- 2 days ago
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00Hollywood loves an iconic villain and there are none better than Hitler's Nazis but did Indiana
00:12Jones's old enemy really plunder the world for ancient relics as depicted in the famous films
00:18the answer is yes spearheaded by Heinrich Himmler and the SS epic expeditions were mounted by Nazi
00:31scientists they called themselves the onanurba their weapons lies theft and murder they are
00:43Hitler's treasure hunters it's Hitler versus Einstein this was the Nazi playbook every part
00:59of human knowledge and culture could be misused to suit their own ends as science becomes a weapon
01:07there are a variety of ways in which the misuse of science underpinned human suffering that
01:16obviously was something that led to the death of millions of people and Nazi treasure hunters stage
01:23a desperate quest for mythical munitions including Thor's hammer sometimes the inmates start running
01:33of the asylum they actually believe in and that's when it gets really dangerous
01:511919 after the humiliating defeat of World War One Germany is in turmoil
01:58mass casualties and economic ruin have decimated national pride sensing his moment Adolf Hitler sells an
02:10intoxicating message of strength tradition and purity at the heart of Hitler's promise is his deranged
02:19racial hierarchy it's a pyramid with the Aryan master race at the top those fit to follow below and
02:28and at the bottom the Jews the Nazi idea about a superior race and a racial hierarchy depends on
02:40understanding that the Aryan race has enemies that there are others out there who threaten our well-being they
02:51threaten our culture they threaten our very survival our livelihoods to not only build but maintain this twisted
03:02social hierarchy Hitler will task his treasure hunting team the onanerba with a quest of mythical even astronomical proportions
03:13one that would bridge the gap between their misguided belief in god-like Nordic ancestors and their aspirations for unlimited otherworldly powers
03:25Thor's hammer is an icon of modern pop culture its awesome power has featured in TV shows like Stargate and Ragnarok and
03:31most notably is the weapon of choice for Thor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe what's lesser known is that the hammer has been represented throughout history by using one notable symbol the swastika before the Nazi regime co-opted the swastika for their own diabolical
03:49purposes both Icelandic folklore and ancient Germanic people used the symbol to represent the hammer of the Nors god Thor the connection with the swastika is up until the Nazis almost inevitably
03:56always a positive one meaning wealth or abundance or good luck something to theweight of the nation of the world which is a positive form of justice and humanity in the world.
04:03So many of the unique features of the universe that some of the myth Анna peoples so they have to see about the history of the world.
04:16So the connection with the swastika is up until the Nazis almost inevitably always a positive one meaning wealth or abundance or good luck
04:24good luck, sometimes more specifically associated
04:27with the sun, I believe in ancient Scandinavian areas,
04:31potentially associated with Thor.
04:37It's no surprise, then, that Heinrich Himmler
04:39and his Anna Nerba would launch a quest
04:42in search of the artifact.
04:44It would have been the ultimate treasure.
04:54Not only might it grant the user untold power,
04:58but possessing the weapon of a blond-haired, blue-eyed Nordic
05:02god would give the Nazis all the legitimacy
05:05they needed to support their Aryan master race theory.
05:12The appeal of Thor's hammer to Himmler, the Iron Erby,
05:15and the Nazis, it was a genuinely Germanic,
05:19Nordic, Aryan artifact, which fit beautifully
05:23into their mythology.
05:25What's interesting about this focus on Thor's hammer
05:28is the willingness to believe in something
05:30so patently ridiculous, whether you see it as a real object
05:34or as speaking to some prehistoric wonder weapon.
05:37These fantasies conjured a romantic vision
05:40of a mythical past that Hitler's Germany was sorely lacking.
05:46Senior Nazis were more ambitious, though.
05:49Himmler himself believed the Nordic myths
05:52were based on a real Aryan superweapon lost to time.
05:58And he had to have it.
06:02Did Himmler write profusely about the potential Thor's hammer
06:07was based on secret energies that maybe one could harness
06:10with the appropriate border science?
06:12Yes, he absolutely talked about that.
06:14And he even charged certain companies to try to research it.
06:23And this is where we meet linguist Bruno Schweitzer,
06:26a man charged with finding Germanic links to the Norse gods in Iceland.
06:34Iceland was thought by many in the Anna Nerva to have once
06:38been an ancestral homeland of the Aryan race.
06:42They believed their ancestors were once a pure, powerful people,
06:46pardoned by the extremes of ice and fire who had conquered
06:51and civilized the ancient world.
06:54If Schweitzer could find traces of this ancient civilization,
06:59he might very well find the resting place of Thor's hammer.
07:04Like many of the Anna Nerva's other treasure hunts, however,
07:08Schweitzer came up empty-handed.
07:11The Nazis were never a group to let a good thing go to waste.
07:16Himmler had dreamed of the power Thor's hammer might give him,
07:20and so if they couldn't find it,
07:22they'd set out to make it themselves.
07:32By 1944, Germany's war efforts are in disarray.
07:38Four years have passed since Himmler ordered his Anna Nerva
07:41treasure hunters to find Thor's hammer.
07:45But as the Allies close in, a letter lands on Himmler's desk
07:50that may yet spark his superweapon dream to life.
07:56A German company called Elamag proposes using shortwave radiation
08:02to ionize the atmosphere,
08:06turning the sky into a giant conductor
08:09and allowing the instant disabling of enemy electrical equipment.
08:15The hunt for Thor's hammer had turned up empty, but with just a spark.
08:20Himmler had within his grasp a man-made alternative.
08:25Was he about to fashion himself as the modern god of thunder?
08:31So many myths and legends that spoke about lightning, lightning gods,
08:39fire coming from the sky implied the existence of a prehistoric superweapon
08:45wielded by some past master race that left no other trace to us in the present.
08:51A thrilled Himmler rushes the proposal to the Reich Research Council
08:59for urgent assessment by the nation's leading experts.
09:02If Elamag's device worked, high voltage electrical energy could be directed across vast distances,
09:11stopping tanks in their tracks, and swatting entire bombing formations from the air.
09:19February 1945, as Dresden is leveled by British bombers from the west,
09:25and Budapest falls to Soviets in the east, the Research Council finally reports back.
09:32The report's tone is mocking, and states that Elamag's proposal lacks
09:38any deep understanding of the technological and physical processes involved.
09:43With those crushing words, Himmler's fantasies of harnessing the power of the gods
09:50comes to a humiliating end.
09:56Heinrich Himmler may have allocated much of the Ananurba's resources to the search for Thor's hammer,
10:02but there was perhaps an even more significant hunt occurring in Germany at the same time.
10:10A race to dictate the very definitions of scientific theory,
10:15one that could influence fact and truth for years to come.
10:20At the same time Hitler was honing his Arian Reich,
10:24another German was rising to prominence with radically different ideas.
10:29The world's most famous scientist, Albert Einstein, was a German Jew.
10:36This was a disaster for Hitler's Aryan pyramid,
10:40one that dictated a place for the Jews right at the bottom.
10:45How could the leading scientific mind of a generation be from such a worthless and diabolical class of people?
10:53For Hitler and the Nazis, these success stories represented a fundamental challenge
10:59to the warped, racially superior states they championed.
11:05Adolf Hitler was very skeptical to certain parts of the academic establishment,
11:11as well as certain ideas of German science.
11:14Because of his rampant racism, he had seen so much of this as unnaturally in his mind,
11:21influenced by Jewish physics or Jewish medicine, and so he distrusted much of that information.
11:30As Hitler's powers grew, his antisemitism drove a scientific exodus.
11:35Jewish researchers are either forced out of office or flee Germany to escape persecution.
11:44Jewish academics, anyone opposed to the ideology of the right,
11:48were kicked out of German universities and went into exile.
11:52So really, you were left with an academic world where any Jewish academics
11:59or left-wing academics had been eliminated.
12:03Hitler's innovative solution to his scientific problem?
12:07Simply create a new Aryan science.
12:11A world of alternative facts that could be used to denounce theories like Einstein's
12:17as nothing more than fraud.
12:18For Hitler, Jewish physics represented the greatest threat to Nazi intellectual ambitions.
12:32Its existence would spark a new kind of hunt,
12:36one where the treasure wasn't so much an object as it was an idea.
12:41The very science that could either justify Aryan supremacy across world history,
12:46or make the whole racist tower of cards come tumbling down.
12:54World ice theory was that treasure.
13:02The theory proposed that cosmic ice was a fundamental building block from which all stars and planets were formed.
13:10It was dreamt up in the 1890s by Hans Horbiger, an Austrian engineer who had an epiphany while gazing at the moon.
13:21Its brightness and perfect shape could only be explained if it consisted entirely of ice.
13:28Horbiger imagined that in the distant past, two stars that were filled with water
13:33water, collided and exploded, spreading water which froze into ice throughout the heavens.
13:43These fragments eventually formed our own galaxy and solar system.
13:48Instead of scientific evidence, Horbiger was guided by what he called creative intuition.
13:55If we take world ice theory, which is a made up fairytale concept,
14:03Hans Horbiger did not have any formal scientific training, and he worked out this system,
14:09which laid this all out as if it was a scientific doctrine.
14:13Already before World War One, when actual scientists read this stuff, they said,
14:18if you replaced the word ice with olive oil, every time it appears in this book,
14:26it would be no more or less true, no more or less verifiable. It was so bizarre.
14:37The bizarre logic went, Aryan ancestors once thrived in the ancient ice world, but after a global
14:44disaster laid waste to the planet, their realm shrank down to the Arctic region, leaving Nordic Aryans as
14:52survivors of this original master race. Despite its exotic premise, world ice theory found a captive
15:01audience in Heinrich Himmler. There doesn't seem to be much of the fringe science or the occult or the
15:13mythical past that Himmler doesn't seem to take an interest in. World ice theory seems to be something
15:19that he has a belief in. I think he believed that much of the world's accomplishments could be traced
15:27back to Aryans as the creators of culture. I think he did believe that there were various migrations which
15:39allowed ancient peoples from the northern areas to migrate, for example, to places like Rome or Greece,
15:46and somehow give the seed of culture to those great societies.
15:51This wasn't a treasure hunt for objects, but rather for scientific authority, a race to prove their
16:01own outlandish theories, which would legitimize their claims. World ice theory offered Himmler not just an
16:09alternative to the complex Jewish physics of Einstein, but also an origin story that could explain how the
16:17world had once been shaped by ancient Aryans. Such an idea could be the ultimate treasure.
16:25It all of it was an attempt to try to get around this problem of where do these people actually
16:29originate? If they're coming from the east and from the south, then that's a problem in terms of the
16:34ideological program of racial purity that the Nazis were trying to propagate. So I think that was the appeal principally.
16:39Hans Horbiger's strange ideas thrilled Himmler. So powerful was his interest that he commissioned his
16:50Onanerba researchers to search for scientific evidence that would prove Horbiger's wild ideas and underpin their
16:58warped racial legacy, regardless of whatever truth they encountered.
17:04Under Nazi rule, world ice theory is adopted as part of the newly approved Deutsch physics.
17:17But if it's to hold up, the Onanerba must provide the proof that Himmler craves and Hitler needs.
17:25Himmler loved it, and Hitler liked it. And guess what? There weren't a lot of German physicists with PhDs
17:33who liked it. So they could easily then say, this is superior. This is Aryan science. And those crazy
17:41Jewish scientists who claim that there are atoms that are moving around that we can't see and claim
17:47that space and time can bend, right? They're the weirdos. They're the unscientific ones.
17:57Under Himmler's leadership, the Onanerba sets out on a global treasure hunt.
18:02The prize they're seeking is evidence that will prove world ice theory once and for all,
18:09and in the process, destroy Jewish physics.
18:19While flying over the vast deserts of Libya in North Africa, Himmler had a revelation.
18:25Spotting what he believed were ancient shorelines below, he became convinced he had discovered the
18:33remains of an ancient natural disaster.
18:35When he was in a plane above North Africa in Libya, and he noticed these geological formations in the desert,
18:48and he thought, aha, this looks like evidence of this world ice theory.
18:54If true, such a discovery would earn Himmler vast prestige and wealth as a hero of the Reich.
19:05All he needed was an amateur archaeologist who had a thing for fantasy novels to investigate his findings.
19:12Luckily, he already had one.
19:15A man who had been taking part in the occultist treasure hunts of the Onanerba through the 1930s.
19:23In February 1939, Himmler dispatches Kiss to North Africa.
19:39Hunting not for precious jewels, but a far more valuable treasure to the Third Reich.
19:49Proof of world ice theory.
19:52For two weeks, Kiss and his team traverse Libya, surveying its mountains and the deep gorges that cut through them.
20:00His nights are spent drawing maps and making sketches.
20:04After examining the proportions of the Libyan gorges, Kiss writes to Himmler, his frequent pen pal, of his discoveries.
20:15They reveal a man caught up in the fanciful treasures the Nazis sought, as he states that
20:21erosion in the area could only have been formed by strong ice currents caused by world ice theory.
20:29What sounded like a confirmation very likely had another far simpler explanation.
20:37The fantasy novelist turned archaeologist was likely just telling his boss what he wanted to hear.
20:44Kiss, who seems to have been impressed by Himmler, or at least impressed by his money,
20:50had a look at these geological formations and realized immediately it had absolutely nothing to do
20:57with a crackpot theory about the creation of the Earth and icy planets and so on and so forth.
21:03What I think the story of Kiss and Libya and the world ice theory show is that
21:08Himmler must have been rather persuasive.
21:10When someone like Kiss, who was not a scientist, wanted patronage, he thought he would go along with Himmler's proposal.
21:22In fact, all that Kiss's expedition ended up proving was the deep flaw at the heart of the
21:29Onanerba approach to science, that Nazi ideals were more important than evidence.
21:36In order to pursue the racist science that the Nazis desired, they couldn't really operate under
21:44proper scientific method. Because what they were proposing was so ridiculous, they had to create
21:51a pseudoscience, a fake science, that would produce the outcomes that they wanted to justify their aims.
21:59But while Himmler's ice theory fantasies would melt into nothing, Onanerba pseudoscience would go on to
22:07become a core part of the Nazi playbook as their treasure hunts tried to alter the very basis of scientific theory.
22:18As the war machine of Germany geared into action, Hitler promised his people a brand new empire,
22:33one that was only possible by invading neighboring lands. To do so, the scientific treasure hunter would be
22:41dispatched. Great German minds that would work to uncover new methods for domination in Europe.
22:50Despite all the madness pursued by the Onanerba, the German mainstream scientists were leaders in
22:56their fields in chemistry and physics, in engineering. And by the time of the Second World War, the German
23:02economy boasted one of the largest industrial bases in the world. While the German economy powers through a
23:08massive rearmament program, Hitler's most destructive weapons remain his racist ideas.
23:20Hitler had built his Germany on the promise of conquest, on this idea of
23:25Lebensraum, living room for the German people. But there were also elements of the racial ideology
23:32that the Germans possessed as well, that war was really a demonstration of the powerful overcoming the weak.
23:38On September 1st, 1939, Hitler seizes the initiative and invades Poland.
23:52Germany invades Poland and the pre-state of Danzig. The efforts and hopes of diplomats for peaceful
23:57settlements are transformed into the roar of gunfire. Warsaw is bombed, blasted and shelled. Poland is in
24:04ruin. The early years of the conflict see Germany's military might sweep across the continent. But at home,
24:12another battle rages between the conventional science of Nazis like Albert Speer and the eccentric
24:20fantasies of Heinrich Himmler. In 1942, Albert Speer took over as Minister for Armaments and he was a very
24:31practical man. He was a technocrat, he was obsessed with efficiency and a pragmatist at every level,
24:37and he had very little time for Himmler's ideas and pseudoscience.
24:41He might not have bought into the hunts for ancient treasure, but Speer was a hunter all the same.
24:50His treasure was simply scientific in nature, a means of control far more tangible than myths
24:57like Thor's hammer. Under Speer's leadership, German war production soars, opening up the capacity to develop
25:06deadly new weapons. In the face of intense Allied bombing, Germany urgently needs a way to strike back,
25:17leading Hitler to become obsessed with the idea of wonder weapons. Central to this vision are the
25:25long-range missiles of the V program. The V weapons program was born out of a combination of desperation
25:33and technological ambition. The Germans were desperate to strike back at distant enemies,
25:40particularly Britain, who'd stood steadfastly for most of the war, and perhaps long-range rockets was
25:46just what they needed to give them the edge. The first wonder weapon to be developed is the V-1,
25:52a cruise missile powered by a simple pulsejet engine. It's cheap to produce and can be launched
25:58in large numbers, but ultimately the V-1 proves unreliable and inaccurate.
26:07With complete disregard for consequences, the Nazis wrecked their own airfields, their own planes,
26:12in a desperate gamble on a revolutionary weapon. Attention shifts to a far more ambitious project,
26:19the V-2. It's a scientific masterpiece. A liquid-fueled rocket capable of delivering a one-ton warhead
26:30to a target 200 kilometers away. Its designer, Werner von Braun, is a brilliant aerospace engineer who's
26:40already developed an experimental rocket propulsion system for German aircraft.
26:45Hitler might have been skeptical when it came to the more fanciful treasure hunts of Himmler,
26:52but in scientists like von Braun, the treasure was something he could see and touch and fed wild
26:59notions of winning the war with one fell swoop. Everyone was reading books and comics about rockets
27:07and aliens in the 20s and 30s. Everyone knows about Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells, and H.P. Lovecraft,
27:14and Edgar Rice Burroughs. The frightening thing is Hitler and Himmler, who had no university training
27:19whatsoever, actually believed you could create these super-powered rockets
27:26that could single-handedly win the war.
27:31In October 1942, von Braun launches the first successful prototype from a secret base
27:38at Pinamunde in northern Germany. His rocket reaches four and a half times the speed of sound,
27:45becoming the first human-made object to enter space.
27:48The V-2 really was a technological marvel. It was like nothing anywhere on Earth. At this stage,
27:55no-one had a rocket that compared with the V-2, and it really demonstrated what German scientists
28:01could achieve when they set their minds to it. London after a V-2 race, the Nazi vengeance weapon,
28:07which in six months killed or maimed 9,000. Under the leadership of Albert Speer,
28:14Wernher von Braun wasn't racing to find ancient artifacts. But if he could build a weapon to end
28:20the war, it would gift Hitler the greatest treasure of all. Von Braun's team succeeded. He had built a
28:28weapon that was years ahead of the Allies.
28:30But their success comes at a terrible human cost. Under von Braun's leadership, thousands of
28:45concentration camp prisoners are used as forced labor. In fact, it's estimated that more prisoners
28:52die manufacturing V-weapons than were ever killed by their deployments.
29:00Although the V-2 was a marvel of technology, it was never going to change the outcome of the Second
29:07World War. The Nazis only managed to produce about 5,000 V-2s, and they could not be produced quickly
29:14enough or deployed quickly enough to change the outcome of the war.
29:22As Albert Speer and Wernher von Braun pushed the boundaries of conventional science,
29:27the internal struggle over which treasures were more important to the Reich creates a rift between
29:35the scientists and the cultish Annanerba.
29:38Himmler's Annanerba and the Institute for Wehrwissenschaft, his own experimental scientific
29:46institute within the Annanerba, started to compete for resources with the rocket experts who actually
29:53understood the technology, that he started to give them orders. Not only do Himmler and the Annanerba
30:00disrupt efforts like the V-program, they also pursue ever more desperate and bizarre paths to victory.
30:11What we see is a change in focus in Annanerba research, from exploring Nazi ideology and history to
30:18so-called practical ways to help the war effort. So fringe subjects like parapsychology, astrology,
30:25dowsing, even UFO research, all explored.
30:35With Himmler's fantasies in full swing, conventional science like that of von Braun take a back seat,
30:43but only for a short time. Because when the treasure is military dominance, every hunter is valuable.
30:52Von Braun would eventually end up in the United States as part of Operation Paperclip,
31:00an initiative to harness the minds of leading German physicists post-war. For his part, Himmler's
31:07obsession with fringe science only grows, turning his attention even to the supernatural in search of
31:15miracle weapons. It results in one of the strangest episodes of the war, when attempts are made to divine
31:23the location of enemy ships using a magic pendulum.
31:28An exotic new chapter of Nazi pseudoscience begins with the mysterious figure of Ludwig Straniak.
31:45He's a proponent of radiesthesia, an exotic theory that explains how radiation or energy is emitted by
31:53objects, objects, and people. Straniak claims this eighth force of nature can influence the movements
32:01of a pendulum or divining rod in a practice known as dowsing, used to locate everything from water and
32:09gold to gemstones and buried corpses. In fact, so obsessed was Hitler with proving racial superiority,
32:18he even entertained the idea that the pendulum could predict the presence of Jews and help identify them
32:26in a crowd. While there's zero evidence to support dowsing, its popularity grows in the 1900s.
32:35Many, like Straniak, treat it as an emerging science. And so begins an even stranger kind of treasure hunt,
32:44one where a strong wind could blow the whole thing off course, and the major players come from beyond the
32:52very edges of accepted science. By 1942, the war in the Atlantic is turning against Germany. British forces
33:03employ cutting-edge science like radar, sonar, and cryptography to sink German vessels at an unprecedented rate.
33:14With the serious scientists on the out, Himmler turns to his pseudo-scientific treasure hunters.
33:24Himmler himself, he wanted to test dowsing, clairvoyance. That's one reason he creates the
33:29Ananerba, is to hire scientists to say what's real, what's fact, what's fiction. Now the questions he was
33:35asking are the same kind of bizarre questions you sometimes see in TV now. Could it be that aliens came to
33:42Earth and made it? He actually thought that was worth asking.
33:51Desperate to understand the secret behind the British success, German naval officers become
33:57convinced they must test radiosthesia to detect their own vessels.
34:03This is not the Nazi party now. This is a navy under this guy named Ruder, who's got this idea,
34:11he's an officer in the German navy, that the reason things are going south in the battle for the Atlantic,
34:17it's not that the British have developed new technologies. He thought it's because they
34:22had perfected the use of the sidereal pendulum.
34:29After observing Ludwig Straniak dowsing, the navy decides to put his abilities to the test.
34:38They challenge him to locate the twin prides of the Kriegsmarine, the cruiser Prinz Eugen and
34:45battleship Bismarck. After studying photographs of both ships, Straniak dangles his sidereal pendulum
34:55over a map of the Atlantic Ocean. To the great surprise of Kriegsmarine intelligence officers,
35:08Straniak successfully locates the position of both ships.
35:12If the sources are to be believed, the Naval Research Institute recruits significant numbers of pendulum
35:23dowsers as a result, who spend their days dangling pendulums over maps, waiting for telltale movements.
35:32But even after the supernatural scheme fails to deliver results,
35:36the Nazi reliance on junk science continues to grow.
35:42The Nazi willingness to embrace the idea of dowsing actually working is actually reflective of something
35:50a bit darker. What it's part of is this pseudo-scientific tradition that they're engaged in,
35:57in taking, at the very least, unreliable theories and putting them across as fact.
36:08So whilst we might laugh at dowsing, when we get to other pseudo-sciences,
36:13eugenics, racism, Aryan superiority, then it becomes a little bit more difficult.
36:21As military failures begin to mount up, realists like Albert Speer warn that blind faith in miracle
36:32weapons could derail the war effort. However, Speer's protests go in vain.
36:40On the Czech border, Himmler raises the stakes of Nazi pseudo-science, establishing an
36:53Onanerba's secret projects office at the Skoda Works weapons plant.
37:00Desperate to snatch victory from the jaws of impending defeat, the secret projects office is
37:06rumored to have explored a bizarre array of weapons, including a science fiction-style death ray that
37:14would use directed energy to kill or stun at a distance. Reports suggest the prototype device was
37:23developed by a young Luftwaffe colonel, Schroeder Strauns.
37:27But after Albert Speer attempts to shut down the unauthorized project, Himmler counters that since
37:37the rays can also promote health, it was not technically a weapon, and outside Speer's authority.
37:45We shouldn't be surprised at this. As a totalitarian state, the Nazis enthusiastically misuse science.
37:52They misused culture, they misused history, they misused religion. This was the Nazi playbook.
38:01Every part of human knowledge and culture could be misused to suit their own ends.
38:08But as outlandish an idea as a Nazi death ray may be,
38:12it's nothing compared to their pipe dream of a flying saucer.
38:25Enter eccentric Austrian naturalist, Victor Schauberger, who believes the natural world contains hidden
38:33energy. According to Schauberger, a combination of precisely curved airflow and ultra-high pressures
38:41would mean the ship generated more energy than it consumed. Witnesses claim a test flight in 1945
38:49saw a disc-shaped craft suddenly rise from the ground, trailing a brightly colored glow behind it.
38:56However, not a single picture or document records the event, leaving the whole episode shrouded in mystery.
39:04And while there's little evidence to support the idea that the Nazis truly believed UFOs were a
39:09viable way to win the war, what it does show is a willingness to co-opt even the most fantastical
39:14ideas as a way to serve Nazi gulls. Ultimately, what the Nazis wanted was power over everything,
39:22no matter how far this obsession took them.
39:27But while Nazi junk science failed to conjure up magical munitions, another group of conventional
39:34German scientists had been frantically working on a real wonder weapon.
39:51Led by the brilliant physicist Werner Heisenberg, a German team had embarked on a desperate race with
39:57the Allied Manhattan Project to create a functional atomic bomb that could turn the tide of the war.
40:05Known as the Uranium Club, in 1942, Heisenberg addresses a secret meeting of Nazi military brass,
40:14including Albert Speer. He announces that uranium can be refined to create U-235, the fuel for a bomb
40:26of unimaginable power.
40:35The most powerful weapon ever conceived now has a road map to readiness.
40:41The Uranium Club continue their work throughout the war, making several breakthroughs and building a
40:47prototype reactor in a secret laboratory hidden under a medieval church in Heigerloch.
40:56But their pioneering work is undermined by the exodus of Jewish scientists from Germany,
41:02along with Hitler's deep mistrust of the Jewish physics in favor of simpler Aryan ideas.
41:09One reason you get this pushback against so-called Jewish science, unlike Newtonian physics,
41:17which any high school student who can do calculus can figure out, is very complicated.
41:23So with all these people working on things that are very small and hard to pinpoint,
41:28there was a reaction by people who saw themselves as educated, saying,
41:31well, that can't be true. It must be world ice theory.
41:35Or what about folklore or Atlantis? And they seized on these alternative ways of explaining the world.
41:43It shows how short-sighted they were, because they could have used the scientific knowledge that
41:51they had in Germany, they could have built upon it, rather than forcing so many scientists to flee.
41:57It's even suggested that a decade of racist persecution under Hitler and the Anunurba
42:04drained Germany of the very people who might have won them the war.
42:121945, as Germany is finally defeated, first Adolf Hitler, then Heinrich Himmler, commits suicide.
42:23And Dönitz was forced to agree to the surrender on Allied terms. At 2.41 on the morning of
42:27Bay 7, 1945, the tragic war on Europe officially came to an end.
42:34The dream of a new Aryan science also dies with its architects.
42:40There are a variety of ways in which the misuse of science underpinned human suffering.
42:46What fascism does is it fashions this supernatural imaginary
42:51that appropriates elements of science, elements of religion.
42:57That obviously was something that led to the death of millions of people.
43:12young men and people are trying to live in their lives.
43:15They were just in the end.
43:16They wanted to understand what theway might not be able to do.
43:17They had to be able to do with the plan.
43:20They had to be conchetic with the Sieg of the world in the world.
43:25They had to go to the power of women.
43:25They had to go to the power of women and women.
43:31They had to go to the power of women's estàs, and women.
43:34On March 어제, they failed to be involved in front of a war,
43:36which was their best-five-lord-class palate.
43:37Transcription by CastingWords
Be the first to comment