In the past weeks, I dove into the rabbit hole of the Death Valley Germans, a real tragedy from 1996 where a German family from the eastern part of Germany visited the USA as tourists, only to disappear and die under misterious and tragic circumstances.
The whole story was covered with great detail on a blog by one of the two hikers who knew the area well and eventually discovered some of the remains of the travellers.
Apart from this blog and a couple of really decent on-site travel vlogs, most youtube or overall internet sources seem to be regurgitating the same "horror/mystery" type of content that always tells the same story.
I want to change that by adding some extra layers of content, even though it's mostly speculative. I want to talk about how, from a German perspective, the events of what happened to the Death Valley Germans had unique characteristics that not too many people consider about this story.
1. The family was East German
This is something that always falls under the radar for two reasons. First, the American media are the ones who control the narrative while the German media (the country the Death Valley Germans are from) also basically just retell what happened in Death Valley without adding much local context.
Why is it important that the Death Valley Germans were actually East Germans originally?
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, only few years before the tourist family consisting of Egbert Rimkus, Cornelia Meyer and the boys Georg and Max would go on their journey into the United States. The Wall fell when Egbert was barely 30 years old and Cornelia was in her early 20s. This is relevant because, up until that point, you would have grown up in a socialist dictatorship that prevents you from leaving the Iron Curtain and enter the western world. A trip to the USA for an East German was, up until 1989, a very distant dream that required you to either try to flee your country and abandon your family, who would then be interrogated by East German police and treated badly, or to just give up on that dream altogether.
This adds an extra layer of freedom to the whole Death Valley Germans story. It also adds a certain degree of wanting to push forward, of taking risks, of not taking the safe way back, if you know the story.
There are also other elements at play. Considering the cold war, not only did the Germans know military installations in Europe, they knew Soviet military installations. It would have been even more probable from their view that an army base would be guarded and patrolled, what is suspected to be the reason they travelled south into their doom.
Another piece of the story few people know: Cornelia, the woman in the family, was regarded as an adventerous person herself. Unlike what you would usually assume - the man being the risk-taker and the woman being the nagging guardian who wants safety - Cornelia allegedly traveled into the soviet union in a East German car, the Trabi, which would have been quite a bold move back in the day.
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| Death Valley Germans |
I couldn't find the German sources I found earlier but I am pretty sure that both Egbert Rimkus and Cornelia Meyer were described as daring, adventerous people. So I would argue that both of them were striving for freedom and taking risks during the trip. Whether one of them was more daring and pushed the car to its eventual limits while the other was more cautious is still speculation and will remain so.
2. Egbert was an architect and art lover
Egbert, who like Cornelia came from the city of Dresden, was
one of the founding members of an artist club that acts as a sort of charity to support freelance artists. He was also an architect and successful businessman at the time of his death. I want to mention his profession specifically because it says something about him.
Having grown up in the German Democratic Republic, a socialist state, being able to study architecture is remarkable because back then, you didn't have freedom of profession as you do in the west. You are told what to do basically, and only if you are intelligent, have good grades and don't cause the ruling party trouble will you be allowed to enter university.
Egbert being an architect is also relevant to the story of the Death Valley Germans because as an architect, you need to have high skills in spacial awareness. Egbert Rimkus must have been able to guess distances, imagine spaces and have a better than average idea of where he was walking down in Death Valley. In the end, it didn't help him though, but it says a lot about psychological biases and errors if someone like that can walk into his doom.
3. Death Valley was especially important to Germans
One of the more overlooked facts regarding this story is the fact that Germans are especially drawn to Death Valley. The reason is a man called
Karl May, an author who is not that well known in the english-speaking world but sold 200 million books worldwide. He wrote stories about Native Americans and American Cowboys, warfare in the Wild West and even Death Valley. For reference, one of the movies based on his books is called "Winnetou and Shatterhand in the valley of the dead". Although May was never in the USA himself, it is obvious that he based his works on the dry areas of the USA and even to some degree on Death Valley, although fictionalized. And while his works had only limited access in East Germany, the cultural impact he had should not be ignored when talking about the Death Valley Germans. Maybe, to some degree, he had an influence in this journey.
4. The psychological aspects of the Death Valley Germans
This is not an exclusively German perspective, but I want to add it anyway. If you really dive into the rabbit hole of the Death Valley Germans, you will find that, with some likelihood, they had a good chance of survival if they simply turned back and walked to where they had driven before. They had been to a small hut that can provide shelter and likely water, and it would have been a lot less of walking than what these Germans - Egbert, Conny and the kids - ended up walking eventually.
To me, what appears to have happened is a sort of sunk cost fallacy paired with a confirmation bias. On the one hand, they totally didn't want to turn back after being stranded in the heat, and on the other hand, they (or at least one of them) was appearently super sure that they would encounter soldiers in the China Lake Naval Facility, a military base that was further south.
I think that the reason they took this risk of going into unknown territory was that they could not accept the seemingly unsatisfying result of walking back their wheel prints, into a cabin that would only be occassionally checked by other people, and to simply sit it out and wait for rescue. This must have seemed unacceptable to them. They were under time pressure. Originally, they wanted to visit Yosemite Park, then they wanted to return their rental car, then they needed to take their flight back home, and they were also out of money and could not afford anything to go wrong in any of these aspects.
Maybe, to some degree, they hoped that they would reach an optimal outcome, maybe where a bunch of strong, muscular soldiers would drive up to the stranded car with a 4x4 hummer, drag the thing out of the ground, change the tyres and send the family back on their way. Maybe I am exaggerating a bit, but you get the picture.
And once again, I want to add the East German background here. This couple, Egbert and Cornelia, had spent most of their lives following orders under an oppressive regime, and now they finally had the power to say "no. I am not staying in my safe boundaries. I am pushing forward". This is what freedom could have meant for them. So perhaps, on a subconscious level, breaking free from chains was part of what influenced their decision.
I also asked AI for some interpretation. Bing Copilot made the suggestion that perhaps the East Germans in Death Valley were actually expecting there to be clear rules. As if to say:"If it's too dangerous to drive here in a car, there would be clear roads signs indicating so and forbidding us to drive here". So maybe their attitude of being used to regulation and strict control gave them a false sense of security when the American roads didn't clearly tell them to turn away near Mengel Pass and Anvil Canyon.
Final thoughts
I hope that these thoughts will add an extra layer of thought to the people who discuss the Death Valley Germans case. To me, it's really a haunting tale and I often compare it to that situation where you shut the house door behind you and realize you locked yourself out with the keys still inside. It's that feeling of making a small mistake that should not cost you much, but that little mistake has drawn-out consequences.
It's really true what Tom Mahood says in his blog about the family. They made honest mistakes, they were not complete idiots, but because they pushed on and didn't want to accept defeat, they ran into their misery.
As a man myself, I sometimes think that we are wired to take unnecessary risks. Our pride gets in the way and we want to push on instead of doing the right thing. It's also tragic that what stood between life and death was a bit of water, a bit of shade and some hours of painful walking. None of what happened to them was immediately fatal, but in combination and over extended periods of time, it was. And the poor boys. It's really tragic and we won't fully know what the last hours for each of the four family members must have been like.
If you want to learn more, I encourage you to read the blog mentioned in the beginning, but also to watch youtube videos from the area. It is a bit of a hell hole if you go there in the wrong season, and other than that, it's just a dead, rocky landscape that is so far from any life.
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