there by God as eternal monuments … Many of our Volk are known to have preserved the pagan belief and its rituals, and I remember that some sixty years ago, in my earliest childhood days … the custom was to undertake a long, continuous journey that lasted for whole days and which only ended on St John’s Day, to see those ancient ‘Holy Stones’ and to celebrate there, with the sunrise, the Festival of the Summer Solstice. (35)
The town of Paderborn itself also had considerable pagan significance, as demonstrated by a letter from a man named von Motz to the head of the Ahnenerbe, Wolfram Sievers, which is quoted in Levenda’s hugely informative book Unholy Alliance:
I am sending to you now … six photographs with explanatory text. Maybe these can appear in one of the next issues of [the official SS magazine] Schwarze Korps in order to show that it is to some extent a favored practice of the church on images of its saints and so forth to illustrate the defeat of adversaries by [having them] step on them.
The referenced essay also mentioned that there are depictions of the serpent’s head, as the symbol of original sin, being stepped on [by the saints].
These depictions are quite uncommonly prevalent. It is always Mary who treads on original sin.
Now these pictures appear to me particularly interesting because the serpent refers to an ancient symbol of Germanic belief. At the Battle of Hastings the flag of the Saxons shows a golden serpent on a blue field …
The Mary Statue at Paderborn was erected in the middle of the past century in the courtyard of the former Jesuit College. As professor Alois Fuchs related several times before in lectures concerning the Paderborn art monuments, the artist that created the Mary Statue must have been a Protestant. This is for me completely proven because the face in the moon-sickle in every case represents Luther.
It is well known that Rome and Judah, preferring thus to take advantage of their own victims, created victory monuments for them. (36)
As Levenda notes, these motifs are common in the volkisch underpinnings of Nazism, with the serpent, thought of as an archetype of evil in Christianity, considered sacred by the Aryans. In addition, ‘“Rome and Judah” shamelessly exploited the suffering of their own people by depicting them as heroes or as vanquishers of evil through their agonies (thus reinforcing weak, non-Aryan suicidal tendencies among the oppressed populations of Europe).’ (37)
As we have noted, the Ahnenerbe received its official status within the SS in 1940, and while other occult- oriented groups such as the Freemasons, the Theosophists and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn were being suppressed, the Ahnenerbe was given free rein to pursue its own line of mystical and occult enquiry, with the express purpose of proving the historical validity of Nazi paganism. Its more than 50 sections covered every aspect of occultism and paganism, including Celtic studies, the rituals surrounding the Exsternsteine monument, Scandinavian mythology, runic symbolism, the World Ice Theory of Hans Horbiger (which will be discussed in Chapter Seven), and an archaeological research group that attempted to prove the geographical ubiquity of the ancient Aryan civilisation. In addition, at the door of the Ahnenerbe must lie the ineradicable iniquity of the medical experiments conducted at Dachau and other concentration camps, since it was this organisation that commissioned the unbelievably hideous programme of ‘scientific research’ on living human subjects.
The mental ambiguity of Heinrich Himmler — rational, obedient and totally desirous of security on the one hand; immersed in the spurious fantasy of Aryan destiny on the other — was demonstrated most powerfully in the final phase of the Nazi regime, when it became obvious that Germany would lose the war and the ‘Thousand-year Reich’ would become dust. From 1943 onward, Himmler maintained loose contacts with the Resistance Movement in Germany, and in the spring of 1945 he entered into secret negotiations with the World Jewish Congress. (By September 1944 he had already given orders for the murder of Jews to be halted, in order to offer a more ‘presentable’ face to the Allies, an order that was not followed). (38)
Himmler’s actions at this time indicate what Fest calls ‘an almost incredible divorce from reality’, one example being his suggestion to a representative of the World Jewish Congress that ‘it is time you Jews and we National Socialists buried the hatchet’. (39) He even assumed, in all seriousness, that he might lead a postwar Germany in an alliance with the West against the Soviet Union. When the reality of the Third Reich’s defeat finally overwhelmed his fantasies and sent them to oblivion, and the idea of disguise and escape finally presented itself to him, Himmler adopted perhaps the worst false identity he could have chosen: the uniform of a sergeant-major of the Secret Military Police, a division of the Gestapo. Such was his ‘divorce from reality’, even then, that it did not occur to him that any Gestapo member would be arrested on sight by the Allies. This indeed occurred on 21 May 1945.
Like their master, many SS men took their own lives in 1945, appalled less at Himmler’s betrayal of Hitler through his attempts to negotiate with the Allies than at his betrayal of the SS itself and of the ideals that had given meaning (at least to them) to the destruction they had wrought upon their six million victims. The collapse of this SS ideal ‘left only a senseless, filthy, barbaric murder industry, for which there could be no defence’. (40)
7 — The secret at the heart of the world
Nazi Cosmology and Belief in the Hollow Earth
For readers encountering the field of Nazi Occultism (and its unholy spawn, contemporary belief in genuine Nazi occult power) for the first time, the Hollow Earth Theory may well prompt a sigh of exasperation. We have already examined a number of esoteric concepts that may be more or less unpalatable to the modern mind; the realm we are about to enter, however, may be considered both the most ridiculous and the most sinister yet, since it constitutes both a synthesis and a further development of the strange ideas promulgated by the volkisch occultists and, later, by the philosophers and pseudo-scientists of the Third Reich. As we shall see in this chapter, the concept of the hollow Earth — and the related notion of vast, inhabited caverns within a solid Earth — have come to occupy a central position in the fields of ufology, conspiracy theory, fringe science and Nazi-survival theories. Indeed, the relevance of these subjects to the belief systems that define late-twentieth-century popular occultism may come as a surprise to many readers.
Of all the strange and irrational beliefs held by the Nazis, the most bizarre is surely the idea that our planet is not a sphere floating in the emptiness of space, but rather is a hollow bubble, with everything — people, buildings, continents, oceans and even other planets and stars — existing on the inside. The origin of this curious notion, which would be developed and accepted in the twentieth century by people such as Peter Bender, Dr Heinz Fisher and many members of the German Admiralty, can be traced back to the seventeenth century and the writings of the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), who speculated on conditions beneath the surface of the Earth in a treatise written in 1665 entitled Mundus Subterraneus (The Subterranean World). In this work, Kircher draws on the theories and speculations of various medieval geographers about the unexplored north and south polar regions. As Joscelyn Godwin notes, Kircher paid particular attention to the thirteenth-century friar Bartholomew of England, who maintained that ‘at the North Pole there is a black rock some 33 leagues in circumference, beneath which the ocean flows with incredible speed through four channels into the subpolar regions, and is absorbed by an immense whirlpool’. (1) Having entered this whirlpool, the waters then travel through a myriad ‘recesses’ and ‘channels’ inside the planet and finally emerge in the ocean at the South Pole (the continent of Antarctica had yet to be discovered).
Kircher’s justification for his ideas was ingenious, if utterly flawed. He claimed that the polar vortices must exist, otherwise the northern and southern oceans would be still and would thus become stagnant, releasing noxious vapours that would prove lethal to life on Earth. In addition, he believed that the movement of water through the body of the Earth was analogous both to the recently discovered circulation of the blood and to the animal digestive system, with elements in sea water extracted for the production of metals and the waste voided at the South Pole. (2) This likening of the Earth to a single, living entity will doubtless call to mind certain New Age concepts, in particular the so-called ‘Gaia Hypothesis’. (While New Ageism might appear to be nothing but benign, concerned as it is with the spiritual evolution of humanity, it does contain certain aspects that are more sinister and potentially dangerous.)
