Original subtitles

(soldiers chanting)

- [Andrew] In the early part of the 20th century,

the Nazis rose to power on a dark platform.

Till this day, their racist ideology is overshadowed

only by their ambition for power

but behind the battles, lie more secrets than we know.

Their most elite and evil force, the SS,

plotted far beyond a conquest.

They mounted global expeditions hunting for ancient relics

of power and long forgotten remnants

of ancient civilization.

Hell bent on proving a mythical heritage.

Now, secrets are revealed,

a new light is shed on dark schemes

and desperate adventures.

(dramatic music)

- People love mystery

and the idea that there are these great massive discoveries

that can be made.

- All these kinds of quests are motivated by a search

for this connection to something which is more than just

the humdrum realities of human existence.

- This idea, and the dream of it.

Was it true?

Is it as magical and special as you believe,

or is it just some ancient ruin

that's hidden away in history?

- [Andrew] Atlantis, the legendary lost continent

sought after for centuries.

- The story of Atlantis is first found in Plato.

Plato was the fourth century philosopher

who lived in Athens.

He wrote quite a number of dialogues,

so brilliantly written with such a diversity of topics

that after people just use Plato

as a reference for everything.

- [Andrew] Atlantis is described by Plato as a powerful

and advanced island kingdom stretching larger

than Libya and Asia Minor put together

and protected by the god, Poseidon.

- It's got so many varying locations

depending on who you talk to about it.

I know when I was growing up,

I had heard stories about Atlantis

and I always had placed it in the Mediterranean

because it was coming from old Greek stories,

but then doing more research,

I discovered that it has had various locations out

in the middle of the Atlantic, off the coast of the UK,

closer up to Iceland.

- And this island kingdom takes over much of Europe,

the Middle East, Africa,

but then they're defeated by the Athenians

and Poseidon and the other gods punish the Atlanteans

for their overreach by destroying their island kingdom.

- But that's where the discussion of Atlantis ends

and the dialogue breaks off.

He never completed it.

- [ Andrew] Eons later, a new evil is hell bent on finding

this ancient land mass.

The myth of Atlantis lies

in the undercurrent of Nazi ideology,

proving Germans are descendants of superior beings

could be the key to this rising party success

and restoring Germany to greatness.

The SS established a team to scour history

for any clue to its potential whereabouts.

- It's wildly fantastical but it would have bloody

and tragic consequences for the world

when put in the hands of the Nazis.

- The idea of Atlantis lingered in the ancient world

a little bit because of the weight of the name Plato.

But it is not significant enough for people

to pursue any detailed inquiry

until the Madame Blavatsky wrote

the founding texts of theosophy.

- [Andrew] Helena Blavatsky

founded the theosophical movement in the late 19th century.

- Theosophy is kind of this amalgamation

of Eastern Buddhism and some Christianity

also kind of melded with Western ideas of the occult.

- Madame Blavatsky spent a great deal of time traveling

in the east going to Nepal and spending time learning

from Buddhists and from the Hindus gaining these pieces

of knowledge from the Eastern esoteric beliefs.

- [Andrew] One key tenant of Theosophy

is the idea that humanity has descended

from a number of root races.

- There are seven route races and then each of those seven

has seven more sub races and you were getting

all of these kinds of higher powers and higher beings.

- And so Atlantis becomes part of this story

because it was the site of one of these races.

- Helena Blavatsky kind of, took what Plato was saying

about Atlantis and she popularized it.

- But she develops it a little bit further.

In Plato we get only, they were good at mining,

they were good at metallurgy.

She says they also had psychic abilities

and these Atlanteans were sort of super beings.

They could even be giants.

These works become very popular all over the world.

They're read in theosophical circles

and Volkisch circles in Germany.

- [Andrew] The Volkisch movement

was a German ethnonationalist movement

that in the late 19th century.

- They believed that the ancient Germanic way of life

was richer, more fulfilling as opposed to the intellectual

and spiritual poverty represented by modernity

and Christianity.

- [Andrew] Antisemitism became a cornerstone

of this growing movement and Blavatsky's ideas

of superior route races appealed to these nationalists.

- They wanted people to be racially pure,

and they really wanted to connect it to the earth

and to soil.

You could grow and develop a community of pure people

and bring them all together.

And so for them, Helena Blavatsky kind of gives them

this chance to really explore.

Can we hone in and link that to our own dynasty as well

and create a modern day version of Atlantis.

And they start tapping into the ancient romantic past.

- [Andrew] The movement revered historic heroes,

such as ninth century war chief, Herman.

Herman had unified tribes and led them to victory

in a bloody battle against the Roman empire

epitomizing Germanic greatness.

(dramatic music)

To bring back glory to Germany,

some Volkisch look to an origin story in Scandinavia.

- We have to go back a little bit further in time

and to the current sort of 19th century nationalism,

particularly the work of Jacobi Grimm, "Fairy Tales",

and what Grimm argues is that there was an all powerful set

of German gods and the German mythological system

got erased in Germany itself

because it converted quite early to Christianity

in the seventh, eighth, ninth centuries.

But by German, he really meant the greater Germania

and that meant Scandinavia as well.

So Grimm reckoned that it was Scandinavia

which have preserved the ancestral myths of the Germans

because the Scandinavians had converted Christianity

that little bit later.

- The Icelandic Eddas,

a collection of ancient stories and poems

about the Norse gods provides a convenient connection

to Westphalia, the site of Herman's great victory.

- The Pros Edda was composed by an Icelandic historian

and scholar called Snorri Sturluson in around 1230.

Baldr the son of Odin was sent by Snorri

to have ruled over Westphalia, the land of the Saxons.

- They were a people that lived off the land and Westphalia

is filled with trees and mountains.

So it really is epic Germany at its best.

- [Andrew] Following Germany's defeat in World War I,

people are desperate for hope for the future.

The Volkisch movement gets a surge in popularity

as new groups form like the Thule society

which shares its name with a mythical island

heralded by some as the ancient Germanic fatherland.

This land will one day play an important role

in the Nazi's search where Atlantis.

- Thee societies take as their inspiration,

the theosophical and Aereosophic movements

that proceeded them.

What makes the Thule society unique

is that Rudolph Hess, Hans Frank, Alfred Rosenberg,

these important high-ranking Nazis were once members

of the Thule Society.

- [Andrew] The Thule Society sponsors

the German workers party which is transformed

into the National Socialist German Workers Party in 1920,

more commonly known as the Nazis.

The Nazis capitalize on Germany's misery

in the aftermath of World War I.

- They were an instigator of World War I.

When they lose they're punished by the victors.

Germany is faced with de-industrialization,

demilitarization, they have to pay war reparations.

This creates a ripe atmosphere for Hitler to come in

with blame mongering, scapegoating.

- If you had just fought a war and humiliated

and came back and had no job

and then some guy comes along and tells you,

hey, it's the Jews who did that to you,

or it's the foreigners who did that to you,

maybe even if you never thought about that before.

- And this false promise that Germanic are Lord's on earth,

(indistinct) Superman,

that they are a superior race and it's their destiny

to rise out of the ashes like the Phoenix.

- The Nazis are inextricably linked to events

which produced tens of millions of dead

and fundamentally changed existence as we know it.

- [Andrew] Blavatsky theosophy served as inspiration

for Nazi racial doctrine.

- So the Nazis have this idea

that they were direct descendants of the Aryan race,

or they were still the Aryan race themselves

and the Aryans where the direct descendants

of the Atlanteans.

- So the argument was the superior bloodline

had been diminished or weakened because of years of breeding

with other races.

The Nazis believe that the differences in the races

were so profound that they were differences in species.

Master races were Nordics, the Germanics,

the mud races were everyone else,

Africans, Southern Europeans, Jews.

So Madame Blavatsky wasn't overtly advocating

some Germanic Nazi version of the Aryan superman,

but her writings had racist overtones clearly.

And when used by Hitler and others,

they would have devastating consequences

for the continent of Europe.

- [Andrew] References to Atlantis

appear all over pseudo scientific concepts

circulating Europe at the same time

such as World Ice Theory.

- World Ice Theory was created by an Austrian physicist

called Hanns Horbiger.

Now, he believed that the world originated

from a giant star.

- His idea is that there is this waterlogged star

that crashes into this giant star

and in the explosion that ensued,

there's ice that is sent out into the cosmos.

This ice forms our solar system.

- World Ice Theory is discredited at the time

by other scientists.

It's not taken seriously.

It's a fringe belief,

but this is also a time of extreme nationalism.

- This is perfect for Himmler and Hitler

because it's Horbiger who comes up with this

who's an Austrian.

It's not a Jewish scientist.

It's not an Albert Einstein with the Theory of Relativity.

And pretty soon, this begins to create

an alternative reality of the history of the earth

and the history of humanity that is rather Aryancentric.

- [Andrew] World Ice Theory claimed that long ago

several satellites orbiting the earth were drawn in

by the planet's gravity and disintegrated in the atmosphere.

Their debris fell to earth and shaped its landscape.

Then, around 1 million years ago,

the earth had a prehistoric moon called Phobos.

Gravity, pulled it closer and closer to the earth

and caused tidal waves to rise up and submerge Atlantis.

- And then as the water rises,

the Atlantean ans have to flee

and they disperse into different areas of the world.

- [Andrew] It was this aspect of World Ice Theory

that would launch a critical expedition

that would later inspire the Nazis.

The Atlantis Edda and Bible,

a document banned until recently makes connections

between World Ice Theory, ancient Germanic markings,

Christianity, and Nordic mythology.

It says that leading up to Phobos' collapse,

the world was uninhabitable resembling

the time before Ragnarok,

the cataclysmic end of the world described

in the Icelandic Eddas.

- You have the thimble fetish, the mighty winter,

and that's three years in which there's a terrible winter

and no summer in between all bonds between humans

will be lost before the world plunges head-long to disaster.

When the end of the world comes, humans are destroyed.

The gods die, the world itself sinks back into the sea.

- [Andrew] Out of this destruction came the rebirth

of a new world ruled by gods who will establish

a reign of justice and peace.

- The world rises again out of the sea

new and green and fresh,

and two people called Lif and Lifthrasir, male and female,

emerge out of Hoddmimir's wood

and they create the new human beings.

- [Andrew] The story of Phobos' collapse

would motivate one Nazi adventurer

to search for the Atlanteans new home.

One of the biggest backers of World Ice Theory

was Edmund Kiss, a celebrated German author

and decorated World war I veteran.

- Kiss fancies himself as a scientist and archeologist

and he was neither.

He's an adventurer who seeks the travel around the world

and prove his wild theories.

- He is also a supporter of the Nazis and had an affiliation

with key party members and the party itself.

And he certainly saw this as a chance to promote

both himself within that, as well as Nazi ideology.

- Anxious to bring proof of World Ice Theory

to the Volkisch circles he frequented,

Edmund Kiss corresponded

with amateur Austrian archeologist Arthur Posnansky in 1927,

who told Kiss about the Tiwanaku ruins in Bolivia.

- I think Kiss is really hinged on to the idea that Bolivia

could have been where the Atlanteans ended up around

the world when they started to migrate

and so he really wanted to take an expedition.

- Traveling around the world in the 1920s

is not like today, you don't just hop on an airplane.

You get on a ship and you sail for weeks

and you have to finance your expedition

and it's months and months long.

- In 1928, Edmund Kiss wins a writing contest.

And from this, he now has the financial backing

to go and take an expedition to Bolivia.

- [Andrew] Arriving in Tiwanaku,

he marvels at the architecture believing it was created

by the prehistoric race of the Atlanteans.

Kiss explores the ruins, looking for clues,

making sketches and floor plans of his findings.

He stumbles upon an ancient man's head sculpture,

believing it depicts a Nordic ancestor.

- He goes to this pre-Colombian ruin in south America

and he looks at a statue and he says,

ah, that's someone from Atlantis.

That statue is never materialized, it's lost the history.

Some scholars believe or suspect that it never existed.

Kiss just made it up.

- They're not looking at the evidence

and then going from there to try to figure out

what is the truth,

they're looking for evidence that will fit their narrative.

And if it doesn't fit, they make it fit

or they get rid of it.

- Kiss feels certain the Atlanteans we're here in Tiwanaku

but he'll need more to impress

his Nazi companions back in Germany.

Then, he finds the proof that he has been waiting for,

the gateway to the sun.

Kiss examines its inscriptions pondering their connection

to the Atlanteans who settled here.

- Kiss looks at and concludes

that there's an advanced calendar,

that some civilization came up

with all this long before everybody else

and of course it must be the Aryans.

- [Andrew] He believes he can see markings

that indicate 12 months of the year

each possessing 24 or 25 days.

He also reads that each day has 30 hours

and each hour has 22 minutes.

It dawns on him this calendar was made

when the ancient moon, Phobos was rapidly orbiting

the earth as described in World Ice Theory

- It's proof that somebody was there,

but is it actually the Atlanteans?

- [Andrew] Despite having no evidence

of when the Atlantean migration might have happened,

Kiss leaps to the conclusion that Tiwanaku

is millions of years old

but modern scientific methods estimate

that it was most likely founded around A.D. 110.

- By saying that it's millions of years old,

that supersedes anything else that we already have known

in terms of humans.

So they're trying to say,

you see, we really are the master race.

We are the ultimate beginning of all humankind.

- [Andrew] After his year long expedition,

Kiss triumphantly returns to Germany in 1929.

Kiss shared his discoveries with his like-minded fellows.

The thousands of members of the Cosmo Technical Society

and Horbiger Institute,

which had been founded in the early 1920s.

He also published a series of novels about Atlantis

and the sun gate calendar popular

among Aryasofis and Nazi party members.

- Bolivia is a far away place in the 1920s.

People in Europe knew nothing about it.

Kiss could come back and say,

there were people that were 20 feet tall

and they were purple.

I mean, people would believe most anything.

And he comes back with these wild stories

of a great civilization.

That's pretty caloric for a lot of people,

especially the Nazis.

- Eventually, a whole SSR would be dedicated

to this type of research inspired by Kiss' success

and the work of another Nazi scholar.

This mysterious building in the city of Bremen

was bombed in 1944 but its remnants

are still standing today.

The building is inspired by one man's unwavering belief

in Atlantis.

- Herman Wirth was a historian and he believed

that the ancient myths of Atlanteans was truth.

- [Andrew] Wirth published a book on the prehistory

of the Nordic Atlantean race.

He specialized in studies of ancient symbols

and religion connected to Atlantis.

- A lot of people with legit qualifications

are still prone to fantastical ideas, dangerous ideas

that's never changed.

And in his particular case,

he buys into to some of the notions

of Atlantis in particular and even draws down

to the idea that Atlantis is in the North Sea.

- [Andrew] Herman Wirth's belief in Atlantis caught

the attention of Ludwing Roselius,

the rich inventor of decaf coffee.

In 1929, Roselius hired German architect

and Nazi sympathizer Bernard Hutkurt

to create a building to encourage Wirth's endeavors.

He named it House Atlantis.

- It's built to look like a temple

and they think they're going to find evidence from Atlantis

and bring all this back to this museum.

- One of the first things you were walking into and seeing

is Odin crucified in a massive wooden sculpture.

- There's a story recounted by Odin himself

of how he hanged himself on Yggdrasil, the world ash

for nine days and nine nights.

So this idea of Odin as the sacrificial god parallels

with the Christian myth.

- It is I think a way of kind of easing people

into that culture.

Yes, it's secret, yes it's new, yes it's weird,

but there's enough there, I think, that resonates

with certain people that they can kind of recognize.

- [Andrew] The art deco and futuristic winding staircase

is built of glass and steel leading up to the second floor,

hemo Sal or heaven's hall

decorated with blue and white glass blocks meant

to take visitors on a spiritual journey to Atlantis.

- And it's able to connect widely, disparities

about epic Nordic poems, rule-based theory,

and to draw them together into a pseudo-scientific nut

that people can therefore crack, right?

They can say, oh, it all makes sense now.

- [Andrew] Herman Wirth was given an office

in House Atlantis and with an inspiring study space

and a wealthy patron,

he continued to research ancient symbols and religion

connected to Atlantis.

He translated the symbols in the Friesian Orlinda

into German text, dubbing it, the Nordic Bible.

And it would later prove to be his calling card

to impress the Nazi hierarchy.

At the time of House Atlantis construction,

Germany was once again in economic disrepair.

- Currency is worthless, businesses and banks have closed,

people are unemployed,

and year after year the pain of that is just building anger.

And along comes the Nazi party

and its message is beginning to resonate,

not just among all ultrnationalists

and the far radical right wing,

but it's becoming mainstream.

- Again later in 1930, when a general election happens,

the Nazis actually win over 18% of the vote

and this puts them in as the second largest political party

in Germany.

- [Andrew] A new era was coming to Germany

and the search for Atlantis.

In 1933, the Nazis officially gained control of the country

marking the beginning of the Third Reich

and one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi leadership

enters the picture.

- Heinrich Himmler comes from upper middle-class,

Roman Catholic family.

He was born in 1900, so he misses World War I

and that's a key development is life.

He be a great soldier.

- He's a sickly, frail and small person

who looks nothing like the tall, muscular,

blonde blue eyed, Germanic ideal that he advocated.

But Heinrich Himmler's rise within the Nazi party

is meteoric.

He joins the party back in the beginning

and in the early 1920s.

Within a few years, he's the head of the SS.

The SS is incorporated into every facet of German society

by the late 1930s which expands Heinrich Himmler's profile.

He's easily one of the most powerful people in Nazi Germany.

- [Andrew] The Nazi party's power was rising steadily,

but threats of opposition still remained.

- The SA which is basically the storm trooper military unit

of Hitler's Nazi party becomes too powerful

and the idea creeps into Hitler's head to have its leader,

Ernst Roehm maybe a personal threat, that he may be arrival.

- [Andrew] In 1934, the SS assassinate, Ernst Roehm

along with 85 others.

Thousands more are arrested

eliminating all concerns about the SA's involvement

in German military operations

and consolidating Hitler's power.

This attack solidifies SS leader, Heinrich Himmler

as the number two Nazi.

After German President Paul Von Hindenburg death

a few months later,

Hitler uses his position as chancellor to abolish

the Office of the President becoming Germany's dictator.

- By 1935, they have banned all political parties,

they have eliminated any freedom of the press

and they have censored universities and academics therein,

they have implemented the infamous Nuremberg Laws,

which dictates citizenship and race.

It's a totalitarian regime and they're not taking no

for an answer.

- Himmler has this pet project

one that Hitler maybe doesn't necessarily approve of,

but he's not gonna get in Himmler's way.

And he starts by basically making it

kind of this secret society within the SS.

- [Andrew] It was known as the Anhnenerbe

and it officially came to life in 1935

co-founded by Himmler and Wirth.

Though Wirth was considered a brin scientist,

Himmler was one of his supporters.

He was impressed by Wirth's early Olynda translation

and saw it as a valuable connection

to Germany's Atlantean heritage.

- Heinrich Himmler hires some of the best scientists,

archeologists, and biologists in all of Germany.

He also hires some absolute crackpots

and he sends them on expeditions all across the world

to find evidence of these mad and wild ideas.

- [Andrew] Their first official expedition

would be led by Wirth himself to an ancient site

that hides strange inscriptions.

- Was he on side with the Nazis at that point

or was it really for him just such an opportunity

of a lifetime that he was willing to do what they asked,

but at the same time be able to study that site

where money was no object.

- In 1936 Wirth and his convoy of six

head to Germany's Baltic coast to begin the voyage

to the Bohuslan region of Sweden.

- Bohuslan is actually one of the largest, neolithic

rock carving areas in the world.

There's 10 or 12 in different locations,

all fairly close to each other.

- [Andrew] Their mission is to make plaster casts

of the ancient engravings to be displayed

in a museum devoted to the thousand year Reich.

- You can take a picture of your discovery,

but that never has the power of bringing back

some physical, tangible evidence that you can touch.

You can show it to the Fuhrer,

you can show it to Himmler, you can put it in a museum.

- This is very much about notions of grandeur,

greatness of destiny.

Hitler believes certainly in his own personal destiny,

he believed in the destiny of the Nazis.

That's why he calls it the thousand year Reich.

We're going to be around for a thousand years

much like the holy Roman empire was.

- [Andrew] A lot of the carvings

were in remote areas covered by thick forest.

That didn't matter to Wirth, he was relentless.

- There were no roads that just drove into these locations.

You had to hike many, many miles in.

- [Andrew] Arriving at Backa, Wirth's team set up camp

and start unpacking their materials.

- Backa is the oldest rock art site in Sweden.

It has some of the earliest known carvings.

- [Andrew] As the expert, Wirth decided which petroglyph

the team would cast.

- I've worked with plaster.

It's very chalky, very porous, it breaks very easily

and if it's not mixed properly, the consistency,

it can become very brittle and dry.

There's also the problem of trying to remove the piece

after being poured in one chunk

so that you're not breaking it, right?

So it is quite a delicate process.

- [Andrew] With their field preparations well underway.

Wirth's team of Nazis is itching to get a closer look

at the ancient rock art in Backa.

- And what they found there was images of people,

men gathering, and getting in their boat and traveling.

And I believe that what this depicts is a hunting party.

- [Andrew] But Wirth believes that these ancient carvings

may reveal secret messages left behind

by their Atlantean ancestors.

Scattered among the carvings of people, animals, and boats,

the team observes a number of circles, lines and crosses.

- So when Dr. Verse tries to interpret these petroglyphs,

rather than taking a cool, measured academic perspective,

he takes yet another giant leap of faith

that this is an ancient alphabet from Atlantis.

- [Andrew] Wirth's interpretation of these symbols

is that a circle with a line through the middle

means one year,

two circles linked by a vertical line

means rebirth of life at winter solstice.

These questionable conclusions warm their way

into Nazi doctrine and publications.

- We know the oldest forms of writing come from Mesopotamia,

but were these symbols in Bohuslan a form of writing?

No, they were pictographs.

It is a language in a sense but not a spoken language

and alphabet that would be used to spell words.

- Was he a true believer or was he just trying

to put one-on-one together and get three

and find the evidence he needed to go back to Himmler

to justify his expedition,

to justify this whole underlying premise

of Aryan superiority?

- [Andrew] Wirth discovers a drawing of a man.

He interprets this as a symbol for primeval divinity

and names it, the son of God

believing it predates Christianity by thousands of years.

- Can we say that it's the son of God?

Well, it certainly wouldn't be any God we identify with.

For me, what I see, what my interpretation is of those,

is warriors, hunters.

- [Andrew] Wirth's team furiously begins making casts

of the so-called Atlantean alphabet

and the son of God, glyph.

These will be great artifacts to show off

to their Nazi counterparts.

Once the plaster casts harden

the team begins trekking them back to the camp site.

From there, they'll get packed into sturdy crates

and driven to the nearest port

where there'll be shipped to Griffin Baird,

the homeward bound for Germany.

1936 marks the ultimate rise for Himmler and the SS

as Hitler appoints him Chief of all German police.

Himmler's power is nearly unmatched in Nazi Germany

and his quest or Atlantis gains new intensity.

- He really did believe that the Atlanteans

had conquered the world.

He wanted to follow that footsteps.

- The Atlanteans became very successful and very advanced,

but at some point they decided

that they were gonna be imperialists

and capture large portions of the Mediterranean world.

Plato says that initially the Atlanteans

held onto the divine element in them

which led them to value virtue and friendship

above everything else.

They lost that contact with the divine element,

which led to a desire and greed

and that is what brought about the end of the Atlanteans.

Plato is cautioning us that if we get obsessed

with power and wealth,

we lose out what's important in life.

What the Nazis did was they made power and absolute end.

And in some sense, I think there is a will

to self-destruction national in socialist thinking.

It's like we will pull ourselves down,

but you will suffer when we destroy ourselves

the whole world will suffer.

- Himmler and other Nazis were willing

to latch on almost any idea, no matter how harebrained

to prove their point and one of those

was the idea of Thule.

- [Andrew] Thule was first mentioned in ancient Greece

by the Explorer Pytheas.

- Pytheas was a Greek Explorer who went out beyond

the pillars of Hercules, which is the straits of Gibraltar,

which was a real boundary for the Greeks.

They tended to like to stay in the Mediterranean.

Pytheas saw all these things, supposedly,

that no one had ever seen before and Thule

was one of the places he visited.

- The Nazi's idea of Thule

was that it was the ancient capital of Hyper Borei,

the origin of one of Blavatsky's root races.

- Early on in the Greeks,

they talked about the Hyper Boreans.

According to one story,

Apollo went to the land of the Hyper Boreans

before he set up his career as a god.

- These are the second root race.

They were described as being golden and somewhat plant-like.

They're beings, but they're not human.

They resided in the north

but the north then was considered tropical and warm

and not cold and icy.

- This island was supposed to be the origin

of the Germanic people.

I think at some point, Thule and Atlantis start to blend.

- [Andrew] With a successful Scandinavian expedition

under their belt, the Ahnenerbe is hungry for more.

Ancient rock art in Sweden peak the interest

of Nazi scholar, Bruno Schweizer,

a high ranking former classmate of Heinrich Himmler.

Schweizer believed that Thule and Atlantis

were ancient aliases for Iceland

and had well-preserved evidence

of the white Nordic Atlanteans, the first Germans.

Schweizer was so convinced of this

that he married an Icelandic woman

believing that marrying and breeding with a woman

from Thule would restore his lineage

back to its Atlantean roots.

- The argument here is if Aryans breed with Aryans,

after a few generations, you will produce

this Aryan in Superman that they idealized

and they imagined.

- In Iceland, they still speak what is closest

to the old Norse.

They've managed to retain a fairly pure concept

of the old language so I think that this is where

the belief is that they are still the original.

They haven't changed, right?

They haven't bred with the outer world.

They haven't dirtied or muddied up their bloodline.

- [Andrew] Schweizer begins planning an expedition

to Iceland to expand on some previous Nazi reconnaissance.

- The idea of Thule something that's really been imposed

on Iceland from the outside rather than something

that Icelanders themselves have ever believed in.

Thule was of course, part of classical learning

and it wasn't something that people in the 70's and 80's

were particularly aware of.

- The Greeks didn't map a lot of the world beyond.

Thule could have literally been Portugal

or the, as Ozar Islands or the UK

or, you know, any of these islands outside the mouth

of the Mediterranean.

- [Andrew] In 1936, a Nazi agent traveled to Iceland,

visiting Snorri Sturlson's former home

and meeting with his descendants.

Recorded observations lament that modern day Icelanders

know nothing of their Atlantean forefathers.

- It's not that the Icelanders have forgotten their history

because they're deeply proud of it

and they can trace their ancestry back to the era

of the sagas.

But they have also been Christians since the year 1000

and their understanding of the north squads

is exactly the understanding that Snorri set down

for them in the 13th century.

Snorri was himself a Christian and is always filtering

what he knows through a kind of Christian lens.

- [Andrew] Though the 1936 expedition

to Iceland proved inconclusive,

it was enough to wet Himmler's appetite.

- He does get excited by this.

So they do wanna investigate further

and see if they can actually find that thread

that's gonna tie them back to the Thule

or the Atlanteans.

- Iceland is the dynamic place because of glaciers

and volcanic activity.

The land is constantly being changed and remade.

So what a better place for the Nazis to ascribe,

this was the location of Atlantis.

- [Andrew] Iceland's glaciers preserved

a lot of ancient settlements.

Now with climate change and the ice caps melting,

more clues about their history are being revealed.

- This is happening all over the world

where we still have current glacial plateaus.

The glaciers will have rapid melt

and these things will start to reveal.

So I think that they thought if they went back

and they did more investigation into glacier fields

and outlying areas that they may actually find artifacts

that would prove that the Thule or the Atlanteans

did reside there.

- [Andrew] In 1938, Schweizer draws up plans

to excavate an ancient farm and a Pagan temple.

These findings will shed some light on the agricultural

and spiritual practices of his Icelandic forefathers.

- Viking is really a job description

and it's not an ethnic identity.

And therefore the people who went viking

came from different parts of Scandinavia

and each of those parts had a slightly different set

of religious traditions

and we have archeological evidence to show that.

And so it's really hard to reconstruct

what any individual Viking would have believed in

and what worship of those gods might have entailed.

- Schweizer also wants to make a detailed inventory

of ancient assembly places,

examine sod houses, photograph artifacts,

and gather soil samples.

He also hopes to record Icelandic folk songs

and film the famous ballad dances of the Faroe Islands.

- From about the 16th century onwards

you have some ballads which are based on stories

that we find in the Edda and they're quite often simplified.

And in the Ferris in particular,

the idea of singing these ballads and dancing,

the famous circle dances of the Faroes

is something that persists until this day.

- [Andrew] As Schweizer prepared for his expedition

in 1938, global hostility towards Germany was on the rise.

- Germany is re militarized re industrialized

in violation of the Treaty of Versailles.

They annex Czechoslovakia, they annex Austria,

this notion of leaving Strom or breathing room

is so important for Hitler's thousand year reign.

- [Andrew] As part of this expansion of the German empire,

Himmler believed Schweitzer's data from Iceland

would provide great insight

for regulating future SS colonies in the East.

Plans were moving along.

Schweitzer chose seven young SS officers

for this important mission.

- Schweizer is very politically astute,

Heinrich Himmler is going to be pleased

that SS officers are a part of it rather than scientists

who are gonna report back that we found nothing,

that this is all baloney or bunk.

- They're trying to keep fairly hush hush

about this whole thing but it ends up being leaked

and the Scandinavian press picks it up

and they really have sort of a field day with it.

- [Andrew] Himmler was furious

about this public humiliation.

He immediately ordered Schweizer to scrap all plans

for the Iceland expedition dashing hopes

for the ultimate trip to the Atlantean homeland.

- Himmler was acutely aware of public opinion.

What he was mostly concerned about

was that he or his agency was deemed to be unsophisticated

and uncivilized.

- [Andrew] But the prospect of building a database

of his Atlantean heritage was too tempting to pass up.

Low profile planning of this trip resumed,

but it wasn't long until they hit another major roadblock.

Himmler's staff couldn't get their hands

on enough Icelandic kronur to fund the expedition.

The Nazis imposed major restrictions on foreign currency

because of the rearmament program introduced by Hitler

which emphasized financial self-sufficiency.

With no quick fix to solve the currency problem,

the Ahnenerbe were forced to postpone

this trip until 1940.

Himmler believed Iceland

held the key to Nazi world domination

but this expedition spate would be sealed

by something way bigger than him.

- 1939 was the event the year everything changed.

On the 1st of September, the Nazis invade Poland.

The Atlantic expedition

that they were going to conduct stops.

- Places like Iceland become very difficult to get to

with any safety.

You of course have to cross both the Baltic

and the North Sea and then the Atlantic

and that is British territory by and large.

This sort of obsession naturally takes a back seat.

Doesn't mean he abandoned it altogether,

but it means that he has other tasks.

- There are still mysteries that we do not know about

the Nazi search for Atlantis.

In the closing days of the Third Reich, senior Nazi leaders

were killed or committed suicide

as the allies were racing to Berlin.

Berlin was being bombed and reduced to rubble.

Government buildings and documents were all destroyed.

- [Andrew] The secrets of the Atlantean civilization

are still out there waiting to be discovered.

- The search for Atlantis has endless appeal.

It's part history, enforcing law and mythology.

- I think that it would be futile

to try to search for Atlantis.

The efforts and the money and the time could be better spent

on so many others things.

Search for sunken treasure,

that's more productive in some sense, right?

And that has a tangible result at the end.

But this just seems to be a waste of time.

It's like searching for the Yeti.

- The legacy of the Nazi search for Atlantis to me

is one of absolute folly.

How an educated, scientifically advanced culture

and group of people could pursue with such zeal

something like this, it's sheer folly

and it shows that the Nazis will go to any lengths

to enable their political objectives of continental,

if not, global domination.

(dramatic music)