Salzburg removes Pillewizer name and lowers peak below 3,000 metres

Salzburg has lost a three-thousand-metre summit after the Austrian Alpine Club removed a commemorative plaque and reduced the artificially raised Pillewizer Spitze near the Großvenediger to its natural height of 2,999 metres, ORF reported.

The summit is now officially unnamed. The Alpine Club said its former namesake, glacier researcher and cartographer Wolfgang Pillewizer, built careers under National Socialism and later among the communists of the German Democratic Republic.

On Friday morning, a team from the Alpine Club’s Salzburg section climbed from the organisation’s Kürsinger Hut near Neukirchen am Großvenediger in the Pinzgau region. Gerd Frühwirth and Roland Kals removed the plaque, which had been installed on the summit in 1988.

Until now, Salzburg had 95 peaks higher than 3,000 metres above the Adriatic Sea, as well as the Pillewizer Spitze, which reached exactly 3,000 metres after additional stones and slabs were carried up from surrounding scree fields over several years.

Frühwirth said the name was incompatible with the Alpine Club’s current open-minded philosophy. He said the decision followed extensive research and also implemented a resolution by the Salzburg state parliament calling for a comprehensive review of alpine place names connected with National Socialism.

The summit lies on a ridge where the Obersulzbachkees and Untersulzbachkees glaciers meet on the northern flank of the Großvenediger.