William Dietrich - Blood of the Reich

The gifts must have provoked curiosity, because now the quintet of SS men were ascending the steep switchbacking staircases that led to the palace’s primary gate, wearing their hastily pressed black Schutzstaffel uniforms trimmed with silver. Despite their conditioning from crossing the Himalayas, the Germans still panted. There were 2,564 steps in the palace, a physical reminder of man’s difficult rise to nirvana. The edifice itself was a dizzying five hundred feet high, a stone skyscraper broad as a dam.

From the red-and-gold gate topped by the heads of seven white lions, Lhasa below looked like a scattering of brown cubes on a cultivated valley floor of yellow barley, an arena encircled by green, grassy mountains. The river curled like a khata scarf, silver where hit by the sun. Monasteries clung to the foothills, and the golden roof of the Jokhang temple in central Lhasa was an answering wink to the gleam of the Potala. The view was one of the most breathtaking Raeder had ever seen, earning his respect. Perhaps the people who had built this did have secrets that could help the Reich triumph.

If so, they must be learned. And stolen.

The Germans were greeted by the dinosaur bellow of the Tibetan long trumpets, the dungchen, a mournful, underworld serenade that echoed against the sloping walls. They passed through gate and passageway and a steward led them into a labyrinth of dark rooms, steep ladders, and dim passageways of the Red Palace, their porter Lokesh translating as they penetrated deeper into a shadowy maze. Gloomy chambers were built around gigantic images of Buddha, each serene and buttery smooth from a fabulous overlay of gold. Ventilation chimneys plunged down story after story like empty elevator shafts, butter lamp flames dancing in the resulting currents of air. There were metal mandalas the size of waterwheels, the sculptures representing exquisite miniature temples that symbolized the universe, each of them gilded with gold and studded with jewels. Adjacent to this artisan glory, the painted wood of the hand-trimmed posts and beams gave a curious mountain lodge feel to the place. The floors were beaten earth and pebbles, tamped into a dry concrete on ancient joists.

“There’s wealth enough here to buy a dozen panzer divisions,” Raeder murmured, “guarded by medieval sentries who could be overcome by a platoon of storm troopers armed with machine pistols. We are conquistadors, comrades, able to view treasures equivalent to the Inca Atahualpa, and yet now we must bow and scrape in order to achieve a greater goal. If Himmler is right, this treasure is mere dross.”

“Dross! Compared to what?” Muller whispered. Slit-eyed Buddhas, golden lamas, and gilded saints looked sternly ahead. The palace was a museum of frozen gold, hundreds of statues, thousands, in a bewildering pantheon.

“Shambhala,” Raeder replied. “The real Shangri-la.”

“That might be Himmler’s fantasy. This is real.”

“For us, what’s real is what the Reichsfuhrer says is real.”

Sufficiently awed and subdued by the splendor, the Germans were taken across the eastern courtyard to the White Palace, its icy color a symbol of peace. More than a hundred people waited in the plaza: guards, monks, emissaries, and petitioners. It was hot in the sun, cold in the shade. After a wait of forty-two minutes-Raeder timed it on his Junghans military watch-the Europeans were led up a short pyramid of stone steps to wooden ones so steep they were almost ladders. Banners with a purple symbol of infinity flanked the door. Inside was dimness that kept only tentative rein on a riot of color, a kaleidoscope of painted reds, golds, blues, greens, and purples on every pillar and beam. The designs could take a year to fully examine and decipher. It was the very opposite of the cold, intimidating austerity of the Third Reich. White, obelisk-shaped posts rose to a mustard-yellow ceiling in the throne room. Cushions were Vatican red, while bowls of ceremonial water were Viking silver. The inside was as baroque as the mountains were bare.

Various functionaries, monks, and hangers-on sat on padded benches in the smoky shadows, murmuring and humming prayers. Light was cast by wicks flaming in tubs of yellow yak butter, the air pungent with incense. The place smelled like every one of its four hundred years.

“Never use a thousand colors when a million will do,” murmured Kranz. “It’s like the explosion of a child’s paint-box set.”

“Look,” whispered Hans Diels, “swastikas!” The symbol was sewn onto tapestries.

“As foreign as this seems, we have, I suspect, in some sense come home,” Reader told his men.

Tibet’s regent sat cross-legged on a padded throne, draped in robes and crowned with a peaked saffron-colored hat that descended over his ears and back of the neck like bird wings. The Reting was a serious-looking, smooth-cheeked, large-eared young man who didn’t look entirely happy about his weight of responsibility. He ruled while the new Dalai Lama, whom he’d helped discover the year before, was coming of age in Kumbum monastery. The majesty of the transition was unsettling. Reting had had a dream of where the reincarnation of the deceased Thirteenth Dalai Lama might be found, and a retinue of holy men had made a pilgrimage to a remote rural home. Eerily, the peasant toddler had picked out the belongings of the dead holy man, shouting, “Mine, mine!” while ignoring other choices. Even to a believer, actually finding a reincarnated presence had been shaking. Soon His Holiness would be brought to Lhasa, but for now Reting was the monarch of the Potala and responsible, with his council, of deciding what to do with these Germans.

The Europeans were stocky, sunburned, hard-looking men, who seemed to want to suck experience in with their mouths instead of feeling it with their souls. The Tibetan thought their eyes darted like those of rodents, their limbs trembled with restlessness, and their black uniforms were forbidding. They wore death’s heads at their collar. Pale, anxious, unhappy men.

The world was squeezing Tibet, the regent knew. There was war to the east between China and Japan. The British had bludgeoned their way into Lhasa more than thirty years before. The Soviet Union was a secretive dark dictatorship hulking beyond the Kunlun Mountains. Airplanes and radio waves were violating the sanctity of distance that had always protected the sacred kingdom. Reting himself had been alerted of Raeder’s approach by British radio. And now these Germans had come claiming some kind of ancestral kinship! Everyone was suddenly Tibet’s friend, because everyone wanted to turn it against their enemies. Which nation should be trusted and which kept out? How could these giants, with their steel machines that groaned and spat fire, be played off against each other?

And then the German spokesman, a man named Raeder, gave a solution.

The handsome visitor began by presenting an album of pictures of Nazi Germany and its leaders, pointing to the National Socialist symbols that seemed inspired by ancient Tibetan iconography. The Fuhrer, like Reting and the future Dalai Lama, was not just the political leader of Germany, Raeder explained. He was the spiritual leader as well, a new kind of god, for a new kind of man.

Some of the pictures depicted huge rallies for him, all the people standing curiously in line, as rigid as posts. They wore helmets and looked like lines of beetles. Reting wanted to laugh at their rigid stiffness but knew that was impolite. He passed the album back.

This Fuhrer ’s lieutenant, Himmler, was intensely interested in the origins of mankind and the history of the Aryan race, Raeder explained. Tibetan nobility had the fine bone structure of the Aryan, and it was in this beautiful country that ancestral proof of their relationship might be hidden. The Germans had come to Tibet to learn if their peoples were related.