William Dietrich - Blood of the Reich

Where, the officials in Calcutta had demanded of him, are your permits to travel to the Forbidden Kingdom of Tibet? Of course there could be no permits, since there was no permitted travel, and there could be no permission until the Germans met personally with the three-year-old god-king’s regent in Lhasa. But they could not meet, because none but the British consul was permitted to travel there. The Germans stewed under the circular and self-serving reasoning of Whitehall and Calcutta.

What the British didn’t take into account was German will, coupled with advice from the kind of Englishman who’d first built the empire.

Before sailing from Genoa in allied Italy, Raeder had received a peculiar letter from Sir Thomas Pickford, the octogenarian Himalaya explorer and hero of the siege of Gyantse, where thousands of Tibetans who believed themselves invulnerable to bullets had been slaughtered by British firepower. Pickford had served on Francis Younghusband’s military expedition to Tibet in 1904 that forced it into reluctant relations with the British. Now, thirty-four years later, Pickford had corresponded with the young German he’d heard lecture in London. Rumor of Raeder’s impending SS expedition had circulated in academic circles, and Pickford had advice.

A few Englishmen understood what the Reich was trying to do, he explained, the racial spirit Germany was trying to revive. A few sympathized with the power of Hitler’s vision in this new, corrupt, decadent age called the twentieth century.

Don’t wait out the bureaucratic intrigues, the crusty Englishman wrote. My country is giving up its civilizing mission, but yours is seizing it. Germany is alone in displaying the character of our race. We are cousins, after all, and Tibet must not be allowed to exist in seclusion and hide its secrets. Take any opportunity and simply go, borders be damned.

If a German had written this to an Englishman, the Gestapo would have called it high treason. But the English, like the Americans, felt free to say anything to anyone. Curious idea.

I have seen the sun set on the Potala Palace with a radiance that speaks of God, the old Englishman wrote. I know there are things to seek in that land we can scarcely dream. If you want to see them, make your own way across the border as Younghusband did in 1904.

Now Raeder had.

In Calcutta, the Germans had first falsely announced their intention, given the diplomatic delay, of returning home. Then, in the dead of night, monsoon thundering and streets awash, they’d loaded their theodolites, chronometers, earth inductors, shortwave radios, anthropological calipers, cameras, movie film, guns, cases of schnapps, and boxes of cigarettes into the specially designed, rubber-sealed cargo cases crafted in Hamburg. They’d hired trucks to taxi them to the station and bribed their way onto the express train north, arriving at its terminus a night and day ahead of any pursuit. Mountains rose as enticing as a mirage.

Paying in Reich gold, the Germans swiftly bought two freight cars on the next conveyance, a popularly dubbed “toy train” with tracks just two feet apart that puffed its way, at twelve miles per hour, to the British hill station of Darjeeling and its warehouses of tea. This would elevate them to 7,000 feet. The Nazis were moving on this second leg of their escape by the time bemused authorities in Calcutta realized they were gone at all.

“It’s Jew gold we use,” Raeder told his companions. “Confiscated from the rats fleeing Berlin. So does Providence assist our mission.”

Up and up the locomotive crept, past banana plantations at first, and then through jungle so high that it arched over the tracks, the canopy shuddering in the downpours. The journey reeked of rotting orchids, foliage steaming.

Indian laborers rode an open freight car pushed by the bow of the train. When monsoon landslides blocked the track, they dutifully clambered out to clear them. Raeder, impatient and restless while the coolies dug, took his rifle into the jungle to look for tigers.

He saw not a living animal. The bamboo was still as death.

Tea plantations hove into view as they neared Darjeeling. There, between Nepal and Bhutan, they could see the beckoning crest of the Himalaya through breaks in the rushing clouds. The peaks were topped by snowy Mount Kanchenjunga, which at 28,000 feet was almost as lofty as Everest.

Diplomatic telegrams awaited Raeder, protesting their progress and demanding a return to Calcutta. But the German Foreign Office was putting pressure on the English to leave the Germans alone and it sent its own telegrams, seeking to bog the debate down in an exchange of diplomatic notes. While consuls argued, Raeder bluffed his way past the British constabulary, hired a train of oxen, and pushed on toward the Sikkim capital of Gangtok.

He knew how Asia worked. You butted your way, arrogant and impatient, or got nowhere. Now he marched up the hairpin turns of the riotously green Tista Valley with their animals, each ox plodding from four cases of equipment strapped to its back.

Still the monsoon sluiced down.

From every slope sprung a hundred white waterfalls, and in the gorges the rivers roared with chocolate fury. The Germans cut upward, first through birch and dark fir and then through whole forests of rhododendron, clouds of bright butterflies hovering over every puddle and wet leaf. The air was so thick with moisture that climbing was like rising from the bottom of a pool. They struggled through mud, crossed precarious log and vine-cable bridges, and drove their oxen along cliff ledges. The men were smeared with goo, lard of the earth. At the end of the day they’d stand under cataracts to sluice it off, roaring out beer hall anthems.

The rain cooled as they climbed, a promising sign of progress.

The British were fools to let them get this far, Raeder thought.

The oxen, powerful but ungainly, were exchanged at Gangtok for nimbler mules, better adapted to the narrower trail ahead. It took twice as many animals to carry the cases. Mounted with brilliantly colored saddles and blankets, and tethered by yak-hair ropes, the cantankerous animals brayed in chorus to the ominous throbbing of the drums and long dungchen trumpets of the Gangtok monastery. Hooves clacked on the muddy route’s rocks. German boots splashed through brimming puddles. Higher and higher they climbed, whole hillsides seeming to peel away in the deluge. Sometimes they had to halt to build a new trail across a slide.

At Dikchu, the Devil’s Water, the old rope bridge had fallen away. They winched a new one across its thundering chute, then hauled and whipped the balking animals across and up it toward the snowy crests above. The trail seemed evermore narrow, evermore wet, evermore slippery. When the rains paused it was foggy. At each stop they spent several minutes peeling leeches from each other, the odious creatures bloated with blood. Most clustered on calves and ankles, sucking greedily, but a few fell from overhanging limbs or ledges to feast on shoulder and neck.

Only rarely did the Germans meet the occasional pilgrim or merchant. These stood aside on the precarious downslope while the Europeans pushed brusquely past, hugging the cliff.

A wool caravan descending with wide, thick-haired yaks finally blocked their way. The horned animals filled the trail where it ran on the side of a precipitous gorge, leaving no room to pass. The wool drovers with their powerful beasts refused to yield to the Reich’s train, and yet trying to back the recalcitrant mules down to a wide spot, even if possible, risked losing the animals and their cargo into the precipice.

Raeder pushed forward. He was wearing a pith helmet marked with the lightning runes of the SS and carried a birch switch in his left hand like a riding crop. As mule nosed with yak, the German confronted the Uygur leader. This man, a Turkic-speaking Muslim with a battered British Enfield- likely stolen from a murder victim, Raeder thought-bellowed in defiance and shook his weapon. He kept pointing down the mountain path, clearly insisting with his flinging arms that it was the Germans who must turn around. His men behind were squat, dark, and sullen.