Incorporate Nazi and Hollow Earth theories into the plan

The incorporation of Nazism and the hollow-earth theory into the Plan is a decisive escalation in the three researchers’ game of conspiracy-making: Belbo turns Hitler’s supposed occult interests, military campaigns, and the Holocaust into evidence of one hidden search for the world’s secret map. The episode demonstrates how the Plan can absorb even the most terrible historical facts by converting coincidence and speculation into an apparently seamless explanation—and how habitual fabrication begins to resemble belief.

From a game of connections to a total explanation

Belbo’s new contribution begins as a confident claim about the Thirty-six Invisibles and the map they had supposedly failed to complete. He says that John Dee had got the geography wrong and that the earth must be mapped anew because humanity lives inside a hollow globe. Hitler, Belbo argues, had recognized the theory and acted on its implications. The claim is not an independent discovery of the conspiratorial system: it is another addition to the Plan, which the researchers have trained themselves to extend by connecting every available fragment.

Belbo insists that this time he is not inventing. His assurance marks a significant turn in the game. Earlier, the three men had understood their far-reaching associations as burlesque, produced through shortcuts they would have been ashamed to defend as serious reasoning. But repeated practice had changed their habits of thought. Casaubon later distinguishes their different degrees of involvement: he was becoming addicted, Diotallevi corrupted, and Belbo converted. Their loss of the ability to distinguish similarity from identity, or metaphor from fact, helps explain how the hollow-earth theory can be presented not as an absurd detour but as the key that makes the larger Plan seem newly coherent.

The hollow earth and Hitler’s supposed map

Belbo elaborates the theory as a reversal of ordinary geography: people supposedly live on the concave inner surface of the earth, while the apparent sky is a gaseous interior containing points of light. He attributes earlier versions of the idea to the American Symmes and to Teed, then claims that a German movement developed it after the First World War. In Belbo’s account, Hitler and his associates adopted the theory, and the claim that German missiles had been misdirected because their trajectories were calculated on a concave rather than convex surface becomes another link in the chain.

The theory gives Belbo a way to reinterpret the Plan’s central instruments and destinations. He claims that Hitler redirected German research toward the final map and the interpretation of the Pendulum, because the six Templar groups had to be assembled again and the search begun from the beginning. Hitler’s conquests are then recast as stages in that supposed effort: Danzig would bring the Teutonic sites under German control; Paris would provide access to the Pendulum and the Eiffel Tower; contacts with synarchic groups would lead to the Vichy government; and Portugal, England, Palestine, the Balkans, and Russia would each correspond to territories or groups required by the Plan. The sequence makes military expansion appear to follow a hidden cartographic design, although the evidence presented is Belbo’s conspiratorial interpretation rather than proof of such a design.

The Plan’s explanation of the Holocaust

Belbo extends this reasoning to the Holocaust. He claims that Hitler, having supposedly secured four-sixths of the Plan, sent Hess to England to seek an alliance with the Baconians, who refused. Hitler then supposedly concluded that the Jews held the most important remaining part of the secret, which Belbo places not in Jerusalem but among the Jewish diaspora. In this fabricated account, the Nazi genocide becomes a search for the clue needed to locate the convergence of telluric currents with the Pendulum.

Belbo argues that the administrative procedures of genocide make sense only if they are read as a hunt for hidden information. He recasts the registration and handling of victims’ belongings, as well as the systematic processing of people, as evidence that Hitler’s regime was searching for a message that might be concealed on or within a person. This is not a factual explanation of the Holocaust; it is the Plan’s grotesque appropriation of mass murder. By making an invented secret the supposed cause of Nazi actions, Belbo turns historical atrocity into a confirmation of his system and demonstrates its moral as well as intellectual danger.

Correspondence, fabrication, and the Plan’s consequences

The hollow-earth theory completes the Plan through a chain of correspondences: what lies beneath is equated with what lies above; the Mystic Pole is identified with the Heart of the Earth; the pattern of the stars becomes the pattern of the underground passages of Agarttha; and the Grail, the philosopher’s stone, and the earth’s interior are treated as aspects of the same endpoint. Within Belbo’s account, whoever identifies that point would become Master of the World. The scheme’s force comes from the way each analogy seems to reinforce the next, not from independent evidence that the supposed connections are true.

The larger narrative makes clear why the invented Plan can nonetheless acquire real effects. The researchers had begun by exchanging fantasies they recognized as unwarranted associations. As the habit of connecting everything became automatic, the distinction between pretending to believe and believing grew unstable. Later, Casaubon reflects that they had invented a nonexistent Plan, yet their readers and adversaries treated fragments of their own confused mythologies as parts of it. Once people began to act as if the Plan existed, its practical consequences could make it seem to exist in reality. The episode of Hitler and the hollow earth is therefore both a particularly extreme instance of the Plan’s method and a warning about what happens when a fabricated explanatory pattern is allowed to absorb history without limit.