Modern archeology and linguistics have helped in the search for the earliest homeland of the Indo-Europeans (such an area often referred to by the German term Urheimat-'ancient home'). The most plausible theories of the Urheimat now locate it somewhere not far from the Black Sea, and especially strong evidence comes from the Dnieper Valley of Ukraine (Dnipro on the linked map).

Nazi intellectuals, however, had very different ideas about where the Urheimat was: namely, Tibet. Often called the Roof of the World, Tibet has long intrigued outsiders as a forbidding region of high mountains (as suggested in the painting above from a Smithsonian Folklife Festival). Drawing on early theories of "Aryan" origins somewhere is north of the Himalaya Mountains, academics and high officials in the Nazi Party thought that they could recover significant evidence of an early Aryan presence in Tibet. An SS officer named Ernst Schaeffer led a well-funded expedition to Tibet shortly before World War II. Although the expedition brought back to Germany a wide variety of finds, virtually nothing has come to be viewed as serious evidence for an early Indo-European presence in Tibet.

The failure of the Nazi Urheimat research might simply be laughed off as a case of goofy science, were it not for the fact that Schaeffer and others engaged in crimes. During their stay in Tibet, the German expedition developed a bad reputation for abusing the natives. Worse still, associates of Schaeffer later murdered Soviet prisoners of war from Central Asian republics as part of their investigations in physical anthropology. The prisoners were taken to Auschwitz, where they were gassed and then dissected. Although the question of Indo-European origins (including the Urheimat) remains a legitimate scientific problem, the crimes of the SS, whether in the name of science or anything else, have made the word Aryan an extremely loaded term.

Source for this page: Tournament of Shadows, by Karl Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1999.