sense they were right: it was a meteorite, probably brought to Troy millennia before from some distant place. Meteorites are found most easily on ice, and I convinced my followers that this was vindication of Welteislehre – the so-called world ice theory developed by my Ahnenerbe scholars, a mad fantasy – and that it was a sacred artefact from the supposed Ice Age precursor civilization that had led us to scour Iceland and Greenland for clues. At some time in prehistory the meteorite had been fashioned by human hands into the shape you will see, and then melded with gold: meteoritic iron on one side, gold on the other. I told my followers that it had been forged in Atlantis. It is the most ancient Aryan symbol, a swastika.’

  Hoffman stared in amazement at the shape within the package, about fifteen centimetres across. Himmler held him in his gaze. ‘With the iron surface facing down, it is a reverse swastika, a symbol of ancient Troy. You can see it decorating ancient potsherds from Troy illustrated in Schliemann’s book. But there’s more. When my scientists analysed the meteoritic iron, they found it had a unique magnetic signature. One of them came up with an ingenious idea. By holding the palladion with the iron facing down, it could be used as a key, one that could never be replicated. A magnetic mechanism aligned to the unique signature of the meteoritic iron could allow doors to be opened, doors to the secret vault that contained the Wunderwaffe.’

  ‘The chamber beneath this tower?’ Hoffman murmured.

  ‘I embedded the palladion in the most secret core of SS ideology. It was concealed below the floor of my SS headquarters at Wewelsburg Castle, like a sacred reliquary. Every new SS general had to swear an oath on that spot. You yourself have been there, when I showed you the cover to the reliquary with the reverse swastika on top, the arms of the cross bending to the left instead of the right. But only a select few knew the significance of what lay concealed beneath – the palladion – and its use as a key. For those, I devised an activation signal called the Agamemnon Code. A simple message, an image of the reverse swastika inside a red roundel, would be sent to a few chosen followers when the time was right. It would signal the start of my plan. Not Adolf ’s plan, but my plan. A plan for a new Reich and a new Führer, but a Reich of global dimensions, one based far away from the squalor and mess of Nazi Germany.’

  Hoffman suddenly remembered Dr Unverzagt. He reached into his tunic pocket, and pulled out the crumpled piece of paper the man had given him. He smoothed it out and held it up, showing the reverse swastika. ‘You mean like this?’

  Himmler nodded. ‘Dr Unverzagt was one of the select few. I knew that Wewelsburg would be stripped bare by the Allies when they captured the castle, so I had the palladion removed to a secret location deep inside a salt mine in Poland. Then, with the advance of the Russians, it was taken to the bunker in the forest in Upper Saxony where the disease weapon had been perfected. The bacterium was kept there, and the virus in the secret storeroom below us now in the Zoo tower. Both could only be accessed using the palladion as a key. Twelve days ago, I persuaded Hitler to issue the command to destroy the infrastructure of Germany. My followers were ready, and the Agamemnon Code was activated. The palladion was brought to me. Most of my followers are now dead, those who believed I was merely a devoted acolyte of Adolf, those who were deluded into thinking that releasing the Wunderwaffe was to be a final act of loyalty to Hitler. They served their purpose, as obediently and loyally as I had apparently served Adolf. Their elimination was also part of my plan. Only a select few survived, those who knew my true intentions and were loyal to me and my cause above all else. Unverzagt was the penultimate link in the chain. Now it passes to you.’

  Hoffman stared at the package. Was his own elimination part of that plan, too? ‘If I am the last link, why am I only finding out about this now?’

  Himmler leaned back. ‘It was essential that this plan appeared to most of my followers to be about loyalty to Hitler. That way I could attract the most fanatical Nazis, the most ruthless. It was a plan to enact once Hitler was dead. It would seem to Hitler’s followers like Götterdämmerung, the final act of loyalty to the Third Reich. With impending annihilation, their loyalty could easily be switched to self-destruction. They believed that my intention was to release the disease weapon and inflict as much horror as possible on the world that had betrayed Hitler, and then to join Adolf in some kind of Valhalla with all the Aryan heroes and gods of the past.’

  Hoffman stared at Himmler, barely able to believe what he had been hearing, the full truth of it only now hitting him. Himmler had always seemed so obsequious to Hitler, idolizing him. If he was telling the truth now, if this was not just some insane pipe dream, then it had all been a sham, all those years when Himmler had seemed like the bulwark of the Third Reich, the man whose administrative efficiency made up for the incompetence of Hitler and the others of his inner circle. Hoffman cleared his throat. ‘But for you the wonder-weapon has another purpose?’

  Himmler stared at him. ‘The victors in this war, the English, the Americans, the Russians, those who delude themselves that they are the world powers to come, have their own Wunderwaffe, the atomic bomb. We know the Americans already have it, and I ensured that the key developments of our own atomic research programme at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute were left there to be captured by the Russians. This means that the Americans and the Russians will be trapped in a stalemate. Neither side will be able to use the weapon against the other, knowing that to launch it would provoke a response that would destroy the aggressor as well. But my new weapon is different. When I reveal it to the Americans and the Russians, they will know that I am prepared to use it. They have discovered the death factories. They know that if I can do that to the Jews, then I am capable of anything. The Final Solution was not just about crackpot racial theory. That was a cover for me too. And the threat of destruction will be entirely one-sided. I will be safe, and they won’t know where to hit back. I can hold the world to ransom. We will be safe. In our new Atlantis.’

  Hoffman’s throat was dry. How much of this was he to believe? Was it all a huge delusion, another Nazi fantasy of salvation? His mind raced back over the last few days, searching for anything that might corroborate Himmler’s story. He remembered the orders he had received to report to the Zoo flak tower, issued from Gestapo headquarters. That had been unusual, but nobody disobeyed orders from the Gestapo, with instant executions going on all round. Hoffman had been desperate to escape from the Chancellery and the Führerbunker and had welcomed the orders without a second’s hesitation. It had never occurred to him that the order might have come from Himmler himself, since by then Himmler had been excommunicated and was on the run, possibly dead. But it made sense. If the Gestapo and the SS knew that Himmler was still alive after Hitler’s death, their first loyalty would be to him, and they would obey any instruction he gave them. Himmler had created a nexus of power that had bound the strongest and most fanatical Nazis to him, knowing that that was what would matter in these final days. He had seen the fall of Berlin coming, and had planned for it. Hoffman had a sudden flashback to
the Wagner concert a few days before. Behind all of Himmler’s symbolism, all the mythology, the heroic illusion that Wagner so embodied for the Nazis, there was a malign purpose. Himmler had been playing them all along. He had been orchestrating this since before the war.

  Hoffman thought hard. Himmler had set up the Ahnenerbe more than ten years before, when he had begun to create the fantasy SS order-castle at Wewelsburg. Hoffman was beginning to think the unthinkable. He remembered all the hats Himmler wore, his tentacles in every limb of the Nazi state, his fingerprint on all the worst crimes: a man who had the ear of Hitler, who could feed the delusions, who could stoke up Hitler’s insane interventions in all aspects of the war, dooming the Reich to collapse and orchestrating the slide into defeat. He recalled what he had seen that day from his aircraft over Poland, the death camp at Auschwitz. Was this what that had really been all about? Had the most vile crime against humanity been part of the scheme of one man to usurp Nazi power, to elevate himself to the status of a god? All the death and suffering. The mass of humanity extinguished by this monstrosity seemed incomprehensible in its scale. He could only think of the children in the Führerbunker, of the boy in the outsized helmet on the rooftop, his ears bleeding, doomed forever to hear the guns of this place. Who had been the true Führer? Had they really all been dancing to Himmler’s tune?

  He looked into the cold eyes opposite. Were they the eyes of a madman? Or were they the eyes of a ruthlessly calculating gangster, a megalomaniac whose time had come?

  ‘Do you have a torch?’ Himmler demanded.

  Hoffman snapped back to the present. He had to keep focused. He patted his tunic pocket, and nodded. ‘Essential in the tower when the generator fails.’