THE OBSIDIAN REGISTRY · TEXT MIRROR · no images, no scripts · index · full site · mirrors
FILE 063 · VOL XI · We Hired the Monsters
A Nazi Stole a Dagger From Tibet. It Must Be Returned on Foot.
Some debts can only be paid by the person who owes them. Waiting does not make them smaller.
Based on: The 1938 Nazi Expedition to Tibet
Intake record
| Recovered from | Bank safe deposit box, Munich; opened under court order after rent went unpaid |
|---|---|
| Contents | Expedition diary (1938 to 1939), eleven unsent letters, a cloth bundle, a courier receipt |
| Finder | Bank officer, in the presence of a court bailiff |
| Status | The cloth bundle has been returned. See archivist's note. |
Recovered file
I have been chosen. Twenty-three years old and I am going to Tibet.
The expedition is led by Ernst Schäfer, the zoologist. It is sponsored in part by the Ahnenerbe, the research society the Reichsführer-SS founded in 1935 to prove that the German people descend from an ancient Nordic master race. [1] We are to collect animals, plants, and measurements. Dr. Beger, the anthropologist, is to measure the heads and faces of the people we meet, and make casts of their faces in plaster. [2]
I am to carry things and write things down. I do not care. I am going to the roof of the world.
We are in the forbidden city. Very few Europeans have ever been allowed here. The officials are polite and watchful. The monks are not afraid of us, which I find I do not like.
Dr. Beger measures people every day with his calipers. Some of the Tibetans think it is a game and laugh. I have stopped watching. I do not know why.
At a small monastery outside the city, an old lama showed us the temple. There was a dagger on the altar, a phurba, three-sided, dark iron and bone. The lama said, through our interpreter, that it pins down what must not move. That it holds things in their place. That it had been on that altar for six hundred years.
I asked to hold it. He let me.
That night I went back alone and took it.
I cannot explain it any better than that. Everyone on the expedition was taking things. Skulls, books, animals, measurements of people's faces. I wanted one thing that was mine.
The rest of this file is sealed. The ending, the sources and the archivist's note unseal with the file.
Unseal File 063 ($2.99) · its volume · everything ($49.99)
Built on real, cited records. The stories are dramatized. Disclaimer · If you are in crisis in the U.S., call or text 988.