Albert Herrmann (1886-1945) was Professor of Geography at Berlin University. Between 1927 and 1931 he declared support for Borchardt’s Atlantis theory in a number of publications. He agreed that a large dried up saltwater lake in Tunisia called Shott el Djerid was originally Lake Tritonis and known during Solon’s time as the Atlantic Sea and further claimed that it had been the location of Atlantis; a theory supported by of a number of investigators. Herrmann suggested that it was the result of an upheaval of the land, which extended a land barrier between the Shott and the sea. He locates the Pillars of Heracles where this barrier was created. Anton Mifsud has pointed out that the 1st century BC writer Apollonius Rhodius located the Strait of Heracles in ancient Syrtis Minor, now the Gulf of Gabés, apparently supporting Herrmann’s contention.
Herrmann disagreed with Plato’s 9,000 years and proposed that he had instead been referring to the 13th or 14th century BC.
Finally, Herrmann, in an effort to match this location with the Platonic narrative, felt obliged to reduce its dimensions by a factor of thirty. He claimed that the priest in Sais had erred in the conversion of the Egyptian ‘schoinos’ into Greek stadia. It must be noted that the schoinos as well as the stadion had variable regional values; the number of schoeni per stadion varied between 30 and 40.
In a later book[386], Herrmann shifted his view from his original stance suggesting that Tunisia had been just a colony under the influence of a culture originating in Friesland, later to become famous as the source of the Oera Linda Book. It is not impossible that the introduction of a Northern European slant to his theories were the consequence of political pressure in Germany at the time, typified by Borchardt being imprisoned because of his Jewish background. Vidal-Naquet describes Herrmann as ‘an avowed Nazi’(580.121), so pressure may not have been necessary.
