As is well known, Hitler himself came to believe wholeheartedly in the veracity of the Protocols, which formed a principal basis for his own anti-Semitism:
To what an extent the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by the Protocols of the Wise Men [Elders] of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung moans and screams once every week: the best proof that they are authentic. What many Jews may do unconsciously is here consciously exposed. And that is what matters. It is completely indifferent from what Jewish brain these disclosures originate; the important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims. The best criticism applied to them, however, is reality. Anyone who examines the historical development of the last hundred years from the standpoint of this book will at once understand the screaming of the Jewish press. For once this book has become the common property of a people, the Jewish menace may be considered as broken. (27)
Hitler’s reference to the Frankfurter Zeitung is especially interesting and ironic, in view of the startling and intriguing suggestion made by that paper’s Munich correspondent, the anti-Nazi Konrad Heiden. Heiden began reporting on Hitler’s activities in 1921; when Hitler took power in 1933, Heiden was forced to flee to France. In his biography of Hitler, Der Fuehrer, written in exile and published in 1944, Heiden suggests a profound connection between Hitler and the Protocols, a connection which is summarised by Rosenbaum:
Heiden’s stunning conjecture, which deserves attention because of his intimate acquaintance with the Hitler Party from the very beginning of the Fuhrer’s rise, was that the secret of that rise lay in Hitler’s adapting the modernized Machiavellian tactics attributed to his archenemy, the Elders of Zion, and putting them to his own use in manipulating the media, subverting the institutions of the state, and Grafting his own successful conspiracy to rule the world. Heiden argues that Hitler did not merely adopt the counterfeit Jewish conspiracy as his vision of the world, he adopted the tactics falsely attributed to Jews by Czarist forgers as his own — and used them with remarkable success. A success that made Hitler himself a kind of creation of a counterfeit. [Original emphasis.] (28)
I hope the reader will forgive this seeming digression from the subject we were discussing: while the apparent influence of the Protocols on Hitler may seem a long way from the lost Aryan homeland of the prehistoric north, it is worth introducing the idea at this point, not only because it was a supporter of Blavatsky who promoted the Protocols in western Europe but also because it is of profound importance to the rest of our study. If Heiden was correct in his conjecture, and Adolf Hitler, and hence Nazi Germany, were the creation of a counterfeit, this demonstrates quite convincingly the power and influence that bizarre falsehoods can have over the collective psyche of a people. This will have special significance in the last three chapters of this book, which will deal with Nazi cosmology and the belief in a hollow Earth, the theory that German scientists were responsible for the wave of UFO sightings in the late 1940s (and perhaps still are responsible for such sightings today), and the persistent rumours regarding the survival of key Nazis in a hidden Antarctic colony.
Before moving on, however, we must return briefly to Blavatsky and Theosophy in order to address the implication that the movement possessed fascist elements. In spite of its proclamation of the supremacy of the Aryan race (not to mention Madame Glinka’s unfortunate promotion of the Protocols), Theosophy was not inherently fascist, and Blavatsky herself did not become overtly involved in politics (29) (Indeed, although it had inspired a large number of German occultists and nationalists at the turn of the century, Theosophy would later be attacked and suppressed by the Nazis, along with all other organisations showing any resistance whatsoever to Hitler.) (30) Nevertheless, some of Blavatsky’s followers, most notably Annie Besant (1847–1933), became active in politics. In Besant’s case, it was Indian politics, and it was under her presidency after Henry Olcott’s death in 1907 that the Theosophical Society became an important element in the Indian Nationalist Movement. As Levenda notes, the Nazis would later attempt to exploit Indian nationalism and the desire for home rule by claiming a similarity of ideals and objectives between Indian nationalism and National Socialism. (31)
It is a matter of historical record that the Nazis mounted expeditions to Iceland, Antarctica and Tibet (the Tibetan expeditions will be examined more closely in the next chapter). The true reasons for these expeditions, however, have been the subject of considerable debate throughout the decades since the end of the war. As we have already noted, the Nazi concept of Thule can be traced to Guido von List, Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels and Rudolf von Sebottendorff, who conceived of it as the ancient homeland of the Aryan race. (At some time between the third and fourth centuries BC, Pytheas of Massilia undertook a voyage to the north. He reached Scotland, and sailed on for six more days, probably reaching the North Shetland Islands. He then claimed to have reached the land of Thule, which may have been Iceland, or perhaps Norway, before encountering a frozen sea.) (32)
The volkisch fascination with the Scandinavian Eddas led von Sebottendorff to conclude that the supposedly long-vanished land of Thule was actually Iceland. This link with the lost Aryan homeland prompted an intense interest in the possibility of discovering further clues to their remote history, indeed, to their very origin, among the caves and prehistoric monuments of the island. (33)
According to Peter Levenda, an organisation called the Nordic Society was established at Lubeck by Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1945), the Nazi mystic, philosopher, editor of the Volkischer Beobachter and later Reich Minister for the occupied eastern territories. The society counted among its members representatives from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland, who were drawn together in order to defend the Nordic nations against the Soviet, Jewish and Masonic threat. On 22 August 1938, the Volkischer Beobachter carried an article on one of the Nordic Society’s meetings, at which Rosenberg was quoted thus:
‘We all stand under the same European destiny, and must feel obliged to this common destiny, because finally the existence of the white man depends altogether upon the unity of the European continent! Unanimous must we oppose that terrible attempt by Moscow to destroy the world, the sea of blood into which already many people have dived!’ (34)
Rosenberg explained his Thulean mythology in his book Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the Twentieth Century), published in 1930, which was a massive bestseller in Germany, despite the fact that it was widely considered to be appallingly-written nonsense. (Hitler himself, who, once in power, had little time for paganism, Thulean or otherwise, described it as ‘stuff nobody can understand’.) (35) In the first chapter of the book, Rosenberg explains the basis of his belief in an ancient Aryan homeland in the north:
The geologists show us a continent between North America and Europe, whose remains we can see today in Greenland and Iceland. They tell us that islands on the other side of the Far North (Novaia Zemlya) display former tide marks over 100 metres higher than today’s; they make it probable that the North Pole has wandered, and that a much milder climate once reigned in the present Arctic. All this allows the ancient legend of Atlantis to appear in a new light. It seems not impossible that where the waves of the Atlantic Ocean now crash and pull off giant icebergs, once a blooming continent rose out of the water, on which a creative race raised a mighty, wide-ranging culture, and sent its children out into the world as seafarers and warriors. But even if this Atlantean hypothesis is not thought tenable, one has to assume that there was a prehistoric northern center of culture. (36)
Despite these assertions concerning the great secrets of a long-vanished Aryan civilisation that might be found in Iceland, Rosenberg, who was looked upon with a mixture of amusement and contempt by most of the leading Nazis, was not involved with the actual expeditions sent there. They were authorised by Heinrich Himmler under the auspices of the Ahnenerbe — the SS Association for Research and Teaching on Heredity. Levenda has retrieved numerous documents regarding these missions, some of which he includes in his fascinating study Unholy Alliance (1995). One of these documents, addressed to the Ahnenerbe from a Dr Bruno Schweizer, contains a proposal for a research journey to Iceland, and is dated 10 March 1938:
From year to year it becomes more difficult to meet living witnesses of Germanic cultural feelings and
