The Tragedy of the Wiesbachhorn

Created: 01/15/2023 08:06

By: Volker Ufertinger

At the top: Ernst Krebs and Toni Schmid loved to climb together.

Here they rest on an unknown peak.

© Photo: family krebs

Ernst Krebs (1906 – 1970) was no mountain too high.

With his friend Toni Schmid, the legendary Matterhorn conqueror, the Gauting tour went on tour after tour.

And witnessed how he fell to his death on the Wiesbachhorn.

Gauting

– The Pentecost days of 1932 are made for mountaineering.

The sky is clear and cloudless.

The two friends Ernst Krebs, 26 years old at the time, and Toni Schmid, 22 years old, set off at 5 a.m. on May 15 to conquer the Wiesbachhorn near the Grossglockner.

It rises 3564 meters into the sky and the friends are full of anticipation.

But the tour ends tragically: Toni Schmid falls to his death on the west face and drags his friend 500 meters down with him.

He survives badly injured.

"I often and quite simply wished that it was all just an ugly, bad dream," writes Krebs in his memoir "Last Mountain Ride".

But it was the truth.

One that rocked the mountaineering scene.

Toni Schmid and Ernst Krebs were close friends.

What connected them was a love for sports, especially for the mountains.

Krebs had made a name for himself as a cross-country skier, including winning an FIS competition in Zakopane, Poland, in 1929, which experts regarded as the unofficial world championship.

Toni Schmid was a real celebrity at the time.

He lived with his brother Franz, who was four years his senior, on Daiserstrasse in Sendling and climbed mountain after mountain.

At the beginning of August 1931, the brothers conquered the Matterhorn via the north face in a daring expedition.

This brought them admiration across Europe - and was exploited by the Nazis as a German heroic act in propaganda.

All of this was only a few months ago when Krebs and the younger Schmid brother set out for the Wiesbachhorn on a motorbike, via Kufstein and the Thurn Pass.

Toni Schmid is still full of impressions of the Matterhorn and talks about it in detail.

Toni Schmid had no idea that he would lose his life on the Wiesbachhorn.

“It works!” exclaims the man from Munich when the west face behind the Pass Thurn becomes visible.

But things are different.

The accident happened in the early hours of Whit Sunday, on steep, icy terrain.

"I hit a hook!" is the last sentence from Toni Schmid.

He calls it to Ernst Krebs, who is 30 meters below him.

When he wants to snap the carabiner, the hook comes loose from the wall.

Schmid loses his balance, starts to slide - and finally pulls his companion down.

"Small bright circles in the brain, spinning at breakneck speed, crazy thoughts, feeling of floating, destroyed by a new, hard impact - and then without transitional black night.

How easy it is to die!” This is how Ernst Krebs describes the moment of misfortune.

Toni Schmid cannot be helped.

Climbers from Graz take care of Ernst Krebs, who miraculously survived.

A few days later, in the hospital in Kaprun, the Gautinger put his experiences on paper in six typed pages in a remarkable act of coping with trauma.

Tough and persistent he works his way back into life, at the end of his sickbed is the sentence in capital letters: "I WANT."

Of course, the Gautinger didn't get away without consequential damage: the shoulder didn't heal, he was only able to make circular movements.

So he turns to another sport, rowing.

A year after his crash he became European champion in single kayak over 10,000 meters in Prague.

Outsiders suspect a namesake, because nobody can imagine that it is the recently injured person.

Ernst Krebs even won gold in this discipline at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.

From now on, Ernst Krebs is a personality in Gauting.

Because of his merits, the municipality gave him building land to build his house.

When he started a family, the newspaper naturally reported about it.

A street is also named after him.

In 1943 he took over his parents' plumbing business on Münchner Strasse, right next to the police station.

The Krebs company still exists as a master craftsman for plumbing, heating, roofing and electronics.

Ernst Krebs died under memorable circumstances on July 20, 1970.

While repairing the roof of the Gautingen police station, he loses his footing on his ladder.

Like his friend Toni Schmid on the Wiesbachhorn, Ernst Krebs reaches into the void and falls three meters onto the wooden porch.

The book

In his 2018 book "Gauting - mein Dorf an der Würm", Stephan Limmer described the fate of Ernst Krebs with many documents from the family archive.

It is available from the Kirchheim bookstore, among other places, at a price of 19.90 euros.