Nazi prohibition of secret societies

The Nazi prohibition of secret societies is presented as a paradox rather than a simple ban: the National Socialist party is said to suppress independent societies while functioning as a secret society itself. That contradiction becomes material for the characters’ Plan, which folds occult speculation and real political violence into an increasingly totalizing explanation of history.

The Prohibition and Its Paradox

The rule is introduced through a claim attributed to René Alleau: the National Socialist party did not tolerate secret societies because it was itself one, complete with a grand master, a racist gnosis, rites, and initiations. The formulation makes the party’s opposition to secret organizations appear less like a rejection of secrecy than a claim to monopolize it. In the surrounding narrative, Aglie has just slipped away from the group, while Belbo jokes about his influence at Garamond; the remark about Nazism shifts the discussion from contemporary intrigue to the political uses of clandestine structure.

The novel’s characters treat this apparent contradiction as a connective clue. Rather than test the historical claim independently, they assimilate it into the Plan’s pattern-making logic: the existence of a secretive political organization becomes evidence that hidden orders can shape public events. The policy thus operates in the story both as a statement about Nazi power and as a premise available for conspiratorial reinterpretation.

From Historical Claims to the Plan

The characters construct a broader lineage of secret influence around antisemitic texts and political accusations. Diotallevi places the major anti-Semitic campaign at the end of the nineteenth century and links it to the appearance of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in Russia, which he attributes to the Paulicians. Belbo then imagines the Jerusalemite group dividing into three branches: one associated with neo-Templars, another with Baconians, and a third established in Russia. In his account, the Paulicians’ supposed influence and hostility toward their adversaries explain the production and circulation of anti-Jewish accusations. These claims are part of the characters’ conspiracy construction, not a reliable account of Jewish or Russian history.

The narrative makes the fabricated genealogy especially visible by tracing how texts are alleged to migrate and change. It recounts the discovery that the Protocols drew on Maurice Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel, while the characters insist that Joly himself copied an earlier document by Sue. Nesta Webster’s reasoning then folds the supposed correspondence between the Protocols and Templar aims back into the Plan: what resembles the Templars’ project is declared to be theirs. The sequence shows how each exposure of copying or contradiction is absorbed as another link, rather than allowed to weaken the theory.

The account of Rachkovsky supplies a further purported origin story. In the characters’ reconstruction, he substitutes Jews for Witte in a text derived from Joly or Sue, after a search of Elie de Cyon’s villa yields a pamphlet attacking Witte. The name Cyon is treated as suggestive of Zion, and the document is said to pass through Juliana or Justine Glinka to Russian officials and ultimately the tsar. This story concludes that Rachkovsky’s anti-Semitism helped bring down his own political sponsor, while the narrator describes the account as plausible and true. That confident verdict exposes how the Plan converts a speculative chain into certainty.

Nazi History Recast as a Search

The hollow-earth theory extends the same method into the history of Nazism. Belbo describes the earth as concave on the inside and imagines Hitler adopting the theory as a guide to military and political strategy. In this invented framework, the conquests of Danzig and Paris, the pursuit of alliances, and campaigns in Africa, the Balkans, and Russia become steps toward gathering portions of a Templar map. Hitler’s supposed belief that he was the King of the World and that Nazi leaders were the Unknown Superiors turns the party’s own secretive hierarchy into part of a cosmic scheme.

The story’s most consequential distortion comes when Belbo claims that the Holocaust can be explained as a search for a hidden message. He recasts the procedures of genocide as an attempt to find a clue supposedly concealed by a representative of the Thirty-six Invisibles, and links that alleged message to the Pendulum and the convergence of telluric currents. This is not offered as historical explanation: it is the Plan’s grotesque appropriation of the persecution and murder of Jews, turning victims into pieces of a fictional puzzle and violence into supposed evidence for occult design.

Belbo completes the construction by joining hollow-earth speculation to hermetic correspondence. In his account, what is below equals what is above; the Mystic Pole, the center of the earth, and the center of the sky become one point. The secret map, the Grail, and the philosopher’s stone are made interchangeable, and Hitler’s supposed pursuit of mastery becomes the final consequence of the system. By making the Plan explain both the party’s secrecy and the Holocaust, the narrative demonstrates its capacity to absorb history into an all-encompassing fiction—and the ethical danger of treating fabricated connections as knowledge.