Hitler and the Himalayas: The SS Mission to Tibet 1938-39
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. By Alex McKay
Members of the German SS expedition crossed the Tibet border in December of 1938 and arrived in Lhasa approximately one month later. In this photograph, members of the expedition gather at a makeshift camp during the journey. Inner circle, from left to right: Krause, Wienert, Beger, Geer, Schaefer.
n 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.
Ernst Schaefer, leader of the 1939 expedition. When the expedition began Schaefer’s wife had been dead just six weeks. Schaefer, an expert marksman, claimed that he had shot her accidentally while hunting wild boar. Courtesy of Alex McKay
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 Frederick 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.
(Top) A German map of Tibet shows the route that the 1939 German expedition to Tibet followed between Sikkim and Lhasa. the British authorities in India, bowing to diplomatic pressure, did not prevent the expedition from crossing the border into Tibet. (Bottom): Bruno Beger, the expdition’s anthropologist, hoped to find evidence of Aryan blood in the Tibetan people. here a member of the expedition measures a Tibetan woman’s head. Some German scientists believed that Aryan features were reflected in the dimensions of the skull. © Transit Films GMBH
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 attaché 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.
The leader of the German mission was Dr. Ernst Schaefer, a respected zoologist and botanist. He was accompanied by Dr. Bruno Beger, an anthropologist and ethnologist, Dr. Karl Wienert, a geophysicist, Edmund Geer, a taxidermist, and Ernst Krause, a photographer who at fifty was the eldest member of the group by more than a decade.
Ernst Schaefer was energetic, emotional, and ambitious. Born in 1910, he made his first journey to Tibet when he traveled on two scientific expeditions in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands in 1930-31 and 1934-36. On the first expedition, an American scientist, Brooke Dolan, accompanied Schaefer. Dolan was also to travel to Lhasa. In 1943, he accompanied Captain Ilya Tolstoy (the grandson of the Russian novelist) on a mission for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. We might suspect the Americans of keeping an eye on the German mission even in those early years, but no evidence of any intelligence involvement in those expeditions has yet emerged.
During the 1930s German scholars studied the material gathered on Schaefer’s early expeditions. This included Tibetan texts from both the Buddhist religion and that of the Bon faith (which in some form predates Buddhism in Tibet). The Nazis naturally had a particular interest in the Bonpo, in the hope that the elder beliefs preserved elements of ancient Aryan religion. But an understanding of the complex nature of Bon and its links to Buddhism lay far in the future and, while they must have hoped to uncover secrets within these texts, their studies of Bon proved of little benefit to the Nazis.
The ambitious Schaefer had developed a network of contacts during the 1930s. He had met the Panchen Lama on his Tibetan travels, and was in contact with most of the great explorers of Tibet and Central Asia. But Schaefer’s membership in the SS brought him his most important connection. His first Tibetan expedition attracted the attention of Heinrich Himmler, who became Schaefer’s patron. Himmler introduced him to SS leaders and to membership in the SS-Ahnenerbe, the Heritage of the SS Forefathers’ Society, which adopted many of its ideas from the Thule Society.
The SS-Ahnenerbe was involved in the mapping of different racial groups. Its members believed that they could classify races into two types: those with Aryan elements in their blood, and those without any Aryan heritage. The latter were to be eliminated. These ideas were the impetus behind both the Holocaust and the Schaefer mission to Lhasa in 1938-39. While the SS-Ahnenerbe society itself faded in prominence, Himmler supported its ideals, and he contributed funds when Schaefer proposed the Lhasa mission.
Schaefer’s interest in Tibet was academic, and it is doubtful that he really shared Himmler’s belief in the ideas of either the Thule Society or the SS-Ahnenerbe. Indeed, he told one British official in India, “I need the sympathy of highest officials in my country to raise funds and to get the money out for future exploration work.” But Schaefer was clearly willing to go along with the Nazi agenda in order to achieve his own ambitions, and he was a member of both the Nazi party and the SS. Included in the expedition, moreover, was at least one ardent proponent of Nazi racial ideology.
Bruno Beger believed that if a race had any Aryan heritage, then evidence could be found in the physical features of the race’s upper classes. Even before Schaefer’s mission was announced, Beger had proposed an expedition to map the characteristics of the peoples of eastern Tibet to ascertain whether they were originally Aryans. But Beger was no mere theorist. During the 1940s his research into the physical characteristics of Central Asian peoples was carried out using concentration camp victims, reportedly placed at his disposal on the orders of Gestapo chief Adolf Eichmann.
The Schaefer mission left Germany in April 1938. The fact that Schaefer himself had accidentally shot and killed his wife while hunting wild boar just six weeks earlier was not seen as reason to delay. The mission received considerable publicity, and the British governments in both London and Delhi were immediately worried about the German aims. The British ambassador in Berlin reported German newspapers as saying, “This large-scale expedition is under the patronage of Reich SS leader Himmler and will be carried out entirely on SS principles.”
Permission for the expedition to travel through British-held India to Lhasa was initially refused. At that time the British imperial Government of India cooperated with the Tibetan government in restricting the number of visitors to Tibet from India. However, the British were also following a policy of “appeasement” toward Hitler’s Germany in the hope of avoiding a major conflict in Europe. Therefore the imperial government bowed to pressure from London, and the British representative in Sikkim was told that it was “politically desirable to do anything possible to avoid any impression that we have put obstacles in Schaefer’s way.” A loophole was found to allow the expedition to continue. Diplomatic pressure kept the British from significantly interfering with the remainder of Schaefer’s mission.
One major problem the Schaefer mission encountered was its leader’s mental state, which had apparently been affected by his wife’s death. Schaefer seemed to transfer his attentions onto one of his Sikkimese servants, a young man referred to in the files as “Kaiser.” The British representative in Sikkim, noting that “Schaefer’s habit with his employees is to pay them well and beat them often,” concluded, “We are all inclined to think that the gentle Kaiser has some sort of special appeal for the dominant Schaefer.” When the German applied to take Kaiser back to Germany with him, permission was quickly refused, as the British feared that Kaiser would become a Nazi sympathizer. Upon reaching Lhasa, the Schaefer mission must have found influential friends in the Tibetan government, for they were able to extend their stay in Lhasa for several months. The British representative in Lhasa, Hugh Richardson, reported that Schaefer and his companions “created an unfavorable impression in Lhasa and by contrast heightened our prestige.” He reported that the Germans were stoned by monks at a festival when they used their camera too blatantly and that they had made themselves unpopular by acting against Buddhist principles in killing local wildlife and ill-treating servants.
Despite this, Schaefer was received by the Reting Regent, the virtual ruler of Tibet during the Dalai Lama’s minority. The Regent was persuaded to write to Adolf Hitler. In his letter, the Regent acknowledged German efforts to create a lasting empire of peace based on racial grounds. He assured Hitler that Tibet shared that aim, and agreed that there were no obstacles to peaceful relations between the two states. So if Schaefer’s mission was a diplomatic one, it was a reasonable success in terms of establishing high-level contacts with Tibet. But, of course, the Tibetans had no real concept of the actual strategies involved in the Nazis’ racial policies.
What the Schaefer mission did not find was any support for the wilder ideas of the Thule Society. The mission did not encounter any mystic masters, find any long-lost Aryan brothers, or obtain any secret powers with which to save Hitler’s Third Reich from ultimate defeat. Indeed, it is doubtful that Schaefer devoted much attention to searching for them. His party did not include any experts on Tibetan religion and must have realized that if the Tibetans had possessed any special powers that might be employed in world conquest, they would already have used them to protect themselves from the Younghusband mission that had marched to Lhasa in 1903-4.
The Schaefer mission finally left Lhasa in May 1939. Returning via Sikkim and India, they arrived back in Germany in August of that year. Within weeks, World War II had begun, and although other missions to Tibet were proposed in wartime Germany, none of them were able to proceed. The Nazis’ direct links with Tibet were thus ended. Schaefer and his colleagues had returned to Germany with more than 2,000 biological and ethnographic specimens, 40,000 photographs, and 55,000 feet of movie film. During the war years they worked on this material, some of which was lost to Allied bombing. Schaefer published several books, which included probably the first full-color photographs of Tibet to be published. A commercial film was also produced and still survives. It includes a brief but chilling segment in which Beger can be seen measuring the skulls of Tibetan peasants. He may have been searching for heads that were “dolichecephalic” (long-headed), a sure sign of Nordic blood according to some Nazi theorists.
In 1942, Himmler ordered an increase in research into Central Asia, aimed toward helping the war effort. Sven Hedin, the great Swedish explorer of Central Asia and a Nazi sympathizer, agreed to lend his name to an institute in Munich where Schaefer, Beger, and others carried out their research. Part of the role of the Hedin Institute was also to offer the German people some escape from the war. Mythical and colorful aspects of Tibet were publicized, often with the implication that Tibet would provide Germany’s salvation. But while Schaefer played a major part in the establishment of the Hedin Institute, the extent to which he believed in the cause remains difficult to ascertain. Many of his statements seem to be little more than necessary rhetoric. Beger, however, who was later to be imprisoned for war crimes at the Nuremberg trials, remained a keen proponent of Nazi ideology.
Although all five members of the mission survived the war and lived on into the 1980s, the only books about their journey were published in German and are long out of print. Within nine months of their reaching Lhasa, Germany had invaded Poland and plunged Europe into World War II, and the expedition was almost forgotten.
In the mid-1990s, when the Dalai Lama hosted a reunion of Europeans who had traveled in pre-Communist Tibet, Beger, the last survivor of the mission, was among those who attended the gathering. When details of his enthusiastic Nazi past emerged, it proved a considerable embarrassment for the Tibetan government-in-exile.
The Nazis’ dreams about Tibet derived directly from the ideas of the Vril and Thule societies, which had constructed an image of Tibet based on fantasies of the type made famous by Madame Blavatsky, Lobsang Rampa, and other mythologizers of Shangri-La. Tibetan Buddhism appealed to the Nazis only inasmuch as its esoteric aspects offered them the promise of acquiring worldly power, just as the Japanese militarists were attracted to aspects of Zen Buddhism that could serve their interests. While their attempts to pervert the dharma ultimately failed, many of their ideas are still alive today. With the spread of Buddhism in the West and the dawn of the information age, however, the ability of hate groups to distort Buddhist symbols and ideas for their own purposes can hopefully become diminished.
Nazis of Tibet: A Twentieth Century Myth
Isrun Engelhardt
Abstract
In this paper I have two aims: first, to describe the long, multilayered and complex process that finally generated an alleged Nazi-Tibetan connection; second, to lay to rest the oft-repeated claim that the Ernst Schäfer Tibet expedition of 1938–39 had some occult purpose.
To accomplish this, I outline the development of the occult perception of Tibet and the occult myth of Nazism, and then describe the history of the expedition. Since this expedition forms the core of any discussion involving the links between National Socialism and Tibet, I next describe how the myth of occult elements in the Schäfer expedition was subsequently created from a variety of often unrelated elements to eventually become an object exploited by the authors of speculative historiography. After seeking to separate the fact and fiction as they appear in the most influential works of this genre, I propose an explanation for this kind of occult historiography based on the concept of conspiracy myths. The essay concludes by demonstrating how the
prevailing and persistent occult perception of this mission has retained far-reaching consequences to the present day, with the result that the Tibetans and the Dalai Lama are either subsumed by the right wing and neo-Nazis, or demonized by the Left as agents of a Tibeto-Buddhist global conspiracy. Our brains grew accustomed to connecting, connecting everything with everything else. “The refuge: It’s Tibet.” “Why Tibet?” “The refuge is Agartha. You gentlemen must have heard talk of Agartha, seat of the King of the World, the underground city from which the masters of the World control and direct the developments of human history. You must be aware of the connection between the realm of Agartha and the Synarchy.” “… but anti-German documents circulated that prove synarchy [[[Wikipedia:rule|rule]] by secret societies] was a Nazi plot: Hitler was a Rosicrucian influenced by the Masons.” “When did we ever invent anything? We’ve always started with objective data, with information in the public domain.”¹Umberto Eco, “Foucault’s Pendulum”
Table of Contents
• Introduction
• The Invention of “Unknown Superiors” and “Hidden Masters” in Tibet
• Creation of Western Myths of Shambhala and Agarthi as Subterranean Theocracies
• Construction of the Mythology of the Nazis and the Occult
• The Legends of “Vril” and the Thule Society linking Nazism with Tibet
• Facts about the Schäfer Expedition
• Myths and Fictions about the Schäfer Expedition
• An Attempt at Explanation, based on Considerations of Conspiracy Theories
• Ironic Paradox: Nazi Construction of Tibetan World Conspiracy
• Neo-Nazi Constructions of a Nazi-Tibet Connection
• Recent Constructions of a Tibetan World Conspiracy Myth
• Notes
Introduction
In July 2000, a large poster in shades of red and brown caught my eye, announcing a nationwide conference entitled “Irrationalism—Esotericism—Anti-Semitism” to be held at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich. At the upper right corner of the poster was a picture of the Dalai Lama, surrounded by pictures of authors with right-wing and esoteric tendencies, and at the lower left—opposite the Dalai Lama—was a picture of Hitler.² Since that time, I have endeavored to trace how a connection could be construed between the Dalai Lama and Hitler.³
Searching the Internet for explanations of this confusing, and indeed shocking, association by entering the words “Tibet” and “Nazi” in the Google search engine, one is rapidly confronted with both the immediacy and the frisson associated with this topic in the electronic age; a search for these terms returns around a hundred thousand entries, with a further twenty thousand for “Nazi-Tibet connection,” most of them involving a “creative” reshaping of history.
Occult- or crypto-historians, those who are writing such speculative history, skillfully blur the borders between fiction and fact, illusion and reality. They document a speculative and crypto-history of occult forces and powers that invisibly govern or control history—facts that have hitherto remained hidden to serious historians, including the fact that the homeland of these powers, including the masters who direct the pattern of world affairs, is often identified as Tibet.
But what is the point of occupying oneself with this spurious historiography? Up to now, the genre has been largely ignored by serious historians. However, the danger of such lack of concern has been pointed out by John Roberts, who has argued that the power of this literature should not be underestimated: “Because the historian passed by, the charlatan, the axe-grinder and the paranoiac long had the field to themselves. In due course, the assertions of terrifying conspiracy and demoniacal subversions which they produced made historians even less inclined to take the subject seriously.”⁴ But historians must respond to simplified interpretations of history and attempt to uncover and correct popular myths, since simplifications and dramatizations of history continue to be a theme with relevance today and can spread like wildfire, particularly in the medium of the Internet. The theoretical inferiority of these ideas and publications, from an academic point of view, must not be permitted to obscure or belie their attraction, and their potential danger.⁵
The growth of the mythology of the occult inspiration of the Nazis and its dependence in part on a distorted view of an “occult” Tibet provides an instructive example of the way such patterns of thought can influence judgments far beyond the absolute scope of the matters at hand, and occult Tibet provided an ideal setting for the emergence of European conspiracy myths.
The Invention of “Unknown Superiors” and “Hidden Masters” in Tibet
Views of Tibet as the occult land par excellence were not derived from any actual experience of the land and its people. Remarkably, the “occultization” of Tibet was not set in motion by those who had actually been there; instead, it was attributed to sources who never set foot in that country and who may not even have existed.
One group seen as possible world-controlling hidden masters was the mysterious secret society of the Rosicrucians. As early as 1618, Heinrich Neuhaus, in his critique of the Rosicrucians, allegedly commented that one would seek them in vain in Germany since they had emigrated to India shortly after the society’s foundation and were living in the high plains of Tibet. This statement has been repeated by a number of scholars, but without a scrap of
evidence.⁶ I have been unable to find any mention of Tibet by Neuhaus, even after repeated readings of his book. He merely writes that the Rosicrucians could not be seen because their whereabouts were unknown.⁷ However, the mere inference of a retreat to Tibet by the Rosicrucians is interesting in itself. In 1710 Samuel Richter, writing under the pseudonym of Renatus Sincerus, did write that the Rosicrucians were no longer in Europe since they had retreated to India to live in peace more easily.⁸ (From 1782 an offshoot of the Rosicrucians was formed that even took the name “Asiatic Brethren.”) Their destination was probably later shifted to Tibet since India was apparently not mysterious enough.⁹
When Gottlieb Baron von Hund founded the Masonry of the Strict Observance in the middle of the eighteenth century, he doubtless had in mind the Rosicrucians of the early seventeenth century.¹⁰Its founder claimed to derive his knowledge and authority from “Unknown Superiors,” who at the proper time and in the proper place would make themselves known and to whom implicit obedience was due.¹¹
The myth of the imaginary retreat of the Rosicrucians and the “Unknown Superiors” certainly influenced the conception of the “Hidden Masters”¹² propounded by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), the Russian founder of modern Theosophy. Her chief source of inspiration was her great-grandfather, Prince Pavel Dolgurukii, a member of the Strict Observance lodge.¹³ Thus eventually “the Russian Rosicrucianism’s legend of a worldwide network of Masters and a secret link with Tibet was a profound influence on HPB’s development.”¹⁴ Late in the summer of 1875, shortly before founding the Theosophical Society, she noted in her first notebook that she had received the order “to form a society—a secret society like the Rosicrucian Lodge.”¹⁵ She made the preposterous claim that she had spent seven years in Tibet, working with her mysterious hidden masters, who lived there but were not Tibetans. Tibet was their refuge from civilization.
In 1906 an anonymous article even appeared in the Theosophical Review by “A Russian,” which referred to an anonymous manuscript supposedly from 1784, where a Rosicrucian from Berlin, Simson, “said he had heard that the true Masonry will arise once more from the kingdom of Tibet.”¹⁶
The myth of the retreat of the Rosicrucians to Tibet was also taken up at the end of the 1920s by representatives of the Polaires, a group of French intellectuals, who were interested in occultism and orientated themselves on the Polestar.¹⁷ Jean Marques-Rivière, a student of Jacques Bacot, in his popular fictional autobiography À l’ombre des monastères thibétains,¹⁸ contributed to the further “occultization” of Tibet by positing once again the existence there of mysterious power figures. (It was not until 1982, in an epilogue to a new edition, that Marques-Rivière admitted that the texts he presented were accounts of his nightly dreams as a young student, intellectually stretched to the limits of his capacity during his waking hours.)¹⁹
In his “autobiography” he describes a supreme, mighty King of the World, superior in status even to the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama, and a “Council of the Twelve Nom’-Kan,” an organization that extends throughout the Orient and unites it in both a spiritual and political sense.²⁰ Alexandra David-Néel also reinforced the myth of Tibet as a country full of occult sciences and magicians, principally in Mystiques et magiciens du Tibet.²¹
By the time of the rise to power of the founders of the Nazi movement, the supposed existence of hidden world masters in Tibet was thus widely known, and often believed in, throughout Western Europe.
Creation of Western Myths of Shambhala and Agarthi as Subterranean Theocracies
The Western myths of the lands of Shambhala and Agarthi were created in parallel to the “Hidden Masters” myth, and also had wide popularity. Shambhala was indeed part of the belief system in Asia, a land from which a great king would emerge to bring peace to the world, but Agarthi was created from whole cloth to fill a need for a further mysterious realm beyond ordinary human knowledge.
In addition to popularizing the idea of Hidden Masters, Madame Blavatsky was the first to gain a large audience in the West for ideas of a hidden abode of spirituality in the East, and Tibet as a secret site of ancient spiritual knowledge. In The Secret Doctrine of 1888, based on a mysterious ancient text called the Book of Dzyan (probably created by Blavatsky herself), she popularized the first Western version of the Shambhala myth, linking the original Indian myth of Shambhala to other myths of legendary sunken islands (Lemuria, Atlantis) to produce a creation myth marked by esoteric and racist elements in which chosen survivors “had taken shelter on the sacred Island (now the ‘fabled’ Shamballah, in the Gobi Desert).”²²
The other popular hidden center of spirituality in the East had no source in history or Asian mythology. Louis Jacolliot created the myth of Agartha and mentioned it for the first time in the 1873 work Le fils de dieu.²³ This spurious legend of Agarthi or Agartha, was taken up and developed by French occultists from the end of the nineteenth century. In 1886 the holy city of Agartha was described in detail by Joseph-Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre in Mission de l’Inde en Europe.²⁴ This subterranean theocracy was apparently located under the Himalayas, from where its rulers directed global events. Its ruler, the Supreme Pontiff, presided over a spiritually and technologically advanced population many millions strong. The Polish explorer Ferdinand Ossendowski presented a further version of the Agarthi myth in his 1922 best seller Beasts, Men and Gods.²⁵ In his account, he claims that Agarthi is an actual kingdom lying under Central Asia. Its ruler, the King of the World, knows all powers of the world and can read the souls of men and the Book of Destiny. Although claiming that the history of Agarthi could be traced to an ancient Mongolian legend, he actually adapted the key elements of his account from Saint-Yves d’Alveydre.²⁶ While the Agartha or Agarthi myth has no Indian or Tibetan roots whatsoever, it still influenced the French traditionalist
René Guénon in his widely read work Le Roi du Monde, published in 1927 and translated into many languages, in which he supported Ossendowski’s claims. The topos of both a subterranean kingdom and an occult brotherhood in Tibet was also addressed by Theodore Illion in his popular Darkness over Tibet, although the work has no factual connection with Tibet.²⁷ He tells of an alleged visit to the “Secret City in the Valley of Mystery,” to a powerful “Occult Fraternity,” in “the Underground City of the Initiates.” Although their ruler pretended to be a “Prince of Light,” he “was really the Prince of Darkness in disguise.” The “City of Great Light Power” turned out to be the “City of the Evil One.” This “Occult Hierarchy” planned to control the world through
telepathy and astral projection.²⁸ It may be worth noting that the Gestapo ordered Illion to furnish documentary evidence of his alleged visits to Tibet when he returned to Germany in 1941,²⁹“since he was under suspicion of being a liar, who claimed he had visited Tibet although he had never been there.”³⁰ Thus two crucial concepts—that of a set of hidden masters and the existence of two possible realms where they dwelt, both of them in Tibet—were in place to influence interpretations of the purpose of the 1939 Schäfer expedition to Tibet.
Construction of the Mythology of the Nazis and the Occult
Careful study of the evidence does not support, however, the idea that National Socialism was inspired by and permeated with occult ideas and purposes, especially to the extent of seeking an alliance with secret powers in Tibet. This lack of evidence has not, however, prevented the growth of a large literature—both contemporary and later—on the subject.
Speculative historiography by French authors³¹ in the genre “Nazis and the Occult”³² and the influence of occult forces on Hitler paved the way for an assumed connection between occultism and National Socialism. “The lightning successes of the Nazis, both electorally and later militarily, together with their manifest evil, stimulated notions of their demonic inspirations” and “represented the Nazi phenomenon as the product of arcane and demonic influences.”³³
As early as 1933, a text of primary importance in this regard was published by Teddy Legrand,³⁴ who propounded an initial indirect connection between National Socialism and Tibet. However, it was not until more than a quarter of a century later that a part of this work received widespread attention and further elaboration by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, who included a passage from it, without attribution, in their “key work” The Morning of the Magicians, a best seller translated into many languages that opened the floodgates for similar publications. However, the authors, who were addicted to a fantastic realism, had themselves downplayed the importance of their work and warned that many of their claims were as fantastic and exaggerated as Marco Polo’s accounts of his travels.³⁵ A direct comparison between the texts of Legrand and Pauwels and Bergier is included below in the section titled The Legends of “Vril”.
Hitler himself has been represented as an occult figure, despite his own stated scorn for interest in the occult. The most influential publication for the “occultization” of Hitler was Hermann Rauschning’s 1939 publication of a forged collection of talks with Hitler, Hitler Speaks,³⁶ intended to present Hitler as an infernally-inspired foe. In the spring of 1939, Edouard Saby published Hitler et les forces occultes, in which he depicts Hitler “as the sorcerer’s apprentice” and manufactures occult connections between Hitler and Tibet: “Wasn’t it Trebitsch-Lincoln, the friend of the Tibetan Badmaiev, who initiated Hitler, by revealing to him the doctrine of Ostara, a secret school of India, where the lamas teach the supremacy of the Aryan?”³⁷ C. Kerneiz’s work La Chute d’Hitler, published in 1940, attempts to analyze Hitler “cosmo-biologically” and claims that the group around General Ludendorff of all people, with whom Hitler was in fact almost unconnected, had subjected Hitler to a course of training of a type practiced in India and Tibet since time immemorial.³⁸
Some Nazi party leaders, principally Himmler and Rosenberg did have strong mystical leanings, but these were falsely extrapolated to apply to the entire Nazi ruling elite, including Hitler. According to today’s standards of historical research,³⁹ however, Hitler himself dismissed occultism and was skeptical of others’ occult ambitions, mocking the mystical interests of Himmler and Rosenberg⁴⁰ in a speech at a Kulturtagung on September 6, 1938:
National Socialism is a cool and highly reasoned approach to reality based upon the greatest scientific knowledge and its spiritual expression … Above all, National Socialism is a Volk Movement in essence and under no circumstances a cult movement! […] For this reason, the infiltration of the movement by mystically inclined researchers into the otherworldly cannot be tolerated. They are not National Socialists, but something else—certainly something with which we have nothing to do. […] Cult-like acts are not our responsibility, but that of the churches.⁴¹
Hitler also scoffed at astrology and horoscopes.⁴²
All of this is supported by the fascinating new book by Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul,⁴³whose “approach to the history of German occult contrasts strongly with the prevalent view among historians,” and challenges the view of the early and highly influential book by Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler,⁴⁴ about the connection between Nazism and the occult. She writes that “as a careful examination of printed and archival sources shows, the larger story of the Nazi regime and the occult movement is one of escalating hostility,” and state officials “did not hesitate to oppress the occult movement brutally.”⁴⁵ And “an official decree in July 1937 dissolved Freemasonic lodges, Theosophical circles and related groups throughout Germany. Occult action now became illegal. Then in 1941, in the wake of Hess’s flight to Britain, police action against occultists rose to fever pitch.”⁴⁶
Furthermore, the subject of Tibet and its religion appeared alien and irrelevant to Hitler. He did say that in his youth the figure of Sven Hedin had been of great interest to him,⁴⁷ so he must have had at least some vague knowledge of Tibet. But the following remark made about Hitler in his Wolfsschanze headquarters on May 14, 1942, demonstrates his later lack of concern for Tibet: “At lunch, the boss [[[Wikipedia:Hitler|Hitler]]] was told about the film about Tibet made by the SS Schäfer expedition. The boss said that if anyone tried to criticize a Tibetan priest, the whole of the Catholic Church and the Protestant Church too would scream blue murder.”⁴⁸ This statement also clearly shows that the content of the film Geheimnis Tibet was not presented to Hitler as a Nazi propaganda film. It is noteworthy that Hitler made this comment in connection with Schäfer’s visit to the Führer’s headquarters. However, Schäfer neither met Hitler personally, nor was the disappointed Hitler able to grasp the significance of the gifts from the Tibetan regent which Schäfer was finally able to present to him, via Hitler’s adjutants, three years after his return from Tibet.⁴⁹
The Legends of “Vril” and the Thule Society linking Nazism with Tibet
But how did Nazi occultism become linked, however falsely, to secret centers of knowledge in Central Asia? This connection is attributed to the Vril Society and the Thule Society. As early as 1871, in his novel The Coming Race,⁵⁰ which also inspired Blavatsky,⁵¹ Edward Bulwer-Lytton described a subterranean race of Übermenschen, the Vril-ya. These “superbeings” were far in advance of humanity in every respect, due to their ability to tap a mysterious force or energy to which Bulwer-Lytton gave the name “Vril.” From these roots, the Vril Society emerged in Germany. The association’s existence is corroborated by nothing more than a single reference in a brief essay written in 1947 by rocket engineer Willy Ley, who emigrated to the USA in 1935: “The next group was literally founded upon a novel.” This Berlin group called itself Society for Truth and “devoted its spare time to looking for Vril … The secret of Vril could be found by contemplating the structure of an apple, sliced in halves.”⁵²
This brief report was taken up by Pauwels and Bergier in The Morning of the Magicians to inflate the significance of this unknown group and to insinuate the determination of the Nazi ruling elite to make contact with an omnipotent subterranean theocracy, thus enabling Germany, armed with the knowledge of this power, to conquer the world. The group was known as the Vril Society or the Luminous Lodge, and the geo-politician Karl Haushofer was said to have been a member.⁵³
An influential role as an occult center of the National Socialist elite was also attributed to the Thule Society, founded in Munich in 1918. According to Pauwels and Bergier it was said to be part of a network of occult groups and associations, some with origins dating back to far-distant times and places. The society not only functioned as an organization of occult adepts, but primarily served as a direct point of contact to supernatural powers or as a link to the “Hidden Masters,” chiefly in Tibet, to whom secret knowledge, superhuman abilities and occult powers were attributed.
With Karl Haushofer having been identified already by Pauwels and Bergier as Hitler’s occult mentor,⁵⁴ the Thule Society was said to have played a key role in the development of National Socialism. Pauwels, himself a disciple of the holistic master Géorge Ivanovich Gurdjieff, claimed that Haushofer, who traveled through India, Burma, Korea and China from 1908-1910, was Military Attaché at the German Embassy in Tokyo, and had a lifelong interest in the Far East and Japan in particular, met Gurdjieff several times in Tibet⁵⁵ between 1903 and 1908:
In 1923 Haushofer founded an esoteric group modeled on similar groups in Tibet … The group was called the “Thule Group” and its philosophy was founded on the famous book of magic of the Dzyan, which belonged to certain Tibetan sages; according to this book there were two sources of power in the world: the right-hand source, which comes from a subterranean monastery, a fortress of meditation, situated in a town called, symbolically, Agarthi. This is the source of the contemplative power. The left-hand source is the source of physical power, and comes from a town on the surface called Shampullah. This is the city of violence and is ruled by the “King of Fear.” Those who succeed in making an alliance with him can dominate the world. Through a large Tibetan colony in Berlin which kept constantly in touch with Haushofer, the “Thule Group” formed this “alliance” in 1928 … The following men were members of the group at this time: Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Rosemberg [sic] under Haushofer’s direction. The members communicated in two ways with Shampullah and the “King of Fear”: firstly, by electronic transmitters and receivers which put them in contact with a so called “Tibetan” information centre through which they obtained valuable comments on India and Japan …
The treacherous insinuations were further magnified: “They [my informants] affirm, too, that one of the conditions of the pact made between the ‘Thule group’ and the Tibetan ‘authorities’ was the extermination of Gypsies.”⁵⁶
However, this sensationalized picture of the Thule Society and its members is a complete fabrication. As in later works, Pauwels inverted the Theosophists’ positive concept of Shambhala into its opposite. Hitler never took part in a single meeting of the Thule Society, nor was Göring a member. Among those Nazi leaders known to hold esoteric beliefs, Himmler was never associated with the Thule Society. While Alfred Rosenberg had contact with the society, the esoterically influenced Rudolf Hess was the sole leading Nazi who was a member.
But what was the Thule Society actually? It was certainly not an occult group. During the rise of Nazism the Thule Society took on certain significance as a racist, anti-Semitic and völkisch, albeit not an occult group, particularly in the crushing of the Munich Räterepublik (Republic of Councils). After 1919 the group’s political influence dwindled.⁵⁷
The claims concerning Haushofer’s contacts with and membership in the Thule Society and Vril Society have no foundation whatsoever, and Pauwels’s allegations of meetings between Haushofer and Gurdjieff in Tibet do not withstand critical examination. Haushofer did not travel outside Europe prior to 1908, and his precisely documented schedule through Asia allowed no time for a visit to Tibet⁵⁸ or for a meeting with Gurdjieff.⁵⁹ Thus it can be seen that Nazi concern with occult beliefs and mysterious powers available to them in the East have been greatly exaggerated, to say the least.
Facts about the Schäfer Expedition
Let us now turn to the project in which the myths and legends described above appear to culminate: “No expedition to Tibet so captured public attention with its plans than a group of five German researchers shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War.”⁶⁰ This expedition constitutes the main piece of “evidence” used by crypto-historians in their construction of a Nazi-Tibet connection. Here only the main points of the expedition, those bearing on later insinuations, since a more detailed account is available elsewhere.⁶¹
This 1938/39 Tibet expedition, although planned by its members as a purely scientific venture, actually fell between the two stools of politics and science from the very outset of its planning stage. Heinrich Himmler and the “Ahnenerbe” (the SS Ancestral Heritage Society) wanted to influence and determine the venture from a political, esoteric, and pseudo-scientific viewpoint. The expedition then fell into the area of foreign affairs conflicts when official permits were required from the English. National Socialist foreign policy, political affiliations, and propaganda ultimately damaged the completion of the expedition’s goals and created enormous obstacles for it.
Ernst Schäfer, born in 1910 in Cologne, had just started to study zoology and geology in Göttingen when Brooke Dolan, a wealthy young American, came to Germany in 1930 to recruit scientists for a zoological expedition. Schäfer, a mere twenty years old at the time, participated in the first Brooke-Dolan expedition to Western China and Tibet.⁶² In 1932 he returned to Germany to resume his studies and joined the SS in 1934. From 1934 to 1936 Schäfer took part in a further scientific expedition with Brooke Dolan, this time as scientific leader, to Eastern Tibet and China.⁶³ After his return to Germany, Schäfer continued his studies in Berlin and received his doctoral degree in zoology in 1937.
Meanwhile, the success of the expeditions Schäfer had participated in had attracted Heinrich Himmler’s attention. Despite his ambivalence towards Asia as a whole, Himmler, who was fascinated by lurid, fantastic ideas of Asian mysticism and believed in karma, had a genuine interest in Tibet.⁶⁴ When he heard about Schäfer’s plans to lead an independent expedition to Tibet, he was immediately keen on launching this expedition under the auspices of the SS “Ahnenerbe.” A memorandum from the “Ahnenerbe,” dated August 1937, finally stated that the Reichsführer wished “the ‘Ahnenerbe’ to equip a new expedition to Tibet. The expedition is to be organized officially by the ‘Ahnenerbe’.”⁶⁵
The “Ahnenerbe,”⁶⁶ founded in 1935 in Berlin by Himmler and others, initially occupied itself with subjects such as early Germanic history, runic research, and fringe subjects like the Atlantis myth. However, it was increasingly endeavoring to gain a foothold in the field of serious science, to extend its scope of study to focus on natural sciences, and to attract first-class scientists, so that it was concerned with both areas in parallel.
Himmler constantly attempted to influence the work of scientists when he discovered a topic that interested him.⁶⁷ Indulging his mystical bent, he wanted Schäfer and his expedition to conduct research based on Hörbiger’s “World Ice Theory,” which claimed that Atlantis was destroyed by a great flood caused by the collision of an ice moon with the Earth. “Himmler believed that ancient emigrants from Atlantis had founded a great civilization in Central Asia, the capital of which was a city called Urbe.”⁶⁸
However, as a scientist Schäfer had more legitimate purposes in mind, and several times declined—eventually with success—to include on his team the pseudoscientist Edmund Kiss, whose task would have been to furnish proof of this theory. The primary objective of Schäfer’s research was the creation of a complete scientific record of Tibet, through a synthesis of geology, botany, zoology, and ethnology, referred to in the German science of the day as “holism.”⁶⁹
The difficulties of travel to Tibet and the hardships facing the expedition were dwarfed by the problems Schäfer faced in organizing and financing the project. Although he had succeeded in asserting his scientific freedom over Himmler’s wild plans,⁷⁰ his objectives and those of Himmler and the “Ahnenerbe” apparently diverged more and more widely until Wolfram Sievers, the head of the “Ahnenerbe,” declared in January 1938 that “In the meantime the task of the
expedition has diverged too far from the goals of the Reichsführer-SS and does not serve his ideas of cultural studies”⁷¹ “because it would lie outside the scope of his work.”⁷² “The Reichsführer complied with Dr. Schäfer’s request to be permitted to conduct negotiations himself concerning the expedition’s financing and organization. The “Ahnenerbe” subsequently transferred the file to Dr. Schäfer.”⁷³ And later: “At the request of the Reichsführer SS, SS Obersturmführer Schäfer’s expedition was not conducted by the ‘Ahnenerbe’.”⁷⁴ Doubtless financial factors also played a key role in this decision.
Thus, in the end, the expedition was not sponsored or financed by the SS or the “Ahnenerbe.” However, Schäfer continued to receive political help from the “Ahnenerbe” and Himmler. He was well aware of the fact that he was dependent on Himmler’s goodwill, and was forced to compromise on some points in order to retain his support with the English and obtain passports. Himmler gave his consent to the expedition on the condition that all of its members join the SS.
Himmler’s meddling was not always helpful in dealings with the English, however. In preparation for the expedition, Schäfer had had “Schäfer Expedition 1938/39” letterheads printed and applied for sponsorship from businessmen. Schäfer was forced to yield on the matter of the expedition’s official title. In February 1938 Himmler decreed that on the orders of the “Ahnenerbe” the expedition’s name would have to be changed and letterheads were ordered with the new text “German Tibet-Expedition Ernst Schäfer [in large print], under the patronage of the Reichsfuehrer-SS Himmler and in connection with the
‘Ahnenerbe’ ” [in small print].⁷⁵ This letterhead, in large Gothic type, caused Schäfer considerable difficulties with the British authorities after his arrival in India. The consequence was that Schäfer ordered new, discreet letterheads in Antiqua typeface, apparently while still in Calcutta, which stated simply “Deutsche Tibet Expedition Ernst Schäfer.” During the expedition he used only this and his original “Schäfer Expedition” paper.
Schäfer continued his efforts to establish the financing of the expedition and carry through his research objectives. He actually raised the funds of his expedition by his own efforts, albeit with the support of the “Ahnenerbe.” He received the sum of 30,000 Reichsmark (RM) from the DFG.⁷⁶ The final statement dated November 15, 1940, shows that the Public Relations and Advertising Council of German Business (Werberat der deutschen Wirtschaft) made the largest contribution, of RM 46,000. In return for supplying reports for the newspapers Völkischer Beobachter and the Illustrierter Beobachter, their publisher Eher Verlag paid the sum of RM 20,000; RM 7,000 came from the Foreign Office, and a further RM 6,500 from private donors including Brooke Dolan. The costs totaled RM 112,111, of which the greatest expenditure, RM 12,119, was to be for the ethnographic collection.⁷⁷Only the contribution from Himmler’s “circle of friends” was the financing of part of the hasty return flight from India—the leg from Bagdad to Berlin—as the outbreak of war became imminent.⁷⁸
One of the greatest problems in those years was the procuring of foreign currency, which was only possible through Hermann Göring. Göring was a great hunting enthusiast,⁷⁹ and Schäfer, also a hunter, was introduced to him through the agency of Himmler at the Munich International Hunting Exhibition at the beginning of November 1937.⁸⁰ The meeting between the two hunters was successful, and the problem of foreign currency was solved.
The expedition was finally ready. It comprised five members: Schäfer as mammologist and ornithologist; Ernst Krause as entomologist, photographer, and camera operator; Bruno Beger as ethnologist; Karl Wienert as geophysicist; and Edmund Geer as technical caravan manager.
They set off in the spring of 1938, heading first to Calcutta. However, political reality caught up with them on their arrival. When they left, the National Socialist propaganda newspaper Völkischer Beobachter had printed an article headlined “SS Expedition Leaves for Uncharted Regions of Tibet.”⁸¹ The Indian Statesman immediately reprinted the article, but under the headline “Nazi invasion—Blackguards in India.” This would cause Schäfer enormous problems during negotiations with the English over entry permits for Sikkim and Tibet. The German Consul-General in Calcutta, Count Podewils, expressed unusually open and direct criticism to the Foreign Office:
I attribute the refusal [of the entry permits] primarily to the fact that the expedition was overly presented as an SS enterprise. The known fact that the English consider the SS to be a police and espionage organization could not do otherwise but cause the expedition’s scientific goals to be regarded as a mere pretext and scent political objectives in the background. The detailed article in the Völkischer Beobachter of 20 April, “Expedition into the Uncharted Regions of Tibet, Research Expedition with the Support of the SS Reichsführer and Völkischer Beobachter” was as unhelpful in this context as the letterhead “Deutsche Expedition Ernst Schäfer, Unter der Schirmherrschaft des Reichsführers der SS Himmler und in Verbindung mit dem Ahnenerbe e.V. Berlin,” which was used prior to the expedition’s departure. Naturally, the English learnt of all this immediately and became suspicious, so that not only the London Times, but also the local press published notes pointing out the expedition’s connection to the SS.⁸²
In support of Schäfer and his expedition, Himmler himself wrote a letter to his friend Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, a fact that also came to the attention of the India Office.⁸³ While Himmler’s intervention helped to get the required permits, the suspicion of the English had now been awakened in earnest. Even though Schäfer appeared to be successful in convincing the British of the exclusively scientific purpose of his mission, British suspicions of espionage clung to the expedition throughout its duration and imputed to it a far greater importance than was warranted.
Although the Tibetan government refused entry to the expedition several times, some months later Schäfer and his crew were admitted to Lhasa, where they stayed a full two months. The members of the expedition established official contact with the Kashag ministers and the Reting Regent, and friendly contact with many aristocratic families.
Given the myths surrounding the expedition’s alleged secret political aims, let us now focus on the contact with the Reting Regent and perhaps the most famous outcome of the expedition, the letter the Regent wrote to Hitler.⁸⁴ Schäfer convinced Reting to write a letter to Hitler, although Reting probably had little idea of who Hitler was. The letter, in the official accompanying English translation, reads:
To his Majesty Fuhrer Adolph Hitler, Berlin,
From The Regent of Tibet.
On the 18th day of the first month of Sand-Hare Year.
Your Majesty,
I trust your Highness is in best of health and in every progress with your goodly affairs.
Here I am well and doing my best in our religious and Government affairs. I have the pleasure to let Your Majesty know that Dr. Schaefer and his party, who are the first Germans to visit Tibet have been permitted without any objection, and every necessary assist is rendered on their arrival. Further, I am in desirous to do anything that will help to improve the friendly tie of relationship between the two Nations, and I trust your Majesty will also consider it essential as before.
Please take care of Your good self, and let me know if Your Majesty desire anything. I am sending under separate parcel a Tibetan silver lid and saucer with a red designed tea cup, and a native dog as a small remembrance.
Sincerely Yours,
Reting Ho-Thok-Thu.
Although this letter is no more than an example of the noncommittal polite correspondence typical of Tibet, it gave rise to much speculation and is nowadays often cited as proof of the Tibetans’ friendly attitude toward Nazi Germany. In 1995 Reinhard Greve published the German translation of the Tibetan original by the Tibetologist Johannes Schubert. Schubert may have thought it advantageous to try to translate this letter in a Nazi style, and may thus have falsified the translation deliberately to flatter Hitler. But his translation is quite simply inaccurate. He even added remarks that are not found in the original document, the most egregious interpolation being the substitution of “At present you [[[Wikipedia:Hitler|Hitler]]] are making all efforts in creating a lasting empire in peaceful prosperity based on a racial foundation,” for the correct translation of the common Tibetan phrase: “Here I [[[Reting]]] am well and doing my best in our religious and Government affairs.”⁸⁵ Schubert’s inaccurate translation has since been used to demonstrate Tibetan sympathy for racist ideas and to ascribe to the Tibetan ruler an uncritical friendship toward the Nazis.⁸⁶
The expedition completed its projected work and was from a scholarly point of view highly successful, collecting an amazing amount of scientific material about Tibet that continues to be of great value even today. It ended, however, in a hasty and dispiriting return to Europe: some weeks after the return of its members the Second World War broke out.
These, then are the facts—the history—of this expedition, as far they can be reconstructed on the basis of the sources available at present.
Myths and Fictions about the Schäfer Expedition
The mere fact that a scientific expedition of SS members visited the mysterious land of Tibet at this time, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, has been enough to add weight to the fictitious occult links between Nazism, Hitler, and the “Hidden Masters” in Agarthi und Shambhala. But what of the distortions of fact and stories concocted on the basis of this history? And how was the expedition exploited to support myths of occult connections between Hitler, Nazism and Oriental theocracies?
Although Pauwels and Bergier were the most influential creators of the myth of a Nazi-Tibetan connection, they were not the first to do so; they used and expanded a story mentioned earlier in this article, one from a French spy novel of 1933, Les sept têtes du dragon vert, in which connections between the Tibetans and Hitler were fabricated.⁸⁷ Its author was allegedly a French secret agent writing under the pseudonym Teddy Legrand who was later said to have died under mysterious circumstances. The novel, which describes a powerful secret organization responsible for the rise of National Socialism and
Communism, adroitly interweaves fact and fiction.⁸⁸ In the novel, two British secret agents in 1933 visited an Asian magician in Berlin described by the Berliner Zeitung as “the man with green gloves.” He had three times accurately predicted the number of Hitler’s supporters who would be elected to the Reichstag.⁸⁹ The Tibetan mala (rosary) with which the two British agents were presented—with 110 beads instead of 108, for occult reasons—implied that he was Tibetan, although this is not specifically mentioned. His fluorescent gloves gleamed like glow-worms. His gaze was cruel, penetrating and sly; he had perfect control over his reflexes. He addressed the British agents in perfect Oxford English: “Gentlemen, although you belong to a race other than mine, the green hand will be extended to you, since you bear the keys that open the 110 locks of the secret kingdom of Aggharti.”⁹⁰
Let us examine what Pauwels and Bergier made of this in their The Morning of the Magicians:
In Berlin there was a Tibetan monk, nicknamed “the man with the green gloves,” who had correctly foretold in the Press, on three occasions, the number of Hitlerian deputies elected to the Reichstag, and who was regularly visited by Hitler. He was said by the Initiates to possess the keys to the kingdom of Agarthi … It was in 1926 that a small Hindu and Tibetan colony settled in Berlin and Munich. When the Russians entered Berlin, they found among the corpses a thousand volunteers for death in German uniform without any papers or badges, of Himalayan origin. As soon as the [[[Wikipedia:Nazi|Nazi]]] movement began to acquire extensive funds, it organised a number of expeditions to Tibet, which succeeded one another practically without interruption until 1943. […]⁹¹
In Tibet, acting on orders from Dr. Sievers, Dr. Scheffer [sic] was in contact with a number of lamas⁹² in various monasteries and he brought back with him to Munich, for scientific examination, some “Aryan” horses and “Aryan” bees, whose honey had special qualities.⁹³
Here we find further occult details added to Teddy Legrand’s fictional story, but none of them have any basis in fact. No green-gloved Tibetan monk lived in Berlin to advise Hitler. Furthermore, far from a constant succession of German expeditions to Tibet from 1926-1943, only a single German expedition went to that country, that of 1938-1939.⁹⁴ There were also no Tibetan colonies in Munich, Berlin or other cities, no Tibetan monks, and no troop of uniformed Tibetans in Germany. In fact, in the first half of the twentieth century only a single Tibetan lived in Germany: he was Albert Tafel’s interpreter, whom Tafel had brought with him after his expedition in 1907.⁹⁵ There is also no proof at all for the claim of a thousand uniformed Tibetan corpses. This story may be a legend arising from the fact that in the Second World War Mongolian Kalmyks had fought on the side of the Germans, although at the end of the war there were almost no Kalmyks in Berlin.⁹⁶Nonetheless, it was thus that the myth arose. Once “Pauwels and Bergier had provided this basic stock of myths relating to the occult inspiration of Nazism, further authors were tempted into a sensational field.”⁹⁷
Trevor Ravenscroft added to this repertoire of myths in his widely read work, also translated into several languages, The Spear of Destiny:
It was largely through the initiative of Professor Karl Haushofer and other members of the Vril Society in Berlin and Munich that exploratory teams were sent out to Tibet. The succession of German expeditions to Tibet, which took place annually from 1926 to 1942, sought to establish contact with Cave Communities and persuade them to enlist the aid of Luciferic and Ahrimanic Powers in the furtherance of the Nazi cause and in the projected mutation which would herald the new race of Superman.
Three years after the first contact had been made with the Adepts of Agarthi and Shamballah, a Tibetan community was established in Germany with branches in Berlin, Munich, and Nuremberg. But only the adepts of Agarthi, the servants of Lucifer, were willing to support the Nazi cause. The Initiates of Shamballah, who were concerned with the advent of materialism and the furtherance of the machine age, flatly refused to co-operate. Serving Ahriman, they had already made contact with the West and were working in affiliation with certain lodges in England and America! The adepts of Agarthi were known in Germany as “The Society of Green Men” and strong measures were taken to keep silence about their real significance. They were joined by seven members of the “Green Dragon Society” of Japan, with whom they had been in astral communication for hundreds of years. […]
During the final months of the war the lamas from Tibet were utterly neglected by the Nazis. They had failed in their mission to harness the powers of Lucifer to the Nazi cause. To show his personal disfavour Hitler ordered that they should live on the same reduced rations as the inmates of the Concentration Camps. When the Russians reached their quarters in the suburbs of Berlin, they discovered their naked bodies lying in orderly rows, each with a ceremonial knife piercing the abdomen.⁹⁸
This freely invented fantasy obviously incorporated dualist ideas taken from the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner. However, I was unable to discover any reliable information about the “Green Dragon Society” or the “The Society of Green Men.”
In the first book on this general topic in the German-speaking world, Dietrich Bronder’s 1975 Bevor Hitler kam, we read:
In 1928 the Thule Society, via the strong Tibetan colony in Berlin with which Haushofer was in permanent contact, is said to have resumed the links to Tibet’s secret societies of monks, which were even maintained during the Second World War. The key used in radio communication between Berlin and the Tibetan capital of Lhasa at this time was the book Dzyan, a secret book of magic of Tibetan sages.
The links to Tibetan Buddhism forged by Trebitsch, Haushofer, and Hess were represented by Karo Nichi, an emissary of the Tibetan Agartha in Berlin; he wore the brush-shaped moustache that indicated an adept. On the evening before the outbreak of the Second World War Schäfer’s SS expedition departed from Germany for Tibet, guided by Karo Nichi and Eva Speimüller, bringing the Dalai Lama radio equipment with which to set up links between Lhasa and Berlin. Schäfer’s SS men were permitted to enter the holy city of Lhasa, otherwise barred to Europeans and Christians—and even the lamas’ magnificent temple, containing one single enormous object, the holiest symbol of the Mongolian empire: the swastika.⁹⁹
Of course, the expedition was neither led by the unknown Karo Nichi, supposed emissary of Tibetan Agartha in Berlin, nor did it have the aim of supplying the Dalai Lama with radio equipment to pass messages between Lhasa and Berlin and establish an axis of the occult, as claimed by Dietrich Bronder. It is, however, correct that the expedition brought gramophones and a radio, which were presented to the Regent and the Kashag; however, these objects, which were part of the equipment of the expedition, were only converted into gifts during the course of the expedition.¹⁰⁰
The myth would be recycled and reconstituted in works in English, German, and French. Although the members of the Schäfer expedition had no knowledge of Illion’s Darkness over Tibet before 1941, the introduction to the currently available edition states: “It is believed that Illion’s accounts of Tibet were instrumental in persuading the Nazi government of Germany to send yearly expeditions into Tibet,”¹⁰¹ which “tried to find fossilized remains of giants. Anyone who attacked Hörbiger was promptly suppressed by the ‘Ahnenerbe’.”¹⁰² It is evidently of no importance that, as natural scientists, all members of the expedition categorically rejected the World-Ice Theory and specifically refused to allow it to be included as part of the expedition’s goals.
The sources continued to be equally creative, stating that there were “persistent rumors that the Nazi interest in Tibet was actually inspired by a desire to contact the black adepts of Shambhala and/or Agartha and to enlist their aid in the conquest of the world.”¹⁰³ Rudolf Hess is said to have cried in a moment of euphoria, “The secret powers of Tibet are fighting on the side of the Axis powers.”¹⁰⁴ And the German Tibet expedition was said to be an attempt by the Nazis to establish communications with true “supermen.”¹⁰⁵ In an American book, it is explained that these SS men “were the warrior elite of a new
civilization, immeasurably superior to the old, the high priesthood of the New Age, the standard bearer of the coming Superman. Their leaders were magicians, who had formed alliances with the mystic Tibetan cities of Agarthi and Schamballah and had mastered the forces of the living universe.”In an American book, it is explained that these SS men “were the warrior elite of a new civilization, immeasurably superior to the old, the high priesthood of the New Age, the standard bearer of the coming Superman. Their leaders were magicians, who had formed alliances with the mystic Tibetan cities of Agarthi and Schamballah and had mastered the forces of the living universe.”¹⁰⁶
We read in a French work that “there was continuous contact between National Socialist Germany and Tibet and it is known that orders were issued directly by the imaginary fatherland of the Germans that concerned the material conquest of the world by the Seven Initiates of the Society of Thule. We know today that our merciless sectarians were magically ‘protected’ by their Tibetan masters under the sign of the swastika.”¹⁰⁷
The letter to Hitler from the Tibetan Regent also triggered speculations:
There were also claims that Schäfer had brought the Führer a document of inestimable value and that the Führer locked it away in a dark corner of the bunker at Rastenberg where he was said to meditate. However, this document was nothing more than a parchment on which the Dalai Lama had signed a pact of friendship with Nazi Germany, where Hitler was known to him as head of the Aryans. While it is possible that Schäfer brought such a document with him, it is not possible to estimate the value ascribed to it by all sides. Was it a declaration of principles, or merely a document of diplomatic value? […]
One item out of all those brought back by Schäfer deserves particular attention: the Tantra ritual Kalachakra and a detailed dossier concerning this Tantric initiation … the first document on this subject to reach the West.¹⁰⁸
Once again, however, reality is less mysterious. Of course, at this time the threeyear-old Dalai Lama had not arrived in Lhasa yet. And, as Bruno Beger confirmed to me, the expedition members were not even aware of the term Kālachakra¹⁰⁹ and brought no such documents back with them.¹¹⁰Perhaps the authors had confused the term Kālachakra with the Kanjur (bKa’ ’gyur), a copy of which had been presented to the expedition in exchange for medical assistance. Yet even this fact galvanized other authors’ imagination and inspired speculations such as those of Dietrich Bronder: “Finally the [[[Panchen]]] Lama presented the SS expedition with the Lamaist bible Kanjur in over a hundred volumes, as a gift for his friend Hitler, or Hsi Talé.”¹¹¹ This last “fact,” however, would have exceeded the framework of space and time, since the Panchen Lama spent the last 15 years of his life outside Tibet and had died two years prior to the expedition’s arrival. A mystery has even been concocted about the fate of this copy of the Kanjur. Peter Levenda speculated: “I have been unable to
discover what has happened to it after the war, though I suspect it wound up in a museum in Vienna.”¹¹² Peter Moon even added: “I have been informed by others that they [the documents] ended up in Russian hands and that they were copies of original sacred texts from the inner caves of Tibet. Monks would spend entire lifetimes dutifully copying sacred scriptures and depositing them in secret locations.”¹¹³ In fact, this impressive hundred volume edition of the new Lhasa Kanjur, initiated by the 13th Dalai Lama, has spent the last several decades in the Bavarian State Library in Munich.¹¹⁴
A greater problem, and a murkier one, than that of the work of occult or cryptohistorians, sensationalist writers, or conspiracists are publications by those journalists and self-styled “agents of enlightenment” who, while purporting to bring light into darkness and to demythologize Tibet, actually construct new myths by skillfully mixing fact and fiction—deliberately or not. For example, the American historian Lee Feigon explains: “In the late 1930s Hitler and Himmler went so far as to send an expedition to Tibet to measure Tibetan head sizes and ascertain that the Tibetans were not Jews but true
Aryans. Hitler even is reputed to have brought a group of monks back to Germany, instructing them to perform special chants to alter weather patterns in preparation for his ill-fated Russian invasion.”¹¹⁵ Orville Schell, an American professor of journalism, reports: “Indeed, as early as 1926, long before they were a force to be reckoned with, future Nazi supporters managed to send the first of several ‘anthropological’ expeditions to the area under the leadership of zoologist Ernst Schafer.”¹¹⁶
The occult insinuations surrounding the expedition reappeared in 1997, when the release of the film Seven Years in Tibet, based in large part on his 1952 book,¹¹⁷ prompted research into Heinrich Harrer’s Nazi past. Among statements published at that time we find things like this:
In 1938 Schäfer left for Tibet with 30 men and a large cache of weapons, arriving in Lhasa in early 1939. […] The SS storm troops were on a mission to persuade the Tibetan army, by giving them gifts, to wean it away from British influence … The plan was … that it was the Tibetans who would teach the Germans how to survive in the harsh environment.¹¹⁸
And even more of a falsification:
Himmler believed that the Tibetans were fellow Aryans. Schäfer’s mandate was to turn the Tibetans against the British with the ultimate end of forming a German-Tibetan Aryan alliance that would eventually conquer Asia. Tibet would be then settled by colonies of Germans seeking the precious Nazi ideal of Lebensraum—“living space.”¹¹⁹
However, even if individual authors were forced to admit, after conscientious research and, for example, after searching all files in the National Archives in Washington, that they could find nothing “about the occult activities and interests of the Third Reich concerning Tibet,”¹²⁰ they often conclude with innuendo along the lines of this: “Thus we cannot rule out the hypothesis that Schäfer was involved in something more than butterfly gathering in this historic (and official) trek to the Himalayas at that time of great international crisis and global tensions.”¹²¹
An Attempt at Explanation, based on Considerations of Conspiracy Theories
What is it that compels authors to write such things? The root causes, the methods of representation and the conventions of the genre may be approached from the perspective of conspiracy theories,¹²² where events are interpreted from the viewpoint of the occult, and groups are identified as “secret societies.”
According to Geoffrey Cubitt, “A conspiracy myth tells the supposedly true and supposedly historical story of a conspiracy and of the events and disastrous effects to which it has given rise.”¹²³ Daniel Pipes observes that “a conspiracy theory is the fear of a non-existent conspiracy. The German term Verschwörungsmythos (‘myth of conspiracy’) serves better than the English conspiracy theory, for it points more directly to the imaginary nature of the content.”¹²⁴
Conspiracy myths arise in times of radical social upheaval and sustained agitation. In this situation of insecurity and problems of orientation, conspiracy myths are a method of mastering crises and a simple cognitive tool, which “makes it easier to reduce dissonant perceptions, and allows one to reduce complexity,” and there is a great “power of attraction resulting from the unburdening and reducing function in a dualist view of the world.”¹²⁵ Even though the act of revelation itself does not contain actual blueprints for solutions, it is an unburdening.¹²⁶ Thus in an effort to give a comprehensible explanation of the threatening situation of the rise to power of Hitler and National Socialism, the pivotal emotional experience of a superpower, and the need to exonerate one’s own failure, Hitler and the Nazi ruling elite are demonized—since one is powerless against demons.¹²⁷
However, the mysterious and secret nature of the alleged activities is one of the reasons for the attraction and power of conspiracy myths. The characteristic features of conspiracy myths are a dualistic world view and occultism: nothing is accidental and appearances deceive. Conspiracists adopt the role of champions of a duped public.¹²⁸ “Any conspiracy theory involves a claim to provide access to a reality which is by its nature, hidden”¹²⁹ and there is an occult force operating behind the seemingly real outward forms of political life.
Such myths primarily tend to be triggered by groups and organizations that appear impenetrable, and that give rise to the wildest speculations on the grounds of their obscure organizational structure and mysterious rituals and symbols. Thus, according to the crypto-historians, the occult connection with Tibet in the era of National Socialism is supposed to have operated via the SS.
A specific technique is used to establish causality and plausibility: the gap in one conspiracy myth is explained by yet another conspiracy myth.¹³⁰ Narrative techniques are also used in the attempt to create plausibility, when details are scattered throughout the text to convey insider knowledge or feign authenticity concerning insider knowledge.¹³¹ A rational method is applied, although not immediately recognizable as such: the generation of calculated insecurity by means of manipulative elements of style,¹³² vague formulations such as passive verbs and indeterminate pronouns (“they”), allusions and references to long-lost printed sources and so-called secret dossiers. We have seen all these techniques at work in the specific case of the Schäfer expedition.
Despite the dubious treatment given to scientific and pseudoscientific speculative literature alike by these crypto-historians, they nonetheless view themselves as genuine historians, often making efforts to imitate the forms of genuine research.¹³³ Furthermore, occult historians and conspiracy theorists commonly slight traditional historians, promising to reveal secrets that they imply would have been avoided by these historians out of prejudice, cowardice or even a deliberate intention to conceal.¹³⁴ They dismiss contradictory evidence as a sign of a conspiracy. However, conspiracy myths must contain a
kernel of truth and reasonableness to make them plausible.¹³⁵ Schäfer did, after all, lead an expedition to Tibet at a time of great worldwide tension. Further, to make an organization appear more historical and weighty, the allegedly conspiratorial groups are depicted as a homogeneous block, even if totally unconnected with each other;¹³⁶ this gives the impression of a united power operating its conspiracies in secret at not only a national, but a global level.¹³⁷ Its leaders commonly invent long histories of connections to other groups. However, “conspiracism turns some of history’s most powerless and abused peoples into the most powerful,”¹³⁸ like the Tibetans in our case.
Ironic Paradox: Nazi Construction of Tibetan World Conspiracy
Is there any evidence among writings by the Nazis themselves concerning a Tibetan connection? Here an ironic paradox emerges, one which devastatingly demonstrates the absurdity of the myths, attributions, and imputations of an occult collaboration with secret Tibetan world commanders. Beginning in the early 1930s, a number of National Socialist writings, all of which achieved widespread circulation, painted a diametrically opposed scene of a Tibetan world conspiracy directed against Germany and Europe, a topos that was developed by another group of crypto-historians, using the same techniques we have seen coming into play in the creation of the Tibetan connection myth.
As noted earlier, Hitler’s attitude towards Tibet was characterized by his lack of interest and understanding of Asia and Tibet. “His thoughts and actions essentially fell into European categories at all times. To Hitler, Asia remained a foreign and misunderstood world.”¹³⁹ However, Alfred Rosenberg, the “chief ideologist” of National Socialism, already held decidedly different opinions as early as 1930. In his main work, The Myth of the 20th Century, he expressed his understanding of “‘history’ as the struggle of antagonistically interrelated powers” and designated the Roman Catholic Church to be the principal enemy seeking world domination, claiming that its sole aim was the subjugation of the faithful to the claims of power and mastery represented by its exclusive caste of priests.¹⁴⁰ Thus all eras of Germany’s history
were assigned “without exception to the primary antithesis of ‘Germanic struggles against Rome’ and interpreted accordingly.”¹⁴¹
Although Rosenberg was fascinated by ancient India¹⁴² and in general interpreted Buddhism in a positive light,¹⁴³ he was evidently influenced by Albert Grünwedel¹⁴⁴ in his rejection of Tibetan Buddhism,¹⁴⁵ to which his conspiracy-based views ascribed negative influences on the Roman Catholic Church such as “the rosary still in use today in Tibet, the mechanism of which has been perfected in the prayer wheel” and the custom of “kissing the Pope’s foot; the Dalai Lama demands the same honor today … Lamaism had, in the form of the Roman priestly caste, completed its invasion and continued the Oriental policies of the Babylonians and Egyptians and Etruscans.” Furthermore, we learn from Rosenberg, that it was Martin Luther who had halted “the progress of that magical monster that had come to us from Central Asia” and had “marched into battle against this spiritual totality, remaining as the victor.” Had Martin Luther not saved the Western world, “Europe today would have attained the state of the filth-encrusted holy men of India and Tibet, a state of the utter imbecility, the most dreadful superstition, poverty and misery—as its caste of priests grew steadily richer.”¹⁴⁶
The most absurd conspiracy myths, however, were developed by the retired general Erich Ludendorff and his wife Mathilde and their circle. After this brilliant commander of the First World War¹⁴⁷ had lost his position of military and political power with the 1918 Armistice, “the frustrated man who had been the virtual master of Germany’s destinies, General Erich Ludendorff, sought an outlet for his bitterness”¹⁴⁸ and attempted to carve out an image for himself as a populist politician. The Ludendorffs were constantly at loggerheads with everyone, including Hitler.¹⁴⁹
The anti-Semitic attitude they held, however, was even more radical than that of the National Socialists.¹⁵⁰ Ludendorff had developed a belief in the activities of “supranational powers”—world Jewry, the Roman Catholic Church, Freemasonry— and believed it his historic task to uncover “global conspiracies” and “supranational powers” and to attack the imaginary foes who were supposed to have deprived him and Germany of victory. Around 1931¹⁵¹ they discovered Tibet and the “Asian priests” as a further power in the global conspiracy, and began to denounce Tibetan monasteries as centers of a new, Judeo-Freemason, global conspiracy with the aim of installing the Dalai Lama as ruler of the world. In 1938 they put together their attacks on the “Tibetan priestly caste,” recycling their collected articles for publication in their joint work Europa den Asienpriestern?.
Although both Mathilde Ludendorff¹⁵² and Hermann Rehwaldt¹⁵³ frequently pointed out that at the time Tibet had neither a Panchen Lama nor a Dalai Lama and that civil war was imminent in the country, the specter of a global conspiracy originating in Tibet was conjured, as the following passages from Europa den Asienpriestern? demonstrate:
The General [Ludendorff] wisely let the situation develop until he directed the eyes of the people—initially a few years ago, and since then repeatedly— to the Roof of the World, Tibet, and to the desire for world power held by Asiatic priests.¹⁵⁴
With good reason, we refrained for a long time from informing the people of the danger emanating from the Tibetan priestly caste, for we were aware of the shoulder-shrugging and wanton indifference with which the Germans treat occultism, as if it were a mere game for semi-lunatics that could never hope to shape global history, to say nothing of that global history that portends such calamity for the freedom of the German people. In the past few years we have begun to reveal the goals of political world dominance held by the Asiatic priests to the people in all their detail. This aspect of our struggle has also achieved success.¹⁵⁵
In fact the spread of Central Asian occultism in the Western world, i.e., in Europe and the United States, to a previously unheard of extent is one of the strangest phenomena of the twentieth century. It was associated with the spread of certain secret orders that are inseparable from “mysteries.” And yet today it does not seem so strange. The Buddhist caste of priests at the “Roof of the World” is the oldest priestly caste still in existence in the world.¹⁵⁶
Authors close to the circle of Ludendorff, whose writings had already triggered a renaissance in conspiracy theory in Germany beginning at the end of the 1920s,¹⁵⁷ denigrated the Tibetans as a people greedy for spiritual power in Europe “and working for the purpose of the ‘great plan’ of the occult ruler of the world.”¹⁵⁸ S. Ipares, Fritz Wilhelmy, Josef Strunk, and Hermann Rehwaldt published further writings concerning the Tibetan global conspiracy—and all, with but one exception, were published by Ludendorff’s own press.
Ipares explains that “this is by no means the start of the Eastern world’s preparations for an unimaginably sweeping global attack on the white races’ plans for world dominance … However, behind these masses from the Middle and Far East pressing onto the great stage of world politics, there watches an invisible power that influences and guides them, the occult hierarchia ordinis of the lamaist theocracy.”¹⁵⁹
Wilhelmy was troubled by the fact that the Dalai Lama is alleged to bear “the presumptuous sounding, pompous title of ‘Secret Ruler of the World’.”¹⁶⁰ Josef Strunk warns: “May the people therefore recognize the great danger threatening them more than ever before from the ‘Roof of the World.’ May they be vigilant that their striving for freedom be not abused by these, for the spirit of Asia is already among them.”¹⁶¹
Hermann Rehwaldt was one of the most active publicists of the Ludendorff movement during the Third Reich, and he continued to address the subject in his manifesto and several articles. Rehwaldt belonged to a new group of propagandists trained in this role by the Ludendorffs from 1935.¹⁶² He argued:
The occasional influence on the Occident by ideas from the Orient was not sufficient for Tibet’s sages. Like all priestly hierarchies, they derive their power over men directly from heaven. Like all propagators of world religions, they take this as the orientation of their claim to world domination. However noble their motivation—world domination to world sublimation—it is this that they strive for, conceiving ways and means to speed the achievement of this, their goal. And despite all the sweet and seductive words of a world movement of love, peace and general global joy, the “Sages of Tibet” are prepared to use any methods in championing their claim to world domination—including monstrous genocide.¹⁶³
In 1939, he wrote that “Europe is currently undergoing a period of invasion by the third, previously little-known supranational power, the full form of which was only revealed by the General—‘Tibet’!”¹⁶⁴ And further on he added: “From there, the secret supreme priestly caste of all Asia extended its tentacles into every country in the Far East, Central and Northern Asia, India, the Near East, and even beyond to America, Africa, Australia and Europe.”¹⁶⁵
As late as 1955, writing under the pseudonym German Pinning, Rehwaldt mentioned that the Ludendorffs had reported on Tibet’s supranational power and invasion of the West in Europa den Asienpriestern?, and concluded by actually claiming: “Today, after some twenty years, they are suddenly ‘topical’ as if they had been written specifically for our age. At the time, in 1937, people still laughed at the idea that some ‘heathen,’ ‘savage,’ idolatrous priests in the remote monasteries of impenetrable Tibet could influence the highly civilized political and cultural life of Europe and America. No one could believe that the religious and philosophical ideas of Asia, springing up everywhere and propagated on all sides, could be directed centrally from a specific location.”¹⁶⁶
In the 1930s the reputation enjoyed by the retired general still sufficed to promote these claims, which evidently reached a broad public. In addition, the Ludendorffs could rely on their own publishing house, several periodicals, and, at one time, forty bookshops under their ownership. On lecture tours, the Ludendorffs succeeded in filling halls holding well over a thousand people.¹⁶⁷ All this contributed significantly to the high sales figures of their writings. Even though the serious press refused to have anything to do with their publications,¹⁶⁸ the Ludendorffs increasingly isolated themselves and the public prestige of the retired general crumbled.
Yet, the Ludendorff’s works were not without effect.¹⁶⁹ For example, Ludendorff’s fortnightly publication Am heiligen Quell deutscher Kraft even reported on the adoption of their beliefs in Holland¹⁷⁰ and Italy.¹⁷¹ A news report in the New York Journal from April 27, 1938, in which Henry Ford had stated in an interview that he was an adherent of the Indian doctrine of reincarnation concluded that “Ford [appeared to be] the spiritual representative of the ‘Wise Men of Tibet’.”¹⁷²
Thus it is the ironic paradox of these Nazi writings that they not only do not provide any evidence to support the claim of the existence of any Nazi-Tibetan conspiracy for world domination, but rather corroborate our debunking of the claims of the above mentioned authors and crypto-historians.
Neo-Nazi Constructions of a Nazi-Tibet Connection
In the past, allegations that Hitler and National Socialist policy were controlled from afar by the supernatural and occult powers of Tibetan “Hidden Masters” were exploited to lend comprehensibility to the horror of Hitler and Nazi rule, by elevating them to a plane of magic. However, since the 1990s new trends have begun to emerge. These trends emerge from the right-wing neo-Nazi sector. On the one hand Neo-Nazi apologists employ the conspiracy myths
about the Tibetans as supposed friends of the Nazis in order to exculpate Hitler and the Nazi regime and portray part of the National Socialist ruling elite as innocently ensnared victims, while on the other hand assimilating the Tibetans and the Dalai Lama as their comrades in National Socialism. In this vein, an astonishing article was published in 1995 in a US neo-Nazi publication by A. V. Schaerffenberg, entitled “The Führer and the Buddha.” Although the article itself is extremely difficult to locate, an abridged version of its content is widely available on the Internet as “Germany and Tibet,” and it has been translated into several languages.¹⁷³ Schaerffenberg writes:
The Tibetans’ relationship with National Socialism began even, while Adolf Hitler was battling the Jewish strangle-hold on Germany. During the 1920’s Thupten Gyatso was the 13th Dalai Lama, or religious-political leader of Tibet. He was a scholar of deep learning and wide intelligence who sought to strike a balance between technical innovations from the West and the spiritual heritage of the East. He had many books translated from European languages
into Tibetan. One of these was Mein Kampf. Even in the distant Himalayas, Thupten Gyatso had heard something about this man of humble origins who inspired almost religious admiration from millions of his followers. The Dalai Lama was more than impressed by the written eloquence of this uneducated ex-soldier. The inji, a Tibetan term for “honorable foreigner,” is assisted by God for some high purpose in his life. He filled his copy of the Führer’s masterpiece with pithy annotations of enthusiastic agreement and underlined numerous favorite passages in yellow ink, virtually on every page. So much of what he read mirrored the ancient wisdom of his own Tibetan heritage. […]
He was likewise surprised to find several important comparisons between National Socialism and Buddhism, especially the belief both held in common regarding service to one’s people as the highest dharma, or purpose in one’s life. Hitler, of course, was familiar with Buddhist principles, but it seems more likely that both he and Buddha drew upon the same font of Aryan genius to come to similar conclusions. Accordingly, after the Führer was elected Chancellor, in 1933 he received warm congratulations all the way from Tibet …
Harrer was part of the National Socialist influences already at work in Tibet for twenty years, but it was his personal contact with Tenzin that formed the 14th Dalai Lama’s world-view. It seems strange, and then again, not so strange, that the great spokesman of Tibetan Buddhism is today’s only world-class leader who embraced National Socialism, however subtly.¹⁷⁴
Schaerffenberg even styles himself as the champion of the Tibetans, who “were being ground under the heel of Chinese Communist executioners” and accuses the Western public of indifference to the fate of the Tibetans.
Such assimilations of the Tibetans and the Dalai Lama by neo-Nazis are naturally grist for the mill of those who charge the current Dalai Lama with friendship with the Nazis and with having been influenced during his youth by National Socialism. These charges appeared in the wake of the publicity surrounding Heinrich Harrer’s membership of the SS in connection with the 1997 film Seven Years in Tibet; for example, Tom Korsky says that “The Dalai Lama has been branded as a Nazi dupe who fell prey to certain influences of the Hitler regime as schoolboy.”¹⁷⁵ Fascist influences on the Dalai Lama have been inferred from his audiences with Miguel Serrano and Shoko Asahara.¹⁷⁶ Even the fictions of Pauwels and Bergier, such as that of the thousand dead Tibetans in German uniform in Berlin at the end of the war, are laid at the Dalai Lama’s door: “One wonders what today’s Dalai Lama might be conveniently forgetting in relation to his community’s Nazi affiliations, each time he proclaims the Tibetan Buddhist’s identification with the suffering of the Jews.”¹⁷⁷
Recent Constructions of a Tibetan World Conspiracy Myth
Another trend has originated from German authors, in whose books the idealized image of Tibet is being turned into its dark, but equally distorted, mirror image. Here the alleged connections to National Socialism and neo-Fascism are linked to a literal interpretation of the final victory of the armies of Shambhala, with Tibetan Tantric Buddhism being seen as a tool for world dominance by the Tibetans.¹⁷⁸ In describing the most strident proponents of such claims, Martin Brauen writes:
Like Ipares, Strunk, Ludendorff, Wilhelmy and Rosenberg some sixty years earlier, the Röttgens construct a conspiracy theory according to which the Dalai Lama is a world ruler and wants to establish a global ‘Buddhocracy’ by infiltrating the West with his omnipotent lamas … and in sublime way making Western people … part of his world-wide Kalachakra project.¹⁷⁹
And this wave has already spilled over to fundamentalist evangelical groups in the United States, which are now conjuring up images of an impending Tibeto-Buddhist global conspiracy. Quite apart from the monstrous nature of these claims, it should be pointed out once again that “conspiracism turns some of history’s most powerless and abused peoples into the most powerful.”
To conclude, and return to our starting point of the poster at the University of Munich, what actual basis is there for the belief in a Tibetan-Nazi connection? There was no collaboration of any kind whatsoever between the Tibetans and Germany in the Second World War. From the outset, the tenor was that “Tibetan opinion appears to expect an Allied victory in the European War, but the official attitude is one of careful neutrality.”¹⁸⁰ A statement made by
Minister Surkhang in conversation with the young Tibetan revolutionary Phuntsog Wangyal in 1943 in Lhasa does make plain why certain hopes arose in some circles of the Tibetan aristocracy that Japan and Germany might be victorious, but for strictly domestic reasons: “If Germany and Japan win, the Council of Ministers feels that we don’t have to worry much. The British will eventually withdraw from India and their power will no longer be a direct threat to Tibet. And when Japan conquers China, they will leave Tibet alone. They are a Buddhist country.”¹⁸¹ There is no indication in this statement, however, of any connection with or support of Nazi Germany.
Thus, apart from the misrepresented scientific expedition to Tibet of five scholars associated with the SS and the non-committal letter from the Tibetan Regent to Hitler, the only evidence that can be adduced for a Nazi-Tibet connection consists of a host of unproven sensationalist best-selling stories. The occult Nazi-Tibet connection was first concocted by the French in the 1930s as a method to either exonerate or discredit the Nazis, drawing a direct line from Blavatsky’s Theosophy to Nazi occultism, and alleging that there had been occult and esoteric connections between the Nazis and Tibet since that
period. This same myth has been resurrected today to blacken Tibetan Buddhism and Tibet’s exiled representatives, with the claim that the Dalai Lama was influenced by Nazi ideology and insinuating a Tibetan conspiracy to conquer the world. However, in the age of the Internet these conspiracy myths seem to spread with breathtaking rapidity and take root in the minds of those predisposed to such beliefs. Tibet, once a dream world, now a nightmare? The Western imagination appears to be inexhaustible when it comes to inventing new roles for Tibet.
[1] Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum (New York: Random, 1989): 386, 122, 265, 420. [2] Admittedly the president of the University of Munich received a number of letters of protest and promised to investigate the matter.
[3] For many ideas I am indebted to Martin Brauen, Dreamworld Tibet: Western Illusions (Bangkok: Orchid Press, 2004): 46-81 (orig. Traumwelt Tibet – Westliche Trugbilder, Zurich: Haupt, 2000, 53-92), who already addressed the subject with many detailed examples in a different context; Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2002), and The Occult Roots of Nazism
(New York: New York University Press, 1992); Hans Thomas Hakl, Unknown Sources: National Socialism and the Occult, trans. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (Edmonds, WA: Holmes 2000); Joscelyn Godwin, Arktos: the Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival (Grand Rapids: Phanes, 1993). As a number of books of the occult historians were not available in Germany, I am grateful to Bianca Horlemann and Günter Schütz for providing me with copies from the Library of Congress, Washington and the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
[4] John Roberts, The Mythology of Secret Societies (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972): 9.
[5] Armin Pfahl-Traughber, Der antisemitisch-antifreimaurerische Verschwörungsmythos in der Weimarer Republik und im NS-Staat (Vienna: Braumüller, 1993): 121.
[6] Paul Arnold, Histoire des Rose-Croix et les origines de la Franc-Maçonnerie (Paris: Mercure de France, 1955): 150; Arthur Edward Waite, The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross (London: Rider, 1924): 244; René Guénon, Le Roi du Monde (Paris: Bosse, 1927): 97-98; cf. also Bruno Hapel, René Guénon et le roi du monde (Paris: Éditions Trédaniel, 2001): 204; Frans Wittemans, Histoire des Rose-Croix, 3rd ed. (Paris: Adyar, 1925): 51; Christopher McIntosh, The Rosicrucians: The History, Mythology, and Rituals of an Esoteric Order (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1997): 53.
[7] “Videri possent non esse, quia de nulla certo loco constat, ubi habitent.” Heinrich Neuhaus (Henricus Neuhusius), Pia et utilissima admonitio de fratribus rosae-crucis, nimirum an sint? Quales sint? Unde nomen ille asciverint? Et quo sine eius modi famam sparserint? (Frankfurt: Vetterus, 1622): 5; (French translation: Henri Neuheus de Dantzig: Advertissement pieux et très utile des Frères de la Rose-Croix, Paris, 1623). Peter Washington (Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon, New York: Schocken Books, 1995) quotes on p. 39: “When Heinrich Neuhaus mischievously suggested that these brothers could not be found because they had all retreated to India and Tibet, he neatly made their existence or non-existence impossible to prove either way, entrenching yet further popular belief in the reality of the brothers.”
[8] Renatus Sincerus, Die wahrhafte und vollkommene Bereitung des philosophischen Steins der Brüderschafft aus dem Orden des Gulden und Rosen Kreutzes [The true and complete preparation of the philosopher’s stone of the brotherhood, from the Order of the Golden Rosy Cross; translation of the title, McIntosh] (Breslau: Fellgiebel, 1710), preface, no pagination, ca. p. 10.
[9] See for example the polemical work: Anonym, Der Asiate in seiner Blöße. Oder gründlicher Beweis: daß die Ritter und Brüder Eingeweihten aus Asien ächte Rosenkreuzer sind. [The Asian revealed. Or: Detailed evidence that the knights and brethren of Asia are true Rosicrucians], Asien [sic] 1790.
[10] J. Godwin, Arktos, 85.
[11] Paul K. Johnson, The Masters Revealed: Madame Blavatsky and the Myth of the Great White Lodge (Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 1994): 20.
[12] On the “Hidden Masters” of Blavatsky see P. K. Johnson, The Masters Revealed.
[13] P. K. Johnson, The Masters Revealed, 4.
[14] P. K. Johnson, The Masters Revealed, 22.
[15] Cited in Sylvia Cranston, HPB: The Extraordinary Life and Influence of Helena Blavatsky, Founder of the Modern Theosophical Movement (New York: Tarcher-Putnam, 1993): 132.
[16] A Russian, “The Rosy Cross in Russia: Russian Masonry and Novikoff,” The Theosophical Review 38 (1906): 489-501, here 495-496; 39 (1906/07): 9-20, 138-144, 201-211, 304-306.
[17] See Zam Bhotiva [i.e., Cesar Accomani], Asia mysteriosa (Paris 1929, repr. Combronde: Éditions Janvier, 1995): 68 and 148. René Guénon in his withdrawn foreword to Asia mysteriosa, see Bruno Hapel, René Guénon et le roi du monde, 204-206; Maurice Magre, La clef des choses cachées (Paris: Fasquelle, 1935); I had access only to the German translation: Die Kraft der frühen Himmel (Bad Münstereifel: Edition Tramontane, 1986): 115. Later Ambelain wrote that Magre had implied the lamas had come from Tibet to become politically active in Europe by using Tantric magic (Robert Ambelain, Les arcanes noirs de L’Hitlerisme, Paris: Rober Laffont, 1990, 114). For more on the Polaires, see Arnaud d’Apremont, “La fraternité des Polaires: Une épopée Romantico-Rosicrucienne du XXème siècle,” in Asia mysteriosa, ed. Z. Bhotiva, 8-41; J. Godwin, Arktos, 87-92; Victor and Victoria Trimondi [i.e., Herbert and Maria Röttgen], Hitler, Buddha, Krishna (Vienna: Ueberreuter, 2002): 271-288.
[18] Jean Marques-Rivière, À l’ombre des monastères thibétains (Paris: Attinger, 1929).
[19] See Jean M. Rivière, À l’ombre des monastères tibétains (Milan: Archè, 1982): 209-213.
[20] Jean Marques-Rivière, À l’ombre des monastères thibétains, 154-156; see also R. Guénon, Le Roi du Monde, 46-47.
[21] J. Marques-Rivière, À l’ombre des monastères thibétains, 154-156.
[22] Alexandra David-Néel, Mystiques et magiciens du Tibet (Paris: Plon, 1929).
[23] Louis Jacolliot, Le fils de dieu (Paris: Lacroix, 1873): 237.
[24] Joseph-Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, Mission de l’Inde en Europe. Originally published in 1886 by Paris: Calmann Lévy. It was deleted except for two copies and republished in 1909 in Paris; and as facsimile repr. Nice: Bélisane, 1981, 49-54. [25] Ferdinand Ossendowski, Beasts, Men and Gods (New York: Dutton, 1922): 314.
[26] Cf. Sven Hedin, Ossendowski und die Wahrheit (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1925): 78-109. Although Sven Hedin was quick to reveal Ossendowski’s sources by applying a synoptic comparison with Saint-Ives d’Alveydre, as did Marco Pallis later in “Ossendowski’s Sources,” Studies in Comparative Religion 15 (1983): 30-41, Ossendowski’s work was widely disseminated in several translations.
[27] Theodore Illion, Darkness over Tibet (London: Rider, 1938). Various claims are made about Illion’s nationality: Canadian (Bundesarchiv Berlin, R 43/4107, fol. 193), Italian (Bundesarchiv Berlin 135/46, fol. 164604), or American (Bundesarchiv Berlin R 135/46, fol. 164600). Jürgen Aschoff (Annotated Bibliography of Tibetan Medicine, 1789-1995, Ulm: Fabri, 1996, 195) cites Hubert Novak, who knew Illion personally, to the effect that he was born in Canada and was a scion of the great Plantagenet family.
[28] Johannes Schubert, the Leipzig Tibetologist, reported of his meeting with Illion in 1941: “I am not familiar with another book of his, Darkness over Tibet; in it, he speaks—as he told me—of a Tibetan secret society assembled in a ‘subterranean city’ and closely aligned to the Freemasons. A reason why the book had been translated into Swedish, but not into German!! Mr Illion, like Alexandra David-Neel, places more value on the occult and parapsychological phenomena which Tibet evinces than on other things.” However, in Schubert’s view his excellent knowledge of the Tibetan language, both written and spoken, proved a “glaring contrast” to the content of Illion’s first book Secret Tibet (Bundesarchiv Berlin, R 135/46, fol. 164600-164601). See now also Hartmut Walravens, “Briefwechsel Johannes Schuberts mit Bruno Beger und Ernst Schäfer,” Nachrichten der Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens 74 (2004): 165-224, here 173-174.
[29] Bundesarchiv Berlin, R 43/4107, fol. 201. [30] Bundesarchiv Berlin, R 135/46, fol. 164604.
[31] A reference to Hitler as being under the guidance of occult forces appeared as early as 1934 in René Kopp, “Le secret psychique des maîtres du monde: Bonaparte, Mussolini, Hitler,” Le Chariot 54 (June 1934): 85-89, which regards Hitler as a reincarnation of Luther (p. 86). Further French books consulted on the Nazis and the Occult: R. Ambelain, Les arcanes noirs de L’Hitlerisme; Élisabeth Antebi, Ave Lucifer (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1970); Jean Robin, Hitler l’élu du dragon (Paris: Trédaniel, 1987); Roger Faligot and Rémi Kauffer, Le marché du diable(Paris: Fayard, 1995); Adolphe D. Grad, Le temps kabbaliste (Neuchâtel: Baconnière, 1967); François Ribadeau Dumas, Hitler et la sorcellerie (Paris: Plon, 1975); Jean-Michel Angebert, Hitler et la tradition cathare (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1971); Jean-Claude Frère, Nazisme et sociétés secrètes (Paris: Grasset, 1974); André Brissaud, Hitler et l’ordre noir: Histoire secrète du National-Socialisme (Paris: Perrin, 1969); Werner Gerson, Le Nazisme, société secrète (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1969); René Alleau, Hitler et les sociétés secrètes (Paris: Grasset, 1969); Serge Hutin, Gouvernants invisibles et sociétés secrètes (Paris: Éditions J’ai lu, 1971).
[32] T. Hakl, Unknown Sources; Michael Rissman, Hitlers Gott (Zurich: Pendo, 2001): 145-161; N. Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, 106-127; N. Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, 217-225.
[33] N. Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, 108 and 127. [34] Teddy Legrand [i.e., Frédéric Causse? (1892–1951)], Les sept têtes du dragon vert (Paris: Éditions Berger-Levrault, 1933). See below for further discussion of his identity.
[35] Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians (New York: Stein & Day, 1964): xvi; (orig. Le matin des magiciens: Introduction au réalisme fantastique, Paris: Gallimard, 1960)
[36] Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939). However, as Theodor Schieder (Hermann Rauschnings Gespräche mit Hitler als Geschichtsquelle, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1972) remarks on p. 80, the relevant chapter on Hitler’s occultism appears only in the French and English edition, not in the German one. See also Eckhard Jesse, “Hermann Rauschning—Der fragwürdige Kronzeuge,” in Die braune Elite, ed. Ronald Smelser (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999): 193-205; Wolfgang Hänel, Hermann Rauschnings “Gespräche mit Hitler”—Eine Geschichtsfälschung (Ingolstadt: Zeitgeschichtliche Forschungsstelle, 1984); Fritz Tobias, “Auch Fälschungen haben lange Beine: Des Senatspräsidenten Rauschnings “Gespräche mit Hitler,” in Gefälscht! Betrug in Kunst, Literatur, Musik, Wissenschaft und Politik, ed. Karl Corino (Frankfurt: Eichborn, 1990): 91-105. [37] Edouard Saby, Hitler et les forces occultes: La magie noire en Allemagne. La vie occculte du Fuhrer (Paris: Société d’Éditions Littéraires et de Vulgarisation, 1939): 131, trans. N. Goodrick-Clarke in T. Hakl, Unknown Sources, 26.
[38] C. Kerneiz [i. e., Felix Guyot], La chute d’Hitler (Paris: Éditions Jules Tallandier, 1940): 45. For more details on the publications of Kopp, Sabry and Kerneiz, see T. Hakl, Unknown Sources, 22-27. More information on Ludendorff’s ideas and publications is given below.
[39] Cf. for example, Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 2 vols. (London: Allen Lane / Penguin, 1998- 2000); Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich; A New History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000); N. Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism; Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2004).
[40] On Himmler see also Albert Speer (Inside the Third Reich, London: Phoenix, 1998, 147-148): “What nonsense! Here we have at least reached an age that has all mysticism behind it, and now he wants to start all over again. We might just as well have stayed with the church. At least it had tradition.” And Speer goes on to report that Hitler also regarded Himmler’s ideas of the ur-Germanic peoples as equally absurd: “When for example, the Japanese presented [[[Wikipedia:Himmler|Himmler]]] with a samurai sword, he at once discovered kinships between Japanese and Teutonic cults and called upon scientists to help him trace these similarities to a racial common denominator.”
[41] Max Domarus, Hitler, Reden und Proklamationen, 1932-1945 (Munich: Süddeutscher Verlag 1965): vol. 1, bk. 2, 893-894. Translation partly taken from M. Burleigh, The Third Reich, 253. (If not stated otherwise, all translations are mine). Burleigh comments that Hitler regarded the “ideologue Rosenberg as an obscurantist and Himmler as a loyal crank” and that the speech was a “coded warning for Rosenberg and Himmler.” See also M. Domarus, Hitler, vol. 1, 223. [42] See Adolf Hitler (Hitler’s Table Talk 1941-1944, ed. Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, first published 1953), July 19, 1942, 583: “The horoscope, in which the Anglo-Saxons in particular have great faith, is another swindle whose significance must not be under-estimated.” Hitler’s attitude here is confirmed by Walter Langer, former officer of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Germany during the last years of World War II (Walter Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler, New York: Basic Books, 1972, 31-32): “All of our informants who have known Hitler rather intimately discard the idea [of Hitler’s belief in astrology] as absurd. They all agree that nothing is more foreign to Hitler’s personality than to seek help from outside sources of this type. Not only has the Führer never had his horoscope cast, but he is in principle against horoscopes because he feels he might be unconsciously influenced by them. It is also indicative that Hitler, some time before the war, forbade the practice of fortune-telling and star-reading in Germany.”
[43] C. Treitel, A Science for the Soul; see also Anson Rabinbach in Times Literary Supplement (November 12, 2004): 36.
[44] Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler (London: Macmillan, 1947, 6th ed., 1987).
[45] C. Treitel, A Science for the Soul, 211.
[46] C. Treitel, A Science for the Soul, 224. [47] Henry Picker, Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier (Munich: Propyläen, 2003, first published 1951): 460, May 21, 1942. [48] H. Picker, Tischgespräche, 421, May 14, 1942.
[49] Isrun Engelhardt, “Mishandled Mail: The Strange Case of the Reting Regent’s Letters to Hitler,” in: Zentralasiatische Studien (ZAS) 37 (2008), 77-106.
[50] Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race (London: Routledge, 1871).
[51] Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled (New York: Bouton, 1877): vol. 1, 64, 115. [52] Willy Ley, “Pseudoscience in Naziland,” Astounding Science-Fiction 39 (1947): 90-98, here 92. [53] Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians, 147-148. However, Peter Bahn and Heiner Gehring (Der Vril-Mythos: Eine geheimnisvolle Energieform in Esoterik, Technik und Therapie, Düsseldorf: Omega, 1997) have succeeded in casting some light on the darkness of this myth and have discovered the actual background to the organizational history of the small Berlin group.
[54] Pauwels and Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians, 194-195.
[55] See on Gurdjieff’s reputed stays in Tibet, M. Brauen, Dreamworld Tibet, 41-46.
[56] Louis Pauwels, Gurdjieff (Douglas, Isle of Man: Times Press, 1964): 62-65 (orig. Monsieur Gurdjieff: Documents, témoignages textes et commentaires sur une société initiatique contemporaine, Paris: Éditions du Seul, 1954, 59-61).
[57] Detlev Rose, Die Thule-Gesellschaft: Legende – Mythos – Wirklichkeit (Tübingen: Grabert 1994, 2nd ed., 2000); Reginald Phelps, “Before Hitler came: Thule Society and Germanen Orden,” Journal of Modern History 25 (1963): 245-261. Although this serious article has been available in English for a long time, none of the occult historians has made use of it.
[58] Hans-Adolf Jacobson, Karl Haushofer. Leben und Werk, 2 vols. (Boppard: Boldt, 1979): vol. 1, 47, 86-89, 224-258, 451. [59] Apparently Gurdjieff was mistaken for the Mongolian monk Agvan Dordjiev, see, for example, James Webb, The Harmonious Circle: The Lives of G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, and their Followers (New York: Putman, 1980): 45, 49-50. [60] Ernesto Milá, Nazisme et ésotéricisme (Puiseaux: Pardès, 1990, orig. Nazismo y esoterismo, 1989): 83. However, the sentence continued with the fiction, “accompanied by twenty SS men.”
[61] Isrun Engelhardt, “Tibetan Triangle: German, Tibetan and British Relations in the Context of Ernst Schäfer’s Expedition, 1938-1939,” Asiatische Studien 58.1 (2004): 57-113. Some of the material in the essay appeared in a preliminary form in “The Ernst-Schaefer Tibet-Expedition (1938-1939),” in Tibet and her Neighbours, ed. Alex McKay (London: Hansjörg Mayer, 2003): 187-195.
[62] Ernst Schäfer, Berge, Buddhas, Bären (Berlin: Parey, 1933).
[63] Ernst Schäfer, Unbekanntes Tibet: Durch die Wildnisse Osttibets zum Dach der Erde, Tibetexpedition 1934/36 (Berlin: Parey, 1937). [64] See I. Engelhardt, “Tibetan Triangle,” 65-66. [65] Memo Sievers, 6 August 1937, Bundesarchiv Berlin, NS 21/682.
[66] The standard work on the “Ahnenerbe”: Michael Kater, Das “Ahnenerbe” der SS 1935-1945: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturpolitik des Dritten Reiches, 3. unveränderte Aufl. mit einem Nachwort zur 2. Aufl. 1997 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2001). [67] Helmut Heiber, Reichsführer! … Briefe an und von Himmler (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1970). [68] Final Intelligence Report (OI-FIR/32), “The Activities of Dr. Ernst Schaefer, Tibet Explorer and Scientist with SS-Sponsored Institutes,” 12 February 1946, National Archives, Washington, RG 238, M-1270, roll 27, fol. 3-4. [69] Ernst Schäfer, Geheimnis Tibet (Munich: Bruckmann, 1943): 7-16. [70] Schäfer in undated letter to Beger from the end of December 1937: “And I set the yardstick for our coming expedition quite independently of other people or explorations … This independence awarded to me by the Reichsführer—and without which I would never have taken on the charge …” Bundesarchiv Berlin, R 135/43 fols. 163367-163370.
[71] Bundesarchiv Berlin, NS 21/682, 23 January 1938; and NS 21/165 from 27 May 1938. [72] Sievers to Wolff, 23 January 1938, Bundesarchiv Berlin, NS 21/682. [73] Memo Sievers, 9 March 1938, Bundesarchiv Berlin, NS 21/165.
[74] 27 May 1938, Bundesarchiv Berlin, NS 21/682. [75] Memo Sievers, 9 March 1938, Bundesarchiv Berlin, NS 21/165. [76] Rudolf Mentzel, President of the DFG to Schäfer, 8 March 1938, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, R 73/1498 and Bundesarchiv Berlin, NS 21/682. [77] Bundesarchiv Berlin, R 135/5, fol. 150165.
[78] For Himmler’s circle of friends, see Reinhard Vogelsang, Der Freundeskreis Himmler (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1972). [79] Schäfer to Galke, 14 October 1937, Bundesarchiv Berlin, NS 21/682. [80] Memo Sievers, 4 October 1937, Bundesarchiv Berlin, NS 21/165. [81] OIOC, L/P&S/12/4343, fol. 333.
[82] Podewils to Foreign Office, 11 June 1938, Bundesarchiv Berlin, ZM 1457 A5, fols. 47-48. [83] Himmler to Domvile, 18 May 1938, OIOC, L/P&S/12/4343, fols. 264-265; Bundesarchiv Berlin, ZM 1457 A5, fols. 78-79. [84] However, Claudio Mutti (“Le SS in Tibet,” www.centrostudilaruna.it/SSTibet.html) claims that “the Panchen Lama received the expedition and issued a document of friendship with the Third Reich.” See also next section.
[85] Reinhard Greve, “Tibetforschung im SS-Ahnenerbe,” in Lebenslust und Fremdenfurcht: Ethnologie im Dritten Reich, ed. Thomas Hauschild (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995): 168-199, here 175, note 25; and recently V. and V. Trimondi, Hitler, Buddha, Krishna, 130. [86] On the Reting letter to Hitler see I. Engelhardt, “Mishandled Mail.”
[87] Teddy Legrand, Les sept têtes du dragon vert, Chapitre IV “L’homme aux gants verts,” 225-245.
[88] However, I doubt that the author was a mere secret agent. There are too many details pointing to inside information concerning the French occult, and the Buddhist and Tibetan scenes of the day. In fact, whatever the true identity of Legrand himself may be, the authors are said to have been two experts on the occult, Pierre Mariel and Arnaud de Vögue. According to É. Antebi (Ave Lucifer, 137) and J. Robin (Hitler l’élu du dragon, 141), the Éditions Berger-Levrault issued this book in a series of army books because the secret service was shocked by the rise of Nazism and gave them the form of brulant dossiers to increase their success. See http://tessa-quayle.joueb.com/news/52.shtml.
[89] É. Antebi (Ave Lucifer, 140) mentions the possibility that “L’homme aux gants verts” might have been the famous magician Erik Hanussen.
[90] Teddy Legrand, Les sept têtes du dragon vert, 243-244.
[91] L. Pauwels and J. Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians, 197-198.
[92] According to R. Ambelain (Les arcanes noirs de l’Hitlerisme, 122), they are “the Tibetan instructors of the Nazis.”
[93] L. Pauwels and J. Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians, 207.
[94] Plans for a second, military expedition in 1939-1940 failed, e.g. Final Intelligence Report (OI-FIR/32), “The Activities of Dr. Ernst Schaefer, Tibet Explorer and Scientist with SS-Sponsored Institutes,” February 12, 1946, National Archives, Washington, RG 238, M-1270, Roll 27, fols. 7-9; Bundesarchiv Berlin, NS 19/2709, fol. 35-41.
[95] His name was Bordjal (Tib. spu rgyal ?). However, his integration into German life was so complete that he could be traced only with difficulty at the beginning of the 1940s near Stuttgart. In 1920 he had married Tafel’s cook and taken a German name. Bundesarchiv Berlin, R135/46, fol. 162120, 162123, 164458, 164522, 164527.
[96] Joachim Hoffmann, Deutsche und Kalmyken, 1942-1945 (Freiburg: Rombach, 1974).
[97] N. Goodrick-Clarke, The Black Sun, 117.
[98] Trevor Ravenscroft, The Spear of Destiny: The Occult Power Behind the Spear, which Pierced the Side of Christ (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972): 255-257.
[99] Dietrich Bronder, Bevor Hitler kam: Eine historische Studie, 2nd ed. (Geneva: Marva, 1975): 248-251.
[100] Bundesarchiv Koblenz, R 73/1498, fol. 25.
[101] Theodore Illion, Darkness over Tibet (Kempton, Illinois: Adventure Unlimited Press, 1997): v. Similarly David Hatcher Childress, Lost Continents and the Hollow Earth (Stelle, Illinois: Adventure Unlimited Press, 1999): 325 as mentioned in Alan Baker, Invisible Eagle: The History of Nazi Occultism (London: Virgin, 2000): 121.
[102] Dusty Sklar, Gods and Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult (New York: Crowell, 1977): 77. [103] Alan Baker, Invisible Eagle, 121. [104] Roger Faligot and Rémi Kauffer, Le marché du diable, 244. [105] James H. Brennan, The Occult Reich (London: Futura, 1974): 82. [106] Gerald Suster, Hitler, the Occult Messiah (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981): 191-192. [107] Adolphe D. Grad, Le temps kabbaliste, 12-13. [[[108]]] E. Milá, Nazisme et ésotéricisme, 86-87.
[109] Interview on December 6, 2003. However, it was presumably Johannes Schubert, who had written a list “Desiderata der Tibetforschung,” in which he did list a question as to whether there were special places in Tibet, where the Kālachakra cult was still practiced. (Bundesarchiv Berlin, R 135/57 fol. 151363). It is unknown whether the expedition received this list in time and took it to Tibet. Bruno Beger has no recollection of it.
[110] Cf. Günter Grönbold, Die tibetischen Blockdrucke der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek: Eine Titelliste (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1989), in which all blockprints brought to Germany by the Schäfer expedition are listed. After having also checked all Tibetan manuscripts from the expedition with the kind help of Namgyal Nyima, I found absolutely nothing of an occult nature—rather, they concern mundane matters such as brawls in a restaurant, problems with the hay harvest, and some prayers.
[111] D. Bronder, Bevor Hitler kam, 250-251. However, of course, in Tibetan “Hitler” was not spelled “Hsi Talé” but “he ti lar.”
[112] Peter Levenda, Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 2002): 196.
[113] Peter Moon, The Black Sun: Montauk’s Nazi-Tibet Connection (New York: Sky Books, 1997): 211.
[114] Cf. Günter Grönbold, The Words of the Buddha in the Languages of the World (Munich: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, 2005): 128-129.
[115] Lee Feigon, Demystifying Tibet (Chicago: Elephant, 1996): 15.
[116] Orville Schell, Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood (New York: Holt, 2000): 289.
[117] Heinrich Harrer, Sieben Jahre in Tibet; mein Leben am Hofe des Dalai Lama (Vienna: Ullstein, 1952).
[118] Gerald Lehner and Tilman Müller, “Dalai Lama’s Friend: Hitler’s Champion,” Himal (July/August 1997): 42-44, here 44. This is the English translation of the article in the German magazine Stern from May 28, 1997, which triggered an avalanche of “revelations.”
[119] David Roberts, “The Nazi Shadow in Tibet,” Men’s Journal 6.8 (1997): 61-62, 119- 120, here 62. [120] P. Levenda, Unholy Alliance, 191.
[121] P. Levenda, Unholy Alliance, 192-193. Despite Levenda’s frequently quoted comparison of Schäfer to a “Nazi Indiana Jones” (p. 194), he never had anything to do with the search for any Ark of the Covenant, Holy Grail, etc.
[122] This section on conspiracy theories and myths is drawn from the following literature: Geoffrey T. Cubitt, “Conspiracy Myths and Conspiracy Theories,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 20 (1989): 12-26; Dieter Groh, “The Temptation of Conspiracy Theory, or: Why do Bad Things Happen to Good People? Preliminary Draft of a Theory of Conspiracy Theories,” in Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy, eds. Carl F. Graumann and Serge Moscovici (Berlin: Springer, 1987): 1-11; Daniel Pipes, Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where it Comes From (New York: Free Press, 1997); John Roberts, The Mythology of Secret Societies (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972); Armin Pfahl-Traughber, Der antisemitisch-antifreimaurerische Verschwörungsmythos in der Weimarer Republik und im NS-Staat (Vienna: Braumüller, 1993): 115; Armin Pfahl-Traughber, “‘Bausteine’ zu einer Theorie über ‘Verschwörungstheorien’: Definitionen, Erscheinungsformen, Funktionen und Ursachen,”
[123] G. Cubitt, “Conspiracy Myths,” 13.
[124] D. Pipes, Conspiracy, 21.
[125] D. Groh, “The Temptation of Conspiracy Theory,” 5.
[126] R. Jaworsky, “Verschwörungstheorien,” 22.
[127] N. Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, 108, 109, 113: “All writers in this genre document a secret history of the Third Reich, unknown to conventional historians, as the instrument of dark powers for the achievement of satanic ends” and “dehistoricize the facts of dictatorship, terror, war and oppression into a mythical tableau of demonic mission.” The claim is made that “Hitler’s rise to power is directly linked to supernatural, secret power that supported and controlled Hitler and his entourage” and “that the Nazi leadership was determined to establish contact with an omnipotent subterranean theocracy in the East, mainly Tibet, and gain knowledge of its power. It was supposed that this power would enable Germany to conquer the whole world.”
[128] R. Jaworsky, “Verschwörungstheorien,” 27.
[129] G. Cubitt, “Conspiracy Myths,” 16.
[130] D. Pipes, Conspiracy, 41.
[131] U. Caumanns and M. Niendorf, “Raum und Zeit,” 205.
[132] D. Rose, Die Thulegesellschaft, 197.
[133] D. Pipes, Conspiracy, 34.
[134] For example, the cover blurb of a book by James H. Brennan states: “This is the strangest book ever written about Nazi Germany. It deals with facts—but facts that orthodox historians ignore.” James Herbert Brennan, Occult Reich, 2nd ed. (London, 1976), cited in D. Rose, Die Thule-Gesellschaft, 166. Brennan went on to publish Occult Tibet: Secret Practices of Himalayan Magic (St. Paul, Minnesota: Llewellyn, 2002).
[135] Johannes Rogalla von Bieberstein, “Die These von der Verschwörung der Freimaurer,”
78.
[136] D. Pipes, Conspiracy, 133: “Time and place hardly matter.” Conspirators “are blithely located where they do not live,” secret societies “blamed for conspiracies occurring long before either group came into existence.”
[137] A. Pfahl-Traughber, Der antisemitisch-antifreimaurerische Verschwörungsmythos, 117.
[138] D. Pipes, Conspiracy, 4
[139] Johannes H. Voigt, “Hitler und Indien,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 19 (1971): 33-63, here 33.
[140] Cf. Frank-Lothar Kroll, Utopie als Ideologie: Geschichtsdenken und politisches Handeln im Dritten Reich: Hitler – Rosenberg – Darré – Himmler – Goebbels (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1998): 134-135.
[141] F. Kroll, Utopie als Ideologie, 146.
[142] Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Hoheneichen, 1940, first published 1930): 28-32, 147-150, 265-273, 389-390, 660-664.
[143] A. Rosenberg, Mythus, 265, 341.
[144] Rosenberg had obviously discovered the leading German Orientalist, philologist and archaeologist Albert Grünwedel through the inaccurate decipherings and strange interpretations of Etruscan texts that the elderly and already sick Grünwedel had attempted; cf. Reinhard Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg und seine Gegner: Studien zum Machtkampf im nationalsozialistischen Herrschaftssystem (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1970): 23, 257. [145] A. Rosenberg, Mythus, 65. Grünwedel had viewed the Etruscan texts as “new testimony to the original home of witchcraft and Satanism as being on European soil” and perceived a “close relationship with the Tibetan Tantras of lamaism.” [146] A. Rosenberg, Mythus, 184-186.
[147] “He possessed outstanding military talent, … and he must be ranked as one of the very greatest military organizers of all time,” Donald James Goodspeed, Ludendorff: Soldier: Dictator: Revolutionary (London: Hart-Davis, 1966): 248.
[148] The American Mercury 52 (February 1941), No. 206.
[149] However, the allegedly prophetic letter written by Ludendorff to Reich President Hindenburg at the end of January 1933, in which he expressed a warning concerning Hitler, is pure fiction. Cf. Lothar Gruchmann, “Ludendorffs ‘prophetischer’ Brief an Hindenburg vom Januar/Februar 1933. Eine Legende,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 47 (1999): 559-562.
[150] Winfried Martini, Die Legende vom Hause Ludendorff (Rosenheim, ca. 1949): 72; cf. also Gert Borst, Die Ludendorff-Bewegung 1919-1961: Eine Analyse monologer Kommunikationsformen in der sozialen Kommunikation (Ph.D. diss., University of Munich, 1969): 261-264.
[151] Erich Ludendorff, Vom Feldherrn zum Weltrevolutionär und Wegbereiter Deutscher Volksschöpfung: Lebenserinnerungen II (Stuttgart: Hohe Warte, 1951): 343.
[152] Mathilde Ludendorff, “Es rumort im ‘Dache der Welt’,” Am heiligen Quell deutscher Kraft 9 (November 5, 1938): 460-464. [153] Hermann Rehwaldt, “Götter, Priester, Politik: Der Buddhismus als weltpolitischer Faktor,” Am heiligen Quell deutscher Kraft 8 (February 5, 1938): 831-839. [154] Erich and Mathilde Ludendorff, Europa den Asienpriestern? (Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag 1938): 27. [155] E. and M. Ludendorff, Europa den Asienpriestern?, 21. [156] E. and M. Ludendorff, Europa den Asienpriestern?, 5. [157] A. Pfahl-Traughber, Der antisemitisch-antifreimaurerische Verschwörungsmythos, 64. [158] Hermann Rehwaldt, Weissagungen (Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag, 1939): 133.
[159] S. Ipares [i.e., Harry Dörfler], Geheime Weltmächte: Eine Abhandlung über die “Innere Regierung” der Welt (Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag, 1936): 45.
[160] Fritz Wilhelmy, Asekha, der Meister aus Fernost: Der Kreuzzug der Bettelmönche! (Düsseldorf: Verlag “Deutsche Revolution,” 1937): 25.
[161] J. Strunk, Zu Juda – Rom – Tibet: Ihr Ringen um die Weltherrschaft (Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag, 1937): 51.
[162] Helmut Neuberger, Winkelmass und Hakenkreuz: Die Freimaurer und das Dritte Reich (Munich: Herbig, 2001): 341.
[163] Hermann Rehwaldt, Vom Dach der Welt: Über die “Synthese aller Geisteskultur” in Ost und West (Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag, 1938): 16, 57.
[164] H. Rehwaldt, Weissagungen, 14.
[165] H. Rehwaldt, Weissagungen, 48.
[166] German Pinning, “Tibet vor den Toren,” Der Quell, Zeitschrift für Geistesfreiheit 7 (1955): 797-801, here 797.
[167] G. Borst, Die Ludendorff-Bewegung 1919-1961, 204.
[168] Mathilde Ludendorff, “Tibet macht Weltgeschichte,” Der Quell, Zeitschrift für Geistesfreiheit 7 (1955): 481-486, here 481.
[169] A. Pfahl-Traughber, Der antisemitisch-antifreimaurerische Verschwörungsmythos, 68.
[170] Am heiligen Quell deutscher Kraft 9 (March 20, 1939): 775.
[171] Am heiligen Quell deutscher Kraft 10 (July 14, 1939): 331.
[172] Am heiligen Quell deutscher Kraft 9 (June 20, 1938): 194. This was probably also an allusion to the “Protocols of the Elders [[[Wise]] Men] of Zion.”
[173] W. Grimwald, “Germany and Tibet,” first published in NEXUS 4 (May 1996).
[174] A.V. Schaerffenberg, “The Führer and the Buddha,” The New Order 119 (1995): 2,
[175] Tom Korsky, “Dalai Lama a ‘Nazi Dupe’,” China Morning Post (October 3, 1997).
[176] Victor and Victoria Trimondi [i.e., Herbert and Maria Röttgen], Der Schatten des Dalai Lama: Sexualität, Magie und Politik im tibetischen Budhismus (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1999), and Hitler, Buddha, Krishna; Colin Goldner, Dalai Lama: Fall eines Gottkönigs (Aschaffenburg: Alibri, 1999). Instead, these audiences were apparently the result of poor planning of either poorly informed advisers, naiveté or a lack of intuition with regard to the situation. See for example Helmut Clemens, “Ist der Dalai Lama ein Nazifreund? Die Protokolle der Weisen von München,” Tibet-Forum 2 (2000): 6-8.
[177] Hannah Newman, “The Rainbow Swastika: Nazism and the New Age,” http://philologos.org/__eb-trs/naF.htm.
[178] V. and V. Trimondi, Der Schatten des Dalai Lama, and Hitler, Buddha, Krishna.
[179] M. Brauen, Dreamworld Tibet, 80.
[180] London, British Library, Oriental and India Office Collections (OIOC), L/P&S712/ 4165, fol. 68, Political Department, Secret, note from March 1, 1940.
[181] Melvyn C. Goldstein, Dawei Sherap, William R. Siebenschuh, A Tibetan Revolutionary: The Political Life and Times of Bapa Phüntso Wangye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004): 77-78.
"Lost Horizon" - the James Hilton novel about a mysterious, paradisiacal monastery amidst the frozen Himalayas, called "Shangri la".
The real thing - the area of our lost monastery, written about in "The Lost Teachings of Atlantis".
The following is an article that appeared in newspapers around the country, around January 8, 1999. It was sent to us by a reader:
From The Chicago Tribune News Service
EXPLORERS FIND ELUSIVE SHANGRI-LA IN WORLD'S DEEPEST KNOWN GORGE
No record exists of people ever having seen the 100 foot-high waterfall and lush subtropical garden in the Tibetan Himalayas until now
WASHINGTON - Explorers finally have found Shangri-La.
It might not be quite the storied, verdant, Utopia Himalayan paradise of James Hilton's 1933 novel "Lost Horizon" and subsequent movie of the same name. But it is verdant, it is a kind of paradise, and it is hidden deep within Tibet's Himalayas in a monstrously steep gorge within a gorge. There is no record of any person having visited, or even seen, the area before.
Tucked beneath a mountain spur at a sharp bend of the Tsangpo River Gorge, where the cliff sides are only 75 yards apart and cast perpetual shadows, the place failed to show up even on satellite surveillance photographs of the area.
"If there is a Shangri-La , this is it," said Rebecca Martin, director of the National Geographic Society's Expeditions Board, which sponsored the trek. "This is a pretty startling discovery, especially in a time when many people are saying, "What's left to discover?" Tentatively named by the explorers the Hidden Falls of the Tsangpo and located in a forbidding region called Pemako that Tibetans consider highly sacred, the elusive site was reached by American explorers Ian Baker, Ken Storm Jr. and Brian Harvey late last year, though the society did not make its confirmation of their success official until Thursday.
In addition to a spectacular 100-foot-high waterfall- long rumored but until now undocumented- they found a subtropical garden between a 23,000 foot and a 26,000 foot mountain, at the bottom of a 4,000 foot high cliff.
According to Martin, it's the world' deepest mountain gorge.
"It's a place teeming with life." Storm said in telephone interview from his office in the Minneapolis suburb of Burnsville. "It's a terribly wild river, with many small waterfalls, heavy rapids and a tremendous current surging through. Yet there are all kinds of flora; subtropical pine, rhododendrons, craggy fir and hemlock and spruce on the hillsides. It's lush. Just a tremendous wild garden landscape." The animals there include a rare, horned creature called the Takin, sacred to Tibetan Buddhists.
Difficult as the gorge was to reach, Storm said one of the hardest aspects of the expedition was leaving to return to civilization.
"The last we saw of it was looking down... with clouds sealing the gorge and side-stream waterfalls jetting out into the river," he said. "it's probably the most romantic landscape I'd ever seen."
This was the seventh expedition that Baker, a Tibet scholar living in Katmandu, led into the Himalayas in search of the mythic falls. In addition to Storm, a book and game dealer turned explorer, and Harvey, a National Geographic photographer, the team included another scholar, Hamid Sardar of Cambridge, Mass., two Tibetan hunters, a Sherpa guide and eight porters - though Baker, Storm and Harvey were the only ones to make the demanding descent to the gorge and falls.
Among other things, their discovery proves that two great rivers of Asia - the Tsangpo, which runs completely across Tibet, and the mighty Brahmaputra, which runs through the Indian state of Assam and Bangladesh to the Bay of Bengal--are connected. Reminiscent of the fabled "source of the Nile" that English explorers Richard Burton and John Spede raced each other to find in the middle of the 19th century--both making controversial claims to have found it first--the Tsangpo falls and gorge proved so far beyond explorers' reach that they were declared nonexistant.
The southern approach up the Brahmaputra posed the most obstacles.
"It's tremendously difficult terrain of jungles and insects and tigers," Storm said. "The lower gorge area was protected by Abhors and Mishmi, Burmese tribal groups. They protected that area pretty fiercely, and early British attempts to penetrate were frustrated." In 1911, two British explorers were able to locate all but 30 to 40 miles of the river connection. A local guide named Kintup was later hired to continue into the inner gorge and try to find the sacred place by traveling as a Buddhist pilgrim.
He claimed to have found a connection between the two rivers but said the only high waterfall was not on the Tsangpo but up a smaller tributary. In 1924, British botanist Francis Kingdon-Ward advanced to a point that narrowed the unknown stretch of the river to three or four miles. He found a waterfall as well but measured it at only 30 feet. Finding further penetration impossible because of the steepness and narrowness of the gorge and bad weather, he turned back, declaring the long sought high falls nonexistent.
Although the Tsangpo River starts at 7,000 feet above sea level, it rapidly descends and cuts through the Tibet plateau by way of the only gap in the Himalayas open to the heavy weather of the Indian plains and wetlands below.
"The weather pours up from Assam, which is one of the wettest places on Earth, and you have notoriously terrible weather in there." Storm said. "You can go weeks if not months with clouds and rains and snow at the higher elevation. You have a river literally eating its way through these mountains in this great gorge."
Lasting 17 days, Baker's expedition approached the Tsangpo from the north, following animal trails and the advice of their Tibetan hunters and descending some 4,000 feet. Using mountaineers' ropes to get down the last 80 feet of the cliff, they found themselves at the "great falls," which they measured with laser range finders - a Shangri-La just a quarter of a mile from where Kingdon-Ward turned back. "It's a powerful sight to experience," said Storm, who said he plans to return. "it's a rather humbling feeling just to have taken part." - END
Right:Tibetan manuscripts in pothi and scroll form from the Dunhuang library cave photographed by Stein in 1907. Photograph from Serindia, 1921, vol. 4, Plate CLXXIII.
Tibetan Manuscripts from the Silk Road
Although the majority of the manuscripts found in the library cave in Dunhuang were Chinese, reflecting the fact that the Chinese empire controlled this area for much of the first millennium, there were also considerable numbers in other languages, primarily Tibetan and Uighur. This issue of the newsletter is devoted to the Tibetan manuscripts and Tibetan Silk Road art and culture.
Below, Dr van Schaik of the International Dunhuang Project reports on the Tibetan manuscripts remaining in collections in Gansu Province, China, following his research visit to Dunhuang last year. He also gives a short report on the Ellsworth Huntington collection at Yale University. There are further reports on the Songtsen Library and listings of web sites and books relating to Tibetan art and culture.
Tibetan Manuscripts in Gansu Province, China
A large number of manuscripts, many in Tibetan, remained in Dunhuang after Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot had made their selections from the original cache. The Tibetan manuscripts were still there after the Chinese authorities had removed most of the Chinese manuscripts to Beijing in 1910. Subsequently a relatively small number of Tibetan manuscripts were acquired by the Otani and Oldenburg expeditions but, in 1919, a government official sent to Dunhuang reported finding 94 scroll bundles and 11 pothi volumes. The great majority of these were Tibetan. They were then removed from the cave, but their fate afterwards is little known outside China.
Right:The City Museum, Dunhuang
The director of the Dunhuang Academy's museum, Luo Huaqing, continues the story: 'In 1928, all the Tibetan manuscripts remaining in Dunhuang went to a cultural institute in Dunhuang city. After 1949, some were brought to the Dunhuang Academy, some were sent to provincial museums, but most of the manuscripts were placed in the City Museum of Dunhuang.'
The present whereabouts of the manuscripts
In a 1978 article by Huang Wenhuan was published on the whereabouts of the Dunhuang Tibetan manuscripts in Gansu province (Wenwu (Dec. 1978), pp. 59-63). He reported that small collections of Tibetan manuscripts were held in the county museums of Jiuquan, Zhangye and Wuwei, that the Dunhuang Academy held 42 pothi folios and 43 scrolls, and that Lanzhou Library held 1,117 folios and 30 scrolls. Most significantly, he reported that Dunhuang City Museum held 8,780 Tibetan folios and 224 scrolls.
Left:Detail of a photograph of Paul Pelliot in the library cave. Behind Pelliot a stack of large pothi leaves can be seen.
In July 2000 I had the opportunity to visit Dunhuang on a British Academy funded research trip. At the Dunhuang Academy I was shown their collection of 47 scrolls (as well as one single panel and one fragment), all of which, except one, contained the Tibetan text of the Aparimitayurnamasutra (the exception was the Heart Sutra). There were 87 large pothi leaves, all containing the Tibetan text of the Prajnaparamitasutra in 100,000 verses. Additionally, the Academy holds at least 700 more Tibetan pothi leaves, and numerous fragments, but all are apparently not older than the Yuan period and some are certainly more recent than that. I also visited the Dunhuang City Museum. The scrolls which I examined all contained, once again, the text of the Aparimitayurnamasutra, while the pothi leaves were all of the large variety, again with the text of the Prajnaparamitasutra in 100,000 verses. According to the museum's curators, the other folios, which they confirmed were over 8,000 in number, were all of the same format.
Right:A scroll at the Dunhuang Academy
The significance of the Chinese collections The group of Tibetan manuscripts in the Dunhuang City Museum makes it the third largest collection in the world, after those of Paris and London. Furthermore, the manuscripts in the Dunhuang Academy and Lanzhou Library comprise significant smaller collections. However, while the size of the Gansu collections rivals those of the Paris and London, the manuscripts are much less varied in subject matter. It seems that both Stein and Pelliot, through a combination of circumstances, took away with them the most varied of the Tibetan manuscripts, leaving behind mainly those regular sets of manuscripts stored together in scroll bundles and large pothi volumes.
Left:Rolled Pothi sheets at the Dunhuang Academy
Outside Gansu, other institutions in China also have small collections of Dunhuang Tibetan manuscripts. The National Library of China in Beijing holds around 200 manuscripts which may have arrived in Beijing in 1910 along with the Chinese scrolls. Peking University Library, Shanghai Library, Shanghai Museum, and Tianjin Arts Museum each have a few manuscripts. Peking University Library acquired most of its Tibetan manuscripts in the 1950s from collectors, and this is likely to be the case with the other institutions too. I would like to thank The British Academy, who provided me with a grant to travel to China, as well as Fan Jinshi and Luo Huaquan at the Dunhuang Academy and Sun Liping at the National Library of China who helped me during my visit. • TOP Bibliography of Catalogues of Tibetan Central Asian Manuscript Collections de la Vallée Poussin, Louis, Catalogue of the Tibetan Manuscripts From Tun-Huang in the India Office Library, Oxford University Press, 1962. Yamaguchi, Z., Kimura, R., Harada, S, Nishioka, S, Uesugi, R. (edd.), Sutain Shushu Chibetto-go Bunken Kaidai Mokuroku (A Catalogue of the Tibetan Manuscripts Collected by Sir Aurel Stein), 12 vols., The Toyo Bunko, Tokyo, 1977-1988.
Thomas, F. W., Tibetan Literary Texts and Documents concerning Chinese Turkestan, Part II: Documents, Royal Asiatic Society, London, 1951. Takeuchi, Tsuguhito, Old Tibetan Manuscripts from East Turkestan in the Stein Collection of the British Library (3 vols.), The Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies for Unesco, The Toyo Bunko & The British Library Board, 1997-2000. Lalou, Marcelle, Inventaire des manuscrits tibétains de Touen-houang conservés À la Bibliothèque Nationale (Fonds Pelliot tibétain), 3 vols., Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, 1939-1961. Savitsky, L.S., Opisanie tibetiskikh svitkov iz dunkhuana v sobranii instituta vostokovedeniia an SSSR, Moscow, 1991. Taube, Manfred, Die Tibetica der Berliner Turfansammlung. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, 1980.
'La formation du Bouddhism tibétain À travers les documents de Dunhuang'
Summary of the January 2001 EPHE Vème Section Lecture Series
The four lectures in the series concerned primarily two broad themes: relations between Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism under the Tibetan empire during the early 9th century; and aspects of the development of Tibetan Buddhist tantrism during the early post-imperial period (late 9th and 10th centuries). The study of Sino-Tibetan religious relations has so far generally emphasized the transmission to Tibet of Chan Buddhism, and the controversy surrounding it. It has been primarily in the work of the late R.A. Stein that other aspects of the relationship have been to some extent examined, for instance, the spread of Chinese Buddhist apocryphal literature in Tibet. In the first lecture, 'Mulian au pays des neiges: les traditions chinoises de l'arhat Maudgalyayana dans la littérature Tibétaine', we have sought to add to this line of research.
The elaboration of the legend of the Arhat Maudgalyayana during the course of Buddhism's progression from India through Central Asia to China has been a topic that has long fascinated scholars of Chinese literature and of Buddhism in East Asia. Two of the most famous products of the legend's development are the Yulanpen jing (Taisho 685) and the Da muqianlian mingjian jiumu bianwen, often referred to in English as The Transformation Text on Mulian Saving His Mother from Hell. It can now be established that these works were to some extent known in Tibet, where they exerted a degree of influence on later Tibetan Buddhist literary accounts of the life of the Buddha and his disciples.
The Tibetan version of the Yulanpen jing is so far known from just three of the manuscript versions of the Tibetan Buddhist canon, where it is entitled 'Phags pa yongs su skyobs pa'i snod ces bya ba'i mdo (Stog Palace Kanjur no. 266, Ulan Bator 314 and Tokyo 266); it is not found in the printed editions. According to the colophon it was translated from the Chinese by 'Gos Chos-grub, the renowned ninth century translator based in Dunhuang, who is also well-known in Chinese as Facheng. The translation is literal and precise, and corresponds very closely with the published Chinese version of the Yulanpen jing, as found in the Taisho Tripitaka (no. 685).
It is of considerable interest, too, that in the Stein collection of Tibetan documents from Dunhuang in London, we find a short verse text composed by 'Gos Chos-grub himself that is devoted to the story of Maudgalyayana (de la Vallée-Poussin 1962, no. 686, IOL Tib J 686). This work is based not on the Yulanpen jing, but on the Transformation Text. Besides this, the Transformation Text had a considerable legacy in later Tibetan literature and a fuller version of it was also translated into Tibetan. Among the numerous late retellings of the tale, we have considered here the version given the popular life of the Buddha (Sangs-rgyas mdzad-rnam) authored by Sna-nam btsun-pa Skal-bzang-chos-kyi-rgya-mtsho (15th century), and the Dmyal-gling episode of the epic of Gling Ge-sar, which seems certainly to be derived ultimately from the story of Mulian's mission to rescue his mother from hell.
The second lecture, 'L'identification du temple de De ga g.yu tshal: étude iconographique', concerned the problem of the precise location of the 'temple of the treaty' (gtsigs kyi gtsug lag khang)celebrated in the Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts Pelliot Tibétain 16 and IOL Tib J 751, first studied by F.W. Thomas. The temple had been founded to commemorate the treaty of peace concluded between Tibet, China, the Uighurs and the kingdom of Nanzhao in 821. Though the exact significance of de ga in the name of place where the temple was situated remains uncertain (it is perhaps an ancient local geonym), philological
arguments were advanced to show that g.yu tshal might have stood for the Chinese place name Yulin, though it is neither an exact translation or transcription of the latter. The suggestion that g.yu tshal = Yulin is however strengthened by the study of iconographic information contained in PT 16: this is found to closely match the actual iconography of Anxi Yulin cave 25, a temple already famed among art historians for the exceptional refinement of its murals. Its construction dates certainly to the period of Tibetan administration in the region during the early 9th century. In its overall iconographic program, as well as in the style of its execution, this temple clearly seems to mediate between Tibetan and Chinese religious worlds, and thus would have been a fitting monument to an accord between these two powers.
The last two lectures both sought to illustrate the early formation of the tantric traditions of Rnying ma pa order, with reference to a particular cycle belonging to the Rnying ma bka' ma collections, namely, the Na rak dong sprugs ('Stirring up the hells'). In the first, 'En amont de la tradition Rnying ma pa: 1. le lotus aux cent pétales: un mandala tantrique', we have studied IOL Tib J 318, a Tibetan manuscript from the Stein collection describing a lotus-mandala of 108 divinities. The mandala in question certainly is derived from the Yogatantras and probably from the Sarvadurgatiparisodhanatantra in particular. Nevertheless, we have attempted to suggest that it may also be related to the mandala called padma brgya-ldan, the 'hundred-petalled lotus', that is the special mandala of the Na rak dong sprugs cycle, and that is attested in Rnying ma pa historical cources as an icon in the temples of the Zur lineage. A functional relationship with the Sarvadurgatiparisodhanatantra is further suggested by a common emphasis on the purification of evil karma and miserable rebirth.
It is in any case quite certain that elements belonging to the Na rak dong sprugs cycle are already in evidence in the Dunhuang Tibetan documents. The final lecture, 'En amont de la tradition Rnying ma pa: 2. un rite de contrition tantrique', concerned a clear example, IOL Tib J 584, a brief tantric confessional litany. We have been able to demonstrate that most of the content of the text can be matched, word for word, with passages contained in a Rnying ma tantra that has remained unstudied to date, the Dri med bshags rgyud, the tantra, in fact, from which the Na rak dong sprugs cycle is derived.
Matthew Kapstein is Associate Professor of Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, The University of Chicago.
Ellsworth Huntington and the Central Asian Manuscripts at Yale
Ellsworth Huntington (1876-1947) was perhaps the best known American geographer of his time. In the last forty years of his life he was a lecturer and research associate at Yale University, during which time he pursued his great interest, the effect of climate changes on human culture and civilisation. Before he arrived at Yale, Huntington also had a short career as one of the first Central Asian explorers. He accompanied an expedition led by Raphael Pumpelly in 1903-1904, which spent most of its time in Russian Turkestan (as it was then), north-west of the Taklamakan Desert. In 1905-06 he accompanied an expedition led by Robert Barrett into Chinese Turkestan, travelling over the Himalayas to Khotan and Niya. Setting out in a different direction from Barrett, Huntington travelled east from Niya to the Lop Nor desert, then north to Turfan, and travelled home via Siberia and Russia. Huntington drew on his Central Asian experiences to illustrate his theory of the significant effect of climatic change on civilisations in his book The Pulse of Asia (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1907). He concluded that: 'with every throb of the climatic pulse which we have felt in Central Asia, the centre of civilisation has moved this way and that. Each throb has sent pain and decay to the lands whose day was done, life and vigour to those whose day was yet to be.'
Although Huntington was not an archaeologist, he brought back a few souvenirs from his Central Asian journeys, manuscripts and artifacts, which were acquired by Yale University Library after his death. This small collection includes some fragments of scuplture, probably from one of the sites on the southern Silk Road, and manuscripts on paper and wood. These include a portion of the Saddharmapundarikasutra in Sanskrit, a page from The Book of Zambasta
in Khotanese, and wooden slips with Kharosthi, Khotanese and Tibetan inscriptions. Huntington was not a textual scholar, but he was able to enlist the help of F.W. Thomas, a retired India Office librarian and scholar living in Oxfordshire, who catalogued the Kharosthi and Tibetan wooden slips. Most of Thomas's transcriptions were published and, more recently, scholars including R.E. Emmerick and Akira Yuyama have published studies of the other manuscripts in the Huntington collection. Bibliography
Studies of Manuscripts in the Huntington Collection
Boyer, A. M., E. J. Rapson, and E. Senart, Kharosthi Inscriptions Discovered by Sir Aurel Stein in Chinese Turkestan, vol.3., Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1929. (F. W. Thomas's work on the Kharosthi wooden slips is on pp. 283-285.) Emmerick, R. E., The Book of Zambasta: A Khotanese Poem on Buddhism, Oxford University Press, London, 1968. (The Khotanese folio of The Book of Zambasta, pp. xii, 120.)
Thomas, F. W., Tibetan Literary Texts and Documents Concerning Chinese Turkestan, Part II: Documents, The Royal Asiatic Society, London, 1951. (For the Tibetan wooden slips see pp. 199-200, 216, 465.) Yuyama, Akira and Hirohumi Toda, 'The Huntington Fragment F of the Saddharma-pundharika-sutra', Studia Philologica Buddhica, Occasional Paper Series, Tokyo, 1977.
Expedition Reports
Huntington, Ellsworth, The Pulse of Asia: A Journey in Central Asia Illuminating the Geographic Basis of History, Archibald Constable and Co., London, 1907.
Pumpelly, Raphael (ed.), Explorations in Turkestan: Expedition of 1904, The Carnegie Institute of Washington, Washington D.C., 1908. Sam van Schaik, IDP, The British Library. Many thanks to Dr Jonathan Silk for his help at Yale, and to Annette Demming for providing the picture of Ellsworth Huntinton.
Other Resources for Tibetan Research
The Songtsen Library
The Songtsen Library is an International research library whose goal is to make accessible in one place (digitally or otherwise) the extant and diverse primary and secondary sources dedicated to Himalayan culture and history. The special emphasis of the Songtsen Library is the complete Dunhuang collected Tibetan manuscripts as well as the study and preservation of the history of Tibetan and Himalayan culture.
The library will also have significant holdings on all traditions of Buddhism furthering the study of Buddhist scripture and scholarship.
The library will use state-of-the-art computer technology bringing online an integrated catalogue and index, unifying search and query of local and international databases for all extant sources of information.
For more information, contact:
Michael Thompson
Songtsen Library
P.O. Kulhan, Sahastradhara Road
Dehra Dun (U.A.) 248001 India
Tibetan Studies Library
This is a new series by Brill Academic Publishers and is intended to provide a forum for outstanding works concerning the Tibetan cultural region, aimed at 2-3 titles per annum. The first volume is expected in November 2001.
For details see:
http://www.brill.nl
Circle of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies
London, UK
The aim of this newly formed circle is to encourage the scholarly exploration of Tibetan culture by providing a forum for research, exhibitions and affiliated events in the UK.
For further details contact:
Dr Ulrich Pagel
Department of the Study of Religions
SOAS, Russell Square
LONDON WC1H OXG, UK
tel: +44 20 7898 4782
fax: +44 20 7898 4779
email: cths@soas.ac.uk
Selected Publications on Tibet
Websites
http://www.ciolek.com/WWWVL-TibetanStudies.html
Matthew Ciolek's guide to
other sites on Tibet and Tibetan studies.
Buddhist Texts
Tibetan Buddhism Resource Centre
http://www.tbrc.org
An extensive searchable catalogue of Tibetan texts and authors, with some texts
available online.
The Asian Classics Input Project (ACIP)
http://www.asianclassics.org
Texts available for download, including Tibetan texts from the Kanjur, Tenjur and other sources, as well as catalogues of certain library collections.
The Samantabhadra Collection
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/tibet/
A catalogue of the canonical collections of the Nyingma school.
Art
The Rubin collection
www.himalayanart.com
Online images of hundreds of paintings from the Rubin collection of Tibetan and Nepalese art.
Art Books
A History of Tibetan Painting, David Jackson
Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996
Tibetan Painted Scrolls, Guiseppe Tucci
Libreria della Stato, Rome, 1949, reprinted in a limited edition of 500 copies by SDI Publications, Thailand, 1999
Tibetan Thangka Painting, David Jackson & Janice Jackson
Serindia Publications, London, 1984
Buddhist Symbols in Tibetan Culture, Loden Sherab & Dagyab Rinpoche
Wisdom Publications, 1995
The Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols and Motifs, Robert Beer
Serindia Publications, London, 1994
Recent Publications
The Dalai Lama's Secret Temple, Ian Baker, et. al.
Thames and Hudson, London, 2000
Photographs of the murals of the Lukhang temple in Lhasa.
Ruthless Compassion, Rob Linrothe
Serindia Publications, London, 1999
A study of the deptition of wrathful deities in Tibet.
From the Sacred Realm, Valrae Reynolds et al.
Prestel, Munich and New York, 1999
Catalogue of the 1999-2000 exhibition held at Newark Museum, New Jersey.
Sacred Visions, Steven M. Mossak and Jane Casey Singer
Harry N. Abrams, Inc., NY, 1998
Catalogue of the 1998 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The Sculptural Heritage of Tibet, David Weldon, and Jane Casey Singer
Laurence King Publishing, London, 1999
Catalogue of the 1999 exhibition at the Ashmolean Musueum, Oxford.
Tibetan Art, Amy Heller
Antique Collectors' Club, London, 1999
An introduction to Tibetan art.
Worlds of Transformation, Marylin Rhie, Robert Thurman & David Jackson
Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1999
Paintings from the New York collection of Shelley and Donald Rubin.
List compiled by Sam van Schaik
Tibetan Exhibitions
THE GODS OF THE HIMALAYAS Essen Collection of Tibetan Art
Opening 6 May, 2001
Museum der Kulerten
Basel, Switzerland
Thanks to a generous donation in 1998, the Museum der Kulturen Basel now possesses one of the world's most important collections of Tibetan art. It was compiled by the religion scientist Gerd-Wolfgang Essen in Hamburg. During his thirty years of research, Essen not only collected two hundred thangkas and religious statues, but also ritual utensils, books, masks, musical instruments, temple textiles and furniture. Thus, this unique collection today provides us with an impressive picture of the religious culture of Tibetan Buddhism.
Right:Jowo Rinpoche Sculpture, fire-gilded hollow copper casting, height: 23.5 cm, Tibet, 16th century IId 13889 (Essen I-1)
TIBET - BUDDHAS - GODS - SAINTS Museum der Kulturen Basel, Switzerland
7 May to 31 October, 2001
Augustinergasse 2, CH-4051 Basel
Opening hours:
Tues. - Sun. 10 am - 5 pm
Wed. 10 am - 9 pm
Special opening: Mon., May 7, 10 am - 5 pm
Closed on Mondays, closed on August 1st
This exhibition comprises 205 works of art, including paintings and statues, with the primary focus on Central Asia.
A catalogue with preface and captions in English is available.
For details see:
http://www.amosanderson.fi
Thanks to Alpo Ratia for details of this exhibition.
MUSEUM FüR INDISCHE KUNST
Berlin-Dahlem, Germany
The Museum für Indische Kunst reopened on 20 October 2000 after several years' restoration. One gallery and a corridor are devoted to the finds from Central Asia which include many mural fragments from the caves at Bezeklik and Kizil. Cave 123 from Kizil has been recreated in the centre of the gallery. Textual fragments, painted banners, paintings and sculptures from central Asian sites are also displayed.
Conferences
2001 INTERNATIONAL TURFANOLOGICAL CONFERENCE
Turfan, China
15-20 August, 2001
For details contact:
Ouyang Hui
Turfan Bureau of Cultural Relics
26 Gaochang Road
Turfan, Xinjiang, China
Tel: +86 995 8522619
Email:OuYangHui@Email.com.cn
'A MAN SHOULD NOT ACT DIFFERENT FROM HIS WIFE:
THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN THE ALTAIC WORLD'
Permanent International Altaistic Conference
PIAC 44th Meeting
Walberberg, Germany
26-31 August, 2001
For details contact:
Secretary General, PIAC
Goodbody Hall 157
Indiana University
1011 E. Third St.
Bloomington
Indiana 47405-7005, USA
Fax: +1 812 855 7500
Email: sinord@indiana.edu
TURFAN REVISITED: THE FIRST CENTURY OF RESEARCH
INTO THE ARTS AND CULTURES OF THE SILK ROAD
Berlin, Germany
8-15 September, 2002
This conference will conincide with a major international exhibition at the Museum of Indian Art in Berlin-Dahlem, details of which will be given in a future issue.
For details contact:
Professor Dr Werner Sundermann
Akademienvorhaben Turfanforschung Berlin-Brandenburgishce
Akademie der Wissenschaften
Unter den Linden 6
D-10117 Berlin, Germany
Tel: +49 30 20370 472
Fax:+49 30 20370 467
Email:sundermann@bbaw.de
INTERNATIONAL DUNHUANG STUDIES IN THE 21ST CENTURY:
CONFERENCE IN HONOUR OF PAN ZHONGGUI'S 95TH BIRTHDAY
Chung Cheng University, Jiayi, Taiwan
2-4 November, 2001
For details contact:
Organizing Committee
International Dunhuang Studies in the 21st Century
Chinese Literature Department
National Chong Cheng University
160 Sanhsing Tsun, Minhsiung
Chiayi Hsien, TAIWAN
Tel: +886 5 2720411
Fax: +886 5 2720493
Email: chlacc@ccunix.ccu.edu.tw
Fieldwork Opportunities
ARCHAEOLOGY IN WESTERN UZBEKISTAN (ANCIENT CHORASMIA)
The University of Sydney Central Asian Programme (USCAP) invites volunteers to join them on their current excavations in western Uzbekistan (ancient Chorasmia). The trip is organised as a tour, with two weeks spent with the field team excavating a massive fortified city datting to around the 4th century to 2nd century AD and a fire temple complex of roughly the same date. The visitors will then continue to a tour of the Silk Road cities of Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand.
There are two group departures, each of about 12 people. 3 and 17 Sept. ex-Sydney. You may also join the tour in Tashkent (land-only price available on request). A shorter tour takes place in May/June. This replaces the excavation with a five day study tour of the early frontier fortresses of Chorasmia.
Details can be obtained from our website at:
http://members.spree.com/education/uscap/uscap/htm
You may also email the Project Director, Dr Alison Betts at:
alison.betts@archaeology.usyd.edu.au
SUMMER ARCHAEOLOGY IN SOUTHERN RUSSIA AT THE CHASTIYE KURGANS
The Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads is now taking applications for the above. Information on the archaeological site, the leaders of the expedition, dates of the session, and other pertinent information is available on the CSEN website at:
http//:www.csen.org
or directly on the Chastiye Kurgans Information page at:
http://csen.org/2001%20Chastiye%20Kurgans/Chastiye%20Kurgans.html
Please address any questions to:
Dr. Jeannine Davis-Kimball
Executive Director
Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads
577 San Clement St.
Ventura, CA 93001 USA
Tel. & fax: +1 805 653-2607
• TOP
Publications
Buddhist Manuscripts in the Schoyen Collection, Vol. 1, Jens Braarvig,
Jens-Uwe Hartmann, Kazunobu Matsuda, Lore Sander (edd.)
Hermes Academic Publishing and Bookshop, Oslo, 2000, ISBN 8280340017.
NOK880/USD95.
For details contact:
Postboks 2709 Solli, N-0204 Oslo Tel & Fax: +47 22 43 69 95
Email: hermesac@online.no
In Japan contact:
Malshow Co. Ltd. Book Section
c/o Mistubori, 2-24 Fujimi-cho,
Yokosuka 238-0021, Japan
Email: malsho@beige.ocn.ne.jp
For details of the Schoyen collection see: http://www.nb.no/baser/schoyen/
Legacy of the Desert King: Textiles and Treasures from Niya on the Silk Road, Feng Zhao and Zhiyong Yu (edd.)
ISAT/Costume, Hong Kong, 2000, 112 pp., colour ills., Chinese/English bilingual, USD20
Catalogue of the exhibition held at Hangzhou, China from 20 October.
The ancient site of Niya is located in the southwestern area of the Taklamakan Desert. It was first excavated by Stein in 1901 and, from 1988, a Sino-Japanese team have been carrying out fieldwork there.
For details contact:
Feng Zhao
China National Silk Museum
73-1 Yuhuangshan Rd
Hangzhou310002, China
Fax: 86-571-7068136
Tel: 86-571-7068138
Email:zhaofeng38@hotmail.com or zhaofeng@hz.col.com.cn
The Renovation of the Musée Guimet: Towards a New Understanding of Asian Art in Paris, Jean-Francois Jarrige, Directeur.
This is one of the world's premier collections of Asian art and the article is an informative history of the museum and its collections with some stunning photographs of the renovated interior and of its exhibits. The museum had its official reopening in January 2001.
Anyone wishing to purchase reprints of this article should contact the publisher:
Arts of Asia Publications Ltd.
1309 Kowloon Centre, 29-39 Ashley Rd
Kowloon, Hong Kong
Tel: +852 2376 2228
Fax: +852 2376 3713
Email: info@artsofasianet.com
L'Asie des Steppe d'Alexandre le Grand À Gengis Khan,
Reunion des Musées Nationaux and Fundacio'La Caxia',
Paris and Barcelona, 2000. ISBN 27112841766, FF290.
Catalogue of an exhibition held in Madrid, Paris and Barcelona, 2000-2001 (see above).
History of Civilizations of Central Asia. Vol. IV. The Age of Achievement: A.D. 750 to the end of the fifteenth century. Part 2: The Achievements, C. E. Bosworth and M. S. Asimov (edd.)
UNESCO Publishing, 2000. ISBN 92-3-103654-8. 300 Ffr plus 30 Ffr postage (total, 50.30 euros).
http://www.unesco.org
The first volumes of this series have recently been reprinted in India, but they are also still available from UNESCO in Paris.
Southern Silk Road: In the Footsteps of Sir Aurel Stein and Sven Hedin, Christoph Baumer
Orchid Press, Bangkok, 2000. 166pp., ISBN: 9748304388 (hb), 9748304396 (pb),
USD45 (hb), USD35(pb).
To order contact:
Asia email: wop@inet.co.th
US fax: +1514-934-6043
Europe fax: +7 22 56 57 66
Silk Road on Wheels, Akhil Bakshi, Odyssey Books, 2001. USD19.95.
For details:
http://www.cuvlindia.com/odessy/silkroute.htm
Journals
Bulletin of the Asia Institute, 11 (1999), pub. Nov. 2000
For details contact:
3287 Bradway Blvd., Bloomfield Hills
MI 48301, USA
Tel: +1 248 647 7917
Fax: +1 248 647 9223
Email:bai34@aol.com
http://www.bulletinasiainstitute.org
Asia Major, 3rd series, 11, 2 (1998), pub. 2000
Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taipei
Devoted to papers from the 'Third Silk Road Conference' held in July 1998 at Yale University, USA.
Project News
Left:Professor Naylor, Chairman of the Sino-British Fellowship Trust (SBFT), and Jannette Cheong, Head of International Collaboration and Development Joint Project with the National Library of China
A memorandum of Understanding for a five year project between the British Library and the he National Library of China concerning the International Dunhuang Project was signed on 7 March by Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library, in the presence of H.E. Ma Zhenguang, Chinese Ambassador to the UK. Zhou Heping, Deputy Director of the National Library of China, was signatory for the Chinese side.
The reception was also attended by representatives of the two main project sponsors, Professor Naylor, Chairman of the Sino-British Fellowship Trust (SBFT), and Jannette Cheong, Head of International Collaboration and Development, The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) (pictured left). Full details of this exciting collaboration will be given in the next issue of IDP News.
Right:HE Ma Zhenguang, Chinese Ambassador to the UK, with Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of The British Library, siging the agreement with the National Library of China.
The Mellon International Dunhuang Archive
In December 2000 the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation agreed to make an award of $1.1 million to the British Library for the Mellon International Dunhuang Archive (MIDA), a scholarly resource that the BL is taking a leading role in developing. The Archive will include two and three-dimensional images of the Dunhuang Buddhist caves linked with digital images of a selection of the artefacts and manuscripts found at Dunhuang. The Archive will complement the International Dunhuang Project web database which will continue to work towards digitizing all of the first millennium manuscripts and documents found at Dunhuang and other Silk Road sites and now in collections worldwide and making them freely available to all on the Internet.
Over the next four years, as part of the Mellon funded project, IDP will digitise over 4,000 manuscripts comprising 35,000 images using the latest digital cameras. As part of this project, advertisements were placed for six new IDP staff, included a Administrative Manager, 3 photographers and 2 Imaging Assistants. Full details of the new IDP personnel and progress on this project will be given in the next issue.
People
Susan Whitfield attended the ECAI conference held at the City University of Hong Kong in January, 2001. She also gave several talks in Hong Kong on the project.
Dr Ksenia Kepping from the Institute of Oriental Studies, St. Petersburg, arrived in London for a three month visit to catalogue the Tangut (Xixia) manuscripts from Kharakhoto, funded by the UK National Heritage Memorial Fund. An article by Dr Kepping will appear in the next issue. Two new imaging consultants started work with the IDP team during January, working on Tibetan and Chinese fragments respectively.
Conservation
Right:Stein fragments Or.8212/480-484 (Maspero Nos. 169-173) reunited as one document. Anna-Grethe Rischel visited the library in December to give a report on her research into the paper fibres of the fragments from Loulan both in the Hedin and Stein collections. She has been working closely with Japanese colleagues on these fragments and the results will be published later this year. Conservation was carried out at the British Library on the particular Loulan fragments under investigation, and they were rejoined (see right). It is curious that these fragments, which clearly belong together, were found by Stein at different sites in the Loulan area, some several miles apart.
Electronic Publication
IDP was submitted as one of the first electronic publications of the California Digital Library/Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative collaboration. Details will shortly be available on www.ecai.org.
THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
geopolitics, geoeconomics, strategic aspects, operative hidden sectors and esoteric spaces. This is an apolitical website dedicated to discussions on the Second World War and on the unresolved historical-political matters concerning years 1933-1945. Our main focus is on the Axis nations of WW2 but we encourage discussions on all aspects of the 20th Century.
Joining up is free and we welcome everyone, regardless of your nationality and level of knowledge, so sign up today and take part in the discussions!
This website is directed toward people interested to the secret developments of Second World War. It would entitle also The buried truths of Second World War: the Secret History must be rewritten. This is the title of a monumental my historical essay of next publication. It concerns hidden chessboards and crucial murders. Italy is a country of closed minds and small “men” and in this country – after the 1945 – especially now the whole Academic and
“political” circles are completely stifle and full of most of mediocre scholars. This freedom’s place, this website was born in 2004 for scientific historians withouth any prejudices about matters concerning the Second World War. You can try in the other sections of this website Alessandro De Felice’s essays regarding also political movements after and before period 1939-1945. The place is opened to all the people who likes the historical-political investigation about 1900’s and we invite every persons interested in the secret aspects of occult and international-political history to participate to debates and discussions that will be derive from our deepenings of the subjects. Our actual researches concern, among other issues, all unpublished reference to:
Coordinator of Information (C.O.I.) [[[Wikipedia:USA|USA]]] from July 11, 1941 to June 1942.
U.S.A.’s Office of Strategic Services (from June 13, 1942 to September 20 1945, its end) and its chief William J. Donovan;
Strategic Services Unit (S.S.U.) [[[Wikipedia:U.S.A|U.S.A]].] from October 1, 1945 to June 22, 1946;
Central Intelligence Group (C.I.G.) [[[Wikipedia:USA|USA]]]; Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.), born in September 18, 1947 [[[Wikipedia:USA|USA]]];
Counter-Intelligence Corps (C.I.C.) (G-2);
Censorship & Documents, Branch of OSS responsible for camouflage, censorship and documentation intelligence CD;
Electra House and cryptogram and intelligence;
Secret War in the Mediterranean Sea;
German secret services: 1) Abwehr, German military foreign intelligence service; 2) Abwehr II, Sabotage division of the Abwehr; 3) Abwehr III, Counter-espionage division of the Abwehr;
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and spy activities of Harry Hopkins;
the silences of Nuremberg Trials;
the mysterious deaths of Duke of Kent, Wladislaw Sikorsky and Joseph Kennedy Jr. (the older brother of J.F.K.);
Rudolf Hess occult sciences and British trap in which he fell;
Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller and his mysterious end;
Nazi-Tibet-SS esoteric connections;
Karl Haushofer and Albrecht Haushofer;
F.B.I.’s files concerning secret relationships between Great Britain and Germany in 1940-1941;
Middle East Nazi politics and Fascist politics;
secret Mussolini’s archives;
secret letters between Winston Churchill and Benito Mussolini during all the progress of years 1939-1945 and the assassination of Italian Duce and Chief of R.S.I. (Italian Social Republic); around this secret relationships there was much talking about them. In the opinion of several historians, no one is to pass this strategic point. The problem to be investigated is a difficult one. The papers to be seen and considered are several and I don’t shut any doors. I’ll never give up to this inquiry. I have been working to this historical problem for more than 15 years and the gate may be still locked.
The Italo-Japanese relations during WW2 were generally good and very linear, without many changes. Mussolini always believed, for a series of reasons (Japan was a new power needing a vital space, a space occupied by UK and USA, Japanese policy was deeply nationalistic, thus alligned with that of the Axis, etc.), that Japan would have entered the war along with the Axis. For example, to a rather dubious Hitler, Mussolini wrote on 24 July 1941:
"It's my conviction that Japan will stay on our side, also because it is forced by the every day more imponent help that the USA give to Chiang-Kai-Shek. To start it will not march against Russia, bur will occupy Indochina, and this will cause a breakdown with Washington."
At the end of December 1941 Japan proposed to the Italian ambassador Indelli a separate peace of the Axis with USSR, a proposal warmly supported by Mussolini but soon refused by Hitler.
That same line was kept during 1942-43, with increasing Italo-Japanese pressures on Germany to make an agreement with Stalin and so use all the forces of the Axis against theAnglo-Americans.
Another point of common interest for Italy and Japan was the policy towards Arabs of Middle East and Indians and generally far less interest in racial problems (thus making pressures for the publication of a charter by the Axis that would have stated the aims of the coalition, just like the Atlantic Charter for UK and USA), plus the common aim of dismantling the British colonial empire between Egypt and the Pacific (an aim not liked by Germany). Mussolini's attitude towards Japan had a counterpart in a growing Japanese interest for Italy, so that in Dec. 1942 the rather gray and irrilevant ambassador Horikiri (who was considered by the Japanese govern too succube of Oshima, the too Germanophile and unreliable ambassador in Germany) was replaced by Shinrokuro Hidaka, a clever and expert diplomat, with an excellent cuture and knowledge of European affairs.
Hidaka supported Mussolini in his requests of a separate peace (or at least armistice) with USSR during 1943, and during their meeting of 25 July 1943 (12:00/12:25), Mussolini told him of his will of forcing Hitler to ask an armistice to USSR, and asked the support of Tojo.
During the RSI Hidaka (who became a personal friend of Mussolini) helped strongly the position of Mussolini (like his request of creating a larger Italian army), but the power of the Duce was of course extremely limited. By the way, the Tripartite Pact was still existing, and the militarly almost irrilevant RSI had, at least nominally, the same position of Germany and Japan (a fact that the both Italians and Japanese tried to exploit).
About Italo-Japanese military cohoperation, it was of course very limited. Japanese officers studied the attack on Taranto and gave technical info for the planning of Operazione C.3 (the occupation of Malta) and for the construction of the Italian aircraft carriers. At the beginning of 1941 a Japanese cargo shipped supplies to Italian East Africa, and then contacts with Japan were kept using submarines, blockade runners and a single flight in 1942. Japan sent to Italy rubber and quinine, while Italy exported mercury and technologies (the Campini motorjet, base of the Japanese Tsu-11 of the Yokosuka MXY7 Ohka Mod.22, pocket submarines, etc.).
Several projects and prototypes of very advanced pocket subs were made in Italy in 1943-45, during the RSI they were tested in the upper Garda Lake (Riva and Torbole); the blueprints were given to a Japanese mission at the beginning of 1945.
dark alliances and espionage in Italy; the deaths of Giovanni Gentile and of Ettore Muti; Ezra Pound and his imprisonment in 1945;
the mysterious death of Thomas Edward Lawrence; Sicilian Mafia’s aid to Allied landing and disembarkation in Sicily in July 1943; John Edgar Hoover and F.B.I. and his activities during Rudolf Hess affair;
MI-5(Military Intelligence Five) – British military intelligence unit for home counter-intelligence;
MI-6 (Military Intelligence Six) – British military intelligence unit for foreign counter-espionage;
MID (Military Intelligence Division) – USA War Department;
OGPU – Soviet Union Russian Secret Service in the years from 1923 to 1944;
PID – Political Intelligence Department – British Foreign Office Service concerning political information;
PWB – Psychological Warfare Division (USA);
PWD – Psychological Warfare Division (USA);
SD – Sicherheitsdienst Nazi-Germany Secret Service near to Reichssicherheitshauptamt;
SOE – Special Operations Executive Great Britain espionage organization;
the UFO-Nazi projects and the hidden truth; Nazi Secret Weapons and the Reich of the Black Sun; Anti-Gravity and Nicholas Tesla; the mystical societies of 20s-30s shared many spiritual truths that contradicted orthodox beliefs; Hitler’s Flying Saucers of the Second World War; the theory of hollow earth; Viktor Schauberger and the secrets of natural energy; Nikola Tesla’s Science of Energy and the anti-gravity airships of the 20s and 30s, the Lost World of Agharti and Shamballah, the mistery of Vril Power and discoid craft propulsion, vortex propulsion, government cover-ups .
Neu Schwabenland and Nazi Submarines to Antarctica linked to mysteries of Thule;
Operation Overcast and Operation Paperclip.
Since May 1945 Wernher von Braun – who will in 1969 father of the USA-NASA’s Apollo Moon Programand Gemini Program – and his German rocket scientists’ team entered the American lines to safety: Overcast Operation and Paperclip Project were instituted by USA government to secure the know-how and to grab the best German scientists’ knowledge about V-1 and V2 missiles and electro-gravitational propellers based on anti-gravity laws. Also Henry Alfred Kissinger, the USA’s ex-Secretary of State, Jewish-German (born in Fürth, Bavaria, in 1923) agent of U.S. Army, participated since 1945 in Paperclip Project whose most important scientist was W. von Braun.
The Shadow Universe; Atlantis of the North; Altai-Himalaya: A Travel Mystery;
Introduction to Tantra; from the Subterranean World to the Sky: Flying Saucers;
Shamballah: Oasis of Light; The Tibetan Book of the Dead;
The Isle of the Dead;
Amrita Hindu: The immortality's nectar;
Kalachakra Studies;
Gobi Desert, Tibet and Afghanistan: The Earth Spirit;
Kundalini: The Vishnu Purana: System of Hindu Mythology;
Hidden Journey: The views over Atlantis;
Mediumistic Mind of Adolf Hitler;
Vimana Flying Object of Ancient India;
Veda and Vimanika Shastra's Enigma;
John Foster Dulles and (his brother) Allen Dulles – the next O.S.S.’ (Office of Strategic Services) leader in Europe during Second World war and after 1947 until the 1960s C.I.A.’s leader - activities since the 1920s. Allen Dulles was posted to Bern (Switzerland) during World War I by his important uncle Rober Lansing, President’s Wilson’s Secretary of State. There Allen Dulles served as chief of intellingence in the USA’s Legation. Lansing brought both Allen and Foster Dulles into the Versailles Peace Treaty negotiations. By mid-1920, Allen Dulles was First Secretary of the American Embassy in Berlin. Hitler was brought to power in Germany by an international financial oligarchy based in London and Wall Street. In the years after 1918, attorney John Foster Dulles represented the Bank of England and the J.P. Morgan firm. In the spring of 1920 John Foster Dulles met Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht (1877-1970), in that period a official of the Allied created German Banking authority, who would later emerge as the architect of the Nazi slave-labor, war economy in the 1930s. John Foster Dulles had been, since 1919, the lawyer for Richard Merton, the founder of the most important industrial anglo-saxon cartels, whose name was Interessen Gemeinschaft Farben (I.G.Farben). In 1924, J. F. Dulles was selected by J.P. Morgan to draw up the Dawes Plan, for reshaping Germany’s reparations payments in negotiations with Schacht. Two years
later, John Foster Dulles became chief executive of Sullivan & Cromwell, the law firm which represented all of the cartels.
The Pro-Hitler British Faction and Rudolf Hess mysterious flight toward Scotland in May 10, 1941.
Operation Sunrise and the Cold War. Its men: Allen Dulles, SS General Karl Wolff, James Jesus Angleton, Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer
Inside Secrets of Second World War
Espionage, Banking Aspects and Occultism: Light in Dark Places
There would have been other 3 secret operations linked to Sunrise Operation. The first, whose name was Amadeus Operation had aim to fund the escape from Europe to Latin America of SS and Nazi members through the drug trade. Vast stocks of SS morphine would have been smuggled to South America for this purpose. The second operation, Operation Bernhardt, consisted in counterfeiting British banknotes always with the aim to fund the so-called <<rat-lines>>. The third operation, someone reveals that would have been the Operation Gladio or Stay Behind.
After 1930, Schacht began to prepare support for Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers Party (N.S.D.A.P.). And in fact, in 1931, after discussions with both Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering, Schacht convinced German Chancellor Brüning to accept the NSDAP to enter into Government. Then in November 1932, as a member of an organization called the Circle of Friends of the Economy, Schacht promoted a petition among industrial and financial circles, calling upon President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor, thing that it happened on January 30, 1933, after a meeting at the home of Baron Kurt von Schröder in Cologne among this banker, the former Chancellor Franz von Papen and the same Hitler. On February 20, 1933, Hermann Goering
invited several leading bankers and industrialists to support by money Nazi Party and it is speaks generally about a sum of 3,000,000 marks. The I.G.Farben (Interessen Gemeinschaft Farben), founded in 1924 by Richard Merton – whose lawyer was since 1919 John Foster Dulles -, supported NSDAP with 400,000 marks.
On March 16, 1933, Schacht became again President of Reichsbank and in August 1934 he was appointed Nazi Economics Minister, office he held until November 1937. But it must remember that in 1933 John Foster Dulles, as a member of Brown Brothers Harriman, Dillon Read, Kuhn Loeb and all many private investment banks and Wall Street firms including 3 employees of Chase Bank, came to Berlin to agree with Schacht and Nazi Government for supporting new Hitler
cabinet. The most famous case of financing to Hitler was that of United Steel Works Corp. (The German Steel Trust) led by Fritz Thyssen, who published later, in 1941, a book entitled I Paid Hitler, in which he spoke about his financings to Hitler since 1923 (the first contribution was of 100,000 marks).
In 1930 Thyssen supported a credit for Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, with a Dutch bank in Rotterdam, whose name was Bank für Handel und Schiff, amounting to 250-300,000 gold marks. I.G.Farben had relationships together Standard Oil of New Jersey (now well-known as Exxon Corporation and Italian Esso) for
support before Second World War Nazi war machine and after 1939 Standard Oil of New Jersey continued to supply oil to the Nazi-economy, through shipments to Franco’s Spain paid for the same Spanish chief and leader that had been unblocked by the USA Federal Reserve Bank. After 1933, I.G.Farben developed its own independent international intelligence operation, operating out of an office at North West 7 in Berlin. The men involved in it were Hermann Schmitz
(I.G.Farben’s president in 1927), Max Ilgner, his nephew, and Rudolf Ilgner brother of Max. Also located at North West 7 in Berlin was an agency set up in 1935 by Hermann Goering and whose name was Vermittlubgsstelle Wehrmacht, led by Carl Krauch, another I.G.Farben’s man. Other partnerships with Hitler’s government were made by Rockefeller’s Chase NationalManhattan Bank and by American International Telephone and Telegraph(I.T.T.). About Mussolini and Hitler relationships it is often said that, deep down, the Italian Duce was really a reasonable man and politician with whom everybody could have done business with in spite of the fact that he was an ideological dictator and strongman. Mussolini yearned to be accepted by the world at
large and achieve the stature of an open-ended statesman. Then he came – the destiny decided – under Hitler’s spell and progressively let himself be overtaken by the Nazi world view. Adolf Hitler, was another breed and kind of mystical leader, an uncompromising fanatic, always going for broke, ready to
gamble everything, and always demanding that his advisors back the most radical solution to every problem and matter. It is certain that under normal circumstances a leader like Hitler would never become head of State, but in the chaotic situation of German politics of the 1930s the impossible became reality and the magician from Branau am Inn was made Germany’s Chancellor. What was the nature of this strange and still largely unknown relationship (<<a
brutal friendship>>, someone called it)? Most historians claim that Hitler was the stronger of the two personalities, with Duce playing the role of second fiddle. But it was not always the case. Our last study and monumental historical essay provides the best and most detailed account of how that relationship evolved, and how the two dictators twisted and turned as the shifting sands of international politics drew them inexorably together. We believe that our
research concerning hidden truths ofII°W.W. will be a unique contribution because it assembles all scattered and sometimes declassified and obscure material, building a complete account of historically vital information into a single text, which includes many details unknown even to many seasoned researchers. It is also necessary to talk about Hitler’s foreign policy, that means to talk about the road to World War II (1933-1939). Alessandro De
Felice’s studies and essays partially contained into this website are an important work of historical investigation, founded upon a large number of German, Italian, Russian, French and British sources and references covering facts indispensable to the historians and of great interest to the general reader. This is a work of objective history, unencumbered by any personal bias or political ideology.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins spy activities: inside intimate history;
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Cordell Hull (USA Secretary of State) and Sumner Welles, i.e., their secret affairs;
Atomic espionage: Soviet Penetration of the Manhattan Project;
Occult circles have long been known as covers for espionage and influence peddling. Hitler's spy apparatus under Canaris and Heydrich were well aware of these conduits, particularly from the direction of Britain which had within its MI5 intelligence agency a department known as the Occult Bureau. That these potential sources of trouble were purged from Nazi life should not be taken to mean that Hitler and the Nazi secret societies were not influenced by mystical and occult writers such as Madame Blavatsky, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Guido Von List, Lanz Von Liebenfels, Rudolf Steiner, George Gurdjieff, Karl Haushofer and Theodor Fritsch. Although Hitler later denounced and ridiculed many of them, he did dedicate his book Mein Kampf to his teacher Dietrich Eckart.
Both Gurdjeiff and Haushofer maintained that they had contacts with secret Tibetan Lodges that possessed the secret of the "Superman". The lodge included Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, Himmler, Goring, and Hitler's subsequent personal physician Dr. Morell. It is also known that Aleister Crowley and Gurdjieff sought contact with Hitler. Hitler's unusual powers of suggestion become more understandable if one keeps in mind that he had access to the "secret" psychological techniques of the esoteric lodges. Haushofer taught him the techniques of Gurdjieff which, in turn, were based on the teachings of the Sufis and the Tibetan Lamas- and familiarized him with the Zen teaching of the Japanese Society of the Green Dragon. The Nazi-Tibet connection is fascinating. The Vril Society believed that after the fall of Thule its survivors settled in Tibet, living in caves under the mountains performing magic. The Nazis sponsored expeditions to Tibet every year from 1926 to 1942. In 1926 German explorer George Roerich was also in Tibet, and recorded an amazing sight in his journal:
<<Something remarkable! In the morning some of our caraveneers noticed a remarkably big black eagle [symbol of Imperial Germany] flying over us. Seven of us began to watch this unusual bird. At this moment another of our caravaneers shouted, 'There is something far above the bird.' We all saw something big and shiny reflecting the sun, like a huge oval moving at great speed. Crossing our camp the thing changed direction from south to south-west. And we saw how it disappeared in the intense blue sky. We even had time to take our field glasses and saw quite distinctly an oval form with shiny surface, one side
of which was brilliant from the sun>>. In 1929, three years after the Nazis had first made contact with the monks of Agarthi and Shamballah, a Tibetan colony was established in Germany, with branches in Berlin, Nuremburg and Munich. Apparently, however, only the monks of Agarthi were willing to help the Nazis.... The monks from Agarthi were known in Germany as 'The Society of Green Men,' because of their strong links - for hundreds of years - with the Green Dragon Society of Japan, to which Haushofer himself belonged. Indeed, seven members of the society joined up with the German-based group. In Berlin, Hitler met regularly with the leader of the Tibetan community, a monk notable for his feats of clairvoyance and precognition. He was nicknamed
<<the man with the green gloves>>, and on three separate occasions correctly predicted, in the press, the precise number of Nazi deputies elected to the German Parliament. He also foretold the exact date when Hitler would become leader of Germany, and even the date when the Second World War would begin. This level of successful prediction soon attracted wide interest among the Nazi occultists. Himmler, as well as Hitler, became deeply interested in Tibetan Lamaism. He set up an occult training college at the Berlin section and ordered members of the SS leadership to attend courses there, especially in magic. As a result of his contacts with the group, Himmler set up the Nazi Occult Bureau. This incorporated into one organization of the Thule group, the Vril Society and the German branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis(OTO) - Aleister Crowley's magical order. But we, instead, believe that Crowley belonged to British Secret Service. In a piece called Secret Agent 666 (Crowley called himself the Great Beast 666 incarnate), it finishes by noting:
Writing about his father's involvement with intelligence, Amado Crowley notes that <<his very eccentricity ... was his cover as an agent>>. Whatever the merits of his other claims, this observation fits the Great Beast's doing in WWI. Crowley is evidence that
intelligence assets can come in all forms and embrace the most outlandish attitudes and behavior. His case may a
lso say something about the reasons some accept such unrewarded and unappreciated duties. Why would a man with such evident contempt for social norms and prevailing ideas of human decency be moved to act on behalf of King and Country? Money, of course, but as Crowley supposedly noted with some bitterness, because the Germans paid him <<the British Government decided to pay me less>>. He explained his peculiar patriotism thus:
I still think the English pot's as black as the German kettle. and I am still willing to die in defense of that pot. Mine is the loyalty of Bill Sykes' dog ... the fact that he starves me and beats me doesn't alter the fact that I am his dog, and I love him. In 1918 in New York City, occultist and British spy Aleister Crowley conducted a ritual he called the <<Amalantrah Working>> intended to create a "magick portal" - a dimensional rift - through which certain intelligences would be invited to cross and manifest themselves in the world. Crowley claimed that one being he called “Lam" did cross, and he drew a
portrait. Public interest in Nazi war persecuted officials (according someone also well-known as <<criminals>>) can be seen in numerous publications since the mid-1970s, such as: Mark Aarons and John Loftus, Unholy Trinity. How the Vatican's Nazi Networks Betrayed Western Intelligence to the Soviets (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1991); Charles Ashman and Robert J. Wagman, Nazi Hunters. The Shocking True Story of the Continuing Search for Nazi War Criminals (New York, Pharos Books, 1988); Howard Blum, Wanted! The Search for Nazis in America(New York, Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Company, 1977); John Loftus, The Belarus Secret, ed. Nathan Miller (New York, Paragon House, 1989, rev. ed. 1982); Allan A. Ryan, Jr., Quiet Neighbors, Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in America (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984); and Christopher Simpson, Blowback.America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (New York, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1988).
CIA, and its predecessor organizations such as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, 1942-45), the Strategic Services Unit (SSU, 1945-46), and the Central Intelligence Group (CIG, 1946-47), employed German intelligence personnel as sources of information. Afterward, the CIA sponsored the new West German intelligence service, an organization under the control of officers of the defunct German general staff. The ranks of the organization sheltered many officers of the German SS and SD whose loyalty to the new West German Government remained in doubt.
In 1884, Dr. Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden founded the German Theosophical Society.
The Stanzas of Dzyan, theosophy, extrasensory powers and Tibetan Buddhism. The legend of Shambala and the main work of James Hilton (entitled Lost Horizon, published in 1933). Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891) and the secret (sacred) occult teachings of trans-Himalaya. Her most important essay was The Secret Doctrine (1888). The studies and researches by Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, Alexander Csomo de Körös (Körösi Csoma Sandor), Jakov Schmidt, Horace Hayman Wallace and The Vishnu Purana. It is right to remember Blavatsky’s placement of Shambhala in the GobiDesert and the roles of the Buryat population of Siberia and of the Kalmyks of the Volga region. The word “Dzyan” transcribes the Sanskrit “dhyana” (Japanese “Zen”), meaning mental balance and stability. According Csoma de Körös, Shambhala is (would has been) situated between 45 and 50 degrees longitude. Possible places of Shambhala are Kazakhstan
(KizilkumDesert), Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang or Sinkiang), or also the Altai Mountains. Impressive studies were those by Alice Bailey who was writer of Letters on Occult Meditation published in 1922. Nicholas Roerich is a famous researcher and painter known in all over the world about Altai Mountains. Helena Roerich spoke in her Collected Letters(1935-1936) about secret teachings transmitted to Blavatsky. Agvan Dorjiev (born in 1854 and dead in 1938), Buryat Mongol and Assistant Tutor of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, succeeded in machinations for put Tibet under Russian control involving even Czar Nicholas II. Other personalities and other topics of our researches concerning secret knowledge, Agarthi and Nazi-Shambhala-Tibet-Connection involved indirectly and directly were:
Ferdinand Ossendowski (1876-1945), a Polish scientist who spent most of his life in Mongolia;
Kamil Gizychy, an other Polish army engineer, Author of Across Urankhai and Mongolia, 1929); the French author Joseph-Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveidre whose essay was Mission of India in Europe, published in 1886;
the Swedish explorer of Tibet Sven Hedin, author of Ossendowski and the Truth, 1925;
Nikolai Roerich (1874-1947), Russian painter and explorer who claimed to have located Shambahala in the Altai region. He was on the building committee for the St. PetersburgKalachakraTemple, because he was an ardent student of Theosophy. His work was Shambhala: In Search of a New Era; Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), an Austrian Spiritualist, was convinced by Annie Besant to enter into the German Theosophical Society, but in 1909 Steiner left this society. Steiner developed the idea of the <<akashic records>>, as psychic level of mental activity in the brain and soul of him like clairvoyant, led by wisdom and Buddha’s Kalachakra omniscient awareness;
Alice Bailey (1880-1949), developed the concept of <<Shambhala Force>> and founded the Tibetan Lodge, after recalled The Lucis Trust. She was a medium who claimed to receive occult letters from a Tibetan master. Her books were entitled Initiations, Human and Solar (1922), Letters on Occult Meditation (1922), A Treatise on Cosmic Fire (1925) and A Treatise on White Magic(1934).
Karl Haushofer (1869-1946), had been German military advisor for the Japanese army after 1904-1905 (Russo-Japanese War). He was the founder of the Vril Society in association with theThulesecret society and was, in the opinions ofmany scholars, the cultural guide who had a major influence on Adolf Hitler’soccult thinking. Before Haushofer several authors and writers searched to identify the exact location of Thule; among them the Indian intellectual Bal Gangadhar Tilak who wrote in 1903 the essay The Arctic Home of the Vedas, identified the migration toward the South of Thule’s people with the origin of the Aryan race. The Thule Society had been founded in 1910 by Felix Niedner, but the 3 main personalities in this topic were Guido von List,Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels (promoter of Ariosophy movement), and Freiherr von Sebottendorf (who established a Munich section of Thule Society in 1918) who added
Islamic and esoteric elements he had learnt when lived in Turkey. In fact, it is interesting to know that von Sebottendorf had belonged to the Assassins Order, a secret mystical Turkish society traced back to the Nazari sect of Ismaili Islam. In Germany, instead, Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorf had been a member of Germanen Order (Order of Teutons). Sanskrit teachings and the emblem of swastika became magic substance of Thule Society that in 1919 will give rise to the German Workers Party and Hitler will join to it always in 1919, becoming its political chief and spiritual guide in 1920 changing old secret
order’s name in that of Nazi Party. Karl Hausofher, promoter of studies’ movement called <<Geopolitics>>, whose wife was Jews, was the main figure about the link between Hitler and all these cultural influences. He had founded the Vril Society in 1918 in Berlin. It is a mysterious the Karl Hausofher’s participation in Green Dragon Society in Japan in 1910s. Another deep mysterious is Hitler’s debt to “Thulism” and according many scholars during 1920s and 1940s, a so-called <<occult war>> would have been taken in Europe among the Occult Societies, Secret Lodges, Anthroposophists, Theosophists, Freemasons and
Rosicrucians. An extraordinary explorer and scholar about Tibet researches in those years was Sven Hedin, from Sweden. Between years 1922 and 1944, Hedin wrote and published many popular essays concerning his travels in Tibet whose titles were: The Pilgrimage of the Tsangpo Lamas (1922), Ossendowski and the Truth (1925), My Life as an Explorer(1926), A Conquest of Tibet (1934). A magic person, a magic man, friend of Sven Hedin, was Friedrick Hielscher, linked to Ahnenerbe (Bureau for the Studies of Ancestral Heritage) established in 1935 with aim to locate the origins of the Aryan race in Central Asia and after two years (1937) incorporated by Heinrich Himmler into SS.
Darkness and mysteries on Tibet and its mysterious valleys, Japan, Germany, Mongolia were perhaps connected with Kalmyk Mongols (Kalmykian Voluntary Cavalry Corps) associated with Germans, and still in Germany until the final months of the war. The Nazi occult sources and their occult powers.
The Role of the Shambhala Legend can also, in some senses, explain Russian, Japanese, British, Chinese involvements with Tibet. Very famous are the Nazi
Expeditions (1938-1939) to Tibet by Ernst Schäffer, hunter and biologist, who had been already in Tibet in 1931-1932 and in 1934-1936. The Schäffer’s 1939 expedition was sponsored by Nazi-SS branch of Ahnenerbe whose leaders wanted to establish the Tibetans as ancestors of the Aryans. In fact among the members of this last expedition there was Bruno Beger, anthropologist, scholar for racial studies. Beger, in scientific agreement with H.F.K. Günther – Author of the book entitled The Northern Race among the Indo-Germans of Asia -, wanted to understand truth racial roots of the Aryans, and to find the psychokinetic energy called <<Vril>>.
Nikola Tesla (1856-1943). The electric magician. Electro-gravitational propulsors vertical takeoff [see following NASA project called B.P.P. (Breakthrough Propulsion Physics)]. Also you can find, see and read about “free energy”, scaled waves, the field of “zero point”, H.A.A.R.P. (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program).
Cosmic Top Secrets.
Antigravity News and Space Drive Technology
The Mysterious Tesla circuits and his Radiant Energy.
Mussolini-Churchill’s top secret files
A Conspiracy Machine and the States’ secrets.
We have been studying especially the matter because Mussolini was killed on Churchill's orders by British agents in synergy with Italian partisans. We believe that Mussolini’s death was covered up because of incriminating letters from Great Britain Premier to Duce. Benito Mussolini was murdered by a two-man team (commando) led by a British secret agent acting on the orders of Winston Churchill, according to a new investigation. In the official version, the Italian dictator and his final mistress, Clara Petacci, were shot by Italian partisans led by Walter Audisio — codenamed “Colonel Valerio” — at the gates of Villa Belmonte at Mezzegra near Lake Como at 4.10 p.m. on April 28, 1945. Their bodies were then hung upside down in Milan. But it is now suggested that
this was cover-up, and that Mussolini and Petacci were really killed at 11 a.m. that day by Bruno Lonati, an Italian partisan codenamed “Giacomo”, and “Captain John”, a British (S.O.E.), i.e. Special Operations Executive’s agent of Sicilian parentage whose name was Robert Maccarrone. Many writers and historians claim that Mussolini was carrying compromising letters from Churchill written over a period of years involving a deal under which Italy would
make a separate peace with the Allies, a breach of Churchill’s agreement with President Roosevelt at Casablanca to seek the “unconditional surrender” of the Axis powers. “Churchill, who like Mussolini was a life-long antiBolshevik, was looking ahead to the coming conflict with the Soviet Union”, Peter Tompkins, a veteran American journalist who coproduced a documentary about espionage sides inside R.S.I.’s period, said. Some British biographers of Churchill deny the existence of this secret correspondence between the two premiers. But a number of letters have come to light, including Mussolini’s last
letter, written on April 24, in which he pleads with Churchill to “intervene personally” and guarantee him “the chance to justify and defend myself”. Bruno Giovanni Lonati, 84 years old, a former Communist who became a Fiat manager after the war and now lives in Brescia, claims that “John” was sent to northern Italy with the specific aim of eliminating Mussolini and answered directly to General (later Field Marshal) Alexander. “John” and Mr. Lonati agent went
together to the house where the Duce and his mistress (Clara Petacci) were being held after being captured by partisans near Dongo. When arrested, Mussolini was clutching a briefcase that he told his captors was “of historic importance for the future of Italy”. Signor Lonati said: “Petacci was sitting on the bed and Mussolini was standing. John took me outside and told me his orders were to eliminate them both, because Petacci knew many things. I said I could not shoot Petacci, so John said he would shoot her. He was quite clear that Mussolini had to be killed by an Italian”.
He said that, when Mussolini stepped out to get some air, under guard, Petacci said with a sad smile: “”So, it’s all over for us”. She asked them to shoot “at the chest, not the head”. At the corner of a lane leading down to the lake, less than a mile from Villa Belmonte, “John” and “Giacomo” stood their victims against a fence and opened fire. Signor Lonati said: “Mussolini had a look of surprise on his face, but not Petacci. “After the shootings, “John” took a camera from his knapsack and photographed the bodies, with Signor Lonati beside them. He had also referred to “very important documents” which he
was ordered to recover from the Duce. Mr. Tompkins, who coproduced the documentary with Maria Luisa Forenza, said that there was evidence that the photographs existed. “Lonati went to the British consulate in Milan in 1981”, he said. “The consul sat opposite Lonati with them, but said he needed authorisation to hand them over. Lonati received a letter from the consulate promising to get in touch, but never heard any more”. Mr. Tompkins, himself an O.S.S.’ secret agent for the Allies in occupied Rome in 1944, said that he had approached the British Embassy in Rome about the pictures. An embassy official “promised to see what he could do, but later apologetically said ‘no’. He did not say they did not exist”.Signora Forenza said that Signor
Lonati’s claims, first advanced ten years ago, had been greeted with scepticism “but we spent three years testing his account and find it completely convincing, with no discrepancies”. By contrast, the official version of Mussolini’s death changed frequently and was “riddled with inconsistencies and lies”. This month, the French-made MAS submachinegun with which Mussolini was said to have been shot by Walter Audisio came to light in Albania. Signor Lonati said that he and “John” had used Sten guns. The documentary by Rai, the Italian State television station, entitled Mussolini: The Final Truth, includes testimony from Dorina Mazzola, who was 19 years old at the time. She said that she heard the firing: “I looked at the clock, it was almost 11”.
She said that her mother, Giuseppina, who was in the garden, saw the shooting. Partisans arrived soon after and took the bodies away, holding Mussolini up to make it look as if he was still alive, she said. The documentary says that partisans were later dressed as Mussolini and Petacci and driven to the gates of the Villa Belmonte, where the bodies were already laid out. “Colonel Valerio” and others then pretended to shoot them. Roberto Remund, who was at the
scene, said that the bodies were “ unnaturally stiff and contorted” and that there was “very little blood”, suggesting that the killings had happened earlier. The programme includes interviews with Claudio Ersoch, grandson of Tommaso David, Mussolini’s head of covert operations, who said that his grandfather confirmed that the correspondence existed and that Churchill had promised in it to restore to Italy lost territory such as Istria. The programme claims that postwar painting trips made by Churchill to the Italian lakes were a cover for efforts to retrieve the correspondence. Christopher
Woods, researcher for the official history of the SOE in Italy, disputed the suggestion that a British spy had led the assassination mission. He said: “It’s just love of conspiracy-making. The leaders of the Resistance in Milan, particularly the left-wing parties, decided that Mussolini should be killed before the Allies arrived”. Mussolini’s death in April 28 1945 came as the end of the Second World War was in sight and the Soviet Union and the West were
already vying to shape the postwar world. Three days earlier talks to found the United Nations were held in San Francisco. But the most important personalities who knew something about secret correspondence Churchill-Mussolini and about Mussolini’s attaché cases (briefcases), that Duce believed it would have been an authentic elixir of long life for himself (i.e. Duce), were: Mr. Dante Gorreri, a dangerous partisan P.C.I.’s trafficker during 1945; Luigi Carissimi Priori of Gonzaga, a clever Italian partisan biotechnology expert, and last, but not least, the S.O.E.’s agent Max Salvadori, well-known as
“Captain Sylvester”, who was in Milan since February 1945. According to Carlo Alberto Biggini, Minister of People's Education in the Italian Social (Fascist) Republic, Mussolini carried with him papers which proved the British (and Churchill's) responsibility for Italy's entry into the war. The UK
persuaded Italy to mount a "phoney war" against the Allies in expectation of a general peace. Hitler would have appreciated Italy's "merits" and Mussolini would have been regaled at a "Munich Summit Two", helping the UK and France's position. Mussolini had a file and attempted to save the documents that he expressed would explain Italy's "mistakes" and his own "good reasons." Carlo Alberto Biggini was adamant about this file and vigorously stated this correspondence displayed proof of British guilt and complicity in Italy's war declaration. The British showed, before and after May of 1945, a most curious interest in those papers and expended much effort in attempting to find them. When Churchill lost the elections of July 1945, he did not give back
the papers and files he had kept covering the years of 1940-1945. Fascists, Germans, Japanese, partisans and even two British individuals explicitly mentioned these papers. Renzo De Felice's last book, entitled Red and Black,, published by Baldini & Castoldi in 1995, maintained the British feared a "Mussolini International trial" and wanted him dead at all costs. Because of the correspondence, Mussolini was aware of some rather volatile information regarding the UK and Churchill.
The Rudolf Hess’ flight of mystery: i.e., the Cold War focus of Spandau’s secret "I have come here, in Great Britain, to save humanity," he said. "I am Rudolf Hess."
No single incident in Britain's wartime history has given birth to so many conspiracy theories, all of them centred on an alleged plot by the intelligence
services to lure Hess to Britain. Hess flew to Britain in a Messerschmitt-110 on May 10, 1941, intent on making contact with the Duke of Hamilton, who he believed would help him mediate a peace deal whereby Britain would join Nazi Germany in a war against the Soviet Union. It was a hopeless mission based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the British establishment. Winston Churchill, Britain's wartime prime minister, was convinced that it had produced an intelligence windfall for Britain. Seven months before Hess flew to Britain, in September 1940, one of his close advisers, Albrecht Haushofer, the leading expert on Great Britain in the German Foreign Office, had written to the Duke Douglas Douglas of Hamilton at Hess's request, attempting to set up a meeting
in Lisbon. The letter, sent via an intermediary, an old family friend of the Haushofers, was intercepted and passed to MI5 (Military Intelligence 5), who initially suspected Hamilton and the intermediary might be German spies and began an investigation. Much of the MI6 archives on Hess has been destroyed. But in the files there was a single, more recent reference that spoke of MI6 plans for "a sting operation" in response to the Haushofer letter. The MI6 historian also has access to oral histories from former officers and, where they are still alive, the officers themselves. In an account written for Hitler after Hess flew to Britain, Haushofer said: "I did not learn whether the letter reached the addressee. The possibilities of it having being lost en route
from Lisbon to England are not small after all”. Despite official denials Hess flew to Britain with Hitler’s full knowledge; there was a substantial peace party in Britain in 1941, which included most of the aristocracy, and the Royal Family in primis. The King’s brother, the Duke of Kent, was actively involved in Hess’s peace mission;
there is substantial evidence that the prisoner who died in Spandau prison was not the real Rudolf Hess. The fate of the real Deputy Fuhrer was inextricably linked with that of the Duke in 1942. The terms of Hitler's peace proposal have been discussed up and down England not only in well-informed
political circles but in pubs, bomb shelters and Pall Mall clubs. It was too elaborate a secret to be kept. Cabinet members presumably told their friends in Parliament and the MP's told their club colleagues and the news percolated down. The filter of time, plus such cross-checking as is possible on a subject that is officially taboo, enables the writer to give the general outline, withholding details. Hitler offered total cessation of the war in the West. Germany would evacuate all of France except Alsace and Lorraine, which would remain German. It would evacuate Holland and Belgium, retaining
Luxembourg. It would evacuate Norway and Denmark. In short, Hitler offered to withdraw from Western Europe, except for the two French provinces and Luxembourg [Luxembourg was never a French province, but an independent state of ethnically German origin], in return for which Great Britain would agree to assume an attitude of benevolent neutrality towards Germany as it unfolded its plans in Eastern Europe. In addition, the Führer was ready to withdraw from Yugoslavia and Greece. German troops would be evacuated from the Mediterranean generally and Hitler would use his good offices to arrange a settlement of the Mediterranean conflict between Britain and Italy. No belligerent or neutral country would be entitled to demand reparations from any other country, he specified. Hess carried also proposals (and promoted) for spared the European Jews to die in Central Europe’s lager, simply advising British Government
about the old idea of Polish Government to assign and to allocate the same Jews to Madagascar like their land. So, if Hess ‘ proposals had been accepted in May 1941, never it would have been Shoah since 1942 to 1945. Alan Dulles, who became the head of the CIA, was of the opinion that the man who was condemned to life imprisonment at Nuremberg, was not the real Rudolf Hess - as was President Roosevelt himself. And in the 1970s, a British surgeon and
ballistics expert, Dr. Hugh Thomas, actually had chance to physically examine the old man in Spandau. He knew that the real Hess had been wounded by a bullet in the First World War; so he looked on the old man’s body for signs of the wound but couldn’t find it. Now we’re not talking about someone who simply cast an eye over the man without knowing what he was looking for. Dr. Hugh Thomas is a surgeon and a ballistics expert who has been used in trials
such as Bloody Sunday, so he really knows what he’s talking about. Also, there are circumstantial things, if you like. The man at Nuremberg refused to see his family and in fact he also refused to see anyone other than his lawyer for over twenty years - which is astonishing considering that he’d been locked
up as you would think he would want to see them. Also, at Nuremberg the man had very, very convenient amnesia. He behaved very oddly at Nuremberg, he failed to recognise people that had worked very close with the real Hess. And at times he also failed to recognise colleagues in the Nazi hierarchy. And they seemed to think there was something strange about him especially Hermann Goring, a co-defendant at the trial. He was quite amused when someone was talking to him about Hess. This isn’t an exact quote, but Goring said: “Hess? Which Hess? The Hess you have here? Our Hess? Your Hess?”
