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Of Lamas and Nazis: The SS in Tibet--1938-39

[CP-List] Of Lamas and Nazis: The SS in Tibet--1938-39

Jeffrey St. Clair sitka@home.com

Mon, 19 Mar 2001 08:08:37 -0800

Hitler and the Himalayas

The SS Mission to Tibet 1938-39

ALEX McKAY

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.

On the nineteenth of January, 1939, 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 withthem 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 partlysuccessful. 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.

This was the age of European expansion, and numerous

theories provided ideological justification for imperialism

and colonialism. In Germany the idea of an Aryan or "master"race found resonance with rabid nationalism, the idea of the

German superman distilled from the philosophy of friedrich

http://www.counterpunch.org/pipermail/counterpunch-list/2001-March/007353.htmlhttp://www.counterpunch.org/pipermail/counterpunch-list/2001-March/007353.html

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Nietzsche, and Wagner's operatic celebrations 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.

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, theseideas 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.

Members of the German SS expedition. Inner circle, left to

right: Krause, Wienert, Beger, Geer, Schaefer. photo

courtesy Alex McKay

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

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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 theJesuits, 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 ThuleSociety 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 attache 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.

Here an SS anthropologist measures a Tibetan woman's head.

Some German scientists believed that Aryan features were

reflected in the dimensions of the skull. (C)Transmit Films

GMBH

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

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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 heperceived 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 asecond 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.

Posted by colin at August 7, 2003 08:38 AM