T: Tahiti to Tyche 265
They Found Atlantis
A 1936 novel by Dennis Wheatley.Third Reich
A view largely promoted by conventional scholars (Colin Renfrew, Donald
Feder, et al) and authors with more interest in the occult than science, who insist
that a belief in Atlantis as the lost homeland of an Aryan “super race” was
aggressively championed by the leaders of Nazi Germany. This view has, in
large measure, been sensationalized by television producers of several pseudo-
documentaries depicting Atlantis as a fantasy with no basis in historical reality.
Hitler, Hess, Himmler, and Rosenberg are particularly singled out for their
fanatic interest in “the lost continent,” and the post-World War I Thule Society—
a mystical club—is sometimes cited as evidence of an early connection between
interest in Atlantis and the Nazis.
But the Thule Society’s emphasis was far more Germanic than Atlantean. True,
one of its members was Rudolf Hess, but the A-word cannot be found in any of his
public speeches or private letters. The Myth of the 20th Century, Alfred Rosenberg’s
magnum opus, contains not a single reference to the sunken civilization. Through-
out millions of recorded statements made by Adolf Hitler from 1919 to 1945,
including his voluminous “Table Talk,” the subject appears just twice, and then only
in casual after-dinner remarks about the German cosmologist, Hanns Hoerbiger.
Contrary to portrayals by some television producers, Heinrich Himmler never
ordered expeditions to search for surviving populations from Atlantis, nor included
the study of Atlantis in the curriculum of his SS corps. No prominent Nazi leader
ever described Atlantis as the homeland of the Aryan race. Still, the German
Navy did name one of it surface raiders the Atlantis, although the name does not
otherwise appear to have been used by the Kriegsmarine.
During the 1930s, both German and non-German anthropologists believed
the Indo-European peoples originated in either the Steppes of Central Russia or
Northern Europe, perhaps a region roughly corresponding to the Baltic States. A
volume that did postulate German origins in Atlantis was Unser Ahnen und die
Atlanten , Nordliche Seeherrschaft von Skandinavien bis nach Nordafrika (“Our
Ancestors and the Atlanteans, Nordic Seamanship from Scandinavia to North
Africa,” published by Kinkhard and Biermann, Berlin, 1934), by Albert Herrmann
(1886–1945). His was principally the examination of an old Frisian manuscript
describing survivors from the Atlantis catastrophe in Northern Europe, Nordic
maritime technology, and a contemporary discovery in Libya at Schott-el-Djerid,
where the concentric ruins of a buried archaeological site suggested Atlantean
influences. Nowhere throughout its 164 pages does the author state that either
the Atlanteans or the Germans were a “master race.”
Four years after the publication of his popular book, Herrmann used his pres-
tige as a professor of historical geography at Berlin University to stage a large-scale