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NEUBERLIN
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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 Siedlungnsfrauen [Antarctic Settlement Women or ASF].
The story actually begins in 1938, when the German seaplane carrier Schwabenland sailed across the South Atlantic, bound for Queen Maud's Land in Antarctica. According to Russian ufologist Konstantin Ivanenko,
The Schwabenland sailed to Antarctica, commanded by Albert Richter, a veteran of cold-weather operations. The Richter expedition's scientists used their large Dornier seaplanes to explore the polar wastes, emulating Admiral Richard E. Byrd's efforts a decade earlier. The German scientists discovered ice-free lakes (heated by underground volcanic features) and were able to land on them. It is widely believed that the Schwabenland's expedition was aimed at scouting out a secret base of operations."
A German base was established in the Muhlig-Hofmann Mountains, just inland from the Princess Astrid Coast. The area was renamed Neuschwabenland (New Swabia) and "the base was known only as Station 211.
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).
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. As we have seen, 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 (newspaper) '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.)
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?
Some day we may know for certain.
(See the books Himmler by Peter Padfield; Hitler's Flying Saucers by Henry Stevens; Hitler's Heirs by Paul Meskil; and Fate magazine for June 2002, "Vostok: Lake of the Shadows" by Scott Corrales)
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