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". 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 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. Their epic tale, when Harrer told it in Seven Years in Tibet (1953), became a classic. 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.
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