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 with them idealized and
unrealistic views of Tibet, projecting, as Orville Schell remarks in his book
Virtual Tibet, "a fabulous skein of fantasy around this distant,
unknown land." The projections of the Nazi expedition, however, did not
include the now familiar search for Shangri-La, the hidden land in which a
uniquely perfect and peaceful social system held a blueprint to counter the
transgressions that plague the rest of humankind. Rather, the perfection sought
by the Nazis was an idea of racial perfection that would justify their views on
world history and German supremacy.
What brings
about this odd juxtaposition of Tibetan lamas and SS officers on the eve of
World War II is a strange story of secret societies, occultism, racial
pseudo-science, and political intrigue. They were, in fact, on a diplomatic and
quasi-scientific mission to establish relations between Nazi Germany and Tibet
and to search for lost remnants of an imagined Aryan race hidden somewhere on
the Tibetan plateau. As such, they were a far-flung expression of Hitler's most
paranoid and bizarre theories on ethnicity and domination. And while the
Tibetans were completely unaware of Hitler's racist agenda, the 1939 mission to
Tibet remains a cautionary tale about how foreign ideas, symbols, and
terminology can be horribly misused. Some Nazi militarists imagined Tibet as a
potential base for attacking British India, and hoped that this mission would
lead to some form of alliance with the Tibetans. In that they were partly
successful. The mission was received by the Reting Regent (who had led Tibet
since the death of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama in 1933), and it did succeed in
persuading the Regent to correspond with Adolf Hitler. But the Germans were
also interested in Tibet for another reason. Nazi leaders such as Heinrich Himmler
believed that Tibet might harbor the last of the original Aryan tribes, the
legendary forefathers of the German race, whose leaders possessed supernatural
powers that the Nazis could use to conquer the world.
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 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, these ideas about Indo-Europeans and light-skinned Aryans were
transformed into a twisted myth of Nordic and later exclusively German racial
superiority. The German identification with the Indo-Europeans and Aryans of
the second millennium B.C.E. gave historical precedence to Germany's imperial
"place in the sun" and the idea that ethnic Germans were racially
entitled to conquest and mastery. It also aided in fomenting anti-Semitism and
xenophobia, as Jews, Gypsies, and other minorities did not share in the Aryan
German's perceived heritage as members of a dominant race. Ideas about an Aryan
or master race began to appear in the popular media in the late nineteenth
century. In the 1890s, E. B. Lytton, a Rosicrucian, wrote a best-selling novel
around the idea of a cosmic energy (particularly strong in the female sex),
which he called "Vril." Later he wrote of a Vril society, consisting
of a race of super-beings that would emerge from their underground hiding-places
to rule the world. His fantasies coincided with a great interest in the occult,
particularly among the upper classes, with numerous secret societies founded to
propagate these ideas. They ranged from those devoted to the Holy Grail to
those who followed the sex and drugs mysticism of Alastair Crowley, and many
seem to have had a vague affinity for Buddhist and Hindu beliefs.
General
Haushofer, a follower of Gurdjieff and later one of Hitler's main patrons,
founded one such society. Its aim was to explore the origins of the Aryan race,
and Haushofer named it the Vril Society, after Lytton's fictional creation. Its
members practiced meditation to awaken the powers of Vril, the feminine cosmic
energy. The Vril Society claimed to have links to Tibetan masters, apparently
drawing on the ideas of Madame Blavatsky, the Theosophist who claimed to be in
telepathic contact with spiritual masters in Tibet. In Germany, this blend of
ancient myths and nineteenth-century scientific theories began to evolve into a
belief that the Germans were the purest manifestation of the inherently
superior Aryan race, whose destiny was to rule the world. These ideas were
given scientific weight by ill-founded theories of eugenics and racist
ethnography. Around 1919, the Vril Society gave way to the Thule
Society (Thule Gesellschaft), which was founded in Munich by Baron Rudolf von
Sebottendorf, a follower of Blavatsky. The Thule Society drew on the traditions
of various orders such as the Jesuits, the Knights Templar, the Order of the
Golden Dawn, and the Sufis. It promoted the myth of Thule, a legendary island
in the frozen northlands that had been the home of a master race, the original
Aryans. As in the legend of Atlantis (with which it is sometimes identified),
the inhabitants of Thule were forced to flee from some catastrophe that
destroyed their world. But the survivors had retained their magical powers and
were hidden from the world, perhaps in secret tunnels in Tibet, where they
might be contacted and subsequently bestow their powers on their Aryan
descendants.
Such ideas
might have remained harmless, but the Thule Society added a strong right-wing,
anti-Semitic political ideology to the Vril Society mythology. They formed an
active opposition to the local Socialist government in Munich and engaged in
street battles and political assassinations. As their symbol, along with the
dagger and the oak leaves, they adopted the swastika, which had been used by
earlier German neo-pagan groups. The appeal of the swastika symbol to the Thule
Society seems to have been largely in its dramatic strength rather than its
cultural or mystical significance. They believed it was an original Aryan
symbol, although it was actually used by numerous unconnected cultures
throughout history. Beyond the adoption of the swastika, it is difficult to
judge the extent to which either Tibet or Buddhism played a part in Thule
Society ideology Vril Society founder General Haushofer, who remained active in
the Thule Society, had been a German military 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.
The importance
of the Thule Society can be seen from the fact that its members included Nazi
leaders Rudolf Hess (Hitler's deputy), Heinrich Himmler, and almost certainly
Hitler himself. But while Hitler was at least nominally a Catholic, Himmler
enthusiastically embraced the aims and beliefs of the Thule Society. He adopted
a range of neo-pagan ideas and believed himself to be a reincarnation of a
tenth-century Germanic king. Himmler seems to have been strongly attracted to
the possibility that Tibet might prove to be the refuge of the original Aryans
and their superhuman powers. By the time Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in the 1920s,
the myth of the Aryan race was fully developed. In Chapter XI, "Race and
People," he expressed concern over what he perceived as the mixing of pure
Aryan blood with that of inferior peoples. In his view, the pure Aryan Germanic
races had been corrupted by prolonged contact with Jewish people. He lamented
that northern Europe had been "Judaized" and that the German's
originally pure blood had been tainted by prolonged contact with Jewish people,
who, he claimed, lie "in wait for hours on end, satanically glaring at and
spying on the unsuspicious girl whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood
and removing her from the bosom of her people." For Hitler, the only
solution to this mingling of Aryan and Jewish blood was for the tainted Germans
to find the wellsprings of Aryan blood. It may happen that in the course of
history such a people will come into contact a second time, and even oftener,
with the original founders of their culture and may not even remember that
distant association. A new cultural wave flows in and lasts until the blood of
its standard-bearers becomes once again adulterated by intermixture with the
originally conquered race. In the search for "contact a second
time" with the Aryans, Tibet-long isolated, mysterious, and remote-seemed
a likely candidate.
