BOOK: Christopher Hale, "Himmler's Crusade"

Christopher Hale: Himmler's Crusade: The true story of the 1938 Nazi expedition into Tibet. London: Bantam Books, 2003, 2004. 0553814451. 592 pp.

I don't usually read the same book more than once — how could I justify doing that when there's so many unread books waiting on my shelves :] — but I decided to make an exception for this book. I bought it in 2004, relatively soon after it was published, and I remember that I read it in something like three or four days, which means that I must have enjoyed it a lot; but I found that I remembered almost nothing about its contents, and there was no blog post for me to refer to since this was before I started my blog. But as I still find the subject matter fascinating, I figured it wouldn't be a bad idea to read it a second time and write a post about it.

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The ‘crusade’ part of the title is clickbait — the book is actually about the German Tibet expedition of 1938–39 — but the ‘Himmler’ part is honest, as he really did support the expedition and took a keen interest in it. But the book takes a broad view of its subject, and the expedition itself occupies only slightly more than half the book, while the rest provides a generous amount of background and context and biographical information about some of the protagonists' lives before and after the expedition. On the one hand, this was all quite interesting to read and was written in a very engaging way; on the other hand I couldn't help wishing, occasionally, that there had been a little less of this extra material. But it would be ungenerous to complain about that, especially on a second reading. For example, the introductory chapter traces the history of the crackpot ideas that inspired Himmler's support of the expedition, and I couldn't help wondering if we really need to hear quite so much about the life of Madame Blavatsky, but it wouldn't have occurred to me to wonder that if I had been reading about this for the first time, and if I hadn't read two or three other books about the same subject before (e.g. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's Occult Roots of Nazism and Black Sun, though I sadly didn't get around to writing blog posts about them).

But the main protagonist of the book, reasonably enough, is not Himmler but the leader of the expedition, Ernst Schäfer. In principle he was a zoologist, but he was at least as much a hunter and adventurer as he was a scientist (pp. 98–9). He had been to Tibet twice before, in the early 1930s, in expeditions led by Brooke Dolan, a rich and hard-drinking American who was just as keen a hunter as Schäfer, and the main purpose of his expeditions seems to have been collecting animal specimens (notably including a giant panda, p. 93) for American museums. The second expedition was additionally motivated by Dolan's having to leave America until the dust settled on some of his drunken antics there (p. 104). They approached Tibet from the Chinese side, but large parts of China were in a state resembling civil war, the expedition's progress was blocked by an uncooperative governor, Dolan eventually abandoned his companions and the whole thing ended in acrimony (pp. 116–20). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Schäfer was determined that next time he came to Tibet, it would be with a purely German expedition and with himself firmly in charge.

He joined the SS in 1933, like a number of young German intellectuals at that time (p. 100–1); it was something of a Faustian bargain: they got the opportunity to advance faster in their academic careers, get better support and funding for their research, but then they also got to be war criminals and participants in genocide.

Himmler was fond of all sorts of crackpot theories and in exchange for his support, Schäfer's new expedition would have to pay some attention to them: carry out anthropometric investigations on the Tibetans to see if the Aryan master race had perhaps originated there, or migrated there at some point; look for extra hardy strains of cereals that could help German agriculture during the upcoming war; and even look for evidence of Hanns Hörbiger's crazy World Ice Theory (pp. 181–2, 194).* Nevertheless Schäfer managed to resist some of Himmler's pressures and at least ended up staffing his expedition with more or less bona fide scientists; besides him there was an anthropologist, an entomologist and a geophysicist, SS officers all (p. 188).

[*See also p. 406 for some surprising indirect evidence that Schäfer himself may have taken that theory seriously...]

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The new expedition was planning to enter Tibet from the south, from British India (I guess because China was in a full-blown war with Japan by then). On the one hand, neither the British nor the Tibetans were at all keen to allow any foreigners to enter Tibet (p. 219); on the other hand, the British didn't want to rebuff the German expedition too bluntly while their policy of appeasement was still in effect (pp. 227, 232). Schäfer et al. spent some time exploring Sikkim and then, by a stroke of good luck, got the Tering Raja, a member of the Sikkimese royal family now living in Tibet, to put in a good word for them with the Tibetan government, who then officially allowed Schäfer's expedition to visit Lhasa for two weeks, as long as they did no hunting and no scientific research (pp. 291–2). In practice they still did a good deal of both, but had to be a bit more discreet about it (pp. 306–7, 313, e.g. hunting with a sort of rubber “catapult”).

Once in Lhasa, Schäfer proved quite successful at lobbying the Tibetans (and the expedition anthropologist, Bruno Beger, gained a lot of goodwill by providing free medical treatment; p. 384) and, despite the efforts of the local British representatives, the expedition was allowed to stay in Tibet for another two months (which, among other things, gave them the rare opportunity to film the Tibetan new year celebrations; pp. 389–90). The Regent of Tibet even asked if he could buy some guns from Germany (p. 400)!

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The expedition returned to Germany in August 1939 (p. 426) — if they had waited one month longer, they would have been interned by the British upon the outbreak of war. Schäfer subsequently toyed with the idea of yet another Tibet expedition, this time with the goal of inducing the Tibetans to start a guerilla campaign against British India (p. 444). This hare-brained scheme was, fortunately, abandoned, partly because Hitler was none too keen to dismantle the British Empire (p. 449) and partly because the scheme relied on Soviet help, so it was impossible after Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Later there were also plans for a very large and ambitious expedition to the Caucasus, which came to nothing because Germany was by then already retreating from the east (p. 477).

Schäfer joined the Ahnenerbe (the SS research organization) and became the head of its Institute for Central Asian Research; other members of the Tibet expedition joined him there. He tried to make the institute more independent (and even renamed it after Sven Hedin), but with limited success. At one point he and Ernst Krause, who had been the cameraman of the Tibet expedition, were asked to help record certain medical experiments at Dachau, but upon learning of their murderous nature, Schäfer managed to get them both out of the assignment (p. 472). Thus one gets the impression that insofar as Schäfer was complicit in the war crimes of the SS, it was not by having done anything heinous himself, but by having known that heinous things were being done by others and yet not resigning from the organization (pp. 455, 471). At the end of the war, his institute was ransacked and its collections scattered; Schäfer spent a few years in POW camps and was eventually cleared by a denazification tribunal without too much trouble (p. 482).

By contrast, his colleague Bruno Beger, the anthropologist of the Tibet expedition, was more complicit than that. At Himmler's suggestion, he began planning a study of fat-bottomed Jewish women to see if there is a connection between Jews and Hottentots; fortunately this bizarre study did not seem to proceed any further, but it shows what sort of crazy theories Himmler had the Ahnenerbe people investigate (pp. 488–9). Rather more serious is Beger's involvement in the collection of specimens for a certain Dr. August Hirt of the anatomy department at the Strasbourg University. Together with another colleague Beger went to Auschwitz, selected 115 prisoners of various races and ethnicities, and carried out anthropometric measurements on them (pp. 513–15); later their corpses, preserved in alcohol, were delivered to Strasbourg (p. 517). Beger was eventually put on trial for his involvement, in 1971, found guilty of being an “accomplice to murder”, but sentenced only to time served (pp. 493, 527). An interesting question here, I guess, is whether (some of) those particular prisoners would have survived if Beger had not selected them; this being Auschwitz, it is unlikely, but not quite impossible.

The book ends with an interesting chapter recounting Hale's meetings with people who still remembered Schäfer's expedition when he was doing research for this book in 2002. Schäfer had died in 1992, but Beger was still alive. Of the native attendants employed by the expedition, Hale found one still alive in Sikkim, and talked to the son of another, as well as to an old man who remembered seeing the expedition as a child (pp. 532–4). It's lucky that he wrote the book when he did; by now, almost twenty years later, they are probably all dead.

Errors galore!

So, as I said before, this was a very pleasant and readable book, if perhaps a tiny bit longer than I would have liked; but I do have one complaint about it: I don't remember the last time I found so many errors in a book. They are mostly minor ones, to be sure, and yet you can't help wondering — if they were so sloppy and careless about these, how much can you trust them on bigger things that you can't easily verify by yourself? Anyway, here are the ones I've noticed:

• “a nomadic Tibetan people called the Kalmyck” (p. 53) — but surely the Kalmyks are a Mongol people, not a Tibetan people;
• Erich von Däniken is twice described as an “Austrian hotelier” (pp. 66, 538), but he is Swiss, not Austrian;
• the Teutoburg(er) Forest is twice misspelt as “Teutoberger” (p. 125);
• “Signora Ciana, the wife of the Italian foreign minister” (p. 137), but he was Ciano and I don't think Italian women use special female forms of surnames the way e.g. Russians do;
• “Himmler's Freundes” (p. 138, referring to a group of industrialists who supported Himmler), but surely it makes no sense to put two plural suffixes on the same word, first the German -e and then the English -s;
• “After receiving his Doktorarbeit” (p. 150); this word means the dissertation, but from the context it's clear that what Hale means is the degree that one gets after writing and defending the dissertation;
• “play a leading roll” (p. 162);
• “Günther's Die Nordische Rasse bei den Indogermanene Aliens” (p. 167) — this should obviously be Indogermanen Asiens, but the intriguing question is how such an error could even happen; was it OCR gone wrong?
• “letze” (p. 184) should be “letzte”;
• “Braunau am In” (p. 226) should be “Inn”;
• Czechoslovakia is described as having a “restless mixture of Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Ruthenians and, in the Sudetenland, Germans” (p. 231); how could he forget the Slovaks? o.O
• “hair lip” (p. 246) — intriguing, but wrong;
• “He bagged argali (wolves)” (p. 265); argali are actually sheep, so we might be dealing with a rare case of sheep in wolf's clothing :)
• Odilo Globocnik is described as “an Austrian Croat” (p. 454); I am of course perfectly happy to foist that horrible man on the Croats, but alas, everything I've ever heard about him explains his surname as a result of Slovenian, not Croatian, ancestry;
• Sigmund Rascher was “hanged on the gallows at Dachau [. . .] in 1944” (p. 474); but the wikipedia says that he was only arrested in 1944, kept in various camps, and then shot at Dachau shortly before liberation in 1945;
• “Vorontersuchung” (p. 493) should be “Voruntersuchung”;
• “Wehrissenschaftliche” (p. 499) should be “Wehrwissenschaftliche”;
• “Goodrick-Clark” (p. 540) should be “Goodrick-Clarke”;
• “Erlebnisse diplomatischen Geheimagenten” (p. 562) is missing an eines;
• “Euphorian” (p. 563), the publisher of Hedin's German Diary, should actually be “Euphorion”.

One thing that is not necessarily an error, but that did strike me as odd: at one point, Hale mentions in passing that “Rock, like Hedin, was homosexual” (p. 419). I don't really know anything about Joseph Rock, but I've read enough about Hedin that I would expect to have heard about his homosexuality somewhere else as well if it were true. There seems to be quite enough evidence that he was attracted to women; see e.g. Wolfram Dirks' psychological study of Hedin, Sven Hedin — ein Mensch im Widerspruch, p. 155. I wonder what Hale's source for his assertion is; but this is one of the main downsides of the book — it is very sparse in quoting sources. There is less than one endnote per page, and often you can go several paragraphs without knowing what source exactly supports them.

ToRead:

• Schäfer wrote several interesting-sounding books about his expeditions, which makes me regret that my German is so rusty: Berge, Buddhas und Bären (Mountains, Buddhas, and Bears, 1933) about his first expedition, and Dach der Erde (Roof of the World, 1938) and Unbekanntes Tibet (Unknown Tibet, 1938) about the second (p. 177).

• Wilhelm Filchner: Sturm über Asien: Erlebnisse eines diplomatischen Geheimagenten (Storm over Asia, 1924). A memoir by this scientist, explorer and “also a spy” (p. 75); he “produced a racy account of the Younghusband mission in Storm over Asia” (p. 303).

One of Filchner's later books did appear in English: A Scientist in Tartary: from the Hoang-ho to the Indus (1939).

• Edmund Kiss wrote several volumes of “turgid fiction about Atlantis”: Frühling in Atlantis (Spring in Atlantis, 1931); Die letzte Königin von Atlantis (The Last Queen of Atlantis, 1931); Die Singschwäne aus Thule (The Singing Swans from Thule, 1939); all mentioned here on p. 184. Himmler invited Kiss to join the Ahnenerbe and tried to have him included in Schäfer's expedition, but Schäfer successfully resisted this.

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's Black Sun includes brief summaries of all three novels, as well as of what seems to be a prequel, Das gläserne Meer (1930). He uses the spelling “Kiß”, which, judging by some googling, is also how it appeared on the title pages of the books themselves.

• Peter Hopkirk wrote several extremely interesting-sounding books about the exploration of Central Asia and related topics (pp. 563–4): Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Cities and Treasures of Chinese Central Asia (1980); Trespassers on the Roof of the World: The Race for Lhasa (1982); The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (1990); On Secret Service East of Constantinople: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire (1994). The last of these is mentioned here on p. 443 with reference to the attempt by Wilhelm Waßmuß, shortly before the WW1, to instigate an anti-British uprising in Persia; which makes him a sort of German counterpart to Lawrence of Arabia.

• A few years after the present book, Hale also wrote Hitler's Foreign Executioners (2011), about the non-German Waffen SS units. Strangely, it doesn't seem to have appeared in paperback (only hardcover and kindle).

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Unrelated but funny: a “miniature tableland” named the “Lingma Thang” is mentioned on p. 309. The ligma jokes practically write themselves :)