48. Heinrich Harrer

The Telegraph (Filed: 09/01/2006)

Heinrich Harrer, the Austrian climber and traveller who died on Saturday aged 93, accomplished two remarkable feats of daring. In 1938, in one of the greatest mountaineering feats of the time, he was in the first party successfully to climb the notorious North Face - or "Murder Wall" - of the Eiger, in the Swiss Alps. Later, after escaping from a British PoW camp in India, he traversed the length of Tibet, reached the "Forbidden City" of Lhasa and became tutor to the young Dalai Lama. At the outbreak of war in 1939, Harrer was on a German expedition in Kashmir, planning an assault on the unclimbed Nanga Parbat, the world's ninth highest peak, for 1940. Captured and subsequently interned at the Dehra Dun camp, in the shadow of the Himalayas, he twice escaped and was recaptured. In April 1944 he finally escaped for good, disguised as an Indian workman. With him was his expedition's German leader, Peter Aufschnaiter. Three weeks later the two men crossed into western Tibet seeking asylum - Aufschnaiter had a rudimentary command of Tibetan - in a country steadfastly closed to foreigners. For the next 20 months they made their way across the roof of the world, negotiating 1,000 miles of terrain above 16,000 feet where winter temperatures dipped below minus 40C. It would have been a formidable enterprise for the best equipped of expeditions. Several times Harrer and Aufschnaiter were ordered to leave by officials, but by dint of persistence, bluff and resourcefulness they reached Lhasa after a bleak journey across the Changtang plateau in January 1946. The Lhasans proved more inquisitive than hostile, and gradually the two men's presence came to be tolerated. Harrer knew that after the Great War some prisoners had been interned in India for up to two years, and so, though the Second World War was now over, resisted attempts to make him return. Official relations with the British Legation in Lhasa were cool. In 1948 Harrer became a salaried official of the Tibetan government, translating foreign news and acting as Court photographer. His first contact with the Dalai Lama came when he was instructed to take a cine-film of the novel sport of skating, which he had introduced, as the 14-year old Dalai Lama could not see the rink from the roof of the Potala palace. Harrer built a cinema for him, though a showing of Laurence Olivier's Henry V was not an unqualified success, the assembled abbots being embarrassed by scenes of wooing. The cinema projector was run off a Jeep engine, from one of only a handful of motor vehicles in Tibet. Harrer then became tutor to the Dalai Lama, as the latter was eager to learn about the outside world. Harrer taught him English, geography and some science, and was astonished by the rapidity with which his pupil absorbed the Western world's knowledge. Geography proved to be a particular favourite with the Dalai Lama, who was intrigued to find that so few countries exceeded his own kingdom in area. The Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950 ended Harrer's stay, forcing him to leave in March the next year. He was then among the first to lobby foreign governments to help the Tibetans. Harrer wrote a record of his adventures, Seven Years in Tibet, which was published in Britain in 1953. Translated into English by Richard Graves, with an introduction by the travel writer Peter Fleming, the book was an immediate popular success. It has since become a classic of travel literature, translated into 53 languages, and bears sympathetic witness to a devastated culture. A $70-million Hollywood film adaptation of the book, under the same title, brought Harrer's exploits in Tibet before a worldwide cinema audience in 1997, with Brad Pitt starring as the young Harrer - "so handsome, such a sex symbol, not at all like me". Other of Harrer's exploits were also brought to light by the film, though unexpectedly. As a result of the interest the project excited during the production stage, an investigation undertaken by an Austrian radio presenter, Gerald Lehner, in the German Federal Archives in Berlin and then published in Stern magazine, revealed Harrer to have had a Nazi past. It emerged that less than a month after the Anschluss in 1938, he had joined the SS. He did not attempt to deny this. When asked for an explanation, he said: "Well, I was young. I was, I admit it, extremely ambitious and I was asked if I would become the teacher of the SS at skiing. I have to say I jumped at the chance. I also have to say that if the Communist party had invited me I would have joined. And if the very Devil had invited me I would have gone with the Devil." Following his conquest of the North Face of the Eiger in July 1938, he and his companions were photographed with Hitler at a sports rally in Breslau; and it appeared that Harrer's presence on the Nanga Parbat expedition - a useful opportunity, it was suggested, for Nazi reconnaissance and propaganda - had been due to the intervention Himmler. Harrer maintained that he had only once worn his SS uniform, on the occasion of his wedding in December 1938; but the revelations of his Nazi associations caused reactions varying from unease to outrage, and led to some changes being made to the film and to the marketing campaign. However, Simon Wiesenthal, always careful to distinguish between war criminals and Nazis, did not consider Harrer to have been guilty of wrong-doing. Heinrich Harrer was born at Hüttenberg, Austria, on July 6 1912. He spent much of his childhood skiing and climbing in the nearby Alps, and as a teenager survived a 170ft fall. After school, he read Geography at Graz University, and in 1936 was chosen for the Austrian Olympic ski team. At Zell-am-See in 1937, he won the downhill race at the World Student Championships. Mountains, however, were his true passion, and he knew that only an extraordinary feat of climbing could win him a place on a Himalayan expedition. With a friend, Fritz Kasparek, he resolved to master the North Face of the Eiger. The wall, near vertical and surmounted by an ice-field known as the White Spider, had claimed many lives. The Swiss government had forbidden any further attempts. Harrer set off straight after his univeristy finals in July 1938. Half-way up the mountain he and Kasparek encountered another team making the attempt, Ludwig Vorg and the experienced Andreas Heckmair. Joining forces, and led by Heckmair, they made steady progress for three days in heavy snow and rain. An avalanche nearly swept them away as they were crossing the White Spider's glassy face. Vorg caught the falling Heckmair, but Heckmair's crampons lacerated his hands. On the afternoon of July 24 they gained the summit. Even then, in the blinding snow, Heckmair and Vorg nearly fell over its cornice and down the South Face. Harrer wrote later that at the time none of them had feared for their lives. "But after our safe return we felt more conscious of the privilege of having been allowed to live, and this feeling of awareness has never left me since." Harrer remained a staunch friend of the Dalai Lama; they shared the same birthday, and in 2002 the Dalai Lama attended his old tutor's 90th birthday party in Austria - and presented him with the Light of Truth Award for his unwavering advocacy of Tibetans' rights. On a brief visit to Tibet in 1982, Harrer had been greatly saddened by the destruction the Chinese had wrought. Harrer wrote, lectured and made films about his travels, and he continued to climb in the Himalayas, the Andes and New Guinea. With King Leopold of the Belgians, he went on expeditions to Surinam and North Borneo. He was also a keen golfer, winning Austrian national championships in 1958 and 1970. Heinrich Harrer's first marriage, in 1938, to Charlotte Wegener, daughter of the explorer Alfred Wegener, ended in divorce. They had a son. Harrer married secondly, in 1953 (dissolved 1958), Margarethe Truxa, and thirdly, in 1962 Katharina Haarhaus.