Customer Reviews

Himmler's Crusade: The Nazi Expedition to Find the Origins of the Aryan Race

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is a brilliant and incredibly well researched book analyzing a little known, but powerfully important, part of Nazi history. I picked the book to read because it received such a stellar review by Michael Burleigh, the most renowned international authority on the Third Reich. Immediately, I was entranced by every aspect of Hale's account of an SS-sponsored expedition to Tibet in 1938-39. Hale goes way beyond doing a comprehensive book study of the subject. He actually conducted his own expedition to Tibet, retracing the steps that the SS-sponsored expedition leaders took and interviewing individuals who were either part of the expedition or who were associated with it. For example, throughout the book Hale provides astonishing information from his interviews with Bruno Beger, an anthropologist and SS member who would later be brought to trial and imprisoned for selecting over 100 inmates for "study" at Auschwitz (all of whom were gassed). I would recommend Hale's book for anyone interested in the origins and perpetuation of Nazism. Himmler's Crusade is already a classic in the field.

Remember Indiana Jones? Weren't those silly scenes fro "Raiders" quite hilarious, with the Nazis searching for the "Arc of the Covenant"? Well... read this book, and you may not find them so amusing next time around.

Christopher Hale, a BBC documentary producer, really knows how to present and tell a story, no matter how unbelievable and apparently preposterous it may seem at first. After all, what would the Nazis be doing in Tibet in 1938-39, right? Worng! Turns out they were there, and not on a picnic trip: they were actively looking for their Aryan roots, visting the forbidden city of Lhasa, meeting with the current regime (and making the British rather nervous at that), while the new Dalai Lama was being found and brought to Tibet .

The story of Ernst Schäfer -who after the war denied any wrongdoing to his allied captors- and his four team-mates makes for an enjoyable and very entertaining reading, while Hale's subtle but precise insights and ocassional humorous remarks all you (the reader) to participate on his unique documentary-producer perspective.

Far from offering his own ideological perspective, Hale limits himself to describing -with his keen ability to look beyond the evident and the superficial- closing up the book with a simple yet well structure "moral" (to give it a name) on the inherent dangers of believeing that myths are essentially harmless: as he's so clearly explained -and history frequently demonstrated- a nation's inherent and underlying beliefs can lead it to far away places.

In summary: if you enjoy cuddling up with a good history book, and don't feel the need to read a doctoral thesis on the occult roots of Nazism (for which Nicholas Goodrich-Clarke is the best path to follow), get a hold of this very well researched and smartly illustrated book (the pictures do tell a whole story here), written from the unmistakeable perspective of a TV-documentaries' producer (you feel like you're watching the documentary on the History Channel). It's an amazing story, proving once again that truth is always far ore incredible than fiction.

I found this account of the Himmler sponsored expedition to find the mythical origins of the Aryan race utterly absorbing, not only because it sheds light on one of the odd, yet central strands of the Nazi cosmology but also because of the ways in which it was observed by the British. I had little idea that Tibet formed the locus of Western spiritual projections over so many decades.

This is an excellent book. It describes the mostly unknown drive of the Nazis to discover the roots of their people and their influences around the world for many thousands of years before the Third Reich. It doesn't get any more interesting than this. The title is somewhat of a misnomer, however. The Nazis never questioned where the Aryan race originated, they were only trying to discover their history and influences around the world. Modern archaeology shows us that caucasian peoples were in North America over 11,000 years ago. The northern European caucasian mummies found in the arid lands of northeastern China show the unrelenting wanderlust of the curious peoples from the north. These exoduses of the European peoples are what the Nazis sought to discover. These are the real "diaspora peoples" whose languages have been confused and who have been spread around the world. That is what drove them in Indiana-Jones-like fashion to try to find these things. Still, it is an excellent book full of great information to those who have never thought or read about these things. Most books parrot the tired old terms about Hitler: "Monster", "Murderer", etc. It is nice to see a book which shows a glimmer of the kinds of underlying motivations which could so fanatically compel an extremely advanced and intelligent population to do the things they did. This book serves to help raise that curtain.

C. Hale's "Himmler's Crusade" continues the scholarly
and sometimes not-so-scholarly attempt to examine
Nazi esotericism. The Nazi expedition to Tibet is a subject
not often commented on, never by mainstream historians
and infrequently by writers on Nazi mysticism. Unfortunately,
Mr. Hale should have done more research and gotten his facts
correct. He refers to the symbol representing the SS as
a "double thunderbolt." They are not thunderbolts but
double sieg runes, representing the pagan Germanic letter
for victory. Mr. Hale refers to Heinrich Himmler as "by far the best educated of the Nazi leaders.." Himmler had a degree
in agriculture fom Munich Technical College. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, earned a doctorate in philology
from Heildelberg University. Goebbels had a background in many
bodies of knowledge. Himmler's intellectual background and experiences were quite pedesrtian compared to those of Goebbels.
On page 117, Mr. Hale writes " Himmler had rlvals for political power, but he also resented the cultural status of Alfred Rosenberg..." I hardly think this likely. Rosenberg was considered to be the outsider among the leading Nazis. He was a
subject of private jokes. His name seemed to identify him as Jewish. Himmler would not have been threatened by him.
In the sense that this book explores a previously unknown
chapter in Nazi history it is a welcome addition to the modern
historian. However, Hr. Hale should have done a more thorough
job in his research.

My main interest in reading the book was for the information about the Nazi fascination with the Occult. I was hoping for something as stimulating as Mel Gordon's HANUSSEN: HITLER'S JEWISH CLAIRVOYANT. I was greatly disappointed. Christopher Hale's HIMMLER'S CRUSADE doesn't really deliver what it promises. Hale basically pooh-poohs anything connected with the occult, asserts that only Himmler took such notions seriously (but was indulged by those seeking favors from him) and then moves on to other matters. The book draws no real conclusion other than "Nazis were evil," which it pounds repeatedly throughout the book. (I think I knew that before I even started reading the book.) Hale never seems to be sure of exactly which story he is telling. For a while it seems as though the book is about Schaeffer, who led the expedition, then toward the end, it drops him altogether and starts giving detailed biographical information about other members of the expedition (and the people with whom THEY interacted). The author goes off on lots of tangents, giving unessential details about minor figures and events that had little bearing on the main story. After having invested several weeks in reading the book, I am not sure what the point of it was.

The most interesting parts of the book were those that took place in Tibet, but the trip to Tibet actually takes up only about half the book. The rest is a long-winded recounting of the rise and fall of Nazism.

It seems to me that here we have yet another book written by someone completely lacking a literary sensibility. The author, Christopher Hale, is a British TV documentarist. This book is an appendix to his TV show. I found it very difficult reading. In addition to its lack of focus, I just don't think Hale is very comfortable with the printed word. There are pages and pages wherein it seems he is giving verbal descriptions of documentary film footage. Perhaps his TV show was interesting, but the book was a chore to read. In addition, the author has this maddening habit of inserting inflammatory opinions into his narrative, apropos of nothing and lacking supporting evidence. Several times throughout the book, the author, a Briton, makes outlandish parallels between America and Nazi Germany, which he doesn't bother to back up (because he can't). Perhaps one can get away with this in a TV documentary, but not in a book, where the reader can back up and say, "Wait a minute. That's a bunch of crap. Where is the evidence are you basing that statement on?"

The book is also rife with typographical errors (some of them giving an unintentional double entendre when for example "role" is spelled "roll") and misusages of words. It appears to have not been edited at all.

I give this book one and a half stars, but let's round it off to two just for the research the author has done. (His bibliography is probably of a lot more use than the book.) I just wish he had been able to put all this research into a more coherent form and told it in a way that was more comprehensible and more interesting.

History makes strange bedfellows. Here we see the Nazi (or more exactly Himmler's) flirtation with Tibet, and Tibet's aristocracy. A fascinating real world "Indiana Jones" adventure into one of history's strangest chapters.

The author also touches on the role of eugenics and physical anthropology in this strange but true tale. This is fascinating but in the end I didn't find it completely satisfying.

Unfortunately they painted a too monochrome view of German physical anthropologists here. Some of the individuals they paint as black hats, were more complex and probably thus more interesting.

In particular I'm referring to their discussion of Felix von Luschan. In this book he is painted as the worst kind of scientific cannibal, but elsewhere (see the discussion in Jan Klein's textbook "Where Do We Come From?") we are told in 1922 he issued a "Ten Commandments", designed to guide the general public away from racialist error. In these commandments he seems to explicitly rejected the viewpoint Christopher Hale attributes to him.

For example, von Luschan's second Commandment says "(t)here are no savages, there are only different cultures. The real barbarians are those ignorant white men who are unable to fathom other races and who exploit them." This is the kind of thing we would expect to hear from "human brotherhood gurus" Margaret Mead or Ashley Montagu, not from a "Nazi mad scientist".

I don't doubt Hale's findings, but something does not compute here. Maybe the gap between Nazi mad scientist and human brotherhood guru is less than we thought. There is obviously a fascinating chapter yet to be unearthed.

After reading some earlier reviews, I must say that I am glad Mr. Hale did not make an exhaustive effort to list facts in a way that, although they may be correct, would have been banal and unnecessary. The important part of this book was attempting to gain insight into the people, the characters, of this little known story. Not only did this book give me a sense of what life and work in a Nazi government was like, but what it was like to be in Tibet in the early 20th century. It depicted the members of the expedition not as 'Nazis' and thus 'evil, bad and terrible beasts' but as breathing beings who experienced this one particular (and peculiar) event.
Now I've romanticized it a bit and it is a shame that Mr. Schafer and others' interior motives could not possibly be touched in this book but Mr. Hale does an adequate job of attempting to recreate his persona through the writings and observations of others.

Hale's book is not unlike a public school cafeteria stew -- poorly thought out, poorly executed, unsatisfying, full of extraneous fillers, and not at all nourishing. Of course, one can poke about and find the odd palatable bit.... but is it really worth the effort? Regarding his "scholarship" one need only note that Hale cites Walther Schellenberg's memoirs as if they are a reliable source. Much of Hale's book is an indiscriminate cobbling together of secondary sources without any learned discrimination. Worse yet, neither he nor his editors could be bothered with consistency in their presentation (e.g., was it 50 or 52 divisions that the Germans invaded Poland with in 1939?; was the SS modeled after the Jesuits or a Tibetan fighting group?). Topping it all off is Hale's juvenile tone throughout much of the book -- a sort of pseudo-pornographic attraction to the darkside of Nazism all rolled together with fervent protestations of condemnation. To paraphrase the author himself, getting this sludge-heap published must have been a real "triumph of the will" on his part. It is now almost 60 years since the end of WWII... can we please have some serious, thoughtful books that don't read like a pastiche of bad Frank Capra war-time propaganda?

This is a good yarn ruined ! The subtitle of the book is, "The true story of the 1938 Nazi expedition into Tibet". If the author had limited himself to this he might have had a winner on his hands, but sadly for the reader it didn't work out that way. The actual story of Schafer's expedition could have been told in less than 200 pages, but Hale pads it out to over 500 pages, with so much extraneous material that book becomes frankly boring.

The book is full of adjectives which show that the book is not really objective, but is a tour de force of Hales own opinions. As an example, whether you agree with her or not, Savitri Devi's books do not deserve the epithet "repellent" ! Odd perhaps, but not repellent. Hale's book is also full of petty (and not so petty !) errors of fact and figure which call into question the thoroughness of his own research. For instance, on page 53 he misnames Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Also in several places, despite describing himself in one part of the book as a "British journalist", he makes that so American mistake of confusing Britain with England, as on page 231 where he says, "Hitler calculated that France and England wanted to avoid war". He repeats this confusion in several places. On page 440, he says, "After September 1939 no-one in the German High Command could predict the outcome of a war with England". Mr. Hale, Germany was never at war with England ! The war was with Britain, of which England is just one part. It was noticeable too that some of the more lurid "quotes" in the last part of the book lack references to show where they came from, like Beger on Jewish female bottoms on page 489. This detracts from the authenticity of such remarks.

The last 100 pages or so of the book have absolutely nothing to do with the 1938 Nazi Expedition into Tibet, but are yet another reiteration of the sins of Germany in World War 2, and I suspect this was put in purely to make the book politically correct and ensure publication.

In sum, this could have been a very interesting book if Hale had stuck to the subject in hand. It does shine through in places when the actual expedition is being written about, but the rest of the book is so dull that the good parts are overshadowed. I was left with the abiding impression that the boring parts one and two were only there as an excuse for the politically correct part three. All three parts were so full or errors, minor and major, that the book is useless as a research tool, and it is so dull that it is not even a good yarn.

Shame really, but I suppose it might be a cure for insomnia !