This is a visually and emotionally impressive film, with a fine lead performance by the versatile Brad Pitt and an amazing performance by the young Tibetan Jamyang Jamtsho Wangchuk, who plays the Dalai Lama aged 14 (and whose younger brother apparently played the Dalai Lama aged 8). The film is very beautiful to look at, and the Buddhist atmosphere is convincing, with a great deal of attention to ritual detail from a Tibetan production adviser. But the film raises many disturbing questions and doubts. I have not read the book, but the consensus of opinion from several reviewers seems to be that this film is highly inaccurate and that many incidents are entirely made up by the screenwriters. However, I am more troubled by the Nazi issue. Heinrich Harrer was a member of the SS, and although he is admitted in some sources to have been a sergeant, he may well really have been a commissioned officer. In the film it is admitted that Harrer was a committed Nazi when he was in Austria, which is very honest, but nothing is mentioned about the SS or that he would therefore have been under SS military orders when he went to Tibet (indeed, he could not have gone in any other capacity, since he was in the SS and had met Hitler). Harrer's internment by the British in India during the War was thus not of an ordinary harmless Austrian mountain climber but of a soldier of the SS, which was a very serious matter in wartime, and the film glosses over this entirely. Instead, Harrer is made to appear an unjustly imprisoned man, which is very far from the truth. Few viewers of this film can possibly be expected to know of the Nazi obsession with Tibet or the reasons for it. Nor is the depiction of Tibetan Buddhism as a wholly good institution accurate. The true facts are very different. There were thousands of monasteries in Tibet and some contained 'good guys' and some contained 'bad guys', to put it in its simplest terms. There were sects of Tibetan monks, doubtless a small minority, who were 'on the left hand path' and involved in black magic. They were sometimes called 'the Yellow Hats' by the Nazis. People like the Dalai Lama, who hate things like black magic and believe in love and gentleness, were strongly opposed to them. In other words, Tibetan Buddhism was anything but uniform, it was diverse. Hundreds of 'Yellow Hat' lamas went to Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, and three hundred of them committed ritual suicide in Berlin just as the Russians were invading the City at the end of the War, and their bodies were found all lying in rows not far from Hitler's bunker. These 'evil lamas' were in league with Hitler, and were controlled through the SS, of which Harrer was a member. It was their 'job' to use their spiritual black magic powers to help the Nazis win the War, and Hitler became annoyed with them at the end because he believed they had failed him and that their mystical powers had been ineffective. The Nazis believed all kinds of crazy things, and the SS was the occult core of the Nazi movement, with its head, Heinrich Himmler, being totally obsessed by such matters, including his Tibetan lamas. Among the bizarre beliefs of the Nazis was that there were 'secret chiefs', hidden spirits of gigantic, super-human size, in command of the dark forces, who resided in deep caves beneath the Himalayas. The Nazis sent various expeditions to Tibet in the 1930s, and some of them were received in Lhasa, or at other places which were friendlier than Lhasa. So it seems that Harrer was somewhat less than candid in what he revealed about this, and that the film in turn is even more obfuscating on the issue. Probably it is true that Harrer really did reject his Nazi past after his years in Tibet, but although admitting to a Nazi past to a certain extent, there was no advantage to him, and indeed there was considerable personal danger, in giving any fuller details. After all, his former colleagues would certainly have taken reprisals against him if he had told the true full story about SS penetration of Tibet. It was acknowledged at the top of the Nazi leadership by such occult fanatics as Himmler and Hess that Hitler was being inspired, perhaps even manipulated, by the primaeval 'dark powers' who resided beneath the mountains of Tibet and who would grant the Nazis dominion over the whole earth if they received enough blood sacrifices. The real reason why millions of people were killed in the gas chambers, by no means all of whom were Jews, was not a simplistic anti-Semitism at all (though that was put about for mass consumption, and the anti-Semitism was real enough), but was as a black magic 'blood sacrifice' to the 'dark powers' in Tibet. Hitler and Himmler believed that if they fed the evil spirits inhabiting the caverns beneath Tibet with the souls of millions of humans, the evil spirits would then grant them rule over the earth as their representatives, and at the same time they would be 'making a New Man' of pure Aryan blood. The SS leadership celebrated black masses and many strange sexual rituals and performed human sacrifices. Himmler was the Grand Master and he and his twelve chief subordinate initiates actually worshiped Satan at Schloss Wewelsburg. Concealing the truth about Harrer's original SS membership does no one any good. Indeed, the contrast between Harrer's true SS past, as opposed to the sanitized version of it which says he was merely a Nazi sympathizer, and his later attitudes does him far more credit than he has ever received. Maybe we should look at it that way, and not be too starry-eyed about Germans in Tibet in the 1930s.
Review of Seven Years in Tibet
