In 1938, just before the war, a team of five Germans left on a mission to Tibet. It was a scientific mission, except that the Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler was its patron, and all five members of the team were SS officers!
Earlier plans of reaching Tibet through the Yangtze river had been abandoned after Japan invaded Manchuria in 1937, and the only other way was through India. And the British, who turned down a request for permission to travel via their territories. It was ultimately with the help of a British Admiral, Barry Domvile, a Nazi sympathizer, that they got permission to go to Sikkim, a country having a border with Tibet and a protectorate of the British Empire.
But why was the mission controversial?
Though dubbed a scientific mission, some debate was ignited at the time as to its real purpose. Himmler's patronage was one, but what fueled the fires was a secret warning to German newspaper in 1940, by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels that "the chief task of the Tibet expedition," was "of a political and military nature" and "had not so much to do with the solution of scientific questions," adding that "details could not be revealed."
And what do the local people say?
I have talked to a few people in Lachen, where this team waited for almost six months till they got Tibetan permission to go to Lhasa. It is also pertinent to note that before the Germans, some Finnish missionaries had already set up a school in Lachen so the locals were exposed to Europeans, and their methods.
One person I interviewed about twenty years ago told me as a teenager he had been baptised a christan, but he had forgotten the prayers as no one came back since then, and that his name was Peter Lachenpa, pronounced "Petay"!
But he also remembered the strange Germans who wanted to measure everyone's faces! And the best part according to him were the bribes!
The British had "spread the word" that any useful information about the Germans and their activities would be well rewarded, and it had drawn people in the hundreds out to make a quick buck which rendered the effort useless.
But the people started getting uneasy when the team started collecting, and caging or killing, insects and other creatures which hurt their Buddhist sensibilities. But before long they were gone, and that was the end of the Germans as far as the villagers were concerned.
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What they were looking for, really?
Many theories have been thrown about but the most popular seems to be that connected to aryan origins in support of the nazi narrative.
Right @norbu . Maybe the Nazi war machine was already planning a way to incorporate the Japanese or Chinese into the German "family tree." I believe they ultimately did that with the Japanese in order to justify their alliance with them. Interesting stuff though!
full $teem ahead!
Just before the war the Nazis were intent upon finding exotic narratives which would give credence to their Aryan supremacy theory. One example was the swastika, a divine symbol of the Hindus used for thousands of years!
They could have warped logic with the Japanese to further their allaince and it seems very plausible when you consider such mission, who's goals were not entirely clear.