SS Division

The SS is presented through the characters’ speculative account of its origins and through their attempt to absorb Nazi history into the Plan. The novel offers no independent account of the organization’s history; instead, it shows how conspiracy-minded interpreters turn fragments about occult interests, political enemies, and historical violence into an all-encompassing explanation—and how that explanatory habit distorts and appropriates real suffering.

Speculative Origins

In a conversation about the links they imagine between the Nazis and secret societies, the characters associate the SS with the Assassins. Their account centers on Sebottendorf, described as having studied Islamic gnosis after becoming interested in an occult Turkish sect. They claim that he and his associates, when founding the SS, had an organization like the Assassins in mind. This is offered as part of the group’s conjectural reconstruction, not as a verified historical account.

The argument also draws on the unlikely alliance between Germany and Turkey in the First World War. The characters treat that political fact as a clue to a hidden continuity between Nazi organization and their imagined network of secret traditions. The association shows the Plan’s method in miniature: a connection that might invite historical inquiry is made to serve a much broader claim about concealed affiliations.

The SS Within the Plan

The characters’ wider theory casts rival secret groups as branches of a single struggle for power. In their account, the supposed Paulicians and the groups they call Jerusalemites, neo-Templars, and Baconians are connected through repeated acts of accusation and political manipulation. This framework makes it possible for them to assign the SS a place in their imagined system without establishing an actual organizational relationship between it and those other groups.

Their reasoning also draws on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forged text presented in the novel as a sequence of twenty-four declarations attributed to the Elders of Zion. The characters track how antisemitic claims are reassigned and repurposed, including the theory that the Protocols emerged when Rachkovsky substituted Jews for Witte in material derived from earlier writings. Yet their own account is not immune to the pattern it describes: they continue to treat political events and fabricated texts as evidence of a hidden, coherent design.

Conspiracy and Historical Violence

The most consequential and disturbing extension of this method comes when the Plan is made to explain the Holocaust. Belbo’s theory recasts the Nazi genocide as a search for a secret clue supposedly concealed among Jewish victims, a clue that would lead Hitler to the point where telluric currents converged. The theory links this imagined search to the hollow-earth idea and to a supposed ambition to become Master of the World. These claims belong to the characters’ delusion, not to the novel’s factual account of the Holocaust.

By making Nazi persecution appear to serve an occult objective, the characters force historical violence into the Plan’s explanatory machinery. Their construction is not an explanation of the genocide; it demonstrates how a theory that demands universal connections can appropriate even mass murder as proof of itself. The episode makes the consequences of their interpretive game impossible to treat as merely intellectual: the search for a hidden pattern replaces attention to what the victims actually suffered.

Narrative Significance

The SS’s place in the novel is therefore less a developed institutional portrait than a measure of how far the characters’ conspiracy-making has progressed. Earlier they could describe their connections as fantasy or parody; with repeated practice, the distinction between pretending to believe and believing begins to erode. Their theories become increasingly self-sealing: scattered clues support the Plan, while the Plan supplies the meaning of every clue.

The novel’s treatment of the SS also sits within its examination of antisemitic conspiracy narratives. It traces how accusations and forgeries can circulate through political conflicts, then shows the characters reproducing the underlying habit of converting history into a secret plot. The result is an account of interpretive corruption: the more completely the Plan seems to connect the past, the more it obscures the difference between historical evidence and invention.