Published by: World Tibet Network News Monday - July 14, 1997

KNAPPENBERG, Austria, 12 June - (AP) -- Revelations of his Nazi past have prompted changes in a film about Austrian explorer Heinrich Harrer and his years in Tibet as the Dalai Lama's mentor.

The film, "Seven Years in Tibet" starring Brad Pitt, is based on Harrer's best seller written after he fled Lhasa following the 1951 Chinese invasion. It is to be released in the United States by Tri Star on Oct. 9.

Harrer became an adviser, teacher and friend of the Dalai Lama after he escaped from a British POW camp in India and trekked to Tibet in 1944.

The film about those years was made before Harrer's links to the Nazi party were disclosed this spring by the German magazine Stern.

"A few seconds will surely be changed," Harrer told The Associated Press. Pitt "will start out as an unlikable Nazi and end the movie as one who has been chastened by Buddhism."

Harrer said Jean-Jacques Arnaud, the movie's director, told him about changes in the film during a recent visit to his home in Knappenburg.

Arnaud confirmed in a telephone interview from London that "very minor changes" had been made as a result of the Stern article. "The only modification I did was at the beginning of the movie," which depicts Harrer with Nazi officials and the Nazi flag.

Arnaud said the film portrays the young Harrer as a "very unlikable character" with a Nazi connection. "This is what has been changed," he said, suggesting that in the revised version Harrer is depicted as joining the Nazi party.

Arnaud praised Harrer for his postwar commitment to human rights and racial equality.

"This is a man who ... feels a tremendous shame," Arnaud said. "I respect him as a man who has remorse."

Critics concede that Harrer's many books and documentary films on his expeditions are void of racism or nationalism, and preach understanding.

Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal said in an interview that Harrer never was involved in politics and was not guilty of wrongdoing.

Stern, in its May 28 issue, published details from a German file showing that Harrer joined the Nazi party and the SS, the party's elite guard, in 1938, the year Hitler annexed Austria.

Harrer, interviewed at his home, called his Nazi membership a "stupid mistake" and an "ideological error."

Stern also reproduced documents it said proved that Harrer joined Nazi organizations in 1933 at age 19. At the time, Nazi groups were illegal in Austria.

But Harrer denied an early affiliation with the Nazis, even though he acknowledged his handwriting was shown in a photocopy of a 1938 curriculum that listed his membership in 1933 in Nazi organizations.

A file card cited by Stern listing Harrer's 1933 membership in a Nazi teachers' group is "an invention," he said.

Harrer said he lied about earlier Nazi affiliations to hasten SS permission for him to marry in 1938 before leaving for a Himalayan climbing expedition. In previous accounts, Harrer said he wanted to brag about his political background.

Harrer and a fellow Austrian mountaineer were on an expedition to the previously unconquered Nanga Parbat peak when they were arrested by the British in India in 1939 as World War II broke out.

The two explorers eventually fled a British prisoner of war camp, trekked for weeks across mountain passes and reached Tibet in 1944.

Harrer had been chosen for the 1938 expedition because he previously led a team that first scaled the dreaded Eiger North Face in Switzerland the same year. That feat led to a meeting and handshake with Adolf Hitler.