







by Jerry E. Smith and George Piccard from AhnenGreyFalcon Website A somewhat abbreviated version of this article appeared in World Explorer Magazine Vol. 4. No. 4, 2006 under the title EXPLORING THE ANTARCTIC REICH: The Final Secret of the Holy Lance





WHAT IS THE HOLY LANCE?



According to the Gospel of John (19:31-37) as Jesus hung on the Cross a Roman centurion pierced his side with a spear. Christian tradition later named that soldier as Gaius Cassius Longinus . Over the centuries an object claimed to be this Holy Lance has passed through the hands of some of Europe’s most influential leaders including Constantine, Justinian, Charlemagne, Otto the Great, the Habsburg Emperors, and most recently Adolf Hitler. A legend has arisen that, "whosoever possesses this Holy Lance and understands the powers it serves, holds in his hand the destiny of the world for good or evil." Also called the Spear of Destiny, Spear of Longinus, and The Spear of Christ, this strange relic of The Passion of The Christ has been written about for nearly two thousand years. Eusebius of Caesarea, who became a spiritual advisor to Constantine described the Holy Lance as it was at the height of Constantine’s power in the Fourth Century: It was a long spear, overlaid with gold. On the top was fixed a wreath of gold and precious stones, and within this the symbol of the Savior’s name, two letters indicating the name of Christ by means of its initial characters – those letters the emperor was in the habit of wearing on his helmet at a later period. From the spear was also suspended a cloth, a royal piece, covered with a profuse embroidery of most brilliant precious stones and which, being also richly interlaced with gold, presented an indescribable degree of beauty to the beholder. The emperor constantly made use of this sign of salvation as a safeguard against every adverse and hostile power, and commanded that it should be carried at the head of all his armies. Trevor Ravenscroft captured the world’s attention with his 1972 opus The Spear of Destiny, the Occult Power Behind the Spear Which Pierced the Side of Christ. His book dealt primarily with the past lives of the Nazi inner core. His contention was that they had been involved in using the Spear of Destiny for black magic in the eleventh century and were at it again, describing World War II as a wizard’s battle between black and white magicians. He spent much of his book presenting “evidence” that the principal players in the world drama of the 1930 and 40s were reincarnations of the real life people who had been the models for the characters in Wagner’s opera Parsifal. Since then the Spear of Destiny has held the central place in many novels, scholarly tomes, TV shows (fictional and documentary) and even comic books: including Indiana Jones And The Spear Of Destiny; Hellboy; and Hellblazer, which gave us the 2005 film Constantine with Keanu Reeves.



Ravenscroft was not the only post-war college professor to write about, and add to the Holy Lance mythos. In 1988-89 Dr. Howard A. Buechner, M.D., professor of medicine at Tulane and later L.S.U., added a strange chapter to the tale in his two books Hitler's Ashes - Seeds Of A New Reich and Adolf Hitler and the Secrets of the Holy Lance. In them he relates that he was contacted by a former German U-boat submariner who claimed to have helped take the Holy Lance to Antarctica in 1945 and to have helped a group of German businessmen who called themselves The Hartmann Expedition recover it in 1979.



Doctor Buechner was a retired Colonel with the U.S. Army who had served as a battalion surgeon in World War II. In the mid-1980s he was presented by the pseudonymous “Capt. Wilhelm Bernhart” with what was claimed to be the log of the equally pseudonymous “Hartmann Expedition,” including a hand-written letter of authenticity signed by “Hartmann,” and photos of some of the objects recovered.



According to Buechner, this former Nazi sailor claimed that he could prove that the famous Spear of Destiny currently on display in the Schatzkammer Museum in Vienna is a fake. Prior to the war Heinrich Himmler , who would become head of the Occult Bureau of the SS, formed a circle of Knights dedicated to the Holy Lance, called The Knight’s Grand Council. It has been widely reported that they used a replica of the Holy Lance in arcane black magic ceremonies in a specially appointed castle in Wewelsburg, Germany, which today welcomes tourists with a taste for the macabre. Capt. Bernhart claimed that during the war Himmler had Japan's greatest sword maker flown to Germany where he created a second and much more exact duplicate of the lance. The “perfect” copy then went on display in Nuremberg, from whence it was turned over to Austrian authorities at the war’s end, while the real one remained under Himmler’s control – until sent to Antarctica by order of Hitler.



In the final hours of the war, according to this sailor, Hitler personally selected a man who would later be called “Col. Maximilian Hartmann” to send several of his most prized possessions, including the Spear of Destiny, to Antarctica via submarine – the one on which Bernhart said he had served. Further, Col. Hartmann was alleged to have recovered the real Spear of Destiny, again with aid from Bernhart, in 1979. According to Buechner and Bernhart the Holy Lance is now in hiding somewhere in Europe, in the possession of the reconvened order of Himmler’s knights, renamed The Knights of the Holy Lance.



After contacting most of the purported members of the 1979 Hartmann Expedition and others involved, including senior former Nazi officials and close personal associates of Adolf Hitler, like Hitler Youth Leader Artur Axmann , Col. Buechner became convinced that the sailor’s claims were true. Either he was the victim of an incredibly elaborate hoax, or the Spear of Destiny really did reside for a while in Antarctica and may well be in the hands of a group of individuals who believe in its power to direct the destiny of mankind – and may be conducting magic rites with it right this moment!



Col. Buechner's story was examined and partially corroborated by the authors of this article in our 2005 book for Adventures Unlimited Press SECRETS OF THE HOLY LANCE: The Spear of Destiny in History & Legend. Common sense, perhaps, would lead one to reject such a wild tale. Yet, over and over we discover that truth is indeed stranger than fiction. Although we leaned toward believing that Buechner was the victim of a hoax we agreed that his story was certainly worthy of inclusion in a book about legends surrounding the Holy Lance – and elements of Buechner’s tale did strike awfully close to the truth! Here then is what we discovered while trying to unravel this final secret of the Holy Lance…







GERMAN ANTARCTICA



The Prime Meridian, zero degrees longitude, runs from pole to pole passing through Greenwich, England, Western France, Eastern Spain, Western Africa, and the South Atlantic Ocean, before reaching Antarctica in the region known today as Dronning (Queen) Maud Land. It was named that in 1930 by the Norwegian Riiser-Larsen in honor of the Queen of Norway.



In 1939 Germany and Norway each staked official territorial claims, within days of each other, to this Atlantic coastal area of Antarctica. The German Antarctica Expedition of 1938-39 over-flew nearly one-fifth of the continent, taking some 11,000 photographs. The expedition’s aircraft also dropped several thousand small Nazi flags, as well as special metal poles with the expedition's insignia and the swastika, claiming the territory for Germany.



They named the region Neuschwabenland (New Schwabenland) after Swabia as it is known today, which was one of the original duchies of the German Kingdom. Swabia was home to one of the most powerful dynasties of European monarchs, The Hohenstaufen Dynasty, which ruled the Holy Roman Empire in the 12th and 13th centuries. Frederick Barbarossa was the greatest of the Hohenstaufen kings, and a wielder of the Holy Lance. It has been reported that Hitler believed he was a reincarnation of Barbarossa. He named one of his houses after him and dubbed the invasion of Russia Operation Barbarossa.



The German Antarctic Expedition discovered several ice-free regions with lakes and signs of vegetation (mostly lichen and moss) in the territory’s interior. The expedition's geologists said that this phenomenon was due to hot springs or other geothermal sources. This discovery, it is claimed, led Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler to hatch a bold plan to build a permanent base in Antarctica. For more than sixty years rumors about a base code named “Station 211” have tantalized historians and researchers. Could it be that it was actually constructed and staffed as an ongoing project throughout the war? Perhaps Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz announced its completion when, in 1943, he said: The German submarine fleet is proud of having built for the Führer, in another part of the world, a Shangri-La on land, an impregnable fortress. Most of the rumors agree that Station 211, if it really existed, was located inside a prominent ice-free mountain in the Muhlig-Hofmann Mountains of Neuschwabenland (Queen Maud Land). In 1946-47 Admiral Byrd, America’s most recognized polar explorer may have searched for Station 211. In what was called Operation Highjump he had at his disposal the largest armada ever sent to Antarctica. Some 13 ships and 4,700 men, which included an aircraft carrier, a submarine, two destroyers, more than two-dozen aircraft and some 3,500 Marines in full battle gear were sent by the United States to Antarctica on what was officially described as a “training” mission. Yet persistent rumors insist that the actual purpose of Highjump was to find the Nazi fortress. It’s unclear if Byrd ever discovered the location of the Führer’s “Shangri-La” - if it really was there and if he really was looking for it, that is.



During the period between 1956 and 1960 a Norwegian expedition mapped most of Queen Maud Land from land surveys and air photos. Tantalizingly they did find an ice-free mountain that matched the description of the one in the Station 211 rumors. They called it Svarthamaren (the black hammer). If it truly is the location of Station 211 its secret will be kept well into this century, for it has been designated an Antarctic Specially Protected Area and Site of Special Scientific Interest under the Antarctic Conservation Act of 1978. It was listed as an, “exceptional natural research laboratory for research on the Antarctic petrel (Thalassoica Antarctica), snow petrel (Pagodroma nivea) and south polar skua (Catharacta maccormicki), and their adaptation to breeding in the inland/interior of Antarctica.” Access is limited to only a handful of specially selected scientists. If this is a ruse, anyone and everyone not deemed safe with the knowledge of what really went on there will be prevented from getting too close for many years to come.



Col. Buechner and Capt. Bernhart avoid mention of Station 211 though, perhaps to maintain its secrecy, which would be in keeping with the general tone of their two books. Indeed, they admit that the names given for all members of the 1979 expedition, including Bernhart and Hartmann, are fictitious and where used to protect their true identities. It is clear that Buechner does not tell us all he knows.



Instead, Buechner and Bernhart tell us that the submarine crew in 1945 placed Hitler’s treasure at the foot of an unnamed glazier in the Muhlig-Hofmann Mountains, dug in and protected with steel plates. This would have meant them finding one of the few stretches of beach not blocked by miles of shelf ice. Then to have gone on shore and trekked more than 100 miles deep into the interior, loaded down with a ton or more of steel! This seemed to us to be the least plausible piece of this whole mad jigsaw puzzle. Some parts of Antarctica receive as much as sixty feet of snow in a single year. How deeply would this treasure have been buried after more than thirty years?

And why head for an ice-free region only to stash it in the ice? No, we rejected Buechner’s cover story, feeling sure that if any of it were true then they must have taken the Holy Lance somewhere from which it would be easily recoverable - to Station 211.







STATION 211



Surprisingly we uncovered evidence that Hitler’s right hand man, Rudolf Hess , had been entrusted with coordinating the effort to build Station 211. Historians have often dismissed Hess as a Nazi figurehead, positioned highly because of his total subservience to the Führer, but perhaps this was because his true role was so well concealed.



If so, Hess must have enlisted the aid of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler . Himmler had rejected Christianity, as had many of the Nazi inner core and believed in a strange Germanic version of a neo-pagan New Age. He was a devotee of the German occultist, Dr. Friedrich Wichtl who specialized in Masonic lore and "world conspiracy" theories. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 at the end of World War I, Dr. Wichtl wrote a best-selling book entitled Weltfreimaurerei, Weltrevolution, Weltrepublik ["World Freemasonry, World Revolution, World Republic”]. Himmler was drawn into the occult after reading Dr. Wichtl's book in 1919, while a military cadet convalescing after a serious stomach illness.



Himmler eventually became a believer in the Hindu concept of world-ages or yugas. He believed that the current age, or Kali Yuga, would end in a global cataclysm, thereby giving birth to a new world-age called the Satya Yuga. By sending a Nazi colony to Antarctica, Himmler believed that he was ensuring a remnant of the "pure Aryan race" would survive the coming cataclysm with its society and culture intact. He believed that these survivors would then take possession of Antarctica after the cataclysm had melted the south polar ice cap.



Germany built more than two dozen “super subs” during the war. Each was the size of an aircraft carrier, but they weren’t built as war ships, they were underwater cargo ships. Initially they were used to re-supply the submarine “wolf packs.” Later, it would seem, they were pressed into transporting tools, equipment, raw materials, and perhaps even slave labor to the south polar base. Evidence suggests that the U-boat traffic to Neuschwabenland continued even after Germany’s surrender in 1945, as we’ll see in a moment.



During the war, surface ships were involved in this massive effort, but as the tide of war turned against the Germans the bulk of the transport work fell to the U-boats and their crews. Some insight into how much activity took place to and from Antarctica might be gleaned from the fact that between October 1942 and September 1944 16 German U-boats were sunk in the South Atlantic.



Several surface ships appear to have been put on “watch dog” duty, resupplying the subs and keeping Allied shipping away. For example, the raider ship Atlantis, under the command of Captain Bernhard Rogge , made an extended voyage in the South Atlantic, Indian and South Pacific Oceans, from 1939 to 1941, visiting the Iles Kerguelen between December 1940 to January 1941 (burying a seaman at Bassin de la Gazelle). The ship then adopted a new disguise as Tamesis before being sunk by HMS Devonshire near Ascension Island, on 22nd November 1941 (the Atlantis was also known as Hilfskreuzer 16 and was, at various times, disguised as Kasii-Maru or Abbekerk).



Another sea raider was the Pinguin, under the command of Captain Ernst-Felix Kruder . She operated chiefly in the Indian Ocean. In January 1941, she captured a Norwegian whaling fleet (factory ships Ole Wegger and Pelagos, supply ship Solglimt and eleven whale catchers) at about 59° S, 02° 30W. One of these catchers was renamed Adjutant. It remained in the Indian Ocean as a tender while the rest of the Norwegian ships were sent to occupied France. On the 8th of May 1941 Pinguin was sunk off the Persian Gulf by HMS Cornwall, after she had captured 136,550 tons of British and allied shipping. She was also known as Hilfskreuzer 33, and disguised herself at various times as Tamerlan, Petschura, Kassos and Trafalgar.



Another raider was the Komet, commanded by Captain Robert Eyssen . She operated in the Pacific and Indian oceans, including a voyage along the Antarctic coastline from Cape Adare to the Shackleton Ice Shelf in search of whaling vessels during February 1941. There she met the Pinguin and supply vessels Alstertor and Adjutant. Komet was also known as Hilfskreuzer 45 and was sunk off Cherbourg in 1942.



Possible evidence for this construction project can be gleamed from the story of submarine U-859. On April 4, 1944 at 04:40 hours, it left port on an unknown mission carrying 67 men and 33 tons of mercury sealed in glass bottles in watertight tin crates. The submarine was later sunk on the 23rd of September by the British submarine HMS Trenchant in the Straits of Malacca. Although 47 of the crew died, 20 survived. Some 30 years later one of these survivors spoke openly about the cargo and divers later confirmed the story on rediscovering the mercury. The significance being that mercury is usable as a fuel source for certain types of aerospace propulsion, as we will discuss shortly. Why would a German submarine be transporting such a cargo so far from home? We suspect that it was en route to Station 211 with “fuel” for a certain specialized type of disk-shaped aircraft!



Further evidence that Station 211 existed, and continued to be inhabited after the war’s end, can be seen in the several accounts of German naval activity after the fall of Berlin. For example, on July 10, 1945, more than two months after the cessation of known hostilities, the German submarine U-530 surrendered to Argentine authorities at the port of Mar del Plata, one of the closest Argentine harbors to Antarctica. Similarly, U-977 arrived a month later in Mar del Plata on 17 August. These were but two of the boats that are believed to have made up the convoy of the “Führer’s Final Army.” Col. Buechner’s informant, “Capt. Bernhart,” supposedly served on one of these U-boats, but which one is never made clear so as to hide his real identity.



There continued to be accounts of German activity for a considerable post-war period. The French Agence France Press on September 25, 1946 stated, "the continuous rumors about German U-boat activity in the region of Tierra del Fuego between the southernmost tip of Latin America and the continent of Antarctica are based on true happenings." Then the French newspaper, France Soir, gave the following account of an encounter with such a German U-boat: Almost one and a half years after cessation of hostilities in Europe, the Icelandic Whaler Juliana was stopped by a large German U-boat. The Juliana was in the Antarctic region around Malvinas Islands [The Falklands] when a German submarine surfaced and raised the German official Flag of Mourning - red with a black edge.



The submarine commander sent out a boarding party, which approached the Juliana in a rubber dingy, and having boarded the whaler demanded of Capt. Hekla part of his fresh food stocks. The request was made in the definite tone of an order to which resistance would have been unwise.



The German officer spoke a correct English and paid for his provisions in US dollars, giving the Captain a bonus of $10 for each member of the Juliana crew. Whilst the foodstuffs were being transferred to the submarine, the submarine commander informed Capt. Hekla of the exact location of a large school of whales. Later the Juliana found the school of whales where designated. Could it be possible that other German U-boats, in addition to U-530 and U-977 were continuing to operate in the area following the war? There are no formal records of such activity, however it is known that 54 German U-boats “disappeared” during the war, of which only 11 are likely to have met their fate in collision with mines.



It is reasonable to suppose that once the first phases of construction at Station 211 were complete, a number of experimental weapons research and development programs would have been relocated there. It is well known that the German High Command hung on believing that the new weapons under development would turn the tide of the war back in Germany’s favor. With ever increasing Allied bombing and armies closing in on Germany from the east, west and south it would seem prudent to move one’s most precious projects to somewhere beyond reach - and what could be further from the Allies’ grasp than Antarctica?







NAZI UFOS



By the end of 1944 Himmler's SS had taken over complete control of all advanced weapon’s design and most of their manufacturing. This included the so-called super weapons projects (like the V-2 rockets and jet fighter planes), and the numerous underground facilities in Germany and elsewhere, and the associated slave labor camps needed to build them.



Nazi ideology wasn’t limited by the established and conventional sciences as taught in American schools. It is apparent that Nazi technological programs enjoyed a similar leisure. These programs were the fusion of Nazi madness and the mobilization of Germany’s seemingly endless resources of production and radical concept.



One such program, headed by implosion technologist Viktor Schauberger, developed flying saucers and levitating disks. Schauberger (1885-1958) pioneered a new understanding of the Science of Nature, discovering primary laws and principles unacknowledged by contemporary science.



The Allies stumbled upon evidence of the saucer program after the war. At the Peenemünde rocket site, managed by the future head of NASA, Wernher Von Braun , the Allies discovered several photographs of the saucers. They viewed images of the Mercury powered Flugkreisel, and the luminescent mystery spheres labeled by Allied pilots as Foo-Fighters. An article in the May 1980 issue of Neue Presse details the recollection of a German engineer from Peenemünde who worked on the project to develop a saucer craft capable of flying manned with weaponry at 3,000 kilometers per hour. Defecting to the United States after the war, the engineer filed for a patent on a flying saucer of his own design.



From 1947 until 17 December 1969, the United States Air Force actively investigated reports and sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) under a program called Project Blue Book. The project was headquartered at Wright-Patterson AFB. After closing Project Blue Book, the US Air Force has not publicly acknowledged any further interest in UFO sightings. The man in charge of Project Blue Book , Captain Edward Ruppert, said in 1956:



When World War II ended, the Germans had several radical types of aircraft and guided missiles under development. The majority were in the most preliminary stages, but they were the only known craft that could even approach the performance of objects reported by UFO observers.



The Allies felt fortunate for Germany’s timely defeat after examining the evidence from their experimental weapons programs. Sir Roy Feddon , entrusted by the Brits to investigate Nazi aircraft production said:



I have seen enough of their designs and production plans to realize that if they had managed to prolong the war some months longer, we would have been confronted with a set of entirely new and deadly weapons in air warfare.



An early saucer, the long range reconnaissance craft dubbed the Vril-ya RFZ-2 (below image), was photographed accompanying the Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean. It is likely that some of these longer range saucers were used to assist the later U-boat missions. Before the production of the Elektroboat - an electric powered submarine -- the U-boats were required to refuel. The ports friendly to German submarines en route to the South Pole were found in Tierra del Fuego and near the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. From the onset of the Neuschwabenland development, UFO sightings were abundant around these ports and their surrounding areas and in South America persisted for decades afterward.



After Hess’ ill-fated peace mission to England that resulted in his spending the rest of his life behind bars, Admiral Dönitz may have assumed Hess’ role of leading the Antarctic project. While giving a commencement speech for graduating naval cadets in 1944, the Admiral ominously boasted:



The German Navy still has a great role to play in the future. The German Navy knows all the hiding places for the Navy to take the Führer to, should the need arise. There, he can complete his last measures in complete quiet.







NEUBERLIN If you had been a Wehrmacht soldier at the bombed-out railroad station in Poltava, a city in the Ukraine, during the summer of 1942, you may have seen a very strange-looking military unit on the march, heading for a waiting passenger train. The unit consisted of women, all of them blond and blue-eyed, between the ages of 17 and 24, tall and slender, their sensational figures encased in striking sky-blue uniforms. Each woman wore an Italian-style garrison cap, an A-line skirt with the hem below the knee, and a form-fitting jacket with the insignia of the SS. You might have thought the SS had recruited a platoon of high-class call girls, but the truth was far stranger than that. You would have been looking at Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler's latest brainstorm - the Antarktische Siedlungensfrauen [Antarctic Settlement Women or ASF]. So wrote Russian UFOlogist Konstantin Ivanenko.



Ivanenko claims that the SS’s Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt (Race and Settlement Bureau or RuSHA) was the agency responsible for selecting women for the Antarctisches Seidlungensfrauen. About half of these "recruits" were Volksdeutsch - ethnic Germans whose ancestors had settled in the Ukraine in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. The others were native Ukrainians whom RuSHA had "upgraded" to full Aryans in a process called Eindeutschung (Germanization). He claimed that as many as 10,000 Ukrainians with acceptable racial purity (out of the more than half a million Ukrainians deported during the war) were transported, not to munitions factories in Germany, but to the German Antarctic!



Further, Ivanenko claimed that the women of the ASF were dispatched in a ratio of “four Ukrainian women to one German man." If true, this would mean that some 2,500 men went to Neuschwabenland, as the territory in Antarctica claimed by Germany was called. While some of these might have been scientists and engineers sent to work on advanced weapons systems, many must have been not-so-common soldiers - the so-called “Last Battalion.” Perhaps they were members of Himmler’s Waffen-SS? Soldiers who had proven themselves in combat, say, on the Russian front? Wow! Four girls for every guy is better than the Beach Boys’ Surf City!



According to believers, the colony in Neuschwabenland survived not only the end of World War II, but a full on battle with the 3,500 Marines and aircraft of Operation Highjump .



Taking credulity to the breaking point Ivanenko wrote: The total population of Nazis in Antarctica now exceeds two million and that many of them have undergone plastic surgery in order to move about with greater ease through South America and conduct all manner of business transactions. He called the Antarctic Reich, "one of the most militarily powerful states in the world because it can destroy the USA several times over with its submarine-based nuclear missiles, remaining itself invulnerable to U.S. nuclear strikes because of the two-mile-thick ice shield." He further claims that the city of Neuberlin, the colony's capital, sprawls through "narrow sub-glacial tunnels" under an unnamed mountain range, heated by “volcanic vents.” Going totally over the top he also makes the claim that Neuberlin adjoins, "the prehistoric ruins of Kadath , which may have been built by settlers from the lost continent of Atlantis well over 100,000 years ago." A search of the Internet will reveal that many other fringe researchers claim that the actual ruins of Atlantis have been found - and possibly reoccupied - under the Antarctic ice. Some say that Atlantis is located near one of the 70 or so warm water lakes that have been discovered miles beneath the Polar Ice Sheet, such as Lake Vostok near the Russian base at the Pole of Inaccessibility.



Another of the oft made claims about Neuberlin is that the city has an Alien Quarter, where Pleiadians, Zeta Reticulans, Reptoids, Men In Black, Aldebarani and other visitors from the stars dwell. The Nazis were working on some very advanced aircraft, some of which may have been capable of leaving the earth’s atmosphere. Some researchers are convinced that the Nazis did indeed make it to the Moon , and even Mars . Could they have made contact with space aliens once they left the earth? Or, could their rockets, foo-fighters and disk aircraft have attracted aliens to visit them?



Our favorite piece of tabloid wackiness is a strange religious sect called the Redemptionists. They believe that Hitler traveled to the moon in 1954 aboard a Nazi-built flying saucer and there met with aliens from Aldebaran, the brightest star in the constellation Taurus. These very undocumented aliens then took Adolf back to their world. But, the cult believes, he will soon return to “redeem” Earth on the bridge of the flagship of a vast Aldebarani space armada!



A claim floats around in modern UFO lore that an extraterrestrial craft with anti-gravity propulsion crashed in the Black Forest in the summer 1936, and was recovered by the Nazis who back-engineered it, thus explaining their flying saucer program. This parallels stories of a similarly recovered crashed “saucer” near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, the American back-engineering of which supposedly led to the discovery of the transistor (patented by Bell Laboratories the following year), fiber-optics and other exotic technologies.



According to Ivanenko in recent years "there was increased popularity for the idea of a 'German-Slavonic Antarctic Reich.'” He says that talk about the Antarctic Reich is "becoming more and more popular" in Russia, Poland, the Ukraine, Belarus and other countries in eastern Europe. In the May 10, 2003 issue of the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine, Polish journalist A. Stagjuk criticized Poland's decision to send troops to Iraq to assist with the American led occupation. At the end of the article he added, “The next Polish government will sign a treaty with Antarctica and declare war on the USA." Stagjuk's words were broadcast on the shortwave radio station Deutsche Welle the same week.



Could there be a city under the ice inhabited by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original SS settlers; or is it just an urban legend and Queen Maud Land is inhabited only by birds and well chilled scientists? Or, could the truth be somewhere in between? What, if anything, did Admiral Byrd encounter in 1947?







THE BATTLE FOR NEUSCHWABENLAND



Most of the rumors about the alleged German colony in Antarctica agree that Station 211, if it really existed, was located inside a prominent ice-free mountain in the Muhlig-Hofmann Mountains of Neuschwabenland (Queen Maud Land). In 1946-47 Admiral Byrd, America’s most recognized polar explorer may have searched for Station 211. In what was called Operation Highjump he had at his disposal the largest armada ever sent to Antarctica. Some 13 ships and 4,700 men, which included an aircraft carrier, a submarine, two destroyers, more than two-dozen aircraft and some 3,500 Marines in full battle gear were sent by the United States to Antarctica on what was officially described as a “training” mission. Yet persistent rumors insist that the actual purpose of Highjump was to find, and if occupied, engage the Nazis in their fortress.



The baker’s dozen of ships in Byrd’s flotilla arrived at three different rendezvous points in the Southern Ocean inside the Antarctic Circle, spread out over more than a month, with the first to arrive dropping anchor on December 30, 1946.



The plan was for the main body of men and equipment, the Central Group, to go to Byrd’s Antarctic “home,” Little America on the Ross Ice Shelf, where they would set up a base camp. There would be two other groups of ships, each group composed of a seaplane tender, a destroyer and a tanker. One group would begin to the east of the central group, the other to the west.



The Central Group consisted of the Mount Olympus, a communications vessel; two supply ships, the Yancey and the Merrick; two icebreakers, the Burton Island and the Northwind; and a submarine, the Sennet.



The East Group, under the command of Captain George J. Dufek, would start on the opposite side of the continent from the base camp at Little America. It would be East Group’s task to begin their mission by reconnoitering Dronning Maud Land, the Norwegian name for the area called Neuschwabenland by the Germans. They began to the east of Neuschwabenland and swung around west, photographing all of the former Deutsch Antarctica in the process. The East Group consisted of the seaplane tender Pine Island, the destroyer Brownson and their refueling ship the Canisteo.



The West Group, under Captain Charles A. Bond, was made up of the Currituck, a seaplane tender, the Henderson, a destroyer, and the Cacapon, a tanker. They in turn began in the center and ended their voyage half-way around the Antarctic continent at Dronning Maud Land, completing the circle.



Bringing up the rear was the brand new aircraft carrier the Philippine Sea with Admiral Byrd on board. She had been finishing up a shakedown cruise near Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, when her orders came in to participate in Operation Highjump. A hasty trip north returned her to harbor at the Norfolk Navy Base in Virginia. It would take a month to complete the preparations for her 10,000 mile voyage to Antarctica.



Since she would be going through the Panama Canal, changes had to be made in the hull and flight deck structures. Dug at the beginning of the 20th Century, the canal can only accommodate small to moderately sized ships. Today’s giants of the sea -- supertankers, container ships, and the floating cities that are modern carriers - are forced, like sailing ships of old, to go around the Horn.



Soon piles of crates burdened the docks around the Philippine Sea as over one hundred tons of miscellaneous equipment and supplies arrived and waited to be loaded. Several helicopters landed on the flight deck and were secured for the trip.



Then came the biggest of the problem children, six R4D transport planes. These were military versions of the famous DC3. They were far too large to land on a WWII era carrier, and could only take off from one with the assistance of rocket engines affixed to their sides. The landing field was over a mile from the dock, so a path from airport to quay had to be cut right through the middle of the naval base. Drivers had to "pilot" the planes through that narrow pathway, with sailors sitting on the wings to prevent a sudden burst of wind from picking the plane up and hurling it against the sides of buildings, fences or machinery. Often the wingtips came within inches of disaster.



Last aboard the Philippine Sea was Admiral Byrd , just hours before shoving off. Shortly after noon on Thursday, January 2, 1947, with Admiral Byrd on the bridge, the Philippine Sea slowly pulled away from the pier as bands played and the local command saluted farewell.



The Central Group had reached their designated rendezvoused point in Antarctica three days before the Philippine Sea even left port, arriving at Scott Island on December 30, 1946. That is, all except for the icebreaker Burton Island. She was also on a shakedown cruise when tapped for the mission. The Burton Island would leave its west coast base late and arrive in the Southern Ocean last of all – indeed, she got there just in time to go home when the hasty retreat was called, as we shall see in a moment.



The first “casualty” of Byrd’s War was the submarine, the USS Sennet. The ships of the Central Group followed the icebreaker Northwind through the pack ice into the open waters of the Ross Sea. The official story is that the ice proved to be too dangerous for the sub, which was towed back to Scott Island. Some researchers have speculated that she actually hit German anti-submarine defenses. From the Ross Sea she went to New Zealand for repairs then headed back to home base, the Balboa naval facility in the Canal Zone. The remainder of the group reached the Bay of Whales on January 15.



Over the following two days, landing parties went ashore and selected a location for their base camp. Once a site was chosen for Little America IV construction began immediately. A wide assortment of vehicles were soon off-loaded and put to use building three compacted snow runways and a short airstrip made of steel matting, as well as preparing the ice surface for their tent city (which also boasted a single Quonset hut). The heavy machinery used included tractors, jeeps, “weasels,” bulldozers and other tracked equipment.



The second “casualty” and the first official fatality occurred on January 21. The victim was a young sailor named Vance Woodall , from the supply ship Yancey. From one account of the incident: The D6 tractors were proving too heavy to ride on top of the snow that lay on the surface of the bay ice. In order to gain sufficient towing purchase, the drivers had to let the steel treads plow into the snow until reaching the hard ice. As a result, one tread would often grip the ice before the other, throwing the tractor violently from side to side until both treads took equally. The official accident report states that Woodall unfortunately caught both his right arm and head in the slats of the roller just as the tractor suddenly lurched ahead. Woodall's spinal column was severed "high in the neck" and the navy veteran of only seven months died instantly. Four days later a very displeased Admiral Byrd arrived. The Philippine Sea rendezvoused with the Central Group on January 25 near Scott Island. Four days later, on January 29, the first two R4D's successfully took off for the dangerous flight to Little America - with Admiral Byrd aboard the first plane aloft. By January 30, all six R4D's had arrived safely. With that the carrier's objective had been completed. Too big to return to the carrier the R4Ds were simply going to be left behind at the end of the mission. The Philippine Sea promptly put her stern to Antarctica and made all possible speed for home, arriving back at Quonset Point, Rhode Island on February 28.



From their base at Little America the six R4D’s flew scores of mapping flights deep into the heart of the frozen continent, including several over-flights of the South Pole. Meanwhile their colleagues, in the PBM “flying boats” launched from the seaplane tenders in the East and West groups, flew mapping missions all along the Antarctic coast.



In all over 73,000 photographs would be taken. But what should have been a mapmaker's dream turned out to be a cartographic nightmare. Only a few thousand of the photographs were of any value due to lack of adequate ground control points. Without known locations to mosaic the images around, all they had were meaningless pictures of ice. Or so it was claimed.



The following year a much smaller expedition, called Operation Windmill, was launched to get these needed coordinates. Some researchers have suggested that Windmill’s real purpose was to see if Station 211 were still occupied, and the need for ground control points was a literal “shore story”.



Not that the photo mapping went that well for the crews of Operation Highjump. All three groups were plagued with bad weather: fogs, low ceilings, dense clouds in the upper atmosphere, strong winds, and so on, but The Western Group had it the worst, spending whole weeks without getting a plane in the air.



The most remarkable happening from the Western Group was the discovery of “Bunger’s Oasis.” As one Antarctic chronicler put it: On either January 30 or February 1 (the record is unclear), PBM pilot Lieutenant Commander David E. Bunger lifted from the bay and headed south for the continent some hundred miles distant. At this time the USS Currituck was off the Shackleton Ice Shelf on the Queen Mary Coast of Wilkes Land. Reaching the coastline, Bunger flew west with cameras humming. Suddenly the men in the cockpit saw a dark spot come up over the barren white horizon and as they drew closer, they couldn't believe their eyes. Byrd later described it as a "land of blue and green lakes and brown hills in an otherwise limitless expanse of ice". Bunger and his men carefully inspected the region and then raced back to the ship to tell the others of their discovery. Several days later Bunger and his flight crew returned for another look, finding one of the lakes big enough to land on. Bunger carefully landed the "flying boat" and slowly came to a stop. The water was actually quite warm for Antarctica, about 30°, as the men dipped their hands in to the elbow. The lake was filled with red, blue and green algae which gave the lakes their distinctive color. The fly boys "seemed to have dropped out of the twentieth century into a landscape of thousands of years ago when land was just starting to emerge from one of the great ice ages", Byrd later wrote. Byrd called the discovery "by far the most important, so far as the public interest was concerned of the expedition". Dr. Paul Siple, Admiral Byrd’s closest friend who had accompanied him on all of his polar expeditions, including this one, later commented that discussions between the expedition’s scientists as to the nature of "Bunger’s Oasis" had hardly even begun, "before the eleven press representatives aboard the USS Mount Olympus had fired off dispatches to the outside world describing the oasis as a 'Shangri-La' and implying that it was warmed by a mysterious source of heat and might be supporting vegetation". Does “Shangri-La” and “a mysterious source of heat” sound familiar? Officially, because of the brackish nature of Bunger’s water sample, "Bunger’s Oasis” was dismissed as being an inlet of the sea.



It was the Eastern Group, flying over Neuschwabenland, who would suffer the next, and last officially recorded fatalities. The official story was that one of their PBM “flying boats” named George One struck the top of a mountain and went down, killing three. What happened is here described by one of the survivors, radar operator Jim Robbins:



My radar had nothing to see except the top of the mountain range peaks that had rugged terrain with good reflective surfaces. They were 15 miles away as indicated on my radar. This agreed with our very erroneous charts and we were still fogged in flying at 800 ft (mostly below the weather) and about to turn back as there was no CAVU over the coast as indicated by the crew on George One's earlier flight. Before we had a chance to turn around, we hit a bump that caused an explosion. We had torn a hole in the hull and hull gas tank which caused the 145 octane to come pouring out. The engine exhaust flames set it all off immediately. Probably the biggest airplane explosion ever, back in 1946! The entire hull completely disintegrated! Most of us were thrown out in the same general direction from the flight deck. Two of us went through the propellers and died instantly.



Bill Kearns was blown right through the windshield in front of the co-pilot's seat, Warr was blown way down the hill behind us. It was snowing like the devil! Williams was seated next to our flight engineer Warr, watching the instrument panel with him. After the explosion we found him beside the flaming fire pit and internally hurt very seriously, bleeding from the mouth and nose. He died a couple of hours later. The photographer, McCarty had been sleeping in the tunnel by his trimetrigon camera and tunnel hatch. He was evidentially thrown around in there (the tunnel section remained pretty well intact and became our foul weather home). Frenchy was left hanging by his seat belt in the flames caused by the remaining fuel from the hull tank still burning. Our honored guest observer, the Capt. of the USS Pine Island, sea plane tender super deluxe, was strapped into a very special new bow seat that replaced the old bow turret. It was encased in a clear plexiglass dome with the most beautiful possible view ever! He was blown right through it. He appeared to be in fairly good shape except for his nose which was obviously badly broken. We later noted that he had a bad limp.



The Duluth, Minnesota News-Tribune for January 2, 2005, ran the story: “Navy tries to find plane lost in Antarctica 58 years ago" on page 7A that read, in part: On November 27, 2004, the Navy undertook the initial flight... to try to locate the wreckage of the George 1, the plane that crashed in 1946. The search flight was a joint one, conducted aboard a Chilean Navy Orion P-3 aircraft with a Chilean crew and NASA scientists working together. “This wasn't just a routine task for us,” said Capt. Christian Aldunate, the senior Chilean pilot on the recovery flight. “It was a challenge to find clues that could help locate the plane, even though we knew it would be almost impossible to get at it because of the ice and snow that had piled up over so many years." During an 11-hour flight from and back to Punta Arenas, in the extreme south of Chile, the search plane dipped as low as 500 feet (150 meters) over Thurston Island so scientists could use radar and laser beams to try to locate the remains of the U.S. Navy PBM (Martin) Mariner seaplane. "Even today it's not easy, but we can rely on information from satellite photos, GPS systems and wind predictions,” Aldunate said, referring to global positioning networks. “But from the time they took off until the time they arrived in the area, they had no idea what to expect." Though little known in the outside world, the three men who died in the (1946) crash - Wendell K. Hendersin, Maxwell Lopez and Frederick Williams - are still celebrated in Antarctica as heroes.



At McMurdo Station, a U.S. research base on the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf, there is a plaque to honor the four men who died on Operation Highjump , the first Americans to die on any of Byrd's many expeditions.



Admittedly, the official record of the operation doesn’t sound much like a report from a war zone. Yet there have been persistent rumors of pitched battles, massive casualties, planes shot down, and more. All just wild tales? If so, why did Captain Richard H. Cruzen, the operational commander of the expedition order an abrupt end to the mission after just eight weeks, when they had enough provisions for 6 to 8 months in the polar region?



Did Byrd, and perhaps the George One, encounter Nazi disk aircraft? Some take comments the Admiral made to a reporter for the Chilean newspaper Brisant while aboard the Mount Olympus on the voyage home as proof that he did: It was necessary for the USA to take defensive actions against enemy air fighters which come from the polar regions... Fighters that are able to fly from one pole to the other with incredible speed. According to paranormal investigator Alan DeWalton : One thing that Admiral Byrd stated in a press conference after his defeat at Antarctica was that the Antarctic continent should be surrounded by a "wall of defense installations since it represented the last line of defense for America." Although the U.S. and Russia had been allies during the war, suddenly the "Iron Curtain" was created and we and the Russians became enemies. Both the Soviets and the United States ringed the poles with defense and detection bases, and in between was the barren no-man's-land of the poles where absolutely nobody lived, or did they? Could it be that we pretended we were protecting against the Russians and they pretended they were protecting against us, while really we and they were both scared of what was in between us - the Nazi Last Battalion?



Another claim which has been made by some investigators, although the original source is difficult to track down, was that upon returning to the States Admiral Byrd went into a rage before the President and Joint Chiefs of Staff (some versions of the story say he was testifying before Congress) and in an almost demanding tone, strongly “suggested” that Antarctica be turned into a thermonuclear test range. Urban Legends add that shortly after Byrd’s demand to nuke the Nazis in Antarctica UFOs buzzed the Capitol. It has been conjectured by some that the UFOs were Nazi craft from Antarctica warning the US of their power to retaliate should Byrd’s recommendation be acted on.



We tried hard to prove this one, believe me! We found no evidence of Byrd’s alleged testimony to Congress but did find that he was debriefed by the President, and the records of that debriefing are still sealed. We did indeed find that UFOs were seen over the Capitol twice, once by day and later again that night. They were witnessed by thousands and were duly reported in the nation’s press. Unfortunately, they were sighted in 1951 long after Byrd’s return, and still nearly two years after Operation Windmill. It seems unlikely to us that there was any connection between these events.



After Highjump and Windmill, the Antarctic was literally crawling with expeditions. Although the Americans stayed away from Antarctica for the next decade, expeditions were launched by more than a dozen nations in the next few years. It is your author’s collective opinion that if there had been a Station 211 it was surely abandoned long before the International Geophysical Year (1958-59) that saw the greatest number of non-German visitors to Antarctica up till that time.







THE HARTMANN EXPEDITION



Our recounting of the legend of the Spear of Destiny in SECRETS OF THE HOLY LANCE: The Spear of Destiny in History & Legend began and ended in 1979 with the recovery of the Holy Lance from the ice of Antarctica by the “Hartmann Expedition.” Our retelling of that event was an admitted fiction, blending the material from Col. Buechner and Capt. Bernhart’s books with our own research into Station 211. As a literary device each chapter in our book begins with a fictionalized reenactment of the most important scene in it, and so we also did the same with the entire book, opening with the Hartmann Expedition’s exploration of a long abandoned Station 211 and final discovery of the treasure they sought. Besides its obvious cinematic value, we began and ended the story of the lance in 1979 because if at least partially true then the Spear of Destiny is not an object on display in some museum, or holed up in some church, but is actually an active player on the world's stage. “The destiny of the world for good or evil” may again be in one man’s hands! The late Dr. Howard A. Buechner ’s books are based on the evidence provided him by a former German U-boat submariner who claimed to have helped take the Holy Lance to Antarctica in 1945 and to have helped the Hartmann Expedition recover it in 1979. As the co-author of Buechner’s books he wrote under the pseudonym of “Capt. Wilhelm Bernhart.” Capt. Bernhart provided Dr. Buechner with what was claimed to be the log of the Hartmann Expedition, including a hand-written letter of authenticity signed by “Hartmann,” also a pseudonym, and photos of some of the objects recovered.



Col. Buechner and Capt. Bernhart avoid mention of Station 211 though. Instead, Buechner and Bernhart tell us that the submarine crew in 1945 placed Hitler’s treasure at the foot of an unnamed glazier in the Muhlig-Hofmann Mountains, dug in and protected with steel plates. The submarine then proceeded to Mar del Plata, Argentina where it surrendered some months after the war’s end. At least the mysterious surrenders of two such subs to Argentine authorities in July and August of 1945 can be confirmed.



In Adolf Hitler And The Secrets of The Holy Lance Col. Buechner and Capt. Bernhard detail how the Hartmann Expedition came about. It began, they wrote, in 1969 when Rudolf Hess was taken to a British hospital for the treatment of ulcers. Several days later an ex-crew member of U-boat 530, one of the subs that had surrendered at Mar del Plata after the war’s end, received the key to a bank box in Switzerland. This box led to another where a number of sealed envelopes were found, along with a large amount of liquid assets. The message had been signed “H.”



The sealed envelopes in the Swiss bank were opened by the former U-530 crewmember. He was instructed to contact and deliver the contents of the box to the man whom Hitler had personally entrusted with sending some of his most prized possessions, including the Holy Lance, to Antarctica. In Buechner and Bernhard’s books he would only be identified as “Colonel Maximilian Hartmann” a name they admitted to being false. Hartmann did not leave Germany at the end of the war, but he saw to it that senior officials, like Martin Bormann , Hitler’s personal secretary, and the Reich treasurer Hitler had entrusted to him got out in two or more subs in the final days of the war. This group of subs, somewhere between three and twelve in number, have often been referred to as the “Führer Convoy.” It was part of the northern “Rat Line” that helped escaping Nazis – and may have conveyed the Führer himself!



The sailor did as instructed, passing the envelopes to Colonel Hartmann. In the first one Hartmann found a coded message from Professor Karl Haushofer. Haushofer was to the Third Reich what the Rev. Billy Graham has been to the last several American Presidents, and then some. More than confidant, Haushofer actively molded the thinking of the Nazi inner core. His beliefs were part of the motivation for the Nazi search for the Ark of the Covenant and Agharta, the mystical realm of enlightened beings who lived inside the hollow earth! Decoded, his message revealed the exact location of the bronze boxes Hartmann had sent to Antarctica aboard a submarine so many years before.



The second envelope instructed Hartmann to recreate Himmler’s Knight’s Grand Council, only this time the knights were to dedicate themselves, and use the power of the Holy Lance, for the purpose of world peace. The organization was also to be called by a new name, Knights of the Holy Lance.



The third envelope contained a very large sum of money. With it Hartmann set about the task of creating the Knights of the Holy Lance and preparing to recover their mystic talisman, the Spear of Destiny . As Buechner and “Bernhart” put it: In 1974 the Order of the Knights was reorganized by a former German army officer named Colonel Maximilian Hartmann, but now the group had a vastly different purpose. This time there was no ancient castle for a meeting place. The military uniforms had been replaced by business suits and guns had given way to briefcases. Violence had disappeared and the wisdom of negotiation had taken its place. While the major objective of their new direction was the attainment of world peace, or so we are asked to believe, they also put the reunification of their homeland as a central goal. Of overriding importance was the need for the power and guidance of the Holy Lance. They believed that there was little hope of success without it. The recovery of the Lance became their first objective. They knew that a secret expedition to Antarctica would be a Herculean task and that the cost would be incredible, but they were determined to succeed.



The Log of the Hartmann Expedition as quoted from and explained by Buechner and Bernhart details a long and somewhat implausible series of changes of planes, boats and finally a helicopter to arrive in Antarctica. Although Buechner seemed to accept the authenticity of the log your authors had a hard time swallowing it. Frankly, it reads like poor amateur fiction. Still, what would you expect from an aging businessman writing in German, then translated into English by an equally aged German sailor who picked up English as a second language? We suspect the narrative was laced with misdirections and half-truths to prevent anyone from identifying those involved – assuming it happened at all of course.



Finally Col. Hartmann arrived in Antarctica aboard a helicopter with three other Knights of the Holy Lance. They located and removed the steel plates placed over the entrance to Lance’s hiding place and found a steel lined tunnel leading into the mountain. Quoting from the expedition’s log we read: Our lights penetrate the steel tunnel which extends for approximately ten meters. When we arrive at the end of the tunnel, we find ourselves in a huge cavernous area. It seems warm. As we search the cavern with our lights, we notice frozen pillars of ice in strange and grotesque shapes. We penetrate into the cavern the distance of about 300 meters. It is at this point that we came to a smaller cavern which turned towards the right and ended in a room approximately 80 meters in width and ten meters in height. It is here that the Reich treasures are hidden!!!



At this point stands a small obelisk about a meter in height which marks the spot. There is an inscription which reads as follows: “There are truly more things in heaven and ‘in’ earth than man has dreamt (beyond this point is AGHARTA) Haushofer, 1943.” Our lights immediately fall upon the treasure which consists of eight large bronze chests. This makes two for each man and will require two trips. Can we do it? This remains to be seen. Each one of us grasps a bronze box in his hands. Hartman was soon disappointed to realize that the weight of the boxes, in total, is too heavy for his team to carry back to their waiting helicopter. Four of the boxes had to be left behind. Hartmann continues: The trek back is energy consuming and difficult. We stop to rest several times along the return route. The chests are growing heavier and heavier as we go along. We have to stop and rest more frequently. Finally we reach the [helicopter] just as complete exhaustion is setting in. After one more brief rest, we begin our task of loading the bronze chests aboard. Lothar and Heinz remove the extra fuel supply cell after pumping its contents into the main benzene tank... Bits and pieces of unnecessary gear are discarded. The loss of weight will compensate for the extra cargo. Eight chests would have been an impossible load.



Shortly before we are ready to leave, the chest containing the Holy Lance is opened. We all watch with profound fascination as Klauss knocks the bronze pin from the clasp. Inside the chest is a faded leather case along with a variety of other items. We carefully open the case. It is there! the Holy Lance! the lance that pierced the side of our lord Jesus Christ! The oil torch we have lit … makes it seem like a ceremony. I hold the Holy Lance aloft in my hand. Without thinking, the words seem to flow from my mouth, “the Holy Lance points ever towards our eternal Deutschland.” Buechner and Bernhart wrote that from Antarctica, Col. Hartman and his team made their way back to their starting point in Brazil, where papers were obtained for the Holy Lance, declaring it an art object. This enabled them to slip it through customs with little or no difficulty. Most of Hartmann’s team returned to Germany, and their everyday lives as successful but otherwise unremarkable businessmen.



Col. Hartmann, however, went on to the United States. There he met with a former crewman from one of the submarines that, perhaps, Admiral Doenitz had used to ferry material and personnel to Station 211. Buechner and Bernhard claim that Col. Hartmann left certain items with this seaman, including a copy of the log of the Hartmann Expedition and a signed, handwritten letter of authenticity. Hartmann then departed, taking the Spear back to Germany.







WHERE IS THE HOLY LANCE NOW?



Buechner assures us that the Spear is now held in the protective custody of these Knights of the Holy Lance. It would seem that their plan is working, for indeed, Germany is again reunited as a single, and very great, nation. Buechner died believing that these modern knights were guarding the Spear, preventing it from ever again falling into the wrong hands. Are they? Perhaps only time will tell.

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