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Heinrich Harrer ex SS dies.....
Heinrich Harrer, a famous mountaineer, ex SS died at the age of 93 in the Austrian province of Huttenberg on 7 January. His classic travel book, Seven Years in Tibet, which recounted his experiences in Tibet after escaping internment in British India in 1944, sold millions of copies worldwide and was translated into 48 languages. This book more than anything else brought Tibet and its tragic situation to the attention and conscience of the world. This book in 1997 was made into a Hollywood movie staring Brad Pitt.
After voluntarily joining the SA (Sturmabtelung or Storm Troopers) in 1933, Harrer enlisted in the SS (Schutzstaffel or Protective Echelon) a short while later and became a sergeant after five years.
After voluntarily joining the SA (Sturmabtelung or Storm Troopers) in 1933, Harrer enlisted in the SS (Schutzstaffel or Protective Echelon) a short while later and became a sergeant after five years.
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response to inquiries from the media concerning his membership in Nazi
organizations during the 1930s, the famous Austrian mountaineer and
explorer Heinrich Harrer issued the following statement from his home in
Huttenberg:
A number of stories have appeared recently in the media reporting on my
involvement with Nazi organizations some 60 years ago. Many of the facts
cited in these stories are true. It is the implications in many of the
reports that are in error.
I was a member of the SS for a limited period in 1938 after I had gained
national attention in Germany for my feat as one of four climbers of the
Eiger North Face (the first to accomplish this famous climbing challenge in
the Alps), I was asked to join the SS as an athletic instructor and agreed.
I was issued an SS uniform at that time. As it turned out, I did not give a
single lesson in my teaching capacity due to my participation in an
expedition to India. I wore the uniform only once -- at the time of my
wedding in December 1938, which was heavily publicized by the government.
Other than this involvement, I had a purely ceremonial group picture taken
with Hitler and other officials during a 1938 sports festival in Breslau
which was cut to show just the two of us when published recently. I was
never a member of the SA.
Thus, though the facts concerning these events of 60 years ago are
generally accurate, any implications that these facts indicate I was a
dedicated Nazi supporter or was involved in any way in the heinous crimes
of the Hitler period are totally false. First, the events in question took
place in my youth and I was then interested in athletics - mountain
climbing and skiing - and not in politics. Second, my association with the
SS was very brief. I departed on the expedition to India in early 1939 and
did not return to Austria until 1952.
My life in that 1939-1952 period is the subject of my book "Seven Years in
Tibet" which has been made into a movie scheduled for opening in October of
this year. My personal political philosophy grew out of my life in Tibet.
It is outlined in my book. It is a belief that reflects many tenets of
Buddhism and places great emphasis on human life and human dignity. It is
this philosophy that has guided my life during my return visits to Tibet
and my explorations in many parts of the world over the past four and a
half decades. And it is a philosophy which leads me to condemn as strongly
as possible the horrible crimes of the Nazi period.
My conscience is clear on my record during the Hitler regime. Nevertheless,
I regard the events that involved the SS as one of the aberrations in my
life, maybe the biggest, and I regret deeply that these events may give
rise to false impressions.
I conveyed these facts and sentiments on Monday, June 30, in Vienna to Mr.
Simon Weisenthal in a meeting to which he graciously agreed and it is my
belief that he has accepted them as a sincere and forthright statement on
my part.
- Source
John Gittings
Monday January 9, 2006
The Guardian
Heinrich Harrer, the mountaineer and champion of Tibet who has died aged 93, first arrived in Lhasa in January 1946 as a penniless refugee, wearing a tattered sheepskin cloak. Accompanied by a fellow mountaineer, Harrer had made a terrifying trek from the Indian border across the high Tibetan plateau.
One of a handful of foreigners in Lhasa, Harrer soon caught the eye of the young 14th Dalai Lama, then aged 11. Before long he was coaching him in English and mathematics, fixing a broken projector to show the film of Henry V, and transcribing BBC news bulletins for the Tibetan government. Harrer left Tibet when the Chinese invaded in 1951, and embarked on a new stage of his mountaineering career, tackling new heights - from Mount Hunter in Alaska to the Carstensz Pyramid in New Guinea, but Tibet remained his passion.
Article continues
Harrer and his colleague Peter Aufschnaiter had escaped from a British camp in India where they were interned (because of their Austrian nationality), after an abortive assault on Nanga Parbat. Their epic tale, when Harrer told it in Seven Years in Tibet (1953), became a classic.
Harrer omitted to mention that as a young man in Austria he had joined the Nazi party, and, with his fellow climbers, had been congratulated in person by Hitler after making the first successful ascent of the north face of the Eiger. The story of his Nazi past came out in 1997, ironically just before the release of the Hollywood film of Seven Years in Tibet, starring Brad Pitt. Harrer said he regarded his involvement with the SS as the biggest aberration of his life: it belonged to the past and his personal philosophy grew entirely "out of my life in Tibet". This episode marred his final years, and there were allegations that he was understating the strength of his past Nazi connection. The affair was also seized upon by hostile Chinese propaganda against Harrer and other western advocates of Tibetan independence.
Harrer was born in Huttenberg in the Austrian province of Carinthia, and studied geography and sports at the Karl Franzen University in Graz. He competed as a skier in the 1936 winter Olympics, and ascended the Eiger two years later. His book, The White Spider, about his own Eiger climb and that of earlier and later ascents, was published in 1958.
Whether he believed in Nazi ideology or was just politically naive, it seems likely that the connection helped secure him a place on a joint German-Austrian expedition to the Himalayas. After escaping from the British, he and Aufschnaiter spent more than a year roaming the fringes of Tibet where local officials refused them permission to head towards Lhasa. Finally they pretended to obey orders to leave; instead they fled eastwards, in the depth of winter, across the high plateau to Lhasa. Granted leave to stay, they soon made themselves useful. Aufschnaiter was commissioned to design a sewer system for Lhasa and Harrer surveyed the entire city.
Although a fervent admirer of Tibetan culture, Harrer's recollections were unsentimental. A fluent speaker of Tibetan, he had many friends in Lhasa and observed from within. His photographs, reproduced in Lost Lhasa (1992), show ordinary Tibetans at prayer, work or play.
Harrer criticised the monastic feudalism of Tibet, which, in his personal experience, stood in the way of reform: he also acknowledged the filth of everyday life. "The Tibetans didn't wash," he told me, "and they had no toilets. Imagine Lhasa in the New Year celebrations when there were 25,000 Lhasans and 20,000 nomads as well as 25,000 monks."
Harrer also admitted that many younger Tibetans believed that internal change was impossible and welcomed the Chinese - at first. But he insisted that if the Dalai Lama had remained in an independent Tibet, "he would have made the changes anyway in spite of the monks". Besides, what did Chinese "progress" really amount to? "Much is as it was before," he concluded in Return to Tibet (1984), after finally managing to revisit Lhasa in a tourist group.
Harrer mourned the commercialisation of Lhasa and the destruction of traditional areas such as Shol village beneath the Potala. A replica of the mostly vanished pilgrims' circuit of Lhasa stands in the Harrer Museum, which he set up in Huttenberg to celebrate Tibetan culture: the museum was opened by the Dalai Lama in 1992. The two men had resumed their friendship after the Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959.
On the last page of Seven Years in Tibet, Harrer wrote soon after leaving Lhasa of his homesickness. He could "still hear the wild cries of geese and cranes ... as they fly over Lhasa in the clear cold moonlight." Forty years later he would observe that "the landscape has not changed, but there are no more birds."
· Heinrich Harrer, mountaineer, born July 6 1912; died January 7 2006
"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".
The Washington Post
"At least nine mountaineers had died trying to scale the sheer wall, long considered Europe's greatest mountaineering challenge. Dozens have perished in subsequent attempts.
His ascent garnered him fame and a handshake from Adolf Hitler: Mr. Harrer had joined the Nazi Party when Germany took control of Austria in 1938. He also joined the SS, the party's police wing associated with atrocities during World War II.
Mr. Harrer later said he joined the SS and Nazi Party to enter a teachers organization. The membership let him join a government-financed Himalayan expedition, his life's dream".
-bf
Palzang
To clarify, my post was only to give Harrer's response to the accusation made in Herman's initial post. In Herman's post, he asserts that Heinreich Harrer voluntarily joined the SA. In my post, I offer a news article in which Harrer denies these accusations. That was my only intention. I have no opinion whatsoever about the man myself. I have never met him, and I know absolutely nothing about him besides what I've learned from watching Seven Years in Tibet.
Jason
"Deny, deny, deny!!"
THis from a man who's going to train to be a lawyer...!!:rockon: