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“They were actually expecting people to take this new religion seriously?” Janice asked.

“I think, to some degree, that’s exactly what happened. That’s what is so frightening.”

“You want to explain that?”

“I’ll be happy to, but please let me finish first.”

“Go ahead, Morty, baby.”

“If I didn’t mention this before, we have learned, credibly, that upper-level SS officers, mostly general officers, would gather secretly at various places in Wewelsburg and there conduct rites of some sort. Religious rites. Or quasi-religious.”

“Sounds crazy,” Cronley said.

“Unfortunately, they were dead serious,” Cohen said. “But speaking of crazy, did you ever hear of the Inner World of Agharti?”

“No.”

“It is a world deep under the surface of this world. It’s a common myth, on the order of the Lost Continent. You never heard of it?”

Cronley shook his head.

“Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote Tarzan, wrote about an under-the-earth civilization. He called it ‘Pellucidar,’” Hessinger said.

“It was fiction, right? Fantasy?”

“Of course,” Hessinger replied.

“What if I told you that beginning in 1941, the SS began construction in Hungary of a vertical tunnel, sort of a mine shaft, that would eventually be equipped with an elevator that would take Himmler and his inner circle ten miles downward to the Inner World of Agharti? Would you consider that fact or fiction?”

“Fiction,” Hessinger said.

“Insanity,” Cronley said.

“Work on the tunnel went on until November 1944, when the SS ran out of supplies and decided the project would have to wait for the Final Victory.”

“You’re bullshitting us, right, Morty baby?” Janice asked.

“Janice, baby, to quote Super Spook, I shit you not.”

“Incredible,” Cronley said.

“Not incredible,” Cohen said. “Very credible. I’ve been there. You would be astonished at the size of the mounds of evacuated earth and stone from a hole two and a half miles deep—that’s as far as they got—and, say, thirty feet in diameter creates.”

“Boggles the mind,” Ziegler said.

“Let me now turn to what happened to Castle Wewelsburg when the Final Victory didn’t occur,” Cohen went on. “In late March 1945, as the U.S. 3rd Armored Division approached the area, Himmler sent SS Major Heinz Macher, one of his adjutants, to Wewelsburg with fifteen men. His orders were to tell SS General Siegfried Taubert, who was in charge of the castle, to remove, quote, sacred items, end quote, and then blow the place up.

“When Macher got there, he found that Taubert was long gone. He was captured by us as he tried to get to Italy. We’ve got him in a cell here. He flatly refuses to tell us what he had with him when he left Castle Wewelsburg.

“Macher couldn’t blow up the castle, as he didn’t have enough explosives. All he had were some tank mines, which he used to take down the southeast tower—the weakest tower—and the guard and SS buildings. Then he tried, unsuccessfully, to burn the castle down.

“Then he took off and tried and failed to make it to Italy. We caught him, and he’s now in an SS prisoner enclosure in Darmstadt. That concludes the lecture.”

“How much of this can I use?” Janice asked. “It’s a hell of a story.”

“You can use all of it, but I suggest that you wait until you see the castle for yourself.”

“Can I go with you and Super Spook in his illegal airplane?”