The sole aim of this lodge was to make further researches into the origins of the Aryan Race and the manner in which magical capacities slumbering in the Aryan blood could be reactivated to become the vehicle of superhuman powers. Surprisingly enough, one of the works which proved an endless source of inspiration to the leading members of this Lodge had been written by an Englishman, Bulwer Lytton … In one of [his] little-known books called The Coming Race he veiled many of the truths he had learned through personal initiation in the Secret Doctrine. He had no idea that this book, in which he described the emergence of a new race with lofty spiritual faculties and superhuman powers, would become the evil inspiration of a small group of Nazis intent on breeding a Master Race in order to enslave the world.
Another opinion expressed by Gunther Rosenberg of the European Occult Research Society and quoted in Fate magazine (July 1972) puts the group’s intentions somewhat more simply: ‘They believed that the Lords of the Universe lived in the centre of the earth. Men on the surface must become God-like and make an alliance with the inner race. Otherwise, we will be enslaved to build the New Cities for the Coming Race.’
Because of Haushofer’s profound knowledge of mysticism in Asia and the Far East, he was a leading – if not the leading – member of the Luminous Lodge. It has been suggested that the Professor had actually mastered the use of Vril Power: and there is certainly no doubt that he was on intimate terms with several of the Tibetan high lamas who lived in Berlin, and who might be expected to know its secret. These mysterious figures, led by a supreme lama identified only as ‘The Man with the Green Gloves’, were to stay in the heart of the Reich through its triumphs and its ultimate downfall. As far as we can tell, all of them died either by their own hand or under fire in the days before the German nation finally surrendered to the Allies.
There is evidence that Haushofer informed Hitler of the Luminous Lodge (although the Fuehrer never joined its ranks) and that he also took the Tibetan in green gloves to meet the Nazi leader on several occasions. Hitler was, of course, much influenced by astrology, and apparently consulted with this lama regularly, according to Eric Norman in his curious book, This Hollow Earth (1972). ‘This Tibetan also made several public predictions that were printed by Nazi newspapers,’ says Norman. ‘These included the number of Hitler’s deputies who would be elected to the Reichstag. The Nazi propaganda papers also reported that the lama “knew the secret of the entrances to Agharti”.’
It seems reasonable to surmise that it was the combined influence of all these factors that further convinced Hitler of the reality of Agharti and redoubled his determination to deploy time and manpower to its discovery. He had learned from the legends that a network of tunnels running across Europe ultimately led to this fabled home of the super-race, and after his rise to power he instituted the search for it which was to continue for the rest of his life. The first expeditions were dispatched purely under the auspices of the Luminous Lodge, beginning in 1926, but later, after coming to power, Hitler took a more direct interest, overseeing the organization of the searches himself.
This involvement was doubtless stimulated by the Fuehrer’s conviction that certain representatives of the underground super-race were already abroad in the world – a conviction that has been graphically recorded by Hermann Rauschning, the Gauleiter of Danzig, whose intimate conversations with the German leader have caused him to be described as ‘the only authentic biographer of Adolf Hitler’.
Rauschning’s book, Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on his Real Aims, was published in 1939, and stimulated widespread interest. However, it was only later that the importance of some of his statements came to be fully appreciated.
In the book, Rauschning describes how he recorded the conversations in a period covering the last year before Hitler’s seizure of power and the first two years of the Nazi regime (1932–1934). ‘In the course of these discussions,’ says Rauschning, ‘Hitler speaks openly about his innermost ideas – ideas which have been kept secret from the masses.’ Rauschning makes no secret of his fear of Hitler and calls him ‘the master enchanter and the high priest of the religious mysteries of Nazidom’.
It seems evident that from early on in their relationship, Hitler regarded Rauschning as a confidant, and would discuss things with him that much more senior members of his hierarchy were not privy to. In particular, his fascination with mysticism. Rauschning records:
Hitler was fond of mystical talk. One cannot help thinking of him as a medium. For most of the time mediums are ordinary, insignificant people. Suddenly they are endowed with what seem to be supernatural powers which set them apart from the rest of humanity. These powers are something that is outside their true personality – visitors, as it were, from another planet. The medium is possessed. Once the crisis is past, they fall back again into mediocrity. It was in this way, beyond any doubt, that Hitler was possessed by forces outside himself.
From Rauschning’s appreciation of Hitler’s mystical qualities developed their discussions about the superman that the Fuehrer dreamed would ultimately emerge. Two instances in particular are recorded by Rauschning which, if taken literally, seem to prove that Hitler actually saw one of these beings. What, in fact, seems more probable is that they are rather deranged fantasies – to which the Fuehrer was, of course, often prone – although they do underline the depth of his faith in this particular idea.
On the first occasion, after a lengthy conversation about the superman of the future, Hitler suddenly confided to his listener: ‘The new man is among us. He is here! Now are you satisfied? I will tell you a secret. I have seen the vision of the new man – fearless and formidable. I shrank from him.’
Then, in a still more dramatic moment in his ‘eagle’s eyrie’, the glass-walled building in the Bavarian mountains, honeycombed with tunnels like some strange facsimile of the place called Shamballah which he so desperately sought, Hitler revealed another encounter with one of these men. Rauschning describes the incident thus:
My informant described to me in full detail a remarkable scene – I should not have credited the story if it had not come from such a source. Hitler stood swaying in his room, looking wildly about him. ‘He! He! He’s been here!’ he gasped. His lips were blue. Sweat streamed down his face. Suddenly he began to reel off figures, and odd words and broken phrases, entirely devoid of sense. It sounded horrible. He used strangely composed and entirely un-German word-formations. Then he stood quite still, only his lips moving. He was massaged and offered something to drink. Then he suddenly broke out –
‘There, there! In the corner! Who’s that?’
He stamped and shrieked in the familiar way. He was shown that there was nothing out of the ordinary in the room, and then he gradually grew calm.
It has been suggested that the strange word-formations that Hitler used on this occasion might have been the language of the Vril-ya which Bulwer Lytton describes in The Coming Race; that Hitler had resorted to them in an attempt to communicate with his visitor. But such, of course, is no more than speculation.
Details of the various expeditions that Hitler ordered to Tibet to search for Agharti and Shamballah are conclusive, if somewhat disappointing. Writing in This Hollow Earth, Eric Norman says:
Nazi records seized after the fall of the Third Reich indicate that Hitler and his henchmen launched several unsuccessful expeditions … Frustrated German geographers and scientists were ordered to find tunnel entrances that led to the Vril-ya. German, Swiss and Italian mines were charted for possible shafts leading down to the interior land of cavern cities. Hitler even ordered an intellectually-inclined Army Colonel to check out Bulwer Lytton’s life, hoping to find where – and when – the author had visited the caverns of Vril-ya … From 1936 onwards the Nazis were regularly sending teams of elite corpsmen into caves and mines in Europe. Entire crews of spelunkers prowled caves hunting for the new advanced man.
Despite failure after failure – e
ach of which brought tirades of rage from Hitler and an insistence that still more effort was to be put into the project – only one discovery of any real significance has subsequently come to light. This was made in Czechoslovakia in 1939. Before the invasion of that country Hitler’s researchers had also combed the Reich’s archives for any European folk tales which spoke of caves, tunnels or mines associated in any way with the idea of a subterranean world. From this line of inquiry emerged the fact that there were a number of places in Czechoslovakia where old legends mentioned superior beings living beneath the ground.
Two separate parties went to check out these locations, but no records have survived of their results. Indeed, the entire operation in Czechoslovakia might have been forgotten altogether but for the accidental discovery of a mysterious tunnel in October 1944 by a member of the Slovak Uprising. It tied up with one locality the Germans were known to have explored. The man’s name was Dr Antonin Horak, the captain of a group of Resistance fighters, who also happened to be an expert spelaeologist. His extraordinary discovery was not made known until 1965, however, when he published a detailed account in the National Spelaeological Society News.
In this report, Dr Horak described how he and two other men – all that remained of a group of Resistance fighters – came across the tunnel near the settlements of Plavince and Lubocna, in a location recorded at 49·2 degrees north, 20·7 degrees east. The three men were on the move after a skirmish with the Germans. One was badly injured and the other two were on the verge of collapse. Fortunately they were able to find a local peasant who led them to a large underground grotto where they could hide up and rest.
The peasant warned Dr Horak against going any further into the cave. ‘It is full of pits, poison gas pockets and it is haunted,’ he said. So tired were the captain and his companion named Jurek that they only had time to make their wounded compatriot, Martin, comfortable, before they fell into the sleep of exhaustion.
The following day, however, as Horak waited for the injured man to recover his strength, he decided to ignore what he considered the superstitious advice of the old peasant and explore the tunnel. For some time he worked his way along the passage until suddenly he came face to face with a totally new section which gave every indication of being man-made. ‘Lighting some torches,’ he said, ‘I saw that I was in a spacious, curved, black shaft formed by cliff-like walls. The floor in the incline was a solid lime pavement.’
Dr Horak was amazed as well as puzzled by this mysterious tunnel which continued far beyond the flickering light of his torches. He determined to take some samples, but when his pickaxe failed to make any impression on the solid lime ‘pavement’, he tried to loosen some material from the walls by firing his pistol.
‘The bullet slammed into the substance of the walls with a deafening, fiery impact,’ he wrote in his article. ‘Sparks flashed, there was a roaring sound, but not so much as a splinter fell from the substance. Only a small welt appeared, about the length of half my finger, which gave off a pungent smell.’
Frustrated in his attempts to obtain a sample, Dr Horak returned to his two companions and discussed what he had found with the man Jurek. After they had both inspected the tunnel – which left neither feeling any closer to solving the mystery – Dr Horak began to ponder over his impressions:
I sat there by the fire speculating. How far did it reach into the rocks, I wondered. Who, or what, put it into the mountain. Was it man-made? And was it at last proof of the truth in legends – like Plato’s – of long lost civilisations with magic technologies which our rationale cannot grasp or believe?
Sadly, no one has followed up these questions posed by Dr Horak, and the tunnel has remained unexplored since the Germans were there in 1939 – if, indeed, they were – and certainly since Dr Horak in 1944.
Despite all the fevered energy poured into locating Agharti, Hitler’s efforts were to be as doomed as his Thousand Year Reich. Though Karl Haushofer and those associated with him in the Luminous Lodge continued to feed their Fuehrer’s interest until the end, he was no nearer a solution in 1945 than when his interest had been first kindled. It was just one more ambition that died frustrated with him, as we believe, in the Berlin bunker. And, as I have already described, his fate was also shared by the Tibetans who had nursed his fascination. Had even one of that extraordinary group survived to tell his story, our knowledge of the Nazi quest for Agharti would surely be without so many unanswered questions.
The man who had played such a central role in this chapter of our story, Karl Haushofer, did briefly survive the war, the extent of his participation evidently unappreciated by his captors. But the failure of all that he had worked towards obviously weighed heavily on him. For on 14 March, 1946, apparently in fulfilment of the promise he had made all those years ago when he was admitted to the secret society in Japan, he killed his wife, Martha, and then committed suicide. He had sworn to take his own life if he failed in his ‘mission’ – and did so in the time-honoured Japanese way by committing hara-kiri – thrusting a knife into his abdomen.
With his passing, the last remnant of Nazi interest in Agharti ended. Soon the story was little more than a footnote in the larger account of the evil that Adolf Hitler had unleashed on the world. There was, though, one persistent rumour emanating from this obsession that persisted – and indeed has persisted in certain quarters to this day. It also leads us very conveniently into our next area of discussion.
The rumour was, and is, that certain members of the Nazi hierarchy – among whom were no lesser persons than Martin Bormann and Hitler himself – actually escaped from the funeral pyre of Berlin through secret tunnels and found their way to South America, where some still live to this day.
It is a fact, as we shall see, that there are secret tunnels in South America, and that ancient traditions link these with Europe and Asia and ultimately Agharti itself. If there is any truth in these rumours, then we might surmise that the Nazi search for the secret underground kingdom was not all in vain. They may not have found Agharti, but perhaps instead they found an escape route from the hell of their own making, to a Shangri-la where they could live out the remainder of their wretched lives.
This is, of course, at first glance, a hypothesis of the wildest improbability. Yet, as we shall see, there is a great deal of convincing evidence about secret tunnels beneath South and North America, and indeed more than a little documentation on the idea of a linking passageway between the continents of America and Europe by way of the ‘Lost Continent’ of Atlantis. Our story is one with yet more amazing facts to be brought to light …
THE SECRET PASSAGES OF SOUTH AMERICA
In March 1942, just three months after the United States had been precipitated into the Second World War by the attack of Japanese planes on the naval base at Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made time in his busy schedule to receive a rather unusual young couple at the White House in Washington. Their names were David and Patricia Lamb, and they had just returned to their home in Los Angeles, California, after travelling for almost a year in the Mexican frontier state of Chiapas. Amazing rumours had preceded their return to America that they had discovered a tribe of highly dangerous, almost dwarfish, white-skinned Indians who were the guardians of a vast network of subterranean tunnels.
President Roosevelt had expressed as strong an interest in this story as any of his fellow-Americans, perhaps even stronger than most, for his distant cousin, the late President Theodore Roosevelt, had been an inveterate explorer of the American continent in the period prior to, and following, his years in high office, and some of this interest had rubbed off on FDR, through his reading the older man’s travel journals and books. Indeed, the President knew that his predecessor had led an expedition through South America in 1914 during the course of which he had picked up stories of a network of tunnels beneath the continent in which vast hordes of gold were said to be hidden.
One old guide had told Theodore Roosevelt that these tun
nels were supposed to be guarded by a strange breed of white Indians who drove off with great ferocity anyone who came within the vicinity. It was the possibility that these might be the same ‘guardians’ that the Lambs had encountered which intrigued FDR, and caused him to invite the husband and wife to the White House.
The hour which the three people spent together proved to be a fascinating encounter. The Lambs told the President that they had been travelling in the dense jungle country of Chiapas when they had suddenly been surrounded by a group of small, pale-skinned men whose features were similar to those of the native Indians, but of an almost pinkish hue. Although the Lambs’ guides were head and shoulders taller than their ambushers, they were clearly quite terrified of them.
David and his wife were quick to admit that they were frightened themselves, but it became apparent that the strange little men were not planning to kill them. They just wanted them to go back the way they had come – and quickly.
The party had been trekking in this particular vicinity in pursuit of what David Lamb had been prepared to admit was probably a fool’s quest. There were stories of a lost Mayan city somewhere about, beneath which ran a network of tunnels filled with a priceless treasure. As he stood looking at the fierce little men surrounding them, the thought crossed David Lamb’s mind that perhaps there was some truth in the legend after all.
For some moments no one moved as the fierce sun beat down on the two so dissimilar groups confronting each other – the two Americans from one of the most modern cities on earth and the white-skinned Indians whose primitive way of life had probably been unchanged for centuries. At last David Lamb plucked up the courage to whisper a message to his chief guide. He told him to ask the Indians who they were and what they wanted. After a moment’s hesitation, the guide nervously mumbled his request.
The Lost World of Agharti- the Mystery of Vril Power Page 12
