‘. . . it looked to Conway a delightfully favoured place, though if it were inhabited its community must be completely isolated by the lofty and sheerly unscalable ranges on the further side.’

– James Hilton, Lost Horizon, 1933

At the beginning of January 1939, five Europeans with a caravan of servants and muleteers approached Lhasa, the Holy City of Tibet. They had travelled across the Himalayas from Sikkim, a tiny kingdom in northern India, and would spend the next eight months in Tibet. They did research which mystified the Tibetans, and occasionally hunted. They took more than 60,000 photographs and exposed more than 120,000 feet of movie film. At a time when Tibet awaited the arrival of a new Dalai Lama, the five Europeans formed close, sometimes intimate friendships with Tibetan nobles and religious leaders, including the Regent. They clashed frequently with the British Mission officer stationed in Lhasa who had tried to prevent their journey and bitterly resented their presence in the ‘Forbidden City’. In August 1939, the five men fled south to Calcutta taking with them 120 volumes of the Tibetan ‘Bible’, the Kangyur, hundreds of precious artefacts and assorted rare animals. At the mouth of the Hoogli River, they boarded a seaplane and began the long journey home – first to Baghdad, then to Berlin. Home for the five Europeans was Nazi Germany. When their aircraft touched down at Tempelhof Airport an ecstatic Heinrich Himmler was waiting on the runway. For the Reichsführer, the ‘German Tibet Expedition’ had been a triumph.

At the end of August, the SS stage-managed a series of provocations on the Polish border. On 1 September, Hitler ordered his generals to attack. Fifty German divisions smashed the Polish defences from three sides: the Second World War had begun. The five men who had returned in triumph from Tibet now became combatants in an imperialist and genocidal war. What could link an expedition to central Asia with the global catastrophe unleashed by Adolf Hitler in 1939? Few historians have even troubled to ask the question.¹ But the true story of this little expedition, told for the first time in this book, reveals that it was a summit of German imperial and racial fantasy.

From the middle of the nineteenth century, Tibet and its Holy City of Lhasa were closed to foreigners. Both the Tibetans and their powerful neighbour China feared, with good cause, imperial incursions. Despite this, an intrepid handful of explorers succeeded in penetrating the high, icy realm and even its mysterious capital – often in disguise and usually at considerable risk. They returned with astonishing tales which quickly transformed Tibet into the quintessence of the forbidden and exotic. By the 1930s, Tibet had become more accessible but the Himalayan passes remained strictly controlled by both the Tibetan government and the British – nervous masters of the Indian Raj to the south of the Himalayas.

The five Germans who arrived in Lhasa at the beginning of 1939 were rather different from the adventurers and diplomats who had embarked on pilgrimages over the Himalayas before. This would not have been evident, quite deliberately on their part, as they rode through the Barkokali Gate and looked up at the empty palace of the Dalai Lamas, but two days earlier, when the expedition was being ferried across the Tsang Po River, an observer might have glimpsed two rather unusual flags strapped to poles. One was a swastika, an ancient symbol of good fortune which represented the Wheel of Life in Tibet but since 1933 had been the national flag of Nazi Germany. The other showed double ‘Sieg’ runes: the pagan Germanic letter for victory, the unmistakable and chilling insignia of Heinrich Himmler’s SS (from Schutzstaffeln, meaning ‘protective squads’). Every one of the five German scientists was also an officer in the SS. They had journeyed from Hitler’s Germany to the ‘roof of the world’ under the command of SS Hauptsturmführer Ernst Schäfer. They were the first official German expedition to enter Tibet and reach Lhasa, its holy city.

What were SS scientists sponsored by Heinrich Himmler doing in Tibet as Europe edged towards the precipice of war? Many different explanations have been offered and scores of conflicting stories told. Here are some of them: ‘The German expedition to Tibet had as its mission the discovery of a connection between lost Atlantis and the first civilization of Central Asia’; ‘Schäfer believed that Tibet was the cradle of mankind, the refuge of an “Aryan root race”, where a caste of priests had created a mysterious empire of knowledge, called Shambhala, adorned with the Buddhist wheel of life, the swastika’; ‘This small troop delivered to the Dalai Lama a radio transceiver to establish contacts between Lhasa and Berlin’; ‘The SS men were magicians, who had forged alliances with the mystic Tibetan cities of Agarthi and Shambhala and had mastered the forces of the living universe’; ‘They had mined a secret substance to prolong life and to be used as a superconductor for higher states of conscience’; ‘In the ruins of Berlin, a thousand bodies with no identity papers were discovered by the Red Army. They were all Tibetans.’²

Every one of these statements is false; some are transparently foolish. In 1939, for instance, the 14th Dalai Lama had yet to be enthroned and Tibet was ruled by a regent. But like a clouded and broken mirror, these fantasies both mask and reflect the true story, which is altogether more remarkable. Its roots are buried deep in the nineteenth century but it unfolded in central Asia on the eve of a world war that was to consume the nations of Europe and the Far East. The final act was played out thousands of miles from the snow-shrouded peaks and plateaus of Tibet in the death camps ruled by the SS. It is, at its core, a story of vaunting ambition and ambivalent retribution.

Although Reichsführer Himmler made only a modest financial donation to its costs, the German Tibet Expedition was a pet project. Himmler has been called the ‘Ignatius Loyola of the SS’ and ‘the architect of the Final Solution’, the Nazi plan to make Germany ‘Jew free’. His passionately held and deadly ‘theories’ about race were, in part, corrupted Darwin. As Himmler began a spectacular ascent through the ranks of the Nazi Party, he had tried to earn a living as a breeder of chickens. When in 1933 he and the Nazis took power, he began to apply the lessons of the hutch to the Fatherland itself. The Herrenvolk, or Master Race, he believed, must be protected from minderwertigen, inferior peoples who could contaminate their pure blood and its qualities: ‘The German people, especially German youth, have learned once again to value people racially . . . to look at bodily forms and according to the value or non value of this our God-given body and our God-given blood . . .’³ ‘Bodily forms’ were a preoccupation for one member of the German Tibet Expedition, its anthropologist Bruno Beger.

Himmler’s racial fantasies were nourished by many malign currents of thought which he promoted through the SS. By 1937, he had become master of a security empire that reached into every part of the Third Reich. He had turned the SS into a national police force, an avaricious business empire and finally a murder machine. Himmler wanted even more. The SS would also be a university for Hitler’s New Order. As he refined the instruments of terror and control, the Reichsführer was ever more in thrall to a bewildering multitude of peculiar intellectual hobbies and scientific fads. Himmler sent archaeologists to search for the remains of an ancient Germanic super race. He was fascinated by the lost kingdom of Atlantis and a cranky idea called the ‘World Ice Theory’. (In one letter, written in 1940, he requested an urgent investigation: what might be the connections between the lineage of the biblical House of David and the ‘records of the kings of Atlantis’? Could the biblical scribes have been mere plagiarists?⁴ There is no record of a reply.) He used his empire of concentration camps to pursue experiments with homoeopathy and herbal medicine. He revered the ancient cultures of India and the East, or at least his own weird vision of them.

These were not private enthusiasms, and they were certainly not harmless. Cranky pseudoscience nourished Himmler’s own murderous convictions about race and inspired ways of convincing others. At his SS stronghold, Wewelsburg Castle in Westphalia, refurbished by slave labourers procured from a concentration camp that had been specially built nearby, Himmler used ritual and myth to inculcate Herrenbewusstsein (master consciousness) in elite members of the SS. Some of these men were aristocrats; many more were academics, lawyers and doctors, the cream of Germany’s professional classes. Like Ernst Schäfer, they were young, impatient, pushy, cutting edge. When they had proved themselves, the Reichsführer sent them forth to do battle with the race enemies of the Reich and rob them of their wealth. The most ruthless would become the CEOs of the death camps. In this strange and terrible world, myths were the building blocks of genocide. They had this power because Himmler’s passions were myths that masqueraded as science.

Himmler regarded himself not as the fantasist he was but as a patron of science. He believed that most conventional wisdom was bogus and that his power gave him a unique opportunity to promulgate new thinking. He founded the Ahnenerbe specifically to advance the study of the Aryan (or Nordic or Indo-German) race and its origins.⁵ From the Ahnenerbe headquarters in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem, archaeologists were sent hither and yon to unearth the glories of Aryan prehistory. And woe betide them if they failed to uncover the potsherds and trinkets of the Herrenvolk. Scientists were set to work to prove that a cosmic battle between fire and ice had brought forth a race of supermen in the distant past. Anthropologists collected the skulls and skeletons of Aryans and made meticulous measurements in search of far-flung ancestors or cousins, and scientific expeditions were despatched to unearth the remnants of long-lost Aryan races, from whom all pure Germans descended. The German Tibet Exhibition was the most ambitious of these quests.

There was a logic behind the fantasy. One German cultural historian put it like this: ‘the work of our ancestors . . . represents the great legal brief for territory’.⁶ The activities of the Ahnenerbe, as well as legions of art historians, prepared the ground for conquest. With ancestors could come territory and the Lebensraum (‘living space’) that obsessed Hitler. If it could be proved that German blood had contributed to an apparently foreign culture or people, the Wehrmacht could follow. This is perhaps what Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring meant when he said, ‘When I hear the word “culture”, I cock my Browning’ – in other words, culture justified conquest. Himmler’s ancestor cult was the mainspring of aggression and scientific expeditions were one way of asserting future territorial rights. This was not a Nazi invention. During the First World War, such expeditions were frequently used as a cover for espionage by Germany.

Ernst Schäfer, who led the German Tibet Expedition, was described by one British diplomat as ‘first and foremost always a Nazi and a politician – and almost a priest of Nazism’.⁷ The British diplomat Hugh Richardson, who was in Lhasa in 1939, remembered Schäfer as ‘an out and out Nazi’. But whatever his political convictions, Schäfer was no crank. He was a fastidious zoologist with a passion for Tibetan birds. The men he selected as fellow expeditionists were just as painstaking, their work equally as rooted in empirical observation. Ernst Krause was a botanist and entomologist; Karl Wienert was a geographer whose task was to measure variations in the earth’s magnetic field in the Himalayas; and Bruno Beger was an anthropologist who would spend his time in Tibet measuring the heads and bodies of its people.

Here, then, is the first big puzzle: what did Himmler want from a zoologist, a geographer and an anthropologist? This leads to another, even more troubling mystery: what did they want from him? What was the function and value of these very diverse sciences in the Third Reich? I have used the story of Ernst Schäfer’s expedition to try to answer these questions. But the journey should not be a blind one; we will need some working hypotheses.

First of all, the history of the SS shows that Himmler collected men like Schäfer to add prestige and glamour to the SS. Some – and Schäfer is a good example – were genuine, even rather workaday scientists, but many were frauds and cranks. All of them, though, were opportunists who fluttered eagerly around the SS flame. From the point of view of Schäfer, who was highly driven, securing the admiration of Heinrich Himmler was, in the words of Shakespeare’s Brutus, ‘young ambition’s ladder’ to attain ‘the upmost round’.⁸ Hindsight judges men like these harshly, and with good reason. But simple disgust fails to come to grips with why intellectuals and scientists flocked to serve the Reich.

Imagine you are young and ambitious and waiting one foggy morning on a platform at Zoo Station in Berlin. When you think about the academic or professional world you work in, you see dead wood everywhere, old stick-in-the-mud professors or ambitious Jews blocking your way. Then, with a triumphant roar, a train pulls alongside. It is new, gleaming, powerful, and gives a definite impression it is going places. On the destination board you can see ‘Professorships, Institutes, Laboratories – Last Stop: Glory’. Inside you can see sleek, well-nourished passengers who have boarded at other stops. They are, to be sure, a mixed bunch, perhaps even a little sinister. They wear black uniforms emblazoned with lightning bolts and death’s heads. Stepping down from a carriage to greet you is a plump, smiling, rather professorial man. He wants to know if pure German blood runs in your veins, and you are certain that it does. It appears to be an innocuous enquiry. Satisfied with your bona fides, he invites you on board – and by now the train whistle is blowing insistently. Do you, as Ernst Schäfer did in the Olympic summer of 1936, get on board?

Sheer ambition will probably provide one answer, but perplexing ambiguities still attach to Schäfer’s motivations and his response to the regime he served. Was he the ‘priest of Nazism’ described in the British records or an ambitious scientist, blind to everything but his work, who was handed irresistible research opportunities by a mass murderer? Was he both at once? How much did he know about what went on outside his laboratory? Frustratingly, while page after page of his diaries describe, at tedious length, birds and beasts, mountains and clouds, they give almost nothing away about his inner life. That was not his intention. We do have the record provided by his ‘Interrogation Reports’, but Schäfer, like many who served Himmler, was a complex, inscrutable man. He was both driven and tormented – and, as this story will show, he took moral as well as physical risks in pursuit of the treasures he hoped to find inside the ‘Snowy Fortress’ of Tibet.

The foremost authority on Schäfer’s life and work, Dr Isrun Engelhardt, has concluded that the Schäfer Expedition was ‘purely scientific’. It is only because of the historical context of Germany in the 1930s, she argues, that we view its goals as somehow sinister. Engelhardt’s conclusions are based on meticulous and original scholarship. But while the idea of ‘Nazi botany’ or ‘Nazi ornithology’ is probably absurd, other sciences are not so innocent – and Schäfer’s small expedition represented a cross-section of German science in the 1930s. And this has considerable significance.

It is now conclusively established that under the Third Reich anthropology and medicine were cold-bloodedly exploited to support and enact a murderous creed. One of Schäfer’s colleagues demonstrates this all too well. Bruno Beger, the expedition’s anthropologist, was a highly educated man who had studied at some of Germany’s most prestigious universities. In the course of his lengthy education, he had absorbed from his professors ideas about race and the origin of the Germans that he hoped to prove in Tibet. Somewhere in central Asia, he was convinced, were the distant relations of the Aryan race itself.⁹ Beger had seen photographs of the Tibetan nobility and suspected that their fine, elongated features provided evidence of a link to an older, founding race that came from northern Europe.

In June 1943 Beger undertook another journey in pursuit of Aryan ancestors who had proved to be rather elusive in Tibet. His destination was the Auschwitz concentration camp. Here he made a selection of more than a hundred Jews and prisoners from central Asia. He measured their skulls and bodies and had face masks made. When Beger left Auschwitz and returned to Berlin, every one of the men and women he had worked on were gassed. Their corpses were delivered to SS Dr August Hirt, an old friend of Beger, to become part of a university anatomical collection. By this time, Schäfer was the proud head of his own ‘Institute for Central Asian Research’, named after Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, headquartered in a castle near Salzburg. He was pleased when Beger, as instructed, sent him the data and face masks he had acquired in Auschwitz. One individual, Beger was pleased to report, had ‘perfect Tibetan features’.

The five men who rode into Lhasa in January 1939 were not prophets. Like millions of other Germans they hoped, indeed expected, that a European war would be averted. It is unlikely that in 1939 they could have foreseen that their patron would promote the worst genocide in human history. But they were, by choice, SS officers and, in Schäfer’s case, intimate with the man who would order millions to be annihilated. They had all boarded the train and could not alter its destination. It would take them to the Forbidden City of Tibet, but it did not stop there. It had other destinations, other purposes, as this book will show.

The German Tibet Expedition is also a story of Tibet. When Schäfer and his companions arrived in Lhasa this unique nation was at a crossroads. The 14th Dalai Lama, a three-year-old child, had recently been ‘discovered’ in a remote village close to the border with China and was about to be brought to Lhasa for his enthronement. Since the death of the 13th Dalai Lama in 1933, Tibet had been consumed by bitter rivalries and had seen violence that emulated any Jacobean tragedy. Its government, the Kashag, regarded both the Chinese and the British warily. They were vulnerable and divided. When he arrived in Lhasa, Schäfer learnt all he could about these tensions and fears – and exploited them.

¹⁰beforeclose to three months