History
Heinrich Himmler And The Nazi Yeti
Why an SS officer led an expedition to Tibet in the 1930s.
The words “Nazi” and “Yeti” don’t usually appear in the same sentence. But from May 1938 to August 1939, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler backed an expedition to Tibet led by Ernst Schäfer, a German zoologist and SS officer, in the hope of obtaining proof that the so-called “Master Race” was descended from the mythological snow beast commonly known as the Yeti.
Schäfer had a legitimate scientific interest in exploring and mapping the whole of Tibet, which left him vulnerable to Himmler’s primary goal of promulgating Nazi propaganda and proving the superiority of the Aryan race.
To gain official approval for the trip, Schäfer had no choice but to agree that all members of the expedition would become members of the paramilitary Schutzstaffel (SS) and that it would operate under the banner of the SS Ahnenerbe (the SS Ancestral Heritage Society), rather than the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (the German Research Foundation), as Schäfer had wished.
