A MOUNTAINEER and explorer whose youthful idealism coincided with the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, Heinrich Harrer became by this historical accident a controversial figure, dogged into old age by his membership of the SS.

Both by choice and by fate, Harrer spent much of his life in the world’s mountainous regions. Born in Huttenberg, Austria, in 1912, he was educated at the University of Graz and first came to prominence as a member of the Austrian ski team in the 1936 Olympics. The following year he represented his country in the World Student Games, winning the downhill ski event. His prowess as a mountaineer led him naturally into full-time work as a guide and in 1938 he joined the four-strong team that was first to climb the North Wall of the Eiger.

The notorious Alpine face had repulsed numerous attempts and cost the lives of German and Austrian climbers. One mile high, swept by avalanche and rockfall and vulnerable to sudden storms, the Eiger Nordwand was deemed to be impossible to climb. This made the first successful ascent, under public scrutiny from the massed telescopes assembled at Kleine Scheidegg, a momentous and internationally significant achievement.

Harrer made no secret of his sympathy for National Socialism, and when in the same year Austria was absorbed into the Third Reich he was photographed with Hitler and, before cheering crowds, was congratulated by him on the successful climb. National Socialism closely associated itself with mountaineering and the sport became a useful allegory for the political goal Germany was striving towards.

Harrer enlisted in the Styrian SS as a sports teacher, an SS Oberscharführer with the rank of sergeant, which in the political circumstances of the day was probably the only way he would have been able to further his climbing career. With hindsight, he admitted, this had been “an unfortunate episode”.

In 1939 Harrer joined a German expedition to Nanga Parbat in the Himalayas, but on the outbreak of the Second World War was interned by the British at the Indian hill station of Dehra Dun as he returned from a reconnaissance of the mountain. Gazing across to the Himalayas beyond the prison wires, Harrer determined to escape and, after more than one abortive attempt, succeeded. With Peter Aufschnaiter, leader of the Nanga Parbat expedition, Harrer fled north towards Tibet.

After 21 months of march and counter-march, of great physical hardship and danger with the constant need “to keep the tongue subtle and the wits agile”, the pair arrived in Lhasa, unkempt but undefeated after crossing 20,000ft-high passes and the Clangthan plateau, a region infested by robbers.

Subtle tongue and agile wits led Harrer to the presence of the Dalai Lama, whose curiosity about the outside world he did his best to satisfy and to whom he became almost a tutor.

The idyll ended with the Chinese invasion of Tibet, when Harrer returned to a postwar, defeated Austria where he turned his experiences into the bestselling book Seven Years in Tibet.

The urge to explore was far from extinguished, and in later years Harrer returned to climb in the Himalayas and went on expeditions to Alaska, the Andes and the Ruwenzori “Mountains of the Moon” in Africa. He remained a keen and active skier into his eighties and, after taking up golf as a gentler sport in 1958, he became the Austrian amateur champion.

But Harrer’s past returned to haunt him when Seven Years in Tibet was made into a $70 million Hollywood epic starring Brad Pitt as Harrer. Following disclosures in the German magazine Stern, skeletons came tumbling from the cupboard and the commercial success of the film was threatened.

The Jewish lobby in Los Angeles threatened a boycott and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre gave warning that casting Pitt as Harrer, thereby boosting his hero status, could “whitewash the legacy of the Third Reich”. Some judicious editing by the director, Jean-Jacques Arnaud, made it clear that Harrer’s story began with a Nazi connection.

The more recent success of Jörg Haider, a keen mountaineer and leader of the Austrian Freedom Party, raised again the tight links that survive between sport and politics in Austria and the eagerness of the far Right to exploit, for political ends, Harrer’s image of the “comradeship of the rope”.

Harrer always insisted his conscience was clear and that many of the stories about his Nazi links were exaggerated or false, in particular that he had planted a swastika flag on the summit of the Eigerwand. “That’s made up. There was a blizzard; we could hardly keep our eyes open. We were covered with snow and just managed to shake hands and then we set off again,” he said in an interview on Austrian Radio.

Harrer called his Nazi membership “an ideological error” and “a stupid mistake”. The Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal (obituary, September 21) said in an interview that Harrer was not involved in politics, and was not guilty of any wrongdoing. Even so, critics accused Harrer of attempting to conceal his past, while appearing unwilling to reject unequivocally the nationalist principles that led to the eventual horrors of Nazism.

Harrer was publicly criticised by Reinhold Messner, the celebrated Italian mountaineer, for stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the extent to which his ideal of the “rope for life”, along with his notion of being “tough as leather, hard as steel”, had been misused by the Nazis. Harrer may have been led astray, yet it remains that he made the hardest climb, and surely the most difficult journey, of his age.

As well as Seven Years in Tibet, Harrer wrote The White Spider, a history of the north face of the Eiger, and Tibet is My Country, the life story of the Dalai Lama’s eldest brother, Thubten Jigme Norbu.

He is survived by his third wife, Katharina (née Haarhaus).







Heinrich Harrer, mountaineer and explorer, was born on July 6, 1912. He died on January 7, 2006, aged 93.