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

It was an SS mission led by two complex individuals–one who was using the Nazis to pursue his own ends, and one so committed to Nazism that afterward he conducted racial experiments using the skulls of prisoners at Auschwitz. Himmler's Crusade relates the 1938 Nazi expedition through British India to the sacred mountains of Tibet in search of the remnants of the Aryan people, the lost master race. Based on a wide range of previously unused sources, this intriguing book reveals the mission–a pet project of Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler—to be the result of both a bizarre historical fantasy and a strategy to provoke insurgency in British India. Providing rare glimpses into Himmler's SS stronghold, this riveting tale sheds new light on the occult component of the racial theories that obsessed Himmler and his fellow Nazis.

A scientific expedition or a sinister mission?

Why would the leader of the Nazi’s dreaded SS, the second-most-powerful man in the Third Reich, send a zoologist, an anthropologist, and several other scientists to Tibet on the eve of war? Himmler’s Crusade tells the bizarre and chilling story one of history’s most perverse, eccentric, and frightening scientific expeditions. Drawing on private journals, new interviews, and original research in German archives as well as in Tibet, author Christopher Hale recreates the events of this sinister expedition, asks penetrating questions about the relationship between science and politics, a nd sheds new light on the occult theories that obsessed Himmler and his fellow Nazis.

Combining the highest standards of narrative history with the high adventure and exotic locales of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Himmler’s Crusade reveals that Himmler had ordered these men to examine Tibetan nobles for signs of Aryan physiology, undermine the British relationship with the ruling class, and sow the seeds of rebellion among the populace. Most strangely, the scientists–all SS officers–were to find scientific proof of a grotesque historical fantasy that was at the center of Himmler’s beliefs about race.

Set against the exquisite backdrop of the majestic Himalayas, this fast-paced and engaging narrative provides new and troubling insight into one of the strangest episodes in the history of science, politics, and war.