initiated. Once again, the truth is somewhat different: Haushofer did not commit ham kin but died from arsenic poisoning on 10 March. In addition, Ley’s reference to ‘contemplating the structure of an apple, sliced in halves’ (thus revealing the five-pointed star at its centre) echoes Rudolf Steiner’s suggestion in Knowledge of Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. Indeed, as Godwin reminds us, (21) the Theosophists were themselves interested in the concept of the vril force, which bears some resemblance to Reichenbach’s Odic force, and to the Astral Light, also known as the Akashic Records: a subtle form of energy said to surround the Earth, in which is preserved a record of every thought and action that has ever occurred.
In spite of the sober research of writers like Goodrick-Clarke and Godwin, the idea of an immensely sinister and powerful Vril Society secretly controlling the Third Reich has lost nothing of its ability to fascinate. Many still maintain that Haushofer introduced Hitler to the leader of the group of Tibetan high lamas living in Berlin, a man known only as ‘The Man with the Green Gloves’, and that this man knew the locations of the hidden entrances to the subterranean realms of Agartha and Shambhala. (22)
These rumours doubtless gave rise to the famous legends about Hitler’s obsessive search for the entrances to the inner world. According to Maclellan: ‘The first expeditions were dispatched purely under the auspices of the Luminous Lodge, beginning in 1926, but later, after coming to power, Hitler took a more direct interest, overseeing the organization of the searches himself.’ (23) Maclellan also states that Hitler believed unequivocally that ‘certain representatives of the underground super-race were already abroad in the world’, (24) citing Hermann Rauschning’s famous book Hitler Speaks A Senes of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on his Real Aims (1939). The conversations recorded by Rauschning have served as source material for many writers on the Third Reich, including serious ones. Proponents of genuine Nazi occult power have repeatedly pointed to the mystical elements in Hitler’s conversations as relayed by Rauschning, who says that he repeatedly had the feeling that Hitler was a medium, possessed of supernatural powers. It seems that on one occasion, Hitler actually met one of the subterranean Supermen. Rauschning claims that Hitler confided to him: The new man is among us. He is here! Now are you satisfied? I will tell you a secret. I have seen the vision of the new man — fearless and formidable. I shrank from him.’ (25)
To his credit, Maclellan states that this was more than likely a deranged fantasy on Hitler’s part. However, Rauschning’s very description should be treated with extreme caution: it should be noted that, in spite of the widespread interest it stimulated, Hitler Speaks has not stood the test of time as an accurate historical document. In fact, Ian Kershaw, one of the foremost authorities on Hitler and the author of Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (1998), does not cite Rauschning’s book anywhere in his monumental study, and states that it is ‘a work now regarded to have so little authenticity that it is best to disregard it altogether’. (26)
As the story goes, Hitler ordered a number of expeditions into German, Swiss and Italian mines to search for the entrances to the cavern cities of the Supermen. He is even said to have ordered research to be conducted into the life of Bulwer-Lytton, in an effort to determine whether the author himself had visited the realm of the Vril-ya. While serious writers ignore these rumours, there is an interesting event on record that Maclellan quotes in his The Lost World of Agharti and that illustrates the frustrating nature of the ‘twilight zone between fact and fiction’ in which we find ourselves when discussing Nazi occultism.
Maclellan cites the testimony of one Antonin Horak, an expert speleologist and member of the Slovak Uprising, who accidentally discovered a strange tunnel in Czechoslovakia in October 1944. Dr Horak kept quiet about the discovery until 1965, when he published an account in the National Speleological Society News. In his article, Dr Horak stated that he and two other Resistance fighters found the tunnel near the villages of Plavince and Lubocna (he is quite specific about the location: 49.2 degrees north, 20.7 degrees east). Having just survived a skirmish with the Germans, the three men (one of whom was badly injured) asked a local peasant for help. He led them to an underground grotto where they could hide and rest. The peasant told the Resistance men that the cave contained pits, pockets of poison gas, and was also haunted, and warned them against venturing too far inside. This they had no intention of doing, such was their weariness. They attended to the wounds of their comrade and fell asleep.
The following day, Horak’s curiosity got the better of him and, while he waited for the injured man to recover enough strength to travel again, he decided to do a little exploring inside the cave. Presently, he came to a section that was completely different from the rest of the cave. ‘Lighting some torches, I saw that I was in a spacious, curved, black shaft formed by cliff-like walls. The floor in the incline was a solid lime pavement.’ (27) The tunnel stretched interminably into the distance. Dr Horak decided to take a sample of the wall, but was unable to make any impression with his pickaxe. He took his pistol and fired at the wall (surely an unwise thing to do, given the risk of a ricochet and with German soldiers possibly still in the vicinity).
‘The bullet slammed into the substance of the walls with a deafening, fiery impact,’ he wrote. ‘Sparks flashed, there was a roaring sound, but not so much as a splinter fell from the substance. Only a small welt appeared, about the length of half my finger, which gave off a pungent smell.’
Dr Horak then returned to his comrades and told them about the apparently man-made tunnel. ‘I sat there by the fire speculating. How far did it reach into the rocks? I wondered.
Who, or what, put it into the mountain? Was it man-made? And was it at last proof of the truth in legends — like Plato’s — of long-lost civilisations with magic technologies which our rationale cannot grasp or believe?’ (28) No one else, apparently, has explored this tunnel since Dr Horak in 1944. The peasants who lived in the region obviously knew of its existence, but kept well away.
In addition to the stories of Nazi mine expeditions in Central and Eastern Europe during the Second World War, occult writers have frequently made reference to the Nazi Tibet Expeditions, allegedly an attempt to locate and make contact with a group of high lamas with access to fantastic power. Once again, Pauwels and Bergier have plenty to say on this subject, which is in itself enough to give pause to the cautious.
The American researcher Peter Levenda experienced a similar scepticism with regard to the supposed Nazi- Tibet connection, until he began to search for references in the microfilmed records in the Captured German Documents Section of the National Archives in Washington, DC. He discovered a wealth of material, running to many hundreds of pages, dealing with the work of Dr Ernst Schafer of the Ahnenerbe. These documents included Dr Schafer’s personal notebooks, his correspondence, clippings from several German newspapers, and his SS file, which describes an expedition to East and Central Tibet from 1934–1936, and the official SS-Tibet Expedition of 1938–1939 under his leadership. (29)
As Levenda demonstrates, the expedition was not so much concerned with contacting Tibetan representatives of the subterranean super-race as with cataloguing the flora and fauna of the region (an activity of little military value to the Third Reich, which accounts for the difficulty Schafer occasionally had in securing funding for his trips).
Born in Cologne on 14 March 1910 into a wealthy industrialist family, Ernst Schafer attended school in Heidelberg and Gottingen, and embarked on his first expedition to Tibet in 1930 under the auspices of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia when he was only twenty years old. The following year, he joined the American Brooke Dolan expedition to Siberia, China and Tibet. He became a member of the SS in mid-1933, finally reaching the rank of Sturmbannfuhrer in 1942. In addition to being an SS officer, Schafer was also a respected scientist who published papers in various journals, such as the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia. As Levenda wryly notes, Schafer was ‘a man of many parts: one part SS officer and one part scholar, one part explorer and one part scientist: a Nazi Indiana Jones’. (30) Schafer was also deeply interested in the religious and cultural practices of the Tibetans, including their sexuality. (Indeed, the members of the 1938–1939 expedition displayed a somewhat prurient fascination with intimate practices: the film-maker Ernst Krause, for instance, took great care to record his observation of a fifteen-year-old Lanchung girl masturbating on a bridge beam.) (31)
When not cataloguing flora and fauna (and spying on teenage girls), the members of the expedition managed to conduct other research, which included an exhaustive study of the physical attributes of the Tibetan people. Schafer noted height and weight, the shape of hands and feet, the colour and shape of eyes, and even took plaster casts of Tibetans’ faces. On 21 July 1939, Der Neue Tag published the following article:
SACRED TIBETAN SCRIPTURE
ACQUIRED BY THE DR SCHAFER-EXPEDITION ON
NINE ANIMAL LOADS ACROSS THE HIGH-COUNTRY
(SPECIAL) FRANKFURT — 20 JULY The Tibet Expedition of Dr Ernst Schafer, which during its expedition through Tibet stayed a long time in Lhasa and in the capital of the Panchen Lama, Shigatse, is presently on its
