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HIMMLER'S CRUSADE: The True Story of the 1938 Nazi Expedition to Tibet
by Christopher Hale
Review: History: Himmler's Crusade by Christopher Hale
MICHAEL BURLEIGH
Sunday Times
3 Aug 03
As the Indiana Jones films showed, Nazis, new age mumbo-jumbo and exotic
locations are a formula that works. Christopher Hale's gripping and
well-researched tale of an SS-sponsored scientific mission to Tibet in
1938-39 has the whole shebang: mad occult beliefs, mountains, strange
characters called Bruno or Ernst and stomach-churning concentration camp
experiments to round things off.
In 1935, the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler founded an organisation called
Ancestral Heritage to uncover the hidden past of an imaginary Aryan race he
and his Führer regarded as the noblest and most vital force in human
history. That fact that there had never been an Aryan race - a philological
category (the Indo-Germanic language group) had been construed into a
"people" - was no impediment to someone who also believed Aryans had been
unleashed on the world after divine thunderbolts shattered the primordial
ice in which they were imprisoned. Himmler was also pretty keen to find gold
in the river Isar or a red horse with a white mane, but that need not detain
us.
Ancestral Heritage became a magnet for cranks (one senior figure was
interested in establishing whether Tibetan women hid magical stones in their
vaginas) and ambitious young scientists who were moving too slowly up the
academic career ladder - notwithstanding the number of Jews that Nazi
scholars and students had thrown off it to make their ascent quicker.
The claim that Sanskrit underlay most modern languages focused 19th-century
minds on the general area of northern India and Tibet as the ancestral home
of the mythical Aryans. Hence one of the scientific missions Himmler
sponsored was a multitasked expedition to Tibet under the leadership of
ornithologist Ernst Schäfer. An expert on rare Tibetan birds, Schäfer was a
fanatical hunter who liked smearing the blood of exotic kills on his craggy
features. This enthusiasm, manifest in boyhood when Schäfer killed rats in
the cellar with a catapult, was undiminished by the fact that while on a
duck-shoot in 1937 he managed to trip over, inadvertently blowing his young
bride Hertha's brains out.
Schäfer recruited an anthropologist, Bruno Beger, to measure noses and
skulls and to make face-masks; a geographer who specialised in the earth's
geomagnetism; and a botanist who was also handy with a film camera. Once
they had conned their way into Tibet, past the British - who thought they
were spies - there were some comic moments.
Their mules were decorated with fluttering swastika pennants - superfluous
in a society where that symbol of good fortune is ubiquitous. The first
attempt at making a gypsum mask failed when the poor Tibetan subject had an
epileptic seizure and nearly choked to death inside the white plaster blob
that sat on his shuddering shoulders. When Schäfer decided to commemorate
the death of his wife by going onto a ridge to fire a symbolic shot, he
forgot to remove the cleaning brush so the breech exploded, throwing him off
his feet and burning his face with gunpowder. All sorts of rare creatures,
whether eagles or animals that look like rugs with horns, paid for that
indignity as the mad explorer blasted anything with a pulse.
The ulterior purpose of the expedition echoed the ancient historian
Tacitus's treatise Germania, in which he ascribed to the primitive German
tribesmen virtues his Roman contemporaries had long lost. The Nazi
scientists sought to show that the Tibetan theocracy had destroyed the
vitality of an earlier warrior culture, as Christianity had supposedly had
an emasculating effect on the ancient pagan Germans. To clinch the point,
the team dwelt on homosexuality among Buddhist clergy - precisely the
aspersion they were using in Germany against Catholic monks and nuns they
were persecuting. Anti-Catholicism was as pervasive as racism among the Nazi
leadership, although Hale is possibly unaware that this was more inspired by
mainstream liberal Protestant theology than by Himmler's idiosyncratic
neo-paganism.
On returning to Germany, Schäfer was feted by Himmler and appointed head of
an institute for Central Asian research in Munich. His career was not
blighted by the fact that, when on an overnight sleeper to Berlin in June
1942, Schäfer had tried to strangle the man who shared his compartment.
Munich meant proximity to the more lethal aspects of Ancestral Heritage,
since the camp in suburban Dachau was where its scientists conducted
experiments on human beings on behalf of the German armed forces. The man
who filmed the Tibet expedition was soon recording people turning blue in
freezing water or choking in decompression chambers used to solve
high-altitude problems for the Luftwaffe. The expedition's erstwhile
anthropologist was subsequently deployed acquiring the skeletons and skulls
of prisoners in Auschwitz for an anatomical institute in Strasbourg.
So Hale's book is a slippery-slope sort of story. Whether it will deter
those who lap up books of a new age variety that draw on the same swamp as
the Nazis seems over-optimistic, but Hale is certainly to be commended for
immersing himself in it for so long.
Ile ten film ma wspólnego z faktami to nie wiem, bo go nie widziałem, a artykułu nie bardzo pamiętam...
)