The story of the Antarctic Space Nazis starts in the Real World, but it doesn't stay
there long. On January 19, 1939, the Kriegsmarine catapult-ship Schwabenland
under the command of German Arctic specialist Kapitan Alfred Ritscher launched
two modified Dornier-Wal flying boats into Antarctica from a position off the coast
of Queen Maud Land. Pilots Rudolf Mayr and Richard-Henrich Schirmacher carried
out extensive reconaissance reaching 300 miles into the interior, mapping and
photographing roughly 230,000 square miles of territory, dropping six-foot metal
spears adorned with swastika fins to literally stake a claim to what Ritscher renamed
"New Swabia," or Neuschwabenland. After a brief landing on January 29 (during
which the explorers examined an area of hot springs and entered a large cave
system), a number of penguin photographs and the requisite flag-raising, the
expedition departed for Germany, returning April 10, 1939.

From such frozen soil springs ream upon ream of conjecture. The Nazis, goes the
story, sent U-Boats full of machinery, scientists, equipment, supplies, gold and
slave laborers to build a final Redoubt somewhere in the "warm-water interior" of
Neuschwabenland. The career of the commerce-raider Pinguin which sank or
captured thousands of tons of Allied shipping, the mysterious sinking of a U-Boat
carrying 33 tons of mercury through the Straits of Malacca in Asia, the final cruise of
U-530 and U-977 which both surrendered to the Allies in Argentina in August of
1945 (three months after V-E Day), and the mysterious disappearance of numerous
high-ranking Nazis are all thrown together in a stew of cryptic hints and dark
allegations. The Nazis built Doenitz' Shangri-La in the depths of Antarctica and
retreated there to prepare for the coming Fourth Reich! Depending on your paranoia,
Heinrich Muller (head of the Gestapo), Martin Bormann (third-in-command of Nazi
Germany) or Hitler's disembodied brain still lurk in the Antarctic Refuge, surrounded
by cloned Lebensborn SS troopers, giving orders and plotting revenge.
SDR4T

"Now, it seems the Nazis have thrown something new into the night skies over
Germany. It is the weird, mysterious 'Foo Fighter' balls . . . Pilots have been
encountering this eerie weapon for more than a month . . ."
-- New York Herald Tribune Jan 2, 1945
But why stop at Antarctica when all of space beckons to you? It's well-known that
the Luftwaffe was experimenting with a bunch of test aircraft toward the end of the
war, and less well known that the German secret weapons research was increasingly
hampered by a deluge of dingbat theories and schizophrenic, pinheaded directives
from Himmler. This means that a flying disk might actually have been built by the
Luftwaffe, no doubt under great protest -- it's not impossible, given some of the
other crackbrained stunts the Germans got up to. Some researchers (notably Renato
Vesco in Man-Made UFOs 1944-1994 with our old acquaintance David Hatcher
Childress) claim to have found documents indicating tests of flying saucers or
saucerlike craft between 1941 and 1945. Said documents, unfortunately, are almost
all secondary sources dating from the 1950s -- there aren't any contemporary
records of such tests. This, no doubt, is because the records were suppressed by
someone (Russians? Americans? Warehouse 23?).

The consensus story is that the BMW Fluegelrad II Mark 3, a workable "flying saucer"
known as the Dora made at least one flight from a Czech airfield on February 12,
1945 under Flugkapital Rudolf Schriever. The best stories say that it was made of a
kind of porous bronze called "Luftschwamm" which somehow defeated the boundary
effect and used the mighty powers of centrifugal force and suction and
electromagnetic Tesla hoo-hah (or Deadly Orgone Radiation, as we learn on p. 107
of GURPS Warehouse 23) to fly at 490.7 mph and up to 50,000 feet. Dora could turn
on a dime, hover, and generally UFO things up in a big way; the Luftschwamm also
made the cool Theremin whine that UFOs make in all your better saucer movies.
Dora was designed by Dr. Richard Miethe at the Nordhausen concentration camp
and built with slave labor. Miethe may have been working from designs by
anachronistic Romanian jet pioneer Henri Coanda, or (more excitingly) from designs
by probably-certifiable wacko Viktor Schauberger, who possessed (in ascending
order of likelihood) a radical theory of "liquid vortex propulsion," a mysterious
kidnapping and beating death in Chicago in 1958, and a truly impressive beard. U-
530 and U-977 slipped Dora, Schriever and SS General Hans Kammler (the man in
charge of Himmler's secret weapons research, who really did disappear in early
1945) into Neuschwabenland, and within two years the Antarctic Nazis had outerspace
capability. Suitably modified, Dora landed on the Moon in 1947.

Slide for other antarctica thread

"When World War II ended, the Germans had several radical types of aircraft and
guided missiles under development. The majority of these projects were in the most
preliminary stages, but they were the only known craft that could even approach the
performance of the objects reported by UFO observers."
-- Cpt. Edward J. Ruppelt, USAF, Report on Unidentified Flying Objects

From here, the Antarctic Space Nazis grasp at global power. The obvious place for
them to work their fell schemes is in a GURPS Atomic Horror campaign (beginning
with the info on Nazi Remnants on page 71) drawing from novels like Heinlein's
Rocketship Galileo, David Drake's Fortress and W.A. Harbinson's wonderfully
recondite Projekt Saucer: Genesis. The mythology says that U.S. Navy Admiral
Richard Byrd's "Operation Highjump," which explored and mapped great swathes of
Antarctica in January 1947, was actually a reconaissance-in-force against the
Neuschwabenland Redoubt. The Nazis retaliated by buzzing the aerodrome of the
509th Bomber Group (the A-bomb squadron) at Roswell, New Mexico, and
launching the first of many "UFO flaps" across America. Are the "Nordic" Loi the
"supermen" Hitler dreamed of? Did Truman's Majestic-12 and Bormann's SS sign a
secret alliance in 1947 against the Reds? Have we been on the moon since the
Fifties using Nazi technology?

In a GURPS Black Ops campaign, the Antarctic Space Nazis can be either an
independent power akin to the Lodge or the Greys' most flexible flunkies. The
discovery of Neuschwabenland can date back to Highjump and the early days of
Argus or break the campaign open at any time later on. Black Ops can plow through
armies of brainless Wehrmacht mooks or match wits with an elusive Otto Skorzeny in
a game of move and countermove throughout the 1960s. Perhaps the cream of the
SS crop is almost capable of taking on a Black Op mano a mano, although Vile
Hitlerian Eugenics can never match Good Solid American Killing Power. (Or, of
course, the SS can cheat with bionics, biotech or anything else that doesn't mar the
smooth, Aryan flesh of its stormtroopers.)In a GURPS Black Ops campaign, the Antarctic Space Nazis can be either an
independent power akin to the Lodge or the Greys' most flexible flunkies. The
discovery of Neuschwabenland can date back to Highjump and the early days of
Argus or break the campaign open at any time later on. Black Ops can plow through
armies of brainless Wehrmacht mooks or match wits with an elusive Otto Skorzeny in
a game of move and countermove throughout the 1960s. Perhaps the cream of the
SS crop is almost capable of taking on a Black Op mano a mano, although Vile
Hitlerian Eugenics can never match Good Solid American Killing Power. (Or, of
course, the SS can cheat with bionics, biotech or anything else that doesn't mar the
smooth, Aryan flesh of its stormtroopers.)

The Antarctic Space Nazis can fit into any slot in a GURPS Illuminati campaign. The
story so far can work with them as the Secret Masters Beyond the Pole, pulling
strings on contactee cults, hate groups, Joseph McCarthy and the CIA (through the
CIA's contact, former Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen). From the CIA, they get their
fingers into the military-industrial complex (trading scraps of saucertech for billions
in stocks or military protection). The Antarctic Space Nazis also make admirable
dupes and pawns, manipulated by the Illuminati, Shangri-La (the first one, in Tibet)
or the aliens themselves (if Miethe designed Dora from alien blueprints). They've got
armies of SS clones, flying saucers, death rays, stacks of gold bullion and the
malevolent brains of Escaped War Criminals on their side, though; as middleweight
villains, they can show up anywhere!

"I will win the Battle of Time!"
-- Adolf Hitler, 1945
Or anywhen, of course. If the U.S. Navy could build Project Rainbow and the
Philadelphia Experiment, so could the Antarctic Space Nazis! (Maybe they
demanded the secret from MJ-12 before they let NASA take off. Or maybe Werner
von Braun was working for the Antarctic Space Nazis all along.) Using the Rainbow
Effect, the Antarctic Space Nazis can launch their deadly saucers into any period of
Earth's past, and grub around for archaeological artifacts before they've been lost.
What if the reason nobody's found the Ark is that the Nazis already stole it from the
Temple in 945 B.C.? Antarctic Space Nazis make truly vile villains for a GURPS Time
Travel-Places of Mystery campaign, with trips to the Face and Pyramids of Mars
thrown in for good measure. Needless to say, the Antarctic Space Nazis would get
along like a house on fire with their pals in GURPS Alternate Earths' Reich-5.
(Although, they might be unwilling to change the past before 1945 for fear of losing
Dora, if you want some bogus reason for the Nazis to play by the rules of the
Observer Effect.) Finally, of course, the Antarctic Space Nazis could get
interdimensional travel when the Hellstorm goes off in the "Antarctica next door" of
>GURPS Technomancer, and trade saucertech for the Kondor Group's magics.

"Had the German submarines discovered at the North Pole or in John Dee's
Greenland the exact point through which one penetrates, as through a black funnel,
going to connect with the Other Pole, emerging in that paradisal land and sea that
are no longer here, yet exist?"
-- Miguel Serrano, Adolf Hitler, El Ultimo Avatar
Not that the Nazis were any slouch as magicians, at least not in the Land of Coulda-
Happened, where all the great High Weirdness lives. Barbara Hambly's Sun-Cross
series is a great source of ideas for introducing Nazis as extraplanar magical foes of
your fantasy world. Others might include riding the Banestorm in specially modified
Fluegelrader -- that Maelstrom is awfully conveniently close to the south pole of
Yrth in GURPS Fantasy, and a secret Antarctic Space Nazi colony could easily
escape detection in the lands of the djinn to the west of Al-Haz. Your fantasy
campaign might actually turn out to lie in the Hollow Earth beneath Antarctica, and
its marbled cities could get a truly unwelcome shock as the flying saucers land in
the square. Or, of course, you could play US Navy ratings on Byrd's fourth Antarctic
expedition, Operation Deep Freeze in 1956, which hopes to outflank the Nazis by
setting up a base camp in the Hollow Earth -- tommyguns vs. Schmeissers in a
land of dinosaurs and scimitars has a certain appeal.

This is the most important topic of our lives
Baby boomers are so fucking stupid. They didn’t even realize that the Nazis won the war.