FEW THINGS IN LIFE so disturbed German Rassenkunde experts as the subject of racial mixing. In their version of history, the human propensity for crossing racial boundaries had reduced an empire of golden-haired gods to a hodgepodge of racial mongrels. It had sown Nordic boldness and creativity and the Nordic capacity for reason into the short, squat bodies of inferior races. It had instilled a penchant for laziness, vacillation, and cowardice in the tall, angular bodies of northern Europe. It had spawned a kind of racial pandemonium in the world, a tumult so bewildering that Rassenkunde experts had been forced to develop various intricate anthropological measurements, followed by lengthy mathematical analyses, in their determined effort to trace the ancestry of individual humans. Before leaving Berlin, Bruno Beger had carefully studied these techniques.
In the highlands of Sikkim, he followed a strict research regime. As each of his nervous subjects stood before him, he held up an eye-color table to measure the precise hue of his subject’s eyes. He then pulled out other charts to identify the exact shading of the hair and the color of the skin on the forehead, carefully recording the results in special notebooks he had brought for the purpose. He then proceeded to the cranial measurements. He charted the length, breadth, and circumference of his subjects’ heads; the height and width of their foreheads; the breadth of their mouths, noses, cheekbones, and lower jaws; the width between their eyes; the depth of their noses; the position of their ears, noses, and mouths relative to the rest of their face.1
Like many other racial scholars of the age, Beger considered certain key cranial features to be reliable indicators of the Nordic race. The most important was the shape of the skull. Anatomists had learned to quantify this shape by using a simple mathematical formula, the cephalic index, which was the ratio of maximum head breadth to maximum head length, multiplied by one hundred. When racial scholars began to use this formula in their early studies, they noted that inhabitants of Scandinavia, Great Britain, and northern Germany—the supposed heartland of the Aryan race—possessed a cephalic index between seventy-seven and seventy-nine, indicating a long and narrow head.2 This delighted racial scholars. They interpreted the numbers to mean that northern Europeans possessed high foreheads—a sure sign, in their opinion, of high intelligence. And so for many German researchers, the cephalic index became a prized pillar of racial theory. Indeed, in the late 1920s Günther proudly proclaimed that one of the distinguishing features of the Nordic race, along with hair and eye color, was a cephalic index of “round about seventy five.”3
Günther, of course, had played fast and loose with science, ignoring powerful evidence that ran contrary to his beliefs. In 1908 prominent American anthropologist Franz Boas had begun questioning whether environmental factors could influence the cranial traits regarded as racial markers. So he put the cephalic index to a major test. He and a group of assistants measured 17,821 immigrants and their children in New York City, selecting a wide range of nationalities, from Scots to eastern European Jews, and from Bohemians to Sicilians. The team then divided the children into two groups—those born in the United States and those born in their parents’ homeland—and compared the cephalic indices of both to those of their parents. Boas found that environmental factors played a profound role in shaping the human body. The American-born children of round-headed eastern European Jews, for example, did not take after their parents. They developed long heads. And the American-born children of long-headed Italians developed shorter, rounder crania. Boas did not speculate on what specific conditions had brought about these impressive cranial changes, but he left little doubt about the significance of the study. “Not even those characteristics of a race which have been proved to be most permanent in their old home,” he concluded, “remain the same under our new surroundings.”4
The publication of Boas’s study in 1910 struck a heavy blow at scientific racism and biological determinism. It convinced leading anthropologists in the United States and Europe to abandon the cephalic index as a scientific indicator of race and to question the whole system of racial classification.5 But it did not dissuade Günther or other German racial experts from proceeding with their racial studies. And it certainly did not deter Beger from putting Sikkimese men and women through the dehumanizing experience of racial measurement.
AS BEGER CONTINUED to search for Sikkimese subjects, Schäfer hunted for a suitable pretext for entering Tibet. In August 1938, fate smiled on the team when a richly dressed official turned up at the German camp. Schäfer was away on a short hunting trip, so Beger beckoned the man over to his tent, hoping to win the visitor’s confidence sufficiently to measure him.6 He had encountered few members of the nobility—individuals whom, he believed, would most likely possess Nordic blood—and he hated the thought of letting any opportunity slip through his fingers. The expedition’s interpreter hastily intervened, however, staving off a major diplomatic blunder.7 The visitor, he whispered, was a high official of the Rajah Tering, a member of the Sikkimese royal family who was living in Tibet.
When Schäfer returned, Edmund Geer met him on the outskirts of the camp and informed him of their important guest. Schäfer was delighted. He hastened to arrange an appropriately regal reception area in his tent. He asked team members to place all their most impressive-looking scientific gear—altimeters, binoculars, and cameras—around the tent and ordered the servants to make hot tea and to set out biscuits and other delicacies on plates.8 When all was ready, he took his seat atop an inflated air mattress, hoping this would make him look taller and more imposing. Then he invited his noble guest to enter.
Schäfer’s careful management of the occasion succeeded wonderfully. The dazzled official returned to Rajah Tering with several muleloads of gifts—biscuits, chocolate, an eighty-pound bag of potatoes, tinned vegetables, soap that Schäfer and his team were secretly glad to be rid of “because it smells like civilization,” woollen socks, rubber boots, and a rubber mattress—as well as a letter from Schäfer expressing his fervent wish to visit Tibet and its legendary monasteries.9 These tokens of esteem and Schäfer’s clever diplomacy sparked months of intense behind-the-scenes talks and deliberations in both Sikkim and Tibet. In December, Schäfer received a letter from Lhasa. The Tibetan council of ministers—an august body accustomed to forbidding foreigners entry to Tibet—invited both him and his colleagues to their capital for a two-week stay.
It was hardly a welcome with open arms. But Schäfer read the letter with intense satisfaction. No German had ever stepped foot inside the holy city, and even the formidable Sven Hedin had been turned away. The young German zoologist had pulled off a major political coup, trumping British officials. Moreover, the journey to Lhasa, with swastika pennants flying boldly from their tents when they encamped, would make striking Nazi propaganda. In exchange for this rare favor, however, Tibet’s rulers had laid down one major condition. They forbid the team from killing any birds or mammals inside Tibet, for this “would deeply hurt the religious feelings of the Tibetan people, both clergy and lay.”10 The stipulation ruled out all zoological collecting, restricting the scope of Schäfer’s own work. But the expedition leader was determined to reach Tibet—he knew how keenly Himmler awaited racial studies in the mountain kingdom. So he grudgingly accepted the council’s demand.
The team returned to Gangtok to stock up on supplies, and in the midst of their reprovisioning they received a message from Himmler. As a reward for their accomplishment, he had promoted the entire team—Schäfer to the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer and his colleagues to SS-Ober-sturmführer.11 Cheered by this, the expedition set off for Lhasa. It was December 20, a bitter time of year to be climbing into the alpine zone and crossing a high Himalayan pass. The next evening, the team held a winter solstice celebration in fine SS style. They piled up wood and built a huge bonfire, and as they huddled about its warmth, they sang an old German military march, “Flame Rise,” that was a popular standard among SS men. The next morning, they tramped onward toward the icy mountain pass of Natu La at 14,600 feet, straining for breath in the thin air. At the summit, prayer flags fluttered in the breeze and the team stopped to gaze to their hearts’ content at a sight granted few Europeans: the snow-powdered highlands of Tibet.
DESCENDING INTO THE valley below, they passed heavily laden yak caravans and Tibetan wool merchants armed with antique-looking flintlocks and swords sheathed in silver and turquoise scabbards. Along the side of the road, tents of black yak hair revealed groups of Buddhist pilgrims—mothers nursing their infants and men drinking tea. As Beger passed them by, he stared at and sized up the curious faces. In the southern village of Phari, an important caravan stop, he was pleased to spy a high official with what he judged to be a noble warrior mien—the vestige, he concluded later, of some European blood.12 He hastened to take the man’s picture. At the other end of the social scale, he later noted, were beggars of almost indeterminate race. In Beger’s eyes, they seem to be walking billboards for the perils of miscegenation. They “are remarkable to me,” he noted, “especially because of their irregular and jarring racial-mixture type.”13
Whenever possible, Beger took a head or partial body cast of his subjects. He had learned a special technique employed by medical professors to make models of diseased human organs, stillborn babies, and on occasion, the faces of convicted criminals.14 Unlike conventional plaster casting, the technique employed a soft substance called Negocoll that could be heated and applied to the human face. When it set, Negocoll formed a rubberlike mask. A second liquid substance—either Hominit or Celerit—could then be poured into the mask to make a positive. The result looked eerily lifelike by the standards of the day, for as the inventor of the method noted in one of his books, “a beginner is able to make a flawless cast in around ten minutes … which shows the finest plastic details of the skin under a magnifying glass.”15
Such lifelike casts had become valuable commodities in academic circles in the Reich. In the mid-nineteenth century, three German brothers, Hermann, Adolph, and Robert Schlagintweit, had taken plaster casts of many people they encountered during their travels through India and Inner Asia. By the 1880s, copies of the complete Schlagintweit collection, which consisted of 275 heads, sold for 6,000 reichsmarks to museums and universities. Individual heads could be purchased for between 25 and 30 reichsmarks.16 Moreover, trade in such human replicas had become even more brisk after the Nazi seizure of power. Across the Reich, museum curators sought new and more lifelike casts of exotic Untermenschen to liven up otherwise dry museum exhibitions on Nazi racial doctrine.17 In addition, racial biologists purchased the casts as teaching aids to instruct students in the finer points of racial typing. Head casting had become a profitable line of business.
Beger tried to collect as many casts as possible. He had begun in Gangtok by bribing his personal servant, a Nepalese Sherpa, Passang, who was in poor health. Passang was clearly terrified at the prospect of being replicated, but he tried to keep his composure as Beger first oiled his face, then applied a thick sloplike paste. Before long, some of the paste dripped into one of Passang’s nostrils, making breathing difficult. Beger insisted that he remain still, however, allowing the cast to set, but the frightened man could not wait. He leapt out of the chair, clawing at the mask forming on his face “as if he was possessed by the devil.”18 Beger and several others tried pinning the unfortunate man to the ground, but by then he was panicstricken, flailing his arms wildly and uttering strange roaring sounds.
Beger looked on with growing alarm. “All of us were thinking that if he died, our expedition—which we had embarked upon with so much hope—would be as good as dead. So all of us, with the same thoughts, tried to help him.”19 The German scientists stood watch over Passang as he gradually revived. Later Schäfer threatened the porters who witnessed the scene. If they breathed a word of the incident to anyone outside the expedition, Schäfer would fire the informers on the spot. Despite the strain this created, Beger soon resumed making casts of porters and others he met on the team’s travels.
ON THE MORNING of January 19, 1939, Schäfer and his colleagues glimpsed with wonder the steep white and ochre walls of the Potala of Lhasa towering high in the air. Light glinted and gleamed from its golden roof pavilions, a mesmerizing sight. Like other travelers on the road, Schäfer and his team dismounted and “bowed in silence to the stronghold of Lamaism.”20 The Potala was the fabled home of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual and political head of Tibet. The thirteenth Dalai Lama had died six years earlier and Tibetan monks had only succeeded in locating his reincarnation in 1937, in a small village in northeastern Tibet. As a young boy, the new Dalai Lama could not play any part in governing the remote kingdom. Indeed, he had not even arrived yet in Lhasa. In his place a council of ministers and a powerful regent, Reting Rimpoche, ruled the country.
Schäfer had received word earlier that a celebration awaited their arrival in Lhasa. He was expecting a warm reception—an important Tibetan welcoming committee, traditional gifts of white silk scarves known as khatas, an invitation to inspect a Tibetan guard of honor, crowds of curious Tibetans, and accommodation in one of the larger mansions of Lhasa. But apart from a swarm of beggars that descended upon them as they reached the western gate of Lhasa, the Tibetans took little notice of their new guests. As Beger recalled later, “a simple official greeted us and showed us to our quarters.”21 This lodging consisted of a small, shabby, foul-smelling government house.
The paltry welcome did not bode at all well for the team’s success in Lhasa. Schäfer intended to ask for permission to film and photograph the people of Lhasa and to extend their stay, all of which would require careful diplomacy. So he hurried off to pay his respects to the Tibetan ministers, as well as to Tsarong Dzasa, an important member of the nobility who had once served as commander in chief of the Tibetan army. Schäfer, who had taken lessons in Tibetan manners from one of his interpreters, was gracious and charming and respectful and invariably arrived at these appointments bearing expensive gifts—HMV portable gramophones and records, Philips radio sets, Zeiss binoculars.
To further cultivate favor, Schäfer made frequent mention of what he called a common bond between the Himalayan nation and Germany: the swastika. For centuries, Tibetans had regarded the ancient symbol as a sign of good fortune and permanence. To capitalize on this, Schäfer had brought a supply of Nazi pennants with him and took pleasure in pointing out to his hosts how revered the symbol was in Nazi Germany.22 The Tibetans were delighted, little knowing that in Europe the swastika had come to symbolize the dark forces of German ultranationalism. Indeed, one influential Tibetan remarked innocently to the team that “it is the first time that the eastern and western swastika could meet under the banner of peace, on the neutral basis of cultural exchange and scholarly activities.”23
In an official report dispatched to Germany on January 23, just four days after the team’s arrival, Schäfer stressed the progress they had made in warming up Tibet’s ruling men. The Tibetan government was about to “let their secrets out” to the Germans and “show us life in the capital and in the huge monastery cities.”24 Moreover, the cabinet was prepared to allow the Germans to film Lhasa and its medieval setting and extend their stay much longer than the original fourteen days. “It is a wonderful feeling,” Schäfer concluded, “to know that the power of the German Reich is so great that it reaches into the most isolated parts of the Inner Asian continent.”25
So pleased were the Tibetan authorities with Schäfer’s gifts and good manners that they gave the team freedom to explore the exotic streets and temples of Lhasa. As Beger wandered each day past market stalls laden with dark, pungent bricks of dried tea, bales of fine silk and cheap printed cloth, heaps of scarlet chili peppers and fragrant nutmeg, and fine jewelry of amber and coral, he gaped at the exotic wares and the even more exotic press of humanity. There were shaven-headed monks wrapped in dark red robes; burly yak herders muffled in heavy sheepskin robes; delicate-looking high officials dressed in shimmering brocade chubas, with an elegant turquoise earring dangling from one ear. Beger wished in vain that he could bring out his calipers and spreading compasses.
When the team finally managed to gain an audience with Regent Reting Rimpoche, Beger stared at the young ruler’s face intently “for a long time.” He was particularly gratified to see that the frail, spindly young man had “an especially long thin head.”26 The object of this intense scrutiny, however, completely misunderstood the nature of the young German’s longing gaze. Reting Rimpoche smiled warmly at the anthropologist and later asked him to join his bodyguard, where the two could presumably get to know each other much better. Afterward, Beger noticed that one of the regent’s young male attendants seemed “to serve the inverted desires” of his master.27
The team was greatly restricted in the scientific work they could do in Lhasa, but they were resolved to make the best possible use of their time. Schäfer seems to have asked for samples of grains from Lhasa’s granaries to add to the collection he had already acquired from Sikkimese and Tibetan farmers en route.28 The German government was extremely keen to develop new forms of vegetable oils and increase the yield of its cereal crops. It hoped to become agriculturally self-sufficient. Tibet, with its highland fields, seemed a promising place to look for new, hardier, disease-resistant varieties of barley, wheat, and oats.29 So Schäfer was particularly pleased to discover what he later called Lhasa’s “sixty-day grain.”30 It could be harvested just two months after it was sown.
During the colorful New Year’s festival in Lhasa, Schäfer and Krause spent days filming the magnificent dances and parades, when crowds of onlookers turned out in their finest clothes. During the quieter periods, Beger set off to visit the most important monasteries in the region, some of which were the size of small cities. As the chief repositories of Tibetan learning, these huge institutions housed important libraries of rare Tibetan books. Beger carried with him a very long wish list.31 He wanted to collect stories from the ancient Tibetan epic, the Gesar; pictures and drawings of the Tibetan gods; copies of the Tibetan astrological tables and calendars; and detailed information on the old holy places of the ancient shamanistic religion of Tibet, known as the Bon, which predated Buddhism. He also wanted to obtain floor plans of each monastery and an exact record of all inscriptions carved on the monastic walls. Last but not least, he wanted to collect copies of the most valuable books—which consisted of loose sheets of paper protected between two separate wooden boards—and interview the scholars who knew them best. All these sources might yield clues to the presence of ancient Aryan lords in Tibet.
To obtain these things, Beger began cultivating the monks and other officials. He filled his notebooks with interesting remarks from their conversations, jotting down Tibetan lore about the swastika and quickly sketching details about the four castes of Tibet. The first caste, he noted approvingly, “hailed from the race of Gods—Second, from non-gods—Third, from the ruling races & Fourth, from subject race[s].”32 He also managed to collect a priceless copy of a 108-volume encyclopedia of Lamaism. As a rule, Tibetan monks were reluctant to part with such treasures. They had previously bestowed only three copies upon Europeans. All three, however, sat on the shelves of European libraries, gathering dust. Schäfer intended to see German scholars claim the distinction as the first translators.
After more than two months of visiting the great mansions of Lhasa and sipping yak-butter tea with high officials, Schäfer was growing restless. He felt it was time to push on. By much humoring and wooing of the regent and other key officials, he had wrangled permission to visit what many scholars called the birthplace of Tibetan civilization, the Yarlung Valley. It was a rare coup, one made all the sweeter by the knowledge that such consent had been denied to British officials. So Schäfer and his companions bid their good-byes to their hosts. After all the diplomacy, and the intrigue and undercurrents of tension in Lhasa, Schäfer felt relieved to be on the road again.
The caravan wound its way eastward across a patchwork of farms, toward the Yarlung Valley. It was a place Tibetans treasured. They believed that their first kings were divine beings who slid down from heaven on a sky cord, landing near Lhabab Ri, a mountain bordering the Yarlung Valley. When their reigns had ended, these kings climbed back up the dangling cord to the celestial realm. Eventually, however, an unlucky thing had happened: one of the monarchs accidentally severed his silken escape route while battling a court magician. After that, Tibet’s kings died as ordinary mortals did. Tibetans believed that their earliest kings ruled from a great stone fortress—known as Yumbulagang—in the valley. To Schäfer, it sounded like an ideal spot to search for traces of primeval Nordic overlords. He intended to be “the first white scholar to study the secret of Yarlung-Potrang, the ancient capital city of Tibet.”33
As the team crossed down into the Yarlung Valley, Schäfer reveled in the green peacefulness. He later described the region as “paradisial.”34 But the ruins of the ancient royal stronghold, Yumbulagang, perched upon a high mountainous spur, proved something of a disappointment. Neither Schäfer nor his colleagues could see much sign of a great palace, still less an ancient capital. All that remained were “mighty watchtowers, which are still to this day testimonies to the brave warriors and courageous soldiers who stood at the side of Tibet’s ancient kings.”35 The team pitched camp at the foot of the spur and spent two days carefully surveying and mapping these ruins. Then they turned back westward toward Shigatse, Tibet’s second largest city. Beger planned on purchasing traditional Tibetan rugs, teapots, tsampa bowls, and other goods in the markets there for the team’s ethnographic collection.
Relations between the team and British officials in the region steadily deteriorated, however, as the weeks passed. By the midsummer of 1939, family members and friends in Germany were urging them in letters to return home as soon as possible. In March, Hitler had sent armored columns into the old Czech heartland, occupying Prague and declaring the industrially rich provinces of Bohemia and Moravia a protectorate. Now Hitler’s eyes were trained greedily on Poland. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had vowed to defend Poland in the event of German military aggression, but no one knew if he would honor his word. Only one thing was clear. If Westminster did declare war, Schäfer and his companions would find themselves in a very difficult spot. British officials would almost certainly arrest them and clap them into an internment camp in India for the duration of the war.
The team had hatched half a dozen adventurous plans for their return trip, even considering at one point driving back from India to Berlin. But Schäfer loathed the thought of capture and imprisonment by the British. He informed the team it was time to wrap things up, and he contacted Himmler’s personal staff, who began making arrangements for the team to fly back to Germany. Meanwhile, he, Geer, and Krause carefully packed up the voluminous natural-history collections—animal and bird skins; butterflies, bees, ants, wasps, and other insect specimens; fragile dried plants for the herbarium; packets of seeds containing one thousand six hundred varieties of barley, seven hundred varieties of wheat, and seven hundred varieties of oats, not to mention hundreds of seeds from other potentially useful plants.36 They also arranged for sturdy crates to be built for the live animals they had captured or acquired for German zoos—three breeds of Tibetan dogs, rare feline species, wolves, badgers, and foxes.37
Beger saw to it that his valuable ethnographical collection of nomad tents and lama trumpets was safely stowed in trunks. During his Tibetan travels, he had photographed nearly 2,000 Tibetans, Bhutians, Sherpas, and Nepalis. He had measured 376 individuals and cast the heads and faces of 17, including 2 of the most powerful men in Tibet—Tsarong, a close friend of the thirteenth Dalai Lama and a former commander in chief of the Tibetan army, and Mondo, a Tibetan noble raised and educated in England.
It would take time to thoroughly analyze his measurements, but based on what he had seen, he thought it very likely that the Nordic race had changed the course of Asian history. The first colonists of Tibet seemed to have been ancient Mongolians who settled in the mountainous land after the last Ice Age ended. He believed, however, that racially mixed descendants of ancient Nordic invaders had swept into the Tibetan plateau more recently, giving rise ultimately to “the higher Tibetan classes.”38 The proof, as he saw it, lay in the supposed Nordic characteristics of Tibetan nobles—“tall stature paired with long head,” “narrow face,” “receding cheekbones,” “strongly protruding, straight or slightly bent noses,” “smooth hair,” and a “sense of themselves as dominant.”39
THE FIVE SCHOLARS boarded a British Indian Airways flight in Calcutta, and switched in Baghdad to a German flight. For the next leg of the trip, from Vienna to Munich, they traveled in Himmler’s own personal aircraft, the Otto Killenbeth. And both Himmler and his chief of staff, SS-Gruppenführer Karl Wolff, were on the runway in Munich when the plane touched down at 5:10 P.M. on August 4, 1939. Schäfer was flattered and delighted to see Himmler. It was sunny and warm—a splendid summer day in Bavaria—and the stocky zoologist beamed broadly as he walked side by side with Himmler down the tarmac toward the terminal. His colleagues followed respectfully a few paces behind. Together, the SS chief and the scientists had a cup of coffee in a private room in the terminal.
Schäfer likely explained that he carried with him an official letter from the Tibetan regent, Reting Rimpoche, for Hitler. In addition, the regent had given him three gifts to present to the German leader—a Tibetan mastiff, a gold coin, and the robe of a lama. Schäfer believed that the garment, which was carefully wrapped, had once belonged to the former Dalai Lama, and he hoped to meet with Hitler in person to deliver it.40 The SS leader listened to the zoologist’s account attentively, and together they proceeded to board the plane for a major press conference and official reception in Berlin.
The next morning, all across the country, Germans read sensational news of the expedition. As they sipped their steaming coffees in cafés and unfolded their newspapers on trains, their eyes lit on the headlines: “Hitler’s delegation in Tibet,” “The First Germans in Lhasa,” and “The First White Men in Yarlung-Potrang.” Himmler was delighted by the great splash of attention, particularly as it reached all the way to the Reich Chancellery. Hitler, it seems, had finally taken notice of one of his cherished projects. Soon after the Tibet team’s return, Schäfer received a rare mark of favor—an invitation to lecture on his Tibetan work to an audience of senior Nazis. Hitler himself would be in attendance.41