Schäfer’s colleague in 1938 was the anthropologist Bruno Beger, who was fascinated by the idea that the Aryans, ancestors of the Nordics, could still be found in a lost civilisation somewhere in Tibet. His proposal to the expedition was ‘to study the current racial-anthropological situation through measurements, trait research, photography and moulds … and to collect material about the proportion, origins, significance and development of the Nordic race in this region’.
Nordic culture was all the rage in the 1930s, as was the pseudo-science of eugenics. Tolkien used the Völsunga saga translated by William Morris of the Arts and Crafts movement in his The Lord of the Rings, as did Wagner in his Ring of the Nibelung cycle of operas. The eponymous ring would grant magical domination over the whole world. Wagner’s ideas were much lauded by Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy, and these Nordic myths fed the strange beliefs held by Hitler and his Reich Minister of the Interior, Heinrich Himmler, who was the founder of the German SS.
Schäfer’s third expedition was under Himmler’s personal patronage and he was promoted to SS-Sturmbannführer, a Nazi party rank approximating to major. Rather like the alpinist Heinrich Harrer, Schäfer claimed after the war that he had joined the SS to advance his career, but in fact he colluded in the hunt for evidence to support these Nazi folk myths. The expedition would search for proof of Aryan supremacy and also serve as a cover for offensive operations against British India during the coming war. Schäfer eventually would regret his alliance with the top Nazis: ‘He was to later call his alliance with Himmler his biggest mistake. But he was an opportunist who had a tremendous craving for recognition.’3
Himmler was obsessed by the belief in Aryan and Nordic racial superiority over lesser races (some of these ideas may have originated with Major Waddell, whom we met earlier, in Chapter Two). He believed in the Welteislehre, or Glacial Cosmogony, which held that the planets and moon were made of ice and that the solar system had evolved out of a cosmic collision of an icy star with our sun. This theory contradicted Albert Einstein’s ‘Jewish’ theory of relativity. Somehow, the Aryan race was bred out of an ice storm, evolved in the Arctic or Tibet, and founded a civilisation on the lost continent of Atlantis. Himmler, a failed chicken farmer, was fascinated by eugenics and wanted to breed back to ‘racially pure and healthy’ Aryans. For this he needed to know where the original stock originated.
The discovery of the Tarim mummies at Lop Nor in Central Asia by explorers such as Sven Hedin, Albert von Le Coq and Sir Aurel Stein lent credence to the idea that the Aryans came from Tibet. These corpses looked German or Irish and they were buried with sun symbols and woven twill cloth like that found in Austria. One found after the Nazi era even had greying reddish-brown hair framing high cheekbones, an aquiline nose, full lips and a ginger beard, and he was wearing a red twill tunic and leggings with a pattern resembling tartan. Was the homeland of the Indo-Germans therefore located somewhere in Tibet? Had there been an Aryan civilisation there, now lost? Was the Abominable Snowman racially related to Germans, and somehow branched off from our ancestors and still living in the ice of the Himalayas? These and other mystical ideas swirled around in the heads of the Welteislehre adherents such as Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler, who said the Aryan type was ‘the Prometheus of mankind from whose bright forehead the divine spark of genius has sprung’.
To support his theories, Himmler founded the SS Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage Society), an institute which mounted eight Indiana Jones-style expeditions worldwide to uncover the archaeological and cultural history of the Aryan race. The Ahnenerbe became a magnet for dubious individuals with bizarre ideas. One senior figure was interested in finding out whether Tibetan women hid magical stones in their vaginas. Others believed that ancient Nordic folk myths might act as an antidote to the disturbing new world of industrialisation, cities and consumerism. The Ahnenerbe also attracted ambitious young scientists like Schäfer who felt they needed a leg up the academic career ladder, despite the number of Jews whom the Nazis had removed from the universities.
Himmler’s ideas verged on the delusional. He instructed his scientists to look for evidence of ‘the thunderbolt, Thor’s hammer’, which he believed to be ‘an early, highly developed form of war weapon of our forefathers’. This notion is eerily prescient of the atomic bomb which the Nazis’ Uranprojekt was racing to build. It would be the magic ring which would give them mastery over the whole world. Himmler himself wore a Mjölnir pendant in the shape of Thor’s hammer.
The Ahnenerbe’s expeditions were calculated to promote the racial theories of the Nazis, and so the participating scientists had to allow the ideology in order to overcome any scientific objectivity. For a serious scientist such as Schäfer, this might have involved a certain amount of double-think. Ahnenerbe’s researchers travelled to Finland and Sweden to examine Bronze Age carvings and study folk customs; during the war they removed the Bayeux Tapestry to examine it for Aryan clues; they raced to Poland to appropriate the Veit Stoss altarpiece, and to the Crimea for Gothic artefacts; and, in this case, sent Schäfer to Tibet to find evidence of early Aryans’ conquest of Asia. And while they were at it, they might as well cause trouble for the British in India.
On his 1938–39 Tibet expedition, Schäfer’s first task was to research passes from which to mount guerrilla attacks on British India, and his second assignment was to find the blue-eyed, blond-haired lost tribe of Aryans living in Tibet. Just before the team left Germany in 1938, the Völkischer Beobachter newspaper ran an article on the expedition which alerted British officials to its intentions. They knew war was coming and refused Schäfer’s team entry to India. Himmler then wrote to Admiral Barry Domvile who happened to be both a Nazi supporter and former head of British naval intelligence, and Domvile gave Himmler’s letter to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. He then allowed the SS team to enter Sikkim, a region of northern India bordering Tibet (Domvile was interned during the war for his pro-Nazi inclinations).
Just before departure to Tibet, Schäfer had shot his wife Hertha in a bizarre duck-hunting accident. He said a sudden wave had unbalanced him and caused him to discharge the weapon into his spouse of only four months. The two servants with them did what they could, but she was dead by the time they got her home.
Schäfer had his own agenda in Tibet and considered Glacial Cosmogony as pseudo-scientific. His instincts were right, as this theory is now considered completely unscientific and another example of how easily large numbers of humans can be fooled. However, he went along with Himmler’s demands in order to be able to mount the expedition. In effect, he was doing precisely what he had accused Smythe and Shipton of: compromising with the truth to facilitate another trip.
The expedition did not go well. After obstructions from the British authorities in India, the party camped on the border between Sikkim and Tibet. After making contact with locals, Tibet’s council of ministers permitted Schäfer, the self-described ‘master of a hundred sciences’, to visit the forbidden capital of Lhasa. His team were told that they could not bring scientific equipment with them or kill any animals or birds, but both conditions were ignored. They decorated their mules with Nazi swastikas and shot every wild creature that came within range. They collected a staggering 3,500 birds, 2,000 eggs, 400 skulls and the pelts of countless mammals, reptiles, amphibians, several thousand butterflies, grasshoppers, 2,000 ethnological objects, minerals, maps and 40,000 black-and-white photographs which still reside in German museums and research institutes.
Schäfer was proud of being ‘the second white man to shoot a Giant Panda’ and he liked to smear the blood of his animal victims on his face. As we have seen, on the expedition with him was Bruno Beger, the anthropologist who later helped to select Jewish victims from Auschwitz for a skeleton collection. He measured the skulls of the Tibetan people they met with callipers and took plaster casts.4 The first attempt