Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

Van de Graaff generators and Marconi spherical dynamos. A treasure hunter would tell me that the Nazis had built a time machine and I’d nod and take notes and leave it at that. I saw no reason to take these discussions seriously because there was no reason to take them seriously. Even to justify why I wasn’t taking them seriously is in effect to take them seriously; I did believe and still do believe that it is a valid position not to engage the crazy. What would be the purpose? To methodically demonstrate the dubiousness of Nazi time travel? The conclusions we would eventually reach are the conclusions we have immediately reached. On top of that—​and not to pierce the illusion of the author as a tirelessly inquisitive information-gatherer but—​my interactions with explorers could be terrifically exhausting, and when things went off the rails, when the subject turned to antigravity or ancient occult civilizations, it’d be that much worse: you feel besieged, bludgeoned, by the absurdity. Half-consciously I grouped the conspiracy theory stuff in with the rest of the weird: the actual history was strange; the people were strange; the quote-unquote alternative history was also strange. I don’t know. People believe crazy things. You will break your brain trying to understand why they believe what they believe. I thought of the conspiracy theories as harmless, unromantic, hard-edged myths. Or—​myths gone rampant, sprawling myths that have shed the metaphor or symbolism that kept them tethered and allowed them to be undogmatically appreciated.

But as I got deeper in, as I met more treasure hunters, the conspiracy theory stuff piled up until I had no choice but to confront it, to at least try to make sense of it. It was too prominent a feature of the community to ignore; it was also too prominent a part of Riese mythology to ignore.

I dove in. I tried to dive in. Much of the material was impenetrable, an impossibly dense tangle of pseudohistory and -science. I did what I could. I read many long posts on the Internet. I watched many videos on the Internet. I read the books available in English and asked others to read the books that were only in Polish. I looked up the sources and then I looked up the sources’ sources. I spoke to and eventually met a man named Igor Witkowski, the author of more than seventy books, including Hitler’s Werewolves, Japanese Wunderwaffe, and Christ & UFOs, and who more than anyone else is responsible for the strangely tenacious myth of Die Glocke, the Nazis’ bell-shaped device that could manipulate time and gravity. I wish I had more to report about our meeting—​Witkowski, cagey and reticent, tried to pass himself off as a run-of-the-mill military historian, if with fewer hang-ups about things like gravity—​but it did help me understand just how seriously the believers believe. They aren’t trolling.

Anyway, I immersed myself or tried to immerse myself and I’m here to report back that it gets much, much stranger. Antigravity and Die Glocke are just the tip of the conspiracy theory iceberg. Project Riese is the epicenter, the catalyst, the cauldron for all sorts of fantastic, absurd, lunatic beliefs about the Nazis. Pull on any thread and very quickly you get to ancient civilizations; aliens; ancient alien civilizations; UFOs; Roswell; the JFK assassination; Operation Paperclip; Hollow Earth Doctrine; World Ice Theory; Twin Space Program; Nazi occultism; and many postwar Nazi plots, including ODESSA (Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen, or Organization of Former SS Members), infiltration into NASA, operational Nazi bases in Antarctica, South America, on other planets.

It is important to understand that conspiracy theories, given the space to fully unfurl, are not beliefs; they are systems of beliefs. These are not standalone delusions. The theory actually has to make sense on its own terms. Which means that one out-there supposition necessitates an entire bouquet of other out-there convictions. I will give you an example. Suppose we grant the premise that the Nazis did in fact successfully deploy antigravity technology: we’ve connected the dots, we’ve called BS on those obdurate historians and myopic scientists, and we are reasonably sure or at least are open to the possibility that antigravity is a thing and the Nazis had it. Okay, great. But that’s only step one. Now we have to flesh it out. Any objections raised have to be addressed. Here is an objection: If antigravity not only is possible but was in fact deployed in the 1940s, how is it that no one since has figured it out? How is it that the technology no longer exists? Answer: the technology does exist and the reason you don’t know about it is that it has been suppressed by governments, corporations, cabals. Okay, but objection: What about all the nongovernment research going on? All those universities, all those start-ups, all those tinkerers? Surely not all are part of the conspiracy! Answer: no, they are not part of the conspiracy, but they are being actively misled; for decades those governments, corporations, cabals have suppressed true physics and promoted an alternative field of physics (what you and I know as “physics”) in order to “disprove” antigravity. You can see how this goes—​one delusion, followed through, implies a radically different understanding of the world. Eventually it’s one giant conspiracy. Everything fits together. Once you’ve established that there is a near-omnipotent invisible power behind the scenes pulling the strings, everything suspicious—​and for those so inclined, everything is suspicious—​suddenly makes sense, the cover-ups are transparent, the dots connect, the pattern emerges.

Some conspiracy theorists take it very far, some take it less far, but there tends to be a consistent underlying framework, a set of attitudes or philosophies that allow these beliefs to take root, a special blend of skepticism and unskepticism, of irrationality and hyperrationality. So while most of the explorers who believe in Nazi antigravity, time travel, etc. aren’t full-blown conspiracy theorists—​only a handful of explorers ever said anything to me about a Nazi-extraterrestrial alliance (though I suppose