12. TO THE HIMALAYAS

SINCE HIS FIRST MEETING with Walther Wüst, Himmler had grown increasingly curious about Asia. It was as if the Orientalist had thrown open a door to a secret chamber that promised rare burnished treasure: Himmler could not resist exploring it. Privately, Himmler began to carry a copy of the Hindu religious poem, Bhagavadgita, wherever he traveled.¹ He browsed the speeches of Buddha and pored over the biography of Genghis Khan, the ruthless Mongol leader whose empire stretched from southern Manchuria to the Caspian Sea in the thirteenth century. Himmler then arranged for copies of the biography to be distributed to all SS leaders.² He also cultivated the friendship of Oshima Hiroshi, Japan’s military attaché to Germany and later its ambassador.³ The two men talked of many things, but Himmler was particularly keen to learn more of the samurai, Japan’s warrior nobility.

This was not an idle curiosity. Himmler had come to believe, as had Wüst, that the elites of Asia—the Brahman priests, the Mongolian chiefs, the Japanese samurai—all descended from ancient European conquerors. It was a bizarre idea. But many German ultranationalists willingly swallowed it because of Hans F. K. Günther, one of the Reich’s most famous racial scholars. In his immensely popular books on race, Günther claimed that the primordial master race had first launched its assault on Asia some four thousand years ago.⁴ A few of its tribes, he suggested, took a northern route. They swept across Inner Asia and successfully fought their way to China and even Japan, where they became large landowners and nobles.⁵ Even in modern times, he noted, the Chinese and Japanese aristocracy often displayed discernible Nordic traits—”a decidedly long skull and an almost white skin, sometimes combined with handsome European features.”⁶

In Günther’s view, however, most of the Nordic invaders had taken a more southerly route. After sweeping through the Caucasus, they fought and slaughtered and pushed their way east to the fertile plains of India.⁷ So awed were the native inhabitants of the subcontinent, alleged Günther, that they described the invaders as gods in their legends. Along India’s fertile river plains, the flaxen-haired foreigners made themselves at home, becoming the lordly Brahmans. They instituted a strict caste system, prohibiting their children from marrying anyone other than a fellow Brahman. In this way, they zealously protected the purity of their bloodlines, and over time they extended their power to northeastern India and Nepal. There, explained Günther, a wealthy young Nordic couple gave birth to a prince—Buddha.⁸

As Günther saw it, these powerful lords were ultimately unseated by something beyond their control. Pale Nordic men and women, he suggested, were simply unable to bear the tropical sun, originating as they did in the dreary, drizzly, snowy lands of northern Europe. Their infants sickened and died at the height of summer, and the few that survived, he contended, had little choice but to marry into native families, giving birth to generations of babies with dark hair and brown skin. Even so, Günther was convinced he could discern certain Nordic traces in the aristocratic Brahmans. “Their height,” he noted, “is six to nine centimeters taller than the rest of the population. In addition to their generally lighter skin, they have a narrower face and nose, and brown hair that they share with other high castes.”⁹

All these far-fetched claims for Nordic overlords in Asia made a deep impression on Himmler.¹⁰ He was keen to unearth hard archaeological proof of these golden-haired conquerors—the farther east the better. Such finds would provide key new evidence of the primacy of the Aryan race through time. Moreover, they would almost certainly rivet Hitler. The German Führer had taken little, if any, interest in the Ahnenerbe’s expeditions and research in northern Europe, much to Himmler’s despair.¹¹ But Hitler greatly admired Günther’s work, even taking the time to attend the scholar’s inaugural lecture at the University of Jena in 1930.¹² An expedition to Asia in search of the golden-haired master race would raise the Ahnenerbe’s profile dramatically in Hitler’s eyes. All that Himmler needed was to find the right scientist.

ON NOVEMBER 2, 1935, a muscular young German SS-Mann turned up at the German consulate in Chung-King with an impressive tale of survival and resourcefulness.¹³ Ernst Schäfer was a twenty-five-year-old zoologist, the son of a prominent German industrialist. Volatile and headstrong, he had set off from Shanghai in early July 1934 with a close friend and another companion on an American-financed expedition to the wilderness that straddled the border between Szechuan and Tibet. Schäfer and his colleagues had planned on collecting bird and mammal skins and other specimens for the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. But the remote region, rife with robbers and warring tribes, tested their endurance to the limit. The trio battled off murderous brigands, faced down a mutiny among their porters, and ferreted out treacherous spies in their midst. But during a perilous siege mounted by the machine gun-toting troops of a Chinese warlord, Schäfer’s friend, Brooke Dolan, decided to flee for help disguised as a Mongolian merchant. He never returned. Schäfer finally managed to talk his way out of the siege, but his second American companion departed the expedition soon after.

Left in charge of the native porters and what remained of the caravan, Schäfer stewed over his fate. “I was totally alone,” he later wrote, “just as the hardest part of the expedition was beginning and the most important research lay ahead of us.”¹⁴ The route ahead led deeper into a war zone, but Schäfer resolved to continue collecting zoological specimens. He set off with the porters, and when he arrived back in civilization seven months later, his caravan was laden with the carcasses of some three thousand exotic animals, including at least two species unknown to science. He had taken nearly seven thousand photographs of the countryside and its people and shot rare film footage of the remote Inner Asian wilderness—all of which would be useful for magazine articles, books, and public lectures. He had also charted the remote region in maps and scribbled his impressions on nearly three thousand double-sided pages.¹⁵

In Shanghai, Schäfer coolly plotted his future. He planned to spend a few months in Philadelphia organizing his collection, but he was keen to return to Inner Asia as the head of his own expedition.¹⁶ He needed financial backing, however, and for this, Schäfer pinned his hopes on his SS connections. From the office of the German consul general in Shanghai, he wrote a five-page letter to August Heissmeyer, an SS-Gruppenführer, describing his success in salvaging the entire trip. “The expedition,” he boasted, “is considered to be the most successful—in terms of results and collected zoological expedition material—that has ever been conducted in Inner Asia and should be the model for future expeditions.”¹⁷ Schäfer left little room for doubt that he was the right man to lead those expeditions.

When the Nazi party caught wind of Schäfer’s success, it quickly called him home.¹⁸ In Philadelphia, Schäfer received an official summons to return to Germany as soon as possible and a telegram from Himmler’s office informing him that he had been awarded a commission as an honorary SS-Untersturmführer. All this attention from high quarters was immensely gratifying to the young SS-Mann. “I am so proud and happy that I am not able to express it,” he declared in his reply to Himmler. “I hope I will be able to show my gratitude through my actions. All my expectations were exceeded in each and every respect, though the greatest honor for me is to have been promoted.”¹⁹

IN JUNE 1936, the new Untersturmführer was ushered past the sentries at the door of the former art school on Prinz Albrechtstrasse. He was led up the stairwell and down a bright corridor decorated with busts of Hitler and other prominent German figures, and shown into Himmler’s office, a plain, impersonal-looking room that displayed little of the gilded magnificence favored by other ministers of the Reich.²⁰ Himmler was in a talkative mood. He warmed quickly to Schäfer and the conversation soon turned to Schäfer’s plans for the future.

The young Untersturmführer had spent seven months mulling over the best way to present his proposal for a new expedition. Like every other member of the SS, he was well aware of the immense importance that Himmler placed on archaeology and the ancient history of the mythical Aryans. As luck would have it, Schäfer’s last expedition had stumbled upon some archaeological and anthropological finds that would interest Himmler greatly.

While out hunting near the small town of Batang, along the Chinese-Tibetan border, Schäfer and his companions had come across several ancient graves dug into the fertile terraces of a riverbed. Curious about the contents, they had not hesitated to open the graves, although they had no permission to do so from local authorities. Schäfer and his companions unearthed several skeletons curled in a fetal position.²¹ Mourners had sent them to the next world wearing jewels and accompanied by all manner of urns and pots. Schäfer was fascinated when he saw the decorative motifs on these objects. They corresponded in his opinion to “old Aryan symbols.”²²

As the expedition moved on, Schäfer observed what he considered to be other proof of an ancient Aryan presence. During his university studies, he had taken classes in ethnology—the history of human groups and their origins and distribution—and without doubt was familiar with the works of Günther.²³ The entire subject interested him greatly.²⁴ While trekking along the mountainous northeastern fringes of Tibet, he had encountered several striking individuals. Unlike the local farmers who were “pure Mongol types” or the citified tradespeople who possessed “strong Semitic streaks,” these individuals seemed in Schäfer’s eyes to possess “pure Aryan facial characteristics, strong hook noses, red-black hair and almost gray-blue eyes.”²⁵ From these brief observations, he concluded that they were “representatives of a racial group that differs from other inhabitants.”²⁶ Such Aryan-looking individuals, he observed, “are spread over the entire area and are strongest in the feudal noble class, as well as among landowners and the warrior-robber group.”²⁷ All this struck the young SS officer as a significant discovery for Germany’s Rassenkunde experts. “This opens up a whole new area of science in a productive and appreciative field—to establish how far the Aryan race interspersed on the Roof of the World.”²⁸

Schäfer almost certainly related these racial discoveries to Himmler, who was a very receptive and attentive listener when the occasion suited him.²⁹ And during the ensuing discussion, Himmler seems to have offered his own thoughts on how Aryan tribes could have ended up in the mountains of Inner Asia—thoughts that clearly blended Wirth’s theories on Atlantis with Günther’s speculations about Asia. After the war, Schäfer recalled some of this conversation for his American interrogators, who then distilled his recollections into one sentence: “Himmler believed that ancient emigrants from Atlantis had founded a great civilization in Inner Asia, the capital of which was a city called [Obo].”³⁰ Himmler also seems to have confided to Schäfer his own personal view on the origins of the Nordic race, which was again summarized by the American interrogators. “Himmler mentioned his belief that the Nordic race did not evolve, but came directly down from heaven to settle on the Atlantic continent. He also mentioned Oshima’s belief in a similar theory concerning the origin of the noble castes in Japan.”³¹

Schäfer thought Himmler’s views on the divine origins of the Nordic race were ridiculous. But he seems to have kept these opinions to himself in his first meeting with the SS leader. Certainly, Himmler retained a very favorable impression of the young scientist, so favorable, in fact, that in 1937, he agreed to make Schäfer’s great dream come true. He put him in charge of a major new Ahnenerbe expedition that was to travel to Tibet and also to the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, where it would look for the ruins of the mythical city Obo.³² He then ordered the Ahnenerbe’s managing director, Wolfram Sievers, and his own trusted aide Bruno Galke to begin piecing together the financing. He also personally instructed Schäfer to consult with Karl-Maria Wiligut.

Schäfer obliged, presenting himself at the old colonel’s villa in Berlin. A pair of SS sentries waved him up the driveway and a young assistant, Gabriele Dechend, led him into a dank, ill-kept tropical conservatory. A deep gloom seemed to envelop the room. As Schäfer waited uneasily, he detected a strange sweet smell that he recognized at once from his travels in the East. It was opium. The old colonel finally shuffled into the room. He embraced Schäfer and kissed him on both cheeks, then took a seat. Slowly, the elderly officer began slipping into some kind of altered state, his eyes glazed and his hands visibly trembling. It reminded Schäfer of the trances he had seen some Tibetan lamas enter.³³

When Wiligut at last broke the silence, he astonished Schäfer. In a deep, rough voice, he began to speak of the Dalai Lama and rattle off names of Buddhist monasteries and other places in eastern Tibet known only to Schäfer. The young zoologist felt as if Wiligut were literally reading his mind. Schäfer later noted in his memoirs that he was rather shaken by the encounter and left at the first opportunity. But in later years, Wiligut’s assistant remembered things differently. The two men, she recalled, had a fascinating conversation about the telepathy of Tibetan lamas, a type of extrasensory perception that Schäfer claimed to have witnessed himself. He told Wiligut that the lamas in Tibet often seemed to be expecting him when he arrived at their monastery.³⁴

Nevertheless, this bizarre experience and Himmler’s remarks on the divine descent of the Nordic race raised a large red flag in the young zoologist’s mind about allying himself with Himmler on matters of science. The question was clearly how to clinch the Ahnenerbe’s support without compromising his own sense of integrity. It was a difficult problem, but Schäfer was young and supremely confident in his own abilities. Indeed, he seems to have believed that he could handle Himmler just as deftly as he had managed the brigands and warlords of China. In Inner Asia he had learned that one “could not lose his nerve. The success of the expedition was based on such games.”³⁵ It was a matter of wile.

SCHÄFER WAS ACCUSTOMED to dominating others and bending them to his will. Short, stocky, and barrel-chested, with a thick crop of wavy dark-blond hair, a strong jutting jaw, and a sturdy—as opposed to handsome—face, he radiated confidence. He possessed immense reserves of physical strength that allowed him, day in and day out, to chase big game up into the rarefied altitudes of the Himalayas as if it were no more than child’s play. He spoke in such a loud, booming voice that his friends often joked that he had no need of a telephone.³⁶ He wrote in a bold hand with a thick nib, covering page after page in a dark scrawl of black ink, every second sentence or so punctuated with one or more exclamation marks. He was egotistical and a master of self-promotion. He relished taking risks. He drove like a maniac.

He tended to be blunt and direct to a fault, but he did not hesitate to lie when stuck in a tight spot. A moody man of dark corners and edges, he had a trigger temper, which he lost frequently—sometimes violently so. In his later years, he fell into strange somnambulatory fits. Once while sleepwalking in a train, he nearly strangled a doctor sleeping in a berth nearby. Life with Schäfer, as his second wife later conceded, was never easy.³⁷ Yet the zoologist rarely bore grudges, and to those he considered peers or friends or family, he was kind, loyal, and generous. He possessed a talent for binding men to him.

His willfulness revealed itself at an early age. Born in Cologne in 1910, the son of a wealthy businessman, Schäfer had little interest as a boy in following in his father’s footsteps. To escape the sprawling family home in Waltershausen, he roamed the glens and pine-covered hills of the neighboring Thuringian Forest. He brought home squirrels and small animals and built aquariums and cages, transforming his room into a miniature zoo.³⁸ He spent hours watching the behavior of birds he had captured. As a teenager, his love of the outdoors was rivaled only by a passion for hunting. He succeeded in shooting his first roebuck at the age of twelve. By his mid-twenties, his prowess with guns was legendary. In Inner Asia, he once shot three fleet-footed antelopes from a distance of two hundred yards, dispatching each with a single bullet. “Consistently he shoots as the average hunter shoots once in a lifetime and bears the memory for the remainder,” his friend Brooke Dolan observed later.³⁹

When Schäfer reached his late teens, his father insisted that he abandon his feral ways and prepare for a business career, taking suitable courses at university. By then, however, the young naturalist abhorred the thought of spending the rest of his life cooped up in offices and boardrooms. He had read with fascination the books of Sven Hedin, a Swedish explorer who had trekked through Inner Asia, and he dreamed of a similar life in the wilds of the East. He enrolled at the University of Göttingen and told his father he was studying law.⁴⁰ In reality, however, he was taking classes in zoology, botany, geology, and ethnology.⁴¹

It was while studying migrating storks, guillemots, and doves as a student on Helgoland, an island just off the North Sea coast of Germany, that he met a distinguished German zoologist who had traveled through the remote highlands of western China and eastern Tibet. Hugo Weigold was much impressed by Schäfer and his remarkable marksmanship, so when the older zoologist received an invitation to join a new scientific expedition to the headwaters of the Yangtze River in 1930, he recommended Schäfer as the team’s hunter. The expedition’s American backers were particularly anxious to collect specimens of a giant panda and other large exotic species. “If anyone can kill a giant panda bear,” Weigold reportedly told the team leader, “it would be Schäfer.”⁴²

The young zoologist needed no arm-twisting. He joined the team and departed by train from Berlin in January 1931. In Chung-King, the expedition haggled and bargained for a large caravan, complete with more than a hundred porters as well as horses and pack animals. Thus equipped, it began trekking north and west toward the mountainous headwaters of the Yangtze. Schäfer was agape at the exotic mountain world he found himself in, with its roaring rivers and dripping bamboo forests and its hundreds of species of strange new birds and insects, snakes and mammals, trees and vines, flowers and grasses. He felt reborn, and he set about hunting zoological specimens with an intense single-minded passion.

For months, he stalked the forests in search of the giant panda. He found broken shoots of bamboo—the jagged leftovers from their meals—but failed to catch even a brief glimpse of a panda. One day, however, he noticed bits of bamboo shoots littering the high boughs of a tree. He realized the bears were capable of climbing up into the forest canopy. The next morning he and a Tibetan assistant returned to the spot and silently clambered up a nearby tree. Some four hundred meters in the distance, he noticed branches gently rustling. He took aim and fired at the spot. Sight unseen, he knocked a panda to the ground, killing it for his collection.

A SEASONED VETERAN of Inner Asian research, Schäfer began drawing up plans in the summer of 1937 for the Ahnenerbe trip to Tibet. He set his sights firmly on the high plateau region of northeastern Tibet, bordered by the Amne Machin Mountains. The remote wilderness, he observed in an eight-page letter to Himmler, was “the last completely unexplored realm of Central Asia,” an exotic land that would greatly appeal to geographers, botanists, zoologists, and ethnologists.⁴³ Schäfer was also highly optimistic about the prospects for racial studies in the region. He planned to examine the “mixed Aryan groups of people and their social behavior which I discovered on my last trip.”⁴⁴ He also intended to excavate the graves of Batang, recovering ancient artifacts that “trace back to the Aryan-Scythian migration.”⁴⁵ All this he planned to capture on a professional expedition film.

He proposed departing sometime between the fall of 1937 and the end of January 1938. This would give him time to finish two popular books he was writing on his recent adventures in Inner Asia—he clearly hoped to model himself on his hero Sven Hedin—and prepare for the oral examination for his doctoral degree before throwing himself into preparations for the expedition. Himmler perused the plans and approved them. By this time, both men had dropped the notion of an extended trip into Mongolia’s Gobi Desert. In all likelihood, Schäfer had convinced the SS leader that such a side trip would needlessly add expense to an already costly itinerary. Schäfer believed that the racial and archaeological studies in Tibet would uncover ample evidence of Aryans.

Over the next ten months, Schäfer slaved away at his studies and his writing, and in his spare time, he wooed a willowy young farmer’s daughter, Herta Volz. Soon after their marriage on July 14, 1937, Schäfer took up preparations for the expedition. He estimated that the team’s journey to Tibet would cost at least 60,000 reichsmarks, 30,000 of which would be needed before departure.⁴⁶ The Ahnenerbe, however, was unable to shoulder such a heavy burden, so Wolfram Sievers and Himmler’s trusted aide, Bruno Galke, immediately set to work locating the necessary money. Galke met with representatives from Eher Verlag, the central publishing house of the Nazi party, to arrange a publishing deal for Schäfer.⁴⁷ He and Sievers also attempted to sell the rights for the expedition film and obtain free steamship passage to Shanghai for the team members. In addition, they contacted the German Research Foundation and the Advertising Council of the German Economy, the government agency responsible for disseminating business propaganda.⁴⁸ In the meantime, Schäfer agreed to search for corporate money through a contact at IG Farben, the world’s largest chemical cartel, based in Frankfurt.

Himmler’s staff also began passing on names of suitable researchers for the expedition. Schäfer listened politely, but having barely survived the near collapse of one trip after his teammates deserted, he had his own definite ideas on the matter. He intended to pick scientists who were young, strong, physically fit, and capable of handling themselves if push came to shove. He also planned to select researchers of a high scientific caliber. For the expedition geologist, he immediately poached an assistant of Wilhelm Filchner, Germany’s most seasoned Tibet explorer. Twenty-four-year-old Karl Wienert had a doctorate degree in geophysics and a passion for fieldwork and adventure. For the technical leader—the person responsible for organizing the expedition in Germany and managing all the provisioning, transport, and communications in Inner Asia—Schäfer selected twenty-four-year-old Edmund Geer, a former regional policeman turned SS officer who possessed strong organizational skills and extensive SS connections. In addition, he recruited thirty-eight-year-old Ernst Krause, a versatile man capable of doubling as the expedition’s filmmaker and its entomologist.

One of the most important slots was still vacant, however. The team needed an anthropologist with a solid background in ethnology. A senior official in RuSHA passed on to Schäfer the name of a twenty-six-year-old, up-and-coming Rassenkunde expert, Bruno Beger.⁴⁹ Beger was a student of Hans F.K. Günther. Sociable and inquisitive and very much a self-made man, he possessed many of the social skills that Schäfer lacked and had mastered the art of networking long before it became fashionable. He was just finishing off his doctoral degree in anthropology. Tall, wiry, and naturally athletic at six foot two, he was the very image of a Nordic man, with his piercing blue eyes, long sharp nose, and neatly parted straight blond hair.

Beger’s sense of ambition easily matched that of Schäfer. He was born in 1911 into an affluent old Heidelberg family that had made its money from the region’s tanneries.⁵⁰ But the family had fallen on hard times. His father died at the front in the First World War, and most of the family’s financial assets slipped through his mother’s hands during the financial tumult of the 1920s. As luck had it, the mother of a good friend came to his rescue, paying for his university studies. Beger had intended on studying mathematics at the University of Jena. But after attending a lecture by the racial scholar Hans F. K. Günther, he gravitated toward the subjects of anthropology and ethnology.⁵¹ Günther, in turn, seems to have encouraged the budding young racial scholar. Indeed, Beger ended up designing the maps for Günther’s book on the Nordic race in Asia.⁵²

In 1934, Beger joined the SS. He landed a part-time job in RuSHA and swiftly rose to the position of section head. From its inception, RuSHA was, as one recent historian has pointed out, less a place for opportunists and careerists and “more a place for convinced ideologues.”⁵³ Beger fit the mold extremely well. RuSHA’s director, Otto Hofmann, for example, liked the young scholar’s approach to racial problem-solving. “Beger,” he wrote, “is an inventive and enthusiastic practitioner with an extraordinarily well-founded knowledge, yet he never gets stuck in pure theory.”⁵⁴ This opinion seems to have been widely shared. When one colleague, Dr. Erich Karl, proposed leading an expedition to Hawaii—a “huge laboratory of racial mixture”—he invited Beger along.⁵⁵ Karl intended to study miscegenation, which was of course anathema to the SS, and gather data on its purported perils.⁵⁶

Discussions over funding of the Hawaii trip dragged on, however, and while waiting for final approval, Beger received a postcard, then a phone call, from Schäfer, inviting him to join the Tibet expedition.⁵⁷ Beger had read about Schäfer’s exploits in Inner Asia in the German newspapers and was flattered that the young zoologist had approached him. Moreover, he was captivated by the prospect of trekking through the Himalayas and conducting racial studies there. Schäfer’s new expedition was custom-made for an ambitious man. What better way was there to establish himself as one of Germany’s preeminent racial scientists and cultivate favor with Himmler?

So Beger signed on. And with the immensely powerful SS political machine spinning behind him, Schäfer continued sorting through the names of other candidates for the expedition—archaeologists, botanists, zookeepers. He was so close to his dream of returning to Inner Asia that he could almost hear the water dripping in the dense bamboo forests. On November 9, 1937, however, his plans suffered a tragic setback. While weekending at the country estate of a friend, the young zoologist went out duck hunting with his wife Herta and two servants in a rowboat. The weather was gray and rough, and as Schäfer stood up to shoot, a wave suddenly smashed against the boat, knocking him off balance just as he was about to pull the trigger. His shotgun slipped from his hands, broke in two, and discharged accidentally, shooting his bride of four months in the head.⁵⁸ By nightfall, she was dead.

SCHÄFER WAS WRACKED with guilt and grief. Immediately after the tragedy, he threatened to kill himself.⁵⁹ He soon managed to pull himself together, however, and a mere eight weeks later he plunged back into work, revising his book manuscripts and pushing harder than ever at preparations for the expedition. He desperately wanted to escape to the remote frontier of western China and eastern Tibet, where he could lose himself in the beauty of nature, the pleasure of the hunt, and his duties as an expedition leader.

He drew up page after page of equipment lists—pistols, saddles, a shortwave receiver and transmitter, a collapsible boat, Leica cameras, tents, first-aid kits, animal traps, tools for processing zoological specimens, geophysical gear, crates of food and cigarettes and brandy, and boxes of presents for the Tibetans, including used binoculars, used and rejected pistols, folding knives with decorations, wrapped biscuits and cookies, and cheap watches. The lists were all passed on to Gestapo officials, who ran checks on the suppliers, right down to the producer of the expedition’s dried fruit.⁶⁰ Each company had to be Aryan-owned. Sievers then composed letters to manufacturers and other potential outfitters, requesting that they donate the necessary gear.⁶¹

As the preparations proceeded, however, political conditions along the proposed expedition route rapidly deteriorated—to Schäfer’s dismay. Fourteen months earlier, in November 1936, Hitler had signed an important anti-Soviet pact with Japan, swallowing his immense disdain of the Japanese as mere “bearers of culture” in order to secure a vital alliance with them.⁶² The new allies shared a fierce hatred of Bolshevism. Moreover, many Japanese researchers and politicians also regarded the world through the fractured prism of race. They proudly described themselves as shid minzoku, or the “leading race” of the world and believed that they traced their origins to the gods.⁶³ Japan’s rulers were immensely keen on carving out a new Japanese empire in Asia and planned on planting colonies of Japanese settlers in the conquered lands.⁶⁴ Already they had invaded, conquered, and occupied Manchuria, and they were hungry for more.

So in July 1937, Japan embarked on a full-scale conquest of China. Its divisions soon occupied the major coastal cities, including Shanghai, the commercial capital of China. By November, hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops were advancing on what was then the Chinese capital, Nanking, and waging pitched battles for control of the vital rail lines along the Yangtze River. Schäfer had been counting on steamship travel up the Yangtze as the swiftest and most direct route to Chung-King, where the expedition would then proceed by foot for Tibet. But the Yangtze had now become a major battleground, one that was far too perilous a place for a scientific team from Germany, Japan’s new ally.

Determined to find another way to northeastern Tibet, Schäfer began poring over maps of the region.⁶⁵ The route that most attracted him wound from the Indian state of Assam into eastern Tibet, but there again he saw major hurdles. The British government feared correctly that a major war with Germany was looming. It would not look kindly on permitting an SS scientific team to traipse through the remote mountain valley of India. If war broke out in Europe, Britain would desperately need Indian troops to man its fronts and Indian factories to churn out munitions. It did not want to have to stamp out an SS-led guerilla movement in the eastern Himalayas, a movement that might ignite all those who advocated Indian independence.

Schäfer refused to concede defeat. He flew to London in early March 1938 with cap in hand. He courted men with influence in the India Office and paid visits to prominent Nazi sympathizers in London who might put in a good word for him.⁶⁶ But the British authorities were deeply suspicious of Schäfer’s real motives for the trip, and turned him down flat, and the Tibetan government, keen to remain on good terms with the British, followed suit. These obstacles, however, only made Schäfer more determined. He proposed booking the passage to India with a small team—just Wienert, Geer, Krause, and Beger—hoping he could negotiate the necessary permissions on the spot. To his immense relief, Himmler agreed to the plan.

With his egotism and his headstrong ways, however, Schäfer had already antagonized both Wüst and Sievers.⁶⁷ Indeed, Sievers had taken the extreme step of writing to Himmler, explaining that the Ahnenerbe was no longer prepared to take responsibility for the expedition.⁶⁸ But Himmler did not seem worried by this. As he must have known, Beger, one of RuSHA’s best young racial experts, would conduct a thorough search for traces of the supposed master race in the Himalayas. Moreover, Himmler was well aware that Schäfer’s maps and Tibetan contacts would prove invaluable if the Reich wanted to engage in a guerilla action later in India.⁶⁹ Besides, most of the preparatory work was done. Sievers and Galke had lined up a good deal of the equipment and organized nearly all of the necessary financing for the trip, from the Advertising Council of the German Economy, the German Research Foundation, and Eher Verlag.⁷⁰ So Himmler agreed to allow Schäfer and the expedition’s technical leader, Edmund Geer, to finish off the remaining preparations on their own.

Even so, Himmler continued to help out with the last-minute glitches. He wrote to Hans F. K. Günther at the University of Berlin, requesting that he move up the date of Beger’s doctoral examinations, so that Beger could “arrive abroad as a German scholar with completed exams.”⁷¹ He also requested assistance from the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and the German ambassador in Calcutta: Schäfer needed introductions to the highest members of the Indian government.⁷²

By mid-April, almost all of the equipment was packed and all the necessary paperwork was stamped and sealed. The team—known officially as “The German Tibet Expedition/Ernst Schäfer under the Auspices of the Reichsführer-SS and in Connection with the Ahnenerbe Association Berlin”—was ready to depart.⁷³ Schäfer and Geer took the train to Genoa, arriving on April 20. Beger, Wienert, and Krause arrived the following morning. At one in the afternoon on April 21, 1938, the five men boarded a German steamship, the Gneisenau, bound for Ceylon. From there, they planned to travel by freighter to Calcutta.

SCHÄFER, SOMETHING OF a taskmaster, saw to it that the passage out was neither relaxing nor idle. He had purchased first-class tickets for the team so that they could rub shoulders with all the important people aboard ship—diplomats, engineers, businessmen, and officials, men of influence who might in some way prove useful to the expedition. He also insisted on turning the team’s spacious cabins into classrooms, pressing team members to brush up on their English and to give mini-lectures to one another on their subject areas. At night, the five men burned the midnight oil, working out problems in the research plans and poring over the maps to plan their routes.⁷⁴

In Ceylon, however, Schäfer received troubling news. The day before they boarded the Gneisenau, the Nazi party newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, ran a glowing article on the Tibet expedition, making much of its SS connections, something Schäfer had hoped to keep quiet abroad.⁷⁵ This story raised eyebrows on London’s Fleet Street. A journalist ran a scoop that an SS expedition had set sail for India, and before long the press in both Britain and India were running headlines about a “Nazi invasion.”⁷⁶ During the stopover in Ceylon’s capital, Colombo, the local press besieged Schäfer. He later raged to the SS headquarters about the “unheard of attention in the press in India, exactly where there are many Jews residing” and expressed his worries about “difficulties to be faced in Calcutta.”⁷⁷

The news infuriated Himmler, spurring him into action. He wrote personally on May 19 to an influential Nazi sympathizer in England, Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, a former head of British naval intelligence. In his letter, Himmler ridiculed the notion that he would be so clumsy as to dispatch a spy in such an open manner and threatened to retaliate against British citizens in Germany.⁷⁸ Domvile passed the missive on to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, a strong believer in placating the leaders of the Reich.⁷⁹ Not long after this, British authorities granted the SS team permission to conduct scientific studies in the small Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim. The kingdom bordered Tibet, but it lay much farther west than Schäfer’s planned staging point in Assam. Worse still, other scientific teams had already pored over the flora and fauna of Sikkim. It was a poor bone that the British had thrown Schäfer. They hoped he would turn it down. But he stubbornly accepted.

Calcutta did little to improve his mood. Even the small German community there appeared hostile to the team. Unwilling to dawdle among enemies, Schäfer wrapped up the negotiations for the entry permit to Sikkim as quickly as possible. Then the team packed their gear and boarded a northbound train. The annual monsoon season had arrived a month early, and Schäfer worried that travel would be slow, with frequent mud slides in the Himalayas. But he was ecstatic to be under way again. ‘And thus,” he wrote proudly by hand in a letter to Himmler, “we weigh anchor as an SS expedition!”⁸⁰

In the capital of Sikkim, Gangtok, the team paid their respects to local British officials and set up camp near the British Residency, a lovely stone house set in a sprawling expanse of manicured lawns and well-tended beds of hollyhocks and asters. Gangtok was a thriving hub in the wool trade with Tibet, and as such its citizens knew a great deal about Tibetan ways. After settling in, Schäfer and Geer began hiring porters with strong backs, and interpreters who could speak Tibetan. All the while the British political officer in Gangtok, Sir Basil Gould, watched Schäfer carefully. The young German, he later noted, was “interesting, forceful, volatile, scholarly, vain to the point of childishness, disregardful of social convention or the feelings of others, and first and foremost always a Nazi and a politician.”⁸¹ It was obvious to Gould that Schäfer intended to complete the trek to Tibet, with or without official British permission.

On June 21, the team set off north with porters and horses and fifty heavily laden mules, each brightly ornamented with silver bells and scarlet tassels of dyed yak hair. The mule track teetered precipitously above the roaring Teesta River, known locally as “Cleft of the Winds.”⁸² It was a nightmarish trip. In the heavy monsoon rain, landslides threatened ominously from the sheer, denuded valley walls: in some spots muddy torrents had already roared down out of the morning mists, plastering the trail with a thick, impassable layer of mud. The porters had no choice but to chop down a new pathway in the forest, and the heavy work in subtropical heat and humidity exhausted them. The team’s misery was further compounded by a plague of tropical leeches that lay in wait for them in the tall grasses or curled about the tips of twigs. One evening alone, as Schäfer unlaced his boots and threw aside his sodden socks, he counted fifty-three fat leeches clinging to his right foot; another forty-five fed contentedly on his left. He noticed that the ankles of the caravan’s porters, who walked barefoot, were coated in a crust of dark black blood.⁸³

Despite all the hardship, however, Schäfer discovered a kind of magic along the Teesta. At night he watched tiny lights dancing amid the ferns—“fantastical and surreal: the motion of the shining tropical glowworm army. The sight is eerie.”⁸⁴ He found a great deal more of fascination as the road wound northward. From the Teesta Valley, the team began climbing upward through forests of fir and pine, which gave way outside the village of Changu to alpine hillsides carpeted with dwarf rhododendrons and azaleas, all blooming furiously in the June heat. Schäfer dispatched men to collect specimens for German botanists to identify, and as the team stopped to set up camp, Schäfer set off into the hills to hunt game.

Slowly, as the team roamed the highland valleys, Schäfer’s companions fell into the simple rhythm of fieldwork. In the early morning, Krause and an assistant visited the light traps they had set the previous evening. They gently plucked out the moths and other nocturnal insects captured inside and collected the new species. Wienert, the geophysicist, set off into the surrounding hills with mules laden with his theodolites and other delicate instruments, while Geer, the team’s technical leader, climbed into the alpine zone. Schäfer had assigned him the task of collecting all bird species that resided above an elevation of four thousand meters.

Beger, meanwhile, visited the tents of travelers and ventured into the small hamlets, searching for people who would submit to his racial measurements. He soon learned that offering medical assistance was the surest way of winning the confidence of those he encountered.⁸⁵ There was always someone who needed help, and Beger was perfectly willing to pull teeth or perform first aid or dispense medicines from one of three large trunks he had packed with pills and salves and tonics from Germany. Only then, after he had finished dosing small babies and frail elders, could he unpack his bag of anthropological instruments—large and small spreading calipers, sliding compasses of various sizes, three steel tape measures, and a somatometer—and begin taking measurements of the local inhabitants for his racial studies.⁸⁶