Published by: World Tibet Network News, Sunday - June 22, 1997

VIENNA, Austria, June 22 (AP) -- A Nazi past has caught up with Austrian explorer and writer Heinrich Harrer just months before a multimillion-dollar movie is released about his time in Tibet, where he tutored the Dalai Lama.

_Seven years in Tibet," starring Brad Pitt, is based on the best-selling book Harrer wrote in the early 1950s after he fled Tibet's capital, Lhasa, during the Chinese invasion. It is to be released Oct. 8 by Tri-Star, a division of Sony.

German magazine Stern last month published details from a file revealing that Harrer joined the Nazi party when Germany took control of Austria in 1938.

The prominent Austrian mountaineer also joined the SS, the party's police wing associated with atrocities during World War II, though Harrer was interned by the British in India at the war's start.

And the documents show that, at a time when Nazi organizations still were banned in Austria, a 21-year-old Harrer joined Adolf Hitler's underground SA (Sturmabteilung), or _storm troops," in Austria in 1933.

Tri-Star did not immediately return phone calls from The Associated Press seeking comment.

The film's French director, Jean-Jacques Annaud, said in a statement quoted by The New York Times that he had suspected Harrer had some Nazi connection prior to the war. But Annaud added that after the war, _he devoted his life to nonviolence, human rights and racial equality."

The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles said there is no indication Harrer had any link to atrocities, but the group questions why he kept his Nazi past hidden.

Harrer, now 84, divides his time between Liechtenstein and his native Austria. He has spoken to only three or four reporters since the revelations, and declined to be interviewed by the AP.

Harrer told the Austria Press Agency that he never carried out any activities for the SS, but added that _from today's view the former party and SS membership is an extremely unpleasant thing." He added that he had a _clear conscience."

Harrer said he joined the party to further his teaching and mountaineering careers, but did not explain why he had joined the SA in 1933, when Nazis still were persecuted in Austria.

The mountaineer made headlines in 1938 with the first ascent of Switzerland's dreaded Eiger North Face, which earned him fame and a handshake from Hitler.

Harrer told APA he later became a sports instructor, and that he joined the SS and Nazi party in order to join a teachers' organization. Harrer told Stern that without this membership he would have had no chance to join a government-financed Himalaya expedition, his life's dream.

At the end of that expedition, Harrer and a colleague were arrested by British troops in India as war broke out in September 1939.

The two escaped an internment camp in 1944 and trekked through Tibet to Lhasa, where few Westerners had been allowed to enter. They soon endeared themselves to the country's secular elite and also the religious head, the young Dalai Lama.

Harrer taught the Dalai Lama mathematics, English and sports, and became his adviser and friend. Harrer's subsequent book about the experience, _Seven Years in Tibet," was translated into 48 languages.

He later explored other remote areas of the globe, wrote about a dozen books and authored some 40 documentary films.