THE WIESENTHAL SANCTION:

Heinrich Harrer (Daily Telegraph, 09/01/2006)

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.