Conspiracies Declassified

by Brian Dunning

  When all is said and done, Diana’s was a tragic death, but an accidental one, according to all the evidence. Henri Paul was drunk and driving too fast, which is precisely what the Operation Paget report found. Any other wild claims are just false conspiracy theories.

  PART 4

  The World at War

  War and other large-scale conflicts result in death and destruction that are not imaginary—unlike many of the other things that inspire conspiracy theories. And it is common to believe that every military engaged in war has some secret interest that is hidden from the public view (and with good reason, for they often do). But sometimes conspiracy theorists take this belief a little too far and believe that we’re being manipulated more than we know.

  In this part we’ll deconstruct conspiracy theories that claim the United States allowed the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor as an excuse to enter the war; that the United States waged war against its own citizens on 9/11; and that the Holocaust was a myth perpetuated by colluding governments. Why would governments do such things? Or a better question might be, why do conspiracy theorists try so hard to hang unimaginable crimes on their own governments?

  One potential answer lies in the uber-popular belief that the Nazi regime was driven by occult mysticism. Books and documentaries abound claiming that the Nazi Party was secretly obsessed with the occult. It’s completely fictional, of course, and yet it’s wildly popular. It satisfies our desire for there to have been some unearthly evil driving the regime. The cruel deeds of the Nazis have been matched very few times in history; our brains try to rationalize them by assigning a motivation that’s equally bizarre. We’ll find similar themes throughout this section.

  Nazi Wunderwaffen

  * * *

  Date: ca. 1930–1945

  Location: Germany

  The Conspirators: The Nazis

  The Victims: World War II Allied Forces

  * * *

  The Theory

  The Nazis were well known for having the world’s most advanced technology during World War II, but less well known are some of their Wunderwaffen (wonder weapons) that were kept secret and destroyed so the Allies couldn’t get their hands on them.

  The fact that these wonder weapons did actually exist has led to a whole subculture of conspiracy theorists who credit the Nazis with technologies that were not just too advanced for 1945, but almost impossible even by today’s standards. The most impressive one is a flying saucer called Die Glocke (the Bell), which was powered by antigravity technology—a substance known as Vril—that even today, theorists say, remains unknown to top scientists in the West. Vril is said to be a source of unlimited power that was known even to the residents of Atlantis. These theorists claim that pictures of the Nazi saucer can even be found online.

  The Truth

  The technology developed by the Nazis at the end of World War II was indeed cutting edge, but they didn’t make any flying saucers, or anything else quite so extraordinary. Fairly complete records and all their design facilities were captured and analyzed at the end of the war, and nothing they actually did create remains unknown today.

  The Backstory

  It’s 100 percent true that Nazi scientists were ahead of Allied scientists in many ways, or at the very least at the same level. This is especially true when it comes to their aeronautical engineers. They had a high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft called the DFS 228 that later inspired the designers of the U-2 spy plane. They had a single-seat jet fighter prototype under construction called the Messerschmitt P.1101 with a variable geometry swing wing similar to that on the American F-14 Tomcat fighter plane developed in the 1970s. Its captured prototype was actually studied by the engineers who designed the Bell X-5 test aircraft of the 1950s. The Nazis had even completed glide tests on a delta-winged ramjet-powered fighter, the Lippisch P.13a, believed to be capable of going Mach 2.2—a concept the Allies were still only dreaming about.

  Skeptoid ® Says . . .

  Considering how close the Germans were to the Allies with their own development of an atomic bomb, and their clearly superior ability to deliver it via their infamous V-2 guided ballistic missiles, the real “wonder” of their Wunderwaffen is that the Allies won the war. Germany’s Uranium Club was their analogue to the American Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb. Even though the Allies had a clear advantage in conventional forces, if the war had lasted only a little longer, the Nazis’ advanced technology might well have proven more than the Allies could have handled.

  When World War II ended, Nazi scientists generally destroyed their records and even their prototypes, so there is some unknown amount of technical knowledge that died alongside their war effort. But today we have no public record of anything like Die Glocke being recovered at the end of the war. With each passing decade of records declassification and research through old archives, it is increasingly unlikely that anything like it actually existed. And, certainly, any substance with properties as amazing as those attributed to Vril would either be well known and incorporated into daily life, or would be the highest of all government secrets.

  So how does anyone know about Die Glocke? Well, we know about Vril because, in 1960, two French authors published an account of the occult underpinnings of Nazi society in their wide-ranging book The Morning of the Magicians. According to them, the very deepest core of the Nazi Party was the Vril Society, an inner circle among inner circles. The Morning of the Magicians was key to popularizing the belief that the Nazis practiced the occult, and this discussion of a Vril Society is what supercharged the belief in the reality of Die Glocke.

  Nearly everything known about Die Glocke comes from a book written as recently as 2000 by a Polish military historian named Igor Witkowski called The Truth about the Wunderwaffe. In it, he recounted his examination of the classified transcript from an interrogation of captured Nazi SS officer, Jakob Sporrenberg. According to Witkowski, Sporrenberg said Die Glocke was powered by a pair of rotating drums containing a mysterious iridescent purple fluid, which later authors have presumed to be Vril. This gave Die Glocke antigravity powers and permitted it to fly at fantastic speeds.

  The Explanation

  Okay, so when it comes to Die Glocke and Vril, all we have in the way of evidence is a third-hand anecdotal account of something that’s desperately implausible, backed up by neither evidence nor even a corroborating account. So once again we call to mind Hitchens’s Razor: “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”

  That said, we can still follow the threads of the tale backward to see if its origins are sound. Was the interrogation transcript Witkowski claimed to have read reliable? Unfortunately, he said he was allowed only to read it, not to copy it, and didn’t even say where or when this reading took place. This means that Witkowski’s story leaves us with nothing to verify.

  We can, however, track down the SS officer who was being interrogated. Jakob Sporrenberg was a real SS officer. However, he was a field officer, not a researcher or scientist. Sporrenberg fought resistance fighters in Belarus, and served as police chief of occupied Poland. He was executed as a war criminal in 1952 for the murders of some 43,000 Jewish civilians in Poland. According to his official military record, he never had any connection to anything involving engineering or aviation, and there’s no reason that he might have been privy to the details of a top secret project entirely unrelated to his duties. What does this mean? Well, it means that even if we choose to believe Witkowski (which is a stretch), there’s not much of a reason to believe Sporrenberg.

  Now, if Die Glocke and Vril didn’t exist, how did they enter the narrative enough to become a major conspiracy theory? Vril was first introduced in 1871 in the science fiction novel The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. In this story, Vril was the power source and life elixir employed by the people of Atlantis to escape when the mythical island sank. No researchers have yet found a primary nonfiction reference to Vril.

  Vril entered
the German popular consciousness during the years between World War I and World War II. This was a time when esotericism, an emphasis on the metaphysical rather than the physical, became something of a fad in Germany. Modern authors have since tried to exaggerate this fad into a fictional Nazi obsession with occultism (the so-called esoteric Nazism movement). Willy Ley, a German rocket scientist and author who emigrated to the United States in 1935, wrote of this period in a 1947 essay for Astounding Science Fiction called “Pseudoscience in Naziland”:

  That group which I think called itself Wahrheitsgesellschaft—Society for Truth—and which was more or less localized in Berlin, devoted its spare time looking for Vril. Yes, their convictions were founded upon Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race.

  Even though Ley was clear that this group’s interest in Vril was based purely in fiction, his one brief comment here became the main reference from which the French authors drew their “Vril Society” for The Morning of the Magicians. The French book, so often referenced as a trusted source describing interwar Germany’s fascination with the occult, is in fact quite an imaginative and speculative work. It also discussed ancient astronauts, a race of giants who once ruled the Earth, prophecies, alchemy, and the paranormal. Much of The Morning of the Magicians appears to have been inspired by the fiction of imaginative horror author H.P. Lovecraft. Even in the book itself, the authors wrote “There will be a lot of silliness in our book.” Thus, the stories of Die Glocke and Vril turn out to have no historical basis at all—outside of esoteric fiction.

  Holocaust Denial

  * * *

  Date: 1933–1945

  Location: Europe

  The Conspirators: Zionists

  The Victims: Students of history

  * * *

  The Theory

  Although history proves that Nazi Germany murdered millions of Jewish people during World War II, some believe that this is a story made up by Zionists (Jewish patriots who advocate for a strong Israel). Believers in this conspiracy theory sometimes say that all Germany did was relocate a large number of the Jewish population. They say that probably a few hundred thousand people were resettled, and they’ve just been missed in subsequent population counts. The ultimate goal of the Zionists who created the myth, according to the theorists, is to garner worldwide sympathy to help advance the political goals of Israel.

  The Truth

  Some six million Jewish people were murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust. No serious evidence suggests otherwise.

  The Backstory

  When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, more than nine million Jewish people lived in Europe. Over the next twelve years, two-thirds of them were murdered by the Nazi regime, in what the Nazis called their Final Solution. Today we refer to it as the Holocaust, which is Greek for “sacrifice by fire.” In addition to the nearly six million Jews, some 200,000 Roma (or Gypsies) were killed, as were some 200,000 mentally and physically disabled Germans.

  But from the very beginning, some anti-Semites and other Nazi sympathizers have denied that this took place. The campaign to deny or soften what was happening in Europe was successful enough that it wasn’t until the war’s end, when Allied troops physically walked into the concentration camps and saw the death with their own eyes, that its scope became fully understood.

  This community of Holocaust deniers remains strong even today, two generations later. Most of them characterize the Holocaust stories as Zionist propaganda. Here are some of the most common claims:

  • There is no record of any specific order by Hitler to exterminate Jews.

  • Many of the most famous “death camps” (Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka) do not exist.

  • There is no evidence of mass graves.

  • The Zyklon-B gas the Nazis bought huge quantities of was used for delousing, not killing.

  • Gassing someone with diesel engine exhaust wouldn’t be lethal.

  • Wartime aerial reconnaissance photos of Auschwitz do not show mass graves or cremations.

  • The death toll of six million has no evidentiary basis.

  These would all sound pretty compelling—if any of them were true. Let’s take a look.

  Skeptoid ® Says . . .

  Holocaust denial is actually illegal in some countries (Germany and Israel being two obvious ones), which is a notable exception to most country’s free-speech laws. While this law is justified by the staggering toll of the Holocaust, this exception to free speech is called out as an example of the suppression of the truth by many Holocaust deniers.

  The Explanation

  Anti-Semitism is, sadly, a cornerstone of many conspiracy theories. Some political scientists trace the reasons for this all the way back to the Bible story of Caiaphas and Judas who conspired to betray Jesus to the Romans. Ever since those times, many people have been mistrustful of Jewish people and some have held much harsher views, so we often find Jewish people to be the villains in modern conspiracy theories. The historical hatred toward Jewish people that drives today’s Holocaust deniers is the very same thing that made it easy for the Nazis to condemn them as the cause of their nation’s problems and launch the Holocaust.

  Holocaust denial is often done by citing vast stores of trivial minutiae: factoids or extrapolations that are so many and varied as to give the impression of comprising an impregnable vault of proof. In their book Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? authors Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman discuss this strategy:

  Most Holocaust deniers are very knowledgeable about very specific aspects of the Holocaust—a gas chamber door that cannot lock, the temperature at which Zyklon-B evaporates, or the lack of a metal grid over the peephole on a gas chamber door—so that anyone who is not versed in these specifics cannot properly question and answer their claims.

  However, information to disprove the claims noted earlier is easy to come by. The only reason a researcher would look past that information is a desire to find only information that supports a desired viewpoint. What would drive such a desire? The only driver common to all Holocaust-denying authors is anti-Semitism. Here’s what a search intended to learn the true facts would reveal about each of the claims laid out in the Backstory section:

  • It is true that there is no single order of the form “I order all Jews exterminated, signed Adolf Hitler.” But just because the order didn’t fit onto a single Post-it note doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. The evidence that the Holocaust was a fundamental of the Third Reich’s strategy is so manifold and vast that to claim otherwise is just plain absurd.

  • The “missing death camps” in Poland that can’t be found on any maps were razed for a good reason, and that reason is not that they never existed. In 1943 as the Soviets advanced and pushed the Germans out of Poland, the Germans aggressively destroyed the evidence of their concentration camps. By the time the Russians arrived nothing remained but bulldozed fields, and by the end of the war, they looked just like more forest. Immense quantities of records exist for the camps, however, beyond the obvious eyewitness testimony.

  • The claim that no evidence exists for mass graves is preposterous. Auschwitz alone employed 900 full-time Sonderkommandos, Jewish prisoners tasked with disposing of the dead. Many survived the war and their jobs became guiding the international excavation efforts, which lasted more than a decade.

  • Zyklon B consisted of an adsorbent (basically kitty litter) infused with hydrogen cyanide and a warning irritant. It was indeed used widely for delousing clothing and fumigating buildings. Deniers claim it was not efficient for killing people, but mountains of evidence dispute this. It was widely used, primarily at Auschwitz, in the gas chambers.

  • Gassing was also done with diesel trucks. By simply piping the truck’s exhaust into the cargo compartment, Jewish prisoners could be transported to a disposal camp and be dead upon arrival. The claim made by some deniers that this would not be lethal is easily disproven.

  • The claim
that aerial photographs of Auschwitz don’t show any evidence of mass burials or cremations can be disproven with a single Google image search. Just go online and try it.

  • For the war crimes trials in Nuremberg, the bulk of the evidence presented proved that nearly 6 million Jewish civilians were murdered during the war (the actual number ranges between 5.5 and 5.9 million), and this number cannot be accounted for by “relocation.” For one thing, population censuses taken before and after the Holocaust showed that many Jewish civilians no longer existed. Anywhere. The rest of the evidence—which included documentation for all the points made earlier—consisted (in part) of 3,000 tons of documents seized from the Nazis: 3,000 tons! That’s a lot for even the most convinced conspiracy theorist to deny . . .

  Skeptoid ® Says . . .

  During the liberation of Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower toured the concentration camp at Ohrdruf and wrote:

  I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to change these allegations merely to “propaganda.”

  He also ordered every Allied soldier in the area to tour the camp, so as many men as possible could bear witness to the Holocaust.

  Attack on Pearl Harbor

  * * *

  Date: 1941