This story began in the summer of 1945, when Hitler's loyal ally, Obergruppenfuehrer SA Robert Ley, who was being held as a war criminal in Nuremberg, alarmed the allied command with the message that the south of Germany was in danger of catastrophe. He told the Americans that in one of the underground bunkers, code-named Z3, where the development of top-secret Nazi weapons continued until the last days of the war, just before the capitulation of Germany, due to the sabotage of prisoners of war, containers with a very dangerous substance were depressurized. If you do not enter the bunker and do not repair the leak, at least a third of the country's population will die. To prevent such a number of deaths, he, Robert Ley, himself is ready to go down into the dungeon.
Mysterious bunker
The Americans were alarmed. During the war years, the Nazis really launched a stormy activity underground, building more than 130 underground factories and industries. It is obvious that Lei, who held prominent posts and was responsible not only for the Labor Front, but also for organizing the forced labor of prisoners of war and other foreign workers, really could know a lot about the secret developments of the Nazis.
Bunker Z3 was located in Weimar, and, according to the assumption of the Americans, the Nazis were engaged in the development of new engines for aircraft there. For the manufacture of fuel, they used previously unknown substances and a huge amount of mercury.
The Americans could not let Lei go down to the bunker himself, he was supposed to play a prominent role in the Nuremberg trials - the Nazi was accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Americans did not want to risk a prominent prisoner, therefore, under the guise of fulfilling allied agreements, they invited Soviet specialists to participate in the liquidation of the accident. They did not talk about the real state of affairs, the Soviet command was planted with disinformation about the development by the Nazis of engines for submarines running on hydrogen peroxide.
Of course, the leadership of the USSR was interested in the new product. Despite the victory, the Soviet Union still lagged behind in a number of research and development. For example, the Nazis already in 1941 made the first underwater missile launch from the U-511 submarine. In the USSR, even four years later, they could only dream about it. The Soviet leadership was interested in the Nazi development of plasma weapons, new disc-shaped flying vehicles and climate weapons. Therefore, in the USSR, it was decided to take part in the survey of the Z3 bunker. They decided to send a self-taught chemist, a specialist in the synthesis of luminophores (substances capable of converting energy into light), Senior Lieutenant Nikolai Zhirov as a performer in Weimar.
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Orders are not negotiable
Nikolai Zhirov was truly passionate about science. Due to the death of his father, he could not get a higher education, but already at the age of 25 he published the first scientific articles on the synthesis of phosphors. He had a very unsuitable noble origin for the USSR, graduated from a gymnasium and independently mastered a chemistry course that was not taught at an educational institution. Before the war, he graduated from the Kiev school of commanding officers for artillerymen, then retired, worked at the Moscow Research Institute of the People's Commissariat of Ammunition, in 1940 he published a monograph on phosphors. During the war years, Zhirov developed blue glow phosphors for the needs of air defense.
When on July 6, 1945 he was summoned to the Lubyanka, Zhirov was sure that he would be offered to work with the archives of the Nazis, because he had learned German excellently at the gymnasium. However, he was given a certificate of a special representative of the State Defense Committee of the USSR, took a nondisclosure agreement and sent him on a business trip to Weimar. The 42-year-old scientist returned from it as a completely different person.
Nikolay Zhirov.
It is known that in Weimar, Robert Ley personally pointed out the hidden entrance to the bunker, after which specialists in chemical protection suits cleared the rubble and found that the lifts were working. However, neither the Americans nor the British dared to go down. And then Nikolay Zhirov did it.
But neither the protective suit nor the gas mask, which Zhirov prudently put on, helped the scientist. After the chemist completed the task and rose to the surface, he became ill. Zhirov was immediately taken to the hospital.
The historian Alexander Voronin in the film "Berlin - Atlantis" mentioned that Zhirov himself admitted: in the Nazis' dungeon, he suffered damage to the nervous system by chemicals unknown to him. But what he saw in the bunker, Zhirov, bound by a state secret, never told anyone.
The patient Zhirov was urgently taken to Moscow and taken to the Botkin hospital, where he remained until April 1947. The diagnosis given to him by Soviet doctors did not explain anything: a viral lesion of the central nervous system. In the hospital, Zhirov raved about Atlantis and read extracts from Plato as a keepsake.
It was here, in a hospital bed, that he found a new meaning of life - the search for an ancient civilization. Zhirov was sure that the Nazis had found a source of ancient knowledge, which means that a department similar to the Nazi research organization "Ahnenerbe" should have been opened in the USSR, and find out where, from what source the Nazis got ideas for new discoveries.
Finding Atlantis
Zhirov was discharged from the hospital as a disabled person of group I, but the scientist did not lose heart - he surrounded himself with textbooks on geology, geography and history and began to search for Atlantis. Despite the fact that in 1948 Zhirov was awarded the degree of Doctor of Chemistry “for the totality of his work”, his new activity did not arouse enthusiasm among the authorities. The chemist now and then sent articles to magazines in France and Britain, copied with foreign colleagues, so he was under the close supervision of the KGB.
By the second half of the 1950s, Zhirov was sure that Atlantis existed and should rightfully occupy one of the sections of the biogeography of the Quaternary period - a geological period of time that continues to this day.
In 1957 his work “Atlantis” was completed, and in 1964 the scientific publication “Atlantis. The main problems of Atlantology , in which the author investigated the civilization of the Atlanteans as a period of the formation of mankind and argued that Atlantis really existed, and in the Atlantic there was once a huge continent, which, as a result of a catastrophe, plunged into the abyss. Zhirov was sure that the knowledge of this civilization was somehow found and used by the Nazis, who were decades ahead of the whole world.
The terminally ill chemist hoped that the USSR would appreciate his work, but this did not happen. Soviet science was aimed only at the future; there was no place for the great civilization of the past. When Nikolai Zhirov died in 1970, his entire archive was confiscated and classified. Whether this was done on the basis of the principle “whatever happens,” or whether the USSR leadership really tried to hide something that became known from the archives of the Nazis, we may never know.
But the idea of searching for the ancient civilization of the Atlanteans was eagerly picked up by other Soviet scientists and writers. In 1961, with a foreword by Academician Vasily Struve, Ekaterina Andreeva's book Atlantis. In Search of the Lost World. The famous geologist and geographer Vladimir Obruchev took up the search for the mythical Hyperborea.
In 1974, the research vessel of Moscow State University "Akademik Petrovsky", while filming Mount Ampere in the Atlantic Ocean at a depth of 80 meters, found clear evidence of the existence of an ancient civilization destroyed by a cataclysm and sank under water. Mount Ampere is located about 380 kilometers southwest of Cape San Vicente on the Iberian Peninsula (coordinates 35 ° 03 'N, 12 ° 54' W, minimum depth 59 meters). Repeated photographs of the mountain were made in 1980 by the Pisis underwater vehicle, and in 1981 an underwater bell with divers was even lowered to Mount Ampere. According to scientists, Atlantis was located between the mountain and the mainland and plunged into the sea about eight and a half thousand years ago.
But, unfortunately, soon after that, the scientific community of the USSR considered the research in the Atlantic to be empty fun, and all research was scrapped. The Atlantis of Nikolai Zhirov has never been discovered. The materials on the Z3 bunker also remain classified to this day.
Alexander Lavrentiev