In 1894, an Austrian engineer named Hans Horbiger had a revelation while peering at the moon through a telescope. With no expertise in astrophysics whatsoever, he was certain that the luminosity and texture of its surface meant it was glazed with ice. A few nights later he dreamt of flying through space, where a gigantic swinging pendulum confirmed that Newton's laws taper off at three times Neptune's distance from the Sun. The epiphanies kept coming, relentlessly as flatulence. Later, observing the explosion of steam at molten metal's contact with water, Horbiger became convinced that the clash of heat and ice had similarly formed the universe and all its astral bodies.
In 1912, Horbiger teamed up with an amateur selenographer, Phillip Fauth (who has a moon crater named after him). Together they published an ugly, lengthy, moronic tome, Glazial-Kosmogonie. The revealed word of the World-Ice Theory ("Welteislehre," or WEL for short), it extolled ice as the most elemental substance in the cosmos.
After WWI, in the surrealist downward spiral of Weimar Germany, the WEL was constituted like a political party, with rallies, leaflets, posters, think tanks, and periodicals that galvanized legions of followers. Among them was British-born Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a pan-German occultist, Nazi founding father, and, as it happens, a devoted posthumous son-in-law of Richard Wagner. Chamberlain disdained the scientific method. "One of the most fatal errors of our time," he said, "is that which impels us to give too great weight to the so-called 'results' of science." Another demented mythologist, yet again a Brit, Hans Schindler Bellamy, regurgitated the WEL in a slew of books. His seminal Moons, Myths and Man is so chock full of fairy tales and (as it were) lunacy that summarizing it is like trying to recount a disjointed, nonsensical dream. Bellamy believed, like Horbiger, that the Earth has gone through a series of moons, at least seven. The capture of our present-day moon, Luna, some thousands of years ago, had warped the tides, flipped the magnetic poles, wrought worldwide flooding, and submerged Atlantis -- the center of Aryan civilization, according to spiritualist Madame Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy and Nazi forerunner. Bellamy corroborated the WEL's great-flood myth with other great-flood myths, especially Noah's Ark. To Bellamy it was obvious that Aryans had settled in the Himalayas and the Andes to escape the global deluge; and that, in the low pressure and gravity of the mountain chains, they had grown to become the literal race of "giants" spoken of in the Bible.
Hans Horbiger died in 1931, before Hitler's assumption of power, but WEL fans kept the movement alive by pushing all the right buttons with the ascendant Nazis. "Our Nordic ancestors grew strong in ice and snow," WEL wackos propagandized. "Belief in the Cosmic Ice is consequently the natural heritage of Nordic Man." And: "Just as it needed a child of Austrian culture -- Hitler! -- to put the Jewish politicians in their place, so it needed an Austrian to cleanse the world of Jewish science." It was all very convincing to the Nazi Party. They liked the WEL's Aryan historiography and the ice-theme, and they sought a volk science as eagerly as a Volkswagen. Under the Nazi regime, the WEL became the state cosmology.
When Adolf Hitler drew up plans for a massive planetarium in his hometown of Linz, he dedicated two floors to Ptolemy's and Copernicus's models of the universe and a top floor to Horbiger, whom Hitler called the "German Copernicus." Meantime, the occult-obsessed Heinrich Himmler and his think-tank, the Ahnenerbe, adopted and fine-tuned the WEL as a means of weather forecasting. (The Ahnenerbe is most famous for its crusade to find the grail.) Himmler dispatched his goon researchers to Tibet, not only to prove that Buddha was an Aryan, but also to trek into the Himalayas and test the WEL's utility in meteorology.
And here's where the history gets extremely weird. According to Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement With The Occult, which boasts a foreword by Norman Mailer, Hitler sent his armies into Russia without the needed winter supplies "because the Horbigerians -- under the auspices of the Ahnenerbe's meteorological division -- had predicted a mild winter."
The WEL was wrong about that mild winter and just about everything else. The moon, contrary to Horbiger's postulation, is not spiraling inward toward Earth; it's actually inching away. The Milky Way is not comprised of ice-balls (though the Oort cloud is). And the moon is most certainly not coated in a layer of ice miles thick, though a 1999 NASA mission to the moon found evidence of up to 300 tons of the stuff buried in the poles.
In retrospect, though, Horbiger can seem like a crude visionary. He was uncannily on the mark about the universality of hydrogen, oxygen, and ice. NASA has even spotted signs of ice in the craters on Mercury. And when it comes to the moon, there's a good chance he'll get the last laugh.
In the '20s, Horbiger had an ornery exchange with Willy Ley, the German, anti-Nazi rocket scientist and sci-fi writer who -- with his pro-Nazi doppelganger, Werner von Braun -- launched America into space. Ley explained to Horbiger that the moon is boiling hot under direct sunlight and can't sustain ice at all. Horbiger, in a typical totalitarian flourish, responded: "... either you believe in me and learn, or you must be treated as an enemy." In retrospect, Ley should've believed him. Today we know that many of the moon's craters are the coldest places in the Solar System, as they're shielded eternally from the sun. NASA blitzkrieged one of those craters -- indeed, did so using rocket technology partially ripped off from the Nazis.
The Nazi party's narrow scientific advancements may have set the launch pad for man's leap into space. But it doesn't follow, as the Daily Mail opined last week, that the Nazis created "hell on earth" by believing "with babyish credulity, in science as the only truth." Quite the opposite. They believed, with New Age zeal, in the WEL and the worst of the woo.