How the Nazis Searched for the Legendary Atlantis – Ancient Myth

It only lasted one day and one unhappy night, and then it was all over. For example, the Greek philosopher Plato described the sinking of Atlantis around 360 BC. First the earth trembled, and then tidal waves washed the mighty realm into the sea. Plato was the first to report the fate of the lost Atlantis.

And speculation began in antiquity: did the philosopher devise it all to use as a teaching example in his philosophical arguments? Or had the fabled realm really existed? The search for the sunken land with its legendary capital continues to this day.

At least there were some natural disasters that the legend of Atlantis could have. In 373 BC. shook the earth beneath the Gulf of Corinth. The resulting tsunami devastated the city of Helike, although the catastrophe was fairly recent when Plato wrote the story.

However, according to the philosopher, the sinking of Atlantis occurred more than 9,000 years ago. A fate similar to Helike befell the city of Orobiai in the Gulf of Euboea, when a tidal wave caused by an earthquake submerged it. But this catastrophe did not happen in the distant past, but in the year 426 BC.

Further in time was the so-called Minoan eruption, when the Thera volcano wreaked havoc in the eastern Mediterranean in the 17th or 16th century BC. Researchers have long suspected that the eruption caused the downfall of Minoan culture in Crete. But this theory has since been disproved. Although it severely disrupted Minoan maritime trade, Crete was far enough away not to be directly damaged by the eruption.

Rather than looking for events that can be dated, most Atlantis researchers look for geographic features, as Plato described them in detail. The empire lay behind the Pillars of Heracles. Usually this means the Rock of Gibraltar at the southernmost tip of Spain and the Moroccan Jebel Musa, which forms the strait between Europe and Africa at the passage from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.

But outside the Strait of Gibraltar there isn’t much. The Macaronesian Islands, such as the Canary Islands or the Azores, are no match for the comparison with Atlantis; of the impenetrable mud fields that Plato describes at the site of the sinking, nothing is visible for miles around. The further description of the lost Atlantis doesn’t necessarily help either. Precious metals such as gold, silver and the “fiery glittering orichalchos” – which we now call brass – were abundant, as well as trees, flowers, vines, grain, fruits and vegetables.

That alone wouldn’t make Atlantis special. Plato gets a little more special when it comes to the animal world: “Even the species of elephants were very numerous,” he writes, “which is the largest and most voracious of all.” Unfortunately, during the philosopher’s lifetime, African elephants were much more widespread on the southern edge of the Mediterranean than today, where their habitat is limited to the regions south of the Sahara.

Most localization attempts are actually focused on the Mediterranean region. Besides Helica, Orobiai and Crete, Troy was also suspected of the legendary Atlantis. Geoarchaeologist Eberhard Zangger assumed in 1992 that sinking in a giant wave was meant metaphorically. In reality, Plato described the fall of the Bronze Age city in the Trojan War.

The large islands in the Mediterranean – Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and Malta – are also particularly popular with Atlantis explorers, as they are said to be remnants of the lost empire. Moreover, Atlantis was located both in the Black Sea and in the Balkans or Andalusia.

An entirely different branch of Atlantis research assumes that the civilization of Atlantis is identical to the megalithic cultures of northwestern Europe. And monuments like Britain’s Stonehenge are the last vestiges of their once great buildings. In fact, there is one aspect that makes this thesis so appealing: the Storegga event, when large parts of the continental slope off the Norwegian coast broke off about 8,200 years ago, causing devastating tidal waves on the coasts of northern Europe.

The National Socialists in particular believed with naive enthusiasm in an ‘Atlantis in the north’. The kingdom is the Original house of the “Aryans” high-ranking Nazi circles said it had been an “Aryan-Germanic motherland of race breeding and colonization,” as the anti-Semitic publicist Heinrich Pudor described it in 1936. Heinrich Himmler, head of the dreaded SS, was impressed by the idea that Heligoland could be what was left of the lost ‘Aryan’ homeland.

He sent several research expeditions to the island to find evidence. Vain. Himmler wasn’t quite wrong, though, that Heligoland is actually the last mountaintop of a vanished land: the Doggerland, a fertile plain crossed by countless rivers and lakes that sank into the North Sea 10,000 to 8,000 years ago as sea levels slowly rose. rose. However, there has never been a “great” civilization, let alone the fantasized “Aryans”. The inhabitants were Mesolithic hunters and gatherers.