Himmler's Crusade: The Nazi Expedition to Find the Origins of the Aryan Race | 
| Author: Christopher Hale
Publisher: Castle Books
Category: Book
List Price: $9.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  20 reviews
Sales Rank: 58822
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 422
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.6
ISBN: 0785822542
Dewey Decimal Number: 940
EAN: 9780785822547
ASIN: 0785822542
Publication Date: January 30, 2007
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Product Description
"As the Indiana Jones films showed, Nazis, new age mumbo-jumbo and exotic locations are a formula that works. Christopher Hale's gripping and well-researched tale of an SS-sponsored scientific mission to Tibet in 1938-39 has the whole shebang: mad occult beliefs, mountains, strange charactors called Bruno or Ernst and stomach-churning concentration camp experiments to round things off."
?The Sunday Times (London) 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 15 more reviews...
 book review July 17, 2008
backgrounder for some of the Indiana Jones plots.
some good information interspersed with extraneous
sections. Too long.
 Himmlers Crusade June 17, 2008
This was ok I guess. It contained material that I had already discovered in other books, but it was superbly written.
Compelling but with distractions April 17, 2007
This is the story of a Nazi expedition into Tibet. The expedition was commissioned by Himmler and led by zoologist Ernst Schaffer. Whilst there were plenty of regular science done in Tibet, much of the expedition had more sinister motives. The expedition included an anthropologist who measured the skulls of Tibetans as part of Himmler's pet project to trace the roots of the Aryan race to Tibet. Hale outlines several other examples of Nazi mysticism, pseudoscience and historical revisionism. He also provides plenty of background info on what happened before and after the expedition but at times these tangents become too much.
The book is an eye opener to the dangerous nature of romantic illusions of mysticism, lost civilisations and more. It also provides info a unique link between Tibet, the British and Nazism and how the three interacted in a very curious way in the 30s. However Hale could have been more organised, coherent and relevant (for instance probing beyond the surface of some of the mystic beliefs described). A good intro to an extremely weird aspect of WWII history, but not the defining word.
True life adventure ...and one of history's strangest turns May 12, 2006
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
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.
A GOOD YARN RUINED April 19, 2006
20 out of 30 found this review helpful
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 !
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