World Ice Theory

When you start with these theories, you seem to be inclined to create "Grand Unifying Theories," one ring to rule them all. Lysenkos are everywhere when crackpots gather.

Without understanding the relationship between Nazism and the supernatural, one cannot fully understand the history of the Third Reich, or so says Eric Kurlander in  Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich. It has that effort to give science "soul," but also is reminiscent of current efforts to regionalize--or give an ethnicity to--science.

Hitler and Himmler sponsored a fanciful doctrine known as “World Ice Theory,” which posited that history, science, and religion could be explained by moons of ice hitting the earth in prehistoric times. Even in 1945, as the Third Reich was collapsing, the Nazis cobbled together a guerrilla band of Nazi “Werewolves” to combat Communist partisans, who were in turn accused of vampirism by ethnic Germans fleeing the Russians.

Invented by the Austrian scientist and philosopher Hanns Hörbiger, World Ice Theory (Welteislehre or WEL) was inspired by a dream in which Hörbiger found himself floating in space, observing a giant pendulum swinging back and forth, growing ever longer and eventually breaking. When he woke Hörbiger claimed to know intuitively that the sun’s gravitational pull ceased to exert any force at three times the distance of Neptune and that most of the physical universe could be explained through the interplay of the “antagonistic Ur-substances of ice and fire.” 

Lacking even a rudimentary scientific background, Hörbiger enlisted the amateur astronomer Philip Fauth, with whom he collaborated in publishing their “findings,” Glacial Cosmogony, in 1912. Their work posited that much of the known universe was created when a small, water-filled star collided with a much larger star, causing an explosion, the frozen fragments of which created multiple solar systems, including our own. All of natural phenomena became subject to these missiles of ice, even human life.

Absurd and totalizing as it was, Hörbiger’s “all-encompassing theory of heaven and earth” promised to solve “the cosmic riddle between original creation and world collapse.” It explained everything from “the origins of the sun and species” to “the earthquake of Messina,” Inca religion, and Nordic mythology.

In the 1920s a number of amateur scientists and bourgeois intellectuals joined together to form the Cosmotechnical Society (Kosmotechnische Gesellschaft) and Hörbiger Institute, creating a virtual cult around Hörbiger and his teachings. His theories also appealed to ariosophists (believers in an esoteric doctrine that prophesied the resurgence of a lost Aryan civilization peopled by Nordic “God Men”) and Germanic paganists such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Guido von List, and Lanz von Liebenfels, who saw in Welteislehre “scientific” proof of their views. In this Ur-Germanic alternative to “Jewish” physics and “soulless” natural science, the cataclysmic floods, apocalyptic battles, and heroic Aryan civilization of the Old Norse Edda appeared to be confirmed.

World Ice Theory, according to the Nazi intellectual Edgar Dacqué, represented a “racial spirit of the times and science” rolled into one. It was an “aggressive response and revolutionary departure from the system of foreign scientific powers,” including the “self-satisfied bourgeois” astronomy and physics of the West. Both Nordic mythology and völkisch-esoteric doctrines such as ariosophy had posited a series of Ur-cataclysms and ice ages, which caused biological mutations in Earth’s inhabitants, producing Atlantean supermen and monstrous humanoids. Weaned on Wagner, Chamberlain, and Lanz von Liebenfels, many völkisch thinkers consequently recognized in World Ice Theory the ancient Aryans (Atlanteans) whose civilization had been destroyed by their former Tschandal (subhuman) slaves. Supporters of World Ice Theory were likewise keen to point out parallels between the Austrians Hörbiger and Hitler, including their mutual success, as so-called amateurs, in conquering the fields of science and politics respectively. 

World Ice Theory was the only border science that Hitler embraced wholly and with conviction.

(Adapted from Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich by Eric Kurlander.)

So World Ice Theory came within an invasion of Russia from being settled science.