Being portrayed by Brad Pitt in a Hollywood movie should have been the final triumph in Heinrich Harrer’s adventurous life, but his Nazi past caught up with him, writes Ed Douglas
When the iron ore mines of Huttenberg closed in 1978 after 2000 years of continuous production, the village died on its feet. Some families moved away; those that stayed became desperate to prop up the fading community buried in rural Austria close to the Slovenian border. Like many post- industrialist towns, a museum was opened describing the village’s heritage. But mining wasn’t enough to bring the tourist schillings pouring in.
Then someone asked Huttenberg’s most famous son if he had any items he could add to the display and he sent them a pair of boots. But these weren’t miner’s boots; they belonged to Heinrich Harrer, arguably the greatest adventurer of the 20th century.
More items followed, artefacts from his seven-year stay in Tibet during and just after the World War II, from his travels along the headwaters of the Amazon, from the Ruwenzori – the Mountains of the Moon in what was then the Belgian Congo – from his crossing of New Guinea and his studies of the Stone Age people he found there, from the jungles of Borneo, from all over Central Asia.
It might seem an act of breathtaking vanity to create a museum dedicated to your own life, but Huttenberg is grateful. Now tourists flock to the village, and local people have offered their thanks with a grant of free firewood and water to Harrer for however many years may be left to the 85-year-old. The man himself, however, seems depressed. He walks around his garden, aqueous blue eyes staring mournfully at the rhododendrons he has planted to remind himself of the Himalayas he will never explore again.
The famously athletic figure, weighed obsessively every day, is suddenly frail. Carina, Harrer’s third wife of 35 years, watches the old man with concern. In all the years he has roamed the world, of all the trials he has undergone, it is the latest that has come closest to crushing his spirit, and it has dragged him back to a time he thought was forgotten, not least by himself. A time when Heinrich Harrer joined the Schutzstaffel (SS).
The immediate cause of his new and unwelcome notoriety is obvious. Written in the visitors’ book at his cabin overlooking Huttenberg is a message from Brad Pitt: “It’s an honour to sit in your home. It’s an honour to share in your life. We will not let you down.” It’s a measure of Harrer’s fame that when Hollywood turned its attention to his extraordinary life, its hottest star would make the pilgrimage to Austria, along with director Jean-Jacques Annaud, to prepare for the role.
Annaud’s mission was to dramatise Seven Years In Tibet, Harrer’s epic story of how, after returning to Karachi from an expedition to reconnoitre a mountain in Kashmir called Nanga Parbat, he was interned by the British in the hill station of Dehra Dun, escaped in 1944 and crossed the border into Tibet with Peter Aufschnaiter, the leader of the Nanga Parbat trip, played in the movie by David Thewlis. After two years’ wandering, the two men made a harrowing traverse of the Chang Tang wilderness north of the Brahmaputra to reach the holy and mysterious city of Lhasa.
Now, with unwelcome revelations about Harrer’s past finally beginning to emerge, there is a cool distance between Pitt, the film’s producers, Mandalay Entertainment, and the subject of their film. When the film premiered in Hollywood last month, Harrer was nowhere to be seen and not answering the phone.
Now, with some judicious voice-overs added to the film, Mandalay believes it has saved the $70-million epic from being a hugely expensive embarrassment.
If Harrer’s plight has been met with studied indifference in his home country, it is because Austrians know very well it is not just his story, but their own.
Gerald Lehner, a radio journalist from Salzburg, understands this history very well. He was working in New York when he heard that Brad Pitt would be starring in Seven Years in Tibet, interviewing Jewish and political refugees who had fled Austria after the Anschluss (annexation of Austria by Germany) in 1938.
Many of them had been members of the mass- membership outdoors clubs that dominated Austrian life: the long-established German and Austrian Alpine Club and the left-wing Naturfreund, set up to encourage factory workers to go walking and climbing in the mountains at weekends, but which was banned after the Anschluss. The history of these clubs mirrors the social history of Austria and Bavaria, the world where Harrer grew up.
In the 1920s, anti-Semitism wasn’t just an attitude in the Alpine Club, it was structural. As early as 1921, sections of the club adopted what was known as the “Aryan paragraph”, banning Jews from membership. By 1923, 10 years before Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, almost half the 110 sections of the German and Austrian Alpine Club included this paragraph in their constitutions.
Given an ethos in the mountains of strong individuals facing nature and struggling to succeed, it’s hardly surprising that the National Socialist German Workers’ Party found the Alpine Club a rich recruiting ground. Swastikas started appearing on the walls of mountain huts in the mid-1920s.
Rainer Amstadter, a historian and teacher living in Vienna, exposed this alarming background to fascism in Austria in his history of the German and Austrian Alpine Club published last year.
Within Austria he has had a hostile reception. “There are those in the Alpine Club who say it was Hitler, not us,” he says. “They say they cannot believe it.”
Gerald Lehner found plenty of evidence in America for what Amstadter had described and several of his sources told him that while the celebrated Heinrich Harrer had denied any involvement with the Nazis beyond his propaganda value as a mountaineer, these weekend skiers and hikers from 60 years ago remembered things differently. They told Lehner that Harrer had led demonstrations and been a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the violent paramilitary wing of the Nazis.
Lehner went to Washington to look for any documents in the United States National Archive relating to Harrer. Back came the clerk with Harrer’s 1938 marriage application confirming that he had been a member of the SA since October 1933 and had joined the SS in 1938. Armed with this information, Lehner travelled to Huttenberg.
The tense and abbreviated confrontation between Lehner and Harrer left both bruised, although the old man had much more to lose. After again denying his involvement with the Nazis, Harrer was forced to acknowledge that the handwriting on the form was his and Lehner published his story.
With Mandalay fearing a public relations disaster, Harrer issued a statement denying political activity: “I was a member of the SS for a limited period in 1938,” he said.
“I wore my SS uniform only once, on the day of my marriage. I was never a member of the SA, I was interested in sport – climbing and skiing – not politics.” He added that his experiences in Tibet had changed his philosophy and that he condemned the crimes of the Nazis unequivocally: “My conscience is clear on my activities under the Hitler regime. I consider these events one of the aberrations of my life, perhaps the greatest.”
Had Harrer not climbed the infamous North Face of the Eiger, his political activities might never have mattered. In 1938, three months after the Anschluss, he teamed up with another Austrian climber, Fritz Kasparek, for an attempt on what the press was calling the Mordwand – the murder wall – because of the eight climbers, mainly German, who had fallen or frozen to death attempting it.
On the wall, the two Austrians teamed up with two Germans, Anderl Heckmair and Wiggerl Vorg. Hitler had promised to award medals at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 to the team that conquered the mountain and, sensing a unique propaganda opportunity, he followed the quartet’s progress up the imposing and gloomy mountain, telephoning regularly for news.
Their success was trumpeted by the Nazis as a triumph of will by German youth. The four were invited to a reception with Hitler at Breslau in July 1938 in front of a crowd of 30000 party supporters. Harrer’s head drops slightly when he recalls, as he has done countless times before, what Hitler said to them.
“‘Boys, boys!’ he said to us. ‘This thing you have done!'”
The photographs taken show the two Austrians on Hitler’s right and left, the two Germans flanking the trio, in an expression of Germanic solidarity.
What Harrer has quoted less often are the closing words of his section of a book about the climb published by Goebbels’s propaganda ministry.
“It is an inestimable reward for us to see the Fhrer [leader] and be able to speak to him,” Harrer writes. “We have climbed the Eiger’s North Face over the summit to our Fhrer.” His zeal won him his place on the reconnaissance expedition to Nanga Parbat the following year, joining the elite group of Himalayan climbers overseen by Paul Bauer, a Bavarian lawyer and ardent Nazi.
But the poor boy from Huttenberg wasn’t just climbing real mountains, he was conquering social heights as well.
On Christmas Eve of 1938 in the Styrian town of Graz where he had studied, Harrer married Lotte Wegener, daughter of Alfred Wegener, the meteorologist and geophysicist who developed the theory of continental drift.
It was a Nazi society wedding that Heinrich Himmler took a personal interest in. Harrer was certainly no war criminal, since he was in prison or in Tibet for all of the war, something that added to his appeal when he came home to an Austria trying to re- establish its national identity.
But for those Austrians trying to come to terms with their country’s role in Hitler’s rise to power, his past denials have proved contentious.
There have been many times in the past few months when Heinrich Harrer wished that the accolade of a Hollywood biopic had passed him by, but now he is content that the Tibetan cause will come to the attention of millions.
He mentions one story that he wishes had been included. While staying in the remote Tibetan village of Kyirong, Harrer was attacked by a Tibetan mastiff, a ferocious beast that makes a rottweiler look like a spaniel. The dog fixed its jaws around Harrer’s arm and his Tibetan companions were sure he would be killed. With his free arm, Harrer caught the animal by its throat and choked it until it collapsed, apparently dead.
The brilliant but flawed explorer may find his past harder to shake off. As Gerald Lehner says: “There are other things in the archive. I can feel it.”
Ed Douglas’s new book, Chomolungma Sings The Blues: Travels Round Everest, will be published next month by Constable