of Thor’s hammer.
The Ahnenerbe’s expeditions were calculated to promote the racial theories of the Nazis, and so the participating scientists had to allow the ideology in order to overcome any scientific objectivity. For a serious scientist such as Schäfer, this might have involved a certain amount of double-think. Ahnenerbe’s researchers travelled to Finland and Sweden to examine Bronze Age carvings and study folk customs; during the war they removed the Bayeux Tapestry to examine it for Aryan clues; they raced to Poland to appropriate the Veit Stoss altarpiece, and to the Crimea for Gothic artefacts; and, in this case, sent Schäfer to Tibet to find evidence of early Aryans’ conquest of Asia. And while they were at it, they might as well cause trouble for the British in India.
On his 1938–39 Tibet expedition, Schäfer’s first task was to research passes from which to mount guerrilla attacks on British India, and his second assignment was to find the blue-eyed, blond-haired lost tribe of Aryans living in Tibet. Just before the team left Germany in 1938, the Völkischer Beobachter newspaper ran an article on the expedition which alerted British officials to its intentions. They knew war was coming and refused Schäfer’s team entry to India. Himmler then wrote to Admiral Barry Domvile who happened to be both a Nazi supporter and former head of British naval intelligence, and Domvile gave Himmler’s letter to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. He then allowed the SS team to enter Sikkim, a region of northern India bordering Tibet (Domvile was interned during the war for his pro-Nazi inclinations).
Just before departure to Tibet, Schäfer had shot his wife Hertha in a bizarre duck-hunting accident. He said a sudden wave had unbalanced him and caused him to discharge the weapon into his spouse of only four months. The two servants with them did what they could, but she was dead by the time they got her home.
Schäfer had his own agenda in Tibet and considered Glacial Cosmogony as pseudo-scientific. His instincts were right, as this theory is now considered completely unscientific and another example of how easily large numbers of humans can be fooled. However, he went along with Himmler’s demands in order to be able to mount the expedition. In effect, he was doing precisely what he had accused Smythe and Shipton of: compromising with the truth to facilitate another trip.
The expedition did not go well. After obstructions from the British authorities in India, the party camped on the border between Sikkim and Tibet. After making contact with locals, Tibet’s council of ministers permitted Schäfer, the self-described ‘master of a hundred sciences’, to visit the forbidden capital of Lhasa. His team were told that they could not bring scientific equipment with them or kill any animals or birds, but both conditions were ignored. They decorated their mules with Nazi swastikas and shot every wild creature that came within range. They collected a staggering 3,500 birds, 2,000 eggs, 400 skulls and the pelts of countless mammals, reptiles, amphibians, several thousand butterflies, grasshoppers, 2,000 ethnological objects, minerals, maps and 40,000 black-and-white photographs which still reside in German museums and research institutes.
Schäfer was proud of being ‘the second white man to shoot a Giant Panda’ and he liked to smear the blood of his animal victims on his face. As we have seen, on the expedition with him was Bruno Beger, the anthropologist who later helped to select Jewish victims from Auschwitz for a skeleton collection. He measured the skulls of the Tibetan people they met with callipers and took plaster casts.4 The first attempt at making a mask failed when the Tibetan subject had a seizure and nearly choked to death.
Schäfer decided to commemorate his wife Hertha by firing a symbolic shot from his rifle, a curious idea considering the circumstances of her death. However, he forgot to remove the cleaning rod from the barrel and the breech exploded, knocking him off his feet and burning his face with the explosion.
On the positive side, Schäfer refused to take the stories of wild men seriously. He became testy with his porters, who day and night discussed the yeti, and so he started faking large footsteps outside their tents in the snow. In this he was to start a long tradition in yeti fakery. He was quite sure the stories arose from the Himalayan brown bear, and described the adventure that proved his theory:
On the morning of the second day, a wild-looking Wata [local tribesman] with a rascally face comes to me and tells the fantastic story of a snowman that haunts the tall mountains. This is the same mythical creature about which Himalaya explorers always like to write because it envelops the unconquered peaks of the mountain chains with the nimbus of mystery. It is supposed to be as tall as a yak, hairy like a bear, and walk on two legs like a man, but its soles are said to point backward so that one can never track its trail. At night it is supposed to roam, descend deep into the valleys, devastate the livestock of the native people, and tear apart men whom it then carries up to its mountain home near the glaciers.
After I listen calmly to this bloody tale, I convey to the Wata that he does not have to make up such a tall tale; however, if he could bring me to the cave of such a ‘snowman’, and if the monster is actually in its lair, then the empty tin can in my tent, which appears to be the object of his great pleasure, would be his reward. But should he have lied to his lord, added Wang [his Tibetan foreman], he could expect a beating with the riding crop. Smiling, with many bows, the lad bids his leave with the promise to return early the next morning and report to me. Wang is also of the opinion that there are snowmen and draws for me the face of the mystery animal in the darkest colours, just like he has heard about it from the elders of his native tribe countless times: devils and evil spirits wreak havoc up there day and night in order to kill men. ‘But Wang,’ I scoffed, ‘how can you as my senior companion believe in such fairy tales?’ Wang explained that these forces were manifest all around them. After all, ‘the same evil demons already tried to menace us many times as we traverse the wild steppes. They also sent us the violent snowstorms that fell on our weak little group like supernatural forces and at night wanted to rip apart our tents with crude fists as if they had rotten canvas before them.’ I insisted ‘that this snowman is nothing other than a bear, perhaps a “Mashinng”, a really large one; but with our “big gun”, I will easily shoot him dead before he even leaves the cave!’
The Wata returned within the day with a witness who had, while searching for lost sheep, found a cave in which ‘he beheld for the first time with his own eyes the yellow head of a snowman.’
Following his guides to the den of the yeti, I shot it at point-blank range when it emerged, roaring angrily, from its nap and it was indeed a Himalayan brown bear.5
On their return home to Germany, Reichsführer-SS Himmler greeted Schäfer and his expedition members on the tarmac at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, where he presented Schäfer with the SS skull ring and dagger of honour. However, it ended badly for them all. Himmler’s puny physique, poor eyesight and digestive problems hardly made him the figurehead for a super-race. He was a pedant, a sadist, probably the most brutal mass murderer in history and the architect of the Holocaust. He was, in short, the middle manager from hell. He committed suicide in custody using a hidden cyanide pill.
Schäfer returned from Tibet with his 7,000 plant specimens with the intention of developing hardy strains of cereals for the newly conquered regions of Eastern Europe. He also brought back a poorly faked yeti specimen with a lower jaw made of clay with teeth jammed into it. His scientific reputation after the war was damaged by his association with Himmler, which perhaps explains why his rebuttal of the yeti story didn’t gain ground. The expedition cameraman who filmed the Tibet expedition afterwards worked at Dachau, recording prisoners made hypothermic in freezing water or suffocating in decompression chambers. These experiments on living human subjects were used to solve high-altitude and pilot-survival problems for the Luftwaffe.
Bruno Beger was soon busy selecting Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz and recording their skeletons and skulls for an anatomical institute in Strasbourg. Although convicted by a German court long after the war as an accessory to 86 murders, he was given the minimum sentence of three years in prison, which
