Tibet Occult and Geopolitical Interests of the Nazis

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Mount Everest

Of all the exotic images that the West has ever projected onto Tibet, that of the Nazi expedition, and its search for the pure remnants of the Aryan race, remains the most bizarre. In April 1938 the SS undertook its biggest and most ambitious expedition to Tibet, led by Ernst Schäfer, a veteran explorer, and the anthropologist Bruno Beger. On the nineteenth of January 1939, the five members of the Waffen-SS, Heinrich Himmler's feared Nazi shock troops, passed through the ancient, arched gateway that led into the sacred city of Lhasa. Like many Europeans, they carried with them idealized and unrealistic views of Tibet, projecting, as Orville Schell remarks in his book Virtual Tibet, "a fabulous skein of fantasy around this distant, unknown land." The projections of the Nazi expedition, however, did not include the now familiar search for Shangri-La, the hidden land in which a uniquely perfect and peaceful social system held a blueprint to counter the transgressions that plague the rest of humankind. Rather, the perfection sought by the Nazis was an idea of racial perfection that would justify their views on world history and German supremacy.

 

What brings about this odd juxtaposition of Tibetan lamas and SS officers on the eve of World War II is a strange story of secret societies, occultism, racial pseudo-science, and political intrigue. They were, in fact, on a diplomatic and quasi-scientific mission to establish relations between Nazi Germany and Tibet and to search for lost remnants of an imagined Aryan race hidden somewhere on the Tibetan plateau. As such, they were a far-flung expression of Hitler's most paranoid and bizarre theories on ethnicity and domination. And while the Tibetans were completely unaware of Hitler's racist agenda, the 1939 mission to Tibet remains a cautionary tale about how foreign ideas, symbols, and terminology can be horribly misused.

Some Nazi militarists imagined Tibet as a potential base for attacking British India, and hoped that this mission would lead to some form of alliance with the Tibetans. In that they were partly successful. The mission was received by the Reting Regent (who had led Tibet since the death of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama in 1933), and it did succeed in persuading the Regent to correspond with Adolf Hitler. But the Germans were also interested in Tibet for another reason. Nazi leaders such as Heinrich Himmler believed that Tibet might harbor the last of the original Aryan tribes, the legendary forefathers of the German race, whose leaders possessed supernatural powers that the Nazis could use to conquer the world.

 

There's a legend that Aryans, led by Thor, fled a cataclysm to settle in old Tibet. Sven Hedin, the Swedish explorer of Central and Inner Asia, went as far as Tibet. He was a friend of Hitler's and an outspoken admirer of NS Germany. As we shall see, the NS regime must have known much about Tibet and to have maintained contacts with that remote nation. It is claimed that the SS sponsored various expeditions there, and this now seems likely given some of the connections which are finally being reliably discovered. That the Germans were permitted to enter a land forbidden to other foreigners is likely given that the Dalai Lama of the time was an enthusiastic admirer of Hitler.       OCCULT AND GEOPOLITICAL INTERESTS As far back as the early 1920s when the NS movement was struggling for power, the geopolitical theorist Prof. Karl Haushofer was teaching his pupils the geopolitical importance of Central Asia and Tibet. Among these pupils was Rudolf Hess who introduced Haushofer to Hitler at Landsberg Prison where the latter was confined as a result of the 1924 Munich Putsch. Haushofer had served on the Kaiser's Staff Corps in the Orient and had studied the mysticism of Japan and India. He believed the Indo-Germanic race had originated in Asia, and control of the region was pivotal to Germanic world power.   At this time there were two occult societies operating in Germany which were to have a lasting impact on NS, and especially on the SS which was to set up a department specifically to explore occultic matters, "Ancestral Heritage". These societies were Thule and Vril. The Vril society was based on the ideas expounded by the Rosicrucian Sir Bulwer Lytton in his book The Coming Race. Lytton claimed that there is a psychic energy of immense power, latent in most humans, but being utilised by adepts living in Tibet. It is claimed that Haushofer introduced Hitler to both the vril concept and his geopolitical ideas.   Intriguingly, there was already a Tibetan community resident in Germany with its own Lama.   While many fanciful claims are made by pseudo-scholarly books on the Third Reich, one of the most intriguing is the assertion that large numbers of Tibetans in German uniform were found amidst the ruins of Berlin by the Soviet Army. An article recently published by the US paper The New Order sheds a uniquely reliable light on some of these Tibetan-German connections, based as it is on the autobiography of the present Dalai Lama.       MEIN KAMPF IN TIBETAN During the 1920s the Dalai Lama was Thutpen Gyatso. He was a scholar of impressive intellect who sought to achieve a balance between Western technology and Eastern spirituality. He had heard about Hitler when the NS movement was still struggling for power. Among the many European books the Dalai Lama had translated was Mein Kampf. He filled his copy with enthusiastic annotations and underlining of his favourite passages on virtually every page.   Of Hitler he said: "The inji (honourable foreigner) is assisted by God for some high purpose in this life."   He also believed there to be a synchronicity for the swastika being the symbol of both NS and the ancient Bon-Buddhism of his warrior monks. Also noted were certain similarities between NS and Buddhist doctrines, especially that service to one's folk is the highest purpose or dharma in life.   Therefore when Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 warm congratulations were received from far off Tibet.       TIBETANS IN GERMAN UNIFORM   During the 1940s Tibetan volunteers formed brigades attached to the Cossack regiments fighting Communism with NS Germany. The Tibetans with their endurance of sub-zero temperatures, refusal to surrender made them among the toughest fighters against the Soviets. They were exceptional horsemen and staged some of the last cavalry charges in history. It was the remnants of these brigades that the Soviet army found in the ruins of Berlin, having fought to the last.   After the war, Tibet took those NS fighters who could make it into sanctuary. Among these was an Austrian, Heinrich Harrer, who became a close confident of the new Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. Tenzin relates in his autobiography that Harrer was a delightful and humourous personality. He spoke fluent Tibetan and was well-liked by the Tibetans. Harrer had escaped British imprisonment in India during the war with another prisoner, and the two had lived as nomads for five years until reaching Lhasa. Harrer and Tenzin first met in 1948. For the next year and a half, before Harrer left they met about once a week. "From him I was able to learn something about the outside world and especially about Europe and the recent war"

 

Quest of the Nazis

This was the age of European expansion, and numerous theories provided ideological justification for imperialism and colonialism. A German In Germany the idea of an Aryan or "master" race found resonance with the route rabid nationalism, the idea of the of the German superman distilled from the expedition philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, photo and Wagner's operatic celebrations courtesy of Nordic sagas and Teutonic mythology. Long before the 1939 mission to Tibet, the Nazis had borrowed Asian symbols and language and used them for their own ends. A number of prominent articles of Nazi rhetoric and symbolism originated in the language and religions of Asia. The term "Aryan", for example, comes from the Sanskrit word arya, meaning noble. In the Vedas, the most ancient Hindu scriptures, the term describes a race of light-skinned people from Central Asia who conquered and subjugated the darker-skinned (or Dravidian) peoples of the Indian subcontinent. Linguistic evidence does support the multidirectional migration of a central Asian people, now referred to as Indo-Europeans, into much of India and Europe at some point between 2000 and 1500 B.C.E., although it is unclear whether these Indo-Europeans were identical with the Aryans of the Vedas.

Gustaf Kossinna 1858-1931 Gustaf Kossinna was born in 1858 in Tilsit, East Prussia, the son of a schoolteacher. He started his education in 1875 and went to Göttingen, Leipzig, Berlin, and Strassburg. He attended many lectures on classical philology but later became interested in German philology, local history, and art history. Kossinna has been held responsible for the Nazis using prehistoric archaeology to prove Germany’s master race. However, Kossinna died before he could accuse the Nazis of misusing his theories. In 1902, at Berlin University, Kossinna studied and taught prehistoric archaeology. Kossinna was one of the first people to make prehistory an academic discipline. While at Berlin University, he developed the siedlungsarchaeologische Methode and presented it at a meeting of the Anthropological Society. His method was for finding ancient settlements by looking at the spatial distribution of artifacts. This method was focused on European prehistory. In 1911 Kossinna wrote a book called The Origin of the Germani: On the Settlement Archaeological Method. The book states the retrospective method of ethnic conditions of present to infer situations in prehistory by looking at the development of historic continuities in particularly settled areas. Kossinna believed that Germany was the center of prehistoric developments. Kossinna’s reputation was later destroyed because his theory of people and race got involved with Germany’s Master Race. Hitler used archaeology to try and prove Aryan supremacy. As mentioned earlier, Kossinna died in 1931 and couldn’t accuse the Nazis of misusing his ideas about Germany being the center of prehistory.Still, others believe that Kossinna was part of an academic community that helped Hitler try to prove the case for Aryans. References: Bahn, Paul. Collins Dictionary of Archaeology Fagan, Brian M. Oxford Companion to Archaeology

So much for responsible scholarship.

 

In the hands of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European jingoists and occultists such as Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, these ideas about Indo-Europeans and light-skinned Aryans were transformed into a twisted myth of Nordic and later exclusively German racial superiority. The German identification with the Indo-Europeans and Aryans of the second millennium B.C.E. gave historical precedence to Germany's imperial "place in the sun" and the idea that ethnic Germans were racially entitled to conquest and mastery. It also aided in fomenting anti-Semitism and xenophobia, as Jews, Gypsies, and other minorities did not share in the Aryan German's perceived heritage as members of a dominant race. Ideas about an Aryan or master race began to appear in the popular media in the late nineteenth century. In the 1890s, E. B. Lytton, a Rosicrucian, wrote a best-selling novel around the idea of a cosmic energy (particularly strong in the female sex), which he called "Vril." Later he wrote of a Vril society, consisting of a race of super-beings that would emerge from their underground hiding-places to rule the world. His fantasies coincided with a great interest in the occult, particularly among the upper classes, with numerous secret societies founded to propagate these ideas. They ranged from those devoted to the Holy Grail to those who followed the sex and drugs mysticism of Alastair Crowley, and many seem to have had a vague affinity for Buddhist and Hindu beliefs.General Haushofer, a follower of Gurdjieff and later one of Hitler's main patrons, founded one such society. Its aim was to explore the origins of the Aryan race, and Haushofer named it the Vril Society, after Lytton's fictional creation. Its members practiced meditation to awaken the powers of Vril, the feminine cosmic energy. The Vril Society claimed to have links to Tibetan masters, apparently drawing on the ideas of Madame Blavatsky, the Theosophist who claimed to be in telepathic contact with spiritual masters in Tibet. In Germany, this blend of ancient myths and nineteenth-century scientific theories began to evolve into a belief that the Germans were the purest manifestation of the inherently superior Aryan race, whose destiny was to rule the world. These ideas were given scientific weight by ill-founded theories of eugenics and racist ethnography. Around 1919, the Vril Society gave way to the Thule Society (Thule Gesellschaft), which was founded in Munich by Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorf, a follower of Blavatsky.

 

The Thule Society drew on the traditions of various orders such as the Jesuits, the Knights Templar, the Order of the Golden Dawn, and the Sufis. It promoted the myth of Thule, a legendary island in the frozen northlands that had been the home of a master race, the original Aryans. As in the legend of Atlantis (with which it is sometimes identified), the inhabitants of Thule were forced to flee from some catastrophe that destroyed their world. But the survivors had retained their magical powers and were hidden from the world, perhaps in secret tunnels in Tibet, where they might be contacted and subsequently bestow their powers on their Aryan descendants.

 

 

Such ideas might have remained harmless, but the Thule Society added a strong right-wing, anti-Semitic political ideology to the Vril Society mythology. They formed an active opposition to the local Socialist government in Munich and engaged in street battles and political assassinations. As their symbol, along with the dagger and the oak leaves, they adopted the swastika, which had been used by earlier German neo-pagan groups. The appeal of the swastika symbol to the Thule Society seems to have been largely in its dramatic strength rather than its cultural or mystical significance. They believed it was an original Aryan symbol, although it was actually used by numerous unconnected cultures throughout history. Beyond the adoption of the swastika, it is difficult to judge the extent to which either Tibet or Buddhism played a part in Thule Society ideology Vril Society founder General Haushofer, who remained active in the Thule Society, had been a German military attaché in Japan. There he may have acquired some knowledge of Zen Buddhism, which was then the dominant faith among the Japanese military. Other Thule Society members, however, could only have read early German studies of Buddhism, and those studies tended to construct the idea of a pure, original Buddhism that had been lost, and a degenerate Buddhism that survived, much polluted by primitive local beliefs. It seems that Buddhism was little more than a poorly understood and exotic element in the Society's loose collection of beliefs, and had little real influence on the Thule ideology. But Tibet occupied a much stronger position in their mythology, being imagined as the likely home of the survivors of the mythic Thule race.

The importance of the Thule Society can be seen from the fact that its members included Nazi leaders Rudolf Hess (Hitler's deputy), Heinrich Himmler, and almost certainly Hitler himself. But while Hitler was at least nominally a Catholic, Himmler enthusiastically embraced the aims and beliefs of the Thule Society. He adopted a range of neo-pagan ideas and believed himself to be a reincarnation of a tenth-century Germanic king. Himmler seems to have been strongly attracted to the possibility that Tibet might prove to be the refuge of the original Aryans and their superhuman powers. By the time Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in the 1920s, the myth of the Aryan race was fully developed. In Chapter XI, "Race and People," he expressed concern over what he perceived as the mixing of pure Aryan blood with that of inferior peoples. In his view, the pure Aryan Germanic races had been corrupted by prolonged contact with Jewish people. He lamented that northern Europe had been "Judaized" and that the German's originally pure blood had been tainted by prolonged contact with Jewish people, who, he claimed, lie "in wait for hours on end, satanically glaring at and spying on the unsuspicious girl whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood and removing her from the bosom of her people."

 

For Hitler, the only solution to this mingling of Aryan and Jewish blood was for the tainted Germans to find the wellsprings of Aryan blood. It may happen that in the course of history such a people will come into contact a second time, and even oftener, with the original founders of their culture and may not even remember that distant association. A new cultural wave flows in and lasts until the blood of its standard-bearers becomes once again adulterated by intermixture with the originally conquered race. In the search for "contact a second time" with the Aryans, Tibet-long isolated, mysterious, and remote-seemed a likely candidate.

 

 

In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler's Germany presented a glittering surface sheen of technological modernity. At the annual Nuremberg rallies, fleets of sleek bombers roared over the upturned faces of the Nazi Party faithful. A system of autobahns carried traffic at speed the length and breadth of the Reich. In Berlin in 1936, a magnificent stadium housed the Olympic Games.   But beneath the tread of marching feet and the rumble of tanks on Nuremberg's Zeppelin Field, there pulsed the rhythms of a different and much older set of beliefs, a philosophy that animated the Nazi Party's early ideologues and, crucially, the man who stood behind Hitler himself – Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS.   These beliefs were anything but technological. They were a curious mixture of ancient Teutonic myth, Eastern mysticism and late 19th-century anthropology. Whether Adolf Hitler took them wholly seriously is open to debate. But Heinrich Himmler certainly did. They lay at the heart of the SS empire he created and which became the most dreaded arm of the Nazi state. They were also the mainspring behind a Nazi expedition to secure the secrets of a lost super-race in the mountains of Tibet.       The Thule Society   Heinrich Himmler was a member of the Thule Society, an extreme German nationalist group founded in 1910 by Felix Niedner. It was named after the mythical land of Hyperborea-Thule, which some of the society's devotees identified with Iceland and Greenland, said by them to be the remnants of the lost kingdom of Atlantis. Others claimed that the people of Thule had survived to  become a subterranean super-race. They were brought to life by the English novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, in his 1871 science fiction novel The Coming Race, as the 'Vril-ya', would-be world conquerors imbued with psychokinetic power (vril).   At the turn of the century, the notion of the Ubermensch (superman) was taken up by many philosophers, notably Friedrich Nietzsche. It also found favour with the peddlers of a perverted form of Darwinism: another Englishman, the philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain, believed in the racial superiority of the 'Aryan' people who inhabited northern Europe.   This struck a chord with the Thule Society. Its members identified the Teuton tribes who, in AD 9, had defeated the Roman legions in the Teutoburg forest as descendants of the lost super-race of Hyperborea-Thule, guardians of the secrets of vril.       The Swastika   An ancient Indian symbol of good luck, the swastika was also the traditional symbol of Thor, the Norse god of thunder, and was favoured by German neo-pagan movement of the early 20th century, who called it the Hakenkreutz. In similar fashion, the Hakenkreutz was adopted by the Thule Society, whose members, like the neo-pagans, had a strong anti-Christian streak.   In 1920, a member of the Thule Society, Friedrick Krohn, suggested to Adolf Hitler that the nascent Nazi Party adopt the Hakenkreutz as its 'logo'. Hitler placed it on a white circle against a red background, to compete with the hammer and sickle of the Communist Party. Thus an ancient and beneficent sign of good luck became one of the most potent and evil designs of the 20th century.       Origins of the Aryan race   By the early 1920s, a toxic mix of racial theory and Teutonic mysticism had seeped into the philosophy of the Nazis, who were then jostling with a range of rivals for supremacy on the political far right of the Weimar Republic.   A savage twist was given to Nazi thinking in 1923. While incarcerated in Landsberg Prison, Hitler immersed himself in the writings of Professor Karl Haushofer. Hitler's close associate Rudolf Hess then introduced him to Haushofer, a former soldier, a scholar and the founder of the Vril Society, which sought contacts with subterranean super-beings to learn from them the ancient secrets of Thule. The Vril Society also asserted a central Asian origin of the Aryan race, and Haushofer claimed to have visited Tibet in pursuit of evidence for this.       Geopolitics   Haushofer was also a persuasive advocate of Lebensraum (living space), a theory that had been a prominent strand of German imperialist ideology since the 1890s and had gained common currency on the German political right. Proponents of Lebensraum demanded the German recolonisation of the Slav lands conquered by the Teutonic knights in the Middle Ages and the reuniting of the ethnic German populations of eastern Europe and European Russia.   Hitler was already familiar with these theories, but Haushofer's work undoubtedly provided some of the ideological underpinning of what would evolve into Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.       Antediluvian primitivism   Hitler, the arch-propagandist, recognised the powerful appeal to the German mind of the antediluvian primitivism espoused by the followers of Thule and Vril. It legitimised the desire of a defeated people (the Germans in 1918) to reassume the mantle of greatness (of the Teuton victors over the Romans). And it dovetailed with the oft-stated Nazi belief that that its creed was 'more than a religion: it is the determination to create a new man'.   Moreover, there was one plank in the creeds of both the Thule and the Vril societies on which Hitler and Himmler were in complete accord – an absolute determination to destroy the Jews, who were seen as the racial enemy of the Volk, the German people.       Enforcer of racial doctrine   In 1933, when Hitler became chancellor of Germany, the fantasies of Himmler and the Thule Society became reality. Tasked with the imposition of the Nazi diktat – and, in particular, racial purity – was Himmler's SS (an abbreviation of Schutzstaffel, protection squadrons), which had begun life as Hitler's 300-strong personal bodyguard. By 1939, the SS numbered  some 500,000 men, and in World War II, its armed formations (collectively known as the Waffen SS) would fight alongside the regular armed forces of the Third Reich – seen by Himmler as the reincarnation of the Teutonic knights and the knights of the Round Table celebrated in Arthurian legend.   The Camelot of the SS was to be the castle at Wewelsburg, near the Teutoburg forest, which became a shrine to Himmler's belief in a new world order. Wewelsburg was to be at its epicentre, a pagan powerhouse that some thought would eventually house the Holy Grail for which King Arthur's knights had quested.   There was an overpoweringly dark side to this vision. In World War II, the SS was the principal enforcer of Nazi racial doctrine. They staffed the Reich's concentration and extermination camps, where they conducted cruel experiments to demonstrate 'Aryan' racial superiority, and formed the core of the Einsatzgruppen (special formations) that were responsible for cleansing eastern Europe of Jews.       The Ahnenerbe and Tibet   The SS had another arm, the Ahnenerbe Forschungs und Lehrgemeinschaft (Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society). Founded in 1935 with Hitler's blessing, Himmler merged it with the SS two years later. The Ahnenerbe's overriding task was to provide scientific, anthropological and archaeological evidence to support the theories of the Thule Society and, in so doing, determine the origins of the 'Aryan' race.   Ahnenerbe-SS   Some devotees of Nazi racial theory believed that the answer to this mystery lay in the lost city of Atlantis. This they identified as the mythical land of Thule, lying between Greenland and Iceland, and it was the putative destination of at least one Nazi expedition.   However, Karl Haushofer was convinced that the key to the harnessing of the power of vril lay in Tibet. He was supported by the Swedish explorer and Nazi sympathiser Sven Hedin, who had led several expeditions to Tibet. Hitler thought so highly of Hedin that he had invited him to give the opening address at the Berlin Olympics of 1936. In January 1943, Hedin was present when the Ahnenerbe's Lehr und Forschungsstätte für Innerasien und Expeditionen – Institute for Inner Asian Research – was formally established.       The expedition to Tibet Ernst Schäfer, leader of the Nazi expedition to Tibet in 1938 In 1938, the Tibetans were putting out feelers to Germany, and to Germany's allies, the Japanese, as counterbalances to the influence in the region of Britain and China. In that year, the Ahnenerbe mounted an expedition to Tibet led by Ernst Schäfer, a German hunter and biologist who had made two previous expeditions to that part of the world. He would later publish his report of the expedition as Festival of the White Gauze Scarves: A research expedition through Tibet to Lhasa, the holy city of the god realm (1950).   One of the members of the Nazi expedition was the anthropologist Bruno Beger, a supporter of the theory that Tibet was home to the descendants of a 'northern race'. Beger's role was to undertake a scientific investigation of the Tibetan people. During the expedition, he examined the skulls of more than 300 inhabitants of Tibet and Sikkim, and logged their other physical features in minute detail.   He concluded that, in anthropological terms, the Tibetans represented a staging post between the Mongol and European races, with the European racial element manifesting itself most strongly among the Tibetan aristocracy. He believed that, after the final victory of the Third Reich, the Tibetans could play an important role in the region, serving as an allied race in a world dominated by Germany and Japan.       Underground cities   No more Nazi expeditions are known to have been undertaken. However, some writers have advanced theories that there were both earlier and subsequent missions to Tibet.   In his book Spear of Destiny (1973), Trevor Ravenscroft argued that the Germans mounted a series of expeditions between 1926 and 1943. These were, says Ravenscroft, intended to allow the Nazis to maintain contact with their Aryan ancestors, guardians of the occult powers of Vril, who were hidden in underground cities beneath the Himalayas. It is a scenario that evokes Bulwer-Lytton.       Mud huts and stone axes   During World War II, Heinrich Himmler's obsessive search for the origins of the Aryan race led to crackpot archaeological digs in western and southern Russia, the trophies discovered being transported to the SS headquarters at Wewelsburg. The agents of the Ahnenerbe arrived in the wake of the Wehrmacht to ransack these regions for proof of their German origins.   Even Hitler became testy with Himmler's obsession, protesting: 'Why do we call the world's attention to the fact that we have no past? It isn't enough that Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were living in mud huts. Now Himmler is starting to dig up the villages of mud huts, enthusing over every potsherd and stone axe he finds.'       Sentenced to death   The secret power of the Vril-ya could not save the Third Reich. After the Nazis' defeat, the head of the Ahnenerbe, Dr Wolfram Sievers, was brought before a war crimes tribunal. He had been closely involved not only with the Ahnenerbe's archaeological  activities but also with the grisly racial experiments in the death camps designed to demonstrate the superiority of the 'Aryan' race. He was found guilty, sentenced to death and executed on 2 June 1948 – the only member of the wartime Ahnenerbe to suffer this punishment.   The archaeological world of the Ahnenerbe died with Hitler, Himmler and Sievers. After the war, many of its leading academic supporters returned to university life, re-emerging in post-war Germany as leading professors. Himmler's Camelot, Wewelsburg Castle, remains a sinister reminder the twisted powers of a perverted philosophy.