In its article on Antarctica, Brisant asked why the Operation Highjump assault force docked near the German-claimed region of Neu Schwabenland on 27 January 1947, why it then divided into three separate task forces and, most importantly, why there had been so many foreign press reports that the operation had been a disaster. Harbinson writes:
That expedition became something of a mystery. Subsequent official reports stated that it had been an enormous success, revealing more about the Antarctic than had ever been known before. However, other, mainly foreign reports suggested that such in fact had not been the case: that many of Byrd’s men were lost during the first day, that at least four of his airplanes inexplicably disappeared, and that while the expedition had gone provisioned for six to eight months, the men actually returned to America in February 1947, after only a few weeks. According to Brisant, Admiral Byrd later told a reporter (I could find no verification on this) that it was ‘necessary for the USA to take defensive actions against enemy air fighters which come from the polar regions’ and that in the case of a new war the USA would be ‘attacked by fighters that are able to fly from one pole to the other with incredible speed.’ Also, according to Brisant, shortly after his return from the Antarctic, Admiral Byrd was ordered to undergo a secret cross-examination — and the United States withdrew from the Antarctic for almost a decade. (26)
The article carried a serious and startling implication: that Operation Highjump had been a military invasion force disguised as a training and exploratory group, that it had intended to deal with a secret colony of Nazi survivors in an elaborate underground facility that had been constructed during the Second World War, and that this invasion force had met its match in the form of a squadron of Nazi-built flying discs based at the colony. The reason for the United States’ temporary withdrawal from Antarctica was, allegedly, to allow itself time to develop its own flying discs, based upon designs captured at the end of the war. (27)
Most reasonable people would dismiss as fantastic nonsense the idea that many Nazis fled the ruins of the Third Reich and took up residence in a secret Antarctic colony, armed with a squadron of flying discs with which to protect themselves. However, the paranoid conspiracy theories that have proliferated in the second half of the twentieth century are based not so much on reason but rather on elaborate extrapolations of puzzling but inconclusive evidence. In the present case, this evidence centres on the undeniable interest the Third Reich maintained in Antarctica throughout the war: German ships and U-boats constantly patrolled the South Atlantic between South Africa and the region of Antarctica containing Neu Schwabenland, and it is certainly possible that many of these voyages could have included shipments of personnel and supplies for the construction of heavily fortified facilities. When we add to this the testimony of the captain of the U-977, Hans Schaeffer (which admittedly may well be false), the claims of the neo-Nazi publication Brisant that such trips included the transfer of flying-disc research teams and disc components, and the rumours regarding the disastrous failure of Byrd’s Operation Highjump, we have the ingredients of a powerful and enduring modern myth, in which the evils of Nazism did not meet destruction at the hands of the victorious Allies in 1945 but continue to exert a terrible influence over human affairs to this day.
Indeed, it is somewhat ironic that the political system that identified the Jews as its scapegoat and moved with such barbarism against them should now be chosen by many conspiracy theorists as the scapegoat responsible for the machinations of a putative ‘New World Order’. It is quite possible that the concept of Nazi survival itself has survived to the present day because of the very extremity of the crimes perpetrated by the Third Reich. While it may be argued that our continuing interest in Nazi Germany constitutes an unhealthy fascination with the suffering and terror of an ultimate inhumanity, there is also a case for saying that this interest is born of a deep and despairing bafflement (see the Introduction). I believe it is not going too far to suggest that the elaborate conspiracy theory involving Nazi survival is born of a deeply ingrained suspicion that such wickedness could not have been completely defeated at the war’s end; this suspicion may well have been reinforced by the fact that the volkisch and Pan-German forerunners of the Nazi Party were influenced by occult and mythological belief systems, combined with the more generalised occult revival occurring throughout Europe in the postwar years.
Of course, conspiracy theories cannot survive without conspiratologists to conceive and propagate them. We shall now, therefore, turn our attention to the means by which the theory of Nazi survival has been developed.
Throughout the postwar period, material has been added constantly to the sinister mythological system built around the idea that the Third Reich continues its activities in a hidden location. This cabal of surviving Nazis is sometimes referred to as the Fourth Reich but more often as the ‘Black Order’. Those who contend that such a concept can have no place in a rational person’s world view are underestimating the subtle power exerted by the strange concepts contained within the field of popular occultism. The British writer Joscelyn Godwin has produced a splendid, highly informative study of this field in his book Arktos The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival, in which he maintains an admirably sceptical standpoint while acknowledging that the notions embodied in popular occultism must be treated with respect, if only for their powerful influence over the public mind. He also includes a pertinent quote from the German Pastor Ekkehard Hieronimus regarding popular beliefs:
What is going on in the lower reaches of society is probably very much more potent and effective than what happens in intellectual circles. We think, of course, that it is the intellectuals — now in the broadest sense of the term, in which I include the scientists — who define our life. But lately the intellectuals have been rather like a film of oil on a great puddle of water: it shines mischievously and thinks that it is the whole thing, but it is only one molecule thick. I can see quite definite things coming towards us. The things going on in the so-called cultural underground, or the so-called subculture, are very strange. (28)
Godwin then wryly offers an example of a product of this ‘subculture’, a report from the 16 April 1991 issue of the London newspaper the Sun, that claims that the ruins of Atlantis have been discovered in the Arctic by a joint French-Soviet research expedition. The ‘proof is a photomontage of some Doric columns rising from an icy landscape. While the vast majority of people seeing this would probably think it interesting but almost certainly spurious, the idea is nevertheless firmly embedded in their unconscious. As Godwin notes (and as we have discussed in earlier chapters), uncritical belief in the literal reality of certain occult concepts aided in no small degree the rise of National Socialism. ‘One has to be thankful that our tabloids are not proclaiming Aryan supremacy or describing Jewish ritual murder; but one may well ask what collective attitudes are being formed by the currents in the “great puddle” of popular occultism.’ (29)
It is one thing for a collective attitude to admit the possibility of visitation by alien spacecraft, or the existence of ghosts or relict hominids such as Bigfoot, the Yeti and so on; it is quite another to admit of the undying — perhaps supernatural — power of an ideology that has already irreparably demeaned humanity and could quite conceivably wreak havoc once again.