German Nanga Parbat Expedition 1934

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The Nanga Parbat from the "fairy tale meadow"

The German Nanga Parbat Expedition 1934 , also known as the German Himalaya Expedition 1934 (DHE), was the second attempt by a German expedition team , the Nanga Parbat (8125 ), after the German-American Himalayan Expedition (DAHE), which ended unsuccessfully in 1932 m) to climb. The mountaineering failure of this expedition solidified the pathetic concept of the “Germans' mountain of fate” for Nanga Parbat. The parallel scientific exploration of the Nanga Parbat area, however, yielded important findings.

Expedition team

As in 1932, the participants included the German expedition leader Willy Merkl and the Austrian Peter Aschenbrenner . At their side were the Germans Alfred Drexel , Uli Wieland , Willo Welzenbach , Fritz Bechtold and Peter Müllritter , as well as the two Austrians, the cartographer Erwin Schneider and the expedition doctor Willi Bernard . Hans Hieronimus took over the administration of the main camp and replaced the high Reichsbahn official Heinz Baumeister , who fell ill shortly before his departure. The cartographer Richard Finsterwalder , the geographer Walter Raechl and the geologist Peter Misch also took part in the expedition . While Dr. Bernard and Garbage Knight stayed at the base camp , Finsterwalder, Raechl and Misch circled the entire massif for eight weeks to explore it topographically, geologically and geographically. Aschenbrenner and Schneider were considered to be excellent performers on the expedition, Welzenbach set new standards in mountain sports as a representative of the "Munich School" and a member of the Munich Academic Alpine Club .

course

As part of the DC circuit of the German Reich by the Nazis had expeditions from the Reich Sports Leader Hans von Tschammer and east are approved. Paul Bauer , the head of the department for mountaineering and hiking in the National Socialist Reichsbund for physical exercises , planned to climb the Kangchenjunga as he did in 1929 . Merkl came before him, who wanted to complete the route from 1932 to Nanga Parbat with significant support from the Deutsche Reichsbahn .

Transport and arrival

The first transport started on March 27, 1934 and reached the main camp at the foot of Nanga Parbat two months later, on May 29, 1934. More than 7000 kg of equipment and food were transported from Europe to the Himalayas , much of the distance by Ship was mastered. Around 600 coolies were hired to transport the loads . Furthermore, the expedition supported 35 Sherpa , experienced high porters from the Khumbu , a sub-region of Nepal . The carefully thought-out logistics and the organization supported by British Captains Sangster and Frier as escort officers made the expedition an international undertaking with almost military planning.

Beginning of the ascent

The upper part of the Rakhiot wall with the silver plateau above (left) and the main peak

The ascent of Nanga Parbat was planned via a route discovered during the German-American Himalaya Expedition in 1932 on the north side of the massif in the Rakhiot flank . On June 8th, Alfred Drexel died in Camp II of high-altitude pulmonary edema (diagnosed by the expedition doctor Willi Bernard, but it was also possible that it was pneumonia ). The group was hit hard by this untimely blow of fate. She then turned back and spent 17 days in the base camp in fine weather.

After the expedition had resumed, two Sherpas fell ill in Camp IV. The mountaineers draw lots and Bechtold accompanied them back to base camp. Despite these strokes of fate, the expedition turned out to be very promising. Merkl's goal was to climb the summit with as many members of the team as possible. Five mountaineers and eleven Sherpas advanced against the 7450 m high “silver saddle”. Peter Aschenbrenner and Erwin Schneider were far ahead and pushed forward together to an altitude of 7895 m, where they were supposed to wait in Camp VII on the instruction of Willy Merkl for the mountain comradeship to conquer the summit. The triumph of the first ascent of Nanga Parbat seemed within reach.

Weather change and termination of the expedition

An avalanche on Nanga Parbat

However, the weather, which can change rapidly in this region, has changed. On the night of July 7th, a hurricane built up, forcing the men to stay in their high camp at 7600 m. This dramatic change in weather, which in addition to the raging wind and snowstorm, also brought gloom over the expedition, and the lack of food led the participants to the realization that the summit could no longer be reached. In addition, the altitude sickness caused exhaustion in the men.

On the morning of July 8th it was decided to cancel the expedition. At the request of the expedition leader Willy Merkl, the two strongest participants, Schneider and Aschenbrenner, accompanied by the three Sherpas Pasang, Nima Dorje and Pinzo Nurbu, should go ahead to Camp IV in order to tread a trail in the deep snow. Below the silver saddle, Nima Dorje fell from a rock. Aschenbrenner and Pasang were able to hold him on the rope, however, and a pack sack with several sleeping bags was lost. With a single remaining sleeping bag, the five had to continue on the way to camp IV, as the supplies from camps V and VI had previously been brought to higher camps. Aschenbrenner and Schneider climbed over the Rakhiot Peak to Camp V, where they found provisions and were able to rest a little. This recovery enabled them to stay with Bechtold, Müllritter and Bernard in Camp IV that same day, which they could reach in the late afternoon. The porters remained in Camp VI.

fight to survive

Rakhiot page with route information, the places of death of Merkl, Wieland and Welzenbach are marked

The other participants should follow in the footsteps of Aschenbrenner and Schneider. For them, however, it was a life-and-death struggle, which Uli Wieland lost on July 9 just before Camp VII, Willo Welzenbach on July 14 in Camp VII and Willy Merkl on July 16, as the notes made in 1938 was found. The six Sherpas Nima Nurbu, Nima Thashi, Nima Dorje, Pinzo Nurbu, Dakshi and Gay-Lay shared the same fate. They died of exhaustion on the east ridge and in the rope crossing of the Rakhiot Wall. The four Sherpas Pasang, Kitar, Dawa Thondup and Kikuli were able to reach camp IV with severe frostbite.

Aschenbrenner, Schneider and Garbage Knight tried together with the Sherpas Nurbu, Ang Tensing and Lobsang to come to the aid of the others and fought desperately against the chest-deep fresh snow. They got beyond Camp V, where they found Pinzo Nurbu dead and also discovered two lifeless Sherpas at a higher altitude. Aschenbrenner and Schneider tried two more times to advance to Camp VI, and even the scientists Raechl and Misch refused to give up. However, their efforts were in vain. Until July 15 they could hear calls down from the ridge - Willy Merkl and his Sherpa Gay-Lay, who fought against death, gradually became quieter until they finally fell silent. In 1938, the mummified corpses of Merkl and Gay-Lay were found near the “Mohrenkopf”, a black rock. The Sherpa had not left his Sāhib's side until death .

Only three out of eleven Sherpas survived this drama. Among them was Kitar, who circled the Kailash with Herbert Tichy in 1935 , and one of the "Tigers of the Himalayas" - as experienced Sherpas are also called - the Sherpa Ang Tshering. Both were then awarded the German Red Cross Medal of Honor.

date of death Surname
06/08/1934 Alfred Drexel
07/09/1934 Uli Wieland
07/14/1934 Willo Welzenbach
07/16/1934 Willy Merkl

Aftermath

Aschenbrenner and Schneider were subsequently accused of breaching their duty of assistance . The Sherpa Pasang reported after the expedition that the two had gone on skis and the Sherpas had left their fate. It is unlikely, however, that skis were carried to Camp IV. No skis can be seen in photographs from these heights either. An alpine court of honor, initiated by the German Himalaya Foundation established in 1936 , was supposed to clarify this allegation. This suspicion was probably triggered by the rivalry between the German Himalaya Foundation on the one hand and the Academic Alpine Club Munich, a group closely related to the Alpine Club , on the other. Although Aschenbrenner and Schneider could not be proven guilty, the two were subsequently excluded from further expeditions. However, this dispute was also a reflection of the tense political and ideological situation between Austria and the German Reich.

Furthermore, Paul Bauer was accused of having sabotaged the expedition from the beginning due to the hostility between Welzenbach and him that had existed since the 1920s. Günter Dyhrenfurth described Willy Merkl's intention to celebrate the summit victory as a kind of “ pilgrimage to the summit” as the decisive mistake of this expedition. In Merkl's plan, the completely unsuitable tactics of the "sworn collective" came to light, which is rarely effective for conquering such a mountain. At that time they did not know about the devastating effects of staying too long at over 7000 m altitude and had not yet recognized that conquering a summit had the difficulty of Nanga Parbat with the lightest possible attack tip "in the manner of a moon rocket" (Dyhrenfurth) must be carried out. It was also the superiority of such a tactic that led to success in 1953.

The Nanga Parbat as "the Germans' mountain of fate"

Political importance

After Adolf Hitler came to power, the expedition became an undertaking of great national and political importance - also because of the strong Austrian participation, especially since the political relationship between the two countries was already very tense in 1934. A possible success was praised by the National Socialist propaganda as the “Triumph of the German People ”. The Nazi regime was very pleased with the philosophy of the participants in the expedition, “death or honor”. The Reichssportführer described the expedition as the "battle of the German nation for the summit of the world", the participants carried a large number of swastika flags with them, media reports were formulated in martial jargon . Bechtold, who was elected expedition leader after Merkl's death, informed the German Alpine Club members while they were on their way home that “the ideational values ​​created by the sacrificial death of our remaining comrades [...] are to be shaped and carried out the German youth. ”A commemorative medal was donated to commemorate the expedition and the unfortunate mountaineers.

After the defeat in World War I and due to the bad economic situation in the German Reich, politics and propaganda looked for ways to regain their strong self-image. As a country with a long history in alpine mountain sports, the rulers in the German Empire saw an opportunity in the far-away Himalayas, where the highest mountain in the world, Mount Everest , was still unconquered. However, since the area of ​​the Himalayas was under British sovereignty, the British authorities were able to deny the German expeditions access. The aim of the German efforts thus became the eight-thousander most westerly - the Nanga Parbat, which was first mapped around 1854 by the German Schlagintweit brothers . The Nanga Parbat was then, although it was in British territory, like the Kangchenjunga before, as a “German” summit in the Himalayas, alongside the “English” Mount Everest, the “ Italian ” K2 and the “ French ” Annapurna .

The nimbus of Nanga Parbat

The nimbus of the term “expedition” already had the effect of “a kind of holy grail of alpinism ” on German mountaineers . After the failure of the second attempt at ascent after 1932 and the death of four expedition members, the press stylized Nanga Parbat as the “German mountain of fate” . In 1936 the German Himalaya Foundation was founded, which was supposed to bundle all energies in order to climb the Nanga Parbat. In 1937 a German team made the next attempt. Seven German mountaineers and nine Sherpas were killed in this German Nanga Parbat expedition . A total of six German expeditions were undertaken from 1932 to 1939, the well-known expedition by Peter Aufschnaiter and Heinrich Harrer , all of them unsuccessful. In 1953, Willy Merkl's half-brother, Karl Maria Herrligkoffer , organized the “Willy Merkl Memory Expedition”. One member of this expedition was Hermann Buhl , who finally, after 58 years of ascent attempts and 31 fatally injured mountaineers, succeeded in the first ascent of Nanga Parbat on July 3rd.

The Nanga Parbat has not lost its importance to this day. In 2004, 70 years after the events of 1934, the Austrian alpinist and extreme mountaineer Markus Kronthaler , who worked on numerous historical expeditions, carried out an expedition "in the footsteps of Peter Aschenbrenner" on Nanga Parbat.

Scientific results of the expedition

The cartographer Richard Finsterwalder from Hanover, the Munich geographer Walter Raechl and the geologist Peter Misch from Göttingen accompanied the expedition as scientists. They circled the Nanga Parbat and reached, among other things, the 5200 meter high Mazenopass on the south side of the mountain, from where they climbed a 5500 meter high summit south of the pass. The scientists succeeded in completely exploring the massif in geological, geographical and cartographic areas. On this basis, a map of Nanga Parbat on a scale of 1: 50,000 was created, which is described as an unsurpassed masterpiece and is counted among the best and most beautiful Himalayan maps ever. Through his geobotanical activities during the German Nanga Parbat expedition in 1937, Carl Troll was able to add a vegetation map to this work. At that time, the Nanga Parbat was the best-researched high mountain range in Asia.

literature

  • Fritz Bechtold: Germans at Nanga Parbat. Bruckmann, Munich 1935.
  • Fritz Bechtold u. a .: Research at Nanga Parbat: German Himalaya Expedition 1934. Helwingsche Verlagbuchhandlung, Hanover 1935.
  • German Himalaya Foundation: Nanga Parbat - Mountain of Comrades. Report of the German Himalaya Expedition 1938. German Himalaya Foundation, Munich 1943
  • Hermann Buhl: Eight thousand above and below. Munich 1954
  • Paul Bauer: The struggle for the Nanga Parbat. 1856-1953. Munich 1955
  • Lutz Chicken : Through the century. My life as a doctor and a mountaineer . Bolzano 2003, ISBN 88-7283-198-9 .
  • Helfried Weyer, Norman G. Dyhrenfurth: Nanga Parbat, the Germans' mountain of fate. Karlsruhe 1980
  • Helmuth Zebhauser: Alpinism in the Hitler State. Bergverlag Rother , Ottobrunn 1998, ISBN 3-7633-8102-3 .
  • Peter Mierau: The German Himalaya Foundation. Their history and their expeditions. Bergverlag Rother, Ottobrunn 1999, ISBN 3-7633-8108-2 .
  • Horst Höfler , Reinhold Messner: Nanga Parbat. Expeditions to the “German Mountain of Fate” 1934–1962 . AS Verlag, Zurich 2002, ISBN 3-905111-83-7 .
  • Ralf-Peter Märtin : Nanga Parbat. Truth and madness of alpinism. Berlin-Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-8270-0425-X .
  • Peter Mierau: National Socialist Expedition Policy. Herbert Utz Verlag, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-8316-0409-6 .
  • Jonathan Neale: Tigers of the Snow. Little Brown Book Group, London 2002, ISBN 0-349-11350-5 .
  • Nokmedemla Lemtur: " Locating Himalayan porters in the archival documents of the expedition companies of the German Alpine Club (1929–1939) ." in: MIDA Archival Reflexicon (2020), ISSN 2628-5029 , 1–11.

Web links

Commons : Nanga Parbat  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b See history of ascent of the Rakhiot flank ( memento from January 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) on the website of the American Foundation For International Mountaineering, Exploration & Research (AFFIMER) .
  2. ^ A b Walter Raechl: Die Tragödie 1934. In: Reinhold Messner: Diamir. King of the mountains. Mount Doom Nanga Parbat. Munich 2008, p. 52.
  3. ↑ According to some information, they “only” came up to an altitude of 7850 m.
  4. ↑ See ascent history of Nanga Parbat on Markus Kronthaler's website .
  5. ↑ According to other information, Merkl died on July 17, 1934. Cf. The story of Nanga Parbat. on: Himalaya-Info.org
  6. ↑ See list of tragic events. on: Himalaya-Info.org
  7. ↑ See Horst Höfler, Reinhold Messner: Nanga Parbat. Expeditions to the “German Mountain of Fate” 1934–1962. P. 14 ff.
  8. ↑ a b c See 50 years of Nanga Parbat. ( Memento from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 528 kB) Austrian Alpine newspaper of the Austrian Alpine Club (July / August 2003 edition), accessed on November 25, 2012
  9. ↑ a b cf. Jochen Hemmleb: Everest. Goddess mother of the earth. AS Verlag & Buchkonzept, Zurich 2002, ISBN 3-905111-82-9 , p. 152.
  10. ↑ See Peter Mierau: National Socialist Expedition Policy. P. 71 f.
  11. ↑ Cf. Günter O. Dyhrenfurth: Das Buch vom Nanga Parbat. 1954
  12. ↑ See The Last Mountain. In: The time . Edition 27/2000.
  13. ↑ a b See “National Socialist Expedition Policy” (PDF; 308 kB) ( Memento from October 20, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Reading sample of the book
  14. ^ Karl M. Herrligkoffer: Nanga Parbat. Seven decades of summit battle in the heat of the sun and ice. Frankfurt 1967, p. 28.
  15. ↑ a b Wolfgang Pillewizer: Between desert and glacier ice. German researchers in the Karakoram. 2nd Edition. Ghota 1961, p. 11.
  16. ^ Günter Oskar Dyhrenfurth: The third pole. The eight-thousanders and their satellites. Frankfurt / M. 1961, p. 244.
  17. ↑ Reinhold Messner: Diamir. King of the mountains. Mount Doom Nanga Parbat. Munich 2008, p. 47.
  18. ^ Günter Oskar Dyhrenfurth: The third pole. The eight-thousanders and their satellites. Frankfurt / M. 1961, p. 162.
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on May 3, 2007 .