Element 115 and the 1939 Antarctic Crash

What did a Nazi expedition really do in Antarctica just before the war? We explore the true history of the 1938 Schwabenland voyage and the terrifying alternate reality it triggers in Mike Rawson's novel.

Read the archive file: /lore/element-115-antarctic-crash

Transcript

The hosts' voices are AI-generated. The script is written from the novel and checked against it.

Kit: Welcome to The Resonance Archive. Just a quick reminder before we begin, Ellis and I are AI-generated voices, and the script for this podcast is written entirely from Mike Rawson's novel Resonance Portal Wars.

Ellis: Exactly right. As an archivist, I like to untangle the threads of real world history from the fiction, and this book gives us a massive canvas to work with. I am Ellis.

Kit: And I am Kit. Today, we are heading down into the freezing cold. Because in February 1939, just seven months before Germany invaded Poland, a Nazi expedition planted swastika flags on the Antarctic ice. That part is history. But Resonance Portal Wars asks a very simple, very dangerous question about it. What if they found something?

Ellis: To understand the fiction, we must first look at what really happened. The German Antarctic Expedition of 1938 to 1939 was a very real endeavour. They sailed from Hamburg in December 1938 aboard a catapult ship called the Schwabenland, commanded by Captain Alfred Ritscher.

Kit: A catapult ship? They were launching planes off the deck?

Ellis: Yes. The expedition's stated aims were purely economic. Germany wanted a stake in Antarctic whaling, and establishing a territorial claim down there would certainly help. So, they launched two Dornier flying boats by catapult over Queen Maud Land. They photographed hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of ice.

Kit: And they dropped aluminium darts stamped with swastikas to mark the claim. They literally just rained branded metal from the sky and named the region Neuschwabenland. It is such a bizarre piece of history.

Ellis: It is. The expedition was back in Hamburg by April 1939, and the outbreak of the war ended any plans they had to return to the ice. But they left behind something far more durable than a territorial claim. They left behind a myth.

Kit: Right, the post-war conspiracy theories. After 1945, stories spread of a secret German base built under the ice, of U-boats ferrying scientists south, and even stories about American Admiral Byrd's 1946 to 1947 Operation Highjump meeting unusual opposition.

Ellis: None of which is supported by historical evidence. The secret bases and U-boat armadas are purely myth. But as the archive page points out, all of that is irresistible to a novelist.

Kit: Which brings us to the novel. In Resonance Portal Wars, the Schwabenland expedition is carrying an extra party. They have tracked snow-crawlers, a geologist named Dr Ernst Herrmann, and an SS engineer named Hans Kammler.

Ellis: Kammler is sent by Heinrich Himmler himself. And they are absolutely not there hunting whales. They are following a magnetic anomaly that Himmler's occult research bureau, the Ahnenerbe, believes marks a power older than the Aryans themselves.

Kit: They find a massive spire of ice that sends all their instrument needles spinning. Worse, it leaves grown men reeling with severe nausea. And underneath it, buried at a steep angle, is a saucer-shaped craft with seamless, uncorroded plating.

Ellis: There are symbols on the hull that seem to shift if you stare at them. But one mark draws the eye more than the rest. It is "a triangle enclosing an eye."

Kit: Dr Herrmann sees it and says exactly what every single reader is thinking at that moment. "This… this is not of this Earth."

Ellis: The true prize is not the hull, however. At the heart of the craft, suspended in a lattice of hair-fine filaments, is a crystal that hums. The men who work near it begin to suffer terribly. They get severe migraines, double vision, and vivid hallucinations. One man wakes up screaming in a language nobody knows.

Kit: Except Kammler. Kammler is the exception here. Near the crystal, he actually becomes sharper and stronger. He cannot stay away from it. That detail is so important for the opening chapters of the book.

Ellis: The German scientists call this crystal Element 115. In the novel, it is copper-gold, wedge-shaped, and impossibly dense. It actually bends light. It also whispers to the people who handle it.

Kit: I want to pause on the name Element 115, because Mike Rawson is playing with real history again here, or at least real pop culture. In 1989, a man named Bob Lazar claimed he had worked on alien craft near Area 51, and he said those craft were powered by a stable isotope of element 115.

Ellis: That is correct. And real element 115, known as moscovium, was actually synthesised in 2003. However, its atoms last only a fraction of a second. Lazar's stable version has never been demonstrated in reality.

Kit: But Resonance Portal Wars keeps that name and gives it a far more unsettling job. Because in the novel's world, everything runs on Resonance, which is a living magic carried through lines of power in the earth.

Ellis: Element 115 amplifies that Resonance. But it also corrupts it. It makes it wrong. Characters who understand the magic best can feel this corruption creeping into everything the crystal touches. Where that corruption ultimately leads is one of the central questions of the book.

Kit: So they have this corrupted alien crystal that amplifies magic. What do the Nazis do with it? This leads us to Project Riese and Die Glocke, which is another incredible blend of real tragedy and myth.

Ellis: Let us establish what really happened first. Under the Owl Mountains in today's Poland, the Nazis dug Project Riese. It was a vast network of tunnels built by forced labour, and thousands of people died in the process. Its true purpose has never been fully established by historians.

Kit: And because we do not know for sure what it was for, legends grew. In the two-thousands, writers popularised a legend about a device called Die Glocke, or The Bell.

Ellis: Supposedly linked to SS General Hans Kammler. The real Hans Kammler was indeed the officer in charge of the Reich's secret construction projects, and he really did vanish in 1945. But no document confirming The Bell has ever surfaced in reality.

Kit: But in the novel? The Bell is real, and it works. It is ceramic-cased, fuelled by a swirling compound called red mercury, and it is run by Dr Walter Gerlach's team. Once they install Element 115 into it, The Bell tears open a portal.

Ellis: On the night it first opens, something steps through from the other side. Later on, the engineers learn they can hold the door open for about eight minutes before the uranium feeding it runs out.

Kit: They run a canary test. They send a canary through the portal, and it comes back unharmed. So, naturally, they start sending men through.

Ellis: The portal opens onto Ilyndor. This is a dying world of orcs, elves, and creatures known as Grimfangs. The archive page mentions that this connection leads to some staggering visual and historical shifts. For instance, the orc warlord Durgar rides into Normandy in a black SS trench coat.

Kit: I absolutely love that image. And the elven commander Lithariel ends up standing in Churchill's war room! It is wild. Kammler's entire climb through the Reich, and the British scramble to understand what Bletchley Park keeps decrypting, it all starts with that same glowing crystal.

Ellis: It also provides a brilliant fictional rationale for real historical strategies. The portal is the reason why, in the novel, Hitler turns on the Soviet Union. Holding a door to another world open costs vast amounts of uranium, and the uranium is in the East.

Kit: It rewires a real turning point of the war. Operation Barbarossa isn't just a military blunder; it is a desperate resource grab to fuel an inter-dimensional gateway.

Ellis: Everything traces back to that crystal in the ice. But we must not forget the symbol on the hull. The triangle and the eye.

Kit: Right! It turns up again and again in the novel. It is on the craft, it is on German paperwork, it is even stitched into an officer's uniform. And nobody in the first half of the book can say who put it there.

Ellis: Readers who finish Book 1 will certainly have their own theories about it.

Kit: If you want to start forming your own theories, or if you want to read more about Durgar and Lithariel, check out resonanceportal.net to find the book and sign up for the free Classified 1939 Dossier.