The Aryan race was one of the biggest obsessions of the Nazis. In order to discover its origins, a large mission was launched in Tibet, under the command of Ernst Schäfer. 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.
Himmler and the Aryan race
Berlin, 1936. National pride is at its highest, 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 the ambitious 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 an incredible love for nature. He enjoys celebrity status among his compatriots. 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 in his book, „Himmler’s Crusade”
This book is actually a detailed work of the German Tibet expedition. Schäfer emerges as a slightly comical figure – ‘a combination of Ernest Hemingway and Reginald Perrin’ – on a ridiculous mission at first sight. Some voices believe that Himmler’s obsession with the Aryan race was far more fiery than Hitler’s.
This whole story was born when Himmler thought he was the reincarnation of a 10th-century German king, Heinrich I. Moreover, his obsession was fed by his personal advisor, Karl Maria Willigut, who claimed to be the last in a long line of German sages.
Ancestral Heritage Organization
In 1935, Himmler had founded the Ahnenerbe, or Ancestral Heritage Organisation, to study the supposed roots of the Aryan nation that the Germans inherited.
„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 subjects.
„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.
Most of the German specialists thought some of Himmler’s ideas slightly embarrassing, but they wanted to be part of this organization because many discoveries were made.
Mission to Tibet, 1939
The Aryan race was a topic to be talked about. Not anyway, but worldwide. The Germans had to be recognized as the descendants of the Aryans. Moreover, the origin of the Aryan race was a mystery to everyone. Who were these people? Where did they come from and what was their lifestyle? These were just some of the questions the scientists who participated in the Tibet Mission had to answer.
The team, led by Schäfer, 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.
The British hated fascism and had vowed to circumvent this mission. Schäfer had failed to get the expedition rubber-stamped by the India Office and the Nazi party was banned in Lhasa. But the German specialist received support from some well-bred British fascists; an explorer had advised him: „Sneak over the border. Then find a way round the regulations.” Eventually Schäfer succeeded and got in touch with the Tibetans. Moreover, he cultivated a beautiful friendship with the Dalai Lama.
The mathematics of racial difference
The fascists were convinced that the Tibetans are the descendants of the pure race, that is, the Aryan race. Beger’s dubious research involved making a precise series of measurements of people’s heads and facial features with calipers. The aim was to compare and contrast bodily types – Hale calls it „the mathematics of racial difference”.
Beger carried eye-color charts and swatches of hair to help him categorize people into neat racial types. He also took face masks of Tibetans, to take them to Germany. The process was a complex and lasting one. He gathered a huge amount of pointless information during eight months in Lhasa.
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.
Their time was limited. In March 1939, Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia, and war was becoming inevitable. The German expedition was suspected of espionage.
Only one superior race, the Aryan race
While they had been away, the Ahnenerbe had been propagating Himmler’s evil philosophies in a process far subtler than Göbbels’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 man 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.
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. The Ahnenerbe was a vast organization. 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 labor camp at Dachau.
About the Aryan race, not much information was discovered, or at least this information was not revealed to the public. It is speculated that the most important information about sensitive topics is in the Ahnenerbe Archive. This archive disappeared immediately after the end of World War II, when the Russians captured it and sent it to an unknown place in the USSR.
