Heinrich Harrer: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.
Tibet though remained his passion. 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.
Heinrich Harrer was born in Hüttenberg 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, but instead fled eastwards, in the depth of winter, across the high plateau to Lhasa.
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.
Heinrich Harrer: born July 6th, 1912; died January 7th, 2006