10

I saw this document posted on several websites about forgotten continents. They detail the maneuvers that a submarine must take to make it through the Antarctic to the other side.

Is there anything that suggests they're authentic, or to the contrary, anything that conclusively proves this is a modern forgery? I'm not interested whether or not this hidden land really exists, just if it's possible that these were created mid 20th century?

Nazi maps believed to be instructions for reaching Agartha have supposedly been corroborated by a letter from a German U-boat navigator named Karl Unger, who claims U-209 made it to Agartha and that the Earth is in fact, hollow. The letter also mentions the notorious German Gens. Karl Haushofer and Rudolf Hess, who he says were correct about the hollow-Earth theory.

Transcription from http://www.imperialgermans.com/documents.html:

DIVE AT THE POINT WITH THE COORDINATES: EXACT INTERSECTION: 68° SOUTHERN LATITUDE AND 1° EASTERN LATITUDE, AT A DEPTH OF 400 METERS.

The instructions should be followed strictly!

Dive. From the point of diving with half drive, a starboard slant of 10° with a bow load inclination angle of 5°. Distance 188 nm (nautical miles). The allowed depth of 500 meters. (during the driving in the corridor the pressure on the ship’s hull during maneuvers is marginally.)

Emerge. Ballast with a stern trim, emerge in an angle of 23° with a portside slant position of 22°. 190 meters upwards. Distance 75,5 nm.

Difficult maneuver! Emerge. Ballast with a stern trim, emerging inclination angle of 41° Drive straight forward. 110 meters upwards, distance 21,5 nm. Afterwards a starboard slant position of 8° until you emerge on the surface of the cave. Distance 81 nm.

Drive on the surface of the cave with a starboard slant position of 8°. Distance 286 nm.

Difficult maneuver! Dive. With a bow load, inclination angle of 45°. Until a depth of 240 meters, distance 60 nm. Afterwards with a portside slant position of 20°,at which the diving until 310 meters until the drive in the corridor is continued. After the mark of 310 meters is the diving to be proceeded with a port load capacity. Diving angle of 7° until 360 meters. Distance 70 nm. Further starboard slant position of 31° until a depth of 380 meters.

Dive. Port load, emergence angle of 22°. 199 Meters upwards with a portside slant position of 26°. Distance 43 nm.

Emerge. Stern trim. Emergence angle of 45°, always straight forward, until you breach the surface in Agharta. Distance 70 nm.

Drive to Agharta. Full speed ahead. Look straight forward, until the new light is put out. Changing of the magnetpoles. The movements of the compass needles and other meters are to be ignored. (Further instructions are in pakage Nr. 3. Open first when you arrive in Agharta!)

Instructions

Improve this question
7
  • 2
    Not enough info for an answer, but the hand-written letter shown in the www.imperialgermans.com link, which is dated April 1947, claims that U-209 made it to the undersea world "since the Fuehrer is gone". Yet U-209 was supposedly destroyed in May 1943 in the North Atlantic, as written here and here.
    – Weather Vane
    Aug 21, 2021 at 22:34
  • 2
    ... moreover the letter was written by Karl Unger, yet his name does not appear on the crew list of U-209.
    – Weather Vane
    Aug 21, 2021 at 23:01
  • @WeatherVane +look @ the fonts used, the names used (ppl & places) in all extent, (( the thing would benefit from focusing down; but: just an analysis of 'what's there' shoots a few ducks…
    – LangLаngС
    Aug 22, 2021 at 0:00
  • 3
    U-209 was a type VII-C with a test depth of 220m (says uboot.net), estimated crush depth < 300m (says WikiP); these instructions require depths of 400-500m. In its final message U-209 reported significant damage from two air attacks one month into its 7th patrol which led to its being ordered to return to port, but was presumed sunk near 56.38N, 42.32W - the described start of the passage to Agharta is 14,000km from there, which is close to the maximum range of a Type VII-C fresh from port. Of course one can explain this as a false trail laid by Nazis & actually it was undamaged in the attacks
    – Tom Goodfellow
    Aug 22, 2021 at 0:37
  • 2
    @LangLаngС another thing is that the stamped/draughted panel bottom right of the map has been signed with an authorization although all its verification details were left blank. I too wondered about the typesetting, the modern look to the fonts, and the gothic style in a military document when its use in Germany was dying out. Moreover, that style is now associated with neo-Nazi groups.
    – Weather Vane
    Aug 22, 2021 at 8:03

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
17

No.

This is at first glance a quite elaborate but then on only slighty closer inspection quite sloppy fake in all respect.

Other versions of the same scam in varying qualities, click to enlarge:
enter image description here enter image description here

While it should be rather self-evident that no such lands like Agartha exist (and in conventional mythology Agartha is placed in the Tibetan Himalya…), that is not to say that some deluded Nazis actually believed in its existence, issued directions to get there, or even used that as some kind of code for an ordinary/conventional military base or whatnot.

However:

The font used is a Fraktur type but apparently of the Schwabacher variant, which both fell into disuse during Nazi rule and was actually banned in the Reich in 1941—so any actual use after that point for body text in the alleged time gets exceedingly unlikely.

More important, if any Fraktur-type would have been used, then the following aspects would have been taken care of: spelling/typography conventions for using short-s and long-s or ligatures (apparently none used at all: ff, ss, etc) seem to be unknown to the creator of these 'instructions' .

Spelling errors throughout the document, not a complete list, only examples listed :

  • Kompaßnadel (lacks 'ß')
  • capitalisation errors (kriegsmarine instead of Kriegsmarine etc)
  • gross misspellings ("Rarte" instead of "Karte", compare with 'k' in "Korridor" or 'r' in "Räumen")
  • uneuqal usage of white space after punctuation marks ("Schwieriges Manöver !" vs "…öffnen!")

For comparison, an actual Kriegsmarine book from 1936, featuring proper Fraktur-font, long-s ('-liste' (also st-ligature), 'Deutschen'), sch-ligature ('Deutschen'):

enter image description here

The prescribed diving depth of going from 400 to 500 meters exceeds the maximum German u-boats of the time could even withstand (Type VII: 400m, Type XXI: 330m), let alone operate safely within. The "A-Klasse" of u-boats must be of some secret type (if not British from the start), as they are completely unknown, but so is any "Sonderkonvoi des Führers"…

Not being an experienced submarine driver, I'd still have to wonder: the instructions seem to make no sense to me. For example: Why should it be of any importance to keep the boat tilted for a while? ("Schräglage") To keep close to all these convoluted maneuvers—instead of giving a precise coordinate? Which is phenomenally absent (with any expected precision) from the two maps of Antarctica given? ("Einfahrt nach Agartha")

But I seem to be not only one being inexperienced with u-boats, of the time. The creator of this map made the odd choice to address the potential readers as "Kapitäne" (captains), which would have been a specific rank with in that navy — and a seemingly obvious colloquial choice for amateurs. But the problem is that u-boats were not always commandeered by 'captains' but a range of officer ranks, from Leutnant zur See up to Kapitän zur See. A more likely form of address would have been therefore the functional title of Kommandant.

This form of address was chosen for example in M.Dv.Nr. 906 (Marinedienstvorschrift) "Handbuch für U-Bootskommandanten" (U.Kdt.Hdb.), 1943 (recreated doc), scan of the original:

enter image description here

There are probably more hints to mark this as a late & digital forgery. (An updated version with most too obvious errors mentioned above corrected is here.)

If this were an illustrative insert for a nazi-themed roleplaying fantasy game, I'd ask for my money back.

Improve this answer
3
  • 5
    the instruction to keep the submarine angled like that seems like a direct ripoff from the hunt for the Red October, a 1990s novel by Tom Clancy where a submarine traverses an underwater maze or cave with tight turns. That's probably where the entire instruction sequence was lifted from with some modifications to make it less blatantly obvious in fact.
    – jwenting
    Aug 25, 2021 at 6:39
  • @jwenting Do you have any transcript or sth to make this comparison? ()
    – LangLаngС
    Aug 25, 2021 at 17:30
  • I own a printed copy of the book, and a DVD of the movie. The text isn't a literal translation of either, but looks to be inspired by them.
    – jwenting
    Aug 26, 2021 at 6:28

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .