Raiders of the Lost Nazis

Giorgio Tsoukalos' second venture "In Search of Aliens" takes an unfortunate turn into Nazi-UFO mythology in his second episode "Nazi Time Travelers."  The stories and theories presented are old hat and regurgitated old stories which interested parties such as myself have heard before.   Presented as truth now is Jan Van Helsing's story of the Bavaria UFO crash in the mid 1930s, a Nazi Roswell.  Van Helsing, either a neo-nazi anti-Semite, or just a crazy but harmless conspiracy theorist, depending on who you listen to, is hardly a trusted granite source of information.

I say again that this venture into Nazism is unfortunate.  Now, I seriously doubt Tsoukalos is a crypto-nazi or that the people he interviews are neo-nazis of some stripe.  I very much doubt that the History Channel would broadcast neo-nazi revisionism.  And I do not want to believe Giorgio has any sympathy with them.

It has now been many decades since the Nazi era.  Over seventy years!  Most of the people alive to witness the events are dead now.  So it is only understandable, I guess, to begin to drift into story, fable, and the recreation of history, mythologizing many of the events.  This is a standard historical effect.  For many people, including some very deluded people, the Nazi era is a time of cool uniforms, awesome panzers, big armies conquering certain hated enemies, awesome technological wizz-bangs, and a time when one man 'stood up bravely' against the people he hated and despised (Adolf Hitler or Winston Churchill depending on your side).   World War II was as historically complex as any other time but for many, pro-Nazi and pro-Allies, it was seemingly a very cut and dried, black and white time.  A time when it was easy to take sides, a battle of good versus evil (and that is relative to which side you were on of course).

As Jacques Peretti said in Hitler: The Comedy Years, all the movies about world war II in the post-war period wanted to record all the nostalgia that people had about the war sans the "horrible bit we found out about at the end" (the death camps and the holocaust). 

However, I have read widely on Nazism and their connection to the occult, and on the current Neo-Nazi movements.  One particular author that directly addresses the problems arising from something like this show's enshrining of Nazi science is the late Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke.  Other authors I have read on Nazi fringe matters include Dusty Skylar and Peter Levenda, among others.

The danger of shows like this, is that it mystifies and romanticizes the Nazis.  These tales of vimanas and Die Glockes and secret Nazi achievements.  Talking so much about Nazis like this, divorced of the fact of their terror and oppression, their genocide, dehistoricizes them.  It makes them into a caricature that, while scary or even desired, is not really all that bad.  Just some tough guys in cool black uniforms that tried to invent anti-gravity drive, after all.   The effect of a show like this is to attempt to erase the evil legacy and bad memory of the Third Reich and all they stood for.

For instance, during Giorgio's interviews, even he mentions that prisoners of war would have been used to create "The Henge" and the supposed secret bases, but no mention of how many thousands died doing projects like this around Germany.  He mentions that hundreds of tons of coal had been brought into a certain area of Poland without mentioning who would have been doing the transporting and at what horrible human cost. 


Another danger of making shows mystifying the Nazis is that it does indeed recreate Nazism for a new generation of Neo-Nazis.  Neo-Nazi intellectual sources such as Savatri Devi and Julis Evola did quite a bit of work in this area after the war, rewriting the Nazi 'narrative' to try and make them more heroic, more honorable, and more of what all white people should have joined with.   Such people do not need the help of UFO mythology to further remake Nazism into something that it was not, and make it into a springboard for further murder, destruction, and terror. 

I would heartily recommend that UFO researchers read Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke as a beginning point to learn how dangerous it is to make heroes of the Nazis based on mythology and false history.  Unless of course, that's the effect the creators of this program were looking for, then I have a quite different suggestion for them...