The alleged underground Nazi city beneath Queen Maud Land: submarine pens, flying discs, the Last Battalion, sometimes the Fuehrer himself. Its coordinates are real, its parent expedition is real, and its existence has no documentation of any kind.
Documented
The documented absence
The 1938-39 expedition's own records show no landing parties in the interior and no construction of any kind; the first German station on the continent was the Georg von Neumayer, established 1981. The German claim was abandoned in 1945 and never revived, and the Antarctic Treaty of 1 December 1959 froze territorial questions under international inspection. Summerhayes and Beeching's 2007 Polar Record study, the standard myth-history of the base, traces the legend through postwar press speculation and finds no documentary basis at any point.
Assessment: Fully documented: the expedition record, the station history, the treaty, and eighty years of survey, drilling, and satellite coverage of the region showing no fortress. Absence of evidence here is backed by an unusual quantity of looking.
Stories
The legend assembles itself
The folk machinery: take the real 1939 secrecy, add the real 1946 armada, quote Byrd about fantastic speed, import the die Glocke wonder-weapon story for flavor, and the base builds itself in the listener's head. Versions differ on the tenants, surviving Nazis, escaped leadership, UFO engineers, but all agree on the landlord: a German Antarctica that the expedition record says consisted of a ship, two planes, and some penguins bound for the Berlin zoo.
Assessment: Stories: the legend's components are each documented, which is precisely its rhetorical trick and its archival tell. Real ingredients, assembled dish, no recipe ever found.
Interesting claims
The fortress as counterfactual comfort
The psychological reading offered by the myth's historians: a regime that lost everything needed, in the telling, to have kept something. The ice fortress is the perfect asset for a defeated empire's afterlife, unreachable, unverifiable, and cold enough to preserve anything, including pride. The Antarctic Treaty system, which opened the continent to any nation's inspection, is the quiet counter-evidence: the one place where rivals may check each other's claims at will has produced no claim to check.
Assessment: Interesting: the reading explains the legend's durability better than any alleged engineering. Filed as claim; the ice keeps its own books, and they show research stations, penguins, and arrows nobody has ever dug up.
Sources and further reading
Summerhayes and Beeching, Hitler's Antarctic Base: The Myth and the Reality, Polar Record 43(1) (2007), the standard myth-history
the 1938-39 expedition record: no inland landings, no construction; first German station: Georg von Neumayer, 1981
the Antarctic Treaty, 1 December 1959, and the inspection regime
the Byrd pole-to-pole quotation as circulated versus the documented El Mercurio context, a warning about Soviet aviation
the Georg von Neumayer and Neumayer III station records, Alfred Wegener Institute
Worth asking
What does it mean that the myth's every ingredient is real except the myth?