A Buddhist statue taken from Tibet by an elite Nazi squad trying to legitimize the origins of Adolf Hitler's racist doctrines has been found to be carved from a meteorite, scientists report.

The Tibetan Buddhist statue taken by the Nazis was chiselled from a fragment of the Chinga meteorite, which crashed into the border area between Mongolia and Siberia about 15,000 years ago, according to a scientist. (Courtesy Dr. Elmar Buchner)

Austrian and German researchers say that Heinrich Himmler, chief of the Schutzstaffel (SS), who was responsible for building Nazi death camps and orchestrating the Holocaust, backed an expedition led by zoologist and ethnologist Ernst Schaefer, according to a paper published in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science.

"Schaefer roamed Tibet in 1938-9 to search for the origins of Aryanism, the notion of racial superiority that underpinned Nazism," Agence France-Presse reported.

The 24-centimetre-high statue was known as Iron Man and had a swastika — a symbol adopted by the Nazis — on its chestplate. It was originally carved from a rare kind of meteorite called an ataxite, containing high amounts of iron and nickel, according to the journal paper.

The swastika symbol long predates the Nazis and was taken as a sign of good fortune by early Buddhists.

“The statue was chiselled from an iron meteorite, from a fragment of the Chinga meteorite which crashed into the border areas between Mongolia and Siberia about 15,000 years ago,” investigator Elmar Buchner of Stuttgart University was quoted by AFP as saying.