Original Aryans in Tibet?

Adolf Hitler was known for his racially motivated ideology and believed that “Aryan” Nordic people had entered India from the north some 1,500 years earlier. He also believed that the Aryans had committed the “crime” of mixing with the local “un-Aryan” people, losing the attributes that had made them racially superior to all other people on earth. For this so- called crime Hitler regularly expressed deep antipathy for the Indian people and their struggle for freedom, articulating his sentiments in his speeches, writings, and debates.

With his order in 1938, Heinrich Himmler, a leading member of Germany’s Nazi party and a key architect of the Holocaust, sent a five-member team to Tibet to search for the origins of the supposed Aryan race. Journalist and Author Vaibhav Purandare recounts the fascinating story of this expedition, which passed through India. The group of Germans landed surreptitiously along India’s eastern borders. They were on a mission to discover the “source of origin of the Aryan race”.

Those who swore by the idea of a white Nordic superior race were believers in the tale of the imagined lost city of Atlantis, where people of “the purest blood” had apparently once lived. Believed to have been situated somewhere between England and Portugal in the Atlantic Ocean, this fictional island allegedly sunk after being struck by a divine thunderbolt. But the Aryans who survived had supposedly moved on to more secure places like the high Himalayan region of Tibet famous for being “the roof of the world”.

Himmler had already set up a unit called the Ahnenerbe – or Bureau of Ancestral Heritage – to find out where people from Atlantis had gone after the bolt from the blue and the deluge, and where traces of the great race remained and could be discovered.

A key man of the Himmler led team was Bruno Beger, a young anthropologist. Beger would take measurements of the skulls and facial details of Tibetans and make face masks specially to collect material about the proportions, origins, significance, and development of the Nordic race in this region.

British authorities in India were wary of the travelling Germans and thought them spies. But ultimately, the Nazi team with swastika flags tied to their mules and baggage, entered Tibet.

The swastika was a ubiquitous sign in Tibet too, known locally as “yungdrung”. Beger and the team would have seen plenty of it during their time in India as well where, among Hindus, it had long been a symbol of good fortune. Even today, the symbol is visible outside homes, inside temples, at street corners and on the backs of tempos and even trucks though in a different position.

The Germans were treated exceptionally well by then Regent in Tibet as well as by common Tibetans, and Beger, who made face masks, even acted as a sort of stand-in doctor for locals for a while. What the Tibetan Buddhists did not know was that in the wildest imagination of the Nazis.

Just when it appeared that Beger and the others could spend more time exploring for their real “research” in the guise of carrying out scientific investigations in areas such as zoology and anthropology, the German expedition was abruptly cut short in August 1939 by the inevitability of the second World War.

Beger had, by then, measured the skulls and features of 376 Tibetans, taken 2,000 photographs, “made casts of heads, faces, hands and ears of 17 people” and collected “the finger and handprints of another 350”. He took most of his Tibetan “treasures” to a castle in Salzburg he moved to during the war. But once the Allied Forces came in 1945, the place was raided and most of the Tibetan pictures and other material were ruined.

It was interesting that though Hitler did not like Indians, Indians had a love for the infamous dictator. The main reasons were that the then British rulers were enemies of Hitler.

(Book Review: Journalist, author and historian Vaibhav Purandare’s recently released “Hitler and India” (Westland Books) addresses the myths around Hitler and his attitude towards India.

Source: Himalayan News Chronicle