During the early 1990s, the Russian political theorist and philosopher
Aleksandr Dugin (1962) spent two years studying Wirth's books. He devoted a whole volume,
Hyperborean Theory: The Experience of Ariosophic Research (1993), to Wirth's geopolitical and religio-historical views. Apparently, this is "one of the most extensive summaries and treatments of Wirth in any language". Dugin probably first referred to the
Palestinabuch in one of his controversial 1993 TV-shows with journalist Yury Vorobyevsky [Юрий Воробьевский], in which he claimed to have had access to the secret
KGB-archives on the Ahnenerbe, captured by the
Red Army in 1945. He subsequently elaborated the theme, suggesting that Wirth's superior knowledge was based on the Ahnenerbe's "vast archaeological material obtained during excavations in Palestine", to his judgement the most experienced organization of the time. As soon as Wirth's would apply his symbolic historical methods, [...] there is no line, not a word in the Old Testament that would not succumb to such Hyperborean deconstruction. It is not a question of criticizing the text [...]. What Wirth did was resacralize, reveal the original, Hyperborean gnosis - the true foundation of the Old Testament tradition, free it from biased interpretative models. [...] Unfortunately, now we can only guess about its contents. [...] Already in the 70s, when Wirth almost finished writing it, the only completed edition disappeared without a trace. In the scientist's absence, unknown people entered the house, turned everything upside down, but only took the
Palestina Buch. Wirth turned to his students (there were two or three unfinished copies), but the mysterious strangers had also visited them. Dugin, who does not cite any sources, claims that the manuscript counted several thousands of pages. According to Dugin's former associate, Yury Vorobyevsky, the manuscript had already been stolen in the 1950s, probably by the
Israeli Secret Service. Scholarly literature on the Ahnenerbe, on the other hand, does not present any evidence that the organisation ever conducted archaeological excavations in Palestine. The only relevant (but non-archaeological)
expedition in 1938 went to Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. Since Dugin's and Vorobyevsky's first publications on the topic, the idea of Jewish-American conspiracy being responsible for the loss of Wirth's world-explaining encyclopaedia, has gained foothold in Russian nationalist circles. It is constitutive for an aggressive nationalist approach, in which the values of the Eurasian civilisation are contrasted with the Jewish-imbued worldview of the Anglo-Saxon maritime world. Recently, the idea of a lost
Palestinabuch has also gained hold among rightwing radicals in the United States. ==References==