Why the Nazis Love The Dalai Lama

Himmler’s Crusade: The Nazi Expedition To Find the Origins of the Aryan Race by Christopher Hale Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003

When Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the Nazi SS, founded the Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage Organization) in 1935, to determine the true roots of the Aryan “master race,” one of his first acts was to send a team of naturalists, botanists, and ethnologists to Tibet to look for the Aryan roots among the Himalayan people. The team, known as the Schäfer mission, headed by Ernst Schäfer, was made up entirely of SS officers under Himmler’s command. Himmler’s Crusade, by British journalist Christopher Hale, while distorting the British role in Tibet, provides a detailed study of the mystical, perverted mentality of Himmler’s mission to Tibet—and some clues about the British support for their venture. Before leaving for Tibet, Schäfer made arrangements in London, in 1938, with the acknowledged British colonial lords over the supposedly “independent” Tibet. While Hale reports that the India Office had some concerns that the Schäfer mission might have strategic motives contrary to British interests, Schäfer found a warm reception across London from the numerous leading British circles which supported Hitler and Nazism. Lord Astor, head of the Cliveden Set, “had been vigorously arguing Schäfer’s cause through friends in the India Office,” writes Hale. The India Office report on Schäfer’s visit also named banker and intelligence officer Charles Hambro as one of his strong backers. The notorious Nazi supporter Adm. Sir Barry Domville hosted Schäfer, and wrote glowingly of Schäfer and the great “scholar” Himmler, in the journal of his own pro-Nazi organization, The Link, which had branches all over England and organized exchanges with the Nazi Youth in Germany. But the most interesting connection Schäfer made in London was with Sir Francis Younghusband, the British Army Major who had led the murderous invasion of Tibet in 1904, in which 1,300 Tibetans were slaughtered along the way. Younghusband “dropped in” on Schäfer’s residence in London, advising the Nazi SS officer: “Sneak over the border, that’s what I would do, then find a way around the regulations.” Schäfer ultimately followed this British imperial advice directly, sneaking across the border from Sikkim in January 1939. Measuring Skulls The Schäfer team spent eight months in Tibet, on the eve of the Nazi Wehrmacht invasions in Europe. The 14th (and current) Dalai Lama had just been chosen, but was only a child at the time, and had not yet been brought to Lhasa from his home in China’s Qinghai Province. The country was being run by a regent to the Dalai Lama, who became a close friend of Schäfer. Hale reports that, “Schäfer’s diaries show that he was able to meet the Regent at almost any time and to spend two or three hours in his company.” Schäfer invited the regent to fly to Germany to meet with Hitler. The trip never materialized, but the regent sent a letter and some gifts to Hitler, asking to “improve the friendly tie of relationship between the two nations.” Schäfer wrote about his admiration for the “absolute rule” maintained by the Tibetan Lamas over their population. Meanwhile, the ethnologist on the Schäfer team, Bruno Beger, was busy measuring the skulls and other body parts of hundreds of Tibetans and other ethnic groups, with the intention of establishing that the Tibetans were, indeed, of the pure Aryan race. He also made casts of people’s heads, faces, hands, and ears, which he took back to Germany for further “research.” The Schäfer mission had to make a quick retreat when the war in Europe was imminent—Lhasa was, after all, British territory. They were greeted by both Himmler and Hitler upon their return to Germany, and treated as heroes. Schäfer was made head of a newly established “Sven Hedin Institute for Inner Asian Research,” named after the Swedish explorer, who was a great admirer of Hitler. Beger went on to measure more skulls, this time of Jews and others at the concentration camp at Auschwitz. According to the Memorial and Museum for Auschwitz-Birkenau: “The selection of 115 persons (79 Jewish men, 30 Jewish women, 2 Poles, and 4 ‘Asians’—probably Soviet POWs) and the preliminary preparation, consisting of biometrical measurements and the collection of personal data, were carried out by .. . SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr. Bruno Beger, who arrived in Auschwitz in the first half of 1943. Beger finished his work by June 15, 1943. After going through quarantine, some of the prisoners whom Beger selected were sent in July and early August to Natzweiler-Struthof Concentration Camp, where they were murdered in the gas chamber. The victims’ corpses were sent to [Beger’s superior Dr. August] Hirt as material for his skeleton collection, which were intended for use in anthropological studies that would demonstrate the superiority of the Nordic race.”

Although Beger was passed through “de-nazification” after the war, his history at Auschwitz emerged again when Adolf Eichmann was captured and tried in Israel in 1961. Beger was placed on trial in 1971, but was acquitted, arguing that he did not know that the Jews he had measured were killed when he was finished with them, nor about the skeleton collection. The evidence against him was strong but inconclusive, according to author Hale. The SS Officer’s ‘Seven Years in Tibet’ The most famous Nazi connection to the Dalai Lama was that of his childhood instruction at the hands of Nazi SS officer Heinrich Harrer, whose book Seven Years in Tibet became a bestseller, and was glorified in the 1997 Hollywood film by that name. The Austrian Harrer had joined the Sturmabteilung, or SA (Brownshirts), in 1933, at the age of 21, at a time when this was illegal in Austria, and rose to the rank of sergeant. When the Anschluss absorbed Austria into Germany in 1938, Harrer, after five years as a Brownshirt, joined the Schutzstaffel, the SS (Blackshirts), Hitler’s private terrorist army, run by the same Heinrich Himmler who deployed the Schäfer mission. Himmler sent Harrer on a mission in the Himalayas in 1939, during the same time frame as the Schäfer mission. When the war broke out, however, Harrer was detained by the British in India. He escaped in 1944, made his way overland into Tibet, and soon befriended the 11-year-old Dalai Lama. He became his tutor and companion, schooling him in various subjects. His books about the experience report only the benign subjects, but it included a heavy dose of anti-communism of the Nazi variety, and God only knows what else. Harrer remained a close friend of the Dalai Lama throughout Harrer’s life (until his death in 2006), meeting him often, most recently, in an event captured on YouTube (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzWOVlgtce8). British Tibet controller Hugh Richardson, despite his antiNazi pretensions, kept in touch with the Dalai Lama after the war through his friend Harrer, and served proudly with the Nazi SS officer on the “Committee of 100 for Tibet,” an antiChina organization of celebrities, scholars, and intelligence operatives. Keeping the Nazi Flame Alive But Harrer is merely the most famous of the many Nazis whom the Dalai Lama counts among his close friends, still today. In a 1994 grand reunion in London, the Dalai Lama met with SS officers Harrer and Beger, together with several British colonial officials who had served in Tibet, and an Italian scholar from the Fascist era, to round things out. Richardson missed the celebration due to ill health. Skull-measurer Beger met with his fellow Aryan, the Dalai Lama, at least four times during the 1980s. In 1992, the Dalai Lama visited Chile, where he was greeted at the airport by another Nazi friend, Miguel Serrano. Serrano, while functioning as a diplomat for the Chilean government, also served as the head of the National Socialist Party (Nazi Party) of Chile, and associated with old Nazis who had fled to South America, including Otto Skorzeny, the SS officer who organized the notorious “Ratline,” smuggling Nazi war criminals out of Germany, many into South America. Serrano had numerous meetings with the Dalai Lama. Serrano was the author of a book titled Esoteric Hitlerism, and another, Adolf Hitler, the Last Avatar, praising the Führer as a “tantric”—the name of the Buddhist sect followed by the Dalai Lama—who converts sexual energy into military energy. When Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was detained in London in 1990, and threatened with extradition to Spain to face charges of crimes against humanity under his fascist rule, the Dalai Lama visited Chile and called for the poor old man to be forgiven for his sins—joining with President George H.W. Bush on that issue. As is well known, the Pinochet regime was put in power with the crucial aid of George Shultz and Felix Rohatyn, the two central players in the drive for fascism in the United States today. Then there is Shoko Asahara, the guru who headed the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan, which released sarin gas in the subway system of Tokyo in 1995, killing 12, and injuring dozens. Asahara credited the Dalai Lama, whom he met several times, as the leading inspiration in determining his course in Buddhism. The Dalai Lama described Shoko Asahara as having the “mind of a Buddha,” and sent youth from his Dharamsala base in India to Japan to study with the cult leader. Aum Shinrikyo taught the sexual perversities of the Tibetan’s tantric belief, and was famous for using “anime” and “manga,” the video-game violence which has been used internationally to brainwash terrorist killers, as “religious” training. Even after the terrorist attack in Tokyo, the Dalai Lama defended Shoko Asahara’s religious sincerity. The Dalai Lama’s dedication to the British and Nazi genocidal hatred of humanity was expressed as recently as April 20, 2008, in Ann Arbor, Mich. After meeting privately (and holding hands) with Paula Dobriansky, the Bush Administration’s special envoy to Tibet (and a spokesperson for the extreme neoconservative faction associated with Dick Cheney), the God-King showed himself to be the reincarnation of the British Empire’s Rev. Thomas Malthus: “There simply aren’t enough natural resources on the planet to support all 6 billion people on Earth imitating Western lifestyles. Because there are limitations on external material resources, but not on internal ones, it’s better to seek contentment and peace rather than material things.” This was clearly the Dalai Lama’s message to the billions of people across the globe now facing starvation as a result of the work of his London controllers—the man of “peace” proposes the peace of the grave for the “excess” population.