The Racism Behind The Myth of Atlantis!

Although the myth of Atlantis is intimately linked to the “Nordic” in Nordic fascism, research on its ideological implications within the absurd movement is lacking. The Nazi racial doctrine found a homeland in the fictional Lost Continent of Atlantis.

Adolf Hitler’s henchman Heinrich Himmler had a dream. He believed the Third Reich was a modern incarnation of an ancient super race. It was his justification for the Nazi party’s authoritarian rule, it’s ambitions towards Europe — and its persecution of Jews. What he needed was something to ‘prove’ this Aryan superiority. And the myth of Atlantis gave him just such an opportunity. Atlantis had been an entire continent in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Its empire had dominated Europe, Africa and South America.

Exactly the sort of domination Heinrich Himmler wanted. And any hint that the Germanic peoples were descendants of the architects of this lost empire would help him justify his new Nazi ideology.

So where did Himmler think this ancient seven-ringed island would be? After all, it had supposedly been shattered by earthquakes and consumed by the ocean within a single day and night. He had that covered. Nazi ideology was all about race.

It considered itself a superior breed. And Himmler’s version of the Atlantis tale told how its refugees scattered across the world. Their Aryan descendants had founded every subsequent civilization — from the Egyptians in the south, the Mayans in the West, and to Europe’s Greek and Roman empires. In the case of Atlantis, there is only one source: Critias and Timaeus, by the Greek philosopher Plato.

In his dialogues, a group of philosophy students are given a task: think up a perfect utopian society — and then pitch it against his own perfect creation, the Republic, in a hypothetical war.

His probably imaginary student Critius creates a fearsome tribe which sweeps all before them — until they are defeated by the great and noble Athenians, of course Plato waxed lyrical: “Listen men to a tale that is both strange but wholly true, for these histories tell of a mighty power — Atlantis”. Through Critius, Plato paints a picture of a 9,000-year-old evil empire of unique geography — concentric rings of land and water.

Sacred bulls roamed its red-metal clad temples. It was a thriving hub of ships and trade. He also positioned it ‘beyond the Pillars of Hercules’ — generally accepted as the mountain peaks that sit astride the Mediterranean’s entrance to the Atlantic Ocean. “They were of all men most renowned and the wealth they possessed was so immense that the likes had never been seen before”.

The Nazis were not only obsessed with the mystical and the undiscovered, they staked a large part of their strategy to winning World War 2 on it. The Nazis’ interest in Atlantis stemmed, of course, from Aryan race theory. While Helena Blavatsky had claimed that Atlantis was the homeland of a dark-skinned “root race” who eventually became the American Indians and the Mongolians, in Atlantis: The Antediluvian World Ignatius Donnelly proposed a white-ruled Atlantis where the ancestors of the world’s white people once lived and reigned over the others.

According to Donnelly, basing his ideas on the racial theories of the Assyriologist François Lenormant, the Flood of Noah was flood that destroyed only the white people of the world, the non-white people having been excluded from the Bible. Therefore, the “Antediluvian World was none other than Atlantis.” To this end, Donnelly cataloged from myth as many instances as he could find of “white” gods escaping Atlantis—“that bridge of land where the white, dark, and red races met”—to civilize the non-white peoples of the world. This myth is why white people keep saying they built the pyramids and practically beg other people to believe North Africa is magically separated from the rest of Africa. That is until the try to get a tan in the middle east!

Himmler sent an expedition to Tibet in 1938 in search of Aryan survivors, and that story was told in Christopher Hale’s book Himmler’s Crusade back in 2003. One result of the Atlantis-Tibet theory was the selection of “Asiatic”-looking Jews from Auschwitz for special measuring and photographing. They were then gassed, their bodies preserved in ethanol for future comparison to Tibetans. Buoyed by the “success” of the Tibet expedition, as the Nazis entered the Soviet Union in 1941, Himmler sent in archaeologists to find evidence of ancient “German superior race-colonies” to justify German annexation of large chunks of territory.

Himmler concluded from the Tibetan expedition that the Aryan race had originated in Atlantis, that race-mixing with the Tibetans had weakened them, and that the current sorry state of Tibet proved that the Holocaust was a necessary step in securing racial purity for the remaining pure Aryans. Some scholars claim that Himmler’s Atlantis-Aryan beliefs helped propel him toward the Final Solution by providing a historical-ethnic rationale for racial cleansing. So in essence millions died behind a rationale of a fictionalized land of Ocean dwelling Aryans.

The perception of a deep affinity between Nazism and the supernatural emerged only a few years after Hitler’s seizure of power. Already in the 1930s, the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung compared Hitler to a ‘truly mystic medicine man… a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity’, who managed to

manipulate the unconscious of 78 million Germans.2 In 1938 the German political scientist Erich Voegelin described Nazism as a ‘political religion’ comparing Hitler to the Egyptian emperor Akhenaton, who attempted to change the old ways ‘so that he [might become the guide] to the mysteries of the gods.’ Even the Nazi leader Alfred Rosenberg conceded that ‘many Germans’ embraced Nazism ‘due to their proclivity for the romantic and the mystical, indeed the occult.’

Most interesting for our purposes, the erstwhile Nazi turned critic, Hermann Rauschning, attributed Hitler’s success to the fact that ‘every German has one foot in Atlantis, where he seeks a better fatherland.’