Yeti. Graham Hoyland

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       Nazi SS Operation Tibet … shooting your wife is wrong … Abominable Snowmen of Everest … Shipton and Tilman … the last explorers … a Blank on the Map … Appendix B … a one-legged, carnivorous bird … the Ascent of Rum Doodle.

      In his book My Quest for the Yeti, the mountaineer Reinhold Messner reproduces a letter sent to him by the German explorer Ernst Schäfer which refers to footprints seen by Smythe and Shipton:

      In 1933–35, the British mountaineers Frank Smythe and Eric Shipton discovered the first ‘yeti footprints’, and published the pictures they took in The London Illustrated News and in Paris Match [Schäfer seemed unaware of the earlier Howard-Bury report]. This created a sensation. The ‘Abominable Snowman’ aroused the interest of journalists and opened up financial resources for numerous Everest expeditions. In 1938, after I had uncovered the whole sham in my publications with Senckenberg in Frankfurt and established the yeti’s real identity with the pictures and pelts of Tibetan bears, Smythe and Shipton came to me on their knees, begging me not to publish my findings in the English-speaking press. The secret had to be kept at all costs – ‘Or else the press won’t give us the money we need for our next Everest expedition.’¹

      Can this be true? Could Smythe and Shipton really have been so cynical? If so, this would cast doubt on the yeti’s most iconic footprint, discovered later by Shipton in 1951. This case will take some unravelling, but it is an interesting journey to Mount Everest and beyond.

      At the time of his alleged meeting with Smythe and Shipton, the 28-year-old Ernst Schäfer was a swashbuckling German explorer and ornithologist who had already been on two expeditions to China and Tibet under the leadership of Brooke Dolan, the son of a wealthy American industrialist. Schäfer had worked on these trips as a scientist and wrote a successful book about the second expedition which had made his name in Germany.² He could have emigrated to America and had a gilded career, but he sold out to the Nazis, as did hundreds of other young academics, seeing opportunities ahead. And then the Nazis demonstrated exactly what happens when criminals get hold of a modern industrial state, using fake science to justify their actions.

      Schäfer’s colleague in 1938 was the anthropologist Bruno Beger, who was fascinated by the idea that the Aryans, ancestors of the Nordics, could still be found in a lost civilisation somewhere in Tibet. His proposal to the expedition was ‘to study the current racial-anthropological situation through measurements, trait research, photography and moulds … and to collect material about the proportion, origins, significance and development of the Nordic race in this region’.

      Nordic culture was all the rage in the 1930s, as was the pseudo-science of eugenics. Tolkien used the Völsunga saga translated by William Morris of the Arts and Crafts movement in his The Lord of the Rings, as did Wagner in his Ring of the Nibelung cycle of operas. The eponymous ring would grant magical domination over the whole world. Wagner’s ideas were much lauded by Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy, and these Nordic myths fed the strange beliefs held by Hitler and his Reich Minister of the Interior, Heinrich Himmler, who was the founder of the German SS.

      Schäfer’s third expedition was under Himmler’s personal patronage and he was promoted to SS-Sturmbannführer, a Nazi party rank approximating to major. Rather like the alpinist Heinrich Harrer, Schäfer claimed after the war that he had joined the SS to advance his career, but in fact he colluded in the hunt for evidence to support these Nazi folk myths. The expedition would search for proof of Aryan supremacy and also serve as a cover for offensive operations against British India during the coming war. Schäfer eventually would regret his alliance with the top Nazis: ‘He was to later call his alliance with Himmler his biggest mistake. But he was an opportunist who had a tremendous craving for recognition.’³

      Himmler was obsessed by the belief in Aryan and Nordic racial superiority over lesser races (some of these ideas may have originated with Major Waddell, whom we met earlier, in Chapter Two). He believed in the Welteislehre, or Glacial Cosmogony, which held that the planets and moon were made of ice and that the solar system had evolved out of a cosmic collision of an icy star with our sun. This theory contradicted Albert Einstein’s ‘Jewish’ theory of relativity. Somehow, the Aryan race was bred out of an ice storm, evolved in the Arctic or Tibet, and founded a civilisation on the lost continent of Atlantis. Himmler, a failed chicken farmer, was fascinated by eugenics and wanted to breed back to ‘racially pure and healthy’ Aryans. For this he needed to know where the original stock originated.

      The discovery of the Tarim mummies at Lop Nor in Central Asia by explorers such as Sven Hedin, Albert von Le Coq and Sir Aurel Stein lent credence to the idea that the Aryans came from Tibet. These corpses looked German or Irish and they were buried with sun symbols and woven twill cloth like that found in Austria. One found after the Nazi era even had greying reddish-brown hair framing high cheekbones, an aquiline nose, full lips and a ginger beard, and he was wearing a red twill tunic and leggings with a pattern resembling tartan. Was the homeland of the Indo-Germans therefore located somewhere in Tibet? Had there been СКАЧАТЬ