A Viennese mining engineer and co-author in 1913 of a massive tome, Glazial-Kosmogonic. The thesis of this magnum opus was that Earth, because it was first formed, has had several moons six or more in succession. Each of the moons had a catastrophic effect that accounts for Earth’s geological features. During the time human beings have been on Earth, the Earth has had two Moons, the present one and the one before it. The earlier Moon’s effects on Earth are described in our myths and legends. The earlier Moon had been smaller than the present one and had been much closer to Earth, which it had orbited rapidly, six times a day. The attraction of this close, rapidly orbiting Moon had distorted Earth, making it bulge at the equator, leaving huge areas away from the equator covered in ice. To get away from the ice areas, humans had concentrated in high mountainous regions of the equatorial belt. Earths gravitational forces on the Moon had caused it to disintegrate, showering Earth with water and rocks. In consequence, Earth, no longer subject to gravitational distortion, had sprung back into near spherical shape, causing earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and floods. These were the floods of our mythologies: the stories of Gilgamesh, Noah, and others.
Horbiger believed that our present Moon has a surface layer of ice 200 kilometers (140 miles) thick and that other planets have a similar ice covering, that the Milky Way is a huge ring of gigantic blocks of ice, and that the moon is steadily spiraling in toward Earth, with more catastrophes yet to come. The Nazi movement seized on Horbiger’s theories as a preferred Aryan alternative to traditional astronomical theories, dismissed as Jewish science. To believe in Horbiger’s theories was essential to being a good Nazi.