The Most Evil Secret Societies in History by Shelley Klein Read Free Book Online Page A

Eastern mysticism and that all-encompassing, late-nineteenth-century obsession, anthropology. Following on from where the Thule Society left off, Heinrich Himmler continued to study all the above disciplines with the sole intention of supporting his (and the Thule Society’s) theories on the origins of the Aryan race. In 1935 Himmler created yet another branch of the SS, this time called the Ahnenerbe Forschungs und Lehrgemeinschaft – the Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society.
    Much as members of the Thule Society had previously believed, there were those among the Nazi Party who were convinced that the true origins of the Thule lay in the lost but not-so-mythical city of Atlantis located somewhere between Greenland and Iceland. In direct contradiction to this, Karl Haushofer, who was the founder of yet another far-right secret society called the Vril, believed that the origins of the Aryan super-race lay in central Asia or, to be more precise, in Tibet. The Swedish explorer (and practising Nazi), Sven Hedin supported Hausofer in this theory and in 1938 Himmler’s Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society mounted an expedition to Tibet led by a German naturalist and big-game hunter, Ernst Schäfer, who was once described by a British diplomat as being, ‘volatile, scholarly, vain to the point of childishness, disregardful of social convention or the feelings of others, and first and foremost always a Nazi.’ 10 The second principal figure on the expedition was Bruno Beger, an anthropologist and member of the SS who believed that the Aryans might well have originated in central Asia because the physical characteristics of Tibetans in particular, with their high cheekbones and, ‘imperious, self-confident behavior’ 11 mirrored the prototypical Aryan. Beger and his men took over 60,000 photographs, collected numerous moulds of the Tibetans’ faces and shot over 120,000 feet of film after which he concluded that, in anthropological terms, the Tibetans were almost certainly a human type of stepping-stone between the Mongol and European races.
    On their return to Germany Himmler declared both men heroes, but although Schäfer remained close to his patron, he never fully understood or agreed with the oncoming Holocaust. In contrast, Bruno Beger continued his studies into the Aryan race by selecting over 100 people from Auschwitz, the majority of whom showed signs of having Asiatic genes, who were studied, photographed, then executed.
    Despite the ‘success’ of Schäfer and Beger’s research, however, most people believe that no more Nazi-funded expeditions took place. One exception was the writer Trevor Ravenscroft whose book, Spear of Destiny, argues that between 1926 and 1943 other trips were undertaken, all with the aim of studying the origins of the Aryan race. Whatever the truth, Himmler’s desire to pin-point where his ancestors originated, led him during World War II to commission a series of archaeological digs in western and southern Russia, afterwards shipping back his ‘finds’ to the SS headquarters at Wewelsburg. Many people, including Hitler, considered this a step too far, but Himmler remained undeterred and throughout the war continued his researches into what Sebottendorff would no doubt have termed legitimate Germanic studies.
    As for Sebottendorff, by the beginning of the 1930s, just as Hitler was starting to realize his dreams of power, the Thule Society’s influence was dwindling. After being ousted as leader of the society, Sebottendorff grew increasingly bitter towards Germany’s new political movement. Not content simply to fade into the background, he published a book claiming that the origin of the Nazi Party was none other than the Thule Society and that they owed him everything, a theory to which, unsurprisingly, the Nazis took great exception. Sebottendorff’s book was confiscated, and every copy the Nazis could