In 1938, Heinrich Himmler, a leading member of the German Nazi party and a key architect of the Holocaust, sent a five-member team to Tibet to search for the origins of the alleged Aryan race. dnes.bg.
Author Weibhav Purandare tells the fascinating story of this expedition, which passed through India, in his new book Hitler And India: The Untold Story of His Hatred For the Country And Its People.
Just over a year before World War II, a group of Germans landed secretly on India’s eastern borders. They have a mission – to find the “source of the origin of the Aryan race”.
Adolf Hitler believes that the “Aryan” Scandinavians entered India from the north about 1,500 years earlier and that the Aryans committed the “crime” by mingling with the local “non-Aryan” people, losing the qualities that made them racially superior to all others. people on earth.
Hitler regularly expressed deep antipathy to the Indian people and their struggle for freedom, expressing his feelings in his speeches, writings and debates. And yet, according to Himmler, one of the Fuhrer’s top lieutenants and head of the SS, the Indian subcontinent still deserves a close look.
This is how Tibet comes into his field of vision.
Those who swear by the idea of a white Scandinavian higher race believe in the tale of the fictional lost city of Atlantis, where people of “pure blood” once lived. It is believed to have been located somewhere between England and Portugal in the Atlantic Ocean. This mythical island sank after being struck by divine thunder.
All Aryans who survived have moved to safer places. The Himalayan region is considered to be such a refuge, especially Tibet, because it is known for being the “roof of the world”.
In 1935, Himmler set up a unit within the SS called the Ahnenerbe or Heritage Bureau to find out where the people of Atlantis had gone after the wrath of heaven and the flood, and where traces of the great race remained and whether it could to be discovered.
In 1938, he sent a team of five Germans to Tibet for this “search operation.”
Two of the team members stand out from the rest. One is Ernst Schaefer, a gifted 28-year-old zoologist. He joined the SS soon after the Nazi triumph in 1933, long before Himmler became his patron of the Tibet expedition.
Schaefer is crazy about hunting and loves to collect trophies at his home in Berlin. During a hunting expedition, while trying to shoot a duck from a boat in which he and his wife were, while aiming, he slipped and accidentally shot his wife in the head.
The second key man was Bruno Beger, a young anthropologist who joined the SS in 1935. Beger was tasked with measuring the skulls and details of Tibetans’ faces, creating face masks. It collects material on the proportions, origins, significance and development of the Scandinavian race in this region. “
The ship with the five Germans docked at Colombo in Sri Lanka in early May 1938. From there, they sailed to Madras (now Chennai) and then to Calcutta (now Kolkata).
British authorities in India are wary of traveling Germans, considering them spies. Initially, they did not want to allow them to cross India, and the then-run Times of India even came out with the accusatory headline: “Gestapo agent in India.”
The British political officer in Gangtok, in the northeastern Indian state of Sikkim, which at the time was an independent mountain kingdom, was also not enthusiastic about allowing men to enter Tibet through Sikkim. But in the end, the determination of the Nazi team won. By the end of the year, the five Germans, with swastika flags tied to their mules and luggage, would enter Tibet.
The swastika is a ubiquitous symbol in Tibet, locally known as “yungdrung” and is a symbol of good luck. Schaefer and his team saw many of them during their stay in India. Even today, the symbol is visible outside homes, inside temples, on street corners and on the backs of trucks.
In Tibet, meanwhile, things are changing
The 13th Dalai Lama died in 1933, and the new one is only three years old, so the Buddhist Tibetan kingdom is controlled by a regent. The Germans were treated extremely well by both the regent and the ordinary Tibetans, and Beger, who made face masks, even acted as a reserve doctor for the locals for a time.
What Tibetan Buddhists did not know was that in the perverted imagination of the Nazis, Buddhism, like Hinduism, was a religion that weakened the Aryans who came to Tibet – and led to the loss of their spirit and strength.
Just when it turned out that Schaefer and the others could spend more time on their real “research” under the guise of zoology and anthropology, the German expedition was abruptly interrupted in August 1939. The reason was the inevitability of war.
By then, Beger had measured the skulls and features of 376 Tibetans, taken 2,000 photographs, as well as “castings on the heads, faces, hands and ears of 17 people” and collected “fingerprints and hands of another 350”. He also collected 2,000 “ethnographic artifacts,” and another member of the contingent had shot 18,000 meters of black-and-white film and 40,000 photographs.
As their trip was interrupted, Himmler arranged for the team to take off from Calcutta at the last minute and personally met them when their plane landed in Munich.
Schaefer carried most of his Tibetan “treasures” to a castle in Salzburg, where he moved during the war. But after the Allies invaded in 1945, the site was invaded, and most Tibetan photographs and other material were destroyed.
The other so-called “scientific results” of the expedition suffered the same fate in the war – they were either lost or destroyed, and the shame of the Nazi past did not mean that no one after the war tried to trace the material.
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