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Popular interest in space began in Germany in the 'Twenties and peaked in the late 'Thirties. From the first, German rocketry had links with extremism. The first commercial space venture anywhere, the Magdeburg rocket of 1933, was meant to prove the Hohlweltlehr or Hollow World Doctrine of one Peter Bender. With the encouragement of anti-intellectual, no-nothing ideologues in the Nazi Party, Bender taught that Copernican cosmology was a lie. Mankind did not live on the outside of a globe orbiting a much larger sun. The universe was actually inside the earth, at the center of a hollow sphere whose inner surface was the world as we know it.If the Magdeburg rocket went straight up, it was held, it would hit the antipodes (the opposite side of the world), proving Bender's contentions. The backers of the scheme of course failed to note that no rocket flies "straight." Any sufficiently powerful rocket would be able to reach the antipodes after a curving, sub-orbital, ballistic flight, so the demonstration would prove nothing. The Bank of Magdeburg may have had its doubts about the Hohlweltlehr, but it did finance a man-carrying rocket, perhaps for publicity purposes. A series of sub-scale test shots was completed successfully, but only after a series of disasters that shook the confidence of the prospective pilots. The effort came to nothing.
Hitler's Nazis were convinced that they were destined to rule the world, and they came to this warped conclusion through the acceptance of many occult beliefs and practices, including astrology, the prophecies of Nostradamus, and the hollow/inverted Earth theory... hohlweltlehre. Because they suspected that our surface is on the interior of a concave Earth, Hitler sent an expedition in April of 1942, including Dr. Heinz Fischer and powerful telescopic cameras, to the Baltic island of Rugen to spy on the British fleet. Fischer did so not by aiming his cameras across the waters, but by pointing them up to peer across the atmosphere to the Atlantic Ocean. The expedition was a failure, of course. Fischer's cameras saw nothing but sky, and the British fleet remained safe.
When the Nazi exponents of the Hollow Earth hypothesis sent the expedition to the island of Rugen, they had complete confidence in their pseudo-scientific vision. Those nearest the Fuehrer shared his belief that such a coup as discovering the entrance to the Inner World would convince the Masters who lived there that the Nazis were truly deserving of mixing their blood in the hybridization of a master race.
An important element in the Nazi mythos was the belief that representatives of a powerful, underground secret race emerged from time to time to walk among Homo sapiens. Hitler's frenzied desire to breed a select race of Nordic types was inspired by his obsessive hope that it should be the Germanic peoples who would be chosen above all other humans to interbreed with the
subterranean supermen in the mutation of a new race of heroes, demigods, and god men.
Then there's the legend... that Hitler and many of his Nazi minions escaped Germany in the closing days of World War II and fled to Antarctica where at the South Pole they had discovered an entrance to the Earth's interior. According to the Hollow Earth Research Society in Ontario, Canada, they are still there. After the war, the organization claims, the Allies discovered that more than 2,000 scientists from Germany and Italy had vanished, along with almost a million people, to the land beyond the South Pole. This story gets more complicated with Nazi-designed UFOs, Nazi collaboration with the people who live in the center of the Earth, and the explanation for "Aryan-looking" UFO pilots.
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Nazis and the Hollow Earth