The 1936 Eiger North Face — Toni Kurz died on the rope within reach of help

Summary

In July 1936 four climbers — the Bavarians Andreas Hinterstoisser and Toni Kurz and the Austrians Willy Angerer and Edi Rainer — attempted the unclimbed north face of the Eiger in the Bernese Alps, and all four died. The last to die was the 23-year-old Toni Kurz, who survived the deaths of his three companions only to perish on a rope a few metres above his rescuers, unable to pass a knot with a frozen hand. His end is among the most harrowing in mountaineering, and it sealed the early reputation of the Eigerwand as the deadliest wall in the Alps.

The Eiger's north face — the Nordwand, soon nicknamed the Mordwand or "murder wall" — is a concave sweep of rotten limestone, ice fields and constant rockfall rising roughly 1,800 metres beneath the 3,967-metre summit. In the mid-1930s it was the last great unsolved problem of the Alps, and its danger had already killed: in 1935 the German climbers Max Sedlmayr and Karl Mehringer had died high on the face at a spot thereafter called the Death Bivouac. National prestige hung on the wall in the Nazi era, drawing ambitious German and Austrian climbers to a route the local Swiss guides regarded as suicidal.

The 1936 party started up on 18 July and made good early progress, in part thanks to a bold sideways pitch Hinterstoisser found and fixed with rope — the move ever after called the Hinterstoisser Traverse. But rockfall injured Angerer, the weather turned, and the team decided to retreat. They could not recross the traverse, because the fixed rope had been pulled through, and were forced into a desperate downward struggle. An avalanche then swept Hinterstoisser to his death, killed Angerer against the wall, and left Rainer to die of asphyxiation crushed by the ropes. Kurz alone survived the night. The next day, 22 July, Grindelwald guides reached a point on the face close beneath him, but could not bridge the last overhang, and he died on the rope as they watched.

Timeline

A wall the guides called murder

The north face of the Eiger is not a slope but a trap. Roughly 1,800 metres high, concave so that it gathers and channels falling rock and ice onto anyone on it, built of loose limestone and raked by storms that boil up the wall without warning, it had defeated and frightened climbers for decades while the gentler routes to the 3,967-metre summit had long since been walked. By the mid-1930s it was the most coveted and most lethal unclimbed objective in the Alps. The local Swiss guides of Grindelwald, who knew the mountain intimately, considered an attempt on the face close to suicide and largely refused to take part. The men who came for it were outsiders — chiefly young Germans and Austrians, climbing in an era when the Nazi regime prized such feats as proof of national vigour, and when an Olympic medal was even floated for the first ascent.

The wall had already killed. In August 1935 the experienced Munich climbers Max Sedlmayr and Karl Mehringer had pushed high onto the face, only to be pinned by a long storm and to die of exposure at an elevated ledge that became known as the Death Bivouac; Mehringer's body was not recovered for decades. That precedent did not deter the next wave. In July 1936 two ropes joined into one party: the Bavarians Andreas Hinterstoisser and Toni Kurz, both strong and confident, and the Austrians Willy Angerer and Edi Rainer. This record does not treat their ambition as glory. It diagnoses a party drawn onto objectively dangerous ground by national pressure and personal drive, onto a face whose hazards the local experts had judged to outweigh any climber's skill.

The traverse that became a one-way door

The four started up on 18 July and at first moved well. The early going included a band of smooth, holdless rock that barred the way to the upper face; Hinterstoisser solved it with a brilliant rising pendulum traverse, fixing a rope across so the others could follow. The move worked, and it carried his name ever after — the Hinterstoisser Traverse. But the party then made the decision that doomed them: they retrieved the fixed rope, leaving nothing in place to cross back. Higher up, the climb began to go wrong. Falling rock, loosened as the sun warmed the face, struck Angerer in the head and injured him. The weather deteriorated, the upper ice fields were slow and dangerous, and Angerer's condition worsened. On 21 July, with their position deteriorating, the four agreed to turn back.

The retreat met the trap they had set themselves. Without the fixed rope, the Hinterstoisser Traverse — a sideways pitch across blank rock — could not be recrossed, and the party was forced to abseil straight down ground that offered no safe line. As they worked down in worsening conditions, an avalanche of snow and ice swept the face. Hinterstoisser, unroped or detached at that moment, was carried off the wall and fell to his death. Angerer, already injured, was slammed against the rock and killed. Rainer was pinned by the ropes and the weight of the others and died of asphyxiation, crushed against the face. Of the four, only Toni Kurz was left alive, hanging on the rope between the bodies of his friends, with night and storm closing in.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

All four climbers died, and the manner of Toni Kurz's death — frozen on a rope, defeated by a single knot within touching distance of his rescuers — made the 1936 attempt one of the most infamous in the history of the sport. The Grindelwald guides who reached him recovered his body and those of his companions over the following period; the deaths confirmed the north face's reputation as the deadliest in the Alps. In the immediate aftermath the Swiss authorities, appalled at the toll and the spectacle of men dying in view of a tourist railway, moved to discourage and at times ban attempts on the face.

The wall was not stopped. After further failures, the north face was finally climbed in July 1938 by the German–Austrian team of Andreas Heckmair, Ludwig Vörg, Heinrich Harrer and Fritz Kasparek, by the route now called the Heckmair. But the dying continued: since the 1930s scores of climbers have been killed on the Eigerwand, and the Mordwand nickname stuck. Toni Kurz's death entered mountaineering literature as a touchstone — recounted at length in Heinrich Harrer's The White Spider — and stands as the central image of the face's cruelty. He is remembered not as a conqueror but as a young man who fought for his life through a night and a day on a rope, and lost it a few metres from hands that could not reach him.

Lessons

References

• 1936 Eiger climbing disaster WIKIPEDIA
• Toni Kurz WIKIPEDIA
• Eiger WIKIPEDIA
• Eiger North Face: 1938, the historic first ascent THOMAS CRAUWELS