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 s, the myth of the Aryan race was fully developed. In his view, the pure Aryan Germanic races had been corrupted by prolonged contact with Jewish people. 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.
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 , he made his first journey to Tibet when he traveled on two scientific expeditions in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands in and On the first expedition, an American scientist, Brooke Dolan, accompanied Schaefer. Dolan was also to travel to Lhasa. 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.
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 s. 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.
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 While the SS-Ahnenerbe society itself faded in prominence, Himmler supported its ideals, and he contributed funds when Schaefer proposed the Lhasa mission.
Included in the expedition, moreover, was at least one ardent proponent of Nazi racial ideology. Sometime in late , Schafer took his wife Hertha out for a duck hunt on a lake near the German-Polish border. He was about to shoot from the boat they were in, when he slipped. She died within an hour. The second key man on the team was Bruno Beger, a young anthropologist who had joined the SS in The ship carrying the five Germans docked at Colombo early in May From there, they took another one to Madras and a third one to Calcutta.
The British authorities in India had been pretty wary of the travelling Germans and saw them as nothing but a bunch of spies. The British political officer in Gangtok in Sikkim, an independent mountain kingdom at the time, too, was not enthusiastic about granting the men entry into Tibet through Sikkim.
At the end of the year, the five Germans, with swastika flags tied to their mules and heavy baggage, entered Tibet. Schafer and the team would have seen plenty of it during their time in India itself, where, among Hindus, it had been for long a symbol of good fortune, visible outside homes, inside temples, at street corners and on the backs of tempos and trucks.
Scholars eagerly used these racial theories to demonstrate that, in spite of differences in language and shifts in geography, northern Europeans were the true heirs of Greco-Roman culture. The ancient Greeks and Romans were as beset by prejudice and racial bias as any other culture, of course.
But their prejudices did not align with, and so do not support, contemporary racisms. They did not see themselves as white, so they were not anti-black — the primary poison of contemporary American and European racism. Because of how the field was constructed, however, those nuances were largely elided, and Greeks and Romans came to be seen as white.
It could have been a relatively minor elision of social complexity outside of the field if Nazis and other white supremacist groups had not latched onto it as evidence for their claims of racial purity, cultural continuity, and authority.
Instead, however, antiquity has become a contested site, with white supremacists pushing one interpretation of the evidence, and expert classicists insisting on distinguishing modern racial categories from ancient ones, and thus modern biases from ancient ones.
Crucially, these corrections are not without teeth in the real world. Sarah Bond, a classicist who regularly writes a column on the ancient world for Forbes , published a number of articles explaining that the supposedly serene white marble of antiquity was actually garishly painted, and received death threats for her trouble.
Mary Beard, a prolific Cambridge classicist, has been abused and publicly reviled for years for pointing out that ancient Rome was full of Africans, Middle Easterners, and South Asians not to mention women , and was far from being a white empire.
The primary learned society of the field, the Society for Classical Studies, has taken to holding sessions at their annual meeting dedicated to combating racist uses of the ancient world. Contact us. Sales contacts. Publishing contacts. Social Media Overview. Terms and Conditions. Privacy Statement. Login to my Brill account Create Brill Account. Author: Gerhard Krebs. Login via Institution. Purchase instant access PDF download and unlimited online access :. Add to Cart. PDF Preview.
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