Quest of the Nazis

In 1938, Himmler sent a team of SS scientists on a mystical expedition to Tibet. Their mission: to seek the origins of the Aryan race. Kathy Brewis reports

Berlin, 1936. National pride is in the air, the preparations for the Olympics are under way and a young naturalist, Ernst Schäfer, is congratulating himself on his luck. He has just had a successful meeting with his new mentor, Heinrich Himmler. Such patronage will bring opportunities for an ambitious young scientist. Soon, with Himmler's blessing, he will lead an expedition to Tibet on a quest to investigate the origins of the Aryan race.

Schäfer is 26. He has just married Hertha Volz, a tall, beautiful blonde. He has already been on two American-led expeditions to China, where he demonstrated a brooding character and a fondness for shooting any creature that moved. He enjoys minor celebrity status as the author of Mountains, Buddhas and Bears. But he wants more: more fame, more power, more prestige. In 1930s Germany, the only way to get ahead is to get in with the Reichsführer.

'Schäfer was seduced by Himmler's power, like many well-educated German intellectuals,' says Christopher Hale, whose new book, Himmler's Crusade, chronicles the roots and results of the German Tibet expedition. Schäfer emerges as a slightly comical figure - 'a combination of Ernest Hemingway and Reginald Perrin' - on a ridiculous mission. Yet the expedition to Tibet was just one of hundreds of strange enterprises overseen by Himmler in an attempt to bolster Nazi ideology with phoney history and science.

During his research, Hale uncovered hundreds of photographs that had been locked away in an archive in Koblenz, Germany, for decades. 'I realised this was as close as I could come to being present,' he says. 'There was the first glimpse of the Himalayas... the trail of men and animals winding their way up to the Natu La pass... I could almost sense what those SS men were thinking - it was not a comfortable experience.'

If it weren't so sinister, it would have been silly. Himmler thought he was the reincarnation of a 10th-century German king, Heinrich I, or Henry the Fowler. He appointed as his personal adviser a madman, Karl Maria Willigut, who claimed to be the last in a long line of German sages. He dabbled in prehistoric Venus figures, telepathy, homeopathy, 'Germanic astronomy', hypnotism, Hindu castes and runes. He belonged to occultist sects. At Wewelsburg castle, which Himmler had renovated (using slave labour) to resemble the mythical Camelot (round table and all), he trained his SS officers in pagan ceremonies and meditation. Dieter Wisleceny, an SS captain, said: 'The usual view of Himmler is that he was an ice-cold, cynical politician. This view is almost entirely wrong... Himmler was a mystic.'

Tibet might seem like an odd place to search for Germanic roots, but it was not an arbitrary choice. Many odd ideas were taken seriously in Europe long before Nazism took hold. In 1786 an Englishman, Sir William Jones, had studied the similarities between Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, and concluded that Sanskrit was the oldest of the three languages. In the next century, a German linguist, Friedrich Schlegel, claimed that Sanskrit had first been spoken by an elite race of light-skinned warriors in northern India, as mentioned in the ancient Hindu scriptures. Schlegel called them Aryans (arya is Sanskrit for 'noble'). They may not have existed, but it was an appealing idea.

Then there was the 19th-century religious fraud 'Madame' Helena Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Movement, who claimed to be in direct spiritual contact with the 'Great White Brotherhood' in Tibet. She convinced thousands that humans had evolved through various stages, each of which had succumbed to floods. An elite priesthood had escaped from the lost continent of Atlantis and fled to the Himalayas, and their successors were the Aryans. Others, too, proposed these Aryans, or Nordics, were descended from godlike men and had once lived in the icy north. These were the people Himmler was interested in. Perhaps there were still traces of them?

In 1935, Himmler had founded the Ahnenerbe, or Ancestral Heritage Organisation, to study the supposed roots of the Aryan nation, which by sleight of hand the Nazis had appropriated as their own. 'A Volk [people] that has this belief in rebirth and that honours its ancestors, and in so doing honours itself, always has children, and this Volk has eternal life,' Himmler told his SS men. 'A people live happily in the present and the future. so long as they are conscious of their past and the greatness of their ancestors,' ran the Ahnenerbe's motto. There were 46 departments, headed by top zoologists, botanists, archeologists, meteorologists, historians and anthropologists. It even had its own publishing house, producing books and journals.

'Culturally and intellectually the Ahnenerbe was very significant,' says the author Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. 'Himmler wanted to forge a coherent ideological instrument to explain why the Aryan was the master race, and establishing a complete prehistory and geography was a way to do that.' If there were no physical signs of such a race ever having existed, it was because nobody had looked hard enough. Small but determined teams were dispatched to the ends of the Earth to seek evidence for superior Germanic ancestry.

Many Germans - even fellow Nazis - thought some of Himmler's ideas slightly embarrassing. But he wanted to make the Ahnenerbe a credible research institute. For this he needed to enlist ambitious scientists, such as Schäfer, to add prestige to the enterprise. It's unlikely that Schäfer shared all Himmler's beliefs, but he was one of hundreds of men who allowed themselves to be sucked into the ReichsfŸhrer's poisonous empire for personal gain. He was eager to be the first German to reach Lhasa, the Forbidden City. 'Schäfer knew that the Ahnenerbe was a bunch of cranks. Yet he knew he needed the support of Himmler, the second most powerful man in Germany,' says Hale.

But he had no reservations about Himmler's politics. He was a proud German nationalist. In a 1937 interview for the SS magazine, he enthused: 'The same essential ideas motivate me as an SS man and as an explorer and scientist. The ideas of the SS and the ideas of research are identical... science only grows on a racial basis.' The other team members were SS officers too: Ernst Krause, a botanist and entomologist, who would double as the official cameraman; Karl Wienert, a geophysicist; Edmund Geer, the expedition's manager; and Bruno Beger, an anthropologist.

The team reached Lhasa in January 1939 on a two-week tourist permit and stayed for eight months, despite strong British opposition. Tibet was on the edge of British India. Our man in Lhasa hated fascism and had vowed to keep the German party out of the Forbidden City. Schäfer had failed to get the expedition rubber-stamped by the India Office, despite support from some well-bred British fascists, but an explorer had advised him: 'Sneak over the border. Then find a way round the regulations.' During the Germans' time in Lhasa, the British maintained a polite front while keeping a close eye on their activities.

Schäfer cultivated friendships with important Tibetans, including the powerful regent. He assumed the perfect Tibetan character - calm, tolerant, smiling - while secretly abhorring their customs. He recognised Tibet's potential political use to the Reich. After all, they shared the swastika, the ancient symbol of good fortune.

Beger's dubious research involved making a precise series of measurements of people's heads and facial features with callipers. The aim was to compare and contrast bodily types - Hale calls it 'the mathematics of racial difference'. Beger carried eye-colour charts and swatches of hair to help him categorise people into neat racial types. He also took face masks of Tibetans, a process that required raw gypsum, water and disinfectant. The first volunteer had fearful convulsions as the plaster set, but Beger pressed on undeterred. He was forced to pose as a medicine man to win the favour of the Tibetan aristocracy, dispensing drugs and tending to monks with sexually transmitted diseases in return for his research. He gathered a huge amount of pointless information. During eight months in Lhasa, he recorded the measurements of 376 people and took casts of the heads, faces, hands and ears of 17 more, as well as fingerprints and hand prints from another 350.

Schäfer made a comprehensive survey of Tibetan flora and fauna and indulged his lifelong passion for hunting. This was a man who boasted of having shot rats in the family cellar at the age of three. In China he had proudly slain an eagle and a giant panda. Like Goering and Himmler, he saw nature as something to be mastered. A Tibetan guide observed he often drank his quarry's blood.

He was a difficult character, plagued by remorse over the death of his wife. They had taken a boat out onto a lake in Germany so that he could shoot game. He leapt up to fire at some ducks, but stumbled and accidentally shot Hertha in the head. She died an hour later, and Schäfer's guilt and grief heightened an already volatile nature. 'Schäfer's chief trouble is that he is unbalanced mentally,' a British official commented.

The Germans collected anything they could: thousands of artefacts, a huge number of plants and animals, including live specimens. Wienert took four sets of geomagnetic data. Krause studied Tibetan wasps. Schäfer observed Tibetan rituals, including sky burials (he even bought some human skulls). And they took stills and film footage of local culture, including the spectacular New Year celebrations when tens of thousands of pilgrims descended upon Lhasa.

Their time was limited. In March 1939, Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia, and war was becoming inevitable. The German expedition was suspected of espionage. A Punch cartoon showed the SS 'secret agents' standing next to a yak with a swastika burnt into its hide. In August, shortly before war was declared, the team hastily left for Europe. Himmler greeted his homecoming heroes personally and declared the expedition a triumph for the SS.

While they had been away, the Ahnenerbe had been propagating Himmler's evil philosophies in a process far subtler than Goebbels's propaganda. Himmler had been clever recruiting scientists: it conferred a respectability on his ideas. 'Myths are never harmless,' says Hale. 'In Himmler's world they were the building blocks of genocide.' The theory that there is one master race under constant threat of extinction fed into the idea that 'outsiders' (for which read 'Jews') were a threat; mass murder could be justified as self-defence. 'Who would have thought in the 1920s that a crank like Himmler would ever have the political power to do something about such absurd and ridiculous ideas? Yet he did achieve that power and the results were catastrophic.'

Beger, Krause and Wienert were absorbed into the German military machine. Schäfer became an administrator in the Ahnenerbe. Now the Tibet expedition's sinister undertones would come to the fore. The 120,000ft of moving film they had taken was edited down into a documentary, Geheimnis Tibet (Secret Tibet), to fit Himmler's agenda. A unique record of Tibetan life and customs, it presents the expedition team as heroes, bravely crossing torrential rivers on rope bridges to reach their goal. The Tibetans welcome them with smiles, and one woman seems to find it all very jolly when Beger measures her with his callipers. In the unedited version, they came to blows.

The overriding theme is that Tibet, once a proud warrior nation, has been dominated and weakened by a religion from outside. 'It was presented as a clear warning from history,' says Hale. 'The inference was that if Germans allowed Jews and their religion to contaminate their country, they faced catastrophe.'

Himmler's protŽgŽs were slowly drawn further into his murderous empire. Schäfer was treated to a glimpse of the ReichsfŸhrer's master plan in action when he joined him on a visit to Poland. Here he learnt all about Himmler's scheme to liquidate the Polish intelligentsia. He breakfasted with some of Himmler's most savage SS henchmen. 'Schäfer wasn't interested in being an agent of genocide, but he would have been stupid or blind if he hadn't seen what was happening,' says Hale. Schäfer would later claim he had been trapped 'in a spider's web'.

On returning from Tibet, he had been given his own institute, which he named after an anti-semitic Swedish explorer. The Sven Hedin Institute for Inner Asian Research opened in January 1943. By now, the Ahnenerbe was a vast organisation. One of its departments was carrying out horrific experiments on Jews, other Germans, Russians and Poles. In 1942, Schäfer and Krause had photographed some of Dr Rascher's gruesome medical experiments in the labour camp at Dachau.

Beger became the Ahnenerbe's race expert. He realised that the Reich's 'resettlement camps' in the east created an opportunity for scientific experiment. On a spring evening in 1943, he arrived at Auschwitz station, had a hearty meal and the next day selected over 100 prisoners to measure. He stayed for eight days, then the prisoners were gassed and their corpses delivered to the anatomy department at Strasbourg university. There are clues to suggest that some of their skulls ended up in Schäfer's institute.

Schäfer spent the last part of the war investigating Himmler's latest obsession: the origins of a mythical red horse with a white mane. But he was no fool. When the allies' victory was declared, he surrendered, playing down his links to the regime. He tried to convince his captors that he had maintained a purely scientific vision, untainted by politics or ideology. He was let off with a fine, and in 1949 moved to Venezuela to create a new wildlife park.

Beger kept a low profile for more than a decade. Wienert, Krause and Geer quietly slipped back into academic life. Himmler himself had committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide pill while in British custody in May 1945. It wasn't until Beger's wartime anthropology came to light during Adolf Eichmann's trial in 1961 that he was implicated in the murder of 115 people. Beger faced trial in 1971. Schäfer testified in his defence. Beger admitted that he had measured the heads of prisoners at Auschwitz, but claimed he knew nothing of their subsequent fate. He was found guilty of being an 'accomplice to murder' and given a three-year suspended sentence.In the 1970s, Schäfer applied to set up a conservation project in northern India, but was denied a visa. In the last known photograph taken before his death in 1992, he looks distrustful, slightly wounded. His friends said he had never quite come to terms with the past. Bruno Beger, now 92, lives in a small town near Frankfurt. He appears to have suffered no such qualms. His Tibetan face masks are proudly displayed on a shelf above his front door.

Himmler's Crusade, by Christopher Hale, is published by Bantam on August 4, price £18.99. To order your copy for £15.99, plus £1.95 for postage and packing, call Sunday Times Books Direct, tel: 0870 165 8585, or visit www.timesonline.co.uk/booksdirect