As hundreds of scientists from around the world were conscripted in the Manhattan Project during the thick of Word War II, the best and brightest were passed along to the top-secret research site in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the secrets of the world’s first atom bomb would soon be unlocked.

Though the US Army heavily patrolled the site and sensitive documents were kept under lock and key, Los Alamos was far from leak proof. The researchers themselves, highly prized for their brilliance and unique areas of expertise, could not be explicitly ruled out of service due to any supposed political leanings. Even the “Father of the Atomic Bomb,” Robert Oppenheimer, was known to keep company with known Communists and under surveillance by the FBI during his involvement in the project.

Meanwhile, another Los Alamos team member, theoretical physicist Klaus Fuchs, while a staunch anti-fascist, had been a member of the Communist Party in his native Germany. After fleeing to Britain to escape the Nazis, he was loaned out to the Manhattan Project in 1943 and, in short order, became a valuable asset to the team. To this day, Fuchs is credited with several key calculations that would prove essential to making the bomb a reality.

After the project disbanded in 1946, however, Fuchs switched sides and spent the next two years passing secrets to Soviets that included a method for refining uranium and diagrams for the construction of a hydrogen bomb. At the same time, the Central Intelligence Agency was projecting that the Soviets would be incapable of going nuclear until the mid-1950s. When the USSR conducted their first successful atomic test in 1949, a stunned President Truman initially declared that the explosion must have been an “accident.”

Fuchs was exposed the following year after US Intelligence decrypted messages implicating him as a traitor. He confessed immediately, leading to a rash of similar revelations from other Los Alamos workers. An Army corporal who worked the base, David Greenglass, revealed that he too sold secrets to the Soviets, including schematics of Fat Man, the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. In strange confluence of events, he was able to receive a reduced sentence in exchange for testifying against his own sister and her husband — who happened to be none other than Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Both were found guilty and executed, sparking one of the opening salvos of the Cold War and leading to a controversy that lingers to this day.

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Many historians have often asked the question of whether or not World War II could have been avoided. Some scholars of military history point to the British led policy of appeasement that existed just before the war and culminated with the Munich Agreement on September 29, 1938, as one way in which the allies failed to realize the threat of Hitler’s regime.

Europe in the aftermath of the First World War was a place full of debt, indignation and upset. Many felt Germany had unfairly taken the blame for a global war; other countries were bankrupt having put everything into the four year war that had killed millions and millions of soldiers and civilians. Many countries, their leaders and their people were sick and tired of violence and death and wanted anything but more war.

Germany for its part was living under the economic pressures of paying for a war they did not start and frustrated at the outcome of the Versailles Treaty which included the payment of reparations, the demilitarization of the Rhineland and the clause that Germany could not build up her army for the foreseeable future.

Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 and immediately set about reversing all the conditions of the Versailles Treaty. Neighboring nations complained but did not take military action against Hitler when he began to build the new German, remilitarize the Rhineland or even annex Austria (Anschluss) in March of 1938.

Every time the powers in Europe drew the line and told Hitler not to cross he ignored them and they ended up drawing a new line. This police became known as “appeasement” and was a way a continent financially weak and morally exhausted could avoid war. And anyway, Hitler promised he would not attack, invade or occupy any other countries. He wrote a friendly note to then British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain assuring him of his good intentions.

On September 29, 1938, Hitler met with British leader Neville Chamberlain and French leader Edouard Daladier. The meeting was mediated by Italian leader Benito Mussolini and ended in an agreement which Hitler drafted and the other leaders simply agreed to. The treaty stated that the German people of Czechoslovakia in an area known as the Sudetenland would be annexed to Germany in stages during October of the same year. This was in line with Hitler’s policy of Lebensraum and uniting all German peoples every where.

The treaty stated that Czechoslovakia would hand the land over to Hitler despite the fact that the Czech leader was not invited to the discussion and treaty signing but was told of their responsibilities by their allies. The land exchange would occur with Czechoslovakia’s help or they alone would be left to fight Hitler. They had little choice.

Six months after the signing of the Munich Agreement, Hitler had taken the Sudetenland and divided Czechoslovakia between Germany, Poland and Hungary. The country had no strength to fight and within a year, Europe was at war once again. The Munich Agreement was the last stance in a failed appeasement policy and the nations of Europe would take six years to get Hitler’s Germany under control.

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There are few dates in recent human history that cause more of an emotional stir in historians than that of September 1, 1939. On this day, Adolph Hitler, then chancellor of Germany declared to his parliament (Reichstag) that enough was enough that Danzig in Poland was a German city full of German people and should be taken back. The culmination of the Nazi ideology of “Lebensraum,” in which all lands currently or formerly belonging to Germany should be returned to Germany and inhabited by German people, would soon signal the death of millions of Jews, Russians, homosexuals, gypsies, agitators, allies and non combatants.

The fact that it is the date that signals the beginning of World War II and the dramatic reformatting of the European landscape and culture is a matter of hindsight. In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. It would have been difficult to imagine then the true scope of that decision.

It all began with the Treaty of Versailles. The document signed in 1919 in a rail car in France where the then German leaders were forced to admit their wrong doing in World War I and accept a significant loss of formerly German land.

Adolph Hitler fought in World War I and like many Germans felt that the treaty of Versailles was a slap in the face to the German nation making them wholly responsible for a war that involved many nations that came into conflict because of the multitudinous pacts that punctuated European politics.

Whether the Germans were simply assisting their allies or whether they were the instigators of the Great War, in which 20,000 a day killed at the Battle of the Somme, is a matter of opinion. Hitler attempted many times to instill a sense of injustice in the German people because of the humiliation of Versailles. His work of propaganda and surreptitious influence came to an end during the speech he made on September 1, 1939.

“Poland has directed its attacks against the Free City of Danzig. Moreover, Poland was not prepared to settle the Corridor question in a reasonable way which would be equitable to both parties, and she did not think of keeping her obligations to minorities. I must here state something definitely; German has kept these obligations; the minorities who live in Germany are not persecuted. No Frenchman can stand up and say that any Frenchman living in the Saar territory is oppressed, tortured, or deprived of his rights. Nobody can say this.” - Adolf Hitler

German troops marched into Danzig to reclaim the city and the Danzig Corridor on September 1 by force. It was not the first act by Germany in regards to nullifying the Versailles Treaty but it would become the most significant. The invasion of Poland was a direct result with Hitler’s Non Aggression Pact with Russia and the secret plan for the two nations to invade Poland and divide her up between the to powers. Because of a pact Britain and France had with Poland, they were forced to declare war on Germany on September 3 and just like the First World War, nation after nation followed suit until the disastrous global conflict was played out once again, only this time religion and ethnic persecution would play a large and deadly role.

All in all the Second World War took the lives of an estimated 22 million people. We see its legacy in the faces of aging veterans, in the gray wash memorial in town parks across the world and in the uncomfortable relationships of several nations. The significance of World War II will never be fully known in our lifetime, only becoming clear as the long line of modern history reaches its inescapable conclusions. What we do know now however is that the actions of one individual, good or bad, can change the world forever.

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In 880 BC, the Buddha is reputed to have relayed the Kalachakra Tantra – a complex system of philosophy and meditation for attaining enlightenment - to sect of followers in Andhra, India. This document, later adopted by Tibetan Buddhists and elaborated upon in a series of subsequent manuscripts, speaks in depth of a kingdom called Shambhala – an paradise where only most spiritually resplendent of beings can reside.

Though the texts depict Shambhala as physical city-state – one with a lotus-shaped perimeter divided into 96 districts and ruled over by a specific chronology of kings – they also maintain that it is separated from the tangible world by a spiritual boundary. As the Dalai Lama stated in 1981, “[If] you lay out a map and search for Shambhala, it is not findable; rather it seems to be a pure land which, except for those whose karma and merit have ripened, cannot be immediately seen or visited.”

It is the goal of all Tibetan lamas to one day, after years of intense study and reflection, to perceive the awesome grandness of this ethereal oasis through the achievement of enlightenment and the cycle of rebirth.

Nonetheless, that did stop rumors of Shambhala’s supposed material riches from slowly seeping into Western Europe, due to increased academic interest in Buddhism in the mid-18th Century. Much like the Spanish conquistadors led astray legends of the golden city of El Dorado or the Fountain of Youth, embellished tales of Shambhalah as a lost city populated by god-kings, oracles and an endless caches of jewels quickly spread through less discerning circles.

Would-be treasure hunters, however, were quickly felled by contradictory accounts of the holy city’s location. Various sources-including some from within Tibet itself-placed Shambhalah at different points throughout Central Asia. Nepal, the Gobi Sea, India and Siberia were, at one time, all considered likely prospects.

Such gossip only served to deepen the legend’s mystique to fringe groups of esoteric devotees and occultists, who fixated on the idea of Shambhalah as the last refuge of a lost civilization or intelligences from beyond the plane of human existence. In Germany, some proto-Nazi organizations, such as the Ariosophists, speculated that Shambhalah was the birthplace of Aryan race and viewed it as an analog to the Asgard of Norse mythology.

Drawing from these conclusions, Heinrich Himmler deployed as an SS unit to Tibet in May 1938 to not only collect data and artifacts that supported those views on Aryan lineage, but also substantiate rumors of Shambhalah’s existence. Within six months, the squad completed the arduous task of reaching the Tibetan capital of Lhasa - but would eventually fail to locate their mythical conquest before returning to Germany.

Luckily, the Tibetan manuscripts themselves do provide some insights - in the form of prophecy - as to when Shambhalah will be revealed once and for all time. In an interesting counterpoint to the Bible’s Book of Revelation, the Kalachakra Tantrathat states that the world of man will eventually degenerate through war, greed and moral corruption. At that point, a tyrannical ruler will ascertain the kingdom’s true location and invade, only to be fought off and defeated by the 32nd King of Shambhlah, Rudra Cakrin, and his army of the pure hearted. In doing so, the world will be ushered into an age of enlightenment and unprecedented global unity.

Not so luckily for us, however, is the fact that the Tibetan calendar places the date of this transformation in the year 2425.

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