The north face of the Eiger, an intimidating, seemingly endless wall of rock, ice, and snow with 1,800 meters of vertical relief in the Swiss Bernese Alps, had not yet been climbed in 1936 — a “problem” to be solved, and a propaganda opportunity for the Nazi regime. The events of that July, the 90th anniversary of which is this week, for decades shaped the way mountaineering was portrayed, as if the sport had to be forever tied to drama, epic scenarios, suffering, and loss. In recent years the burden of the tragic story of the north face of the Eiger’s conquest has only begun to ease with the advent of a new approach to mountaineering and risk management. Grand feats stopped being a matter of sheer chance and gave way to scientific training grounded in deep knowledge of the environment, equipment vastly superior to that used nine decades ago, precise weather forecasting, and the absence of inappropriate extrinsic motivations such as nationalism.
In July 1936, Toni Kurz and Andreas Hinterstoisser were German climbers, but not necessarily supporters of Adolf Hitler’s regime. The propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, decided to exploit the two young men’s obsessive passion for high mountains to exalt the Aryan race and celebrate Third Reich values during the Berlin Olympic Games. In Nazi thinking, Kurz and Hinterstoisser could only succeed and become national heroes, or die and be remembered as martyrs. The latter happened.
On July 18, the same day the Spanish Civil War began, Kurz and Hinterstoisser chose the Eiger trench as their battlefield, their own war, with uncertainty as the enemy: was it even possible to climb the north face — the Nordwand, already known to Germans as the Mordwand or “murder wall”? To their surprise, they were not alone, which in itself was notable: local authorities had repeatedly banned any incursions on the face, exhausted by seeing those who tried never return. The observation terrace at the Kleine Scheidegg train station and its panoramic binoculars had become the area’s main summer attraction, with tourists eager to watch climbers fall. That day Austrians Willy Angerer and Eduard Rainer had also started up the wall, and when the four met at the foot of a delicate traverse they decided to join forces and climb as a team. Hinterstoisser, the most skilled climber in the group, led the way across vertical rock slabs, moving from left to right over a breathtaking void. His extraordinary skill allowed him to overcome the difficulty and secure the rope so the rest could follow. But once they had completed the traverse, the group decided to remove the rope — a decision that sealed their fate. At the first large snowfield on the wall, a rockfall injured Angerer, but they decided to press on and bivouac. The next morning, visibly slowed down by the injured climber, they reached the second snowfield and a small hollow known as the “bivouac of death” to spend the night. The following day, as they neared the final third of the wall, the Austrian pair rappelled down and called for help. The Germans were making progress with a real chance of successfully completing their climb, but they ultimately decided to come to the aid of Angerer and Rainer.
What followed was a retreat threatened by rapidly worsening weather: slow, delicate and with a wounded climber whose condition deteriorated quickly. When they reached the day-one traverse, Hinterstoisser realized they had made a grave mistake: the rock section was now impassable, coated in ice. They should have left a fixed rope to secure their descent, but they had not. Their only option was to make several rappels down the overhanging rock section. If all went well, they would reach a ledge that would lead them to one of the windows of the railroad that ran through the mountain (today, the train that travels through the interior remains a major tourist attraction). While he was hammering pitons into the rock to set up the anchor for the final rappel, an avalanche swept Hinterstoisser away. Since he wasn’t roped in, he died instantly. Angerer and Kurz also fell, but because they were roped to Rainer, he acted as a brake, becoming horribly pinned against the rappel anchor and suffocating under the weight of the two bodies. Angerer also died instantly after hitting his head. Only Kurz survived. A mere handful of seconds had been enough to claim three lives. But Kurz’s situation was dire: screaming for help, he was heard by a railroad worker, who raised the alarm. Swiss guides came to his aid, but night was falling, the storm was intensifying, and they promised him they would return the next morning with a plan to reach him — he was hanging 40 meters above them.
Dawn saw Kurz brought back alive but with a severely frostbitten hand. The guides asked him to release Angerer’s corpse from the rope. He did. Then, using only one hand, he succeeded in ascending the rope to the belay where Rainer acted as counterweight. There he untied the rope and spliced several lengths before throwing it down within the guides’ reach, and they knotted a new rope so he could rappel down safely. But that new rope was barely 30 meters long, so they had to pass him another one, which he tied to gain sufficient length. That knot proved fatal. Kurz began to rappel using a carabiner and a Munter hitch (a dynamic knot that allows controlled descent), but when he reached the join knot between the ropes the carabiner jammed. Kurz had no strength left to fix the situation. He said, ‘I can’t go on’ and died just three meters from his rescuers. It was July 22.
Two years and two days later the Eiger north face was finally climbed by Germans Anderl Heckmair and Ludwig Vörg and Austrians Heinrich Harrer and Fritz Kasparek. The Third Reich and its propaganda apparatus exploited that event. Hitler himself, together with Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick and German sports leader and SA head Hans von Tschammer und Osten, received them on August 1, 1938. Heckmair never joined the Nazi Party and rejected the publicity. Vörg died in the Nazi campaign against the Soviet Union in June 1941; Kasparek was imprisoned by the Allies after the war because of his rank as senior SS sergeant; and Heinrich Harrer, due to his links with the SA and the SS, was captured by the British in Tibet, from where he eventually escaped and returned to Austria in 1952. He later wrote the well-known book Seven Years in Tibet.
In 2007 Swiss climber Ueli Steck completed one of the most astonishing episodes in mountaineering history: he soloed the original route on the north face of the Eiger in three hours and 54 minutes. A year later, even climbing without a rope, he lowered his time to two hours and 47 minutes. For many, that act forever broke the old alpine narrative and its dark literary history. On the most tragic mountain stage there is, Steck chose to break with past anguish and declare that supreme physical and technical excellence, strategy, and meticulous planning might not eliminate deaths in the mountains but could reduce them to a minimum among the discipline’s vanguard. The future would go that way. Others followed to confirm it.
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