Nazi Antarctic base rumors revived amid Russian drilling

As my colleague David M. Herszenhorn reports, scientists are poised to take some highly anticipated samples from a deep subglacial lake in Antarctica, saying on Wednesday that they had succeeded in boring through more than two miles of ice....

What evolutionary secrets Lake Vostok — named after the Russian research station above it — may hold after being sealed under ice for millions of years has tantalized scientists who hope to find evidence of previously unknown forms of life.

Probing the mysterious depths of earth has also fascinated casual observers, some of whom gravitated toward more outlandish theories about what may be discovered in the ancient lake, including alien life forms or Hitler’s remains.

That last theory, based on sketchy rumors of a Nazi base on the frozen continent, received an unlikely boost this week from Russia’s state-run news service, Ria Novosti, which said that the scientific mission had revived an “old theory saying that German Nazis may have built a secret base” at Lake Vostok “as early as the 1930s.”...

Editor's Note: The article goes on to discuss the impossibility of the rumors.