Peter Aufschnaiter (2 November 1899 – 12 October 1973) was an Austrian mountaineer, agricultural scientist, geographer and cartographer. His experiences with fellow climber Heinrich Harrer during World War II were depicted in the 1997 film Seven Years in Tibet. Early life Born in Kitzbühel, Austria-Hungary, Peter Aufschnaiter went to high school in Kufstein. During his school education he was drafted into military service in the First World War in 1917. After he finished his final exams in 1919 he went to Munich in Germany to study agriculture. Climbing In his early years he began climbing in his beloved Kaiser mountain range; later, in Munich, Aufschnaiter became acquainted with several German alpinists of the time. He took part in expeditions to Kangchenjunga (1929 and 1931) in Sikkim, where he reached a height of . On these expeditions he had first contacts with Tibetans and learned the Tibetan language. Nazi Party After the Machtergreifung of 30 January 1933, he joined the Nazi Party. From 1936 he worked full-time for the established that year by Paul Bauer. Capture and Tibet After several attempts at the Nanga Parbat, Aufschnaiter led a small four-man expedition in 1939, including Heinrich Harrer, to the Diamir Face with the aim of finding an easier route to the peak. Having concluded that the face was viable, they were in Karachi at the end of August waiting for a freighter to take them home. The ship being long overdue, Harrer, Ludwig and Lobenhoffer tried to reach Persia with their shaky car, but several hundred kilometers northwest of Karachi were put under the "protection" of British soldiers and escorted back to Karachi, where Aufschnaiter had stayed on. 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 two weeks later. They considered escaping to Portuguese Goa but when further transferred to Dehradun, where they were detained for years with 1,000 other enemy aliens, they found Tibet more promising. Their goal was 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 after lunch a group of seven, Rolf Magener and Heins von Have disguised as British officers, Harrer, Aufschnaiter, the Salzburger Bruno Treipel (aka Treipl) and the Berliners Hans Kopp and Sattler, disguised as native Indian workers, walked