Adolf Hitler and the Spear of Destiny

The Spear of Destiny, also known as the Spear Longinus, and the Spear of Christ, is an ancient weapon, supposedly forged by the equally ancient Hebrew prophet, Phineas. Legend has it, is has been passed down from dynasty to dynasty over the centuries.

According to the Gospel of John (19:31-37) as Jesus hung on the Cross a Roman centurion, pierced His side with a spear. Blood and water spurted forth from the wound. The mixture apparently splattered in Longinus' face, restoring his vision, which had been failing.It was then he exclaimed, "Indeed, this was the Son of God!" as recorded in Mark 15:39.

In the oldest known references to the legend, in the Gospel of Nicodemus (of uncertain date, possibly 5th or 6th century), the soldier who pierced Christ's side is identified with a centurion called Longinus. Later Christian tradition further identifies him as Gaius Cassius.
The circumstances surrounding Jesus' crucifixion had such a profound effect on Longinus that he later sought out the surviving Apostles, so he could learn from them. He later moved to Caesarea of Cappadocia and became a monk, where he was eventually condemned to death for being a Christian.

The spear itself became a religious relic. The piercing was seen as proof of Jesus' death and his subsequent resurrection.

Over the centuries an object claimed to be this Holy Lance has passed through the hands of some of Europe’s most influential leaders, most recently Adolf Hitler. A legend has arisen that "whosoever possesses this Holy Lance and understands the powers it serves, holds in his hand the destiny of the world for good or evil."

This strange relic of The Passion of The Christ has been written about for nearly two thousand years.

Among those who are alleged to have possessed the Spear at one time or another are :

Herod the Great (King of Judea, ruled 37 BC-4BC)

Maurice the Manichean (from Egypt, who held the spear until his death circa 306, to keep it from the Emperor Maximian)

Constantine the Great (Roman Emperor, b.337, d.361, carried it into victory at the battle of Milvian Bridge and also while surveying the layout of his new city, Constantinople)  Eusebius of Caesarea, who became a spiritual advisor to Constantine described the Holy Lance as it was at the height of Constantine’s power in the Fourth Century:

It was a long spear, overlaid with gold. On the top was fixed a wreath of gold and precious stones, and within this the symbol of the Savior’s name, two letters indicating the name of Christ by means of its initial characters – those letters the emperor was in the habit of wearing on his helmet at a later period. From the spear was also suspended a cloth, a royal piece, covered with a profuse embroidery of most brilliant precious stones and which, being also richly interlaced with gold, presented an indescribable degree of beauty to the beholder. The emperor constantly made use of this sign of salvation as a safeguard against every adverse and hostile power, and commanded that it should be carried at the head of all his armies.
Theodosius

Alaric (who sacked Rome)

Theodoric (the only man to force Attila the Hun to retreat, circa 451)

Justinian, Charles Martel (Frankish ruler, grandfather of Charlemagne, b.688?, d.741)

Charlemagne the Great (Carolingian King of France, Emperor of the West, b.771, d.814), carried the Spear through 47 victorious battles, but died when he accidentally dropped it).

In the early 900's, it fell into the possession of the Saxon Dynasty of Germany, passing from Heinrich I the Fowler (Duke of Saxony, Saxon King of Germany, ruled 919-936, the Spear was present at his victorious battle against the Magyars) to his son Otto I the Great (Saxon King of Germany, Holy Roman Emperor, ruled 936-973, Pope John XII (term 955-963) used the Spear to christen him Holy Roman Emperor in 936 - Otto went on to carry the Spear into victory over the Mongols in the Battle of Leck.

After his death, there are conflicting stories of what happened to the Spear. One tale says it was passed on to his son Otto II (Saxon King of Germany, Holy Roman Emperor, ruled 973-983), then to Otto III (Saxon King of Germany, Holy Roman Emperor, ruled 983-1002), and eventually to Henry II the Saint (Saxon King of Germany, Holy Roman Emperor, ruled 1002-1024). [A purported Holy Lance has been in Krakow since at least the 1200s, though German records indicate that the lance was a copy made from the German lance under Henry II,with a small sliver of the original embedded. Another copy was given to the Hungarian king at the same time.]

Another story claims it was moved to Antioch following the death of Otto I the Great, where it was allegedly unearthed by a Crusader named Peter Bartholomew in 1098 while the Crusaders were under siege from the Seljuk Turks under Kerbogha. Peter Bartholomew reported that he had had a vision in which St. Andrew told him that the Holy Lance was buried in St. Peter's Cathedral in Antioch. At the time some were skeptical, but others were convinced. In any case, after much digging in the cathedral, Peter Bartholomew took a hand and, in a few moments, discovered the lance. For some of the Crusaders this was a marvelous discovery. At the same time, dissension had begun in the ranks of the Muslim army besieging the city. This combination of factors resulted in the Christian army being able to rout the Muslims a few days later when they joined battle, allowing the Crusaders to decisively capture Antioch. That object is now at Etschmiadzin in Armenia. Scholars believe that it is not actually a Roman lance but the head of a Roman standard.

The holy spear that was used by the Holy Roman Emperors (from Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor on and  the one most often referred to) as a part of their imperial insignia eventually found its way to Vienna, Austria, where they are kept in a museum.
Eventually, it fell into the possession of the house of Hohenstaufen (descendants of the house of Saxon) and to Frederick Barbarossa (Holy Roman Emperor and conqueror of Italy during the 12th century, ruled 1152-1190, Barbarossa died within minutes after accidentally dropping the Spear into a stream), Henry VI (King of Germany, Holy Roman Emperor, ruled 1190-1197), Otto IV (Holy Roman Emperor, ruled 1198-1218), and Frederick II (King of Germany, Holy Roman Emperor, ruled 1218?-1250). It was allegedly possessed by three other Hohenstaufen Emperors as well.

In 1411 Sigismund was made Holy Roman Emperor. In 1424 he announced: "It is the Will of God that the Imperial Crown, Orb, Scepter, Crosses, Sword and Lance of the Holy Roman Empire must never leave the soil of the Fatherland." This collection of relics, known collectively as the Reichkleinodien or Imperial Regalia, were moved from his capital in Prague to his birth place, Nuremberg.

When the army of Napoleon Bonaparte approached Nuremberg in the spring of 1796 many were terrified that Napoleon would seize the Spear and rule the world with it. The city councilors decided to remove the Reichkleinodie to Vienna for safe keeping. The collection of relics was entrusted to one Baron von Hügel, who promised to return the objects as soon as peace had been restored and the safety of the collection assured.

The Holy Roman Empire was officially dissolved in 1806. Baron von Hugel took advantage of the confusion over who was the legal owner of the Reichkleinodie and sold the entire collection, including the Spear, to the Habsburgs. Baron von Hugel's perfidy did not come to light until after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. When the city councilors of Nuremberg asked for their treasures back the Austrian authorities' response was a curt rejection.

In the early 20th century, it was briefly in the possession of Kaiser Wilhelm II, before eventually ending up the Hofsburg Treasure House in Vienna.

It was there, in September of 1912, where Adolf Hitler first laid his eyes upon it...

I knew with immediacy that this was an important moment in my life...I stood there quietly gazing upon it for several minutes, quite oblivious to the scene around me. It seemed to carry some hidden inner meaning which evaded me, a meaning which I felt I inwardly knew, yet could not bring to consciousness...I felt as though I myself had held it in my hands before in some earlier century of history - that I myself had once claimed it as my talisman of power and held the destiny of the world in my hands. What sort of madness was this that was invading my mind and creating such turmoil in my breast ?

Adolf Hitler seized the Spear in the name of the Third Reich on March 12th, 1938, the day he annexed Austria. It was shipped via an armored SS train to Nuremberg on October 13th (the same date that the Knights Templar were destroyed centuries earlier).

Hitler's failure to invade England as he had planned was a fatal mistake which even the Spear of Destiny could not remedy. In time, the islands of the United Kingdom became the launching point for the greatest invasion in all of recorded history. On June 6, 1944, Allied forces made history with the landings in Normandy and soon the armies of the Third Reich were forced to retreat into the Fatherland. Hitler's generals realized very early on that the end was near, but history's most notorious tyrant held fast to his belief that possession of the Spear of Destiny would secure his final victory, no matter what the price.

As the Allies advanced ever closer to the German borders, the cities of German came under constant attack from the air as bombing raids continued around the clock. To protect the Spear of Destiny and an unprecedented amount of treasure in the form of gold, jewels, and priceless works of art stolen from conquered nations, Hitler ordered these relics to be placed underground in caves, abandoned mines, and bunkers specially constructed for the purpose. The Spear of Destiny, which some believe was stored at the Church of St. Catherine's for a number of years, was reposited in a bombproof bunker under the city of Nuremburg.

The Allied forces cut through the heart of Germany in the early spring of 1945, the once feared and dreaded German army had all but disintegrated into isolated pockets of resistance. The Allies pressed their bombing campaigns, laying waste to the grand cities of Germany. The end of the "Thousand Year Reich" would come at any moment, it seemed.

Hitler sequestered himself in a bunker under the capital city of Berlin. The Russians had assumed control over the eastern side of the city and the sounds of combat drew ever closer as the Soviet army pressed towards the Reichstag and Hitler's bunker. However close the end appeared to be, Hitler refused to surrender and continued to issue desperate orders to what German troops still remained within the city.

Throughout the history of the Spear of Destiny, those who wielded the sacred relic came to unprecedented position of power and were hailed as kings, emperors, and conquerors. But, as the legends state, the moment men of such greatness let the Spear slip from their fingers, their time on earth as rulers comes to a quick end. And such may have been the case with Adolf Hitler.

In the city of Nuremberg, the fighting had already ceased and a victorious American army began to secure the city. On April 30, 1945, at precisely 2:10 PM, First Lieutenant Walter William Horn (serial number 01326328), an adjutant assigned to the United States 7th Army, took possession of the Spear of Destiny in the name of the United States government. Within 90 minutes of the United States capturing the Spear, Adolf Hitler lay dead in his Berlin bunker after having taken his own life.

Horn, a specialist assigned to the intelligence unit of the 7th Army, held a very unique position within the ranks of the United States military. Very early on in the war, the US government recognized the need to preserve the cultural heritage of Europe by reclaiming the priceless works of art stolen by Hitler's army during their conquests. Horn was assigned to a unit specifically charged with the recovery of these treasures and he may have recognized the importance of his discovery from the moment he first laid eyes upon it. Horn was not the only US Army officer to recognize the value of the artifact.

News of the capture of the Holy Lance of Longinus quickly reached legendary General George S. Patton, who immediately took a personal interest in the relic. It is said that when the general first laid eyes upon the spear which had pierced the side of Christ, he became silent and withdrawn, meditating upon the object in deep contemplation.

Patton was well known for his deep scholarly interests in history and for his intense personal religious fervor, but there was another side to "Old Blood and Guts" which may explain his utter fascination with the Spear of Destiny. Patton was quite well known for his strong beliefs that he had been been reincarnated as a warrior many times over and was quite adamant about being the literal reincarnation of the legendary Carthaginian general Hannibal.

Whether or not his experiences in past lives allowed Patton to readily identify the relic which lay before him as the Spear of Destiny is a matter of speculation, but it is certain that he realized the great worth and importance of the ancient lance. Immediately, he ordered that the history of the artifact be researched and fully documented so that he might be better prepared to give a full report on it to his superior, General Dwight David Eisenhower. Patton personally supervised a great portion of the research efforts, carefully guiding his staff in all aspects of the project. In the end, he presented his findings to Eisenhower.

There is some contention at this juncture of the long history of the Holy Lance of Longinus as to what the conversation may have been between the two great generals, but it is believed that Patton was firmly in favor of claiming the spear in the name of the United States. Oddly, it was during this period in time when Patton began to petition his superiors for permission to begin engaging the Russians in battle, claiming that the threat of communism was every bit as evil as the banished threat of Nazism. Despite the speculation, in the end, General Eisenhower ordered the Spear returned to Austria.

There is another story that in light of the Spear's incredible legend, Patton is said to have become extremely upset at General Eisenhower's decision to return such a great talisman of power to the Hapsburgs. Consequently, some people have theorized that the lance which was actually returned to Vienna may not have been the original spearhead, but that it is, rather, a copy - a counterfeit - of the original which Patton insisted be retained by the United States.

It is interesting to note that George Patton, in his poem Through a Glass Darkly, curiously posits himself as Longinus in a previous lifetime.

Stories, of the power of the Holy Lance have persisted for centuries.

One of the earliest documented uses of the Holy Lance is credited to Attila the Hun, who acquired it as he cut his path of destruction through Europe. When his army was weaken from famine and pestilence 'in Italy, he galloped his horse to the gates of Rome and hurled the lance at the feet of the officers who had been sent out to surrender the city. "Take back your Holy Lance," he said, "it is of no use to me, since I do not know Him that made it holy."

The staff of the spear has long since disappeared.  Arculpus, about 670, saw it at Jerusalem, where it must have been restored by Heraclius, but it was then venerated at the church of the Holy Sepulchre. After this date practically nothing is heard any more of it from pilgrims to the Holy Land. In particular, St. Willibald, who came to Jerusalem in 715, does not mention it.

All that remains now are the Spear's head (in two sections), and a bolt used to connect the two sections, rumored to be one of the actual nails from the True Cross.

The Spear hads been in the possession of the Royal House of Hapsburg (de jure Holy Roman Emperors) for quite some time. It now rests, once again, in the Hofsburg Treasure House in Austria, where Hitler first saw it in 1912, and where the public can see it, free of charge, Monday through Saturday, 9am-6pm.
Did Hitler really think possessing the spear would help him win the war? How important was the spear to Hitler - who never really seemed to make a big deal out of it after it was seized from the museum, at least in public - is not clear.

Trevor Ravenscroft captured the world’s attention with his 1972 opus The Spear of Destiny, the Occult Power Behind the Spear Which Pierced the Side of Christ and fixed his version of the legend in the minds of many today. He claims that Adolf Hitler started World War II to capture the spear, hypothesizing that Hitler's interest in the relic probably originated with his interest in the 1882 opera Parsifal — by Hitler’s favorite composer, Richard Wagner — which concerns a group of knights and their guardianship of the Holy Grail, as well as the recovery of the Spear. He spent much of his book presenting “evidence” that the principal players in the world drama of the 1930 and 40s were reincarnations of the real life people who had been the models for the characters in Wagner’s opera Parsifal. His book dealt primarily with the past lives of the Nazi inner core. His contention was that they had been involved in using the Spear of Destiny for black magic in the eleventh century and were at it again, describing World War II as a wizard’s battle between black and white magicians..

Though a number of historians cast doubt on Hitler's obsession with the Spear as it was reported by Trevor Ravenscroft et al, recent work by researcher and author Alec MacLellan has unearthed material from Ravenscroft's original source that seems to validate some of the stranger assertions.

Other historians have found Trevor Ravenscroft’s research in Spear of Destiny suspicious and his book remains controversial. Alan Baker, author of Invisible Eagle, The History of Nazi Occultism, thinks Hitler was more interested in getting hold of the Hofburg treasures for financial, not occult reasons. 

Ravenscroft repeatedly attempted to define the mysterious “powers” that the legend says the Spear serves. He found it to be a hostile and evil spirit, which he variously referred to as the Antichrist and the Spirit of the Age.

Ravenscroft claimed that his friend and mentor Dr. Walter Johannes Stein would have written "The Spear Of Destiny" if he had lived long enough to do so. Curiously, several persons who said that they too were friends and associates of Dr. Stein deny Ravenscroft’s claimed friendship with Dr. Stein, saying that they met but once, and then only for an hour. Since Ravenscroft’s death from cancer in 1989 there has been an international debate over how much of his book was actually written from hard facts and how much he simply made up.

Ravenscroft accepted that the artifact on display today in room 11 of the Schatzkammer (Treasure House) was the object that pierced the side of Christ. Dr. Robert Feather, a British metallurgist, who is currently preparing his own book on the Spear, has since disproved this. He was permitted in 2003 to conduct a series of tests on it, which conclusively proved that it had been forged in the 6th or 7th centuries and so could not have been used at the Crucifixion. While Ravenscroft could not have known what Dr. Feather would find thirty years after his book came out, a visit to the museum would have revealed to him that its curators had been convinced of its Carolingian origins for over a century.

He also completely ignored the half-dozen other objects scattered around the world, each of which is claimed to be the real Holy Lance. In so doing he gives us not a book about the spear that pierced the side of Christ, but a book about the Nazi’s obsession with the Spear of Destiny and other matters occult.

Since then the Spear of Destiny has held the central place in many novels, scholarly tomes, TV shows (fictional and documentary) and even comic books: including Indiana Jones And The Spear Of Destiny; Hellboy; and Hellblazer, which gave us the 2005 film Constantine with Keanu Reeves.
Ravenscroft was not the only post-war college professor to write about, and add to the Holy Lance mythos. In 1988-89 Dr. Howard A. Buechner, M.D., professor of medicine at Tulane and later L.S.U., added a strange chapter to the tale in his two books Hitler's Ashes - Seeds Of A New Reich and Adolf Hitler and the Secrets of the Holy Lance. His two books on the Holy Lance, now long out of print, became underground bestsellers in the ‘90s. In them he relates that he was contacted by a former German U-boat submariner who claimed to have helped take the Holy Lance to Antarctica in 1945 and to have helped a group of German businessmen who called themselves The Hartmann Expedition recover it in 1979.

Doctor Buechner was a retired Colonel with the U.S. Army who had served as a battalion surgeon in World War II. In the mid-1980s he was presented by the pseudonymous “Capt. Wilhelm Bernhardt” with what was claimed to be the log of the equally pseudonymous “Hartmann Expedition,” including a hand-written letter of authenticity signed by “Hartmann,” and photos of some of the objects recovered.

According to Buechner, this former Nazi sailor claimed that he could prove that the famous Spear of Destiny currently on display in the Schatzkammer Museum in Vienna is a fake.

Prior to the war Heinrich Himmler, who would become head of the Occult Bureau of the SS, formed a circle of Knights dedicated to the Holy Lance, called The Knight’s Grand Council. It has been widely reported that they used a replica of the Holy Lance in arcane black magic ceremonies in the specially appointed Castle of Wewelsburg, Germany, which today welcomes tourists with a taste for the macabre. Capt. Bernhart claimed that during the war Himmler had Japan's greatest sword maker flown to Germany where he created a second and much more exact duplicate of the lance. The “perfect” copy then went on display in Nuremberg, from whence it was turned over to Austrian authorities at the war’s end, while the real one remained under Himmler’s control – until sent to Antarctica by order of Hitler.

In the final hours of the war, according to this sailor, Hitler personally selected a man who would later be called “Col. Maximilian Hartmann” to send several of his most prized possessions, including the Spear of Destiny, to Antarctica via submarine – the one on which Bernhart said he had served. Further, Col. Hartmann was alleged to have recovered the real Spear of Destiny, again with aid from Bernhardt, in 1979. According to Buechner and Bernhart the Holy Lance is now in hiding somewhere in Europe, in the possession of the reconvened order of Himmler’s knights, renamed The Knights dof the Holy Lance.

After contacting most of the purported members of the 1979 Hartmann Expedition and others involved, including senior former Nazi officials and close personal associates of Adolf Hitler, like Hitler Youth Leader Artur Axmann, Col. Buechner became convinced that the sailor’s claims were true. Either he was the victim of an incredibly elaborate hoax, or the Spear of Destiny really did reside for a while in Antarctica and may well be in the hands of a group of individuals who believe in its power to direct the destiny of mankind – and may be conducting magic rites with it right this moment!

Col. Buechner's story is examined and partially corroborated by both Alec Maclellan and the research/writing team of Jerry E. Smith and George Piccard. These writers focus on the mysterious surrenders of two U-boats to Argentine authorities months after the war’s end and how they may have been part of the "Führer Convoy" taking high ranking Nazis and maybe treasure, to Argentina and/or Antarctica.

Spear legend meets Urban legend in the writings of the two conspiracy theory authors, Smith and Piccard. Their retelling of the Spear myth stretches from its purported creation in 3061 B.C. by Tubal-Cain, seventh generation grandson of Adam (the Spear was forged from a meteorite at the same time that he made the sword Excalibur), to Admiral Byrd’s battle (Operation Highjump) in the Antarctic against Nazis in their underground fortress in Neuschwabenland. Their version is replete with Nazi UFOs and the search for Atlantis. They connect the Thule Society (a Nazi secret society) to the Yale University Skull and Bones fraternity and the horrific events of September 11, 2001. 

GERMAN ANTARCTICA
The Prime Meridian, zero degrees longitude, runs from pole to pole passing through Greenwich, England, Western France, Eastern Spain, Western Africa, and the South Atlantic Ocean, before reaching Antarctica in the region known today as Dronning (Queen) Maud Land. It was named that in 1930 by the Norwegian Riiser-Larsen in honor of the Queen of Norway.

Hitler had authorized several expeditions to the poles shortly before WWII. Their stated objective was to either to rebuild and enlarge Germany’s whaling fleet or test out weaponry in severely hostile conditions. Yet, if true, all of this could have been achieved at the North Pole rather than at both poles and been much closer to home. For some reason, however, the Germans had long held an interest in the South Polar region of Antarctica with the first Germanic research of that area being undertaken in 1873 when Sir Eduard Dallman (1830-1896) discovered new Antarctic routes and the "Kaiser-Wilhelm-Inseln" at the western entrance of the Biskmarkstrasse along the Biscoue Islands with his ship Grönland during his expedition for the German polar Navigation Company of Hamburg. The Grönland also achieved the distinction of being the first steamer to operate in the southern ocean.

A further expedition took place in the early years of the twentieth century in the ship the Gauss (which became embedded in the ice for 12 months), and then a further expedition took place in 1911 under the command of Wilhelm Filchner with his ship the Deutschland.

Between the wars, the Germans made a further voyage in 1925 with a specially designed ship for the Polar Regions, the Meteor under the command of Dr. Albert Merz.

Then, in the years directly preceding the Second World War, the Germans laid claim to parts of Antarctica in order to set up a permanent base there. Given that no country actually owned the continent and it could not exactly be conquered as no-one lived there during the winter months at least, it appeared to the Germans that the most effective way to conquer part of the continent was to physically travel there, claim it, let others know of their actions and await any disagreements.
In late 1938 the Germans undertook an expedition to Antarctica, specially retfitting a seaplane carrier, the Schwabenland for the purpose. Around one million Reichsmark, nearly a third of the entire expedition budget - was spent on this refit alone. It was placed  under the command of one of Germany's most experienced polar navigators, Captain Alfred Ritscher.

The Schwabenland had been used for transatlantic mail deliveries by special flightboats, the famous 10 ton Dornier Super Wals since 1934.

These Wals were launched by catapult from the Schwabenland and had to be accelerated to 93mph before they could become airborne. At the end of each flight a crane on the ship lifted the aircraft back on board after they landed in the sea.

That the mission was military in nature seems beyond doubt, for the Nazis spared no effort to outfit the expedition as thoroughly as possible.

At a cost of some millions of Reichsmarks, the expedition was under the personal direction and mentorship of none other than Luftwaffe chief, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, which leaves one to wonder what possible purpose Göring would have in sponsoring such an expedition.

[In the 1930s, animal fats were still an important industrial resource and Germany suffered from a shortage of fat. Germany was one of the main purchasers of whale oil from Norway at a considerable expense to the German foreign currency reserves. In 1937 Germany launched a whaling fleet of its own, which set sail for the Southern Ocean. When the fleet returned the following summer, three annual exploring expeditions were planned. Hermann Göring took a personal interest in the project and rushed the preparations through the Reich bureaucracy. Due to the war, only the first expedition took place. During the war, German surface raiders and a few submarines were active in the far southern Atlantic and Indian Oceans near Antarctica. One surface raider, the Pinguin captured an entire Nowegian whaling fleet and sent it to occupied France in early 1941.]

It is also to be noted that apparently the then Deputy Führer and Party chief, Rudolf Hess, was also privy to whatever secret purpose and findings this expedition had. Some people allege that this was in part a hidden motivation for Hess's inexplicable flight to Great Britain in 1941 to conduct secret "peace" negotiations with representatives of the British Fascist movement.

The crew was prepared for the mission by the German Society of Polar Research and as these preparations neared completion, the   society also made the sensational step to invite Richard E. Byrd, the most famous American Antarctic researcher. On the mid of November 1938 he arrived in Hamburg and showed the crew and a clearly selected publicity of 84 persons his new Antarctic documentation movie in the Urania of Hamburg. Byrd, who had flown across the south pole as the first human in 1929, was already at this time a living legend, a national hero to the Americans and most of the polar researchers. In 1938 he still was civilian. This invitation to the Germans could have been a typical irony of history, for nearly ten years later exactly this Richard E. Byrd - then in the rank as US NAVY admiral - got the instruction to destroy the secret German Antarctic base 211.

The Schwabenland left the port of Hamburg on 17 December 1938 and followed a precisely planned and determined route towards the southern continent. In little over a month the ship arrived at the ice covered Antarctica, dropping anchor at 4B0 30B” W and 69B0 14B” S on January 20, 1939.

The expedition then spent three weeks off Princess Astrid Coast and Princess Martha Coast off Queen Maud Land. Truly beautiful, Queen Maud Land is dominated by the giant shelf of ice, flowing slowly from King Haakon VII - plateau over the South Pole, down to the ocean. This area is called "Fenriskjeften" after the mouth of the giant Devil-wolf in Norse mythology. According to this mythology Fenris' (the wolf) teeth were very sharp, and they would kill all people on Earth during Ragnarok - the end of the world. Most of the mountains in Fenriskjeften have names with analogies to teeth, or to other parts of the Norse.

The use of wolf symbology is interesting as it touches upon a theme in Nazi symbology which used the wolf as a totem of the hunter-killer: Hitler's retreat in Berchtesgaden, Bavaria was nicknamed "Wolf's Lair" and the tactic used by German U-Boats to defeat convoys during the War was called "Wolfpack."

During these weeks, the two Schwabenland aircraft, the Passat and Boreas, flew 15 missions across some 600,000 square kilometers of Antarctica, taking more than 11,000 pictures of the area with their specially designed Zeiss Reihenmess-Bildkameras RMK 38b.

New canning techniques were invented for the food needed on the voyage from and back to Germany, and new clothing was designed, including allegedly a "grey almost bullet proof seamless and metallic appearing suit...made of whale skin." [Christoph Friedrich, Secret Nazi Polar Expeditions.] The inspiration for the expedition may have had hidden occult motivations as well, for the occult Thulegesellschaft or Thule Society subscribed to a Nordic Atlantis hidden beneath the polar ice, whence sprang, so the legend goes, the Germanic race. [This fact would also place the expedition within the brief of the SS Ahnenerbedienst.] In any case, small teams of specially selected biologists and other scientists accompanied the expedition to run laboratory experiments on board the refurbished Schwabenland. [The expedition is the subject of a fascinating novel by William Dietrich called Ice Reich. Dietrich's thesis is that the Germans were after unknown microbial and bacteriological life forms that were frozen in the ice and that could be transformed into biological weapons.]

The Germans chose the region of Antarctica known as Queen Maud Land, an area of the continent claimed by Denmark. In blatant disregard for international law, the Nazis overflew the enire area, dropping thousands of little Swastika flags on the region with little spikes to embed them in the ice, and claimed it for Germany, renaming the region Neuschwabenland after Swabia as it is known today, which was one of the original duchies of the German Kingdom. Swabia was home to one of the most powerful dynasties of European monarchs, The Hohenstaufen Dynasty, which ruled the Holy Roman Empire in the 12th and 13th centuries. Frederick Barbarossa was the greatest of the Hohenstaufen kings, and a wielder of the Holy Lance. It has been reported that Hitler believed he was a reincarnation of Barbarossa. He named one of his houses after him and dubbed the invasion of Russia Operation Barbarossa.

But they did more than just fly and drop flags.....

The German pilots extensively photographed the region, and reported mountain ranges in excess of 12,000 feet altitude, rocky crags projecting above the fields of ice. But most amazingly, they allegedly found ice-free ponds, heated geothermally, in which grew various unknown species of algae. They also discovered the southern tip of the fault line that runs from New Zealand, through Neuschwabenland, and up the Atlantic Ocean, the famous Atlantic "trench". The Germans concluded that such features might indicate the presence of rocky caverns on the continent, heated geothermally, the perfect place for a hidden base in the world's most isolated, desolate, and inaccessible wilderness.

Most intriguingly, the scientists aboard the Schwabenland were not idle in analyzing the potential foodstuffs of the continent. It is known that German dieticians were commissioned to prepare tasty and nutritious meals using only what was available in Antarctica.

Emperor penguins were captured for return to Germany for study. Walruses were shot and their bodies dissected. Their bodies were tested for fat, protein, vitamin and other nutrient content. The biological findings made during this expedition would occupy German university scientists for months to come but the aim of this focus was secret .

Clearly, if these allegations are true, then the Germans were preparing for a relatively large and permanent presence on the continent.

Then, via an unusual zigzagging route between Africa and South America - itself one of the intriguing mysteries of the expedition - the Schwabenland returned to Germany, reaching port on April 10, 1939. Göring presented the expedition members with written medals and commemorations. Then, all further mention of the expedition in the German - or any other press - ceased.

So what do we have at this juncture?

Allegations from German writers of known or suspected Nazi sympathies of a continued German presence on the Antarctic continent during and after the war;
Actual suspicious U-boat activity in the South Atlantic at the end of the war;
Allegations of German research that could have been for no other purpose than establishment of a permanent German presence on the continent; Allegations of discoveries of small thermally heated ponds with unknown types of algae on the continent's interior;
Allegations of Grand Admiral Dönitz that the U-boat fleet was involved in the construction of a secret base or bases far from the Reich, one base of which was surrounded by "eternal ice";
Allegations of a last sea battle in the Atlantic prior to the German surrender, with things going surprisingly disastrously for the Allies;
An actual large postwar American military adventure to the continent within two years of the end of the war, with small accompanying international press contingents, an expedition outfitted for eight months that stayed only eight weeks.
And finally, an actual newspaper report of Admiral Byrd trying to warn America of a military threat from "enemy aircraft" flying from either pole at tremendous speed.
There is no conceivable reason, at least on the surface, for such an intense interest in the South Polar regions...

The true purpose of this expedition has never been satisfactorily explained; there is merely a series of puzzles, related reports and snippets of information that are no longer open to verification. What is not open to doubt however, is that in the decade preceding the Second World War, the Germans did almost nothing that did not put the entire structure of the country on a war footing.

This activity affected all aspects of German life; military, civilian, economic, social and foreign policies, engineering, industry etc. Given that the seizing of Neu-Schwabenland occurred on the very eve of the war, it can only be concluded that that the polar expedition was of major importance and significance to the goals and development of the German nation.

Nor did activity end with the outbreak of the war... In fact, it intensified... The South Atlantic, including South Polar waters became quite active...
The German Antarctic Expedition had discovered several ice-free regions with lakes and signs of vegetation (mostly lichen and moss) in the territory’s interior. The expedition's geologists said that this phenomenon was due to hot springs or other geothermal sources. This discovery, it is claimed, led Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler to hatch a bold plan to build a permanent base in Antarctica.

The brackish water of the warm lakes virtually confirmed that all had an outlet to the sea and would thus have been a haven for U-boats. The two ice-free mountain ranges in Neu Schwabenland presented no worse an underground tunnelling project for Organization Todt than anything they had encountered and overcome in Norway. The Germans were the world's experts at building and inhabiting underground metropolis.

At the end of the war the United States gave anything concerning Ohrdruf a top secret classification for 100 years upwards. The fact that there had been substantial underground workings there, and Ohrdruf was the location of the last Redoubt, was concealed absolutely. Fortunately for researchers, in 1962 the DDR had taken sworn depositions from all local residents during an investigation into wartime Ohrdruf, and upon the reunification of the two Germanys in 1989, these documents became available to all and sundry at Arnstadt municipal archive.

From the Arnstadt documents it is clear that the Charite Anlage unit operated in a three-story underground bunker with floors 70 by 20 metres. When working, the device emitted some kind of energy field which shut down all electrical equipment and non-diesel engines within a range of about eight miles. For this reason, even though Ohrdruf was crawling with SS, it was never photographed from the air nor bombed. Declassified USAF documents dated early 1945 admit the existence of an unknown energy field over Frankfurt/Main "and other locations" which "fantastic though it may appear" were able to "interfere with our aircraft engines at 30,000 feet."

Ohrdruf rebuilt below Neu Schwabenland during the last two years of the war would not have been difficult, and since Charite Anlage had the highest priority of anything in the Third Reich, it seems likely that it must have been. Such a base would have been impregnable, for the suggestion is that the force-field worked in various ways favourable to the occupants.

For more than sixty years rumors about a base code named “Station 211” have tantalized historians and researchers. Could it be that it was actually constructed and staffed as an ongoing project throughout the war? Perhaps Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz announced its completion when, in 1943, he said:

The German submarine fleet is proud of having built for the Führer, in another part of the world, a Shangri-La on land, an impregnable fortress.

STRANGE SECRETS OF THE ANTARCTIC REICH A magazine article published June 2004 in Portugal is shedding new light on the strange cruise of the German ship Schwabenland and the origins of the Antarctic Reich While the German scientists improved and the RFZ, the Haunebu and the Vril, other strange events happened quickly, beginning in 1938. One of the new problems that emerged in the early Twentieth Century, right after World War I, was the transportation of mail between Europe and the Americas. In the 1920s, two companies contested for the newly-opened mail routes across the Atlantic Ocean. These were Pan American Airways and Luft-Hansa, the German airline. Trips by air over the vast ocean created numerous problems with refueling, logistics and maintenance. Both companies decided to use hydroplanes, and the Azores (owned by Portugal) became the logical replenishment point. German catapult ships that became famous included the Bremen, the Westfalen and the Schwabenland. This last one, built in 1925, could launch hydroplanes weighing as much as 14 tons. The Schwabenland was a modern ship, well-equipped and with a modern communications system, plus an excellent on-board meteorological station. The vessel often operated out of Horta and Faial in the Azores. On May 24, 1938, the Schwabenland was visited by James Roosevelt, the brother of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. That same evening, the Schwabenland received a coded message from the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, ordering the captain to leave the Azores and proceed at once to Germany. And thereby hangs the tale. James "Rosey" Roosevelt was the older half-brother of the president. A quick review of FDR's childhood is in order. Franklin was born in January 1882. His father, James Roosevelt, was 53 years old when he was born and already had an older son, James Jr., by his first wife. James Jr., nicknamed Rosey, was born in 1855 and was 27 when his baby brother, the future president, made his natal debut in Hyde Park, N.Y. Although he was the older brother of one president (FDR) and the cousin of another (Theodore Roosevelt, president from 1901 to 1909), not too much is known about Rosey. He was a Wall Street investment banker and the college roommate and lifelong pal of one of the USA's wealthiest billionaires, John Jacob Astor IV. After Astor died, it was Rosey who managed his friend's estate, with its numerous trust funds, annuities, bloc shares and whatnot. In short, Rosey was a heavy hitter on Wall Street, and he was in and out of the White House as often as Monica Lewinsky. What Rosey was doing aboard Hitler's "Antarctic Ark" is a mystery. But there's more. Rosey was the favorite child of Franklin's maternal grandfather, Warren Delano, a stalwart Republican from Fairhaven, Massachusetts. Of his New York City son-in-law, old man Delano once said, "James is the one who taught me that a Democrat could be a gentleman." In his youth, Warren Delano had been a sailor aboard a Massachusetts whaling ship that often plied Antarctic waters. Later he got involved in the China trade. Another contemporary from the same area of southeastern Massachusetts was a whaler-turned-fishmonger named Andrew J. Borden, who was chopped up with an axe by his daughter Lizzie in August 1892. The most notorious book about whalers in Antarctica is, of course, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket  by Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849). Poe wrote about the whalers encountering strange ruins and hinted at an alien presence on the icebound southern continent, linked to the haunting phrase Tekeli-li. According to S.T. Joshi, the biographer of H.P. Lovecraft (who used Pym as the basis of his own novel, At the Mountains of Madness) the first book publication of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe is dated 1838 but it was copyrighted in June 1837. Two installments had appeared in the January and February 1837 issues of the Southern Literary Messenger, at that time edited by Poe. So where did Poe get the idea for mysterious ruins in Antarctica? Probably from talking to returning American whalers in the Baltimore waterfront taverns that he loved to haunt. Clearly some very strange shit was going on in Antarctica during the late 1830s, and it was known to Delano and Borden and the other whalers of the New Bedford-Fairhaven-Nantucket area. A century after Poe penned his Antarctic tale, the Schwabenland returned to Hamburg. Following a swift and effective refitting, the ship departed for Antarctica. The official German Antarctic Expedition of 1938-1939 assumed a long-term strategic importance. Led by Captain Alfred Ritscher, a veteran Arctic explorer, this scientific expedition carried out extensive geographical, meteorological and zoological research in Queen Maud Land, which had formed part of the Norwegian territorial claim on Antarctica since 1930. Two large flying boats of the Dornier-Wal type flew daily from the expedition ship Schwabenland, taking over 11,000 photographs, occasionally landing, covering in all some 600,000 square kilometers and photomapping 350,000 square kilometers. The discovery of high Alpine peaks (Mühlig-Hoffman Mountains) and a group of warm-water oases (Schirrmacher Lakes) amid the frozen wastes was of particular interest as it suggested that there were hospitable microclimates (ecosystems) within the icebound continent. The explorers used harpoons with Swastika flags, dropped from the air, to mark off their new territory of Neuschwabenland. They also drew up a detailed map of the region. However, today this map cannot be exhibited in Germany. Anyone found in possession of this map is prosecuted under the statues governing denial of the Holocaust. One of the people who led the expedition was Helmuth Wohlthat, a former German fighter pilot of World War I who had served in Hermann Göring's Jagdstaffel and remained friends with Göring after the war. Wohlthat was an economist by trade and represented the Third Reich at international financial conferences with British and American bankers. A strange choice to play a leading role in an Antarctic expedition, to be sure. But the Portuguese article asserts that Wohlthat was also a member of the Vril Society and the Thule Society, the mystical forerunners of the Nazi party. Also aboard the Schwabenland was a sizable contingent from Himmler's SS-Ahnenerbe, a kind of "Ministry of the Occult." Wohlthat prepared an extensive report of the expedition which he radioed to Göring on May 9, 1939. In October of 1939, one month after the beginning of World War II, the Schwabenland was turned over to the Luftwaffe. On December 17, 1939, the ship again left Hamburg, headed for Antarctica, packed with scientists and equipment. This time they were going to build a permanent base in Antarctica. Running the Royal Navy's blockade, the Schwabenland returned to Hamburg on April 11, 1940. The ship and her crew were received in Germany as heroes. But not all of the Germans had returned. A handful had remained behind at the base now called "Point 211." In August 1942, the ship was sent to Tromso in Norway, which was then under German occupation. She travelled to Tromso in a convoy of 24 ships. During the next year and a half, nobody knew where the Schwabenland was. It was not possible to find any record of its whereabouts. The ship's registration was transferred to Norway, with the approval of the (Vidkun) Quisling government. At the same time, Hitler ceded to Norway a portion of the Antarctic territory claimed by Germany. Late in 1942, the Schwabenland came under the direct control of the SS. Himmler had the "home port" name on her stern changed from Oslo to Stockholm, and the ship began traveling under a false flag, that of neutral Sweden. [In 1965, actor Marlon Brando, made a strange little movie called Morituri. In the film, Brando plays an expatriate German who is blackmailed into spying for the Allies. He winds up on board a German U-boat tender disguised as a Swedish tramp steamer. Was this film a fictionalized version of the wartime South Atlantic voyages of the Schwabenland?] On May 19, 1943, the Allies began to suspect that something strange was happening in Antarctica, mainly because of the large number of U-boats passing through the South Atlantic. Himmler was using large supply submarines--the famous Milchkuh U-boats of Admiral Dönitz--to ferry Organisation Todt construction supplies and equipment to Point 211. Also heading south were thousands of Waffen-SS soldiers and the Antarktische Siedlungnsfrauen (ASF). At this time, President Roosevelt sent a coded message to President Getulio Vargas of Brazil, complaining that Portugal's (fascist) Prime Minister Dr. Antonio Salazar refused to permit the construction of an Allied naval base in the Azores. Roosevelt told Vargas that Allied intelligence had learned of an existing Nazi submarine base in the islands. Unknown to Dr. Salazar, General Eisenhower had prepared plans for a pre-emptive occupation of the Canary Islands (owned by Spain) and Cabo Verde (owned by Portugal). From these new bases, Allied 'sub-killers' would destroy the U-boat 'migration' to Antarctica. An OSS (Office of Strategic Services, World War II forerunner of the CIA) document dated May 23, 1944 affirmed that 'Salazar continues to play for time' before drafting a formal response for the Allies. Portugal is geographically farther from Germany than are Switzerland and Sweden, but the country and its colonies were still very vulnerable to pressure from the Reich. Moreover, the authoritarian Portuguese dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar, was sympathetic to the Axis powers (especially after siding with Franco in the Spanish Civil War). These factors resulted in considerable collaboration between Portugal and Nazi Germany. Salazar provided shipments of tungsten to the Third Reich that were important for the German armaments industry, and allowed German espionage agents to operate in his country. Portugal, in fact, like Switzerland, was a hive of spying during the Second World War. Because Salazar incorporated many facets of fascism into his government -- including corporatist social and economic policies, the debasement of democracy and parliament, an extensive secret police, and a ban on strikes -- he was viewed favourably by Hitler and Mussolini, as well as by Spain's General Franco. He used that approval to obtain financial profit. While the exact amount of that profit is difficult to determine, there are clues that convey its value. The 44 tons of German gold which the United States wanted Portugal to surrender at war's end (going so far, to compel agreement, as to freeze Portuguese assets in the U.S.) is a case in point. Despite his ties to the Axis nations, Salazar also, at times, cooperated with the Allies. He leased bases in the Azores to the British, and he permitted many refugees who escaped the Nazis to travel through Lisbon, Portugal's capital. Antarctica is a continent, an enormous land area covered by ice. The pace of shrinkage of Antarctic glaciers has been accelerating. Especially during the past five years has the shrinkage been rapid. As its snowy cover disappears, what might this continent reveal? Easter Island-type statues? Stonehenge-type ruins? This farthest southern land has long been a blank slate inviting speculation. An ancient hi-tech "city" nicknamed "Rainbow City" was reportedly discovered in Antarctica by a small group of American researchers in the late 1940's. Reportedly an on-site staff of 2000 was later stationed there to study the ancient mechanical devices, the operation of time-space portals, holographic records, and an ancient underground 'rail' system with Rainbow City being the central hub. Antigravity craft are also reportedly being used by the researchers. ~The Hefferlin Manuscript; Rainbow City and the Inner Earth People, by Timothy Green Beckley In the late 1830s a travel narrative appeared claiming to recount the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a stowaway whose macabre misadventures had landed him on a tropical island in the Open Polar Sea of Antarctica. Chased by cannibals and tormented by the weird cries of strange penguins, Pym made his way to the South Pole, where he was promptly sucked down a giant polar hole into. . . . But here, to everyone's disappointment, the narrative broke off. Notwithstanding the question of how a manuscript last seen accompanying its author to the center of the earth ended up in the hands of American publishers, some readers considered Pym's description of the Antarctic plausible enough to warrant a revision of world maps. Unfortunately, Pym's narrative was actually a work of fiction, invented by an imaginative author by the name of Edgar Allen Poe. Although Pym is not one of Poe's most famous works, it proved popular enough to survive and inspire other SF authors. H.P. Lovecraft wrote At the Mountains of Madness as a loose sequel to Pym, and his invention of Antarctic "shoggoths" went a long way towards explaining why poor Arthur Gordon Pym was so terrified of penguins. 　 Building upon Poe's earlier work, H.P. Lovecraft told a fantastic tale in At The Mountains Of Madness. An Antarctic expedition finds a cyclopean lost city dating from before pre-Cambrian times. Unearthed is evidence of a long-gone alien civilization, which had retreated to the polar region. Deep underground, a final discovery drives one of the explorers insane and they both narrowly escape with their lives. With such accounts, it is uncertain where fact ends and fiction begins. The essential guidebook to various intriguing literature regarding Antarctica is Joscelyn Goodwin's Arktos: The Polar Myth (1993). Return now to the noncommital news that shrinkage of Antarctic glaciers has been accelerating. A blip on the radar screen to many; evidence of environmental problems to some; fraught with potential meaning to a few: Is something cooking there, at the mountains of madness? Antarctica’s ice story has been put on ice From World Climate Report: Antarctic Ice Melt at Lowest Levels in Satellite Era Where are the headlines? Where are the press releases? Where is all the attention? The ice melt across during the Antarctic summer (October-January) of 2008-2009 was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite history. Such was the finding reported last week by Marco Tedesco and Andrew Monaghan in the journal Geophysical Research Letters: A 30-year minimum Antarctic snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008–2009 according to spaceborne microwave observations for 1980–2009. Strong positive phases of both the El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode (SAM) were recorded during the months leading up to and including the 2008–2009 melt season. Standardized values of the Antarctic snow melt index (October-January) from 1980-2009 (adapted from Tedesco and Monaghan, 2009) The silence surrounding this publication was deafening. It would seem that with oft-stoked fears of a disastrous sea level rise coming this century any news that perhaps some signs may not be pointing to its imminent arrival would be greeted by a huge sigh of relief from all inhabitants of earth (not only the low-lying ones, but also the high-living ones, respectively under threat from rising seas or rising energy costs). But not a peep. But such is not always the case—or rather, such is not ever the case when ice melt is pushing the other end of the record scale. Lest you think that perhaps NASA hasn’t had any data on ice melt across Antarctica in past years, we give you this one: NASA Researchers Find Snowmelt in Antarctica Creeping Inland On the world’s coldest continent of Antarctica, the landscape is so vast and varied that only satellites can fully capture the extent of changes in the snow melting across its valleys, mountains, glaciers and ice shelves. In a new NASA study, researchers [including Marco Tedesco] using 20 years of data from space-based sensors have confirmed that Antarctic snow is melting farther inland from the coast over time, melting at higher altitudes than ever and increasingly melting on Antarctica’s largest ice shelf. But this time around, nothing, nada, zippo from NASA when their ice melt go-to guy Marco Tedesco reports that Antarctica has set a record for the lack of surface ice melt (even more interestingly coming on the heels of a near-record low ice-melt year last summer). So, seriously, NASA, what gives? Is not important enough to elucidate the history and recent behavior across Antarctica? (This is not meant as a rhetorical question) ReferenceTedesco M., and A. J. Monaghan, 2009. An updated Antarctic melt record through 2009 and its linkages to high-latitude and tropical climate variability. Geophysical Research Letters

The maps of Neu Schwabenland that cannot be exhibited in Germany, on penalty of imprisonment

Most of the rumors agree that Station 211, if it really existed, was located inside a prominent ice-free mountain in the Mühlig-Hofmann Mountains of Neuschwabenland (Queen Maud Land). In 1946-47 Admiral Byrd, America’s most recognized polar explorer may have searched for Station 211. In what was called Operation Highjump he had at his disposal the largest armada ever sent to Antarctica. Some 13 ships and 4,700 men, which included an aircraft carrier, a submarine, two destroyers, more than two-dozen aircraft and some 3,500 Marines in full battle gear were sent by the United States to Antarctica on what was officially described as a “training” mission. Yet persistent rumors insist that the actual purpose of Highjump was to find the Nazi fortress. It’s unclear if Byrd ever discovered the location of the Führer’s “Shangri-La” -- if it really was there and if he really was looking for it, that is.

During the period between 1956 and 1960 a Norwegian expedition mapped most of Queen Maud Land from land surveys and air photos. Tantalizingly they did find an ice-free mountain that matched the description of the one in the Station 211 rumors. They called it Svarthamaren (the black hammer). If it truly is the location of Station 211 its secret will be kept well into this century, for it has been designated an Antarctic Specially Protected Area and Site of Special Scientific Interest under the Antarctic Conservation Act of 1978. It was listed as an “exceptional natural research laboratory for research on the Antarctic petrel (Thalassoica Antarctica), snow petrel (Pagodroma nivea) and south polar skua (Catharacta maccormicki), and their adaptation to breeding in the inland/interior of Antarctica.” Access is limited to only a handful of specially selected scientists. If this is a ruse, anyone and everyone not deemed safe with the knowledge of what really went on there will be prevented from getting too close for many years to come.

Col. Buechner and Capt. Bernhart avoid mention of Station 211 though, perhaps to maintain its secrecy, which would be in keeping with the general tone of their two books. Indeed, they admit that the names given for all members of the 1979 expedition, including Bernhardt and Hartmann, are fictitious and where used to protect their true identities. It is clear that Buechner does not tell us all he knows.

Instead, Buechner and Bernhardt tell us that the submarine crew in 1945 placed Hitler’s treasure at the foot of an unnamed glazier in the Mühlig-Hofmann Mountains, dug in and protected with steel plates. This would have meant them finding one of the few stretches of beach not blocked by miles of shelf ice. Then to have gone on shore and trekked more than 100 miles deep into the interior, loaded down with a ton or more of steel! This seemed to us to be the least plausible piece of this whole mad jigsaw puzzle. Some parts of Antarctica receive as much as sixty feet of snow in a single year. How deeply would this treasure have been buried after more than thirty years? And why head for an ice-free region only to stash it in the ice?  No, this part of Buechner’s cover story can be rejected - if any of it were true then they must have taken the Holy Lance somewhere from which it would be easily recoverable -- to Station 211.

STATION 211

In his book The Murder of Rudolf Hess, Hugh Thomas casts doubt on the man who was locked up in Berlin’s Spandau Prison for so long and offers fairly persuasive evidence that the figure held prisoner there was not the real Hess, but an imposter. Yet if that were the case – and the evidence is quite startling – why was he not executed at Nuremberg, as so many of his contemporaries were, or simply released as a harmless stooge, before his death there in 1981? Other characters served long prison sentences, such as Albert Speer, a civilian figure who might arguably have had a more heinous war record than Deputy Führer Hess, who, after all absconded to Britain in 1941 before the war had taken a more serious turn for the worse. So why such a long sentence? It has been suggested that Hess was in some way connected to BASE 211…did the real Hess abscond in 1941 to Base 211 itself, simultaneously using a loyal double, with instructions to fly to Scotland and thereafter take the brunt of ridicule and long incarceration? If So, Hess would have effectively disappeared to oversee the development of a Fourth Reich in the southern hemisphere. Whatever the truth, there is no doubt…Base 211 is an extremely potent one and…it’s all part of the wider picture. Along with the intricate history of the secret societies [and] the overall story of the development of flying discs in Germany it is all the easier to accept when one looks at the background… Pages 48-49. It should be noted that Rudolf Hess had a lasting relationship with Karl Haushofer who was, according to researcher Louis Pauwels, a member of the Vril Society. Haushofer, like others in the secret society, believed in the existence of a subterranean race living within the Earth. In 1979 the Hartmann expedition discovered, within Base 211 itself, an inscription from none other than Rudolf Hess’s mentor. ~Gary Hyland Blue Fires – The Lost Secrets of Nazi Technology ©2001

Surprisingly there is evidence that Hitler’s right hand man, Rudolf Hess, who went to England and was arrested as a war criminal on 10 May 1941, had been entrusted with coordinating the effort to build Station 211.

Following his arrest, Hess was held in Spandau Prison in isolation until his death. Such unique treatment is suggestive that he had information that the Allies considered dangerous. Indeed, in his book Secret Nazi Polar Expeditions Christof Friedrich states Hess “was entrusted with the all-important Antarctic file. Hess, himself, kept the Polar file.” Now, granted, such information as Hess possessed, if any, would have been complete only to the time that he took off on his solo flight to England... but... that period... prior to 1941... would have covered the initial recovery of the Bavarian “flying disc” in 1936, and at the very least, the early stages of any project or projects arising from such a recovery. It would also contain any information with regard to any survivors of the crash, and their eventual fate(s). Many believe that Hess, who had no part in any of the so-called “war crimes” was deliberately kept in Spandau Prison, for life, in an attempt to keep him quiet. It has also been speculated that the man who died, in Spandau Prison, was, in fact, not Hess at all... that Hess had been murdered, years before, in an effort to keep the truth... on several highly embarrassing matters... from getting out.

Historians have often dismissed Hess as a Nazi figurehead, positioned highly because of his total subservience to the Führer, but perhaps this was because his true role was so well concealed.

If Hess was involved with Station 211, he must have enlisted the aid of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. Himmler had rejected Christianity, as had many of the Nazi inner core and believed in a strange Germanic version of a neo-pagan New Age. He was a devotee of the German occultist, Dr. Friedrich Wichtl who specialized in Masonic lore and "world conspiracy" theories. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 at the end of World War I, Dr. Wichtl wrote a best-selling book entitled Weltfreimaurerei, Weltrevolution, Weltrepublik [World Freemasonry, World Revolution, World Republic]. Himmler was drawn into the occult after reading Dr. Wichtl's book in 1919, while a military cadet convalescing after a serious stomach illness.

Himmler eventually became a believer in the Hindu concept of world-ages or Yugas. He believed that the current age, or Kali Yuga, would end in a global cataclysm, thereby giving birth to a new world-age called the Satya Yuga. By sending a Nazi colony to Antarctica, Himmler believed that he was ensuring a remnant of the "pure Aryan race" would survive the coming cataclysm with its society and culture intact. He believed that these survivors would then take possession of Antarctica after the cataclysm had melted the south polar ice cap.

Germany built more than two dozen “super subs” during the war. Each was the size of an aircraft carrier, but they weren’t built as war ships, they were underwater cargo ships. Initially they were used to re-supply the submarine “Wolfpacks.” Later, it would seem, they were pressed into transporting tools, equipment, raw materials, and perhaps even slave labor to the south polar base. Evidence suggests that the U-boat traffic to Neuschwabenland continued even after Germany’s surrender in 1945.

During the war, surface ships were involved in this massive effort, but as the tide of war turned against the Germans the bulk of the transport work fell to the U-boats and their crews.

Several surface ships appear to have been put on "watch dog" duty, re-supplying the subs and keeping Allied shipping away.

Between 1939 and 1941, well after the outbreak of war in Europe, Captain Bernhard Rogge of the commerce raider Atlantis made an extended voyage in the South Atlantic, Indian and South Pacific, visiting the Iles Kerguelen between December 1940 to January 1941 and burying a seaman at Bassin de la Gazelle.

The Atlantis is known to have been visited by an RFZ-2,  the UFO style craft which had served as a reconnaissance aircraft since late 1940 which was photograhed./ The ship then adopted a new disguise as Tamesis before being sunk by HMS Devonshire near Ascension Island, on 22 November 1941. The Atlantis was also known as Hilfskreuzer 16 and was, at various times, disguised as Kasii-Maru or Abbekerk.

The Kerguelen Island (named the Most Useless Island In the World in 1995) continued to feature prominently in Nazi plans. For example, in 1942 the German Navy planned to establish a meteorological station there. In May of that year the ship Michel transferred a meteorologist and two radio operators with full equipment to a supply vessel Charlotte Schlieman that went on to the island, however the orders for the station were later counter-manned.

It is interesting to note that Kerguelen was also the centre of a mid 19th Century mystery. Then entirely uninhabited, except for seals and seabirds, British Captain Sir James Clark Ross landed there in May 1840. He found in the snow unidentifiable “traces of the singular footprints of a pony, or ass, being 3 inches in length and 2 inches in breadth, having a small deeper depression in either side, and shaped like a horseshoe.” Similar markings appeared overnight in England fifteen years later ["The Devil's Footprints"] and have also defied adequate explanation.

The Kerguelen Archipelago – ideal for secret supply bases

Then in 1942 Captain Gerlach in his ship the Stier investigated nearby Gough Island as a possible temporary base for raiders and a camp for prisoners.

This ship activity does not appear considerable, however the level of U-boat activity in the South Atlantic was much higher. The exact nature and extent of how high will probably never be known, however some insight might be gleaned from the fact that between October 1942 and September 1944 16 German U-boats were sunk in the South Atlantic area. And... some of these submarines did appear to be engaged in covert activities.

A fine example of this would be that of U-859 which, on April 4, 1944 at 04.40hrs, left on a mission carrying 67 men and 33 tons of mercury sealed in glass bottles in watertight tin crates. The submarine was later sunk on 23 September by a British submarine (HMS Trenchant) in the Straits of Malacca and although 47 of the crew died, 20 survived. Some 30 years later one of these survivors spoke openly about the cargo and divers later confirmed the story on rediscovering the mercury. The significance being that mercury is usable as a fuel source for certain types of aerospace propulsion. Why would a German submarine be transporting such a cargo so far from home? It is not odd, at all, if one considers the fact that aviation/avionics construction is what the Polar Base  Station 211 seems to be all about...

Further evidence that Station 211 existed, and continued to be inhabited after the war’s end, can be seen in the several accounts of German naval activity after the fall of Berlin. For example, on July 10, 1945, more than two months after the cessation of known hostilities, the German submarine U-530 surrendered to Argentine authorities at the port of Mar del Plata, one of the closest Argentine harbors to Antarctica. Similarly, U-977 arrived a month later in Mar del Plata on 17 August. These were but two of the boats that are believed to have made up the convoy of the “Führer’s Final Army.” Col. Buechner’s informant, “Capt. Bernhardt,” supposedly served on one of these U-boats, but which one is never made clear so as to hide his real identity.

Of all the high-ranking German military leaders, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz is the most often overlooked, and yet he may have been the most crucial for the story of Nazi survival and continued secret weapons research.

After all, the secret preparations and voyage of the U-234 to Japan, with its precious cargo of enriched uranium and infrared fuses, could not likely have taken place without his express knowledge, participation, and authorization. Thus, outside Kammler's "think tank", he was perhaps the one military leader of a conventional service arm to know the full extent of Nazi Germany's actual advances in atom bomb and other nuclear research.

Best known for his orchestration of the Nazi U-boat campaign against British, Canadian, and American shipping, his alleged role in the various survival myths is little known outside a small circle of UFOlogy and World War Two researchers. And of all the Nazi military leaders, his selection by Adolf Hitler as the second Führer of the Third Reich is, at best, problematical, unless viewed in the light of these late war technology transfers and escaping Nazis.

Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz: Last President of a United Germany For a few brief weeks during late April and May of 1945, a leader of Europe came to power, an honorable man, respected even within the military councils of the Allies. That man was Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander-in-chief of the German Navy, in overall command of German military forces in the north, and at that tense moment engaged in arranging sea and other transportation for the masses of refugees fleeing from the eastern areas. To his overwhelming astonishment, Dönitz had been designated by Hitler as his successor and head of state. In his last political testament executed at 4:00 a.m. on 29 April 1945, and witnessed by Dr. Josef Göbbels, Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, and Generals Wilhelm Burgdorf and Hans Krebs, Adolf Hitler appointed Grand Admiral Dönitz as "President of the Reich and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces ... by virtue of my statement in the Reichstag on September 1st, 1939 ..."

Why would Hitler have chosen Dönitz, a World War One veteran of the High Seas Fleet of Kaiser Wilhelm, with the Kriegsmarine's well-known imperialist culture and leanings that he represented, to be his successor?

A conventional answer is afforded by the circumstances. Betrayed on all sides - by Himmler and Göring themselves - a desperate Hitler reached out to what he thought was the most loyal conventional military service arm of the Wehrmacht, the Navy. But the survival mythos contributes a very different perspective from which to view Hitler's possible motivations.

Dönitz himself does nothing to allay those suspicions, either during or immediately after the war. According to Henry Stevens, who has almost single-handedly investigated every lead - no matter how implausible the detail - of the Nazi UFO and survival legends, Dönitz on more than one occasion alluded to the Navy's role in exotic secret weapons research and in the construction of very secret bases far from the Reich homeland. In 1943, the Grand Admiral is reported to have stated that "the German submarine fleet is proud of having built for the Führer, in another part of the world, a Shangri-La on land, an impregnable fortress." [Henry Stevens, The Last Battalion and German Arctic, Antarctic, and Andean Bases citing Col. Howard A. Buechner and Capt. Wilhelm Bernhardt, Hitler's Ashes.]

Strange language for an admiral well-known for cold calculation in military strategy and tactics, and not well-known to be inclined to mystical statements. Then again, in 1944, the Grand Admiral doled out a little more information:

The German Navy will have to accomplish a great task in the future. The German Navy knows all hiding places in the oceans and therefore it will be very easy to bring the Führer to a safe place should the necessity arise and in which he will have the opportunity to work out his final plans.
[Ibid. citing Buechner and Bernhardt]

But it was Dönitz's almost insane remarks at Nuremberg that seemed to point clearly to one of the two polar regions as the "site" for these "plans". At Nuremberg he boasted of "an invulnerable fortress, a paradise-like oasis in the middle of eternal ice." [Ibid., citing Willibald Mattern, UFOs Unbekannte Flugobjekt? Letzte Geheimwaffe des Dritten Reiches?]

Watever the trustworthiness of Steven's sources, these statements, plus the unusual behavior of some U-boats at the end of the war, and the Germans' well-publicized pre-war Antarctic scientific expedition, certainly seemed to spur the United States into a sudden and intense postwar military interest in Antarctica.

Again, since the basic facts are well-known to but a small circle of World War Two and UFOlogy researchers, it is worth recalling them in some detail. U-530 surrendered at Mar del Plata, Argentina, on July 10, 1945, U- 977 surrendered at Mar del Plata, Argentina, on August 17, 1945. U-465 was scuttled off the coast of Patagonia in August 1945. Another U-boat of unknown number surrendered to the Argentine Navy on June 10, 1945.

When the U-530 and U-977 surrendered so late after the European War's end, Allied intelligence was more than a little concerned, and dispatched agents to interrogate the German officers. They certainly did not believe that the German captains had taken their ships on a South Atlantic excursion of three to four months just to surrender to the Argentines, as Captain Schäffer of the U-977 and Captain Wermoutt of the U-530 actually, and apparently in all seriousness, stated.

Stevens summarizes the Allies' real concern - Nazi survival in no uncertain terms:

The Allies first believed that these U-Boats had taken persons of special importance, perhaps even Adolf Hitler, from Germany to South America. In light of this possibility both captains were held for questioning. Captain Schäffer, who surrendered last, was taken to America for a month or so then to England for another period of questioning. Both captains maintained that there had been no persons of political importance deposited in South America. Eventually the captains were released although Schäffer found living in Occupied Germany intolerable and relocated to South America. Captain Schäffer even went on to write a book explaining his voyage and actions.

Unfortunately, nobody really believed Schäffer. Bernhardt, who himself was aboard U-530, claims that American and British Intelligence had learned that U-530 and U-977 did visit Antarctica before landing in South America but the exact nature of their mission eluded them.
A glimpse into this extraordinary mission and the high importance afforded by the German Navy High Command (the Oberkommando der KriegsMarine or OKM) to it can perhaps be afforded by a glance of the alleged performance characteristics of the U-530. In the spring of 1945, an old fashioned type U-boat with the number 530 was dry-docked after being damaged by a freighter which had rammed it. As was typical for the Kriegsmarine, a new submarine, probably a type XXI or further development of it, was launched at approximately the same time, and was given the same service number, an obvious ploy to confuse Allied military intelligence. But why was the U-boat that actually sailed to the South Atlantic and that later surrendered to Argentina probably a type XXI or some derivative? Because Captain Wilhelm Bernhardt, a pen name of an actual crew member of Captain Wermoutt's U-530, let out a significant piece of information; he stated that her submerged speed was approximately 30 knots, an unheard of speed for a submerged submarine in that day. The only submarines in service in any navy in the world capable of that performance at that time were the German type XXI U-boats.

The type XXI U-boat, like most U-boats in the German Navy by that time, was fitted with the special Schnorkel device that allowed its main diesel engines to operate while submerged underwater. It is quite possible that these newer Type XXI U-boats also had the newer Schnorkels fitted with special anti-radar coatings. But the Type XXI was also outfitted with the special "Walther" turbine, an underwater jet" device that utilized hydrogen peroxide that allowed great underwater cruising speeds. In effect, these turbines were "silent" engines allowing great underwater speeds for limited durations of time. Thus, the Type XXI had brought submarine technology and warfare to a new and sophisticated level by the war's end. But would even the Type XXI have been able to brave the North and then South Atlantic Oceans, by that point in the war all but Allied lakes? There is some indication that not only were they successful in doing so, but wildly so. The Germans had adapted special new guidance systems to missiles, and torpedoes. These systems included wire-guidance, as well as magnetic proximity fuses.

Stevens reports that on May 2, 1945, a flotilla of U-boats, many of them Type XXIs, carefully husbanded by Dönitz at Kristiansand fjord in Norway, departed in a wolf pack for Iceland, making the traditional run through the straits between Iceland and Greenland. What happened next has been deleted from what passes as history, at least in the countries of the former Allied Powers. What happened was the last great sea battle of the Atlantic. The German U-boat convoy ran straight into an Allied naval battle formation.The result was stunning. Using the new torpedoes... the Allied ships were totally annihilated. Apparently the Allies never quite realized what they had run into. Our only third-party report of the event was an article in a South American newspaper which learned of the event. A quote (sic) from the only survivor of the attack is often quoted by the underground German writers: "May God help me, may I never again encounter such a force" - British destroyer captain. This was reportedly carried in El Mercurio Santiago, Chile, and Der Weg a paper published by exiled Germans living in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The British consistently maintained a flotilla of destroyers, accompanied occasionally by heavier units of light and heavy cruisers, on station in these straits throughout the war. The use of new torpedoes - whether wire-guided, acoustic-seeking, or magnetic proximity-fused - leads once again back to Karnrnler's "think tank" secret weapons empire. These torpedoes, plus the high-submersible speeds and "proto-stealth" capabilities of the Type XXI U-boats would have been more than a match for the British destroyers on station between Iceland and Greenland.

The Coler coil came to the quick attention of the Kriegsmarine in the early days of the Third Reich, which immediately classified it at the highest level, and funded further research. It is not hard to understand the Kriegsmarine's interest in the Coler device. It is the perfect generator for submarine use. It produces no exhaust and burns no fuel. It could be linked directly to existing electric-drive vessels and run under water indefinitely. Did the Germans actually accomplish this? The underground German writers say that this indeed happened. This theme runs throughout the writing of Bergmann whose specialty is the link between German submarines and German flying saucers. This is an incredible, if not outlandish, claim. Yet it is worth pondering for a moment. The Coler devices, developed in 1933 [British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee, 1946: The Invention of Hans Coler Relating to an Alleged New Source of Power] and their unusual ability to transduce electrical power out of something were known to the Germans fully six years before the war had even started, and were developed in secret for twelve years after that (and then presumably by the British for another twenty three years after that!).

We do not know, of course, nor is the British Government saying (if indeed it knows), to what state the Germans brought this device, but whatever the state, they bad fully twelve years in which to do it. But whether perfected or not, notice what else is being implied by the assertion that it was brought to some state of practical use on submarines: the Germans were deliberately after a method of submarine propulsion that would have allowed indefinite submerged cruising, much as a modern nuclear submarine, but by a device much simpler in design and construction, and presumably, much less risky in operation Whether or not the Germans were able to bring it to a state of practical use is thus, in one sense, immaterial, since the classification of the device alone indicates the nature of their interest. It goes without saying that the high priority that the British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee placed on recovering a Coler device and its inventor after the war tends to corroborate the notion that the British had learned the hard way that it had been brought to some state of practical use for submarine propulsion. Whatever the Allies learned, there was a sudden, intense interest in Antarctica.

This interest was so strong that in 1946, as Allied troop were returning home from the War and all thoughts were turned to peacetime pursuits, the United States Government, under President Harry Truman, found it absolutely imperative that a full military expedition be mounted against Antarctica. This campaign was called Operation Highjump. While the operation was billed in American newspapers, magazines and even the occasional newsreel as a mapping expedition, its actual military character is easily seen from a glance at its composition.

Commanded by America's premier polar explorer, Admiral Byrd, the flotilla included an aircraft escort carrier (the Philippines Sea), two seaplane carriers (the Pine Island and Curritich), two destroyers (the Brownsen and Henderson), two escort ships (Yankee and Merrick), two fueling ships (Canister and Capacan), and a submarine (the Sennet). Additionally, four thousand troops equipped with helicopters, reliable fixed wing DC-3s, and a specially designed armored tracked vehicle were also at the Admiral's command. Outfitted for a stay of eight months, the expedition encircled the German claimed territory of Neuschwabenland (New Swabialand), Admiral Byrd stationing the naval vessels off the coast, and then advanced the ground troops and aerial reconnaissance from the pole toward the German territory.

Allegedly the German "base" was quickly found, overflown, and either an American flag, or a bomb, depending on the version of the story, was dropped on the position. In any case, the four escort craft accompanying the scout aircraft were lost without a trace.

Byrd´s diary and flight log
On an expeditionary flight, a copy of Byrd´s flight diary reveals that Byrd and his radio operator flying a C-47 exploratory craft was seized down softly by two flying saucers. Byrd lost control of the plane and its instruments and flight controls, the prop-driven C-47 went down very much like a helicopter. As the plane landed this way, two tall men, both blond and Germanic looking escorted him and his radio operator to an underground facility, where he was assigned with giving the following message to the "surface governments": Stop exploding nuclear weapons for you will most assuredly experience difficult times ahead. That was all, Byrd and his companion were escorted back to their plane. The strange men said something very similar to "Auf Wiedersehen" when they went, calling their own discs "FLUGRAD."
These events throw the whole Highjump exercise into a curious light, for they somehow change the whole character of the Byrd expedition. Within 48 hours Admiral Byrd had given orders which canceled the expedition and made preparations to leave Antarctica. The mission had lasted closer to eight weeks than to eight months. No official reason was given for the sudden withdrawal.Byrd was returned to Washington DC, debriefed, and his personal and operational logs from the mission were seized and remain classified to this day, fueling an endless stream of rumors and conspiracy theories.

There continued to be accounts of German activity for a considerable post-war period. The French Agence France Press on September 25, 1946 stated, "the continuous rumors about German U-boat activity in the region of Tierra del Fuego between the southernmost tip of Latin America and the continent of Antarctica are based on true happenings."

Then the French newspaper, France Soir, gave the following account of an encounter with such a German U-boat:

Almost one and a half years after cessation of hostilities in Europe, the Icelandic Whaler Juliana was stopped by a large German U-boat. The Juliana was in the Antarctic region around Malvinas Islands [The Falklands] when a German submarine surfaced and raised the German official Flag of Mourning - red with a black edge.

The submarine commander sent out a boarding party, which approached the Juliana in a rubber dingy, and having boarded the whaler demanded of Capt. Hekla part of his fresh food stocks. The request was made in the definite tone of an order to which resistance would have been unwise.

The German officer spoke a correct English and paid for his provisions in US dollars, giving the Captain a bonus of $10 for each member of the Juliana crew. Whilst the foodstuffs were being transferred to the submarine, the submarine commander informed Capt. Hekla of the exact location of a large school of whales. Later the Juliana found the school of whales where designated.

To address that 1947 story: To this day there has never been any Icelandic whaler in the South Atlantic, let alone in the Antarctica. No Icelandic ship has ever been named Juliana and Hekla is an active volcano in Iceland, not a last name. 99% of all Icelandic last names for males end in ”-son”.

Hekla eruption 1980

Could it be possible that other German U-boats, in addition to U-530 and U-977 were continuing to operate in the area following the war?

The future may well reveal the fate of more of these submarines; however given the French and South American reports, and the number of missing U-boats, it may not be unreasonable to conclude that at least some of them relocated to the South Polar area.

History also gives us further clues as to a German-Antarctica connection, for it records that Hans-Ulrich Rudel of the German Luftwaffe was being groomed by Hitler to be his successor. It is known that Rudel made frequent trips to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America nearest Antarctica. And...one of Martin Bormann’s last messages from the bunker in Berlin to Dönitz also mentioned Tierra del Fuego.
It is reasonable to suppose that once the first phases of construction at Station 211 were complete, a number of experimental weapons research and development programs would have been relocated there. It is well known that the German High Command hung on believing that the new weapons under development would turn the tide of the war back in Germany’s favor. With ever increasing Allied bombing and armies closing in on Germany from the east, west and south it would seem prudent to move one’s most precious projects to somewhere beyond reach -- and what could be further from the Allies’ grasp than Antarctica?

In 1959, three large newspapers in Chile reported front-page articles about Unidentified Flying Object encounters in which the crew members appeared to be German soldiers. In the early 1960s there were reports in New York, and New Jersey, of flying saucer ‘aliens’ who spoke German, or English with a German accent. Nor, can it be neglected to mention that in one of the most spectacular legal cases of the Twentieth Century... the “atomic espionage” trials... Julius and Ethel Rosenberg spoke of “warships of space.” Since they had access to top secret information, and, at that point, no reason to lie, what was it, exactly, that they meant?

South America has always been a “hotbed” of Unidentified Flying Object activity. Many of the reports coming out of the area are unverified, and unverifiable... However, many have credence.

The claims that something extremely unusual was taking place around the foreboding reaches of the frozen continent took a major leap forward in the 1960s when the Argentine Navy was charged with the official investigation into strange sightings in the sky.

A 1965 official report prepared by Captain Sanchez Moreno of the Naval Air Station Comandante Espora in Bahia Blanca stated that Between 1950 and 1965, personnel of Argentina’s Navy alone made 22 sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects that were not airplanes, satellites, weather balloons or any type of known (aerial) vehicles. These 22 cases served as precedents for intensifying that investigation of the subject by the Navy.

Following a series of sightings at Argentine and Chilean meteorological stations on Deception Island, Antarctica, in June and July 1965, Captain Engineer Omar Pagani disclosed at a press conference that “Unidentified Flying Objects do exist. Their presence in Argentine airspace is proven”. The report went on to state, however, “their nature and origin are unknown and no judgment is made about them”.

More details of these UFO sightings were given in a report in the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo in its 8th July 1965 edition.

For the first time in history, an official communiqué has been published by a government about the flying saucers. It is a document from the Argentine Navy, based on the statements of a large number of Argentine, Chilean and British sailors stationed in the naval base in Antarctica. The communiqué declared that the personnel of Deception Island (left) naval base saw, at nineteen hours forty minutes on 3 July, a flying object of lenticular shape, with a solid appearance and a colouring in which red and green prevailed and, for a few moments, yellow. The machine was flying in a zig-zag fashion, and in a generally western direction, but it changed course several times and changed speed, having an inclination of about forty-five degrees above the horizon. The craft also remained stationary for about twenty minutes at a height of approximately 5,000 meters, producing no sound. The communiqué states moreover that the prevailing meteorological conditions when the phenomenon was observed can be considered excellent for the region in question and the time of year. The sky was clear and quite a lot of stars were visible. The Secretariat of the Argentine Navy also states in its communiqué that the occurrence was witnessed by scientists of the three naval bases and that the facts described by these people agree completely.

Practically everyone in the “UFO Community” is aware that in March 1950 Commodore Augusto Vars Orrego of the Chilean Navy shot still pictures and 8mm movie footage of a very large cigar shaped flying object that hovered over and manoeuvred about in the frigid skies above the Chilean Antarctic. The photos and the report of Orrego’s sighting have, quite literally, been seen by millions over the half century since he saw, and photographed the objects. Orrego stated “during the bright Antarctic night, we saw flying saucers, one above the other, turning at tremendous speeds. We have photographs to prove what we saw .”

There have, of course, been numerous other Chilean sightings. During January 1956 another major Unidentified Flying Object “event” was witnessed by a group of Chilean scientists who had been flown by helicopter to Robertson Island in the Wendell Sea to study geology, fauna and other features. This experience was the subject of a later article entitled A Cigar-Shaped UFO over Antarctica.

At the beginning of January 1956, during a period of stormy weather, the party suddenly became aware of something which, in other circumstances, could have been very grave for them. This was that their radio had mysteriously ceased to function. This was not too worrying a disaster in so much as it was firmly settled that the helicopter would return to take them off again on January 20.” One of the scientists, a doctor, was in the habit of getting up in the night to observe anything of meteorological interest, but another of the group, a professor, did not like to be disturbed. However on the night of 8 January 1956, the Doctor decided to wake the professor. He “pointed upwards, almost overhead. Still in a bad temper due to being disturbed, the professor looked as directed, and beheld two “metallic, cigar-shaped objects in verticular positions, perfectly still and silent, and flashing vividly the reflected rays of the sun”. Just after 7.00am, two other members of the party, an assistant and a medical orderly joined the two men. The group watched the two craft. “At about 9.00am object No. 1 (the nearest to the zenith) suddenly assumed a horizontal posture and shot away like a flash towards the west. It had now lost its metallic brightness and had taken on the whole gamut of visible colours of the spectrum, from infrared to ultra-violet.
The report of the sighting went on to say...

Without slowing down it performed an incredible acute-angle change of direction, shot off across another section of the sky and then did another sharp turn as before. These vertiginous manoeuvres, the zig-zagging, abrupt stopping, instantaneous accelerating, went on for some time right overhead, the object always following tangential trajectories in respect to the Earth and all in the most absolute silence”. The demonstration lasted about five minutes. Then, according to the witnesses, the object returned and took up position beside its companion in almost the same area of the sky as before. Then, it was the turn of No. 2 to show its paces and do a convoluted, zigzagging dance across the sky. Shooting off towards the east, it performed a series of ten disjointed bursts of flight, broken by abrupt changes of direction, and marked by the pronounced colour changes when accelerating or stopping. After about three minutes, object No. 2 was observed to resume its station near its companion, and return to its original solid and metallic appearance.

Due to the nature of their mission, the group had with them two Geiger-Miller counters of high sensitivity, one of the auditory and the other of the flash-type. When the two objects had finished their dance and reassumed their stations in the sky, someone discovered that the flash-type Geiger counter now showed that radioactivity around them had suddenly increased 40 times... far more than enough to kill any organism subjected long enough to it. The discovery greatly increased the anxiety felt by the four men. Although they had no telescopic lens, they did have cameras with them, and managed to take numerous photographs of the objects, both in colour and black and white.

The report does not state what became of these photographs, but it is safe to assume that they are in the possession of the Chilean Government, and there is no reason to assume that they have not been shared with that of the United States, as well as others. Of course... no names are given in this report, but... it has the ring of truth, and is consistent with any number of similar sightings... Would that we knew their names!

It is one of the exasperating facts of Unidentified Flying Object research that so many of the South American and South Atlantic sightings are attributed to “anonymous sources” or the names of the witnesses involved, have been expunged from the “official” records. So many of the witnesses being cited would be, with reference to their stated credentials, credible sources, but because of the practice of expunging names from records which might fall into “public hands” are practically impossible to trace. The absence of names... in many, if not most cases deliberately expunged from official reports... simply lends to an aura of “unbelievability”, even though it is a common practice, especially in most countries.

Yet another documented account of a UFO sighting over Antarctica is by Rubens Junqueira Villela, a meteorologist and the first Brazilian scientist to participate in an expedition to the South Polar region, and now, a veteran of eleven expeditions to Antarctica (two with the US Navy, eight with the Brazilian Antarctic Programme and another on the sailing ship Rapa Nui). While on board the US Navy icebreaker Glacier, which had set sail from New Zealand at the end of January 1961, Villela claims that he witnessed a UFO event in the skies over Antarctica which he immediately recorded in his diary, even including the emotions felt by all those involved. On 16 March 1961, after a fierce storm had forced the expedition to retreat to Admiralty Bay in the King George Isles, “a strange light suddenly crossed the sky, and everyone started to shout”. Speculation went wild. Some thought the object to be an incoming missile. Others thought it to be a meteor. The excitement was widespread and growing. “Trying to describe the light which appeared over Almirantado Bay” he told interviewers, later, “wasn’t easy because I wrote in my diary:

Positively the colours, the configuration and contours of the object, as a bodied light, with geometric forms, did not seem to be from this world, and I did not know what could possibly reproduce it.
The object, he went on to report, was “multi-coloured”, and had a luminous, oval-shaped body. It left, behind it, a “long tube-like orange/red trail”. Allegedly, it split into two pieces, as if it had exploded. Then, each part shone even more intensively, with white, blue and red colours projecting V shaped rays behind it. They quickly moved away and could be seen 200 meters above the ground b& According to the witnesses, the entire display was completely silent. The US Navy officially registered the incident as “a meteor or some other natural luminous phenomenon” according to the report submitted by the Glacier’s captain, Captain Porter.

However, this is a common practice, and has been, ever since the inception of the Unidentified Flying Object cover-up.  This policy of “official denial” and “logical explanation” no matter how far fetched, would seem, has been followed by all branches of the United States Government since the first days after the Roswell Incident, in July 1947. It certainly applies to any sightings or alleged sightings in and around Antarctica...

Villela, on the other hand, easily dismissed the official line.

How could they mistake a meteor with an object carrying antennae, completely symmetrical and followed by a tail without any sight of atmospheric disturbance?

According to most “official” sources... and certainly according to world renowned sceptic and self-styled debunker, Phillip Klaus, this particular episode is a classic example of plasma, however the late meteorologist, James McDonald argued that the highly structured nature of the object and the low cloud overcast present at about 1500 feet were not compatible with Klaus’s hypothesis. The list of sightings in the South Atlantic area is practically endless. It is, and has been, particularly since the end of the Second World War, one of the most active areas on earth with respect to Unidentified Flying Object activity.

Another classic sighting took place on 16 January 1958 when the Brazilian naval vessel Almirante Salddanha was escorting a team of scientists to a weather station on Trindade Island. As the ship approached the island (or rather an outcrop of rock) an Unidentified Flying Object reportedly flew low, over the water, past the ship, circled the island, then flew off in front of dozens of witnesses. One of the witnesses to this particular event, the expedition photographer, took a number of photographs of the object. Later, the film was handed over to the military by the Captain. Amazingly, after the initial analysis, the Brazilian government released the film stating that they were unable to account for the images. 

In official public statements, Argentina and Chile have solidly nailed down the existence of UFO color pictures taken at their Antarctic scientific stations. Adding to earlier press stories, the Secretary of the Argentina Navy confirmed these details:

On July 3, 1965, a giant lens-shaped flying object was seen, tracked and photographed at the Argentina scientific base, Deception Island, in the Antarctic. Lt. Daniel Perisse, C.O., confirmed by radio that the large UFO alternately hovered, then accelerated and manoeuvred at tremendous speeds. While being tracked by theodolite and watched through binoculars, the unknown object caused strong interference with variometers used to measure the earth's magnetic field, and also registered on magnetograph tapes. Color pictures were taken through a theodolite by a member of a visiting group from the Chilean scientific base.”

Also confirming these points, the Chilean Minister of Defence at Santiago added new information radioed by Cdr. Mario Janh Barrera, C.O. of the Chilean base:

On June 18, a similar UFO had manoeuvred over the area, seen by all personnel. During the July 3 sighting, the strange object had caused strong radio interference, temporarily blocking his attempts to report the UFO to the English and Argentina bases. 

In late 1947, only months after the famous Roswell Incident, then Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal  sent a naval task force to Antarctic including Admiral Nimitz, Admiral Krusen and Admiral Byrd, called “Operation Highjump”. It was touted to be an expedition to find “coal deposits” and other valuable resources, but... the facts indicate otherwise... In actuality they were apparently trying to locate an immense underground base constructed by the Germans, before, during and immediately after the Second World War. This base was allegedly located  in Neuschwabenland, an area of Antarctica which Germany explored, and claimed, before the outbreak of the Second World War...  In fact, Germany had done a very detailed study of Antarctic and were alleged to have built a small underground base there before the War.

At this point, one must ask why, exactly, the United States, and, in fact, her allies, suspected that German activity at the pole was continuing, after the conclusion of the Second World War... The answer, quite honestly, has nothing at all to do with Unidentified Flying Objects... That part of the story came to light from a completely different set of sources... The fact is that there was plenty of evidence, at the time, to indicate that as late as 1947, elements of the Kriegsmarine, or German Navy, were still very much active in the South Atlantic, operating either out of South America, or some base, previously unsuspected, in the Antarctic.

They were  thought to be Type XXI U-Boats, with the “snorkel” that allowed them to make the entire passage from Germany submerged and operating out of Argentina, possibly under the Argentine flag, but crewed by German crew. The fact that in the dying moments of the Second World War, ten U-Boats, based in Oslofjord, Hamburg and Flensburg, were made available to transport several hundred German officers and officials to Argentina to found a new Reich is widely accepted. These officers, mostly involved in “secret” projects, and many of whom were members of the SS and Kriegsmarine, itself, sought to escape the “vengeance” of the Allies, and continue their work, abroad. The U-boats were filled with their luggage, documents and, more than likely, gold bullion, to finance their efforts. All the U-boats departed their home ports between 3 and 8 May 1945. They were to proceed to Argentina where they would be welcomed by the friendly regime of Juan Peron and his charismatic wife Eva Peron.

Seven of the ten of the U-Boats, based on the German/Danish border, set off for Argentina through the Kattegat and Skagerrak. None were ever seen again... “officially”.

It has been, however, documented that three of the boats did, in fact, arrive in Argentina... These were U-530, U-977 and U-1238. U-530 and U-977 surrendered to the Argentine Navy at Mar del Plata in early July and August, 1945... U-1238 was scuttled, by her crew, in the waters of San Matias Gulf, off Northern Patagonia. Seven boats are as yet unaccounted for... and... Kriegsmarine archives, recently discovered, indicate that a total of more than forty boats are completely unaccounted for... all of which were late construction, state-of-the-art craft, and could have made either Argentina or Antarctica, completely submerged... and completely unnoticed by existing “allied” technology of the time...  for the entire duration of their crossing

The question arises, of course, why these men would make such a perilous crossing. It must surely be seen as a act of either desperation or fanaticism, or both... and such men as crewed U-Boats were neither. Nor, were the scientists and military officers who were their passengers. The fact is, it would seem that most of those who fled the ruin of Germany to the far South, were scientists and engineers, and their dedication sprang from the project on which they were working... To understand this dedication, it is necessary to go back, before the outbreak of the Second World War, to an isolated section of the Bavarian Alps, It was there, in the summer of 1936, that an Unidentified Flying Object, crewed by a distinctly human, and Aryan appearing race, made a forced landing, very similar to the one which was to occur, some ten years later, in the desert, near Roswell, New Mexico, in the United States.

While the occupants of the two craft were completely unrelated, the technology involved, seems to have been strikingly similar. Also, the outcome of the recovery effort, undertaken by Germany, just as a similar recovery effort was undertaken by the United States, had strikingly different results.

The Bavarian crash of 1936, seems to have yielded an functioning, or almost functioning and repairable (with the technology of the time) power plant, and a nearly completely destroyed, or unrepairable airframe. The Roswell crash resulted in exactly the opposite... a nearly intact airframe and a ruined power plant. Because of this, the German research, which was to follow, took a vastly different turn from that which was undertaken in the United States, some ten years later... Germany needed an airframe which was capable of supporting the “engine” (for lack of a better term), while the United States would eventually need an “engine” capable of giving maximum performance to the airframe.

This, of course, would explain the vast array of “experimental” aircraft... of extremely “unique” design... to literally pour out of the design bureaus of Messerschmidt, Focke Wulf, Fokker and a multitude of smaller firms in the period between 1939 and 1945. The most notable, of course, is the Horten “Flying Wing” which was later copied by the United States, and is, of course, the ancestor of today’s “stealth” bomber and fighter designs... notably, the B-2 Heavy Bomber.

It is also beyond doubt that both Unidentified Flying Object recoveries are the initial impetus for the long standing and ongoing research in “anti-gravity” propulsion seen in work of current aircraft manufacturers such as Boeing and Lockheed in the United States, and PanAvia in Europe.
NAZI UFOS
By the end of 1944 Himmler's SS had taken over complete control of all advanced weapons’ design and most of their manufacturing. This included the so-called super weapons projects (like the V-2 rockets and jet fighter planes), and the numerous underground facilities in Germany and elsewhere, and the associated slave labor camps needed to build them.

Nazi ideology wasn’t limited by the established and conventional sciences as taught in American schools. It is apparent that Nazi technological programs enjoyed a similar leisure. These programs were the fusion of Nazi madness and the mobilization of Germany’s seemingly endless resources of production and radical concept.

One such program, headed by implosion technologist Viktor Schauberger, developed flying saucers and levitating disks. Schauberger (1885-1958) pioneered a new understanding of the Science of Nature, discovering primary laws and principles unacknowledged by contemporary science.

The Allies stumbled upon evidence of the saucer program after the war. At the Peenemünde rocket site, managed by the future head of NASA, Wernher Von Braun, the Allies discovered several photographs of the saucers. They viewed images of the Mercury powered Flugkreisel, and the luminescent mystery spheres labeled by Allied pilots as Foo-Fighters. An article in the May 1980 issue of Neue Presse details the recollection of a German engineer from Peenemünde who worked on the project to develop a saucer craft capable of flying manned with weaponry at 3,000 kilometers per hour. Defecting to the United States after the war, the engineer filed for a patent on a flying saucer of his own design.

From 1947 until 17 December 1969, the United States Air Force actively investigated reports and sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) under a program called Project Blue Book. The project was headquartered at Wright-Patterson AFB. After closing Project Blue Book, the US Air Force has not publicly acknowledged any further interest in UFO sightings. The man in charge of Project Blue Book, Captain Edward Ruppert, said in 1956:

When World War II ended, the Germans had several radical types of aircraft and guided missiles under development. The majority were in the most preliminary stages, but they were the only known craft that could even approach the performance of objects reported by UFO observers.

The Allies felt fortunate for Germany’s timely defeat after examining the evidence from their experimental weapons programs. Sir Roy Feddon, entrusted by the Brits to investigate Nazi aircraft production said:
I have seen enough of their designs and production plans to realize that if they had managed to prolong the war some months longer, we would have been confronted with a set of entirely new and deadly weapons in air warfare.
An early saucer, the long range reconnaissance craft dubbed the RFZ-2, was photographed accompanying the Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean. It is likely that some of these longer range saucers were used to assist the later U-boat missions. Before the production of the Elektroboat -- an electric powered submarine -- the U-boats were required to refuel. The ports friendly to German submarines en route to the South Pole were found in Tierra del Fuego and near the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. From the onset of the Neuschwabenland development, UFO sightings were abundant around these ports and their surrounding areas and in South America persisted for decades afterward.

After Hess’ ill-fated peace mission to England that resulted in his spending the rest of his life behind bars, Admiral Dönitz may have assumed Hess’ role of leading the Antarctic project. While giving a commencement speech for graduating naval cadets in 1944, the Admiral ominously boasted:
The German Navy still has a great role to play in the future. The German Navy knows all the hiding places for the Navy to take the Führer to, should the need arise. There, he can complete his last measures in complete quiet.
NEUBERLIN

If you had been a Wehrmacht soldier at the bombed-out railroad station in Poltava, a city in the Ukraine, during the summer of 1942, you may have seen a very strange-looking military unit on the march, heading for a waiting passenger train. The unit consisted of women, all of them blond and blue-eyed, between the ages of 17 and 24, tall and slender, their sensational figures encased in striking sky-blue uniforms. Each woman wore an Italian-style garrison cap, an A-line skirt with the hem below the knee, and a form-fitting jacket with the insignia of the SS. You might have thought the SS had recruited a platoon of high-class call girls, but the truth was far stranger than that. You would have been looking at Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler's latest brainstorm - the Antarktische Siedlungensfrauen [Antarctic Settlement Women or ASF].

So wrote Russian UFOlogist Konstantin Ivanenko.

From the movie Schindler's List, people have gotten the idea that killing Jews was the Nazis' main concern. But in actual fact, Hitler and the SS were just as ruthless with the rest of the population in their eastern European empire, thinking nothing of shuffling large numbers of people around in their quest for a more perfect Aryan race.

This shuffle was accomplished by a little-known office of the SS called the Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt (German for Race and Settlement Bureau) or RuSHA. In the Ukraine alone, RuSHA drafted 500,000 women for forced labor in the munitions factories of Nazi Germany,

It was RuSHA which selected women for Himmler's unit of Antarktische Siedlungsfrauen (Antarctic Settlement Women) About half of the "recruits" were Volksdeutsch--ethnic Germans whose ancestors had settled in the Ukraine in the Seventeenth and Eighteeneth Centuries. The others were native Ukrainians whom RuSHA had "upgraded" to full Aryans. This process was called Eindeutschung (Germanization).

Ivanenko  claimed that as many as 10,000 Ukrainians with acceptable racial purity (out of the more than half a million Ukrainians deported during the war) were transported, not to munitions factories in Germany, but to the German Antarctic!

According to Ivanenko, There is increased popularity for the idea of a 'German-Slavonic Antarctic Reich.' It is said that 10,000 of the 'racially most pure' Ukrainians, out of half a million deported in 1942 by Martin Bormann, were transported to the German Antarctic bases during World War II, in the proportion of four Ukrainian women to one German man.

If true, this would mean that Himmler transferred 2,500 Waffen-SS soldiers, who had proven themselves in combat on the Russian front, to Station 211 - now Neuschwabenland - in Antarctica. This may be the source of the myth of the "Last SS Battalion."

An ASF training camp was set up in Estonia, on a peninsula near Ristna on Hiiumaa Island in the Baltic Sea. It was a combination finishing school and boot camp, where the ladies took lessons in charm and housekeeping along with their courses in polar survival. Himmler kept the camp's existence a closely-guarded secret. For "unhappy campers," the only escape consisted of a one-way train ticket to Auschwitz.

[There is one known instance of an ASF "deserter." In 1943, Auschwitz guard Irma Griese, 22, the off-and-on girl friend of Dr. Josef Mengele, took to wearing a sky-blue ASF uniform, which she had scavenged from a pile of inmate clothing. Griese was hanged in 1946 for war crimes. The uniform's original owner must have had serious second thoughts about a permanent move to Antarctica].

The failure of Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz's U-boat offensive by May 1943 freed up dozens of "milk cow" U- boats. These were large submarines, almost as big as tramp steamers, which Dönitz had used to supply his U- boat "wolf packs" in remote seas of the world. Himmler now put them to work carting supplies and personnel to Antarctica.

Himmler's rationale for sending thousands of settlers to Antarctica can only be understood within the context of his mystic beliefs. As a result of his youthful reading of New Age books, his association with the occultist Dr. Friedrich Wichtl, and his membership in the Artamen, Himmler became a believer in the Hindu concept of world-ages or yugas. He believed that the current age, or Kali Yuga, would end in a global cataclysm, thereby giving birth to a new world-age called the Satya Yuga. By sending a Nazi colony to Antarctica, Himmler was ensuring that a remnant of the "pure Aryan race" would survive the coming cataclysm with its society and culture intact. They would then take possession of Antarctica when the cataclysm melted the south polar ice cap.

According to believers, the Neuschwabenland colony survived not only the end of World War II, but a full on battle with the 3,500 Marines and aircraft of Operation High Jump.

In 2003 Ivanenko wrote:

The total population of Nazis in Antarctica now exceeds two million and that many of them have undergone plastic surgery in order to move about with greater ease through South America and conduct all manner of business transactions.

He called the Antarctic Reich "one of the most militarily powerful states in the world because it can destroy the USA several times over with its submarine-based nuclear missiles, remaining itself invulnerable to U.S. nuclear strikes because of the two-mile-thick ice shield." Further, he claims that the city of Neu Berlin, the colony's capital, sprawls through "narrow sub-glacial tunnels" under an unnamed mountain range, heated by "volcanic vents." The ufologist also makes the claim that Neu Berlin adjoins "the prehistoric ruins of Kadath, which may have been built by settlers from the lost continent of Atlantis well over 100,000 years ago."

Still other fringe researchers claim that the actual ruins of Atlantis have been found -- and possibly reoccupied - under the Antarctic ice. Some say that Atlantis is located near one of the 70 or so warm water lakes that have been discovered miles beneath the Polar Ice Sheet, such as Lake Vostok near the Russian base at the Pole of Inaccessibility.

Another of the oft made claims about Neuberlin is that the city has an Alien Quarter, where Pleiadians, Zeta Reticulans, Reptoids, Men In Black, Aldebarani and other visitors from the stars dwell.

The Nazis were working on some very advanced aircraft, some of which may have been capable of leaving the earth's atmosphere. Some researchers are convinced that the Nazis did indeed make it to the moon, and even Mars. Could they have made contact with space aliens once they left the earth? Or, could their rockets, foo-fighters and disk aircraft have attracted aliens to visit them?

A claim floats around in modern U.F.O. lore that an extraterrestrial craft with anti-gravity propulsion crashed in the Schwarzwald in the summer 1936, and was recovered by the Nazis who back-engineered it, thus explaining their flying saucer program.

This parallels stories of a similarly recovered crashed "saucer" near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, the American back-engineering of which supposedly led to the discovery of the transistor (patented by Bell Laboratories the following year), fiber-optics and other exotic technologies.

Ivanenko reported that talk about the Antarctic Reich is "becoming more and more popular" in Russia, Poland, the Ukraine, Belarus and other countries in eastern Europe. He writes, In the May 10, 2003 issue of the  Frankfurter Allgemeine, Polish journalist A. Stagjuk criticized Poland's decision to send troops to Iraq" to assist with the Allied occupation. "At the end, he said, 'The next Polish government will sign a treaty with Antarctica and declare war on the USA.'"

Ivanenko added that Stagjuk's words were broadcast on the shortwave radio station Deutsche Welle the same week. Some analysts compared this sentence to famous code phrases which started wars in the Twentieth Century, such as ' Over all of Spain, the sky is cloudless' in 1936, and 'Climb Mount Niitaka' in 1941. ("Climb Mount Niitaka" was the signal Admiral Yamamoto sent to Kido Butai, the Imperial Japanese Navy's fleet, to begin the attack on Pearl Harbor.)

Lake Vostok, about the size of Lake Ontarioin Canada, is about 2km below the surface ice. It contains life forms that are not known anywhere else on the planet and is at a relatively comfortable temperature of between 50 and 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Not bad considering the surface temperature is about -60 degrees F.

In 1998 NASA and JPL were involved in a scientific operation to drill into and explore Lake Vostok. Their stated objective was to train astronauts for future missions to the frozen moons of Jupiter. It seems that in 1998 the chances of any manned craft getting to Jupiter in the life time of the men being trained was not very likely.

In February, 2001, all drilling and scientific work at Lake Vostok was abruptly ceased. NASA and JPL stated that they were vacating the area and abandoning their research. They just up and walked away from billions of dollars worth of equipment. Why? Because they were concerned about damaging the natural environment. Since when has NASA had a 'Green' conscience? However, they didn't leave the base unattended. As they walked out, the NSA walked in.

Many other strange events happened around the same time. Extraordinary and unprecedented emergency airlifts were made to evacuate ill personnel during the dead of the six-month winter. Scientists discovered massive magnetic anomalies beneath the ice at Lake Vostok. Three of those same scientists died in 'accidents' before they could leave Antarctica. Another technician apparently "became insane" and was evacuated to New Zealand. This is after the hitherto lucid, rationally-minded man publicly broadcast news of large UFO's at McMurdo Base.

What could have caused them to stop? One site believes that a civilization from Mars is below there. Iit’s just as likely this could be the Nazi base that was constructed in the war.

It is strange to think of a large population living under the ice of Antarctica, totally divorced from the "mainstream" world. Then again, there are Jivaro indigenous people living on Lago de Yanayacu (lake), less than 50 kilometers (30 miles) east of Iquitos, Peru, who have never heard of Courtney Love. So, is there a city under the ice inhabited by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original SS settlers? Or is it just an urban legend stemming from the chaotic conditions that prevailed in Europe during World War II?  What, if anything, did Admiral Byrd encounter in 1947?

Some day we may know for certain.
THE BATTLE FOR NEUSCHWABENLAND

Most of the rumors about the alleged German colony in Antarctica agree that Station 211, if it really existed, was located inside a prominent ice-free mountain in the Mühlig-Hofmann Mountains of Neuschwabenland (Queen Maud Land).

In 1947, Admiral Richard E. Byrd, America’s most recognized polar explorer,  led what was, basically an invasion of the Antarctic, and at least one follow-up expedition. That is fact. It is undeniable. But... the part of the story that is seldom told, at least in “official” circles, is that Byrd and his forces encountered heavy resistance to their Antarctic venture from “flying saucers” and had to call off the invasion. This aspect of the story was pushed forward, again, a few years ago, when a retired Rear Admiral, allegedly living in Texas, who had been involved in the “invasion”, said he was “shocked” when he read material from a documentary, entitled "Fire from the Sky. He allegedly claimed that he knew there had been “a lot of aircraft and rocket shoot-downs”, but did not realize the situation was as serious as the documentary presented it.

Operation “High Jump”,  consisted of three Naval battle groups, which  They were led by Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s command ship, the ice-breaker “Northwind,” and consisted of the catapult ship “Pine Island,” the destroyer “Brownsen,” the aircraft-carrier “Phillipines Sea,” the U.S. submarine “Sennet,” two support vessels “Yankee” and “Merrick,” and two tankers “Canisted” and “Capacan,” the destroyer “Henderson” and a floatplane ship “Currituck.”
Some 13 ships and 4,700 men, which included an aircraft carrier, a submarine, two destroyers, more than two-dozen aircraft and some 3,500 Marines in full battle gear were sent by the United States to Antarctica on what was officially described as a “training” mission,  departing from Norfolk, VA, on 2 December 1946.

Thus Operation Highjump, began...  The expedition was filmed by the Navy and brought to Hollywood to be made into a commercial film called The Secret Land. It was narrated by Hollywood actor Robert Montgomery, father of Bewitched star, Elizabeth Montgomery, who was, himself, an officer in the Naval Reserve.

It seems incredible that so shortly after a war that had decimated most of Europe and crippled global economies, an expedition to Antarctica was undertaken with so much haste (it took advantage of the first available Antarctic summer after the war), at such cost, and with so much military hardware - unless the operation was absolutely essential to the security of the United States.

At the time of the operation, the US Navy itself was being taken apart piece by piece as the battle-tested fleet was decommissioned with its mostly civilian crew bidding farewell to the seas forever. The Navy was even reduced to further recruitment to man the few remaining ships in service.

Tensions across the globe were also mounting as Russia and America edged into a Cold War, possibly a Third World War that the US would have to fight with “tragically few ships and tragically half trained men.” This made the sending of nearly 5,000 residual Navy personnel to a remote part of the planet where so much danger lurked in the form of icebergs, blizzards and sub-zero temperatures even more of a puzzle. The operation was also launched with incredible speed, “a matter of weeks.” Perhaps it would not be uncharitable to conclude that the Americans had some unfinished business connected with the war in the polar region. Indeed this was later confirmed by other events and the operation’s leader, Admiral Richard Byrd, himself.

The official instructions issued by the then Chief of Naval Operations, Chester W. Nimitz were: to (a) train personnel and test material in the frigid zones; (b) consolidate and extend American sovereignty over the largest practical area of the Antarctic continent; (c) to determine the feasibility of establishing and maintaining bases in the Antarctic and to investigate possible base sites; (d) to develop techniques for establishing and maintaining air bases on the ice, (with particular attention to the later applicability of such techniques to Greenland) and (e) amplify existing knowledge of hydro graphic, geographic, geological, meteorological and electromagnetic conditions in the area.

Little other information was released to the media about the mission, although most journalists were suspicious of its true purpose given the huge amount of military hardware involved. The US Navy also strongly emphasized that Operation Highjump was going to be a navy show; Admiral Ramsey’s preliminary orders of 26th August 1946 stated that “the Chief of Naval Operations only will deal with other governmental agencies” and that “no diplomatic negotiations are required. No foreign observers will be accepted.” Not exactly an invitation to scrutiny, even from other arms of the government.
Yet persistent rumors insist that the actual purpose of Highjump was to find, and if occupied, engage the Nazis in their fortress.

Some facts, however, are well known...

The baker’s dozen of ships in Byrd’s flotilla arrived at three different rendezvous points in the Southern Ocean inside the Antarctic Circle, spread out over more than a month, with the first to arrive dropping anchor on December 30, 1946.

The plan was for the main body of men and equipment, the Central Group, to go to Byrd’s Antarctic “home,” Little America on the Ross Ice Shelf, where they would set up a base camp. There would be two other groups of ships, each group composed of a seaplane tender, a destroyer and a tanker. One group would begin to the east of the central group, the other to the west.

The Central Group consisted of the Mount Olympus, a communications vessel; two supply ships, the Yancey and the Merrick; two icebreakers, the Burton Island and the Northwind; and a submarine, the Sennet.

The East Group, under the command of Captain George J. Dufek, would start on the opposite side of the continent from the base camp at Little America. It would be East Group’s task to begin their mission by reconnoitering Dronning Maud Land, the Norwegian name for the area called Neuschwabenland by the Germans. They began to the east of Neuschwabenland and swung around west, photographing all of the former Deutsch Antarctica in the process. The East Group consisted of the seaplane tender Pine Island, the destroyer Brownson and their refueling ship the Canisteo.

The West Group, under Captain Charles A. Bond, was made up of the Currituck, a seaplane tender, the Henderson, a destroyer, and the Cacapon, a tanker. They in turn began in the center and ended their voyage half-way around the Antarctic continent at Dronning Maud Land, completing the circle.

Bringing up the rear was the brand new aircraft carrier the Philippine Sea with Admiral Byrd on board. She had been finishing up a shakedown cruise near Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, when her orders came in to participate in Operation Highjump. A hasty trip north returned her to harbor at the Norfolk Navy Base in Virginia. It would take a month to complete the preparations for her 10,000 mile voyage to Antarctica.

Since she would be going through the Panama Canal, changes had to be made in the hull and flight deck structures. Dug at the beginning of the 20th Century, the canal can only accommodate small to moderately sized ships. Today’s giants of the sea - supertankers, container ships, and the floating cities that are modern carriers - are forced, like sailing ships of old, to go around the Horn.

Soon piles of crates burdened the docks around the Philippine Sea as over one hundred tons of miscellaneous equipment and supplies arrived and waited to be loaded. Several helicopters landed on the flight deck and were secured for the trip.

Then came the biggest of the problem children, six R4D transport planes. These were military versions of the famous DC3. They were far too large to land on a WWII era carrier, and could only take off from one with the assistance of rocket engines affixed to their sides. The landing field was over a mile from the dock, so a path from airport to quay had to be cut right through the middle of the naval base. Drivers had to "pilot" the planes through that narrow pathway, with sailors sitting on the wings to prevent a sudden burst of wind from picking the plane up and hurling it against the sides of buildings, fences or machinery. Often the wingtips came within inches of disaster.

Last aboard the Philippine Sea was Admiral Byrd, just hours before shoving off. Shortly after noon on Thursday, January 2, 1947, with Admiral Byrd on the bridge, the Philippine Sea slowly pulled away from the pier as bands played and the local command saluted farewell.

The Central Group had reached their designated rendezvoused point in Antarctica three days before the Philippine Sea even left port, arriving at Scott Island on December 30, 1946. That is, all except for the icebreaker Burton Island. She was also on a shakedown cruise when tapped for the mission. The Burton Island would leave its west coast base late and arrive in the Southern Ocean last of all – indeed, she got there just in time to go home when the hasty retreat was called, as we shall see in a moment.

The first “casualty” of Byrd’s War was the submarine, the USS Sennet. The ships of the Central Group followed the icebreaker Northwind through the pack ice into the open waters of the Ross Sea. The official story is that the ice proved to be too dangerous for the sub, which was towed back to Scott Island. Some researchers have speculated that she actually hit German anti-submarine defenses. From the Ross Sea she went to New Zealand for repairs then headed back to home base, the Balboa naval facility in the Canal Zone. The remainder of the group reached the Bay of Whales on January 15.

Over the following two days, landing parties went ashore and selected a location for their base camp. Once a site was chosen for Little America IV construction began immediately. A wide assortment of vehicles were soon off-loaded and put to use building three compacted snow runways and a short airstrip made of steel matting, as well as preparing the ice surface for their tent city (which also boasted a single Quonset hut). The heavy machinery used included tractors, jeeps, “weasels,” bulldozers and other tracked equipment.

The second “casualty” and the first official fatality occurred on January 21. The victim was a young sailor named Vance Woodall, from the supply ship Yancey. From one account of the incident:

The D6 tractors were proving too heavy to ride on top of the snow that lay on the surface of the bay ice. In order to gain sufficient towing purchase, the drivers had to let the steel treads plow into the snow until reaching the hard ice. As a result, one tread would often grip the ice before the other, throwing the tractor violently from side to side until both treads took equally. The official accident report states that Woodall unfortunately caught both his right arm and head in the slats of the roller just as the tractor suddenly lurched ahead. Woodall's spinal column was severed "high in the neck" and the navy veteran of only seven months died instantly.
Four days later a very displeased Admiral Byrd arrived. The Philippine Sea rendezvoused with the Central Group on January 25 near Scott Island. Four days later, on January 29, the first two R4D's successfully took off for the dangerous flight to Little America -- with Admiral Byrd aboard the first plane aloft. By January 30, all six R4D's had arrived safely. With that the carrier's objective had been completed. Too big to return to the carrier the R4Ds were simply going to be left behind at the end of the mission. The Philippine Sea promptly put her stern to Antarctica and made all possible speed for home, arriving back at Quonset Point, Rhode Island on February 28.

From their base at Little America the six R4D’s flew scores of mapping flights deep into the heart of the frozen continent, including several over-flights of the South Pole. Meanwhile their colleagues, in the PBM “flying boats” launched from the seaplane tenders in the East and West groups, flew mapping missions all along the Antarctic coast.

In all over 73,000 photographs would be taken. But what should have been a mapmaker's dream turned out to be a cartographic nightmare. Only a few thousand of the photographs were of any value due to lack of adequate ground control points. Without known locations to mosaic the images around, all they had were meaningless pictures of ice. Or so it was claimed.

The following year a much smaller expedition, called Operation Windmill, was launched to get these needed coordinates. Some researchers have suggested that Windmill’s real purpose was to see if Station 211 were still occupied, and the need for ground control points was a literal “shore story”.

Not that the photo mapping went that well for the crews of Operation Highjump. All three groups were plagued with bad weather: fogs, low ceilings, dense clouds in the upper atmosphere, strong winds, and so on, but The Western Group had it the worst, spending whole weeks without getting a plane in the air.

The most remarkable happening from the Western Group was the discovery of “Bunger’s Oasis.” As one Antarctic chronicler put it:

On either January 30 or February 1 (the record is unclear), PBM pilot Lieutenant Commander David E. Bunger lifted from the bay and headed south for the continent some hundred miles distant. At this time the USS Currituck was off the Shackleton Ice Shelf on the Queen Mary Coast of Wilkes Land. Reaching the coastline, Bunger flew west with cameras humming. Suddenly the men in the cockpit saw a dark spot come up over the barren white horizon and as they drew closer, they couldn't believe their eyes. Byrd later described it as a "land of blue and green lakes and brown hills in an otherwise limitless expanse of ice.

Bunger and his men carefully inspected the region and then raced back to the ship to tell the others of their discovery. Several days later Bunger and his flight crew returned for another look, finding one of the lakes big enough to land on. Bunger carefully landed the "flying boat" and slowly came to a stop. The water was actually quite warm for Antarctica, about 30°, as the men dipped their hands in to the elbow. The lake was filled with red, blue and green algae which gave the lakes their distinctive color. The fly boys "seemed to have dropped out of the twentieth century into a landscape of thousands of years ago when land was just starting to emerge from one of the great ice ages", Byrd later wrote. Byrd called the discovery "by far the most important, so far as the public interest was concerned of the expedition.

Dr. Paul Siple, Admiral Byrd’s closest friend who had accompanied him on all of his polar expeditions, including this one, later commented that discussions between the expedition’s scientists as to the nature of "Bunger’s Oasis" had hardly even begun "before the eleven press representatives aboard the USS Mount Olympus had fired off dispatches to the outside world describing the oasis as a 'Shangri-La' and implying that it was warmed by a mysterious source of heat and might be supporting vegetation". Does “Shangri-La” and “a mysterious source of heat” sound familiar? Officially, because of the brackish nature of Bunger’s water sample, "Bunger’s Oasis” was dismissed as being an inlet of the sea.

It was the Eastern Group, flying over Neuschwabenland, who would suffer the next, and last officially recorded fatalities. The official story was that one of their PBM “flying boats” named George One struck the top of a mountain and went down, killing three. What happened is here described by one of the survivors, radar operator Jim Robbins:

My radar had nothing to see except the top of the mountain range peaks that had rugged terrain with good reflective surfaces. They were 15 miles away as indicated on my radar. This agreed with our very erroneous charts and we were still fogged in flying at 800 ft (mostly below the weather) and about to turn back as there was no CAVU over the coast as indicated by the crew on George One's earlier flight. Before we had a chance to turn around, we hit a bump that caused an explosion. We had torn a hole in the hull and hull gas tank which caused the 145 octane to come pouring out. The engine exhaust flames set it all off immediately. Probably the biggest airplane explosion ever, back in 1946! The entire hull completely disintegrated! Most of us were thrown out in the same general direction from the flight deck. Two of us went through the propellers and died instantly.

Bill Kearns was blown right through the windshield in front of the co-pilot's seat, Warr was blown way down the hill behind us. It was snowing like the devil! Williams was seated next to our flight engineer Warr, watching the instrument panel with him. After the explosion we found him beside the flaming fire pit and internally hurt very seriously, bleeding from the mouth and nose. He died a couple of hours later. The photographer, McCarty had been sleeping in the tunnel by his trimetrigon camera and tunnel hatch. He was evidentially thrown around in there (the tunnel section remained pretty well intact and became our foul weather home). Frenchy was left hanging by his seat belt in the flames caused by the remaining fuel from the hull tank still burning. Our honored guest observer, the Capt. of the USS Pine Island, sea plane tender super deluxe, was strapped into a very special new bow seat that replaced the old bow turret. It was encased in a clear plexiglass dome with the most beautiful possible view ever! He was blown right through it. He appeared to be in fairly good shape except for his nose which was obviously badly broken. We later noted that he had a bad limp.

The Duluth, Minnesota News-Tribune for January 2, 2005, ran the story: “Navy tries to find plane lost in Antarctica 58 years ago" on page 7A that read, in part:

On November 27, 2004, the Navy undertook the initial flight...to try to locate the wreckage of the George 1, the plane that crashed in 1946. The search flight was a joint one, conducted aboard a Chilean Navy Orion P-3 aircraft with a Chilean crew and NASA scientists working together.

“This wasn't just a routine task for us,” said Capt. Christian Aldunate, the senior Chilean pilot on the recovery flight. “It was a challenge to find clues that could help locate the plane, even though we knew it would be almost impossible to get at it because of the ice and snow that had piled up over so many years."

During an 11-hour flight from and back to Punta Arenas, in the extreme south of Chile, the search plane dipped as low as 500 feet (150 meters) over Thurston Island so scientists could use radar and laser beams to try to locate the remains of the U.S. Navy PBM (Martin) Mariner seaplane.

"Even today it's not easy, but we can rely on information from satellite photos, GPS systems and wind predictions,” Aldunate said, referring to global positioning networks. “But from the time they took off until the time they arrived in the area, they had no idea what to expect."

Though little known in the outside world, the three men who died in the (1946) crash--Wendell K. Hendersin, Maxwell Lopez and Frederick Williams--are still celebrated in Antarctica as heroes.

At McMurdo Station, a U.S. research base on the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf, there is a plaque to honor the four men who died on Operation Highjump, the first Americans to die on any of Byrd's many expeditions.

Admittedly, the official record of the operation doesn’t sound much like a report from a war zone. Yet there have been persistent rumors of pitched battles, massive casualties, planes shot down, and more. All just wild tales? If so, why did Captain Richard H. Cruzen, the operational commander of the expedition order an abrupt end to the mission after just eight weeks, when they had enough provisions for 6 to 8 months in the polar region?

In the end, the task force came steaming back to the United Sates with their data, which then, immediately became classified “top secret”. Secretary of the Navy (by this time, Secretary of Defense) James Forrestal retired... and started to “talk”.... not only about Highjump, but about other things, as well... He was put in Bethesda Naval Hospital psychiatric ward where he was prevented from seeing or talking to anyone, including his wife... and...  after a short while he was thrown out the window while trying to hang himself with a bed sheet. So the story goes... It was, of course, ruled a suicide, case closed. However, some of what he knew... about Highjump... about Roswell... and other things... did manage to “leak”... How much is truth, how much is speculation is difficult to tell. However, in every “myth” there is a grain of truth...

This much is certain... As incredible as it may sound, there is considerable supporting evidence for these claims about a German base in Antarctica... On the very eve of the Second World War, the Germans themselves had invaded part of Antarctica and claimed it for the Third Reich.

Did Byrd, and perhaps the George One, encounter Nazi disk aircraft?

In 1947, the prestigious Chilean newspaper El Mercurio carried an article from its correspondent Lee van Atta aboard the support ship Mount Olympus. The title of the article was: Admiral Richard E Byrd refers to the Strategic Importance of the Poles. It has often been alleged that this item never appeared and is fiction, but now we have the cutting in question, and so it exists. In the past it has often been misquoted in translation by occult enthusiasts, the usual interpolation in the text being "flying objects" having the ability "to fly from pole to pole at incredible speeds".

The article reads in true translation as follows:

Admiral Byrd declared today that it was imperative for the United States to initiate immediate defence measures against the possible invasion of the country by hostile aircraft operating from the polar regions. The Admiral stated: - 'I don't want to frighten anyone unduly but it is a bitter reality that in the case of a new war, the continental United States will be attacked by aircraft flying in from one or both poles.' - As regards the recently terminated expedition, Byrd said that the most important result of the observations and discoveries made is the current potential effect which they will have on the security of the United States.

Since Admiral Byrd was subsequently appointed Officer-in-Charge US Antarctic Programs, it is fair to assume that he was never at any time certifiably psychotic.

The statement, which was never denied by the US Government, gives rise to a number of interesting questions:

(1) Why was the 1947 Antarctic Expedition terminated after only two months? What "observations and discoveries" did he make?
(2) Why did the Admiral make his statement at a Press conference before his return to the United States when the information he had was a matter he considered vital to the country's national defence, and he was bound by his office to report in the first instance to his superior, USN Secretary Forrestal?
(3) From where did he obtain the idea of "hostile aircraft" operating from Antarctica and the Arctic? [Not "operating from" - It says "the continental United States will be attacked by aircraft flying in from one or both poles" i.e. coming OVER the poles from the USSR. There was during the 50's and 60's and perhaps during the latter 40's a general perception that if the US and the Soviets went to war Soviet bombers and missiles would come in over the North Pole; a trans-polar route tends to be shorter than a great circle route for certain flight paths. Since many ICBM's can achieve low orbit they could easily come in over the South Pole as well it would just take longer. Hence the construction of the radar and BMEWS lines.]
(4) How many "hostile aircraft" would it take to actually invade a country the size of the United States?

The matter was never mentioned again officially but there are two points we might like to bear in mind. These are the mental breakdown and mysterious suicide of USN Secretary Forrestal at Bethesda Naval Hospital, believed to be linked to Admiral Byrd's report and the spate of sightings of strange unidentified boomerang-shaped aircraft "with the ability to materialize and dematerialize at will" which were reported on numerous occasions to overfly USAF force bases during the early summer of 1947 and which are mentioned in a declassified USAF document drafted in August 1947.
Admiral Byrd  in March 1955 was placed in charge of Operation Deepfreeze which was part of the International Geophysical Year, 1957-1958, exploration of the Antarctic. He died, shortly thereafter... in 1957... many have suggested he was murdered...

When the Antarctica mystery is mentioned, Britain is never given more than a footnote. That fact is surprising in itself, especially as British forces were active in Antarctica throughout the war and quite possibly took the initiative in dealing with the Antarctic Nazi threat a whole 12 months before Operation Highjump was initiated.

Britain's activities on Antarctica, though less documented and more clandestine, are just as intriguing as the supposed much vaunted Operation Highjump. Unfortunately for Britain, though victorious in the War, it was bankrupted and humiliated by the two new superpowers. But Britain was in a position to regain some pride and surreptitiously upset its supposed allies with the final, decisive battle against the surviving Nazis: a battle that would never be recorded in the history books; a battle that would make its claims on the continent more legitimate; but, most importantly, a battle that ended the war that it had been compelled to wage.

What does help substantiate their story is the little known fact (which Pravda reported on 16 January 2003) that, in 1983, Special Services seized a confidential letter that Captain Schäffer wrote to "Captain Bernhardt", and in the letter Schäffer pleads to Bernhard not to publish his memoirs in too profound a detail and, in fact, states his intent for the world not to know the truth:

We all made an oath to keep the secret; we did nothing wrong: we just obeyed orders and fought for our loved Germany and its survival. Please think again; isn't it better to picture everything as a fable? What results do you plan to achieve with your revelations? Think about it, please.

The missing U-boats were part of the Antarctic jigsaw puzzle that Britain had been putting together since the Nazis first sent Admiral Ritscher on his Thule sponsored polar mission. And with Britain's Intelligence network - the SOE (Special Operations Executive) and the SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) providing virtually all the information to the Allied Forces via the Enigma machine and its immense European spy network during the War, the picture was appearing slowly.

One prime example of Britain's Intelligence excelling was in how much Britain knew about the Nazi's secret atomic weapons programs which, in turn, helped the RAF bomb the Nazi's secret research station at Peenemünde in the Baltic Sea. The Germans were at a loss to how the British had even heard about it, let alone been able to bomb it.

An East German source who had served in the Kriegsmarine and has first-hand accounts about Neuschwabenland, claimed:

Neuschwabenland, after Europe, was in ruins and Norway, completely in German hands, became the only viable base of operations. When it was decided that for the German nation surrender was best, those who could, left, and took their chances in the U-boat convoys.

Antarctica was a secret but rumors persisted, and only for the most dedicated was it a haven. Most of those with any intimate knowledge of Neuschwabenland did not see the end of the war, and of those who did, the majority were executed, committed suicide or were sent to the Russian gulags... Only those captured by the British forces fared better, but after interrogation were forbidden to mention their wartime exploits again. The threat of having damaging wartime links brought up kept the Germans silent and helped the Allies suppress the truth.

From 1941 until the start of the British/Swedish/Norwegian Expedition of 1949–52, Britain sent at least 12 official missions to Antarctica, half of them between the end of the war and the beginning of Operation Highjump, led by Admiral Byrd, starting in December 1946. Even more intriguingly, Britain sent no missions from the commencement of Highjump until 1948, during which time the US had Antarctica all to itself. Britain nonetheless was more active in Antarctica during the 1940s than any other nation, yet the only Antarctic mission mentioned in depth by historians is Admiral Byrd's. His mission still overshadows every other mission and is the main focus of attention for many conspiracy theorists. Britain's exertions were and still are totally overlooked; and with Admiral Byrd spreading misinformation, the true conspiracy concerning Antarctica as a Nazi haven was forgotten.

In the UK, British Intelligence unearthed more of Norway's secrets but suppressed them; Antarctica was no exception. When the Norwegian Government returned to a liberated Norway, Antarctica soon returned to their consciousness, though the Norwegians would have to wait several years to go back there, lest the rumors of a Nazi base were true.

On the other hand, Britain decided it had collated enough knowledge about Antarctica to initiate an intense investigation, one that had to dispel all fears and hide all evidence, for it could not tolerate any more technology or personnel being acquired by the wrong hands, namely, the USSR and the USA.

Britain had helped liberate Norway and, as 1945 was drawing to a close, was in the process of "liberating" Queen Maud Land (the new atlas of the post-war world no longer recognized Neuschwabenland). However, the mysterious wartime expeditions conducted by all the combatant countries, especially Germany, were not entered into the World War II history books. A travesty of history had occurred.

The Nazi "Shangri-La" did exist. Of unknown size, it was set up during the 1938–39 Deutsche Antarktische Expedition. The existence of a Nazi Antarctic base hidden in vast caverns was considered feasible enough for the British to set up bases in many parts of Antarctica during the war in response to the threat. And whilst the officially recorded British expeditions mainly concentrated around the Antarctic Peninsula, those not recorded were those that concentrated on investigating Queen Maud Land, so named by Norwegian whalers prior to 1939 in honor of Queen Maud of Norway (1869–1938), consort of King Haakon VII and formerly Princess Maud of the United Kingdom, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria.

Britain's arrogance in committing troops to Antarctica, independent of the United States, and in celebrating the feat with the release in February 1946 of a provocative stamp set, would inevitably lead to Britain's claims on Antarctica being contested, even though the stamps commemorated Britain's final fight with Nazism rather than being a statement of its Antarctic claims. And even though Britain expressed outrage publicly when Highjump was launched, it was just a pretense: privately, Britain knew that the USA's newfound superpower status meant that it would not permit Antarctica to be utilized by other nations for financial gain.

The USA, distracted by the war against Japan and the brewing Cold War, had been caught short by Britain's Antarctic exertions and humbled by its aggressive stance. So the Americans soon adopted a policy, dreamt up during the war, that would destroy Britain's imperial aspirations, hinder every attempt by Britain to exert any influence around the world and make the country an "ally" in name only. However, as early as 1942, Britain and British identity were suffering as a result of the United States' globalization agenda. It must be remembered that Britain was denied its own atomic bomb, despite the fact that the bomb could have not been created without British expertise. Furthermore, the British people faced worse rationing than any other Western nation, lasting direfully until the 1950s, and Britain was also pressured into giving full independence or self government to most of the territories in its Empire.

So, whilst Britain went into World War II a superpower, by the end of the war and by the actions of American foreign policy, especially Operation Highjump, it had been put firmly in its place. The United States became the only country that could successfully influence Britain, as the 1956 Suez crisis proved. Even now, 60 years after the end of World War II, British blood is still being shed on behalf of US foreign policy.

Britain halted its Antarctic flights and operations for two years, giving the United States a free hand in Antarctica with the commencement of Operation Highjump. With the Nazi haven destroyed, there was little need for the British to return: the Americans would not discover anything that had not already been discovered. Or would they?

In the two years they had to discover as much about Antarctica as possible, the Americans found dry areas and warm water lakes that provoked immense media interest, but Operation Highjump, which they'd planned to last for six months, ended after just eight weeks. They received a hostile reaction from other nations, but it was only after the mission's return that the rumors and theories began to abound and the enigma surrounding Highjump really began.

In the years prior to the June 1961 ratification, the USA, UK and USSR had all used Antarctica for military purposes and all three nations were rumored to have tested nuclear bombs on the continent. On 27 and 30 August and 6 September 1958, at least three such bombs were detonated in Antarctica, allegedly by the Americans. Rumor has it that they were set off in the area of Queen Maud Land and were triggered 300 meters above the target, with the initial aim being to "recover" frozen areas. The locations of other bomb detonation sites have been firmly suppressed, but it is believed that the areas reconnoitered by the Germans in 1939 and 1940 were targeted.

With the Germans and Americans officially claiming to have found warm water lakes on their expeditions, it was only a matter of time before more were discovered. One such lake, discovered by the Russians, is Lake Vostok, which is 4,000 meters below the surface and curiously is located under the Russian base camp of Vostok. News of the discovery was not released to the world until 1989, so had the Soviets found the subterranean lake years earlier and was this their main reason for refusing to leave its base? The lake has still not been investigated, mainly out of fear of what could be unleashed and to avoid contamination of the lake, although a huge magnetic anomaly has been identified.

Subterranean lakes with signs of life, geothermally warmed lakes in dry valleys in a supposed frozen wasteland, viruses that threaten mankind, mysterious holes in the atmosphere allied with suppressed military ventures may seem the work of fiction, and yet they are all fact! Antarctica is a truly mysterious place, and that is why it is inconceivable that the Nazis would claim an area and leave it unoccupied and undefended,...

Whether the British mission did destroy the Nazi base, with any remaining Nazis finally being expunged by the atomic force of the wartime allies, is not the question that needs asking. What is, though, is just how much of Antarctica's past, present and, indeed, its future has been, is being and will be suppressed?

When the United States returned to Antarctica some twelve years later, it did so once again with force, this time, nuclear force, and once again, under the cover of an "international cooperative effort," the International Geophysical Year of 1957- 1958.

This means that if there were indeed Germans on a secret base somewhere on that frozen continent, they had some twelve years to do whatever they were doing. In terms of the Nazi legend, supposedly they were busily perfecting their strange wartime research.

In any case, as Henry Stevens points out, this period, from 1947 to 1957-58, is in fact the "golden age" of the flying saucer, encompassing the Kenneth Arnold sightings, the alleged Roswell UFO crash and recovery, to the famous "buzzing" of the Capital and White House by UFOs that supposedly made even the unflappable Harry Truman anxious. Stevens further speculates on the possible motivation for the UFO overflights of sensitive areas of Washington DC:

Was this overflight in retaliation for the Byrd overflight of the German base in Antarctica and designed to show the Americans they had no control over their own airspace?

Stevens offers no evidence for this speculation. Supposing Stevens is correct for the sake of argument, then suffice it to say that overflights of the American capital by Nazi flying saucers so long after the war's end would certainly have shaken the national security apparatus of the United States much more than overflights by apparently benign extraterrestrial ones, and the response would have been to clamp the lid down on government research of the phenomenon, exactly as happened, since the supposedly defeated enemy was not, if this is true, really defeated after all.

The famous 1952 Washington DC sightings prompted a nervous and unconvincing Pentagon press conference - the only one ever given by a general officer from the Pentagon - on the subject of UFOs. Under the cover of the geophysical year, the United States again sent a naval task force to the Antarctic. The use of military force – including atomic weapons! – was "covered" by the ridiculous story that the USA and USSR, in a rare moment of nuclear cooperation during the height of the Cold War, were interested in seeing how much of the continent could be "recovered" for use by warming it with nuclear explosions! Accordingly, it would be necessary to explode a few small nuclear "devices" for above the continent to warm and melt the ice as a proof of concept! As Stevens aptly quips, "You already know exactly where in Antarctica they planned to explode these atomic bombs."

Three bombs were thus detonated at an altitude of approximately 300 miles above the target, one on August 27, 1958, one on August 30, 1958, and a third on September 6, 1958. Additionally, perhaps it is possible that one atom bomb from each of the world's then nuclear powers, the US, the USSR, and the UK, were used.

If these bursts were indeed intended secretly against an actual target, then why so high? Stevens hypothesizes that they were to knock out any German equipment in the region by the strong electromagnetic pulse that results from a nuclear detonation. Stevens also notes that these bursts may have something to do with the "ozone hole" over the South Pole and the US government's reluctance to discuss the idea or the events that may have caused it.

While this is a plausible explanation if the intention were to occupy the alleged base via a ground assault or assaults within the time frame of the bursts, no such contingent is known to have accompanied the small armada of two destroyers, two destroyer escorts, and a small aircraft carrier. However, this explanation does bear some weight in connection with the allegations of the capabilities of German bases at the other pole. With the Geophysical Year expedition of 1958's atomic detonations, the alleged German base on the Antarctic continent fades, the Germans themselves supposedly gradually evacuating it during the interim period from Byrd's expedition to the final coup de grace for more favorable climes in South America. There the case for Nazi survival and continued research becomes much stronger.

A Secret U.S. Post Office operated in Antarctica 1946-1948 causing speculation about the real reason behind two concurrent U.S. expeditions... Finn Ronne was a Norwegian immigrant who later joined the United States Navy and was a member and officer in Admiral Byrd's earlier expeditions to Antarctica. In 1946-8, he led a privately-financed expedition to Antarctica, following upon the heels of Operation Highjump.  Ronne's expedition was to the Marguerite Bay area, where he reoccupied Byrd's 1939 Base.  One of the most important results of this expedition was a showing that the Antarctic Peninsula was connected to the rest of Antarctica, thus solving one of the last great public mysteries of the continent.  Writing in his book entitled Antarctic Conquest, he stated: Although no one knew it, I had been operating a United States Post office too, but for reasons of state (emphasis added) had been compelled to keep it secret. Secrecy seems to be in no scarcity as it relates to several Antarctic expeditions; perhaps in no small way due to a continued concern that the Nazis had a remnant left in Antarctica from their infamous 1938-9 "New Schwabenland" colonization of Antarctica. The web is abundant with sites setting forth information about suspected and actual German involvement in Antarctica possibly dating back even to the late 1800's.   It does make one wonder if there were in fact, covert or as they say today, "black-ops" reasons for one or more of the Byrd Expeditions (including Operation Highjump for this discussion) as well as the private expedition of Captain Ronne. Many online sources are available with information concerning what I has been dubbed the "Byrd Conspiracy", which was not a conspiracy by Admiral Byrd, rather what may have been an apparent conspiracy by the government to keep particular information that he had uncovered during Operation Highjump as a secret.  However, lending credence to this conspiracy theory is the observation that Admiral Byrd does in effect seem to "disappear" from public view shortly after his return from Operation Highjump in 1947-- until approximately 1955 when he organized Operation Deep Freeze I,  and he was reported to have been hospitalized (in a mental ward) shortly after his return in 1947.  This forced hospitalization is said to have came upon the tails of Byrd having made some remarkably candid comments (which included what smacked of being a description of a UFO) to a South American newspaper about what he had found during Operation Highjump.  His disappearance from the scene after his arrival back in the states, would make it appear he may have been promptly squelched!  Remember that this time period coincided roughly with the Roswell UFO sightings.  Operation Highjump would have been first, early in 1947, and then Roswell to follow in the summer of 1947.  This was a situation that was the last thing the government would have wanted, another military official (in this case a quite prominent and popular man who had spent years criss-crossing the United States giving lectures and whose word would have been quite respected and accepted) who apparently reported having seen/and or believing in UFOs!!  NOTE:  If Op HJ had continued to its full expected duration of six to eight months, they would have still been in Antarctica at the time of Roswell.  The expedition headed back to the U.S. in early 1947, well short of its expected ending.  Some would say "limped back", after suffering great losses of personnel and equipment.  The official record only sets forth a limited loss of life and aircraft, but conspiracists feel the record has been doctored or we are not being told the full story.   Contrast this lack of public accessibility after Operation Highjump, to the previous well-known availability of Admiral Byrd in the period following his first two Antarctic Expeditions, where there are documented philatelic items from cities all over the country serving as commemorations of where Byrd visited lecturing to the public about his travels in Antarctica.   That Byrd loved to travel and lecture about his polar explorations is quite evident.  The polar regions and his expeditions were his very reason for existence; he had said from the time he was a child that he felt destined to be a polar explorer.  He had a passion for all things polar, especially exploration, that could scarcely be contained.   Operation Highjump was at least as important in many respects, it would appear, as his previous expeditions... so where was he after his return?  Where did he go?  Was he locked away so he couldn't share the story of what he really had found in Antarctica?  As some theorists suggest, during Operation Highjump, did he encounter and engage Nazi forces operating from bases that lodged advanced aircraft with advanced propulsion systems? Many think so..... The little tidbit mentioned above that Ronne forked us in his book, only begins to tell us why the Oleana Base, Antarctica postmark is one of the rarest polar cancels that exist.   With this being the first American post office established on the Antarctic continent, it is a shame that the cancel was not used more often.  Is there perhaps a larger reason why this post office was kept secret?  We do know that many countries, including Britain, had concurrent secret bases and or expeditions in the same general time period, notably Port Lockroy on the Antarctic peninsula.  Port Lockroy was part of a top secret World War II British expedition called Operation Tabarin. Operation Tabarin was the beginning of Britain's permanent presence on the Antarctic continent, and was built to serve as a southern outpost and to keep an eye on suspected Nazi presence on the ice.  In a 2001 BBC interview, one of the last remaining survivors of that secret expedition, Gwion Davies, noted that the posting of mail from their secret base was a way of their laying claim to, or establishing that section of Antarctica as British sovereign territory.  In other words, just as the Nazis are known to have dropped metal dart/ markers with the Third Reich Swastika emblem over a large area of Antarctica during their expedition in 1939, to act as a laying of a claim; for any country (such as Britain) to have a post office that actually accepted and postmarked mail definitely shows an intention on their part of not only establishing a base, but of staying. While the United States did not then, and does not now, recognize any country as having specific territorial claims upon Antarctica, for Ronne to have allowed his expedition members to have open mailing of letters from Oleana Base would have served a similar purpose as with Port Lockroy, but for some reason, he would not allow that to be done.  Why?  Some mail did escape, and other mail from members of the Ronne Expedition is known to have been posted from nearby British bases.  The posting of mail often serves a geo-political purpose in addition to the simple fact it carries mail back home to loved ones; and it is a great curiosity to many polar philatelists and followers of Antarctic history that it was not done in this instance.  The full story about the existence of the post office (as well as even greater secrets?) may have passed with Captain Ronne. The "Holy Grail" of Antarctic Covers The Oleana Bay covers are most commonly seen with a date of March 12, 1947, which was the date the expedition arrived at Marguerite Bay, Antarctica. In this instance, the cover illustrated above is extraordinary in that it is on a printed envelope from the Byrd II Antarctic Expedition, postmarked with the less common hand cancellation from that mission; then repostmarked at Oleana Base in 1947, with the addition of Captain Ronne's "corner card" and the IGY Ellsworth Station octagonal cachet, and the best part of all, Ronne's signature in which he adds the word "Postmaster", rounding it out to make a splendid cover!

The Blohm & Voss BV222 sea plane had a range of approximately 3,800 miles, well within flying distance from Travemünde (on Germany's northern Baltic coast) to the eastern coast of Greenland. A number of U-boats operated in Greenland waters and as the giant flying boats used 2-stroke diesel engines refueling from U-boat was perfectly feasible. Also there are upwellings of warm water around Greenland which stay ice free year round suitable for water landings. Furthermore Enigma signals decoded at Bletchley Park revealed that the Abwehr (German secret service) sailing vessel Santa Barbara was positioned in the mouth of the Orinoco River. Santa Barbara was the former French Lobster sailing yawl Passim from the Bay of Biscay and had done several trips to Argentina during the war. It is perhaps even possible that a BV222 could reach the Orinocco River directly from a Bavarian lake. In O"Donnell's book The Berlin Bunker Hitler's pilot Hans Baur was quoted from interviews saying he could have flown Hitler out until the very last day, but Hitler was determined to stay and kill himself. Also Albert Speer said Baur did have plans to do so on 28/29 April 1945 An article appeared in a German newspaper in the 50s reminiscing about long range flights to Japan by Junkers Ju-290 aircraft. Ju 290 aircraft were converted to civilian airframes with extra fuel capacity and these were transferred to Deutsche Lufthansa (DLH) during the war. These aircraft flew from Bulgaria to Yin-ch'uan also known as Ninghsia, which is 540nm west of Beijing. The same article also refers to flights by BV222 aircraft in Lufthansa registrations to Sakhalin Island which was then part of Japan. It may be fair to surmise therefore that Hitler's pilot Hans Baur planned to evacuate the Führer to Japan via a refueling stop at sea with a U-boat near Greenland. One rather secretive U-boat the U-534 was often posted to perform weather duties near Greenland, but was in the Baltic at the time. Other U-boats often landed spies in Canada. At any given time late in the war there was usually one U-boat performing weather duties near Greenland. From there Sakhalin was probably within range of the BV222. In his memoirs Hans Baur insisted Hitler could have been evacuated as late as 28 April 1945. An article in Aerospace Historian, XXXV, No. 2 (Summer/June 1988), pp. 111-16 debunks the myth of Ju 290 flights to Japan/Manchuria. A Ju-290 could in theory fly one way to Manchuria, and such flights were at one time envisioned. The story got started through disinformation provided by a captured German serviceman, Unteroffizer Wolf Baumgart, which was duly recorded in Ninth Air Force A.P.W.I.U. Report 44/1945. As well, research by Günther Ott, the leading authority on the type, has established the careers and fates of all these long range modified aircraft and ascertained that no such flights were actually carried out. A German navigator has described for the first time a daring plan by the Nazis to evacuate their surviving leaders by flying boat to Greenland at the end of the Second World War. The plan, which was scuppered by the German surrender, would have involved Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler and other senior figures taking off from north Germany to continue their struggle from abroad. Hitler himself was determined not to leave Berlin, where he eventually committed suicide.The Greenland operation has been revealed by Captain Ernst König, 93, who had previously been determined to keep the story secret until after his death. He was persuaded to speak earlier this month by friends in Britain. The last-ditch mission described by König also involved an attempt to pick up a copy of the Führer's will from Berlin, but this had to be abandoned because of heavy Russian fire. . . Terry Charman, a historian at the Imperial War Museum in London, said he believed König’s story was credible and was backed up by incidental details revealed by other Germans. From Times of London Magnetstromapparat Entitled "The Invention of Hans Coler, Relating to an Alleged New Source ol Power," B.I.O.S. Final Report no 1043, Item No. 31, Summer 1946, this report consists of tests and findings on two strange circuits conducted at the University of Berlin between the World Wars under the auspices of none other than Dr. Winfried Otto Schumann, discoverer of the Schumann resonance of the earth. The hexagonal construction of coils and magnets and two "rotating" sub-circuits had absolutely no source of power. Yet, to the mystified Coler and Dr. Schumann, it nevertheless managed to produce, or better, transduce power seemingly... from nowhere. The device attracted the immediate attention of the German Navy, which classified it as a possible source of quiet and limitless energy for submarine propulsion. Coler's Magnetstromapparat did not give the Kriegsmarine a gravitic "free energy" battery for their U-boats, and little is known how much farther the Germans took this device, or for that matter, how far the British took it for the two decades and a half after the war that they had to work on it until its declassification. What is unusual is that Dr. Schumann was involved with secret German research on "batteries" as late as 1943, and was subsequently brought to the United State as part of Operation Paperclip.

Spitzbergen, Greenland, and Arctic Canada: The Other German Polar Survival Myth

The Western Allies, the Russians, and the Germans all relied heavily on weather reports to plan and execute their campaigns, and for this purpose, accurate up-to-the-minute reporting on Arctic conditions was crucial. To this end it is not surprising to find the Germans in particular  special commando units - usually Waffen SS - to operate independently in Spitzbergen Island north of Norway, in Greenland, and in Arctic Canada. Such teams were delivered to their operational areas via U-boat. Spitzbergen in particular seemed to trade hands between the British and the Germans, as each side mounted commando operations to destroy the other's weather stations and listening posts.

On one such occasion, the most famous perhaps, the German battleship Tirpitz, sister ship to the Bismarck, sailed to the island where one such British station was operating, leveled her 15 inch heavy guns at it, and promptly dispatched it, no doubt to the complete shock and surprise of the British manning it. Other allegations have a secret German weather base and listening post operating in Franz Josef Land, the islands to the north of Finland and the Soviet Union. However, with the allegations of German bases in Greenland, one again enters the realm of the surreal.

These bases were allegedly comparatively large, as were the contingents of Germans operating them. While they were supposedly known by the Greenlanders and occupying American forces, most efforts to find them ended in failure. One postwar German source places as many as three independent SS battle groups (Kamfgruppen) operating in Greenland, under the code name of Thulekampfgruppen (Thule battle groups). The connection to the occult interests of the Third Reich are once again in evidence. Predictably, these "Thule battle groups" become the subject of another series of survival legends, as former SS officers supposedly reported seeing U-boats loaded with rates designated "Thule 1 K" and so on departing Germany in the final days of the war.

Sworn to secrecy by the SS, the "clear implication is that the 'Thule 1 K' is the Thule Kampfgruppe 1" and that it had "no intentions of surrender; and that there was still a mission to accomplish. The Americans, so the story goes, were unsuccessful in locating the bases for two reasons: the area was too large, and the bases were "like the German fortifications built in Neuschwabenland...tunneled deep underneath the glaciers of ice (into presumably solid rock) and that they were bored to a length of 2000 meters." [O. Bergmann, Deutsche Flugsheiben und U-Boote Überwachen die Weltmeere.] This allegation is surely implausible, since the transport of sophisticated mining and boring equipment, let alone enough explosive, for such a task by U-boat would have been an enormous undertaking, one quite beyond the labor capabilities of small SS battle groups – consider the fact that the huge underground factories in Germany were built over several months by thousands of slave laborers working around the clock with the best available existing mining and tunneling technology.

But this is not the end of the surreal aspects of the story. Should the bases have been detected, they were supposedly defended with exotic electromagnetic weapons, one of which had a short range, but that could cause the ignition of aircraft engines to fail completely. After the war, the Vienna Wiener Montag reported in its December 29, 1947 edition that Eskimos reported to American authorities that an SS battle group of fully 150 men had been encountered. The number 150 is realistic for a battle group, but quite below the labor requirements for the construction of such large bases. Besides these allegations of large bases and battle groups and exotic weaponry, there is a similar account circulated by the distinctly pro-Nazi novelist Wilhelm Landig in his 1971 novel Götzen gegen Thule, a novel he billed as "full of realities" (voller Wirklichkeiten), of a large German base in the Canadian Arctic, near the magnetic North pole. This base, he alleges, was serviced by the German military using special long-range aircraft and, of course, flying saucers! As if that were not enough, Landig maintains that these aircraft were not equipped with normal machine guns or cannon for their defensive weaponry, but utilized a Metallstrahl, essentially an electromagnetic "rail gun" used to propel tiny pellets with extreme velocity, a kind of hyper-velocity shotgun that would more than rip apart any Allied aircraft, and do so at great distances.

All of these allegations would remain merely fanciful if it were not for the discovery by American UFOlogist William Lyne - himself definitely outside the "mainstream" of the UFOlogy community - of a piece of German equipment that, quite literally, he bought at a second-hand store in White Sands, New Mexico! [Lyne is the author of a rather extraordinary book of UFOlogy - a field in which the extraordinary seems to be the norm - called Space Aliens from the Pentagon, the main theme of which is his adamant insistence that UFOs are entirely terrestrial and man-made, and being used to advance a fictitious "alien agenda" and psychological operations campaign. Lyne, notwithstanding the more often than not unbelievable aspects of his book, was, in addition to Stevens, one of the few UFOlogists to take the Nazi origins myth of UFOs seriously prior to the publication of Nick Cook's The Hunt for Zero Point.

The unusual thing about this piece of equipment was not only its circular central Swastika - a clear reference to the occult Thule Gesellschaft since that version of the Swastika appeared on its emblem - but also its designation as a Peiltochterkompass, a "daughter compass." Investigating this strange piece of equipment further, Lyne concluded that it was no ordinary compass, since it appeared not to operate by any magnetic means, which might explain how it ended up in White Sands, New Mexico! Lyne and his mysterious compass even became the subject of an article in a local American newspaper. Why is Lyne's find so important to the allegations of Nazi bases in the Canadian Arctic that were being supplied by long range aircraft? Very simple. If there were ever any truth to the allegations of German bases in these heavily forested regions, then normal magnetic compasses would be of virtually no use for navigation purposes in the region, since standard compasses are notoriously inaccurate at the polar regions with solar energy cascading down and causing local disruptions of the magnetic field. Some other method, therefore, had to be found to orient aircraft for safe navigation. Landig alleges that this was done by means of a compass that oriented itself to the sun by reading polarized light, rather than magnetic field lines. Lyne therefore seems to have found some version of this compass in an area of America known for its secret research laboratories some twenty years or so after Landig's surreal allegations first appeared! But according to Landig there is even more to consider, for according to him the German base in the Canadian Arctic was actively researching and developing so-called "free energy" devices, devices that would tap the so-called "zero point energy" of quantum mechanics.

In this connection, the research was allegedly carried out under the auspices of the SS Entwicklungstelle IV, or SS "Developmental Installation IV," an entity, if it existed at all, that would have fallen under the mission brief and jurisdiction of Kammler's SS Sonderkommando, for it was responsible for "research into making Germany independent of foreign energy sources." So with Landig's fantastic allegations, we come full circle back to the exotic energy sources, the technologies, the occult, and the SS research being conducted by Nazi Germany. To summarize the accumulated allegations and evidences:

(1) Fact: The Germans undertook an expedition to Antarctica whose hidden purpose was clearly military in nature, since one cannot imagine the likes of Reichsmarschall Göring sponsoring an expedition for any other purpose
(2) Fact: The United States on two separate occasions over the wide time-frame of eleven to twelve years undertook two large military expeditions to that continent, both under appropriate cover stories for mapping (the 1947 Byrd expedition, Operation Highjump, and for the 1957-58 Geophysical Years (to study the effects of atomic blasts on Antarctic weather!)
(3) Fact: Admiral Byrd, the leader of the first American expedition, was recorded in a South American newspaper as warning of "enemy" aircraft capable of violating American airspace with ease, and of flying form either polewith tremendous speed
(4) Fact: The German Navy showed great interest in the "free-energy" ideas and coils of Hans Coler, for the ostensible purpose of creating a means of submarine propulsion that would allow German U-boats to stay submerged more or less indefinitely
(5) Fact: Admiral Byrd's diaries and logs from his expedition are still classified
(6) Fact: Coler's inventions were highly classified by the German Navy, and later by the British, who only declassified them over thirty years after the war's end
(7) Fact: The Germans had also apparently contrived a sophisticated compass for possible use in polar regions by aircraft, and possibly by other less conventional aircraft
(8) Fact: the alleged time span of the German Antarctic base's survival is coincident with "golden age" of the UFO, from the Arnold sightings, the Roswell Crash, up to and beyond the great 1950s Washington DC UFO flap
(9) Fact: SS General Dr. Ing. Hans Kammler had assumed total control of all the Third Reich's secret weapons research by the end of the war, a position which would have made him privy to the German Navy's research
(10) Fact: It is evident from the movements of General Patton's divisions in the closing days of the European war that Kammler's SS secret weapons empire was the deliberate, and principal, target of these military operations
(11) Allegation: Grand Admiral Dönitz on more than one occasion alluded to the role of the German U-boat fleet in the construction of secret bases in polar regions
(12) Allegation: These bases were staffed by SS troops, and presumably technicians conducting ongoing secret research into "zero point energy" or "free energy"; (13) Allegation: Said research fell under an SS entity called S-IV, recalling Kammler's S-III
(14) Allegation: These bases were said to be defended by exotic types of weaponry, including electromagnetic "rail guns" to devices that could interfere with and halt standard electrical engine ignitions systems
(15) Allegation: There were secret SS teams working on "areas of physics" even more exotic than atomic and thermonuclear energy
(16) Allegation: There is a connection to Nazi occult interests in the polar regions via the myth of the pre-war occult Thule Society(Thulegesellschaft)
(17) Fact: The highest levels of the SS were initiates into Himmler's occult inner circle at Wewelsburg, making it likely that Kammler himself was such an initiate
(18) Fact: The 1944 German atom bomb test at Rügen took place at a location with its own occult pedigree and significance for the pre-war Germanic, and very occult, Order of the New Templars

What emerges from this list is disturbing indeed. Clearly, a prima facie case can be made that the Nazi leadership had invested significant resources in the investigation of any and all avenues to power, occult and otherwise, and to new sources of energy. And equally clearly, the Nazi leadership was willing to think "outside the box" and to go to any lengths - often quite literally - to research those matters. What also emerges from this list is a preoccupation with areas of physics, and areas of the globe, almost completely neglected - at least publicly - by the wartime Allies. Moreover, what also emerges is a disturbing sense, that maybe, just maybe, there was something to the survival myths after all, for one thing seems clear from the pattern of events after the war, particularly in respect to Antarctica: such myths were inevitably connected to the exotic research pursuits the Germans were conducting, and such myths seem clearly to have been the hidden motivation for American counter-strikes.

So...  who was the enemy that owned or flew these flying objects? Germany was apparently defeated, and there was no evidence that the new emerging enemy, Russia, had such superior technologies. They were, like the United States, only on the verge of the “rocket age”, and totally dependent upon technology, and expertise captured from Germany at the end of the War. There was no other known threat could that could account for the United States’ invasion of Antarctica nor for the development of any craft that could fly “fly from Pole to pole with incredible speeds.” Of course, the Roswell Incident had been in the news the past summer, but.. it had been “officially” explained, and hushed up by the time Highjump began.
Rumours began to circulate that even though Germany had been defeated, a selection of military personnel and scientists had fled the fatherland as Allied troops swept across mainland Europe and established themselves at a base on Antarctica from where they continued to develop advanced aircraft based on extraterrestrial technologies. It is interesting to note that at the end of the war the Allies determined that there were 250,000 Germans unaccounted for, even taking into account casualties and deaths. This would be quite a population base for a fledgling colony, and provide the essential degree of skill, expertise, and pure manpower for an industrial base of any sort, let alone the production of, even by today’s standards, extremely high technology.

All Unidentified Flying Object researchers are, of course, aware of the multitude of reports concerning sightings of ‘flying saucers’ with Swastikas or iron crosses on them, ‘aliens’ speaking German, etc. Most have also heard of abductees who have been taken to underground bases with swastika emblems on the walls, or as in the case of noted abductee Alex Christopher, have seen “Reptiloids” and “Nazis” working together aboard antigravity craft or within underground bases. Barney Hill was apparently, not the only one to describe the so-called “Nazi” connection to Unidentified Flying Object abductions. However, reports such as Christopher’s and Hill’s must be taken with a rather large grain of salt...

According to paranormal investigator Alan DeWalton:

One thing that Admiral Byrd stated in a press conference after his defeat at Antarctica was that the Antarctic continent should be surrounded by a "wall of defense installations since it represented the last line of defense for America."

Although the U.S. and Russia had been allies during the war, suddenly the "Iron Curtain" was created and we and the Russians became enemies.

Both the Soviets and the United States ringed the poles with defense and detection bases, and in between was the barren no-man's-land of the poles where absolutely nobody lived, or did they? Could it be that we pretended we were protecting against the Russians and they pretended they were protecting against us, while really we and they were both scared of what was in between us -- the Nazi Last Battalion?

Another claim which has been made by some investigators, although the original source is difficult to track down, was that upon returning to the States Admiral Byrd went into a rage before the President and Joint Chiefs of Staff (some versions of the story say he was testifying before Congress) and in an almost demanding tone, strongly “suggested” that Antarctica be turned into a thermonuclear test range. Urban Legends add that shortly after Byrd’s demand to nuke the Nazis in Antarctica UFOs buzzed the Capitol. It has been conjectured by some that the UFOs were Nazi craft from Antarctica warning the US of their power to retaliate should Byrd’s recommendation be acted on.

No evidence of Byrd’s alleged testimony to Congress has been found, but he was debriefed by the President, and the records of that debriefing are still sealed. UFOs were seen over the Capitol twice, once by day and later again that night. They were witnessed by thousands and were duly reported in the nation’s press. Unfortunately, they were sighted in 1951 long after Byrd’s return, and still nearly two years after Operation Windmill. It seems unlikely that there was any connection between these events.

After Highjump and Windmill, the Antarctic was literally crawling with expeditions. Although the Americans stayed away from Antarctica for the next decade, expeditions were launched by more than a dozen nations in the next few years. if there had been a Station 211 it was surely abandoned long before the International Geophysical Year (1958-59) that saw the greatest number of non-German visitors to Antarctica up till that time.

While there is, still,  no conclusive evidence of a German base on Antarctica, It is beyond doubt that something highly unusual was happening on, or around, the frozen continent. In general, it appears that the probability for such a base to have existed... and perhaps continue to exist, to this day, are rather high... The evidence, a large volume of it, is there for all to see...

1.  The Germans explored and claimed part of Antarctica on the very eve of the war when the vast majority of their activity was geared towards the rebuilding of the German economy and military infrastructure. 2. There was ongoing ship and submarine activity in the South Atlantic and polar regions throughout and after the war had apparently ended. This activity continued well into the 1950s, and if some accounts are to be believed, continues to this day, with what can only be considered U-Boat sightings, and a very high incidence of Unidentified Flying Object sightings in the South Atlantic and South Polar regions, including the Southern portions of South America. 3. The US literally invaded the continent of Antarctica, itself, with considerable naval resources leaving mainland America exposed and vulnerable as the world edged into the Cold War. The task force limped home as if defeated only weeks later, and the local South American press wrote of such a defeat. This coincided with a substantial increase in Unidentified Flying Object activity... generally attributed to the first major “wave” of such activity in modern times, with an inordinate amount of this activity taking place in the Southern Hemisphere, particularly in South America.
4.  Admiral Byrd spoke of objects that could fly from pole to pole at incredible speeds being based on Antarctica.
5.  Hundreds of thousands of Germans and a minimum of forty (40) U-boats were missing at the end of the war. Documentation and eyewitness accounts prove that at least a portion of these craft made it as far as South America, in some cases, several months after the end of the war in Europe.
OF THE HOLY LANCE: THE HARTMANN EXPEDITION

The recounting of the legend of the Spear of Destiny in SECRETS OF THE HOLY LANCE: The Spear of Destiny in History & Legend began and ended in 1979 with the recovery of the Holy Lance from the ice of Antarctica by the “Hartmann Expedition.” The retelling of that event was an admitted fiction, blending the material from Col. Buechner and Capt. Bernhart’s books with the authors' own research into Station 211. As a literary device each chapter in the book begins with a fictionalized reenactment of the most important scene in it, opening with the Hartmann Expedition’s exploration of a long abandoned Station 211 and final discovery of the treasure they sought. Besides its obvious cinematic value,  the story of the Lance began and ended in 1979 because if at least partially true then the Spear of Destiny is not an object on display in some museum, or holed up in some church, but is actually an active player on the world's stage. “The destiny of the world for good or evil” may again be in one man’s hands!

The late Dr. Howard A. Buechner’s books are based on the evidence provided him by a former German U-boat submariner who claimed to have helped take the Holy Lance to Antarctica in 1945 and to have helped the Hartmann Expedition recover it in 1979. As the co-author of Buechner’s books he wrote under the pseudonym of “Capt. Wilhelm Bernhart.” Capt. Bernhart provided Dr. Buechner with what was claimed to be the log of the Hartmann Expedition, including a hand-written letter of authenticity signed by “Hartmann,” also a pseudonym, and photos of some of the objects recovered.

Col. Buechner and Capt. Bernhart avoid mention of Station 211 though. Instead, Buechner and Bernhart tell us that the submarine crew in 1945 placed Hitler’s treasure at the foot of an unnamed glacier in the Muhlig-Hofmann Mountains, dug in and protected with steel plates. The submarine then proceeded to Mar del Plata, Argentina where it surrendered some months after the war’s end. At least the mysterious surrenders of two such subs to Argentine authorities in July and August of 1945 can be confirmed.

In Adolf Hitler And The Secrets of The Holy Lance Col. Buechner and Capt. Bernhard detail how the Hartmann Expedition came about. It began, they wrote, in 1969 when Rudolf Hess was taken to a British hospital for the treatment of ulcers. Several days later an ex-crew member of U-boat 530, one of the subs that had surrendered at Mar del Plata after the war’s end, received the key to a bank box in Switzerland. This box led to another where a number of sealed envelopes were found, along with a large amount of liquid assets. The message had been signed “H.”

The sealed envelopes in the Swiss bank were opened by the former U-530 crewmember. He was instructed to contact and deliver the contents of the box to the man whom Hitler had personally entrusted with sending some of his most prized possessions, including the Holy Lance, to Antarctica. In Buechner and Bernhard’s books he would only be identified as “Colonel Maximilian Hartmann” a name they admitted to being false. Hartmann did not leave Germany at the end of the war, but he saw to it that senior officials, like Martin Bormann, Hitler’s personal secretary, and the Reich treasurer Hitler had entrusted to him got out in two or more subs in the final days of the war. This group of subs, somewhere between three and twelve in number, have often been referred to as the “Führer Convoy.” It was part of the northern “Rat Line” that helped escaping Nazis – and may have conveyed the Führer himself!

The sailor did as instructed, passing the envelopes to Colonel Hartmann. In the first one Hartmann found a coded message from Professor Karl Haushofer. Haushofer was to the Third Reich what the Rev. Billy Graham has been to the last several American Presidents, and then some. More than confidant, Haushofer actively molded the thinking of the Nazi inner core. His beliefs were part of the motivation for the Nazi search for the Ark of the Covenant and Agharta, the mystical realm of enlightened beings who lived inside the hollow earth! Decoded, his message revealed the exact location of the bronze boxes Hartmann had sent to Antarctica aboard a submarine so many years before.

The second envelope instructed Hartmann to recreate Himmler’s Knight’s Grand Council, only this time the knights were to dedicate themselves, and use the power of the Holy Lance, for the purpose of world peace. The organization was also to be called by a new name, Knights of the Holy Lance.

The third envelope contained a very large sum of money. With it Hartmann set about the task of creating the Knights of the Holy Lance and preparing to recover their mystic talisman, the Spear of Destiny. As Buechner and “Bernhart” put it:

In 1974 the Order of the Knights was reorganized by a former German army officer named Colonel Maximilian Hartmann, but now the group had a vastly different purpose. This time there was no ancient castle for a meeting place. The military uniforms had been replaced by business suits and guns had given way to briefcases. Violence had disappeared and the wisdom of negotiation had taken its place.

While the major objective of their new direction was the attainment of world peace, or so we are asked to believe, they also put the reunification of their homeland as a central goal. Of overriding importance was the need for the power and guidance of the Holy Lance. They believed that there was little hope of success without it. The recovery of the Lance became their first objective. They knew that a secret expedition to Antarctica would be a Herculean task and that the cost would be incredible, but they were determined to succeed.

The Log of the Hartmann Expedition as quoted from and explained by Buechner and Bernhart details a long and somewhat implausible series of changes of planes, boats and finally a helicopter to arrive in Antarctica. Although Buechner seemed to accept the authenticity of the log your authors had a hard time swallowing it. Frankly, it reads like poor amateur fiction. Still, what would you expect from an aging businessman writing in German, then translated into English by an equally aged German sailor who picked up English as a second language? We suspect the narrative was laced with misdirections and half-truths to prevent anyone from identifying those involved – assuming it happened at all of course.

Finally Col. Hartmann arrived in Antarctica aboard a helicopter with three other Knights of the Holy Lance. They located and removed the steel plates placed over the entrance to Lance’s hiding place and found a steel lined tunnel leading into the mountain. Quoting from the expedition’s log we read:

Our lights penetrate the steel tunnel which extends for approximately ten meters. When we arrive at the end of the tunnel, we find ourselves in a huge cavernous area. It seems warm. As we search the cavern with our lights, we notice frozen pillars of ice in strange and grotesque shapes. We penetrate into the cavern the distance of about 300 meters. It is at this point that we came to a smaller cavern which turned towards the right and ended in a room approximately 80 meters in width and ten meters in height. It is here that the Reich treasures are hidden!!!

At this point stands a small obelisk about a meter in height which marks the spot. There is an inscription which reads as follows:

There are truly more things in heaven and ‘in’ earth than man has dreamt of (Beyond this point is AGHARTA) Haushofer, 1943

Our lights immediately fall upon the treasure which consists of eight large bronze chests. This makes two for each man and will require two trips. Can we do it? This remains to be seen. Each one of us grasps a bronze box in his hands.

Hartman was soon disappointed to realize that the weight of the boxes, in total, is too heavy for his team to carry back to their waiting helicopter. Four of the boxes had to be left behind. Hartmann continues:

The trek back is energy consuming and difficult. We stop to rest several times along the return route. The chests are growing heavier and heavier as we go along. We have to stop and rest more frequently. Finally we reach the [helicopter] just as complete exhaustion is setting in. After one more brief rest, we begin our task of loading the bronze chests aboard. Lothar and Heinz remove the extra fuel supply cell after pumping its contents into the main benzene tank... Bits and pieces of unnecessary gear are discarded. The loss of weight will compensate for the extra cargo. Eight chests would have been an impossible load.
Shortly before we are ready to leave, the chest containing the Holy Lance is opened. We all watch with profound fascination as Klauss knocks the bronze pin from the clasp. Inside the chest is a faded leather case along with a variety of other items. We carefully open the case. It is there! the Holy Lance! the lance that pierced the side of Our Lord Jesus Christ! The oil torch we have lit … makes it seem like a ceremony. I hold the Holy Lance aloft in my hand. Without thinking, the words seem to flow from my mouth, “the Holy Lance points ever towards our eternal Deutschland.”
Buechner and Bernhart wrote that from Antarctica, Col. Hartman and his team made their way back to their starting point in Brazil, where papers were obtained for the Holy Lance, declaring it an art object. This enabled them to slip it through customs with little or no difficulty. Most of Hartmann’s team returned to Germany, and their everyday lives as successful but otherwise unremarkable businessmen.

Col. Hartmann, however, went on to the United States. There he met with a former crewman from one of the submarines that, perhaps, Admiral Dönitz had used to ferry material and personnel to Station 211. Buechner and Bernhardt claim that Col. Hartmann left certain items with this seaman, including a copy of the log of the Hartmann Expedition and a signed, handwritten letter of authenticity. Hartmann then departed, taking the Spear back to Germany.

Iif true, then the Spear of Destiny is not an object hidden in some church or displayed in a musty museum but is in the hands of men who mean to alter mankind’s destiny with it - for good or evil?

WHERE IS THE HOLY LANCE NOW?
Buechner was sure that the Spear is now held in the protective custody of these Knights of the Holy Lance. It would seem that their plan is working, for indeed, Germany is again reunited as a single, and very great, nation. Buechner died believing that these modern knights were guarding the Spear, preventing it from ever again falling into the wrong hands. Are they? Perhaps only time will tell.

There really should be quite a bit about this little piece of trivia from the Nazi era that, supposedly, goes back to the time of Christ. It is better known, however, as the Spear of Longinus. It was named after the Roman Centurion that pierced the side of Christ with his lance during the Crucifixion. The tip of the lance, the spear-point, is all that remains of this relic. In Germany, it was known as the "Heilige Lance".

It has quite a myth that has built up around it. Supposedly, the holder of the Lance cannot be defeated in battle. This is why, perhaps, the first thing that Adolph Hitler did upon entering Austria was to go to the museum, where it was then housed, to claim it for himself.

An interesting sidebar to this story is that, after the war, the lance was found in a secret cache under a bank in Nuremberg, Germany. At the time, no one could identify this relic or it's significance. No one except none other than General George Patton. As many know, Patton was extremely well versed in history and, of course, aspects of all things military. I wasn't surprised that he would know of a relic that promised the holder victory in battle.