First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2011
By David Gibbins
HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP
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Book Details
Price
|
2.00 |
|---|---|
Pages
| 363 p |
File Size
|
2,006 KB |
File Type
|
PDF format |
eISBN
| 9780755374328 |
Copyright©
| 2011 David Gibbins |
David Gibbins has worked in underwater archaeology all his professional life.
After taking a PhD from Cambridge University he taught archaeology in Britain
and abroad, and is a world authority on ancient shipwrecks and sunken cities. He
has led numerous expeditions to investigate underwater sites in the
Mediterranean and around the world. He currently divides his time between
fieldwork, England and Canada.
....
Forward
In 1934, Heinrich Himmler – the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany –
bought Wewelsburg Castle, a medieval stronghold perched high above the valley
of the River Oder in Westphalia. Himmler associated the region with the mythic
origins of the German nation, and saw the castle’s triangular shape as a ‘spear
of destiny’, pointing north. The castle had a sinister history: legend held that
thousands of accused witches were tortured and executed there, and an
inquisition room still survived in the basement. But nothing in its past could
equal the plans that Himmler had for it.
He set about transforming Wewelsburg into the ‘order-castle’ of the SS, the
ideological centre of the Nazi cult. Slave labourers were brought to a new
concentration camp near the castle, and over a thousand of them were worked to
death quarrying and transporting stone. A circular chamber was created, the ‘SS
Generals’ Hall’. In the centre of the floor was a twelve-spoked sunwheel, leading
out to twelve pillars and twelve window ninches. Directly below lay another
chamber, a domed vault based on the tombs of the Bronze Age Mycenaeans, and
a semi-mythical ruler Himmler admired – Agamemnon, the Mycenaean
conqueror of Troy. At the zenith of the dome was an ancient symbol that had
been found on pottery at Troy and on golden decorations at Mycenae, a symbol
the Nazis expropriated for their own baleful ends – the ‘crooked cross’, the
swastika.
What went on in those rooms may never be known. Wewelsburg became a
focus for Nazi archaeological research, to fulfil Adolf Hitler’s desire to ‘return to
the source of the blood, to root us again in the soil, to seek again for strength
from sources which have been buried for 2,000 years’. Yet Hitler himself never
visited the castle. It was to remain Himmler’s preserve, central to his obsession
with prehistory and the occult. From there, the Ahnenerbe – the ‘Department of
Cultural Heritage’ – sent expeditions to Tibet, to Peru, to Iceland, to places still
unknown today, searching for Aryan origins and for the greatest prize of all, the
lost civilization of Atlantis. Underlying everything lay Himmler’s racial theories,
and Wewelsburg became a springboard for some of the greatest crimes against
humanity ever conceived. It was there that he began to formulate the ‘Final
Solution’, the mass murder of the Jews. And it was there in 1941 that he
assembled his top SS generals for ideological strengthening before the invasion
of Russia, the most destructive military campaign in history – one foretold to
Himmler in a legend of a final battle between West and East, and fuelled by his
doctrine of Aryan racial superiority over the Slavic peoples of Russia.
Yet even while these terrible events were unfolding, Himmler continued to
be obsessed with the symbols and artefacts of the past. He envisaged
Wewelsburg Castle within a huge semicircular complex, the ‘Centre of the New
World’, its plan reminiscent of the circular prehistoric monuments that he
associated with mythical Aryan forebears. He planned a huge archaeological
collection at Wewelsburg, to make it part of SS indoctrination. The placing of the
sunwheel and the swastika in the Generals’ Hall and the vault below show how
he drew power from ancient symbols, and incorporated them into the very core
of Nazi ideology. And just as he saw those prehistoric monuments as evidence of
a new order, of a new race arisen, so he saw his new world as one where the
only gods were the gods of the Nazis, the gods they themselves had become.
Nobody knows how close Himmler may have come to realizing his dream,
and what artefacts may have been brought there. Deep within the castle lay
another chamber, Himmler’s private vault, but when American soldiers captured
Wewelsburg in 1945 they found it empty, its contents unknown and seemingly lost
forever to history.
One artefact might have been at Wewelsburg, an artefact of extraordinary
power that could have unlocked the greatest obsession of all: the dream of the
lost civilization of Atlantis, and of Atlantis reborn . . .
....
Table of Contents
By the Author
Title Page
Copyright
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Map of the Mediterranean region
Forward
Epigraph
Prologue
PART 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
PART 2
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
PART 3
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
Background to the novel
Screenbook
....
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