As laid out in his 1922 pamphlet Denn die Welt ist hohl, und ich habe den Himmel berührt, Peter Bender claimed that the Earth is not a sphere floating in space but is actually a bubble set in an infinity of rock, with humanity living on the concave inner surface and the sun, Moon, and what Bender called die Phantom-Universum (‘the Phantom Universe’) - a globe of blue gas studded with points of light which astronomers identify as stars - floating in the centre. The radiation from the sun (“infinitely smaller and brighter than can ever be conceived by the foolish and orthodoxy-blinded!!” Bender 1922) exerts a downward pressure misinterpreted as the Earth’s gravitational pull. His Hohlweltlehre or ‘Hollow World Theory’ gained numerous adherents among the Nazi leadership following their rise to power.
Sometime in 1942, a team under the leadership of infra-red optics specialist Dr. Heinz Fisher undertook an expedition to the Baltic island of Rügen to test Bender’s ideas. This photo shows members of Sondergruppe Steinspiegel with a pair of Dr. Fisher’s Wenig Augen 22 infra-red telescopes; compact and thus easier to quickly scan across large areas of sky, they were used as sighting devices to provide alignment and aiming data for the much larger and more unwieldy Zyklopen 1.5m camera. By aligning these various devices 45° above the horizon, it was hoped that ultimately they would be able to obtain images of the British Fleet at Scapa Flow. The complete failure to obtain useful images of any sort led to a total rejection of Bender’s cosmology, with the Third Reich’s astronomers wholly embracing Hans Hörbiger’s WEL.
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