by Bill Yenne
Altheim found no evidence that the Romans were a Nordic tribe, and it is probable that he knew going into his adventure that he wouldn’t. However, the time that he did spend investigating Türkic runes provided him with grist for several later monographs. As later scholars, such as O. G. Tichzen, have pointed out, the origin of the Türkic runic alphabet remains uncertain, and there indeed is a resemblances between Türkic runes and the Gothic runes of the Germanic futharks. Another rune scholar, N. M. Yadrintsev, saw in such runes “an Indo-European alphabet [reminiscent of] Phoenician, Gothic, Greek, etc. letters.” Altheim’s runic findings were finally published in the Hallische Monographien series as Hunnische Runen (The Runes of the Huns), but not until 1948.
For Göring and the Ahnenerbe, which were no longer around by 1948, the results of the expedition may have been as disappointing as Otto Rahn’s search for the Holy Grail, although in retrospect Altheim and Trautmann’s expedition probably served as a useful cover for covert German efforts to shore up relations with pro-Axis factions in both Romania and Iraq. Romania was allied with Germany during World War II, while Iraq was briefly affiliated with Germany in 1941 during a half-hearted anti-British uprising across the Arab world. Thereafter, Iraqi leader Rashid Ali headed an Iraqi government in exile based in Berlin. Unlike Otto Rahn, who ended up in a snowbank, Franz Altheim had a long and successful postwar academic career.
As Himmler’s desire to prove an Nordic link to the ancient civilizations of the Middle East continued unabated, so too did plans to investigate other archeological sites in the area. One such objective was the so-called Bisutun, or Behistun, Inscription, located on a mountain of the same name in the western Iranian province of Kermanshah. Carved between 522 BC and 486 BC, the inscription discusses the life and ancestry of the Achaemenid Persian emperor Darius I, also known as Darius the Great. In the text of the narrative, Darius is thought to have described himself as being an Aryan. Proving that a historic figure of the stature of Darius the Great was one of his own certainly would have thrilled Himmler.
In 1938, Walther Wüst began pulling the logistics together for an expedition to Iran, but it had not gotten off the ground by the fall of 1939, when most Ahnenerbe junkets were put on hold because of World War II.
As Altheim and Trautmann were heading toward the Middle East in 1938, another, even more challenging project to investigate the Aryan connection with Asia was percolating within the halls of the Ahnenerbe. Once again, it was a story that could have been pulled from an Indiana Jones script. Indeed, the protagonist of this enterprise could easily have been stand-in for Harrison Ford in his prime. The young outdoorsman named Ernst Schäfer was leading-man handsome and an experienced hunter and mountaineer. Among his other adventures, Schäfer had been part of expeditions into the remote mountains of Tibet and Western China with Brooke Dolan II of Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences in 1931 and 1934–1935. Schäfer’s 1933 book, Berge, Buddhas und Bären (Mountains, Buddhas and Bears), was a popular and exciting tale of man-against-nature of that genre always popular with armchair adventurers.
A natural Völkisch mountain man, Schäfer was the kind of perfect Aryan specimen bespectacled clerks such as Heinrich Himmler drool over. Schäfer had been recruited into the SS in 1933. It was here that he would meet another diligent young example of the Völkisch ideal, Bruno Beger. The man who had measured the skull of Heinrich I at Quedlinburg Cathedral, Beger was now employed by Walther Darré’s Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt (Race and Settlement Office). He was also an attractive candidate for the Tibet expedition because of his impeccable Aryan pedigree, his anthropology credentials, and his connection with Völkisch anthropologist Hans Friedrich Karl “Race” Günther.
Like most in the Aryan superiority camp, Günther was convinced that the Aryan race originated in northern Europe, not in Asia as believed by the linguists studying the Indo-European family of languages. He agreed with Wüst and Rosenberg that the Nordic Aryans had later migrated across Asia, through Persia and into India. He believed that the Aryans gave the Hindus the Vedic scriptures. What Beger found particularly compelling was Günther’s idea that threads of this original Aryan influence might still exist in remote regions of Asia, such as in Tibet. Like Thule, that favorite mythical hunting ground of the Völkisch fringe, Tibet was certainly a remote and icy world. There were stories of light-skinned, blue- and green-eyed people living in these isolated areas of the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush. Indeed, there are many such people in this part of the world. (One is reminded of the famous photo of the green-eyed “Afghan Girl,” twelve-year-old Sharbat Gula, who was photographed by Steve McCurry in 1984 and who appeared on the cover of the June 1985 issue of National Geographic.)
Another story, somewhat at odds with Günther’s theory, that interested the Ahnenerbe was the old theory, possibly originating with Arab geographers of the Middle Ages, of Jabal al-Alsinah, the Mountain of Tongues. This place, real or allegorical, was supposedly the origin of Indo-European languages and possibly of the Aryan race. The stories placed it in the Caucasus, but the Himalayas were higher and icier, so perhaps the Mountain of Tongues was in Tibet?
Going around at the time was also yet another theory that suggested that the common origin of plant and animal species in both Asia and Europe existed somewhere up there on the roof of the world. If the master, or common source, species of plants and animals were there, what about the master race of people? The Ahnenerbe couldn’t afford not to take a look.
It was over the subject of Aryans in Tibet that Schäfer and Beger crossed paths. Schäfer, the inveterate outdoorsman, had been there and wanted to go back. Beger, the Aryan anthropologist, wanted to study the Aryans of this mysterious place for himself. At the time, Tibet was indeed one of the most remote nations on earth. A traveler could neither fly there nor travel there by train. There were no highways that crossed the Himalayas to reach this far-off land. Claimed by China and coveted by Britain, it was a defacto Buddhist theocracy beyond the practical political control of outsiders. Indeed, foreigners were rarely granted permission to enter the country.
Ever since he returned in 1935 from his mainly American expedition, Schäfer had been casting about for a funding source to mount an all-German trip that would travel all the way to Lhasa, Tibet’s forbidden capital and Buddhist spiritual center. Himmler heard about his efforts and summoned the twenty-six-year-old explorer to Prinz Albrechtstrasse in the summer of 1936 to let him outline his proposal. Though Himmler was keen on the idea, the price tag that Schäfer quoted was more than the Ahnenerbe budget could afford.
A 1942 newspaper clipping from the “Who-Where-Which” column on the entertainment page discusses the Ernst Schäfer film Geheimnis Tibet (Secret Tibet). The film, gleaned from “exceptional, on-the-spot material, is finished [was shown] by the director/conductor of the expedition, Dr. Ernst Schäfer, last evening in Hamburg, approximately two months before it was to be released by the Tobis [film company].” The movie was cut from more than 60,000 feet of 16mm motion-picture film that had been shot in Tibet by filmographer Ernst Krause. Author’s collection
Nevertheless, the idea proved so appealing that Schäfer was able to raise the cash from outside fundraising. Corporate contributors, such as the IG Farben chemical conglomerate, stepped up and kicked in sizable sums. The German industry advertising council—a de facto subsidiary of Goebbels’s Reich propaganda ministry—recognized the public-relations value of the project and footed most of the tab. The image of brave young Nordic explorers raising the swastika flag on a Himalayan mountaintop would be a wonderful coup for Germany’s international prestige.
How the research aspect could greatly advance the goal of the Ahnenerbe is less clear. The expedition was probably not going to find a race of blonde, blue-eyed Tibetans. Schäfer knew better. He had been there. The tenuous goal was to prove that Aryans were the mother race of the Tibetans, thus demonstrating a Nordic racial hegemony over the whole swath of the Indo-European world.
If Schäfe
r was cast in the role of the strong, handsome leader, Beger was cast as the essential scientist. Beger’s mission as the anthropologist was to assess the “Aryaness” of the people whom he encountered. How would he know, in the absence of DNA testing, and in the anticipated absence of blonde, blue-eyed subjects? He would use the time-tested methods of twentieth-century Western anthropologists everywhere—he would measure their heads and bodies. Every quack racial anthropologist and Social Darwinist from Arthur de Gobineau to “Race” Günther had been quite specific with the physical characteristics that defined each race within their hierachy of races. By using rulers and calipers, the standard tools of early twentieth century physical anthropologists, these features could be measured. In addition to his measuring, Beger would make plaster casts of people’s faces.
The team, which also included Edmund Geer, geologist Karl Wienert, and filmmaker Ernst Krause, was also asked to assess more exotic aspects of Tibetan culture. During his last meeting with Himmler at Prinz Albrechtstrasse before they departed in April 1938. Karl Maria Wiligut took Beger aside. He whispered that he had heard stories of Tibetan women keeping magic stones in their vaginas. Wiligut asked Beger to check to see if this was true.
After a bizarre interval of intrigue and rejection, the team managed to obtain permission from the British to cross through India to get to Tibet. (The Brits finally decided that it was wise to keep the Nazis where they could see them.) The team set out across India in June 1938 without receiving permission from the Tibetans to enter their country, but correctly predicted that this detail could be worked out at the border.
Along the way, Schäfer, a passionate hunter, was determined to collect specimens of animal life to ship back to the dissecting tables of Berlin. With Schäfer busy killing wildlife, some of which were rare and seldom seen, the expedition wound its way across the roof of the world with their long pack train of gear and small army of local bearers. The Germans were quite impressed with the Sikkimese, Nepalese, and Tibetans they met—and many of whom Beger measured. The people were strong and innovative, as is often the case of people who live in extreme climates, and their agrarian lifestyle was best described as Völkisch. They lived the back-to-nature ideal of the German romantics. The hardy people were like the Alpine folk of the Bavarian or Tyrolian Alps, but even more so.
In the hundreds upon hundreds of meters of film shot by Krause—most of it held now by the United States Library of Congress—Beger is seen measuring faces, arms, and other parts of Tibetan anatomy, generally with the full cooperation of his good-natured subjects. Though he almost smothered one man while plaster casting, most of his inquiries were unmarred by serious incident. It is unclear whether he undertook the specific research requested by Wiligut, although the explorers apparently did have numerous off-camera contacts with the women of the mountains.
In January 1939, after seven months of trekking across some of the most difficult terrain in the Indo-European world, the five Germans finally reached the holy city of Lhasa. Here, the Nazis probably felt right at home given that banners with the Buddhist swastika were everywhere to be seen. The German responded by proudly displaying their own swastika livery in an effort to bond with their hosts. The Tibetans regarded them with caution or amusement, not as men from a superior race, although they did load the Germans down with gifts of food and Buddhist artifacts.
The expedition accumulated benign geographic, climate, and weather data and gathered many crates of animal specimens. Krause took 40,000 photos, including many in Agfacolor, and 60,000 feet of 16-mm motion-picture film. The latter was edited into the film Geheimnis Tibet (Secret Tibet), which was released in Germany in 1942. Among his numerous photographs were attempts to capture the mysterious, frosty aura of Tibetan priests and lamas.
Beger had made measurements of 376 people, and in his measuring, the SS race expert was gradually becoming convinced that this hardy, Völkisch race actually were “Europoid” descendants of Nordic Aryans. He published an unconvincing paper to this effect, but not until 1943. As author and adventurer Christopher Hale wrote in his 2004 book Himmler’s Crusade: The True Story of the 1938 Nazi Expedition into Tibet, “Beger’s own attempts to make sense of his Tibetan data were inconclusive and fragmentary. They did not tell the story of Nordic expansion that he wanted to bring back to his professors and the expedition’s patron [Himmler]. Much of what he reported simply showed what any visitor to the market in Gangtok would have seen—that the people of India and Tibet were highly diverse.”
Having been granted permission to visit Lhasa for two weeks, the Germans ingratiated themselves to their cordial hosts and remained for two months, finally departing on March 20. When they finally reached Calcutta at the end of July, the more relaxed relations with the British that had prevailed a year earlier had evaporated in the heat of war paranoia. Indeed, Heinrich Himmler was so fearful that his archaeologists in black would be interned by the British that he used SS funds to send an airplane to pick them up and shuttle them back to Berlin, where they finally arrived on August 4, 1939, less than a month before the start of World War II.
Another German showpiece expedition into the Himalayas met either more or less fortunate fate than Schäfer’s, depending on how one looks at it. In May 1939, the German Himalayan Foundation sent noted Austrian mountaineer and champion skier Heinrich Harrer to make an attempt to be the first to climb Nanga Parbat (Naked Mountain), the 26,660-foot, ninth-highest mountain in the world. Considered one of the most difficult climbs over 8,000 meters on earth, it had never been climbed, although many had died trying. Though this expedition had nothing to do with the Ahnenerbe or its goals of pseudoscientific wishful thinking, Harrer himself was a member of the SS.
Having been unsuccessful in his climb, Harrer was nabbed by the British in October 1939 when he came off the mountain, which was located within British India. Because World War II had begun, he was interned in India for the duration. Though he was recaptured after several thwarted escape attempts, Harrer finally got away for good in May 1944. He slipped across the border into Tibet, where he remained until 1951. His 1952 book, Seven Years in Tibet, featured an introduction by the Dalai Lama and became an international bestseller. Brad Pitt portrayed Harrer in the second of two movies based on the book. As for Nanga Parbat, it was first successfully climbed by in 1953 by another Austrian, Hermann Buhl.
Another individual who went in search of Aryans in Asia, but without the aid of the Ahnenerbe, was the French writer Maximine Julia Portaz. She became a convert to Nazism in or around 1929, and a convert to Hinduism three years later when she traveled to India. She created a theory, an interesting corollary to Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels’s notion of superhumans versus subhumans, that described men as being in, above, or against time. According to Portaz, men in time act from selfish motives and are destructive forces in the world; men above time are enlightened mystics, too detached from the real world to cause change; and men against time combine the mystical knowledge of men above time with the strength of men in time to become heroes able to restore a golden age. Of course she considered Adolf Hitler to fall into the latter category and once declared that he was the reincarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. (She would be dubbed “Hitler’s Priestess” by historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clark.) She remained in India through World War II, changing her name to Savitri Devi, meaning “sun goddess,” and working as a pro-Nazi advocate of Indian independence from Britain.
CHAPTER 12
A World of Ice
HEINRICH HIMMLER had carefully monitored Ernst Schäfer’s Tibetan expedition through wireless messages that the team was sending. Indeed, he was so excited that he promoted Schäfer to Obersturmbannführer while he was still on the faraway, icebound roof of the world. At the same time, the Reichsführer was also obsessing about the icy origins of the Aryan race on the icebound roof of primeval Europe. Both Hitler and Himmler had become believers in an ideology that would be written off as bizarre nonsense were it not for its sizable number of adherent
s. Welteislehre (World Ice Theory) was an idea that would have been destined for a legacy as a footnote to a footnote in the annals of pseudoscience had the Reichsführer not become fixated upon it.
Welteislehre was the brainchild of an engineer whose earlier credentials planted his feet firmly in the terra firma of the real world. Born in Austria in 1860, Hanns (sometimes called Hans) Hörbiger had invented a compressor valve that greatly increased the efficiency of blast-furnace engines. His valve revolutionized the steel industry and was also adapted for the chemical industry. Eventually, his Austrian company had branch offices in Britain and Germany, and he became a rich man exporting his invention throughout the world. By the time Hörbiger handed off management of his successful engineering company to his son Alfred in 1925, he had already been tinkering with his astronomical theories—and leading a scientific double life—for three decades.
As was the case with Guido von List and his Armanen runes, Hörbiger came about his theory through a self-described vision. An amateur astronomer, he was staring at the moon one night when he decided that it and the planets were actually made of ice. He went on to receive a “vision” that made him believe that the basic building block of the universe is water-ice. The Milky Way, for example, was seen a vast archipelago of icebergs. (Jupiter’s moon Europa, the sixth largest moon in the solar system, does have a more or less solid ice surface, but this fact was unknown in Hörbiger’s lifetime.)
Working with backyard astronomer Philipp Fauth, Hörbiger concocted his theory about how the icy universe had been formed, and published it in his 1912 book Glazial-Kosmogonie (Glacial Cosmogony). In Hörbiger’s view of things, the universe had indeed been formed by a big bang—in this case, an explosion that sent chunks of ice hurtling in all directions. Most of the stars and planets are, he said, ice fragments from that big bang. This idea of the origin of the universe came nearly two decades before 1929, when Edwin Hubble began making the observations that led to the big bang theory of the creation of the universe.
