Hans von Tschammer und Osten

Mountain climbers, jungle explorers and desert foxes - many of them ended up in the claws of the Nazi Party, the SS or the Wehrmacht because of their careers, scientific curiosity or their love of travel. Were these adventurers aware of the consequences of this association or were they simply interested in pursuing their own interests regardless of the price? That's the question that this documentary seeks to answer for the search for pre-historic sites in the Sahara led to the development of maps for the Wehrmacht, while an airborne expedition in the Amazon helped to develop aerial photographic analysis. The stories of explorers like Heinrich Harrer and Laszlo Almasy, better known as the «English Patient», are retold using spectacular pictures and footage from places like India, Egypt and Peru.

Norman Dyhrenfurth, 90, tells for the first time the extraordinary story of his parents, husband and wife mountaineers and filmmakers Hettie and Günter Dyhrenfurth, and their 1930s expeditions to the Himalayas (Kanchenjunga, Hidden Peak). These family expeditions equalled those of their state-sponsored Nazi rivals and beat them in setting world climbing records. In doing so, the Dyhrenfurths took the first moving pictures at high altitude. Norman himself put the first Americans on top of Mount Everest in 1963 and led the first traverse of an 8000-metre peak. Through engaging interviews, Chris Bonington and Reinhold Messner put the Dyhrenfurth expeditions into contemporary context and convey an intense compassion for the heroic achievements and tragic failures of this family.

Record of the 1934 german expedition to Nanga Parbat, led by Willy Merkl and with the full backing of the new Nazi government. Peter Aschenbrenner and Erwin Schneider reached an estimated height of 7,895m on July 6, but were forced to return because of worsening weather. On July 7 they and 14 others were trapped by a ferocious storm at 7,480m. During the desperate retreat that followed, three famous German mountaineers, Uli Wieland, Willo Welzenbach and Merkl himself, and six Sherpas died of exhaustion, exposure and altitude sickness, and several more suffered severe frostbite.