Ludwig Vörg

Vörg was a Gefreiter in the German Army and killed on 22 June 1941 at Siolo on the Russian front. He is registered in the memorial book at the German graveyard in Przemyśl, Poland.

Vörg, it seems, saved the whole party from certain death, and without his bravery there would never have been the legendary tales of Heinrich Harrer. The four went on to reach the summit, and glory, on 24 July 1938. The pictures of Vörg taken at the end of July at the Breslau Deutsches Turn- und Sportfest 1938 taken a couple of days later show injury to his arm when the 4 climbers are with the minister of sport as well the most notorious third Reich figures. These are the same pictures that Harrer denied in certain editions of White Spider but caused him to change his story 50 years later.

Vörg and Matthias Rebitsch were planning an attempt of the North Face in 1937 when news came that two Austrian climbers, Franz Primas and Bertl Gollackner, were stuck high on the North East face in ferocious conditions. Vörg and Rebitsch immediately began their climb up the Lauper Wall, where they too were caught in the storm. The face was streaming with torrents of water, glazed rocks, and avalanches. They were forced to bivouac high on the face on a tiny perch of rock. In the morning they pushed on to the hut on the Mittellegi Ridge, taking a break to dry their clothes and rest. Late in the afternoon, two guides reported to the hut that they had brought a freezing exhausted Primas down from the ridge, but that Gollackner was dead 500 ft below the summit. They volunteered to recover the body, and carried it down the knife edge of the Mittellegi Ridge. Vörg and Rebitsch had put their own lives at risk for the sake of others; it was a trait in Vörg that would come out again the following year.

Ludwig 'Wiggerl' Vörg (19 October 1911 – 22 June 1941) was a notable German mountaineer. With Heinrich Harrer, Fritz Kasparek, and Anderl Heckmair, he successfully climbed the north face of the Eiger in 1938, which was regarded as unclimbable at the time. He also made the first ascent of the West Face of Ushba in the Caucasus. Vörg was killed in action on the first day of Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941.