The Great Game, the Vril-ya and Theosophy

[Helen Reyes]

Thanks again Helen, especially for the links. I had no idea that Gandhi was a big fan of Adolph. How surprising.

He later backed off his initial enthusiasm, but the letters to Berlin had already gone out.

I'm sure you're familiar with the fact that the Japanese royal house were regarded as honourary whites and the only Non European royalty invited to be members of Her Majesty's highest chivalric order, the Most Noble Order of the Garter. It is an honour that is still bestowed on the current Emperor.

I had no idea really. I knew the Trilateral Commission's third leg is Japan.

Btw, have you come across the story of hundreds of suicided Tibetan monks wearing green gloves found in Berlin when the Third Reich fell? ... I've always considered the story to be apocryphal /urban legend but wonder if there is any basis in fact for it. Any thoughts?

I looked into it a little back in 2000 and what I found was there were definitely Tibetan adepts in the Third Reich, I even found a cyanotype photo of some wild eyed monk looking like Charlie Manson if he had a more nutritious diet. I couldn't find more than a few Tibetans discovered by the Soviet forces, but it might be I just didn't find them and there were 200 yellowhats working for Himmler in some spiritual capacity. I always sort of thought Thomas Pynchon was hinting around about it in Gravity's Rainbow but his Rakettenkorps were Namibians, not sure if he stuck any Tibetans in there or if my memory did.

My understanding is that the Nazi expeditions were sent to find the "Aryan" Tibetans. A Nazi version of the Prester John myth?

There's also a rumor about a certain episode.... Hitler once opened (or at least mentioned in) a speech saying "I have met the Ubermensch. I spoke with him. He made me afraid." The rumor is he had just taken a call from G.I. Gurdjieff, who phoned him from Lhasa.

There is a pro-Fascist author who wrote under the name of W. Grimwald. I first noticed him because he was censored off the internet. I found his works mentioned in caches of search engines but they were always missing, no matter where the internet page was physically located. Eventually I located some of his works, which are really just little essays. I think if you search for him on scribd you'll probably find everything these days, and probably even him confessing his true name and affiliations, but this was interesting to me way back when:

National Socialist Germany and Tibet

By William Grimwald

There's a legend that Aryans, led by Thor, fled a cataclysm to settle in old Tibet. Sven Hedin, the Swedish explorer of Central and Inner Asia, went as far as Tibet. He was a friend of Hitler's and an outspoken admirer of National Socialist Germany. As we shall see, the National Socialist regime must have known much about Tibet and to maintain contacts with that remote nation. It is claimed that the SS sponsored various expeditions there, and this now seems likely given some of the connections which are finally being reliably discovered. That the Germans were permitted to enter a land forbidden to other foreigners is likely given that the Dalai Lama of the time was an enthusiastic admirer of Hitler.

OCCULT AND GEOPOLITICAL INTERESTS

As far back as the early 1920s when the National Socialist movement was struggling for power, the geopolitical theorist Prof. Karl Haushofer was teaching his pupils the geopolitical importance of Central Asia and Tibet. Among these pupils was Rudolf Hess who introduced Haushofer to Hitler at Landsberg Prison where the latter was confined as a result of the 1924 Munich Putsch. Haushofer had served on the Kaiser's Staff Corps in the Orient and had studied the mysticism of Japan and India. He believed the Indo-Germanic race had originated in Asia, and control of the region was pivotal to Germanic world power.

At this time there were two occult societies operating in Germany which were to have a lasting impact on National Socialism, and especially on the SS which was to set up a department specifically to explore occultic matters, "Ancestral Heritage". These societies were Thule and Vril. The Vril society was based on the ideas expounded by the Rosicrucian Sir Bulwer Lytton in his book The Coming Race. Lytton claimed that there is a psychic energy of immense power, latent in most humans, but being utilised by adepts living in Tibet. It is claimed that Haushofer introduced Hitler to both the vril concept and his geopolitical ideas.

Intriguingly, there was already a Tibetan community resident in Germany with its own Lama. While many fanciful claims are made by pseudo-scholarly books on the Third Reich, one of the most intriguing is the assertion that large numbers of Tibetans in German uniform were found amidst the ruins of Berlin by the Soviet Army. An article recently published by the US paper The New Order sheds a uniquely reliable light on some of these Tibetan-German connections, based as it is on the autobiography of the present Dalai Lama.

MEIN KAMPF IN TIBETAN

During the 1920s the Dalai Lama was Thutpen Gyatso. He was a scholar of impressive intellect who sought to achieve a balance between Western technology and Eastern spirituality. He had heard about Hitler when the National Socialist movement was still struggling for power. Among the many European books the Dalai Lama had translated was Mein Kampf. He filled his copy with enthusiastic annotations and underlining of his favourite passages on virtually every page.

Of Hitler he said: "The inji (honourable foreigner) is assisted by God for some high purpose in this life."

He also believed there to be a synchronicity for the swastika being the symbol of both National Socialism and the ancient Bon-Buddhism of his warrior monks. Also noted were certain similarities between National Socialism and Buddhist doctrines, especially that service to one's folk is the highest purpose or dharma in life.

Therefore when Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 warm congratulations were received from far off Tibet.

TIBETANS IN GERMAN UNIFORM

During the 1940s Tibetan volunteers formed brigades attached to the Cossack regiments fighting Communism with National Socialist Germany. The Tibetans with their endurance of sub-zero temperatures, refusal to surrender made them among the toughest fighters against the Soviets. They were exceptional horsemen and staged some of the last cavalry charges in history. It was the remnants of these brigades that the Soviet army found in the ruins of Berlin, having fought to the last.

After the war, Tibet took those National Socialist fighters who could make it into sanctuary. Among these was an Austrian, Heinrich Harrer, who became a close confident of the new Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. Tenzin relates in his autobiography that Harrer was a delightful and humourous personality. He spoke fluent Tibetan and was well-liked by the Tibetans. Harrer had escaped British imprisonment in India during the war with another prisoner, and the two had lived as nomads for five years until reaching Lhasa. Harrer and Tenzin first met in 1948. For the next year and a half, before Harrer left they met about once a week. "From him I was able to learn something about the outside world and especially about Europe and the recent war."

Several years later the Tibetans were again in the frontline of the conflict between the materialist worldview and the spiritual/archetypal. Although the 80,000 troops of Red China overwhelmed the 8,500 Tibetan troops the Dalai Lama remarks: "it is necessary to say that the Chinese lost large numbers of men in their conquest of Tibet."

FOLKISH NATIONALIST

While Tenzin might be portrayed as a pacifistic internationalist by the media and scraps such as the Nobel Peace Prize are thrown at him by a condescending world Liberalism whilst his nation is subjugated by genocidal Chinese, Tenzin remains an opponent of those materialistic forces bent on driving humanity into a universal drabness. He is, like the National Socialists for whom his countrymen once fought, a proponent of folkish and national diversity.

Speaking at the 1993 Chicago Conference on World Religions, he said that the boundaries separating different peoples across the world were not bad if they preserved and defined genetic and cultural identities. He stated these differences need to be maintained in order that the individual have his own sense of identity. Tenzin is totally opposed to One Worldism, saying of the internationalists: "they fail to see that the so-called 'cultural diversity' they claim to admire would vanish in a One World system. No, true 'cultural diversity' values the different material and spiritual achievements of a people uniquely different from all others on the planet. Therefore it cannot exist without the barriers which separate and identify culture from culture."

Today, while the Tibetans are exiled and exterminated, their cause should be a worthy one for all Folkists to uphold, just as the Tibetans themselves once gave their lives in the service of folkish Dharma, from their remote homeland to the Russian steppes to the smoking ruins of Berlin.

Sources:

The Lost World of Agharti, A MaClellan, Corgi, Britain, 1983.
The Fuhrer & the Buddha, A V Schaerffenberg, The New Order #119.
Citing Freedom in Exile: The Autobiography of the Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, Harper Collins, NY, 1990.

The Bosnian Waffen SS were likewise highly regarded, I'm told. Or maybe it was the Crimean Tartar brigade. You know, the Crimea, which Stalin promised to special ambassador Harriman as a Jewish Homeland, and then started shipping Tartars east....

There is also something very similar between Nazi concepts of Heimat and Pure Land Buddhism, a sort of mysticism that translates well from Asia to Europe. This goes back to Bon religion, pre-Buddhism, and it's interesting that the myths and legends of Bon put their origins west, slightly west of Tibet, but ultimately from the Pamirs. Or Kish, or Kush, or whatever you want to call the ancient land there. Hindu Kush certainly doesn't derive from "Hindu killer," and must mean the Hindu-occupied region of Kush, Kish or whatever the vowel is best represented by. If you follow the Bon tradition back, they claim shakyas (great teachers of whom Buddha was one recent) stretching back something like ten thousand years, and there's an interesting story about lost knowledge written in a sacred but forgotten language called Kipa, but translated back into an intellible language from some Persian language in the area. btw the word Pamir is very interesting too. Mir as spiritual authority, mir as world, mir as peace... Bon says the religion was originally taught by people from Gilgit or Hunza, which is Baltistan, which is in the Pamirs. If you look at their way of life in Hunza and surroundings, you have to wonder if their ancestors didn't ride out the last ice age in some relatively warm corner of the world, maybe right there in the Pamir Range. For more on this, see Olmolungring/Tagzig Olmo Lung Ring/Zhangzhung and Bon religion.

PS The OSS lost some men while withdrawing from China through Tibet around the time of the end of the war in Europe. I think the CIA later did supply some arms to Tibetan nationalists too.