Himmler’s SECRET Expedition: Nazis in Search of ATLANTIS | Documentary

In 1938, Heinrich Himmler financed one of the Third Reich's most unusual scientific expeditions: five SS officers sent to Tibet in search of evidence of the Atlantean origins of the Aryan race. The mission, managed through the Ahnenerbe—a pseudoscientific organization founded by the Reichsführer himself in 1935—was the culmination of decades of ideological construction that began in the 18th century, when the jurist William Jones identified the Indo-European language family and the philosopher Friedrich Schlegel transformed that discovery into racial mythology. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society in 1875, established the crucial link: the survivors of Atlantis had supposedly transmitted their wisdom to the Aryans from a hidden kingdom in the Himalayas called Shambhala. Himmler, who believed himself to be the reincarnation of the medieval King Henry I of Saxony and always carried a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, turned this cosmogony into a state program. The zoologist Ernst Schäfer led the expedition along with the anthropologist Bruno Beger, the cameraman Ernst Krause, the geophysicist Karl Wienert, and the logistics officer Edmund Geer. Under the guise of scientific research, they crossed the icy passes of the Himalayas, negotiated access to Lhasa while evading British surveillance, and exhaustively documented Tibetan culture. Beger measured 376 people with racial calipers. Wienert secretly collected strategic geomagnetic data at night. Krause filmed more than eighteen thousand meters of film. They did not find Atlantis. Four years later, Beger used the same instruments at Auschwitz.