Nazi Secrets: An Occult Breach in the Fabric of History (2 page)

The strict conditions to be eligible for the Lebensborn benefits were of course in accordance with the Nuremberg racial laws, and therefore they applied only to the members of the so-called Nordic race or Aryan race.

Nurse taking care of Aryan children

in a Lebensborn center

Though not directly involved, the Lebensborn helped host some of the abducted Polish children who were meant to be Germanized. A total of around 200,000 Polish children, none older than 10 and all bearing "racial value," were taken from their homes and brought to Germany to be raised by German families according to the national-socialist ideology. On a lesser scale, similar abductions were reported in other occupied countries as well.

It appears that the Lebensborn was only the tip of the iceberg regarding the broader problem of children considered to be Aryans throughout Europe. Besides abductions, many children were born from the illegitimate relations between German soldiers and women in occupied countries. In France alone, the number of such children, called enfants de la guerre (children of war) is estimated to be as high as 200,000. There were as many as 40,000 in Belgium, 20,000 in the Netherlands, 12,000 in Norway and 4,000 in Finland. After the war, these children were very often harshly discriminated against as "traitors."

Lake Toplitz: the Nazi Abyss

Lake Toplitz is located in the mountains close to Salzburg, in Austria. It is possible to access its shores only by foot, since the only small road close to it is private property. The lake itself is pretty narrow, only 400 meters wide; it’s not that long (2 km), but it is quite deep (108 m). Because of these particular characteristics, Germans used this site to test their torpedoes.

Towards the end of the war, Nazis wanted to bring Hitler to this natural alpine fortress and organize a last-ditch guerrilla attempt against the Allied troops, which were closing in. However, Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, and this place was used to hide the last secrets of the Third Reich as an absolutely last resort to prevent them falling into Allied hands.

Lake Toplitz dark and deep waters

During the very last days of WWII, a SS car squad brought mysterious crates close to the lake. Since no vehicle could go further, they knocked at the door of a 21-year-old girl named Ida Weisenbacher, who still lives in a small house close to the lake. "It was five o'clock in the morning, we were still in bed when we heard the knock on the door," remembered Weisenbacher. "'Get up immediately! Hitch up the horse wagon, we need you.'"

She hurried up and guided them to ride their wagon pulled by horses to the lakeshore. "A commander was there. He told us to bring these boxes as fast as possible to Lake Toplitz," added Weisenbacher. The boxes were labeled with bold-painted letters and numbers. After carrying three full wagonloads to the lake she could later testify: "When I brought the last load, I saw how they went on to the lake and dropped the boxes into the water. The SS kept shoving me away, but I saw the boxes were sunk into the lake."

After the war many people tried to dive in to find these Nazi treasures, but the odds were low and the danger was high. The bottom of the lake was carpeted with logs, sometimes standing like an underwater forest made by falling trees from the steep slopes of the mountain. In 1947 a US navy diver became entangled there and drowned. Then in 1959 a team, financed by the German magazine Stern, managed to retrieve £72 million in forged British currency, hidden in those boxes, together with their money printing press. The fake currency was produced during a secret counterfeiting operation, code-named Operation Bernhard, which was personally authorized by Adolf Hitler to weaken the Allied economies.

In 1963 another diver drowned, and explorations became forbidden until 1983, when a German biologist accidentally discovered more forged British pounds, in addition to numerous Nazi-era rockets that had crashed into the lake. At the turn of the new millennium, other expeditions costing up to US$600,000 were launched in the depths of the lake, one of which brought back some more fake currency. A French company managed to dry some of those soaked banknotes in order to show them at an exhibition.

Some claim, sometimes with good reasons, that there could be more to find there, since it is most likely that any heavy treasure would probably be hidden under the log forest which lies at the bottom of the lake.

Werewolves

The name Werwolf (German for Werewolf) was initially a novel written by Hermann Löns: Der Wehrwolf (1910). The latter spelling literally means "the wolf that defends" in German. This book was read by the Free Corps fighters after WWI, and held as an example. Some go so far back as to see the Werwolf 's origins in the late Middle Ages and the Holy Vehme Courts, which were a secret society of normal citizens taking revenge on criminals who acted negatively towards the community. The criminal was sentenced and often hung on a tree as a manner of advertisement.

Werwolf insignia on pennant

By March 1945, when the Final Victory was seen as impossible, minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels fostered the idea of a clandestine guerrilla warfare that would assault ceaselessly upon the Allies, even after their victory.

The truth is that the Werwolf was firstly intended as a uniformed unit and not an intellectual concept of resistance. Though some acts of "terrorism" against enemies of Nazism were accounted for as late as 1948, many put into question the fact that they actually were linked to a secret Werwolf organization. The only confirmed consequence of the propaganda made around the Werwolf was the overestimation of the phenomena by the Allies, which led to greater hardships for the German population.

The actual Werwolf was initiated by Heinrich Himmler in the summer of 1944, and then entrusted to SS General Hans-Adolf Prützmann. Their recruits, comprised of some 5,000 SS men and Hitler Youths alike, were trained with guerrilla tactics that were similar to what the Germans saw being used by the Soviet partisans in the occupied territories of the East.

On March 23, 1945, Dr. Joseph Goebbels urged every citizen of occupied Germany to act as a Werwolf. Although the partisans trained by Prützmann were completely annihilated in 1945, the Allies still adopted harsh measures with the Germans. The Soviets in particular killed thousands of young boys suspected to be Werwolf members, with no real proof or proper court trial.

Nonetheless, the Werwolf could be considered as a masterpiece of Dr. Joseph Goebbels’ successful propaganda, since it mobilized many Allied resources against a quite non-existant danger.

The Underground Reich

In just a few years, Nazi Germany occupied many European countries, and managed to introduce noticeable changes in their daily landscape. Some of them are still visible today, such as the bunkers; others are spread underground through extended networks of tunnels and chambers. What was the purpose of such constructions, and did they hide agendas of the strangest kind?

Many know from WWII movies about the impressive chain of bunkers along the Atlantic Wall, which was meant to prevent any attempt of the Allied forces to land by sea. Others may remember pictures of Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia (Wolfsschanze aka The Wolf's Lair) or in Ukraine (at Vinnitsa: Werwolf aka The Werewolf). But who had ever heard of the underground cities in the Jonas Valley, or of the underground networks of factories at the Dora concentration camp?

They had built no less than fourteen headquarter-ready bunkers for Hitler, of which he actually used ten. Some of them were well known, but others are barely mentioned in the history books. For example, most French are not even aware that there exists a large bunker complex just 60 km from Paris, in the city of Margival adjacent to Soissons. Except for the people who live very close to it, nobody else had ever visited Hitler’s Polish headquarters of Stępina or Strzyżów, referred to as the Anlage Süd, (Southern Installations). Hitler met Mussolini there on August 27, 1941. Based on the information that I was able to personally gather from the local elderly, villagers were asked to stay home and close their windows in order not to see the Duce and the Führer while they stayed at Stępina, although they were allowed to stay put in their homes.

The same old people told me that just after the war, Polish secret service agents discovered that there was a multi-level structure right under the bunker that may be four to five underground floors. Nobody could know for sure, since the Germans flooded the whole building thanks to a nearby river. Polish divers tried to locate the breach in the structure from which the river poured in, but always failed in doing so. Pumping up the water was therefore not an option. Rumors have said that rich North Americans of Polish descent would try in the near future to invest the necessary money in order to stop the leak and drain the bunker and its underground floors. Yet nobody knows exactly what they expect to find down there because of the lack of archives on the matter.

Stępina Train Bunker where Mussolini's train was hosted

Even more mysterious were the vast network of tunnels and bunkers, which were so big that they sometimes looked like underground cities. Their real purpose has not always been clear up to this day.

The less mysterious and yet probably the most gruesome among them was the Dora concentration camp near the city of Nordhausen, with its Mittelwerk factory.

The majority of Nazi covert activities took place in their underground facilities beneath Kohnstein Mountain, where they had buried their entire factory that produced the famous V2 rockets. The existence of these rockets was discovered after the Allied air raid on the Peenemünde island’s U-boat facilities, on August 17 and 18, 1943, which destroyed most of its infrastructure.