Swastikas in Shangri La: The Strange Story of the Nazi Expedition to Tibet

 

        A frigid wind whips down into the valley from the towering peaks of the Himalayas.

A small group of five European men and a dozen pack-laden sherpas squint into the wintry sunlight to see straight ahead.  They pull the fur lined hoods of their parkas even tighter around their faces.

For the last nine months these men have journeyed over halfway around the world by ship, train and on foot--mostly on foot--to get here.

All of the men are exhausted.  But as they proudly march through the ancient gates of the city of Lhasa, the capital city of Tibet, and the Buddhist prayer flags flutter in the wind they feel exhilarated.

Cheering crowds greet these military men as they walk through the city.  Bands play “Deutschland uber Alles” and Swastika banners are held high.  The date is January 19, 1939 and this is the high point of the Nazi pseudo-scientific expedition to Tibet.

The titular leader of the expedition is an adventurous zoologist and mountain climber turned SS officer named Ernst Schafer.  

Schafer has received worldwide acclaim over the course of the past decade for both his scientific and mountaineering exploits.  A smile surely graces his face as he enters Lhasa at the head of the small jack-booted column.  

Schafer knows that the way the Nazis are planning to propagandize this expedition and its exploits will only serve to increase both his fame and fortune.  Even though he did have to sell out many of his scientific beliefs and give into the pseudo-scientific ramblings of that portly psychotic Heinrich Himmler to get here, Schafer as he enters Lhasa feels, literally and figuratively, on top of the world.

Ernst Schafer has always been a man of science and adventure and this trip to Tibet, albeit under a swastika banner, has given him ample opportunity to fulfill both of his passions.

Ernst Schafer

        The column of Nazis and sherpas winds its way through the temple lined streets of Lhasa before reaching an enormous monastery near the city center.  This temple is lined on all sides with fluttering prayer flags, and dozens of robed monks come out of the monastery and into the sunlight to greet the column.  

This is the Reting Monastery.  It is one of Tibet’s largest, oldest and most prominent monasteries.  Schafer is escorted inside by the large group of monks.

Inside the monastery, Schafer sits cross-legged on the carpeted floor and meets with the venerable abbot--Reting Rinpoche--the fifth Reting Rinpoche to be exact--named Jamphel Yeshe Gyaltsen.

Reting Rinpoche is a learned and influential monk.  He is a powerful man who seeks control and he is an ardent Tibetan nationalist.

Without any small talk whatsoever, point blank, Reting Rinpoche asks Schafer, “Will your country sell us weapons?”

Schafer blinks, caught off guard by the bluntness of the abbot’s question, and thinks for a moment before answering.  “Germany has come to Tibet in the interests of science and with good will towards the Tibetan people,” he answers.

“Will you sell us weapons?” Reting Rinpoche forcefully reiterates. “Weapons, to free Tibet from our common enemies.”

The common enemies that Reting Rinpoche speaks of are the British and the Chinese.  For countless centuries the Tibetan people have been trapped between the dual evils of British colonial oppression and Chinese military conquest.

Schafer sighs and he wonders what the hell he’s gotten himself into.  As the probing eyes of the abbot gaze into his own, he no longer feels quite so on top of the world.  Although Hitler has certainly made no great secret of his dual desires to promote supposed Aryan racial superiority while at the same time acquiring more “living space” for the German people, as of now officially at least, Europe is still at peace.  It will be another nine months before Germany’s unprovoked invasion of Poland sets off the Second World War in Europe.

Or will it?  At this moment Ernst Schafer definitely does not want to set off the spark that will light the powder keg of the Second World War in Europe all the way over here on the other side of the world in far off inconsequential Tibet.

Reting Monastery

Ernst Schafer may have wondered, sitting there in a monastery talking about weapons deals with an aged Buddhist monk, what the hell he had gotten himself into, but today we have to wonder--What the hell were the Nazis doing in Tibet on the eve of the Second World War anyway?

The answer to that question starts with the psychotic beliefs and perverse interests of one very influential Nazi--Reichsfurher Heinrich Himmler.

Himmler, as is well documented today, had many odd interests in the occult and he ascribed to many esoteric and pseudo-scientific theories on everything from race and religion to meteorology.  

To understand why Himmler believed it was so important for Nazi Germany to launch an investigative expedition all the way to distant Tibet it is necessary to first explore two erroneous and laughable beliefs that Henirich Himmler and many other leading members of the SS held at the time.

The first of these beliefs was that all of humanity had literally “descended” from an ancient super race of godlike beings called “Aryans” (a perversion of ancient Sanskrit words and vedic beliefs) and that these original “Aryans” were located somewhere in the east.  This belief that the Nazi super-race had originated in the east is one of the reasons why Hitler and early Nazi party leaders chose to adopt the Swastika as their party symbol because of the swastika’s original use in both the Hindu and Buddhist faiths as an ancient symbol of good luck and prosperity.  Hitler and his minions wanted to accentuate, through their use of symbols, the connection between the Nazi party they created and beliefs that had originated in the distant past.

Himmler believed that by studying the Tibetan people themselves, literally examining their physical characteristics such as facial bone structure and hair and eye color in a demeaning way, that he could prove there was a common lineage between the German people and the Tibetan people thereby establishing the fact that at one time in prehistory there had once existed a superior “Aryan” master race from which both Germans and Tibetans were descended.

The second, and less well known reason is that Heinrich Himmler along with several other Nazi leaders, ascribed to a scientific theory called Welteislehre or World Ice Theory.  

World Ice Theory was the brainchild of Austrian engineer and inventor, Hanns Horbiger.  Horbiger (1864-1931) first wrote his concept of World Ice Theory, or Glacial Cosmology as it came to be known, in 1913.  Horbiger, though he claimed that his theory could be used to explain everything from the creation of the universe to the nature of time, did not base any of his conclusions on any type of research or study whatsoever, but rather he claimed that the concept of World Ice Theory had come to him in a vision that he had during a dream in 1894.

Hanns Horbiger

        Glacial Cosmology is a rambling theory about the creation, expansion and continuation of the universe that is hard to make any real sense of today.  Simply put, advocates of World Ice Theory believed that ice was the essential substance and building block of everything in the universe and that each star and plant, including the planet earth, in the Milky Way Galaxy was in fact made up primarily of ice.  

Nazi scientists who ascribed to this Glacial Cosmology on the eve of World War Two believed that all weather patterns could be predicted by studying glaciers since because the earth was made up primarily of ice, then it stood to reason that large masses of ice such as glaciers located in the Himalayas and at the arctic poles would somehow (curiously I could never determine exactly how or why they believed this to be the case!) dictate the climatic conditions on earth.

Himmler, and the SS intelligence service, hoped that by sending an expedition to Tibet and studying glaciers on the Himalayas they could somehow gain the upper hand in meteorology based upon the tenets of Hanns Horbiger’s Glacial Cosmology and World Ice Theory. 

It was Himmler who first approached Schafer sometime in late 1937 with the idea of leading an expedition to Tibet.  The reason Himmler approached Schafer was because Himmler hoped to be able to cash in on the celebrity of Ernst Schafer and use it as a sort of propaganda coup when it came to promoting the findings of Nazi scientists in Tibet.  

Schafer, who had led a previous scientific and mountaineering expedition to China and India back in 1934 and 1935, though not an ardent Nazi by most accounts, was desperate to go back, and went along with Himmler’s proposal as a means to journey back to the place that had so captivated his imagination earlier in the decade.  Schafer asked for approximately 65,000 Reichsmarks to finance the expedition but the Ahnenerbe (the scientific research branch of the SS) didn’t have the requisite funds to cover the cost of an expedition to Tibet.

Fortunately for Himmler, as he had probably assumed when he proposed the expedition in the first place, Schafer had enough contacts in the business world of Germany to raise the necessary funds and in April of 1938 the group of five hand-picked men set off to from Nazi Germany to journey east to Tibet.

The SS Tibet Expedition, as it would come to be called, was composed of five men each selected by Schafer and members of the Ahnenerbe.  In addition to Schafer there was Karl Wienert as team Geologist, Edmund Geer who was selected as the the team’s logistical leader and quartermaster of sorts, Ernest Krause who would act as a biologist and was the team’s designated photographer and filmmaker and lastly Bruno Beger, perhaps, the most ardent Nazi of them all and an SS man to the core.

Beger was a young, twenty-six year old student of Hans F.K. Gunther.  Hans F.K. Gunther was an anthropologist whose racist theories on the nature of eugenics did much to influence the perverse notions of human racial superiority and inferiority so ardently ascribed to by members of the Nazi Party.

Behind all of the phoney science surrounding the Nazi Expedition to Tibet lies a sinister and more practical military motive.  It is thought by many researchers that although Schafer and his colleagues may have followed what they considered to be legitimate scientific pursuits on their expedition to Tibet, that what the Nazi hierarchy was actually after by supporting such an expedition, was to study the feasibility of attacking British controlled India by way of the Himalayas.

This theory was not lost on British authorities who tailed the Nazis almost from the moment they left Germany.  It also didn’t help that word of the journey to Tibet had been blazoned across German newspapers for propaganda purposes prior to Schafer and his team members even beginning the expedition.

British espionage agents trailed Schafer and his team all through Tibet and kept a close eye on everything he did in Lhasa itself.  Later on, even Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels was forced to release a statement regarding the Nazi Tibetan Expedition in which he stated, “Germany sent a team to Tibet in 1939 for purely scientific reasons,” in 1940 when many allied sources pointed to the German expedition to Tibet the previous years as an early sign that the Nazis were somehow planning a military intervention in Asia against the British with Japanese support.

Bruno Beger measuring Tibetans

In the end, though the expedition was well documented and represented a cross section of the German scientific community at the time, the whole thing proved to be somewhat of a farce and was not the propaganda success the that Nazi’s had hoped.

For one thing, photos of Bruno Beger measuring the faces of Tibetans with callipers and rulers that ran in newspapers world wide seemed dehumanizing even at the time and did much to alienate Asian people from supporting the Axis powers during World War Two.  

As could be imagined, a possible invasion route through the Himalays to attack British held India just wasn’t feasible and the Nazi government itself was perhaps never really serious about offering any military assistance to the oppressed Tibetan people at all.

However, on July 25, 1939 Ernst Schafer did present the scientific results of the expedition to the members of the Himalaya Club in Calcutta India, one of the last episodes of Anglo-German cooperation prior to the outbreak of World War Two in September of that year.

Schafer had taken meticulous notes on the social and religious customs of the Tibetan people and he was able to present one of the outside world’s first true glimpses inside the insular nation of Tibet.  Though Schafer's insights were well researched and present an intimate portrait of many aspects of Tibetan culture and society, perhaps, for the Tibetan people it would have been best if all outsiders had simply left them alone.

Today, Tibet, which throughout its history has struggled with encroachment from outsiders whether they be German, British, or Japanese remains under the oppressive heel of the Chinese communist regime.  Tibet, a nation based on a unique form of Buddhism and spiritual insight, today has its government in exile in Nepal and Tibetans are no longer free to practice their faith in their own homeland.   Each day, Tibetans suffer human rights abuses at the hands of their Chinese oppressors that are under-reported and little known in the outside world.

Were Ernst Schafer to lead an expedition back to Tibet today, perhaps somewhere in the capital city of Lhasa, he would meet up with a robed aged monk (this time in private to hide from the atheist Chinese) who would forcefully ask him once again, “Will you give us weapons to fight our common enemies?”