Space oddity
Pop quiz: did the Nazis build flying saucers with an eye on conquering the cosmos? Well, it's not rocket science. Oh, wait, yes it is. David Robinson reports
The plot of Robert Heinlein's 1947 sci-fi novel Rocket Ship Galileo is, of course, fantasy, but it would have struck a chord with a readership still coming to terms with the horrors of the war and the scale of Nazi brutality.
The story plays on rumours that began soon after the war - amid revelations about advanced weaponry and secret experiments - that the Nazi regime had plans to conquer outer space. This is a premise that has provided works of science fiction - encompassing everything from comics to computer games to episodes of Star Trek - with a chilling motif ever since.
The latest example is Iron Sky, a Finnish sci-fi spoof. The flurry of interest the movie has generated is testament to the enduring appeal of its eccentric subject matter. The plot - in common with Heinlein's novel - asks us to believe a troop of Nazis fled to the moon at the end of the war; on this occasion, on a fleet of saucer-shaped spaceships from a secret base in Antarctica. "In 1945, the Nazis went to the moon," the tagline declares. "In 2018, they are coming back."
The film's producers swatted up on starry-eyed conspiracy theories to feed their gloriously far-fetched storyline. "There's some amazing stuff out there," says Iron Sky director Timo Vuorensola. "Many people still believe the Nazis had some kind of space programme. It's amazing how widespread this view is, even today."
A host of books and articles, wielding all manner of wild and wacky statements as fact, have helped propagate the Nazi space legend, allowing it to enter the fringes of public consciousness. The internet allows these theories to be recycled and disseminated ad infinitum.
The book Morning of the Magicians, for example, authored by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier (1964), links a mysterious group named the Vril Society with Nazi designs on space. Meanwhile, Nazi International: The Nazis' Postwar Plan to Control the Worlds of Science, Finance, Space and Conflict, by American writer Joseph Farrell (2009), claims the Nazis developed technologies that stretched the boundaries of physics.