Reacting to Dr Isrun Engelhardt's conclusions that the Schäfer expedition was "purely scientific" and her claim that the historical context of Germany in the 1930s made the expedition's goals appear as somehow sinister, the British writer Christopher Hale observed that "while the idea of ‘Nazi botany’ or ‘Nazi ornithology’ is probably absurd, other sciences are not so innocent – and Schäfer's small expedition represented a cross-section of German science in the 1930s." To Hale, that has considerable significance as "under the Third Reich anthropology and medicine were cold-bloodedly exploited to support and enact a murderous creed." There have been allegations that one of the expedition's purposes was to determine whether Tibet was the cradle of the "Aryan race". The taking of cranial measurements and the making of facial casts of local people by the anthropologist Bruno Beger did little to dissipate those allegations.