from the book,
Invisible Eagle
By
Alan Baker
The History of Nazi Occultism
3 - A hideous strength
The Vril Society
We have now reached the point in our survey of Nazi involvement with the occult where
we must depart from what is historically verifiable and enter an altogether more obscure
and murky realm, a place that Pauwels and Bergier call the 'Absolute Elsewhere'. (1)
Serious historians (at least, those who deign to comment on the subject at all) regard the
material we shall be examining for the rest of this book with contempt - and, it must be
said, not without good reason. Much of what follows may well strike the reader as bizarre
and absurd in equal measure; and yet, as we shall see, amongst the notions we are about
to address (products, apparently, of fevered imaginations) will be found unsettling hints of
a thread running through the collective mind of humanity in the late twentieth century -
ominous, dangerous and, by the majority, unseen.
As we shall see, the 'twilight zone between fact and fiction' can produce significant shifts
in our collective awareness of the world, our place in it and the unstated intentions of
those who rule us. The world view of those who subscribe to the idea of genuine Nazi
occult power includes a number of outrageous conspiracy theories that revolve around the
claim that many leading Nazis (including, according to some, Hitler himself) escaped from
the ruins of Berlin and continue with their plans for world domination from some hidden
headquarters. At first sight, these theories can surely have little to do with known reality.
And yet, the idea that the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) could have
smuggled many personnel from Nazi intelligence and the German secret weapons
programme into the United States in the post-war years might likewise seem outlandish -
until we remember that this, too, is a documented historical fact. Project PAPERCLIP
proves that some senior elements of the Third Reich did indeed survive in this way, their
lives bought with scientific and military knowledge that the American government
desperately wanted.
So, for the rest of this book, we shall concentrate on the elements of Nazi occultism that
find no home in orthodox history but that nevertheless stretch their pernicious tentacles
through modern popular and fringe culture and refuse to vanish in the glare of the light of
reason. The Vril Society, our departure point into the Absolute Elsewhere, might seem to
have been better placed in the first chapter, were it not that there is so little evidence for
its influence over the activities of the Third Reich. In spite of this, it has come to occupy a
central position in the dubious study of Nazi occult power and so demands a chapter of its
own. But what was the strangely named Vril Society?
The first hint of the Vril Society's existence was discovered in a scene that would not have
been out of place in one of Dennis Wheatley's occult thrillers. On 25 April 1945, so the
story goes, a group of battle-weary Russian soldiers were making their cautious way
through the shattered remnants of Berlin, mopping up the isolated pockets of German
resistance that remained in the heart of the Third Reich. The soldiers moved carefully from
one wrecked building to another, in a state of constant readiness against the threat of
ambush.
In a ground-floor room of one blasted building, the soldiers made a surprising discovery.
Lying in a circle on the floor were the bodies of six men, with a seventh corpse in the
centre. All were dressed in German military uniforms, and the dead man in the centre of
the group was wearing a pair of bright green gloves. The Russians' assumption that the
bodies were those of soldiers was quickly dispelled when they realised that the dead men
were all Orientals. One of the Russians, who was from Mongolia, identified the men as
Tibetans. It was also evident to the Russian soldiers that the men had not died in battle
but seemed to have committed suicide. Over the following week, hundreds more Tibetans
were discovered in Berlin: some of them had clearly died in battle, while others had
committed ritual suicide, like the ones discovered by the Russian unit. (2)
What were Tibetans doing in Nazi Germany towards the end of the Second World War?
The answer to this question may be found in a curious novel entitled The Coming Race by
Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), first Baron Lytton. A prolific and very successful writer
(his output included novels, plays, essays and poetry) Bulwer-Lytton was considered in his
lifetime to be one of the greatest writers in the English language. Unfortunately, his
reputation for vanity, ostentation and eccentricity attracted a good deal of hostility from the
press and this has damaged his subsequent literary reputation to a disproportionate
extent, with the result that today his books are extremely hard to find and his work is
seldom - if at all - taught in universities in the English-speaking world. (3)
Throughout his career, Bulwer-Lytton wrote on many themes, including romance, politics,
history, social satire, melodrama and the occult. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that
he should have turned to the subject of Utopian science fiction with The Coming Race,
published in 1871. In this novel, the narrator, a traveller and adventurer of independent
means, explores a mine in an unnamed location and discovers a vast subterranean world,
inhabited by a superior race of humans called the Vril-ya. Once tenants of the Earth's
outer surface, the Vril-ya were forced to retreat underground by a natural catastrophe
similar to the biblical Flood many thousands of years ago. Their technology is far in
advance of anything to be found in the world of ordinary humanity, and is based on the
application of a force known as 'vril'. Befriended by a young female Vril-ya named Zee, the
narrator asks about the nature of the vril force.
Therewith Zee began to enter into an explanation of which I understood very little, for
there is no word in any language I know which is an exact synonym for vril. I should call it
electricity, except that it comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature, to
which, in our scientific nomenclature, differing names are assigned, such as magnetism,
galvanism, &c. These people consider that in vril they have arrived at the unity in natural
energetic agencies, which has been conjectured by many philosophers above ground, and
which Faraday thus intimates under the more cautious term of correlation:
'I have long held an opinion,' says that illustrious experimentalist, 'almost amounting to a
conviction, in common, I believe, with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that the
various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common
origin; or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent, that they are
convertible, as it were, into one another, and possess equivalents of power in their action.'
(4)
According to Zee, all Vril-ya are trained in the application of vril, which can be used to
control the physical world, including the minds and bodies of others, as well as to enhance
the telepathic and telekinetic potentials of the human mind. The vril force is most often
applied through the use of a device known as the Vril Staff which, like the vril force itself,
requires many years to master. (The narrator is not allowed to hold one, 'for fear of some
terrible accident occasioned by my ignorance of its use'.) The Vril Staff 'is hollow, and has
in the handle several stops, keys, or springs by which its force can be altered, modified, or
directed - so that by one process it destroys, by another it heals - by one it can rend the
rock, by another disperse the vapour - by one it affects bodies, by another it can exercise
a certain influence over minds'. (5)
During his protracted stay in the subterranean realm, the narrator learns of the system of
government by which the Vril-ya live. They are ruled by a single supreme magistrate who
abdicates the position at the first sign of advancing age.
Although their society is entirely free of crime or strife of any kind, they consider strength
and force to be among the finest virtues, and the triumph of the strong over the weak to be
in perfect accordance with Nature. Democracy and free institutions are, to them, merely
the crude experiments of an immature culture.
The government of the tribe of Vril-ya ... was apparently very complicated, really very
simple. It was based upon a principle recognised in theory, though little carried out in
practice, above ground - viz., that the object of all systems of philosophical thought tends
to the attainment of unity, or the ascent through all intervening labyrinths to the simplicity
of a single first cause or principle. Thus in politics, even republican writers have agreed
that a benevolent autocracy would insure the best administration, if there were any
guarantees for its continuance, or against its gradual abuse of the powers accorded to it.
There was ... in this society nothing to induce any of its members to covet the cares of
office. No honours, no insignia of higher rank were assigned to it. The supreme magistrate
was not distinguished from the rest by superior habitation or revenue. On the other hand,
the duties awarded to him were marvellously light and easy, requiring no preponderant
degree of energy or intelligence. (6)
After a number of adventures in the subterranean world -and a great many conversations
with its denizens -the narrator comes to the following conclusion regarding the ultimate
origins of the fantastic Vril-ya race:
[T]his people - though originally not only of our human race, but, as seems to me clear by
the roots of their language, descended from the same ancestors as the great Aryan family,
from which in varied streams has flowed the dominant civilisation of the world; and having,
according to their myths and their history, passed through phases of society familiar to
ourselves, - had yet now developed into a distinct species with which it was impossible
that any community in the upper world could amalgamate: And that if they ever emerged
from these nether recesses into the light of day, they would, according to their own
traditional persuasions of their ultimate destiny, destroy and replace our existent varieties
of man. (7)
Although greatly impressed with the knowledge and accomplishments of the Vril-ya, the
narrator is nevertheless terrified by their power and the ease with which they wield it,
implying at one point that, should he have angered them at any time, they would have had
no compunction in turning their Vril Staffs on him and reducing him to cinders. This
uneasiness, coupled with his natural desire to return to the upper world and the life with
which he is familiar, prompts the narrator to begin seeking a means of escape from the
subterranean world of the Vril-ya. Aid comes in the unlikely form of Zee, who has fallen in
love with him and has attempted to persuade him to stay, but who nevertheless
understands that an unrequited love cannot result in happiness for either of them. It is she
who leads him back to the mine shaft through which he first entered the realm of the Vrilya.
Upon his return home, the narrator begins to ponder the wonders he has beheld far below
the surface of the Earth, and once again hints at the possible dreadful fate awaiting a
blissfully unaware humanity at the hands of the 'Coming Race'. In the final chapter, we
read:
[T]he more I think of a people calmly developing, in regions excluded from our sight and
deemed uninhabitable by our sages, powers surpassing our most disciplined modes
offeree, and virtues to which our life, social and political, becomes antagonistic in
proportion as our civilisation advances, - the more devoutly I pray that ages may yet
elapse before there emerge into sunlight our inevitable destroyers. (
It is an assumption of many occultists that The Coming Race is fact disguised as fiction:
that Bulwer-Lytton based his engaging novel on a genuine body of esoteric knowledge. He
was greatly interested in the Rosicrucians, the powerful occult society which arose in the
sixteenth century and which claimed to possess ancient wisdom, discovered in a secret
underground chamber, regarding the ultimate secrets of the Universe. There is some
evidence that Bulwer-Lytton believed in the possibility of a subterranean world, for he
wrote to his friend Hargrave Jennings in 1854: 'So Rosenkreuz [the founder of the
Rosicrucians] found his wisdom in a secret chamber. So will we all. There is much to be
learned from the substrata of our planet.' (9)
Some writers, including Alec Maclellan, author of the fascinating book The Lost World of
Agharti (1996), have suggested that The Coming Race revealed too much of the
subterranean world, and was as a result suppressed in the years following Bulwer-Lytton's
death in 1873. Indeed, he describes the book as 'one of the hardest to find of all books of
mysticism', (10) and informs us of his own search for a copy, which for some years met
with no success. While doubtless an intriguing piece of stage-setting on Maclellan's part,
the rarity of the book can surely be accounted for by the unjust waning of Bulwer-Lytton's
posthumous literary reputation (mentioned earlier). The present author searched for some
months for a copy of The Coming Race, before finding an extremely affordable paperback
edition in a high-street bookshop.
What is the connection between Bulwer-Lytton's strange novel and Nazi Germany? If
there really was a large colony of Tibetan monks in Berlin in the 1940s, what were they
doing there? It seems that the connection was none other than the Bavarian Karl
Haushofer (1869-1946) whose theories of Geopolitics gave rise to the concept of
Lebensraum (living space), which Hitler maintained would be necessary to the continued
dominance of the superior Aryan race and which he intended to take, primarily, from the
Soviet Union. Haushofer, along with Dietrich Eckart (1868-1923) - an anti-Semitic
journalist and playwright who influenced Hitler's racial attitudes and introduced him to
influential social circles after the First World War - is frequently described by believers in
genuine Nazi occult power as a practising black magician, and the 'Master Magician of the
Nazi Party'. (11)
Haushofer excelled at Munich University, where he began to develop his lifelong interest
in the Far East. After leaving university, he entered the German army, where his great
intelligence ensured a rapid rise through the ranks. His knowledge of the Far East earned
him a posting as military attache in Japan. The idea that Haushofer was an occult adept,
with secret knowledge of powerful trans-human entities, was first suggested by Louis
Pauwels and Jacques Bergier in their fascinating but historically unreliable book The
Morning of the Magicians (which served as the model for a number of subsequent
treatments of Nazi occultism in the 1960s and early 1970s).
According to Pauwels and Bergier:
[Haushofer] believed that the German people originated in Central Asia, and that it was
the Indo-Germanic race which guaranteed the permanence, nobility and greatness of the
world. While in Japan, Haushofer is said to have been initiated into one of the most
important secret Buddhist societies and to have sworn, if he failed in his 'mission', to
commit suicide in accordance with the time-honoured ceremonial. (12)
Haushofer was also apparently a firm believer in the legend of Thule, the lost Aryan
homeland in the far north, which had once been the centre of an advanced civilisation
possessed of magical powers. Connecting this legend with the Thule Society, Pauwels
and Bergier have this to say:
Beings intermediate between Man and other intelligent beings from Beyond would place at
the disposal of the [Thule Society] Initiates a reservoir of forces which could be drawn on
to enable Germany to dominate the world again and be the cradle of the coming race of
Supermen which would result from the mutations of the human species. One day her
legions would set out to annihilate everything that had stood in the way of the spiritual
destiny of the Earth, and their leaders would be men who knew everything, deriving their
strength from the very fountain-head of energy and guided by the Great Ones of the
Ancient World ... It would seem that it was under the influence of Karl Haushofer that [the
Thule Society] took on its true character of a society of Initiates in communion with the
Invisible, and became the magic centre of the Nazi movement. (13)
Serious historians such as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke take issue with the claims of
Pauwels and Bergier and the later writers who reiterated them. Goodrick-Clarke, who has
perhaps conducted more research into primary German sources than any other writer in
this curious field, states that the claims regarding the secret guiding power of the Thule
Society are 'entirely fallacious. The Thule Society was dissolved in 1925 when support
had dwindled.' He goes on to assure us that 'there is no evidence at all to link Haushofer
to the group1. (14) Nevertheless, Haushofer's alleged skill in the Black Arts has become
an important link in the Nazi occult chain as described by writers on such fringe subjects.
After the end of the First World War, Haushofer returned to Munich, where he gained a
doctorate from the university. He divided his time between teaching and writing and
founded the Geopolitical Review in which he published his ideas on Lebensraum, which
could 'both justify territorial conquest by evoking the colonizing of Slav lands by Teutonic
knights in the Middle Ages and, emotively, conjure up notions of uniting in the Reich what
came to be described as Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) scattered throughout eastern
Europe'. (15)
While incarcerated in the fortress of Landsberg am Lech following the failure of the Munich
Putsch in 1924, Adolf Hitler read and was influenced by Haushofer's books on geopolitics
(he had already been introduced to Haushofer by the professor's student assistant, Rudolf
Hess). There is no doubt that Hitler occupied his time in Landsberg judiciously, reading
widely in several fields, though not for the sake of education so much as to confirm and
clarify his own preconceptions. (He later said that Landsberg was his 'university paid for
by the state'). (16)
According to Pauwels and Bergier and other fringe writers, Haushofer visited Hitler every
day in Landsberg, where he explained his geopolitical theories and described his travels
through India in the early years of the century. While in India, he had heard stories of a
powerful civilisation living beneath the Himalayas:
Thirty or forty centuries ago in the region of Gobi there was a highly developed civilization.
As the result of a catastrophe, possibly of an atomic nature, Gobi was transformed into a
desert, and the survivors emigrated, some going to the extreme North of Europe, and
others towards the Caucasus. The Scandinavian god Thor is supposed to have been one
of the heroes of this migration.
... Haushofer proclaimed the necessity of 'a return to the sources' of the human race - in
other words, that it was necessary to conquer the whole of Eastern Europe, Turkestan,
Pamir, Gobi and Thibet. These countries constituted, in his opinion, the central core, and
whoever had control of them controlled the whole world. (17)
After the cataclysm that destroyed the Gobi civilisation, the survivors migrated to a vast
cavern system beneath the Himalayas where they split into two groups, one of which
followed the path of spirituality, enlightenment and meditation while the other followed the
path of violence and materialistic power. The first of these centres was called Agartha, the
other Shambhala. (These names have many different spellings: for Agartha, I use the
simplest; for Shambhala, the spelling favoured by Orientalists.) We shall return for a closer
look to the realms of Agartha and Shambhala in the next chapter.
According to Alec Maclellan, among the many books Hitler read while languishing in
Landsberg was Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race, which, Haushofer informed him, was
an essentially correct description of the race of Supermen living far beneath the surface of
the Earth and corroborated much of what the professor had himself learned while
travelling in Asia. Bulwer-Lytton's novel apparently galvanised Hitler's imagination, and he
'began to yearn for the day when he might establish for himself the actuality of the secret
civilization beneath the snows of Tibet ...' (18)
In the following year, 1925, the Vril Society (also known as the Luminous Lodge) was
formed by a group of Berlin Rosicrucians including Karl Haushofer. As Joscelyn Godwin
informs us, there is only one primary source of information on the Vril Society: Willy Ley, a
German rocket engineer who fled to the United States in 1933 and followed a successful
career writing popular science books. In 1947, Ley published an article entitled
'Pseudoscience in Naziland'. Following a description of Ariosophy, Ley writes:
The next group was literally founded upon a novel. That group which I think called itself
Wahrheitsgesellschaft -Society for Truth - and which was more or less localized in Berlin,
devoted its spare time looking for Vril. Yes, their convictions were founded upon Bulwer-
Lytton's 'The Coming Race'. They knew that the book was fiction, Bulwer-Lytton had used
that device in order to be able to tell the truth about this 'power'. The subterranean
humanity was nonsense, Vril was not. Possibly it had enabled the British, who kept it as a
State secret, to amass their colonial empire. Surely the Romans had had it, inclosed [sic]
in small metal balls, which guarded their homes and were referred to as lares. For reasons
which I failed to penetrate, the secret of Vril could be found by contemplating the structure
of an apple, sliced in halves. No, I am not joking, that is what I was told with great
solemnity and secrecy. Such a group actually existed, they even got out the first issue of a
magazine which was to proclaim their credo. (19)
Although they apparently interviewed Ley, Pauwels and Bergier could learn nothing more
from him about this mysterious society; however, they later discovered that the group
actually called itself the Vril Society, and that Karl Haushofer was intimately connected
with it. (Joscelyn Godwin kindly reminds us of the unreliability of the splendid Pauwels and
Bergier: although they cite Jack Fishman's The Seven Men of Spandau with regard to
Haushofer's connection to the Vril Society, Fishman actually makes no such reference.)
(20)
Pauwels and Bergier go on to inform us that, having failed in his mission, Haushofer
committed suicide on 14 March 1946, in accordance with his pledge to his masters in the
secret Japanese society into which he had been initiated. Once again, the truth is
somewhat different: Haushofer did not commit ham kin but died from arsenic poisoning on
10 March. In addition, Ley's reference to 'contemplating the structure of an apple, sliced in
halves' (thus revealing the five-pointed star at its centre) echoes Rudolf Steiner's
suggestion in Knowledge of Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. Indeed, as Godwin reminds
us, (21) the Theosophists were themselves interested in the concept of the vril force,
which bears some resemblance to Reichenbach's Odic force, and to the Astral Light, also
known as the Akashic Records: a subtle form of energy said to surround the Earth, in
which is preserved a record of every thought and action that has ever occurred.
In spite of the sober research of writers like Goodrick-Clarke and Godwin, the idea of an
immensely sinister and powerful Vril Society secretly controlling the Third Reich has lost
nothing of its ability to fascinate. Many still maintain that Haushofer introduced Hitler to the
leader of the group of Tibetan high lamas living in Berlin, a man known only as 'The Man
with the Green Gloves', and that this man knew the locations of the hidden entrances to
the subterranean realms of Agartha and Shambhala. (22)
These rumours doubtless gave rise to the famous legends about Hitler's obsessive search
for the entrances to the inner world. According to Maclellan: 'The first expeditions were
dispatched purely under the auspices of the Luminous Lodge, beginning in 1926, but later,
after coming to power, Hitler took a more direct interest, overseeing the organization of the
searches himself.' (23) Maclellan also states that Hitler believed unequivocally that 'certain
representatives of the underground super-race were already abroad in the world', (24)
citing Hermann Rauschning's famous book Hitler Speaks A Senes of Political
Conversations with Adolf Hitler on his Real Aims (1939). The conversations recorded by
Rauschning have served as source material for many writers on the Third Reich, including
serious ones. Proponents of genuine Nazi occult power have repeatedly pointed to the
mystical elements in Hitler's conversations as relayed by Rauschning, who says that he
repeatedly had the feeling that Hitler was a medium, possessed of supernatural powers. It
seems that on one occasion, Hitler actually met one of the subterranean Supermen.
Rauschning claims that Hitler confided to him: The new man is among us. He is here! Now
are you satisfied? I will tell you a secret. I have seen the vision of the new man - fearless
and formidable. I shrank from him.' (25)
To his credit, Maclellan states that this was more than likely a deranged fantasy on Hitler's
part. However, Rauschning's very description should be treated with extreme caution: it
should be noted that, in spite of the widespread interest it stimulated, Hitler Speaks has
not stood the test of time as an accurate historical document. In fact, Ian Kershaw, one of
the foremost authorities on Hitler and the author of Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris (1998), does
not cite Rauschning's book anywhere in his monumental study, and states that it is 'a work
now regarded to have so little authenticity that it is best to disregard it altogether'. (26)
As the story goes, Hitler ordered a number of expeditions into German, Swiss and Italian
mines to search for the entrances to the cavern cities of the Supermen. He is even said to
have ordered research to be conducted into the life of Bulwer-Lytton, in an effort to
determine whether the author himself had visited the realm of the Vril-ya. While serious
writers ignore these rumours, there is an interesting event on record that Maclellan quotes
in his The Lost World of Agharti and that illustrates the frustrating nature of the 'twilight
zone between fact and fiction' in which we find ourselves when discussing Nazi occultism.
Maclellan cites the testimony of one Antonin Horak, an expert speleologist and member of
the Slovak Uprising, who accidentally discovered a strange tunnel in Czechoslovakia in
October 1944. Dr Horak kept quiet about the discovery until 1965, when he published an
account in the National Speleological Society News. In his article, Dr Horak stated that he
and two other Resistance fighters found the tunnel near the villages of Plavince and
Lubocna (he is quite specific about the location: 49.2 degrees north, 20.7 degrees east).
Having just survived a skirmish with the Germans, the three men (one of whom was badly
injured) asked a local peasant for help. He led them to an underground grotto where they
could hide and rest. The peasant told the Resistance men that the cave contained pits,
pockets of poison gas, and was also haunted, and warned them against venturing too far
inside. This they had no intention of doing, such was their weariness. They attended to the
wounds of their comrade and fell asleep.
The following day, Horak's curiosity got the better of him and, while he waited for the
injured man to recover enough strength to travel again, he decided to do a little exploring
inside the cave. Presently, he came to a section that was completely different from the
rest of the cave. 'Lighting some torches, I saw that I was in a spacious, curved, black shaft
formed by cliff-like walls. The floor in the incline was a solid lime pavement.' (27) The
tunnel stretched interminably into the distance. Dr Horak decided to take a sample of the
wall, but was unable to make any impression with his pickaxe. He took his pistol and fired
at the wall (surely an unwise thing to do, given the risk of a ricochet and with German
soldiers possibly still in the vicinity).
'The bullet slammed into the substance of the walls with a deafening, fiery impact,' he
wrote. 'Sparks flashed, there was a roaring sound, but not so much as a splinter fell from
the substance. Only a small welt appeared, about the length of half my finger, which gave
off a pungent smell.'
Dr Horak then returned to his comrades and told them about the apparently man-made
tunnel. 'I sat there by the fire speculating. How far did it reach into the rocks? I wondered.
Who, or what, put it into the mountain? Was it man-made? And was it at last proof of the
truth in legends - like Plato's - of long-lost civilisations with magic technologies which our
rationale cannot grasp or believe?' (28) No one else, apparently, has explored this tunnel
since Dr Horak in 1944. The peasants who lived in the region obviously knew of its
existence, but kept well away.
In addition to the stories of Nazi mine expeditions in Central and Eastern Europe during
the Second World War, occult writers have frequently made reference to the Nazi Tibet
Expeditions, allegedly an attempt to locate and make contact with a group of high lamas
with access to fantastic power. Once again, Pauwels and Bergier have plenty to say on
this subject, which is in itself enough to give pause to the cautious.
The American researcher Peter Levenda experienced a similar scepticism with regard to
the supposed Nazi-Tibet connection, until he began to search for references in the
microfilmed records in the Captured German Documents Section of the National Archives
in Washington, DC. He discovered a wealth of material, running to many hundreds of
pages, dealing with the work of Dr Ernst Schafer of the Ahnenerbe. These documents
included Dr Schafer's personal notebooks, his correspondence, clippings from several
German newspapers, and his SS file, which describes an expedition to East and Central
Tibet from 1934-1936, and the official SS-Tibet Expedition of 1938-1939 under his
leadership. (29)
As Levenda demonstrates, the expedition was not so much concerned with contacting
Tibetan representatives of the subterranean super-race as with cataloguing the flora and
fauna of the region (an activity of little military value to the Third Reich, which accounts for
the difficulty Schafer occasionally had in securing funding for his trips).
Born in Cologne on 14 March 1910 into a wealthy industrialist family, Ernst Schafer
attended school in Heidelberg and Gottingen, and embarked on his first expedition to
Tibet in 1930 under the auspices of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia
when he was only twenty years old. The following year, he joined the American Brooke
Dolan expedition to Siberia, China and Tibet. He became a member of the SS in mid-
1933, finally reaching the rank of Sturmbannfuhrer in 1942. In addition to being an SS
officer, Schafer was also a respected scientist who published papers in various journals,
such as the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia. As Levenda
wryly notes, Schafer was 'a man of many parts: one part SS officer and one part scholar,
one part explorer and one part scientist: a Nazi Indiana Jones'. (30) Schafer was also
deeply interested in the religious and cultural practices of the Tibetans, including their
sexuality. (Indeed, the members of the 1938-1939 expedition displayed a somewhat
prurient fascination with intimate practices: the film-maker Ernst Krause, for instance, took
great care to record his observation of a fifteen-year-old Lanchung girl masturbating on a
bridge beam.) (31)
When not cataloguing flora and fauna (and spying on teenage girls), the members of the
expedition managed to conduct other research, which included an exhaustive study of the
physical attributes of the Tibetan people. Schafer noted height and weight, the shape of
hands and feet, the colour and shape of eyes, and even took plaster casts of Tibetans'
faces. On 21 July 1939, Der Neue Tag published the following article:
SACRED TIBETAN SCRIPTURE
ACQUIRED BY THE DR SCHAFER-EXPEDITION ON
NINE ANIMAL LOADS ACROSS THE HIGH-COUNTRY
(SPECIAL) FRANKFURT - 20 JULY The Tibet Expedition of Dr Ernst Schafer, which
during its expedition through Tibet stayed a long time in Lhasa and in the capital of the
Panchen Lama, Shigatse, is presently on its return trip to Germany. Since the monsoons
began unusually early, the return march of the expedition was hastened in order to secure
the shipment of the precious collections. The expedition has singularly valuable scientific
research results to inventory. In addition to outstanding accomplishments in the areas of
geophysical and earth-magnetic research they succeeded in obtaining an extra-rich
ethnological collection including, along with cult objects, many articles and tools of daily
life.
With the help of the regent of Lhasa it was Dr Schafer who also succeeded in obtaining
the Kangschur, the extensive, 108-volume sacred script of the Tibetans, which required
nine animal loads to transport. Also especially extensive are the zoological and botanical
collections that the expedition has already shipped, in part, to Germany, the remainder of
which they will bring themselves. The zoological collection includes the total bird-fauna of
the research area. Dr Schafer was also able, for the first time, to bag a Schapi, a hitherto
unknown wild goat. About 50 live animals are on the way to Germany, while numerous
other live animals are still with the expedition. An extensive herbarium of all existing plants
is also on its way. Furthermore, valuable geographical and earth-historical
accomplishments were made. Difficulties encountered due to political tensions with the
English authorities were eliminated due to personal contact between Dr Schafer and
members of the British authorities in Shangtse, so that the unimpeded return of the
expedition out of Tibet with its valuable collections was guaranteed. (32)
Levenda informs us that he was unable to discover the fate of the Kangschur, the 'core
document' of Tibetan Buddhism, although he suspects that it was taken to Vienna. With
regard to the expedition itself, while it must be conceded that it had very little to do with
the occult or magical ambitions of the Third Reich, it is possible that the 'earth-magnetic'
and 'geophysical' experiments had a firm foundation in a very shaky theory. Levenda
suggests that the Tibet Expedition of 1938-1939 attempted to prove the pseudo-scientific
World Ice Theory of Hans Horbiger. This bizarre theory will be discussed in detail in
Chapter Seven. But for now, let us return to the concept embodied in the rumours about
the Vril Society, with its alleged attempts to contact (and enlist the aid of) a mysterious
group of vastly powerful Eastern adepts. To examine the origins of this idea, we must
ourselves embark on a journey to Tibet, known in some quarters as 'the Phantom
Kingdom'.
