Nazi Germany’s Expeditions Into Antarctica Has Spawned a Lot of Conspiracy Theories

Nov. 2 2023, Published 4:15 p.m. ET

The Gist:

• As a largely uninhabited a part of the world, Antarctica has instilled a way of surprise in many of us.
• From secret Nazi bases to the observe of dark arts, there are a slew of theories pertaining to the continent.

The gelid desolation of Antarctica has been romanticized within the paintings of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and depicted as a horrifyingly icy prison where Kurt Russell faces off with an unspeakable horror in The Thing.

There's something about the lonely, icy continent that instills other folks with a way of wonder, so it only is smart that the in large part uninhabited part of the world could also be house to several conspiracy theories.

Operation Highjump: the World War II Antarctica conspiracy.

On Sept. 2, 1945, World War II formally ended. Hitler's rise to power used to be thwarted and the Nazi regime in Germany was toppled. Less than a year later on Aug. 26, 1946, Operation Highjump commenced. The challenge, in accordance to Smithsonian mag, was once to discover possible army strongholds via transferring a big naval fleet to the South Pole.

The outlet spoke with historian Dian Olson Belanger, who stated that the United States sought after to preempt any Soviet assaults over the North Pole, which was once an actual worry now that international locations had been gaining nuclear functions.

Admiral Richard Byrd was in control of the Highjump trek. An completed aviator and naval officer, Byrd used to be answerable for 4,seven-hundred throughout Thirteen ships and 23 plane.

Belanger would pass onto say that even if Byrd was technically in charge of the operation, his identify was once most effective used to lend it weight and that the Navy was the only in point of fact calling the photographs. What the ones photographs have been, however, were unclear, because, as the author puts it, the group truly did not know what they have been doing in the market or what they have been intended to be surveying.

In December of 1946, three males died within the George 1 plane crash and although attempts have been made to get better their our bodies, Belanger said that the crash website online was simply too unhealthy to attempt the sort of restoration.

The Nazis in Antarctica conspiracy.

This is the place Highjump and its subsequent aerial photography follow-up venture that passed off the following year, Windmill, get fascinating. It's a well-documented incontrovertible fact that Hitler commissioned Nazi troops to Antarctica. Some say it was simply to collect margarine fat, while others imagine that there was an army base built there for a variety of research purposes.

Not lengthy after the war ended in 1945, there were stories of a Nazi submarine that showed up unexpectedly, which led some people to believe that there were Nazis who saved combating as a result of they both did not think the war had ended, or they outright refused to recognize Hitler's give up.

Some speculate that this is why Operation Highjump and Windmill have been conducted: to gain reconnaissance on any pre-existing Nazi outposts in Antarctica or even snuff out any ultimate Nazi forces that can've been lingering within the house.

But there are different theories as to why the United States was once concerned about those bases.

While Cool Antarctica lists several compelling arguments as to why it might've most certainly been not possible for any military energy at the time to build a long-form army base that might sustain the chilly for extended classes of time in Antarctica, especially within the six-year time frame when the first expedition Hitler commissioned in 1939 came about, there are nonetheless some fantastical ideas concerning the nature of the Nazis' pastime within the area.

There's been a ton of hypothesis referring to occultism among Nazis, with some pointing out that there have been scientists and armed forces leaders taking a look to mix magic with technological developments in order to get the higher hand in the world-domination recreation.

Theories indicate that due to Antarctica's place in occult practices, given its unique placement on the globe and how it pertains to magnetic fields being a conductor of various energies, Nazis were deliberately setting up a base right here in order to practice and/or explore some very dark arts.

This has led folks to consider an entire slew of theories pertaining to Antarctica: that it could possibly be the actual remaining stand of the Nazis and that World War II in fact ended later than we believed, or that the U.S. army discovered some unspeakable horrors there that had been being conjured up by way of the Nazis.

Or maybe, the military managed to commandeer those horrors for themselves, and the entirety's been on a downward trajectory since then. But that's another conspiracy for another day.

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