Heinrich Harrer - Internment in India

Internment in India

In 1939, Harrer joined a four-man expedition, led by Peter Aufschnaiter to the Diamir Face of the Nanga Parbat with the aim of finding an easier route to the peak. Having concluded that the face was viable, the four mountaineers were in Karachi at the end of August, waiting for a freighter to take them home. The ship being long overdue, Harrer, Ludwig Chicken, and Hans Lobenhoffer tried to reach Persia, but several hundred kilometers northwest of Karachi they were put under the "protection" of British soldiers and escorted back to Karachi, where Aufschnaiter had stayed. Two days later, war was declared, and on 3 September 1939 all were put behind barbed wire to be transferred to a detention camp at Ahmednagar near Bombay. They considered escaping to Portuguese Goa, but when further transferred to Dehradun to be detained there for years with 1,000 other enemy aliens, they found Tibet more promising, the final goal being the Japanese front in Burma or China.

Aufschnaiter and Harrer escaped and were re-captured a number of times before finally succeeding. On 29 April 1944, Harrer and six others, including Rolf Magener and Heins von Have (disguised as British officers), Aufschnaiter, the Salzburger Bruno Treipel (aka Treipl) and the Berliners Hans Kopp and Sattler (disguised as native Indian workers), walked out of the camp. Magener and von Have took the train to Calcutta and from there found their way to the Japanese army in Burma.

The others headed for the closest border. After Sattler gave up on 10 May, the remaining four entered Tibet on 17 May 1944, crossing the Tsang Chok-la Pass (5,896 m, 19,350 ft) and thereafter split into two groups: Harrer and Kopp, Aufschnaiter and Treipel. On 17 June, Treipel, exhausted, bought himself a horse and rode back to the lowlands. Several months later, when the remaining three were still without visas for Tibet, Kopp also gave up and left for Nepal (where he was handed over to the British within a few days).