The Nazis Sent an Expedition to Tibet. What Were They Looking For?

On 19 January 1939, five Germans reached Lhasa after months of negotiations and travel through Sikkim and the Himalayas.

Their leader was Ernst Schäfer, a 28-year-old zoologist who already knew Central Asia unusually well. He had participated in expeditions to China and eastern Tibet in 1930–31 and 1934–36, collecting large numbers of zoological specimens and completing a doctorate on Tibetan bird life.

This time he was leading his own expedition.

With him were photographer and entomologist Ernst Krause, geophysicist Karl Wienert, logistics specialist Edmund Geer and anthropologist Bruno Beger. All five had become members of the SS, a condition Heinrich Himmler placed on his support for the expedition.

Their equipment reflected several very different interests.

There were cameras and film equipment. There were instruments for geographical and meteorological measurements. There were collecting materials for animals and plants.

And Beger carried equipment for measuring people.

The German Federal Archives still hold thousands of photographs from the journey, including images of expedition members, Tibetan officials, monasteries, landscapes, animals and anthropometric examinations.

So what exactly had Germany sent into Tibet?

Schäfer Wanted Another Scientific Expedition

The project did not begin with Himmler ordering five men to search for a mystical kingdom.

Schäfer had already spent years working in the region and wanted to return. In 1936 he presented plans for another major scientific expedition involving zoology, botany, geology, archaeology and ethnology.

Then Heinrich Himmler became interested.

Historian Isrun Engelhardt, who reconstructed the expedition from diaries, correspondence, British records and surviving German documents, describes a struggle over its direction from the beginning. Schäfer wanted an ambitious multidisciplinary research expedition. Himmler offered patronage, while the SS organisation known as the Ahnenerbe attempted to influence the project politically and ideologically.

The Ahnenerbe had been founded in 1935 to investigate what its organisers regarded as the ancestral heritage of the Germanic and “Aryan” peoples. Its interests extended through archaeology, folklore, ancient religions, runes and racial history into considerably stranger territory, including Atlantis and Hanns Hörbiger’s World Ice Theory.

An expedition to Tibet therefore entered an institution already obsessed with questions about ancient origins.

But even the financing was more complicated than the familiar phrase “SS expedition” suggests.

Schäfer raised much of the money himself. Engelhardt records 30,000 Reichsmarks from the German Research Foundation and 46,000 from the Public Relations and Advertising Council of German Business, alongside support connected with the Ahnenerbe and Himmler.

The expedition could therefore be scientific, political and ideological without every participant necessarily looking for the same thing.

One Member Was Looking at Human Bodies

Bruno Beger’s presence gives the expedition another purpose entirely.

Beger was an anthropologist working within the racial classifications of the period and of the Nazi state. In Tibet he measured bodies and skulls, photographed people, recorded physical characteristics, took hand and footprints and produced facial casts.

Surviving film held by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shows Beger performing anthropological work and making casts of Tibetan faces. The German expedition photographs preserve the same activity.

A later Cambridge study of anthropometry in Tibet notes that the expedition collected hundreds of anthropological measurements as part of this work.

Why Tibet?

One idea circulating in German racial research was that isolated populations of Inner Asia might preserve physical traces useful for reconstructing supposed ancient population movements. Tibet’s geographical isolation made it especially attractive to researchers interested in origins, migration and racial classification.

That creates an important distinction.

Searching for supposed traces of ancient “Aryans” among living populations is not quite the same thing as searching for a supernatural Aryan civilisation beneath a monastery.

But it provides an obvious bridge between the documented expedition and the stories that came later.

Then There Was the Swastika

Few historical details could have been more convenient for the Germans.

The swastika had existed across Eurasian cultures for thousands of years before the Nazi Party adopted one orientation of it as its emblem. Variants appear extensively in Hinduism, Buddhism and other Asian religious traditions.

The Germans entered Tibet wearing a symbol that Tibetans already knew in a completely different cultural setting.

Schäfer appears to have noticed the possibilities.

Engelhardt records an episode in which he sought permission to enter Tibet’s Yarlung Valley, associated with the early Tibetan kings. To strengthen his argument, Schäfer told Tibetan officials that the swastika had supposedly travelled from that valley to Germany around 5,000 years earlier.

He eventually received permission to visit the valley.

Elsewhere in his notes, Schäfer deliberately emphasised a supposed symbolic connection between Germans and Tibetans through the swastika.

Was this simply a useful story invented to obtain access?

Did Schäfer believe some version of it?

Did Himmler see Tibet as potentially connected with the ancient population history he imagined for Europe?

The surviving episode makes one thing clear: ancient symbols and ideas about origins were not merely added to the expedition by modern conspiracy writers. They were already being discussed by the men themselves.

Getting Into Lhasa Was an Achievement of Its Own

Tibet was difficult for foreigners to enter during the 1930s, and the Germans initially failed to obtain permission.

They spent months in Sikkim while Schäfer cultivated contacts and repeatedly tried to persuade Tibetan authorities to admit the group.

Eventually the Kashag, Tibet’s governing council, sent an invitation allowing the five Germans to travel to Lhasa. What was initially permission for a short stay developed into approximately two months in the Tibetan capital. Engelhardt describes it as the first German scientific expedition officially invited there by the Tibetan government.

They arrived during an unusually interesting moment.

The 13th Dalai Lama had died in 1933. The future 14th Dalai Lama had been identified but had not yet assumed political authority. Tibet was governed by the Regent, Reting Rinpoche.

Meanwhile British India surrounded the southern approaches to Tibet, China continued to regard Tibet as part of its territory, and Germany was rapidly moving toward war with Britain.

A zoological expedition had wandered into the Great Game wearing SS uniforms.

The Germans Met Tibet’s Government

Schäfer did more than collect birds.

He met Tibetan ministers, aristocrats, religious figures and the Regent himself. German photographs preserve those meetings, including portraits of members of the Tibetan government and expedition group photographs in Lhasa.

The contacts became politically interesting.

Accounts of Schäfer’s conversations indicate that Tibetan officials discussed Germany and international affairs with him. During one meeting, the Regent reportedly asked whether Germany might be willing to sell weapons to Tibet.

In March 1939, Reting Rinpoche wrote letters intended for Adolf Hitler. The surviving correspondence has been studied in detail by Engelhardt and became one of the most discussed results of the expedition.

The Germans were therefore not merely observing Tibetan society from behind cameras.

They had opened a diplomatic channel.

What did Berlin intend to do with it?

Schäfer Later Described a Wartime Plan

After Germany’s defeat, American military intelligence questioned Schäfer about his activities.

According to the 1946 interrogation account discussed in later research, Schäfer said that after returning from Tibet he had talked with Himmler about another possible mission if war created the opportunity.

The concept involved returning to Tibet, drawing the country toward the German side and establishing resistance against British influence in a manner Schäfer compared with T. E. Lawrence’s activities in the Middle East during the First World War.

That plan was not the expedition of 1938–39.

But it shows how quickly scientific access could become strategically useful.

Tibet lay north of British India. Germany was preparing for a war in which Britain would become its principal European opponent. A friendly contact beyond the Himalayas had obvious possibilities even before anyone introduced secret monasteries or ancient masters.

They Collected Far More Than Measurements

The expedition produced an enormous archive.

Engelhardt reports that roughly 17,000 negatives survive in the German Federal Archives from an original collection of about 20,000. The photographs cover religious ceremonies, ordinary work, monasteries, architecture, Tibetan aristocrats, nomads, agriculture, animals and daily life.

Objects were brought back as well. German museum records still identify Tibetan material collected by Schäfer’s expedition and later incorporated into German collections.

There were zoological specimens, seeds, ethnographic objects, written material and extensive film footage.

The film eventually became Geheimnis Tibet, released in Germany in 1942.

The Deutsches Historisches Museum notes that the footage documented Tibetan ceremonies and customs alongside the expedition’s racial-anthropological examinations, while its later editing and narration placed those images within Nazi propaganda.

A scientific expedition had become a cinema product during wartime.

The photographs, however, remained.

And they preserve an extraordinary amount of Tibet immediately before one of the most disruptive periods in its modern history.

Where Do Shambhala and Agartha Enter the Story?

This is where the expedition acquires its second life.

Later books, documentaries and occult histories connect the German journey with Shambhala, Agartha, hidden masters, subterranean kingdoms, ancient Aryan survivors and secret knowledge supposedly preserved somewhere in the Himalayas.

Some versions have the SS searching for the origins of an ancient master race.

Others have them seeking supernatural technology.

Others connect Tibet with Thule, Vril, Atlantis or a hidden civilisation capable of influencing events on the surface.

The surviving expedition plans, diaries and research records discussed by Engelhardt instead contain repeated references to zoology, geography, botany, agriculture, ethnography, anthropology, filming and political contacts.

But the institutional background surrounding the expedition contains some of the ingredients later writers would use.

Himmler was interested in reincarnation and esoteric ideas. The Ahnenerbe investigated Atlantis, ancient ancestry and World Ice Theory. Schäfer himself used a story about an ancient German-Tibetan connection through the swastika. Beger was physically measuring Tibetans in a search for population history.

The distance between those activities and a literal search for Shambhala is substantial.

The distance between them and a later author imagining such a search is considerably shorter.

Perhaps the Better Question Is: Whose Expedition Was It?

If we ask what “the Nazis” were looking for in Tibet, we may already be making the expedition tidier than it was.

Schäfer wanted scientific prestige and another major expedition.

Krause filmed and documented.

Wienert conducted geophysical work.

Beger measured human beings through the racial anthropology of his institution and period.

Himmler saw an expedition carrying SS personnel into a region that interested him ideologically.

The Ahnenerbe wanted research that could be connected with its ideas about ancestry.

German officials could see political possibilities in direct contact with Tibet.

The Tibetan government had its own reasons for receiving the Germans while balancing Britain, China and other outside powers.

And a few years later, wartime propaganda could turn thousands of metres of expedition film into Geheimnis Tibet.

The five men returned to Germany in August 1939.

On 1 September, Germany invaded Poland.

Their Tibetan photographs went into archives. Their specimens went into collections. Their measurements entered research files. Their political contacts became irrelevant to a war that developed very differently from whatever anyone had imagined in Lhasa.

Then later generations began asking another question.

Why had Heinrich Himmler, of all people, been interested in sending SS men to Tibet?

Once that question is asked, the expedition opens into several different stories at once.

Science, racial ideology, geopolitics, ancient symbols, Himmler’s private interests and the mythology of hidden Himalayan kingdoms all occupy the same landscape.

Which of those was the real destination?

Perhaps the surviving records tell us something more complicated: five Germans reached Tibet together, but they may not all have been looking for the same thing.