The 1937 Nanga Parbat Disaster — Sixteen men buried alive in their sleep

Summary

On the night of 14–15 June 1937, an avalanche of ice swept down onto Camp IV of a German expedition on Nanga Parbat, in the western Himalaya, and buried sixteen men as they slept. All of them died — seven German climbers and nine Sherpa porters, almost the entire climbing party — without warning and, by every later account, without waking. It was the deadliest single event in the history of mountaineering to that time, and it remains one of the worst. The mountain stands at 8,126 metres in what is now the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan; Camp IV lay at roughly 6,180 metres on a snow terrace above the Rakhiot Glacier, beneath the ice cliffs of Rakhiot Peak.

The expedition was led by Karl Wien and was the latest German attempt on a mountain that had become a national obsession after the disaster of 1934, when Willy Merkl's expedition lost climbers and porters in a storm high on the same Rakhiot face. The 1937 party was working its way up that face, establishing camps in heavy snow, when the entire camp was overrun. The dead Germans were Karl Wien, Hans Hartmann, Adolf Göttner, Günther Hepp, Martin Pfeffer, Pert Müllritter and Otto Fankhauser. The nine Sherpas killed alongside them — men whose labour carried every load up that mountain and whose deaths were long recorded more faintly than the climbers' — were Pasang, Nim Tsering, Mambahadur, Kami, Gyaljen Monjo, Jigmay, Chong Karma, Ang Tsering II and Da Thondup. This record names them in full.

The disaster left no survivors at the high camp to describe it, so its sequence was reconstructed only weeks later, when a relief expedition under Paul Bauer dug down through the avalanche debris to the buried tents. What they found — men still in their sleeping bags, faces calm, killed in an instant — established what had happened: a mass of ice had broken from the cliffs hundreds of metres above and crossed the supposedly safe terrace in seconds, entombing the camp under metres of snow and ice before anyone could stir.

Timeline

The Killer Mountain

By 1937 Nanga Parbat had earned its German name, the Schicksalsberg — the "mountain of destiny" — and its grimmer reputation as a killer. It is the ninth-highest mountain on Earth, a vast, isolated massif at the western end of the Himalaya whose Rakhiot face, on the northern side, was the line the German expeditions of the 1930s chose to climb. That face rises in a series of glacier terraces and ice slopes toward the Silver Saddle and the long summit ridge, and it is raked by avalanches from the hanging glaciers and ice cliffs that overhang it. The 1934 expedition under Willy Merkl had already died there, caught by a storm during a desperate retreat from high on the mountain, and the 1937 party climbed in the shadow of that loss.

The German attempts of this era were heavily nationalistic undertakings, pursued with state interest and triumphalist press, and they depended absolutely on Sherpa porters recruited from Darjeeling and Sikkim — experienced high-altitude men, several of whom had served on earlier Himalayan and Everest expeditions. These were not anonymous bearers but skilled mountaineers in their own right: Da Thondup had reached the high camps on Nanga Parbat in 1934, Kami had carried to Camp IV on Everest in 1936, and Nim Tsering had worked with a French expedition in the Karakoram. The route up the Rakhiot face placed camps beneath ice that could release without warning, and the calculus of the climb — accepting that exposure in order to stock the high camps — fell, as ever, most heavily on the men who did the carrying.

A camp in the wrong place

Through May and into June 1937 the expedition pushed its chain of camps up the face against persistent heavy snowfall that slowed every move. Camp IV was placed on 7 June on a broad snow terrace above the Rakhiot Glacier at roughly 6,180 metres, a flat, sheltered-seeming spot that served as the staging point for the climb to the Silver Saddle. The terrace lay below the ice cliffs of Rakhiot Peak, and the danger of that position was not entirely unrecognized: a diary later recovered from the site recorded that the camp was judged not wholly safe from avalanches. But the terrace was the natural place to gather, and gather the party did. By mid-June seven German climbers and nine Sherpas — almost the whole expedition — were concentrated at Camp IV, waiting out the weather before pressing higher.

That concentration of the entire team in one exposed place was the fatal condition. On a mountain, a camp beneath ice cliffs trades the certainty of a hard climbing position for the gamble that the ice above will hold. For days it did. The men slept in their tents on the terrace, the loads stacked around them, the route to the saddle waiting above. There was no storm at the moment of the disaster, no struggle, no warning climb gone wrong — only sixteen men asleep in a place where, sooner or later, the ice was always going to come down.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

Sixteen men died in an instant, the deadliest single event mountaineering had then recorded, and the loss fell on Germany as a national tragedy in an era when the Nanga Parbat campaign carried political weight. Paul Bauer's relief expedition recovered what bodies it could and brought home the diaries that allowed the disaster to be reconstructed; the following year a further German expedition on the same face encountered and buried more of the dead from the 1934 and 1937 catastrophes, a measure of how thoroughly the mountain had become a graveyard. Germany returned again, and Nanga Parbat was not climbed until 1953, when Hermann Buhl reached the summit alone — by which time the mountain had killed dozens in pursuit of it and carried the name Killer Mountain.

What the 1937 disaster taught, and what mountaineering slowly absorbed, was the lethal logic of the avalanche-exposed camp: that a tent pitched beneath hanging ice is gambling against an event no skill can survive, and that the gamble eventually loses. The nine Sherpas who died at Camp IV deserve to be remembered by name and not as a number appended to the climbers' loss — Pasang, Nim Tsering, Mambahadur, Kami, Gyaljen Monjo, Jigmay, Chong Karma, Ang Tsering II and Da Thondup — experienced high-altitude men who carried the expedition up the mountain and died with it. They are buried where they slept, on the Rakhiot face of Nanga Parbat.

Lessons

References

• Nanga Parbat WIKIPEDIA
• A Climbing History of Nanga Parbat's Deadly Rakhiot Face EXPLORERSWEB
• Nanga Parbat, 1937 HIMALAYAN JOURNAL
• Karl Wien WIKIPEDIA