Grove Koger

In the long, rich history of bad ideas, a handful stand out as being spectacularly, even colossally bad. It’s in this latter category that we can confidently place the Atlantropa project of Herman Sörgel, who was born in Regensbury, Bavaria, on April 2, 1885.

Sörgel studied architecture at Munich’s Technische Universität from 1904 to 1908, but made his mark only in 1929 when he published a small book with text in four languages, the English title of which was Lowering the Mediterranean, Irrigating the Sahara: Panropa Project. What appear to be revised versions in which his project’s name was changed to that by which it’s remembered today—Atlantropa—began to appear a few years later.

In a nutshell, Sörgel’s plan envisioned the construction of dams across the Strait of Gibraltar, sealing off the Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean and thus causing the level of the Mediterranean to fall as its waters evaporated. Secondary dams would be built at the Dardanelles (one of the straits connecting the Mediterranean and Black seas), the Strait of Sicily (between the Italian island and Tunisia), and at the mouths of the rivers flowing into the Mediterranean.

In this mad scheme, the level of the western Mediterranean would eventually fall by nearly 330 feet and that of the eastern by twice as much. As a long-term result, more than 250,000 square miles of what had been “useless” sea bed would become available for cultivation (after a suitable period of desalination, of course), thus creating what would be, in effect a new continent—Atlantropa. Europe’s growing problems of overpopulation and unemployment would be alleviated, and, as a bonus, the various dams would generate untold megawatts of electricity, thus providing for the brave new continent’s growing energy needs.

Over the longer term, Sörgel also envisioned two dams on the Congo River, steps that would fill the Chad Basin of what was once Central Africa and open the region to shipping. (What the region’s indigenous inhabitants might think about the transformation was, of course, of no consequence.)

In the case of the Chad Basin, Sörgel clearly considered the climatological effects of his project, as he anticipated that an expanded Lake Chad would moderate the tropical region’s climate and thus render it more attractive to European settlers. However, he doesn’t seem to have given much thought to the enormous and unquestionably catastrophic changes that the Atlantropa project would have wrought upon the world’s climate and its ocean currents.

Sörgel campaigned tirelessly for his project, publishing thousands of articles and presenting his plan to the Nazis when they came to power, but to no avail. He himself died when his bicycle was struck by a car in Munich in late 1952. Not surprisingly, he was on his way to deliver a lecture.

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The map at the top of the post illustrates the projected impact of the Atlantropa project upon the Mediterranean region, and is reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. The black-and-white illustration depicts the construction of one of the dams across the Strait of Gibraltar. It dates from 1933, and was distributed in connection with a short press release, the conclusion of which suggested that “by transforming Europe into Atlantropa, by uniting Europe and Africa and making them one continent under European government, the expansion of Bolshivism [sic] might be prevented.”