Free Blood of the Reich by William Dietrich Page A

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