National Socialist Workers' Party of Germany

The German National Socialist Workers’ Party is represented in the novel through a double frame: it is a political party that rejects independent secret societies, yet the conspiratorial Plan devised by Casaubon, Belbo, and Diotallevi recasts it as a secret society in its own right. As the trio connects Nazism to occult doctrines, hidden maps, and the Pendulum, their fanciful explanation culminates in a false account of the Holocaust. The party’s role thus exposes the Plan’s central danger: a web of analogy can make invention seem to explain history, even when that requires turning mass murder into purported evidence for a secret plot.

A Secret Society in the Guise of a Party

A source quoted in the novel describes the National Socialist party as intolerant of secret societies because it was itself one, complete with a grand master, racist gnosis, rites, and initiations. The statement gives the party a secret structure, but the novel’s surrounding narrative places that description inside the trio’s habit of treating political movements as parts of a hidden continuity. It is not a neutral account of the party’s organization so much as a formulation that the Plan can absorb and extend.

That absorption follows the group’s self-conscious method. The men initially trade fantasies through associations so far-fetched that they would have been ashamed to admit belief in them. They tell themselves they are parodying the reasoning of their imagined Diabolicals. Yet, as they collect and present material, connecting one thing to another becomes an automatic habit. Casaubon later distinguishes their different degrees of involvement: he was becoming addicted, Diotallevi corrupted, and Belbo converted. Their shared play erodes the ability to tell resemblance from identity and metaphor from reality. Nazism’s place in the Plan is therefore not an isolated claim; it is a product of a process that gradually makes fabricated connections feel persuasive.

From Hollow Earth to the Final Map

Belbo’s account folds Nazism into the Plan through hollow-earth theory. He invokes the idea that the earth’s inhabited surface encloses an interior world, and claims that Hitler recognized its significance. Within this invented interpretation, the Nazi leadership’s interest in the theory redirects German research toward a final map and a new interpretation of the Pendulum. The map, the Pendulum, and the imagined underground geography become parts of one explanatory apparatus.

Belbo then reads military expansion as a sequence of attempts to recover the Plan’s scattered components. In his account, the conquest of Danzig secured sites associated with the Teutonic group; the conquest of Paris brought the Pendulum and the Eiffel Tower within reach; connections with synarchic groups led to influence in the Vichy government; and Portugal’s neutrality amounted to cooperation. He treats the intended advance on England as unsuccessful, as were efforts to reach Palestine through campaigns in Africa. Invasion of the Balkans and Russia becomes an attempt to dominate Paulician territories. These claims are the trio’s conspiratorial reconstruction, not an independent account of Nazi strategy: the Plan turns military events into clues arranged around a hidden objective.

The same logic assigns meaning to a proposed alliance. Belbo says that once Hitler had four-sixths of the Plan, he sent Hess to England on a secret mission, but that the Baconians refused. In the trio’s scheme, this failure redirected Hitler toward the Jews, whom Belbo recasts as the holders of the most important remaining part of the secret. His narrative makes conquest and alliance appear to follow from a single occult map, converting the Plan’s arbitrary categories into an apparently coherent history.

The Plan’s False Explanation of the Holocaust

Belbo’s most disturbing extension of the theory is his attempt to explain the Holocaust as a search for a hidden message. He claims that the Jerusalemite group’s portion of the message was held not in Jerusalem but by a group of the Diaspora, and says that this makes the Holocaust explicable within the Plan. When challenged, he points to the bureaucracy and sequence of persecution as supposed evidence: the confinement and starvation of victims, the taking of clothing and personal effects, and the recording and sorting of belongings. He invents the possibility that the Nazis were searching for a message concealed in a garment, in a person’s mouth, or marked on a body.

In Belbo’s version, the goal of this imagined search was to use the Pendulum to locate the point where telluric currents converged beneath the earth’s concave vault. He then merges hollow-earth speculation with Hermetic correspondence: what lies below is made equal to what lies above, the Mystic Pole is identified with the earth’s heart, and the supposed subterranean passages of Agarttha mirror a celestial pattern. The Grail and philosopher’s stone become names for the same imagined endpoint. This sequence reveals the Plan’s moral and intellectual collapse: rather than account for Nazi persecution through historical evidence, it appropriates the Holocaust as a coded episode in an invented esoteric quest.

Invention, Belief, and Historical Harm

The novel sets this Nazi strand within a broader chain of conspiracy stories about secret societies and political enemies. The characters discuss the Protocols as a series of twenty-four declarations attributed to the Elders of Zion, noting that its proposals are contradictory: it can attack liberalism while endorsing tactics that supposedly manipulate public life, and it can promote revolution while seeking greater inequality. Their investigation traces material attributed to the Protocols back through earlier polemics and borrowings, including Maurice Joly’s dialogue between Montesquieu and Machiavelli and a later pamphlet connected to Rachkovsky. In this account, textual reuse, forgery, and political interests do not reveal a single hidden master plan; the trio’s own reasoning turns these tangled origins into further evidence for one.

That process culminates in the group’s recognition that the Plan was invented by them, yet others believed it and identified fragments of their own confused mythology with its supposed design. The narration draws a distinction between a plot as an explanatory fiction and the consequences of people acting as if that fiction were real: if others carry out an invented Plan, then it acquires a practical existence. The claim that a secret society spreads the rumor of a universal conspiracy captures the paradox, while the party’s transformation into an occult agent shows how easily political history can be drawn into the web.

The episode also warns that conspiracy thinking is self-reinforcing. Frustration encourages the search for a responsible enemy; a discovered contradiction can be reinterpreted as concealment, and coincidence as confirmation. In the novel, the men’s initially ironic connections become habitual, and the habit threatens their ability to distinguish metaphor from fact. Their treatment of Nazism makes the cost stark: the Plan does not merely misread history but distorts a real atrocity into a fictional clue. The German National Socialist Workers’ Party is therefore significant not only as an object of the trio’s theory, but as the point where their play at explanation becomes a dangerous falsification of historical suffering.