Toni Kurz

Biographical Record & Archival Chronicle

Born on July 16, 1913, in Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps, Anton Kurz grew up amid the limestone towers and demanding routes of the Berchtesgadener Land. A skilled and ambitious young climber, Kurz quickly distinguished himself on the local alpine crags before setting his sights on the great north faces of the Alps that had become the obsession of a generation of young German and Austrian climbers in the 1930s. In the summer of 1936, Kurz teamed with fellow Berchtesgadener Andreas Hinterstoisser and two Austrians, Willy Angerer and Edi Rainer, for an attempt on the still-unclimbed Eiger North Face. On July 18, the four-man team crossed Hinterstoisser's revolutionary pendulum traverse across smooth limestone and pushed high onto the face. On July 19, storm descended. Willy Angerer, who had been struck by rockfall, could no longer climb effectively. The party turned to descend. At the bottom of the Hinterstoisser Traverse, they discovered catastrophically that the rope used for the pendulum had already been pulled up — they could not reverse it. Trapped on the wall in a screaming blizzard, the four men attempted to descend the vertical ice-glazed rock by hammering in pitons. During the night of July 21 to 22, Rainer, Angerer, and Hinterstoisser all perished — from exhaustion, injury, or falls. Kurz alone remained alive, hanging by his harness rope on a small ledge in the storm. When mountain railway workers and guides emerged from the Stollenloch window tunnel into the face at dawn on July 22, they found Kurz alive, shouting down to them. They were only 40 metres below him — close enough to hear his voice clearly — but could not reach him on the vertical ground. Through a day of extraordinary suffering, rescuers talked Kurz through rappelling down one rope while climbing up the second to retrieve the pieces, then splicing them into a single rope to reach them. After more than 24 hours on the wall alone, Kurz lowered himself close enough to the guides to almost touch their outstretched hands. But the splice knot in the rope jammed in a carabiner, and Kurz's fingers, black with frostbite, could no longer bend. He said, softly, 'Ich kann nicht mehr' — 'I cannot go on' — and died, dangling in mid-air, three metres above rescue.

Notable Milestones & Ascents

• Reached a height of approximately 3,300 m on the still-unclimbed Eiger North Face in the summer of 1936
• Survived alone on the Eiger North Face for over 24 hours after the deaths of three companions in a storm, a feat of superhuman endurance
• His death metres above rescuers became mountaineering's most poignant and widely recounted tragedy, inspiring books, films, and the 2008 film Nordwand
• His 1936 campaign helped establish the Hinterstoisser Traverse as a named landmark in the topography of the Eiger North Face